The Ophiuchi Hotline
Page 3
"Where now?"
"I'm not supposed to say," Mari said, with a shrug.
It didn't take Lilo long to figure it out. Most Lunarians know little selenography. They might not get out on the surface more than once or twice in several years, most likely for a trip like that Lilo and Mari were taking: enclosed in a capsule riding an induction rail while landscape whizzed past the windows. But Lilo knew the surface map pretty well. They were going north into the Imbrium flats, and when peaks began to loom up over the horizon she knew it was the Spitzbergen Mountains. So that was where the Boss lived. That kind of information was not exactly a state secret; but it was not advertised, because of the constant danger of assassination.
Tweed's home was on the surface—as it logically would be, Lilo realized, so he could see Earth at all times. Tweed was obsessed by Earth, and by the Invaders. There was one massive geodesic, surrounded by clusters of smaller ones. A spidery telescope with a twenty-meter mirror stood in the shadow of a cupola. It was trained on Earth.
Mari cut away the arm and replaced it with the original, then said Tweed was waiting for Lilo in the main dome. She pointed the way. Lilo took her time, looking into open doorways she passed. There would be just the one tube station, and the suits would be carefully watched. She fully realized this was as much a prison as the institute had been, but the time to start planning was right now.
Water was flowing down the hall. She splashed through it until the hall became a brook running through trees, in an artful mix of holos and real plants. She hadn't detected the transition. The creek bed was lined with polished stones of varicolored crystal and the deeper pools were full of fish. A panther studied her from the shore, joined her as she reached dry land, and stropped himself against her after smelling the fur on her calves. She fussed with him for a while, then sent him away with a cuff on the head.
The trail led to a clearing, and in the clearing was Tweed, sitting in a chair with a nude woman standing beside him. She spotted a man, also nude, in the trees at the edge of the clearing.
Lilo had been trying not to be impressed, but it was useless. She had no idea how much money it took to maintain a pocket disneyland like this, but she knew it was a great deal.
"Sit down, Lilo," Tweed said, and a chair unfolded from the high grass. She did, putting one foot up on the seat. She searched the pockets of the robe, found a brush, and began to comb the burrs from the wet hair on her legs.
"You've already met Vaffa," Tweed said, gesturing to the standing woman. Lilo glanced at her, noted the stance and the attitude of the hands. This woman could kill her in a second, and would. She had thought there was something familiar in the eyes.
"How many of them do you keep?" she said. There was a boa constrictor, fully twenty meters long, coiled in the grass at the woman's feet. "That's a hell of a pet."
"You don't like snakes?"
"I wasn't talking about the snake."
Tweed chuckled. "Vaffa is very useful, loyal, smart as can be, and totally ruthless. Aren't you, Vaffa?"
"If you say so, sir." Her eyes never left Lilo.
"In answer to your question, there are many Vaffas. One here, the other who helped you escape a few hours ago. Others in other places." Lilo did not need to ask why Vaffa was so useful. Though the faces and bodies were entirely different in the two she had seen, the feeling was the same. This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.
"Tell me about the Rings," Tweed said, unexpectedly.
"It was brought out at the trial," Lilo stammered. "I thought you knew."
"I knew, but I'm not convinced you were telling the whole truth. Where is the life capsule?"
"I don't know."
"We have ways of making you talk."
"Don't give me that crap." Tweed had a habit of talking that way, like an actor reading his lines in a third-rate thriller. "It's not a question of telling you," she elaborated. "I admitted setting it up. If I knew where it was, it wouldn't be much good to me, would it?"
At that moment, Lilo could see it might do her some harm instead of good. Tweed seemed unhappy, and that was disturbing. Keeping him happy had become very important.
Five years earlier, when her research began taking her into areas where she might expect to have trouble with the law, she had decided to build the capsule. She had contacts among the Ringers, and the money to get the project going. The idea, which had looked good at the time, was that if she got caught and convicted, her work could go on without interruption. Now she was not sure her motives had been that selfless. The urge to live is a strong one, as she had just learned.
"They questioned me with drugs," she said. "I have a friend out there. When I left the capsule, she moved it. I can't lead anyone to it. I don't know where it is."
"This accomplice," he said. "Did you have any way of getting in touch with her?"
"Have you ever been out there?"
"No, there's never time." He shrugged expressively. Lilo had seen it before, on the cube. Tweed was adept at the self-effacement routine, playing the part of one who's always busy with the People's work.
"Well, the Rings are big. If you haven't been there, you can't know just how big. I might get in touch with her by radio, but we couldn't think of a way she could be protected, too. I mean, anything could be drugged out of me, and she'd have no way of knowing if she was being lured into something. It was hard enough to get her involved in this, anyway. Ringers tend to be solitary. They don't worry much about other people's problems."
"But you have a way of getting in touch with her?"
"If you mean finding her, no. I can leave a message at the Janus switchboard. She calls every twenty years, like clockwork."
He spread his hands. "Not very efficient."
"That was sort of the idea. If it was easy for me to stop this project, it would be easy for someone who knew what I knew."
Tweed got up and walked slowly a few paces away, looking at the sky. The snake stirred, and coiled around Vaffa's leg. She bent over to stroke it, never looking away from Lilo.
"What was the name of this accomplice?"
"Parameter. Parameter/Solstice."
3
Song of the Rings, by Clancy-Daniel-Mitre. A collection of early human-symb collaborative poetry.
Circa 240-300 O.E. Open read-rating.
Of all the things received over the Ophiuchi Hotline, none is more wonderful than the symb. In the early part of the third century, symbs were seen as the salvation of the human race. Futurists saw the day when each human would be paired with a symb partner and forever free of reliance on airlocks, hydroponic farming, and recycled water. Each human would be a tiny model of lost Earth, free to roam the solar system at will.
It's easy to see what inspired the optimism. The symmetry of the concept is overwhelming. Each human-symb pair is a closed ecology, requiring only sunlight and a small amount of solid matter to function. The vegetable symb gathers sunlight in space, using it to convert human waste and carbon dioxide into food and oxygen. At the same time it protects the fragile human from vacuum and the extremes of heat and cold. The symb's body extends into the lungs and through the alimentary canal. Each side feeds the other.
What we didn't bargain for is the mind of the symb. Since it has no brain, a symb is nothing but a lump of artificial organic matter until it comes in contact with a human. But upon permeating the nervous system of its host it is born as a thinking being. It shares the human brain. The early experimenters learned that, once in, the symb was there to stay. Since that time relatively few have opted to surrender their mental privacy in exchange for Utopia in the Rings.
But out of the disappointment we have been given a precious gift. Ring society is not human society. We live in rooms and corridors; they have all of space. We each have the right to be the mother of one child in our lifetimes; they breed like bacteria. We are islands; they are paired minds. It is a relationship that is difficult to imagine.
Parameter floated over a golden desert that no horizon could contain. She faced the sun, which was a small but very bright disc just to anti-spinward of Saturn. Saturn itself was a dark hole in space, edged by a razored crescent with the sun set in it like a precious stone.
She saw none of this. She perceived the sun as a pressure and a wind, and Saturn as a cold, deep well that pulled.
The sunrise had been delicious. She could still taste the flavors of it flowing through the wafer-thin part of her body that had opened to receive it. She was a sunflower.
Sunflower mode was a lazy, vegetable time. Parameter had Solstice, her symb, disconnect the visual centers of her brain so she could savor the simple pleasures of being a plant. Her arms were spread wide to the light and her feet were planted firmly in the fertile soil that was her symb. It was a good time.
Seen from the outside, Parameter was the center of a hundred-meter filmy parasol, slightly parabolic. She was a spider sitting in the middle of a frozen section of soap bubble, but the section was shot through with veins, like the inner surface of an eyeball. Fluids pumped through the veins, some milky, some deep red, others purplish-brown. From a point near Parameter's navel a thin stalk extended, with a fist-sized nodule at the end of it. The nodule was at the focus of the parabola and received the small percentage of sunlight that was reflected from the sunflower. It was hot there, a steamy center for Parameter to revolve around. In the nodule and in the capillaries of the sunflower, chemical reactions were going on.
Activity in her brain was damped down to almost nothing, interrupted only by the passing peaks of Solstice, who never went completely to sleep.
"Parameter." It was not a voice, even when Parameter was more fully conscious. It was words forming in her head, like thoughts, but they were not her own thoughts.
"(Recognition; slight reproach; receptivity)"
"Come on. Wake up."
"What is it?" Coming awake was effortless.
"Are you ready for vision now?"
"Sure. Why not?"
Solstice, functioning as a switchboard in the back of the cerebrum, closed the contacts that would allow Parameter's visual cortex to communicate with her forebrain: She saw.
"What a lovely morning."
"Yeah. Very nice. Wait till you see the morning papers. You won't be so happy."
"Can it wait? Why ruin it?" Parameter felt no sense of urgency. It had been a century since she felt rushed.
"Sure. Let me know when you're up to it."
Parameter communicated wry amusement to her symb. (Picture of herself buckling on sword, dagger, donning brass helmet and picking up embossed shield.) Solstice responded. (Picture of Parameter climbing a staircase, gazing at the stars, failing to see she was reaching for a top step that wasn't there.)
Parameter stretched, causing the filmy parasol to undulate slowly. She made tight fists of all four hands—she had no feet, having surgically replaced them with oversized hands at the time of her pairing—then spread twenty fingers. One hand caught her attention. It was pale, but was turning pinker as she watched. She had the coloring of an albino; the skin under her nails was amber, turning quickly to orange. Solstice was packing up, pumping liquids around, getting ready to move.
Nothing she saw was real. Her eyes were protected behind the opaque substance of Solstice; no light had fallen on her retinas in over seven years. Had she looked at the sun with her eyes, as she seemed to be doing, cells would have been destroyed. What she saw was the product of nerve impulses sent to different areas of her brain by Solstice's sensory receptors. But it looked to her as though she were floating naked in space, feeling the raw sunlight on her body. The illusion was complete.
"Okay. What's up?"
"This is up. I monitored this broadcast two minutes ago. It came from the Janus transmitter, channel nineteen. Where do you want it?"
"I don't care. Anywhere."
A three-dimensional image built up between Parameter and the dark semicircle of Saturn. It looked as real as anything else she could see. The view was the interior of a room. It could have been any room, but the woman sitting in it was someone Parameter knew. The voice-over explained that Lilo, the convicted Enemy of Humanity, had been put to death. It gave the time, the place, and a brief summary of her crimes. As the commentary moved on to a lecture about the evils of genetic experimentation, Solstice tuned it out without Parameter needing to ask for it.
"We knew it would happen," Parameter pointed out, wondering why the news did not affect her more.
"So did she."
"Okay. Where is she now?"
Her view shifted. Saturn appeared to rotate beneath her until she saw the Rings from the top. She seemed to be hovering over the north polar region.
At the bottom of the Ring, near where the shadow of Saturn cut across it, a small green arrow blinked on and off.
"That's us," Solstice said. Further around the curve of the Ring, about sixty degrees to spinward, a dark red arrow appeared. Its color told her the mass of the rock in question. It was on the edge of Ring Alpha, the outermost of the rings, where perturbations would not have been severe over five years.
Solstice caused the picture to zoom in. There was Lilo's life capsule as Parameter had last seen it, retrieved by Solstice from areas in their common brain that Parameter could never reach without hypnosis.
It was a rock—slightly larger than average, but in all a quite ordinary rock. Inside it was a nuclear generator, a computer, a modest rocket engine, a life-support system—and Lilo. Or someone who could become Lilo; a clone who, when Lilo's recorded memories were played into her, would become the Lilo of five years ago.
"Has it really been five years?"
"And sixty days and three hours, Old Earth Corrected Time."
"Doesn't seem like that." She studied the two arrows again. It was a long distance.
"One hundred forty-one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five kilometers, as the rock rolls," Solstice supplied.
"Well, we made a promise, didn't we?'"
"I was waiting for you to say it."
It was six years ago they had first met her. Lilo had set up her private research station on Janus, hoping that the status of that satellite as the interface between human and pair society would mean less vigilance, looser enforcement of the genetic statutes. Parameter/Solstice had met her there on one of their infrequent visits, and they had immediately liked her. That was rare for them. Humans and pairs do not generally mix.
They had hung around her small lab while they were on Janus, and when they were ready to leave they had suggested she move her entire operation into the Rings. Lilo had not been willing to go that far, but had approached them with the idea of setting up a robot station on the edge of the Rings. She was worried about getting caught. They had agreed to supervise the awakening of the clone if she ever needed it.
Now the long journey was ahead of them. It was impossible to hurry. Though they could reach speeds of fifty kilometers per hour in their travels, they had to stop to feed each day. It would take them nearly a year to reach Lilo.
"Well, every trip starts with one push," Solstice said. "Let's go."
4
I'm not a frequent visitor to any of the disneylands. To me, a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands and eat dirt-grown food is harmless, but silly. It makes us yearn for something we can never have, something that's always up there in the Lunar sky. It leads to lunatic fantasies like the one that had obsessed Tweed for so long: the retaking of Earth, the liberation of our home planet from the Invaders.
I grew up surrounded by metal, and have never felt deprived because of it. Stories of Old Earth glories leav
e me unmoved. Our frontiers will be found not by trying to recapture the past, but by looking within ourselves. I had tried to do that, and ended up in jail.
Tweed must have set the thermostat on his private paradise at around forty degrees. I was sweltering. Maybe the plants needed a summer, but I definitely didn't. And some unspeakable little vermin had found their way into my leg hair. Nature. I stripped off the bulky robe and tried to cool myself while Tweed pondered my fate.
Lilo saw Tweed make a signal to the man on the edge of the woods. She tensed. Was this it? He could decide she wasn't worth the trouble—she still didn't know what he had in mind for her—and things could start to happen fast. She watched Vaffa carefully. If they came at her, she vowed to do some damage on the way out.
But Tweed was hurrying through the thick grass. Vaffa relaxed a little when Tweed had gone out of sight. She sat in the grass and stroked the snake. This female Vaffa was two and a half meters tall, had no breasts and very little fat anywhere, and was completely hairless. She was bone-white all over. A death's-head: spare, economical of movement, powerful and lethal.
Someone came running through the field toward them. Lilo wondered why anyone would run in this heat. Was she in trouble? But it was sheer high spirits. She saw the tattoo first, then the face.
"Hello, Mari."
"Hi," she gasped. "Isn't it wonderful? Being here, I mean."
"Uh-huh." Lilo slapped at something that buzzed; her hand came away red. Bloodsucker!
"Hi, Vaffa." The woman nodded to Mari. The medico was covered in sweat, and seemed to love it. She stood for a moment, getting her breath back. "You're supposed to come with me," she said.
"What for?"
"I have to make a recording of you. Boss's orders. Come on, it won't take a minute."
Lilo knew it took a bit longer than that, but followed her along a path leading into the woods. Turning, she saw that Vaffa was following, giving more attention to the snake than to Lilo. It wasn't very flattering. It would have been nice to think of herself as dangerous, but Vaffa did not seem impressed. Well, that was probably best. Maybe she'd get a surprise one day.