The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  It did not surprise Lilo. She knew most people thought of Hotline transmissions as a sort of substitution code; when cracked, the result would be in good, grammatical System Speech.

  But the data received over the Hotline was the result of alien thinking. As long as it stuck to data of a scientific nature, couched in mathematical terms, reasonable translations could be made. Even so, there were huge "gray areas" which were thought to be data but could not be interpreted by any computer programs yet devised. Lilo had her own opinions about the gray areas. Her research into them had put her in jail.

  The few times messages had come through which the computers tagged as being something like language, the translations were hedged with uncertainties. The linguists were not surprised at this. Languages embody cultural assumptions, inconsistencies; even contradictions. Given a large body of transmissions, the computers could get closer and closer to the meanings of words. But the Ophiuchites had not shown much interest in talking about themselves, or in doing anything but sending oceans of engineering data. The few verbal messages could have been anything from commercials to religious evangelism, or something that had no human analogue at all.

  Lilo read it a third time.

  "What's this blowout about accounts, and termination of service? and payment? What could they possibly want? What could we give them?"

  "Maybe what they're giving us. Information." Vaffa shrugged.

  "But we... what does it mean?"

  "I'm assuming it means just what it says. This is a phone bill for four hundred years of service."

  "But... that's crazy."

  "Is it? Why did we think the Hotline should just go on forever, without us giving anything in return? Why should we expect them to be any less mercenary than we are?"

  Lilo calmed down and thought about it before she replied.

  "Okay. I can see that. But what would we give them? And how? I guess we could build a big laser like they have—I'm not saying it's within our power for sure, but we might—but what do we transmit? Everything we've gotten from the Hotline has been two or three thousand years beyond where our science was at the time. It's like... like asking an Earth primitive for advice on how to fix your fusion motor. What could we have that they want to learn?"

  Vaffa grimaced, and took the message back. "I was hoping you'd have some ideas about that. I can't think of anything, and it's got me worried. I guess what I'm really wondering is, what are the 'severe penalties'?"

  "I don't see what it could be except a disconnection. I mean, they're seventeen light-years away. What could they do?"

  "I don't know." Vaffa brooded for a while as Lilo tried to figure it out. Then she looked up. "Everybody says star travel is impossible, or at least it would take so long it wouldn't be worthwhile. One of the big reasons they give is the Ophiuchites. If they had star travel, they'd be here, right? They wouldn't be sitting home beaming messages." She shook her head. "Now I wonder. Maybe we've got them all wrong. Maybe they had another reason for staying away. But I don't think they'd send this unless they meant business."

  Lilo wanted to talk about it some more, but Vaffa had withdrawn into a private world. The woman was scared. Lilo wasn't, yet, but she would be.

  13

  Starline, by the Public Relations Master Program, Main Business Computer, StarLine, Ltd. Read-rating II.

  Who'd a thought they'd miss? Nobody figured on it. People were looking for junk from the stars for God knows how long. Way back in old-style time, Project Ozma took a listen. No good. Later on, we turned the big ears on 'em. Centauri, Wolf, Lalande, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Quiet, real quiet. What gives? We listened to 'em all, and no buzz.

  Then we started to get way far out. Beyond Pluto, twice that fuggin' far away, and what do you think? Voices!

  Well, not voices, exactly, you readout? Computer bippety-bips and offedy-ons. Nobody could read 'em for a long time. (I mean, you should take a look at 'em! Press the printout and a zillion acres of flyspecks.) Even the computers didn't know what the message was. But a couple things were sure. Somebody was sittin' on 70 Ophiuchi with one fuggin' big laser, they wanted to talk, and they couldn't shoot piss into a pot!

  Hold on! Maybe they weren't shootin' at us. So they looked around behind us, you know, but there's nothing but a couple of stars in Orion's armpit. They were yakkin' at us, all right. But how come they missed? You think they'd build a laser like that if they can't aim it?

  No way. Somebody said, "Hey! Maybe they don't want to talk till we're ready! Like, we gotta be smart enough to get out there, or something." Sounds okay, huh? Sure enough. They've been talking for four hundred years now. They lead us by fifteen billion klicks, like a skeet shooter. You wanna listen, you gotta go out there.

  Somebody else said, "How come we don't build us a big laser and talk back?" You kiddin'? Who's gonna pay for it?

  Even at the best of economic times, there was little a traveler would choose to bring to Pluto. The import duties were the highest in the system, and the weight penalties charged by the shipping lines made it more sensible to leave all luggage at home and buy a new wardrobe on arrival. Normally, the only thing worth bringing to Pluto was information, and even that was carried as compactly as possible.

  But Pluto was in a depression. The government had been on the losing end of an economic war with Mercury for two years, and the effects were drastic. Vaffa had used her Intersystem Credit Card on Mars to get a small amount of cash. Even so, the weight penalty was steep.

  Lilo and Vaffa stepped out of the five-gee express at Florida Port, groggy and miserable from eight days spent floating in an acceleration tank. Lilo kept coughing up unpleasant substances, and there was a steady drip of fluid from her nose. She had licked it once, which proved to be a mistake.

  Looking for something to wash away the taste, she spotted a drink-vending machine and inserted one of the Martian bills Vaffa had given her.

  "I can't change that," said the machine. "Tell you what. If you deposit the money, we can do business." The machine explained that it was an authorized branch of the Florida Planetary Bank. A light came on that said INTEREST ACCRUING. It went off in a few seconds. Lilo got her flask of drink, and her bill was returned along with a few Plutonian coins. Vaffa advised her to toss them in the recycler, since they were virtually worthless.

  Pluto was in the middle of an inflationary spiral. Money was being dated as it was printed, and it had to be spent quickly before the value dropped. Every Monday one thousand Old Marks became equal to one New Mark. If your money was more than a week old, it would make an economical fire; it would not buy its weight in paper.

  Lilo and Vaffa waited in the recovery room of the spaceport lounge until the medicos certified them as being over the effects of high-gee travel. A few steps away was a line of shops which specialized in outfitting naked travelers as they emerged from Inner Planet flights. Lilo wanted to stop.

  "Don't shop here," Vaffa advised. "They gouge you."

  "What's the difference?" Lilo asked. "We're rich, right?" She entered The Underworld Boutique.

  Inside, she was soaped, showered, oiled, and massaged until she felt more human and less like something pickled. She began to lose some of the muscle kinks that plague high-gee passengers for days after a flight. She told the clerks to dress her.

  From the things they brought, she selected a red shirt with buckles at the waist and wrists and neck. It had puffed sleeves, but otherwise was quite utilitarian, with plenty of pockets and a built-in chronometer. They wanted to paint her legs, but she refused firmly. She bought a hat, and slippers, mainly because the soles of her feet were wrinkled like prunes. The clerks tried to sell her face paint, a holomist suit, dildopants, and a live mink coat, so she paid and left. She wasn't used to pressure selling, and didn't like it. Vaffa bought nothing.

  "Don't you ever wear clothes?" Lilo asked her.

  "I don't like them. They can get in your way in a fight. Sometimes I wear a belt with a holster, but not in public."
>
  Vaffa was glancing around nervously. Lilo had observed that the other woman didn't like crowds, even on Luna. Here, she seemed very jumpy. Her movements were quick and jerky as she tried to cover all angles at once.

  "Where do we go?"

  "I have an address. Maybe we'd better find a map."

  Pluto liked to think of itself as the frontier. After three hundred years of steady colonization, the idea was showing signs of wear. In most ways, Pluto was as urban as any of the Eight Worlds. But Plutonian cities tended to be louder and gaudier. There was an air of ostentation, a constant assault of bad taste and commercial and personal display. It was distasteful to both the Lunarian women.

  Rough edges of construction were sometimes left unfinished. The carpet in the corridors was thick and soft, but in places it did not fit together right, with raveled edges stopping short of the walls and gobs of light brown pitch in the corners. At one point the slideway carried them past a section of bare rock where workers were installing insulation and plastic facing. The rock was caked with frost; it sucked heat from one side of Lilo's body.

  They came to Center, hub of the city's slidewalk network and the main transit nexus where tube capsules departed for outlying suburbs, enclaves, and communes. They got off and looked around. The ceiling was two kilometers above them, but some of the trees in Center Park seemed to scrape it. Eight arcades circled the vast cylindrical area, reached by glass elevators hung from transparent cables. Everything seemed to be in motion or flashing for their attention.

  Lilo was feeling oppressed, an outlander. It was dizzying. She was a born Lunarian, conservative in many ways. She dressed for convenience, not decoration. Waste and frivolity offended her. It was the legacy of the Invasion, and in many ways it set Lunar society apart from the rest of human space.

  Luna was the planet that was colonized directly from Earth. When the Invaders came, the few thousand humans on Luna dug in for the long struggle for self-sufficiency. They had not been ready; autonomy was supposed to have been thirty years away. But species survival would be decided by what they did.

  The first fifty years had been extremely hard. Many had died in selective lotteries or in violent resistance to them when it became clear the population had to be thinned. The survivors had sacrificed all the harder to insure that the martyrs had not died in vain.

  The struggle left its mark on Lunarians. They tended to be conservative in politics and morals. They clung to a ghost of representative democracy while the colonies were trying Ordeal-Selectivism. Neutersex had never caught on. Current fashions of Mars and Mercury sold poorly on Luna. With the modesty taboo an almost forgotten aberration, the average Lunarian usually wore a vest-of-pockets, carried a shoulder purse, or went nude. It was almost a uniform, and the rest of humanity made endless jokes about it.

  A creative surgeon could go broke in Luna. Few were interested in extra legs in odd places, reversed heads, new nose designs, or prehensile tails. They changed their sex an average of once every eight years, a system-wide low. The ratio of maintenance to cosmetic surgery was nine to one. Most Lunarians who wanted a face change did it at home as a hobby.

  Pluto was at the other end of the spectrum. Lilo thought it vulgar. It was a deep-seated distaste that was beyond her power to reason away. Plutonians were peacocks. They wore their social status on their skins.

  Lilo and Vaffa moved through a maze of floating advertisements of ghostsmoke and holomist that followed the prospective customer and played breath-catching tricks with perspective, all the time broadcasting direct to the inner ear, thus evading the noise-pollution laws.

  They managed to whirl out of the mainstream into a green eddy of parkland. The trunk of a tree provided sculptured seats growing from the bark. Lilo looked up, and decided it would take her five minutes just to walk around the tree.

  It was like the eye of a hurricane. Holo ads approached them, but were stopped by an invisible wall.

  VISIT THE CHARON FERRYBOAT.

  BUY EROTICON. USE IT, EAT IT, WIPE IT ON, RUB IT OFF, COP IT.

  GIVE TO THE PERSONALITY BANK.

  TRADE IN YOUR FEET TODAY. BUY NEW ASTAIRES. PUT ON THE RITZ.

  The park was deserted. Plutonians did not seem to need peace and quiet. Lilo and Vaffa sat and watched the people go by.

  "Breasts seem popular this year," Vaffa observed after a while. "Nearly everybody has at least two. Hey, what do you call that?"

  "Electric testicles. I read about them."

  "Kind of pretty," Vaffa mused. "Like lanterns."

  "It's supposed to be the quickest way to assure a copping partner that you're sterile. Look, do you have any idea where we're going? I need another bath, and a quiet place."

  14

  The gravity trains departed from the level just below Center. Lilo bought two tickets, nervously sticking her hand into the slot of the genoprinter before doing so. It had worked well enough on Mars.

  Tweed's nixonian hand reached across five billion kilometers. She felt the scrape of the sampler across her palm, the machine whirred, and somewhere in the banks of the Pluto Central Computer an entry was made:

  JOVIAN-342 (ID-L-502-KC-98) BOARDED FLORIDA-BARROW SHUTTLE 0349 HRS. 4/8/71.

  The security check was automatic, and it came up green. The name Jovian-342 did not appear on any list of wanted persons, and that was the end of it. Had the Pluto computer felt the need to check further with Lunar records, it would have learned twelve hours later that Jovian-342 was a member of the Church of Cosmic Engineering, an upstanding citizen of Luna, and an enthusiastic traveler. What it would not have learned was the fact that Jovian-342 had emigrated ten years before and was now presumably paired in the Rings, cut off from the rest of human civilization and unable to protest the theft of her identity.

  Lilo did not know how Tweed had done it. She did know that the people who ran the main computers were potentially above the law, so the safeguards against illegal tampering were stringent. But it had happened in the past, and would happen again.

  The inside of the car was plush brown velvet and subdued lights on chrome. She sank into one of the couches and strapped in, with Vaffa taking the seat beside her. The car eased into a tunnel and glided slowly upward. Airlock doors got out of the way and closed behind the car as it picked up speed. Lilo counted twelve of them. Then stars appeared outside the window. She pulled her feet up under her and rubbed them. She was cold.

  It was purely psychological, but the frozen gas outside seemed to claw at her. She hated the cold. There was nothing warm here, even in the daytime.

  A large man came down the aisle and sat on the arm of Vaffa's chair. He gave her a big grin, then tried to sell her a membership in a sexcircle. Vaffa was annoyed, but when she tried to push him away her hand went through him. He was only the first. Soon they were surrounded.

  Vaffa jumped when one of them touched her.

  "Pardon me," the man said. "I see you're from Luna."

  "Yes," Lilo said. "Is it that obvious?"

  "Your nose," he said. "It's pointed." His own was as flat as a bad prizefighter's. He had eyelashes half a meter long. It made him blink in slow motion. "And other things. No offense, I hope. I just thought you might be interested in what I'm selling."

  "You know, you could be replaced by an illusion," Vaffa said.

  "What are you selling that couldn't be hawked by a holo?" Lilo asked.

  "An antiholo generator," he said.

  It was a small bracelet, stamped with a number to call for repairs. They were leased, not sold, like a computer terminal. They came in a range of prices and models. Some merely held the holos at arm's length. Most Plutonians thought this was enough. If you couldn't see the ads, how would you know what was fashionable?

  The man showed no surprise when Lilo and Vaffa took the heavy-duty Annihilator model.

  The train pulled into Barrow and the windows fogged. The outside of the car was coated with frost as they debarked. Melting slush dripped from the sides of the car in
to gutters in the carpeted platform.

  "What can you tell me about this guy?" Lilo asked.

  Vaffa was scanning the walls. She never seemed to relax.

  "Ex-teacher. The guy's weird. Never really got over being kicked out of the Educational Association. But the Boss lets him work Pluto alone. His job isn't that important. Not until now, anyway."

  "Did he have something to do with intercepting that transmission?"

  "Yeah. That last message from the Boss filled me in on some of that. He has access to Hotline data. He sends it to the Boss, and we get it about the same time as the StarLine board of directors."

  "Why? I mean, up to now, what good has it done you?"

  Vaffa shrugged. "He likes to know things. We're fighting a war."

  Lilo had to keep reminding herself of that. The Free Earth Party versus the Invaders. No shots had been fired as yet. Lilo had little hope for the outcome if Tweed ever managed to get the conflict heated up.

  But it was the most important thing in Vaffa's life. She was always alert for enemies. Now she was edgy, and Lilo thought she knew why. Vaffa had traveled many times to Titan, but had never strayed far from the spaceport. Luna was the only environment she knew well. She was suffering from culture shock.

  Lilo was familiar with the phenomenon. It is not true that one corridor is just like another. There are trifles a person does not consciously notice: the shape of the ceiling fixtures, the foreign arrangement of dials on the corner air sniffers, the unfamiliar designs of fountains, callboxes, sprinklers, door flanges, medical terminals, and crash locks. Even the air smelled wrong. Pluto air was scrubbed only seven times before reuse. It was heavy with humanity.

  They reached their destination and rang the bell. The door flange popped and they stepped over the lip into chaos.

  The room was large, but it seemed filled by seven or eight children. They never stopped moving and yelling. A foot-race was in progress, with furniture serving as obstacles. Lilo and Vaffa backed against a wall to be out of the way, and waited. Across the room, a man was talking to a pregnant woman. He looked up.