The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “That’s very nice, Charlie,” Galloway said. “I’d like one, too.”

  “I’ll draw you one!” Charlie said happily . . . and ran out of the picture.

  There was angry shouting for a few moments. Galloway stood her ground, explaining that she had only been trying to cement the friendship, and how was she to know Charlie would run off like that?

  Even Hoeffer was emboldened enough to take a few shots, pointing out—logically, in Bach’s opinion—that time was running out and if anything was to be done about her situation every second was valuable.

  “All right, all right, so I made a mistake. I promise I’ll be more careful next time. Anna, I hope you’ll call me when she comes back.” And with that, she picked up her cane and trudged from the room.

  Bach was surprised. It didn’t seem like Galloway to leave the story before it was over, even if nothing was happening. But she was too tired to worry about it. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes, and was asleep in less than a minute.

  Charlie was hard at work on the picture for Megan when Tik-Tok interrupted her. She looked up in annoyance.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “I’m sorry, but this can’t wait. There’s a telephone call for you.”

  “There’s a . . . what?”

  But Tik-Tok said no more. Charlie went across the room to the phone, silent these thirty years. She eyed it suspiciously, then pressed the button. As she did, dim memories flooded through her. She saw her mother’s face. For the first time, she felt like crying.

  “This is Charlotte Perkins-Smith,” she said, in a childish voice. “My mother isn’t . . . My mother . . . May I ask who’s calling, please?”

  There was no picture on the screen, but after a short pause, there was a familiar voice.

  “This is Megan Galloway, Charlie. Can we talk?”

  When Steiner shook Bach’s shoulder, she opened her eyes to see Charlie sitting on the desk once more. Taking a quick sip of the hot coffee Steiner had brought, she tried to wipe the cobwebs from her mind and get back to work. The girl was just sitting there, hands folded once more.

  “Hello, Anna,” the girl said. “I just wanted to call and tell you I’ll do whatever you people think is best. I’ve been acting silly. I hope you’ll forgive me; it’s been a long time since I had to talk to other people.”

  “That’s okay, Charlie.”

  “I’m sorry I pissed on Captain Hoeffer. Tik-Tok said that was a bad thing to do, and that I ought to be more respectful to him, since he’s the guy in charge. So if you’ll get him, I’ll do whatever he says.”

  “All right, Charlie. I’ll get him.”

  Bach got up and watched Hoeffer take her chair.

  “You’ll be talking just to me from now on,” he said, with what he must have felt was a friendly smile. “Is that all right?”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, indifferently.

  “You can go get some rest now, Corporal Bach,” Hoeffer said. She saluted, and turned on her heel. She knew it wasn’t fair to Charlie to feel betrayed, but she couldn’t help it. True, she hadn’t talked to the girl all that long. There was no reason to feel a friendship had developed. But she felt sick watching Hoeffer talk to her. The man would lie to her, she was sure of that.

  But then, could she have done any different? It was a disturbing thought. The fact was, there had as yet been no orders on what to do about Charlie. She was all over the news, the public debate had begun, and Bach knew it would be another day before public officials had taken enough soundings to know which way they should leap. In the meantime, they had Charlie’s cooperation, and that was good news.

  Bach wished she could be happier about it.

  “Anna, there’s a phone call for you.”

  She took it at one of the vacant consoles. When she pushed the Talk button, a light came on, indicating the other party wanted privacy, so she picked up the handset and asked who was calling.

  “Anna,” said Galloway, “come at once to room 569 in the Pension Kleist. That’s four corridors from the main entrance to NavTrack, level—”

  “I can find it. What’s this all about? You got your story.”

  “I’ll tell you when you get there.”

  The first person Bach saw in the small room was Ludmilla Rossnikova, the computer expert from GMA. She was sitting in a chair across the room, looking uncomfortable. Bach shut the door behind her, and saw Galloway sprawled in another chair before a table littered with electronic gear.

  “I felt I had to speak to Tik-Tok privately,” Galloway began, without preamble. She looked about as tired as Bach felt.

  “Is that why you sent Charlie away?”

  Galloway gave her a truly feral grin, and for a moment did not look tired at all. Bach realized she loved this sort of intrigue, loved playing fast and loose, taking chances.

  “That’s right. I figured Ms. Rossnikova was the woman to get me through, so now she’s working for me.”

  Bach was impressed. It would not have been cheap to hire Rossnikova away from GMA. She would not have thought it possible.

  “GMA doesn’t know that, and it won’t know, if you can keep a secret,” Galloway went on. “I assured Ludmilla that you could.”

  “You mean she’s spying for you.”

  “Not at all. She’s not going to be working against GMA’s interests, which are quite minimal in this affair. We’re just not going to tell them about her work for me, and next year Ludmilla will take early retirement and move into a dacha in Georgia she’s coveted all her life.”

  Bach looked at Rossnikova, who seemed embarrassed. So everybody has her price, Bach thought. So what else is new?

  “Turns out she had a special code which she withheld from the folks back at NavTrack. I suspected she might. I wanted to talk to him without anyone else knowing I was doing it. Your control room was a bit crowded for that. Ludmilla, you want to take it from there?”

  She did, telling Bach the story in a low voice, with reserved, diffident gestures. Bach wondered if she would be able to live with her defection, decided she’d probably get over it soon enough.

  Rossnikova had raised Charlie Station, which in this sense was synonymous with Tik-Tok, the station computer. Galloway had talked to him. She wanted to know what he knew. As she suspected, he was well aware of his own orbital dynamics. He knew he was going to crash into the moon. So what did he intend to do about Charlotte Perkins-Smith? Galloway wanted to know.

  What are you offering? Tik-Tok responded.

  “The important point is, he doesn’t want Charlie to die. He can’t do anything about his instruction to fire on intruders. But he claims he would have let Charlie go years ago but for one thing.”

  “Our quarantine probes,” Bach said.

  “Exactly. He’s got a lifeboat in readiness. A few minutes from impact, if nothing has been resolved, he’ll load Charlie in it and blast her away, after first killing both your probes. He knows it’s not much of a chance, but impact on the lunar surface is no chance at all.”

  Bach finally sat down. She thought it over for a minute, then spread her hands.

  “Great,” she said. “It sounds like all our problems are solved. We’ll just take this to Hoeffer, and we can call off the probes.”

  Galloway and Rossnikova were silent. As last, Galloway sighed.

  “It may not be as simple as that.”

  Bach stood again, suddenly sure of what was coming next.

  “I’ve got good sources, both in the news media and in city hall. Things are not looking good for Charlie.”

  “I can’t believe it!” Bach shouted. “They’re ready to let a little girl die? They’re not even going to try to save her?”

  Galloway made soothing motions, and Bach gradually calmed down.

  “It’s not definite yet. But the trend is there. For one thing, she is not a little girl, as you well know. I was counting on the public perception of her as a little girl, but that’s not working out so well.�
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  “But all your stories have been so positive.”

  “I’m not the only newscaster. And . . . the public doesn’t always determine it anyway. Right now, they’re in favor of Charlie, seventy-thirty. But that’s declining, and a lot of that seventy percent is soft, as they say. Not sure. The talk is, the decision makers are going to make it look like an unfortunate accident. Tik-Tok will be a great help there; it’ll be easy to provoke an incident that could kill Charlie.”

  “It’s just not right,” Bach said, gloomily. Galloway leaned forward and looked at her intently.

  “That’s what I wanted to know. Are you still on Charlie’s side, all the way? And if you are, what are you willing to risk to save her?”

  Bach met Galloway’s intent stare. Slowly, Galloway smiled again.

  “That’s what I thought. Here’s what I want to do.”

  Charlie was sitting obediently by the telephone in her room at the appointed time, and it rang just when Megan had said it would. She answered it as she had before.

  “Hi there, kid. How’s it going?”

  “I’m fine. Is Anna there too?”

  “She sure is. Want to say hi to her?”

  “I wish you’d tell her it was you that told me to—”

  “I already did, and she understands. Did you have any trouble?”

  Charlie snorted.

  “With him? What a doo-doo-head. He’ll believe anything I tell him. Are you sure he can’t hear us in here?”

  “Positive. Nobody can hear us. Did Tik-Tok tell you what all you have to do?”

  “I think so. I wrote some of it down.”

  “We’ll go over it again, point by point. We can’t have any mistakes.”

  When they got the final word on the decision, it was only twelve hours to impact. None of them had gotten any sleep since the close approach. It seemed like years ago to Bach.

  “The decision is to have an accident,” Galloway said, hanging up the phone. She turned to Rossnikova who bent, hollow-eyed, over her array of computer keyboards. “How’s it coming with the probe?”

  “I’m pretty sure I’ve got it now,” she said, leaning back. “I’ll take it through the sequence one more time.” She sighed, then looked at both of them. “Every time I try to reprogram it, it wants to tell me about this broken rose blossom and the corpse of a puppy and the way the wheel looks with all the lighted windows.” She yawned hugely. “Some of it’s kind of pretty, actually.”

  Bach wasn’t sure what Rossnikova was talking about, but the important thing was the probe was taken care of. She looked at Galloway.

  “My part is all done,” Galloway said. “In record time, too.”

  “I’m not even going to guess what it cost you,” Bach said.

  “It’s only money.”

  “What about Dr. Blume?”

  “He’s with us. He wasn’t even very expensive. I think he wanted to do it, anyway.” She looked from Bach to Rossnikova, and back again. “What do you say? Are we ready to go? Say in one hour?”

  Neither of them raised an objection. Silently, they shook each other’s hand. They knew it would not go easy with them if they were discovered, but that had already been discussed and accepted and there seemed no point in mentioning it again.

  Bach left them in a hurry.

  The dogs were more excited than Charlie had ever seen them. They sensed something was about to happen.

  “They’re probably just picking it up from you,” Tik-Tok ventured.

  “That could be it,” Charlie agreed. They were leaping and running all up and down the corridor. It had been hell getting them all down here, by a route Tik-Tok had selected that would avoid all the operational cameras used by Captain Hoeffer and those other busybodies. But here they finally were, and there was the door to the lifeboat, and suddenly she realized that Tik-Tok could not come along.

  “What are you going to do?” she finally asked him.

  “That’s a silly question, Charlie.”

  “But you’ll die!”

  “Not possible. Since I was never alive, I can’t die.”

  “Oh, you’re just playing with words.” She stopped, and couldn’t think of anything good to say. Why didn’t they have more words? There ought to be more words, so some of them would be useful for saying goodbye.

  “Did you scrubba-scrub?” Tik-Tok asked. “You want to look nice.”

  Charlie nodded, wiping away a tear. Things were just happening so fast.

  “Good. Now you remember to do all the things I taught you to do. It may be a long time before you can be with people again, but I think you will, someday. And in the meantime, Anna-Louise and Megan have promised me that they’ll be very strict with little girls who won’t pick up their rooms and wash their hair.”

  “I’ll be good,” Charlie promised.

  “I want you to obey them just like you’ve obeyed me.”

  “I will.”

  “Good. You’ve been a very good little girl, and I’ll expect you to continue to be a good girl. Now get in that lifeboat, and get going.”

  So she did, along with dozens of barking Shelties.

  There was a guard outside the conference room and Bach’s badge would not get her past him, so she assumed that was where the crime was being planned.

  She would have to be very careful.

  She entered the control room. It was understaffed, and no one was at her old chair. A few people noticed her as she sat down, but no one seemed to think anything of it. She settled down, keeping an eye on the clock.

  Forty minutes after her arrival, all hell broke loose.

  It had been an exciting day for the probe. New instructions had come. Any break in the routine was welcome, but this one was doubly good, because the new programmer wanted to know everything, and the probe finally got a chance to transmit its poetry. It was a hell of a load off one’s mind.

  When it finally managed to assure the programmer that it understood and would obey, it settled back in a cybernetic equivalent of wild expectation.

  The explosion was everything it could have hoped for. The wheel tore itself apart in a ghastly silence and began spreading itself wildly to the blackness. The probe moved in, listening, listening . . .

  And there it was. The soothing song it had been told to listen for, coming from a big oblong hunk of the station that moved faster than the rest of it. The probe moved in close, though it had not been told to. As the oblong flashed by the probe had time to catalog it (LIFEBOAT, type 4A; functioning) and to get just a peek into one of the portholes.

  The face of a dog peered back, ears perked alertly.

  The probe filed the image away for later contemplation, and then moved in on the rest of the wreckage, lasers blazing in the darkness.

  Bach had a bad moment when she saw the probe move in on the lifeboat, then settled back and tried to make herself inconspicuous as the vehicle bearing Charlie and the dogs accelerated away from the cloud of wreckage.

  She had been evicted from her chair, but she had expected that. As people ran around, shouting at each other, she called room 569 at the Kleist, then patched Rossnikova into her tracking computers. She was sitting at an operator’s console in a corner of the room, far from the excitement.

  Rossnikova was a genius. The blip vanished from her screen. If everything was going according to plan, no data about the lifeboat was going into the memory of the tracking computer.

  It would be like it never existed.

  Everything went so smoothly, Bach thought later. You couldn’t help taking it as a good omen, even if, like Bach, you weren’t superstitious. She knew nothing was going to be easy in the long run, that there were bound to be problems they hadn’t thought of . . .

  But all in all, you just had to be optimistic.

  The remotely piloted PTP made rendezvous right on schedule. The transfer of Charlie and the dogs went like clockwork. The empty lifeboat was topped off with fuel and sent on a solar escape orbit, airless and lifeless, its
only cargo a barrel of radioactive death that should sterilize it if anything would.

  The PTP landed smoothly at the remote habitat Galloway’s agents had located and purchased. It had once been a biological research station, so it was physically isolated in every way from lunar society. Some money changed hands, and all records of the habitat were erased from computer files.

  All food, air, and water had to be brought in by crawler, over a rugged mountain pass. The habitat itself was large enough to accommodate a hundred people in comfort. There was plenty of room for the dogs. A single dish antenna was the only link to the outside world.

  Galloway was well satisfied with the place. She promised Charlie that one of these days she would be paying a visit. Neither of them mentioned the reason that no one would be coming out immediately. Charlie settled in for a long stay, privately wondering if she would ever get any company.

  One thing they hadn’t planned on was alcohol. Charlie was hooked bad, and not long after her arrival she began letting people know about it.

  Blume reluctantly allowed a case of whiskey to be brought in on the next crawler, reasoning that a girl in full-blown withdrawal would be impossible to handle remotely. He began a program to taper her off, but in the meantime Charlie went on a three-day bender that left her bleary-eyed.

  The first biological samples sent in all died within a week. These were a guinea pig, a rhesus monkey, and a chicken. The symptoms were consistent with Neuro-X, so there was little doubt the disease was still alive. A dog, sent in later, lasted eight days.

  Blume gathered valuable information from all these deaths, but they upset Charlie badly. Bach managed to talk him out of further live animal experiments for at least a few months.

  She had taken accumulated vacation time, and was living in a condominium on a high level of the Mozartplatz, bought by Galloway and donated to what they were coming to think of as the Charlie Project. With Galloway back on Earth and Rossnikova neither needed nor inclined to participate further, Charlie Project was Bach and Dr. Blume. Security was essential. Four people knowing about Charlie was already three too many, Galloway said.