Steel Beach (43 page)

“I loved every second of it.” He let that hang for a moment, then leaned forward slightly, his already-intense eyes blazing. “When life is simple like that, you have no chance to be bored. When your life hangs in the balance as a consequence of every action you take, suicide seems such an effete, ridiculous thing. Every organism has the survival instinct at its very core. That so many humans kill themselves—not just now, they have been doing it for a long time—says a lot about civilization, about ‘intelligence.’ Suicides have lost an ability that every amoeba possesses: the knowledge of how to
live
.”

“So that’s the secret of life?” I asked. “Hardship? Earning what you get out of life, working for it?”

“I don’t
know
.” He got up and began pacing. “I was exhilarated when I returned to the here and now. I thought I had an answer. Then I realized, as you did, that I couldn’t trust it. It wasn’t me living those ten years. It was a machine writing a script about how he thought I would have lived them. He got some of it right, but a lot more wrong, because…  it wasn’t
me
. The me he was trying to imitate had just tried to end his life. The me the CC imagined worked like a dog to stay alive. It was the CC’s wish-fulfillment, not mine.”

“But you said—”

“But it
was
an answer,” he said, whirling to face me. “What I found out was that, for well over a century, I’d had nothing at
risk
! Whether I succeeded or failed at something had no meaning for me, because my life was not at stake. Not even my comfort was really at stake. If I succeeded or failed financially, for instance. If I succeeded, I’d simply win more things that had long ago lost their meaning. If I failed, I would lose some of these things, but the State would take care of my basic needs.”

I wanted to say something, to argue with him, but he was on a roll, and it was just as well, because even if I did disagree with him here and there, it was exciting simply to be able to talk about it with someone who
knew
.

“That’s when I started fighting Deathmatches,” he said. “I had to re-introduce an element of risk into my life.” He held up a hand. “Not too much risk; I’m very good at what I do.” And now he smiled, and it was beautiful. “And I
do
want to live again. That’s what you’ve got to do, Hildy. You’ve got to find a way to experience
risk
again. It’s a tonic like nothing I ever imagined.”

The questions were lining up in my mind, clamoring to get out. There was one more important than all the others.

“What’s to prevent the CC,” I said, slowly, “from reviving you again, like he did to me, if you…  make a mistake?”

“I will, someday. Everybody does. I think it will be a long time yet.”

“There’s lots of people gunning for you.”

“I’m going to retire soon. A few more matches, that’s all.”

“What about the tonic?”

He smiled again. “I think I’ve had enough of it. I
needed
it, I needed to have the Deathmatches…  and nothing else would have worked. That’s the beauty of it. To die so publicly…  ”

I saw it then. The CC wouldn’t dare revive Silvio, for instance (not that he could; Silvio’s brain had been destroyed). Everybody knew Silvio was dead, and if he suddenly showed up again embarrassing questions would be asked.

Committees would be formed, petitions circulated, programming re-examined. Andrew had found the obvious way to beat the CC’s little resurrection game, an answer so obvious that I had never thought of it.

Or had I, and simply kept it buried?

That would have to be a question for later as, with an apologetic shrug, Andrew opened his door and half of King City spilled into the room, all talking at once. Well, fifteen or twenty people, anyway, most of them angry. I collected a few glares and tried to make myself small in one corner of the room and watch as agents, trainers, managers, Arena reps, and media types all tried to compress an hour’s worth of psyching up, legalities, and interviews into the five minutes left to them before the match was due to start. Andrew remained an island of calm in the center of this hurricane, which rivaled any press conference I’ve ever attended for sheer confusion.

Then he was gone, trailing them all behind him like yapping puppies. The noise faded down the short corridor and up the stairs and I heard the crowd noise grow louder and the bass mumble that was all I could hear of the announcer’s voice from this deep below the ring.

The noise stayed at that level for a while, then decreased a little, as I sat down to wait for his return.

Then it grew to a pitch I thought might endanger the building.
Fans
, I thought, contemptuously.

If anything, it grew even louder, and I began to wonder what was going on.

And then they brought Andrew MacDonald back on a stretcher.

Nothing is ever as straightforward as it at first seems.

Andrew was fighting a Deathmatch…  but what did that mean?

I had no idea, myself. Having seen just a few matches, I knew that blows were delivered routinely that would not have been survivable without modern medical techniques. I had witnessed medical attention being administered between rounds, combatants being patched up, body fluids being replaced. The normal sign of victory was the removal of the loser’s head, one of the many endearing things about slash-boxing and surely a sign that things weren’t going well for the beheadee…  but what about the Grand Flack? He did quite well without a body. The only surely fatal wound these days was the destruction of the brain, and the CC was working on that one.

It seemed the rules were different for a Deathmatch. It also seemed no one was really happy about them, except possibly for Andrew.

I could not tell what his injuries were, but his head was still on his shoulders. The body was covered with a sheet, which was soaked in blood. I gathered, later, that a hierarchy of wounds had been established for Deathmatches, that some could be treated by ringside handlers between rounds, and that others had to be acknowledged as fatal. The fallen opponent was not decapitated, it being thought too gruesome to hold aloft an actual dead severed head. I was told the ritual took the place of the
coup de grace
, that it was meant to be symbolic of victory in some way. Go figure that one out.

I also learned, later, that no one really knew how to handle the situation they now found themselves in. Only three fighters had ever engaged in Deathmatches since they were allowed into a gray area of legality known as consensual suicide. Only one had ever met the requirements for a death wound, and he had experienced a deathbed revelation that could be summed up as “maybe this wasn’t such a good idea, after all,” been revived, stitched up, and retired in disgrace to everyone’s considerable secret relief. Of the two people currently risking their lives in fights, it had been tacitly agreed long ago that they would never meet each other, as the certain outcome of such a match would be the pickle the handlers, lawyers, and Arena management now found themselves in, which might be expressed as “are we really going to let this silly son of a bitch
die
on us?”

There was not a lot of time to come up with an answer. I could hear a sound coming from Andrew, all the way across the room, and knew I was hearing the death rattle.

I couldn’t see much of him. If he’d hoped his final moments would be peaceful, he’d been a fool. A dozen people crowded around, some feverish to offer aid, others worrying about corporate liability, a very few standing up for Andrew’s right to die as he pleased.

The Bucket of Blood management had for years been in a quandary concerning Deathmatches. On the one hand, they were a guaranteed draw; stadia were always filled when the titillation of a possible actual death was offered. On the other, no one knew what the public reaction would be if someone actually
died
right out there in front of God and everyone, for the glory of sport. The prevailing opinion was it would not be good for business. The public’s appetite for non-injurious violence in sport and entertainment had never been plumbed, but real death, though always good for a sensation, was much easier to take if it could be seen as an accident, like David Earth, or Nirvana.

To give them credit, the Arena people were queasy about the whole idea, and not just from a legal standpoint. Their worst sin in the matter was something we all do, which is fail to imagine the worst happening. No one had died in a Deathmatch yet, and they’d kept hoping no one would. Now someone was.

But not without a last-ditch effort. The people around him reminded me, as things in life so often do, of scenes from movies. You’ve seen them: in a war picture, when medics gather around a wounded comrade trying to save his life, buddies at his side telling him everything’s gonna be okay, kid, you’ve got a million-dollar wound there, you’ll be home with the babes before you know it, and their eyes saying this one’s a goner. And this seems weird, maybe it was a trick of the light, but I saw another scene, the priest leaning over the bed, holding a rosary, hearing the last confession, giving the last rites. What they were really doing was trying to talk him into accepting treatment,
please
, so we can all go home and wipe our brows and have a few stiff drinks and pretend this fucking disaster never happened, dear lord.

He refused them all. Gradually their pleas grew less impassioned, and a few even gave up and retreated to the wall near me, like what he had was contagious. And finally someone leaned close enough to hear what it was he’d been trying to say, and that someone looked over at me and beckoned.

I’m surprised I made it, as I had no feeling in my legs. But somehow I was leaning over him, into the stench of his blood, his entrails, the smell of death on him now, and he grabbed my hand with an amazing strength and tried to lift himself closer to my ear because he didn’t have much of a voice left. I hope he wasn’t feeling any pain; they said he wasn’t, pain wasn’t his thing, he’d been deadened before the match. He coughed.

“Let them help you, Andrew,” I said. “You’ve proved your point.”

“No point,” he coughed. “Nothing to prove, to
them
.”

“You’re sure? It’s no disgrace. I’ll still respect you.”

“Not about respect. Gotta go
through
with it, or it didn’t mean anything.”

“That’s crazy. You could have died in
any
of them. You don’t have to die now to validate that.”

He shook his head, and coughed horribly. He went limp, and I thought he was dead, but then his hand put a little pressure on mine again, and I leaned closer to his lips.

“Tricked,” he said, and died.

It’s a well-known fact that nobody goes to the library in this day and age. It’s also wrong.

Why take the time and trouble to travel to a big building where actual books on actual paper are stored when you can stay at home and access any of that information, plus trillions of pages of data that exist only in the memories? If you don’t already know the answer to that question, then you just don’t love books, and I’ll never be able to explain it to you. But if you get up from your terminal right now, any time of the day or night, take the tube down to the King City Civic Center Plaza, and walk up the Italian marble steps between the statues of Knowledge and Wisdom, you will find the Great Hall of Books thrumming with the kind of quiet activity that has characterized great libraries since books were on papyrus scrolls. Do it someday. Stroll past the rows of scholars at the old oak tables, stand in the center of the dome, beside the Austin Gutenberg Bible in its glass case, look down the infinite rows of shelves radiating away from you. If you love books at all, it will soothe your mind.

Soothing was something my mind was sorely in need of. In the three or four days following the death of Andrew MacDonald, I spent a lot of time at the library. There was no practical reason for it; though I was now homeless, I could have done the reading and research I now engaged in sitting in the park, or in my hotel room. Few of the things I looked at actually existed on paper anyway. I spent my time looking at a library terminal no different from the ones in any street corner phone box. But I was far from the only one so engaged. Though many people used the library because they liked holding the actual source material in their hands, most were accessing stored data, and simply preferred to do it with real books on shelves around them. Let’s face it, the vast majority of books in the King City Library were quite old, the pre-Invasion legacy of a few bibliophile fanatics who insisted the yellowing, fragile, inefficient and inconvenient old things were necessary to any culture that called itself civilized, who convinced the software types that the logically unjustifiable expense of shipping them up here was, in the end, worth it. As for new books…  why bother? I doubt more than six or seven new works were published on paper in a typical Lunar year. There was a small publishing business, never very profitable, because some people liked to have sets of the classics sitting on a shelf in the living room. Books had become almost entirely the province of interior decorators.

But not here. These books were used. Many had to be stored in special inert-gas rooms and you had to don a p-suit to handle them, under the watchful eyes of librarians who thought dog-earing should be a hanging offense, but every volume in the institution was available for reference, right up to the Gutenberg. Almost a million books sat on open shelves. You could walk down the rows and run your hand over them, pull one down and open it (carefully, carefully!), smell the old paper and glue and dust. I did most of my work with a copy of
Tom Sawyer
open on the table beside me, partly so I could read a chapter when I got tired of the research, partly so I could just touch it when I felt at my lowest.

I’d had to keep redefining “lowest.” I was beginning to wonder if there was a natural lower limit, if this was the limit I had reached the last times, when I had attempted to kill myself,
would
have killed myself without the CC’s intervention.