The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  It’s an endless series of details. Where does the lightning strike, for instance? On a flat, gently rolling plain, the natural accumulation of electric charge can be just about anywhere. We had to be sure we could shape it the way we wanted, by burying five hundred accumulators that could trigger an air-to-ground flash on cue. And to the right spot. The air-to-air are harder. And the ball lightning—oh, brother. But we found we could guide it pretty well with buried wires carrying an electric current. There were going to be range fires—so check with the management on places that are due for a controlled burn anyway, and keep the buffalo away from there, too; and be sure the smoke would not blow over into the audience and spoil the view or into the herd and panic them. . . .

  But it was going to be glorious.

  Six lunations rolled by. Six lunations! 177.18353 mean solar days!

  I discovered that figure during a long period of brooding when I called up all sorts of data on the investigation. Which, according to Isadora, was going well.

  I knew better. The CC has its faults but shading data is not one of them. Ask it what the figures are and it prints them out in tricolor.

  Here’s some: probability of a capture by the original curve, 93 percent. Total number of viable suspects remaining: nine. Highest probability of those nine possibles: 3.9 percent. That was Carnival. The others were also close friends, and were there solely because they had had the opportunity at all three murders. Even Isadora dared not speculate—at least not aloud, and to me—about whether any of them had a motive.

  I discussed it with the CC.

  “I know, Fox, I know,” it replied, with the closest approach to mechanical despair I have ever heard.

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “No. As it happens, I’m pursuing the other possibility: that it was a ghost who killed you.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. The term ‘ghost’ covers all illegal beings. I estimate there to be on the order of two hundred of them existing outside legal sanctions on Luna. These are executed criminals with their right to life officially revoked, unauthorized children never registered, and some suspected artificial mutants. Those last are the result of proscribed experiments with human DNA. All these conditions are hard to conceal for any length of time, and I round up a few every year.”

  “What do you do with them?”

  “They have no right to life. I must execute them when I find them.”

  “You do it? That’s not just a figure of speech?”

  “That’s right. I do it. It’s a job humans find distasteful. I never could keep the position filled, so I assumed it myself.”

  That didn’t sit right with me. There is an atavistic streak in me that doesn’t like to turn over the complete functioning of society to machines. I get it from my mother, who goes for years at a time not deigning to speak to the CC.

  “So you think someone like that may be after me. Why?”

  “There is insufficient data for a meaningful answer. ‘Why’ has always been a tough question for me. I can operate only on the parameters fed into me when I’m dealing with human motivation, and I suspect that the parameters are not complete. I’m constantly being surprised.”

  “Thank goodness for that.” But this time, I could have wished the CC knew a little more about human behavior.

  So I was being hunted by a spook. It didn’t do anything for my peace of mind. I tried to think of how such a person could exist in this card-file world we live in. A technological rat, smarter than the computers, able to fit into the cracks and holes in the integrated circuits. Where were those cracks? I couldn’t find them. When I thought of the checks and safeguards all around us, the voluntary genalysis we submit to every time we spend money or take a tube or close a business deal or interface with the computer . . . People used to sign their names many times a day, or so I’ve heard. Now, we scrape off a bit of dead skin from our palms. It’s damn hard to fake.

  But how do you catch a phantom? I was facing life as a recluse if this murderer was really so determined that I die.

  That conclusion came at a bad time. I had finished Cyclone, and to relax I had called up the films of some of the other performances during my absence from the art scene. I never should have done that.

  Flashiness was out. Understated elegance was in. One of the reviews I read was very flattering to my Liquid Ice. I quote:

  “In this piece Fox has closed the book on the blood and thunder school of Environmentalism. This powerful statement sums up the things that can be achieved by sheer magnitude and overwhelming drama. The displays of the future will be concerned with the gentle nuance of dusk, the elusive breath of a summer breeze. Fox is the Tchaikovsky of Environmentalism, the last great romantic who paints on a broad canvas. Whether she can adjust to the new, more thoughtful styles that are evolving in the work of Janus, or Pym, or even some of the ambiguous abstractions we have seen from Tyleber, remains to be seen. Nothing will detract from the sublime glory of Liquid Ice, of course, but the time is here . . .” and so forth and thank-you for nothing.

  For an awful moment I thought I had a beautiful dinosaur on my hands. It can happen, and the hazards are pronounced after a reincarnation. Advancing technology, fashion, frontiers, taste, or morals can make the best of us obsolete overnight. Was everyone contemplating gentle springtimes now, after my long sleep? Were the cool, sweet zephyrs of a summer’s night the only thing that had meaning now?

  A panicky call to my agent dispelled that quickly enough. As usual, the pronouncements of the critics had gone ahead of the public taste. I’m not knocking critics; that’s their function, if you concede they have a function: to chart a course into unexplored territory. They must stay at the leading edge of the innovative artistic evolution, they must see what everyone will be seeing in a few years’ time. Meanwhile, the public was still eating up the type of superspectacle I have always specialized in. I ran the risk of being labeled a dinosaur myself, but I found the prospect did not worry me. I became an artist through the back door, just like the tinkerers in early twentieth-century Hollywood. Before I was discovered, I had just been an environmental engineer having a good time.

  That’s not to say I don’t take my art seriously. I do sweat over it, investing inspiration and perspiration in about the classic Edison proportions. But I don’t take the critics too seriously, especially when they’re not enunciating the public taste. Just because Beethoven doesn’t sound like currently popular art doesn’t mean his music is worthless.

  I found myself thinking back to the times before Environmentalism made such a splash. Back then we were carefree. We had grandiose bull sessions, talking of what we would do if only we were given an environment large enough. We spent months roughing out the programs for something to be called Typhoon! It was a hurricane in a bottle, and the bottle would have to be five hundred kilometers wide. Such a bottle still does not exist, but when it’s built some fool will stage the show. Maybe me. The good old days never die, you know.

  So my agent made a deal with the owner of the Kansas disneyland. The owner had known that I was working on something for his place, but I’d not talked to him about it. The terms were generous. My agent displayed the profit report on Liquid Ice, which was still playing yearly to packed houses in Pennsylvania. I got a straight 50 percent of the gate, with costs of the installation and computer time to be shared between me and the disneyland. I stood to make about five million Lunar marks.

  And I was robbed again. Not killed this time, but robbed of the chance to go into Kansas and supervise the installation of the equipment. I clashed mightily with Isadora and would have stormed out on my own, armed with not so much as a nail file, if not for a pleading visit from Carnival. So I backed down this once and sat at home, going there only by holographic projection. I plunged into self-doubt. After all, I hadn’t even felt the Kansas sod beneath my bare feet this time. I hadn’t been there in the flesh for over three years. My usual method before I even conceive
a project is to spend a week or two just wandering naked through the park, getting the feel of it through my skin and nose and those senses that don’t even have a name.

  It took the CC three hours of gentle argument to convince me again that the models we had written were accurate to seven decimal places. They were perfect. An action ordered up on the computer model would be a perfect analog of the real action in Kansas. The CC said I could make quite a bit of money just renting the software to other artists.

  The day of the premiere of Cyclone found me still in my apartment. But I was on the way out.

  Small as I am, I somehow managed to struggle out that door with Carnival, Isadora, Leander, and my agent pulling on my elbows.

  I was not going to watch the performance on the tube.

  I arrived early, surrounded by my impromptu bodyguard. The sky matched my mind; gray, overcast, and slightly fearful. It brooded over us, and I felt more and more like a sacrificial lamb mounting some somber altar. But it was a magnificent stage to die upon.

  The Kansas disneyland is one of the newer ones, and one of the largest. It is a hollowed-out cylinder twenty kilometers beneath Clavius. It measures two hundred and fifty kilometers in diameter and is five kilometers high. The rim is artfully disguised to blend into the blue sky. When you are half a kilometer from the rim, the illusion fails; otherwise, you might as well be standing back on Old Earth. The curvature of the floor is consistent with Old Earth, so the horizon is terrifyingly far away. Only the gravity is Lunar.

  Kansas was built after most of the more spectacular possibilities had been exhausted, either on Luna or another planet. There was Kenya, beneath Mare Moscoviense; Himalaya, also on the Farside; Amazon, under old Tycho; Pennsylvania, Sahara, Pacific, Mekong, Transylvania. There were thirty disneylands under the inhabited planets and satellites of the solar system the last time I counted.

  Kansas is certainly the least interesting topographically. It’s flat, almost monotonous. But it was perfect for what I wanted to do. What artist really chooses to paint on a canvas that’s already been covered with pictures? Well, I have, for one. But for the frame of mind I was in when I wrote Cyclone it had to be the starkness of the wide-open sky and the browns and yellows of the rolling terrain. It was the place where Dorothy departed for Oz. The home of the black twister.

  I was greeted warmly by Pym and Janus, old friends here to see what the grand master was up to. Or so I flattered myself. More likely they were here to see the old lady make a fool of herself. Very few others were able to get close to me. My shield of high shoulders was very effective. It wouldn’t do when the show began, however. I wished I was a little taller, then wondered if that would make me a better target.

  The viewing area was a gentle rise about a kilometer in radius. It had been written out of the program to the extent that none of the more fearsome effects would intrude to sweep us all into the Land of Oz. But being a spectator at a weather show can be grueling. Most had come prepared with clear plastic slicker, insulated coat, and boots. I was going to be banging some warm and some very cold air masses head on to get things rolling, and some of it would sweep over us. There were a few brave souls in Native American war paint, feathers, and moccasins.

  An Environmental happening has no opening chords like a musical symphony. It is already in progress when you arrive, and will still be going on when you leave. The weather in a disneyland is a continuous process and we merely shape a few hours of it to our wills. The observer does not need to watch it in its entirety.

  Indeed, it would be impossible to do so, as it occurs all around and above you. There is no rule of silence. People talk, stroll, break out picnic lunches as an ancient signal for the rain to begin, and generally enjoy themselves. You experience the symphony with all five senses, and several that you are not aware of. Most people do not realize the effect of a gigantic low-pressure area sweeping over them, but they feel it all the same. Humidity alters mood, metabolism, and hormone level. All of these things are important to the total experience, and I neglect none of them.

  Cyclone has a definite beginning, however. At least to the audience. It begins with the opening bolt of lightning. I worked over it a long time, and designed it to shatter nerves. There is the slow building of thunderheads, the ominous rolling and turbulence, then the prickling in your body hairs that you don’t even notice consciously. And then it hits. It crashes in at seventeen points in a ring around the audience, none farther away than half a kilometer. It is properly called chain lightning, because after the initial discharge it keeps flashing for a full seven seconds. It’s designed to take the hair right off your scalp.

  It had its desired effect. We were surrounded by a crown of jittering incandescent snakes, coiling and dancing with a sound imported direct to you from Armageddon. It startled the hell out of me, and I had been expecting it.

  It was a while before the audience could get their oohers and aahers back into shape. For several seconds I had touched them with stark, naked terror. An emotion like that doesn’t come cheaply to sensation-starved, innately insular tunnel dwellers. Lunarians get little to really shout about, growing up in the warrens and corridors, and living their lives more or less afraid of the surface. That’s why the disneylands were built, because people wanted limitless vistas that were not in a vacuum.

  The thunder never really stopped for me. It blended imperceptibly into the applause that is more valuable than the millions I would make from this storm.

  As for the rest of the performance . . .

  What can I say? It’s been said that there’s nothing more dull than a description of the weather. I believe it, even spectacular weather. Weather is an experiential thing, and that’s why tapes and films of my works sell few copies. You have to be there and have the wind actually whipping your face and feel the oppressive weight of a tornado as it passes overhead like a vermiform freight train. I could write down where the funnel clouds formed and where they went from there, where the sleet and hail fell, where the buffalo stampeded, but it would do no one any good. If you want to see it, go to Kansas. The last I heard, Cyclone is still playing there two or three times yearly.

  I recall standing surrounded by a sea of people. Beyond me to the east the land was burning. Smoke boiled black from the hilltops and sooty gray from the hollows where the water was rising to drown it. To the north a Herculean cyclone swept up a chain of ball lightning like pearls and swallowed them into the evacuated vortex in its center. Above me, two twisters were twined in a death dance. They circled each other like baleful gray predators, taking each other’s measure. They feinted, retreated, slithered, and skittered like tubes of oil. It was beautiful and deadly. And I had never seen it before. Someone was tampering with my program.

  As I realized that and stood rooted to the ground with the possibly disastrous consequences becoming apparent to me the wind-snakes locked in a final embrace. Their counterrotations canceled out, and they were gone. Not even a breath of wind reached me to hint of that titanic struggle.

  I ran through the seventy-kilometer wind and the thrashing rain. I was wearing sturdy moccasins and a parka, and carrying the knife I had brought from my apartment.

  Was it a lure, set by one who has become a student of Foxes? Am I playing into his hands?

  I didn’t care. I had to meet him, had to fight it out once and for all.

  Getting away from my “protection” had been simple. They were as transfixed by the display as the rest of the audience, and it had merely been a matter of waiting until they all looked in the same direction and fading into the crowd. I picked out a small woman dressed in Indian style and offered her a hundred marks for her moccasins. She recognized me—my new face was on the programs—and made me a gift of them. Then I worked my way to the edge of the crowd and bolted past the security guards. They were not too concerned since the audience area was enclosed by a shock-field. When I went right through it they may have been surprised, but I didn’t look back to see. I was one of only
three people in Kansas wearing the PassKey device on my wrist, so I didn’t fear anyone following me.

  I had done it all without conscious thought. Some part of me must have analyzed it, planned it out, but I just executed the results. I knew where he must be to have generated his tornado to go into combat with mine. No one else in Kansas would know where to look. I was headed for a particular wind generator on the east periphery.

  I moved through weather more violent than the real Kansas would have experienced. It was concentrated violence, more wind and rain and devastation than Kansas would normally have in a full year. And it was happening all around me.

  But I was all right, unless he had more tricks up his sleeve. I knew where the tornadoes would be and at what time. I dodged them, waited for them to pass, knew every twist and dido they would make on their seemingly random courses. Off to my left the buffalo herds milled, resting from the stampede that had brought them past the audience for the first time. In an hour they would be thundering back again, but for now I could forget them.

  A twister headed for me, leaped high in the air, and skidded through a miasma of uprooted sage and sod. I clocked it with the internal picture I had and dived for a gully at just the right time. It hopped over me and was gone back into the clouds. I ran on.

  My training in the apartment was paying off. My body was only six lunations old, and as finely tuned as it would ever be. I rested by slowing to a trot, only to run again in a few minutes. I covered ten kilometers before the storm began to slow down. Behind me, the audience would be drifting away. The critics would be trying out scathing phrases or wild adulation; I didn’t see how they could find any middle ground for this one. Kansas was being released from the grip of machines gone wild. Ahead of me was my killer. I would find him.