by John Varley
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 Doctor Blume. Security was essential. Four people knowing about Charlie was already three too many, Galloway said.
Charlie seemed cheerful, and cooperated with Blume's requests. He worked through robotic instruments, and it was frustrating. But she learned to take her own blood and tissue samples and prepare them for viewing. Blume was beginning to learn something of the nature of Neuro-X, though he admitted that, working alone, it might take him years to reach a breakthrough. Charlie didn't seem to mind.
The isolation techniques were rigorous. The crawler brought supplies to within one hundred yards of the habitat and left them sitting there on the dust. A second crawler would come out to bring them in.
Under no circumstances was anything allowed to leave the habitat, nor to come in contact with anything that was going back to the world—and, indeed, the crawler was the only thing in the latter category.
Contact was strictly one-way. Anything could go in, but nothing could come out. That was the strength of the system, and its final weakness.
Charlie had been living in the habitat for fifteen days when she started running a fever. Doctor Blume prescribed bed rest and aspirin, and didn't tell Bach how worried he was.
The next day was worse. She coughed a lot, couldn't keep food down. Blume was determined to go out there in an isolation suit. Bach had to physically restrain him at one point, and be very firm with him until he finally calmed down and saw how foolish he was being. It would do Charlie no good for Blume to die.
Bach called Galloway, who arrived by express liner the next day.
By then Blume had some idea what was happening.
"I gave her a series of vaccinations," he said, mournfully. "It's so standard... I hardly gave it a thought. Measles-D1, the Manila-strain mumps, all the normal communicable diseases we have to be so careful of in a Lunar environment. Some of them were killed viruses, some were weakened... and they seem to be attacking her."
Galloway raged at him for a while. He was too depressed to fight back. Bach just listened, withholding her own judgment.
The next day he learned more. Charlie was getting things he had not inoculated her against, things that could have come in as hitch-hikers on the supplies, or that might have been lying dormant in the habitat itself.
He had carefully checked her thirty-year-old medical record. There had been no hint of any immune system deficiency, and it was not the kind of syndrome that could be missed. But somehow she had acquired it.
He had a theory. He had several of them. None would save his patient.
"Maybe the Neuro-X destroyed her immune system. But you'd think she would have succumbed to stray viruses there on the station. Unless the Neuro-X attacked the viruses, too, and changed them."
He mumbled things like that for hours on end as he watched Charlie waste away on his television screen.
"For whatever reason... she was in a state of equilibrium there on the station. Bringing her here destroyed that. If I could understand how, I still might save her..."
The screen showed a sweating, gaunt-faced little girl. Much of her hair had fallen out. She complained that her throat was very dry and she had trouble swallowing. She just keeps fighting, Bach thought, and felt the tightness in the back of her own throat.
Charlie's voice was still clear.
"Tell Megan I finally finished her picture," she said.
"She's right here, honey," Bach said. "You can tell her yourself."
"Oh." Charlie licked her lips with a dry tongue, and her eyes wandered around. "I can't see much.
Are you there, Megan?"
"I'm here."
"Thanks for trying." She closed her eyes, and for a moment Bach thought she was gone. Then the eyes opened again.
"Anna-Louise?"
"I'm still right here, darling."
"Anna, what's going to happen to my dogs?"
"I'll take care of them," she lied. "Don't you worry." Somehow she managed to keep her voice steady. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.
"Good. Tik-Tok will tell you which ones to breed. They're good dogs, but you can't let them take advantage of you."
"I won't."
Char
lie coughed, and seemed to become a little smaller when she was through. She tried to lift her head, could not, and coughed again. Then she smiled, just a little bit, but enough to break Bach's heart.
"I'll go see Albert," she said. "Don't go away."
"We're right here."
She closed her eyes. She continued breathing raggedly for over an hour, but her eyes never opened again.
Bach let Galloway handle the details of cleaning up and covering up. She felt listless, uninvolved.
She kept seeing Charlie as she had first seen her, a painted savage in a brown tide of dogs.
When Galloway went away, Bach stayed on at the Mozartplatz, figuring the woman would tell her if she had to get out. She went back to work, got the promotion Galloway had predicted, and began to take an interest in her new job. She evicted Ralph and his barbells from her old apartment, though she continued to pay the rent on it. She grew to like Mozartplatz even more than she had expected she would, and dreaded the day Galloway would eventually sell the place. There was a broad balcony with potted plants where she could sit with her feet propped up and look out over the whole insane buzz and clatter of the place, or prop her elbows on the rail and spit into the lake, over a mile below. The weather was going to take some getting used to, though, if she ever managed to afford a place of her own here. The management sent rainfall and windstorm schedules in the mail and she faithfully posted them in the kitchen, then always forgot and got drenched.
The weeks turned into months. At the end of the sixth month, when Charlie was no longer haunting Bach's dreams, Galloway showed up. For many reasons Bach was not delighted to see her, but she put on a brave face and invited her in. She was dressed this time, Earth fashion, and she seemed a lot stronger.
"Can't stay long," she said, sitting on the couch Bach had secretly begun to think of as her own. She took a document out of her pocket and put it on a table near Bach's chair. "This is the deed to this condo. I've signed it over to you, but I haven't registered it yet. There are different ways to go about it, for tax purposes, so I thought I'd check with you. I told you I always pay my debts. I was hoping to do it with Charlie, but that turned out... well, it was more something I was doing for myself, so it didn't count."
Bach was glad she had said that. She had been wondering if she would be forced to hit her.
"This won't pay what I owe you, but it's a start." She looked at Bach and raised one eyebrow. "It's a start, whether or not you accept it. I'm hoping you won't be too stiff-necked, but with loonies—or should I say Citizens of Luna?—I've found you can never be too sure."
Bach hesitated, but only for a split second.
"Loonies, Lunarians... who cares?" She picked up the deed. "I accept."
Galloway nodded, and took an envelope out of the same pocket the deed had been in. She leaned back, and seemed to search for words.
"I... thought I ought to tell you what I've done." She waited, and Bach nodded. They both knew, without mentioning Charlie's name, what she was talking about.
"The dogs were painlessly put to sleep. The habitat was depressurized and irradiated for about a month, then reactivated. I had some animals sent in and they survived. So I sent in a robot on a crawler and had it bring these out. Don't worry, they've been checked out a thousand ways and they're absolutely clean."
She removed a few sheets of paper from the envelope and spread them out on the table. Bach leaned over and looked at the pencil sketches.
"You remember she said she'd finally finished that picture for me? I've already taken that one out.
But there were these others, one with your name on it, and I wondered if you wanted any of them?"
Bach had already spotted the one she wanted. It was a self-portrait, just the head and shoulders. In it, Charlie had a faint smile... or did she? It was that kind of drawing; the more she looked at it, the harder it was to tell just what Charlie had been thinking when she drew this. At the bottom it said
"To Anna-Louise, my friend."
Bach took it and thanked Galloway, who seemed almost as anxious to leave as Bach was to have her go.
Bach fixed herself a drink and sat back in "her" chair in "her" home. That was going to take some getting used to, but she looked forward to it.
She picked up the drawing and studied it, sipping her drink. Frowning, she stood and went through the sliding glass doors onto her balcony. There, in the brighter light of the atrium, she held the drawing up and looked closer.
There was somebody behind Charlie. But maybe that wasn't right, either, maybe it was just that she had started to draw one thing, had erased it and started again. Whatever it was, there was another network of lines in the paper that were very close to the picture that was there, but slightly different.
The longer Bach stared at it, the more she was convinced she was seeing the older woman Charlie had never had a chance to become. She seemed to be in her late thirties, not a whole lot older than Bach.
Bach took a mouthful of liquor and was about to go back inside when a wind came up and snatched the paper from her hand.
"Goddamn weather!" she shouted as she made a grab for it. But it was already twenty feet away, turning over and over and falling. She watched it dwindle past all hope of recovery.
Was she relieved?
"Can I get that for you?"
She looked up, startled, and saw a man in a flight harness, flapping like crazy to remain stationary.
Those contraptions required an amazing amount of energy, and this fellow showed it, with bulging biceps and huge thigh muscles and a chest big as a barrel. The metal wings glittered and the leather straps creaked and the sweat poured off him.
"No thanks," she said, then she smiled at him. "But I'd be proud to make you a drink."
He smiled back, asked her apartment number, and flapped off toward the nearest landing platform.
Bach looked down, but the paper with Charlie's face on it was already gone, vanished in the vast spaces of Mozartplatz.
Bach finished her drink, then went to answer the knock on her door.
Options
Cleo hated breakfast.
Her energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children's. There was always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last minute, some argument that had to be settled.
This morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli's lap. Cleo hadn't seen it happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.
And of course it had to happen after Lilli was dressed.
"Mom, this was the last outfit I had."
"Well, if you wouldn't use them so hard they might last more than three days, and if you didn't..."
She stopped before she lost her temper. "Just take it off and go as you are."
"But Mom, nobody goes to school naked. Nobody. Give me some money and I'll stop at the store on—"
Cleo raised her voice, something she tried never to do. "Child, I know there are kids in your class whose parents can't afford to buy clothes at all."
"All right, so the poor kids don't—"
"That's enough. You're late already. Get going."
Lilli stalked from the room. Cleo heard the door slam.
Through it all Jules was an island of calm at the other end of the table, his nose in his newspad, sipping his second cup of coffee. Cleo glanced at her own bacon and eggs cooling on the plate, poured herself a first cup of coffee, then had to get up and help Paul find his other shoe.
By then Feather was wet again, so she put her on the table and peeled off the sopping diaper.
"Hey, listen to this," Jules said. " 'The City Council today passed without objection an ordinance requiring—' "
"Jules, aren't you a little behind schedule?"
He glanced at his thumbnail. "You're right. Thanks." He finished his coffee, folded his newspad and tucked it under his arm, bent over to kiss her, then frowned.
"You really ought to eat more, honey," he said, indicat
ing the untouched eggs. "Eating for two, you know. 'Bye now."
"Good-bye," Cleo said, through clenched teeth. "And if I hear that 'eating for two' business again, I'll..." But he was gone.
She had time to scorch her lip on the coffee, then was out the door, hurrying to catch the train.
There were seats on the sun car, but of course Feather was with her and the UV wasn't good for her tender skin. After a longing look at the passengers reclining with the dark cups strapped over their eyes—and a rueful glance down at her own pale skin—Cleo boarded the next car and found a seat by a large man wearing a hardhat. She settled down in the cushions, adjusted the straps on the carrier slung in front of her, and let Feather have a nipple. She unfolded her newspad and spread it out in her lap.
"Cute," the man said. "How old is he?"
"She," Cleo said, without looking up. "Eleven days." And five hours and thirty-six minutes...
She shifted in the seat, pointedly turning her shoulder to him, and made a show of activating her newspad and scanning the day's contents. She did not glance up as the train left the underground tunnel and emerged on the gently rolling, airless plain of Mendeleev. There was little enough out there to interest her, considering she made the forty-minute commute to Hartman Crater twice a day.
They had discussed moving to Hartman, but Jules liked living in King City near his work, and of course the kids would have missed all their school friends.
There wasn't much in the news storage that morning. When the red light flashed, she queried for an update. The pad printed some routine city business. Three sentences into the story she punched the reject key.
There was an Invasion Centennial parade listed for 1900 hours that evening. Parades bored her, and so did the Centennial. If you've heard one speech about how liberation of Earth is just around the corner if we all pull together, you've heard them all. Semantic content zero, nonsense quotient high.
She glanced wistfully at sports, noting that the J Sector jumpball team was doing poorly without her in the intracity tournament. Cleo's small stature and powerful legs had served her well as a starting sprint-wing in her playing days, but it just didn't seem possible to make practices anymore.
