Steel Beach by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page A

were a quarter mile out of town before Brenda spoke to me again.
    “This business about covering up,” she ventured. “That’s a cultural thing, right? Something they did in this place?”
    “Not the place so much as the time. Out here in the country no one cares whether you cover up or not. But in town, they try to stick to the old rules. They stretched a point for you, actually. You really should have been wearing a dress that reached your ankles, your wrists, and covered most of your neck, too. Hell, a young lady really shouldn’t have been allowed in a saloon at all.”
    “Those other girls weren’t wearing all that much.”
    “Different rule. They’re ‘Fallen flowers.’ ” She was giving me a blank look again. “Whores.”
    “Oh, sure,” she said. “I read an article that said it used to be illegal. How could they make that illegal?”
    “Brenda, they can make anything illegal. Prostitution has been illegal more often than not. Don’t ask me to explain it; I don’t understand, either.”
    “So they make a law in here, and then they let you break it?”
    “Why not? Most of those girls don’t sell sex, anyway. They’re here for the tourists. Get your picture taken with the B-girls in the Alamo Saloon. The idea of Texas is to duplicate what it was really like in 1845, as near as we can determine. Prostitution was illegal but tolerated in a place like New Austin. Hell, the Sheriff would most likely be one of the regular customers. Or take the bar. They shouldn’t have served you, because this culture didn’t approve of giving alcoholic drinks to people as young as you. But on the frontier, there was the feeling that if you were big enough to reach up and take the drink off the bar, you were big enough to drink it.” I looked at her frowning intently down at the ground, and knew most of this was not getting through to her. “I don’t suppose you can ever really understand a culture unless you grew up in it,” I said.
    “These people were sure screwed up.”
    “Probably so.”
    We were climbing the trail that led toward my apartment.
    Brenda kept her eyes firmly on the ground, her mind obviously elsewhere, no doubt chewing over the half-dozen crazy things I’d told her in the past hour. By not looking around she was missing a sunset spectacular even by the lavish standards of West Texas. The air had turned salmon pink when the sun dipped below the horizon, streaked by wispy curls of gold. Somehow the waning light made the surrounding rocky hills a pale purple. I wondered if that was authentic. A quarter of a million miles from where I stood, the real sun was setting on the real Texas. Were the colors as spectacular there?
    Here, of course, the “sun” was sitting in its track just below the forced-perspective “hills.” A fusion tech was seeing to the shut-down process, after which the sun would be trucked through a tunnel and attached to the eastern end of the track, ready to be lit again in a few hours. Somewhere behind the hills another technician was manipulating colored mirrors and lenses to diffuse the light over the dome of the sky. Call him an artist; I won’t argue with you. They’ve been charging admission to see the sunsets in Pennsylvania and Amazon for several years now. There’s talk of doing that here, too.
    It seemed unlikely to me that nature, acting at random, could produce the incredible complexity and subtlety of a disneyland sunset.
     
    It was almost dark by the time we reached the Rio Grande.
    The entrance to my condo was on the south, “Mexican” side of the river. West Texas is compressed, to display as wide a range of terrain and biome as possible. The variety of geographical features that, on Earth, spread over five hundred miles and included parts of New Mexico and Old Mexico here had been made to fit within a sub-lunar bubble forty miles in diameter. One edge duplicated the rolling hills and grassland around the real Austin, while the far edge had the