The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  She just looked at me, kept massaging my foot, and nodded slowly. Finally she spoke.

  “Cambodia was hot,” she said. “I kept telling myself when I finally got to the U.S. I’d live in Maine or someplace, where it snowed. And I did go to Cambridge, but I found out I didn’t like snow.”

  She told me about it. The last time I heard, a million people had died over there. It was a whole country frothing at the mouth and snapping at anything that moved. Or like one of those sharks you read about that, when its guts are ripped out, bends in a circle and starts devouring itself.

  She told me about being forced to build a pyramid of severed heads. Twenty of them working all day in the hot sun finally got it ten feet high before it collapsed. If any of them stopped working, their own heads were added to the pile.

  “It didn’t mean anything to me. It was just another job. I was pretty crazy by then. I didn’t start to come out of it until I got across the Thai border.”

  That she had survived it at all seemed a miracle. She had gone through more horror than I could imagine. And she had come through it in much better shape. It made me feel small. When I was her age, I was well on my way to building the prison I have lived in ever since. I told her that.

  “Part of it is preparation,” she said wryly. “What you expect out of life, what your life has been so far. You said it yourself. Korea was new to you. I’m not saying I was ready for Cambodia, but my life up to that point hadn’t been what you’d call sheltered. I hope you haven’t been thinking I made a living in the streets by selling apples.”

  She kept rubbing my feet, staring off into scenes I could not see.

  “How old were you when your mother died?”

  “She was killed during Tet, 1968. I was ten.”

  “By the Viet Cong?”

  “Who knows? Lots of bullets flying, lot of grenades being thrown.”

  She sighed, dropped my foot, and sat there, a scrawny Buddha without a rope.

  “You ready to do it again, Yank?”

  “I don’t think I can, Lisa. I’m an old man.”

  She moved over me and lowered herself with her chin just below my sternum, settling her breasts in the most delicious place possible.

  “We’ll see,” she said and giggled. “There’s an alternative sex act I’m pretty good at, and I’m pretty sure it would make you a young man again. But I haven’t been able to do it for about a year on account of these.” She tapped her braces. “It’d be sort of like sticking it in a buzz saw. So now I do this instead. I call it ‘touring the silicone valley. ’” She started moving her body up and down, just a few inches at a time. She blinked innocently a couple of times, then laughed.

  “At last, I can see you” she said. “I’m awfully myopic.”

  I let her do that for a while, then lifted my head.

  “Did you say silicone?”

  “Uh-huh. You didn’t think they were real, did you?”

  I confessed that I had.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy with anything I ever bought. Not even the car.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Does it bother you?”

  It didn’t, and I told her so. But I couldn’t conceal my curiosity.

  “Because it was safe to. In Saigon I was always angry that I never developed. I could have made a good living as a prostitute, but I was always too small, too skinny, and too ugly. Then in Cambodia I was lucky. I managed to pass for a boy some of the time. If not for that I’d have been raped a lot more than I was. And in Thailand I knew I’d get to the West one way or another, and when I got there, I’d get the best car there was, eat anything I wanted anytime I wanted to, and purchase the best tits money could buy. You can’t imagine what the West looks like from the camps. A place where you can buy tits!”

  She looked down between them, then back at my face.

  “Looks like it was a good investment,” she said.

  “They do seem to work okay,” I had to admit.

  We agreed that she would spend the nights at my house. There were certain things she had to do at Kluge’s, involving equipment that had to be physically loaded, but many things she could do with a remote terminal and an armload of software. So we selected one of Kluge’s best computers and about a dozen peripherals and installed her at a cafeteria table in my bedroom.

  I guess we both knew it wasn’t much protection if the people who got Kluge decided to get her. But I know I felt better about it, and I think she did, too.

  The second day she was there a delivery van pulled up outside and two guys started unloading a king-size waterbed. She laughed and laughed when she saw my face.

  “Listen, you’re not using Kluge’s computers to—”

  “Relax, Yank. How’d you think I could afford a Ferrari?”

  “I’ve been curious.”

  “If you’re really good at writing software you can make a lot of money. I own my own company. But every hacker picks up tricks here and there. I used to run a few Kluge scams, myself.”

  “But not anymore?”

  She shrugged. “Once a thief, always a thief, Victor. I told you I couldn’t make ends meet selling my bod.”

  Lisa didn’t need much sleep.

  We got up at seven, and I made breakfast every morning. Then we would spend an hour or two working in the garden. She would go to Kluge’s and I’d bring her a sandwich at noon, then drop in on her several times during the day. That was for my own peace of mind; I never stayed more than a minute. Sometime during the afternoon I would shop or do household chores, then at seven one of us would cook dinner. We alternated. I taught her “American” cooking, and she taught me a little of everything. She complained about the lack of vital ingredients in American markets. No dogs, of course, but she claimed to know great ways of preparing monkey, snake, and rat. I never knew how hard she was pulling my leg, and didn’t ask.

  After dinner she stayed at my house. We would talk, make love, bathe.

  She loved my tub. It is about the only alteration I have made in the house, and my only real luxury. I put it in—having to expand the bathroom to do so—in 1975, and never regretted it. We would soak for twenty minutes or an hour, turning the jets and bubblers on and off, washing each other, giggling like kids. Once we used bubble bath and made a mountain of suds four feet high, then destroyed it, splashing water all over the place. Most nights she let me wash her long black hair.

  She didn’t have any bad habits—or at least none that clashed with mine. She was neat and clean, changing her clothes twice a day and never so much as leaving a dirty glass on the sink. She never left a mess in the bathroom. Two glasses of wine was her limit.

  I felt like Lazarus.

  Osborne came by three times in the next two weeks. Lisa met him at Kluge’s and gave him what she had learned. It was getting to be quite a list.

  “Kluge once had an account in a New York bank with nine trillion dollars in it,” she told me after one of Osborne’s visits. “I think he did it just to see if he could. He left it in for one day, took the interest, and fed it to a bank in the Bahamas, then destroyed the principal. Which never existed anyway.”

  In return, Osborne told her what was new on the murder investigation—which was nothing—and on the status of Kluge’s property, which was chaotic. Various agencies had sent people out to look the place over. Some FBI men came, wanting to take over the investigation. Lisa, when talking about computers, had the power to cloud men’s minds. She did it first by explaining exactly what she was doing, in terms so abstruse that no one could understand her. Sometimes that was enough. If it wasn’t, if they started to get tough, she just moved out of the driver’s seat and let them try to handle Kluge’s contraption. She let them watch in horror as dragons leaped out of nowhere and ate up all the data on a disk, then printed “You Stupid Putz!” on the screen.

  “I’m cheating them,” she confessed to me. “I’m giving them stuff I know they’re gonna step in, because I already stepped i
n it myself. I’ve lost about forty percent of the data Kluge had stored away. But the others lose a hundred percent. You ought to see their faces when Kluge drops a logic bomb into their work. That second guy threw a three-thousand-dollar printer clear across the room. Then tried to bribe me to be quiet about it.”

  When some federal agency sent out an expert from Stanford, and he seemed perfectly content to destroy everything in sight in the firm belief that he was bound to get it right sooner or later, Lisa showed him how Kluge entered the IRS mainframe computer in Washington and neglected to mention how Kluge had gotten out. The guy tangled with some watchdog program. During his struggles, it seemed he had erased all the tax records from the letter S down into the W’s. Lisa let him think that for half an hour.

  “I thought he was having a heart attack,” she told me. “All the blood drained out of his face and he couldn’t talk. So I showed him where I had—with my usual foresight—arranged for that to be recorded, told him how to put it back where he found it, and how to pacify the watchdog. He couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. Pretty soon he’s gonna realize you can’t destroy that much information with anything short of dynamite because of the backups and the limits of how much can be running at any one time. But I don’t think he’ll be back.”

  “It sounds like a very fancy video game,” I said.

  “It is, in a way. But it’s more like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s an endless series of closed rooms with dangers on the other side. You don’t dare take it a step at a time. You take it a hundredth of a step at a time. Your questions are like, ‘How this isn’t a question, but if it entered my mind to ask this question—which I’m not about to do—concerning what might happen if I looked at this door here—and I’m not touching it, I’m not even in the next room—what do you suppose you might do?’ And the program crunches on that, decides if you fulfilled the conditions for getting a great big cream pie in the face, then either throws it or allows as how it might just move from step A to step A prime. Then you say, ‘Well, maybe I am looking at that door.’ And sometimes the program says, ‘You looked, you looked, you dirty crook!’ And the fireworks start.”

  Silly as all that sounds, it was very close to the best explanation she was ever able to give me about what she was doing.

  “Are you telling everything, Lisa?” I asked her.

  “Well, not everything. I didn’t mention the four cents.”

  Four cents? Oh my god.

  “Lisa, I didn’t want that, I didn’t ask for it, I wish he’d never—”

  “Calm down, Yank. It’s going to be all right.”

  “He kept records of all that, didn’t he?”

  “That’s what I spend most of my time doing. Decoding his records.”

  “How long have you known?”

  “About the seven hundred thousand dollars? It was in the first disk I cracked.”

  “I just want to give it back.”

  She thought that over and shook her head.

  “Victor, it’d be more dangerous to get rid of it now than it would be to keep it. It was imaginary money at first. But now it’s got a history. The IRS thinks it knows where it came from. The taxes are paid on it. The State of Delaware is convinced that a legally chartered corporation disbursed it. An Illinois law firm has been paid for handling it. Your bank has been paying you interest on it. I’m not saying it would be impossible to go back and wipe all that out, but I wouldn’t like to try. I’m good, but I don’t have Kluge’s touch.”

  “How could he do all that? You say it was imaginary money. That’s not the way I thought money worked. He could just pull it out of thin air?”

  Lisa patted the top of her computer console and smiled at me.

  “This is money, Yank,” she said, and her eyes glittered.

  At night she worked by candlelight so she wouldn’t disturb me. That turned out to be my downfall. She typed by touch and needed the candle only to locate software.

  So that’s how I’d go to sleep every night, looking at her slender body bathed in the glow of the candle. I was always reminded of melting butter dripping down a roasted ear of corn. Golden light on golden skin.

  Ugly, she had called herself. Skinny. It was true she was thin. I could see her ribs when she sat with her back impossibly straight, her tummy tucked in, her chin up. She worked in the nude these days, sitting in lotus position. For long periods she would not move, her hands lying on her thighs, then she would poise, as if to pound the keys. But her touch was light, almost silent. It looked more like yoga than programming. She said she went into a meditative state for her best work.

  I had expected a bony angularity, all sharp elbows and knees. She wasn’t like that. I had guessed her weight ten pounds too low, and still didn’t know where she put it. But she was soft and rounded, and strong beneath.

  No one was ever going to call her face glamorous. Few would even go so far as to call her pretty. The braces did that, I think. They caught the eye and held it, drawing attention to that unsightly jumble.

  But her skin was wonderful. She had scars. Not as many as I had expected. She seemed to heal quickly, and well.

  I thought she was beautiful.

  I had just completed my nightly survey when my eye was caught by the candle. I looked at it, then tried to look away.

  Candles do that sometimes. I don’t know why. In still air, with the flame perfectly vertical, they begin to flicker. The flame leaps up then squats down, up and down, up and down, brighter and brighter in regular rhythm, two or three beats to the second—

  —and I tried to call out to her, wishing the candle would stop its regular flickering, but already I couldn’t speak—

  —I could only gasp, and I tried once more, as hard as I could, to yell, to scream, to tell her not to worry, and felt the nausea building . . .

  I tasted blood. I took an experimental breath, did not find the smells of vomit, urine, feces. The overhead lights were on.

  Lisa was on her hands and knees leaning over me, her face very close. A tear dropped on my forehead. I was on the carpet, on my back.

  “Victor, can you hear me?”

  I nodded. There was a spoon in my mouth. I spit it out.

  “You just lie there. The ambulance is on its way.”

  “No. Don’t need it.”

  “Well, it’s on its way. You just take it easy and—”

  “Help me up.”

  “Not yet. You’re not ready.”

  She was right. I tried to sit up and fell back quietly. I took deep breaths for a while. Then the doorbell rang.

  She stood up and started to the door. I just managed to get my hand around her ankle. Then she was leaning over me again, her eyes as wide as they would go.

  “What is it? What’s wrong now?”

  “Get some clothes on,” I told her. She looked down at herself, surprised.

  “Oh. Right.”

  She got rid of the ambulance crew. Lisa was a lot calmer after she made coffee and we were sitting at the kitchen table. It was one o’clock and I was still pretty rocky. But it hadn’t been a bad one.

  I went to the bathroom and got the bottle of Dilantin I’d hidden when she moved in. I let her see me take one.

  “I forgot to do this today,” I told her.

  “It’s because you hid them. That was stupid.”

  “I know.” There must have been something else I could have said. It didn’t please me to see her look hurt. But she was hurt because I wasn’t defending myself against her attack, and that was a bit too complicated for me to dope out just after a grand mal.

  “You can move out if you want to,” I said. I was in rare form.

  So was she. She reached across the table and shook me by the shoulders. She glared at me.

  “I won’t take a lot more of that kind of shit,” she said, and I nodded and began to cry.

  She let me do it. I think that was probably best. She could have babied me, but I do a pretty good job of that myself.

&n
bsp; “How long has this been going on?” she finally said. “Is that why you’ve stayed in your house for thirty years?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it’s part of it. When I got back they operated, but it just made it worse.”

  “Okay. I’m mad at you because you didn’t tell me about it, so I didn’t know what to do. I want to stay, but you’ll have to tell me how. Then I won’t be mad anymore.”

  I could have blown the whole thing right there. I’m amazed I didn’t. Through the years I’d developed very good methods for doing things like that. But I pulled through when I saw her face. She really did want to stay. I didn’t know why, but it was enough.

  “The spoon was a mistake,” I said. “If there’s time, and if you can do it without risking your fingers, you could jam a piece of cloth in there. Part of a sheet, or something. But nothing hard.” I explored my mouth with a finger. “I think I broke a tooth.”

  “Serves you right,” she said. I looked at her and smiled, then we were both laughing. She came around the table and kissed me, then sat on my knee.

  “The biggest danger is drowning. During the first part of the seizure, all my muscles go rigid. That doesn’t last long. Then they all start contracting and relaxing at random. It’s very strong.”

  “I know. I watched, and I tried to hold you.”

  “Don’t do that. Get me on my side. Stay behind me and watch out for flailing arms. Get a pillow under my head if you can. Keep me away from things I could injure myself on.” I looked her square in the eye. “I want to emphasize this. Just try to do all those things. If I’m getting too violent, it’s better you stand off to the side. Better for both of us. If I knock you out, you won’t be able to help me if I start strangling on vomit.”

  I kept looking at her eyes. She must have read my mind, because she smiled slightly.

  “Sorry, Yank. I am not freaked out. I mean, like, it’s totally gross, you know, and it barfs me out to the max, you could—”