Picnic On Nearside

by John Varley

  One thing was bothering Xanthia. "What do you mean, 'as often as is necessary'?"

  "Usually five or six thousand passes is sufficient."

  "No, no. What I meant is why is it necessary? What do you get out of it?"

  "Mass," the hole said. "I need to replenish my mass. The Relativity Laws state that nothing can escape from a black hole, but the Quantum Laws, specifically the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, state that below a certain radius the position of a particle cannot be determined. I lose mass constantly through tunneling. It is not all wasted, as I am able to control the direction and form of the escaping mass, and to use the energy that results to perform functions that your present-day physics says are impossible."

  "Such as?" Xanthia didn't know why, but she was getting nervous.

  "I can exchange inertia for gravity, and create energy in a variety of ways."

  "So you can move yourself."

  "Slowly."

  "And you eat..."

  "Anything."

  Xanthia felt a sudden panic, but she didn't know what was wrong. She glanced down at her instruments and felt her hair prickle from her wrists and ankles to the nape of her neck.

  The hole was ten kilometers closer than it had been.

  "How could you do that to me?" Xanthia raged. "I trusted you, and that's how you repaid me, by trying to sneak up on me and... and—"

  "It was not intentional. I speak to you by means of controlled gravity waves. To speak to you at all, it is necessary to generate an attractive force between us. You were never in any danger."

  "I don't believe that," Xanthia said angrily. "I think you're doubletalking me. I don't think gravity works like that, and I don't think you really tried very hard to tell me how you talk to me, back when we first started." It occurred to her now, also, that the hole was speaking much more fluently than in the beginning. Either it was a very fast learner, or that had been intentional.

  The hole paused. "This is true," it said.

  She pressed her advantage. "Then why did you do it?"

  "It was a reflex, like blinking in a bright light, or drawing one's hand back from a fire. When I sense matter, I am attracted to it."

  "The proper cliché would be 'like a moth to a flame.' But you're not a moth, and I'm not a flame. I don't believe you. I think you could have stopped yourself if you wanted to."

  Again the hole hesitated. "You are correct."

  "So you were trying to...?"

  "I was trying to eat you."

  "Just like that? Eat someone you've been having a conversation with?"

  "Matter is matter," the hole said, and Xanthia thought she detected a defensive note in its voice.

  "What do you think of what I said we're going to do with you? You were going to tell me, but we got off on that story about where you came from."

  "As I understand it, you propose to return for me. I will be towed to near Pluto's orbit, sold, and eventually come to rest in the heart of an orbital power station, where your species will feed matter into my gravity well, extracting power cheaply from the gravitational collapse."

  "Yeah, that's pretty much it."

  "It sounds ideal. My life is struggle. Failing to find matter to consume would mean loss of mass until I am smaller than an atomic nucleus. The loss rate would increase exponentially, and my universe would disappear. I do not know what would happen beyond that point. I have never wished to find out."

  How much could she trust this thing? Could it move very rapidly? She toyed with the idea of backing off still further. The two of them were now motionless relative to each other, but they were both moving slowly away from the location she had given Zoe.

  It didn't make sense to think it could move in on her fast. If it could, why hadn't it? Then it could eat her and wait for Zoe. to arrive—Zoe, who was helpless to detect the hole with her broken mass detector.

  She should relay the new vectors to Zoe. She tried to calculate where her twin would arrive, but was distracted by the hole speaking.

  "I would like to speak to you now of what I initially contacted you for. Listening to Pluto radio, I have become aware of certain facts that you should know, if, as I suspect, you are not already aware of them. Do you know of Clone Control Regulations?"

  "No, what are they?" Again, she was afraid without knowing why.

  The genetic statutes, according to the hole, were the soul of simplicity. For three hundred years, people had been living just about forever. It had become necessary to limit the population. Even if everyone had only one child—the Birthright—population would still grow. For a while, clones had been a loophole. No more. Now, only one person had the right to any one set of genes. If two possessed them, one was excess, and was summarily executed.

  "Zoe has prior property rights to her genetic code," the hole concluded. "This is backed up by a long series of court decisions."

  "So I'm—"

  "Excess."

  Zoe met her at the airlock as Xanthia completed the docking maneuver. She was smiling, and Xanthia felt the way she always did when Zoe smiled these days: like a puppy being scratched behind the ears. They kissed, then Zoe held her at arm's length.

  "Let me look at you. Can it only be three months? You've grown, my baby."

  Xanthia blushed. "I'm not a baby anymore, Mother." But she was happy. Very happy.

  "No. I should say not." She touched one of Xanthia's breasts, then turned her around slowly. "I should say not. Putting on a little weight in the hips, aren't we?"

  "And the bosom. One inch while I was gone. I'm almost there." And it was true. At sixteen, the young clone was almost a woman.

  "Almost there," Zoe repeated, and glanced away from her twin. But she hugged her again, and they kissed, and began to laugh as the tension was released.

  They made love, not once and then to bed, but many times, feasting on each other. One of them remarked—Xanthia could not remember who because it seemed so accurate that either of them might have said it—that the only good thing about these three-month separations was the homecoming.

  "You did very well," Zoe said, floating in the darkness and sweet exhausted atmosphere of their bedroom many hours later. "You handled the lifeboat like it was part of your body. I watched the docking. I wanted to see you make a mistake, I think, so I'd know I still have something on you." Her teeth showed in the starlight, rows of lights below the sparkles of her eyes and the great dim blossom of her hair.

  "Ah, it wasn't that hard," Xanthia said, delighted, knowing full well that it was that hard.

  "Well, I'm going to let you handle it again the next swing. From now on, you can think of the lifeboat as your ship. You're the skipper."

  It didn't seem like the time to tell her that she already thought of it that way. Nor that she had christened the ship.

  Zoe laughed quietly. Xanthia looked at her.

  "I remember the day I first boarded my own ship," she said. "It was a big day for me. My own ship."

  "This is the way to live," Xanthia agreed. "Who needs all those people? Just the two of us. And they say hole hunters are crazy. I... wanted to..." The words stuck in her throat, but Xanthia knew this was the time to get them out, if there ever would be a time. "I don't want to stay too long at Pluto, Mother. I'd like to get right back out here with you." There, she'd said it.

  Zoe said nothing for a long time.

  "We can talk about that later."

  "I love you, Mother," Xanthia said, a little too loudly.

  "I love you, too, baby," Zoe mumbled. "Let's get some sleep, okay?"

  She tried to sleep, but it wouldn't happen. What was wrong?

  Leaving the darkened room behind her, she drifted through the ship, looking for something she had lost, or was losing, she wasn't sure which. What had happened, after all? Certainly nothing she could put her finger on. She loved her mother, but all she knew was that she was choking on tears.

  In the water closet, wrapped in the shower bag with warm water misting around her,
she glanced in the mirror.

  "Why? Why would she do a thing like that?"

  "Loneliness. And insanity. They appear to go together. This is her solution. You are not the first clone she has made."

  She had thought herself beyond shock, but the clarity that simple declarative sentence brought to her mind was explosive. Zoe had always needed the companionship Xanthia provided. She needed a child for diversion in the long, dragging years of a voyage; she needed someone to talk to. Why couldn't she have brought a dog? She saw herself now as a shipboard pet, and felt sick. The local leash laws would necessitate the destruction of the animal before landing. Regrettable, but there it was. Zoe had spent the last year working up the courage to do it.

  How many little Xanthias? They might even have chosen that very name; they would have been that much like her. Three, four? She wept for her forgotten sisters. Unless...

  "How do I know you're telling me the truth about this? How could she have kept it from me? I've seen tapes of Pluto. I never saw any mention of this."

  "She edited those before you were born. She has been careful. Consider her position: there can be only one of you, but the law does not say which it has to be. With her death, you become legal. If you had known that, what would life have been like in Shirley Temple?"

  "I don't believe you. You've got something in mind, I'm sure of it."

  "Ask her when she gets here. But be careful. Think it out, all the way through."

  She had thought it out. She had ignored the last three calls from Zoe while she thought. All the options must be considered, all the possibilities planned for. It was an impossible task; she knew she was far too emotional to think clearly, and there wasn't time to get herself under control.

  But she had done what she could. Now The Good Ship Lollipop, outwardly unchanged, was a ship of war.

  Zoe came backing in, riding the fusion torch and headed for a point dead in space relative to Xanthia. The fusion drive was too dangerous for Shirley to complete the rendezvous; the rest of the maneuver would be up to Lollipop.

  Xanthia watched through the telescope as the drive went off. She could see Shirley clearly on her screen, though the ship was fifty kilometers away.

  Her screen lit up again, and there was Zoe. Xanthia turned her own camera on.

  "There you are," Zoe said. "Why wouldn't you talk to me?"

  "I didn't think the time was ripe."

  "Would you like to tell me how come this nonsense about talking black holes? What's gotten into you?"

  "Never mind about that. There never was a hole, anyway. I just needed to talk to you about something you forgot to erase from the tape library in the Lol-... in the lifeboat. You were pretty thorough with the tapes in Shirley, but you forgot to take the same care here. I guess you didn't think I'd ever be using it. Tell me, what are Clone Control Regulations?"

  The face on the screen was immobile. Or was it a mirror, and was she smiling? Was it herself, or Zoe she watched? Frantically, Xanthia thumbed a switch to put her telescope image on the screen, wiping out the face. Would Zoe try to talk her way out of it? If she did, Xanthia was determined to do nothing at all. There was no way she could check out any lie Zoe might tell her, nothing she could confront Zoe with except a fantastic story from a talking black hole.

  Please say something. Take the responsibility out of my hands. She was willing to die, tricked by Zoe's fast talk, rather than accept the hole's word against Zoe's.

  But Zoe was acting, not talking, and the response was exactly what the hole had predicted. The attitude control jets were firing, Shirley Temple was pitching and yawing slowly, the nozzles at the stern hunting for a speck in the telescope screen. When the engines were aimed, they would surely be fired, and Xanthia and the whole ship would be vaporized.

  But she was ready. Her hands had been poised over the thrust controls. Lollipop had a respectable acceleration, and every gee of it slammed her into the couch as she scooted away from the danger spot.

  Shirley's fusion engines fired, and began a deadly hunt. Xanthia could see the thin, incredibly hot stream playing around her as Zoe made finer adjustments in her orientation. She could only evade it for a short time, but that was all she needed.

  Then the light went out. She saw her screen flare up as the telescope circuit became overloaded with an immense burst of energy. And it was over. Her radar screen showed nothing at all.

  "As I predicted," the hole said.

  "Why don't you shut up?" Xanthia sat very still, and trembled.

  "I shall, very soon. I did not expect to be thanked. But what you did, you did for yourself."

  "And you, too, you... you ghoul! Damn you, damn you to hell." She was shouting through her tears. "Don't think you've fooled me, not completely, anyway. I know what you did, and I know how you did it."

  "Do you?" The voice was unutterably cool and distant. She could see that now the hole was out of danger, it was rapidly losing interest in her.

  "Yes, I do. Don't tell me it was coincidence that when you changed direction it was just enough to be near Zoe when she got here. You had this planned from the start."

  "From much further back than you know," the hole said. "I tried to get you both, but it was impossible. The best I could do was take advantage of the situation as it was."

  "Shut up, shut up."

  The hole's voice was changing from the hollow, neutral tones to something that might have issued from a tank of liquid helium. She would never have mistaken it for human.

  "What I did, I did for my own benefit. But I saved your life. She was going to try to kill you. I maneuvered her into such a position that, when she tried to turn her fusion drive on you, she was heading into a black hole she was powerless to detect."

  "You used me."

  "You used me. You were going to imprison me in a power station."

  "But you said you wouldn't mind! You said it would be the perfect place."

  "Do you believe that eating is all there is to life? There is more to do in the wide universe than you can even suspect. I am slow. It is easy to catch a hole if your mass detector is functioning: Zoe did it three times. But I am beyond your reach now."

  "What do you mean? What are you going to do? What am I going to do?" That question hurt so much that Xanthia almost didn't hear the hole's reply.

  "I am on my way out. I converted Shirley into energy; I absorbed very little mass from her. I beamed the energy very tightly, and am now on my way out of your system. You will not see me again. You have two options. You can go back to Pluto and tell everyone what happened out here. It would be necessary for scientists to rewrite natural laws if they believed you. It has been done before, but usually with more persuasive evidence. There will be questions asked concerning the fact that no black hole has ever evaded capture, spoken, or changed velocity in the past. You can explain that when a hole has a chance to defend itself, the hole hunter does not survive to tell the story."

  "I will. I will tell them what happened!" Xanthia was eaten by a horrible doubt. Was it possible there had been a solution to her problem that did not involve Zoe's death? Just how badly had the hole tricked her?

  "There is a second possibility," the hole went on, relentlessly. "Just what are you doing out here in a lifeboat?"

  "What am I... I told you, we had..." Xanthia stopped. She felt herself choking.

  "It would be easy to see you as crazy. You discovered something in Lollipop's library that led you to know you must kill Zoe. This knowledge was too much for you. In defense, you invented me to trick you into doing what you had to do. Look in the mirror and tell me if you think your story will be believed. Look closely, and be honest with yourself."

  She heard the voice laugh for the first time, from down in the bottom of its hole, like a voice from a well. It was an extremely unpleasant sound.

  Maybe Zoe had died a month ago, strangled or poisoned or slashed with a knife. Xanthia had been sitting in her lifeboat, catatonic, all that time, and had constructed th
is episode to justify the murder. It had been self-defense, which was certainly a good excuse, and a very convenient one.

  But she knew. She was sure, as sure as she had ever been of anything, that the hole was out there, that everything had happened as she had seen it happen. She saw the flash again in her mind, the awful flash that had turned Zoe into radiation. But she also knew that the other explanation would haunt her for the rest of her life.

  "I advise you to forget it. Go to Pluto, tell everyone that your ship blew up and you escaped and you are Zoe. Take her place in the world, and never, never speak of talking black holes."

  The voice faded from her radio. It did not speak again.

  After days of numb despair and more tears and recriminations than she cared to remember, Xanthia did as the hole had predicted. But life on Pluto did not agree with her. There were too many people, and none of them looked very much like her. She stayed long enough to withdraw Zoe's money from the bank and buy a ship, which she named Shirley Temple. It was massive, with power to blast to the stars if necessary. She had left something out there, and she meant to search for it until she found it again.

  Picnic on Nearside

  THIS IS THE STORY of how I went to the Nearside and found old Lester and maybe grew up a little. And about time, too, as Carnival would say.

  Carnival is my mother. We don't get along well most of the time, and I think it's because I'm twelve and she's ninety-six. She says it makes no difference, and she waited so long to have her child because she wanted to be sure she was ready for it. And I answer back that at her age she's too far away from childhood to remember what it's like. And she replies that her memory is perfect all the way back to her birth. And I retort...

  We argue a lot.