John Varley: Steel Beach

"In five years, the penis will be obsolete," said the salesman.

He paused to let this planet-shattering information sink into our amazed brains. Personally, I didn't know how many more wonders I could absorb before lunch.

"With the right promotional campaign," he went on, breathlessly, "it might take as little as two years.

He might even have been right. Stranger things have happened in my lifetime. But I decided to hold off on calling my broker with frantic orders to sell all my jock-strap stock.

The press conference was being held in a large auditorium belonging to United Bioengineers. It could seat about a thousand; it presently held about a fifth that number, most of us huddled together in the front rows.

The UniBio salesman was non-nondescript as a game-show host. He had one of those voices, too. A Generic person. One of these days they'll standardize every profession by face and body type. Like uniforms.

He went on:

"Sex as we know it is awkward, inflexible, unimaginative. By the time you're forty, you've done everything you possibly could with our present, 'natural' sexual system. In fact, if you're even moderately active, you've done everything a dozen times. It's become boring. And if it's boring at forty, what will it be like at eighty, or a hundred and forty? Have you ever thought about that? About what you'll be doing for a sex life when you're eighty? Do you really want to be repeating the same old acts?"

"Whatever I'm doing, it won't be with him," Cricket whispered in my ear.

"How about with me?" I whispered back. "Right after the show."

"How about after I'm eighty?" She gave me a sharp little jab in the ribs, but she was smiling. Which is more than I could say for the hulk sitting in front of us. He worked for Perfect Body , weighed about two hundred kilos-none of it fat-and was glaring over the slope of one massive trapezius, flexing the muscles in his eyebrows. I wouldn't have believed he could even turn his head, much less look over his shoulder. You could hear the gristle popping.

We took the hint and shut up.

"At United Bioengineers," the pitch went on, "we have no doubt that, given twenty or thirty million years, Mother Nature would have remedied some of these drawbacks. In fact," and here he gave a smile that managed to be sly and aw-shucks at the same time, "we wonder if the grand old lady might have settled on this very System … that's how good we think it is.

" And how good is that ? I hear you saying. There have been a lot of improvements since the days of Christine Jorgensen. What makes this one so special?"

"Christine who?" Cricket whispered, typing rapidly with the fingers of her right hand on her left forearm.

"Jorgensen. First male-to-female sex change, not counting opera singers. What are they teaching you in journalism school these days?"

"Get the spin right, and the factoids will follow. Hell, Hildy, I didn't realize you dated the lady."

"I've done worse since. If she hadn't kept trying to lead on the dance floor… "

This time an arm-it had to be an arm, it grew out of his shoulder, though I could have put both my legs into one of his sleeves-hooked itself over the back of the chair in front of me, and I was treated to the whole elephantine display, from the crew-cut yellow hair to the jaw you could have used to plow the south forty, to the neck wider than Cricket's hips. I held up my hands placatingly, pantomimed locking up my lips and throwing away the key. His brow beetled even more-god help me if he thought I was making fun of him-then he turned back around. I was left wondering where he got the tiny barbells he must have used to get those forehead muscles properly pumped up.

In a word, I was bored.

I'd seen the Sexual Millennium announced before. As recently as the previous March, in fact, and quite regularly before that. It was like end-of-the-world stories, or perpetual motion machines. A journalist figured to encounter them every few weeks as long as his career lasted. I suspect it was the same when headlines were chiseled into stone tablets and the Sunday Edition was tossed from the back of a woolly mammoth. I had lost track of how many times I'd sat in audiences just like this, listening to a glib young man/woman with more teeth than God intended proclaim the Breakthrough of the Age. It was the price a feature reporter had to pay.

It could have been worse. I could have had the political beat.

"… tested on over two thousand volunteer subjects… random sampling error of plus or minus one percent… "

I was having a bad feeling. That the story would not be one hundredth as revolutionary as the guy was promising was a given. The only question was, would there be enough substance to hack out a story I could sell to Walter?

"… registered a sixty-three percent increase in orgasmic sensation, a two to one rise in the satisfaction index, and a complete lack of post-coital depression."

And as my old uncle J. Walter Thompson used to say, makes your wash fifty percent whiter, cleans your teeth, and leaves your breath alone.

I reached down to the floor and recovered the faxpad each of us had been given as we came through the door. I called up the survey questions and scanned through them quickly. My bullshit detector started beeping so loudly I was afraid Mister Dynamic Tension would turn around again.

The questions were garbage. There are firms whose purpose is to work with pollsters and guard against the so-called "brown-nose effect," that entirely human tendency to tell people what they want to hear. Ask folks if they like your new soda pop, they'll tend to say yes, then spit it out when your back is turned. UniBio had not hired one of these firms. Sometimes that in itself indicates a lack of confidence in the product.

"And now, the moment you've been waiting for." There was a flourish of trumpets. The lights dimmed. Spotlights swirled over the blue velvet drapes behind the podium, which began to crawl toward the wings with the salesman aboard.

"United Bioengineers presents-"

"Drum roll," Cricket whispered, a fraction of a second early. I hit her with my elbow.

"-the future of sex… ULTRA-Tingle !"

There was polite applause and the curtains parted to reveal a nude couple standing, embracing, beneath a violet spot. Both were hairless. They turned to face us, heads high, shoulders back. Neither seemed to be male or female. The only real distinction between them was the hint of breasts and a touch of eye shadow on the smaller one. There was flat, smooth skin between each pair of legs.

"Another touchie-feelie," Cricket said. "I thought this was going to be all new. Didn't they introduce the Tingle system three years ago?"

"They sure did. Paid a fortune to get half a dozen celebs to convert, and they still didn't get more than ten, twenty thousand subscribers. I doubt there's a hundred of them left."

What can you do? They hold a press conference, we have to send somebody. They throw chum in the water, we start to feed.

Five minutes into the ULTRA-Tingle presentations (that's how they insisted it be spelled, with caps) I could see this turkey would be of interest only to the trades. I'm sure my beefy buddy up front was tickled down to the tips of his muscle-bound toes.

There were a dozen nude, genderless dancers on stage now, caressing each others' bodies and posing artistically. Blue sparks flew from their fingertips.

"That's it for me," I said to Cricket. "You sticking around?"