by John Varley
"I wish I could offer more solid guarantees," Krista said. "Tweed deliberately tried to keep us dependent on the monthly shipments. He knew what he was doing, I guess. We're short on some trace elements that are being lost in the secondary recyclers. Lilo and I are working on a tertiary system to recover what we have, but unless we can find larger amounts by mining the rocks, we could be in trouble in a few years."
"But what's the outlook on the new system?" Cathay asked.
"Well, I'd hate to say for sure, but—"
"We can do it," Lilo shouted. "We have to do it, so we will. Sit down, Krista."
The rest of the reports said much the same thing. Damage was not completely repaired in several areas, but the work was progressing. Everyone wanted more time, but finally agreed there was nothing preventing a fast takeoff.
Cathay heard them all to the end, then banged his gavel.
"You people elected me; you gave me the power to assign a time for the starting of the drive. I'm going to exercise that power now. We move in eighteen hours."
20
How can I summarize a trip that lasted ten years? To say that it was dull and that nothing much happened would be at the same time a terrible understatement and untrue.
I'm sure Javelin began to regret it within the first month. She had taken us on as a lark, as something to break the routine she had lived under for such a long time. But she would not have lived that way for so long if it wasn't, in reality, a very good routine for her. We saw little of her after the first month. Her quarters were accessible only to her. When we entered the solarium she would go to her own parts of the ship.
Vaffa opted out early. She had no great desire to sleep the trip away, being frightened of suspended animation, but in her own words, "If I don't do something soon I'm gonna kill something."
Cathay and I grew close. Several times. In between, we scarcely spoke to each other. I recall one blistering row over whose turn it was to feed the fish. It wasn't his fault, and it wasn't mine. In a different situation we might have evolved something lasting, but there was no one else, for loving or for hating, or for petty anger. Part of it was sheer stubbornness on my part, I admit it. I didn't wish to love him simply because there was no one else; I needed more reasons than that. He saw this as insane, and he was probably right. But there was no help for it.
We kept coming back together mainly because of my sexual needs. I've always found my hand an unsatisfactory sex partner. I've never been able to stay angry at a lover for too long; I begin to need him. Javelin was no alternative. I copped with her once—which was a great surprise to me, since I had thought she was actually neuter. Her solution to the problem of female genitals without a crotch to put them in was ingenious, functional, and fascinating, but ultimately disappointing. She was an indifferent lover, too self-centered to be concerned with satisfying me.
I ended up holding out two weeks longer than Cathay. Javelin looked relieved when she administered the injection that put me under for eight years of sleep.
They had been decelerating for three weeks.
Javelin had been right; there was something out there. It showed up on the radar screen as an object the size of a large asteroid. It was impossible as yet to look at it directly because the light of the ship's drive interfered with the telescope. Javelin had carefully aimed for a point a hundred kilometers away from the object, so that her drive would not be seen as a weapon.
But no one had yet seen Javelin. Cathay, Lilo, and Vaffa had been awake four weeks, exercising every day to get back in shape from the long sleep, but Javelin had stayed in her room. They could talk to her, but only over the audio circuits. Lilo assumed the woman was by now even more acutely aware of their presence on her ship, and even more unhappy about it.
When she did make an appearance, it was after first cutting a door from the inside of her room. She now had two arms and legs, and could no longer fit through the tiny entrance she had used. It was not the sort of surgery she could have accomplished by herself; Lilo assumed she had mechanical aids in her room.
Javelin seemed self-conscious about it. Lilo was going to make a comment, but when she saw how awkwardly Javelin moved in the one-gee acceleration—tending to forget about her left leg and right arm—she said nothing. There had been some neural rewiring done, Lilo felt sure. It was as if Javelin had suddenly donned glasses that inverted everything she saw; it would take a while for her brain to accept the change.
At first Lilo wondered why Javelin had done it. In the past she had accepted the brief periods of immobility enforced by the boost of the ship; they never lasted more than a month, and were a small price to pay for ten years of easy movement in free-fall.
But now every day brought them closer to the Ophiuchite outpost, and Javelin's reason became obvious. There was no way of knowing what they would find. It could be anything from weightlessness to many gravities, and Javelin had thought it best to be prepared.
The Hotline station was a torus, a thick, dark doughnut with an outer diameter of seventy kilometers, spinning slowly.
"It looks like a tire," Cathay said, staring over Javelin's tiny shoulder at the telescope screen. "See how it's flattened?"
"That would give them more flat surface on the inside," Javelin pointed out. "Flat on the bottom, and an arched roof overhead." She hit a few switches on her console. "They're pulling three quarters of a gravity on the inside. You know, it's pretty big for that kind of rotation. And the density fooled us. It's about twice as dense as water, which isn't much. There's not much metal in it."
"What do you think it's made of?" Vaffa asked. Nobody answered.
There was a tower growing from the inner edge of the wheel. It was massive at the base, but tapered quickly into a needle as it rose toward the center. There was a module at the hub of rotation. Javelin did some more computations.
"There must be something heavy inside, just opposite the base of the tower," she announced. "Otherwise the mass of the tower would throw the rotation off balance."
"And that's where we have to go, right?" Cathay asked. "To the top of the tower?"
"I don't know where else we could go," Javelin said. "Everything else is moving too fast. You'd better all strap in. I'm going to have to do some maneuvering."
"Shouldn't we try to contact them first?" Lilo asked. "They must know what frequencies we use. I imagine they've been listening to us for centuries."
"You're right. But what should we say?" Javelin looked uncertain for the first time since Lilo had known her. They all looked at each other, and no one seemed anxious to make the first contact. Javelin turned the dials on her screen and made the scope zoom in on the docking module in the center of the wheel. They had all noticed a faint light on one side of it; now Javelin brought it into focus.
No one said anything for a while. The light was actually several lights, and looked like nothing so much as tubes of ionized neon gas. They spelled out a word: WELCOME.
"We've been waiting," said a voice over the radio. "If you'll come in to about five hundred meters, we'll throw you a line. See you in about twenty minutes?"
21
How can I summarize our life on Poseidon?
The news programs we monitored during the first days called us "The Runaway Moon." There was great consternation from Mercury to Pluto. The departure of Poseidon was seen as the precursor of some disastrous turn of events in connection with the Invaders. There were calls for armament of all human peoples in the system to prepare for the coming fight.
It didn't come, of course, and gradually all the fuss died away. Much later we heard someone suggest that Poseidon could have been moved by technologies known to humans, and that indeed it might have been human outlaws who had done it. The idea did not seem to go over well, and in any case we were by then too far away and moving too fast for anything to be done about it.
We worked frantically for a year. The impact of Vengeance had caused a lot of damage to the tunnels and rooms. A power overload ha
d caused failures in the heating system which powered the hydroponic farms; all the plants died. For a while we lived on stored food, in the darkness. There was not enough air to pressurize the corridors—many of which would have leaked badly if we did—so we lived in our suits and observed strict oxygen rationing.
There had been no way for me and Cathay to know if the impact of Vengeance would cause irreparable damage to a vital installation on Poseidon, one that we would need to survive after taking control. Cathay said Vejay was certain everything was already there to make the planetoid self-sufficient. In the end, we had to gamble with the lives of everyone on Poseidon.
In the first flush of victory, everyone was glad we did. Cathay was swept into office as our first president. Even I was admired. It didn't last. In six months Cathay was out of office and we were both avoiding the faces of people we met in the dark, airless corridors.
But it worked. For many years Tweed had been sending equipment to make the base less dependent on supplies brought in by ship. The most hazardous part of his operation had always been sending ships to Jupiter, and the fewer he sent, the better he felt about it. One by one, the needs of Poseidon were taken over by small, mostly hand-operated, fabricating machines. The energy was there, more than the machines could ever use. Raw materials could be mined or transmuted by the limitless power. There were machines for making light tubes, integrated circuits, and pumps. The machines which had built the base were still there, and could be used to clear rubble or dig new tunnels. There was equipment to make new parts for things that wore out.
In three years we were a stable ecology, if not yet much of a community. The days of oxygen rationing were just a memory, and the inhabited base was actually larger than it had been in fifteen years. The population had grown by twenty children, and four more were on the way. I could hold up my head and be a respected member of society now that I was Chief Hydroponicist and Grand Panjandrum of Mutagenic Foodstuffs. Every time I developed a new plant that was better than the things we had been eating for three years, my prestige rose a little higher.
By the time five years had passed, things were settled down. We had an old-style school with the students outnumbering the teachers. It turned out to be not so bad, after all.
We were all surprised at how much time and effort it took to keep things running. Our world would not have allowed us survival if we hadn't maintained it constantly. That's true of all human societies since the Invasion, but it's usually behind the scenes, unnoticed. Only three percent of the population of Luna, for instance, is directly involved in an environmental industry. On Poseidon, we all were, and we often held two or even three jobs. Most of us were farmers in addition to our other functions. We worked ten-hour days.
The catch was that while we were a technological society, we lacked a lot of the base that should support it. We employed computers to map the gene changes on the plants we mutated to grow in the changed conditions, and then we cultivated those plants with shovels and hoes. The automated cybernetic and judgmental machines so common in Lunar society—the devices that do so much of the actual physical work—were in short supply. We didn't have the sophisticated industry needed to build such machines, or to provide replacement parts for our best computers when they broke down. We were reduced to the IC chip, the incandescent light bulb, helium-chilled superconductors, and other of the more basic, long-established technologies. It wasn't exactly the Neolithic Age, but sometimes it felt like it.
And after nine years, we were moving at half the speed of light.
22
First contact.
Lilo had considered everything, or thought she had, from beings of pure energy to the standard monstrous lifeforms that were a fixture of cheap adventure fiction. She had considered the possibility that the Ophiuchites might be humanlike, bipedal, bilaterally symmetrical. It was an efficient design for some purposes. It had occurred to her that they might be literally beyond her understanding, more related to Invaders than to humans.
What she found was a stretch of corridor that might have been the one she had played in as a child. At the end was a conference room with a carpet and a long, wooden table with a dozen chairs.
"Would you say it's about one gee?" Javelin said, as they entered the room. Lilo was startled to hear her voice; the room absorbed all echoes.
"Yes, about that." She glanced at Javelin. She had never seemed smaller than she did now, standing on two feet in a gravity field. She barely reached to Lilo's waist.
"Why do you think that is?" Javelin went on. "This place rotates for artificial gravity, wouldn't you think? Yet we're at the hub. It should be weightless."
"It follows that they have gravity control," Vaffa said.
"Yes, but then why do they need the rotation? If they can give us one gee here, why can't they do it at the rim?"
"Maybe it's expensive," Cathay said. "Maybe it's a gesture of friendship."
"Let's don't draw too many conclusions," Lilo said. "We've got to be on guard against that."
"Keep an open mind," Vaffa said.
Lilo knew they were all whistling in the dark. They were standing at one end of the room, hesitant to go any further unless invited. The voice, after its startling intrusion on Cavorite's radio, had told them where to enter the Hotline base, and to go to the end of the corridor. After that, there had been nothing.
Now the door at the other end of the room opened and people started coming in. They seemed to be quite ordinary men and women, dressed in a style that was perhaps two centuries out of date. They were attractive people, the sort Lilo might have run into in any public corridor in Luna.
"Please, please, have seats," said one man. "Pull up a chair. We're not formal around here."
None of the four could think of any reply, so they all sat down. When the Ophiuchites were seated, every chair was filled. The man who had spoken was at one end of the table, and now he got to his feet. He put both hands on the table and looked at them. His brow furrowed slightly.
"We knew you'd be nervous," he said. "I don't know what we can do about that. We've tried to keep the surroundings familiar, but it will probably be a while before you feel comfortable."
He looked at each of them in turn, and favored each with a smile.
There was something odd about that smile. It seemed warm enough, but Lilo got the feeling there was nothing beneath it. It tried to be an expression of friendship, as the earlier frown had tried to show concern. She glanced at Cathay and Javelin to see if she was the only one who saw that.
"It is awkward," the man went on. "Your species has only limited experience with this situation. Mine has been through it thousands of times. We know much about your species-type, and about your race specifically. You're apprehensive about this meeting, you have many questions, and this all seems very strange to you."
He paused again, and looked this time at the double line of his companions seated at the table. They were all nodding, and now a few uttered polite assents. They sought eye contact with the four humans, a familiarity Lilo did not feel ready for. She felt disoriented. For all she could tell, these people might be the board of directors of some large company, gathered to discuss business.
"First we should introduce ourselves. I'm the spokesman for the contact team, and my name is William." Each of them stood and gave a name, and none of them convinced Lilo. All the names were archaic, common names from Old Earth. When they were finished, Javelin stood and introduced herself and the others did the same.
With the formalities over, William sat down and all the Ophiuchites visibly relaxed. There was a murmur of conversation. It almost escaped Lilo's attention because it was so commonplace, but when she strained to hear individual remarks she realized there were none. It was a literal murmur; as artificial as canned laughter. A show was being put on for their benefit. They were participating in some kind of living theater.
"You can consider yourselves our guests for as long as you want to stay. Would you like anything to
eat? No? Very well, but don't be shy about asking, as we have a long presentation. I hope you don't mind. We've found that if we begin with a question-and-answer session it takes a long time just to get to the point where you can ask meaningful questions. And I'm sure you don't want to sit through a dry lecture. So we've put together this little piece of film that should fill you in on the background that led up to this historic contact. Alicia, would you get the lights, please?"
Someone was setting up what looked like a film projector. A screen lowered from the ceiling, and as the lights went down, the machine began to clatter. Titles appeared on the screen, accompanied by swelling background music.
Hierarchies
Produced by the Hotline First Contact Committee
The film opened with a shot of scattered stars and galaxies. The voice of the narrator was the perfect choice, Lilo thought. It was the Stand Computer Voice, the SVC that all humans heard every day of their lives. The controlled, soothing modulations had a good effect on all of them. They were able to relax a little for the first time.
"Greeting to the people of the Sol system, formerly the Race of Earth, from your nearest neighbors among the peoples of the galaxy. For many hundreds of years our two races have been in contact through the communication device you call the Ophiuchi Hotline. Now the time is drawing near when great decisions must be made, great steps taken, when things must be told to you which before now you had only guessed at.
"The universe is a far stranger place than you have heretofore imagined. This will come as no surprise to those who have considered the questions of philosophy which have been posed since your race came down from the trees. We would not have you think we are about to answer those questions; we are much alike in many ways, and for us, as for you, many things seem destined to remain mysteries. But there are things we have learned which you should know, as you are approaching a turning point that will determine your survival or failure as a race.
