The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  She had no way of knowing how long it went on. There must have been a blackout in there, though she did not recall going under or waking up. But the pressure had stopped. She had reached terminal velocity for the upper atmosphere, and was now falling under the pull of gravity, almost weightless. She looked around for the hole, which should have been visible as it sucked in the surrounding gases. Then she remembered that the atmosphere would not have slowed the hole at all; it would be halfway through the planet by now. So it would definitely be Jupiter that killed her.

  The air was clear, with towering clouds rising around her. From time to time she felt sharp surges of acceleration as the winds caught her and moved her sideways.

  It was a timeless thing, the falling. At first she had followed old habits, speculating on how long it would take her to reach the dark clouds below, what the temperature outside her suit field might be, at what point the density of the gases might cause her to float instead of fall. But she became content just to observe. It was a staggering sight. If she had to die, she could do worse than meet death in such surroundings, alone.

  That didn't last. She reached the cloud layer and visibility dropped to zero. There was nothing to see but the silvery hand she held in front of her face to assure herself she had not already died. She wondered if it would be possible to die and not know it.

  It began to annoy her that her mind would not stop working. With nothing to do and nothing to see, she began speculating again. What would kill her? Would she survive it all, and live until her oxygen supply ran out? That should be an easy death, gradually losing consciousness and never waking up.

  She remembered the exhaust valve on her suit, the metal flower below her collarbone through which waste gas and heat was pumped from her body. It was made from a very tough alloy, but it could heat up, jam, melt—any of a number of things. Death would be quicker that way, and possibly more painful. But there was nothing she could do about it. She felt a momentary regret that she would not make it to the layer of hot liquid hydrogen. That would have been something to see.

  Later, more soberly, she realized it would probably be as dull as this lousy cloud layer she was passing through.

  But now she burst out of the cloud layer. A vast, dim space lay open beneath her. At that, it was still much brighter than she would have expected from the thickness of the cloud layer above.

  For some reason, her fear returned then with paralyzing intensity. There was nothing she could do to prevent it. Some part of her mind had taken another look at her situation, concluded she had no hope of surviving, and did not want to accept it.

  She suffered another blackout, or an episode of insanity. The clouds were much closer now, a blend of red and violet shapes fringed with bright sparks—(white, with fluffy gray bottoms)—tumbling and boiling like a cauldron of electric eels.

  There were some yellow shapes just visible, darting from the cloud bank below her—(above me, floating in a blue sky)—into the clearer air, then back into obscurity. They were almost certainly alive. She wondered if they were Invaders, or members of the intelligent Jovian race, or simply animals.

  (The ground beneath me was soft, yielding. I grabbed a handful of it; it trickled through my fingers. Sand. I writhed deeper into it, trying to bury myself. A breeze cooled my body, and blew the soft white clouds past me in the blue sky. A yellow shape darted from one of the clouds)—and back into the cloud bank again. They were getting closer. Her detached calm had returned to her now, and she wondered if they would try to eat her. It made her eyes hurt to try to look at them—

  (Left, right, receding from me, then... Ouch! My eyes crossed, and my head started to hurt. I buried my face in my hands, welcoming the hurting grit I rubbed over my face. I rolled in the sand, over and over, hard beneath me, wetness, sliding)—it was rising, coming directly at her. Her eyes could not define its shape. In the center of it, if it could be said to have a center, was a hole, and in the middle of the hole was a tree—(a tree)—and the feeling of sand in her mouth, water—(rushing over me, rolling me, pulling, in my mouth and nose)— salt and sand and a roaring noise. Disorientation, time running sidewise, nausea building in the pit of her stomach—

  I stood up in the surf and swayed drunkenly, naked, soaking wet, dizzy. I took a step and fell over as the ground lurched. On hands and knees, I vomited into the foamy water. I began to crawl, dazed, my whole attention focused on the wet strands of hair dangling down in front of me, swaying back and forth. I saw my hands grip the sand, and they might have belonged to someone else.

  The sun was setting. It was the most glorious thing Lilo had ever seen.

  She huddled under a clump of windblown shrubbery, hugging her legs close to her. The wind was coming off the sea, and it was cold. Her teeth chattered. It was possible that she would freeze to death before the night was over, and she had no idea of what to do about it.

  It was impossible for her to recall when she had decided that she was not dead, that this was not the afterlife. For many hours she had sprawled in the sand, insensible, her mind overloaded with too many impossible things. Rational awareness had returned only gradually, cautiously, ready to retreat at any moment.

  The cold had helped. Awareness of discomfort had forced her to marshal her wits, to crawl into the thin shelter of the tree, to draw her body into compactness to combat the chill.

  Looking out over the ocean with the sun setting behind her, it had come to her that she knew where she was. Stars came out one by one and flickered weakly. So they did twinkle, it wasn't a fairy tale for kids.

  Night fell, and after many hours of shivering and growing hunger, something rose over the water. It was Luna.

  She was sitting on the continent of North America, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.

  The land was flat. Lilo had been walking south along the beach for several hours. Once she had gone inland a few hundred meters, but the ground was soft and wet and clouds of insects rose to torment her. Her skin was dotted with welts.

  Thus far she had no real plan except to keep moving. She hoped to find some sort of shelter, and possibly plants that she could eat. She had studied some green berries and a type of brown seaweed, tasted both, and moved on. It would take a lot more hunger to drive her to that. The idea of trapping and eating animals was one she was avoiding. All the meats she had ever eaten came from mutated plants. She had not yet considered that she might not be able to catch anything. Part of her mind could not stop thinking that this was a disneyland beneath the Lunar surface. It would be easy to believe that, except for the constant heaviness she felt. Her ankles and calves were throbbing from the gravity and the constant sliding of the sand underfoot.

  The beach narrowed to a point; the north arm of a large bay lay to the west. She sank down on the sand and looked across to the land on the other side. It was too far to swim, so she had to decide if she should retrace her steps or strike out along the inside of the bay. There was no way to tell from where she sat if it really was a bay, or if she was on an island.

  It was a shock to realize how tired she was. Her head was spinning, and she felt overheated. The sand felt very good as she stretched out on it and rolled over on her side to shield her face from the sun. In minutes, she was asleep.

  Lilo woke to pain such as she had never known.

  She came to her feet screaming, feeling that she was on fire, frantic to put it out. But touching herself only brought more pain.

  Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. The few times she had hurt herself the pain had been easily controllable; help had been as near as the first-aid terminal on every corner. When the pain had gone on for fifteen minutes and gave no sign of abating, she became hysterical and ran blindly down the beach until she fell.

  After a while she noticed something. It hurt just as badly as before, but it could be lived with. She sat up, wiped the tears away, and examined herself. She was cherry-red from her ankles to her shoulders. She had received first-degree radiation burns all
over her backside.

  It had not occurred to her that this could happen on Earth. The atmosphere was supposed to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, or else how could life survive? Never had she needed to think about the possible harmful effects of sunlight. The only times she had encountered it, she had been either in a suit or beneath screening plastic in a public solarium.

  She could see there were lessons she had better learn.

  The land was less marshy now. After following the beach along the inside of the bay for a while, she had decided to go overland when the beach began to curve westward. There had been nothing edible by the water; she hoped for better luck inland.

  Lilo noticed that when she moved due north—or as nearly so as she could estimate—she encountered little difficulty. If she went east or west the ground was interrupted with large pits. The trees and underbrush obscured her view of the area, so it was not until she mounted a small hill and could look down that she realized she was moving through the remains of the city. She had been walking down a broad avenue. On either side were regular rows of pits, most of them choked with brambles and half-full of water. Houses had been there, and now nothing was left but the slope-sided basements.

  The destruction had been methodical, but not absolutely thorough. There was evidence of subterranean artifacts, half-buried objects of concrete and stainless steel. She found one twisted section of copper pipe sticking two meters out of the ground.

  She walked all day, and when there was only an hour of daylight left she came to a place where the bay narrowed and seemed to be more like a river. It astounded her to realize how little she could tell about the land by actually being there and walking on it. The land across the river looked much the same as what she had already seen. Some of it was less than a kilometer away, but there was more in the distance. She couldn't tell if the closer land was an island in the river or a point curving around from the other shore.

  But there were two small islands in the middle of the water before her, and she was sure they were artificial. Looking closer at the hill she stood on, she discovered masonry. There had once been a suspension bridge crossing the river; she was sure of it.

  She went down the hill and explored its sides, hoping to find the entrance to any hidden room that might be there. Darkness was approaching, and she hoped to find some kind of shelter. But there was nothing.

  A large spotted cat looked down at her from the branches of a tree. Aside from sea gulls and crabs, it was the first animal life she had encountered. Lilo knew something about animal species, but was unable to place this one. It seemed to have jaguar blood in it, but was more the size of an African lion. She turned her back on it and started off again.

  Something made her turn around.

  She saw the cat out of the corner of her eye, then face to face. It was on the ground, running at her with impossible speed. Its head zoomed larger and larger in her vision. It opened its mouth and leaped.

  Things happened too fast for Lilo to follow. She remembered hearing the sound of an impact, and the cat hitting her, knocking her over. There was a confused vision of the cat gnawing at its hind leg, and blood spurting out around a long wooden shaft. Then the cat was up and moving, and so was Lilo. The next thing she remembered was being three meters up in a tree with her hands bleeding.

  There was a human down there, struggling with the cat. It had him by the arm, and he was hacking at it with a small ax. She saw the cat fall away, and the man straighten. He glanced up at her, then down at his forearm and at the cat, with its head split open, still twitching. Lilo slowly came down from the tree.

  "You're only a boy," she said in surprise. He glanced at her again, nervously, but apparently without comprehension. She began to wonder if he really was a child.

  He was short, not even two meters tall. He could have stood under Lilo's outstretched arm. His hair was blond and he wore brief leather garments and shoes. She dug through her memory of ancient racial types, and decided he was Scandinavian. His face was long, with a high forehead.

  "Thank you for what you did," Lilo said. "But you don't understand, do you?"

  He looked up at her and smiled. Three of his front teeth were missing.

  "I don't think I've ever seen anything as dirty as you are," Lilo said. "Except possibly me." She kept her voice friendly, and the fact was that she was not afraid of him. Then she wondered if she ought to be, and moved back a step. She had made two mistakes already, with the sun and the cat, and didn't want him to be the third. She tried to remember something about primitive tribes on Old Earth. The few scraps she could recall did nothing to make her think she could trust him.

  He said something, and she thought she could recognize a few words. He nodded and grinned at her, made a few gestures that confused her until he pointed at the sun repeatedly.

  He was speaking a corruption of American, and probably talking of the approaching night. Lilo was delighted. American was supposed to have come from the same roots as English, or was it the other way around? Lilo was not a student of history. But she did know that her own System Speech was a mix of English and Russian roots. She thought she could learn to talk to him.

  She decided to follow him to see if he had food and shelter he would share. He seemed to approve when he looked back and saw her. She had to keep reminding herself that he could be dangerous, especially if he was going back to a tribe of others like him. But the fact was that she had no instincts to make her wary of strangers. The thought of him doing violence to her was so foreign that she soon forgot about it.

  He took her to a concealed cavern. It was reached by concrete stairs beneath a thicket of bushes, and was large and flat on the inside. She thought at first that it was a basement that had retained its roof, but when he lit a fire she saw the place for what it was: The design of a train station for short-range rapid transit was still very much the same in Luna.

  Lilo was wondering what to expect of the man. Her knowledge of the lives and customs of barbarous peoples was near zero. She did, however, recall some stories of how women had occupied a social position distinctly different from men, back in the days before routine sex changing had obviated the whole question. She wondered if he would want to cop, then, with a shock, wondered if he felt it might be his right to do so. He would get a big surprise in that case, she promised herself.

  But he seemed a little in awe of her. He kept glancing at the hair on her lower legs, and when she stood up he gaped as he looked at her. Lilo soon discovered that he was in pain from his wounds. She looked at his injured arm. He didn't protest, and when she smiled encouragingly, he smiled back. It didn't look serious—just four deep punctures and a few ragged cuts.

  Once again she had to stop herself. Such a wound on Luna would be of absolutely no consequence once the pain had been stopped. Here, it might take days to heal.

  His name was Makel, and five days later he was dead.

  The wound never healed. He tended it with water and various leaves and ointments, but each day it grew worse. It began to stink.

  Lilo now understood her oversight, and cursed her stupidity. But considerations of sterility were as alien to her as the predatory instincts of the wild cat that had nearly killed her. Luna had been, from the very first, a germ-free environment. Rubber gloves, face masks—even boiled water, which she might have used to treat him—were unknown in Lunar surgery.

  He remained vigorous until the last day, ignoring the spreading infection. Every day he hunted, and she went along with him. There was not time to learn a great deal from him, but she picked up some basic survival tactics. She learned to be always alert. It was a different world out there, and it would kill her if she gave it the chance. She learned which berries and fruits to eat, which roots to dig.

  Finally he collapsed in a fever. She stayed with him, wiping the sweat from his brow, giving him sips of water when he asked for them. She stripped him and bathed him, and found that her first impression had been correct. He was not a
n adult, but not a child, either. He must have been in his early teens.

  In the middle of the night she discovered that he was cold. She had no way of knowing how long he had been dead.

  Lilo cradled his head in her lap and rocked back and forth, crying quietly. She had never seen a human die. She kept trying to tell herself that it wasn't her fault, but she never did believe it.

  11

  Gold. Everything was yellow gold.

  I floated in the dim light, aware, detached from everything but the single color. The liquid began to drain from the tank and still I floated, dry, in midair.

  A shock came and made me aware of sixteen needle-tiny sources of agony; my arms and legs jerked convulsively but my heart did not start beating. Then a familiar sensation: I had banged one of my knees.

  Another shock, and my heart thumped. I was alive, and about time, too. I'd rather have died than go through another shock. I took a breath and was choked by racking coughs. I bumped my head on the lid of the tank and drew cold hands away from the lump to find they were streaked with blood. Some had run into my left eye, tinting the gold with pink.

  The cover of the tank popped with a wet hiss of rubber seals. There was a strap around my middle and I fumbled over it with hands that felt like inflated rubber gloves. As I sat there massaging my wrinkled feet, the rest of my senses crept up on me and made me sick. I wanted to spit out my tongue.

  My fingertips and the soles of my feet looked ancient, mummified. I tried to get my eyes to focus around the room, squinting, wiping away the blood—

  "Who the hell are you?"

  The room was small, never meant to hold three people. Luckily, no one had to sit down in free-fall, not even Lilo, who was so weak she could not have lifted her arms in a gravity field. She floated, warming her hands around a tube of broth. She took tiny sips from the nipple, having found out what disaster she faced if she tried to drink it faster.