The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  "But anything's better than being in a death cell," she said.

  "I suppose so. I wouldn't know."

  Her companion of the moment was a man named Cathay. She had met him in the mess hall a few minutes earlier when he came to sit with her at breakfast. They were the only people in the room; it was early, and Lilo's schedule was not yet synchronized with the rest of the station.

  The mess hall was one of the areas that was centrifuged, spinning slowly in a hollow in the rock. There was a larger wheel that was used as a gymnasium for running and weight lifting, and a third which held bunk rooms for those who did not like sleeping in free-fall.

  Cathay was a tall, thin man. He had a lot of untidy brown hair, long legs, and a boyish face with incongruous muttonchop sideburns. He was handsome without overdoing it and Lilo liked that, felt a definite physical attraction without having actually touched or smelled him, and that was rare for her. Physical beauty was cheap and universal with cosmetic surgery, but it tended toward about a dozen standard types. Lilo was bored with them all. Any visual stimulation she got from a man was in proportion to the degree he departed from the current, stultifying fashion.

  "Then you weren't kidnapped from the Institute?" she asked, mopping up the last of her maple syrup with a piece of pancake.

  "I was kidnapped, but not from the Institute. I was genenapped."

  "You mean you didn't do anything... well, to deserve being here? Would you like some more coffee?"

  "Yes, please. What I did to end up here was to trust Tweed. I should have known better, but then who could have expected this?"

  Lilo placed a white plastic mug in front of Cathay, then leaned back in her chair. She hooked her shoulder blades over the chair back, stretched out her legs, and held the warm mug on her belly.

  "Okay," Cathay went on. "I was in trouble, admitted. But I wasn't in jail. Tweed came to me with a good offer. He said he'd..." Cathay stopped, then looked away from her. He glanced back once, sighed, and went on, not meeting her eyes.

  "I'm a teacher," he said. "Was a teacher. There's no sense in trying to hide it from you. I was kicked out of the Education Association. Unjustly, I believe, but there's no way I could prove that to you." He looked up at her again. Lilo shrugged, decided that wasn't enough, and smiled at him.

  "It makes no difference to me," she said. "I'm an Enemy of Humanity, remember?"

  "Well, that's mostly crap, too," he said, easily. "You're not the only one here. A couple of them are really nuts, but most of them are just like anyone else. They went a little too far, but it was usually from some sort of principle." He raised his eyebrows, but Lilo was not yet ready to talk about that. Not yet; not to someone she'd just met.

  "Go on."

  "Well, Tweed said he could get me work again, teaching kids. I was really desperate. It had been five years. I need kids, I really do. Anyway, the deal was that I do two jobs for him. One was teaching the kids at some remote, unspecified place. The other—I thought the other was after I'd finished the first, you see—was to work for him on Pluto. He didn't say what kind of work, and I didn't care. After a few years, he'd let me go and see to it that I was reinstated under another name."

  "So what happened?" Lilo reached over to stir another spoonful of sugar into her coffee, hoping to mask the taste. "This stuff's terrible."

  "Yeah, isn't it? See, I should have been suspicious when he said he could reinstate me. That means he has access, illegally, to some pretty high-powered government computers. He can get things. You know what I mean?"

  "Yeah. I'm afraid I do. What did he get? Your recording?"

  Cathay smiled. "Uh-huh. Turns out that all along he meant for me to do both jobs simultaneously. He sent me out to Pluto, I assume. He took my recording and played it into a clone. Me."

  "Shanghaied."

  "Exactly. There's about ten others like me here. People who made a deal with Tweed and found themselves being awakened in a clone body."

  Lilo sipped at her coffee. "That's really rotten. Doesn't he have any... what? Shame? Principles?"

  "I don't know. When something is important to him, though, it gets done. One way or the other."

  "Then the rest of the people here are like me? Condemned prisoners?"

  "No. There're about fifteen. He seems to like them. The rest of the people here were stolen, as simple as that. They're scientists, most of them. Tweed decided he needed them. Apparently it's easier for him to steal their recordings and a tissue sample and grow his own scientist than to abduct the original."

  "I can see the logic. This makes no waves at all. No one even knows a crime's been committed."

  Cathay got up to refill their cups, and they sat in silence for a while as people drifted in for breakfast. No one joined them, but Cathay waved to many of the people.

  "What no one's told me so far," Lilo said, "is why Tweed needed a genetic engineer. What will I be doing here?"

  Cathay made a face. "For starters, you could breed us a better coffee plant. Can you do that?"

  "Maybe," Lilo laughed. "I'm a pretty good cook, too, and it looks like you could use one. Is that why Tweed sent me here?"

  "He didn't tell me why, actually. But if you can cook, he's not as ruthless as I thought."

  "All genetic engineers learn to cook," she said, forcing herself to finish the coffee. "I got my start developing a thick-shelled egg plant with a double yolk for a company on Mercury. I learned a thousand ways to cook eggs so I could save on food bills and not get sick of eating them. But you really don't have any idea of why he wanted me here?"

  "Maybe an idea. Most of the people here are planetary specialists, physicists, inorganic chemists, mechanical engineers, and so forth. Once every couple of months we've been running a skimmer through the atmosphere of Jupiter. We've been picking up some living organisms. They probably want you to work on that."

  Lilo was fascinated, but still puzzled. It had long been known that Jovian life existed, but no one had ever studied it.

  "Why me? My field isn't so much analysis as restructuring."

  Cathay shrugged. "I'm not the one to ask. But don't get the idea there's anything like pure research up here. Whatever they have you doing, it'll be aimed at defeating the Invaders."

  "It still doesn't sound like they would want my skills."

  Cathay stood up. "What can I tell you? Tweed is sometimes more interested in the person than in the skills. That's why he robs prisons, I'm told. He wants the oddball, not the committee mind. In a way, it's like picking a gear for a machine because of its pretty color instead of because it has the right number of teeth."

  "Which sounds like a hell of a way to run an army. Where are you going?"

  "Out to play." He grinned. "Making my rounds. I have seventy-three pupils up here—now don't look so surprised, things are different here—and one of them is my very own second child. Ah ha! Now I've scandalized you."

  "No, I... I'm surprised. It'll take some getting used to. Do you mind if I tag along?" Lilo had been telling the truth; she was not scandalized, but it was a shock to hear that the most basic rule of human civilization—One Person, One Child—was being violated: that an entire community of people was breeding as it wished.

  They took the elevator to the hub of the cylindrical room, then entered the corridors and moved along with easy pushes of feet and hands against the walls. Lilo was getting good at it.

  She had not seen that many children. The reason, she soon found out, was that they spent most of their time in the dead areas. Cathay grabbed a lamp and she followed him through one of the nullfield barriers. Soon they began to hear voices over their radios. Then they started to encounter them, in groups of two or three, intent on their own business. They seemed to like Cathay, enough so they would tolerate being introduced to a strange woman. But she had a growing sense that they had their own society down here in the abandoned caverns. Elaborate fantasies were being played out, drawn from television broadcasts and educational comics, having little to
do with reality.

  They were strange children. But then, she thought, they would have to be different. Many of them were growing up with brothers or sisters. How different that could make a child Lilo could barely imagine. And she finally did get a real shock when she saw one child strike a smaller one. Cathay did nothing, so she started to move in.

  "Leave them alone," Cathay warned. "There's nothing you can do about that."

  "But..."

  "I know. It was very hard for me at first. But look. It's settled, isn't it?"

  The fight had not gone very far, she was glad to see. But she felt strongly that the smaller one had been wronged, and said so.

  "Of course he was. And he had to demean himself, back away from the fight, because he's little. You've got to understand that I'm the only teacher for this entire group. I can do just so much, and I've found I should concentrate on teaching them to resolve their own conflicts. It's rough justice, but so far no one's been killed." Lilo began to understand just how different these children were.

  Cathay had been a victory of sorts for the people of Poseidon. It did not show too much on the surface, but Poseidon had an extremely brutal social order. Its inhabitants had come there through abduction, or as the only alternative to death. Once there, they quickly understood that they were expected to work, and that little else mattered. The only rules were to do what you were told, and not attempt to escape. The only punishment for infractions was death.

  Other than that, Tweed did not care what they did. The Vaffas conducted a constant patrol for evidence of someone trying to build a rocket drive or a radio. The first was so difficult and would take so much time and stealth that it had only been attempted once. The second was suicide, though Tweed did not rule it out. It was true that if the Eight Worlds ever heard about Poseidon, Tweed should be damned. But it would also mean the death of everyone living there. Even the abductees were illegal clones. The confederation would have to dispose of them, regretfully, because only one person could legally exist with any given set of genes. Vaffa had never found a transmitter.

  The pace of research was slow. Tweed had no intention of advertising his presence to the Invaders and the Jovians. Jupiter was watched constantly with every instrument known to science, and from time to time a probe was sent into the atmosphere. The scientists on Poseidon knew more about the giant planet than anyone in the system, but it was still not much.

  The second aspect of the work on Poseidon was the search for new weapons that might be effective in the future war with the Invaders.

  There was a lot of free time. The inmates were free to spend it as they wished. Eventually they began to have children, as it became clear they were there for the rest of their lives. And in time, someone had the radical notion that she didn't need to stop with one child.

  Tweed had been delighted. He even sent a sociologist to study the only unlimited-breeding society outside the Rings. He hoped to use what he learned as a template for the society to come, on Earth, after the defeat of the Invaders.

  But the children had caused the only organized resistance that ever had any effect. The parents got together and told Tweed they wanted teachers, or there would be no more work. The first and only strike was organized. They asked for twenty teachers. What they got was Cathay, and a promise that if they ever went on strike again they would all be killed. Tweed could do it and replace them all with a second set of clones exactly like them, but he was reluctant to do so. It would mean the loss of knowledge and skills acquired by the inmates since their last recordings.

  "They tried to persuade me to be cloned, like Vaffa," Cathay said. "I'm sure it's the practical solution, but I couldn't do it. The whole idea made me sick. I don't want to be a dozen people."

  "You don't have to explain it to me," Lilo said, with a shiver. "It gives me the creeps, too."

  A group of five silvery children came rocketing down the corridor. They stopped long enough for Cathay to introduce them.

  "...Olympica, Cypris, and the tiny one over there is Iseult. The handsome one standing over there is my child, Cass."

  Cass was a tall child. Lilo guessed his age at about twelve, then had to look closely to be sure if he was a boy, while wondering if it would ever be easy to see people whose bodies were curved mirrors. She was getting anxious to be inside again, in the air. She had not seen the faces of any of the children, only twisted reflections.

  Cathay noticed her discomfort and led her back through the maze to the inhabited corridors. Lilo took a deep breath—her first in over an hour.

  There was a male Vaffa waiting for them. He was idly patting his holstered weapon, and seemed to know who he was looking for.

  "You're to start work this shift," he said. "Follow me, and I'll show you what I want done."

  8

  Tweed must have chosen me as some sort of wild card. I couldn't see what possible use I might be to his plans. Not that I was upset about it; I had no burning urge to help him defeat the Invaders. I suppose I sympathized with the goal, on an abstract level, but I just did not think it was possible. Fighting Invaders is like repealing the law of gravity.

  There were workers who had much more meaningful work than I did, however. If you call that meaningful. I was shown drawings and small demonstration models of some new weapons systems that were ready to go into production, awaiting only Tweed's reelection and access to the government blank checks he had once controlled. There were some frightening new applications of null-field theory, for instance, including one device which could project a spherical field at great distances. The idea was to enclose an Invader in one, then contract the field down to about one atomic diameter. It was hard to imagine a creature that could survive that. Then you turn off the field. Presto: a pocket H-bomb.

  I saw blueprints for ships of war, the kind that hadn't been built since pre-Invasion days. And all the other bric-a-brac of warfare, from servo-powered fighting suits, to rifles and tanks and grenades, to fusion bombs and neutronium bombs. On paper, Poseidon could have outgunned any member planet of the Eight Worlds. But what would we be shooting at?

  Lilo was able to get her real work out of the way in about an hour each day. At that, she often stayed in her lab more for appearances than anything.

  The first month had been interesting, from an academic standpoint. There was a backlog of atmospheric samples awaiting analysis. Lilo knew a little about the types of organic materials to be found in the Jovian atmosphere from reading about ancient research conducted before the Invasion. The chemists and planetologists on Poseidon had added to that body of information, and had picked up some spores and microorganisms. Then, about a year ago, something had impacted the scoop of the robot probe. It wasn't very big; it had massed about as much as an adult mouse. Anything larger would have wrecked the probe.

  There was not much left of it on a structural level. It was a glob of jelly frozen in methane and ammonia. But on a cellular level there was much to be learned. Lilo got that out of the way in the first week, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days. She mapped the chromosomal structure present in the undamaged cells. The organism was similar in many ways to the upper-atmosphere animals that had been collected by probes on Uranus.

  She worked with Chea, the inorganic specialist, to learn the chemical properties to be expected from the organism. In common with certain higher Martian life forms, upper-layer gas giant creatures had been found to utilize catalysts and polymers in ways that had been accomplished on Earth only in refineries. Her specimen was no exception. She managed to clone one of the cells at the end of her third week, when she found remnants of a reproductive system. The cell grew into a gauzy sphere filled with hydrogen that lived for a few hours in her jury-rigged Jove Chamber, then collapsed. The balloon was made of a vinyl plastic. On the underside was a thin cross-shaped swelling, which contained a bony structure.

  Having done that, the rest of her work was routine. She established a tissue culture from the remains of the specimen and set about
finding ways of killing it. It was completely hit-or-miss. If she had been working with a creature using a water-oxygen economy she could have found a dozen ways to attack it merely by studying its genes and synthesizing a virus. But no work had been done on genetic structures of Jovian organisms. Almost all her work on terrestrial life was done with computer calculations, and there were no programs for nonterrestrial genes. To attack them, she had to make changes almost at random at different points on the gene, then sit back to see what happened.

  "But Tweed wants some kind of bug that will kill Jovians," Chea pointed out one day. "Is this going to find one?"

  Lilo shrugged. "It's as likely to as anything else. But no, it's not very likely. I might come up with something that would kill these things. But not Jovians, if you mean the intelligent creatures down there."

  She was in the farm tank with Chea, Cathay, and Jasmine, who was the chief planetologist. They were all getting their hands dirty with the new strain of pork trees Lilo had made which yielded bacon superior to what they had been eating. They knelt on the warm, black dirt and talked as they transplanted the tiny seedlings. Overhead was the brilliant central core of the farm, while beyond that was the far side of the spinning cylinder. They all wore dark goggles and their bodies were coated with UV-screening lotion and sweat. It was a happy time for all of them.

  Lilo was spending most of her time farming—in the hydroponic nursery and outside on a plot of ground she had prepared to take the vacuum-resistant plants she was making. The food was already better, and she had become something of a hero with the inmates. Lilo loved working with plants, but was not so fond of cooking. She was teaching Cass and three other children how to do that. They were coming along fine, but in the meantime there were hardly enough hours in a standard day.

  "You mean you don't think the Jovians are like this creature?" Cathay asked.

  "I have no reason to think so," Lilo said. "And Jasmine could probably give you plenty of reasons why we shouldn't expect it."