The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

“I think a baby around here would be fun. Two should be twice as much fun. I think I’ll start. Come on, Marty.”

  “Hold on, honey,” Lang said, dryly. “If you conceive now, I’ll be forced to order you to abort. We have the chemicals for it, you know.”

  “That’s discrimination.”

  “Maybe so. But just because we’re colonists doesn’t mean we have to behave like rabbits. A pregnant woman will have to be removed from the work force at the end of her term, and we can only afford one at a time. After Lucy has hers, then come ask me again. But watch Lucy carefully, dear. Have you really thought what it’s going to take? Have you tried to visualize her getting into her pressure suit in six or seven months?”

  From their expressions, it was plain that neither Song nor McKillian had thought of it.

  “Right,” Lang went on. “It’ll be literal confinement for her, right here in the Poddy. Unless we can rig something for her, which I seriously doubt. Still want to go through with it, Lucy?”

  “Can I have a while to think it over?”

  “Sure. You have about two months. After that, the chemicals aren’t safe.”

  “I’d advise you to do it,” Crawford said. “I know my opinion means nothing after shooting my mouth off. I know I’m a fine one to talk; I won’t be cooped up in here. But the colony needs it. We’ve all felt it: the lack of a direction or a drive to keep going. I think we’d get it back if you went through with this.”

  McKillian tapped her teeth thoughtfully with the tip of a finger.

  “You’re right,” she said. “Your opinion doesn’t mean anything.” She slapped his knee delightedly when she saw him blush. “I think it’s yours, by the way. And I think I’ll go ahead and have it.”

  The penthouse seemed to have gone to Lang and Crawford as an unasked-for prerogative. It just became a habit, since they seemed to have developed a bond between them and none of the other three complained. Neither of the other women seemed to be suffering in any way. So Lang left it at that. What went on between the three of them was of no concern to her as long as it stayed happy.

  Lang was leaning back in Crawford’s arms, trying to decide if she wanted to make love again, when a gunshot rang out in the Podkayne.

  She had given a lot of thought to the last emergency, which she still saw as partly a result of her lag in responding. This time she was through the door almost before the reverberations had died down, leaving Crawford to nurse the leg she had stepped on in her haste.

  She was in time to see McKillian and Ralston hurrying into the lab at the back of the ship. There was a red light flashing, but she quickly saw it was not the worst it could be; the pressure light still glowed green. It was the smoke detector. The smoke was coming from the lab.

  She took a deep breath and plunged in, only to collide with Ralston as he came out, dragging Song. Except for a dazed expression and a few cuts, Song seemed to be all right. Crawford and McKillian joined them as they lay her on the bunk.

  “It was one of the fruit,” she said, gasping for breath and coughing. “I was heating it in a beaker, turned away, and it blew. I guess it sort of stunned me. The next thing I knew, Marty was carrying me out here. Hey, I have to get back in there! There’s another one . . . it could be dangerous, and the damage, I have to check on that—” She struggled to get up but Lang held her down.

  “You take it easy. What’s this about another one?”

  “I had it clamped down, and the drill—did I turn it on or not—I can’t remember. I was after a core sample. You’d better take a look. If the drill hits whatever made the other one explode, it might go off.”

  “I’ll get it,” McKillian said, turning toward the lab.

  “You’ll stay right here,” Lang barked. “We know there’s not enough power in them to hurt the ship, but it could kill you if it hit you right. We stay right here until it goes off. The hell with the damage. And shut that door, quick!”

  Before they could shut it they heard a whistling, like a teakettle coming to boil, then a rapid series of clangs. A tiny white ball came through the doorway and bounced off three walls. It moved almost faster than they could follow. It hit Crawford on the arm, then fell to the floor where it gradually skittered to a stop. The hissing died away, and Crawford picked it up. It was lighter than it had been. There was a pinhole drilled in one side. The pinhole was cold when he touched it with his fingers. Startled, thinking he was burned, he stuck his finger in his mouth, then sucked on it absently long after he knew the truth.

  “These ‘fruit’ are full of compressed gas,” he told them. “We have to open up another, carefully this time. I’m almost afraid to say what gas I think it is, but I have a hunch that our problems are solved.”

  By the time the rescue expedition arrived, no one was calling it that. There had been the little matter of a long, brutal war with the Palestinian Empire, and a growing conviction that the survivors of the First Expedition had not had any chance in the first place. There had been no time for luxuries like space travel beyond the Moon and no billions of dollars to invest while the world’s energy policies were being debated in the Arabian desert with tactical nuclear weapons.

  When the ship finally did show up, it was no longer a NASA ship. It was sponsored by the fledgling International Space Agency. Its crew came from all over Earth. Its drive was new, too, and a lot better than the old one. As usual, war had given research a kick in the pants. Its mission was to take up the Martian exploration where the first expedition had left off and, incidentally, to recover the remains of the twenty Americans for return to Earth.

  The ship came down with an impressive show of flame and billowing sand, three kilometers from Tharsis Base.

  The captain, an Indian named Singh, got his crew started on erecting the permanent buildings, then climbed into a crawler with three officers for the trip to Tharsis. It was almost exactly twelve Earth years since the departure of the Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  The Podkayne was barely visible behind a network of multicolored vines. The vines were tough enough to frustrate the rescuers’ efforts to push through and enter the old ship. But both lock doors were open, and sand had drifted in rippled waves through the opening. The stern of the ship was nearly buried.

  Singh told his people to stop, and he stood back admiring the complexity of the life in such a barren place. There were whirligigs twenty meters tall scattered around him, with vanes broad as the wings of a cargo aircraft.

  “We’ll have to get cutting tools from the ship,” he told his crew. “They’re probably in there. What a place this is! I can see we’re going to be busy.” He walked along the edge of the dense growth, which now covered several acres. He came to a section where the predominant color was purple. It was strangely different from the rest of the garden. There were tall whirligig derricks but they were frozen, unmoving. And covering all the derricks was a translucent network of ten-centimeter-wide strips of plastic, which was thick enough to make an impenetrable barrier. It was like a cobweb made of flat, thin material instead of fibrous spider silk. It bulged outward between all the cross braces of the whirligigs.

  “Hello, can you hear me now?”

  Singh jumped, then turned around, looked at the three officers. They were looking as surprised as he was.

  “Hello, hello, hello? No good on this one, Mary. Want me to try another channel?”

  “Wait a moment. I can hear you. Where are you?”

  “Hey, he hears me! Uh, that is, this is Song Sue Lee, and I’m right in front of you. If you look real hard into the webbing, you can just make me out. I’ll wave my arms. See?”

  Singh thought he saw some movement when he pressed his face to the translucent web. The web resisted his hands, pushing back like an inflated balloon.

  “I think I see you.” The enormity of it was just striking him. He kept his voice under tight control as his officers rushed up around him, and managed not to stammer. “Are you well? Is there anything we can do?”

  There wa
s a pause. “Well, now that you mention it, you might have come on time. But that’s water through the pipes, I guess. If you have some toys or something, it might be nice. The stories I’ve told little Billy of all the nice things you people were going to bring! There’s going to be no living with him, let me tell you.”

  This was getting out of hand for Captain Singh.

  “Ms. Song, how can we get in there with you?”

  “Sorry. Go to your right about ten meters, where you see the steam coming from the web. There, see it?” They did, and as they looked, a section of the webbing was pulled open and a rush of warm air almost blew them over. Water condensed out of it on their faceplates, and suddenly they couldn’t see very well.

  “Hurry, hurry, step in! We can’t keep it open too long!” They groped their way in, scraping frost away with their hands. The web closed behind them, and they were standing in the center of a very complicated network made of single strands of the webbing material. Singh’s pressure gauge read 30 millibars.

  Another section opened up and they stepped through it. After three more gates were passed, the temperature and pressure were nearly Earth-normal. And they were standing beside a small oriental woman with skin tanned almost black. She had no clothes on, but seemed adequately dressed in a brilliant smile that dimpled her mouth and eyes. Her hair was streaked with gray. She would be—Singh stopped to consider—forty-one years old.

  “This way,” she said, beckoning them into a tunnel formed from more strips of plastic. They twisted around through a random maze, going through more gates that opened when they neared them, sometimes getting on their knees when the clearance was low. They heard the sound of children’s voices.

  They reached what must have been the center of the maze and found the people everyone had given up on. Eighteen of them. The children became very quiet and stared solemnly at the new arrivals, while the other four adults . . .

  The adults were standing separately around the space while tiny helicopters flew around them, wrapping them from head to toe in strips of webbing like human maypoles.

  “Of course we don’t know if we would have made it without the assist from the Martians,” Mary Lang was saying from her perch on an orange thing that might have been a toadstool. “Once we figured out what was happening here in the graveyard, there was no need to explore alternative ways of getting food, water, and oxygen. The need just never arose. We were provided for.”

  She raised her feet so a group of three gawking women from the rescue ship could get by. They were letting them come through in groups of five every hour. They didn’t dare open the outer egress more often than that, and Lang was wondering if it was too often. The place was crowded, and the kids were nervous. But better to have the crew satisfy their curiosity in here where we can watch them, she reasoned, than have them messing things up outside.

  The inner nest was free-form. The New Amsterdamites had allowed it to stay pretty much the way the whirlibirds had built it, only taking down an obstruction here and there to allow humans to move around. It was a maze of gauzy walls and plastic struts, with clear plastic pipes running all over and carrying fluids of pale blue, pink, gold, and wine. Metal spigots from the Podkayne had been inserted in some of the pipes. McKillian was kept busy refilling glasses for the visitors, who wanted to sample the antifreeze solution that was fifty percent ethanol. It was good stuff, Captain Singh reflected as he drained his third glass, and that was what he still couldn’t understand.

  He was having trouble framing the questions he wanted to ask, and he realized he’d had too much to drink. The spirit of celebration, the rejoicing at finding these people here past any hope—one could hardly stay aloof from it. But he refused a fourth drink regretfully.

  “I can understand the drink,” he said, carefully. “Ethanol is a simple compound and could fit into many different chemistries. But it’s hard to believe that you’ve survived eating the food these plants produced for you.”

  “Not when you understand what this graveyard is and why it became what it did,” Song said. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor nursing her youngest, Ethan.

  “First you have to understand that all this you see,” she waved around at the meters of hanging soft sculpture, nearly causing Ethan to lose the nipple, “was designed to contain beings who are no more adapted to this Mars than we are. They need warmth, oxygen at fairly high pressures, and free water. It isn’t here now, but it can be created by properly designed plants. They engineered these plants to be triggered by the first signs of free water and to start building places for them to live while they waited for full summer to come. When it does, this whole planet will bloom. Then we can step outside without wearing suits or carrying airberries.”

  “Yes, I see,” Singh said. “And it’s all very wonderful, almost too much to believe.” He was distracted for a moment, looking up to the ceiling where the airberries—white spheres about the size of bowling balls—hung in clusters from the pipes that supplied them with high-pressure oxygen.

  “I’d like to see that process from the start,” he said. “Where you suit up for the outside, I mean.”

  “We were suiting up when you got here. It takes about half an hour, so we couldn’t get out in time to meet you.”

  “How long are those . . . suits good for?”

  “About a day,” Crawford said. “You have to destroy them to get out of them. The plastic strips don’t cut well, but there’s another specialized animal that eats that type of plastic. It’s recycled into the system. If you want to suit up, you just grab a whirlibird and hold onto its tail and throw it. It starts spinning as it flies, and wraps the end product around you. It takes some practice, but it works. The stuff sticks to itself, but not to us. So you spin several layers, letting each one dry, then hook up an airberry, and you’re inflated and insulated.”

  “Marvelous,” Singh said, truly impressed. He had seen the tiny whirlibirds weaving the suits, and the other ones, like small slugs, eating them away when the colonists saw they wouldn’t need them. “But without some sort of exhaust, you wouldn’t last long. How is that accomplished?”

  “We use the breather valves from our old suits,” McKillian said. “Either the plants that grow valves haven’t come up yet or we haven’t been smart enough to recognize them. And the insulation isn’t perfect. We only go out in the hottest part of the day, and our hands and feet tend to get cold. But we manage.”

  Singh realized he had strayed from his original question.

  “But what about the food? Surely it’s too much to expect these Martians to eat the same things we do. Wouldn’t you think so?”

  “We sure did, and we were lucky to have Marty Ralston along. He kept telling us the fruits in the graveyard were edible by humans. Fats, starches, proteins; all identical to the ones we brought along. The clue was in the orrery, of course.”

  Lang pointed to the twin globes in the middle of the room, still keeping perfect Earth time.

  “It was a beacon. We figured that out when we saw they grew only in the graveyard. But what was it telling us? We felt it meant that we were expected. Song felt that from the start, and we all came to agree with her. But we didn’t realize just how much they had prepared for us until Marty started analyzing the fruits and nutrients here.

  “Listen, these Martians—and I can see from your look that you still don’t really believe in them, but you will if you stay here long enough—they know genetics. They really know it. We have a thousand theories about what they may be like; and I won’t bore you with them yet, but this is one thing we do know. They can build anything they need, make a blueprint in DNA, encapsulate it in a spore and bury it, knowing exactly what will come up in forty thousand years. When it starts to get cold here and they know the cycle’s drawing to an end, they seed the planet with the spores and . . . do something. Maybe they die, or maybe they have some other way of passing the time. But they know they’ll return.

  “We can’t say how long they’ve
been prepared for a visit from us. Maybe only this cycle; maybe twenty cycles ago. Anyway, at the last cycle they buried the kind of spores that would produce these little gizmos.” She tapped the blue ball representing the Earth with one foot.

  “They triggered them to be activated only when they encountered certain conditions. Maybe they knew exactly what it would be; maybe they only provided for a likely range of possibilities. Song thinks they’ve visited us, back in the Stone Age. In some ways it’s easier to believe than the alternative. That way they’d know our genetic structure and what kinds of food we’d eat, and could prepare.

  “’Cause if they didn’t visit us, they must have prepared other spores. Spores that would analyze new proteins and be able to duplicate them. Further than that, some of the plants might have been able to copy certain genetic material if they encountered any. Take a look at that pipe behind you.” Singh turned and saw a pipe about as thick as his arm. It was flexible, and had a swelling in it that continuously pulsed in expansion and contraction.

  “Take that bulge apart and you’d be amazed at the resemblance to a human heart. So there’s another significant fact; this place started out with whirligigs, but later modified itself to use human heart pumps from the genetic information taken from the bodies of the men and women we buried.” She paused to let that sink in, then went on with a slightly bemused smile.

  “The same thing for what we eat and drink. That liquor you drank, for instance. It’s half alcohol, and that’s probably what it would have been without the corpses. But the rest of it is very similar to hemoglobin. It’s sort of like fermented blood. Human blood.”

  Singh was glad he had refused the fourth drink. One of his crew members quietly put his glass down.

  “I’ve never eaten human flesh,” Lang went on, “but I think I know what it must taste like. Those vines to your right; we strip off the outer part and eat the meat underneath. It tastes good. I wish we could cook it, but we have nothing to burn and couldn’t risk it with the high oxygen count, anyway.”