The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  There was a lot more in that vein. I’m afraid that when Lisa began talking about computers, ninety percent of my head shut off.

  “I’d like to know something, Osborne,” Lisa said.

  “What would that be?”

  “What is my status here? Am I supposed to be solving your crime for you, or just trying to get this system back to where a competent user can deal with it?”

  Osborne thought it over.

  “What worries me,” she added, “is that I’m poking around in a lot of restricted data banks. I’m worried about somebody knocking on the door and handcuffing me. You ought to be worried, too. Some of these agencies wouldn’t like a homicide cop looking into their affairs.”

  Osborne bridled at that. Maybe that’s what she intended.

  “What do I have to do?” he snarled. “Beg you to stay?”

  “No. I just want your authorization. You don’t have to put it in writing. Just say you’re behind me.”

  “Look. As far as L.A. County and the State of California are concerned, this house doesn’t exist. There is no lot here. It doesn’t appear in the assessor’s records. This place is in a legal limbo. If anybody can authorize you to use this stuff, it’s me, because I believe a murder was committed in it. So you just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

  “That’s not much of a commitment,” she mused.

  “It’s all you’re going to get. Now, what else have you got?”

  She turned to her keyboard and typed for a while. Pretty soon a printer started, and Lisa leaned back. I glanced at her screen. It said: osculate posterior-p. I remembered that osculate meant kiss. Well, these people have their own language. Lisa looked up at me and grinned.

  “Not you,” she said, quietly. “Him.”

  I hadn’t the faintest notion of what she was talking about.

  Osborne got his printout and was ready to leave. Again, he couldn’t resist turning at the door for final orders.

  “If you find anything to indicate he didn’t commit suicide, let me know.”

  “Okay. He didn’t commit suicide.”

  Osborne didn’t understand for a moment.

  “I want proof.”

  “Well, I have it, but you probably can’t use it. He didn’t write that ridiculous suicide note.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I knew that my first day here. I had the computer list the program. Then I compared it to Kluge’s style. No way he could have written it. It’s tighter’n a bug’s ass. Not a spare line in it. Kluge didn’t pick his alias for nothing. You know what that means?”

  “Clever,” I said.

  “Literally. But it means . . . a Rube Goldberg device. Something overly complex. Something that works, but for the wrong reason. You ‘kluge around’ bugs in a program. It’s the hacker’s Vaseline.”

  “So?” Osborne wanted to know.

  “So Kluge’s programs were really crocked. They were full of bells and whistles he never bothered to clean out. He was a genius, and his programs worked, but you wonder why they did. Routines so bletcherous they’d make your skin crawl. Real crufty bagbiters. But good programming’s so rare, even his diddles were better than most people’s super-moby hacks.”

  I suspect Osborne understood about as much of that as I did.

  “So you base your opinion on his programming style.”

  “Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s gonna be ten years or so before that’s admissible in court, like graphology or fingerprints. But if you know anything about programming you can look at it and see it. Somebody else wrote that suicide note—somebody damn good, by the way. That program called up his last will and testament in a sub-routine. And he definitely did write that. It’s got his fingerprints all over it. He spent the last five years spying on the neighbors as a hobby. He tapped into military records, school records, word records, tax files, and bank accounts. And he turned every telephone for three blocks into a listening device. He was one hell of a snoop.”

  “Did he mention anywhere why he did that?” Osborne asked.

  “I think he was more than half crazy. Possibly he was suicidal. He sure wasn’t doing himself any good with all those pills he took. But he was preparing himself for death, and Victor was the only one he found worthy of leaving it all to. I’d have believed he committed suicide if not for that note. But he didn’t write it. I’ll swear to that.”

  We eventually got rid of him, and I went home to fix dinner. Lisa joined me when it was ready. Once more she had a huge appetite.

  I fixed lemonade and we sat on my small patio and watched evening gather around us.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, sweating. I sat up, thinking it out, and I didn’t like my conclusions. So I put on my robe and slippers and went over to Kluge’s.

  The front door was open again. I knocked anyway. Lisa stuck her head around the corner.

  “Victor? Is something wrong?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “May I come in?”

  She gestured, and I followed her into the living room. An open can of Pepsi sat beside her console. Her eyes were red as she sat on her bench.

  “What’s up?” she said and yawned.

  “You should be asleep, for one thing,” I said.

  She shrugged and nodded.

  “Yeah. I can’t seem to get in the right phase. Just now I’m in day mode. But Victor, I’m used to working odd hours, and long hours, and you didn’t come over here to lecture me about that, did you?”

  “No. You say Kluge was murdered.”

  “He didn’t write his suicide note. That seems to leave murder.”

  “I was wondering why someone would kill him. He never left the house, so it was for something he did here with his computers. And now you’re . . . well, I don’t know what you’re doing, frankly, but you seem to be poking into the same things. Isn’t there a danger the same people will come after you?”

  “People?” She raised an eyebrow.

  I felt helpless. My fears were not well formed enough to make sense.

  “I don’t know . . . you mentioned agencies . . .”

  “You notice how impressed Osborne was with that? You think there’s some kind of conspiracy Kluge tumbled to, or you think the CIA killed him because he found out too much about something, or—”

  “I don’t know, Lisa. But I’m worried the same thing could happen to you.”

  Surprisingly, she smiled at me.

  “Thank you so much, Victor. I wasn’t going to admit it to Osborne, but I’ve been worried about that, too.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?”

  “I want to stay here and keep working. So I gave some thought to what I could do to protect myself. I decided there wasn’t anything.”

  “Surely there’s something.”

  “Well, I got a gun, if that’s what you mean. But think about it. Kluge was offed in the middle of the day. Nobody saw anybody enter or leave the house. So I asked myself, who can walk into a house in broad daylight, shoot Kluge, program that suicide note, and walk away, leaving no traces he’d ever been there?”

  “Somebody very good.”

  “Goddamn good. So good there’s not much chance one little gook’s gonna be able to stop him if he decides to waste her.”

  She shocked me, both by her words and by her apparent lack of concern for her own fate. But she had said she was worried.

  “Then you have to stop this. Get out of here.”

  “I won’t be pushed around that way,” she said. There was a tone of finality to it. I thought of things I might say, and rejected them all.

  “You could at least . . . lock your front door,” I concluded lamely.

  She laughed and kissed my cheek.

  “I’ll do that, Yank. And I appreciate your concern. I really do.”

  I watched her close the door behind me, listened to her lock it, then trudged through the moonlight toward my house. Halfway there I stopped. I could suggest she stay in my spare bedroom. I c
ould offer to stay with her at Kluge’s.

  No, I decided. She would probably take that the wrong way.

  I was back in bed before I realized, with a touch of chagrin and more than a little disgust at myself, that she had every reason to take it the wrong way.

  And me exactly twice her age.

  I spent the morning in the garden, planning the evening’s menu. I have always liked to cook, but dinner with Lisa had rapidly become the high point of my day. Not only that, I was already taking it for granted. So it hit me hard, around noon, when I looked out the front and saw her car gone.

  I hurried to Kluge’s front door. It was standing open. I made a quick search of the house. I found nothing until the master bedroom, where her clothes were stacked neatly on the floor.

  Shivering, I pounded on the Laniers’ front door. Betty answered and immediately saw my agitation.

  “The girl at Kluge’s house,” I said. “I’m afraid something’s wrong. Maybe we’d better call the police.”

  “What happened?” Betty asked, looking over my shoulder. “Did she call you? I see she’s not back yet.”

  “Back?”

  “I saw her drive away about an hour ago. That’s quite a car she has.”

  Feeling like a fool, I tried to make nothing of it, but I caught a look in Betty’s eye. I think she’d have liked to pat me on the head. It made me furious.

  But she’d left her clothes, so surely she was coming back.

  I kept telling myself that, then went to run a bath, as hot as I could stand it.

  When I answered the door she was standing there with a grocery bag in each arm and her usual blinding smile on her face.

  “I wanted to do this yesterday but I forgot until you came over, and I know I should have asked first, but then I wanted to surprise you, so I just went to get one or two items you didn’t have in your garden and a couple of things that weren’t in your spice rack . . .”

  She kept talking as we unloaded the bags in the kitchen. I said nothing. She was wearing a new T-shirt. There was a big V, and under it a picture of a screw, followed by a hyphen and a small case p. I thought it over as she babbled on V, screw-p. I was determined not to ask what it meant.

  “Do you like Vietnamese cooking?”

  I looked at her and finally realized she was very nervous.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never had it. But I like Chinese, and Japanese, and Indian. I like to try new things.” The last part was a lie, but not as bad as it might have been. I do try new recipes, and my tastes in food are catholic. I didn’t expect to have much trouble with southeast Asian cuisine.

  “Well, when I get through you still won’t know,” she laughed. “My momma was half-Chinese. So what you’re gonna get here is a mongrel meal.” She glanced up, saw my face, and laughed.

  “I forgot. You’ve been to Asia. No, Yank, I ain’t gonna serve any dog meat.”

  There was only one intolerable thing, and that was the chopsticks. I used them for as long as I could, then put them aside and got a fork.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Chopsticks happen to be a problem for me.”

  “You use them very well.”

  “I had plenty of time to learn how.”

  It was very good, and I told her so. Each dish was a revelation, not quite like anything I had ever had. Toward the end, I broke down halfway.

  “Does the V stand for victory?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Beethoven? Churchill? World War Two?”

  She just smiled.

  “Think of it as a challenge, Yank.”

  “Do I frighten you, Victor?”

  “You did at first.”

  “It’s my face, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a generalized phobia of Orientals. I suppose I’m a racist. Not because I want to be.”

  She nodded slowly, there in the dark. We were on the patio again, but the sun had gone down a long time ago. I can’t recall what we had talked about for all those hours. It had kept us busy, anyway.

  “I have the same problem,” she said.

  “Fear of Orientals?” I had meant it as a joke.

  “Of Cambodians.” She let me take that in for a while, then went on. “When Saigon fell, I fled to Cambodia. It took me two years with stops when the Khmer Rouge put me in labor camps. I’m lucky to be alive, really.”

  “I thought they called it Kampuchea now.”

  She spat. I’m not even sure she was aware she had done it.

  “It’s the People’s Republic of Syphilitic Dogs. The North Koreans treated you very badly, didn’t they, Victor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Koreans are pus suckers.” I must have looked surprised, because she chuckled.

  “You Americans feel so guilty about racism. As if you had invented it and nobody else—except maybe the South Africans and the Nazis—had ever practiced it as heinously as you. And you can’t tell one yellow face from another, so you think of the yellow races as one homogeneous block. When in fact Orientals are among the most racist peoples on the earth. The Vietnamese have hated the Cambodians for a thousand years. The Chinese hate the Japanese. The Koreans hate everybody. And everybody hates the ‘ethnic Chinese.’ The Chinese are the Jews of the East.”

  “I’ve heard that.”

  She nodded, lost in her own thoughts.

  “And I hate all Cambodians,” she said, at last. “Like you, I don’t wish to. Most of the people who suffered in the camps were Cambodians. It was the genocidal leaders, the Pol Pot scum, who I should hate.” She looked at me. “But sometimes we don’t get a lot of choice about things like that, do we, Yank?”

  The next day I visited her at noon. It had cooled down, but was still warm in her dark den. She had not changed her shirt.

  She told me a few things about computers. When she let me try some things on the keyboard, I quickly got lost. We decided I needn’t plan on a career as a computer programmer.

  One of the things she showed me was called a telephone modem, whereby she could reach other computers all over the world. She “interfaced” with someone at Stanford who she had never met, and who she knew only as “Bubble Sorter.” They typed things back and forth at each other.

  At the end, Bubble Sorter wrote “bye-p.” Lisa typed T.

  “What’s T?” I asked.

  “True. Means yes, but yes would be too straightforward for a hacker.”

  “You told me what a byte is. What’s a byep?”

  She looked up at me seriously.

  “It’s a question. Add p to a word, and make it a question. So bye-p means Bubble Sorter was asking if I wanted to log out. Sign off.”

  I thought that over.

  “So how would you translate ‘osculate posterior-p’?”

  “‘You wanna kiss my ass?’ But remember, that was for Osborne.”

  I looked at her T-shirt again, then up to her eyes, which were quite serious and serene. She waited, hands folded in her lap.

  Intercourse-p.

  “Yes,” I said. “I would.”

  She put her glasses on the table and pulled her shirt over her head.

  We made love in Kluge’s big waterbed.

  I had a certain amount of performance anxiety—it had been a long, long time. After that, I was so caught up in the touch and smell and taste of her that I went a little crazy. She didn’t seem to mind.

  At last we were done, and bathed in sweat. She rolled over, stood, and went to the window. She opened it and a breath of air blew over me. Then she put one knee on the bed, leaned over me, and got a pack of cigarettes from the bedside table. She lit one.

  “I hope you’re not allergic to smoke,” she said.

  “No. My father smoked. But I didn’t know you did.”

  “Only afterwards,” she said with a quick smile. She took a deep drag. “Everybody in Saigon smoked, I think.” She stretched out on her back beside me and we lay like that, soaking wet, holding hands. She opened her legs so one o
f her bare feet touched mine. It seemed enough contact. I watched the smoke rise from her right hand.

  “I haven’t felt warm in thirty years,” I said. “I’ve been hot, but I’ve never been warm. I feel warm now.”

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  So I did, as much as I could, wondering if it would work this time. At thirty years remove, my story does not sound so horrible. We’ve seen so much in that time. There were people in jails at that very moment, enduring conditions as bad as any I encountered. The paraphernalia of oppression is still pretty much the same. Nothing physical happened to me that would account for thirty years lived as a recluse.

  “I was badly injured,” I told her. “My skull was fractured. I still have . . . problems from that. Korea can get very cold, and I was never warm enough. But it was the other stuff. What they call brainwashing now.

  “We didn’t know what it was. We couldn’t understand that even after a man had told them all he knew they’d keep on at us. Keeping us awake. Disorienting us. Some guys signed confessions, made up all sorts of stuff, but even that wasn’t enough. They’d just keep on at you.

  “I never did figure it out. I guess I couldn’t understand an evil that big. But when they were sending us back and some of the prisoners wouldn’t go . . . they really didn’t want to go, they really believed . . .”

  I had to pause there. Lisa sat up, moved quietly to the end of the bed, and began massaging my feet.

  “We got a taste of what the Vietnam guys got, later. Only for us it was reversed. The GIs were heroes, and the prisoners were . . .”

  “You didn’t break,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “That would be worse.”

  I looked at her. She had my foot pressed against her flat belly, holding me by the heel while her other hand massaged my toes.

  “The country was shocked,” I said. “They didn’t understand what brainwashing was. I tried telling people how it was. I thought they were looking at me funny. After a while, I stopped talking about it. And I didn’t have anything else to talk about.

  “A few years back the Army changed its policy. Now they don’t expect you to withstand psychological conditioning. It’s understood you can say anything or sign anything.”