The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  Lilo had been prepared for a long, circuitous discussion. The holehunters she had met seemed to operate that way. Javelin caught her a little off balance.

  "Uh, could I ask one question? I thought you wanted me to come here so you could see me face-to-face. But it looks like I can't even get into your ship."

  "This is face-to-face," Javelin said. "I've never bothered to install video transmission equipment. For me to see you, you had to come to this room. Now, where were you planning to go? And I'll give you another hint. Lay it on the line. Don't back into it; tell me exactly what you want."

  "All right. I... that is, me, my wife, and... let me start over." Lilo was sweating. She had the uneasy feeling Javelin knew something about her, and it was obvious she wanted the truth. Maybe Quince had called and told her something.

  "Me and two other people need to get out to the Hotline."

  "Where on the Hotline? Are you talking about the transmitter at... 70 Ophiuchi? That would be quite a trip. But I suspect you mean you want to get to a point on the line that marks the area of strongest signal strength as it passes the Solar System."

  "Exactly. Could you get us there?"

  "Certainly. Why do you want to go?"

  "I can't tell you that. I'm sorry. I just can't."

  "That's all right. You're entitled to your little secrets." She looked thoughtful, and Lilo was worried. She sensed she was up against a shrewd person, possibly a very old one. There was no way to tell for sure; but she always got a strange feeling when she was around someone who was over three hundred.

  "Where are you from? And what are the names of the other two who would be going?"

  "Luna. Vaffa and Cathay. How old are you?" She had not meant to ask it.

  "If I don't mind your asking?" She made a small smile. "Old enough to be the missing link in your family chain, Lilo. I was born in 1979, Old Style. My name at that time was Mary Lisa Bailey. I was the first woman on Mars, if you're interested. It was my only footnote in the history books."

  Lilo was not sure if she was being lied to. She had run into extravagant claims of age before, and generally discounted them.

  As far as she knew, there were no Earth-born people still alive. The Invasion had been five and a half centuries ago, after all, and biological science had been in its infancy. Still...

  "That would make you—"

  "The oldest living human. Don't spread it around. The last thing I need is to be discovered again as a human interest story on the news. By the way, I've decided to take you and your friends. When can you be ready to go?"

  "You've... uh, let me see. This is going a little too fast for me." She never thought she'd say that to a hunter.

  "Well, get thinking, woman. You don't need any shots or passports where we're going. I'll allow each of you thirty kilos of luggage. When can you be packed?"

  "How about tomorrow? Don't you have to—"

  "We burn in eighty-four-thousand standard seconds, then. Have your boarding passes ready. You do your own cooking and cleaning. I'm signing off now. There's some structural changes I'll have to make if you people are going to move around inside the ship. Walls to knock out, that sort of thing. You bring the champagne, okay?"

  The screen went dark.

  "I don't know why she caved in so fast," Lilo said. "Will you quit bothering me about it? Maybe she'll tell us." The three were approaching the vast bulk of the Cavorite in a scooter, a larger model that allowed them to carry their helmets. Each had a suit and a small suitcase.

  Lilo had been replaying her conversation with Javelin all day long. She had told Vaffa that she was not worried about anything, that Javelin was just eccentric and probably didn't have a reason for taking them other than her own amusement.

  But privately, Lilo was disturbed by several things, all of them so ephemeral she could barely define them. Of course there was the large question of why Javelin had agreed in the first place. The more she thought about it, the more she was convinced the deciding factor had been the mention of being from Luna, and the name of Vaffa. Something had happened just behind Javelin's impassive face when Lilo had said that.

  Then there was the talk about the Hotline itself. Had there been a reason for Javelin being so specific about the destination? It had to be just her peculiar sense of humor, suggesting they might be considering a trip to 70 Ophiuchi. The deepest penetration by a human into interstellar space was no more than half a light-year; 70 Ophiuchi was seventeen lights away. But she had paused—hadn't she?—before mentioning the star.

  The reception room was changed from her earlier visit. The wall opposite the lock had been knocked out, and the chairs were no longer bolted to the walls. The room was crowded now with odds and ends of antique furniture, so much that they could not see how to get to the other end.

  Javelin appeared on the other side of the jumble. It was the first time any of them had seen her, but their view was impeded.

  "Hello there," she called, peering at them through the furniture. "You'll have to help me load this stuff into the scooter before you get settled in. I won't be able to boost it with the three of you along." Then, quicker than the eye could follow, she was beside them.

  "Holy Mother Earth, don't do that!" Vaffa seemed genuinely shaken. Lilo was a little dizzy herself. It was uncanny, beyond belief, how Javelin had threaded herself through the seemingly impassable maze.

  Lilo looked at Javelin and saw a two-meter cylinder, swelling gently from the extremities to a fatter part in the middle, with a hand at each end. The cylinder was flexible at four points, which were her knee, hip, shoulder, and elbow. Growing from her "shoulder" at a slight angle from the rest of the cylinder was her head, with brown hair cut efficiently short. She wore a simple blue tube of cloth that left her arm and leg bare.

  That was Javelin, with her arm held straight up. When she put her arm at her side, she looked like a jackknife.

  What she had done was not a simple matter of getting rid of her right arm and left leg. Dispensing with two limbs—usually the legs—was common among spacers. But rib cage, right shoulder, and left hip had been redesigned with plastic structures replacing the bones. She had got rid of her left kidney, right lung, and a lot of intestine. Her elbow and knee had been reengineered with ball and socket joints.

  She was limber as a snake. What was left of her could wriggle through a hole twenty centimeters in diameter.

  "Do what?" Javelin asked, innocently.

  "...that. What you did. I don't like people coming up on me that fast."

  "I'll bear it in mind. Now will you lend a hand?"

  They got the items moved into the scooter. It might have gone faster, but all three were fascinated by Javelin's movements. She would grab a handle at the side of the lock with one hand, reach out with her leg and use the hand on that end to snatch a piece of furniture, pull, and bend like an eel as she guided it through the hatch.

  "This way," she said, when it was done. They followed her out the door, all of them moving awkwardly in zero-gee. There was a long hallway, two walls carpeted and two paneled in oak, with ornamental brass rails on each of the paneled walls.

  "Life-support equipment back here," she said, indicating the walls. "Living quarters are forward." She started off, hand over hand, which in her case meant grabbing the rail and swinging her body in an arc until she could make contact with the other hand on the end of her ankle. Three swings like that and she was arrowing down the center of the corridor, leg first, looking back at them with a broad smile on her face. She hit the far end, soaked up momentum with her leg, and vanished around the corner.

  "What will modern science think of next?" Cathay said.

  "Don't knock it," Lilo said. "It seems to work pretty well. She makes me feel almost... outmoded, you know?"

  "Yeah. But she'd be a real sight in a gravity field."

  "I gather she never goes down. Never."

  Javelin was waiting for them at the end of the corridor, at the first of two locks. She ush
ered them through, with comments about the ship's air-integrity routines that she expected them to follow with no nonsense. Then they were into the living quarters.

  "Sorry about the size," Javelin said, opening the doors to two small rooms. "This isn't the Queen Mary. As it was, I had to move out my stamp collection. So two of you will have to room together, unless one of you bunks on the couch in the solarium. Go ahead, stow your luggage. Now come this way."

  Lilo was dazzled. She was not sure how much Javelin was underplaying, whether she actually regretted that there were only two "guest rooms" on a ship that by all economic laws should have had none at all. The rooms were small, but lavishly furnished, paneled, and carpeted, like everything else she had seen. They passed two more facing doors, one leading to a workshop and another to a medical laboratory. Lilo got only a glimpse of each.

  The solarium was the biggest part of the living area. Javelin led them in, and kept going forward.

  "I'll be right back," she said. "Make yourselves at home. Coffee bulbs over there, drinks in the bottles against that wall." She darted through a small hole in the forward bulkhead.

  "This place is crazy," Cathay said. "Absolutely crazy."

  Lilo agreed with him. She had been in all types of ships, and had seen nothing like the Cavorite.

  "What do you call this?" she asked. "Early Victorian? Late Captain Nemo?" But Cathay had no answer, and Javelin was gone.

  The solarium was about ten meters in length, and four meters across. Unlike the rest of the ship, it had a definite floor, which made no sense at all to Lilo. Things can be done so much more economically in free-fall. Not only that, but the floor was parallel to the axis of thrust. Under boost, the room would stand on end. At no time would down be in the direction of the floor. Vaffa pointed this out.

  "Well, when you think of it, she spends such a tiny part of her trip boosting..." But it still didn't make sense.

  The ceiling was curved, following the cylindrical shape of the outer hull. Twelve great panes of glass, six on each side of the room, curved overhead to meet at an ornate wooden beam that ran the length of the room. It was obvious why she called it the solarium.

  The room was festooned with plants, vines, and flowers. It featured a two-keyboard pipe organ at one end, and a slowly spinning toroidal aquarium at the other; tiny angel-fish gaped at Lilo when she put her face close to their revolving world. In between, the motif was plush velvet-upholstered chairs and sofas, carved wood, and lots of brass trim. Lilo felt swamped with detail; everything was infested with curlicues.

  Lilo stuck her head through the hole where Javelin had gone, and she got a surprise. As she had suspected, the room beyond was the control center for the ship—though again, it was very different, with its brass-ringed instruments, its lack of digital readouts, and several things that looked like manual controls. Beside the narrow pilot's chair there was one long lever, capped with a crystal knob, that was plainly marked STOP and GO. But the real surprise was that the room was empty. Since it was at the nose of the ship with nothing beyond it but space, Lilo thought it odd.

  She backed out in time to see Javelin enter the solarium from the aft corridor. So she had her own ways of getting around.

  "This is an astounding ship," Cathay said to her.

  "Do you think so? Thank you. I like it. I should—it's been home for nearly three hundred years. I lifted the basic design—the outside, that is—from an old magazine cover. Pre-Invasion. Pre-space, for that matter."

  "That's crazy," Vaffa said, flatly.

  "Do you think so? I don't. Obviously the artist who thought up the design knew nothing about spaceships. He was trying to sell magazines, so he made it sexy instead of logical. I liked that."

  "But the weight penalties," Lilo said, feeling baffled. "If form doesn't follow function, don't you lose efficiency?"

  "It's funny you should say that. It's true, mostly, but don't you have any poetry in your soul? I've been battling hard-assed engineers since the first moon colony. We've become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it's time to railroad, there's time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency. But deep-space ships still look like a hat rack fucking a Christmas tree."

  "Pardon me?"

  "Copping. Sorry, it was an archaic word. Come to think of it, all the concepts in that metaphor were archaic. But Cavorite is less inefficient than you'd think. Once I'd made the one extravagant decision—to go out alone in a ship five times bigger than what I need for the bare necessities—the rest of it was virtually free. A little thin metal for the false shell outside. Some furniture that looks massive but really isn't; the wood is a thin veneer over standard structural foam. The organ doubles as input to the ship's computer and library, which is out of sight. The aquarium is part of the recycling system, and if the fish are okay, so am I. You'll see. It works."

  Lilo still had her doubts. But Quince had spoken of her with awe. She was said to be the most successful hunter of all time.

  "If you're about ready to go, I should start on the final countdown. Still some things to do. I searched your luggage, and studied the X rays I took of you as—"

  "You what?" It was Vaffa. Her face was quickly turning red.

  Javelin looked her up and down. "Yes, I'm not surprised at your reaction," she said, dryly. "You had several crystals and several other components in your things. With a little spit and bubble gum, you might have turned them into a pair of hand lasers. I ditched them, in the interest of a safe, calm voyage."

  Vaffa had planted her feet against the aft bulkhead. She launched herself across the room, toward Javelin. Her arms were extended, her mouth open in a snarl. Lilo didn't want to watch. Javelin was so tiny, so fragile-looking. Vaffa started to twist in the air, coming around for a blow at Javelin's midsection.

  It was over almost before it began. Javelin twisted, bent at impossible places, planted one hand against the floor. She shoved, turned as Vaffa sailed past her, and chopped across the larger woman's neck. Vaffa hit the pipes above the organ, loosely, and floated.

  Javelin glanced at her once, then turned her attention to Lilo.

  "I have to know the nature of the device implanted in your abdomen," she said. "Also the thing attached to the left side of your pelvic bone."

  "I don't know what they are," Lilo said. "I've suspected there might be something in me, though."

  Javelin nodded. "Like that, huh? All right. One of them looks like a simple homing device. I thought the other was a bomb, but decided it wasn't. More likely it's a narcotic drug ampule. That would go along with the homer, wouldn't it?"

  "I guess so." Lilo's cheeks were burning.

  "Fine." Javelin seemed to want to get off the subject, too. "You'll want to remove them. Feel free to use the surgery. I can put them overboard, or you might think of something else to do with them." She let her eyes move slowly to Vaffa, still dangling loosely in midair, then smiled at Lilo.

  "Boost in six hundred seconds. You'd better get to your cabins."

  18

  Cathay and I moved Vaffa to one of the cabins, and we decided to share the other. As we belted her into her bunk, the ship was undergoing changes. Vaffa's bunk moved from the floor and positioned itself against the aft bulkhead. In the solarium, the fish tank was draining.

  Boost was one gee, about what I'd got used to on Pluto. Now we were living on the wall. But the washbasin and refresher facilities had done a flip-flop, and the lighting shifted as we moved so it was never in our eyes.

  Outside, the corridor was now a vertical shaft. I could live with it for the twenty-four hours we'd be boosting.

  They spent most of their time in their cabins, and they didn't see Javelin. Lilo went to the solarium once, but to do it she had to climb eight meters on a ladder which had extruded itself from the corridor wall. And now the solarium was not a pleasant place to be. The organ was now on the ceiling, hanging ten meter
s over her head. There was another ladder, and she climbed it to poke her head into the control room, but Javelin wasn't there. She realized that they were not likely to see her until the ship stopped boosting. Javelin would get around by means of her system of narrow pipes, where the rest of them could not follow.

  Cathay and Lilo could see Vaffa across the hall. She made no move to visit them, spending her time pacing. Lilo was nervous about it, wondering how much of the blame for the situation she was going to have to take. Vaffa was going to suspect a deal between Lilo and Javelin, and would be hard to live with.

  There was not much to do but sleep. They went through one night period, with the ship's lights dimmed. It was not until they had been boosting for twenty hours that Javelin contacted them. Again, it was by a flat television screen, this time set into their ceiling.

  "You're gonna hate me," she said, "but it's decision time, kids. Time for the laying of cards upon tables, for the revelation of hidden motives. Possibly you've wondered why I was willing to take you on this little jaunt."

  "We have, some. Are you going to tell us?" Lilo glanced across the hall. Vaffa was at her door, leaning out over the drop-off, listening intently.

  "Yeah. Well, insofar as I know myself. As to why I took you, I guess a lot of that was simple perversity. It's not what I might normally do, so I did it. You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they're new. Otherwise you rust."

  "How do you know?" Cathay asked.

  "I don't. But it's worked so far. I'd be a fool to change my tactics now. As to why I was willing to go, in the sense of with or without you, to the Hotline... I've become very interested in the Hotline in the last few months."

  Lilo saw Vaffa step quickly onto the ladder, then into the room with them. She stood beside them, looking up at the screen.

  "Why are you interested?" Vaffa asked.