The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  Five years before that, when I made my own recording in the capsule orbiting Saturn, there was the potential for another branch. I had no way of knowing if that one had produced another Lilo, but it was possible. I hoped I would never meet her. I had met myself once, and learned something about myself I would have been happier not knowing.

  But since I did know it, since I had seen what lengths I would go to stay alive, I intended to live.

  I intended to live forever.

  Survival training took Lilo three months to complete. At that, she gathered she was getting the short course.

  She never complained, but it seemed a lot of foolishness to her, and highly uncomfortable foolishness. Unless Tweed was seriously preparing to establish a beachhead on Old Earth, it seemed pointless.

  But she went along with it, from the Amazon to Egypt. She spent a week in each of the major disneylands. The Free Earth Party spent a lot of money to be allowed in the wilderness areas of the environmental parks. In return they had the pleasure of dehydrating under desert suns and getting frostbite in Siberia.

  Lilo was in a class of twenty. All the others were initiates into the cult-party, with the exception of Vaffa-female, who accompanied Lilo and made everything look easy. She got to know the Free Earthers. She suspected many of them were not as fanatic as Tweed about the actual liberation of Earth. Many were there for the interesting experiences.

  She grew to have a great deal of respect for Tweed's profile of her. He was sticking his neck out every time he allowed her to come in contact with someone who was not a member of the tight inner circle of Free Earthers. Presumably she could tell someone who she was. Tweed could not be sure that any of her classmates were sufficiently committed to the cause not to report her to the government. If anyone did, if the State found out Tweed had abducted her from the institute, his ass was in the recycler.

  The catch was that Lilo would be condemning herself to death along with him. He knew she would not do that.

  Actually, though she would never have admitted it, she came to like living in the bush. Slogging through a snowstorm was no fun, but huddling in your igloo with five other people under a polar-bearskin blanket was. There were many good moments.

  There was also loneliness. It was much harder to take than the physical hardships. She had learned to live alone during her year at the institute. Now she ached to have friends again, to find a lover. But she could not be friends with anyone in the survival class. It was unthinkable to love someone and not be able to open up, to tell everything, and she could not do that. There were secrets she must guard. The people at Tweed's residence were even worse. They knew all her secrets, but they knew she was not one of them. She was treated with civility, but would never be trusted. Only with Mari could she begin to get close. Lilo knew Mari liked her, but it was the broad, uncritical affection that was a part of her personality. Mari thought genetic experimentation on human DNA was wrong, and Lilo thought the dream of the Free Earthers was crazy. There was little for them to talk about.

  So she was alone in a crowd. In some ways, it was worse than the confinement of prison. She began to hang back during the nights around the campfire when everyone got together for singing and telling stories and copping. She told herself it was because she didn't care for sex in the Great Outdoors. "Cop on the beach," she told Mari, "and spend the next day digging sand out of yourself." Only when the yearning became unbearable would she find a partner, but increasingly, her most trusted lovers had been the fingers of her right hand.

  She was lonely, her sex life was terrible, and she began to suffer anxieties of recapture by the authorities. It would be awful to face execution at this point, after all she had been through and the shameful things she had done. If she died now, somehow, all the previous deaths would have been for nothing.

  Lilo had not seen Tweed since the day of her awakening. She assumed he had been present at that so her responses would be as they had been before. He was teaching her a lesson, and connecting it with his own person. It was good psychology, and it worked. She found that she did fear him.

  From that day on he seemed to take no further interest in her. She tried to get in to see him, but was brushed off by aides. The Boss was always too busy.

  It had been oddly comforting to see herself as very important to Tweed, someone he must have even at the risk of abducting her from the institute. She gradually had to change that picture. When she realized she was going through an established curriculum for clandestine agents—which implied there were others, perhaps hundreds of others, like her—she became depressed. Maybe she was no more important to Tweed than Mari, whose skills he could hire at any labor exchange in Luna.

  The more she looked at it, the more it became apparent that she was being put through machinery that had been in place long before the need to abduct her ever arose. The Free Earthers' control of the institute was such that Mari could grow a full-term clone—a six-month undertaking—inside the walls with no fear of detection. In the light of that, Lilo began to wonder if her sprint across vacuum had been necessary. Had it been some sort of test? Free Earthers seemed to like tests; her training, if it had a purpose at all, consisted of an endless series of them, putting her up against environments she would never see, since they were all Earth environments.

  It seemed certain that Tweed was not after Lilo personally, but people like her. Looking at it impartially, there were only three things she could see in herself that set her apart from anyone else. She was a scientist, but surely he could hire all the scientists he needed. She was a condemned criminal, but she could not even venture a guess as to why he might value that quality. So it had to be the nature of her researches, the work that had resulted in her arrest.

  No one could have been more surprised than Lilo when she had found herself drifting gradually but persistently into proscribed areas. She had had time to reflect on that while in prison, and more time now, during her training, to review again the steps that had made her an Enemy of Humanity. That still amazed her.

  Lilo had wanted to be a medico. As early as she could remember she had been good with her hands, and while she was growing up her most cherished toy was her junior surgery kit. She would operate on herself and her friends, always keeping abreast of the latest fashions in face and figure.

  But her mother and her teachers knew she was cut out for better things and steered her into a skilled profession. She did not object; she was a reader—all her ancestors had been, all the way back to pre-Invasion times—and devoured any book that was left in her reach. Her teachers knew their business; eventually it seemed that she had always wanted to be a genetic engineer.

  She was good at what she did. Her services were in demand with all the big companies, and she worked for several before going into business for herself. Her specialty was foodstuffs, an area that had been neglected for a long time but was then undergoing a new surge of interest.

  While most of her colleagues concentrated on hydroponic fad foods—exotic blends of existing flavors that made a splash for a few months and then were forgotten—Lilo took a new look at staples. She refined rather than invented, and it paid off. The production companies knew that with a big advertising budget and promotion they could create a transitory demand for almost anything. In the long run, however, they made their money licensing gene patents for improved beef trees and egg plants.

  Lilo concentrated on pork trees. She succeeded in improving the yield and sweetness of the pink inner meat, while at the same time decreasing the fat-to-lean ratio of the bacon. It made her enough money to improve her facilities, and she turned to new horizons.

  Her work on pork trees had brought her to realize that there were many base organisms which had long been neglected because of inability to compete with the artificially created strains people now thought of as staple crops. There had been a time when wheat, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and rice had been the major foods of the human race. Now there was no one alive who had ever seen them. />
  But they existed in the Life Bank, as did virtually every plant and animal that had lived on Old Earth. It dawned on her that the food she had eaten all her life were all created plants, and that all of them were over four hundred years old. It seemed that the age of invention in plant genetics was behind her, that no totally new staple food had been invented since human civilization had established itself in the Eight Worlds. She did not bother wondering why that was; she set about to invent a new staple.

  The result was the bananameat tree, and it was an instant and steady success. As its name indicated, she derived it from tropical fruit stock, but the flavor was not derivative of anything. It was something new, and the attempts to describe it as tasting "like chicken" or "like venison" always fell short.

  Lilo did not advertise the fact, but the meat that came closest to the taste of bananameat was human flesh. Her first questionable act, done innocently and in the spirit of investigation, had been to include a tissue culture from her own body in the samples she was analyzing while making a study of human taste parameters. Her first illegal act had been to introduce changes into the culture and transplant sections of DNA into banana genes.

  Bananameat made her rich. Not fabulously so, but with the time and resources to tempt her back to her first love: the human body.

  She remembered the happy days spent tinkering with the external structure of her own body and the bodies of others. While she still saw it as a phase she had been going through—and by now was contemptuous of most cosmetic body changes—it continued to fascinate her.

  She thought about the tremendous genetic accidents that had shaped her life, and that shaped the lives of all humans. She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.

  This did not make her feel superior. It was an accident, and it offended her. Her intelligence was not of her own doing, but had been predetermined when two gametes blundered into each other in a placentory.

  As she chafed under the restraints of the genetic laws, she researched into their origins and was appalled to discover that the five-hundred-year ban on human experimentation had been intended only as a moratorium. It had made a lot of sense at the time, with the human race in a state of flux, facing an uncertain future. But how long is enough? The present scope of humanity represented all the changes that could be rung on a small gene pool of survivors of the Invasion. All the actual genetic diseases and defects had been weeded out early, before the ban on research. The human race was healthy enough, but was it going anywhere?

  Her shock increased as she learned about the reproductive aspect of genetics. Lilo was not a geneticist or a breeder. In the same sense that the builder of a machine might know little of the metallurgy that had produced its parts. Lilo was only vaguely aware of the laws of inheritance. Her job was to take something that was already there and bend it to her will with the direct manipulation techniques learned from the Ophiuchi Hotline. Now she delved into the world of recessives and inbreeding. She began to wonder if the human race might be turning into idiots, with no baseline to indicate the change.

  She tried to stir up some interest among other genetic engineers, but had no luck. There seemed to be no political current she could tap in an effort to have the genetic laws rescinded. If there was a taboo in human society which had taken the place of sex, it was human genetics. No one wanted to look at the problem, simply because no one saw it as a problem. It was accepted as a fact of life, the way things were; human DNA was inviolable.

  Lilo thought for a year about the courses open to her.

  She could forget it. That was a real possibility, and even now she was unsure of why she had gone on. Some days the inertia of society had felt like an actual drug in her veins, soothing her and telling her to leave things alone. It was good enough for your grandmother, why isn't it good enough for you?

  Or she could explore it, cautiously. In the end, that's what she did. But not cautiously enough.

  Her guide was the Ophiuchi Hotline. Of the huge volume of encoded transmissions that came down the Line, fully ninety-five percent had always been untranslatable. But she had heard rumors that a part of that, maybe a lot of it, had been found to relate in some way to human DNA. She set her computer to scan portions of the data which were in the public record. It was blind work; she had little idea of what she was looking for. The field was so unexplored that she had to go back to pre-Invasion records to find any meaningful work on the subject. She knew it was a job for hundreds of researchers, for the type of scientists who had existed in the days of basic research and who she suspected were no longer to be found. She had come to the realization that she had not been trained to be a scientist; she was an engineer, or at best, a tinkerer.

  The indications were good. She did not bother herself with the question of how the Ophiuchites were able to know so much about human genetics; they seemed to know just about everything, and the human race had been relying on that stream of new knowledge for centuries. She set up a base on Janus and began her first halting experiments on her own egg cells. She had no intention of producing living human beings. What she did was introduce changes and grow the result to a fetal stage of development, then use what she had learned to guide her next step.

  She was not sure what she was seeking. She was not sure why she was doing it. At her worst times, she suspected she was merely acting out the desires of a little girl who had loved to play medico.

  But at other times she was sustained by a vision. She did not know where it came from, but at times it felt as though it were not really a part of herself, not a product of her own mind. It was a vaguely defined but compelling vision of a human race scattered to the stars, redefined, transformed.

  There was one vivid picture that went along with the vision. She saw it every night as she fell asleep. She was running through tall grass and trees under a blue sun. It was a lovely blue that washed into her skin and the flowers that waved beneath a gentle breeze. There was someone running with her.

  Lilo was staying at Earthhome, Tweed's pocket disneyland, sleeping in a grass shack she had been forced to build herself.

  Her first visitor every morning was Mari. Lilo could not leave Earthhome without someone to escort her. She had tried several times, but had been unable to find the streambed entrance effectively one-way. So each morning Mari came and blindfolded her, then led her splashing through the water.

  But this time the two of them reached the embankment leading down to the stream and Mari did not reach for the scrap of cloth.

  "Himalaya this week, right?" Lilo said, casually.

  "No," Mari said. "You're shipping out today."

  "Today?" But it made sense. If she had known when she would leave, she might have made an escape deadline.

  "That's right. Take my hand, and hold on to your gut. This is not too pleasant until you get used to it." She led Lilo to a tree that grew from the opposite bank. Lilo was sure she had explored it. They started to go around the tree....

  Lilo had an attack of vertigo as everything seemed to tilt down in front of her. She held back. The scene was distorted, like looking through a bottle. Mari pulled on her hand.

  "Step up," she said. "Three steps. You won't fall." Lilo gulped, and stepped into the empty air. She felt concrete under her bare feet. She was rising, but it looked as though she were going down a vertical hillside. "Turn left, then left again. Close your eyes, it'll be easier." But Lilo kept them open. She had seen trick holos like this at funhouses, but none so perfect. They emerged into the water-filled corridor.

  "Can you tell me where I'm going?" Lilo asked. "So I'll know what to pack?"

  Mari laughed. "No. Truthfully, I don't know whe
re it is."

  They stopped off at Mari's lab. An hour later, Lilo emerged minus her left lung. In its place was a null-suit generator, something she had never used before. It seemed to indicate that she was going to Mercury or Venus, since these were the only places where null-suits were necessary to get by. She curiously fingered the small metal flower below her collarbone, which was the air exhaust valve and control unit of the suit, as Mari explained how to operate it. She had a slight soreness in her neck where Mari had installed the binaural radio and voder that went with the suit.

  Lilo was sure she was going off Luna when she was introduced to Iphis. He was certainly a spacer, since he had no legs. He was obviously on a layover too short to justify the expense of getting legs grafted on. He sat strapped in a padded basket on top of a spidery walker.

  The female Vaffa appeared, as she had a habit of doing, right beside Lilo's elbow.

  "Where's Tweed?" Lilo asked.

  "He said to tell you he can't come," Mari said. "Vaffa will be coming with you. I asked to go, but the Boss needs me because there's another prisoner who... oh, I'm not supposed to tell you that. But it doesn't matter." She kissed Lilo. "I hate good-byes," she said, looking away. "You be careful. Maybe we'll meet again."

  "I hope so."

  Lilo did not see the ship. She followed Iphis and Vaffa through a collapsible tube into the living quarters. They were quite small. Iphis heaved himself out of his walker and into his couch, and Vaffa put the contraption out of the lock.

  "Grab seats," Iphis said. "We lift in two minutes."

  Lilo tried again. "To where?"

  "Titan."

  They had planned a tacking maneuver on Jupiter. Lilo didn't like it, but was not about to mention the fact. She had not bought a ticket, and couldn't complain about the service.