The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

“Certainly. Deep in the atmospheres of your four gas giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—beautiful beings have evolved that . . . our leader treasures. On Mercury, creatures of quicksilver inhabit deep caves near the poles. These are being gathered as well. And there are life forms we admire that thrive on very cold planets.”

  Gathering cryogenic butterflies on Pluto? Since he showed me no visual aids, the image would do until something better came along.

  The Lineman didn’t elaborate beyond that, and I couldn’t think of another question that might be useful. I reported what I had learned at the end of the day. None of the team of expert analysts could think of a reason why this should concern us, but they assured me my findings would be bucked up the chain of command.

  Nothing ever came of it.

  The next day they said I could go home, and I was hustled out of California almost as fast as I’d arrived. On my way I met Larry, who looked haunted. We shook hands.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “All our answers, over thousands of years. Myths, gods, philosophers . . . What’s it all about? Why are we here? Where do we come from, where do we go, what are we supposed to do while we’re here? What’s the meaning of life? So now we find out, and it was never about us at all. The meaning of life is . . . butterflies.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “But you knew that all along, didn’t you?”

  Of all the people on the planet, I and a handful of others could make the case that we were most directly affected. Sure, lives were uprooted, many people died before order was restored. But the Linemen were as unobtrusive as they could possibly be, given their mind-numbing task, and things eventually got back to a semblance of normal. Some people lost their religious faith, but even more rejected out of hand the proposition that there was no God but the Line, so the holy men of the world registered a net gain.

  But lepidopterists . . . let’s face it, we were out of a job.

  I spent my days haunting the dusty back rooms and narrow corridors of the museum, opening cases and drawers, some of which might not have been disturbed for decades. I would stare for hours at the thousands and thousands of preserved moths and butterflies, trying to connect with the childhood fascination that had led to my choice of career. I remembered expeditions to remote corners of the world, miserable, mosquito-bitten, and exhilarated at the same time. I recalled conversations, arguments about this or that taxonomic point. I tried to relive my elation at my first new species, Hypolimnes lewisii.

  All ashes now. They didn’t even look very pretty anymore.

  On the twenty-eight day of the invasion, a second Line appeared on the world’s western coasts. By then the North American Line stretched from a point far in the Canadian north through Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, reaching the Gulf of Mexico somewhere south of Corpus Christi, Texas. The second Line began marching east, finding very few butterflies but not seeming to mind.

  It is not in the nature of the governmental mind to simply do nothing when faced with a situation. But most people agreed there was little or nothing to be done. To save face, the military maintained a presence following the Line, but they knew better than to do anything.

  On the fifty-sixth day the third Line appeared.

  Lunar cycle? It appeared so. A famous mathematician claimed he had found an equation describing the Earth-Moon orbital pair in six dimensions, or was it seven? No one cared very much.

  When the first Line reached New York I was in the specimen halls, looking at moths under glass. A handful of Linemen appeared, took a quick look around. One looked over my shoulder at the displays for a moment. Then they all went away, in their multidimensional way.

  And there it is.

  I don’t recall who it was that first suggested we write it all down, nor can I recall the reason put forward. Like most literate people of the Earth, though, I dutifully sat down and wrote my story. I understand many are writing entire biographies, possibly an attempt to shout out “I was here!” to an indifferent universe. I have limited myself to events from Day One to the present.

  Perhaps someone else will come by, some distant day, and read these accounts. Yes, and perhaps the Moon is made of green butterflies.

  It turned out that my question, that last day of my military career, was the key question, but I didn’t realize I had been given the answer.

  The Lineman never said they were growing creatures on Pluto.

  He said there were things they grew on cold planets.

  After one year of combing the Earth, the Linemen went away as quickly as they appeared.

  On the way out, they switched off the light.

  It was night in New York. From the other side of the planet the reports came in quickly, and I climbed up to the roof of my building. The moon, which should have been nearing full phase, was a pale ghost and soon became nothing but a black hole in the sky.

  Another tenant had brought a small TV. An obviously frightened astronomer and a confused news anchor were counting seconds. When they reached zero, a bit over twenty minutes after the events at the antipodes, Mars began to dim. In thirty seconds it was invisible.

  He never mentioned Pluto as their cold-planet nursery . . .

  In an hour Jupiter’s light failed, then Saturn.

  When the Sun came up in America that day it looked like a charcoal briquette, red flickerings here and there, and soon not even that. When the clocks and church bells struck noon, the Sun was gone.

  Presently, it began to get cold.

  INTRODUCTION TO “The Flying Dutchman”

  I took my first flight on an airplane shortly after I dropped out of Michigan State (well, technically, flunked out; I stopped going to classes, I was very depressed). The plane was a Delta Airlines Convair Cv-880, a not-too-successful rival to the 707 and DC-8; only sixty-five were made. It flew me from Detroit to Atlanta, where I boarded another 880 for a flight to Houston.

  My last six years in Texas were spent only about a mile from the Mid-County Airport, which served not just tiny Nederland, but Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange, so it was fairly busy, though too small then for jetliners. I was so aviation-crazy that my idea of a great time was to park at the end of the runway and watch the planes land and take off. It was there that our high school band greeted Lyndon Johnson, and we played “Hail Columbia,” the official song of the vice presidency.

  My idea of a really great time was to go to Houston Hobby Airport and stand out on the observation platform watching the big jets. You could do that back then.

  It should have been an exciting trip, and I enjoyed it, gawked like a rube from a small town in Texas, but I was exhausted, emotionally and physically. It had been a hard night. The Selective Service System, ever vigilant in its hunt for raw meat to feed Lyndon’s war, had already revoked my II-S status and ordered me to report to Detroit for my pre-induction physical. I was now the dreaded One-A.

  The only way I could make it was to hitchhike from East Lansing to Detroit, spend the night in the bus station, and report bright and early in the morning. Inside, I was processed like prize pork, and despite my debilitated condition, pronounced a fit target for Viet Cong land mines and bullets. Then I hitched to the airport and spent the night on the floor there. It was a pretty bedraggled nineteen-year-old who finally stepped aboard that Cv-880.

  That began a six-year battle with the SSS that I won, largely by attrition. I didn’t have any particular secret, I just sort of bureaucrated them to a standstill.

  Example: My draft board was in Michigan, but my only address was in Texas. All notices had to shuffle between the two destinations before my mother could forward them to me.

  Another example: I found out that every decision they made could be appealed, and all that paperwork had to shuffle around, too. Years were eaten up that way.

  Most ridiculous example: I was ordered to report to the Oakland Induction Center for the Big One, the One Step Forward that would send me into basic training. A man outside the center told me the co
mmanding officer of the place was so insanely angry at the goddamn pinko peaceniks demonstrating outside that if you took anti-draft literature inside, you would be ordered to surrender it, before you were in the army, before they had the authority to order you to do a damn thing. I took it in, was told to surrender it, and then was sat down at a table and ordered to sign twenty different forms, surrounded by gorillas who looked like they would like to do nothing more than wring my scrawny hippie neck. I signed nothing, didn’t surrender the literature, and was told to go away, that the District Attorney would be contacting me. No one ever did. That ate up a year, right there.

  At one point FBI agents showed up at my parents’ home, and eventually at mine. They questioned me, and went away.

  I went to Canada, to see if I wanted to live up there, dodging the draft. Canada is a fine country, I love it, but the idea of never being able to go home was too much to bear.

  I sort of knew that if I was sent to Nam there was an excellent chance of going home in a body bag or minus my legs and testicles, but I admit that didn’t scare me too much. I was young, I thought I was immortal. I also thought I could find a way to finagle my way into being the best damn clerk-typist or chaplain’s assistant stationed in Germany in this man’s army.

  But I kept resisting because I’d read Catch-22, and knew I could never survive one aspect of the military: officers. I knew I was destined to be a private, and I don’t take orders well. So I fought.

  My main weapon was being the sole means of support for my wife, who was in a wheelchair. I lost every appeal I ever made, I don’t even remember how many there were, but then one day . . . the war was over. And I never broke the law.

  I have no regrets about any of this. I respected and still respect those who went, who died, who were maimed mentally and physically. I never spat at soldiers, never called them baby-killers. Call me a draft-dodger if you like. I can handle it.

  I don’t really know where this story came from. Even after 9/11 air travel is not quite this inconvenient, though I’m planning to take the train the next time I take a trip. I don’t like having my shoes searched. I think I was simply tinkering with the notion that Hell might not be guys with pitchforks herding people into pools of molten brimstone . . . that there might actually be worse things. . . .

  THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

  IT WAS DARK when the plane reached O’Hare, three hours late. Snow swirled in white tornadoes over the frozen field. The plowing crews had kept just one runway clear. Planes were stacked up back to New Jersey. Flights were being diverted to St. Louis, Cleveland, Dayton, and other places people didn’t really want to go when they intended to go there.

  The 727 hit the icy tarmac like a fat lady on skates, slued to the left, then straightened out as the nose came down and the thrust reversers engaged. Then the plane taxied for thirty minutes.

  When the jetway finally reached them and the Fasten Seat Belts sign went off, Peter Meers stood up. He was immediately bumped back into his seat by a large man across the aisle. Somebody stepped on his foot.

  He struggled to his feet again, reached for his carry-on bag under the seat. When he jerked on the handle, it snagged on something. He pushed at it with his foot, being jostled from behind and almost falling into the man from Seat B, waiting for Meers to get out. He yanked again, and heard a sound that meant there was a new, deep scratch on the expensive leather.

  He looked up in time to have a filthy duffel bag fall from the overhead compartment into his face. A filthier hand appeared and yanked on the canvas strap, and the bag vanished into the press of bodies. Meers glimpsed a ragged man with a beard. How had such a man got aboard an airplane? he wondered. Could you buy airline tickets with food stamps?

  Retrieving his briefcase and his laptop computer, he slung everything over his shoulders. It was another ten minutes of shuffling before he reached the closet at the front of the plane where a harried flight attendant was helping people reclaim their garment bags. He found his, grabbed it, and slung it over his shoulder. Then he waddled sideways toward the door and the jetway. On the way out he barked his shin against a folded golf cart leaning against the exit door. Then he was trudging up the jetway into O’Hare.

  O’Hare. ORD. On a snowy night with one runway operating, an inner circle of Hell. Meers shuffled down the concourse with several million other lost souls, all looking to make a connection. Those who had abandoned all hope—at least for the night—slumped in chairs or against walls or just stood, asleep on their feet.

  At O’Hare, connections were made not on shadowy street corners, cash for tiny baggies, but at the ends of infinite queues shaped, twisted, and re-doubled by yellow canvas bands strung between stainless steel poles, under lights as warm and homey as an operating theater. Meers found the right line and stood at the end of it. In ten minutes, he shoved his garment bag, his carry-on, his briefcase, and his laptop forward three feet with the tip of his shoe. Ten minutes later, he did it again. He was hungry.

  When he reached the ticket counter the agent told him he had missed his connecting flight for home, and that there would be no more flights that night.

  “However,” she said, frowning at her computer screen, “I have one seat available on a flight to Atlanta. You ought to be able to make a connection from there in the morning.” She looked up at him and smiled.

  Meers took the rewritten ticket. The departure gate was a good three miles from where he stood. He shouldered his burdens and went off in search of food.

  Everything was closed except one snack bar near his gate. Airport unions were on strike. The menu on the wall had been covered with a sheet of butcher paper, hand lettered: “Hot dogs $4. Cokes $2. No coffee.” Behind the counter were two harried workers, a fiftyish woman with gray wisps of hair straggling from her paper cap, and a Hispanic man in his twenties with mustard and ketchup stains all over his apron.

  When Meers was still a good distance away, the counterman suddenly threw down his hot dog tongs, snatched the hat from his head and crumpled it into a ball.

  “I’m through with this shit!” he shouted. “I quit. No mas!” He continued to scream in Spanish as he ran through a door in the back. The woman was shouting his name, which was Eduardo, but the man paid no attention. He hit the red emergency bar on a fire door and an alarm sounded as he scrambled down stairs outside.

  Meers could see a little through the glass. The Hispanic man was short and stocky, but a good runner. He charged away from the building. From somewhere beneath, two uniformed security guards charged out, guns in their hands. Eduardo was nowhere to be seen. The guards kept going. There was a flash of light. Gunfire? There was too much noise from jet engines for Meers to be sure. He shivered, and turned back toward the snack counter.

  He was still ten people back in line when they announced his flight to Atlanta. He was three back when they made the second announcement. The gray-haired women, still distracted by the flight of Eduardo, slapped a hot dog into his hand and spilled a third of his Coke on the counter as another call came over the public address. Meers hurried to a stand-up counter. There were no onions, no relish. He squeezed some mustard out of a plastic packet, half of it squirting cleverly onto his tan overcoat. Cursing, dabbing at the mustard, Meers took a bite. It was lukewarm on one end, cold on the other.

  Gulping Coke and choking down cold weenie and stale bun, Meers hurried to the boarding area, Down the jetway and into the 727. Most of the passengers were seated except a few struggling with crammed overhead compartments. He sidled down to seat 28B. In 28C was a woman who had to be three hundred pounds, most of it in the hips. In 28A was a man who was more like three-fifty, his face shiny with sweat. Meers looked around desperately, but he already knew this was the last, the absolute last seat on the plane.

  The woman glared at him as she stood. Meers got his carry-on under the seat, then popped the overhead rack. There was about enough space to store a wallet. The next one was just as full. A flight attendant took his briefcase and laptop an
d hurried away.

  He wedged himself into the seat. The lady wedged herself into hers. He felt his ribs compressing. From his right came gusts of a sickening lilac perfume. From the left, waves of stale terror.

  “My first flight,” the fat man confided.

  “Oh, really?” Meers said.

  “I’m real scared.”

  “No need to be.” The fat lady scrambled in her purse for a box of tissue, then blew her nose loud enough to frighten a walrus. She crumpled the noisome tissue and dropped it on Meers’ shoe.

  They were pushed back, they taxied, they waited two hours and taxied some more, they were de-iced and waited another hour. All of which took much longer than it takes to tell about it. Then they were in the air. The fat man promptly threw up into the little white bag.

  Atlanta. ATL. They landed under a thick pall of black smoke. Somewhere to the west, a large part of Georgia was tinder-dry and burning. Hartsfield International sweltered in hundred-degree heat, and soot swirled across the runways. It was dark as night.

  The fat man had filled barf bags all through the flight. In spite of this, he had eaten like a starving hyena. Meers had been unable to eat. He could barely get his hands to his mouth. He had stared at the meal on his tray table, as immobilized as if bound to his seat, until the stewardess took it away.

  Just before they reached the gate, the flight attendant arrived for the fat man’s latest delivery. Meers eyed the bulging bottom of the bag in horror as it passed over his lap, but it didn’t break.

  The heat slammed him as he left the plane. It didn’t abate when he entered the terminal. The air was thick, hot syrup. The forest fires had downed power lines, and the air conditioning was off. So were the lights. So were the computers and telephones.

  Somehow the ticketing staff were still working, though Meers couldn’t imagine how. He joined the endless line and began shuffling forward. He shuffled for five hours. At the end of that time, when he was nearing starvation, the agent told him he hadn’t a hope of a connection to his home, but he could put Meers on a flight to Dallas-Fort Worth, where his chances would be better. The flight would leave in nine hours.