The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “But . . . Apollonia, this is charming, but why do you appear to me in these crazy ways? Why all the pomp and circumstance? What’s wrong with letters?”

  She looked around her at the clouds, the sunbeams, the tablets in his hand, and at her body, as if seeing them for the first time. She threw her head back and laughed like a symphony orchestra. It was almost too beautiful for Fingal to bear.

  “Me?” she said, dropping the angelic bearing. “Me? I don’t pick ’em, Fingal. I told you, it’s your head, and I’m just passing through.” She arched her eyebrows at him. “And really, sir, I had no idea you felt this way about me. Is it puppy love?” And she was gone, except for the grin.

  The grin haunted him for days. He was disgusted with himself about it. He hated to see a metaphor overworked so. He decided his mind was just an inept analogizer.

  But everything had its purpose. The grin forced him to look at his feelings. He was in love, hopelessly, ridiculously, just like a teenager. He got out all his old letters from her and read through them again, searching for the magic words that could have inflicted this on him. Because it was silly. He’d never met her except under highly figurative circumstances. The one time he had seen her, most of what he saw was the product of his own mind.

  There were no clues in the letters. Most of them were as impersonal as a textbook, though they tended to be rather chatty. Friendly, yes; but intimate, poetic, insightful, revealing? No. He failed utterly to put them together in any way that should add up to love, or even a teenage crush.

  He attacked his studies with renewed vigor, awaiting the next communication. Weeks dragged by with no word. He called the post office several times, placed personal advertisements in every periodical he could think of, took to scrawling messages on public buildings, sealed notes in bottles and flushed them down the disposal, rented billboards, bought television time. He screamed at the empty walls of his apartment, buttonholed strangers, tapped Morse Code on the water pipes, started rumors in skid-row taprooms, had leaflets published and distributed all over the solar system. He tried every medium he could think of, and could not contact her. He was alone.

  He considered the possibility that he had died. In his present situation, it might be hard to tell for sure. He abandoned it as untestable. That line was hazy enough already without his efforts to determine which side of the life/death dichotomy he inhabited. Besides, the more he thought about existing as nothing more than kinks in a set of macromolecules plugged into a data system, the more it frightened him. He’d survived this long by avoiding such thoughts.

  His nightmares moved in on him, set up housekeeping in his apartment. They were a severe disappointment, and confirmed his conclusion that his imagination was not as vivid as it might be. They were infantile boogeymen, the sort that might scare him when glimpsed hazily through the fog of a nightmare, but were almost laughable when exposed to the full light of consciousness. There was a large, talkative snake that was crudely put together, fashioned from the incomplete picture a child might have of a serpent. A toy company could have done a better job. There was a werewolf whose chief claim to dread was a tendency to shed all over Fingal’s rugs. There was a woman who consisted mostly of breasts and genitals, left over from his adolescence, he suspected. He groaned in embarrassment every time he looked at her. If he had ever been that infantile he would rather have left the dirty traces of it buried forever.

  He kept booting them into the corridor but they drifted in at night like poor relations. They talked incessantly, and always about him. The things they knew! They seemed to have a very low opinion of him. The snake often expressed the opinion that Fingal would never amount to anything because he had so docilely accepted the results of the aptitude tests he took as a child. That hurt, but the best salve for the wound was further study.

  Finally a letter came. He winced as soon as he got it open. The salutation was enough to tell him he wasn’t going to like it.

  Dear Mr. Fingal,

  I won’t apologize for the delay this time. It seems that most of my manifestations have included an apology and I feel I deserved a rest this time. I can’t be always on call. I have a life of my own.

  I understand that you have behaved in an exemplary manner since I last talked with you. You have ignored the inner workings of the computer just as I told you to do. I haven’t been completely frank with you, and I will explain my reasons.

  The hook-up between you and the computer is, and always has been, two-way. Our greatest fear at this end had been that you would begin interfering with the workings of the computer, to the great discomfort of everyone. Or that you would go mad and run amok, perhaps wrecking the entire data system. We installed you in the computer as a humane necessity, because you would have died if we had not done so, though it would have cost you only two days of memories. But Kenya is in the business of selling memories, and holds them to be a sacred trust. It was a mix-up on the part of the Kenya Corporation that got you here in the first place, so we decided we should do everything we could for you.

  But it was at great hazard to our operations at this end.

  Once, about six months ago, you got tangled in the weather-control sector of the computer and set off a storm over Kilimanjaro that is still not fully under control. Several animals were lost.

  I have had to fight the Board of Directors to keep you on-line, and several times the program was almost terminated. You know what that means.

  Now, I’ve leveled with you. I wanted to from the start, but the people who own things around here were worried that you might start fooling around out of a spirit of vindictiveness if you knew these facts, so they were kept from you. You could still do a great deal of damage before we could shut you off. I’m laying it on the line now, with directors chewing their nails over my shoulder. Please stay out of trouble.

  On to the other matter.

  I was afraid from the outset that what has happened might happen. For over a year I’ve been your only contact with the world outside. I’ve been the only other person in your universe. I would have to be an extremely cold, hateful, awful person—which I am not—for you not to feel affection for me under those circumstances. You are suffering from intense sensory deprivation, and it’s well known that someone in that state becomes pliable, suggestible, and lonely. You’ve attached your feelings to me as the only thing around worth caring for.

  I’ve tried to avoid intimacy with you for that reason, to keep things firmly on a last-name basis. But I relented during one of your periods of despair. And you read into my letters some things that were not there. Remember, even in the printed medium it is your mind that controls what you see. Your censor has let through what it wanted to see and maybe even added some things of its own. I’m at your mercy. For all I know, you may be reading this letter as a passionate affirmation of love. I’ve added every reinforcement I know of to make sure the message comes through on a priority channel and is not garbled. I’m sorry to hear that you love me. I do not, repeat not, love you in return. You’ll understand why, at least in part, when we get you out of there.

  It will never work, Mr. Fingal. Give it up.

  Apollonia Joachim

  Fingal graduated first in his class. He had finished the required courses for his degree during the last long week after his letter from Apollonia. It was a bitter victory for him, marching up to the stage to accept the sheepskin, but he clutched it to him fiercely. At least he had made the most of his situation, at least he had not meekly let the wheels of the machine chew him up like a good worker.

  He reached out to grasp the hand of the college president and saw it transformed. He looked up and saw the bearded, robed figure flow and writhe and become a tall, uniformed woman. With a surge of joy, he knew who it was. Then the joy became ashes in his mouth, which he hurriedly spit out.

  “I always knew you’d choke on a figure of speech,” she said, laughing tiredly.

  “You’re here,” he said. He could not quite believe it. He s
tared dully at her, grasping her hand and the diploma with equal tenacity. She was tall, as the prophecy had said, and handsome. Her hair was cropped short over a capable face, and the body beneath the uniform was muscular. The uniform was open at the throat, and wrinkled. There were circles under her eyes, and the eyes were bloodshot. She swayed slightly on her feet.

  “I’m here, all right. Are you ready to go back?” She turned to the assembled students. “How about it, gang? Do you think he deserves to go back?”

  The crowd went wild, cheering and tossing mortarboards into the air. Fingal turned dazedly to look at them, with a dawning realization. He looked down at the diploma.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. Back to work at the data room?”

  She clapped him on the back.

  “No. I promise you that.”

  “But how could it be different? I’ve come to think of this piece of paper as something . . . real. Real! How could I have deluded myself like that? Why did I accept it?”

  “I helped you along,” she said. “But it wasn’t all a game. You really did learn all the things you learned. It won’t go away when you return. That thing in your hand is imaginary, for sure, but who do you think prints the real ones? You’re registered where it counts—in the computer—as having passed all the courses. You’ll get a real diploma when you return.”

  Fingal wavered. There was a tempting vision in his head. He’d been here for over a year and had never really exploited the nature of the place. Maybe that business about dying in the memory bank was all a shuck, another lie invented to keep him in his place. In that case, he could remain here and satisfy his wildest desires, become king of the universe with no opposition, wallow in pleasure no emperor ever imagined. Anything he wanted here he could have, anything at all.

  And he really felt he might pull it off. He’d noticed many things about this place, and now had the knowledge of computer technology to back him up. He could squirm around and evade their attempts to erase him, even survive if they removed his cube by programming himself into other parts of the computer. He could do it.

  With a sudden insight he realized that he had no desires wild enough to keep him here in his navel. He had only one major desire right now, and she was slowly fading out. A lap dissolve was replacing her with the old college president.

  “Coming?” she asked.

  “Yes.” It was as simple as that. The stage, president, students, and auditorium faded out and the computer room at Kenya faded in. Only Apollonia remained constant. He held onto her hand until everything stabilized.

  “Whew,” she said, and reached around behind her head. She pulled out a wire from her occipital plug and collapsed into a chair. Someone pulled a similar wire from Fingal’s head, and he was finally free of the computer.

  Apollonia reached out for a steaming cup of coffee on a table littered with empty cups.

  “You were a tough nut,” she said. “For a minute I thought you’d stay. It happened once. You’re not the first to have this happen to you, but you’re no more than the twentieth. It’s an unexplored area. Dangerous.”

  “Really?” he said. “You weren’t just saying that?”

  “No,” she laughed. “Now the truth can be told. It is dangerous. No one had ever survived more than three hours in that kind of cube, hooked into a computer. You went for six. You do have a strong world picture.”

  She was watching him to see how he reacted to this. She was not surprised to see him accept it readily.

  “I should have known that,” he said. “I should have thought of it. It was only six hours out here, and more than a year for me. Computers think faster. Why didn’t I see that?”

  “I helped you not see it,” she admitted. “Like the push I gave you not to question why you were studying so hard. Those two orders worked a lot better than some of the orders I gave you.”

  She yawned again, and it seemed to go on forever.

  “See, it was pretty hard for me to interface with you for six hours straight. No one’s ever done it before; it can get to be quite a strain. So we’ve both got something to be proud of.”

  She smiled at him but it faded when he did not return it.

  “Don’t look so hurt, Fingal. What is your first name? I knew it, but erased it early in the game.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t know. Surely you must see why I haven’t fallen in love with you, though you may be a perfectly lovable person. I haven’t had time. It’s been a very long six hours, but it was still only six hours. What can I do?”

  Fingal’s face was going through awkward changes as he absorbed that. Things were not so bleak after all.

  “You could go to dinner with me.”

  “I’m already emotionally involved with someone else, I should warn you of that.”

  “You could still go to dinner. You haven’t been exposed to my new determination. I’m going to really make a case.”

  She laughed warmly and got up. She took his hand.

  “You know, it’s possible that you might succeed. Just don’t put wings on me again, all right? You’ll never get anywhere like that.”

  “I promise. I’m through with visions—for the rest of my life.”

  INTRODUCTION TO “In the Hall of the Martian Kings”

  I sold half a dozen stories over the next year. Not enough to support myself and my family, but enough to make life a bit easier. But it was becoming clear that I was unlikely to make a living just selling short stories. I worked fast in those days, but never turned out more than two in any given month, and usually only one. If I sold them all, it wouldn’t be enough. I started to think in terms of another novel.

  Growing up, I had been aware that there was something called fandom, but it had never occurred to me that I might be a part of it. I know there are places more off the beaten track than Nederland, Texas, but growing up there it was hard to imagine them. We had a good football team, went to the state AAA finals a couple times. We had a great band, one of the best in the state, that had marched in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural parade, in which I played trumpet, French horn, and baritone horn at various times. But academically we were only middling. The only other things Nederland had to brag about, wedged there between Beaumont and Port Arthur, were mosquitoes the size of P-51s, five big refineries within smelling distance, and the semiannual hurricane.

  I was not a complete hick. I’d been to Dallas, and New Orleans, and knew that was the life for me. When I got my driver’s license (you could get it at age fourteen in Texas), I used every opportunity I could find to wheedle the keys to Dad’s big Mercury and tear down U.S. 90 to Houston, ninety miles away, seeing if that needle would still peg out at 120 mph. It always did, and so did the Pontiac, later (Sorry, Dad) . . . just to stare up at the big buildings. One was forty stories tall!

  But so far as I knew no science fiction convention had ever been held within a thousand miles of me. Those things happened in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Denver.

  Shangri-La, Neverland, El Dorado.

  Then I became aware that something called Westercon was being held in Oakland, California. By then I was living in Eugene, Oregon, and driving the sort of car that the EPA is mostly keeping off the road these days. I didn’t trust it to get much past Mount Shasta, and besides, my wife and children couldn’t go, and they would need the car. By then I knew a few science fiction fans, including a couple who always went to Westercon. So we set off down I-5 in a car not a whole lot better than mine—I remember getting down to as low as 20 mph on some of the grades—and with some smiles from the gods of the highway, actually made it.

  I didn’t have enough money to join the convention and eat, too, so I lurked around the big, noisy place, knowing no one. But I had sold a story to David Gerrold for an anthology he was putting together, and saw he was on a panel. I sneaked in, waited around in the back when it was over, and approached him as he was on his way to the next event on the schedule of a busy pr
ofessional writer who had written “The Trouble With Tribbles,” the most popular Star Trek episode of all time. David was cordial at first sight, as I have found most pros to be with fans, but when I introduced myself I first experienced something I had not expected: instant acceptance. David’s enthusiasm at meeting me was not a fluke, not just because David is a sweet guy. All the writers I would meet that day were just as cordial, just as accepting. Apparently, in the world of science fiction writers, one sale was all you needed to be a member. I stood in awe of some of the people I met that day, tried not to show it too egregiously, and never felt a hint of condescension.

  David immediately swept me up to Valhalla, or as he called it, “the SFWA suite.” I was too embarrassed to admit I didn’t know what SFWA stood for. I later learned it was Science Fiction Writers of America. The pros. And I was welcomed there, even though I wasn’t a member.

  Hal Clement was there. John Brunner. Charles Brown, the editor of Locus, the newsmagazine of SF. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle were there. (Larry Niven!) I talked to him for a while. It’s hard to recall now just who all was in that room, since so many of them later became my friends, and I was still dazzled by the idea of them as colleagues.

  Colleagues!

  Someone, probably David, wangled a membership for me and I could stop feeling like an illegal alien on the lookout for la migra. I was hustled off to appear on a panel about breaking into the business. And soon I was having lunch with Donald Bensen from New York, who was involved in launching a new publishing line called Quantum SF. He asked me if I was thinking about writing a novel, and what it might be about. I came up with an idea, winging it, and soon had outlined The Ophiuchi Hotline, something I had made up in a recent story. Before long I had been put in contact with Jim Frenkel, who was later to guide me through the process of getting my first book in print.

  Each night I sneaked off and walked to the fleabag hotel almost a mile away where I was staying because I couldn’t afford even one night at the convention hotel, and wondered if I had been dreaming it all.