Steel Beach Read Online Free Page B

the right kind. I mean, I could write a story about earthworm sex, or jellyfish sex, but it wouldn’t turn anybody on but earthworms and jellyfish.”
    “Exactly. Why is that, Hildy? Why do they want to turn us into jellyfish?”
    I knew all about this particular hobbyhorse, but there was nothing to do but ride it.
    “It’s like the search for the Holy Grail, or the Philosopher’s Stone,” I said.
    “What’s the Philosopher’s Stone?”
    The question had not come from Walter, but from behind me.
    I was pretty sure I knew who it was. I turned, and saw Brenda, cub reporter, who for the past two weeks had been my journalistic assistant—pronounced “copy girl.”
    “Sit down, Brenda,” Walter said. “I’ll get to you in a minute.”
    I watched her dither around pulling up a chair, folding herself into it like a collapsible ruler with bony joints sticking out in all directions, surely too many joints for one human being. She was very tall and very thin, like so many of the younger generation. I had been told she was seventeen, out on her first vocational education try-out. She was eager as a puppy and not half as graceful.
    She irritated the hell out of me. I’m not sure why. There’s the generational thing. You wonder how things can get worse, you think that these kids have to be the rock bottom, then they have children and you see how wrong you were.
    At least she could read and write, I’ll give her that. But she was so damnably earnest, so horribly eager to please. She made me tired just looking at her. She was a tabula rasa waiting for someone to draw animated cartoons on. Her ignorance of everything outside her particular upper-middle class social stratum and of everything that had happened more than five years ago was still un-plumbed.
    She opened the huge purse she always carried around with her and produced a cheroot identical to the one Walter was smoking. She lit up and exhaled a cloud of lavender smoke. Her smoking dated to the day after she met Walter Editor. Her name dated to the day after she met me. Maybe it should have amused or flattered me that she was so obviously trying to emulate her elders; it just made me angry. Adopting the name of a famous fictional reporter had been my idea.
    Walter gestured for me to go on. I sighed, and did so.
    “I really don’t know when it started, or why. But the basic idea was, since sex and reproduction no longer have much to do with each other, why should we have sex with our reproductive organs? The same organs we use for urination, too, for that matter.”
    “ ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,’ ” Walter said. “That’s my philosophy. The old-fashioned system worked for millions of years. Why tamper with it?”
    “Actually, Walter, we’ve already tampered with it quite a bit.”
    “Not everybody.”
    “True. But well over eighty percent of females prefer clitoral relocation. The natural arrangement didn’t provide enough stimulation during the regular sex act. And just about that many men have had a testicle tuck. They were too damn vulnerable hanging out there where nature put them.”
    “I haven’t had one,” he said. I made note of that, in case I ever got into a fight with him.
    “Then there’s the question of stamina in males,” I went on. “Back on Earth, it was the rare male over thirty who could consistently get an erection more than three or four times a day. And it usually didn’t last very long. And men didn’t have multiple orgasms. They just weren’t as sexually capable as women.”
    “That’s horrible,” Brenda said. I looked at her; she was genuinely shocked.
    “That’s an improvement, I’ll have to admit,” Walter said.
    “And there’s the entire phenomenon of menstruation,” I added.
    “What’s menstruation?”
    We both looked at her. She wasn’t joking. Walter and I looked at each other and I could read his thoughts.
    “Anyway,” I said, “you just pointed out the challenge. Lots of people get