The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “Thank you. Go away.” She did, by dissolving into thin air. This really made his day. He leaned back in his chair and thought about his situation for the first time since he was young.

  He didn’t like what he saw.

  In the middle of his ruminations, his computer screen lit up again.

  “Watch it, Fingal,” it read. “That way lies catatonia.”

  He took the warning seriously, but didn’t intend to abuse the newfound power. He didn’t see why judicious use of it now and then would hurt anything. He stretched, and yawned broadly. He looked around, suddenly hating the office with its rows of workers indistinguishable from their desks. Why not take the day off?

  On impulse, he got up and walked the few steps to Felicia’s desk.

  “Why don’t we go to my house and make love?” he asked her.

  She looked at him in astonishment, and he grinned. She was almost as surprised as when he had hurled the tapes at her.

  “Is this a joke? In the middle of the day? You have a job to do, you know. You want to get us fired?”

  He shook his head slowly. “That’s not an acceptable answer.”

  She stopped, and rewound from that point. He heard her repeat her last sentences backwards, then she smiled.

  “Sure, why not?” she said.

  Felicia left afterwards in the same slightly disconcerting way his boss had left earlier, by melting into the air. Fingal sat quietly in his bed, wondering what to do with himself. He felt he was getting off to a bad start if he intended to edit his world with care.

  His telephone rang.

  “You’re damn right,” said a woman’s voice, obviously irritated with him. He sat up straight.

  “Apollonia?”

  “Ms. Joachim to you, Fingal. I can’t talk long; this is quite a strain on me. But listen to me, and listen hard. Your navel is very deep, Fingal. From where you’re standing, it’s a pit I can’t even see the bottom of. If you fall into it I can’t guarantee to pull you out.”

  “But do I have to take everything as it is? Aren’t I allowed some self-improvement?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. That wasn’t self-improvement. That was sheer laziness. It was nothing but masturbation, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, if you do it to the exclusion of all else, your mind will grow in on itself. You’re in grave danger of excluding the external universe from your reality.”

  “But I thought there was no external universe for me here.”

  “Almost right. But I’m feeding you external stimuli to keep you going. Besides, it’s the attitude that counts. You’ve never had trouble finding sexual partners; why do you feel compelled to alter the odds now?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Like you said, laziness, I guess.”

  “That’s right. If you want to quit your job, feel free. If you’re serious about self-improvement, there are opportunities available to you there. Search them out. Look around you, explore. But don’t try to meddle in things you don’t understand. I’ve got to go now. I’ll write you a letter if I can, and explain more.”

  “Wait! What about my body? Have they made any progress?”

  “Yes, they’ve found out how it happened. It seems . . .” Her voice faded out, and he switched off the phone.

  The next day he received a letter explaining what was known so far. It seemed that the mix-up had resulted from the visit of the teacher to the medico section on the day of his recording. More specifically, the return of the little boy after the others had left. They were sure now that he had tampered with the routing card that told the attendants what to do with Fingal’s body. Instead of moving it to the slumber room, which was a green card, they had sent it somewhere—no one knew where yet—for a sex change, which was a blue card. The medico, in her haste to get home for her date, had not noticed the switch. Now the body could be in any of several thousand medico shops in Luna. They were looking for it, and for the boy.

  Fingal put the letter down and did some hard thinking.

  Joachim had said there were opportunities for him in the memory banks. She had also said that not everything he saw was his own projections. He was receiving, was capable of receiving, external stimuli. Why was that? Because he would tend to randomize without them, or some other reason? He wished the letter had gone into that.

  In the meantime, what did he do?

  Suddenly he had it. He wanted to learn about computers. He wanted to know what made them tick, to feel a sense of power over them. It was particularly strong when he thought about being a virtual prisoner inside one. He was like a worker on an assembly line. All day long he labors, taking small parts off a moving belt and installing them on larger assemblies. One day, he happens to wonder who puts the parts on the belt. Where do they come from? How are they made? What happens after he installs them?

  He wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before.

  The admissions office of the Lunar People’s Technical School was crowded. He was handed a form and told to fill it out. It looked bleak. The spaces for “previous experience” and “aptitude scores” were almost blank when he was through with them. All in all, not a very promising application. He went to the desk and handed the form to the man sitting at the terminal.

  The man fed it into the computer, which promptly decided Fingal had no talent for being a computer repairperson. He started to turn away when his eye was caught by a large poster behind the man. It had been there on the wall when he came in, but he hadn’t read it.

  LUNA NEEDS COMPUTER TECHNICIANS. THIS MEANS YOU, MR. FINGAL!

  Are you dissatisfied with your present employment? Do you feel you were cut out for better things? Then today may be your lucky day. You’ve come to the right place, and if you grasp this golden opportunity you will find doors opening that were closed to you.

  Act, Mr. Fingal. This is the time. Who’s to check up on you? Just take that stylus and fill in the application any old way you want. Be grandiose, be daring! The fix is in, and you’re on your way to

  BIG MONEY!

  The secretary saw nothing unusual in Fingal’s coming to the desk a second time, and didn’t even blink when the computer decided he was eligible for the accelerated course.

  It wasn’t easy at first. He really did have little aptitude for electronics, but aptitude is a slippery thing. His personality matrix was as flexible now as it would ever be. A little effort at the right time would go a long way toward self-improvement. What he kept telling himself was that everything that made him what he was, was etched in that tiny cube wired in to the computer, and if he was careful he could edit it.

  Not radically, Joachim told him in a long, helpful letter later in the week. That way led to complete disruption of the FPNA matrix and catatonia, which in this case would be distinguishable from death only to a hair splitter.

  He thought a lot about death as he dug into the books. He was in a strange position. The being known as Fingal would not die in any conceivable outcome of this adventure. For one thing, his body was going toward a sex change and it was hard to imagine what could happen to it that would kill it. Whoever had custody of it now would be taking care of it just as well as the medicos in the slumber room would have. If Joachim was unsuccessful in her attempt to keep him aware and sane in the memory bank, he would merely awake and remember nothing from the time he fell asleep on the table.

  If, by some compounded unlikelihood, his body was allowed to die, he had an insurance recording safe in the vault of his bank. The recording was three years old. He would awaken in the newly grown clone body knowing nothing of the last three years, and would have a fantastic story to listen to as he was brought up to date.

  But none of that mattered to him. Humans are a time-binding species, existing in an eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts. The Fingal of three years ago was not the Fingal in the memory bank. The simple fact about immortality by memory recording was that it was a poor solut
ion. The three-dimensional cross section that was the Fingal of now must always behave as if his life depended on his actions, for he would feel the pain of death if it happened to him. It was small consolation to a dying man to know that he would go on, several years younger and less wise. If Fingal lost out here, he would die, because with memory recording he was three people: the one who lived now, the one lost somewhere on Luna, and the one potential person in the bank vault. They were really no more than close relatives.

  Everyone knew this, but it was so much better than the alternative that few people rejected it. They tried not to think about it and were generally successful. They had recordings made as often as they could afford them. They heaved a sigh of relief as they got onto the table to have another recording taken, knowing that another chunk of their lives was safe for all time. But they awaited the awakening nervously, dreading being told that it was now twenty years later because they had died sometime after the recording and had to start all over. A lot can happen in twenty years. The person in the new clone body might have to cope with a child he or she had never seen, a new spouse, or the shattering news that his or her employment was now the function of a machine.

  So Fingal took Joachim’s warnings seriously. Death was death, and though he could cheat it, death still had the last laugh. Instead of taking your whole life from you, death now only claimed a percentage, but in many ways it was the most important percentage.

  He enrolled in classes. Whenever possible, he took the ones that were available over the phone lines so he needn’t stir from his room. He ordered his food and supplies by phone and paid his bills by looking at them and willing them out of existence. It could have been intensely boring, or it could have been wildly interesting. After all, it was a dream world, and who doesn’t think of retiring into fantasy from time to time? Fingal certainly did, but firmly suppressed the idea when it came. He intended to get out of this dream.

  For one thing, he missed the company of other people. He waited for the weekly letters from Apollonia (she now allowed him to call her by her first name) with a consuming passion and devoured every word. His file of such letters bulged. At lonely moments he would pull one out at random and read it again and again.

  On her advice, he left the apartment regularly and stirred around more or less at random. During these outings he had wild adventures. Literally. Apollonia hurled the external stimuli at him during these times and they could be anything from The Mummy’s Curse to Custer’s Last Stand with the original cast. It beat hell out of the movies. He would just walk down the public corridors and open a door at random. Behind it might be King Solomon’s mines or the sultan’s harem. He endured them all stoically. He was unable to get any pleasure from sex. He knew it was a one-handed exercise, and it took all the excitement away.

  His only pleasure came in his studies. He read everything he could about computer science and came to stand at the head of his class. And as he learned, it began to occur to him to apply his knowledge to his own situation.

  He began seeing things around him that had been veiled before. Patterns. The reality was starting to seep through his illusions. Every so often he would look up and see the faintest shadow of the real world of electron flow and fluttering circuits he inhabited. It scared him at first. He asked Apollonia about it on one of his dream journeys, this time to Coney Island in the mid-twentieth century. He liked it there. He could lie on the sand and talk to the surf. Overhead, a skywriter’s plane spelled out the answers to his questions. He studiously ignored the brontosaurus rampaging through the roller coaster off to his right.

  “What does it mean, O Goddess of Transistoria, when I begin to see circuit diagrams on the walls of my apartment? Overwork?”

  “It means the illusion is beginning to wear thin,” the plane spelled out over the next half-hour. “You’re adapting to the reality you have been denying. It could be trouble, but we’re hot on the trail of your body. We should have it soon and get you out of there.” This had been too much for the plane. The sun was down now, the brontosaurus vanquished and the plane out of gas. It spiraled into the ocean and the crowds surged closer to the water to watch the rescue. Fingal got up and went back to the boardwalk.

  There was a huge billboard. He laced his fingers behind his back and read it.

  “Sorry for the delay. As I was saying, we’re almost there. Give us another few months. One of our agents thinks he will be at the right medico shop in about one week’s time. From there it should go quickly. For now, avoid those places where you see the circuits showing through. They’re no good for you, take my word for it.”

  Fingal avoided the circuits as long as he could. He finished his first courses in computer science and enrolled in the intermediate section. Six months rolled by.

  His studies got easier and easier. His reading speed was increasing phenomenally. He found that it was more advantageous for him to see the library as composed of books instead of tapes. He could take a book from the shelf, flip through it rapidly, and know everything that was in it. He knew enough now to realize that he was acquiring a facility to interface directly with the stored knowledge in the computer, bypassing his senses entirely. The books he held in his hands were merely the sensual analogs of the proper terminals to touch. Apollonia was nervous about it, but let him go on. He breezed through the intermediate and graduated into the advanced classes.

  But he was surrounded by wires. Everywhere he turned, in the patterns of veins beneath the surface of a man’s face, in a plate of French fries he ordered for lunch, in his palmprints, overlaying the apparent disorder of a head of blonde hair on the pillow beside him.

  The wires were analogs of analogs. There was little in a modern computer that consisted of wiring. Most of it was made of molecular circuits that were either embedded in a crystal lattice or photographically reproduced on a chip of silicon. Visually, they were hard to imagine, so his mind was making up these complex circuit diagrams that served the same purpose but could be experienced directly.

  One day he could resist it no longer. He was in the bathroom, on the traditional place for the pondering of the imponderable. His mind wandered, speculating on the necessity of moving his bowels, wondering if he might safely eliminate the need to eliminate. His toe idly traced out the pathways of a circuit board incorporated in the pattern of tiles on the floor.

  The toilet began to overflow, not with water, but with coins. Bells were ringing happily. He jumped up and watched in bemusement as his bathroom filled with money.

  He became aware of a subtle alteration in the tone of the bells. They changed from the merry clang of jackpot to the tolling of a death knell. He hastily looked around for a manifestation. He knew that Apollonia would be angry.

  She was. Her hand appeared and began to write on the wall. This time the writing was in his blood. It dripped menacingly from the words.

  “What are you doing?” the hand wrote, and having writ, moved on. “I told you to leave the wires alone. Do you know what you’ve done? You may have wiped the financial records for Kenya. It could take months to straighten them out.”

  “Well, what do I care?” he exploded. “What have they done for me lately? It’s incredible that they haven’t located my body by now. It’s been a full year.”

  The hand bunched up in a fist. Then it grabbed him around the throat and squeezed hard enough to make his eyes bulge out. It slowly relaxed. When Fingal could see straight, he backed warily away from it.

  The hand fidgeted nervously, drummed its fingers on the floor. It went to the wall again.

  “Sorry,” it wrote, “I guess I’m getting tired. Hold on.”

  He waited, more shaken than he remembered being since his odyssey began. There’s nothing like a dose of pain, he reflected, to make you realize that it can happen to you.

  The wall with the words of blood slowly dissolved into a heavenly panorama. As he watched, clouds streamed by his vantage point and mixed beautifully with golden rays of sunshine. He hear
d organ music from pipes the size of sequoias.

  He wanted to applaud. It was so overdone, and yet so convincing. In the center of the whirling mass of white mist an angel faded in. She had wings and a halo, but lacked the traditional white robe. She was nude, and hair floated around her as if she were under water.

  She levitated to him, walking on the billowing clouds, and handed him two stone tablets. He tore his eyes away from the apparition and glanced down at the tablets:

  Thou shalt not screw around with things thou dost not understand.

  “All right, I promise I won’t,” he told the angel. “Apollonia, is that you? Really you, I mean?”

  “Read the Commandments, Fingal. This is hard on me.” He looked back at the tablets.

  Thou shalt not meddle in the hardware systems of the Kenya Corporation, for Kenya shall not hold him indemnifiable who taketh freedoms with its property.

  Thou shalt not explore the limits of thy prison. Trust in the Kenya Corporation to extract thee.

  Thou shalt not program.

  Thou shalt not worry about the location of thy body, for it has been located, help is on the way, the cavalry has arrived, and all is in hand.

  Thou shalt meet a tall, handsome stranger who will guide thee from thy current plight.

  Thou shalt stay tuned for further developments.

  He looked up and was happy to see that the angel was still there.

  “I won’t, I promise. But where is my body, and why has it taken so long to find it? Can you—”

  “Know thou that appearing like this is a great taxation upon me, Mr. Fingal. I am undergoing strains the nature of which I have no time to reveal to thee. Hold thy horses, wait it out, and thou shalt soon see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

  “Wait, don’t go.” She was already starting to fade out.

  “I cannot tarry.”