The Ophiuchi Hotline

by John Varley

  "Well, I..."

  "Now! Tweed's life depends on this. Don't make us doubt what you're saying."

  "I speak to him in code, through a laser that is relayed to Luna by a satellite, so the signal will not be traced. The lagtime will be ninety-seven minutes today, because of that. He carries a prompter; it has never taken me longer than three minutes to get to him."

  "Very well. It's bargaining time. Cathay and I are interested in the fate of the people under your guard. We realize that you are capable, if ordered to do it, of killing them. Tweed might order you to do that, we decided." Lilo found it hard to believe, but admitted that Cathay knew more about Tweed and Vaffa than she did.

  "We want you to tell the Boss that would be a very stupid thing to do.

  "We're going to broadcast the facts about the Poseidon installation all over the system. If they catch him, they'll kill him.

  "The important thing to him is when we do this broadcasting. Now listen carefully. If he does as we tell him, we will hold off for a period of one standard month. Obviously, it's not in our interest to publicize this place. We don't want it known what's going on out here because we're all illegals in one way or another, including you. If an Eight Worlds ship lands on Poseidon, we'll all be executed.

  "What we have to do is work toward our common interests. We need time, and so does Tweed. But we also need assurances that the people down there will not be massacred." She took a deep breath.

  "Here's the deal. Tweed is to issue orders to you, and all your clone brothers and sisters, to leave the station and congregate in the open one kilometer from the nearest entrance. Unarmed. Before you leave, you are to deactivate the barrier leading to your private quarters and allow Niobe and Vejay to enter and see for themselves that no one is still inside. After that—"

  "I've just learned that Vejay is unaccounted for," the man said. "Apparently he is buried. Niobe is here."

  "All right. After Niobe has entered your quarters and seen you depart from the station, she will tell us so. We will then land and take you prisoner. Tweed is to further order you, in the hearing of Niobe and anyone else she wants with her, that you are not to harm anyone, now or in the future.

  "In return for this, you and your clones will be allowed to live, as long as you stick to your orders. Tweed will be given one month to get away from Luna, to do whatever he planned to do to get underground if he was discovered."

  "How do we know you'll keep your word about not killing us?" Vaffa said. For the first time, he sounded worried, and Cathay slapped Lilo on the shoulder. Lilo grinned back at him.

  "Obviously you can't be sure. You'll have to take my word for it. But your alternative is certain death, if an Eight Worlds ship is brought here in response to what we have to say, or if you harm the prisoners. Understand, we will broadcast if we have to. If Tweed won't accept our terms, it means all the people down there will be killed by you, anyway, so there's nothing for us to lose. This way you have a chance to live, too.

  "Tweed's alternative is simple, too. He has exactly one hundred and fifteen minutes from right now to comply with our demands. If we don't hear from Niobe in that time, we start talking."

  "We're calling him," Vaffa said. "I have only one more question. How do I know you're telling the truth about knocking Poseidon out of its orbit? How could I tell that?"

  "Uh... I guess I can't prove it's not a bluff. But it doesn't change anything. The broadcast goes out in one hundred and fourteen minutes."

  "Very well." There was a pause. "I suspect you're telling the truth about that. It was quite a jolt."

  Lilo sat back again. She was sweating. She looked at Cathay, found herself hoping for his approval.

  "How'd I do?"

  "I thought it was pretty good," he said. It was sinking in on him now that they were really committed. His son was down there, out of his reach, dependent on Tweed's decision. "What if he does something else? I almost wish we hadn't done it. It's... it's such a responsibility."

  Lilo reached over and touched him, gently. She knew she didn't have as much at stake as he did, and yet it was very important to her that the trick work. Her initial dislike of Cathay had faded as she came around to his way of thinking, as his interests began to coincide more easily with hers. On the trip from Saturn, they had grown close. She was anxious to meet his son, who was supposed to have been her clone's best friend. She hoped she would get the chance.

  "What can he do?" she said. "We've gone over it a million times."

  "I know. I just get scared he's got some trick."

  "Look. When Tweed gets the message from Vaffa, he's got two hours. A couple minutes to make up his mind, forty-eight minutes for his answer to get to us, then another forty-eight before our broadcast could reach Luna. He's a public figure. The police computers know where he is, because he's an assassination target. If he drops out of sight quickly, with no notice, the whole machinery will be looking for him in sixty seconds."

  "But he must have prepared something. He knew I'm out here, with a radio, and could blow the whistle on him anytime."

  "But he knew you wouldn't. He felt safe enough about that, because if you did, it would kill your son."

  Cathay was shaking now, and Lilo stroked his shoulder. The control cabin of the tug was too cramped for them to even turn to face each other, but she managed to kiss his cheek.

  "Tweed doesn't have a choice," Lilo said. "If he doesn't do what we told him to, he'll have only two hours to get so far underground that the kind of massive search we could stir up won't be able to find him. I just don't think he can do that."

  "But could we really broadcast?" Cathay was in increasing agony now. It was going to be a long two hours.

  Lilo said nothing. The choices were really out of their control now; had been since Vengeance smashed in. If they didn't get confirmation from Niobe in two hours it would mean that things too ghastly to think about were happening on Poseidon.

  And then they damn well would broadcast.

  Tweed was a familiar figure in the public ways of King City, and he had always loved it. The sight of him lumbering down Clarke Boulevard was beloved by most of his former constituents. Some days he would waddle aimlessly and amiably, pressing the flesh, with a smile and a pat on the back for all.

  But the love of the people sometimes had to be kept at arm's length. One had to hobnob to keep winning mandates at the polls. On the other hand, there were times when it was necessary to move freely without being mobbed. His hat was the signal. If it was in his hand, they could feel free to talk to him. When he was wearing it, it was understood that he was busy on the people's business.

  Hat firmly on his head, Boss Tweed pounded down the center of the corridor, implacable as a rhinoceros, spouting blue clouds of smoke from his cigar.

  He turned corners with the ponderous grace of a tugboat, gradually working his way into less frequented parts of the city. There was an anonymous door at the end of a deserted stretch of corridor. It opened to his palmprint; he stepped into a small room and sealed the door behind him. At the press of a button, the room began a slow descent.

  Off came the black and gray coat, the baggy pants, the shoes of hardened leather, the white spats. Soon he stood naked in front of a pile of clothes. Without his shoes he was nine centimeters shorter, but he was still a big man.

  He did something to his face and the sagging jowls sagged even further, dropped, and fell into his hands. They were warm to the touch, made from a plastic that sat on the borderline between living and dead material. He dropped the two quivering masses onto the pile of clothes, onto the stovepipe hat he had worn every day for fifty years. The hat collapsed on itself.

  For a moment he stood staring down at the pile of clothes, and he began to shake.

  "No," he said. "No, this isn't the end. It's just a setback." He leaned against the wall behind him and waited for the fit of weakness to pass. With his face buried in his hands, more scraps of plastiflesh peeled away. When he finally looked
up, his sense of purpose restored, he was a different person. He had shed thirty years of apparent age, along with the subtle gestalt of lines and protrusions that had marked his face as that of a male human being. He was androgynous now; his huge paunch could not conceal the fact that he had no genital organs. Two swellings on his chest could have belonged to a woman or a very fat man.

  He heaved himself erect. With a wet slithering sound, twenty-five kilos of rubbery plastiflesh fell from his belly, his arms and legs, and his buttocks. The breasts remained, jutting out over a flat stomach he had not seen in fifty years.

  Tweed was now outwardly a female, but a close examination of the labial folds hidden under the triangle of pubic hair would have revealed no vaginal opening. No hormones raged through Tweed's body, nothing that could divert him from his purpose. He had decided on neutrality long ago, and had never regretted it. Now, it was going to help save his life. The first step in adopting a new identity was radical cosmetic surgery, usually involving a sex change. That alone would never be enough to turn the trick, but it was an essential first step. He had just accomplished it in record time, as he had planned long ago if it ever came to this.

  "Came to this..." he muttered. Again he felt weak. He staggered, and nearly fell on the slippery floor. The plastiflesh had dissolved, and so had the clothes. The water and gray sludge left behind by the disintegration was sucked into a drain in the floor.

  He thought back over the years since the first glimmerings of the vision, the future of a liberated Earth. He knew there were those who thought him an opportunist, who felt he was just cashing in on a vein of opinion which had been growing in Luna for a century. But he was sincere.

  Tweed had been sincere enough to take his only son and carefully raise him to be a killer, a follower of orders no matter what those orders might be. He had pored over ancient books for a year before trying it, but he had raised a soldier. The methods of the U.S. Marines and the Red Army had worked admirably, combined with drug therapy and behavioral psychology. Vaffa had never disappointed him, except for a lingering sadness that he and his clone brothers and sisters had been such dull company.

  It would be a scandal, all right. Even with the month's grace period, things would begin to come out as soon as it was clear that Tweed had actually disappeared. People would be looking for him, computer search programs narrowing down on him, at first with concern for his safety. Later, when questions started to be asked, things would start to come to light. Vaffa would be the first of those things, but there would be more. There were two Vaffas still on Luna, and no chance to do anything about them.

  Now he faced the nearly impossible struggle to reestablish himself as a data-banked citizen with a right of life. He could no longer be Boss Tweed. He had to fit himself into the cracks between the integrated circuits, the very task he had set for a dozen condemned criminals as their only alternative to working for him. It could be done—party members were in key positions in many of the most powerful computers—but it would take time.

  "It's just a setback," Tweed said again.

  But did it have to be? His/her new face frowned deeply as once more the facts were reviewed. There was still time to countermand the orders to Vaffa, but it was running out. The face contorted, and she/he slammed a fist into the wall. Lilo!

  Tweed had always known, down deep, that with the kind of chances he/she was taking it was inevitable that one day someone would make it to freedom. Then, a few months ago, that call from Pluto. Lilo, dictating through Vaffa, telling Tweed what he had to do. It had galled him, but he really had no choice. Now this final blow, and again it came from Lilo. But which one? The teacher, Cathay, had dropped the pilot of the tug close to Poseidon after he took possession of the ship. The man had said Cathay was alone in the ship, that Lilo had fallen into the hole, or into Jupiter. How had she come back to do this?

  Tweed remembered now that Lilo had a base in the Ring. It had to be that one. The other one was dead. She took a vicious satisfaction in the thought. The communicator was in her hand, ready to link with the relay station and tell Vaffa to kill them all. She stopped with her thumb on the button.

  Two hours. That's how long there would be if the order was given. In two hours Lilo would be telling everything, and all the police in the system would be after Tweed. Could it be done? She had tricks Lilo had never heard of; the sex change alone would leave a false trail that might confuse the authorities for as long as three or four hours.

  But that assumed no one was looking for her yet. If she gave the order to Vaffa now, the pursuit would start in two hours. And it would be literally snapping at her heels. She ran her thumbnail around the transmit button.

  No. She needed a few days to get far ahead of them. In four days—in two, with luck—she would be someone else, with a personal history going back seventy years and all properly logged in the data banks. Boss Tweed was dead, and the new woman he had become yearned to avenge him. But it would be too costly. She must always think of the long term. In two or three years she would be back. She would be someone else this time, but it would not be like starting from scratch. The Free Earth Party would go on, and she would lead it.

  The communicator fell to the floor and the elevator door opened. The nude woman stepped out and hurried down the corridor. There was much to do.

  The cafeteria was filled to capacity and a little beyond the safe limits, though Lilo found it hard to believe. The place didn't look crowded.

  There was no large meeting area in Poseidon. Vaffa had discouraged groups of more than ten people at a time. There were large areas in the dead spaces but there had not yet been time to reclaim them. One meeting had been tried in an abandoned room, but no one liked it with everyone's suit turned on. It was impossible to read faces.

  So the cafeteria had been chosen, but it was almost as disconcerting. People had to be evenly spaced around the rotating cylinder, and they had to sit all around its inner circumference, with the result that the speaker could be standing directly overhead. It made for a lot of sore necks.

  "But I was promised two weeks," Vejay was saying. "I've done the best I can. If you can just give me another four days, even three days, I—"

  "We all understand your desire to give us the best possible drive, Vejay," Cathay said. "But you just told us that what you have will function—"

  "But I can only guarantee a couple months, at best, then I'll have to—"

  "—if you'll just listen to me—"

  "I still have the floor, don't I?"

  Lilo slumped further down into her chair. Meetings bored her. Why couldn't Cathay just tell him to pipe down and set a time for the burn? But then, she conceded, that's why he was a better president than she would have been. She recognized it; when her name was put into nomination she had quickly withdrawn it. And Cathay had handled it well. So far he had been able to do just what his advisors had said must be done if they were to have a chance, and had made it seem as if it was fair to everyone. If that wasn't the definition of a good leader, Lilo did not know what was.

  But she had never expected that getting a group of eighty people to agree on anything would be tougher than beating Tweed in the first place.

  The drive was ready, no matter what Vejay said. He was a lover of fine machinery, and the thing he had cobbled together on the other side of Poseidon offended his sense of beauty. But it would work. It would work long enough to get them beyond any possible pursuit. And that was the critical thing, as Cathay was pointing out once more.

  "Tweed must have known that if we gave him a month, we'd give him two months, and forever for that matter. We have no advantage to gain by exposing him. I know there's a minority who want to do just that, but I'll remind you again that we're not out of the woods. You people who hate him that much should be the very ones to know that if there's a way he can get to us by treachery, out of sheer spite, he'll do it. That's why we planned to move in ten days from the very beginning. I know it's been hard..." There was a chorus of
loud comment greeting the statement. "...but we've just about arrived. We're within hours of being able to boost, and once we get started, our chances improve by an order of magnitude."

  Lilo let her attention wander again. She scanned the crowd restlessly. She had not had time to get to know many of the people present, though a lot of them had a maddening habit of assuming friendship based on their acquaintance with her dead clone. She smiled when she spotted Cass sixty degrees around the curve of the floor. So far, he had been one of the few not to presume on his previous friendship with her clone. He seemed willing to start from scratch. In this case, she approved of her sister's judgment.

  Sitting in front of her, in a tight group, were the Vaffas. There were eight of them; not as many as had been feared, but more than anyone was comfortable with. There had been nine. The death of one of them at the hands of what had to be called a lynch mob was the first crisis the community had faced. The other Vaffas, already fearful, had occupied a room and vowed to fight to the death. It had taken careful work by Cathay to get them out again. They had stuck to their end of the bargain, not raising a hand against anyone. It remained to be seen how they would fare in the long run. There were many long-standing grudges to settle. Already they were regarded as second-class citizens, which they did not seem to mind as long as people left them alone. But they were going to be a problem.

  "Now we'll hear from the ecology committee," Cathay said. "Krista, will you report?"

  Krista was one of the few people Lilo knew well. With work going on around the clock to get Poseidon ready to move, Lilo had been with her for marathon sessions devoted to repairing damage to the hydroponic gardens caused by the crash. Krista was a hard worker, one of the kidnapped scientists Tweed had put on the station when he couldn't find what he wanted in prison. Lilo liked her, except for the tendency she displayed to be interested in what Lilo had done to land in jail.