The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “No government agency has ever heard of him. We’ve checked him with everybody from the post office to the CIA.”

  “Kluge was probably an alias, right?” I offered.

  “Yeah. But the FBI doesn’t have his fingerprints. We’ll find out who he was, eventually. But it doesn’t get us any closer to whether or not he was murdered.”

  He admitted there was pressure to simply close the felony part of the case, label it suicide, and forget it. But Osborne would not believe it. Naturally, the civil side would go on for some time, as they attempted to track down all Kluge’s deceptions.

  “It’s all up to the dragon lady,” Osborne said. Hal snorted.

  “Fat chance,” Hal said and muttered something about boat people.

  “That girl? She’s still over there? Who is she?”

  “She’s some sort of giant brain from Caltech. We called out there and told them we were having problems, and she’s what they sent.” It was clear from Osborne’s face what he thought of any help she might provide.

  I finally managed to get rid of them. As they went down the walk I looked over at Kluge’s house. Sure enough, Lisa Foo’s silver Ferrari was sitting in his driveway.

  I had no business going over here. I knew that better than anyone.

  So I set about preparing my evening meal. I made a tuna casserole—which is not as bland as it sounds, the way I make it—put it in the oven and went out to the garden to pick the makings for a salad. I was slicing cherry tomatoes and thinking about chilling a bottle of white wine when it occurred to me that I had enough for two.

  Since I never do anything hastily, I sat down and thought it over for a while. What finally decided me was my feet. For the first time in a week, they were warm. So I went to Kluge’s house.

  The front door was standing open. There was no screen. Funny how disturbing that can look, the dwelling wide open and unguarded. I stood on the porch and leaned in, but all I could see was the hallway.

  “Miss Foo?” I called. There was no answer.

  The last time I’d been here I had found a dead man. I hurried in.

  Lisa Foo was sitting on a piano bench before a computer console. She was in profile, her back very straight, her brown legs in lotus position, her fingers poised at the keys as words sprayed rapidly onto the screen in front of her. She looked up and flashed her teeth at me.

  “Somebody told me your name was Victor Apfel,” she said.

  “Yes. Uh, the door was open . . .”

  “It’s hot,” she said, reasonably, pinching the fabric of her shirt near her neck and lifting it up and down like you do when you’re sweaty. “What can I do for you?”

  “Nothing, really.” I came into the dimness and stumbled on something. It was a cardboard box, the large fat kind used for delivering a jumbo pizza.

  “I was just fixing dinner, and it looks like there’s plenty for two, so I was wondering if you . . .” I trailed off, as I had just noticed something else. I had thought she was wearing shorts. In fact, all she had on was the shirt and a pair of pink bikini underpants. This did not seem to make her uneasy.

  “. . . would you like to join me for dinner?”

  Her smile grew even broader.

  “I’d love to,” she said. She effortlessly unwound her legs and bounced to her feet, then brushed past me, trailing the smells of perspiration and sweet soap. “Be with you in a minute.”

  I looked around the room again but my mind kept coming back to her. She liked Pepsi with her pizza; there were dozens of empty cans. There was a deep scar on her knee and upper thigh. The ashtrays were empty . . . and the long muscles of her calves bunched strongly as she walked. Kluge must have smoked, but Lisa didn’t, and she had fine, downy hairs in the small of her back just visible in the green computer light. I heard water running in the bathroom sink, looked at a yellow notepad covered with the kind of penmanship I hadn’t seen in decades, and smelled soap and remembered tawny brown skin and an easy stride.

  She appeared in the hall, wearing cut-off jeans, sandals, and a new T-shirt. The old one had advertised BURROUGHS OFFICE SYSTEMS. This one featured Mickey Mouse and Snow White’s Castle and smelled of fresh bleached cotton. Mickey’s ears were laid back on the upper slopes of Lisa Foo’s incongruous breasts.

  I followed her out the door. Tinkerbell twinkled in pixie dust from the back of her shirt.

  “I like this kitchen,” she said.

  You don’t really look at a place until someone says something like that.

  The kitchen was a time capsule. It could have been lifted bodily from an issue of Life in the early fifties. There was the hump-shouldered Frigidaire, of a vintage when that word had been a generic term, like kleenex or coke. The countertops were yellow tile, the sort that’s only found in bathrooms these days. There wasn’t an ounce of Formica in the place. Instead of a dishwasher I had a wire rack and double sink. There was no electric can opener, Cuisinart, trash compacter, or microwave oven. The newest thing in the whole room was a fifteen-year-old blender.

  I’m good with my hands. I like to repair things.

  “This bread is terrific,” she said.

  I had baked it myself. I watched her mop her plate with a crust, and she asked if she might have seconds.

  I understand cleaning one’s plate with bread is bad manners. Not that I cared; I do it myself. And other than that, her manners were impeccable. She polished off three helpings of my casserole and when she was done the plate hardly needed washing. I had a sense of ravenous appetite barely held in check.

  She settled back in her chair and I refilled her glass with white wine.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like some more peas?”

  “I’d bust.” She patted her stomach contentedly. “Thank you so much, Mr. Apfel. I haven’t had a home-cooked meal in ages.”

  “You can call me Victor.”

  “I just love American food.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing. I mean, not like Chinese or . . . You are American, aren’t you?” She just smiled. “What I mean—”

  “I know what you meant, Victor. I’m a citizen, but not native-born. Would you excuse me for a moment? I know it’s impolite to jump right up, but with braces I find I have to brush instantly after eating.”

  I could hear her as I cleared the table. I ran water in the sink and started doing the dishes. Before long she joined me, grabbed a dish towel, and began drying the things in the rack, over my protests.

  “You live alone here?” she asked.

  “Yes. Have ever since my parents died.”

  “Ever married? If it’s none of my business, just say so.”

  “That’s all right. No, I never married.”

  “You do pretty good for not having a woman around.”

  “I’ve had a lot of practice. Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Where are you from? Taiwan?”

  “I have a knack for languages. Back home, I spoke pidgin American, but when I got here I cleaned up my act. I also speak rotten French, illiterate Chinese in four or five varieties, gutter Vietnamese, and enough Thai to holler, ‘Me wanna see American Consul, pretty-damn-quick, you!’”

  I laughed. When she said it, her accent was thick.

  “I been here eight years now. You figured out where home is?”

  “Vietnam?” I ventured.

  “The sidewalks of Saigon, fer shure. Or Ho Chi Minh’s Shitty, as the pajama-heads renamed it, may their dinks rot off and their butts be filled with jagged punjee-sticks. Pardon my French.”

  She ducked her head in embarrassment. What had started out light had turned hot very quickly. I sensed a hurt at least as deep as my own, and we both backed off from it.

  “I took you for a Japanese,” I said.

  “Yeah, ain’t it a pisser? I’ll tell you about it someday. Victor, is that a laundry room through that door there? With an electric washer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wou
ld it be too much trouble if I did a load?”

  It was no trouble at all. She had seven pairs of faded jeans, some with the legs cut away, and about two dozen T-shirts. It could have been a load of boys’ clothing except for the frilly underwear.

  We went into the backyard to sit in the last rays of the setting sun, then she had to see my garden. I’m quite proud of it. When I’m well, I spend four or five hours a day working out there, year-round, usually in the morning hours. You can do that in southern California. I have a small greenhouse I built myself.

  She loved it, though it was not in its best shape. I had spent most of the week in bed or in the tub. As a result, weeds were spouting here and there.

  “We had a garden when I was little,” she said. “And I spent two years in a rice paddy.”

  “That must be a lot different than this.”

  “Damn straight. Put me off rice for years.”

  She discovered an infestation of aphids, so we squatted down to pick them off. She had that double-jointed Asian peasant’s way of sitting that I remembered so well and could never imitate. Her fingers were long and narrow, and soon the tips of them were green from squashed bugs.

  We talked about this and that. I don’t remember quite how it came up, but I told her I had fought in Korea. I learned she was twenty-five. It turned out we had the same birthday, so some months back I had been exactly twice her age.

  The only time Kluge’s name came up was when she mentioned how she liked to cook. She hadn’t been able to at Kluge’s house.

  “He has a freezer in the garage full of frozen dinners,” she said. “He had one plate, one fork, one spoon, and one glass. He’s got the best microwave oven on the market. And that’s it, man. Ain’t nothing else in his kitchen at all.” She shook her head, and executed an aphid. “He was one weird dude.”

  When her laundry was done it was late evening, almost dark. She loaded it into my wicker basket and we took it out to the clothesline. It got to be a game. I would shake out a T-shirt and study the picture or message there. Sometimes I got it, and sometimes I didn’t. There were pictures of rock groups, a map of Los Angeles, Star Trek tie-ins . . . a little of everything.

  “What’s the L5 Society?” I asked her.

  “Guys that want to build these great big farms in space. I asked ’em if they were gonna grow rice, and they said they didn’t think it was the best crop for zero gee, so I bought the shirt.”

  “How many of these things do you have?”

  “Wow, it’s gotta be four or five hundred. I usually wear ’em two or three times and then put them away.”

  I picked up another shirt, and a bra fell out. It wasn’t the kind of bra girls wore when I grew up. It was very sheer, though somehow functional at the same time.

  “You like, Yank?” Her accent was very thick. “You oughtta see my sister!”

  I glanced at her, and her face fell.

  “I’m sorry, Victor,” she said. “You don’t have to blush.” She took the bra from me and clipped it to the line.

  She must have misread my face. True, I had been embarrassed, but I was also pleased in some strange way. It had been a long time since anybody had called me anything but Victor or Mr. Apfel.

  The next day’s mail brought a letter from a law firm in Chicago. It was about the seven hundred thousand dollars. The money had come from a Delaware holding company which had been set up in 1933 to provide for me in my old age. My mother and father were listed as the founders. Certain long-term investments had matured, resulting in my recent windfall. The amount in my bank was after taxes.

  It was ridiculous on the face of it. My parents had never had that kind of money. I didn’t want it. I would have given it back if I could find out who Kluge had stolen it from.

  I decided that, if I wasn’t in jail this time next year, I’d give it all to some charity. Save the Whales, maybe, or the L5 Society.

  I spent the morning in the garden. Later I walked to the market and bought some fresh ground beef and pork. I was feeling good as I pulled my purchases home in my fold-up wire basket. When I passed the silver Ferrari I smiled.

  She hadn’t come to get her laundry. I took it off the line and folded it, then knocked on Kluge’s door.

  “It’s me, Victor.”

  “Come on in, Yank.”

  She was where she had been before, but decently dressed this time. She smiled at me, then hit her forehead when she saw the laundry basket. She hurried to take it from me.

  “I’m sorry, Victor. I meant to get this—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It was no trouble. And it gives me the chance to ask if you’d like to dine with me again.”

  Something happened to her face which she covered quickly. Perhaps she didn’t like “American” food as much as she professed to. Or maybe it was the cook.

  “Sure, Victor, I’d love to. Let me take care of this. And why don’t you open those drapes? It’s like a tomb in here.”

  She hurried away. I glanced at the screen she had been using. It was blank, but for one word: intercourse-p. I assumed it was a typo.

  I pulled the drapes open in time to see Osborne’s car park at the curb. Then Lisa was back, wearing a new T-shirt. This one said “A CHANGE OF HOBBIT,” and had a picture of a squat, hairy-footed creature. She glanced out the window and saw Osborne coming up the walk.

  “I say, Watson,” she said. “It’s Lestrade of the Yard. Do show him in.”

  That wasn’t nice of her. He gave me a suspicious glance as he entered. I burst out laughing. Lisa sat on the piano bench, poker-faced. She slumped indolently, one arm resting near the keyboard.

  “Well, Apfel,” Osborne started. “We’ve finally found out who Kluge really was.”

  “Patrick William Gavin,” Lisa said.

  Quite a time went by before Osborne was able to close his mouth. Then he opened it right up again.

  “How the hell did you find that out?”

  She lazily caressed the keyboard beside her.

  “Well, of course I got it when it came into your office this morning. There’s a little stoolie program tucked away in your computer that whispers in my ear every time the name Kluge is mentioned. But I didn’t need that. I figured it out five days ago.”

  “Then why the . . . why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask me.”

  They glared at each other for a while. I had no idea what events had led up to this moment, but it was quite clear they didn’t like each other even a little bit. Lisa was on top just now and seemed to be enjoying it. Then she glanced at her screen, looked surprised, and quickly tapped a key. She gave me an inscrutable glance, then faced Osborne again.

  “If you recall, you brought me in because all your own guys were getting was a lot of crashes. This system was brain-damaged when I got here, practically catatonic. Most of it was down and you couldn’t get it up.” She had to grin at that.

  “You decided I couldn’t do any worse than your guys were doing. So you asked me to try and break Kluge’s codes without frying the system. Well, I did it. All you had to do was come by and interface and I would have downloaded N tons of wallpaper right in your lap.”

  Osborne listened quietly. Maybe he even knew he had made a mistake.

  “What did you get? Can I see it now?”

  She nodded and pressed a few keys. Words started to fill her screen, and one close to Osborne. I got up and read Lisa’s terminal.

  It was a brief bio of Kluge/Gavin. He was about my age, but while I was getting shot at in a foreign land, he was cutting a swath through the infant computer industry. He had been there from the ground up, working at many of the top research facilities. It surprised me that it had taken over a week to identify him.

  “I compiled this anecdotally,” Lisa said, as we read. “The first thing you have to realize about Gavin is that he exists nowhere in any computerized information system. So I called people all over the country—interesting phone system he’s got,
by the way; it generates a new number for each call, and you can’t call back or trace it—and started asking who the top people were in the fifties and sixties. I got a lot of names. After that, it was a matter of finding out who no longer existed in the files. He faked his death in 1967. I located one account of it in a newspaper file. Everybody I talked to who had known him knew of his death. There is a paper birth certificate in Florida. That’s the only other evidence I found of him. He was the only guy so many people in the field knew who left no mark on the world. That seemed conclusive to me.”

  Osborne finished reading, then looked up.

  “All right, Ms. Foo. What else have you found out?”

  “I’ve broken some of his codes. I had a piece of luck, getting into a basic rape-and-plunder program he’d written to attack other people’s programs, and I’ve managed to use it against a few of his own. I’ve unlocked a file of passwords with notes on where they came from. And I’ve learned a few of his tricks. But it’s the tip of the iceberg.”

  She waved a hand at the silent metal brains in the room.

  “What I haven’t gotten across to anyone is just what this is. This is the most devious electronic weapon ever devised. It’s armored like a battleship. It has to be; there’s a lot of very slick programs out there that grab an invader and hang on like a terrier. If they ever got this far Kluge could deflect them. But usually they never even knew they’d been burgled. Kluge’d come in like a cruise missile, low and fast and twisty. And he’d route his attack through a dozen cutoffs.

  “He had a lot of advantages. Big systems these days are heavily protected. People use passwords and very sophisticated codes. But Kluge helped invent most of them. You need a damn good lock to keep out a locksmith. He helped install a lot of the major systems. He left informants behind, hidden in the software. If the codes were changed, the computer itself would send the information to a safe system that Kluge could tap later. It’s like you buy the biggest, meanest, best-trained watchdog you can. And that night, the guy who trained the dog comes in, pats him on the head, and robs you blind.”