The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “We don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Bach’s shoulders slumped.

  “You mean you can’t . . . not even if you saw her again . . . ?”

  The woman shrugged. “We all look the same to this one.”

  Anna-Louise Bach sprawled out on her flotation bed later that night, surrounded by scraps of paper. Untidy as it was, her thought processes were helped by actually scribbling facts on paper rather than filing them in her datalink. And she did her best work late at night, at home, in bed, after taking a bath or making love. Tonight she had done both and found she needed every bit of the invigorating clarity it gave her.

  Standardists.

  They were an off-beat religious sect founded ninety years earlier by someone whose name had not survived. That was not surprising, since Standardists gave up their names when they joined the order, made every effort consistent with the laws of the land to obliterate the name and person as if he or she had never existed. The epithet “barbie” had quickly been attached to them by the press. The origin of the word was a popular children’s toy of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a plastic, sexless, mass-produced “girl” doll with an elaborate wardrobe.

  The barbies had done surprisingly well for a group which did not reproduce, which relied entirely on new members from the outside world to replenish their numbers. They had grown for twenty years, then reached a population stability where deaths equalled new members—which they call “components.” They had suffered moderately from religious intolerance, moving from country to country until the majority had come to Luna sixty years ago.

  They drew new components from the walking wounded of society, the people who had not done well in a world which preached conformity, passivity, and tolerance of your billions of neighbors, yet rewarded only those who were individualist and aggressive enough to stand apart from the herd. The barbies had opted out of a system where one had to be at once a face in the crowd and a proud individual with hopes and dreams and desires. They were the inheritors of a long tradition of ascetic withdrawal, surrendering their names, their bodies, and their temporal aspirations to a life that was ordered and easy to understand.

  Bach realized she might be doing some of them a disservice in that evaluation. They were not necessarily all losers. There must be those among them who were attracted simply by the religious ideas of the sect, though Bach felt there was little in the teachings that made sense.

  She skimmed through the dogma, taking notes. The Standardists preached the commonality of humanity, denigrated free will, and elevated the group and the consensus to demi-god status. Nothing too unusual in the theory; it was the practice of it that made people queasy.

  There was a creation theory and a godhead, who was not worshipped but contemplated. Creation happened when the Goddess—a prototypical earth-mother who had no name—gave birth to the universe. She put people in it, all alike, stamped from the same universal mold.

  Sin entered the picture. One of the people began to wonder. This person had a name, given to him or her after the original sin as part of the punishment, but Bach could not find it written down anywhere. She decided that it was a dirty word which Standardists never told an outsider.

  This person asked Goddess what it was all for. What had been wrong with the void, that Goddess had seen fit to fill it with people who didn’t seem to have a reason for existing?

  That was too much. For reasons unexplained—and impolite to even ask about—Goddess had punished humans by introducing differentness into the world. Warts, big noses, kinky hair, white skin, tall people and fat people and deformed people, blue eyes, body hair, freckles, testicles, and labia. A billion faces and fingerprints, each soul trapped in a body distinct from all others, with the heavy burden of trying to establish an identity in a perpetual shouting match.

  But the faith held that peace was achieved in striving to regain that lost Eden. When all humans were again the same person, Goddess would welcome them back. Life was a testing, a trial.

  Bach certainly agreed with that. She gathered her notes and shuffled them together, then picked up the book she had brought back from Anytown. The barbie had given it to her when Bach asked for a picture of the murdered woman.

  It was a blueprint for a human being.

  The title was The Book of Specifications. The Specs, for short. Each barbie carried one, tied to her waist with a tape measure. It gave tolerances in engineering terms, defining what a barbie could look like. It was profusely illustrated with drawings of parts of the body in minute detail, giving measurements in millimeters.

  She closed the book and sat up, propping her head on a pillow. She reached for her viewpad and propped it on her knees, punched the retrieval code for the murder tape. For the twentieth time that night, she watched a figure spring forward from a crowd of identical figures in the tube station, slash at Leah Ingraham, and melt back into the crowd as her victim lay bleeding and eviscerated on the floor.

  She slowed it down, concentrating on the killer, trying to spot something different about her. Anything at all would do. The knife struck. Blood spurted. Barbies milled about in consternation. A few belatedly ran after the killer, not reacting fast enough. People seldom reacted quickly enough. But the killer had blood on her hand. Make a note to ask about that.

  Bach viewed the film once more, saw nothing useful, and decided to call it a night.

  The room was long and tall, brightly lit from strips high above: Bach followed the attendant down the rows of square locker doors which lined one wall. The air was cool and humid, the floor wet from a recent hosing.

  The man consulted the card in his hand and pulled the metal handle on locker 659A, making a noise that echoed through the bare room. He slid the drawer out and lifted the sheet from the corpse.

  It was not the first mutilated corpse Bach had seen, but it was the first nude barbie. She immediately noted the lack of nipples on the two hills of flesh that pretended to be breasts, and the smooth, unmarked skin in the crotch. The attendant was frowning, consulting the card on the corpse’s foot.

  “Some mistake here,” he muttered. “Geez, the headaches. What do you do with a thing like that?” He scratched his head, then scribbled through the large letter “F” on the card, replacing it with a neat “N.” He looked at Bach and grinned sheepishly. “What do you do?” he repeated.

  Bach didn’t much care what he did. She studied L. P. Ingraham’s remains, hoping that something on the body would show her why a barbie had decided she must die.

  There was little difficulty seeing how she had died. The knife had entered her abdomen, going deep, and the wound extended upward from there in a slash that ended beneath the breastbone. Part of the bone was cut through. The knife had been sharp, but it would have taken a powerful arm to slice through that much meat.

  The attendant watched curiously as Bach pulled the dead woman’s legs apart and studied what she saw there. She found the tiny slit of the urethra set back around the curve, just anterior to the anus.

  Bach opened her copy of The Specs, took out a tape measure, and started to work.

  “Mr. Atlas, I got your name from the Morphology Guide’s files as a practitioner who’s had a lot of dealings with the Standardist Church.”

  The man frowned, then shrugged. “So? You may not approve of them, but they’re legal. And my records are in order. I don’t do any work on anybody until the police have checked for a criminal record.” He sat on the edge of the desk in the spacious consulting room, facing Bach. Mr. Rock Atlas—surely a nom de métier—had shoulders carved from granite, teeth like flashing pearls, and the face of a young god. He was a walking, flexing advertisement for his profession. Bach crossed her legs nervously. She had always had a taste for beef.

  “I’m not investigating you, Mr. Atlas. This is a murder case, and I’d appreciate your cooperation.”

  “Call me Rock,” he said, with a winning smile.

  “Must I? Very well. I came to
ask you what you would do, how long the work would take, if I asked to be converted to a barbie.”

  His face fell. “Oh, no, what a tragedy! I can’t allow it. My dear, it would be a crime.” He reached over to her and touched her chin lightly, turning her head. “No, Lieutenant, for you I’d build up the hollows in the cheeks just the slightest bit—maybe tighten up the muscles behind them—then drift the orbital bones out a little bit farther from the nose to set your eyes wider. More attention-getting, you understand. That touch of mystery. Then of course there’s your nose.”

  She pushed his hand away and shook her head. “No, I’m not coming to you for the operation. I just want to know. How much work would it entail, and how close can you come to the specs of the church?” Then she frowned and looked at him suspiciously. “What’s wrong with my nose?”

  “Well, my dear, I didn’t mean to imply there was anything wrong; in fact, it has a certain overbearing power that must be useful to you once in a while, in the circles you move in. Even the lean to the left could be justified, aesthetically—”

  “Never mind,” she said, angry at herself for having fallen into his sales pitch. “Just answer my question.”

  He studied her carefully, asked her to stand up and turn around. She was about to object that she had not necessarily meant herself personally as the surgical candidate, just a woman in general, when he seemed to lose interest in her.

  “It wouldn’t be much of a job,” he said. “Your height is just slightly over the parameters; I could take that out of your thighs and lower legs, maybe shave some vertebrae. Take out some fat here and put it back there. Take off those nipples and dig out your uterus and ovaries, sew up your crotch. With a man, chop off the penis. I’d have to break up your skull a little and shift the bones around, then build up the face from there. Say two days’ work, one overnight and one outpatient.”

  “And when you were through, what would be left to identify me?”

  “Say that again?”

  Bach briefly explained her situation, and Atlas pondered it.

  “You’ve got a problem. I take off the fingerprints and footprints. I don’t leave any external scars, not even microscopic ones. No moles, freckles, warts or birth-marks; they all have to go. A blood test would work, and so would a retinal print. An X-ray of the skull. A voiceprint would be questionable. I even that out as much as possible. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Nothing that could be seen from a purely visual exam?”

  “That’s the whole point of the operation, isn’t it?”

  “I know. I was just hoping you might know something even the barbies were not aware of. Thank you, anyway.”

  He got up, took her hand, and kissed it. “No trouble. And if you ever decide to get that nose taken care of . . .”

  She met Jorge Weil at the temple gate in the middle of Anytown. He had spent his morning there, going through the records, and she could see the work didn’t agree with him. He took her back to the small office where the records were kept in battered file cabinets. There was a barbie waiting for them there. She spoke without preamble.

  “We decided at equalization last night to help you as much as possible.”

  “Oh, yeah? Thanks. I wondered if you would, considering what happened fifty years ago.”

  Weil looked puzzled. “What was that?”

  Bach waited for the barbie to speak, but she evidently wasn’t going to.

  “All right. I found it last night. The Standardists were involved in murder once before, not long after they came to Luna. You notice you never see one of them in New Dresden?”

  Weil shrugged. “So what? They keep to themselves.”

  “They were ordered to keep to themselves. At first, they could move freely like any other citizens. Then one of them killed somebody—not a Standardist this time. It was known the murderer was a barbie; there were witnesses. The police started looking for the killer. You guess what happened.”

  “They ran into the problems we’re having.” Weil grimaced. “It doesn’t look so good, does it?”

  “It’s hard to be optimistic,” Bach conceded. “The killer was never found. The barbies offered to surrender one of their number at random, thinking the law would be satisfied with that. But of course it wouldn’t do. There was a public outcry, and a lot of pressure to force them to adopt some kind of distinguishing characteristic, like a number tattooed on their foreheads. I don’t think that would have worked, either. It could have been covered.

  “The fact is that the barbies were seen as a menace to society. They could kill at will and blend back into their community like grains of sand on a beach. We would be powerless to punish a guilty party. There was no provision in the law for dealing with them.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The case is marked closed, but there’s no arrest, no conviction, and no suspect. A deal was made whereby the Standardists could practice their religion as long as they never mixed with other citizens. They had to stay in Anytown. Am I right?” She looked at the barbie.

  “Yes. We’ve adhered to the agreement.”

  “I don’t doubt it. Most people are barely aware you exist out here. But now we’ve got this. One barbie kills another barbie, and under a television camera . . .” Bach stopped, and looked thoughtful. “Say, it occurs to me . . . Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” She didn’t like the look of it.

  “I wonder. This murder took place in the tube station. It’s the only place in Anytown that’s scanned by the municipal security system. And fifty years is a long time between murders, even in a town as small as . . . How many people did you say live here, Jorge?”

  “About seven thousand. I feel I know them all intimately.” Weil had spent the day sorting barbies. According to measurements made from the tape, the killer was at the top end of permissible height.

  “How about it?” Bach said to the barbie. “Is there anything I ought to know?”

  The woman bit her lip, looked uncertain.

  “Come on, you said you were going to help me.”

  “Very well. There have been three other killings in the last month. You would not have heard of this one except it took place with outsiders present. Purchasing agents were there on the loading platform. They made the initial report. There was nothing we could do to hush it up.”

  “But why would you want to?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? We exist with the possibility of persecution always with us. We don’t wish to appear a threat to others. We wish to appear peaceful—which we are—and prefer to handle the problems of the group within the group itself. By divine consensus.”

  Bach knew she would get nowhere pursuing that line of reasoning. She decided to take the conversation back to the previous murders.

  “Tell me what you know. Who was killed, and do you have any idea why? Or should I be talking to someone else?” Something occurred to her then, and she wondered why she hadn’t asked it before. “You are the person I was speaking to yesterday, aren’t you? Let me rephrase that. You’re the body . . . that is, this body before me . . .”

  “We know what you’re talking about,” the barbie said. “Uh, yes, you are correct. We are . . . I am the one you spoke to.” She had to choke the word out, blushing furiously. “We have been . . . I have been selected as the component to deal with you, since it was perceived at equalization that this matter must be dealt with. This one was chosen as . . . I was chosen as punishment.”

  “You don’t have to say ‘I’ if you don’t want to.”

  “Oh, thank you.”

  “Punishment for what?”

  “For . . . for individualistic tendencies. We spoke up too personally at equalization, in favor of cooperation with you. As a political necessity. The conservatives wish to stick to our sacred principles no matter what the cost. We are divided; this makes for bad feelings within the organism, for sickness. This one spoke out, and was punished by having her own way, by being appointed . . . individually . . . to deal
with you.” The woman could not meet Bach’s eyes. Her face burned with shame.

  “This one has been instructed to reveal her serial number to you. In the future, when you come here you are to ask for 23900.”

  Bach made a note of it.

  “All right. What can you tell me about a possible motive? Do you think all the killings were done by the same . . . component?”

  “We do not know. We are no more equipped to select an . . . individual from the group than you are. But there is great consternation. We are fearful.”

  “I would think so. Do you have reason to believe that the victims were . . . does this make sense? . . . known to the killer? Or were they random killings?” Bach hoped not. Random killers were the hardest to catch; without motive, it was hard to tie killer to victim, or to sift one person out of thousands with the opportunity. With the barbies, the problem would be squared and cubed.

  “Again, we don’t know.”

  Bach sighed. “I want to see the witnesses to the crime. I might as well start interviewing them.”

  In short order, thirteen barbies were brought. Bach intended to question them thoroughly to see if their stories were consistent, and if they had changed.

  She sat them down and took them one at a time, and almost immediately ran into a stone wall. It took her several minutes to see the problem, frustrating minutes spent trying to establish which of the barbies had spoken to the officer first, which second, and so forth.

  “Hold it. Listen carefully. Was this body physically present at the time of the crime? Did these eyes see it happen?”

  The barbie’s brow furrowed. “Why, no. But does it matter?”

  “It does to me, babe. Hey, twenty-three thousand!”

  The barbie stuck her head in the door. Bach looked pained.

  “I need the actual people who were there. Not thirteen picked at random.”