The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  Jasmine got another plant from the bucket and started digging a hole. She was a small woman with wide eyes and large, capable hands. She wore her blond hair in thick braids and had a collar of fur around her neck—her only surgical alteration. Cathay had been sharing a room with Jasmine for two years before Lilo arrived, and the two of them had expressed an interest in inviting Lilo to join them. Lilo wasn't sure. She had been doing well rooming with Chea, who was as capable a co-worker as she had ever found. But that phase of their relationship had ended when they finished their work on the Jovian organism. Chea was doing other work now, work that didn't involve Lilo. Since then he had not been around as much as she could have wished.

  "There's no way to know for sure yet," Jasmine said, patting the dirt around the roots of her plant. "I mean if what Lilo's learning about the upper organisms will have any bearing on the ones who live deeper. But it's unlikely."

  "How come?" Cathay was the perpetual straight man when the discussions got into science, but he didn't mind. He cheerfully admitted that he knew next to nothing about it. He was not a teacher of skills or knowledge, but a primary teacher: one who led children into exploring themselves, discovering and developing their aptitudes.

  "We know a lot about the nature of the Jovian atmosphere," Jasmine said. "It's stratified. Hydrogen on top, then under that ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, water, and liquid hydrogen, all of them in various crystalline states, or melted, or diffused through each other. There's no reason to think the creature Lilo has could survive if it dropped a few hundred kilometers."

  "And plenty of reason to think it couldn't," Lilo added.

  "You say this thing had a hydrogen gasbag," Cathay said. "How could that keep it up if it floated in hydrogen?"

  Lilo laughed. "Good question. I wondered about that myself, and I'm really not sure. I think I might have seen it in an early stage. Maybe it's born in a lower layer, makes hydrogen to fill its balloon, and rises to the sunlight. After that, it would need a new method of staying in the air. There's plenty of energy it could tap. It's a violent place."

  "It's possible that Jupiter has several biospheres," Jasmine said. "They might mix a little, like Lilo's suggestion that her critter might be born at a lower level and rise to the top. But it's going to be tough to study it, especially down at the lowest levels where the Jovians probably are."

  "Why do you think they're down there?"

  "Well, I... you're right. They might live in the upper layers. But it's unlikely, I think, if only on straight probability. There are so many strata they could occupy. The probes I've sent in have identified thirty-seven distinct environments, like layers of an onion. Some of them mix in different weather conditions, which makes even more possibilities. But it's hard to imagine anything that could live in all of them. Down there at the bottom, just before my probes stop sending, is a core of hot metallic hydrogen. I don't know if anything could live in that, but I wouldn't take any bets that it's impossible to live in the layer just above."

  "And what's in that layer?"

  "It's a layer of liquid hydrogen, but it's hot. About twelve thousand degrees. Three million atmospheres pressure. And don't ask me what kind of life might be there. It wouldn't be like anything Lilo's ever studied. But if the Invaders and Jovians live in that stuff, all bets are off. We may never touch them."

  The conversation was disturbing Lilo. She was new to the concept of weapons research; it was not something she had ever thought of before. It was not pleasant to think that your research is aimed at only one result: to kill anything you could discover.

  9

  After finishing her work in the lab and spending some time in the farm, Lilo would often go exploring with Cathay and Cass and Jasmine, or sometimes just with one of them. After about a month, however, Jasmine gradually lost interest. At one hundred and fifty, she was the oldest of the group. Jasmine had borne her child over a century ago, found that she wasn't really interested in children, and had not had another on Poseidon.

  The situation with the three of them grew awkward. Lilo had moved in with them and things had gone well for a while. But it gradually became clear that Jasmine was more drawn to Lilo than to Cathay. Cathay was unhappy about it, and a little resentful of Lilo. Jasmine was talking about having a sex change, which further alienated Cathay since he was a confirmed male with no interest in other men. Lilo, on the other hand, liked them both. She was a female-stable personality—though not to the degree that Cathay was male-stable—and had spent only three of her fifty-seven years as a male. Jasmine was a member of the no-preference majority.

  The months went by. Jasmine got her sex change from Mari. For a short while it seemed that it might work with the three of them, but eventually Jasmine drifted out of their lives. Lilo and Cathay got along well, in all but one area.

  "You're crazy. We'll never get out of here until Tweed is ready to let us go."

  "Which will be never." She didn't want to get into an argument with him about it, but could not help feeling aggravated at his acceptance of imprisonment. She looked at him and saw herself after ten years.

  "You're right," he said. "Never. That is, unless you think there's a chance we'll find a way to defeat the Invaders—"

  "And I do not, not for a—"

  "—in which case we'll be welcomed all over the system as heroes. Otherwise, one of these days he's going to run out of money or get tired of the project."

  "And we'll all be eliminated."

  "Exactly. Surely you don't think I like that idea? But what the hell can we do about it?"

  "We can devote all our energy to trying to do something!"

  "Fine, fine. I'm all for that. What did you have in mind?"

  Lilo swallowed her anger and tried to discuss it calmly with him. This is what it always came to: Give me a concrete proposal, tell me your plan. And every time she mentioned one, half-formed and highly tentative, someone would pick a million holes in it.

  "I don't have anything specific," she admitted, again.

  "Okay. Why don't you think about it some more and—"

  "But I'll never get one without some help! Can't you see that giving up is the surest way to stay here forever? I know all my plans have been bad ones. So far! But I keep meeting with this fatalistic attitude. And from you! That continues to amaze me." She stopped, and calmed herself again. She had not meant to yell at him, and now he seemed hurt. She put her arms around him. He was unresponsive for a time, but gradually softened.

  It was good with Cathay. He was a considerate lover, a good man, and a person she could trust.

  "There are some who are working on getting away," he said. "But they're pretty much stuck, too, the last I heard. You might want to talk to them. There was one plan to move the whole damn moon. But it's crazy."

  "Who? That's all I want to do; talk to people who want to get away."

  "You're talking to me. We all want out. But the only ones who are still working on it that I know of are Vejay and Niobe."

  Vejay hovered near the ceiling of his room, hanging by one foot, rummaging in a box of papers. The room was cluttered, all six walls holding furniture and boxes stuffed with paper.

  "It's a simple principle, really," he said. "It's even been done a couple of times, in the asteroid belt. But it's not economical." He found what he was looking for—a ragged sheet of blue paper, much folded—and began to spread it in the air. Lilo twisted and came up beside him. She wrinkled her nose as she got close to him. Vejay was not very popular; on a civilized planet he would always be in trouble with the law for forgetting to bathe.

  Vejay often forgot to eat, and never exercised at all. He neglected taking his booster pills to the point that he was all skin and bones, with just enough muscle to move him around in a weightless state. Mari had told Lilo he was healthy enough, as long as he never had to cope with gravity. Vejay believed in operating at an optimum state, and on Poseidon, that meant massing thirty kilos soaking wet.

  There could not have be
en a greater contrast between Vejay and the third occupant of the room. Niobe the Dancer was a flawless physical specimen. Every muscle in her body was perfectly defined, standing out in a graceful pattern of swells and hollows all over her arms, legs, belly, and back.

  "It's a good space drive," Vejay was saying. "But it only works well for something massive. The hole itself would outweigh any ship I ever heard of. The hole is on the other side, directly opposite us. Have you been over there to see it?"

  "No. I've been meaning to, but I didn't think it was really important. I think I will now, though."

  "You should. It's rather remarkable, being on the surface of the moon. You put one down on Luna and if something goes wrong it would just sink right through the surface and start orbiting underground. Pretty soon, no Luna."

  Lilo shivered. No one really liked black holes.

  It would have been easy to dismiss them as just another scientific abstraction if they had stayed decently distant from human affairs. When black holes were first postulated, it was thought that only a huge star which had burned itself out could ever form one. When the nuclear fires in the core of a star could no longer support the star's mass, gravity would take over; it would begin to collapse. Eventually it would reach a size and density that meant its escape velocity exceeded the speed of light.

  But it was determined that at the creation of the universe, during the Big Bang, there were forces powerful enough to form tiny black holes, some of them being smaller than an atomic nucleus. Shortly afterward, that theory was modified. Though the holes might have been formed, they would have quickly evaporated, and would no longer be around to give human scientists headaches.

  That theory had held until shortly after the Invasion, when tiny "quantum" black holes were discovered in the cometary zone, beyond the orbit of Pluto. These mysterious objects were tiny; the largest in use was only a fraction of a millimeter across. But their gravity was tremendous. If they came in close proximity to a material object, they would destroy it, and energy would be released. That energy could be captured and broadcast from the orbital power stations to receivers on the ground.

  One of them had gotten away, two hundred years ago, as it was being warped into orbit around Pluto. It had drilled a ten-meter hole straight through the center of the planet. The area of destruction was much more extensive than that, with tidal disruptions and quakes as pressure forced rock to flow like warm butter and fill in behind the hole's passage.

  "What keeps that from happening here?" she asked.

  "It could happen," Vejay said. "But it's not a huge hole, and Poseidon's a small rock. It'd fall through slowly, and what with the irregularities we'd be able to catch it on the other side. See, look here, this is how it works."

  Lilo studied the diagram as Vejay explained it to her. She had thought it an extravagance to use a black hole for the station's power supply, and her opinion was confirmed by the figures. The hole was capable of putting out enough power to run a small city; Poseidon was able to utilize only a fraction of the output, even after much of it was siphoned off to maintain the hole against the pull of gravity.

  "It's just sitting out there right now," Vejay said. "It's got a nullfield under it, bowl-shaped, like this." He pointed out a hemisphere which hovered over the surface of Poseidon, open end pointed outward. "The field protects the equipment under it from overheating, or the rock from melting. Also it means you can go right up close under the thing to service the support facilities." He indicated three massive domes on the ground.

  "The hole has a charge on it, and it's held up by these electromagnets. Big ones, supercooled."

  "So how does this help us escape?"

  Vejay cocked his head, studying the drawing as if seeing it for the first time. He looked up, baffled.

  "Doesn't that nullfield hemisphere shape suggest anything to you? It's not the most efficient design—we could tune it to whatever shape we want when we take control—but it would work as it is now."

  Lilo looked again. Of course, why hadn't she seen it?

  "A rocket exhaust nozzle."

  "You got it. The hole is just sitting down there in that bowl, which points up from the surface of Poseidon. When we dump matter in there—anything at all, but not too much of it—the hole's gravity compresses it. It compresses it so hard that any nuclear reaction you want to think of can take place. A lot of matter gets destroyed, and that means energy, which we can tap for our power needs here.

  "Even at the rate we put matter into it right now, there's a slight thrust generated, since the bowl is open at the top. It's almost too small to measure when you realize the whole mass of Poseidon and the hole is resisting the acceleration. So what we'd do is drop rocks into the hole just like we're doing now. Only instead of using dust particles and measuring them out with an eye-dropper, we'd need a conveyor belt. We'd need a steady fuel supply.

  "So we've solved the second problem. Now all we have to do is solve the first."

  Lilo frowned. "Maybe I'm slow."

  Niobe laughed. "Don't worry. I thought we were on our way when I saw this, too. Vejay, you go too fast. She just got here."

  "Sorry," he said. "Okay. The second problem is where do we go when we eliminate all the Vaffas. Any of the Eight Worlds would execute the lot of us as illegal clones. With this, we can go anywhere. I suggest we go far away."

  "You're talking about interstellar travel?"

  "What else? This drive would get us up close to the speed of light. We probably couldn't push it much faster than a twentieth of a gee, but we'd get there. Alpha Centauri in maybe twenty years."

  "But what about the mass... ah. I think I see."

  "We'd have enough. We use the mass of Poseidon itself, of course, just like we do now."

  Lilo thought about that for a while. It was awfully damn frustrating, because, while Vejay had not mentioned the first problem, she saw what it was. It would take construction, utilization of the heavy equipment that had been used to hollow out the corridors—a myriad of details. A space drive cannot be designed and slapped together overnight.

  "How long do you think it would take to get it ready?"

  He shrugged. "Working hard, with no unplanned complications, I might have it working in two weeks."

  And Vaffa inspected the site every day. It always came back to Vaffa.

  I began to sleep badly. Meeting Vejay and Niobe had fired up my hopes, whetted my appetite for actually doing something about getting away. I was still as far from escaping as ever, but I didn't feel like it. We had solved the easy end of the equation of freedom. The problems all still lay ahead. At least six of them, possibly as many as ten, all of them named Vaffa.

  A Vaffa could be killed. It was difficult, but it had been done twice over the years by desperate people. I heard both stories told a hundred times. They could be ambushed and overpowered indoors. Outside, they were as invulnerable as their suits. Bury them alive under a ton of rock; their suit fields would protect them and they would last as long as their air held out—plenty of time to be rescued.

  Bury them all at once? You could blow up the whole rock, but where would that leave you?

  "What are they?"

  "Sugar babies. Are you kidding? How could you not know what sugar babies are?"

  But Lilo did not. They were in a large glass jar with a narrow neck that she had discovered in Cass's hideout. Apparently he had tired of them, but they seemed to have done well.

  The bottom of the soil was covered with dark soil, and growing from it were five dwarf elm trees, three Douglas firs, and a lot of moss. There was a cave formed from piled rocks, and standing in the entrance to the cave were three bipedal figures, one millimeter tall. Their bodies were white, and the tops of their tiny heads were black. They looked just like little people.

  "It looks like they have faces," she said, leaning closer.

  "You aren't kidding. You've really never seen them before."

  "Never." But as she said it, she had a funny feeli
ng that it was not true. She shook her head, but the feeling persisted.

  "Well, they do have faces. But take a closer look."

  There was a magnifier embedded in the side of the jar. Lilo looked through it, and the illusion fell apart. What looked to be hair on the heads was just coloring of the exoskeleton, concealing multifaceted eyes. The faces were three dots and a line. The things were segmented at the joints and waist like marionettes, or like...

  "Ants. These are ants."

  "That's what they started off with," Cass confirmed. "They changed them. You can see the fifth and sixth legs at the waist. They're real small."

  Lilo felt sick, but could not take her eyes from the creatures. More came from the cave, walking crazily on their hind legs, the jointed arms waving about.

  "It's repulsive," she said. She wondered if she was going to throw up.

  Cass grimaced. "Yeah. I know what you mean. I got them when I was younger and now I don't know what to do with them. I can't just kill them; it wouldn't feel right."

  "Tweed lets you..."

  "We can order stuff sometimes. The kits to build these were in the supplies from Luna a few years back. All the kids made them. I wish I'd asked for cat eggs instead."

  Lilo was feeling dizzy now. There was a sense of disorientation, and a growing feeling of déjà vu. She tried to force the memory, but it wouldn't come. Yet it was building inside her, and wouldn't be stopped.

  "They can't live outside the jar," Cass was saying. "Special soil, or something, so if they get loose they can't turn into a pest. I don't guess they'll last much... hey, are you all right?"

  "Just be quiet a minute, please? Don't say anything." She continued to stare at the tiny prisoners. Was it just the fact of their confinement? She didn't see how that could bother her so badly. She never liked to see things caged, had always avoided working with living specimens for that very reason. But that couldn't account for a reaction like this.

  She went back in time, several years earlier. She knew she had looked into a bottle just like this one, at a colony of sugar babies. One time... no, twice. Wait. She was sure it had happened to her three times. Standing there, staring...