The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  All that was easy. Much harder was to decide what the people would be like. What new technologies would they have? How would these new things affect human behavior? What would it be like to know that we were not the smartest or most powerful species in the galaxy, that we weren’t even a good second place?

  It was from such premises that “Picnic on Nearside” grew. Other stories followed, including this one, which I now see as a sort of early take on virtual reality. It was filmed, starring Raul Julia, and shown on PBS. I don’t think it was entirely successful, but I enjoyed it as it was the first of my works to be dramatized.

  OVERDRAWN AT THE MEMORY BANK

  IT WAS SCHOOLDAY at the Kenya disneyland. Five nine-year-olds were being shown around the medico section where Fingal lay on the recording table, the top of his skull removed, looking up into a mirror. Fingal was in a bad mood (hence the trip to the disneyland) and could have done without the children. Their teacher was doing his best, but who can control five nine-year-olds?

  “What’s the big green wire do, teacher?” asked a little girl, reaching out one grubby hand and touching Fingal’s brain where the main recording wire clamped to the built-in terminal.

  “Lupus, I told you you weren’t to touch anything. And look at you, you didn’t wash your hands.” The teacher took the child’s hand and pulled it away.

  “But what does it matter? You told us yesterday that the reason no one cares about dirt like they used to is dirt isn’t dirty anymore.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t tell you exactly that. What I said was that when humans were forced off Earth, we took the golden opportunity to wipe out all harmful germs. When there were only three thousand people alive on the moon after the Occupation it was easy for us to sterilize everything. So the medico doesn’t need to wear gloves like surgeons used to, or even wash her hands. There’s no danger of infection. But it isn’t polite. We don’t want this man to think we’re being impolite to him, just because his nervous system is disconnected and he can’t do anything about it, do we?”

  “No, teacher.”

  “What’s a surgeon?”

  “What’s ‘infection’?”

  Fingal wished the little perishers had chosen another day for their lessons, but as the teacher had said, there was very little he could do. The medico had turned his motor control over to the computer while she took the reading. He was paralyzed. He eyed the little boy carrying the carved stick, and hoped he didn’t get a notion to poke him in the cerebrum with it. Fingal was insured, but who needs the trouble?

  “All of you stand back a little so the medico can do her work. That’s better. Now, who can tell me what the big green wire is? Destry?”

  Destry allowed as how he didn’t know, didn’t care, and wished he could get out of here and play spat ball. The teacher dismissed him and went on with the others.

  “The green wire is the main sounding electrode,” the teacher said. “It’s attached to a series of very fine wires in the man’s head, like the ones you have, which are implanted at birth. Can anyone tell me how the recording is made?”

  The little girl with the dirty hands spoke up.

  “By tying knots in string.”

  The teacher laughed, but the medico didn’t. She had heard it all before. So had the teacher, of course, but that was why he was a teacher. He had the patience to deal with children, a rare quality now that there were so few of them.

  “No, that was just an analogy. Can you all say analogy?”

  “Analogy,” they chorused.

  “Fine. What I told you is that the chains of FPNA are very much like strings with knots tied in them. If you make up a code with every millimeter and every knot having a meaning, you could write words in string by tying knots in it. That’s what the machine does with the FPNA. Now . . . can anyone tell me what FPNA stands for?”

  “Ferro-Photo-Nucleic Acid,” said the girl, who seemed to be the star pupil.

  “That’s right, Lupus. It’s a variant on DNA, and it can be knotted by magnetic fields and light, and made to go through chemical changes. What the medico is doing now is threading long strings of FPNA into the tiny tubes that are in the man’s brain. When she’s done, she’ll switch on the machine and the current will start tying knots. And what happens then?”

  “All his memories go into the memory cube,” said Lupus.

  “That’s right. But it’s a little more complicated than that. You remember what I told you about a divided cipher? The kind that has two parts, neither of which is any good without the other? Imagine two of the strings, each with a lot of knots in it. Well, you try to read one of them with your decoder, and you find out that it doesn’t make sense. That’s because whoever wrote it used two strings, with knots tied in different places. They only make sense when you put them side by side and read them that way. That’s how this decoder works, but the medico uses twenty-five strings. When they’re all knotted the right way and put into the right openings in that cube over there,” he pointed to the pink cube on the medico’s bench, “they’ll contain all this man’s memories and personality. In a way, he’ll be in the cube, but he won’t know it, because he’s going to be an African lion today.”

  This excited the children, who would much rather be stalking the Kenya savanna than listening to how a multi-holo was taken. When they quieted down the teacher went on, using analogies that got more strained by the minute.

  “When the strings are in . . . class, pay attention. When they’re in the cube, a current sets them in place. What we have then is a multi-holo. Can anyone tell me why we can’t just take a tape recording of what’s going on in this man’s brain, and use that?”

  One of the boys answered, for once.

  “Because memory isn’t . . . what’s that word?”

  “Sequential?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. His memories are stashed all over his brain and there’s no way to sort them out. So this recorder takes a picture of the whole thing at once, like a hologram. Does that mean you can cut the cube in half and have two people?”

  “No, but that’s a good question. This isn’t that sort of hologram. This is something like . . . like when you press your hand into clay, but in four dimensions. If you chip off a part of the clay after it’s dried, you lose part of the information, right? Well, this is sort of like that. You can’t see the imprint because it’s too small, but everything the man ever did and saw and heard and thought will be in the cube.”

  “Would you move back a little?” asked the medico. The children in the mirror over Fingal’s head shuffled back and became more than just heads with shoulders sticking out. The medico adjusted the last strand of FPNA suspended in Fingal’s cortex to the close tolerances specified by the computer.

  “I’d like to be a medico when I grow up,” said one boy.

  “I thought you wanted to go to college and study to be a scientist.”

  “Well, maybe. But my friend is teaching me to be a medico. It looks a lot easier.”

  “You should stay in school, Destry. I’m sure your parent will want you to make something of yourself.” The medico fumed silently. She knew better than to speak up—education was a serious business and interference with the duties of a teacher carried a stiff fine. But she was obviously pleased when the class thanked her and went out the door, leaving dirty footprints behind them.

  She viciously flipped a switch, and Fingal found he could breathe and move the muscles in his head.

  “Lousy conceited college graduate,” she said. “What the hell’s wrong with getting your hands dirty, I ask you?” She wiped the blood from her hands onto her blue smock.

  “Teachers are the worst,” Fingal said.

  “Ain’t it the truth? Well, being a medico is nothing to be ashamed of. So I didn’t go to college, so what? I can do my job, and I can see what I’ve done when I’m through. I always did like working with my hands. Did you know that being a medico used to be one of the most respected professions there was?”

>   “Really?”

  “Fact. They had to go to college for years and years, and they made a hell of a lot of money, let me tell you.”

  Fingal said nothing, thinking she must be exaggerating. What was so tough about medicine? Just a little mechanical sense and a steady hand, that was all you needed. Fingal did a lot of maintenance on his body himself, going to the shop only for major work. And a good thing, at the prices they charged. It was not the sort of thing one discussed while lying helpless on the table, however.

  “Okay, that’s done.” She pulled out the modules that contained the invisible FPNA and set them in the developing solution. She fastened Fingal’s skull back on and tightened the recessed screws set into the bone. She turned his motor control back over to him while she sealed his scalp back into place. He stretched and yawned. He always grew sleepy in the medico’s shop; he didn’t know why.

  “Will that be all for today, sir? We’ve got a special on blood changes, and since you’ll just be lying there while you’re out doppling in the park, you might as well—”

  “No, thanks. I had it changed a year ago. Didn’t you read my history?”

  She picked up the card and glanced at it. “So you did. Fine. You can get up now, Mr. Fingal.” She made a note on the card and set it down on the table. The door opened and a small face peered in.

  “I left my stick,” said the boy. He came in and started looking under things, to the annoyance of the medico. She attempted to ignore the boy as she took down the rest of the information she needed.

  “And are you going to experience this holiday now, or wait until your double has finished and play it back then?”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean . . . yes, I see. No, I’ll go right into the animal. My psychist advised me to come out here for my nerves, so it wouldn’t do me much good to wait it out, would it?”

  “No, I suppose it wouldn’t. So you’ll be sleeping here while you dopple in the park. Hey!” She turned to confront the little boy, who was poking his nose into things he should stay away from. She grabbed him and pulled him away.

  “You either find what you’re looking for in one minute or you get out of here, you see?” He went back to his search, giggling behind his hand and looking for more interesting things to fool around with.

  The medico made a check on the card, glanced at the glowing numbers on her thumbnail and discovered her shift was almost over. She connected the memory cube through a machine to a terminal in the back of Fingal’s head.

  “You’ve never done this before, right? We do this to avoid blank spots, which can be confusing sometimes. The cube is almost set, but now I’ll add the last ten minutes to the record at the same time I put you to sleep. That way you’ll experience no disorientation, you’ll move through a dream state to full awareness of being in the body of a lion. Your body will be removed and taken to one of our slumber rooms while you’re gone. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  Fingal wasn’t worried, just tired and tense. He wished she would go on and do it and stop talking about it. And he wished the little boy would stop pounding his stick against the table leg. He wondered if his headache would be transferred to the lion.

  She turned him off.

  They hauled his body away and took his memory cube to the installation room. The medico chased the boy into the corridor and hosed down the recording room. Then she was off to a date she was already late for.

  The employees of Kenya disneyland installed the cube into a metal box set into the skull of a full-grown African lioness. The social structure of lions being what it was, the proprietors charged a premium for the use of a male body, but Fingal didn’t care one way or the other.

  A short ride in an underground railroad with the sedated body of the Fingal-lioness, and he was deposited beneath the blazing sun of the Kenya savanna. He awoke, sniffed the air, and felt better immediately.

  The Kenya disneyland was a total environment buried twenty kilometers beneath Mare Moscoviense on the far side of Luna. It was roughly circular, with a radius of two hundred kilometers. From the ground to the “sky” was two kilometers except over the full-sized replica of Kilimanjaro, where it bulged to allow clouds to form in a realistic manner over the snowcap.

  The illusion was flawless. The curve of the ground was consistent with the curvature of the Earth, so that the horizon was much more distant than anything Fingal was used to. The trees were real, and so were all the animals. At night an astronomer would have needed a spectroscope to distinguish the stars from the real thing.

  Fingal certainly couldn’t spot anything wrong. Not that he wanted to. The colors were strange but that was from the limitations of feline optics. Sounds were much more vivid, as were smells. If he’d thought about it, he would have realized the gravity was much too weak for Kenya. But he wasn’t thinking; he’d come here to avoid that.

  It was hot and glorious. The dry grass made no sound as he walked over it on broad pads. He smelled antelope, wildebeest, and . . . was that baboon? He felt pangs of hunger but he really didn’t want to hunt. But he found the lioness body starting on a stalk anyway.

  Fingal was in an odd position. He was in control of the lioness, but only more or less. He could guide her where he wanted to go, but he had no say at all over instinctive behaviors. He was as much a pawn to these as the lioness was. In one sense, he was the lioness; when he wished to raise a paw or turn around, he simply did it. The motor control was complete. It felt great to walk on all fours, and it came as easily as breathing. But the scent of the antelope went on a direct route from the nostrils to the lower brain, made a connection with the rumblings of hunger, and started him on the stalk.

  The guidebook said to surrender to it. Fighting it wouldn’t do anyone any good, and could frustrate you. If you were paying to be a lion, read the chapter on “Things to Do,” you might as well be one, not just wear the body and see the sights.

  Fingal wasn’t sure he liked this as he came downwind of the antelope and crouched behind a withered clump of scrub. He pondered it while he sized up the dozen or so animals grazing just a few meters from him, picking out the small, the weak, and the young with a predator’s eye. Maybe he should back out now and go on his way. These beautiful creatures were not harming him. The Fingal part of him wished mostly to admire them, not eat them.

  Before he quite knew what had happened, he was standing triumphant over the bloody body of a small antelope. The others were just dusty trails in the distance.

  It had been incredible!

  The lioness was fast, but might as well have been moving in slow motion compared to the antelope. Her only advantage lay in surprise, confusion, and quick, all-out attack. There had been the lifting of a head; ears had flicked toward the bush he was hiding in, and he had exploded. Ten seconds of furious exertion and he bit down on a soft throat, felt the blood gush and the dying kicks of the hind legs under his paws. He was breathing hard and the blood coursed through his veins. There was only one way to release the tension.

  He threw his head back and roared his bloodlust.

  He’d had it with lions at the end of the weekend. It wasn’t worth it for the few minutes of exhilaration at the kill. It was a life of endless stalking, countless failures, then a pitiful struggle to get a few bites for yourself from the kill you had made. He found to his chagrin that his lioness was very low in the dominance order. When he got his kill back to the pride—he didn’t know why he had dragged it back but the lioness seemed to know—it was promptly stolen from him. He/she sat back helplessly and watched the dominant male take his share, followed by the rest of the pride. He was left with a dried haunch four hours later, and had to contest even that with vultures and hyenas. He saw what the premium payment was for. That male had it easy.

  But he had to admit that it had been worth it. He felt better; his psychist had been right. It did one good to leave the insatiable computers at his office for a weekend of simple living. There were no complicated choices to be made out here. If he wa
s in doubt, he listened to his instincts. It was just that the next time, he’d go as an elephant. He’d been watching them. All the other animals pretty much left them alone, and he could see why. To be a solitary bull, free to wander where he wished with food as close as the nearest tree branch . . .

  He was still thinking about it when the collection crew came for him.

  He awoke with the vague feeling that something was wrong. He sat up in bed and looked around him. Nothing seemed to be out of place. There was no one in the room with him. He shook his head to clear it.

  It didn’t do any good. There was still something wrong. He tried to remember how he had gotten there, and laughed at himself. His own bedroom! What was so remarkable about that?

  But hadn’t there been a vacation, a weekend trip? He remembered being a lion, eating raw antelope meat, being pushed around within the pride, fighting it out with the other females and losing and retiring to rumble to him/herself.

  Certainly he should have come back to human consciousness in the disneyland medical section. He couldn’t remember it. He reached for his phone, not knowing who he wished to call. His psychist, perhaps, or the Kenya office.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Fingal,” the phone told him. “This line is no longer available for outgoing calls. If you’ll—”

  “Why not?” he asked, irritated and confused. “I paid my bill.”