The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Singh and everyone else was silent for a while. He found he really was beginning to believe in the Martians. The theory seemed to cover a lot of otherwise inexplicable facts.

  Mary Lang sighed, slapped her thighs, and stood up. Like all the others, she was nude and seemed totally at home that way. None of them had worn anything but a Martian pressure suit for eight years. She ran her hand lovingly over the gossamer wall, the wall that had provided her and her fellow colonists and their children protection from the cold and the thin air for so long. Singh was struck by her easy familiarity with what seemed to him outlandish surroundings. She looked at home. He couldn’t imagine her anywhere else.

  He looked at the children. One wide-eyed little girl of eight years was kneeling at his feet. As his eyes fell on her, she smiled tentatively and took his hand.

  “Did you bring any bubblegum?” the girl asked.

  He smiled at her. “No, honey, but maybe there’s some in the ship.” She seemed satisfied. She would wait to experience the wonders of Earthly science.

  “We were provided for,” Mary Lang said, quietly. “They knew we were coming and they altered their plans to fit us in.” She looked back to Singh. “It would have happened even without the blowout and the burials. The same sort of thing was happening around the Podkayne, too, triggered by our waste, urine and feces and such. I don’t know if it would have tasted quite as good in the food department, but it would have sustained life.”

  Singh stood up. He was moved, but did not trust himself to show it adequately. So he sounded rather abrupt, though polite.

  “I suppose you’ll be anxious to go to the ship,” he said. “You’re going to be a tremendous help. You know so much of what we were sent here to find out. And you’ll be quite famous when you get back to Earth. Your back pay should add up to quite a sum.”

  There was a silence, then it was ripped apart by Lang’s huge laugh. She was joined by the others, and the children, who didn’t know what they were laughing about but enjoyed the break in the tension.

  “Sorry, Captain. That was rude. But we’re not going back.”

  Singh looked at each of the adults and saw no trace of doubt. And he was mildly surprised to find that the statement did not startle him.

  “I won’t take that as your final decision,” he said. “As you know, we’ll be here six months. If at the end of that time any of you want to go, you’re still citizens of Earth.”

  “We are? You’ll have to brief us on the political situation back there. We were United States citizens when we left. But it doesn’t matter. You won’t get any takers, though we appreciate the fact that you came. It’s nice to know we weren’t forgotten.” She said it with total assurance, and the others were nodding. Singh was uncomfortably aware that the idea of a rescue mission had died out only a few years after the initial tragedy. He and his ship were here now only to explore.

  Lang sat back down and patted the ground around her, ground that was covered in a multiple layer of the Martian pressure-tight web, the kind of web that would have been made only by warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing, water-economy beings who needed protection for their bodies until the full bloom of summer.

  “We like it here. It’s a good place to raise a family, not like Earth the last time I was there. And it couldn’t be much better now, right after another war. And we can’t leave, even if we wanted to.” She flashed him a dazzling smile and patted the ground again.

  “The Martians should be showing up any time now. And we aim to thank them.”

  INTRODUCTION TO “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance”

  Why would a guy who had longed all his life to live in the big city move from San Francisco to Eugene, Oregon? In a word, family.

  My wife at the time, Anet, had three children from a previous marriage. They are Maurice, Roger, and Stefan, and I have long since stopped thinking of them as my stepsons. All three are self-taught musicians of amazing talent in the areas of rock and blues. I’m proud to call them my sons.

  While we lived in the Haight and during our travels around the country we had Stefan with us while the two older boys lived with their father. Later they moved in with us, and it quickly began to seem that, in spite of what I had thought of as a frustrated youth, there were severe drawbacks to growing up in the big city. A smaller town has its advantages if you’re trying to raise three boys and keep them out of trouble. We had a friend in Eugene, so that’s where we went.

  It’s a college town, home of the University of Oregon. We lived in five different places there, each one a little better than the last, most of them not really worth talking about. Just houses. And away from the city, no longer rambling hippies, Anet and I began to grow apart. Eventually we separated and divorced. I don’t see her much these days but we remain friends.

  And we’ll always have Woodstock.

  The second Cool 8 I lived in was a ’56 Buick parked in a muddy field in New York. We were only there four days, but they were an amazing four days, and we had no other home at the time. As a residence it didn’t have a lot to recommend it, but as the real estate people say: location, location, location. It was parked about a mile down the road from Max Yasgur’s farm, where some hippies said there was going to be a concert.

  In my life I have blundered into wonderful things so many times it’s scary. I didn’t plan them, they just happened. My whole career seems that way in retrospect. Woodstock was like that, for us. We knew it was happening, we’d heard about it in New York City, but we had no idea where. We had recently discovered that finding an affordable apartment in the city was hard, maybe impossible. It quickly became clear that, in New York City, somebody had to die before somebody else could move in—people actually read obituaries for leads on what might soon be available—so we decided to head up into the Catskills in search of cheaper rent.

  Somewhere along the way I noticed we were almost out of gas. Running on fumes, actually. We got off the road and into the worst traffic jam I ever saw. We sputtered to a halt and pushed the car off the road and into a field. That’s when we realized we were involuntarily interned for the duration. There was no gas, no food, no lodging for fifty miles.

  Luckily, we had stuff to eat and stuff to smoke, so we figured we’d be all right. Stefan had just learned to pee in a bucket instead of into his diapers, and the Buick kept us out of the rain. People shared, you made friends quickly.

  It’s impossible to explain Woodstock to the mosh pit generation. You couldn’t even explain it to those at the Altamont Rolling Stones concert not long after, where they tried to re-create the Woodstock experience and failed miserably. Woodstock was a one-of-a-kind thing, probably never to be repeated.

  Did I say that old Buick was an 8 on a scale of one to ten? Hell, a sleeping bag out in the rain would have been a 6, if you were young enough and stupid enough to endure it, and I was both.

  I’m probably reaching a bit here attempting to tie Woodstock to the following story. Woodstock is a legend that has grown in the telling. It was not utopia; nothing is. If I think real hard I recall being miserable, wet, hungry, and bored. I saw no violence, didn’t even hear a raised voice, but I know there were problems, many of them drug-induced. If it had gone on another two or three days it would have resembled Bangladesh after the great cyclone of 1970. . . . Well, come to think of it, it did resemble Bangladesh when it was over, but without the 300,000 dead bodies. Starvation and cholera were distinct possibilities.

  And yet something there worked. Mostly people were smiling, and working hard, and having a great time. A few of the locals took advantage of the weird hordes who had descended on their peaceful community, but most pitched in the same way they would have if a dam broke . . . again, a metaphor very like what did happen.

  It is the feeling of cooperation that strikes me. And in nature there is no better example of cooperation than symbiosis. This is when two dissimilar organisms work together for their mutual benefit. Sometimes the two cannot survive at all without each other. The bi
ggest engine of symbiosis I know of is Planet Earth itself.

  In the days before real space travel, people imagined that spaceships on long voyages would try to duplicate the cycles of life by bringing plants along with them. Hydroponic gardening features in many classic SF novels. It made perfect sense. Why bring along all that bottled oxygen if plants could make it for you?

  It still makes sense, though to my knowledge it has not been used thus far in the space program.

  “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance” is the result of my considering the smallest possible symbiotic unit that might survive in space. It is part of the Eight Worlds history, but an isolated part. The people living raw in the rings of Saturn are an isolated community, devoted to a project that is alien to the rest of humanity. It is one of my personal favorites of the stories I have written, and I keep thinking the idea could be expanded into a novel . . . but I haven’t yet figured out how.

  GOTTA SING, GOTTA DANCE

  SAILING IN TOWARD a rendezvous with Janus, Barnum and Bailey encountered a giant, pulsing quarter note. The stem was a good five kilometers tall. The note itself was a kilometer in diameter, and glowed a faint turquoise. It turned ponderously on its axis as they approached it.

  “This must be the place,” Barnum said to Bailey.

  “Janus approach control to Barnum and Bailey,” came a voice from the void. “You will encounter the dragline on the next revolution. You should be seeing the visual indicator in a few minutes.”

  Barnum looked down at the slowly turning irregular ball of rock and ice that was Janus, innermost satellite of Saturn. Something was coming up behind the curve of the horizon. It didn’t take long for enough of it to become visible so they could see what it was. Barnum had a good laugh.

  “Is that yours, or theirs?” he asked Bailey.

  Bailey sniffed. “Theirs. Just how silly do you think I am?”

  The object rising behind the curve of the satellite was a butterfly net, ten kilometers tall. It had a long, fluttering net trailing from a gigantic hoop. Bailey sniffed again, but applied the necessary vectors to position them for being swooped up in the preposterous thing.

  “Come on, Bailey,” Barnum chided. “You’re just jealous because you didn’t think of it first.”

  “Maybe so,” the symb conceded. “Anyway, hold onto your hat, this is likely to be quite a jerk.”

  The illusion was carried as far as was practical, but Barnum noticed that the first tug of deceleration started sooner than one would expect if the transparent net was more than an illusion. The force built up gradually as the electromagnetic field clutched at the metal belt he had strapped around his waist. It lasted for about a minute. When it had trailed off, Janus no longer appeared to rotate beneath them. It was coming closer.

  “Listen to this,” Bailey said. Barnum’s head was filled with music. It was bouncy, featuring the reedy, flatulent, yet engaging tones of a bass saxophone in a honky-tonk tune that neither of them could identify. They shifted position and could just make out the location of Pearly Gates, the only human settlement on Janus. It was easy to find because of the weaving, floating musical staffs that extruded themselves from the spot like parallel strands of spider web.

  The people who ran Pearly Gates were a barrel of laughs. All the actual structures that made up the aboveground parts of the settlement were disguised behind whimsical holographic projections. The whole place looked like a cross between a child’s candy-land nightmare and an early Walt Disney cartoon.

  Dominating the town was a giant calliope with pipes a thousand meters tall. There were fifteen of them, and they were all bouncing and swaying in time to the saxophone music. They would squat down as if taking a deep breath, then stand up again, emitting a colored smoke ring. The buildings, which Barnum knew were actually functional, uninteresting hemispheres, appeared to be square houses with flower boxes in the windows and cartoon eyes peering out the doors. They trembled and jigged as if they were made of Jell-O.

  “Don’t you think it’s a trifle overdone?” Bailey asked.

  “Depends on what you like. It’s kind of cute, in its own gaudy way.”

  They drifted in through the spaghetti maze of lines, bars, sixteenth notes, rests, smoke rings, and blaring music. They plowed through an insubstantial eighth-note run, and Bailey killed their remaining velocity with the jets. They lighted softly in the barely perceptible gravity and made their way to one of the grinning buildings.

  Coming up to the entrance of the building had been quite an experience. Barnum had reached for a button marked LOCK CYCLE and it had dodged out of his way, then turned into a tiny face, leering at him. Practical joke. The lock had opened anyway, actuated by his presence. Inside, Pearly Gates was not so flamboyant. The corridors looked decently like corridors, and the floors were solid and gray.

  “I’d watch out, all the same,” Bailey advised, darkly. “These people are real self-panickers. Their idea of a good laugh might be to dig a hole in the floor and cover it with a holo. Watch your step.”

  “Aw, don’t be such a sore loser. You could spot something like that, couldn’t you?”

  Bailey didn’t answer, and Barnum didn’t pursue it. He knew the source of the symb’s uneasiness and dislike of the station on Janus. Bailey wanted to get their business over as soon as possible and get back to the Ring, where he felt needed. Here, in a corridor filled with oxygen, Bailey was physically useless.

  Bailey’s function in the symbiotic team of Barnum and Bailey was to provide an environment of food, oxygen, and water for the human, Barnum. Conversely, Barnum provided food, carbon dioxide, and water for Bailey. Barnum was a human, physically unremarkable except for a surgical alteration of his knees that made them bend outward rather than forward, and the oversized hands, called peds, that grew out of his ankles where his feet used to be. Bailey, on the other hand, was nothing like a human.

  Strictly speaking, Bailey was not even a he. Bailey was a plant, and Barnum thought of him as a male only because the voice in Barnum’s head—Bailey’s only means of communication—sounded masculine. Bailey had no shape of his own. He existed by containing Barnum and taking on part of his shape. He extended into Barnum’s alimentary canal, in the mouth and all the way through to emerge at the anus, threading him like a needle. Together, the team looked like a human in a featureless spacesuit, with a bulbous head, a tight waist, and swollen hips. A ridiculously exaggerated female, if you wish.

  “You might as well start breathing again,” Bailey said.

  “What for? I will when I need to talk to someone who’s not paired with a symb. In the meantime, why bother?”

  “I just thought you’d like to get used to it.”

  “Oh, very well. If you think it’s necessary.”

  So Bailey gradually withdrew the parts of him that filled Barnum’s lungs and throat, freeing his speech apparatus to do what it hadn’t done for over ten years. Barnum coughed as the air flowed into his throat. It was cold! Well, it felt like it, though it was actually at the standard seventy-two degrees. He was unused to it. His diaphragm gave one shudder then took over the chore of breathing as if his medulla had never been disconnected.

  “There,” he said aloud, surprised at how his voice sounded. “Satisfied?”

  “It never hurts to do a little testing.”

  “Let’s get this out in the open, shall we? I didn’t want to come here any more than you did, but you know we had to. Are you going to give me trouble about it until we leave? We’re supposed to be a team, remember?”

  There was a sigh from his partner.

  “I’m sorry, but that’s just it. We are supposed to be a team, and out in the Ring we are. Neither of us is anything without the other. Here I’m just something you have to carry around. I can’t walk, I can’t talk; I’m revealed as the vegetable that I am.”

  Barnum was accustomed to the symb’s periodic attacks of insecurity. In the Ring they never amounted to much. But when they entered a gravitational field Bailey was remi
nded of how ineffectual a being he was.

  “Here you can breathe on your own,” Bailey went on. “You could see on your own if I uncovered your eyes. By the way, do you—”

  “Don’t be silly. Why should I use my own eyes when you can give me a better picture than I could on my own?”

  “In the Ring, that’s true. But here all my extra senses are just excess mass. What good is an adjusted velocity display to you here, where the farthest thing I can sense is twenty meters off, and stationary?”

  “Listen, you. Do you want to turn around and march back out that lock? We can. I’ll do it if this is going to be such a trauma for you.”

  There was a long silence, and Barnum was flooded with a warm, apologetic sensation that left him weak at his splayed-out knees.

  “There’s no need to apologize,” he went on in a more sympathetic tone. “I understand you. This is just something we have to do together, like everything else, the good along with the bad.”

  “I love you, Barnum.”

  “And you, silly.”

  The sign on the door read:

  TYMPANI & RAGTIME

  TINPANALLEYCATS

  Barnum and Bailey hesitated outside the door.

  “What are you supposed to do, knock?” Barnum asked out loud. “It’s been so long I’ve forgotten how.”

  “Just fold your fingers into a fist and—”

  “Not that.” He laughed, dispelling his momentary nervousness. “I’ve forgotten the politenesses of human society. Well, they do it in all the tapes I ever saw.” He knocked on the door and it opened by itself on the second rap.

  There was a man sitting behind a desk with his bare feet propped up on it. Barnum had been prepared for the shock of seeing another human, one who was not enclosed in a symb, for he had encountered several of them on the way to the offices of Tympani and Ragtime. But he was still reeling from the unfamiliarity of it. The man seemed to realize it and silently gestured him to a chair. He sat down in it, thinking that in the low gravity it really wasn’t necessary. But somehow he was grateful. The man didn’t say anything for a long while, giving Barnum time to settle down and arrange his thoughts. Barnum spent the time looking the man over carefully.