by John Varley
The supreme irony of it to the man, who eventually found refuge in a minor cult in a far corner of the Earth, was that the tape itself, the means of his betrayal, his humiliation, was proof that Galloway had returned his love.
And Galloway had sold it. Never mind that she had her reasons, or that they were reasons with which Bach could find considerable sympathy.
She had sold it.
All Bach ever got out of the episode was a compulsion to seek lovers who looked like the Earth-muscled Cooper. Now it seemed she might get something else. It was time to change the subject.
“What do you know about Charlie?” she asked.
“You want it all, or just a general idea?” Galloway didn’t wait for an answer. “I know her real name is Charlotte Isolde Hill Perkins-Smith. I know her father is dead, and her mother’s condition is open to debate. Leda Perkins-Smith has a lot of money—if she’s alive. Her daughter would inherit, if she’s dead. I know the names of ten of Charlie’s dogs. And, oh yes, I know that, appearances to the contrary, she is thirty-seven years old.”
“Your source is very up-to-date.”
“It’s a very good source.”
“You want to name him?”
“I’ll pass on that, for the moment.” She regarded Bach easily, her hands folded on the table in front of her. “So. What do you want me to do?”
“Is it really that simple?”
“My producers will want to kill me, but I’ll sit on the story for at least twenty-four hours if you tell me to. By the way,” she turned in her seat and crooked a finger at another table, “it’s probably time you met my producers.”
Bach turned slightly, and saw them coming toward her table.
“These are the Myers twins, Joy and Jay. Waiter, do you know how to make a Shirley Temple and a Roy Rogers?”
The waiter said he did, and went off with the order while Joy and Jay pulled up chairs and sat in them, several feet from the table but very close to each other. They had not offered to shake hands. Both were armless, with no sign of amputation, just bare, rounded shoulders. Both wore prosthetics made of golden, welded wire and powered by tiny motors. The units were one piece, fitting over their backs in a harnesslike arrangement. They were quite pretty—light and airy, perfectly articulated, cunningly wrought—and also creepy.
“You’ve heard of amparole?” Galloway asked. Bach shook her head. “That’s the slang word for it. It’s a neo-Moslem practice. Joy and Jay were convicted of murder.”
“I have heard of it.” She hadn’t paid much attention to it, dismissing it as just another harebrained Earthling idiocy.
“Their arms are being kept in cryonic suspension for twenty years. The theory is, if they sin no more, they’ll get them back. Those prosthetics won’t pick up a gun, or a knife. They won’t throw a punch.”
Joy and Jay were listening to this with complete stolidity. Once Bach got beyond the arms, she saw another unusual thing about them. They were dressed identically, in loose bell-bottomed trousers. Joy had small breasts, and Jay had a small mustache. Other than that, they were absolutely identical in face and body. Bach didn’t care for the effect.
“They also took slices out of the cerebrums and they’re on a maintenance dosage of some drug. Calms them down. You don’t want to know who they killed, or how. But they were proper villains, these two.”
No, I don’t think I do, Bach decided. Like many cops, she looked at eyes. Joy and Jay’s were calm, placid . . . and deep inside was a steel-gray coldness.
“If they try to get naughty again, the amparole units go on strike. I suppose they might find a way to kill with their feet.”
The twins glanced at each other, held each other’s gaze for a moment, and exchanged wistful smiles. At least, Bach hoped they were just wistful.
“Yeah, okay,” Bach said.
“Don’t worry about them. They can’t be offended with the drugs they’re taking.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Bach said. She couldn’t have cared less what the freaks felt; she wished they’d been executed.
“Are they really twins?” she finally asked, against her better judgment.
“Really. One of them had a sex change, I don’t know which one. And to answer your next question, yes they do, but only in the privacy of their own room.”
“I wasn’t—”
“And your other question . . . they are very good at what they do. Who am I to judge about the other? And I’m in a highly visible industry. It never hurts to have conversation pieces around. You need to get noticed.”
Bach was starting to get angry, and she was not quite sure why. Maybe it was the way Galloway so cheerfully admitted her base motives, even when no one had accused her of having them.
“We were talking about the story,” she said.
“We need to go with it,” Joy said, startling Bach. Somehow, she had not really expected the cyborg-thing to talk. “Our source is good and the security on the story is tight—”
“—but it’s dead certain to come out in twenty-four hours,” Jay finished for her.
“Maybe less,” Joy added.
“Shut up,” Galloway said, without heat. “Anna-Louise, you were about to tell me your feeling on the matter.”
Bach finished her drink as the waiter arrived with more. She caught herself staring as the twins took theirs. The metal hands were marvels of complexity. They moved just as cleverly as real hands.
“I was considering leaking the story myself. It looked like things were going against Charlie. I thought they might just let the station crash and then swear us all to secrecy.”
“It strikes me,” Galloway said, slowly, “that today’s developments give her an edge.”
“Yeah. But I don’t envy her.”
“Me, either. But it’s not going to be easy to neglect a girl whose body may hold the secret of eternal life. If you do, somebody’s bound to ask awkward questions later.”
“It may not be eternal life,” Bach said.
“What do you call it, then?” Jay asked.
“Why do you say that?” Joy wanted to know.
“All we know is she’s lived thirty years without growing any older—externally. They’d have to examine her a lot closer to find out what’s actually happening.”
“And there’s pressure to do so.”
“Exactly. It might be the biggest medical breakthrough in a thousand years. What I think has happened to her is not eternal life, but extended youth.”
Galloway looked thoughtful. “You know, of the two, I think extended youth would be more popular.”
“I think you’re right.”
They brooded over that in silence for a while. Bach signaled the waiter for another drink.
“Anyway,” she went on, “Charlie doesn’t seem to need protection just now. But she may, and quickly.”
“So you aren’t in favor of letting her die.”
Bach looked up, surprised and beginning to be offended, then she remembered Dr. Wilhelm. The good doctor was not a monster, and Galloway’s question was a reasonable one, given the nature of Neuro-X.
“There has to be a way to save her, and protect ourselves from her. That’s what I’m working toward, anyway.”
“Let me get this straight, then. You were thinking of leaking the story so the public outcry would force the police to save her?”
“Sure, I thought . . .” Bach trailed off, suddenly realizing what Galloway was saying. “You mean you think—”
Galloway waved her hand impatiently.
“It depends on a lot of things, but mostly on how the story is handled. If you start off with the plague story, there could be pressure to blast her out of the skies and have done with it.” She looked at Jay and Joy, who went into a trance-like state.
“Sure, sure,” Jay said. “The plague got big play. Almost everybody remembers it. Use horror show tapes of the casualties . . .”
“. . . line up the big brains to start the scare,” Joy said.
> “You can even add sob stuff, after it gets rolling.”
“What a tragedy, this little girl has to die for the good of us all.”
“Somber commentary, the world watches as she cashes in.”
“You could make it play. No problem.”
Bach’s head had been ping-ponging between the two of them. When Galloway spoke, it was hard to swing around and look at her.
“Or you could start off with the little girl,” Galloway prompted.
“Much better,” Joy said. “Twice the story there. Indignant exposé stuff: ‘Did you know, fellow citizens . . .’”
“ ‘. . . there’s this little girl, this innocent child, swinging around up there in space and she’s going to die!’”
“A rich little girl, too, and her dying mother.”
“Later, get the immortality angle.”
“Not too soon,” Joy cautioned. “At first, she’s ordinary. Second lead is, she’s got money.”
“Third lead, she holds the key to eternal youth.”
“Immortality.”
“Youth, honey, youth. Who the fuck knows what living forever is like? Youth you can sell. It’s the only thing you can sell.”
“Megan, this is the biggest story since Jesus.”
“Or at least we’ll make it the biggest story.”
“See why they’re so valuable?” Galloway said. Bach hardly heard her. She was reassessing what she had thought she knew about the situation.
“I don’t know what to do,” she finally confessed. “I don’t know what to ask you to do, either. I guess you ought to go with what you think is best.”
Galloway frowned.
“Both for professional and personal reasons, I’d rather try to help her. I’m not sure why. She is dangerous, you know.”
“I realize that. But I can’t believe she can’t be handled.”
“Neither can I.” She glanced at her watch. “Tell you what, you come with us on a little trip.”
Bach protested at first, but Galloway would not be denied, and Bach’s resistance was at a low ebb.
By speedboat, trolley, and airplane they quickly made their way on the top of Mozartplatz, where Bach found herself in a four-seat PTP—or point-to-point—ballistic vehicle.
She had never ridden in a PTP. They were rare, mostly because they wasted a lot of energy for only a few minutes’ gain in travel time. Most people took the tubes, which reached speeds of three thousand miles per hour, hovering inches above their induction rails in Luna’s excellent vacuum.
But for a celebrity like Galloway, the PTP made sense. She had trouble going places in public without getting mobbed. And she certainly had the money to spare.
There was a heavy initial acceleration, then weightlessness. Bach had never liked it, and enjoyed it even less with a few drinks in her.
Little was said during the short journey. Bach had not asked where they were going, and Galloway did not volunteer it. Bach looked out one of the wide windows at the fleeting moonscape.
As she counted the valleys, rilles, and craters flowing past beneath her, she soon realized her destination. It was a distant valley, in the sense that no tube track ran through it. In a little over an hour, Tango Charlie would come speeding through, no more than a hundred meters from the surface.
The PTP landed itself in a cluster of transparent, temporary domes. There were over a hundred of them, and more PTP’s than Bach had ever seen before. She decided most of the people in and around the domes fell into three categories. There were the very wealthy, owners of private spacecraft, who had erected most of these portable Xanadus and filled them with their friends. There were civic dignitaries in city-owned domes. And there were the news media.
This last category was there in its teeming hundreds. It was not what they would call a big story, but it was a very visual one. It should yield spectacular pictures for the evening news.
A long, wide black stripe had been created across the sun-drenched plain, indicating the path Tango Charlie would take. Many cameras and quite a few knots of pressure-suited spectators were situated smack in the middle of that line, with many more off to one side, to get an angle on the approach. Beyond it were about a hundred large glass-roofed touring buses and a motley assortment of private crawlers, sunskimmers, jetsleds, and even some hikers: the common people, come to see the event.
Bach followed along behind the uncommon people: Galloway, thin and somehow spectral in the translucent suit, leaning on her crystal cane; the Myers twins, whose amparolee arms would not fit in the suits, so that the empty sleeves stuck out, bloated, like crucified ghosts; and most singular of all, the wire-sculpture arm units themselves, walking independently, on their fingertips, looking like some demented, disjointed mechanical camel as they lurched through the dust.
They entered the largest of the domes, set on the edge of the gathering nearest the black line, which put it no more than a hundred meters from the expected passage.
The first person Bach saw, as she was removing her helmet, was Hoeffer.
He did not see her immediately. He, and many of the other people in the dome, were watching Galloway. So she saw his face as his gaze moved from the celebrity to Joy and Jay . . . and saw amazement and horror, far too strong to be simple surprise at their weirdness. It was a look of recognition.
Galloway had said she had an excellent source.
She noticed Bach’s interest, smiled, and nodded slightly. Still struggling to remove her suit, she approached Bach.
“That’s right. The twins heard a rumor something interesting might be going on at NavTrack, so they found your commander. Turns out he has rather odd sexual tastes, though it’s probably fairly pedestrian to Joy and Jay. They scratched his itch, and he spilled everything.”
“I find that . . . rather interesting,” Bach admitted.
“I thought you would. Were you planning to make a career out of being an R/A in Navigational Tracking?”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
“I didn’t think so. Listen, don’t touch it. I can handle it without there being any chance of it backfiring on you. Within the week you’ll be promoted out of there.”
“I don’t know if . . .”
“If what?” Galloway was looking at her narrowly.
Bach hesitated only a moment.
“I may be stiff-necked, but I’m not a fool. Thank you.”
Galloway turned away a little awkwardly, then resumed struggling with her suit. Bach was about to offer some help, when Galloway frowned at her.
“How come you’re not taking off your pressure suit?”
“That dome up there is pretty strong, but it’s only one layer. Look around you. Most of the natives have just removed their helmets, and a lot are carrying those around. Most of the Earthlings are out of their suits. They don’t understand vacuum.”
“You’re saying it’s not safe?”
“No. But vacuum doesn’t forgive. It’s trying to kill you all the time.”
Galloway looked dubious, but stopped trying to remove her suit.
Bach wandered the electronic wonderland, helmet in hand.
Tango Charlie would not be visible until less than a minute before the close encounter, and then would be hard to spot as it would be only a few seconds of arc above the horizon line. But there were cameras hundreds of miles downtrack which could already see it, both as a bright star, moving visibly against the background, and as a jittery image in some very long lenses. Bach watched as the wheel filled one screen until she could actually see furniture behind one of the windows.
For the first time since arriving, she thought of Charlie. She wondered if Tik-Tok—no, dammit, if the Charlie Station Computer had told her of the approach, and if so, would Charlie watch it. Which window would she choose? It was shocking to think that, if she chose the right one, Bach might catch a glimpse of her.
Only a few minutes to go. Knowing it was stupid, Bach looked along the line indicated by the thousand cameras,
hoping to catch the first glimpse.
She saw Megan Galloway doing a walk-around, followed by a camera crew, no doubt saying bright, witty things to her huge audience. Galloway was here less for the event itself than for the many celebrities who had gathered to witness it. Bach saw her approach a famous TV star, who smiled and embraced her, making some sort of joke about Galloway’s pressure suit.
You can meet him if you want, she told herself. She was a little surprised to discover she had no interest in doing so.
She saw Joy and Jay in heated conversation with Hoeffer. The twins seemed distantly amused.
She saw the countdown clock, ticking toward one minute.
Then the telescopic image in one of the remote cameras began to shake violently. In a few seconds, it had lost its fix on Charlie Station. Bach watched as annoyed technicians struggled to get it back.
“Seismic activity,” one of them said, loud enough for Bach to hear.
She looked at the other remote monitor, which showed Tango Charlie as a very bright star sitting on the horizon. As she watched, the light grew visibly, until she could see it as a disc. And in another part of the screen, at a site high in the lunar hills, there was a shower of dust and rock. That must be the seismic activity, she thought. The camera operator zoomed in on this eruption, and Bach frowned. She couldn’t figure out what sort of lunar quake could cause such a commotion. It looked more like an impact. The rocks and dust particles were fountaining up with lovely geometrical symmetry, each piece, from the largest boulder to the smallest mote, moving at about the same speed and in a perfect mathematical trajectory, unimpeded by any air resistance, in a way that could never be duplicated on Earth. It was a dull gray expanding dome shape, gradually flattening on top.
Frowning, she turned her attention to the spot on the plain where she had been told Charlie would first appear. She saw the first light of it, but more troubling, she saw a dozen more of the expanding domes. From here, they seemed no larger than soap bubbles.
Then another fountain of rock erupted, not far from the impromptu parking lot full of tourist buses.
