The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  Numbers began to tumble through her head. She could see them as if they were solid objects with dimensions and mass. She began to remember.

  "I helped make these," she said, softly.

  "What?"

  "I was on the research team that first developed this strain of ant. It was twenty-five years ago, I was working for Copernicus Biological Labs. There was me, and Thessa, and Zaire and... and Yao-kaha. My name's on the patent. They were a big hit for a year, they sold very well, and—" She choked it off. Cass waited silently beside her, looking worried.

  Her stomach was feeling better, and the numbers were still there.

  "It was a big problem," she said, as if reading from a book. "The base in the Rings was no good to me if I could tell someone where it was under interrogation. And yet I couldn't just leave it there. I had to be able to find it if I was not arrested. I had to know and yet not know."

  "What are you talking about?" Cass said. "Lilo, you' re giving me the—"

  "Deep hypnotic suggestion," she said, as if she had not heard him. "I didn't know what I'd be up against in prison. I had to have it buried so deeply that I could die and never remember it, never know it was even there. I couldn't trust anyone to feed me the hypnotic trigger, and yet the location had to be recoverable if I wasn't arrested. So I set up the trigger stimulus keyed to something that I would encounter more or less at random. But not too often. I couldn't go through this every day, or even every week. It happened three times in five years. Each time I buried the knowledge again."

  "The sugar babies made you remember something?" She looked at the creatures again. The choice had been apt. Pitiful little things. Did they try to get out of their bottle? She could not have known she would survive her own execution when she was making her plans, and it had been sheer luck to encounter the sugar babies on Poseidon. But she knew. "I know. I know where it is."

  10

  The rumors had been going around for a month; there was finally going to be a trial run, an actual test of one of the possible weapons in the war with the Invaders. When Lilo heard what it was to be, she could not credit it. Surely Tweed would not do that.

  But shortly it was official. Everyone was worried, but no one could think of a way to stop it. Tweed was going to remove the black hole from the other side of Poseidon, let it pass through Jupiter, then sit back and see if there was any reaction. The general consensus on Poseidon was that if there was a reaction, it would not be necessary to radio the news to Tweed. The whole system would hear about it soon enough.

  Lilo talked it over with Niobe and Vejay, then spent hours with Cass and Cathay. They were all frightened. The question Lilo wanted to resolve was what approach to take. Cathay felt that any attempt to stop the project would be suicide, and said the best they could do was hope the Invaders would ignore it. After all, it was a big planet. It might not hit any of them on the way through.

  Lilo strongly disagreed, and was backed up by Niobe, Vejay, and Cass.

  "You know what I think?" Lilo asked. "I think the time is never going to be better to try and take over Poseidon."

  She waited for the reaction to die down. She was breathing hard, determined to get her point across. If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself. She did not wish to die, and what she was proposing looked dangerous, even to her.

  "What I'm saying is, what better time is there to go for broke than when it looks like the alternative might be just as bad? I'm willing to take the chance. What about you?"

  The discussion went on into the night, and proved inconclusive. The best Lilo could get was an agreement to discuss the situation further, and pledges of support if she could come up with a plan.

  She had one, but it was barely formed. It would have to depend on circumstances as they evolved, but it seemed as though the first necessary step in any plan was to be aboard the ship which would position the hole for its drop into Jupiter. If she could do that, there was time to think of a way to steal the ship and return for the others.

  So she approached Vaffa about the possibility of using the ship for the launching of another biological probe. She argued that it would make sense to combine the two missions. The electromagnetic tug could first release the hole on a course to pass through the center of Jupiter, then make a slight trajectory change to position an instrument package for an atmosphere-grazing path. After conferring with her clones and consulting the guidelines Tweed had given them, Vaffa okayed the project. Lilo said that she would need someone to help her, and suggested Vejay. Vaffa quickly vetoed him, on the grounds that he did not have a good reputation. Lilo hastily named Cathay as an alternative. She didn't want Vaffa thinking there was an escape being planned.

  She was counting on the fact that, while Tweed might know very well what she would do in terms of planning and preparation, he could not predict how she might react when confronted with an unplanned opportunity. Her policy was to put herself in a place where such an opportunity might occur.

  She told Vejay to come up with a means whereby Cathay could kill or disable the pilot of the tug, and, with any luck, take control of the ship. She intentionally made no plans to get rid of Vaffa. Not only did it seem impossible, but she was convinced that planning had to work against her rather than for her. The whole thing would have to be played by ear. She would get onto the ship and remain alert for an opening.

  She did her best not to think about it much, because when she did it sounded insane.

  Tweed surprised them all, and almost ruined everything. The conspirators assembled hastily when Lilo got the news of what was actually going to happen.

  "That's what comes of relying on rumors," Niobe said.

  "We should have thought of it," Vejay complained. "We would have been hard up for power here if he'd used our black hole. The standby fusion generator would have carried us, but it would have been tight."

  "I just didn't think he cared enough to worry about that," Niobe said.

  What Tweed had done was to buy a second hole on the open market at Pluto. It was on its way to Luna to become the ninth orbital power station, but what no one in authority knew was that Tweed planned to pass it through Jupiter before that happened.

  It was neat, it was economical; it was typically Tweed. Whenever possible he carried out more than one plan of action with every move he made. The hole, in orbit around Luna, would be enormously profitable to him, so the expense of the project would be justified and absorbed. The huge electromagnetic tug which had accelerated the hole at Pluto would let it go on one side of Jupiter, wait for it to pass through, and pick it up on the other side.

  Lilo pointed out to Vaffa that it would still be possible to use the small rocket scooter based on Poseidon to rendezvous with the larger ship as it passed them. Vaffa thought it over, and eventually agreed. The Vaffas might have suspected some sort of plot, but felt secure enough about the scooter. It had the peculiar property of exploding if it passed a certain distance from the gravity well of Jupiter: another of the innumerable precautions against escape.

  The scooter was a standard model, little more than an engine with a framework of seats attached. Three of the four seats were filled with silvery bodies as Vaffa matched velocity with the mammoth tug.

  They had come in laterally from the front, allowing the tug to catch up with them. None of them wanted to get anywhere near the aft end of the other ship. Somewhere back there, suspended by invisible lines of magnetic force, was a black hole smaller than a pinhead but massing as much as a medium-sized asteroid. It would not do to get too close to it.

  Lilo was trying to juggle all the factors in her head, looking for the chance which, when it came, might last only a fraction of a second. One crew member in the tug. Vaffa the only one in communication with him. The homemade gas capsule hidden in the atmosphere probe, the probe strapped to the outside of the scooter. Vaffa's weapon strapped to his side. Times and courses: twenty minutes to castoff, when the tug would let go of the hole and pull away f
rom it; thirty minutes to the course change that would put the probe on the right trajectory to graze the Jovian atmosphere.

  Cathay was to try to get into the tug first—the lock would take only one person at a time. After that, it was up to him. If he gassed the man inside, they were committed to trying to overpower Vaffa. They might do it, with the help of surprise.

  Ten meters away, Vaffa cast a magnetic line to the tug and warped the scooter in close. The three of them jumped free and began to lash the scooter. Lilo saw Cathay move toward the compartment where the gas bomb was hidden, and tried to get between him and Vaffa.

  "I know what you're doing," Vaffa said quietly.

  "Inspection," Lilo said, desperately. "We have to—"

  "Let me see that." He was reaching for his laser.

  Lilo put one foot on the scooter and dived at him. Her head hit him in the stomach, doubling him up. She saw the laser swing by her face, his grip loosened for a moment. She chopped at his wrist, and the gun fell away from them, spinning free.

  "The lock!" she cried. "Get in the lock! Hurry!" She couldn't see if Cathay was moving. Vaffa swung at her chin, but the force of his blow turned his body enough so that he missed her. It had been instinctive, but the wrong thing to do in weightlessness. He saw his mistake and was about to switch tactics when he realized he had moved out of reach of the ship and scooter. He grabbed for Lilo's foot as it came by him, just as she reached for a strut on the scooter. He pulled, she kicked, and her hand lost its grip. The two of them drifted away from the scooter, not fast, but there was no way back under their own power. Unless...

  Lilo kicked again, hitting him in the jaw. He hung on desperately until she had to stop because she was no longer facing the ship. Her idea was to push him from her and get back that way. But he saw it, too, and as soon as she stopped kicking he started to climb her leg. In another second he would be pushing her away from the ship.

  She kicked again, shaking him back to her ankle, and kept on kicking, this time with both feet. His ribs seemed to crunch under her heel as she connected. Savagely, she aimed for the same spot again. He doubled over in pain, and his hand released her. She was floating free, spinning very slowly.

  It didn't look too bad, if Cathay could get control of the ship. She saw Vaffa turning end over end at about one revolution per second, then she spotted the tug. She had drifted about fifty meters away from it. It was impossible to tell yet which way she was moving.

  Then she heard Vaffa calling the ship.

  "Cathay! He's talking to the pilot. You've got to get him before he can call back to Poseidon and tell them what's happened, or..." She stopped, realizing he wouldn't be able to hear her if he was in the ship and in a position to do anything about it. If he wasn't in the ship, it was all over anyway.

  Three long minutes dragged by. The only thing Lilo learned for sure was that she was not getting closer to the ship. She was moving away. And she didn't care for the direction, either. Ahead of her, Jupiter was growing, filling the sky with the round circle of the tug exactly centered in it, seen from the stern. Somewhere in the direction she was moving was a black hole.

  "You'll get there first," she yelled, feeling lightheaded. "How does it feel, Vaffa?"

  There was no reply for a while. The voice that finally came was strained, full of pain.

  "Why did you do it?"

  "I don't think I could explain it to you. But it almost worked. Still might. I've got my fingers crossed."

  There was no answer. Lilo thought she heard a moan. In a few seconds she was sure of it. There was an incoherent noise that stood her hair on end even after she had identified it. It was a subvocalized scream, picked up by the voder in Vaffa's throat and amplified as sheer agony. Then silence. Lilo began to worry. She hadn't hit him that hard.

  "Lilo? Can you hear me? Are you alive?"

  "Yes, I'm here! You got in!"

  "It took me a while to get my radio tuned to the suit frequency. Damn, I wish it was you in here. All these buttons scare me." They had trained him for hours on mock-ups Vejay had built. He could punch in a course, if it came to that, and as long as nothing went wrong he could fly it.

  "Never mind about that. You've got to cut the hole loose, and fast. I think Vaffa's dead, and I'm afraid what killed him was the magnetic field interfering with his suit generator. I'm not enough of a physicist to know just what a powerful magnetic field can do, but it didn't sound pleasant. Can you... I mean, in a hurry, you understand? I don't know how long it will be—" She stopped herself when she realized she was panicking.

  "Just a minute. I'll do it." She heard him muttering to himself, then a cry of triumph. "There. They're all reading zero. Did that do it?"

  "I'll know in a minute. Now we've got to think fast. Neither of us wants to fall into the thing. You're going to have to move the ship a little farther out. Vejay said the gravity field of a hole is very weak at just a small distance, but it increases sharply the closer you get to it. I'll be all right. But you have to save the ship so we can get back and—"

  "It's too late for that. I didn't have time to tell you, but the pilot talked to Poseidon before I gassed him. They know we've taken over. They'll be waiting for us. It's no good, Lilo." She could hear him choking. Oh, God. Vejay and Niobe and Cass, waiting outside on the chance Lilo and Cathay would return in control of the tug...

  "Cathay, we talked about that. They know what to do. If they're suspected of anything, they'll hole up with Cass and wait it out. We've got to get away now, so we can come back with some weapons we can use."

  "You're right. We—"

  Everything seemed to happen at once. There was a bright flash behind Lilo. She started to turn, thought better of it. It had to be Vaffa impacting the hole, being condensed by the awful gravity into degenerate matter, releasing all the energy stored in the atoms of his body as raw radiation.

  That was bad enough, but ahead of her the tug was moving. A thin spear of light shot from it, angled away from her, and the engines continued to burn.

  Jupiter had swallowed up the sky. It was beautiful. Even knowing it would be her death, Lilo had to admit that. And she preferred it to the hole, though her death would not be as quick.

  From the time two hours earlier when the tug's autopilot had performed its preset maneuver (the details, the endless details; how could she have thought of them all?), Lilo had been overcome with a paralyzing lethargy, a certainty of death. Not that she hadn't struggled against it; she and Cathay had talked over every possible chance of escape. But when the background of stars began to swing around her in a direction she could account for in only one way, she knew her fate was sealed. She had missed the hole, but not by enough.

  Vaffa had missed it, too, but by an even smaller margin. His body had come close enough to be compressed into a speck too small to see except for the light of its annihilation. It lasted only a second, then dispersed into space.

  Lilo had not come that close. A hole could be a dangerous thing, though not so much from the danger of falling into it. That was very unlikely, since it was so tiny and the space she floated in was so vast. But a near-miss could be fatal. The strength of the gravity field changed sharply as one neared the hole. If Lilo had fallen into a close, hyperbolic orbit around it, the tidal strains induced by the hole's gravity attracting different parts of her body with varying strength would have torn her apart. Or if she came close enough, as Vaffa had done, the gravity could collapse her body to a pinhead-sized mass of neutronium.

  She had been lucky, in a way, but not lucky enough. She would remain far enough away from it to stay alive, but she was definitely in a slow orbit around it.

  She had discussed it calmly with Cathay. He was going to try getting her with the scooter until she told him what she had seen when the tug boosted. The acceleration had torn the fragile scooter from its moorings and it had come apart. Then he wanted to move the tug in close, but that was out of the question. Even a superbly skilled pilot would not have dared to get
that close to the hole.

  In a way, Cathay was suffering worse than she was. He still had choices to make, things to do, and none of them was easy. Lilo spelled it out to him with the detached brutality of one whose fate is certain.

  "You can't go back to Poseidon; not now. They'll be waiting for you. You have to hope that Cass and the others are okay. You have to go to Saturn. Go to the coordinates I told you, and sit tight. Broadcast on the frequency I gave you. Parameter is not likely to have moved far from the lab, even in a year. I'm out there, somewhere. You have to find me, and Parameter. They'll help you. You have the tug. You can get weapons somehow. Then come back for the children. Come back, Cathay."

  "I will. But I don't want to leave. I can't leave you here."

  "You have to. I don't want you listening in when... when the end comes. I don't want that." She felt the panic just below the surface, and made her voice as hard as possible. "Now go. You did everything you could."

  It was not until she noticed a faint pressure on her back that she began to wonder how she was going to die.

  The pressure built with incredible rapidity. She was slicing straight into Jupiter's atmosphere, like a meteor, but the suit was going to protect her. An orange glow built up around her, became so bright that she could see nothing else. Her spinning motion stopped as aerodynamic forces stabilized her with her back to the planet, arms and legs pulled out in front of her by the drag. The deceleration built up steeply, but she knew she could take a tremendous amount with the suit lung feeding oxygen into her blood.

  The suit became rigid. Now the tugging sensations at her feet and hands were gone. The only sensation of motion was the feeling that her belly was trying to meet her backbone. The skin on her face was drawn tightly to the sides, and her breasts were trying to find new homes in her armpits.