The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

“That is of no concern to this department, Mr. Fingal. And please do not interrupt. It’s hard enough to reach you. I’m fading, but the message will be continued if you look to your right.” The voice and the power hum behind it faded. The phone was dead.

  Fingal looked to his right and jerked in surprise. There was a hand, a woman’s hand, writing on his wall. The hand faded out at the wrist.

  “Mene, Mene . . .” it wrote, in thin letters of fire. Then the hand waved in irritation and erased that with its thumb. The wall was smudged with soot where the words had been.

  “You’re projecting, Mr. Fingal,” the hand wrote, quickly etching out the words with a manicured nail. “That’s what you expected to see.” The hand underlined the word “expected” three times. “Please cooperate, clear your mind, and see what is there, or we’re not going to get anywhere. Damn, I’ve about exhausted this medium.”

  And indeed it had. The writing had filled the wall and the hand was now down near the floor. The apparition wrote smaller and smaller in an effort to get it all in.

  Fingal had an excellent grasp on reality, according to his psychist. He held tightly onto that evaluation like a talisman as he leaned closer to the wall to read the last sentence.

  “Look on your bookshelf,” the hand wrote. “The title is Orientation in your Fantasy World.”

  Fingal knew he had no such book, but could think of nothing better to do.

  His phone didn’t work, and if he was going through a psychotic episode he didn’t think it wise to enter the public corridor until he had some idea of what was going on. The hand faded out, but the writing continued to smolder.

  He found the book easily enough. It was a pamphlet, actually, with a gaudy cover. It was the sort of thing he had seen in the outer offices of the Kenya disneyland, a promotional booklet. At the bottom it said, “Published under the auspices of the Kenya computer; A. Joachim, operator.” He opened it and began to read.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Where Am I?”

  YOU’RE probably wondering by now where you are. This is an entirely healthy and normal reaction, Mr. Fingal. Anyone would wonder, when beset by what seem to be paranormal manifestations, if his grasp on reality had weakened. Or, in simple language, “Am I nuts, or what?”

  No, Mr. Fingal, you are not nuts. But you are not, as you probably think, sitting on your bed, reading a book. It’s all in your mind. You are still in the Kenya disneyland. More specifically, you are contained in the memory cube we took of you before your weekend on the savanna. You see, there’s been a big goof-up.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “What Happened?”

  WE’D like to know that, too, Mr. Fingal. But here’s what we do know. Your body has been misplaced. Now, there’s nothing to worry about, we’re doing all we can to locate it and find out how it happened, but it will take some time. Maybe it’s small consolation, but this has never happened before in the seventy-five years we’ve been operating, and as soon as we find out how it happened this time, you can be sure we’ll be careful not to let it happen again. We’re pursuing several leads at this time, and you can rest easy that your body will be returned to you intact just as soon as we locate it.

  You are awake and aware right now because we have incorporated your memory cube into the workings of our H-210 computer, one of the finest holomemory systems available to modern business. You see, there are a few problems.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “What Problems?”

  IT’S kind of hard to put in terms you’d understand, but let’s take a crack at it, shall we?

  The medium we use to record your memories isn’t the one you’ve probably used yourself as insurance against accidental death. As you must know, that system will store your memories for up to twenty years with no degradation or loss of information, and is quite expensive. The system we use is a temporary one, good for two, five, fourteen, or twenty-eight days, depending on the length of your stay. Your memories are put in the cube, where you might expect them to remain static and unchanging, as they do in your insurance recording. If you thought that, you would be wrong, Mr. Fingal. Think about it. If you die, your bank will immediately start a clone from the plasm you stored along with the memory cube. In six months, your memories would be played back into the clone and you would awaken, missing the memories that were accumulated in your body from the time of your last recording. Perhaps this has happened to you. If it has, you know the shock of awakening from the recording process to be told that it is three or four years later, and that you had died in that time.

  In any case, the process we use is an ongoing one, or it would be worthless to you. The cube we install in the African animal of your choice is capable of adding the memories of your stay in Kenya to the memory cube. When your visit is over, these memories are played back into your brain and you leave the disneyland with the exciting, educational, and refreshing experiences you had as an animal, though your body never left our slumber room. This is known as “doppling,” from the German doppelganger.

  Now, to the problems we talked about. Thought we’d never get around to them, didn’t you?

  First, since you registered for a weekend stay, the medico naturally used one of the two-day cubes as part of our budget-excursion fare. These cubes have a safety factor, but aren’t much good beyond three days at best. At the end of that time the cube would start to deteriorate. Of course, we fully expect to have you installed in your own body before then. Additionally, there is the problem of storage. Since these ongoing memory cubes are intended to be in use all the time your memories are stored in them, it presents certain problems when we find ourselves in the spot we are now in. Are you following me, Mr. Fingal? While the cube has already passed its potency for use in coexisting with a live host, like the lioness you just left, it must be kept in constant activation at all times or loss of information results. I’m sure you wouldn’t want that to happen, would you? Of course not. So what we have done is to “plug you in” to our computer, which will keep you aware and healthy and guard against the randomizing of your memory nexi. I won’t go into that; let it stand that randomizing is not the sort of thing you’d like to have happen to you.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “So What Gives, Huh?”

  I’M glad you asked that. (Because you did ask that, Mr. Fingal. This booklet is part of the analogizing process that I’ll explain further down the page.)

  Life in a computer is not the sort of thing you could just jump into and hope to retain the world-picture compatibility so necessary for sane functioning in this complex society. This has been tried, so take our word for it. Or rather, my word. Did I introduce myself? I’m Apollonia Joachim, First Class Operative for the DataSafe computer troubleshooting firm. You’ve probably never heard of us, even though you do work with computers.

  Since you can’t just become aware in the baffling, on-and-off world that passes for reality in a data system, your mind, in cooperation with an analogizing program I’ve given the computer, interprets things in ways that seem safe and comfortable to it. The world you see around you is a figment of your imagination. Of course, it looks real to you because it comes from the same part of the mind that you normally use to interpret reality. If we wanted to get philosophical about it, we could probably argue all day about what constitutes reality and why the one you are perceiving now is any less real than the one you are used to. But let’s not get into that, all right?

  The world will likely continue to function in ways you are accustomed for it to function. It won’t be exactly the same. Nightmares, for instance. Mr. Fingal, I hope you aren’t the nervous type, because your nightmares can come to life where you are. They’ll seem quite real. You should avoid them if you can, because they can do you real harm. I’ll say more about this later if I need to. For now, there’s no need to worry.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “What Do I Do Now?”

  I’D advise you to continue with your normal activities. Don’t be alarmed at anythin
g unusual. For one thing, I can only communicate with you by means of paranormal phenomena. You see, when a message from me is fed into the computer, it reaches you in a way your brain is not capable of dealing with. Naturally, your brain classifies this as an unusual event and fleshes the communication out in unusual fashion. Most of the weird things you see, if you stay calm and don’t let your own fears out of the closet to persecute you, will be me. Otherwise, I anticipate that your world should look, feel, taste, sound, and smell pretty normal. I’ve talked to your psychist. He assures me that your world-grasp is strong. So sit tight. We’ll be working hard to get you out of there.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Help!”

  YES, we’ll help you. This is a truly unfortunate thing to have happened, and of course we will refund all your money promptly. In addition, the lawyer for Kenya wants me to ask you if a lump sum settlement against all future damages is a topic worthy of discussion. You can think about it; there’s no hurry.

  In the meantime, I’ll find ways to answer your questions. It might become unwieldy the harder your mind struggles to normalize my communications into things you are familiar with. That is both your greatest strength—the ability of your mind to bend the computer world it doesn’t wish to see into media you are familiar with—and my biggest handicap. Look for me in tea leaves, on billboards, on holovision; anywhere! It could be exciting if you get into it.

  Meanwhile, if you have received this message you can talk to me by filling in the attached coupon and dropping it in the mailtube. Your reply will probably be waiting for you at the office. Good luck!

  Yes! I received your message and am interested in the exciting opportunities in the field of computer living! Please send me, without cost or obligation, your exciting catalog telling me how I can move up to the big, wonderful world outside!

  Fingal fought the urge to pinch himself. If what this booklet said was true—and he might as well believe it—it would hurt and he would not wake up. He pinched himself anyway. It hurt.

  If he understood this right, everything around him was the product of his imagination. Somewhere, a woman was sitting at a computer input and talking to him in normal language, which came to his brain in the form of electron pulses it could not cope with and so edited into forms he was conversant with. He was analogizing like mad. He wondered if he had caught it from the teacher, if analogies were contagious.

  “What the hell’s wrong with a simple voice from the air?” he wondered aloud. He got no response, and was rather glad. He’d had enough mysteriousness for now. And on second thought, a voice from the air would probably scare the pants off him.

  He decided his brain must know what it was doing. After all, the hand startled him but he hadn’t panicked. He could see it, and he trusted his visual sense more than he did voices from the air, a classical sign of insanity if ever there was one.

  He got up and went to the wall. The letters of fire were gone, but the black smudge of the erasure was still there. He sniffed it: carbon. He fingered the rough paper of the pamphlet, tore off a corner, put it in his mouth and chewed it. It tasted like paper.

  He sat down and filled out the coupon and tossed it to the mailtube.

  Fingal didn’t get angry about it until he was at the office. He was an easygoing person, slow to boil. But he finally reached a point where he had to say something.

  Everything had been so normal he wanted to laugh. All his friends and acquaintances were there, doing exactly what he would have expected them to be doing. What amazed and bemused him was the number and variety of spear carriers, minor players in this internal soap opera. The extras that his mind had cooked up to people the crowded corridors, like the man he didn’t know who had bumped into him on the tube to work, apologized, and disappeared, presumably back into the bowels of his imagination.

  There was nothing he could do to vent his anger but test the whole absurd setup. There was doubt lingering in his mind that the whole morning had been a fugue, a temporary lapse into dreamland. Maybe he’d never gone to Kenya, after all, and his mind was playing tricks on him. To get him there, or keep him away? He didn’t know, but he could worry about that if the test failed.

  He stood up at his desk terminal, which was in the third column of the fifteenth row of other identical desks, each with its diligent worker. He held up his hands and whistled. Everyone looked up.

  “I don’t believe in you,” he screeched. He picked up a stack of tapes on his desk and hurled them at Felicia Nahum at the desk next to his. Felicia was a good friend of his, and she registered the proper shock until the tapes hit her. Then she melted. He looked around the room and saw that everything had stopped like a freeze-frame in a motion picture.

  He sat down and drummed his fingers on his desk top. His heart was pounding and his face was flushed. For an awful moment he had thought he was wrong. He began to calm down, glancing up every few seconds to be sure the world really had stopped.

  In three minutes he was in a cold sweat. What the hell had he proved? That this morning had been real, or that he really was crazy? It dawned on him that he would never be able to test the assumptions under which he lived.

  A line of print flashed across his terminal.

  “But when could you ever do so, Mr. Fingal?”

  “Ms. Joachim?” he shouted, looking around him. “Where are you? I’m afraid.”

  “You mustn’t be,” the terminal printed. “Calm yourself. You have a strong sense of reality, remember? Think about this: even before today, how could you be sure the world you saw was not the result of catatonic delusions? Do you see what I mean? The question ‘What is reality?’ is, in the end, unanswerable. We all must accept at some point what we see and are told, and live by a set of untested and untestable assumptions. I ask you to accept the set I gave you this morning because, sitting here in the computer room where you cannot see me, my world-picture tells me that they are the true set. On the other hand, you could believe that I’m deluding myself, that there’s nothing in the pink cube I see and that you’re a spear carrier in my dream. Does that make you more comfortable?”

  “No,” he mumbled, ashamed of himself. “I see what you mean. Even if I am crazy, it would be more comfortable to go along with it than to keep fighting it.”

  “Perfect, Mr. Fingal. If you need further illustrations you could imagine yourself locked in a straitjacket. Perhaps there are technicians laboring right now to correct your condition, and they are putting you through this psychodrama as a first step. Is that any more attractive?”

  “No, I guess it isn’t.”

  “The point is that it’s as reasonable an assumption as the set of facts I gave you this morning. But the main point is that you should behave the same whichever set is true. Do you see? To fight it in the one case will only cause you trouble, and in the other, would impede the treatment. I realize I’m asking you to accept me on faith. And that’s all I can give you.”

  “I believe in you,” he said. “Now, can you start everything going again?”

  “I told you I’m not in control of your world. In fact, it’s a considerable obstacle to me, seeing as I have to talk to you in these awkward ways. But things should get going on their own as soon as you let them. Look up.”

  He did, and saw the normal hum and bustle of the office. Felicia was there at her desk, as though nothing had happened. Nothing had. Yes, something had, after all. The tapes were scattered on the floor near his desk, where they had fallen. They had unreeled in an unruly mess.

  He started to pick them up, then saw they weren’t as messy as he had thought. They spelled out a message in coils of tape.

  “You’re back on the track,” it said.

  For three weeks Fingal was a very good boy. His co-workers, had they been real people, might have noticed a certain standoffishness in him, and his social life at home was drastically curtailed. Otherwise, he behaved exactly as if everything around him were real.

  But his patience had limits. This had
already dragged on for longer than he had expected. He began to fidget at his desk, let his mind wander. Feeding information into a computer can be frustrating, unrewarding, and eventually stultifying. He had been feeling it even before his trip to Kenya; it had been the cause of his trip to Kenya. He was sixty-eight years old, with centuries ahead of him, and stuck in a ferro-magnetic rut. Longlife could be a mixed blessing when you felt boredom creeping up on you.

  What was getting to him was the growing disgust with his job. It was bad enough when he merely sat in a real office with two hundred real people, shoveling slightly unreal data into a much-less-than-real-to-his-senses computer. How much worse now, when he knew that the data he handled had no meaning to anyone but himself, was nothing but occupational therapy created by his mind and a computer program to keep him busy while Joachim searched for his body.

  For the first time in his life he began punching some buttons for himself. Under slightly less stress he would have gone to see his psychist, the approved and perfectly normal thing to do. Here, he knew he would only be talking to himself. He failed to perceive the advantages of such an idealized psychoanalytic process; he’d never really believed that a psychist did little more than listen in the first place.

  He began to change his own life when he became irritated with his boss. She pointed out to him that his error index was on the rise, and suggested that he shape up or begin looking for another source of employment.

  This enraged him. He’d been a good worker for twenty-five years. Why should she take that attitude when he was just not feeling himself for a week or two?

  Then he was angrier than ever when he thought about her being merely a projection of his own mind. Why should he let her push him around?

  “I don’t want to hear it,” he said. “Leave me alone. Better yet, give me a raise in salary.”

  “Fingal,” she said promptly, “you’ve been a credit to your section these last weeks. I’m going to give you a raise.”