The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  Going to Earth had made Lilo a Free Earther.

  One day a huge dark shape appeared from under the water, not three meters from her boat. There was a tremendous, hooting rush of air, and a column of spray dispersed around her.

  She stood and stared at it. It was at least twenty meters long, and blunt at the front end. The Sperm Whale.

  Lilo hurled her reed basket of fish at the shape, and it bounced into the water. The hide gleamed, unhurt. She threw her paddle, a rough clay bowl she used to hold bait, and anything else she could find in the bottom of the boat.

  Slowly, the leviathan rolled. Huge flukes appeared and waved for a moment in the air, then sliced soundlessly into the water.

  Lilo shook for an hour.

  The next day, silent yellow shapes appeared at the horizon. She stood on the beach and watched them, though it hurt her eyes to do so. They were at the limits of visibility, but that was not the problem. They were shapes. They were all shapes at once; they would not hold still.

  She had seen them before, below her, as she fell through the Jovian atmosphere, just before her senses fragmented and she found herself on the beach—found that she had been on the beach for some time, as she was still falling through Jupiter. She had blanked the experience from her mind; now it came back: the incredible, stop-action, living lap dissolve that had left her on Earth.

  Again she could not control her shaking, but this time it was much more from anger than fear.

  She cut down a suitable tree and spent her days sitting on the sand looking out over the water, working the wood. She made it three meters long, and tipped it with steel painstakingly beaten from scraps she had collected. Then she waited.

  The spouts appeared early one morning. Lilo watched them, taking deep breaths of the sea air until her fingertips tingled. Every nerve in her body was singing as she stripped away her leather jerkin and loincloth and raced across the sand to her boat. She was no longer afraid to die. The day was right for it, and the whales waited to taste her harpoon.

  Did they know she was there, intent on killing them? She did not know or care. She rowed strongly out to the mass of rolling black bodies.

  Overhead, the Invaders darted. They did not accelerate or slow down; they simply moved. They entered and left the water without sound or splash, occupying one volume of space as easily as any other. Lilo stood and shook the harpoon at them, then checked herself. Even in the mania of her anger, the blood-red depths of her rage at them and what they had done to her people, she knew that certain things were beyond her. She would take her revenge on flesh and blood, then die because there was nothing left to do, no sense in walking endlessly down bare beaches or in sitting placidly beside a mud hut.

  It was there in the water beside her, a broad dappled black hide just below the surface. She reached to the metal flower on her collarbone and was transformed into a creature of bright blue distortion, hot as the broken sun that blazed from her face.

  She heard a scream. Her arm came up, straightened, jerked, and the wooden shaft shivered in her hand as it sank into the mountain of blubber.

  The Silver Huntress, Diana, stood on the whale's back, shouting. She held the harpoon in both hands as the monster's tail came up and smashed down on the boat.

  The whale dived.

  24

  The film reached its end, and for a moment it flapped noisily around the reel until one of the men reached over to turn the projector off. The lights came up, and Lilo, Javelin, Vaffa, and Cathay were confronted with eight faces, all looking at them expectantly. The atmosphere in the room was tense; the Traders were waiting for something.

  For some reason, Lilo was convinced they were about to break into a song-and-dance routine. The situation was divorced from reality in almost the same way as a musical comedy, where characters pause in the midst of action to sing. If they do, I'll go crazy, Lilo thought.

  "Well," William said. "Well. What do you think?"

  Lilo looked from William to Alicia to Thomas to... whatever her name was.

  "Effective," Cathay ventured.

  "Solid. To the point," said one of the Traders.

  Javelin cleared her throat.

  "Uh... yes. It's a nice piece of work. But did we really come here to discuss the artistic merits of your propagandists?"

  "We would like to know what you think," William said. His voice oozed sincerity. "Of course we realize you have no powers of your own to either accept or reject what we've offered. You're not envoys for your race."

  "What are you going to do with it? I assume you didn't put it together just for us."

  "We'll broadcast it. Not over the Hotline; this time it goes directly to every inhabited planet of your system. It's customary for us to work this way. You must have realized that we have never used our transmitter at full strength. Our laser is not big enough to broadcast across seventeen light-years, but we can send a stronger signal than any you have yet received. We deliberately garble and distort the signal at this end, simulating what you would expect to happen to it if it had come from 70 Ophiuchi. We wanted you to think of us as being very far away.

  "When we know that being discovered is only a matter of time, we send the first message that you received. Someone usually shows up. If no one does, we wonder if we're wasting our time. You did very well."

  Javelin shifted in her chair, a sour look on her face.

  "Yes, but what do you expect anyone to make of it?"

  "Please?" William looked down his nose at her.

  "What I'm saying is, you want something in trade for the free information you've been sending us. Okay, anyone can understand that. But what you want is our culture. I'm afraid I didn't follow just how you intended to get it."

  "I thought the film made that clear."

  "Not to me," Cathay put in. "I didn't understand that, or just what the alternatives are to the human race if we don't cooperate."

  "Ah." William pursed his lips. "Perhaps we need to make some changes in the final sections before we release it. You see how valuable this can be to us? I'll turn you over to our Minister for Assimilation. Alicia?"

  If William seemed stilted and slightly unreal in his mannerisms, Alicia was little more than a manikin. Lilo could imagine strings leading to her arms and legs. She wondered just what kind of beings these Traders were. Alicia soon answered her.

  "As I hope you understood from the film," she said, "what you see before you is not the result of Trader culture or Trader genes. This room and our bodies were tailored for this meeting. We had been studying you for nearly eight hundred years, listening to your radio and television broadcasts. We have been here much longer than that; our first visit to Earth was twenty thousand years ago. Since then we have waited for you to come to us.

  "We have been learning how to be humans."

  She spread her hands. "It is an impossible task to do at a distance, but this station is an experimental laboratory for the assimilation of human cultures. There are two hundred environmental cells below us, duplicating the conditions of various human societies of the present and past. In addition, we are prepared to conduct crossbreeding experiments, merging cultures already in our possession with what we learn of human culture. As you can see, we have at this time only an imperfect grasp of the essential outlooks and mind-sets that make a human a human."

  "Yes, I understand that," Lilo said. "Or I think I do, anyway. You're saying that you have no culture of your own, that you lost it, or it was assimilated into others so thoroughly that you can't separate it out any more."

  "True," Alicia said, "so far as it goes. But this was not accidental. We had observed in the other races around us that the vitality tends to be sapped from a people when they are forced to live a million years of a transitory and nomadic existence. That spark that each race possesses—each one of them different—is extinguished, and they vanish. This had happened to many races. So we have made the deliberate effort to change ourselves at every opportunity. Individuals persist—I m
yself am over two million years old as a group consciousness. I think it would be futile to try and explain to you what that means."

  "Yes, you said that in the film," Javelin said, impatiently. "What you still haven't told me is what you want to do. With us. The human race."

  "It's very simple. We wish to coexist with some of you for a time. The only way to learn a culture is from the inside out. There are techniques—very like the memory recording that you developed independently, and which we helped you refine—for the superposition of one mind over another. We wish to hitchhike in your minds for a few years. After that time, we will be as human as you are, not the imperfect constructs that you see."

  "Do you think this idea will be accepted?" William asked.

  "You mean do I think people will buy it?" Javelin asked. She sighed. "I can think of easier things to sell. What will it be like? Like a symb?"

  "No, no, nothing so drastic as that. We will be unnoticed observers. After a few years we will leave you to your own devices. But you don't have very long. The Invaders will not give you more than a century before they exterminate you from all your Eight Worlds."

  "And how many... ah, how many hosts would you need?"

  "A few thousand. To get a representative sample. After that, we can learn humanity from each other." He paused. "We know this is a strange request. The fact is, it is the only thing your race has to offer us. It is the only reason we have bothered to send you the things we have discovered and collected over seven million years. We don't need your gold and silver, your paper money, or anything you would see as wealth. We know all your technology. We don't need you as slaves, as a source of food, or as another link in our chain of empire. And we're not interstellar philanthropists. In point of fact, we are invaders. Your race has experienced a second invasion, and this time you welcomed it."

  "What do you mean?" It was Vaffa, always alert to danger.

  "This has been a long-distance invasion. We now come to the core of the matter, the penalties for nonpayment we mentioned in the first message. Have you ever heard of the Trojan Horse?"

  Lilo looked at her friends. Only Javelin was nodding.

  "If you were not of a mind to give value for value received you should have been slower to accept us when we came bearing gifts. But we saw no reluctance. We seldom do. It is a nearly universal trait among races to accept what looks to be free.

  "The symbs. They were never a great success, but they've been in the Rings for a long time now, and they breed prolifically. There are now upward of one hundred and ninety million symb-human pairs in Saturn's Rings. Each one is a time bomb. If we were to send the proper signal each pair would be fused into a single being, and it would belong to us, not you. They would be ready to carry out the missions they were programmed for many years ago. They can travel from planet to planet, in hibernation, and when they reach human worlds... well, I leave it to your imagination." He sat back, and so did all the others.

  Lilo had no trouble imagining it.

  Humans lived underground everywhere but Venus and Mars. Those two places would probably be safe, since they had an atmosphere, but everywhere else the symbs could wreak havoc with the surface life-support facilities.

  The possibilities multiplied in her mind. It was easy to forget in the day-to-day existence in secure warrens beneath the surface, but the space environment was constantly at war with air-breathing animals. The one advantage had always been that, though the environment was hostile, it was not malevolent. It did not seek with a will to destroy humans. With proper precautions it could be held at bay.

  But with millions of saboteurs, soldiers perfectly adapted to the space environment...

  She felt sick when she thought of Parameter. She knew a little of the complexities built into a symb which allowed a pair to survive in space. Solstice could change her body at will to meet the needs of almost any situation. It was not hard to believe that she could dissolve the thin dividing line between her own body and that of Parameter, fusing the two of them into one supremely efficient organism. But what would be left of Parameter as a human being? Parameter had told Lilo that though a pair was very close and could almost be thought of as one being, there always remained some part of each that maintained a separate identity. That would be gone now, if the Traders carried out their threat. There would be only Solstice, and on some level Lilo had never completely trusted the symb.

  Was that distrust justified? The Traders had not really said so. Was Solstice as much a puppet to the Traders as Parameter, an unwitting potential ally?

  Lilo was about to try to find out, but a loud noise interrupted her. It was a siren of some sort, and all the Traders looked up in consternation. Or at least they made the attempt to look worried, though Lilo shivered again to see just how alien they could look while looking just like human beings.

  "Just a minute," said William. "Just a minute. There seems to be a problem. I'll..." He stopped, briefly, and suddenly did not look very human at all. His eyes closed, and all his muscles relaxed. Javelin was on her feet, looking anxiously at the walls around them. Vaffa had knocked over her chair and stepped back from the table. Lilo found herself on her feet, too.

  When William spoke again, his voice had changed.

  "There's been detection of Invader activity," he said, and then his words trailed off into a babble that was meaningless to Lilo, but seemed to worry the Traders. The group stirred uncertainly.

  25

  Lilo-Diana hung on to the harpoon while the animal headed for the deep ocean. It reached the bottom and leveled out, still swimming strongly.

  The adrenalin slowly began to wear away, and Lilo was left with the bitter dregs of defeat. She had not killed the beast, and was not likely to. She was not sure if she had even hurt it.

  Eventually she let go and the whale vanished in the blue water in front of her. She floated, neither rising or sinking.

  Where did she go from here? Her hand touched the intake valve on her chest. She could turn off the suit and drown quickly. Or she could rise to the surface and strike out for shore. She would probably make it with the suit lung feeding her air, but did she want to?

  There was something above her.

  Without knowing why, she kicked upward to meet it.

  It grew rapidly—(below me now, still falling)—and made no attempt to get away from her. The shape hurt her eyes. Yellow? No, many colors—(a deeper yellow than the billowing clouds that now came into view around me, below me, another of the things like the one I had fallen into so many years before)—all colors and all shapes, contained in one shape.

  Her stomach lurched, and she was falling.

  I don't know how long I fell, but the question probably has no meaning. I was falling through space and time, and through my own life.

  It became no longer possible to know who or where I was. Every second of my life existed simultaneously. I was—

  standing on a rocky plain beneath a bright light, and knew I was on the world that used to be called Poseidon, but was now two light-years from the sun.

  crying, hopelessly, with a depth of feeling never to be equaled in my life, holding the head of a dead man in my lap.

  falling through the Jovian atmosphere.

  facing the man called Vaffa, watching his weapon rise in slow-motion, hearing an explosion.

  holding a knife in my hand, thinking about suicide.

  looking at fish in a spinning, circular tank.

  running through trees beneath a burning blue sun, laughing.

  talking with a man named Quince in the public bath on Pluto.

  sitting in a conference room at the hub of a seventy-kilometer wheel, watching a presentation from an alien race.

  feeling an erect penis enter my body, with lights flashing around the walls of my room.

  facing Vaffa, his gun coming up to kill me.

  coming to life in a pool of yellow fluid.

  five years old, holding my mother's hand as we followed the transporter car
rying our possessions to a new home.

  sitting in the green glow of my computer terminal, studying an interesting interpretation of Hotline data.

  docking with a huge colony ship orbiting 82 Eridani. The planet was inhabited, and we would have to move on.

  fording a stream in America, white water rushing around my knees.

  giving birth to Alicia, my second child, on the way to the core.

  holding Alicia's hand as she gave birth to my grandson.

  facing Vaffa.

  dying. Dying again. And again.

  I recoiled from it helplessly. All moments had been now. They all vanished, leaving me confused images and almost no memory. The things I remembered were as often in my future as in my past.

  It returned, that vertiginous feeling of inhabiting all my past, present, and future at one time. Again I recoiled, and this time rebounded along the four-dimensional length of that long pink worm with a million legs that was my life, from my birth to my many deaths. I was one entity, one viewpoint, one now, I traveled the whole length of my existence, backward and forward, into the future and the past.

  I fell back again, disoriented, confused. I had been shown something my mind could not contain, and I felt the memories of it fading already. I existed in too many ways at the same time for me to comprehend it. My eyes would not function, or they presented me with images that my brain could not assimilate.

  I don't know how long I rested in that quiet, black place I had come to. There was no time, but all my sisters were there with me. We began to see, a little. Something swam into my detached consciousness, a strange thing that I perceived without actually seeing it. Strange as it was, it was closer to familiarity than anything else around me. Suddenly I knew it was a valuable thing. It was something I had to have. (Someone was telling me I had to have it?) It belonged to them, to the Invaders, and I had to possess it.

  I reached—