The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  So we live our lives in pieces. I could know, for whatever good it would do me, that thousands of years from now a being would still exist who would be at least partly me. She would remember exactly the same things I remembered of her childhood; the trip to Archimedes, her first sex change, her lovers, her hurts and her happiness. If I had another recording taken, she would remember thinking the thoughts I was thinking now. And she would probably still be stringing chunks of experience onto her life, year by year. Each time she had a new recording, that much more of her life was safe for all time. There was a certain comfort in knowing that my life was safe up until a few hours ago, when the recording was made.

  Having thought all that out, I found myself fiercely determined to never let it happen again. I began to hate my killer with an intensity I had never experienced. I wanted to storm out of the apartment and beat my killer to death with a blunt instrument.

  I swallowed that emotion with difficulty. It was exactly what the killer would be looking for. I had to remember that the killer knew what my first reaction would be. I had to behave in a way that he or she would not expect.

  But what way was that?

  I called the police department and met with the detective who had my case. Her name was Isadora, and she had some good advice.

  “You’re not going to like it, if I can judge from past experience,” she said. “The last time I proposed it to you, you rejected it out of hand.”

  I knew I’d have to get used to this. People would always be telling me what I had done, what I had said to them. I controlled my anger and asked her to go on.

  “It’s simply to stay put. I know you think you’re a detective, but your predecessor proved pretty well that you are not. If you stir out of that door you’ll be nailed. This guy knows you inside and out, and he’ll get you. Count on it.”

  He? You know something about him, then?”

  Sorry, you’ll have to bear with me. I’ve told you parts of this case twice already, so it’s hard to remember what you don’t know. Yes, we do know he’s a male. Or was, six months ago, when you had your big fight with him. Several witnesses reported a man with blood-stained clothes, who could only have been your killer.”

  “Then you’re on his trail?”

  She sighed, and I knew she was going over old ground again.

  “No, and you’ve proved again that you’re not a detective. Your detective lore comes from reading old novels. It’s not a glamorous enough job nowadays to rate fictional heroes and such, so most people don’t know the kind of work we do. Knowing that the killer was a man when he last knocked you off means nothing to us. He could have bought a Change the very next day. You’re probably wondering if we have fingerprints of him, right?”

  I gritted my teeth. Everyone had the advantage over me. It was obvious I had asked something like that the last time I spoke with this woman. And I had been thinking of it.

  “No,” I said. “Because he could change those as easily as his sex, right?”

  “Right. Easier. The only positive means of identification today is genotyping, and he wasn’t cooperative enough to leave any of him behind when he killed you. He must have been a real brute, to be able to inflict as much damage on you as he did and not even be cut himself. You were armed with a knife. Not a drop of his blood was found at the scene of the murder.”

  “Then how do you go about finding him?”

  “Fox, I’d have to take you through several college courses to begin to explain our methods to you. And I’ll even admit that they’re not very good. Police work has not kept up with science over the last century. There are many things available to the modern criminal that make our job more difficult than you’d imagine. We have hopes of catching him within about four lunations, though, if you’ll stay put and stop chasing him.”

  “Why four months?”

  “We trace him by computer. We have very exacting programs that we run when we’re after a guy like this. It’s our one major weapon. Given time, we can run to ground about sixty percent of the criminals.”

  “Sixty percent?” I squawked. “Is that supposed to encourage me? Especially when you’re dealing with a master like my killer seems to be?”

  She shook her head. “He’s not a master. He’s only determined. And that works against him, not for him. The more single-mindedly he pursues you, the surer we are of catching him when he makes a slip. That sixty percent figure is overall crime; on murder, the rate is ninety-eight. It’s a crime of passion, usually done by an amateur. The pros see no percentage in it, and they’re right. The penalty is so steep it can make a pauper of you, and your victim is back on the streets while you’re still in court.”

  I thought that over, and found it made me feel better. My killer was not a criminal mastermind. I was not being hunted by Fu Manchu or Professor Moriarty. He was only a person like myself, new to this business. Something Fox 1 did had made him sufficiently angry to risk financial ruin to stalk and kill me. It scaled him down to human dimensions.

  “So now you’re all ready to go out and get him?” Isadora sneered. I guess my thoughts were written on my face. That, or she was consulting her script of our previous conversations.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because, like I said, he’ll get you. He might not be a pro but he’s an expert on you. He knows how you’ll jump. One thing he thinks he knows is that you won’t take my advice. He might be right outside your door, waiting for you to finish this conversation like you did last time around. The last time, he wasn’t there. This time he might be.”

  It sobered me. I glanced nervously at my door, which was guarded by eight different security systems bought by Fox 3.

  “Maybe you’re right. So you want me just to stay here. For how long?”

  “However long it takes. It may be a year. That four-lunation figure is the high point on a computer curve. It tapers off to a virtual certainty in just over a year.”

  “Why didn’t I stay here the last time?”

  “A combination of foolish bravery, hatred, and a fear of boredom.” She searched my eyes, trying to find the words that would make me take the advice that Fox 3 had fatally refused. “I understand you’re an artist,” she went on. “Why can’t you just . . . well, whatever it is artists do when they’re thinking up a new composition? Can’t you work here in your apartment?”

  How could I tell her that inspiration wasn’t just something I could turn on at will? Weather sculpture is a tenuous discipline. The visualization is difficult; you can’t just try out a new idea the way you can with a song, by picking it out on a piano or guitar. You can run a computer simulation, but you never really know what you have until the tapes are run into the machines and you stand out there in the open field and watch the storm take shape around you. And you don’t get any practice sessions. It’s expensive.

  I’ve always needed long walks on the surface. My competitors can’t understand why. They go for strolls through the various parks, usually the one where the piece will be performed. I do that, too. You have to, to get the lay of the land. A computer can tell you what it looks like in terms of thermoclines and updrafts and pocket ecologies, but you have to really go there and feel the land, taste the air, smell the trees, before you can compose a storm or even a summer shower. It has to be a part of the land.

  But my inspiration comes from the dry, cold, airless surface that so few Lunarians really like. I’m not a burrower; I’ve never loved the corridors, as so many of my friends profess to do. I think I see the black sky and harsh terrain as a blank canvas, a feeling I never really get in the disneylands where the land is lush and varied and there’s always some weather in progress even if it’s only partly cloudy and warm.

  Could I compose without those long, solitary walks?

  Run that through again: could I afford not to?

  “All right, I’ll stay inside like a good girl.”

  I was in luck. What could have been an endless purgatory turned into creative fre
nzy such as I had never experienced. My frustrations at being locked in my apartment translated themselves into grand sweeps of tornadoes and thunderheads. I began writing my masterpiece. The working title was A Conflagration of Cyclones. That’s how angry I was. My agent later talked me into shortening it to a tasteful Cyclone, but it was always a conflagration to me.

  Soon I had managed virtually to forget about my killer. I never did completely; after all, I needed the thought of him to flog me onward, to serve as the canvas on which to paint my hatred. I did have one awful thought, early on, and I brought it up to Isadora.

  “It strikes me,” I said, “that what you’ve built here is the better mousetrap, and I’m the hunk of cheese.”

  “You’ve got the essence of it,” she agreed.

  “I find I don’t care for the role of bait.”

  “Why not? Are you scared?”

  I hesitated, but what the hell did I have to be ashamed of?

  “Yeah. I guess I am. What can you tell me to make me stay here when I could be doing what all my instincts are telling me to do, which is run like hell?”

  “That’s a fair question. This is the ideal situation, as far as the police are concerned. We have the victim in a place that can be watched perfectly safely, and we have the killer on the loose. Furthermore, this is an obsessed killer, one who cannot stay away from you forever. Long before he is able to make a strike at you we should pick him up as he scouts out ways to reach you.”

  “Are there ways?”

  “No. An unqualified no. Any one of those devices on your door would be enough to keep him out. Beyond that, your food and water is being tested before it gets to you. Those are extremely remote possibilities since we’re convinced that your killer wishes to dispose of your body completely, to kill you for good. Poisoning is no good to him. We’d just start you up again. But if we can’t find at least a piece of your body, the law forbids us to revive you.”

  “What about bombs?”

  “The corridor outside your apartment is being watched. It would take quite a large bomb to blow out your door, and getting a bomb that size in place would not be possible in the time he would have. Relax, Fox. We’ve thought of everything. You’re safe.”

  She rang off, and I called up the Central Computer.

  “CC,” I said, to get it on-line, “can you tell me how you go about catching killers?”

  “Are you talking about killers in general, or the one you have a particular interest in?”

  “What do you think? I don’t completely believe that detective. What I want to know from you is what can I do to help?”

  “There is little you can do,” the CC said. “While I myself, in the sense of the Central or controlling Lunar Computer, do not handle the apprehension of criminals, I act in a supervisory capacity to several satellite computers. They use a complex number theory, correlated with the daily input from all my terminals. The average person on Luna deals with me on the order of twenty times per day, many of these transactions involving a routine epidermal sample for positive genalysis. By matching these transactions with the time and place they occurred, I am able to construct a dynamic model of what has occurred, what possibly could have occurred, and what cannot have occurred. With suitable peripheral programs I can refine this model to a close degree of accuracy. For instance, at the time of your murder I was able to assign a low probability of their being responsible to ninety-nine point nine three percent of all humans on Luna. This left me with a pool of two hundred ten thousand people who might have had a hand in it. This is merely from data placing each person at a particular place at a particular time. Further weighting of such factors as possible motive narrowed the range of prime suspects. Do you wish me to go on?”

  “No, I think I get the picture. Each time I was killed you must have narrowed it more. How many suspects are left?”

  “You are not phrasing the question correctly. As implied in my original statement, all residents of Luna are still suspects. But each has been assigned a probability, ranging from a very large group with a value of ten to the minus-twenty-seventh power to twenty individuals with probabilities of thirteen percent.”

  The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.

  “None of those sound to me like what you’d call a prime suspect.”

  “Alas, no. This is a very intriguing case, I must say.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  “Yes,” it said, oblivious as usual to sarcasm. “I may have to have some programs rewritten. We’ve never gone this far without being able to submit a ninety percent rating to the Grand Jury Data Bank.”

  “Then Isadora is feeding me a line, right? She doesn’t have anything to go on?”

  “Not strictly true. She has an analysis, a curve, that places the probability of capture as near certainty within one year.”

  “You gave her that estimate, didn’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then what the hell does she do? Listen, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t feel good about putting my fate in her hands. I think this job of detective is just a trumped-up featherbed. Isn’t that right?”

  “The privacy laws forbid me to express an opinion about the worth, performance, or intelligence of a human citizen. But I can give you a comparison. Would you entrust the construction of your symphonies to a computer alone? Would you sign your name to a work that was generated entirely by me?”

  “I see your point.”

  “Exactly. Without a computer you’d never calculate all the factors you need for a symphony. But I do not write them. It is your creative spark that makes the wheels turn. Incidentally, I told your predecessor but of course you don’t remember it. I liked your Liquid Ice tremendously. It was a real pleasure to work with you on it.”

  “Thanks. I wish I could say the same.” I signed off, feeling no better than when I began the interface.

  The mention of Liquid Ice had me seething again. Robbed! Violated! I’d rather have been gang-raped by chimpanzees than have the memory stolen from me. I had punched up the films of Liquid Ice and they were beautiful. Stunning, and I could say it without conceit because I had not written it.

  My life became very simple. I worked—twelve and fourteen hours a day sometimes—ate, slept, and worked some more. Twice a day I put in one hour learning to fight over the holovision. It was all highly theoretical, of course, but it had value. It kept me in shape and gave me a sense of confidence.

  For the first time in my life I got a good look at what my body would have been with no tampering. I was born female, but Carnival wanted to raise me as a boy so she had me Changed when I was two hours old. It’s another of the contradictions in her that used to infuriate me so much but which, as I got older, I came to love. I mean, why go to all the pain and trouble of bringing a child to term and giving birth naturally, all from a professed dislike of tampering—and then turn around and refuse to accept the results of nature’s lottery? I have decided that it’s a result of her age. She’s almost two hundred by now, which puts her childhood back in the days before Changing. In those days—I’ve never understood why—there was a predilection for male children. I think she never really shed it.

  At any rate, I spent my childhood male. When I got my first Change, I picked my own body design. Now, in a six-lunation-old clone body which naturally reflected my actual genetic structure, I was pleased to see that my first female body design had not been far from the truth.

  I was short, with small breasts and an undistinguished body. But my face was nice. Cute, I would say. I liked the nose. The age of the accelerated clone body was about seventeen years; perhaps the nose would lose its upturn in a few years of natural growth, but I hoped not. If it did, I’d have it put back.

  Once a week, I had a recording made. It was the only time I saw people in the flesh. Carnival, Leander, Isadora, and a medico would enter and stay for a while after it was made. It took them an hour each way to get past the security devices. I admit it
made me feel a little more secure to see how long it took even my friends to get into my apartment. It was like an invisible fortress outside my door. The better to lure you into my parlor, killer!

  I worked with the CC as I never had before. We wrote new programs that produced four-dimensional models in my viewer unlike anything we had ever done. The CC knew the stage—which was to be the Kansas disneyland—and I knew the storm. Since I couldn’t walk on the stage before the concert this time I had to rely on the CC to reconstruct it for me in the holo tank.

  Nothing makes me feel more godlike. Even watching it in the three-meter tank I felt thirty meters tall with lightning in my hair and a crown of shimmering frost. I walked through the Kansas autumn, the brown, rolling, featureless prairie before the red or white man came. It was the way the real Kansas looked now under the rule of the Invaders, who had ripped up the barbed wire, smoothed over the furrows, dismantled the cities and railroads, and let the buffalo roam once more.

  There was a logistical problem I had never faced before. I intended to use the buffalo instead of having them kept out of the way. I needed the thundering hooves of a stampede; it was very much a part of the environment I was creating. How to do it without killing animals?

  The disneyland management wouldn’t allow any of their livestock to be injured as part of a performance. That was fine with me, my stomach turned at the very thought. Art is one thing; but life is another and I will not kill unless to save myself. But the Kansas disneyland has two million head of buffalo and I envisioned up to twenty-five twisters at one time. How do you keep the two separate?

  With subtlety, I found. The CC had buffalo behavioral profiles that were very reliable. The damn CC stores everything, and I’ve had occasion more than once to be thankful for it. We could position the herds at a selected spot and let the twisters loose above them. The tornadoes would never be totally under our control—they are capricious even when handmade—but we could rely on a hard 90 percent accuracy in steering them. The herd profile we worked up was usable out to two decimal points, and as insurance against the unforeseen we installed several groups of flash bombs to turn the herd if it headed into danger.