The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  "We have called this broadcast Hierarchies. As you have already been shown in the most convincing terms possible, your race is not destined to be a dominant one in the galaxy. Your planet has been taken from you by beings greater than yourselves. They had no trouble doing so; it was as inevitable as the law of gravity that they should have none. You live now in the airless places, the too-hot and too-cold deserts of your planetary system. Some among you pray for liberation. Others are beginning to try and do something about it.

  "You will not be liberated. We would return your planet to you if we could, but it is beyond our power. Your struggles to reclaim the Earth on your own will come to nothing.

  "Having made these statements, we must now tell you why this is so. A good place to start would be for us to tell you something about ourselves."

  The film lasted about an hour. Lilo let her eyelids droop, slouched in the comfortable chair, allowing information to wash over her just as it was meant to. The production values of the film were very good, very much like a commercial spot with quick cuts and finicky attention to detail.

  They were told about the Ophiuchites in outline form, with animated sequences that never showed a living being. It failed to surprise Javelin, as she later told Lilo, since in the four hundred years of operation of the Line there had never been a scrap of information about the people who were sending it.

  According to them, they were a race without a home planet. They were not natives of 70 Ophiuchi, or any other star they could name.

  Javelin leaned over and whispered in Lilo's ear, "I wonder. I think they're covering up."

  "Could be."

  They claimed to have been around a very long time—their exact origins, as they expressed it in the film, "lost in the mists of history." They had records going back seven million years, and in that time there had been no changes in their society.

  The film recapped what humans had speculated about Invaders, confirming most of it.

  "The beings you know as Invaders are members of what can be called a stratum of intelligence. There are many races in the galaxy similar to them, including a race native to the solar planet Jupiter. These races evolve only on the gas giant planets. They are not tool-using, as we understand the term, but rather are able to manipulate the world around them through methods which are beyond our powers of comprehension. It might be helpful to think of them as telekinetic; they are not, but many of the things they do are similar to what we might do if such a power existed.

  "To the Invaders, time is a dimension of substance. How this affects their perception of life we can only guess, and it does us little good to do so. But this fact puts them as far beyond our reach as we would be above the inhabitants of a hypothetical two-dimensional world."

  The film went on to confirm what Lilo had been told about dolphins many years ago, that they were the second level of intelligence. Vaffa snorted, and Lilo glanced at her, wondering how she was taking all this. It was believed by the Free Earthers that aquatic mammals were merely animals, that the tales of Invaders coming to Earth to free them were nothing more than folklore.

  "Tool-using species, those which evolve on land and in an atmosphere which permits combustion, are the third level of intelligence. We share this level with you, but it should be pointed out that there can be levels within levels. You are not our equals, and may never be. We can talk to you about certain matters, but there are things which you are not ready to understand, and things which we are not ready to reveal. Because now we come to the point of the message, to an explanation of what we are doing here and why we have been communicating with you these many years."

  For the first time, a face appeared on the screen. It was a standardized face, handsome but unmemorable, and it took a second for Lilo to realize it was "William." He performed another smile, as unconvincing as the ones Lilo had seen in person.

  "As we said earlier, we are a race that has lost contact with its roots. It might be hard for you to understand how that could happen. We can only surmise as to the exact details."

  The screen showed an Earth-like planet over William's shoulder. "We must have evolved on a planet much like your own. In the natural course of things, we were pushed off the planet, as you have been. We have watched this process happen thousands of times, and it changes very little from race to race." On the screen, thousands of ships fled the planet and traveled to various moons and asteroids in the system.

  "In time, races like ours and yours begin to wonder if they can recapture their home world. They begin to take steps in that direction. Before too long the gas giant beings put a stop to these experiments. As before, they have no trouble doing so." Lilo watched as indefinite shapes swam up from the blue planet to swarm over the others. It was clear what was happening, with no need for narration.

  "This is what happened to us. Already evicted from our home world, we were attacked in our places of refuge. As in the original invasion, only a few of us survived by escaping to the nearer stars. This is a fate you face in a short time.

  "You are all aware of the increased importance of a group calling itself the Free Earth Party. Your race has quietly accepted its exile for many centuries now. The time has come for dissenting voices to be raised. It is unlikely that anything could be done to suppress them. We can point out to you—and we formally do so now—that the leader of the Free Earthers, Tweed, has been engaged in experiments at Jupiter and in close-Earth orbit which by now have certainly drawn the attention of the Invaders to the humans living in the Eight Worlds. These experiments were misguided, but Tweed is not a monster. We can sympathize with his desire to reassert human domination of the home world. We can only observe that the attempts are futile.

  "If it were not Tweed, it would have been someone else. If you succeed in stopping Tweed, there will be others to take his place. We know from experience that when the time for an idea has arrived, there is no use trying to suppress it. Some among you will refuse to believe our warnings and you will go your own way. You will continue to test yourselves against the Invaders. In time, you will be ready to try an invasion of your own. It will fail, and those of you who remain in the Eight Worlds will be annihilated.

  "Some of you will escape. Interstellar travel is already in your reach; there just has never been sufficient economic pressure to force you to obtain it. But some of you will believe us, and get away in time. I wish I could tell you that the story ends happily at that point."

  Again the picture changed. And changed again. Star after star flicked onto the screen in stylized representation. Many had gas giant planets, and were removed from consideration. Others contained oxygen-breathing races living on airless worlds, as humans were doing now. Only a few had livable worlds with no second-level forms in the oceans, and almost all of those were already inhabited.

  "The galaxy is a crowded place," William went on. "Our race discovered this quickly. The search for a place to live is a long and hard one. Some species never manage to find a niche. They become extinct. Others fragment, never able to maintain contact among their far-flung branches. Gradually, they mutate. New races are born in interstellar space. There is a process of evolution going on between the stars more fierce than that which gave birth to your race on your hospitable world, and all the competing species are intelligent. Where interests conflict, no quarter is given. War is too simple a term to describe it. Species can change, combine, absorb one another.

  "We call ourselves the Traders. In one sense, we have no single home planet, though there must have been an original race which first evolved our life-style. As we exist now, we are an amalgam of many races which have achieved an equilibrium enabling us to survive."

  The Hotline station appeared, turning slowly. A red beam of light emerged from it, and passed near a yellow star.

  "The Traders are an organization set up to provide ousted races with the knowledge they will need to survive. We broadcast information, as we have done to you. Over the centuries we have taught you how to man
ipulate your own genetic structure. For you own reasons, you have not seen fit to change yourselves. You have ignored the bulk of the information we have sent you, information largely concerned with alternatives you face in the alteration of your human DNA. This is an unusual situation; few races we have encountered hesitate to change themselves when the need arises. For some reason, your race has adopted an attitude so powerfully biased against racial change that you cannot even understand the information we send you concerning yourselves.

  "You can no longer afford that quirk. You will have to cease defining your race by something as arbitrary as a genetic code, and make the great leap to establishing a racial awareness that will hold together in spite of the physical differences you will be introducing among yourselves. And you must define your race more successfully than you have done so far. Today, you could not tell us what it is that makes one a human being.

  "What you see before you," William spread his hands and looked down at his body, "would qualify as a human by the standards you now employ. This body is genetically human. But I am only a temporary resident in it, in the same way that many individuals among you now live in cloned bodies, and will live in other bodies in your lifetimes."

  The scene shifted again. Lilo felt a sense of expectancy and was not sure why. She saw the Grand Concourse in King City, Luna, a place she had visited many times. People walked in front of the camera, going about their business.

  "Here comes the stinger," Javelin whispered. "Hold onto your credit meter and your gold fillings." Her nostrils dilated and her eyes were bright. She smelled a deal coming up, and it was all she needed to make her happy.

  "We call ourselves the Traders. You know what it is we give; you have been getting it for centuries. No one thought to ask us if we wanted anything in return. We do, and what it is is both very simple and rather difficult to explain.

  "What we want is your culture."

  23

  How could I tell of my ten years on what used to be the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America?

  What made me so sure I was on the American continent was for a long time a source of considerable bewilderment. For several days after the death of Makel I wandered in a more or less dazed condition. It seems as though it took nearly a month before I dared to ask any of the questions that would continue to puzzle me for ten years. They can be summed up as What happened?

  One moment I had been falling through Jupiter's atmosphere, and the next, I was in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. And I knew it was the Atlantic.

  But that wasn't quite right. One event didn't follow the other; rather, they merged into each other. I'm sure I recall sitting under the bushes, shivering, before I was in the water. I recall crawling out of the water before I remembered being in it.

  The whole experience was so subjective that I doubted from the first I would ever get any good answers by thinking about it. But it didn't stop me thinking. The conclusions I came to were so tenuous they might be worthless, and yet I felt good about them in the same way that I had no doubts about where I was.

  I had fallen into an Invader—or a Jovian, if it makes any difference. For reasons of its own, the Invader had moved me. Perhaps I was told something in those scrambled seconds, minutes, hours, or centuries during which the transition took place. Or perhaps some level of my mind had been able to see how and to where I was moved.

  Why? Why should the Invader care enough about me to do whatever was done? Was it accidental? I didn't know, but I had the persistent feeling that I had been displaced in space and time for some reason, and that it would become clear to me later. In the meantime, I had the hard task of survival facing me.

  There were adventures by the hundreds. In a sense, every day was an adventure. But I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them. I never knew in the morning if I would live to see the sun set.

  And yet with all the troubles, all the close calls, the story is mostly one of wandering, of slogging day after day down the woods and marshes and beaches of the Atlantic.

  I always moved south. My knowledge of geography was not as good as it might have been, but I did know that it had to get warmer the farther south I went. After my first winter I had an abiding interest in staying warm.

  My method was to pick an encampment when the leaves were starting to change colors. I would either build a hut from mud and sticks—Tweed, your training paid off!—or find an indigenous group of people and live with them while the snow fell.

  I learned many skills: how to build a rude boat for crossing rivers, how to make and shoot a bow and arrows, how to set traps and track game. On a good day I might cover three kilometers, or I might settle down for weeks or months with some friendly group.

  My size was a great help in everything I did. The people I met were in religious awe of me because of it. I never met anyone who was as tall as my shoulders.

  It was tricky at first, learning to get along with them, finding the best way to enter a camp and set myself up as a sort of traveling goddess. But while they spoke a thousand dialects, they were all based on English. I could communicate with them. Tales of Diana, the great silver huntress with the legs of a horse, spread before me. Villages turned out to welcome me, and to see me turn into an apparition for a few seconds by switching on my nullfield. They eagerly and fearfully touched the metal flower above my breast. I became the warrior princess of legend, the metal-bodied Bride of Frankenstein, the Cyborg Diana.

  I was subservient in their eyes to one thing only, and that was the Dolphin. Every holy place in every village had a wooden statue of a great fish with horizontal flukes and a blowhole.

  She had been going north for some weeks now. She had gone northward before on her long journey, but it was always to go far enough up a river to find a suitable crossing. Once over, she had resumed her route south.

  This time it looked as though it might be different. She had not been able to see any land to the west of her, and the ocean seemed to be a different color, more green than blue. The land was marshy, and she did most of her traveling with a canoe and a long pole. Huge reptiles lazed in the mud or swam slowly by her, but she did not fear them.

  She had not seen snow for two years. The winters were mild, if this land could be said to have winters at all. She had kept moving from force of habit, and from the inability to decide what to do with her life. No call had come from the Invaders, no sign to tell her why she was there. But to stop moving would have been to face becoming part of a tribe. Even as a goddess, she did not think she could stand it.

  She had done what she could, imparting to the people she met what knowledge she had that might be of use to them. There was no way to know if they heeded what she said after she was gone. And, truthfully, she did not know if it would do them any good. Possibly the solutions they had evolved to deal with their environment were the best for them, but they were not for her. Their lives were short, full of pain and suffering. The only thing they had that was good was the sense of community, the security of being surrounded by comrades, and she knew she could never participate in that. She was different, and could not be assimilated into a tribe except as a woman apart from the others.

  Lilo was not the woman she had been. Her skin was brown and weathered now, her hair bleached by sun and salt water. She had no mirror, but knew there were unfashionable lines on her forehead, around her eyes and mouth. Ten years had aged her from a clone of the standard decanting age of nineteen apparent years to a woman of forty. There was a white, puckered scar from her right temple to her jaw, and another on her left thigh. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were thick with callous, and the hair on her calves was not as smooth and luxuriant as it used to be.

  At the end of the fourth week of northward travel, Lilo decided she had come to the end of the long peninsula at the southeast of the continent. The natives called it Florda.

  Now she stopped her journey. There was no reason why she should not continue up t
he gulf coast, around the curve to Mexico and finally South America. But she had no heart for it. She turned her boat around and started poling through the placid waterways, back to the Atlantic.

  When the water was blue again she picked a spot near the ancient ruins of Miami and built a hut. For the first time she began to cultivate a patch of ground with seeds given to her by the natives, to experiment with pottery, and to raise wild chickens and rabbits.

  The local tribes respected her privacy except for certain holy days when they came and asked for religious rites which were obscure to her but seemed mainly aimed at procuring good hunting. She was willing to pray for them, as long as they left her alone during the rest of the year.

  There was plenty to do to keep busy. When she needed relaxation she went out in her boat and fished. She liked that; she could just sit and watch the water and not think about anything. She no longer felt bitterness for what had happened to her. When she thought of anything, it was of Makel.

  Lilo had stayed aloof from everyone since the day he died. Nothing in her life had moved her as deeply as the boy's death. It had been such a pointless, such an ignominious way for a human being to die. Since then she had seen the deaths of many people, and it was always with the same feeling. We were not made for this. The human race deserves better.

  Lilo was not used to such strong illogical feelings. She had wrestled with herself for years, on the one hand telling herself that a human was just another animal and could die like any other animal. But it never satisfied her. Logic wasn't enough. It could not encompass the issues. She began to feel that the land she walked on should belong to the human race. It had, once. Maybe the people who lived before the Invasion had done a sorry job of taking care of it, but they had been trying, even then. Now all the humans on Earth had been thrown back into savagery. It hurt her to see it.