The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “Goddam Sun-Belt,” Cristabel groused, hitching at her bra.

  “At least they got rid of the high heels,” Dave pointed out. A year earlier we would have been teetering down the aisles on three-inch platforms. We all wore short pink shifts with blue and white diagonal stripes across the front, and carried matching shoulder bags. I fussed trying to get the ridiculous pillbox cap pinned on.

  We jogged into the dark Operations Control Room and lined up at the gate. Things were out of our hands now. Until the gate was ready, we could only wait.

  I was first, a few feet away from the portal. I turned away from it; it gives me vertigo. I focused instead on the gnomes sitting at their consoles, bathed in yellow lights from their screens. None of them looked back at me. They don’t like us much. I don’t like them, either. Withered, emaciated, all of them. Our fat legs and butts and breasts are a reproach to them, a reminder that Snatchers eat five times their ration to stay presentable for the masquerade. Meantime we continue to rot. One day I’ll be sitting at a console. One day I’ll be built in to a console, with all my guts on the outside and nothing left on my body but stink. The hell with them.

  I buried my gun under a clutter of tissues and lipsticks in my purse. Elfreda was looking at me.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “Motel room. She was alone from ten P.M. to noon on flight day.”

  Departure time was 1:15. She had cut it close and would be in a hurry. Good.

  “Can you catch her in the bathroom? Best of all, in the tub?”

  “We’re working on it.” She sketched a smile with a fingertip drawn over lifeless lips. She knew how I liked to operate, but she was telling me I’d take what I got. It never hurts to ask. People are at their most defenseless stretched out and up to their necks in water.

  “Go!” Elfreda shouted. I stepped through, and things started to go wrong.

  I was facing the wrong way, stepping out of the bathroom door and facing the bedroom. I turned and spotted Mary Katrina Sondergard through the haze of the gate. There was no way I could reach her without stepping back through. I couldn’t even shoot without hitting someone on the other side.

  Sondergard was at the mirror, the worst possible place. Few people recognize themselves quickly, but she’d been looking right at herself. She saw me and her eyes widened. I stepped to the side, out of her sight.

  “What the hell is . . . hey? Who the hell—” I noted the voice, which can be the trickiest thing to get right.

  I figured she’d be more curious than afraid. My guess was right. She came out of the bathroom, passing through the gate as if it wasn’t there, which it wasn’t, since it only has one side. She had a towel wrapped around her.

  “Jesus Christ! What are you doing in my—” Words fail you at a time like that. She knew she ought to say something, but what? Excuse me, haven’t I seen you in the mirror?

  I put on my best stew smile and held out my hand.

  “Pardon the intrusion. I can explain everything. You see, I’m—” I hit her on the side of the head and she staggered and went down hard. Her towel fell to the floor. “—working my way through college.” She started to get up, so I caught her under the chin with my artificial knee. She stayed down.

  “Standard fuggin’ oil!” I hissed, rubbing my injured knuckles. But there was no time. I knelt beside her, checked her pulse. She’d be okay, but I think I loosened some front teeth. I paused a moment. Lord, to look like that with no makeup, no prosthetics! She nearly broke my heart.

  I grabbed her under the knees and wrestled her to the gate. She was a sack of limp noodles. Somebody reached through, grabbed her feet, and pulled. So long, love! How would you like to go on a long voyage?

  I sat on her rented bed to get my breath. There were car keys and cigarettes in her purse, genuine tobacco, worth its weight in blood. I lit six of them, figuring I had five minutes of my very own. The room filled with sweet smoke. They don’t make ’em like that anymore.

  The Hertz sedan was in the motel parking lot. I got in and headed for the airport. I breathed deeply of the air, rich in hydrocarbons. I could see for hundreds of yards into the distance. The perspective nearly made me dizzy, but I live for those moments. There’s no way to explain what it’s like in the pre-meck world. The sun was a fierce yellow ball through the haze.

  The other stews were boarding. Some of them knew Sondergard so I didn’t say much, pleading a hangover. That went over well, with a lot of knowing laughs and sly remarks. Evidently it wasn’t out of character. We boarded the 707 and got ready for the goats to arrive.

  It looked good. The four commandos on the other side were identical twins for the women I was working with. There was nothing to do but be a stewardess until departure time. I hoped there would be no more glitches. Inverting a gate for a joker run into a motel room was one thing, but in a 707 at twenty thousand feet . . .

  The plane was nearly full when the woman Pinky would impersonate sealed the forward door. We taxied to the end of the runway, then we were airborne. I started taking orders for drinks in first.

  The goats were the usual lot, for 1979. Fat and sassy, all of them, and as unaware of living in a paradise as a fish is of the sea. What would you think, ladies and gents, of a trip to the future? No? I can’t say I’m surprised. What if I told you this plane is going to—

  My alarm beeped as we reached cruising altitude. I consulted the indicator under my Lady Bulova and glanced at one of the restroom doors. I felt a vibration pass through the plane. Damn it, not so soon.

  The gate was in there. I came out quickly, and motioned for Diana Gleason—Dave’s pigeon—to come to the front.

  “Take a look at this,” I said, with a disgusted look. She started to enter the restroom, stopped when she saw the green glow. I planted a boot on her fanny and shoved. Perfect. Dave would have a chance to hear her voice before popping in. Though she’d be doing little but screaming when she got a look around . . .

  Dave came through the gate, adjusting his silly little hat. Diana must have struggled.

  “Be disgusted,” I whispered.

  “What a mess,” he said as he came out of the restroom. It was a fair imitation of Diana’s tone, though he’d missed the accent. It wouldn’t matter much longer.

  “What is it?” It was one of the stews from tourist. We stepped aside so she could get a look, and Dave shoved her through. Pinky popped out very quickly.

  “We’re minus on minutes,” Pinky said. “We lost five on the other side.”

  “Five?” Dave-Diana squeaked. I felt the same way. We had a hundred and three passengers to process.

  “Yeah. They lost contact after you pushed my pigeon through. It took that long to realign.”

  You get used to that. Time runs at different rates on each side of the gate, though it’s always sequential, past to future. Once we’d started the Snatch with me entering Sondergard’s room, there was no way to go back any earlier on either side. Here, in 1979, we had a rigid ninety-four minutes to get everything done. On the other side, the gate could never be maintained longer than three hours.

  “When you left, how long was it since the alarm went in?”

  “Twenty-eight minutes.”

  It didn’t sound good. It would take at least two hours just customizing the wimps. Assuming there was no more slippage on 79-time, we might just make it. But there’s always slippage. I shuddered, thinking about riding it in.

  “No time for any more games, then,” I said. “Pink, you go back to tourist and call both of the other girls up here. Tell ’em to come one at a time, and tell ’em we’ve got a problem. You know the bit.”

  “Biting back the tears. Got you.” She hurried aft. In no time the first one showed up. Her friendly Sun-Belt Airlines smile was stamped on her face, but her stomach would be churning. Oh God, this is it!

  I took her by the elbow and pulled her behind the curtains in front. She was breathing hard.

  “Welcome to the twilight zone,” I s
aid, and put the gun to her head. She slumped, and I caught her. Pinky and Dave helped me shove her through the gate.

  “Fug! The rotting thing’s flickering.”

  Pinky was right. A very ominous sign. But the green glow stabilized as we watched, with who knows how much slippage on the other side. Cristabel ducked through.

  “We’re plus thirty-three,” she said. There was no sense talking about what we were all thinking: things were going badly.

  “Back to tourist,” I said. “Be brave, smile at everyone, but make it just a little bit too good, got it?”

  “Check,” Cristabel said.

  We processed the other quickly, with no incident. Then there was no time to talk about anything. In eighty-nine minutes Flight 128 was going to be spread all over a mountain whether we were finished or not.

  Dave went into the cockpit to keep the flight crew out of our hair. Me and Pinky were supposed to take care of first class, then back up Cristabel and Liza in tourist. We used the standard “coffee, tea, or milk” gambit, relying on our speed and their inertia.

  I leaned over the first two seats on the left.

  “Are you enjoying your flight?” Pop, pop. Two squeezes on the trigger, close to the heads and out of sight of the rest of the goats.

  “Hi, folks. I’m Mandy. Fly me.” Pop, pop.

  Halfway to the galley, a few people were watching us curiously. But people don’t make a fuss until they have a lot more to go on. One goat in the back row stood up, and I let him have it. By now there were only eight left awake. I abandoned the smile and squeezed off four quick shots. Pinky took care of the rest. We hurried through the curtains, just in time.

  There was an uproar building in the back of tourist, with about 60 percent of the goats already processed. Cristabel glanced at me, and I nodded.

  “Okay, folks,” she bawled. “I want you to be quiet. Calm down and listen up. You, fathead, pipe down before I cram my foot up your ass sideways.”

  The shock of hearing her talk like that was enough to buy us a little time, anyway. We had formed a skirmish line across the width of the plane, guns out, steadied on seat backs, aimed at the milling, befuddled group of thirty goats.

  The guns are enough to awe all but the most foolhardy. In essence, a standard-issue stunner is just a plastic rod with two grids about six inches apart. There’s not enough metal in it to set off a hijack alarm. And to people from the Stone Age to about 2190 it doesn’t look any more like a weapon than a ballpoint pen. So Equipment Section jazzes them up in a plastic shell to real Buck Rogers blasters, with a dozen knobs and lights that flash and a barrel like the snout of a hog. Hardly anyone ever walks into one.

  “We are in great danger, and time is short. You must all do exactly as I tell you, and you will be safe.”

  You can’t give them time to think, you have to rely on your status as the Voice of Authority. The situation is just not going to make sense to them, no matter how you explain it.

  “Just a minute, I think you owe us—”

  An airborne lawyer. I made a snap decision, thumbed the fireworks switch on my gun, and shot him.

  The gun made a sound like a flying saucer with hemorrhoids, spit sparks and little jets of flame, and extended a green laser finger to his forehead. He dropped.

  All pure kark, of course. But it sure is impressive.

  And it’s damn risky, too. I had to choose between a panic if the fathead got them to thinking, and a possible panic from the flash of the gun. But when a 20th gets to talking about his “rights” and what he is “owed,” things can get out of hand. It’s infectious.

  It worked. There was a lot of shouting, people ducking behind seats, but no rush. We could have handled it, but we needed some of them conscious if we were ever going to finish the Snatch.

  “Get up. Get up, you slugs!” Cristabel yelled. “He’s stunned, nothing worse. But I’ll kill the next one who gets out of line. Now get to your feet and do what I tell you. Children first! Hurry, as fast as you can, to the front of the plane. Do what the stewardess tells you. Come on, kids, move!”

  I ran back into first class just ahead of the kids, turned at the open restroom door, and got on my knees.

  They were petrified. There were five of them—crying, some of them, which always chokes me up—looking left and right at dead people in the first class seats, stumbling, near panic.

  “Come on, kids,” I called to them, giving my special smile. “Your parents will be along in just a minute. Everything’s going to be all right, I promise you. Come on.”

  I got three of them through. The fourth balked. She was determined not to go through that door. She spread her legs and arms and I couldn’t push her through. I will not hit a child, never. She raked her nails over my face. My wig came off, and she gaped at my bare head. I shoved her through.

  Number five was sitting in the aisle, bawling. He was maybe seven. I ran back and picked him up, hugged him and kissed him, and tossed him through. God, I needed a rest, but I was needed in tourist.

  “You, you, you, and you. Okay, you too. Help him, will you?” Pinky had a practiced eye for the ones that wouldn’t be any use to anyone, even themselves. We herded them toward the front of the plane, then deployed ourselves along the left side where we could cover the workers. It didn’t take long to prod them into action. We had them dragging the limp bodies forward as fast as they could go. Me and Cristabel were in tourist, with the others up front.

  Adrenaline was being catabolized in my body now; the rush of action left me and I started to feel very tired. There’s an unavoidable feeling of sympathy for the poor dumb goats that starts to get me about this stage of the game. Sure, they were better off; sure, they were going to die if we didn’t get them off the plane. But when they saw the other side they were going to have a hard time believing it.

  The first ones were returning for a second load, stunned at what they’d just seen: dozens of people being put into a cubicle that was crowded when it was empty. One college student looked like he’d been hit in the stomach. He stopped by me and his eyes pleaded.

  “Look, I want to help you people, just . . . what’s going on? Is this some new kind of rescue? I mean, are we going to crash—”

  I switched my gun to prod and brushed it across his cheek. He gasped and fell back.

  “Shut your fuggin’ mouth and get moving, or I’ll kill you.” It would be hours before his jaw was in shape to ask any more stupid questions.

  We cleared tourist and moved up. A couple of the work gang were pretty damn pooped by then. Muscles like horses, all of them, but they can hardly run up a flight of stairs. We let some of them go through, including a couple that were at least fifty years old. Je-zuz. Fifty! We got down to a core of four men and two women who seemed strong, and worked them until they nearly dropped. But we processed everyone in twenty-five minutes.

  The portapak came through as we were stripping off our clothes. Cristabel knocked on the door to the cockpit and Dave came out, already naked. A bad sign.

  “I had to cork ’em,” he said. “Bleeding captain just had to make his grand march through the plane. I tried everything.”

  Sometimes you have to do it. The plane was on autopilot, as it normally would be at this time. But if any of us did anything detrimental to the craft, changed the fixed course of events in any way, that would be it. All that work for nothing, and Flight 128 inaccessible to us for all Time. I don’t know sludge about time theory, but I know the practical angles. We can do things in the past only at times and in places where it won’t make any difference. We have to cover our tracks. There’s flexibility; once a Snatcher left her gun behind and it went in with the plane. Nobody found it, or if they did, they didn’t have the smoggiest idea of what it was, so we were okay.

  Flight 128 was mechanical failure. That’s the best kind; it means we don’t have to keep the pilot unaware of the situation in the cabin right down to ground level. We can cork him and fly the plane, since there’s nothing he cou
ld have done to save the flight anyway. A pilot-error smash is almost impossible to snatch. We mostly work midairs, bombs, and structural failures. If there’s even one survivor, we can’t touch it. It would not fit the fabric of space-time, which is immutable (though it can stretch a little), and we’d all just fade away and appear back in the ready room.

  My head was hurting. I wanted that portapak very badly.

  “Who has the most hours on a 707?” Pinky did, so I sent her to the cabin, along with Dave, who could do the pilot’s voice for air traffic control. You have to have a believable record in the flight recorder, too. They trailed two long tubes from the portapak, and the rest of us hooked in up close. We stood there, each of us smoking a fistful of cigarettes, wanting to finish them but hoping there wouldn’t be time. The gate had vanished as soon as we tossed our clothes and the flight crew through.

  But we didn’t worry long. There’s other nice things about Snatching, but nothing to compare with the rush of plugging into a portapak. The wake-up transfusion is nothing but fresh blood, rich in oxygen and sugars. What we were getting now was an insane brew of concentrated adrenaline, supersaturated hemoglobin, methedrine, white lighting, TNT, and Kickapoo joyjuice. It was like a firecracker in your heart; a boot in the box that rattled your sox.

  “I’m growing hair on my chest,” Cristabel said solemnly. Everyone giggled.

  “Would someone hand me my eyeballs?”

  “The blue ones, or the red ones?”

  “I think my ass just fell off.”

  We’d heard them all before, but we howled anyway. We were strong, strong, and for one golden moment we had no worries. Everything was hilarious. I could have torn sheet metal with my eyelashes.

  But you get hyper on that mix. When the gate didn’t show, and didn’t show, and didn’t sweetjeez show we all started milling. This bird wasn’t going to fly all that much longer.

  Then it did show, and we turned on. The first of the wimps came through, dressed in the clothes taken from a passenger it had been picked to resemble.