The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Blume said nothing. Bach watched them both for a while in the resulting silence, finally understanding just how much Wilhelm feared this thing.

  There was a lot more. The meeting went on for three hours, and everyone got a chance to speak. Eventually, the problem was outlined to everyone’s satisfaction.

  Tango Charlie could not be boarded. It could be destroyed. (Some time was spent debating the wisdom of the original interdiction order—beating a dead horse, as far as Bach was concerned—and questioning whether it might be possible to countermand it.)

  But things could leave Tango Charlie. It would only be necessary to withdraw the robot probes that had watched so long and faithfully, and the survivors could be evacuated.

  That left the main question. Should they be evacuated?

  (The fact that only one survivor had been sighted so far was not mentioned. Everyone assumed others would show up sooner or later. After all, it was simply not possible that just one eight-year-old girl could be the only occupant of a station no one had entered or left for thirty years.)

  Wilhelm, obviously upset but clinging strongly to her position, advocated blowing up the station at once. There was some support for this, but only about ten percent of the group.

  The eventual decision, which Bach had predicted before the meeting even started, was to do nothing at the moment.

  After all, there were almost five whole days to keep thinking about it.

  “There’s a call waiting for you,” Steiner said, when she got back to the monitoring room. “The switchboard says it’s important.”

  Bach went into her office—wishing yet again for one with walls—flipped a switch.

  “Bach,” she said. Nothing came on the vision screen.

  “I’m curious,” said a woman’s voice. “Is this the Anna-Louise Bach who worked in The Bubble ten years ago?”

  For a moment, Bach was too surprised to speak, but she felt a wave of heat as blood rushed to her face. She knew the voice.

  “Hello? Are you there?”

  “Why no vision?” she asked.

  “First, are you alone? And is your instrument secure?”

  “The instrument is secure, if yours is.” Bach flipped another switch, and a privacy hood descended around her screen. The sounds of the room faded as a sonic scrambler began operating. “And I’m alone.”

  Megan Galloway’s face appeared on the screen. One part of Bach’s mind noted that she hadn’t changed much, except that her hair was curly and red.

  “I thought you might not wish to be seen with me,” Galloway said. Then she smiled. “Hello, Anna-Louise. How are you?”

  “I don’t think it really matters if I’m seen with you,” Bach said.

  “No? Then would you care to comment on why the New Dresden Police Department, among other government agencies, is allowing an eight-year-old child to go without the rescue she so obviously needs?”

  Bach said nothing.

  “Would you comment on the rumor that the NDPD does not intend to effect the child’s rescue? That, if it can get away with it, the NDPD will let the child be smashed to pieces?”

  Still Bach waited.

  Galloway sighed, and ran a hand through her hair.

  “You’re the most exasperating woman I’ve ever known, Bach,” she said. “Listen, don’t you even want to try to talk me out of going with the story?”

  Bach almost said something, but decided to wait once more.

  “If you want to, you can meet me at the end of your shift. The Mozartplatz. I’m on the Great Northern, suite 1, but I’ll see you in the bar on the top deck.”

  “I’ll be there,” Bach said, and broke the connection.

  Charlie sang the Hangover Song most of the morning. It was not one of her favorites.

  There was penance to do, of course. Tik-Tok made her drink a foul glop that—she had to admit—did do wonders for her headache. When she was done she was drenched in sweat, but her hangover was gone.

  “You’re lucky,” Tik-Tok said. “Your hangovers are never severe.”

  “They’re severe enough for me,” Charlie said.

  He made her wash her hair, too.

  After that, she spent some time with her mother. She always valued that time. Tik-Tok was a good friend, mostly, but he was so bossy. Charlie’s mother never shouted at her, never scolded or lectured. She simply listened. True, she wasn’t very active. But it was nice to have somebody just to talk to. One day, Charlie hoped, her mother would walk again. Tik-Tok said that was unlikely.

  Then she had to round up the dogs and take them for their morning run.

  And everywhere she went, the red camera eyes followed her. Finally she had enough. She stopped, put her fists on her hips, and shouted at a camera.

  “You stop that!” she said.

  The camera started to make noises. At first she couldn’t understand anything, then some words started to come through.

  “. . . lie, Tango . . . Foxtrot . . . in, please. Tango Charlie . . .”

  “Hey, that’s my name.”

  The camera continued to buzz and spit noise at her.

  “Tik-Tok, is that you?”

  “I’m afraid not, Charlie.”

  “What’s going on, then?”

  “It’s those nosy people. They’ve been watching you, and now they’re trying to talk to you. But I’m holding them off. I don’t think they’ll bother you, if you just ignore the cameras.”

  “But why are you fighting them?”

  “I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered.”

  Maybe there was some of that hangover still around. Anyway, Charlie got real angry at Tik-Tok, and called him some names he didn’t approve of. She knew she’d pay for it later, but for now Tik-Tok was pissed, and in no mood to reason with her. So he let her have what she wanted, on the principle that getting what you want is usually the worst thing that can happen to anybody.

  “Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Come in, please. Tango—”

  “Come in where?” Charlie asked, reasonably. “And my name isn’t Tango.”

  Bach was so surprised to have the little girl actually reply that for a moment she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Uh . . . it’s just an expression,” Bach said. “Come in . . . that’s radio talk for ‘please answer.’”

  “Then you should say please answer,” the little girl pointed out.

  “Maybe you’re right. My name is Bach. You can call me Anna-Louise, if you’d like. We’ve been trying to—”

  “Why should I?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Excuse you for what?”

  Bach looked at the screen and drummed her fingers silently for a short time. Around her in the monitoring room, there was not a sound to be heard. At last, she managed a smile.

  “Maybe we started off on the wrong foot.”

  “Which foot would that be?”

  The little girl just kept staring at her. Her expression was not amused, not hostile, not really argumentative. Then why was the conversation suddenly so maddening?

  “Could I make a statement?” Bach tried.

  “I don’t know. Can you?”

  Bach’s fingers didn’t tap this time; they were balled up in a fist.

  “I shall, anyway. My name is Anna-Louise Bach. I’m talking to you from New Dresden, Luna. That’s a city on the moon, which you can probably see—”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Fine. I’ve been trying to contact you for many hours, but your computer has been fighting me all the time.”

  “That’s right. He said so.”

  “Now, I can’t explain why he’s been fighting me, but—”

  “I know why. He thinks you’re nosy.”

  “I won’t deny that. But we’re trying to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because . . . it’s what we do. Now if you could—”

  “Hey. Shut up, will you?”

  Bach did so. With forty-five oth
er people at their scattered screens, Bach watched the little girl—the horrible little girl, as she was beginning to think of her—take a long pull from the green glass bottle of Scotch whiskey. She belched, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and scratched between her legs. When she was done, she smelled her fingers.

  She seemed about to say something, then cocked her head, listening to something Bach couldn’t hear.

  “That’s a good idea,” she said, then got up and ran away. She was just vanishing around the curve of the deck when Hoeffer burst into the room, trailed by six members of his advisory team. Bach leaned back in her chair, and tried to fend off thoughts of homicide.

  “I was told you’d established contact,” Hoeffer said, leaning over Bach’s shoulder in a way she absolutely detested. He peered at the lifeless scene. “What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know. She said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ got up, and ran off.”

  “I told you to keep her here until I got a chance to talk to her.”

  “I tried,” Bach said.

  “You should have—”

  “I have her on camera nineteen,” Steiner called out.

  Everyone watched as the technicians followed the girl’s progress on the working cameras. They saw her enter a room to emerge in a moment with a big-screen monitor. Bach tried to call her each time she passed a camera, but it seemed only the first one was working for incoming calls. She passed through the range of four cameras before coming back to the original, where she carefully unrolled the monitor and tacked it to a wall, then payed out the cord and plugged it in very close to the wall camera Bach’s team had been using. She unshipped this camera from its mount. The picture jerked around for awhile, and finally steadied. The girl had set it on the floor.

  “Stabilize that,” Bach told her team, and the picture on her monitor righted itself. She now had a worm’s-eye view of the corridor. The girl sat down in front of the camera, and grinned.

  “Now I can see you,” she said. Then she frowned. “If you send me a picture.”

  “Bring a camera over here,” Bach ordered.

  While it was being set up, Hoeffer shouldered her out of the way and sat in her chair.

  “There you are,” the girl said. And again, she frowned. “That’s funny. I was sure you were a girl. Did somebody cut your balls off?”

  Now it was Hoeffer’s turn to be speechless. There were a few badly suppressed giggles; Bach quickly silenced them with her most ferocious glare, while giving thanks no one would ever know how close she had come to bursting into laughter.

  “Never mind that,” Hoeffer said. “My name is Hoeffer. Would you go get your parents? We need to talk to them.”

  “No,” said the girl. “And no.”

  “What’s that?”

  “No, I won’t get them,” the girl clarified, “and no, you don’t need to talk to them.”

  Hoeffer had little experience dealing with children.

  “Now, please be reasonable,” he began, in a wheedling tone. “We’re trying to help you, after all. We have to talk to your parents, to find out more about your situation. After that, we’re going to help get you out of there.”

  “I want to talk to the lady,” the girl said.

  “She’s not here.”

  “I think you’re lying. She talked to me just a minute ago.”

  “I’m in charge.”

  “In charge of what?”

  “Just in charge. Now, go get your parents!”

  They all watched as she got up and moved closer to the camera. All they could see at first was her feet. Then water began to splash on the lens.

  Nothing could stop the laughter this time, as Charlie urinated on the camera.

  For three hours Bach watched the screens. Every time the girl passed the prime camera Bach called out to her. She had thought about it carefully. Bach, like Hoeffer, did not know a lot about children. She consulted briefly with the child psychologist on Hoeffer’s team and the two of them outlined a tentative game plan. The guy seemed to know what he was talking about and, even better, his suggestions agreed with what Bach’s common sense told her should work.

  So she never said anything that might sound like an order. While Hoeffer seethed in the background, Bach spoke quietly and reasonably every time the child showed up. “I’m still here,” she would say. “We could talk,” was a gentle suggestion. “You want to play?”

  She longed to use one line the psychologist suggested, one that would put Bach and the child on the same team, so to speak. The line was “The idiot’s gone. You want to talk now?”

  Eventually the girl began glancing at the camera. She had a different dog every time she came by. At first Bach didn’t realize this, as they were almost completely identical. Then she noticed they came in slightly different sizes.

  “That’s a beautiful dog,” she said. The girl looked up, then started away. “I’d like to have a dog like that. What’s its name?”

  “This is Madam’s Sweet Brown Sideburns. Say hi, Brownie.” The dog yipped. “Sit up for Mommy, Brownie. Now roll over. Stand tall. Now go in a circle, Brownie, that’s a good doggy, walk on your hind legs. Now jump, Brownie. Jump, jump, jump!” The dog did exactly as he was told, leaping into the air and turning a flip each time the girl commanded it. Then he sat down, pink tongue hanging out, eyes riveted on his master.

  “I’m impressed,” Bach said, and it was the literal truth. Like other citizens of Luna, Bach had never seen a wild animal, had never owned a pet, knew animals only from the municipal zoo, where care was taken not to interfere with natural behaviors. She had had no idea animals could be so smart, and no inkling of how much work had gone into the exhibition she had just seen.

  “It’s nothing,” the girl said. “You should see his father. Is this Anna-Louise again?”

  “Yes, it is. What’s your name?”

  “Charlie. You ask a lot of questions.”

  “I guess I do. I just want to—”

  “I’d like to ask some questions, too.”

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  “I have six of them, to start off with. One, why should I call you Anna-Louise? Two, why should I excuse you? Three, what is the wrong foot? Four . . . but that’s not a question, really, since you already proved you can make a statement, if you wish, by doing so. Four, why are you trying to help me? Five, why do you want to see my parents?”

  It took Bach a moment to realize that these were the questions Charlie had asked in their first, maddening conversation, questions she had not gotten answers for. And they were in their original order.

  And they didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.

  But the child psychologist was making motions with his hands, and nodding his encouragement to Bach, so she started in.

  “You should call me Anna-Louise because . . . it’s my first name, and friends call each other by their first names.”

  “Are we friends?”

  “Well, I’d like to be your friend.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, you don’t have to call me Anna-Louise if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t mind. Do I have to be your friend?”

  “Not if you don’t want to.”

  “Why should I want to?”

  And it went on like that. Each question spawned a dozen more, and a further dozen sprang from each of those. Bach had figured to get Charlie’s six—make that five—questions out of the way quickly, then get to the important things. She soon began to think she’d never answer even the first question.

  She was involved in a long and awkward explanation of friendship, going over the ground for the tenth time, when words appeared at the bottom of her screen.

  Put your foot down, they said. She glanced up at the child psychologist. He was nodding, but making quieting gestures with his hands. “But gently,” the man whispered.

  Right, Bach thought. Put your foot down. And get off on the wrong foot again.

  “That’s enough
of that,” Bach said abruptly.

  “Why?” asked Charlie.

  “Because I’m tired of that. I want to do something else.”

  “All right,” Charlie said. Bach saw Hoeffer waving frantically, just out of camera range.

  “Uh . . . Captain Hoeffer is still here. He’d like to talk to you.”

  “That’s just too bad for him. I don’t want to talk to him.”

  Good for you, Bach thought. But Hoeffer was still waving.

  “Why not? He’s not so bad.” Bach felt ill, but avoided showing it.

  “He lied to me. He said you’d gone away.”

  “Well, he’s in charge here, so—”

  “I’m warning you,” Charlie said, and waited a dramatic moment, shaking her finger at the screen. “You put that poo-poo-head back on, and I won’t come in ever again.”

  Bach looked helplessly at Hoeffer, who at last nodded.

  “I want to talk about dogs,” Charlie announced.

  So that’s what they did for the next hour. Bach was thankful she had studied up on the subject when the dead puppy first appeared. Even so, there was no doubt as to who was the authority. Charlie knew everything there was to know about dogs. And of all the experts Hoeffer had called in, not one could tell Bach anything about the goddamn animals. She wrote a note and handed it to Steiner, who went off to find a zoologist.

  Finally Bach was able to steer the conversation around to Charlie’s parents.

  “My father is dead,” Charlie admitted.

  “I’m sorry,” Bach said. “When did he die?”

  “Oh, a long time ago. He was a spaceship pilot, and one day he went off in his spaceship and never came back.” For a moment she looked far away. Then she shrugged. “I was real young.”

  Fantasy, the psychologist wrote at the bottom of her screen, but Bach had already figured that out. Since Charlie had to have been born many years after the Charlie Station Plague, her father could not have flown any spaceships.

  “What about your mother?”

  Charlie was silent for a long time, and Bach began to wonder if she was losing contact with her. At last, she looked up.