The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “You want to talk to my mother?”

  “I’d like that very much.”

  “Okay. But that’s all for today. I’ve got work to do. You’ve already put me way behind.”

  “Just bring your mother here, and I’ll talk to her, and you can do your work.”

  “No. I can’t do that. But I’ll take you to her. Then I’ll work, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Bach started to protest that tomorrow was not soon enough, but Charlie was not listening. The camera was picked up, and the picture bounced around as she carried it with her. All Bach could see was a very unsteady upside-down view of the corridor.

  “She’s going into Room 350,” said Steiner. “She’s been in there twice, and she stayed awhile both times.”

  Bach said nothing. The camera jerked wildly for a moment, then steadied.

  “This is my mother,” Charlie said. “Mother, this is my friend, Anna-Louise.”

  The Mozartplatz had not existed when Bach was a child. Construction on it had begun when she was five, and the first phase was finished when she was fifteen. Tenants had begun moving in soon after that. During each succeeding year new sectors had been opened, and though a structure as large as the Mozartplatz would never be finished—two major sectors were currently under renovation—it had been essentially completed six years ago.

  It was a virtual copy of the Soleri-class arcology atriums that had spouted like mushrooms on the Earth in the last four decades, with the exception that on Earth you built up, and on Luna you went down.

  First dig a trench fifteen miles long and two miles deep. Vary the width of the trench, but never let it get narrower than one mile, nor broader than five. In some places make the base of the trench wider than the top, so the walls of rock loom outward. Now put a roof over it, fill it with air, and start boring tunnels into the sides. Turn those tunnels into apartments and shops and everything else humans need in a city. You end up with dizzying vistas, endless terraces that reach higher than the eye can see, a madness of light and motion and spaces too wide to echo.

  Do all that, and you still wouldn’t have the Mozartplatz. To approach that ridiculous level of grandeur there were still a lot of details to attend to. Build four mile-high skyscrapers to use as table legs to support the midair golf course. Criss-cross the open space with bridges having no visible means of support, and encrusted with shops and homes that cling like barnacles. Suspend apartment buildings from silver balloons that rise half the day and descend the other half, reachable only by glider. Put in a fountain with more water than Niagara, and a ski slope on a huge spiral ramp. Dig a ten-mile lake in the middle, with a bustling port at each end for the luxury ships that ply back and forth, attach runways to balconies so residents can fly to their front door, stud the interior with zeppelin ports and railway stations and hanging gardens . . . and you still don’t have Mozartplatz, but you’re getting closer.

  The upper, older parts of New Dresden, the parts she had grown up in, were spartan and claustrophobic. Long before her time Lunarians had begun to build larger when they could afford it. The newer, lower parts of the city were studded with downscale versions of the Mozartplatz, open spaces half a mile wide and maybe fifty levels deep. This was just a logical extension.

  She felt she ought to dislike it because it was so overdone, so fantastically huge, such a waste of space . . . and, oddly, so standardized. It was a taste of the culture of old Earth, where Paris looked just like Tokyo. She had been to the new Beethovenplatz at Clavius, and it looked just like this place. Six more arco-malls were being built in other Lunar cities.

  And Bach liked it. She couldn’t help herself. One day she’d like to live here.

  She left her tube capsule in the bustling central station, went to a terminal and queried the location of the Great Northern. It was docked at the southern port, five miles away.

  It was claimed that any form of non-animal transportation humans had ever used was available in the Mozartplatz. Bach didn’t doubt it. She had tried most of them. But when she had a little time, as she did today, she liked to walk. She didn’t have time to walk five miles, but compromised by walking to the trolley station a mile away.

  Starting out on a brick walkway, she moved to cool marble, then over a glass bridge with lights flashing down inside. This took her to a boardwalk, then down to a beach where machines made four-foot breakers, each carrying a new load of surfers. The sand was fine and hot between her toes. Mozartplatz was a sensual delight for the feet. Few Lunarians ever wore shoes, and they could walk all day through old New Dresden and feel nothing but different types of carpeting and composition flooring.

  The one thing Bach didn’t like about the place was the weather. She thought it was needless, preposterous, and inconvenient. It began to rain and, as usual, caught her off guard. She hurried to a shelter where, for a tenthMark, she rented an umbrella, but it was too late for her paper uniform. As she stood in front of a blower, drying off, she wadded it up and threw it away, then hurried to catch the trolley, nude but for her creaking leather equipment belt and police cap. Even this stripped down, she was more dressed than a quarter of the people around her.

  The conductor gave her a paper mat to put on the artificial leather seat. There were cut flowers in crystal vases attached to the sides of the car. Bach sat by an open window and leaned one arm outside in the cool breeze, watching the passing scenery. She craned her neck when the Graf Zeppelin muttered by overhead. They said it was an exact copy of the first world-girdling dirigible, and she had no reason to doubt it.

  It was a great day to be traveling. If not for one thing, it would be perfect. Her mind kept coming back to Charlie and her mother.

  She had forgotten just how big the Great Northern was. She stopped twice on her way down the long dock to board it, once to buy a lime sherbet ice cream cone, and again to purchase a skirt. As she fed coins into the clothing machine, she looked at the great metal wall of the ship. It was painted white, trimmed in gold. There were five smokestacks and six towering masts. Midships was the housing for the huge paddlewheel. Multicolored pennants snapped in the breeze from the forest of rigging. It was quite a boat.

  She finished her cone, punched in her size, then selected a simple above-the-knee skirt in a gaudy print of tropical fruit and palm trees. The machine hummed as it cut the paper to size, hemmed it and strengthened the waist with elastic, then rolled it out into her hand. She held it up against herself. It was good, but the equipment belt spoiled it.

  There were lockers along the deck. She used yet another coin to rent one. In it went the belt and cap. She took the pin out of her hair and shook it down around her shoulders, fussed with it for a moment, then decided it would have to do. She fastened the skirt with its single button, wearing it low on her hips, south-seas style. She walked a few steps, studying the effect. The skirt tended to leave one leg bare when she walked, which felt right.

  “Look at you,” she chided herself, under her breath. “You think you look all right to meet a world-famous, glamorous tube personality? Who you happen to despise?” She thought about reclaiming her belt, then decided that would be foolish. The fact was it was a glorious day, a beautiful ship, and she was feeling more alive than she had in months.

  She climbed the gangplank and was met at the top by a man in an outlandish uniform. It was all white, covered everything but his face, and was festooned with gold braid and black buttons. It looked hideously uncomfortable, but he didn’t seem to mind it. That was one of the odd things about Mozartplatz. In jobs at places like the Great Northern, people often worked in period costumes, though it meant wearing shoes or things even more grotesque.

  He made a small bow and tipped his hat, then offered her a hibiscus, which he helped her pin in her hair. She smiled at him. Bach was a sucker for that kind of treatment—and knew it—perhaps because she got so little of it.

  “I’m meeting someone in the bar on the top deck.”

  “If madame would walk thi
s way . . .” He gestured, then led her along the side rail toward the stern of the ship. The deck underfoot was gleaming, polished teak.

  She was shown to a wicker table near the rail. The steward held the chair out for her, and took her order. She relaxed, looking up at the vast reaches of the arcomall, feeling the bright sunlight washing over her body, smelling the salt water, hearing the lap of waves against wood pilings. The air was full of bright balloons, gliders, putt-putting nano-lights, and people in muscle-powered flight harnesses. Not too far away, a fish broke the surface. She grinned at it.

  Her drink arrived, with sprigs of mint and several straws and a tiny parasol. It was good. She looked around. There were only a few people out here on the deck. One couple was dressed in full period costume, but the rest looked normal enough. She settled on one guy sitting alone across the deck. He had a good pair of shoulders on him. When she caught his eye, she made a hand signal that meant “I might be available.” He ignored it, which annoyed her for a while, until he was joined by a tiny woman who couldn’t have been five feet tall. She shrugged. No accounting for taste.

  She knew what was happening to her. It was silly, but she felt like going on the hunt. It often happened to her when something shocking or unpleasant happened at work. The police headshrinker said it was compensation, and not that uncommon.

  With a sigh, she turned her mind away from that. It seemed there was no place else for it to go but back into that room on Charlie Station, and to the thing in the bed.

  Charlie knew her mother was very sick. She had been that way “a long, long time.” She left the camera pointed at her mother while she went away to deal with her dogs. The doctors had gathered around and studied the situation for quite some time, then issued their diagnosis.

  She was dead, of course, by any definition medical science had accepted for the last century.

  Someone had wired her to a robot doctor, probably during the final stages of the epidemic. It was capable of doing just about anything to keep a patient alive and was not programmed to understand brain death. That was a decision left to the human doctor, when he or she arrived.

  The doctor had never arrived. The doctor was dead, and the thing that had been Charlie’s mother lived on. Bach wondered if the verb “to live” had ever been so abused.

  All of its arms and legs were gone, victims of gangrene. Not much else could be seen of it, but a forest of tubes and wires entered and emerged. Fluids seeped slowly through the tissue. Machines had taken over the function of every vital organ. There were patches of greenish skin here and there, including one on the side of its head which Charlie had kissed before leaving. Bach hastily took another drink as she recalled that, and signaled the waiter for another.

  Blume and Wilhelm had been fascinated. They were dubious that any part of it could still be alive, even in the sense of cell cultures. There was no way to find out, because the Charlie Station computer—Tik-Tok, to the little girl—refused access to the autodoctor’s data outputs.

  But there was a very interesting question that emerged as soon as everyone was convinced Charlie’s mother had died thirty years ago.

  “Hello, Anna-Louise. Sorry I’m late.”

  She looked up and saw Megan Galloway approaching.

  Bach had not met the woman in just over ten years, though she, like almost everyone else, had seen her frequently on the tube.

  Galloway was tall, for an Earth woman, and not as thin as Bach remembered her. But that was understandable, considering the recent change in her life. Her hair was fiery red and curly, which it had not been ten years ago. It might even be her natural color; she was almost nude, and the colors matched, though that didn’t have to mean much. But it looked right on her.

  She wore odd-looking silver slippers, and her upper body was traced by a quite lovely filigree of gilded, curving lines. It was some sort of tattoo, and it was all that was left of the machine called the Golden Gypsy. It was completely symbolic. Being the Golden Gypsy was worth a lot of money to Galloway.

  Megan Galloway had broken her neck while still in her teens. She became part of the early development of a powered exoskeleton, research that led to the hideously expensive and beautiful Golden Gypsy, of which only one was ever built. It abolished wheelchairs and crutches for her. It returned her to life, in her own mind, and it made her a celebrity.

  An odd by-product to learning to use an exoskeleton was the development of skills that made it possible to excel in the new technology of emotional recording: the “feelies.” The world was briefly treated to the sight of quadriplegics dominating a new art form. It made Galloway famous as the best of the Trans-sisters. It made her rich, as her trans-tapes out-sold everyone else’s. She made herself extremely rich by investing wisely, then she and a friend of Bach’s had made her fabulously rich by being the first to capture the experience of falling in love on a trans-tape.

  In a sense, Galloway had cured herself. She had always donated a lot of money to neurological research, never really expecting it to pay off. But it did, and three years ago she had thrown the Golden Gypsy away forever.

  Bach had thought her cure was complete, but now she wondered. Galloway carried a beautiful crystal cane. It didn’t seem to be for show. She leaned on it heavily, and made her way through the tables slowly. Bach started to get up.

  “No, no, don’t bother,” Galloway said. “It takes me a while but I get there.” She flashed that famous smile with the gap between her front teeth. There was something about the woman; the smile was so powerful that Bach found herself smiling back. “It’s so good to walk I don’t mind taking my time.”

  She let the waiter pull the chair back for her, and sat down with a sigh of relief.

  “I’ll have a Devil’s Nitelite,” she told him. “And get another of whatever that was for her.”

  “A banana Daquiri,” Bach said, surprised to find her own drink was almost gone, and a little curious to find out what a Devil’s Nitelite was.

  Galloway stretched as she looked up at the balloons and gliders.

  “It’s great to get back to the moon,” she said. She made a small gesture that indicated her body. “Great to get out of my clothes. I always feel so free in here. Funny thing, though. I just can’t get used to not wearing shoes.” She lifted one foot to display a slipper. “I feel too vulnerable without them. Like I’m going to get stepped on.”

  “You can take your clothes off on Earth, too,” Bach pointed out.

  “Some places, sure. But aside from the beach, there’s no place where it’s fashionable, don’t you see?”

  Bach didn’t, but decided not to make a thing out of it. She knew social nudity had evolved in Luna because it never got hot or cold, and that Earth would never embrace it as fully as Lunarians had.

  The drinks arrived. Bach sipped hers, and eyed Galloway’s, which produced a luminous smoke ring every ten seconds. Galloway chattered on about nothing in particular for a while.

  “Why did you agree to see me?” Galloway asked, at last.

  “Shouldn’t that be my question?”

  Galloway raised an eyebrow, and Bach went on.

  “You’ve got a hell of a story. I can’t figure out why you didn’t just run with it. Why arrange a meeting with someone you barely knew ten years ago, and haven’t seen since, and never liked even back then?”

  “I always liked you, Anna-Louise,” Galloway said. She looked up at the sky. For a while she watched a couple pedaling a skycycle, then she looked at Bach again. “I feel like I owe you something. Anyway, when I saw your name I thought I should check with you. I don’t want to cause you any trouble.” Suddenly she looked angry. “I don’t need the story, Bach. I don’t need any story, I’m too big for that. I can let it go or I can use it, it makes no difference.”

  “Oh, that’s cute,” Bach said. “Maybe I don’t understand how you pay your debts. Maybe they do it different on Earth.”

  She thought Galloway was going to get up and leave. She had reached for
her cane, then thought better of it.

  “I gather it doesn’t matter, then, if I go with the story.”

  Bach shrugged. She hadn’t come here to talk about Charlie, anyway.

  “How is Q.M., by the way?” she said.

  Galloway didn’t look away this time. She sat in silence for almost a minute, searching Bach’s eyes.

  “I thought I was ready for that question,” she said at last. “He’s living in New Zealand, on a commune. From what my agents tell me, he’s happy. They don’t watch television, they don’t marry. They worship and they screw a lot.”

  “Did you really give him half of the profits on that . . . that tape?”

  “Did give him, am giving him, and will continue to give him until the day I die. And it’s half the gross, my dear, which is another thing entirely. He gets half of every Mark that comes in. He’s made more money off it than I have . . . and he’s never touched a tenthMark. It’s piling up in a Swiss account I started in his name.”

  “Well, he never sold anything.”

  Bach hadn’t meant that to be as harsh as it came out, but Galloway did not seem bothered by it. The thing she had sold . . .

  Had there ever been anyone as thoroughly betrayed as Q.M. Cooper? Bach wondered. She might have loved him herself, but he fell totally in love with Megan Galloway.

  And Galloway fell in love with him. There could be no mistake about that. Doubters are referred to Gitana de Oro catalog #1, an emotional recording entitled, simply, “Love.” Put it in your trans-tape player, don the headset, punch PLAY, and you will experience just how hard and how completely Galloway fell in love with Q.M. Cooper. But have your head examined first. GDO #1 had been known to precipitate suicide.

  Cooper had found this an impediment to the course of true love. He had always thought that love was something between two people, something exclusive, something private. He was unprepared to have Galloway mass-produce it, put it in a box with liner notes and a price tag of LM14.95, and hawk copies in every trans-tape shop from Peoria to Tibet.