The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  "No. It wasn't that way at all. I sent him that message three months ago. I don't care where he told you and Vaffa you were going; your destination was right here. Probably the pilot didn't even know it. The message would have gotten to you just in time to divert to Mars."

  "It was a pretty close thing," she conceded.

  "Not at all. That means he wanted you out here. He wanted Vaffa as his only loyal agent among us. If he thought Vaffa couldn't handle you, be sure he would have sent someone else to trail you from the spaceport."

  "I don't get it. It sounds like a game. Does he want us to do anything for him out here, or just to tear each other apart?"

  "It's never simple," Cathay sighed. He took her arm and gently coaxed her up alongside him. She pressed close to his side, enfolded in his arm. "I've dealt with him for fifteen years. Five more... well, he promised me a new identity. I've begun to doubt it, but you have to have something to live for."

  Now he no longer wanted to talk about it. He hugged her closer, then moved down and began kissing her breasts. But now it was Lilo's turn to push him away and raise her head to study him.

  "I still don't understand what you're saying."

  "All right. Vaffa's a great soldier, but a lousy general. She has no initiative. That's what you're here for; to make the hard decisions that might come up, things that can't wait a day to be resolved by the Boss. Not the life-or-death ones, nor the ethical ones—Free Earther ethics. He can trust Vaffa to be right on those. He has you judged very well. I know something of what you've been through, and how well he does know you. You won't gang up on Vaffa. That's out of the question."

  "How can you say that?" she demanded. She felt her cheeks heating up; it was part anger, part shame. She had just about decided that resistance at this point would be futile, that her best chance would be to wait until they returned to Pluto and she knew more about her opponent.

  "For one reason, because your best chances of escape will be later. You can see that. Your cage is insubstantial. You won't learn the limits of it by rattling bars. You will win your freedom piece by piece, by slowly finding out what you can get away with and putting it together into a successful escape. If that's possible, which has not yet been proved, so far as I know. At this point, there's a very good chance that Vaffa is not alone. Tweed would not have to tell her that he has someone else watching you. He thinks you'll realize this, and not try to get away."

  It did look like the sort of tantalizing chance her first clone, Lilo 2, must have taken, Lilo realized. She remembered her resolve to suspect the easy escape, to look for the unlikely one. But she was still angry.

  "What if I say the hell with common sense? Damn him, anyway. Go for broke, throw in with you, and we knock her off. How can he tell that I won't make an irrational decision? Unless this is just another test and there's really no message from the Hotline."

  "There is, but I'm glad you saw that possibility. You've trusted me entirely too quickly for your own good, you know." His tongue was at her nipples again, and this time she didn't protest. She stroked his back and let her eyes close slowly. The last of the muscle kinks from the high-gee trip were fading beneath an enveloping warmth, a tingling that went from her hot earlobes to her toes. But she opened her eyes again and looked down at him.

  "You didn't answer my question."

  "He doesn't know. Your best chance might actually be to make a try right now. He has no real defense against your doing something totally illogical. He can't predict that."

  "Then how can he chance it?"

  Cathay sighed. "Because he knows me pretty well, too. You can't join me if I'm not willing. And I'm not. I'm going. I'm choosing to live. I will abandon my students, abandon my self-respect, or what's left of it, one more time. Now that I've revealed that, bared my shame to you, will you please shut up and open your legs?"

  He said it with lightness in his voice and a half-smile, but when he entered her he was fierce, determined to lose himself in an excess of passion. Lilo surrendered and let him set the tempo, at least for the first time. To her surprise, she was responding well. Part of that was her physical need; it had been a long time. Another part was feeling sorry for him. It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living. But part of it was something else again, maybe the beginnings of that sort of feeling that could one day transform a simple act of recreational copping into that thing which is so subtly and yet so hugely different—the act of love.

  15

  Career Counseling, a reader-response eventbook, Programmed by the E-Z Educational Peripherals Company.

  READER: I can't read.

  CAREER COUNSELOR: That's okay with me. I'll respond orally from now on. You just ignore those words on the screen, all right?

  R: Uh, okay. How can I, I mean, what do I have to do to be a holehunter?

  CC: A holehunter! That's one of the more popular career ambitions we encounter. It sure sounds romantic, doesn't it? You're your own boss, you have this ship all to yourself, and you can get rich. Is that what attracted you to holehunting?

  R: Yeah. I guess so.

  cc: We try to steer young people away from holehunting as a career. There's a lot of problems. For instance, what do you think one of those ships costs?

  R: A lot, I guess.

  cc: Whew! You said it! You've got to get money together for the initial investment in your ship. Outfitting it for a trip costs a lot more. And it's dangerous. What you do, in case you don't know much about it, is just go flat out in your ship for as long as your engines are good for. Then you sit back and watch the mass detector. You may have to wait fifteen years, and you may never see anything. So you stop dead, and you start back the way you came. Three trips out of four you won't find a hole, so you'll be broke when you get back. Your first trip will be your last. If you survive it.

  R: What do you mean?

  cc: It's dangerous! If you find one, you've got to slow down long enough to figure out just where it is, and where it's going. Sometimes, you'll plow right into it! But if you do all that right, you've got to come back to get it with an electromagnetic tug. There are folks who sit around Pluto and watch for that. They'll follow you back. You might be half a light-year from the sun. You gonna call the cops? You'll have to fight for it.

  R: Well, I can fight, good as anyone. What I wanna know is, do I have to know how to read?

  cc: I don't see why. What's your computer for, anyway?

  The verdict on Cathay was blunt and to the point. Vaffa showed it to me after she'd decoded it. Trying to vindicate herself in my eyes? I hoped so; if she cared that much about my opinion, whether she was aware of it or not, it strengthened my position. The Boss did not need Cathay, not if allowing him to live meant leaving him on Pluto, knowing what he knew.

  I think Vaffa made her plans in the first minute after reading the message. Her mind was that linear. She had to shift gears painfully when I told her Cathay was going with us.

  "But he wants something in return," Lilo said, on the spur of the moment.

  "It won't do him any good. What?"

  "He realizes he has no bargaining power," she said, improvising. "But he's been useful to Tweed in the past. He can continue to be useful in the future, when we return, if you don't make him into a permanent enemy now."

  "Go on."

  "The three educational... contracts he holds." They weren't actually legal, of course. He was strictly bootleg, but to him, the contracts had the force of law because he had promised to stand behind them. "The mothers of those children will be in shit crater, you know. With the teacher shortage, how are they going to find someone to take over the education of their children? Cathay says the waiting list is ten years here. They'll be grown before substitutes can be found. Everyone's booked up, committed to teach kids who aren't even born yet."

  "Not my problem."

  "No. But Tweed's a rich man. Other bootleg teachers can be found, but they're expensive."

  Vaffa considered it. "I'l
l ask the Boss."

  The next day brought confirmation from Tweed. He would pay the money to the mothers of the children. It seemed to surprise Vaffa; she had asked the question mainly to satisfy Lilo, to whose judgment she had begun to defer in small ways.

  It came as a big surprise to Cathay, who was elated and tried not to show it to Vaffa. Lilo saw it, and it made her feel good. It occurred to her that it was almost the only thing she had been able to do on her own initiative since her escape from prison. But even then she wondered if Tweed had foreseen it, else why the quick acceptance? Did money matter that little to him? Did he buy her argument that it would placate Cathay, make him useful to Tweed after his return? Or did he fear that without the money the mothers would become angry enough to denounce Cathay—leading to an investigation and possible trouble themselves? As usual, Tweed's motives were opaque to her.

  But now they had to obtain a ship, and Vaffa didn't know the first thing about doing it. Lilo didn't, either, but she acted as if she did, and she did not doubt that she would be better at it than Vaffa.

  Working from Cathay's phone, they quickly got the idea of what the market in second-hand ships were like. There were always ships for sale; they became available as holehunters went bankrupt and had to sell out. But the market was brisk, and prices were always high. Lilo checked with a dozen brokers, and relayed the results to Tweed through Vaffa. The most encouraging thing she could report was that by paying three times the already inflated market value, they might be able to obtain a ship in four to five months.

  "Why so much?" Vaffa asked.

  "It's complicated," Lilo said. "There's more buyers than sellers. You have to get on a waiting list. The courts award the assets of a bankrupt hunter to a broker, who collects a commission. As soon as a hunter who's gone bust comes in, the ship is sold. They can ask almost anything for it. The waiting list runs to three or four years. To move up on the list, you pay a bribe to the broker. To move way up, the bribe can be three times the price of the ship."

  "Isn't that illegal?"

  "No, strangely enough. They were very open about it. The broker makes the list. The courts have nothing to say about whom the ship is sold to. So the broker cleans up. It sounds like a nice racket."

  "What about dealing directly with a holehunter?"

  "Nope. The ones that are solvent aren't selling, at any price. The ones who're broke don't own a ship any more. They go into receivership, and the courts always give them to brokers. I told you it was a racket."

  "And what about new ships?"

  "An even longer waiting list, higher prices, and bigger bribes."

  Vaffa looked sour. Business was not her field of expertise. "I'll relay it to the Boss."

  "You might mention something else," Lilo said, thoughtfully. "We only need this ship for the one trip. It seems silly to buy it. Also, can you fly one?"

  "I thought you let the computer do that."

  "True. But holehunters go a long way out. A lot of them don't come back, because something goes wrong, maybe with the computer, and they don't know how to fix it. A lot of those people think hunting holes is as easy as getting from Luna to Mars, but they're wrong. Fifty percent don't return from their first trip. So you're going to need a pilot, because I don't know anything about fixing ships, and neither does Cathay. I can do computer work, as long as it's not too complicated. But I don't know anything about fusion engines. We'll need someone who does."

  Vaffa sighed. "So what are you proposing?"

  "I don't know if this is possible, but we could give it a try. Maybe we could charter a ship, one that belongs to a hunter. Even one tenth of the price of a ship would be attractive, I'd think. That is, unless money is no object. I don't know just how rich the Boss is."

  I don't think you can get rich enough that money is no object. If you think that way you either don't get rich or you don't stay rich. Tweed was fabulously wealthy, but he was interested in my idea. I don't blame him; some of the prices we quoted him would have run a fair-sized city for a year.

  I didn't care one way or the other about Tweed's money. What was important to me was that you could buy a ship over the phone. To charter one, you had to go out and look for holehunters. There were no agencies that handled charters; who ever rented a ship that size, anyway?

  Vaffa would not be able to handle it, certainly not alone. That meant I would get to go outside, to stir around, to get my bearings. If I saw a perfect chance, who knows...?

  After two weeks they had got nowhere. Day after day they had returned to residential corridors lit by widely spaced pale blue nitelites, and collapsed into bed.

  Tweed was beginning to get impatient. Vaffa said he was talking about a deadline; if they had not managed to charter a ship in another two weeks, he was going to have them buy one. By that time, they would already have lost a month, and he was unwilling to let any more time go by before getting his bid down.

  Lilo was not happy about it. She didn't care about the lost time, but thought that if they bought a ship they would still be faced with the same problem: hiring a pilot. There were plenty of them around but Lilo was sure it would be hard to hire one. And for the same reasons they were having trouble chartering a ship. Vaffa scared the hunters away.

  Holehunters were as quirky a group of people as the human race had ever produced. In many ways, they were almost as different as a human paired with a symb. It takes a special temperament to seal oneself into a single-seat ship for a trip that would last from twenty to forty years. Most of the ships had about fifty cubic meters of living space; some had less. The endpoint of a voyage could be as much as half a light-year from the sun. The people who survived such loneliness for such a time tended to be different.

  "Most of them didn't really like people much before they went out," Cathay said. "When they come back, they haven't seen anyone for at least twenty years. A lot of them decide they didn't miss all that much."

  They were back at Cathay's home after another day of haunting the pleasure palaces around the spaceport. Tonight Cathay had done as Lilo suggested, lowering the air temperature so it would be cozy to huddle around the fireplace which concealed the electric heater. They had all applied a mild hallucinodisiac cream onto their genitals, then inhaled a muscle-relaxant powder. They had coated their bodies with lucent oils: Lilo was lavender, Cathay was pearl, and Vaffa crimson. The result had been a stretched hour of slow-motion slithering, low-key and undemanding. Now they were lying face down, Lilo in the middle.

  She felt good. It was like the peace that could be achieved when you had regained your breath after a ten-kilometer run, but without the pain and exhaustion that would have preceded it. She had wanted Vaffa in a good mood for what she was about to propose, and it looked as though she had succeeded. Vaffa was inclined to be perfunctory about copping; Lilo assumed that the woman had never attracted anyone to love her and had decided, like so many, that sex was overrated. Tonight might well have been the first time she had experienced copping as a sensual delight, not merely the pursuit of orgasm.

  "Well, I certainly can't understand them," Vaffa said.

  "That's because you've never run into anyone who dislikes people as much as you do," Lilo said. She hoped it would go over well, not be taken as an insult. Vaffa had never pretended to like people.

  "Maybe you're right," Vaffa said. She seemed about to smile, but her lips did not quite know how to manage it. Lilo sat up on one elbow and faced the faintly glowing apparition. Her head felt a little thick now that she'd raised it; there had been entirely too many things to drink and smoke and sniff during the course of the day. Tiny red tongues of flame were dancing over the hairless woman's back. Lilo pursued them with her fingertips, pressing firmly into yielding muscle. Vaffa arched herself sensuously, with a contented moan.

  "They're very sensitive, holehunters," Lilo said. "Am I right?"

  "Very," Cathay mumbled. He shook his head to wake up, and sparks flew from his hair. Lilo was delighted.

  "
I think they're reacting to you," Lilo said.

  "In what way?" Vaffa lifted her head, managing to look very like her pet python.

  "I'm not sure. But they get almost telepathic. They don't see people for twenty years. When they get back they're sensitive, very touchy."

  "Very perceptive," Cathay said. "The hunters, not you."

  "Thanks. But they seem to feel when someone's dangerous. And I think they're feeling that from you."

  Vaffa considered it, then let her head fall back. "You could be right." Lilo used both hands on Vaffa's neck and shoulders.

  "I think I am. You're a killer; we both know it, so there's no need to mince words."

  "No need at all."

  "I happen to think there's more to you than that. Maybe you never got a chance to express it. Anyway, the hunters may not know that you've killed, but they sense the menace."

  "I think you're right."

  "Which leaves us the question of what to do about it. How can we charter a ship, and save the Boss a lot of money?" Lilo could have gone on, but it sounded like the place to stop. It would be better if Vaffa came up with the idea herself.

  Cathay smiled at Lilo, then carefully turned away before Vaffa could see. The room was quiet for half an hour. Finally Vaffa rolled onto her side and rested her head on her arm. Her voice was sleepy when she spoke.

  "Then you'll just have to go out alone."

  16

  Saint Peter's Casino was on fire, just as it had been the last time Lilo visited. Flames licked upward from the bottom edges of hanging tapestries, crackled through blistered oak paneling. The row of pews in the nave was an inferno, a whirling fire storm that reached to the ceiling. Smashed furniture had been heaped around the Pietà and set to the torch; the white marble was now coated with soot. Lilo took a sandwich and a drink from the snack bar that had been set up on the altar. She had been standing around the crap table all night and her feet hurt. St. Pete's bored her. But it was almost closing time. Soon Jesus would be there.