The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  The phone booths were smaller. He wondered why.

  There were four names in his book. He sat there facing the phone, wondering which name to call first. His eyes were drawn to Radiant Shiningstar Smith, so he punched that name into the phone. He got a number and an address in Novosibirsk.

  Checking the timetable he had picked up—putting off making the call—he found the antipodean shuttle left on the hour. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and took a deep breath and looked up to see her standing outside the phone booth. They regarded each other silently for a moment. She saw a man much shorter than she remembered, but powerfully built, with big hands and shoulders and a pitted face that would have been forbidding but for the gentle eyes. He saw a tall woman around forty years old who was fully as beautiful as he had expected she would be. The hand of age had just begun to touch her. He thought she was fighting that waistline and fretting about those wrinkles, but none of that mattered to him. Only one thing mattered, and he would know it soon enough.

  “You are Ian Haise, aren’t you?” she said, at last.

  “It was sheer luck I remembered you again,” she was saying. He noted the choice of words. She could have said coincidence.

  “It was two years ago. We were moving again and I was sorting through some things and I came across that plasmoid. I hadn’t thought about you in . . . oh, it must have been fifteen years.”

  He said something noncommittal. They were in a restaurant, away from most of the other patrons, at a booth near a glass wall beyond which spaceships were being trundled to and from the blast pits.

  “I hope I didn’t get you into trouble,” he said.

  She shrugged it away.

  “You did, some, but that was so long ago. I certainly wouldn’t bear a grudge that long. And the fact is, I thought it was all worth it at the time.”

  She went on to tell him of the uproar he had caused in her family, of the visits by the police, the interrogation, puzzlement, and final helplessness. No one knew quite what to make of her story. They had identified him quickly enough, only to find he had left Earth and would not be back for a long, long time.

  “I didn’t break any laws,” he pointed out.

  “That’s what no one could understand. I told them you had talked to me and told me a long story, and then I went to sleep. None of them seemed interested in what the story was about, so I didn’t tell them. And I didn’t tell them about the . . . the Starstone.” She smiled. “Actually, I was relieved they hadn’t asked. I was determined not to tell them, but I was a little afraid of holding it all back. I thought they were agents of the . . . who were the villains in your story? I’ve forgotten.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “I guess not. But something is.”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe you should tell me what it is. Maybe you can answer the question that’s been in the back of my mind for twenty-five years, ever since I found out that thing you gave me was just the scrapings from a starship engine.”

  “Was it?” he said, looking into her eyes. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying it was more than that. I’m asking you if it wasn’t more.”

  She looked at him again. He felt himself being appraised for the third or fourth time since they met. He still didn’t know the verdict.

  “Yes, I guess it was more,” she said, at last.

  “I’m glad.”

  “I believed in that story passionately for . . . oh, years and years. Then I stopped believing it.”

  “All at once?”

  “No. Gradually. It didn’t hurt much. Part of growing up, I guess.”

  “And you remembered me.”

  “Well, that took some work. I went to a hypnotist when I was twenty-five and recovered your name and the name of your ship. Did you know—”

  “Yes. I mentioned them on purpose.”

  She nodded, and they fell silent again. When she looked at him now he saw more sympathy, less defensiveness. But there was still a question.

  “Why?” she said.

  He nodded, then looked away from her, out to the starships. He wished he was on one of them, pushing c. It wasn’t working. He knew it wasn’t. He was a weird problem to her, something to get straightened out, a loose end in her life that would irritate until it was made to fit in, then be forgotten.

  To hell with it.

  “Hoping to get laid,” he said. When he looked up she was slowly shaking her head back and forth.

  “Don’t trifle with me, Haise. You’re not as stupid as you look. You knew I’d be married, leading my own life. You knew I wouldn’t drop it all because of some half-remembered fairy tale thirty years ago. Why?”

  And how could he explain the strangeness of it all to her?

  “What do you do?” He recalled something, and rephrased it. “Who are you?”

  She looked startled. “I’m a mysteliologist.”

  He spread his hands. “I don’t even know what that is.”

  “Come to think of it, there was no such thing when you left.”

  “That’s it, in a way,” he said. He felt helpless again. “Obviously, I had no way of knowing what you’d do, what you’d become, what would happen to you that you had no control over. All I was gambling on was that’d you remember me. Because that way . . .” He saw the planet Earth looming once more out the viewport. So many, many years and only six months later. A planet full of strangers. It didn’t matter that Amity was full of strangers. But Earth was home, if that word still had any meaning for him.

  “I wanted somebody my own age I could talk to,” he said. “That’s all. All I want is a friend.”

  He could see her trying to understand what it was like. She wouldn’t, but maybe she’d come close enough to think she did.

  “Maybe you’ve found one,” she said, and smiled. “At least I’m willing to get to know you, considering the efforts you’ve put into this.”

  “It wasn’t much effort. It seems so long-term to you, but it wasn’t to me. I held you on my lap six months ago.”

  She giggled in almost the same way she had six months before.

  “How long is your leave?” she asked.

  “Two months.”

  “Would you like to come stay with us for a while? We have room in our house.”

  “Will your husband mind?”

  “Neither my husband nor my wife. That’s them sitting over there, pretending to ignore us.” Ian looked, caught the eye of a woman in her late twenties. She was sitting across from a man Ian’s age, who now turned and looked at Ian with some suspicion but no active animosity. The woman smiled; the man reserved judgment.

  Radiant had a wife. Well, times change.

  “Those two in the red skirts are police,” Radiant was saying. “So is that man over by the wall, and the one at the end of the bar.”

  “I spotted two of them,” Ian said. When she looked surprised, he said, “Cops always have a look about them. That’s one of the things that don’t change.”

  “You go back quite a ways, don’t you? I’ll bet you have some good stories.”

  Ian thought about it, and nodded. “Some, I suppose.”

  “I should tell the police they can go home. I hope you don’t mind that we brought them in.”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’ll do that, and then we can go. Oh, and I guess I should call the children and tell them we’ll be home soon.” She laughed, reached across the table and touched his hand. “See what can happen in six months? I have three children, and Gillian has two.”

  He looked up, interested.

  “Are any of them girls?”

  INTRODUCTION TO “Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo”

  This story contains a lot of dogs. They are Shetland Sheepdogs, known to the people who love them, as I do, as Shelties, to the people who know nothing about them as “miniature collies,” and to all small children as “Look, Mom! It’s a little Lassie!”

  This seems a good time to say a few words
about the living soul who I have shared my life with longer than anyone else. Longer than my first wife, longer than my sons, longer than I lived at home with my parents and sisters, longer than I have lived with Lee, though I hope in a few more years that will have changed. I’m speaking of the finest dog that ever lived, my beloved Sheltie, Cirocco. That’s my prejudiced opinion, of course, but I would have no respect for any dog owner who wouldn’t proudly say the same thing about that special dog who, for a time, made your life worth living through the down and lonely hours.

  She was our second Sheltie. We got the first, Fuchsia, from a friend in Marin County with half a dozen of them, who was basically letting her newest litter run wild at her country house. She was giving them away. Fuchsia lived for eleven years, brightening our lives, then one day ran out in front of a car. The lady who hit her took her to the vet, who couldn’t save her. I was in Los Angeles when I heard the news, in the Polo Lounge, taking my first meeting with the Millennium production people. I couldn’t continue, and they all understood.

  Cirocco’s name came from the main character in the books I was writing at the time, the Gaea Trilogy. I got her in a very well-run puppy farm, one of a couple dozen Sheltie pups that swarmed me in the owner’s living room. This one little female hung back, but when the rest started playing with each other she came over and made me fall in love with her.

  The owner sneered. “That’s ‘Too-white,’” she said. “She has too much white on her legs and around the collar, and that little white spot on her butt. She’s a cull. That means she is purebred, descended from champions, but I won’t give you her papers unless you have her spayed.” Too-white’s genes were to be swept from the pool, like rotten leaves. That struck me as monumentally stupid, but I didn’t say so, because it meant I could have her for $150 instead of the $500 to 600 she wanted for the others.

  Dog breeders come in two varieties: the most finicky people on Earth, fanatical about the breed standards, or cynical exploiters who churn out the most popular mutt of the moment, inbreeding willy-nilly until they are producing animals with congenital defects that would make hemophiliac European royalty seem handsome, healthy, and sane. I decided to be grateful this woman was the first type. I wasn’t planning to show the dog, or breed her.

  Again, I know I’m prejudiced, but I have been to quite a few dog shows and I have never seen a Sheltie with a more magnificent coat than the one Cirocco soon grew, including the Sheltie that stood in the Best in Show circle a few years ago at Westminster.

  She was playful, as all puppies are, and loved to have fun later when she grew up, like all happy dogs do, but there was a dignity about her that was partly a characteristic of the breed and partly her own personality. She didn’t care for little children. She would never, never bite them, but she tended to want to chivvy them into a herd, round ’em up, and head ’em out the front door, as a good sheepdog should. She didn’t fawn on strangers, but after a while she would daintily accept a piece of cheese or a potato chip from them, then later she would come back for more. Food is a dog’s religion, as someone once said, and she worshipped at the same altar as all of her species, but she had to know you first.

  We were living in a big house on a hill overlooking Eugene when we got her. It had a fenced backyard that was at about a forty-five-degree angle. She would spend most of the day bounding up and crashing back down through the ivy, pausing at the three knotholes in the fence where she could spy on the neighbor’s German shepherds.

  I never heard her whine, not once in her life. She would yip at a sharp pain, and that was all. One night I heard her howl in agony. I threw open the back door and she came slinking toward me as if she had done something bad. Her face was covered in blood. She had chased a raccoon that had been stealing her food. Nobody ever told her about raccoons, which should be attacked only with your pack backing you up. She had one bleeding cut on her face . . . and four deep bites on the backs of her hind legs. Conclusion: she caught the coon, took one swipe across the face, then turned and ran. I would have, too. She was a lover, not a fighter.

  Once she was overcome with an insane spirit of adventure, and dug her way under the fence and went out to see the world and promptly got lost. I spent a frantic hour driving the neighborhood, then found her in the dog pound, having a swell time playing with a little black dog. The instant she saw me she tried to look miserable, repentant, and frightened. It was Academy Award time. The card pinned to the cage said something like “Sweet, affectionate, well cared for. This is someone’s precious baby.” Damn straight. When I went to pay her bail I learned there was already quite a waiting list to adopt her.

  I could tell you a thousand stories about Cirocco, I could turn this into a book about Cirocco. If you want to know more about her go to my website, she has her own page, with pictures. Tell me if she isn’t the most beautiful Sheltie you’ve ever seen.

  It all comes down, in the end, to death. They don’t live as long as we do, we usually outlive them. It’s probably better that way than the reverse, because if we die first who will take care of them?

  At the age of nineteen and a half, Cirocco was still as beautiful as ever. You’d never know to see her sitting there that she was mostly blind, half deaf, and so crippled by arthritis that she could no longer get on her feet by herself. After she spent the night lying in her own filth because she couldn’t get up, we decided it was time. We gave her a good meal which she enjoyed, took her for a last walk in the park, where she looked with great interest at things she could barely see and tottered around for a bit, then we took her to the vet, who gave her a lethal injection that killed her in seconds, with no evidence of pain.

  There was plenty of pain in the room, but it wasn’t hers.

  Her ashes were scattered in an apple orchard in the Hood River Valley, one of the prettiest places on Earth.

  Re-reading this story, I wondered if I was somehow preparing myself for Cirocco’s death. If so, it didn’t work. I still miss her every day.

  TANGO CHARLIE AND FOXTROT ROMEO

  THE POLICE PROBE was ten kilometers from Tango Charlie’s Wheel when it made rendezvous with the unusual corpse. At this distance, the wheel was still an imposing presence, blinding white against the dark sky, turning in perpetual sunlight. The probe was often struck by its beauty, by the myriad ways the wheel caught the light in its thousand and one windows. It had been composing a thought-poem around that theme when the corpse first came to its attention.

  There was a pretty irony about the probe. Less than a meter in diameter, it was equipped with sensitive radar, very good visible-light camera eyes, and a dim awareness. Its sentient qualities came from a walnut-sized lump of human brain tissue cultured in a lab. This was the cheapest and simplest way to endow a machine with certain human qualities that were often useful in spying devices. The part of the brain used was the part humans use to appreciate beautiful things. While the probe watched, it dreamed endless beautiful dreams. No one knew this but the probe’s control, which was a computer that had not bothered to tell anyone about it. The computer did think it was rather sweet, though.

  There were many instructions the probe had to follow. It did so religiously. It was never to approach the wheel more closely than five kilometers. All objects larger than one centimeter leaving the wheel were to be pursued, caught and examined. Certain categories were to be reported to higher authorities. All others were to be vaporized by the probe’s small battery of lasers. In thirty years of observation, only a dozen objects had needed reporting. All of them proved to be large structural components of the wheel which had broken away under the stress of rotation. Each had been destroyed by the probe’s larger brother, on station five hundred kilometers away.

  When it reached the corpse, it immediately identified it that far: it was a dead body, frozen in a vaguely fetal position. From there on, the probe got stuck.

  Many details about the body did not fit the acceptable parameters for such a thing. The probe examined it again, an
d still again, and kept coming up with the same unacceptable answers. It could not tell what the body was . . . and yet it was a body.

  The probe was so fascinated that its attention wavered for some time, and it was not as alert as it had been these previous years. So it was unprepared when the second falling object bumped gently against its metal hide. Quickly the probe leveled a camera eye at the second object. It was a single, long-stemmed, red rose, of a type that had once flourished in the wheel’s florist shop. Like the corpse, it was frozen solid. The impact had shattered some of the outside petals, which rotated slowly in a halo around the rose itself.

  It was quite pretty. The probe resolved to compose a thought-poem about it when this was all over. The probe photographed it, vaporized it with its lasers—all according to instruction—then sent the picture out on the airwaves along with a picture of the corpse, and a frustrated shout.

  “Help!” the probe cried, and sat back to await developments.

  “A puppy?” Captain Hoeffer asked, arching one eyebrow dubiously.

  “A Shetland Sheepdog puppy, sir,” said Corporal Anna-Louise Bach, handing him the batch of holos of the enigmatic orbiting object, and the single shot of the shattered rose. He took them, leafed through them rapidly, puffing on his pipe.

  “And it came from Tango Charlie?”

  “There is no possible doubt about it, sir.”

  Bach stood at parade rest across the desk from her seated superior and cultivated a detached gaze. I’m only awaiting orders, she told herself. I have no opinions of my own. I’m brimming with information, as any good recruit should be, but I will offer it only when asked, and then I will pour it forth until asked to stop.

  That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.

  “A Shetland . . .”