The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  I wasn’t totally unprepared. Isadora had given in and allowed me to install a computerized bomb in my body. It would kill my killer—and me—if he jumped me. It was intended as a balance-of-terror device, the kind you hope you will never use because it terrorizes your enemy too much for him to test it. I would inform him of it if I had the time, hoping he would not be crazy enough to kill both of us. If he was, we had him, though it would be little comfort to me. At least Fox 5 would be the last in the series. With the remains of a body, Isadora guaranteed to bring a killer to justice.

  The sun came out as I reached the last, distorted gully before the wall. It was distorted because it was one of the place where tourists were not allowed to go. It was like walking through the backdrop on a stage production. The land was squashed together in one of the dimensions, and the hills in front of me were painted against a bas-relief. It was meant to be seen from a distance.

  Standing in front of the towering mural was a man.

  He was naked, and grimed with dirt. He watched me as I went down the gentle slope to stand waiting for him. I stopped about two hundred meters from him, drew my knife and held it in the air. I waited.

  He came down the concealed stairway, slowly and painfully. He was limping badly on his left leg. As far as I could see he was unarmed.

  The closer he got, the worse he looked. He had been in a savage fight. He had long, puckered, badly healed scars on his left leg, his chest, and his right arm. He had one eye; the right one was only a reddened socket. There was a scar that slashed from his forehead to his neck. It was a hideous thing. I thought of the CC’s suspicion that my killer might be a ghost, someone living on the raw edges of our civilization. Such a man might not have access to medical treatment whenever he needed it.

  “I think you should know,” I said, with just the slightest quaver, “that I have a bomb in my body. It’s powerful enough to blow both of us to pieces. It’s set to go off if I’m killed. So don’t try anything funny.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “I thought you might have a failsafe this time, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Is that what you told the others?” I sneered, crouching a little lower as he neared me. I felt like I had the upper hand, but my predecessors might have felt the same way.

  “No, I never said that. You don’t have to believe me.”

  He stopped twenty meters from me. His hands were at his sides. He looked helpless enough, but he might have a weapon buried somewhere in the dirt. He might have anything. I had to fight to keep feeling that I was in control.

  Then I had to fight something else. I gripped the knife tighter as a picture slowly superimposed itself over his ravaged face. It was a mental picture, the functioning of my “sixth sense.”

  No one knows if that sense really exists. I think it does, because it works for me. It can be expressed as the knack for seeing someone who has had radical body work done—sex, weight, height, skin color all altered—and still being able to recognize him. Some say it’s an evolutionary change. I didn’t think evolution worked that way. But I can do it. And I knew who this tall, brutalized male stranger was.

  He was me.

  I sprang back to my guard, wondering if he had used the shock of recognition to overpower my earlier incarnations. It wouldn’t work with me. Nothing would work. I was going to kill him, no matter who he was.

  “You know me,” he said. It was not a question.

  “Yes. And you scare hell out of me. I knew you knew a lot about me, but I didn’t realize you’d know this much.”

  He laughed, without humor. “Yes. I know you from the inside.”

  The silence stretched out between us. Then he began to cry. I was surprised, but unmoved. I was still all nerve endings, and suspected ninety thousand types of dirty tricks. Let him cry.

  He slowly sank to his knees, sobbing with the kind of washed-out monotony that you read about but seldom hear. He put his hands to the ground and awkwardly shuffled around until his back was to me. He crouched over himself, his head touching the ground, his hands wide at his sides, his legs bent. It was about the most wide-open, helpless posture imaginable, and I knew it must be for a reason. But I couldn’t see what it might be.

  “I thought I had this all over with,” he sniffed, wiping his nose with the back of one hand. “I’m sorry, I’d meant to be more dignified. I guess I’m not made of the stern stuff I thought. I thought it’d be easier.” He was silent for a moment, then coughed hoarsely. “Go on. Get it over with.”

  “Huh?” I said, honestly dumbfounded.

  “Kill me. It’s what you came here for. And it’ll be a relief to me.”

  I took my time. I stood motionless for a full minute, looking at the incredible problem from every angle. What kind of trick could there be? He was smart, but he wasn’t God. He couldn’t call in an air strike on me, cause the ground to swallow me up, disarm me with one crippled foot, or hypnotize me into plunging the knife into my own gut. Even if he could do something, he would die, too.

  I advanced cautiously, alert for the slightest twitch of his body. Nothing happened. I stood behind him, my eyes flicking from his feet to his hands to his bare back. I raised the knife. My hands trembled a little, but my determination was still there. I would not flub this. I brought the knife down.

  The point went into his flesh, into the muscle of his shoulder blade, about three centimeters deep. He gasped. A trickle of blood went winding through the knobs along his spine. But he didn’t move, he didn’t try to get up. He didn’t scream for mercy. He just knelt there, shivering and turning pale.

  I’d have to stab harder. I pulled the knife free, and more blood came out. And still he waited.

  That was about all I could take. My bloodlust had dried in my mouth until all I could taste was vomit welling in my stomach.

  I’m not a fool. It occurred to me even then that this could be some demented trick, that he might know me well enough to be sure I could not go through with it. Maybe he was some sort of psychotic who got thrills out of playing this kind of incredible game, allowing his life to be put in danger and then drenching himself in my blood.

  But he was me. It was all I had to go on. He was a me who had lived a very different life, becoming much tougher and wilier with every day, diverging by the hour from what I knew as my personality and capabilities. So I tried and I tried to think of myself doing what he was doing now for the purpose of murder. I failed utterly.

  And if I could sink that low, I’d rather not live.

  “Hey, get up,” I said, going around in front of him. He didn’t respond, so I nudged him with my foot. He looked up, and saw me offering him the knife, hilt-first.

  “If this is some sort of scheme,” I said, “I’d rather learn of it now.”

  His one eye was red and brimming as he got up, but there was no joy in him. He took the knife, not looking at me, and stood there holding it. The skin on my belly was crawling. Then he reversed the knife and his brow wrinkled, as if he were summoning up nerve. I suddenly knew what he was going to do, and I lunged. I was barely in time. The knife missed his belly and went off to the side as I yanked on his arm. He was much stronger than I. I was pulled off balance, but managed to hang onto his arm. He fought with me, but was intent on suicide and had no thought of defending himself. I brought my fist up under his jaw and he went limp.

  Night had fallen. I disposed of the knife and built a fire. Did you know that dried buffalo manure burns well? I didn’t believe it until I put it to the test.

  I dressed his wound by tearing up my shirt, wrapped my parka around him to ward off the chill, and sat with my bare back to the fire. Luckily, there was no wind, because it can get very chilly on the plains at night.

  He woke with a sore jaw and a resigned demeanor. He didn’t thank me for saving him from himself. I suppose people rarely do. They think they know what they’re doing, and their reasons always seem logical to them.

  “You don’t understand,
” he moaned. “You’re only dragging it out. I have to die, there’s no place for me here.”

  “Make me understand,” I said.

  He didn’t want to talk, but there was nothing to do and no chance of sleeping in the cold, so he eventually did. The story was punctuated with long, truculent silences.

  It stemmed from the bank robbery two and a half years ago. It had been staged by some very canny robbers. They had a new dodge that made me respect Isadora’s statement that police methods had not kept pace with criminal possibilities.

  The destruction of the memory cubes had been merely a decoy. They were equally unconcerned about the cash they took. They were bunco artists.

  They had destroyed the rest of the cubes to conceal the theft of two of them. That way the police would be looking for a crime of passion, murder, rather than one of profit. It was a complicated double feint, because the robbers wanted to give the impression of someone who was trying to conceal murder by stealing cash.

  My killer—we both agreed he should not be called Fox so we settled on the name he had come to fancy, Rat—didn’t know the details of the scheme, but it involved the theft of memory cubes containing two of the richest people on Luna. They were taken, and clones were grown. When the memories were played into the clones, the people were awakened into a falsely created situation and encouraged to believe that it was reality. It would work; the newly reincarnated person is willing to be led, willing to believe. Rat didn’t know exactly what the plans were beyond that. He had awakened to be told that it was fifteen thousand years later, and that the Invaders had left Earth and were rampaging through the solar system wiping out the human race. It took three lunations to convince them that he—or rather she, for Rat had been awakened into a body identical to the one I was wearing—was not the right billionaire. That she was not a billionaire at all, just a struggling artist. The thieves had gotten the wrong cube.

  They dumped her. Just like that. They opened the door and kicked her out into what she thought was the end of civilization. She soon found out that it was only twenty years in her future, since her memories came from the stolen cube which I had recorded about twenty years before.

  Don’t ask me how they got the wrong cube. One cube looks exactly like another; they are in fact indistinguishable from one another by any test known to science short of playing them into a clone and asking the resulting person who he or she is. Because of that fact, the banks we entrust them to have a foolproof filing system to avoid unpleasant accidents like Rat. The only possible answer was that for all their planning, for all their cunning and guile, the thieves had read 2 in column A and selected 3 in column B.

  I didn’t think much of their chances of living to spend any of that money. I told Rat so.

  “I doubt if their extortion scheme involves money,” he said. “At least not directly. More likely the theft was aimed at obtaining information contained in the minds of billionaires. Rich people are often protected with psychological safeguards against having information tortured from them, but can’t block themselves against divulging it willingly. That’s what the Invader hoax must have been about, to finagle them into thinking the information no longer mattered, or perhaps that it must be revealed to save the human race.”

  “I’m suspicious of involuted schemes like that,” I said.

  “So am I.” We laughed when we realized what he had said. Of course we had the same opinions.

  “But it fooled me,” he went on. “When they discarded me, I fully expected to meet the Invaders face-to-face. It was quite a shock to find that the world was almost unchanged.”

  “Almost,” I said, quietly. I was beginning to empathize with him.

  “Right.” He lost the half-smile that had lingered on his face, and I was sad to see it go.

  What would I have done in the same situation? There’s really no need to ask. I must believe that I would have done exactly as she did. She had been dumped like garbage, and quickly saw that she was about that useful to society. If found, she would be eliminated like garbage. The robbers had not thought enough of her to bother killing her. She could tell the police certain things they did not know if she was captured, so she had to assume that the robbers had told her nothing of any use to the police. Even if she could have helped capture and convict the conspirators, she would still be eliminated. She was an illegal person.

  She risked a withdrawal from my bank account. I remembered it now. It wasn’t large, and I assumed I must have written it since it was backed up by my genalysis. It was far too small an amount to suspect anything. And it wasn’t the first time I have made a withdrawal and forgotten about it. She knew that, of course.

  With the money she bought a Change on the sly. They can be had, though you take your chances. It’s not the safest thing in the world to conduct illegal business with someone who will soon have you on the operating table, unconscious. Rat had thought the Change would help throw the police off his trail if they should learn of his existence. Isadora told me about that once, said it was the sign of the inexperienced criminal.

  Rat was definitely a fugitive. If discovered and captured, he faced a death sentence. It’s harsh, but the population laws allow no loopholes whatsoever. If they did, we could be up to our ears in a century. There would be no trial, only a positive genalysis and a hearing to determine which of us was the rightful Fox.

  “I can’t tell you how bitter I was,” he said. “I learned slowly how to survive. It’s not as hard as you might think, in some ways, and much harder than you can imagine in others. I could walk the corridors freely, as long as I did nothing that required a genalysis. That means you can’t buy anything, ride on public transport, take a job. But the air is free if you’re not registered with the tax board, water is free, and food can be had in the disneylands. I was lucky in that. My palmprint would still open all the restricted doors in the disneylands. A legacy of my artistic days.” I could hear the bitterness in his voice.

  And why not? He had been robbed, too. He went to sleep as I had been twenty years ago, an up-and-coming artist, excited by the possibilities in Environmentalism. He had great dreams. I remember them well. He woke up to find that it had all been realized but none of it was for him. He could not even get access to computer time. Everyone was talking about Fox and her last opus, Thunderhead. She was the darling of the art world.

  He went to the premiere of Liquid Ice and began to hate me. He was sleeping in the air recirculators to keep warm, foraging nuts and berries and an occasional squirrel in Pennsylvania, while I was getting rich and famous. He took to trailing me. He stole a spacesuit, followed me out onto Palus Putridinus.

  “I didn’t plan it,” he said, his voice wracked with guilt. “I never could have done it with planning. The idea just struck me and before I knew it I had pushed you. You hit the bottom and I followed you down, because I was really sorry I had done it and I lifted your body up and looked into your face. . . . Your face was all . . . my face, it was . . . the eyes popping out and blood boiling away and . . .”

  He couldn’t go on, and I was grateful. He finally let out a shuddering breath and continued.

  “Before they found your body I wrote some checks on your account. You never noticed them when you woke up that first time, since the reincarnation had taken such a big chunk out of your balance. We never were any good with money.” He chuckled again. I took the opportunity to move closer to him. He was speaking very quietly so that I could barely hear him over the crackling of the fire.

  “I . . . I guess I went crazy then. I can’t account for it any other way. When I saw you in Pennsylvania again, walking among the trees as free as can be, I just cracked up. Nothing would do but that I kill you and take your place. I’d have to do it in a way that would destroy the body. I thought of acid, and of burning you up here in Kansas in a range fire. I don’t know why I settled on a bomb. It was stupid. But I don’t feel responsible. At least it must have been painless.

  “They reincarnated you
again. I was fresh out of ideas for murder. And motivation. I tried to think it out. So I decided to approach you carefully, not revealing who I was. I thought maybe I could reach you. I tried to think of what I would do if I was approached with the same story, and decided I’d be sympathetic. I didn’t reckon with the fear you were feeling. You were hunted. I myself was being hunted, and I should have seen that fear brings out the best and the worst in us.

  “You recognized me immediately—something else I should have thought of—and put two and two together so fast I didn’t even know what hit me. You were on me, and you were armed with a knife. You had been taking training in martial arts.” He pointed to the various scars. “You did this to me, and this, and this. You nearly killed me. But I’m bigger. I held on and managed to overpower you. I plunged the knife in your heart.

  “I went insane again. I’ve lost all memories from the sight of the blood pouring from your chest until yesterday. I somehow managed to stay alive and not bleed to death. I must have lived like an animal. I’m dirty enough to be one.

  “Then yesterday I heard two of the maintenance people in the machine areas of Pennsylvania talking about the show you were putting on in Kansas. So I came here. The rest you know.”

  The fire was dying. I realized that part of my shivering was caused by the cold. I got up and searched for more chips, but it was too dark to see. The “moon” wasn’t up tonight, would not rise for hours yet.

  “You’re cold,” he said, suddenly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. Here, take this back. I’m used to it.” He held out the parka.

  “No, you keep it. I’m all right.” I laughed when I realized my teeth had been chattering as I said it. He was still holding it out to me.