The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

“I’m afraid not.”

  “Pity,” he said, and turned away, and vanished.

  Our operation in northern California was not the only group trying desperately to find out more about the Linemen, of course. There were lines on every continent, and soon they would be present in every nation. They had covered many small Pacific islands in only a day, and when they reached the eastern shores, they simply vanished, as my guide had.

  News media were doing their best to pool information. I believe I got a lot of those facts before the general population, since I had been shanghaied into the forefront, but our information was often as garbled and inaccurate as what the rest of the world was getting. The military was scrambling around in the dark, just like everyone else.

  But we learned some things:

  They were collecting moths as well as butterflies, from the drabbest specimen to the most gloriously colored. The entire order Lepidoptera.

  They could appear and vanish at will. It was impossible to get a count of them. Wherever one stopped to commune with the natives, as mine had, the Line remained solid, with no gaps. When they were through talking to you, they simply went where the Cheshire Cat went, leaving behind not even a grin.

  Wherever they appeared, they spoke the local language, fluently and idiomatically. This was true even in isolated villages in China or Turkey or Nigeria, where some dialects were used by only a few hundred people.

  They didn’t seem to weigh anything at all. Moving through forests, the Line became more of a wall, Linemen appearing in literally every tree, on every limb, walking on branches obviously too thin to bear their weight and not even causing them to bend. When the tree had been combed for butterflies the crews vanished, and appeared in another tree.

  Walls meant nothing to them. In cities and towns nothing was missed, not even closed bank vaults, attic spaces, closets. They didn’t come through the door, they simply appeared in a room and searched it. If you were on the toilet, that was just too bad.

  Any time they were asked about where they came from, they mentioned that book, Flatland. Within hours the book was available on hundreds of websites. Downloads ran to the millions.

  The full title of the book was Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. It was supposedly written by one Mr. A. Square, a resident of Flatland, but its actual author was Edwin Abbott, a nineteenth-century cleric and amateur mathematician. A copy was waiting for me when we got back to camp after that first frustrating day.

  The book is an allegory and a satire, but also an ingenious way to explain the concept of multidimensional worlds to the layman, like me. Mr. Square lives in a world of only two dimensions. For him, there is no such thing as up or down, only forward, backward, and side to side. It is impossible for us to really see from Square’s point of view: a single line that extends all around him, with nothing above it or below it. Nothing. Not empty space, not a black or white void . . . nothing.

  But humans, being three-dimensional, can stand outside Flatland, look up or down at it, see its inhabitants from an angle they can never have. In fact, we could see inside them, examine their internal organs, reach down and touch a Flatlander heart or brain with our fingers.

  In the course of the book Mr. Square is visited by a being from the third dimension, a Sphere. He can move from one place to another without apparently traversing the space between point A and point B. There was also discussion of the possibilities of even higher dimensions, worlds as inscrutable to us as the 3-D world was to Mr. Square.

  I’m no mathematician, but it didn’t take an Einstein to infer that the Line, and the Linemen, came from one of those theoretical higher planes.

  The people running the show were not Einstein, either, but when they needed expertise they knew where to go to draft it.

  Our mathematician’s name was Larry Ward. He looked as baffled as I must have looked the day before and he got no more time to adjust to his new situation than I did. We were all hustled aboard another helicopter and hurried out to the Line. I filled him in, as best I could, on the way out.

  Again, as soon as we approached the Line, a spokesman appeared. He asked us if we’d read the book, though I suspect he already knew we had. It was a creepy feeling to realize he, or something like him, could have been standing . . . or existing, in some direction I couldn’t imagine, only inches away from me in my motel bedroom, looking at me read the book just as the Sphere looked down on Mr. A. Square.

  A flat, white plane appeared in the air between us and geometrical shapes and equations began drawing themselves on it. It just hung there, unsupported. Larry wasn’t too flustered by it, nor was I. Against the background of the Line an anti-gravity blackboard seemed almost mundane.

  The Lineman began talking to Larry, and I caught maybe one word in three. Larry seemed to have little trouble with it at first, but after an hour he was sweating, frowning, clearly getting out of his depth.

  By that time I was feeling quite superfluous, and it was even worse for Lieutenant Evans and his men. We were reduced to following Larry and the Line at its glacial but relentless pace. Some of the men took to slipping between the gaps in the line to get in front, then doing all sorts of stupid antics to get a reaction, like tourists trying to rattle the guards at the Tower of London. The Linemen took absolutely no notice. Evans didn’t seem to care. I suspected he was badly hung over.

  “Look at this, Dr. Lewis.”

  I turned around and saw that a Lineman had appeared behind me, in that disconcerting way they had. He had a pale blue sphere cupped in his hands, and in it was a lovely specimen of Papilio zelicaon, the Anise Swallowtail, with one blue wing and one orange wing.

  “A gynandromorph,” I said, immediately, with the spooky feeling that I was back in the lecture hall. “An anomaly that sometimes arises during gametogenesis. One side is male and the other is female.”

  “How extraordinary. Our . . . leader will be happy to have this creature existing in his . . . palace.”

  I had no idea how far to believe him. I had been told that at least a dozen motives had been put forward by Line spokesmen, to various exploratory groups, as the rationale for the butterfly harvest. A group in Mexico had been told some substance was to be extracted—harmlessly, so they said—from the specimens. In France a lepidopterist swore a Lineman told her the captives were to be given to fourth-dimension children, as pets. It didn’t seem all the stories could be true. Or maybe they could. Step One in dealing with the Linemen was to bear in mind that our minds could not contain many concepts that, to them, were as basic as up and down to us. We had to assume they were speaking baby talk to us.

  But for an hour we talked butterflies, as Larry got more and more bogged down in a sea of equations and the troops got progressively more bored. The creature knew the names of every Lepidopteran we encountered that afternoon, something I could not claim. That fact had never made me feel inadequate before. There were around 170,000 species of moth and butterfly so far catalogued, including several thousand in dispute. Nobody could be expected to know them all . . . but I was sure the Linemen did. Remember, every book in every library was available to them, and they did not have to open them to read them. And time, which I had been told was the fourth dimension but now learned was only a fourth dimension, almost surely did not pass for them in the same way as it passed for us. Larry told me later that a billion years was not a formidable . . . distance for them. They were masters of space, masters of time, and who knew what else?

  The only emotion any of them had ever expressed was delight at the beauty of the butterflies. They showed no anger or annoyance when shot at with rifles; the bullets went through them harmlessly. Even when assaulted with bombs or artillery rounds they didn’t register any emotion, they simply made the assailants and weapons disappear. It was surmised by those in charge, whoever they were, that these big, noisy displays were dealt with only because they harmed butterflies.

  The troops had been warned, but there’s always some clown . . .

&nbs
p; So when an Antheraea polyphemus fluttered into the air in front of a private named Paulson, he reached out and grabbed it in his fist. Or tried to; while his hand was still an inch away, he vanished.

  I don’t think any of us quite credited our senses at first. I didn’t, and I’d been looking right at him, wondering if I should say something. There was nothing but the Polyphemus moth fluttering in the sunshine. But soon enough there were angry shouts. Many of the soldiers unslung their rifles and pointed them at the Line.

  Evans was frantically shouting at them, but now they were angry and frustrated. Several rounds were fired. Larry and I hit the deck as a machine gun started chattering. Looking up carefully I saw Evans punch the machine gunner and grab the weapon. The firing stopped.

  There was a moment of stunned silence. I got to my knees and looked at the Line. Larry was okay, but the “blackboard” was gone. And the Line moved placidly on.

  I thought it was all over, and then the screaming began, close behind me. I nearly wet myself, and turned around, quickly.

  Paulson was behind me, on his knees, hands pressed to his face, screaming his lungs out. But he was changed. His hair was all white and he’d grown a white beard. He looked thirty years older, maybe forty. I knelt beside him, unsure what to do. His eyes were full of madness . . . and the name patch sewn on the front of his shirt now read:

  “They reversed him,” Larry said.

  He couldn’t stop pacing. Myself, I’d settled into a fatalistic calm. In the face of what the Linemen could do, it seemed pointless to worry much. If I did something to piss them off, then I’d worry.

  Our northern California headquarters had completely filled the big Holiday Inn. The Army had taken over the whole thing, this bizarre operation gradually getting the encrustation of barnacles any government operation soon acquires, literally hundreds of people bustling about as if they had something important to do. For the life of me, I couldn’t see how any of us were needed, except for Larry and a helicopter pilot to get him to the Line and back. It seemed obvious that any answers we got would come from him, or someone like him. They certainly wouldn’t come from the troops, the tanks, the nuclear missiles I’m sure were targeted on the Line, and certainly not from me. But they kept me on, probably because they hadn’t yet evolved a procedure to send anybody home. I didn’t mind. I could be terrified here just as well as in New York. In the meantime, I was bunking with Larry . . . who now reached into his pocket and produced a penny. He looked at it, and tossed it to me.

  “I grabbed that when they were going through his pockets,” he said. I looked at it. As I expected, Lincoln was looking to the left and all the inscriptions were reversed.

  “How can they do that?” I asked.

  He looked confused for a moment, then grabbed a sheet of motel stationery and attacked it with one of the pens in his pocket. I looked over his shoulder as he made a sketch of a man, writing L by one hand and R by the other. Then he folded the sheet without creasing it, touching the stick figure to the opposite surface.

  “Flatland doesn’t have to be flat,” he said. He traced the stick man onto the new surface, and I saw it was now reversed. “Flatlanders can move through the third dimension without knowing they’re doing it. They slide around this curve in their universe. Or, a third-dimensional being can lift them up here, and set them down here. They’ve moved, without traveling the distance between the two points.”

  We both studied the drawing solemnly for a moment.

  “How is Paulson?” I asked.

  “Catatonic. Reversed. He’s left-handed now, his appendectomy scar is on the left, the tattoo on his left shoulder is on the right now.”

  “He looked older.”

  “Who can say? Some are saying he was scared gray. I’m pretty sure he saw things the human eye just isn’t meant to see . . . but I think he’s actually older, too. The doctors are still looking him over. It wouldn’t be hard for a fourth-dimensional creature to do, age him many years in seconds.”

  “But why?”

  “They didn’t hire me to find out ‘why.’ I’m having enough trouble understanding the ‘how.’ I figure the why is your department.” He looked at me, but I didn’t have anything helpful to offer. But I had a question.

  “How is it they’re shaped like men?”

  “Coincidence?” he said, and shook his head. “I don’t even know if ‘they’ is the right pronoun. There might be just one of them, and I don’t think it looks anything like us.” He saw my confusion, and groped again for an explanation. He picked up another piece of paper, set it on the desk, drew a square on it, put the fingertips of his hand to the paper.

  “A Flatlander, Mr. Square, perceives this as five separate entities. See, I can surround him with what he’d see as five circles. Now, imagine my hand moving down, through the plane of the paper. Four circles soon join together into an elliptical shape, then the fifth one joins, too, and he sees a cross section of my wrist: another circle. Now extend that . . .” He looked thoughtful, then pulled a comb from his back pocket and touched the teeth to the paper surface.

  “The comb moves through the plane, and each tooth becomes a little circle. I draw the comb through Flatland, Mr. Square sees a row of circles coming toward him.”

  It was making my head hurt, but I thought I grasped it.

  “So they . . . or it, or whatever, is combing the planet . . .”

  “Combing out all the butterflies. Like a fine-tooth comb going through hair, pulling out . . . whaddayou call ’em . . . lice eggs . . .”

  “Nits.” I realized I was scratching my head. I stopped. “But these aren’t circles, they’re solid, they look like people . . .”

  “If they’re solid, why don’t they break tree branches when they go out on them?” He grabbed the gooseneck lamp on the desk and pointed the light at the wall. Then he laced his hands together. “You see it? On the wall? This isn’t the best light . . .”

  Then I did see it. He was making a shadow image of a flying bird. Larry was on a roll; he whipped a grease pencil from his pocket and drew a square on the beige wall above the desk. He made the shadow-bird again.

  “Mr. Square sees a pretty complex shape. But he doesn’t know the half of it. Look at my hands. Just my hands. Do you see a bird?”

  “No,” I admitted.

  “That’s because only one of many possible cross sections resembles a bird.” He made a dog’s head, and a monkey. He’d done this before, probably in a lecture hall.

  “What I’m saying, whatever it’s using, hands, fingers, whatever shapes its actual body can assume in four-space, all we’d ever see is a three-dimensional cross section of it.”

  “And that cross section looks like a man?”

  “Could be.” But his hands were on his hips now, regarding the square he’d drawn on the wall. “How can I be sure? I can’t. The guys running this show, they want answers, and all we can offer them is possibilities.”

  By the end of the next day, he couldn’t even offer them that.

  I could see he was having tough sledding right from the first. The floating blackboard covered itself with equations again, and the . . . Instructor? Tutor? Translator? . . . stood patiently beside it, waiting for Larry to get it. And, increasingly, he was not.

  The troops had been kept back, almost a quarter mile behind the line. They were on their best behavior, as that day there was some brass with them. I could see them back there, holding binoculars, a few generals and admirals and such.

  Since no one had told me to do differently, I stayed up at the Line near Larry. I wasn’t sure why. I was no longer very afraid of the Linemen, though the camp had been awash in awful rumors that morning. It was said that Paulson was not the first man to be returned in a reversed state, but it had been hushed up to prevent panic. I could believe it. The initial panics and riots had died down quite a bit, we’d been told, but millions around the globe were still fleeing before the advancing Line. In some places feeding these migrant masses was
getting to be a problem. And in some places, the moving mob had solved the problem by looting every town they passed through.

  Some said that Paulson was not the worst that could happen. It was whispered that men had been “vanished” by the Line and returned everted. Turned inside out. And still alive, though not for long . . .

  Larry wouldn’t deny it was possible.

  But today Larry wasn’t saying much of anything. I watched him for a while, sweating in the sun, writing on the blackboard with a grease pencil, wiping it out, writing again, watching the Lineman patiently writing new stuff in symbols that might as well have been Swahili.

  Then I remembered I had thought of something to ask the night before, lying there listening to Larry snoring in the other king-size bed.

  “Excuse me,” I said, and instantly a Lineman was standing beside me. The same one? I knew the question had little meaning.

  “Before, I asked ‘Why butterflies?’ You said because they are beautiful.”

  “The most beautiful things on your planet,” he corrected.

  “Right. But . . . isn’t there a second best? Isn’t there anything else, anything at all, that you’re interested in?” I floundered, trying to think of something else that might be worth collecting to an aesthetic sense I could not possibly imagine. “Scarab beetles,” I said, sticking to entomology. “Some of them are fabulously beautiful, to humans anyway.”

  “They are quite beautiful,” he agreed. “However, we do not collect them. Our reasons would be difficult to explain.” A diplomatic way of saying humans were blind, deaf, and ignorant, I supposed. “But yes, in a sense. Things are grown on other planets in this solar system, too. We are harvesting them now, in a temporal way of speaking.”

  Well, this was new. Maybe I could justify my presence here in some small way after all. Maybe I’d finally asked an intelligent question.

  “Can you tell me about them?”