The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “You could try that,” she agreed.

  They stared at each other for a while. Lisa won. Osborne rubbed his eyes and nodded. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slumped to the door.

  Lisa stubbed out her cigarette. We listened to him going down the walk.

  “I’m surprised he gave up so easy,” I said. “Or did he? Do you think he’ll try a raid?”

  “It’s not likely. He knows the score.”

  “Maybe you could tell it to me.”

  “For one thing, it’s not his department, and he knows it.”

  “Why did you buy the house?”

  “You ought to ask how.”

  I looked at her closely. There was a gleam of amusement behind the poker face.

  “Lisa. What did you do?”

  “That’s what Osborne asked himself. He got the right answer, because he understands Kluge’s machines. And he knows how things get done. It was no accident I was the only bidder. I used one of Kluge’s pet councilmen.”

  “You bribed him?”

  She laughed and kissed me.

  “I think I finally managed to shock you, Yank. That’s gotta be the biggest difference between me and a native-born American. Average citizens don’t spend much on bribes over here. In Saigon, everybody bribes.”

  “Did you bribe him?”

  “Nothing so indelicate. One has to go in the back door over here. Several entirely legal campaign contributions appeared in the accounts of a state senator, who mentioned a certain situation to someone, who happened to be in the position to do legally what I happened to want done.” She looked at me askance. “Of course I bribed him, Victor. You’d be amazed to know how cheaply. Does that bother you?”

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I don’t like bribery.”

  “I’m indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done.”

  “I assume you covered yourself.”

  “Reasonably well. You’re never entirely covered with a bribe, because of the human element. The councilman might geek if they got him in front of a grand jury. But they won’t, because Osborne won’t pursue it. That’s the second reason he walked out of here without a fight. He knows how the world wobbles, he knows what kind of force I now possess, and he knows he can’t fight it.”

  There was a long silence after that. I had a lot to think about, and I didn’t feel good about most of it. At one point Lisa reached for the pack of cigarettes, then changed her mind. She waited for me to work it out.

  “It is a terrific force, isn’t it,” I finally said.

  “It’s frightening,” she agreed. “Don’t think it doesn’t scare me. Don’t think I haven’t had fantasies of being superwoman. Power is an awful temptation, and it’s not easy to reject. There’s so much I could do.”

  “Will you?”

  “I’m not talking about stealing things, or getting rich.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “This is political power. But I don’t know how to wield it . . . it sounds corny, but to use it for good. I’ve seen so much evil come from good intentions. I don’t think I’m wise enough to do any good. And the chances of getting torn up like Kluge did are large. But I’m wise enough to walk away from it. I’m still a street urchin from Saigon, Yank. I’m smart enough not to use it unless I have to. But I can’t give it away, and I can’t destory it. Is that stupid?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that one. But I had a bad feeling.

  My doubts had another week to work on me. I didn’t come to any great moral conclusions. Lisa knew of some crimes, and she wasn’t reporting them to the authorities. That didn’t bother me much. She had at her fingertips the means to commit more crimes, and that bothered me a lot. Yet I really didn’t think she planned to do anything. She was smart enough to use the things she had only in a defensive way—but with Lisa that could cover a lot of ground.

  When she didn’t show up for dinner one evening, I went over to Kluge’s and found her busy in the living room. A nine-foot section of shelving had been cleared. The disks and tapes were stacked on a table. She had a big plastic garbage can and a magnet the size of a softball. I watched her wave a tape near the magnet, then toss it in the garbage can, which was almost full. She glanced up, did the same operation with a handful of disks, then took off her glasses and wiped her eyes.

  “Feel any better now, Victor?” she asked.

  “What do mean? I feel fine.”

  “No, you don’t. And I haven’t felt right, either. It hurts me to do it, but I have to. You want to go get the other trash can?”

  I did, and helped her pull more software from the shelves.

  “You’re not going to wipe it all, are you?”

  “No. I’m wiping records, and . . . something else.”

  “Are you going to tell me what?”

  “There are things it’s better not to know,” she said darkly.

  I finally managed to convince her to talk over dinner. She had said little, just eating and shaking her head. But she gave in.

  “Rather dreary, actually,” she said. “I’ve been probing around some delicate places the last couple days. These are places Kluge visited at will, but they scare the hell out of me. Dirty places. Places where they know things I thought I’d like to find out.”

  She shivered, and seemed reluctant to go on.

  “Are you talking about military computers? The CIA?”

  “The CIA is where it starts. It’s the easiest. I’ve looked around at NORAD—that’s the guys who get to fight the next war. It makes me shiver to see how easy Kluge got in there. He cobbled up a way to start World War Three, just as an exercise. That’s one of the things we just erased. The last two days I was nibbling around the edges of the big boys. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security . . . something. DIA and NSA. Each of them is bigger than the CIA. Something knew I was there. Some watchdog program. As soon as I realized that, I got out quick, and I’ve spent the last five hours being sure it didn’t follow me. And now I’m sure, and I’ve destroyed all that, too.”

  “You think they’re the ones who killed Kluge?”

  “They’re surely the best candidates. He had tons of their stuff. I know he helped design the biggest installation at NSA, and he’d been poking around in there for years. One false step is all it would take.”

  “Did you get it all? I mean, are you sure?”

  “I’m sure they didn’t track me. I’m not sure I’ve destroyed all the records. I’m going back now to take a last look.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  We worked until well after midnight. Lisa would review a tape or a disk, and if she was in any doubt, toss it to me for the magnetic treatment. At one point, simply because she was unsure, she took the magnet and passed it in front of an entire shelf of software.

  It was amazing to think about it. With that one wipe she had randomized billions of bits of information. Some of it might not exist anywhere else in the world. I found myself confronted by even harder questions. Did she have the right to do it? Didn’t knowledge exist for everyone? But I confess I had little trouble quelling my protests. Mostly I was happy to see it go. The old reactionary in me found it easier to believe There Are Things We Are Not Meant To Know.

  We were almost through when her monitor screen began to malfunction. It actually gave off a few hisses and pops, so Lisa stood back from it for a moment, then the screen started to flicker. I stared at it for a while. It seemed to me there was an image trying to form in the screen. Something three-dimensional. Just as I was starting to get a picture of it I happened to glance at Lisa, and she was looking at me. Her face was flickering. She came to me and put her hands over my eyes.

  “Victor, you shouldn’t look at that.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. And when I said it, it was, but as soon as I had the words out I knew it wasn’t. And that is the last thing I remembered for a long time.

  I’m told it was
a very bad two weeks. I remember very little of it. I was kept under high dosage of drugs, and my few lucid periods were always followed by a fresh seizure.

  The first thing I recall clearly was looking up at Dr. Stuart’s face. I was in a hospital bed. I later learned it was in Cedars-Sinai, not the Veteran’s Hospital. Lisa had paid for a private room.

  Stuart put me through the usual questions. I was able to answer them, though I was very tired. When he was satisfied as to my condition, he finally began to answer some of my questions. I learned how long I had been there, and how it had happened.

  “You went into consecutive seizures,” he confirmed. “I don’t know why, frankly. You haven’t been prone to them for a decade. I was thinking you were well under control. But nothing is ever really stable, I guess.”

  “So Lisa got me here in time.”

  “She did more than that. She didn’t want to level with me at first. It seems that after the first seizure she witnessed, she read everything she could find. From that day, she had a syringe and solution of Valium handy. When she saw you couldn’t breathe, she injected you with one hundred milligrams, and there’s no doubt it saved your life.”

  Stuart and I had known each other a long time. He knew I had no prescription for Valium. Though we had talked about it the last time I was hospitalized. Since I lived alone, there would be no one to inject me if I got in trouble.

  He was more interested in results than anything else, and what Lisa did had the desired result. I was still alive.

  He wouldn’t let me have any visitors that day. I protested but soon was asleep. The next day she came. She wore a new T-shirt. This one had a picture of a robot wearing a gown and mortarboard, and said “Class of 11111000000.” It turns out that was 1984 in binary notation.

  She had a big smile and said, “Hi, Yank!” and as she sat on the bed I started to shake. She looked alarmed and asked if she should call the doctor.

  “It’s not that,” I managed to say. “I’d like it if you just held me.”

  She took off her shoes and got under the covers with me. She held me tightly. At some point a nurse came in and tried to shoo her out. Lisa gave her profanities in Vietnamese, Chinese, and a few startling ones in English, and the nurse left. I saw Dr. Stuart glance in later.

  I felt much better when I finally stopped crying. Lisa’s eyes were wet, too.

  “I’ve been here every day,” she said. “You look awful, Victor.”

  “I feel a lot better.”

  “Well, you look better than you did. But your doctor says you’d better stick around another couple of days, just to make sure.”

  “I think he’s right.”

  “I’m planning a big dinner for when you get back. You think we should invite the neighbors?”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. There were so many things we hadn’t faced. Just how long could it go on between us? How long before I got sour about being so useless? How long before she got tired of being with an old man? I don’t know just when I had started to think of Lisa as a permanent part of my life. And I wondered how I could have thought that.

  “Do you want to spend more years waiting in hospitals for a man to die?”

  “What do you want, Victor? I’ll marry you if you want me to. Or I’ll live with you in sin. I prefer sin, but if it’ll make you happy—”

  “I don’t know why you want to saddle yourself with an epileptic old fart.”

  “Because I love you.”

  It was the first time she had said it. I could have gone on questioning—bringing up her Major again, for instance—but I had no urge to. I’m very glad I didn’t. So I changed the subject.

  “Did you get the job finished?”

  She knew which job I was talking about. She lowered her voice and put her mouth close to my ear.

  “Let’s don’t be specific about it here, Victor. I don’t trust any place I haven’t swept for bugs. But, to put your mind at ease, I did finish, and it’s been a quiet couple of weeks. No one is any wiser, and I’ll never meddle in things like that again.”

  I felt a lot better. I was also exhausted. I tried to conceal my yawns, but she sensed it was time to go. She gave me one more kiss, promising many more to come, and left me.

  It was the last time I ever saw her.

  At about ten o’clock that evening Lisa went into Kluge’s kitchen with a screwdriver and some other tools and got to work on the microwave oven.

  The manufacturers of those appliances are very careful to insure they can’t be turned on with the door open, as they emit lethal radiation. But with simple tools and a good brain it is possible to circumvent the safety interlocks. Lisa had no trouble with them. About ten minutes after she entered the kitchen she put her head in the oven and turned it on.

  It is impossible to say how long she held her head in there. It was long enough to turn her eyeballs to the consistency of boiled eggs. At some point she lost voluntary muscle control and fell to the floor, pulling the microwave down with her. It shorted out, and a fire started.

  The fire set off the sophisticated burglar alarm she had installed a month before. Betty Lanier saw the flames and called the fire department as Hal ran across the street and into the burning kitchen. He dragged what was left of Lisa out onto the grass. When he saw what the fire had done to her upper body, and in particular her breasts, he threw up.

  She was rushed to the hospital. The doctors there amputated one arm and cut away the frightful masses of vulcanized silicone, pulled all her teeth, and didn’t know what to do about the eyes. They put her on a respirator.

  It was an orderly who first noticed the blackened and bloody T-shirt they had cut from her. Some of the message was unreadable, but it began, “I can’t go on this way any more . . .

  There is no other way I could have told all that. I discovered it piecemeal, starting with the disturbed look on Dr. Stuart’s face when Lisa didn’t show up the next day. He wouldn’t tell me anything, and I had another seizure shortly after.

  The next week is a blur. I remember being released from the hospital, but I don’t remember the trip home. Betty was very good to me. They gave me a tranquilizer called Tranxene, and it was even better. I ate them like candy. I wandered in a drugged haze, eating only when Betty insisted, sleeping sitting up in my chair, coming awake not knowing where or who I was. I returned to the prison camp many times. Once I recall helping Lisa stack severed heads.

  When I saw myself in the mirror, there was a vague smile on my face. It was Tranxene, caressing my frontal lobes. I knew that if I was to live much longer, me and Tranxene would have to become very good friends.

  I eventually became capable of something that passed for rational thought. I was helped along somewhat by a visit from Osborne. I was trying, at that time, to find reasons to live, and wondered if he had any.

  “I’m very sorry,” he started off. I said nothing. “This is on my own time,” he went on. “The department doesn’t know I’m here.”

  “Was it suicide?” I asked him.

  “I brought along a copy of the . . . the note. She ordered it from a shirt company in Westwood, three days before the . . . accident.”

  He handed it to me, and I read it. I was mentioned, though not by name. I was “the man I love.” She said she couldn’t cope with my problems. It was a short note. You can’t get too much on a T-shirt. I read it through five times, then handed it back to him.

  “She told you Kluge didn’t write his note. I tell you she didn’t write this.”

  He nodded reluctantly. I felt a vast calm, with a howling nightmare just below it. Praise Tranxene.

  “Can you back that up?”

  “She saw me in the hospital shortly before she died. She was full of life and hope. You say she ordered the shirt three days before. I would have felt that. And that note is pathetic. Lisa was never pathetic.”

  He nodded again.

  “Some things I want to tell you. There were no signs of a struggle. Mrs. Lanier is su
re no one came in the front. The crime lab went over the whole place and we’re sure no one was in there with her. I’d stake my life on the fact that no one entered or left that house. Now, I don’t believe it was suicide, either, but do you have any suggestions?”

  “The NSA,” I said.

  I explained about the last things she had done while I was still there. I told him of her fear of the government spy agencies. That was all I had.

  “Well, I guess they’re the ones who could do a thing like that, if anyone could. But I’ll tell you, I have a hard time swallowing it. I don’t know why, for one thing. Maybe you believe those people kill like you and I’d swat a fly.” His look made it into a question.

  “I don’t know what I believe.”

  “I’m not saying they wouldn’t kill for national security, or some such shit. But they’d have taken the computers, too. They wouldn’t have let her alone, they wouldn’t even have let her near that stuff after they killed Kluge.”

  “What you’re saying makes sense.”

  He muttered on about it for quite some time. Eventually I offered him some wine. He accepted thankfully. I considered joining him—it would be a quick way to die—but did not. He drank the whole bottle, and was comfortably drunk when he suggested we go next door and look it over one more time. I was planning on visiting Lisa the next day, and I knew I had to start somewhere building myself up for that, so I agreed to go with him.

  We inspected the kitchen. The fire had blackened the counters and melted some linoleum, but not much else. Water had made a mess of the place. There was a brown stain on the floor which I was able to look at with no emotion.

  So we went back to the living room, and one of the computers was turned on. There was a short message on the screen.

  IF YOU WISH TO KNOW MORE

  PRESS ENTER ■

  “Don’t do it,” I told him. But he did. He stood, blinking solemnly, as the words wiped themselves out and a new message appeared.