The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  YOU LOOKED

  The screen started to flicker and I was in my car, in darkness, with a pill in my mouth and another in my hand. I spit out the pill and sat for a moment, listening to the old engine ticking over. In my other hand was the plastic pill bottle. I felt very tired but opened the car door and shut off the engine. I felt my way to the garage door and opened it. The air outside was fresh and sweet. I looked down at the pill bottle and hurried into the bathroom.

  When I got through what had to be done, there were a dozen pills floating in the toilet that hadn’t even dissolved. There were the wasted shells of many more, and a lot of other stuff I won’t bother to describe. I counted the pills in the bottle, remembered how many there had been, and wondered if I would make it.

  I went over to Kluge’s house and could not find Osborne. I was getting tired, but I made it back to my house and stretched out on the couch to see if I would live or die.

  The next day I found the story in the paper. Osborne had gone home and blown out the back of his head with his revolver. It was not a big story. It happened to cops all the time. He didn’t leave a note.

  I got on the bus and rode out to the hospital and spent three hours trying to get in to see Lisa. I wasn’t able to do it. I was not a relative and the doctors were quite firm about her having no visitors. When I got angry they were as gentle as possible. It was then I learned the extent of her injuries. Hal had kept the worst from me. None of it would have mattered, but the doctors swore there was nothing left in her head. So I went home.

  She died two days later.

  She had left a will, to my surprise. I got the house and contents. I picked up the phone as soon as I learned of it, and called a garbage company. While they were on the way I went for the last time into Kluge’s house.

  The same message.

  PRESS ENTER ■

  I cautiously located the power switch and turned it off. I had the garbage people strip the place to the bare wall.

  I went over my own house very carefully, looking for anything that was even the first cousin to a computer. I threw out the radio. I sold the car, and the refrigerator, and the stove, and the blender, and the electric clock. I drained the waterbed and threw out the heater.

  Then I bought the best propane stove on the market and hunted a long time before I found an old icebox. I had the garage stacked to the ceiling with firewood. I had the chimney cleaned. It would be getting cold soon.

  One day I took the bus to Pasadena and established the Lisa Foo Memorial Scholarship fund for Vietnamese refugees and their children. I endowed it with seven hundred thousand eighty-three dollars and four cents. I told them it could be used for any field of study except computer science. I could tell they thought me eccentric.

  And I really thought I was safe, until the phone rang.

  I thought it over for a long time before answering it. In the end, I knew it would just keep on going until I did. So I picked it up.

  For a few seconds there was a dial tone, but I was not fooled, I kept holding it to my ear and finally the tone turned off. There was just silence. I listened intently. I heard some of those far-off musical tones that live in phone wires. Echoes of conversations taking place a thousand miles away. And something infinitely more distant and cool.

  I do not know what they have incubated out there at the NSA. I don’t know if they did it on purpose, or if it just happened, or if it even has anything to do with them in the end. But I know it’s out there, because I heard its soul breathing on the wires. I spoke very carefully.

  “I do not wish to know any more,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone anything. Kluge, Lisa, and Osborne all committed suicide. I am just a lonely man, and I won’t cause you any trouble.”

  There was a click, and a dial tone.

  Getting the phone taken out was easy. Getting them to remove all the wires was a little harder, since once a place is wired they expect it to be wired forever. They grumbled, but when I started pulling them out myself, they relented, though they warned me it was going to cost.

  The power company was harder. They actually seemed to believe there was a regulation requiring each house to be hooked up to the grid. They were willing to shut off my power—though hardly pleased about it—but they just weren’t going to take the wires away from my house. I went up on the roof with an axe and demolished four feet of eaves as they gaped at me. Then they coiled up their wires and went home.

  I threw out all my lamps, all things electrical. With hammer, chisel, and hand-saw I went to work on the drywall just above the baseboards.

  As I stripped the house of wiring I wondered many times why I was doing it. Why was it worth it? I couldn’t have very many years before a final seizure finished me off. Those years were not going to be a lot of fun.

  Lisa had been a survivor. She would have known why I was doing this. She had once said I was a survivor, too. I survived the camp. I survived the death of my mother and father and managed to fashion a solitary life. Lisa survived the death of just about everything. No survivor expects to live through it all. But while she was alive, she would have worked to stay alive.

  And that’s what I did. I got all the wires out of the walls, went over the house with a magnet to see if I had missed any metal, then spent a week cleaning up, fixing the holes I had knocked in the walls, ceiling, and attic. I was amused trying to picture the real-estate agent selling this place after I was gone.

  It’s a great little house, folks. No electricity . . .

  Now I live quietly, as before.

  I work in my garden during most of the daylight hours. I’ve expanded it considerably, and even have things growing in the front yard now. I live by candlelight and kerosene lamp. I grow most of what I eat.

  It took a long time to taper off the Tranxene and the Dilantin, but I did it, and now take the seizures as they come. I’ve usually got bruises to show for it.

  In the middle of a vast city I have cut myself off. I am not part of the network growing faster than I can conceive. I don’t even know if it’s dangerous, to ordinary people. It noticed me, and Kluge, and Osborne. And Lisa. It brushed against our minds like I would brush away a mosquito, never noticing I had crushed it. Only I survived.

  But I wonder.

  It would be very hard . . .

  Lisa told me how it can get in through the wiring. There’s something called a carrier wave that can move over wires carrying household current. That’s why the electricity had to go.

  I need water for my garden. There’s just not enough rain here in southern California, and I don’t know how else I could get the water.

  Do you think it could come through the pipes?

  INTRODUCTION TO “The Pusher”

  Not long before the Monte Carlo burned to the ground, we had moved into a travel trailer on Sauvie Island, ten minutes outside Portland. Lewis and Clark camped there for a while almost two hundred years before. They complained that quacking Canada geese kept them awake all night. Not surprising; there are hundreds of thousands of them.

  You’d never know Portland was so close. We were right on the Columbia River, huge ships would glide by silently all day long. In the spring and summer we picked and ate the best peaches, strawberries, raspberries, and tomatoes I’ve ever had. Our plan was to travel around the country, stopping here and there for a couple months. We ended up staying on Sauvie a lot longer then we planned, but eventually traded the trailer in on an RV and hit the road. We got as far as the Central Coast of California area near Pismo Beach, where we’ve been for a while. It’s a great spot. We’re parked about fifty yards from the beach; most days I feel like Jim Rockford, except I don’t get shot at as much.

  The weather here is mild, but the geology is exciting. A few days before this last Christmas we had a 6.5 earthquake that tossed the RV around like a Matchbox toy, cracked the pavements and sewers and a few houses down the street, and left us without an Internet connection or electricity for twenty-four hours.

  The
area has historically attracted some odd people. About a quarter of a mile from us there was, in the 1930s, a community of artists, nonconformists, communists, and nudists who called themselves Dunites, because they lived in rent-free shacks in the dunes. Forty-five miles north of us is San Simeon, where William Randolph Hearst a stately pleasure dome decreed. You can see it up on the hill if you stand on the beach where eight thousand elephant seals haul out for winter mating. And forty-five miles south of us is another pleasure dome: Neverland Ranch.

  A few days ago as I write this Michael Jackson was arraigned in criminal court in Santa Maria, fifteen miles south of us. Lee and I like circuses, so we went down there to watch it. All we saw of the King of Pop was a pale, pale hand stuck out of an SUV’s window, waving. After that, just the top of an umbrella moving slowly over the tops of heads. I could describe the scene but unless you never watch TV news or are having this book delivered via FedEx hypermail to a planet circling Betelgeuse and the television signal hasn’t reached you yet, you’ve already seen it all. Probably a lot more than you wanted to see. But there were guys there from the Nation of Islam handing out invitations to Neverland: “In the spirit of love and togetherness Michael Jackson would like to invite his fans and supporters to his Neverland ranch. Please join us Friday, January 16, 2004 from 11A.M.-2P.M. Refreshments will be served. We’ll see you there!”

  We are neither fans nor supporters, but when we got there no one asked us to sign a loyalty oath. We were required to sign a secrecy agreement, however, promising not to write about our experiences within the gates for profit. These introductions would seem to fall into that category, so that’s all I can say about the day we spent there. But I specifically asked if it was okay to write an account and post it on my website and was told that was fine, so if you’re interested you can find it at www.varley.net. For free.

  I can’t tell you why Michael Jackson is the perfect way to start an introduction to the following story without spoiling the story for you. I can tell you that it is the only story I ever wrote that my ex-wife didn’t like. She had always been my first reader, and after she finished this one she practically threw the pages back in my face. Harsh words were exchanged, and I finally prevailed on her to read it again, which she did. She had missed something vital, and totally misunderstood the story.

  I don’t blame her for getting angry. If I had been saying what she thought I was saying, I’d have been enraged, too. Pretty much as enraged as I’ll be at Michael Jackson if the allegations against him are proved to be true in court.

  THE PUSHER

  THINGS CHANGE. IAN Haise expected that. Yet there are certain constants, dictated by function and use. Ian looked for those and he seldom went wrong.

  The playground was not much like the ones he had known as a child. But playgrounds are built to entertain children. They will always have something to swing on, something to slide down, something to climb. This one had all those things, and more. Part of it was thickly wooded. There was a swimming hole. The stationary apparatus was combined with dazzling light sculptures that darted in and out of reality. There were animals, too: pygmy rhinoceros and elegant gazelles no taller than your knee. They seemed unnaturally gentle and unafraid.

  But most of all, the playground had children.

  Ian liked children.

  He sat on a wooden park bench at the edge of the trees, in the shadows, and watched them. They came in all colors and all sizes, in both sexes. There were black ones like animated licorice jellybeans and white ones like bunny rabbits, and brown ones with curly hair and more brown ones with slanted eyes and straight black hair and some who had been white but were now toasted browner than some of the brown ones.

  Ian concentrated on the girls. He tried with boys before, long ago, but it had not worked out.

  He watched one black child for a time, trying to estimate her age. He thought it was around eight or nine. Too young. Another one was more like thirteen, judging from her skirt. A possibility, but he’d prefer something younger. Somebody less sophisticated, less suspicious.

  Finally he found a girl he liked. She was brown, but with startling blonde hair. Ten? Possibly eleven. Young enough, at any rate.

  He concentrated on her, and did the strange thing he did when he had selected the right one. He didn’t know what it was, but it usually worked. Mostly it was just a matter of looking at her, keeping his eyes fixed on her no matter where she went or what she did, not allowing himself to be distracted by anything. And sure enough, in a few minutes she looked up, looked around, and her eyes locked with his. She held his gaze for a moment, then went back to her play.

  He relaxed. Possibly what he did was nothing at all. He had noticed, with adult women, that if one really caught his eye so he found himself staring at her she would usually look up from what she was doing and catch him. It never seemed to fail. Talking to other men, he had found it to be a common experience. It was almost as if they could feel his gaze. Women had told him it was nonsense, or if not, it was just reaction to things seen peripherally by people trained to alertness for sexual signals. Merely an unconscious observation penetrating to the awareness; nothing mysterious, like ESP.

  Perhaps. Still, Ian was very good at this sort of eye contact. Several times he had noticed the girls rubbing the backs of their necks while he observed them, or hunching their shoulders. Maybe they’d developed some kind of ESP and just didn’t recognize it as such.

  Now he merely watched. He was smiling, so that every time she looked up to see him—which she did with increasing frequency—she saw a friendly, slightly graying man with a broken nose and powerful shoulders. His hands were strong, too. He kept them clasped in his lap.

  Presently she began to wander in his direction.

  No one watching her would have thought she was coming toward him. She probably didn’t know it herself. On her way, she found reasons to stop and tumble, jump on the soft rubber mats, or chase a flock of noisy geese. But she was coming toward him, and she would end up on the park bench beside him.

  He glanced around quickly. As before, there were few adults in this playground. It had surprised him when he arrived. Apparently the new conditioning techniques had reduced the numbers of the violent and twisted to the point that parents felt it safe to allow their children to run without supervision. The adults present were involved with each other. No one had given him a second glance when he arrived.

  That was fine with Ian. It made what he planned to do much easier. He had his excuses ready, of course, but it could be embarrassing to be confronted with the questions representatives of the law ask single, middle-aged men who hang around playgrounds.

  For a moment he considered, with real concern, how the parents of these children could feel so confident, even with mental conditioning. After all, no one was conditioned until he had first done something. New maniacs were presumably being produced every day. Typically, they looked just like everyone else until they proved their difference by some demented act.

  Somebody ought to give those parents a stern lecture, he thought.

  “Who are you?”

  Ian frowned. Not eleven, surely, not seen up this close. Maybe not even ten. She might be as young as eight.

  Would eight be all right? He tasted the idea with his usual caution, looked around again for curious eyes. He saw none.

  “My name is Ian. What’s yours?”

  “No. Not your name. Who are you?”

  “You mean what do I do?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m a pusher.”

  She thought that over, then smiled. She had her permanent teeth, crowded into a small jaw.

  “You give away pills?”

  He laughed. “Very good,” he said. “You must do a lot of reading.” She said nothing, but her manner indicated she was pleased.

  “No,” he said. “That’s an old kind of pusher. I’m the other kind. But you knew that, didn’t you?” When he smiled she broke into giggles. She was doing the pointless
things with her hands that little girls do. He thought she had a pretty good idea of how cute she was, but no inkling of her forbidden eroticism. She was a ripe seed with sexuality ready to burst to the surface. Her body was a bony sketch, a framework on which to build a woman.

  “How old are you?”

  “That’s a secret. What happened to your nose?”

  “I broke it a long time ago. I’ll bet you’re twelve.”

  She giggled, then nodded. Eleven, then. And just barely.

  “Do you want some candy?” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pink and white striped paper bag.

  She shook her head solemnly. “My mother says not to take candy from strangers.”

  “But we’re not strangers. I’m Ian, the pusher.”

  She thought that over. While she hesitated he reached into the bag and picked out a chocolate thing so thick and gooey it was almost obscene. He bit into it, forcing himself to chew. He hated sweets.

  “Okay,” she said, and reached toward the bag. He pulled it away. She looked at him in innocent surprise.

  “I just thought of something,” he said. “I don’t know your name, so I guess we are strangers.”

  She caught on to the game when she saw the twinkle in his eye. He’d practiced that. It was a good twinkle.

  “My name is Radiant. Radiant Shiningstar Smith.”

  “A very fancy name,” he said, thinking how names had changed. “For a very pretty girl.” He paused, and cocked his head. “No. I don’t think so. You’re Radiant . . . Starr. With two r’s. . . . Captain Radiant Starr, of the Star Patrol.”

  She was dubious for a moment. He wondered if he’d judged her wrong. Perhaps she was really Miss Radiant Faintingheart Belle, or Mrs. Radiant Motherhood. But her fingernails were a bit dirty for that.