Steel Beach (44 page)

My research concerned, naturally enough, suicide. It didn’t take me long to discover that not much useful was really known about it. Why should that have surprised me? Not much really useful was known concerning
anything
relating to why we are what we are and do what we do.

There’s plenty of behavioristic data: stimulus A evokes response B. There’s lots of statistical data as well: X percent will react in such-and-such a way to event Y. It all worked very well with insects, frogs, fish and such, tolerably good with dogs and cats and mice, even reasonably decent with human beings. But then you pose a question like why, when Aunt Betty’s boy Wilbur got run over by the paving machine, did she up and stick her head in the microwave, while her sister Gloria who’d suffered a similar loss grieved, mourned, recovered, and went on to lead a long and useful life? Best extremely scientific answer to date: It beats the shit out of me.

Another reason for being in the library was that it was the perfect place to go at a problem in a logical way. The whole environment seemed to encourage it. And that’s what I intended to do. Andrew’s death had really rocked me. I had nothing else that needed doing, so I was going to attack my problem by going at it a step at a time, which meant that first I had to define the steps. Step one, it seemed to me, was to learn all I could about the causes of suicide. After three days of almost constant reading and note-taking I had it down to four, maybe five categories of suicide. (I bought a pad of paper and pencil to take notes with, which earned me a few sidelong glances from my neighbors. Even in these fusty environs writing on paper was seen as eccentric.) These four, maybe five categories were not hard-edged, they overlapped each other with big, fuzzy gray borders. Again, no surprise.

The first and easiest to identify was cultural. Most societies condemned suicide in most circumstances, but some did not. Japan was an outstanding example. In ancient Japan suicide was not only condoned, but mandatory in some circumstances. Further, it was actually institutionalized, so that one who had lost honor must not only kill himself, but do it in a prescribed, public, and very painful way. Many other cultures looked on suicide, in certain circumstances, as an honorable thing to do.

Even in societies where suicide was frowned on or viewed as a mortal sin, there were circumstances where it was at least understandable. I encountered many tales both in folklore and reality of frustrated lovers leaping off a cliff hand in hand. There were also the cases of elderly people in intractable pain (see Reason #2), and several other marginally acceptable reasons.

Most early cultures were very tough to analyze. Demographics, as we know it, didn’t really get its start until recently. Records were kept of births and deaths and not much else. How do you determine what the suicide rate was in ancient Babylon? You don’t. You can’t even learn much useful about nineteenth century Europe. There were blips in the data here and there. In the twentieth century it was said that Swedes killed themselves at a rate higher than their contemporaries. Some blamed the cold weather, the long winters, but how then do you account for the Finns, the Norwegians, the Siberians? Others said it was the dour nature of the Swedes themselves. I’ve been asking people questions for long enough to know something important about them: they lie. They lie often enough even when nothing is at stake. When the answer can mean something as important as whether or not Grandpa Jacques gets buried in the hallowed ground of the churchyard, suicide notes have a way of vanishing, bodies get re-arranged, coroners and law officers get bribed or simply look the other way out of respect for the family. The blip in suicide data for the Swedes could simply have meant they were more straightforward about reporting it.

As for Lunar society, post-Invasion society in general…  it was a civil right, but it was widely viewed as the coward’s way out. Suicide was not something that was going to earn you any points with the neighbors.

The second reason was best summed up in the statement “I can’t go on like this anymore.” The most obvious of these cases involved pain, and no longer applied. Then there was unhappiness. What can you say about unhappiness? It is real, and can have real and easily seen causes: disappointment with one’s accomplishments in life, frustration at being unable to attain a goal or an object, tragedy, loss. Other times, the cause of this hopeless feeling can be difficult to see to the outside observer: “He had everything to live for.”

Then there was the reason Andrew proclaimed, that he had been bored. This happened even in the days when people didn’t live to be two, three hundred years old, but rarely. It was a reason appearing in more and more suicide notes as life spans lengthened.

The fourth reason might be called the inability to visualize death. Children were vulnerable to this one; many affluent, industrial societies reported increasing teen-age suicide rates, and survivors of failed attempts often revealed elaborate fantasies of being aware at their own funerals, of getting back at their tormenters: “I’ll show them, they’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

That’s why I said I had maybe five reasons. I couldn’t decide if the attempts, successful or not, known as “gestures” rated a category of their own. Authorities differed as to how many suicides were merely cries for help. In a sense,
all
of them were, if only to an indifferent Providence. Help me stop the pain, help me find love, help me find a reason,
help me, I’m hurting
…  

Did I say maybe five? Maybe six.

Maybe six was what I thought of as “The Seasons Of Life.”

We are, most of us, closet numerologists, subconscious astrologers. We are fascinated with anniversaries, birthdays, ages of ourselves and others. You are in your thirties, or forties, or seventies, or you’re over one hundred. Back when people lived their fourscore years, on average, those words said even more than they do today. Turning forty meant your life was half over, and was a portentous time to examine what the first half had been like and, often as not, find it lacking. Turning ninety meant you’d
already
outlived your allotted time, and the most useful thing left to you was selecting the color of your coffin.

Ages with a zero on the end were a particularly stressful time. They still are. One term I encountered was “mid-life crisis,” used back when mid-life was somewhere between 40 and 50. Ages with
two
zeros on the end pack one
hell
of a wallop. Newspapers used to run stories about centenarians. The data I studied said that, even though it might now be thought of as mid-life, the age of one zero zero still meant a lot. While you could be in your eighties, or your nineties, you were never in your hundreds. That term just never attained popular usage. You were “over one hundred,” or “over two hundred.” Soon there would be people over three hundred years old. And there was a rise in the suicide rate at both these magical milestones.

Which was of particular interest to me because…  now how old did Hildy say she was, class? Let’s not always see the same hands.

I don’t know if my research was really telling me much, but it was something to do, and I intended to keep on doing it. I became a library gnome, going out only to sleep and eat. But after four days something told me it was time to take a walk, and my feet drew me back to Texas.

I was wondering what could happen to me next. Death had dogged my steps from the time of my return from Scarpa Island: David Earth, Silvio, Andrew, eleven hundred and twenty-six souls in Nirvana. Three brontosaurs. Was I forgetting anybody? Was anything good ever going to happen to me?

I sneaked in a back way I had found during my hiding-out days. I didn’t want to encounter any of my friends from New Austin, I didn’t want to have to try to explain to them why I’d torched my own cabin. If I couldn’t explain it to myself, what was I going to say to them? So I came over the hill from a different direction and my first thought was I must be lost, because there was a cabin over there. Then I thought, maybe for the first time since this ordeal began, that I might be losing my mind, because I wasn’t lost, I was where I thought I was, and that was my cabin, intact, just as it had been before I watched it consumed by flames.

You can get a genuine dizzy feeling at a time like that; I sat down. After a moment I noticed two things that might be of interest. First, the cabin was not quite where it had been. It looked to have been moved about three meters up the slope of the hill. Second, there was a pile of what looked like charred lumber down in the slight depression I’d been calling “the gully.” As I watched, a third item of interest appeared: a heavily-loaded burro came around the side of the house, looked at me briefly, and then stuck his nose into a bucket of water that had been left in the shade.

I got up and started toward the cabin as a man came out the front door and began lifting the burdens from the beast and setting them on the ground. He must have heard me, because he looked up, grinned toothlessly, and waved at me. I knew him.

“Sourdough,” I called out to him. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Evening, Hildy,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind. I just got into town and they sent me up here, said to stick around a few days and let them know when you got back.”

“You’re always welcome, Sourdough, you know that.
Mi casa es tu casa
. It’s just…  ” I paused, looked over the cabin again, and wiped sweat from my forehead. “I didn’t think I
had
a casa.”

He scratched himself, and spat in the dust.

“Well, I don’t know much about that. All I know’s Mayor Dillon said if’n I didn’t give a holler when you got back to these here parts, he’d skin me
and
Matilda.” He patted the burro affectionately, raising a cloud of dust.

Maybe old Sourdough laid on the accent and the Old West slang a bit thick, but I felt he was entitled. He was a real Natural, as opposed to Walter, who was only natural on the surface.

He belonged to a religious sect that had some things in common with the Christian Scientists. They didn’t refuse all medical help, nor did they pray for a cure when they were sick. What they rejected was rejuvenation. They allowed themselves to grow old and, when the measures needed to keep them alive reached a point Sourdough had described to me as “just too dang much trouble,” they died.

There was even some money in it. The Antiquities Board paid them a small annual stipend for having the grace to let them avoid what would have been a tricky ethical problem, which was maintaining a small control group of humans untouched by most modern medical advances.

Sourdough was one of the handful of prospectors who roamed West Texas. His chances of discovering a vein of gold or silver were slim—zero, actually, since nothing like that had been included in the specs when the place was built. But the management assured us there were three pockets of diamond-bearing minerals somewhere in Texas. No one had found any of them yet. Sourdough and three or four others ranged over the land with their pickaxes and grubstakes and burros, perhaps secretly hoping they’d never find them. After all, what would you do with a handful of diamonds? It certainly didn’t justify all that work.

I’d asked Sourdough about that, early on, before I’d learned it was impolite to ask such questions in an historical disney.

“I’ll tell you, Hildy,” he’d said, not taking offense. “I worked forty years at a job I didn’t particularly like. I’m not quite the fool I sound; I didn’t realize how much I disliked it until I quit. But when I retired I come out here and I liked the sunshine and the heat and the open air. I found I’d pretty much lost my taste for the company of people. I can only take ’em in small doses now. And I’ve been happy. Matilda is the only company I need, and prospecting gives me something to do.”

In fact, Matilda seemed to be his only remaining worry in life. He was concerned about her welfare after he was gone. He was constantly asking people if they’d see to her needs, to the point that half the people in New Austin had promised to adopt the damn donkey.

He looked older than Adam’s granddaddy. All his teeth were gone, and most of his hair. His skin was mottled and wrinkled and loose on his scrawny frame and his knuckles were swollen to the size of walnuts.

He was eighty-three years old, seventeen years younger than me.

I’d had him pegged as an illit, and the job he’d hated as something on the order of the carrying of hods, whatever they were, or the laying of bricks. Then Dora told me he’d been the chairman of the board of the third largest company on Mars. He’d retired to Luna for the gravity.

“What happened here, Sourdough?” I asked. “I didn’t sell the land. What gives somebody the right to come in here and build on it?”

“I don’t know about that, either, Hildy. You know me. I’ve been out in the hills, and let me tell you, girl, I’m on the trail of something.”

He went on like that for a while, with me paying minimal attention. Sourdough and his like were always on the trail of something. I looked around the house. There wasn’t much different between this one and the one I’d built and burned down, except some almost indefinable things that told me the builders had been better at it than I had been. The dimensions were the same, the windows were in the same places. But it looked more solid. I went inside, Sourdough trailing behind me still yammering about the glory hole he was on the verge of discovering. The inside was still bare except for some bright yellow calico curtains in the windows. They were prettier than the ones I’d installed.

I went back out, still unable to make sense of it, and looked down the road toward New Austin in time to see the first of a long parade arrive from town.

The next half hour is something of a blur. More than a dozen wagons arrived in the hour of dusk. All of them were laden with people and food and drink and other things. The people got down and set to work, building a fire, stringing orange paper lanterns with candles inside, clearing an area for dancing. Someone had loaded the piano from the saloon, and stood beside it turning the crank. There was a banjo player and a fiddle player, both dreadful, but no one seemed to mind. Before I quite knew what was happening there was a full-scale hoedown going on. A cow was turning on the spit, sizzling in barbecue sauce that hissed and popped when it dripped into the fire. A table had been laid out with cookies and cakes and candied fruits in mason jars. Bottles of beer were thrust into a galvanized tub full of ice and people were swilling it down or sipping from bottles they’d tucked away. Petticoats and silk stockings flashed in the firelight as the ladies from the Alamo kicked up their heels and the men stood around whooping and hollering and clapping their hands or moved in and tried to turn it into a square dance. All my friends from New Austin had showed up, and a lot more I didn’t even know, and I still didn’t know why.