by John Varley
Anything unusual was related over a loudspeaker so everyone could be aware of it and thus spread out the intolerable burden of anomaly. No barbie wanted to keep a unique experience to herself; it made her soiled, unclean, until it was shared by all.
Bach was getting very tired of it—she was short on sleep—when the lights went out. The buzz of conversation shut off as if a tape had broken.
“All cats are alike in the dark,” someone muttered, quite near Bach. Then a single voice was raised. It was solemn; almost a chant.
“We are the wrath. There is blood on our hands, but it is the holy blood of cleansing. We have told you of the cancer eating at the heart of the body, and yet still you cower away from what must be done. The filth must be removed from us!”
Bach was trying to tell which direction the words were coming from in the total darkness. Then she became aware of movement, people brushing against her, all going in the same direction. She began to buck the tide when she realized everyone was moving away from the voice.
“You think you can use our holy uniformity to hide among us, but the vengeful hand of Goddess will not be stayed. The mark is upon you, our one-time sisters. Your sins have set you apart, and retribution will strike swiftly.
“There are five of you left. Goddess knows who you are, and will not tolerate your perversion of her holy truth. Death will strike you when you least expect it. Goddess sees the differentness within you, the differentness you seek but hope to hide from your upright sisters.”
People were moving more swiftly now, and a scuffle had developed ahead of her. She struggled free of people who were breathing panic from every pore, until she stood in a clear space. The speaker was shouting to be heard over the sound of whimpering and the shuffling of bare feet. Bach moved foward, swinging her outstretched hands. But another hand brushed her first.
The punch was not centered on her stomach, but it drove the air from her lungs and sent her sprawling. Someone tripped over her, and she realized things would get pretty bad if she didn’t get to her feet. She was struggling up when the lights came back on.
There was a mass sigh of relief as each barbie examined her neighbor. Bach half expected another body to be found, but that didn’t seem to be the case. The killer had vanished again.
She slipped away from the equalization before it began to break up, and hurried down the deserted corridors to room 1215.
She sat in the room—little more than a cell, with a bunk, a chair, and a light on a table—for more than two hours before the door opened, as she had hoped it would. A barbie stepped inside, breathing hard, closed the door, and leaned against it.
“We wondered if you would come,” Bach said, tentatively.
The woman ran to Bach and collapsed at her knees, sobbing.
“Forgive us, please forgive us, our darling. We didn’t dare come last night. We were afraid that . . . that if . . . that it might have been you who was murdered, and that the wrath would be waiting for us here. Forgive us, forgive us.”
“It’s all right,” Bach said, for lack of anything better. Suddenly, the barbie was on top of her, kissing her with a desperate passion. Bach was startled, though she had expected something of the sort. She responded as best she could. The barbie finally began to talk again.
“We must stop this, we just have to stop. We’re so frightened of the wrath, but . . . but the longing! We can’t stop ourselves. We need to see you so badly that we can hardly get through the day, not knowing if you are across town or working at our elbow. It builds all day, and at night, we cannot stop ourselves from sinning yet again.” She was crying, more softly this time, not from happiness at seeing the woman she took Bach to be, but from a depth of desperation. “What’s going to become of us?” she asked, helplessly.
“Shhh,” Bach soothed. “It’s going to be all right.”
She comforted the barbie for a while, then saw her lift her head. Her eyes seemed to glow with a strange light.
“I can’t wait any longer,” she said. She stood up, and began taking off her clothes. Bach could see her hands shaking.
Beneath her clothing the barbie had concealed a few things that looked familiar. Bach could see that the merkin was already in place between her legs. There was a wooden mask much like the one that had been found in the secret panel, and a jar. The barbie unscrewed the top of it and used her middle finger to smear dabs of brown onto her breasts, making stylized nipples.
“Look what I got,” she said, coming down hard on the pronoun, her voice trembling. She pulled a flimsy yellow blouse from the pile of clothing on the floor, and slipped it over her shoulders. She struck a pose, then strutted up and down the tiny room.
“Come on, darling,” she said. “Tell me how beautiful I am. Tell me I’m lovely. Tell me I’m the only one for you. The only one. What’s the matter? Are you still frightened? I’m not. I’ll dare anything for you, my one and only love.” But now she stopped walking and looked suspiciously at Bach. “Why aren’t you getting dressed?”
“We . . . uh, I can’t,” Bach said, extemporizing. “They, uh, someone found the things. They’re all gone.” She didn’t dare remove her clothes because her nipples and pubic hair would look too real, even in the dim light.
The barbie was backing away. She picked up her mask and held it protectively to her. “What do you mean? Was she here? The wrath? Are they after us? It’s true, isn’t it? They can see us.” She was on the edge of crying again, near panic.
“No, no, I think it was the police—” But it was doing no good. The barbie was at the door now, and had it half open.
“You’re her! What have you done to . . . No, no, you stay away.” She reached into the clothing that she now held in her hand, and Bach hesitated for a moment, expecting a knife. It was enough time for the barbie to dart quickly through the door, slamming it behind her.
When Bach reached the door, the woman was gone.
Bach kept reminding herself that she was not here to find the other potential victims—of whom her visitor was certainly one—but to catch the killer. The fact remained that she wished she could have detained her, to question her further.
The woman was a pervert, by the only definition that made any sense among the Standardists. She, and presumably the other dead barbies, had an individuality fetish. When Bach had realized that, her first thought had been to wonder why they didn’t simply leave the colony and become whatever they wished. But then why did a Christian seek out prostitutes? For the taste of sin. In the larger world, what these barbies did would have had little meaning. Here, it was sin of the worst and tastiest kind.
And somebody didn’t like it at all.
The door opened again, and the woman stood there facing Bach, her hair disheleveled, breathing hard.
“We had to come back,” she said. “We’re so sorry that we panicked like that. Can you forgive us?” She was coming toward Bach now, her arms out. She looked so vulnerable and contrite that Bach was astonished when the fist connected with her cheek.
Bach thudded against the wall, then found herself pinned under the woman’s knees, with something sharp and cool against her throat. She swallowed very carefully, and said nothing. Her throat itched unbearably.
“She’s dead,” the barbie said. “And you’re next.” But there was something in her face that Bach didn’t understand. The barbie brushed at her eyes a few times, and squinted down at her.
“Listen, I’m not who you think I am. If you kill me, you’ll be bringing more trouble on your sisters than you can imagine.”
The barbie hesitated, then roughly thrust her hand down into Bach’s pants. Her eyes widened when she felt the genitals, but the knife didn’t move. Bach knew she had to talk fast, and say all the right things.
“You understand what I’m talking about, don’t you?” She looked for a response, but saw none. “You’re aware of the political pressures that are coming down. You know this whole colony could be wiped out if you look like a threat to the outs
ide. You don’t want that.”
“If it must be, it will be,” the barbie said. “The purity is the important thing. If we die, we shall die pure. The blasphemers must be killed.”
“I don’t care about that anymore,” Bach said, and finally got a ripple of interest from the barbie. “I have my principles, too. Maybe I’m not as fanatical about them as you are about yours. But they’re important to me. One is that the guilty be brought to justice.”
“You have the guilty party. Try her. Execute her. She will not protest.”
“You are the guilty party.”
The woman smiled. “So arrest us.”
“All right, all right. I can’t, obviously. Even if you don’t kill me, you’ll walk out that door and I’ll never be able to find you. I’ve given up on that. I just don’t have the time. This was my last chance, and it looks like it didn’t work.”
“We didn’t think you could do it, even with more time. But why should we let you live?”
“Because we can help each other.” She felt the pressure ease up a little, and managed to swallow again. “You don’t want to kill me, because it could destroy your community. Myself . . . I need to be able to salvage some self-respect out of this mess. I’m willing to accept your definition of morality and let you be the law in your own community. Maybe you’re even right. Maybe you are one being. But I can’t let that woman be convicted, when I know she didn’t kill anyone.”
The knife was not touching her neck now, but it was still being held so that the barbie could plunge it into her throat at the slightest movement.
“And if we let you live? What do you get out of it? How do you free your ‘innocent’ prisoner?”
“Tell me where to find the body of the woman you just killed. I’ll take care of the rest.”
The pathology team had gone and Anytown was settling down once again. Bach sat on the edge of the bed with Jorge Weil. She was as tired as she ever remembered being. How long had it been since she slept?
“I’ll tell you,” Weil said, “I honestly didn’t think this thing would work. I guess I was wrong.”
Bach sighed. “I wanted to take her alive, Jorge. I thought I could. But when she came at me with the knife . . .” She let him finish the thought, not caring to lie to him. She’d already done that to the interviewer. In her story, she had taken the knife from her assailant and tried to disable her, but was forced in the end to kill her. Luckily, she had the bump on the back of her head from being thrown against the wall. It made a blackout period plausible. Otherwise, someone would have wondered why she waited so long to call for police and an ambulance. The barbie had been dead for an hour when they arrived.
“Well, I’ll hand it to you. You sure pulled this out. I’ll admit it, I was having a hard time deciding if I’d do as you were going to do and resign, or if I could have stayed on. Now I’ll never know.”
“Maybe it’s best that way. I don’t really know, either.”
Jorge grinned at her. “I can’t get used to thinking of you being behind that godawful face.”
“Neither can I, and I don’t want to see any mirrors. I’m going straight to Atlas and get it changed back.” She got wearily to her feet and walked toward the tube station with Weil.
She had not quite told him the truth. She did intend to get her own face back as soon as possible—nose and all—but there was one thing left to do.
From the first, a problem that had bothered her had been the question of how the killer identified her victims.
Presumably the perverts had arranged times and places to meet for their strange rites. That would have been easy enough. Any one barbie could easily shirk her duties. She could say she was sick, and no one would know it was the same barbie who had been sick yesterday, and for a week or month before. She need not work; she could wander the halls acting as if she was on her way from one job to another. No one could challenge her. Likewise, while 23900 had said no barbie spent consecutive nights in the same room, there was no way for her to know that. Evidently room 1215 had been taken over permanently by the perverts.
And the perverts would have no scruples about identifying each other by serial number at their clandestine meetings, though they could do it in the streets. The killer didn’t even have that.
But someone had known how to identify them, to pick them out of a crowd. Bach thought she must have infiltrated meetings, marked the participants in some way. One could lead her to another, until she knew them all and was ready to strike.
She kept recalling the strange way the killer had looked at her, the way she had squinted. The mere fact that she had not killed Bach instantly in a case of mistaken identity meant she had been expecting to see something that had not been there.
And she had an idea about that.
She meant to go to the morgue first, and to examine the corpses under different wavelengths of lights, with various filters. She was betting some kind of mark would become visible on the faces, a mark the killer had been looking for with her contact lenses.
It had to be something that was visible only with the right kind of equipment, or under the right circumstances. If she kept at it long enough, she would find it.
If it was an invisible ink, it brought up another interesting question. How had it been applied? With a brush or spray gun? Unlikely. But such an ink on the killer’s hands might look and feel like water.
Once she had marked her victims, the killer would have to be confident the mark would stay in place for a reasonable time. The murders had stretched over a month. So she was looking for an indelible, invisible ink, one that soaked into pores.
And if it was indelible . . .
There was no use thinking further about it. She was right, or she was wrong. When she struck the bargain with the killer she had faced up to the possibility that she might have to live with it. Certainly she could not now bring a killer into court, not after what she had just said.
No, if she came back to Anytown and found a barbie whose hands were stained with guilt, she would have to do the job herself.
INTRODUCTION TO “The Phantom of Kansas”
I have a little experience of weather.
I was born in Austin, Texas, along with my sister, Francine, but I don’t remember much of Austin except for the time some guy came by the house with a donkey and Mom paid to let me sit on it in a cowboy hat and have my picture taken. I still have the picture. God, am I cute, though already my legs are starting to dangle longer than they should for a kid my age. Probably the last time anyone ever called me cute.
Then we moved to Fort Worth, where Dad worked for Consolidated Aircraft assembling B-36 bombers—not single-handed, as I thought then, but with a few other guys—and later for the Magnolia Petroleum Company, in a refinery. If you’re old enough you might remember the “flying red horse” on the gas station signs. Now it’s “Mobil.” If you think that’s a better name, I don’t want to know you.
We stayed there long enough for my other sister, Kerry, to be born. I remember her in Mom’s arms coming home from the hospital. Other than that, I remember Mrs. Rosequist’s first-grade class, the incredible roar of the ten-engine B-36s flying over, and chasing what we called “horney toads” around the backyard. They are the only lizards I know of that are fat and slow enough to catch easily. They are covered with spines, and will spit blood at you when you pick them up.
Then Dad got laid off and the nearest job he could find was in Port Arthur, Texas. I hated the place from the first time I saw it. It was always hot and humid at the same time. The mosquitoes would feed on you at night until they were too fat to fly; you could turn on the light and watch them try to crawl away over the sheets. Most of the town was about six inches above sea level, and all the houses seemed to be set up on blocks. You could look right under them and see the pools of stagnant water where the skeeters bred. It rained almost every day. We figured that was the reason for the blocks.
Not long after that we found out the real reason. Hu
rricane Audrey blew through with not a lot of advance warning (no weather satellites in those days, which is a big reason why eight thousand people died in Galveston, sixty miles down the coast, in 1900). It was a Category 4 blow, and it hit smack-dab on our new hometown.
We had never seen anything like it, didn’t really have a realistic idea how dangerous it was. I remember trying to step outside the house when the winds were blowing about 100 mph to see what it was like, and being blown right back inside. It got worse after that, and it seemed to go on for hours. It’s one thing to see it on television, something else to be cowering in your house as the trees wave back and forth and come crashing down, believe me.
The eye passed over us, and we all went outside in the unearthly quiet. We didn’t know it at the time but about thirty-five miles to the east of us as the crow flies (if any crows had been stupid enough to fly that day) in Cameron, Louisiana, 390 people were dying in a storm surge. The town was virtually wiped off the planet.
In terms of human life lost, it was the fourth worst American hurricane of the twentieth century—bearing in mind that 1900 was the last year of the nineteenth century.
In terms of damage, Audrey didn’t even make the Top 50. If you’ve ever been to Port Arthur you’d conclude, as I did, that there wasn’t all that much of value there before the winds started to blow. But the people down there must have known something about storms, because most houses that didn’t have a tree fall on them were not badly damaged. After a few days with the chain saws, the area called, for no rational reason I can see, the “Golden Triangle” of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange was pretty much back to normal . . . but always with the horror of Cameron on our minds.
Janis Joplin got out of Port Arthur the first chance she got. I had never heard of her then, but I made the same decision. I decided that as soon as I finished school I’d go to California, where there’s nothing to worry about but earthquakes.
I’ve just been through my first earthquake, and it was a piece of cake compared to Audrey.
