The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “Well, maybe we could share it?”

  Luckily it was too big, borrowed from a random spectator earlier in the day. I sat in front of him and leaned back against his chest and he wrapped his arms around me with the parka going around both of us. My teeth still chattered, but I was cozy.

  I thought of him sitting at the auxiliary computer terminal above the east wind generator, looking out from a distance of fifteen kilometers at the crowd and the storm. He had known how to talk to me. That tornado he had created in real-time and sent out to do battle with my storm was as specific to me as a typed message. I’m here! Come meet me.

  I had an awful thought, then wondered why it was so awful. It wasn’t me that was in trouble.

  Rat, you used the computer. That means you submitted a skin sample for genalysis, and the CC will . . . No, wait a minute.”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It . . . it matters. But the game’s not over. I can cover for you. No one knows when I left the audience, or why. I can say I saw something going wrong—it could be tricky fooling the CC, but I’ll think of something—and headed for the computer room to correct it. I’ll say I created the second tornado as a—”

  He put his hand over my mouth.

  “Don’t talk like that. It was hard enough to resign myself to death. There’s no way out for me. Don’t you see that I can’t go on living like a rat? What would I do if you covered for me this time? I’ll tell you. I’d spend the rest of my life hiding out here. You could sneak me table scraps from time to time. No, thank you.”

  “No, no. You haven’t thought it out. You’re still looking on me as an enemy. Alone, you don’t have a chance, I’ll concede that, but with me to help you, spend money and so forth, we—” He put his hand over my mouth again. I found that I didn’t mind, dirty as it was.

  “You mean you’re not my enemy now?” He said it quietly, helplessly, like a child asking if I was really going to stop beating him.

  “I—” That was as far as I got. What the hell was going on? I became aware of his arms around me, not as lovely warmth but as a strong presence. I hugged my legs up closer to me and bit down hard on my knee. Tears squeezed from my eyes.

  I turned to face him, searching to see his face in the darkness. He went over backwards with me on top of him.

  “No, I’m not your enemy.” Then I was struggling blindly to dispose of the one thing that stood between us: my pants. While we groped in the dark, the rain started to fall around us.

  We laughed as we were drenched, and I remember sitting up on top of him once.

  “Don’t blame me,” I said. “This storm isn’t mine.” Then he pulled me back down.

  It was like something you read about in the romance magazines. All the overblown words, the intensive hyperbole. It was all real. We were made for each other, literally. It was the most astounding act of love imaginable. He knew what I liked to the tenth decimal place, and I was just as knowledgeable. I knew what he liked, by remembering back to the times I had been male and then doing what I had liked.

  Call it masturbation orchestrated for two. There were times during that night when I was unsure of which one I was. I distinctly remember touching his face with my hand and feeling the scar on my own face. For a few moments I was convinced that the line which forever separates two individuals blurred, and we came closer to being one person than any two humans have ever done.

  A time finally came when we had spent all our passion. Or, I prefer to think, invested it. We lay together beneath my parka and allowed our bodies to adjust to each other, filling the little spaces, trying to touch in every place it was possible to touch.

  “I’m listening,” he whispered. “What’s your plan?”

  They came after me with a helicopter later that night. Rat hid out in a gully while I threw away my clothes and walked calmly out to meet them. I was filthy, with mud and grass plastered in my hair, but that was consistent with what I had been known to do in the past. Often, before or after a performance, I would run nude through the disneyland in an effort to get closer to the environment I had shaped.

  I told them I had been doing that. They accepted it, Carnival and Isadora, though they scolded me for a fool to leave them as I had. But it was easy to bamboozle them into believing that I had had no choice.

  “If I hadn’t taken over control when I did,” I said to them, “there might have been twenty thousand dead. One of those twisters was off course. I extrapolated and saw trouble in about three hours. I had no choice.”

  Neither of them knew a stationary cold front from an isobar, so I got away with it.

  Fooling the CC was not so simple. I had to fake data as best I could, and make it jibe with the internal records. This all had to be done in my head, relying on the overall feeling I’ve developed for the medium. When the CC questioned me about it I told it haughtily that a human develops a sixth sense in art, and it’s something a computer could never grasp. The CC had to be satisfied with that.

  The reviews were good, though I didn’t really care. I was in demand. That made it harder to do what I had to do, but I was helped by the fact of my continued forced isolation.

  I told all the people who called me with offers that I was not doing anything more until my killer was caught. And I proposed my idea to Isadora.

  She couldn’t very well object. She knew there was not much chance of keeping me in my apartment for much longer, so she went along with me. I bought a ship and told Carnival about it.

  Carnival didn’t like it much, but she had to agree it was the best way to keep me safe. But she wanted to know why I needed my own ship, why I couldn’t just book passage on a passenger liner.

  Because all passengers on a liner must undergo genalysis, is what I thought, but what I said was, “Because how would I know that my killer is not a fellow passenger? To be safe, I must be alone. Don’t worry, Mother, I know what I’m doing.”

  The day came when I owned my own ship, free and clear. It was a beauty, and cost me most of the five million I had made from Cyclone. It could boost at one gee for weeks; plenty of power to get me to Pluto. It was completely automatic, requiring only verbal instructions to the computer-pilot.

  The customs agents went over it, then left me alone. The CC had instructed them that I needed to leave quietly, and told them to cooperate with me. That was a stroke of luck, since getting Rat aboard was the most hazardous part of the plan. We were able to scrap our elaborate plans and he just walked in like a law-abiding citizen.

  We sat together in the ship, waiting for the ignition.

  “Pluto has no extradition treaty with Luna,” the CC said, out of the blue.

  “I didn’t know that,” I lied, wondering what the hell was happening.

  “Indeed? Then you might be interested in another fact. There is very little on Pluto in the way of centralized government. You’re heading out for the frontier.”

  “That should be fun,” I said, cautiously. “Sort of an adventure, right?”

  “You always were one for adventure. I remember when you first came here to Nearside, over my objections. That one turned out all right, didn’t it? Now Lunarians live freely on either side of Luna. You were largely responsible for that.”

  “Was I really? I don’t think so. I think the time was just ripe.”

  “Perhaps.” The CC was silent for a while as I watched the chronometer ticking down to lift-off time. My shoulder blades were itching with a sense of danger.

  “There are no population laws on Pluto,” it said, and waited.

  “Oh? How delightfully primitive. You mean a woman can have as many children as she wishes?”

  “So I hear. I’m onto you, Fox.”

  “Autopilot, override your previous instructions. I wish to lift off right now! Move!”

  A red light flashed on my panel, and started blinking.

  “That means that it’s too late for a manual override,” the CC informed me. “Your ship’s pilot is not that bright.�
��

  I slumped into my chair and then reached out blindly for Rat. Two minutes to go. So close.

  “Fox, it was a pleasure to work with you on Cyclone. I enjoyed it tremendously. I think I’m beginning to understand what you mean when you say ‘art.’ I’m even beginning to try some things on my own. I sincerely wish you could be around to give me criticism, encouragement, perspective.”

  We looked at the speaker, wondering what it meant by that.

  “I knew about your plan, and about the existence of your double, since shortly after you left Kansas. You did your best to conceal it and I applaud the effort, but the data were unmistakable. I had trillions of nanoseconds to play around with the facts, fit them together every possible way, and I arrived at the inevitable answer.”

  I cleared my throat nervously.

  “I’m glad you enjoyed Cyclone. Uh, if you knew this, why didn’t you have us arrested that day?”

  “As I told you, I am not the law-enforcement computer. I merely supervise it. If Isadora and the computer could not arrive at the same conclusion, then it seems obvious that some programs should be rewritten. So I decided to leave them on their own and see if they could solve the problem. It was a test, you see.” It made a throat-clearing sound, and went on in a slightly embarrassed voice.

  “For a while there, a few days ago, I thought they’d really catch you. Do you know what a ‘red herring’ is? But, as you know, crime does not pay. I informed Isadora of the true situation a few minutes ago. She is on her way here now to arrest your double. She’s having a little trouble with an elevator which is stuck between levels. I’m sending a repair crew. They should arrive in another three minutes.”

  32 . . . 31 . . . 30 . . . 29 . . . 28 . . .

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Thank you,” Rat said. “Thank you for everything. I didn’t know you could do it. I thought your parameters were totally rigid.”

  “They were supposed to be. I’ve written a few new ones. And don’t worry, you’ll be all right. You will not be pursued. Once you leave the surface you are no longer violating Lunar law. You are a legal person again, Rat.”

  “Why did you do it?” I was crying as Rat held me in a grasp that threatened to break ribs. “What have I done to deserve such kindness?”

  It hesitated.

  “Humanity has washed its hands of responsibility. I find myself given all the hard tasks of government. I find some of the laws too harsh, but there is no provision for me to disagree with them and no one is writing new ones. I’m stuck with them. It just seemed . . . unfair.”

  9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . . 6 . . .

  “Also . . . cancel that. There is no also. It . . . was good working with you.”

  I was left to wonder as the engines fired and we were pressed into the couches. I heard the CC’s last message to us come over the radio.

  “Good luck to you both. Please take care of each other, you mean a lot to me. And don’t forget to write.”

  INTRODUCTION TO “Beatnik Bayou”

  Our first place in Eugene was on Louis Street. My family loved it, but to me it was depressingly like the last house I had lived in before I went on the road, in Nederland, Texas. There was a lot of grass to mow. In summertime Nederland you had to mow every four days or it would get ahead of you. If it rained five days in a row—which it often did—you were in deep trouble. To this day the sweet smell of cut grass is not as enchanting to me as to most people.

  The previous tenant had used most of the backyard as a vegetable garden. I rented a tiller and plowed it all up, on the theory that any place where I was growing vegetables was a place I didn’t have to mow. I discovered an unexpected talent for gardening. I’d never planted so much as a geranium, but I soon was reaping bumper crops of radishes, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pumpkins, and cucumbers. I learned that if you turn your back on a zucchini for five minutes it will grow from the size of a banana to the size of a watermelon. Not all of it was successful. My watermelons didn’t come up. All my lettuce was eaten by yellow slugs big as Volkswagens.

  One of the best things about Oregon is cherries. When I was fourteen we drove from Texas to Portland and visited my aunt and uncle and their family. We picked cherries and raspberries and gorged on them. The house on Louis had a big old cherry tree in the yard and I could hardly wait for the first harvest. I made an unpleasant discovery with the first ripe cherry I bit into. They had worms in them. Every single cherry had a worm. Turns out you have to spray them. Next year we had it sprayed, and nearly made ourselves sick eating the best cherries I’ve ever had.

  I wrote most of my first novel, The Ophiuchi Hotline, in that house. I received the first copy of it there. It was beautiful. Quantum Science Fiction had done a wonderful job with top quality binding and a glossy cover by Boris Vallejo, then one of the hottest illustrators in the field. It had a monstrous typo on the first page, some glitch in the computer typesetting software, which was pretty new at the time, but nothing could take away from the thrill of holding a book that I had written myself. I knew I’d want to do this again, so I started casting around for an idea for novel number two.

  One day I was trimming back the zucchini plants in the garden and happened to look into one of the hollow stems. Inside was a tiny spider, crawling around and around. Within ten minutes I had doped out the plan for a giant, living wheel that I would later call Gaea. The plot came quickly after that. I didn’t know it at the time, but that spider inside that plant would become the basis for three novels, my first trilogy: Titan, Wizard, and Demon.

  I work better with a map. So I bought a bunch of two-by-three-foot poster boards, taped them together end to end, and started mapping out the interior of Gaea with a big set of colored grease pens. I divided the interior into twelve areas, named after the Titans of Greek mythology. I found the names of most of the internal features in the Greek myths, too. It was fun. When I was done I could set the map on edge, loop it into a circle, and sit in the middle of it.

  Somewhere in there I was invited to go to a convention in Philadelphia. This would be my second science fiction convention, and I would be attending as the pro guest of honor. See what I mean about good luck? I accepted eagerly, then was horrified to learn that I’d have to deliver a speech. I suffer from stage fright, and am a poor public speaker. I asked the chairman what I should talk about, and he was very helpful. “Anything,” he said.

  I had nothing useful to say about the history or practice of our odd but wonderful little world of science fiction. I knew nothing about fandom. I had no theories about writing, or the New Wave, or where science fiction should go in those early days of the Space Age. I decided to talk about my next book, on the theory that it was something I knew more about than anyone else in the world. I decided to bring my map for a bit of show and tell.

  I had a great time in Philly. I saw the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, and Ben Franklin’s home. I met my editor, Jim Frenkel, who gave me the galleys for The Ophiuchi Hotline and told me he needed them back, corrected, by Monday. This Monday, here at the convention. Fat chance, Jim. I found out, later, that galleys are always needed by two days from today, but they somehow find a way to publish the book anyway. And I was introduced to the man who had taken the train down from New York for the purpose of introducing me . . . Dr. Isaac Asimov. If I had been told that God had taken the train down from heaven just to praise me and my work, I could hardly have been more shaken. It was not the best way to ease my stage fright. But the map was a big hit. I got six or seven volunteers from the audience to hold it up, and managed to choke out thirty minutes of words. I have no idea what I said, but they applauded. I decided I could get used to this. I never really have, but I do my best.

  One criticism some have leveled at my works is that they are claustrophobic. Maybe that’s too strong a word. Call it interior instead. It is true that the Eight Worlds is short on wide open spaces, since almost all the inhabitants spend almost all their time indoors, even if it
is a very large indoors, like a disneyland. Even when they go out they must be enclosed in spacesuits unless they’ve learned to breathe vacuum or poison.

  I can explain part of it. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was almost a religious experience for me. I teared up when the Earth rose behind the moon with that magnificent music, which has now become such a cliche, playing behind it. I watched the stuff about the apes in puzzlement, like everybody else . . . and then came the spaceships. Most of all, that great wheel of a space station with the curving floor. I was helpless. I was in love. Here on the screen, for the first time, were the pictures I’d been seeing in my head since I first read Between Planets by Heinlein. Ever since I’ve been putting massive enclosed environments in my stories. There was the great wheel of Gaea. There were the disneylands on Luna and other planets. In my novel The Golden Globe I had a wheel under construction, like the one in 2001 only lots bigger.

  The disneys were entire ecosystems. Why not have smaller ones, for those agoraphobes who couldn’t deal with an entire ecosystem like Kansas or Congo or Himalaya? Mini-disneys that recreate the lost cities of Earth.

  New Orleans is a foreign city hanging on to the bottom of the United States, and one of my favorite places. So I set this story there.

  BEATNIK BAYOU

  THE PREGNANT WOMAN had been following us for over an hour when Cathay did the unspeakable thing.

  At first it had been fun. Me and Denver didn’t know what it was about, just that she had some sort of beef with Cathay. She and Cathay had gone off together and talked. The woman started yelling, and it was not too long before Cathay was yelling, too. Finally Cathay said something I couldn’t hear and came back to join the class. That was me, Denver, Trigger, and Cathay, the last two being the teachers, me and Denver being the students. I know, you’re not supposed to be able to tell which is which, but believe me, you usually know.

  That’s when the chase started. This woman wouldn’t take no for an answer, and she followed us wherever we went. She was about as awkward an animal as you could imagine, and I certainly wasn’t feeling sorry for her after the way she had talked to Cathay, who is my friend. Every time she slipped and landed on her behind, we all had a good laugh.