The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  I was the only visitor, the only one in seven years to stay at Keller for longer than a few days. I brooded on that. I was not strong enough or confident enough in my opinion of myself to see it as anything but a flaw in me, not in those others. I was obviously too easily satisfied, too complacent to see the flaws that those others had seen.

  It didn’t have to be flaws in the people of Keller, or in their system. No, I loved and respected them too much to think that. What they had going certainly came as near as anyone ever has in this imperfect world to a sane, rational way for people to exist without warfare and with a minimum of politics. In the end, those two old dinosaurs are the only ways humans have yet discovered to be social animals. Yes, I do see war as a way of living with another; by imposing your will on another in terms so unmistakable that the opponent has to either knuckle under to you, die, or beat your brains out. And if that’s a solution to anything, I’d rather live without solutions. Politics is not much better. The only thing going for it is that it occasionally succeeds in substituting talk for fists.

  Keller was an organism. It was a new way of relating, and it seemed to work. I’m not pushing it as a solution for the world’s problems. It’s possible that it could only work for a group with a common self-interest as binding and rare as deafness and blindness. I can’t think of another group whose needs are so interdependent.

  The cells of the organism cooperated beautifully. The organism was strong, flourishing, and possessed of all the attributes I’ve ever heard used in defining life except the ability to reproduce. That might have been its fatal flaw, if any. I certainly saw the seeds of something developing in the children.

  The strength of the organism was communication. There’s no way around it. Without the elaborate and impossible-to-falsif y mechanisms for communication built into Keller, it would have eaten itself in pettiness, jealousy, possessiveness, and any dozen other “innate” human defects.

  The nightly Together was the basis of the organism. Here, from after dinner till it was time to fall asleep, everyone talked in a language that was incapable of falsehood. If there was a problem brewing, it presented itself and was solved almost automatically. Jealousy? Resentment? Some little festering wrong that you’re nursing? You couldn’t conceal it at the Together, and soon everyone was clustered around you and loving the sickness away. It acted like white corpuscles, clustering around a sick cell, not to destroy it, but to heal it. There seemed to be no problem that couldn’t be solved if it was attacked early enough, and with Touch, your neighbors knew about it before you did and were already laboring to correct the wrong, heal the wound, to make you feel better so you could laugh about it. There was a lot of laughter at the Togethers.

  I thought for a while that I was feeling possessive about Pink. I know I had done so a little at first. Pink was my special friend, the one who had helped me out from the first, who for several days was the only one I could talk to. It was her hands that had taught me handtalk. I know I felt stirrings of territoriality the first time she lay in my lap while another man made love to her. But if there was any signal the Kellerites were adept at reading, it was that one. It went off like an alarm bell in Pink, the man, and the women and men around me. They soothed me, coddled me, told me in every language that it was all right, not to feel ashamed. Then the man in question began loving me. Not Pink, but the man. An observational anthropologist would have had subject matter for a whole thesis. Have you seen the films of baboons’ social behavior? Dogs do it, too. Many male mammals do it. When males get into dominance battles, the weaker can defuse the aggression by submitting, by turning tail and surrendering. I have never felt so defused as when that man surrendered the object of our clash of wills—Pink—and turned his attention to me. What could I do? What I did was laugh, and he laughed, and soon we were all laughing, and that was the end of territoriality.

  That’s the essence of how they solved most “human nature” problems at Keller. Sort of like an oriental martial art; you yield, roll with the blow so that your attacker takes a pratfall with the force of the aggression. You do that until the attacker sees that the initial push wasn’t worth the effort, that it was a pretty silly thing to do when no one was resisting you. Pretty soon he’s not Tarzan of the Apes, but Charlie Chaplin. And he’s laughing.

  So it wasn’t Pink and her lovely body and my realization that she could never be all mine to lock away in my cave and defend with a gnawed-off thighbone. If I’d persisted in that frame of mind she would have found me about as attractive as an Amazonian leech, and that was a great incentive to confound the behaviorists and overcome it.

  So I was back to those people who had visited and left, and what did they see that I didn’t see?

  Well, there was something pretty glaring. I was not part of the organism, no matter how nice the organism was to me. I had no hopes of ever becoming a part, either. Pink had said it in the first week. She felt it herself, to a lesser degree. She could not ***, though that fact was not going to drive her away from Keller. She had told me that many times in shorthand and confirmed it in bodytalk. If I left, it would be without her.

  Trying to stand outside and look at it, I felt pretty miserable. What was I trying to do, anyway? Was my goal in life really to become a part of a blind-deaf commune? I was feeling so low by that time that I actually thought of that as denigrating, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. I should be out in the real world where the real people lived, not these freakish cripples.

  I backed off from that thought very quickly. I was not totally out of my mind, just on the lunatic edges. These people were the best friends I’d ever had, maybe the only ones. That I was confused enough to think that of them even for a second worried me more than anything else. It’s possible that it’s what pushed me finally into a decision. I saw a future of growing disillusion and unfulfilled hopes. Unless I was willing to put out my eyes and ears, I would always be on the outside. I would be the blind and deaf one. I would be the freak. I didn’t want to be a freak.

  They knew I had decided to leave before I did. My last few days turned into a long goodbye, with a loving farewell implicit in every word touched to me. I was not really sad, and neither were they. It was nice, like everything they did. They said goodbye with just the right mix of wistfulness and life-must-go-on, and hope-to-touch-you-again.

  Awareness of Touch scratched on the edges of my mind. It was not bad, just as Pink had said. In a year or two I could have mastered it.

  But I was set now. I was back in the life groove that I had followed for so long. Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I’m afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again.

  I left quietly in the night for the highway and California. They were out in the fields, standing in that circle again. Their fingertips were farther part than ever before. The dogs and children hung around the edges like beggars at a banquet. It was hard to tell which looked more hungry and puzzled.

  The experiences at Keller did not fail to leave their mark on me. I was unable to live as I had before. For a while I thought I could not live at all, but I did. I was too used to living to take the decisive step of ending my life. I would wait. Life had brought one pleasant thing to me; maybe it would bring another.

  I became a writer. I found I now had a better gift for communicating than I had before. Or maybe I had it now for the first time. At any rate, my writing came together and I sold. I wrote what I wanted to write, and was not afraid of going hungry. I took things as they came.

  I weathered the non-depression of ’97, when unemployment reached twenty percent and the government once more ignored it as a temporary downturn. It eventually upturned, leaving the jobless rate slightly higher than it had been the time before, and the time before that. Another million useless persons had been created with nothing better to do than shamble through the streets looking for beatings in progress, car smashups, heart attacks,
murders, shootings, arson, bombings, and riots: the endlessly inventive street theater. It never got dull.

  I didn’t become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptoms of which are the ability to ignore the fact that your society is developing weeping pustules and having its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots. I had a nice apartment in Marin County, out of sight of the machine-gun turrets. I had a car, at a time when they were beginning to be luxuries.

  I had concluded that my life was not destined to be all I would like it to be. We all make some sort of compromise, I reasoned, and if you set your expectations too high you are doomed to disappointment. It did occur to me that I was settling for something far from “high,” but I didn’t know what to do about it. I carried on with a mixture of cynicism and optimism that seemed about the right mix for me. It kept my motor running, anyway.

  I even made it to Japan, as I had intended in the first place.

  I didn’t find someone to share my life. There was only Pink for that, Pink and all her family, and we were separated by a gulf I didn’t dare cross. I didn’t even dare think about her too much. It would have been very dangerous to my equilibrium. I lived with it, and told myself that it was the way I was. Lonely.

  The years rolled on like a caterpillar tractor at Dachau, up to the penultimate day of the millennium.

  San Francisco was having a big bash to celebrate the year 2000. Who gives a shit that the city is slowly falling apart, that civilization is disintegrating into hysteria? Let’s have a party!

  I stood on the Golden Gate Dam on the last day of 1999. The sun was setting in the Pacific, on Japan, which had turned out to be more of the same but squared and cubed with neo-samurai. Behind me the first bombshells of a firework celebration of holocaust tricked up to look like festivity competed with the flare of burning buildings as the social and economic basket cases celebrated the occasion in their own way. The city quivered under the weight of misery, anxious to slide off along the fracture lines of some subcortical San Andreas Fault. Orbiting atomic bombs twinkled in my mind, up there somewhere, ready to plant mushrooms when we’d exhausted all the other possibilities.

  I thought of Pink.

  I found myself speeding through the Nevada desert, sweating, gripping the steering wheel. I was crying aloud but without sound, as I had learned to do at Keller.

  Can you go back?

  I slammed the citicar over the potholes in the dirt road. The car was falling apart. It was not built for this kind of travel. The sky was getting light in the east. It was the dawn of a new millennium. I stepped harder on the gas pedal and the car bucked savagely. I didn’t care. I was not driving back down that road, not ever. One way or another, I was here to stay.

  I reached the wall and sobbed my relief. The last hundred miles had been a nightmare of wondering if it had been a dream. I touched the cold reality of the wall and it calmed me. Light snow had drifted over everything, gray in the early dawn.

  I saw them in the distance. All of them, out in the field where I had left them. No, I was wrong. It was only the children. Why had it seemed like so many at first?

  Pink was there. I knew her immediately, though I had never seen her in winter clothes. She was taller, filled out.

  She would be nineteen years old. There was a small child playing in the snow at her feet, and she cradled an infant in her arms. I went to her and talked to her hand.

  She turned to me, her face radiant with welcome, her eyes staring in a way I had never seen. Her hands flitted over me and her eyes did not move.

  “I touch you, I welcome you,” her hands said. “I wish you could have been here just a few minutes ago. Why did you go away darling? Why did you stay away so long?” Her eyes were stones in her head. She was blind. She was deaf.

  All the children were. No, Pink’s child sitting at my feet looked up at me with a smile.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked when I got my breath. “Scar? Baldy? Green-eyes? And what’s happened? What’s happened to you?” I was tottering on the edge of a heart attack or nervous collapse or something. My reality felt in danger of dissolving.

  “They’ve gone,” she said. The word eluded me, but the context put it with the Mary Celeste and Roanoke, Virginia. It was complex, the way she used the word gone. It was like something she had said before: unattainable, a source of frustration like the one that had sent me running from Keller. But now her word told of something that was not hers yet, but was within her grasp. There was no sadness in it.

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. I don’t know where. They’re happy. They ***ed. It was glorious. We could only touch a part of it.”

  I felt my heart hammering to the sound of the last train pulling away from the station. My feet were pounding along the ties as it faded into the fog. Where are the Brigadoons of yesterday? I’ve never yet heard of a fairy tale where you can go back to the land of enchantment. You wake up, you find that your chance is gone. You threw it away. Fool! You only get one chance; that’s the moral, isn’t it?

  Pink’s hands laughed along my face.

  “Hold this part-of-me-who-speaks-mouth-to-nipple,” she said, and handed me her infant daughter. “I will give you a gift.”

  She reached up and lightly touched my ears with her cold fingers. The sound of the wind was shut out, and when her hands came away it never came back. She touched my eyes, shut out all the light, and I saw no more.

  We live in the lovely quiet and dark.

  INTRODUCTION TO “PRESS ENTER ■”

  I’ve always thought of myself as a high-tech sort of guy, though lately I’ve fallen a bit behind. I don’t have an MP3 player or a DVD burner or a picture cell phone or a plasma television. They bring out the stuff now faster than I can find a use for it. But I bought a CD player when they were pretty new and rare, and I had a JVC VCR back when it was the fanciest one you could buy, there were only thirty titles for rent, blank tapes cost $35, and the remote had a wire on it. I paid $1,300. The last VCR I bought, probably my sixth, cost me $60.

  When I started writing I wanted the best tools. I skipped right over chisels on rocks, stylus on wet clay plates, quills and fountain pens, even mechanical pencils, and went straight to one of the first popular spin-offs of the aerospace program: the ballpoint pen. They were developed for bomber navigators in the war because fountain pens would squirt all over your leather bomber jacket at altitude. (I have a cherished example of the next generation ballpoint, a pressurized Space Pen cleverly designed to work in weightlessness, given to me by Spider Robinson. At least, I cherish it when I can find it. It is also cleverly designed to seek out the lowest point of your desk, roll off, then find the lowest point on the floor, under a heavy piece of furniture. That’s because it is cylindrical and lacks a pocket clip to keep it from rolling. In space, I presume it would float out of your pocket and find a forgotten corner of your spacecraft to hide in. NASA spent $3 million developing it. Good job, guys. I’m sure it’s around here somewhere.)

  When I decided I’d better learn to type I bought an electric machine. Never learned to type on a manual, I’m hopeless at it. I used carbon paper because Xeroxing was fairly expensive, and Wite-Out, becuase I made a lot off misteaks.

  When I wore out the Smith-Corona, I invested a lot of money in the Rolls-Royce of typewriters: an IBM Correcting Selectric. I could fool around for hours watching the little type ball twitch, faster than the eye could follow. No more jammed-up keys! You want a new typeface? Pop in another golf ball! No more blobs of white-out glop, no more eraser scraps gumming up the works. Just press a key and the tape jumps up and sucks the ink right out of the paper! No more smudgy cloth ribbons I used over and over because my innate frugality wouldn’t let me throw them away as long as the words were even slightly readable. The IBM used film ribbons, and the print was sharper than a newspaper or book.

  I loved that machine. I loved it so much that for years I resisted the enthusiastic endorsements of friends who had these
infernal machines called “word processors.” Heck, I didn’t want to process words, I wanted to write. After a few years, when everybody I knew owned a computer, I even wrote a silly little story called “The Unprocessed Word,” pointing out the perils of entrusting your golden prose to the uncertain innards of a cantankerous machine instead of committing them to nice, pretty white paper.

  And they were uncertain, too. One thing I noticed when people were talking about computers (and by then everybody was talking about computers, you couldn’t shut them up once they got started!) was that every single one of them had lost massive chunks of data in something called a “crash,” usually more than once. They spoke about this with an odd pride, but it made me break out in a cold sweat. In my twenty-odd years of writing, I had never lost so much as one precious piece of paper, never had to go back and think the whole thing out again. The IBM Correcting Selectric was infallible. Errorless. Crashless.

  Point two: They were expensive. I gulped hard when I paid $860 for the IBM. With these “word processors,” $860 was about what you paid for the word processing software. Okay, slight exaggeration, but the first word processor I ever actually used belonged to Richard Rush. We were rewriting the script to Millennium. It was made by one of those defunct pioneers, maybe Osborne. It had a daisy-wheel printer console the size of a Victrola that made a racket like the starting lap at Daytona Beach. If you couldn’t afford one of these beasts, there was an alternative: dot-matrix printing. Oh, puhleese! The y and the p and the g and the q didn’t drop below the line. Each letter was formed of about nine little dots. I’d rather read Braille with my toes. With my shoes on. The Osborne had enough memory for forty, maybe fifty pages of text. The whole ensemble, which pretty much filled an office, cost more than $15,000. (Richard didn’t care, the studio was paying for it.) Six times a day it did something inexplicable or failed to do anything at all. For these times you consulted an instruction manual the size of the Manhattan phone book, written in Sanskrit.