In the Bowl

by John Varley

  "You sure go out on a limb, don't you?"

  "It's good practice. We future medicos must always be on the alert for malpractice suits. Lean over here and I'll put it in."

  "What I was wondering," I said, as she hooked it up and eased it back into the socket, "is whether I'd be safe going out in the desert for four weeks with this eye."

  "No," she said promptly, and I felt a great weight of disappointment. "Nor with any eye," she quickly added. "Not if you're going alone."

  "I see. But you think the eye would hold up?"

  "Oh, sure. But you wouldn't. That's why you're going to take me up on my astounding offer and let me be your guide through the desert."

  I snorted. "You think so? Sorry, this is going to be a solo expedition. I planned it that way from the first. That's what I go out rock hunting for in the first place: to be alone." I dug my credit meter out of my pouch. :: "Now, how much do I owe you?"

  She wasn't listening but was resting her chin on her palm and looking wistful.

  "He goes out so he can be alone, did you hear that, Malibu?" The otter looked up at her from his place on the floor. "Now take me, for instance. Me, I know what being alone is all about. It's the crowds and big 4 cities I crave. Right, old buddy?" The otter kept looking at her, obviously ready to agree to anything.

  "I suppose so," I said. "Would a hundred be all right?" That was about half what a registered medico A would have charged me, but like I said, I was running short.

  "You're not going to let me be your guide? Final word?"

  "No. Final. Listen, it's not you, it's just " j

  "I know. You want to be alone. No charge. Come on, Malibu." She got up and headed for the door. 4 Then she turned around.

  "I'll be seeing you," she said, and winked at me.

  It didn't take me too long to understand what the e wink had been all about. I can see the obvious on the 1 third or fourth go-around The fact was that Prosperity was considerably be- R mused to have a tourist in its midst. There wasn't a rental agency or hotel in the entire town. I had thought of that but hadn't figured it would be too hard to find .` someone willing to rent his private skycycle if the price. was right. I'd been saving out a large chunk of cash for the purpose of meeting extortionate demands in that department. I felt sure the locals would be only too willing to soak a tourist.

  But they weren't taking. Just about everyone had a skycycle, and absolutely everyone who had one was uninterested in renting it. They were a necessity to anyone who worked out of town, which everyone did, and they were hard to get. Freight schedules were as spotty as the passenger service. And every person who turned me down had a helpful suggestion to make. As I say, after the fourth or fifth such suggestion I found myself back in the town square. She was sitting just as she had been the first time, trailing her feet in the water. Malibu never seemed to tire of the waterslide.

  "Yes," she said, without looking up. "It so happens that I do have a skycycle for rent."

  I was exasperated, but I had to cover it up. She had me over the proverbial barrel.

  "Do you always hang around here?" I asked. "People tell me to see you about a skycycle and tell me to look here, almost like you and this fountain are a hyphenated word. What else do you do?"

  She fixed me with a haughty glare. "I repair eyes for dumb tourists. I also do body work for everyone in town at only twice what it would cost them in Last Chance. And I do it damn well, too, though those rubes'd be the last to admit it. No doubt Mr. Lamara at the ticket station told you scandalous lies about my skills. They resent it because I'm taking advantage of the cost and time it would take them to get to Last Chance and pay merely inflated prices, instead of the outrageous ones I charge them."

  I had to smile, though I was sure I was about to become the object of some outrageous prices myself. She was a shrewd operator.

  "How old are you?" I found myself asking, then almost bit my tongue. The last thing a proud and independent child likes to discuss is age. But she surprised me.

  "In mere chronological time, eleven Earth years.

  That's just over six of your years. In real, internal time, of course, I'm ageless."

  "Of course. Now about that cycle...

  "Of course. But I evaded your earlier question. What I do besides sit here is irrelevant, because while sitting here I am engaged in contemplating eternity. I'm diving into my navel, hoping to learn the true depth of the womb. In short, I'm doing my yoga exercises." She looked thoughtfully out over the water to her pet. "Besides, it's the only pool in a thousand kilometers." She grinned at me and dived fiat over the water. She cut it like a knife blade and torpedoed out to her otter, who set up a happy racket of barks.

  When she surfaced near the middle of the pool, out by the jets and falls, I called to her.

  "What about the cycle?"

  She cupped her ear, though she was only about fifteen meters away.

  "1 said what about the cycle?"

  "I can't hear you," she mouthed. "You'll have to come out here."

  I stepped into the pool, grumbling to myself. I could see that her price included more than just money.

  "I can't swim," I warned.

  "Don't worry, it won't get much deeper than that." It was up to my chest. I sloshed out until I was on tiptoe, then grabbed at a jutting curlicue on the fountain. I hauled myself up and sat on the wet Venusian marble with water trickling down my legs.

  Ember was sitting at the bottom of the waterslide, thrashing her feet in the water. She was leaning flat against the smooth rock. The water that sheeted over the rock made a bow wave at the crown of her head. Beads of water ran off her head feathers. Once again she made me smile. If charm could be sold, she could have been wealthy. What am I talking about? Nobody ever sells anything but charm, in one way or another. I got a grip on myself before she tried to sell me the north and south poles. In no time at all I was able to see her as an avaricious, cunning little guttersnipe again.

  "One billion Solar Marks per hour, not a penny less," she said from that sweet little mouth.

  There was no point in negotiating from an offer like that.

  "You brought me out here to hear that? I'm really disappointed in you. I didn't take you for a tease, I 'really didn't. I thought we could do business. I-"

  "Well, if that offer isn't satisfactory, try this one. Free of charge, except for oxygen and food and water." She waited, threshing the water with her feet.

  Of course there would be some teeth in that. In an intuitive leap of truly cosmic scale, a surmise worthy of an Einstein, I saw the string. She saw me make that leap, knew I didn't like where I had landed, and her teeth flashed at me. So once again, and not for the last time, I had to either strangle her or smile at her. I smiled. I don't know how, but she had this knack of making her opponents like her even as she screwed them.

  "Are you a believer in love at first sight?" I asked her, hoping to throw her off guard. Not a chance.

  "Maudlin wishful thinking, at best," she said. "You have not bowled me over, Mister-"

  "Kiku."

  "Nice. Martian name?"

  "I suppose so. I never really thought of it. I'm not rich, Ember."

  "Certainly not. You wouldn't have put yourself in my hands if you were."

  "Then why are you so attracted to me? Why are you so determined to go with me, when all I want from you is to rent your cycle? If I was that charming, I would have noticed it by now."

  "Oh, I don't know," she said, with one eyebrow climbing up her forehead. "There's something about you that I find absolutely fascinating. Irresistible, even." She pretended to swoon.

  "Want to tell me what it is?"

  She shook her head "Let that be my little secret for now."

  I was beginning to suspect she was attracted to me by the shape of my neck-so she could sink her teeth into it and drain my blood. I decided to let it lie. Hopefully she'd tell me more in the days ahead. Because it looked like there would be days together, many of them.

>   "When can you be ready to leave?"

  "I packed right after I fixed your eye. Let's get going."

  Venus is spooky. I thought and thought, and that's the best way I can describe it.

  It's spooky partly because of the way you see it. Your right eye-the one that sees what's called visible light--shows you only a small circle of light that's illuminated by your hand torch. Occasionally there's a glowing spot of molten metal in the distance, but it's far too dim to see by. Your infraeye pierces those shadows and gives you a blurry picture of what lies outside the torchlight, but I would have almost rather been blind.

  There's no good way to describe how this dichotomy affects your mind. One eye tells you that everything beyond a certain point is shadowy, while the other shows you what's in those shadows. Ember says that after a while your brain can blend the two pictures as easily as it does for binocular vision. I never reached that point. The whole time I was there I was trying to reconcile the two pictures.

  I don't like standing in the bottom of a bowl a thousand kilometers wide. That's what you see. No matter how high you climb or how far you go, you're still standing in the bottom of that bowl. It has something to do with the bending of the light rays by the thick atmosphere, if I understand Ember correctly.

  Then there's the sun. When I was there it was night time, which means that the sun was a squashed ellipse hanging just above the horizon in the east, where it had set weeks and weeks ago. Don't ask me to explain it. All I know is that the sun never sets on Venus. Never, no matter where you are. It just gets flatter and flatter and wider and wider until it oozes around to the north or south, depending on where you are;- becoming a flat, bright line of light until it begins pulling itself back together in the west, where it's going to rise in a few weeks.

  Ember says that at the equator it becomes a complete circle for a split second when it's actually directly underfoot. Like the lights of a terrific stadium. All this happens up at the rim of the bowl you're standing in, about ten degrees above the theoretical horizon. It's another refraction effect.

  You don't see it in your left eye. Like I said, the clouds keep out virtually all of the visible light. It's in your right eye. The color is what I got to think of as infrablue.

  It's quiet. You begin to miss the sound of your own breathing, and if you think about that too much, you begin to wonder why you aren't breathing. You know, of course, except the hindbrain, which never likes it at all. It doesn't matter to the automatic nervous system that your Venus-lung is dribbling oxygen directly into your bloodstream; those circuits aren't made to understand things; they are primitive and very wary of improvements. So I was plagued by a feeling of suffocation, which was my medulla getting even with me, I guess.

  I was also pretty nervous about the temperature and pressure. Silly, I know. Mars would kill me just as dead without a suit, and do it more slowly and painfully into the bargain. If my suit. failed here, I doubt if I'd have felt anything. It was just the thought of that incredible pressure being held one millimeter away from my fragile skin by a force field that, physically speaking, isn't even there. Or so Ember told me. She might have been trying to get my goat. I mean, lines of magnetic force have no physical reality, but they're there, aren't they?

  I kept my mind off it. Ember was there and she knew about such things.

  What she couldn't adequately explain to me was why a skycycle didn't have a motor. I thought about that a lot, sitting on the saddle and pedaling my ass off with ,. nothing to look at but Ember's silver-plated buttocks.

  She had a tandem cycle, which meant four seats; two for us and two for our tagalongs. I sat behind Ember, and the tagalongs sat in two seats off to our right. Since they aped our leg movements with exactly the same force we applied, what we had was a four human power cycle.

  "I can't figure out for the life of me," I said on our first day out, "what would have been so hard about mounting an engine on this thing and using some of the surplus power from our packs."

  "Nothing hard about it, lazy," she said, without turning around. "Take my advice as a fledgling medico; this is much better for you. If you use the muscles you're wearing, they'll last you a lot longer. It makes you feel healthier and keeps you out of the clutches of money-grubbing medicos. I know. Half my work is excising fat from flabby behinds and digging varicose veins out of legs. Even out here, people don't get more than twenty years' use of their legs before they're ready for a trade-in. That's pure waste."

  "I think I should have had a trade-in before we left. I'm about done in. Can't we call it a day?"

  She tut-tutted, but touched a control and began spilling hot gas from the balloon over our heads. The steering vanes sticking out at our sides tilted, and we started a slow spiral to the ground.

  We landed at the bottom of the bowl-my first experience with it, since all my other views of Venus had been from the air where it isn't so noticeable. I stood looking at it and scratching my head while Ember turned on the tent and turned off the balloon.

  The Venusians use null fields for just about everything. Rather than try to cope with a technology that must stand up to the temperature and pressure extremes, they coat everything in a null field and let it go at that. The balloon on the cycle was nothing but a standard globular field with a discontinuity at the bottom for the air heater. The cycle body was protected with the same kind of field that Ember and I wore, the kind that follows the surface at a set distance. The tent was a hemispherical field with a fiat floor. '

  It simplified a lot of things. Airlocks, for instance. What we did was to simply walk into the tent. Our suit fields vanished as they were absorbed into the tent field. To leave one need merely walk through the wall again, and the suit would form around you.

  I plopped myself down on the floor and tried to turn my hand torch off. To my surprise, I found that it wasn't built to turn off. Ember turned on the campfire and noticed my puzzlement.

  "Yes, it is wasteful," she conceded. "There's something in a Venusian that hates to turn out a light. You won't find a light switch on the entire planet. You may not believe this, but I was shocked silly a few years ago when I heard about light switches. The idea had never occurred to me. See what a provincial I am?"

  That didn't sound like her. I searched her face for clues to what had brought on such a statement, but I could find nothing. She was sitting in front of the campfire with Malibu on her lap, preening her feathers.

  I gestured at the fire, which was a beautifully executed holo of snapping, crackling logs with a heater concealed in the center of it.

  "Isn't that an uncharacteristic touch? Why didn't you bring a fancy house, like the ones in town?"

  "I like the fire. I don't like phony houses."

  "Why not?"

  She shrugged. She was thinking of other things. I tried another tack.

  "Does your mother mind you going into the desert with strangers?"

  She shot me a look I couldn't read.

  "How should I know? I don't live with her. I'm emancipated. I think she's in Venusburg." I had obviously touched a tender area, so I went cautiously.

  "Personality conflicts?"

  She shrugged again, not wanting to get into it.

  "No. Well, yes, in a way. She wouldn't emigrate from Venus.- I wanted to leave and she wanted to stay. Our interests didn't coincide. So we went our own ways. I'm working my way toward passage off-planet."

  "How close are you?"

  "Closer than you might think." She- seemed to be weighing something in her mind, sizing me up. I could hear the gears grind and the cash register bells cling as she studied my face. Then I felt 'the charm start up again, like the flicking of one of those nonexistent light switches.

  "See, I'm as close as I've ever been to getting off Venus. In a few weeks, I'll be there. As soon as we get back with some blast jewels. Because you're going to adopt me."

  I think I was getting used to her. I wasn't rocked by that, though it was nothing like what I had expected t
o hear. I had been thinking vaguely along the lines of blast jewels. She picks some up along with me, sells them, and buys a ticket off-planet, right?

  That was silly, of course. She didn't need me to get blast jewels. She was the guide, not I, and it was her cycle. She could get as many jewels as she wanted, and probably already had. This scheme had to have something to do with me, personally, as I had known back in town and forgotten about. There was something she wanted from me.

  "That's why you had to go with me? That's the fatal attraction? I don't understand."

  "Your passport. I'm in love with your passport. On the blank labeled `citizenship' it says `Mars.' Under age it says, oh... about seventy-three." She was within a year, though I keep my appearance at about thirty.

  "$o?"

  "So, my dear Kiku, you are visiting a planet which is groping its way into the stone age. A medieval planet, Mr. Kiku, that sets the age of majority at thirteen-a capricious and arbitrary figure, as I'm sure you'll agree. The laws of this planet state that certain rights of free citizens are withheld from minor citizens. Among these are liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the ability to get out of the goddam place!" She startled me with her fury, coming so hard on the heels of her usual amusing glibness. Her fists were clenched. Malibu, sitting in her lap, looked sadly up at his friend, then over to me.

  She quickly brightened and bounced up to prepare dinner. She would not respond to my questions. The subject was closed for the day.

  I was ready to turn back the next day. Have you ever had stiff legs? Probably not; if you go in for that sort of thing-heavy physical labor-you are probably one of those health nuts and keep yourself in shape. I wasn't in shape, and I thought I'd die. For a panicky moment I thought I was dying.

  Luckily, Ember had anticipated it. She knew I was a desk jockey, and she knew how pitifully under-conditioned Martians tend to be. Added to the sedentary life styles of most modern people, we Martians come off even worse than the majority because Mars' gravity never gives us much of a challenge no matter how hard we try. My leg muscles were like soft noodles.