The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  I was sitting there eating fitfully and licking my wounds. The argument had been inconclusive, philosophically, but from the pragmatic standpoint she had won, no question about it. The hard fact was that I couldn’t get a Change until she affixed her personality index to the bottom of a sheet of input, and she said she’d put her brain in cold storage before she’d allow that. She would, too.

  “I think I’m ready to have a Change,” Carnival said to us.

  “That’s not fair!” I yelled. “You said that just to spite me. You just want to rub it in that I’m nothing and you’re anything you want to be.”

  “We’ll have no more of that,” she said, sharply. “We’ve exhausted this subject, and I will not change my mind. You’re too young for a Change.”

  “Blowout,” I said. “I’ll be an adult soon; it’s only a year away. Do you really think I’ll be all that different in a year?”

  “I don’t care to predict that. I hope you’ll mature. But if, as you say, it’s only a year, why are you in such a hurry?”

  “And I wish you wouldn’t use language like that,” Chord said.

  Carnival gave him a sour look. She has a hard line about outside interference when she’s trying to cope with me. She doesn’t want anyone butting in. But she wouldn’t say anything in front of me and Adagio.

  “I think you should let Fox get his Change,” Adagio said, and grinned at me. Adagio is a good kid, as younger foster-siblings go. I could always count on her to back me up, and I returned the favor when I could.

  “You keep out of this,” Chord advised her, then to Carnival, “Maybe we should leave the table until you and Fox get this settled.”

  “You’d have to stay away for a year,” Carnival said. “Stick around. The discussion is over. If Fox thinks different, he can go to his room.”

  That was my cue, and I got up and ran from the table. I felt silly doing it, but the tears were real. It’s just that there’s a part of me that stays cool enough to try and get the best of any situation.

  Carnival came to see me a little later, but I did my best to make her feel unwelcome. I can be good at that, at least with her. She left when it became obvious she couldn’t make anything any better. She was hurt, and when the door closed, I felt really miserable, mad at her and at myself, too. I was finding it hard to love her as much as I had a few years before, and feeling ashamed because I couldn’t.

  I worried over that for a while and decided I should apologize. I left my room and was ready to go cry in her arms, but it didn’t happen that way. Maybe if it had, things would have been different and Halo and I would never have gone to Nearside.

  Carnival and Chord were getting ready to go out. They said they’d be gone most of the lune. They were dressing up for it, and what bothered me and made me change my plans was that they were dressing in the family room instead of in their own private rooms where I thought they should.

  She had taken off her feet and replaced them with peds, which struck me as foolish, since peds only make sense in free-fall. But Carnival wears them every chance she gets, prancing around like a high-stepping horse because they are so unsuited to walking. I think people look silly with hands on the ends of their legs. And naturally she had left her feet lying on the floor.

  Carnival glanced at her watch and said something about how they would be late for the shuttle. As they left, she glanced over her shoulder.

  “Fox, would you do me a favor and put those feet away, please? Thanks.” Then she was gone.

  An hour later, in the depths of my depression, the door rang. It was a woman I had never seen before. She was nude.

  You know how sometimes you can look at someone you know who’s just had a Change and recognize them instantly, even though they might be twenty centimeters shorter or taller and mass fifty kilos more or less and look nothing at all like the person you knew? Maybe you don’t, because not everyone has this talent, but I have it very strong. Carnival says it’s an evolutionary change in the race, a response to the need to recognize other individuals who can change their appearance at will. That may be true; she can’t do it at all.

  I think it’s something to do with the way a person wears a body: any body, of either sex. Little mannerisms like blinking, mouth movements, stance, fingers; maybe even the total kinesthetic gestalt the doctors talk about. This was like that. I could see behind the pretty female face and the different height and weight and recognize someone I knew. It was Halo, my best friend, who had been a male the last time I saw him, three lunes ago. She had a big foolish grin on her face.

  “Hi, Fox,” she said, in a voice that was an octave higher and yet was unmistakably Halo’s. “Guess who?”

  “Queen Victoria, right?” I tried to sound bored. “Come on in, Halo.”

  Her face fell. She came in, looking confused.

  “What do you think?” she said, turning slowly to give me a look from all sides. All of them were good because—as if I needed anything else—her mother had let her get the full treatment: fully developed breasts, all the mature curves—the works. She had been denied only the adult height. She was even a few centimeters shorter than she had been.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “Listen, Fox, if you’d rather I left . . .”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Halo,” I said, giving up on my hatred. “You look great. Fabulous. Really you do. I’m just having a hard time being happy for you. Carnival is never going to give in.”

  She was instantly sympathetic. She took my hand, startling me badly.

  “I was so happy I guess I was tactless,” she said in a low voice. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come over here yet.”

  She looked at me with big brown eyes (they had been blue, usually), and I started realizing what this was going to mean to me. I mean, Halo? A female? Halo, the guy I used to run the corridors with? The guy who helped me build that awful eight-legged cat that Carnival wouldn’t let in the house and looked like a confused caterpillar? Who made love to the same girls I did and compared notes with me later when we were alone and helped me out when the gang tried to beat me up and cried with me and vowed to get even? Could we do any of that now? I didn’t know. Most of my best friends were male, maybe because the sex thing tended to make matters too complicated with females, and I couldn’t handle both things with the same person yet.

  But Halo was having no such doubts. In fact, she was standing very close to me and practicing a wide-eyed innocent look that she knew did funny things to me. She knew it because I had told her so, back when she was a boy. Somehow that didn’t seem fair.

  “Ah, listen, Halo,” I said hastily, backing away. She had been going for my pants! “Ah, I think I need some time to get used to this. How can I . . . ? You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?” I don’t think she did, and neither did I, really. All I knew was I was unaccountably mortified at what she was so anxious to try. And she was still coming at me.

  “Say!” I said, desperately. “Say! I have an idea! Ah . . . I know. Let’s take Carnival’s jumper and go for a ride, okay? She said I could use it today.” My mouth was leading its own life, out of control. Everything I said was extemporaneous, as much news to me as it was to her.

  She stopped pursuing me. “Did she really?”

  “Sure,” I said, very assured. This was only a half lie, by my mother’s lights. What had happened was I had meant to ask her for the jumper, and I was sure she would have said yes. I was logically certain she would have. I had just forgotten to ask, that’s all. So it was almost as if permission had been granted, and I went on as if it had. The reasoning behind this is tricky, I admit, but as I said, Carnival would have understood.

  “Well,” Halo said, not really overjoyed at the idea, “where would we go?”

  “How about to Old Archimedes?” Again, that was a big surprise to me. I had had no idea I wanted to go there.

  Halo was really shocked. I jolted her right out of her new mannerisms. She reacted just like the old Halo would have, wit
h a dopey face and open mouth. Then she tried on other reactions: covering her mouth with her hands and wilting a little. First-time Changers are like that; new women tend to mince around like something out of a gothic novel, and new men swagger and grunt like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. They get over it.

  Halo got over it right in front of my eyes. She stared at me, scratching her head.

  “Are you crazy? Old Archimedes is on the Nearside. They don’t let anybody go over there.”

  “Don’t they?” I asked, suddenly interested. “Do you know that for a fact? And if so, why not?”

  “Well, I mean everybody knows . . .”

  “Do they? Who is ‘they’ that won’t let us go?”

  “The Central Computer, I guess.”

  “Well, the only way to find out is to try it. Come on, let’s go.” I grabbed her arm. I could see she was confused, and I wanted it to remain that way until I could get my own thoughts together.

  “I’d like a flight plan to Old Archimedes on the Nearside,” I said, trying to sound as grownup and unworried as possible. We had packed a lunch and reached the field in ten minutes, due largely to my frantic prodding.

  “That’s a little imprecise, Fox,” said the CC. “Old Archimedes is a big place. Would you like to try again?”

  “Ah . . .” I drew a blank. Damn all computers and their literal-mindedness! What did I know about Old Archimedes? About as much as I knew about Old New York or Old Bombay.

  “Give me a flight plan to the main landing field.”

  “That’s better. The data are . . .” It reeled off the string of numbers. I fed them into the pilot and tried to relax.

  “Here goes,” I said to Halo. “This is Fox-Carnival-Joule, piloting private jumper AX1453, based at King City. I hereby file a flight plan to Old Archimedes’ main landing field, described as follows . . .” I repeated the numbers the CC had given me. “Filed on the seventeenth lune of the fourth lunation of the year 214 of the Occupation of Earth. I request an initiation time.”

  “Granted. Time as follows: thirty seconds from mark. Mark.”

  I was stunned. “That’s all there is to it?”

  It chuckled. Damn maternalistic machine. “What did you expect, Fox? Marshals converging on your jumper?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I thought you wouldn’t allow us to go to the Nearside.”

  “A popular misconception. You are a free citizen, although a minor, and able to go where you wish on the lunar surface. You are subject only to the laws of the state and the specific wishes of your parent as programmed into me. I . . . Do you wish me to start the burn for you?”

  “Mind your own business.” I watched the tick and pressed the button when it reached zero. The acceleration was mild, but went on for a long time. Hell, Old Archimedes is at the antipodes.

  “I have the responsibility to see that you do not endanger yourself through youthful ignorance or forgetfulness. I must also see that you obey the wishes of your mother. Other than that, you are on your own.”

  “You mean Carnival gave me permission to go to the Nearside?”

  “I didn’t say that. I have received no instruction from Carnival not to permit you to go to Nearside. There are no unusual dangers to your safety on Nearside. So I had no choice but to approve your flight plan.” It paused, significantly. “It is my experience that few parents consider it necessary to instruct me to deny such permission. I infer that it’s because so few people ever ask to go there. I also note that your parent is at the present moment unreachable; she has left instructions not to be disturbed. Fox,” the CC said, accusingly, “it occurs to me that this is no accident. Did you have this planned?”

  I hadn’t! But if I’d known . . .

  “No.”

  “I suppose you want a return flight plan?”

  “Why? I’ll ask you when I’m ready to come back.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” it said, smugly. “In another five minutes you’ll be out of range of my last receptor. I don’t extend to the Nearside, you know. Haven’t in decades. You’re going out of contact, Fox. You’ll be on your own. Think about it.”

  I did. For a queasy moment I wanted to turn back. Without the CC to monitor us, kids wouldn’t be allowed on the surface for years.

  Was I that confident? I know how hostile the surface is if it ever gets the drop on you. I thought I had all the mistakes trained out of me by now, but did I?

  “How exciting,” Halo gushed. She was off in the clouds again, completely over her shock at where we were going. She was bubble-headed like that for three lunes after her Change. Well, so was I, later, when I had my first.

  “Hush, numbskull,” I said, not unkindly. Nor was she insulted. She just grinned at me and gawked out the window as we approached the terminator.

  I checked the supply of consumables; they were in perfect shape for a stay of a full lunation if need be, though I had larked off without a glance at the delta-vee.

  “All right, smart-ass, give me the data for the return.”

  “Incomplete request,” the CC drawled.

  “Damn you, I want a flight plan Old Archimedes-King City, and no back talk.”

  “Noted. Assimilated.” It gave me that data. Its voice was getting fainter.

  “I don’t suppose,” it said, diffidently, “that you’d care to give me an indication of when you plan to return?”

  Ha! I had it where it hurt. Carnival wouldn’t be happy with the CC’s explanation, I was sure of that.

  “Tell her I’ve decided to start my own colony and I’ll never come back.”

  “As you wish.”

  Old Archimedes was bigger than I had expected. I knew that even in its heyday it had not been as populated as King City is, but they built more above the surface in those days. King City is not much more than a landing field and a few domes. Old Archimedes was chock-a-block with structures, all clustered around the central landing field. Halo pointed out some interesting buildings to the south, and so I went over there and set down next to them.

  She opened the door and threw out the tent, then jumped after it. I followed, taking the ladder since I seemed elected to carry the lunch. She took a quick look around and started unpacking the tent.

  “We’ll go exploring later,” she said, breathlessly. “Right now let’s get in the tent and eat. I’m hungry.”

  All right, all right, I said to myself. I’ve got to face it sooner or later. I didn’t think she was really all that hungry—not for the picnic lunch, anyway. This was still going too fast for me. I had no idea what our relationship would be when we crawled out of that tent.

  While she was setting it up, I took a more leisurely look around. Before long I was wishing we had gone to Tranquillity Base instead. It wouldn’t have been as private, but there are no spooks at Tranquillity. Come to think of it, Tranquillity Base used to be on the Nearside, before they moved it.

  About Old Archimedes:

  I couldn’t put my finger on what disturbed me about the place. Not the silence. The race has had to adjust to silence since we were forced off the Earth and took to growing up on the junk planets of the system. Not the lack of people. I was accustomed to long walks on the surface where I might not see anyone for hours. I don’t know. Maybe it was the Earth hanging there a little above the horizon.

  It was in crescent phase, and I wished uselessly for the old days when that dark portion would have been sprayed with points of light that were the cities of mankind. Now there was only the primitive night and the dolphins in the sea and the aliens—bogies cooked up to ruin the sleep of a child, but now I was not so sure. If humans still survive down there, we have no way of knowing it.

  They say that’s what drove people to the Farside: the constant reminder of what they had lost, always there in the sky. It must have been hard, especially to the Earthborn. Whatever the reason, no one had lived on the Nearside for almost a century. All the original settlements had dwindled as people migrated to t
he comforting empty sky of Farside.

  I think that’s what I felt, hanging over the old buildings like some invisible moss. It was the aura of fear and despair left by all the people who had buried their hopes here and moved away to the forgetfulness of Farside. There were ghosts here, all right: the shades of unfulfilled dreams and endless longing. And over it all a bottomless sadness.

  I shook myself and came back to the present. Halo had the tent ready. It bulged up on the empty field, a clear bubble just a little higher than my head. She was already inside. I crawled through the sphincter, and she sealed it behind me.

  Halo’s tent was a good one. The floor was about three meters in diameter, plenty of room for six people if you didn’t mind an occasional kick. It had a stove, a stereo set, and a compact toilet. It recycled water, scavenged CO2, controlled temperature, and could provide hydroponic oxygen for three lunations. And it all folded into a cube thirty centimeters on a side.

  Halo had skinned out of her suit as soon as the door was sealed and was bustling about, setting up the kitchen. She took the lunch hamper from me and started to work.

  I watched her with keen interest as she prepared the food. I wanted to get an insight into what she was feeling. It wasn’t easy. Every fuse in her head seemed to have blown.

  First-timers often overreact, seeking a new identity for themselves before it dawns on them there was nothing wrong with the old one. Since our society offers so little differentiation between the sex roles, they reach back to where the differences are so vivid and startling: novels, dramas, films, and tapes from the old days on Earth and the early years on the moon. They have the vague idea that since they have this new body and it lacks a penis or vagina, they should behave differently.

  I recognized the character she had fallen into; I’m as interested in old culture as the next kid. She was Blondie and I was supposed to be Dagwood. The Bumsteads, you know. Typical domestic nineteenth-century couple. She had spread a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth and set two places with dishes, napkins, washbowls, and a tiny electric candelabra.