The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  But a few days before the insertion Vaffa had a surprise for her.

  "We're not really going to Titan. I am, eventually, but you're not."

  "Where am I going?"

  "Little place called Poseidon."

  "Where the hell is that?"

  Vaffa and Iphis exchanged glances. Lilo had the uncomfortable feeling that the name should mean something to her.

  "Try Jay-eight. Jay dash vee eye eye eye. Roman numerals."

  "One of Jupiter's retrograde moons," Iphis explained. "A chunk of rock about twenty kilometers through, twenty million kilometers out."

  "But that's..."

  "Illegal?" Vaffa laughed, and was joined by Iphis. "Tell it to the Invaders."

  "Invaders," Lilo mumbled.

  6

  Why We Can't Go Home. The March 5 Oral Creative Co-op. (Illit. level transcribed tape)

  They came in the year 2050, old style. (Two asteroid-sized objects entering the solar system from interstellar space. Palomar scope pans upward. Astronomer bends over eyepiece.) They were decelerating, heading for Jupiter.

  Two astronauts, Purunkita and Mizinchikov, were diverted from a regular supply mission to the Mars base. (Stock footage of P & M boarding spaceship U Thant. Cut to actors in ship: watching instruments, getting radio message, firing engines, eating meals, copping.) They were to swing out to Jupiter in six months and arrive with empty tanks. Their orders: Sit tight, observe, and await the arrival of a robot tanker. (Process shot of P & M at port of U Thant, Jupiter outside. P is as black as space. Her arm is around M. She is pregnant.)

  One of the objects did orbit Jupiter. The other changed course at the last moment and headed for Earth. It landed in the Pacific Ocean, near the equator. That was the Year One of the Occupation of Earth. (Flat newsreel footage of Invader ship, twenty-kilometer sphere sitting half-submerged in water, dull-surfaced, pocked with holes.)

  What little we know of Invaders comes from Purunkita and Mizinchikov, the only people known to have entered one of the ships and returned. This is what happened to them. (The alien ship matches with the U Thant, swallows it. Camera follows P. M. and infant daughter through water-filled stone tunnels.) They met Doctor Ellen Bronson and her two companions, who had entered the ship that landed in the Pacific. They had been in the ship no more than a day, but had entered on the day of landing. On that day, the astronauts had still been three months from Jupiter.

  If the story the astronauts told is true, space and time exist in a different manner inside the ships. There is little reason to doubt the story.

  Doctor Bronson is thought to be the only human ever to have seen the aliens themselves and survived. (B alone, entering large chamber, as big as the interior of an engineered asteroid. It is half-full of water. In the distance, special-effect distortions represent Invaders. Tight shot of B's face, indicating shock and fear. She turns and runs.)

  Bronson claimed to have had a strange experience. Things were told to her in a mysterious way, and she could never account for it when she told Purunkita and Mizinchikov. (Five figures gathered around a fire on a beach within the ship, whispering.) No one knows whether to believe her story, but it's the only one we've got. This is what she said.

  The Invaders come from a gas giant planet like Jupiter. Their purpose in coming to the solar system was not the invasion of Earth, but unknown motives concerned with the inhabitants of Jupiter. Bronson said there are intelligent Jovians who are much like the Invaders. (Animation sequence in the Jovian atmosphere. Huge shadowy shapes swim by.)

  The invasion of Earth was secondary. It was done for the benefit of the three intelligent species of Earth: sperm whales, "killer" whales, and bottle-nosed dolphins. (Stock footage of aquatic mammals.)

  Bronson said there are levels of intelligence in the universe. On top are the Jovians and Invaders. One step below are the dolphins and whales. Humans, birds, bees, beavers, ants, and corals are not considered intelligent.

  No one knows if any of this is right. But it's all we have.

  There were no explanations given to humanity. No ambassadors appeared, no ultimatums were offered. Humans resisted the Invasion, but the resistance was ignored. H-bombs would not go off, tanks would not move, guns would not fire. (Panic in the streets, helicopter shots of jammed highways.) No one ever saw an Invader. Pictures show distortions in the sky that no observer noticed at the time, like blind spots in the human eye. Perhaps these things were the Invaders. (Still, flat photos of buildings toppling, streets being uprooted, with colorful whirlpools in the sky.)

  As far as anyone knows from information sent up before the transmitters went dead, the Invaders never killed a human. What they did was destroy utterly every artifact of human civilization. In their wake they left plowed ground, sprouting seedlings, and grass.

  In the next two years, ten billion humans starved to death.

  Poseidon is an irregular chunk of rock. It is the most distant object of any size that Jupiter can be said to claim. Being retrograde and inclined one hundred and fifty degrees from Jupiter's equator, it is one of the more difficult bodies in the solar system to rendezvous with.

  The Earthhome II was a free-faller, a cargo ship designed to carry bulky, nonpriority freight. It traveled by hyperbolic orbits, not the straight lines of a high-booster.

  "Congratulations, Captain," Lilo said. "That was a neat bit of work."

  "Huh? Oh, you mean the approach?" He shrugged, but she saw he was pleased. She had gotten to know him pretty well on the twenty-nine-day trip to Jupiter.

  "Really," she said. "Most ship pilots are like slide-way operators nowadays. They make travel pretty dull."

  "Yeah, I won't argue with you on that."

  "You make me think of the days when people just set out. Nothing on the other end, no refueling stations, no air, nothing at all. And I think you like it."

  He smiled at her. "I guess I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't. I always felt born in the wrong age, though. No adventure. This run is about the most dangerous thing you can do, and it's illegal. You must have wondered how we get away with this, going to Jupiter." Iphis explained Tweed's system.

  It was illegal to assume a closed orbit around Jupiter, or to land on any of the moons. The loophole was that it was legal to use Jupiter to alter an orbit on the way to somewhere else. Passenger ships never did it—too many people were afraid to approach Jupiter at all. But there were plenty of independent operators who were willing if it would save them time and fuel.

  The trick was to have two ships. Tweed had obtained one at Pluto, listed as missing and presumed lost. An identical ship had been purchased openly. Now both ships bore the same registration numbers. More important, they had the same captain. Lilo went to Jupiter in the Earthhome II, captained by Iphis II. But there was an Earthhome I, and an Iphis I, a clone, whom number two had never met and probably never would.

  "Customs, by its nature," Iphis explained, "is only interested in incoming ships. I take off for Titan, listing only Vaffa as a passenger. I come to Jupiter, and meanwhile my clone and another Vaffa are on their way down from Poseidon. He takes my place on the course I was traveling. Everything's airtight at Titan, because he'll get there carrying only what I declared at Luna. If anyone's ever noticed my exhaust out here in the moons, no one's ever said anything about it. They probably think it's Invaders up to something."

  Lilo sobered at the mention of Invaders. It had been twenty hours since they had swung around Jupiter. It was not something she liked to recall.

  She looked out the port again. "Isn't it about time you thought about landing us?" The moon was getting uncomfortably large; she could no longer see the edges. Something moved on the surface. With a shock, she realized it was a person. They were that close.

  "Don't worry. You don't land a ship like this on a pebble like that. You could fart your way right into orbit." He glanced out the port, and his hands went to the controls. With a few pops from the attitude jets, they seemed stationary. "Now they'll pull us
in with ropes and tie us down. You can get out now, if you want to." He vaulted from his couch. It astounded Lilo how graceful he was. She knew that legs were encumbrances in weightlessness, too overpowered for any job they might be called on to do. She had not realized they were actually dangerous. She had nearly split her head three times on the first day of the flight. All her traveling had been done on one-gee ships.

  She found herself looking around for something. Her suit. A deeply ingrained reflex was trying to keep her from stepping into the lock in only her vest and kilt. Those horrible seconds escaping from the Institute came back to her. She repressed the memory. It annoyed her to be prey to unreasoning fears. She knew the null-suit worked; it had come to life a few hours from Jupiter, when the radiation level in the ship had become dangerous.

  Sealing herself into the lock as soon as Iphis and Vaffa had gone out, she pressed the cycle button. Goose pimples broke out on her bare skin; then the suit came on and she was fighting for breath. She suppressed the reflex to gasp.

  A null-suit was not easy to get used to. Some of it was merely disconcerting, such as finding yourself wrapped in a mirror that followed every curve of your body at a distance of one to one and a half millimeters. When she looked at herself, what she saw was a distorted picture of the things around her, twisted like a funhouse mirror. But some of it was downright alarming. Lilo had been breathing air for fifty-seven years, and suddenly to stop was not easy.

  The suit contained a neural link that suppressed the part of the automatic nervous system that controlled her diaphragm. When the suit was on, the breathing reflex was turned off. But it was not quite that simple. Below even the level where digestion, heartbeat, and breathing are controlled was a primitive ape that was just smart enough to realize she was not breathing, but not smart enough to understand the suit was taking care of it. The result was a near-panic reaction.

  Lilo knew she could not cope with it. Others had done so; on Mercury and Venus people grew up in null-suits. But for the first five minutes she just held the side of the lock and tried to stop shaking. She found it helpful to think of the process that was keeping her alive. She visualized the irregular metal implant Mari had put in place of her left lung. It contained the nullfield generator, a thirty-hour supply of oxygen, and artificial alveoli that connected with her pulmonary circulation system. The null-suit exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide, but much more efficiently than her lungs could. The oscillation of her suit's field created a bellows action that forced nearly pure carbon dioxide from the exhaust valve under her collarbone. There were ancillary systems, such as the binaural radio which she could work by subvocalizing in her throat.

  She began to feel better. Below her, about five meters down, was the surface, which was a dirty gray color. Some attempt had been made to level it in places, especially the area around the Earthhome's berth. A network of silver ropes stretched between metal supports. It was Poseidon's equivalent of a road system.

  Stepping out of the lock had seemed like a good idea, but after a few seconds Lilo saw her mistake. On the way down she had time to calculate the acceleration of gravity, which she found to be almost one centimeter per second squared, or six thousandths of a Lunar gravity. She landed—too hard, with too much reaction—and had time for more calculations as she drifted down again, a little frightened this time. But the escape velocity was quite a bit higher than her legs could deliver. The gravity well was three hundred thirty meters deep, under standard Lunar conditions.

  When she approached the surface again she was more careful. She grabbed a rope and pulled herself down. The rope had the same mirror brightness as her body. She watched her silver hands wrap around it, and saw that her suit joined the rope seamlessly as she touched it.

  She pulled herself toward the mirror the others had entered. It was another nullfield, protecting the entrance to an underground warren. She tried to go through it, but only got as far as her neck. Vaffa was inside, floating in a bare rock corridor, and she was smiling slightly. Lilo backed out and took off her vest and kilt, which had not been enclosed in her suit when it came on. There had to be a way to get them in, but she couldn't see what it might be. She entered, leaving her clothes behind.

  Vaffa was still there, and now she was holding something out to Lilo. It was a pressurized suitcase.

  "You'll have to learn about nullfields," Vaffa said. "Nothing gets through them but something that's encased in another nullfield. Except some of them are tuned to let in certain frequencies of light. That's how you can see through your suit."

  Lilo was angry, but wasn't going to say anything. She took the box from Vaffa and turned around. The mirror surface was invisible from the inside. She seemed to be looking out the end of an open shaft. As she stepped through, her suit formed around her again.

  "Is this some sort of initiation?" she snapped, as she returned with her clothes. Vacuum had not done them any good. The kilt contained volatile plastics which had begun to boil off.

  "No," Vaffa said. "Not really. Though it never hurts to get it through your head that things are different here." She paused, and looked at the ruined clothes as Lilo took them out again. "I hope those weren't your favorites or anything."

  Lilo said nothing.

  "I'll give you a few useful tips," Vaffa said. Lilo looked up, vaguely surprised. Vaffa had never been the type to volunteer anything.

  "For free?"

  "Sure," she laughed. "One is when you go outside, hold your hair back out of your eyes. The field will compress your hair to your head, tightly, as the air spaces in it are squashed out. If your hair is in your face, you won't be able to see."

  "Thanks. I'll remember that."

  "The second thing is to be careful when you're talking. That thing in your throat will broadcast whenever you subvocalize. If you think too hard, you might find everyone listening in."

  "I'll remember it."

  The corridor was round and looked unfinished. Someone had simply bored it out, not bothering about leveling the door. Sprayed stripes of yellow and green indicated the top and bottom, and arrows directed traffic. Lilo knew it would make sense eventually, but her disorientation was nearly total after three turns. Had she gone up or down, left or right? Was the yellow stripe the floor or ceiling? Looking into the rooms that branched off the tunnel every fifty meters was no help; furniture was attached to any convenient surface.

  Vaffa took her to a medico's shop. An unsmiling woman sat in a chair behind a desk attached to the rear wall.

  "Mari!" Lilo started forward before she recalled. Then she felt the blood rush to her face. Her ears were burning.

  "Yes. I understand you knew my clone on Luna," Mari was saying, drifting toward them. "I also know what you did to her."

  "I'm... sorry. I—"

  "Don't tell me. You didn't do anything. Number three did, I know that, and you're number four. And you didn't do it to me. Nevertheless I think you'll understand if I tell you I don't have much to say to you. Let's get on to business."

  Business turned out to be mostly medical. Mari tested her and began a course of treatment that would continue as long as she remained on Poseidon, designed to overcome the effects of weightlessness. Her goal was to keep all the females at the standard point nine-gee muscle-tone level. Mari believed—along with Lilo—that allowing human muscles to adapt to lower gravity states was dangerous in the long run.

  Lilo was given a tranquillizer to help her through the disorientation she was feeling, taken to a small cubicle, and told to sleep eight hours, after which she would be briefed on her duties at the station.

  7

  Poseidon base was a maze of catacombs more than forty years old. It rambled through the rock like termite trails in rotten wood, and eighty percent of it was abandoned.

  Lilo had discovered the empty sections of her first full day at the station, after having been told to look around and familiarize herself with the place. Some corridors ended in mirrors. When she passed through them, her suit for
med around her to give protection from the vacuum on the other side.

  Poseidon had been a much larger operation when Tweed had been President, and able secretly to funnel taxpayers' money into the project. Now that he was out of office and had to rely on his own funds and those of the party, it had been cut back. Still, it was a large undertaking for one man, involving eighty adult prisoners, their children, and an indeterminate number of guards, all of them clones of the ubiquitous Vaffa.

  There was no way to tell how many Vaffas there were simply because they were never all in the same place at the same time. They had their own section of the station, walled off by a nullfield that was tuned to allow them to pass, but to bar everyone else. They came in the two standard models—male and female—and they were all completely hairless. There were at least six of them, but there could have been twice that many. It was impossible to tell how they worked the watch periods and how many remained behind the impenetrable wall at any given time.

  Security was unobtrusive. Everyone was free to go anywhere on the base, with the exception of the guard room, and interference was minimal as long as the assigned projects got done. Each Vaffa carried a laser sidearm. It had been learned at great cost that the guns were effective for shooting prisoners, but useless for shooting Vaffas. They would shoot through a nullfield as long as a Vaffa wasn't behind it. Some had tried to adjust their suit generators to screen out the laser frequency. That worked fine, but only outside when the field was in operation. And the air in your lung would only last thirty hours. When the rebels had to come back in, they were shot.

  Lilo learned all this quickly. No one seemed reticent about discussing past escape attempts, and they were all willing to listen to what might be new ideas. But there was an answer for everything she proposed. The general opinion was that Poseidon was escape-proof. Lilo reserved judgment, but admitted to herself that it didn't look good.