Free Steel Beach by John Varley

profession couldn’t weigh all that much.
    The door opened again and MacDonald’s manager beckoned to us.
    We followed him down a dim corridor lined with numbered doors. One of them was open and I could hear moaning coming from it. I glanced in as we passed. There was a bloody mess on a high table, with half a dozen pit crew clustered around.
    “You don’t mean to tell me…  ”
    “What?” Brenda said, and glanced into the room. “Oh. Yeah, she fights without nerve deadening.”
    “I thought—”
    “Most fighters turn their pain center way down, just enough so they know when they’ve been hit. But a few feel that trying to avoid real pain makes them quicker on their feet.”
    “It sure would make me quicker.”
    “Yeah, well, obviously it wasn’t enough tonight.”
    I was glad I’d had only the one piece of popcorn.
    The Manhattan Mugger was sitting in a diagnostic chair, wearing a robe and smoking a cheroot. His left leg was propped up and being worked on by one of his trainers. He smiled when he saw us, and held out his hand.
    “Andy MacDonald,” he said. “Pardon me for not getting up.”
    We both shook his hand, and he waved us into seats. He offered us drinks, which a member of his entourage brought us.
    Then Brenda launched into a breathless recap of the match, full of glowing praise for his martial skills. You’d never have known she just lost fifty on him. I sat back and waited, fully expecting we’d spend the next hour talking about the finer points of slash boxing. He was smiling faintly as Brenda went on and on, and I figured I had to say something, if only to be polite.
    “I’m not a sports fan,” I said, not wishing to be too polite, “but it seemed to me your technique was different from the others I saw tonight.”
    He took a long drag on his cheroot, then examined the glowing tip as he slowly exhaled purple smoke. He transferred his gaze to me, and some of the heat seemed to go with it. There was a deepness to his eyes I hadn’t noticed at first. You see that sometimes, in the very old. These days, of course, it is usually the only way you can tell someone is old. MacDonald certainly had no other signs of age. His body looked to be in its mid-twenties, but he’d had little choice in its features, given his profession. Slash boxers inhabit fairly standardized bodies, in nine different formulas or weight classes, as a way of minimizing any advantage gained by sheer body mass. His face seemed a bit older, but that could have been just the eyes. It wasn’t old enough for age to have impressed a great deal of character on it. Neither was it one of those generic “attractive” faces about half the population seem to prefer. I got the feeling this was pretty much the way he might have looked in his youth, which—I remembered, with a little shock—had been spent on Earth.
    The Earth-born are not precisely rare. The CC told me there were around ten thousand of them still alive. But they look like anyone else, usually, and tend not to announce themselves. There were some who made a big thing about their age—the perennial talk-show guests, storytellers, professional nostalgics—but by and large the Earth-born were a closeted minority. I had never wondered why before.
    “Walter said you’d talk me into joining this project of his,” MacDonald said, finally, ignoring my own comment. “I told him he was wrong. Not that I intend to be stubborn about it; if you can give me a good reason why I should spend a year with you two, I’d like to hear it.”
    “If you know Walter,” I countered, “you’ll know he’s possibly the least perceptive man in Luna, where other people are concerned. He thinks I’m enthusiastic about this project. He’s wrong. As far as I know, Walter is the only one interested in this project. It’s just a job to me.”
    “I’m interested,” Brenda piped up. MacDonald shifted his gaze to her, but didn’t feel the need to leave it there long. I had the