The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “The funeral was very beautiful,” she said, pushing the stool nearer the mammoth marble washbasin and climbing up on it. Behind the basin the whole wall was a mirror, and when she stood on the stool she could see herself. She flounced her blonde hair out and studied it critically. There were some tangles.

  “Tell me about it,” Tik-Tok said. “I want to know every detail.”

  So she told him, pausing a moment to sniff her armpits. Wearing the suit always made her smell so gross. She clambered up onto the broad marble counter, went around the basin and goosed the 24-karat gold tails of the two dolphins who cavorted there, and water began gushing out of their mouths. She sat with her feet in the basin, touching one tail or another when the water got too hot, and told Tik-Tok all about it.

  Charlie used to bathe in the big tub. It was so big it was more suited for swimming laps than bathing. One day she slipped and hit her head and almost drowned. Now she usually bathed in the sink, which was not quite big enough, but a lot safer.

  “The rose was the most wonderful part,” she said. “I’m glad you thought of that. It just turned and turned and turned . . .”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “I sang a song. A hymn.”

  “Could I hear it?”

  She lowered herself into the basin. Resting the back of her neck on a folded towel, the water came up to her chin, and her legs from the knees down stuck out the other end. She lowered her mouth a little, and made burbling sounds in the water.

  “Can I hear it? I’d like to hear.”

  “Lord, guide and guard all those who fly . . .”

  Tik-Tok listened to it once, then joined in harmony as she sang it again, and on the third time through added an organ part. Charlie felt the tears in her eyes again, and wiped them with the back of her hand.

  “Time to scrubba-scrubba-scrubba,” Tik-Tok suggested.

  Charlie sat on the edge of the basin with her feet in the water, and lathered a washcloth.

  “Scrubba-scrub beside your nose,” Tik-Tok sang.

  “Scrubba-scrub beside your nose,” Charlie repeated, and industriously scoured all around her face.

  “Scrubba-scrub between your toes. Scrub all the jelly out of your belly. Scrub your butt, and your you-know-what.”

  Tik-Tok led her through the ritual she’d been doing so long she didn’t even remember how long. A couple times he made her giggle by throwing in a new verse. He was always making them up. When she was done, she was about the cleanest little girl anyone ever saw, except for her hair.

  “I’ll do that later,” she decided, and hopped to the floor, where she danced the drying-off dance in front of the warm air blower until Tik-Tok told her she could stop. Then she crossed the room to the vanity table and sat on the high stool she had installed there.

  “Charlie, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Tik-Tok said.

  Charlie opened a tube called “Coral Peaches” and smeared it all over her lips. She gazed at the thousand other bottles and tubes, wondering what she’d use this time.

  “Charlie, are you listening to me?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said. She reached for a bottle labeled “The Glenlivet, Twelve Years Old,” twisted the cork out of it, and put it to her lips. She took a big swallow, then another, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm.

  “Holy mackerel! That’s real sippin’ whiskey!” she shouted, and set the bottle down. She reached for a tin of rouge.

  “Some people have been trying to talk to me,” Tik-Tok said. “I believe they may have seen Albert, and wondered about him.”

  Charlie looked up, alarmed—and, doing so, accidentally made a solid streak of rouge from her cheekbone to her chin.

  “Do you think they shot at Albert?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they’re just curious.”

  “Will they hurt me?”

  “You never can tell.”

  Charlie frowned, and used her finger to spread black eyeliner all over her left eyelid. She did the same for the right, then used another jar to draw violent purple frown lines on her forehead. With a thick pencil she outlined her eyebrows.

  “What do they want?”

  “They’re just prying people, Charlie. I thought you ought to know. They’ll probably try to talk to you, later.”

  “Should I talk to them?”

  “That’s up to you.”

  Charlie frowned even deeper. Then she picked up the bottle of Scotch and had another belt.

  She reached for the Rajah’s Ruby and hung it around her neck.

  Fully dressed and made up now, Charlie paused to kiss Fuchsia and tell her how beautiful her puppies were, then hurried out to the Promenade Deck.

  As she did, the camera on the wall panned down a little, and turned a few degrees on its pivot. That made a noise in the rusty mechanism, and Charlie looked up at it. The speaker beside the camera made a hoarse noise, then did it again. There was a little puff of smoke, and an alert sensor quickly directed a spray of extinguishing gas toward it, then itself gave up the ghost. The speaker said nothing else.

  Odd noises were nothing new to Charlie. There were places on the wheel where the clatter of faltering mechanisms behind the walls was so loud you could hardly hear yourself think.

  She thought of the snoopy people Tik-Tok had mentioned. That camera was probably just the kind of thing they’d like. So she turned her butt to the camera, bent over, and farted at it.

  She went to her mother’s room, and sat beside her bed telling her all about little Albert’s funeral. When she felt she’d been there long enough she kissed her dry cheek and ran out of the room.

  Up one level were the dogs. She went from room to room, letting them out, accompanied by a growing horde of barking jumping Shelties. Each was deliriously happy to see her, as usual, and she had to speak sharply to a few when they kept licking her face. They stopped on command; Charlie’s dogs were all good dogs.

  When she was done there were seventy-two almost identical dogs yapping and running along with her in a sable-and-white tide. They rushed by another camera with a glowing red light, which panned to follow them up, up, and out of sight around the gentle curve of Tango Charlie.

  Bach got off the slidewalk at the 34strasse intersection. She worked her way through the crowds in the shopping arcade, then entered the Intersection-park, where the trees were plastic but the winos sleeping on the benches were real. She was on Level Eight. Up here, 34strasse was taprooms and casinos, secondhand stores, missions, pawnshops, and cheap bordellos. Free-lance whores, naked or in elaborate costumes according to their specialty, eyed her and sometimes propositioned her. Hope springs eternal; these men and women saw her every day on her way home. She waved to a few she had met, though never in a professional capacity.

  It was a kilometer and a half to Count Otto Von Zeppelin Residential Corridor. She walked beside the slidewalk. Typically, it operated two days out of seven. Her own quarters were at the end of Count Otto, apartment 80. She palmed the printpad, and went in.

  She knew she was lucky to be living in such large quarters on a T/A salary. It was two rooms, plus a large bath and a tiny kitchen. She had grown up in a smaller place, shared by a lot more people. The rent was so low because her bed was only ten meters from an arterial tubeway; the floor vibrated loudly every thirty seconds as the capsules rushed by. It didn’t bother her. She had spent her first ten years sleeping within a meter of a regional air-circulation station, just beyond a thin metal apartment wall. It left her with a hearing loss she had been too poor to correct until recently.

  For most of her ten years in Otto 80 she had lived alone. Five times, for periods varying from two weeks to six months, she shared with a lover, as she was doing now.

  When she came in, Ralph was in the other room. She could hear the steady huffing and puffing as he worked out. Bach went to the bathroom and ran a tub as hot as she could stand it, eased herself in, and stretched out. Her blue paper uniform brief floated to the
surface; she skimmed, wadded up, and tossed the soggy mass toward the toilet.

  She missed. It had been that sort of day.

  She lowered herself until her chin was in the water. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead. She smiled, and mopped her face with a washcloth.

  After a while Ralph appeared in the doorway. She could hear him, but didn’t open her eyes.

  “I didn’t hear you come in,” he said.

  “Next time I’ll bring a brass band.”

  He just kept breathing heavy, gradually getting it under control. That was her most vivid impression of Ralph, she realized: heavy breathing. That, and lots and lots of sweat. And it was no surprise he had nothing to say. Ralph was oblivious to sarcasm. It made him tiresome, sometimes, but with shoulders like his he didn’t need to be witty. Bach opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  Luna’s low gravity made it hard for all but the most fanatical to aspire to the muscle mass one could develop on the Earth. The typical Lunarian was taller than Earth-normal, and tended to be thinner.

  As a much younger woman Bach had become involved, very much against her better judgment, with an earthling of the species “jock.” It hadn’t worked out, but she still bore the legacy in a marked preference for beefcake. This doomed her to consorting with only two kinds of men: well-muscled mesomorphs from Earth, and single-minded Lunarians who thought nothing of pumping iron for ten hours a day. Ralph was one of the latter.

  There was no rule, so far as Bach could discover, that such specimens had to be mental midgets. That was a stereotype. It also happened, in Ralph’s case, to be true. While not actually mentally defective, Ralph Goldstein’s idea of a tough intellectual problem was how many kilos to bench press. His spare time was spent brushing his teeth or shaving his chest or looking at pictures of himself in body-building magazines. Bach knew for a fact that Ralph thought the Earth and Sun revolved around Luna.

  He had only two real interests: lifting weights, and making love to Anna-Louise Bach. She didn’t mind that at all.

  Ralph had a swastika tattooed on his penis. Early on, Bach had determined that he had no notion of the history of the symbol; he had seen it in an old film and thought it looked nice. It amused her to consider what his ancestors might have thought of the adornment.

  He brought a stool close to the tub and sat on it, then stepped on a floor button. The tub was Bach’s chief luxury. It did a lot of fun things. Now it lifted her on a long rack until she was half out of the water. Ralph started washing that half. She watched his soapy hands.

  “Did you go to the doctor?” he asked her.

  “Yeah, I finally did.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Said I have cancer.”

  “How bad?”

  “Real bad. It’s going to cost a bundle. I don’t know if my insurance will cover it all.” She closed her eyes and sighed. It annoyed her to have him be right about something. He had nagged her for months to get her medical check-up.

  “Will you get it taken care of tomorrow?”

  “No, Ralph, I don’t have time tomorrow. Next week, I promise. This thing has come up, but it’ll be all over next week, one way or another.”

  He frowned, but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. The human body, its care and maintenance, was the one subject Ralph knew more about than she did, but even she knew it would be cheaper in the long run to have the work done now.

  She felt so lazy he had to help her turn over. Damn, but he was good at this. She had never asked him to do it; he seemed to enjoy it. His strong hands dug into her back and found each sore spot, as if by magic. Presently, it wasn’t sore anymore.

  “What’s this thing that’s come up?”

  “I . . . can’t tell you about it. Classified, for now.”

  He didn’t protest, nor did he show surprise, though it was the first time Bach’s work had taken her into the realm of secrecy.

  It was annoying, really. One of Ralph’s charms was that he was a good listener. While he wouldn’t understand the technical side of anything, he could sometimes offer surprisingly good advice on personal problems. More often, he showed the knack of synthesizing and expressing things Bach had already known, but had not allowed herself to see.

  Well, she could tell him part of it.

  “There’s this satellite,” she began. “Tango Charlie. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “That’s a funny name for a satellite.”

  “It’s what we call it on the tracking logs. It never really had a name—well, it did, a long time ago, but GWA took it over and turned it into a research facility and an Exec’s retreat, and they just let it be known as TC-38. They got it in a war with Telecommunion, part of the peace treaty. They got Charlie, the Bubble, a couple other big wheels.

  “The thing about Charlie . . . it’s coming down. In about six days, it’s going to spread itself all over the Farside. Should be a pretty big bang.”

  Ralph continued to knead the backs of her legs. It was never a good idea to rush him. He would figure things out in his own way, at his own speed, or he wouldn’t figure them out at all.

  “Why is it coming down?”

  “It’s complicated. It’s been derelict for a long time. For a while it had the capacity to make course corrections, but it looks like it’s run out of reaction mass, or the computer that’s supposed to stabilize it isn’t working anymore. For a couple of years it hasn’t been making corrections.”

  “Why does it—”

  “A Lunar orbit is never stable. There’s the Earth tugging on the satellite, the solar wind, mass concentrations of Luna’s surface . . . a dozen things that add up, over time. Charlie’s in a very eccentric orbit now. Last time it came within a kilometer of the surface. Next time it’s gonna miss us by a gnat’s whisker, and the time after that, it hits.”

  Ralph stopped massaging. When Bach glanced at him, she saw he was alarmed. He had just understood that a very large object was about to hit his home planet, and he didn’t like the idea.

  “Don’t worry,” Bach said, “there’s a surface installation that might get some damage from the debris, but Charlie won’t come within a hundred kilometers of any settlements. We got nothing to worry about on that score.”

  “Then why don’t you just . . . push it back up . . . you know, go up there and do . . .” Whatever it is you do, Bach finished for him. He had no real idea what kept a satellite in orbit in the first place, but knew there were people who handled such matters all the time.

  There were other questions he might have asked, as well. Why leave Tango Charlie alone all these years? Why not salvage it? Why allow things to get to this point at all?

  All those questions brought her back to classified ground.

  She sighed, and turned over.

  “I wish we could,” she said, sincerely. She noted that the swastika was saluting her, and that seemed like a fine idea, so she let him carry her into the bedroom.

  And as he made love to her she kept seeing that incredible tide of Shelties with the painted child in the middle.

  After the run, ten laps around the Promenade Deck, Charlie led the pack to the Japanese Garden and let them run free through the tall weeds and vegetable patches. Most of the trees in the Garden were dead. The whole place had once been a formal and carefully tended place of meditation. Four men from Tokyo had been employed full time to take care of it. Now the men were buried under the temple gate, the ponds were covered in green scum, the gracefully arched bridge had collapsed, and the flower beds were choked with dog turds.

  Charlie had to spend part of each morning in the flower beds, feeding Mister Shitface. This was a cylindrical structure with a big round hole in its side, an intake for the wheel’s recycling system. It ate dog feces, weeds, dead plants, soil, scraps . . . practically anything Charlie shoveled into it. The cylinder was painted green, like a frog, and had a face painted on it, with big lips outlining the hole. Charlie sang. The Shit-Shoveling Song as she worked.


  Tik-Tok had taught her the song, and he used to sing it with her. But a long time ago he had gone deaf in the Japanese Garden. Usually, all Charlie had to do was talk, and Tik-Tok would hear. But there were some places—and more of them every year—where Tik-Tok was deaf.

  “‘. . . Raise dat laig,’” Charlie puffed.“‘Lif dat tail, If I gets in trouble will you go my bail?’”

  She stopped, and mopped her face with a red bandanna. As usual, there were dogs sitting on the edge of the flower bed watching Charlie work. Their ears were lifted. They found this endlessly fascinating. Charlie just wished it would be over. But you took the bad with the good. She started shoveling again.

  “‘I gets weary, O’ all dis shovelin’ . . .’”

  When she was finished she went back on the Promenade.

  “What’s next?” she asked.

  “Plenty,” said Tik-Tok. “The funeral put you behind schedule.”

  He directed her to the infirmary with the new litter. There they weighed, photographed, X-rayed, and catalogued each puppy. The results were put on file for later registration with the American Kennel Club. It quickly became apparent that Conrad was going to be a cull. He had an overbite. With the others it was too early to tell. She and Tik-Tok would examine them weekly, and their standards were an order of magnitude more stringent than the AKC’s. Most of her culls would easily have best of breed in a show, and as for her breeding animals . . .

  “I ought to be able to write Champion on most of these pedigrees.”

  “You must be patient.”

  Patient, yeah, she’d heard that before. She took another drink of Scotch. Champion Fuchsia O’Charlie Station, she thought. Now that would really make a breeder’s day.

  After the puppies, there were two from an earlier litter who were now ready for a final evaluation. Charlie brought them in, and she and Tik-Tok argued long and hard about points so fine few people would have seen them at all. In the end, they decided both would be sterilized.

  Then it was noon feeding. Charlie never enforced discipline here. She let them jump and bark and nip at each other, as long as it didn’t get too rowdy. She led them all to the cafeteria (and was tracked by three wall cameras), where the troughs of hard kibble and soft soyaburger were already full. Today it was chicken-flavored, Charlie’s favorite.