The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “A send-off,” Bailey said. He accelerated them until they could hear it. “It’s coming over the radio. A circus march.”

  Barnum had no sooner recognized it than he felt the gentle but increasing push of the cannon accelerating him up the tube. He laughed, and the two of them shot out of the bulging brass pipe of the Pearly Gates calliope. They made a bull’s-eye through a giant orange smoke ring, accompanied by the strains of “Thunder and Blazes.”

  INTRODUCTION TO “The Barbie Murders”

  Damon Knight was living in Florida and publishing a series of hardcover anthologies called Orbit when I first started submitting stories to him. Damon had always been one of the best editors in the field, going all the way back to the 1950s, and the Orbit books were very good. It was considered a mark of prestige to appear in them. I sent him three stories and he bought two of them. (More about the one he didn’t buy later.)

  Shortly after I had established a written correspondence with Damon, he told me that he and his wife, Kate Wilhelm, were considering moving away from Florida to a smaller town. They were considering Eugene. I gathered it was for much the same reason I was living there; they had a young son named Jon, and the area they lived in was beginning to resemble a big city. They visited Eugene, liked it, and soon had bought a house. The small science fiction community in Oregon, including myself, couldn’t believe our luck.

  Damon turned out to be a quiet-spoken man with a beard almost as big as he was, and an incredible, dry wit. He was one of those rare people who never seemed to say anything unless it was really worth listening to. Kate Wilhelm was much like him in that sense, and not only is she one of the best writers I’ve ever known, she is one of the best human beings. On the very first meeting you just knew you were in the presence of someone special.

  Damon and Kate soon initiated something they had been doing for some years in Florida, which was a sort of open house one night every month for writers and readers. It quickly became the place to be in Eugene.

  Not long after their arrival they hosted the first Oregon edition of something they had begun in Pennsylvania and carried on in Florida: The Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference. This was one of the two best-known gatherings in the genre, the other being Clarion, held every year at Michigan State University, my old alma mater. Clarion goes on for six weeks and has a different guest writer each week. Milford lasted only one week. I was invited to attend, and thus got my first taste of “work-shopping” stories.

  It turned out to be my only taste of it. Workshops didn’t really agree with me. This is absolutely nothing against Milford. I know that many writers have benefited from this sort of thing, and that many writers are proud to be able to pass on some of the tricks of the trade to beginners, journeymen, and apprentices, as well as swapping tradecraft with other veterans. It just doesn’t work for me. I am usually helpless to point out anything useful about someone else’s story except to say that it works for me, or it doesn’t work for me. Also, when I’m finished with a story, I’m done with it. I don’t enjoy revisiting it, tinkering with it, and won’t do so except to editorial order, and will fight that if it is given. Luckily, I have been very little edited in my career in books and magazines. (Movies are another story, and we’ll get to that.)

  The format of Milford was simple. Everyone submitted stories, everyone read them, and then we would all sit down together and go around the circle, tearing them apart. Most of the people there had published. Gene Wolfe was there, and so was Kim Stanley Robinson. There didn’t seem to be any favoritism; everyone got savaged more or less equally.

  This story is one that was workshopped. Maybe “savaged” is too strong a word. I remember that several people had some good things to say about this story, and some others, but without an exception I can remember every story got a few helpful hints that the reader felt could have improved it. Many of them were good hints.

  Kate had what may have been the best critique of all . . . and it was of no use to me because of my stubbornness about rewriting. Central problem of the story: how do you find a murderer among a community who all look exactly the same? Kate found the premise fascinating, but thought it should have been the jumping-off point for a deeper examination of the idea of identity itself. Her disappointment was that I had avoided any of the deeper existential and moral questions and turned it into a “puzzle” story. This criticism was offered with no condescension or opprobrium at puzzle stories per se, as she had no problem with them—and in fact went on to write a great many wonderful detective novels later that, being Kate Wilhelm stories, were always much more than simply puzzles—but rather with the thought that the work could have been more significant than it was. I accepted it in that spirit . . . and moved on to the next. Tackling what Kate had suggested would have involved a total rethinking and complete rewrite, and I just don’t do that. For me, it is better to apply the lessons learned and search for the opportunities missed in the next story I write, not the previous one. Not a flawless system, but mine own.

  A word about Anna-Louise Bach. She is not actually a part of the Eight Worlds stories. Some critics have assumed she is, and I suppose she might somehow fit in between today and the alien invasion, in a time when we have established large cities on the moon but before the time, two hundred years or so from today, when the bulk of the Eight Worlds stories take place. But I never thought of her that way.

  No, it was simply a matter of every once in a while I would come up with a darker story idea. A situation the police should handle. The Eight Worlds is a semi-utopian environment—and by that, I mean not perfect, because I don’t believe in such a thing, but a place and time that is better in many ways than the world we have today. So when I had a story that was too nasty for those rascals in the Eight Worlds, I handed it to the unfortunate Anna-Louise. Thus I created her career, in no particular order, through half a dozen stories from her days as a probationary patrolwoman up to the chief of police of the Lunar community of New Dresden. Several of them are in this book, including one rescued from a state of suspended animation.

  THE BARBIE MURDERS

  THE BODY CAME to the morgue at 2246 hours. No one paid much attention to it. It was a Saturday night, and the bodies were piling up like logs in a millpond. A harried attendant working her way down the row of stainless steel tables picked up the sheaf of papers that came with the body, peeling back the sheet over the face. She took a card from her pocket and scrawled on it, copying from the reports filed by the investigating officer and the hospital staff:

  Ingraham, Leah Petrie. Female. Age: 35. Length: 2.1 meters. Mass: 59 Kilograms. Dead on arrival, Crisium Emergency Terminal. Cause of death: homicide. Next of kin: unknown.

  She wrapped the wire attached to the card around the left big toe, slid the dead weight from the table and onto the wheeled carrier, took it to cubicle 659A, and rolled out the long tray.

  The door slammed shut, and the attendant placed the paperwork in the out tray, never noticing that, in his report, the investigating officer had not specified the sex of the corpse.

  Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach had moved into her new office three days ago and already the paper on her desk was threatening to avalanche onto the floor.

  To call it an office was almost a perversion of the term. It had a file cabinet for pending cases; she could open it only at severe risk to life and limb. The drawers had a tendency to spring out at her, pinning her in her chair in the corner. To reach “A” she had to stand on her chair; “Z” required her either to sit on her desk or to straddle the bottom drawer with one foot in the legwell and the other against the wall.

  But the office had a door. True, it could only be opened if no one was occupying the single chair in front of the desk.

  Bach was in no mood to gripe. She loved the place. It was ten times better than the squadroom, where she had spent ten years elbow-to-elbow with the other sergeants and corporals.

  Jorge Weil stuck his head in the door.

  “Hi.
We’re taking bids on a new case. What am I offered?”

  “Put me down for half a Mark,” Bach said, without looking up from the report she was writing. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “Not as busy as you’re going to be.” Weil came in without an invitation and settled himself in the chair. Bach looked up, opened her mouth, then said nothing. She had the authority to order him to get his big feet out of her “cases completed” tray, but not the experience in exercising it. And she and Jorge had worked together for three years. Why should a stripe of gold paint on her shoulder change their relationship? She supposed the informality was Weil’s way of saying he wouldn’t let her promotion bother him as long as she didn’t get snotty about it.

  Weil deposited a folder on top of the teetering pile marked “For Immediate Action,” then leaned back again. Bach eyed the stack of paper—and the circular file mounted in the wall not half a meter from it, leading to the incinerator—and thought about having an accident. Just a careless nudge with an elbow . . .

  “Aren’t you even going to open it?” Weil asked, sounding disappointed. “It’s not every day I’m going to hand-deliver a case.”

  “You tell me about it, since you want to so badly.”

  “All right. We’ve got a body, which is cut up pretty bad. We’ve got the murder weapon, which is a knife. We’ve got thirteen eyewitnesses who can describe the killer, but we don’t really need them since the murder was committed in front of a television camera. We’ve got the tape.”

  “You’re talking about a case which has to have been solved ten minutes after the first report, untouched by human hands. Give it to the computer, idiot.” But she looked up. She didn’t like the smell of it. “Why give it to me?”

  “Because of the other thing we know. The scene of the crime. The murder was committed at the barbie colony.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  The Temple of the Standardized Church in Luna was in the center of the Standardist Commune, Anytown, North Crisium. The best way to reach it, they found, was a local tube line which paralleled the Cross-Crisium Express Tube.

  She and Weil checked out a blue-and-white police capsule with a priority sorting code and surrendered themselves to the New Dresden municipal transport system—the pill sorter, as the New Dresdenites called it. They were whisked through the precinct chute to the main nexus, where thousands of capsules were stacked awaiting a routing order to clear the computer. On the big conveyer which should have taken them to a holding cubby, they were snatched by a grapple—the cops called it the long arm of the law—and moved ahead to the multiple maws of the Cross-Crisium while people in other capsules glared at them. The capsule was inserted, and Bach and Weil were pressed hard into the backs of their seats.

  In seconds they emerged from the tube and out onto the plain of Crisium, speeding along through the vacuum, magnetically suspended a few millimeters above the induction rail. Bach glanced up at the Earth, then stared out the window at the featureless landscape rushing by, She brooded.

  It had taken a look at the map to convince her that the barbie colony was indeed in the New Dresden jurisdiction—a case of blatant gerrymandering if ever there was one. Anytown was fifty kilometers from what she thought of as the boundaries of New Dresden, but was joined to the city by a dotted line that represented a strip of land one meter wide.

  A roar built up as they entered a tunnel and air was injected into the tube ahead of them. The car shook briefly as the shock wave built up, then they popped through pressure doors into the tube station of Anytown. The capsule doors hissed and they climbed out onto the platform.

  The tube station at Anytown was primarily a loading dock and warehouse. It was a large space with plastic crates stacked against all the walls, and about fifty people working to load them into freight capsules.

  Bach and Weil stood on the platform for a moment, uncertain where to go. The murder had happened at a spot not twenty meters in front of them, right here in the tube station.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Weil volunteered.

  “Me, too.”

  Every one of the fifty people Bach could see was identical to every other. All appeared to be female, though only faces, feet, and hands were visible, everything else concealed by loose white pajamas belted at the waist. They were all blonde; all had hair cut off at the shoulder and parted in the middle, blue eyes, high foreheads, short noses, and small mouths.

  The work slowly stopped as the barbies became aware of them. They eyed Bach and Weil suspiciously. Bach picked one at random and approached her.

  “Who’s in charge here?” she asked.

  “We are,” the barbie said. Bach took it to mean the woman herself, recalling something about barbies never using the singular pronoun.

  “We’re supposed to meet someone at the temple,” she said. “How do we get there?”

  “Through that doorway,” the woman said. “It leads to Main Street. Follow the street to the temple. But you really should cover yourselves.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?” Bach was not aware of anything wrong with the way she and Weil were dressed. True, neither of them wore as much as the barbies did. Bach wore her usual blue nylon briefs in addition to a regulation uniform cap, arm and thigh bands, and cloth-soled slippers. Her weapon, communicator, and handcuffs were fastened to a leather equipment belt.

  “Cover yourself,” the barbie said, with a pained look. “You’re flaunting your differentness. And you, with all that hair . . .” There were giggles and a few shouts from the other barbies.

  “Police business,” Weil snapped.

  “Uh, yes,” Bach said, feeling annoyed that the barbie had put her on the defensive. After all, this was New Dresden, it was a public thoroughfare—even though by tradition and usage a Standardist enclave—and they were entitled to dress as they wished.

  Main Street was a narrow, mean little place. Bach had expected a promenade like those in the shopping districts of New Dresden; what she found was indistinguishable from a residential corridor. They drew curious stares and quite a few frowns from the identical people they met.

  There was a modest plaza at the end of the street. It had a low roof of bare metal, a few trees, and a blocky stone building in the center of a radiating network of walks.

  A barbie who looked just like all the others met them at the entrance. Bach asked if she was the one Weil had spoken to on the phone, and she said she was. Bach wanted to know if they could go inside to talk. The barbie said the temple was off limits to outsiders and suggested they sit on a bench outside the building.

  When they were settled, Bach stared her questioning. “First, I need to know your name, and your title. I assume that you are . . . what was it?” She consulted her notes, taken hastily from a display she had called up on the computer terminal in her office. “I don’t seem to have found a title for you.”

  “We have none,” the barbie said. “If you must think of a title, consider us as the keeper of records.”

  “All right. And your name?”

  “We have no name.”

  Bach sighed. “Yes, I understand that you forsake names when you come here. But you had one before. You were given one at birth. I’m going to have to have it for my investigation.”

  The woman looked pained. “No, you don’t understand. It is true that this body had a name at one time. But it has been wiped from this one’s mind. It would cause this one a great deal of pain to be reminded of it.” She stumbled verbally every time she said “this one.” Evidently even a polite circumlocution of the personal pronoun was distressing.

  “I’ll try to get it from another angle, then.” This was already getting hard to deal with, Bach saw, and knew it could only get tougher. “You say you are the keeper of records.”

  “We are. We keep records because the law says we must. Each citizen must be recorded, or so we have been told.”

  “For a very good reason,” Bach said. “We’re going to need access to those recor
ds. For the investigation. You understand? I assume an officer has already been through them, or the deceased couldn’t have been identified as Leah P. Ingraham.”

  “That’s true. But it won’t be necessary for you to go through the records again. We are here to confess. We murdered L. P. Ingraham, serial number 11005. We are surrendering peacefully. You may take us to your prison.” She held out her hands, wrists close together, ready to be shackled.

  Weil was startled, reached tentatively for his handcuffs, then looked to Bach for guidance.

  “Let me get this straight. You’re saying you’re the one who did it? You, personally.”

  “That’s correct. We did it. We have never defied temporal authority, and we are willing to pay the penalty.”

  “Once more.” Bach reached out and grasped the barbie’s wrist, forced the hand open, palm up. “This is the person, this is the body that committed the murder? This hand, this one right here, held the knife and killed Ingraham? This hand, as opposed to ‘your’ thousands of other hands?”

  The barbie frowned.

  “Put that way, no. This hand did not grasp the murder weapon. But our hand did. What’s the difference?”

  “Quite a bit, in the eyes of the law.” Bach sighed, and let go of the woman’s hand. Woman? She wondered if the term applied. She realized she needed to know more about Standardists. But it was convenient to think of them as such, since their faces were feminine.

  “Let’s try again. I’ll need you—and the eyewitnesses to the crime—to study the tape of the murder. I can’t tell the difference between the murderer, the victim, or any of the bystanders. But surely you must be able to. I assume that . . . well, like the old saying went, ‘all Chinamen look alike.’ That was to Caucasian races, of course. Orientals had no trouble telling each other apart. So I thought that you . . . that you people would . . .” She trailed off at the look of blank incomprehension on the barbie’s face.