The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  “Sheepdog, sir.” She glanced down at him, and interpreted the motion of his pipestem to mean he wanted to know more. “A variant of the Collie, developed on the Shetland Isles of Scotland. A working dog, very bright, gentle, good with children.”

  “You’re an authority on dogs, Corporal Bach?”

  “No, sir. I’ve only seen them in the zoo. I took the liberty of researching this matter before bringing it to your attention, sir.”

  He nodded, which she hoped was a good sign.

  “What else did you learn?”

  “They come in three varieties: black, blue merle, and sable. They were developed from Icelandic and Greenland stock, with infusions of Collie and possible Spaniel genes. Specimens were first shown at Cruft’s in London in 1906, and in America—”

  “No, no. I don’t give a damn about Shelties.”

  “Ah. We have confirmed that there were four Shelties present on Tango Charlie at the time of the disaster. They were being shipped to the zoo at Clavius. There were no other dogs of any breed resident at the station. We haven’t determined how it is that their survival was overlooked during the investigation of the tragedy.”

  “Somebody obviously missed them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hoeffer jabbed at a holo with his pipe.

  “What’s this? Have you researched that yet?”

  Bach ignored what she thought might be sarcasm. Hoeffer was pointing to the opening in the animal’s side.

  “The computer believes it to be a birth defect, sir. The skin is not fully formed. It left an opening into the gut.”

  “And what’s this?”

  “Intestines. The bitch would lick the puppy clean after birth. When she found this malformation, she would keep licking as long as she tasted blood. The intestines were pulled out, and the puppy died.”

  “It couldn’t have lived anyway. Not with that hole.”

  “No, sir. If you’ll notice, the forepaws are also malformed. The computer feels the puppy was stillborn.”

  Hoeffer studied the various holos in a blue cloud of pipe smoke, then sighed and leaned back in his chair.

  “It’s fascinating, Bach. After all these years, there are dogs alive on Tango Charlie. And breeding, too. Thank you for bringing it to my attention.”

  Now it was Bach’s turn to sigh. She hated this part. Now it was her job to explain it to him.

  “It’s even more fascinating than that, sir. We knew Tango Charlie was largely pressurized. So it’s understandable that a colony of dogs could breed there. But, barring an explosion, which would have spread a large amount of debris into the surrounding space, this dead puppy must have left the station through an airlock.”

  His face clouded, and he looked at her in gathering outrage.

  “Are you saying . . . there are humans alive aboard Tango Charlie?”

  “Sir, it has to be that . . . or some very intelligent dogs.”

  Dogs can’t count.

  Charlie kept telling herself that as she knelt on the edge of forever and watched little Albert dwindling, hurrying out to join the whirling stars. She wondered if he would become a star himself. It seemed possible.

  She dropped the rose after him and watched it dwindle, too. Maybe it would become a rosy star.

  She cleared her throat. She had thought of things to say, but none of them sounded good. So she decided on a hymn, the only one she knew, taught her long ago by her mother, who used to sing it for her father, who was a spaceship pilot. Her voice was clear and true.

  Lord guard and guide all those who fly Through Thy great void above the sky. Be with them all on ev’ry flight, In radiant day or darkest night. Oh, hear our prayer, extend Thy grace To those in peril deep in space.

  She knelt silently for a while, wondering if God was listening, and if the hymn was good for dogs, too. Albert sure was flying through the void, so it seemed to Charlie he ought to be deserving of some grace.

  Charlie was perched on a sheet of twisted metal on the bottom, or outermost layer of the wheel. There was no gravity anywhere in the wheel, but since it was spinning, the farther down you went the heavier you felt. Just beyond the sheet of metal was a void, a hole ripped in the wheel’s outer skin, fully twenty meters across. The metal had been twisted out and down by the force of some long-ago explosion, and this part of the wheel was a good place to walk carefully, if you had to walk here at all.

  She picked her way back to the airlock, let herself in, and sealed the outer door behind her. She knew it was useless, knew there was nothing but vacuum on the other side, but it was something that had been impressed on her very strongly. When you go through a door, you lock it behind you. Lock it tight. If you don’t, the breathsucker will get you in the middle of the night.

  She shivered, and went to the next lock, which also led only to vacuum, as did the one beyond that. Finally, at the fifth airlock, she stepped into a tiny room that had breathable atmosphere, if a little chilly. Then she went through yet another lock before daring to take off her helmet.

  At her feet was a large plastic box, and inside it, resting shakily on a scrap of bloody blanket and not at all at peace with the world, were two puppies. She picked them up, one in each hand—which didn’t make them any happier—and nodded in satisfaction.

  She kissed them, and put them back in the box. Tucking it under her arm, she faced another door. She could hear claws scratching at this one.

  “Down, Fuchsia,” she shouted. “Down, momma-dog.” The scratching stopped, and she opened the last door and stepped through.

  Fuchsia O’Charlie Station was sitting obediently, her ears pricked up, her head cocked and her eyes alert with that total, quivering concentration only a mother dog can achieve.

  “I’ve got ’em, Foosh,” Charlie said. She went down on one knee and allowed Fuchsia to put her paws up on the edge of the box. “See? There’s Helga, and there’s Conrad, and there’s Albert, and there’s Conrad, and Helga. One, two, three, four, eleventy-nine and six makes twenty-seven. See?”

  Fuchsia looked at them doubtfully, then leaned in to pick one up, but Charlie pushed her away.

  “I’ll carry them,” she said, and they set out along the darkened corridor. Fuchsia kept her eyes on the box, whimpering with the desire to get to her pups.

  Charlie called this part of the wheel The Swamp. Things had gone wrong here a long time ago, and the more time went by, the worse it got. She figured it had been started by the explosion—which, in its turn, had been an indirect result of The Dying. The explosion had broken important pipes and wires. Water had started to pool in the corridor. Drainage pumps kept it from turning into an impossible situation. Charlie didn’t come here very often.

  Recently plants had started to grow in the swamp. They were ugly things, corpse-white or dental-plaque-yellow or mushroom-gray. There was very little light for them, but they didn’t seem to mind. She sometimes wondered if they were plants at all. Once she thought she had seen a fish. It had been white and blind. Maybe it had been a toad. She didn’t like to think of that.

  Charlie sloshed through the water, the box of puppies under one arm and her helmet under the other. Fuchsia bounced unhappily along with her.

  At last they were out of it, and back into regions she knew better. She turned right and went three flights up a staircase—dogging the door behind her at every landing—then out into the Promenade Deck, which she called home.

  About half the lights were out. The carpet was wrinkled and musty, and worn in the places Charlie frequently walked. Parts of the walls were streaked with water stains, or grew mildew in leprous patches. Charlie seldom noticed these things unless she was looking through her pictures from the old days, or was coming up from the maintenance levels, as she was now. Long ago, she had tried to keep things clean, but the place was just too big for a little girl. Now she limited her housekeeping to her own living quarters—and like any little girl, sometimes forgot about that, too.

  She stripped off her suit a
nd stowed it in the locker where she always kept it, then padded a short way down the gentle curve of the corridor to the Presidential Suite, which was hers. As she entered, with Fuchsia on her heels, a long-dormant television camera mounted high on the wall stuttered to life. Its flickering red eye came on, and it turned jerkily on its mount.

  Anna-Louise Bach entered the darkened monitoring room, mounted the five stairs to her office at the back, sat down, and put her bare feet up on her desk. She tossed her uniform cap, caught it on one foot, and twirled it idly there. She laced her fingers together, leaned her chin on them, and thought about it.

  Corporal Steiner, her number two on C Watch, came up to the platform, pulled a chair close, and sat beside her.

  “Well? How did it go?”

  “You want some coffee?” Bach asked him. When he nodded, she pressed a button in the arm of her chair. “Bring two coffees to the Watch Commander’s station. Wait a minute . . . bring a pot, and two mugs.” She put her feet down and turned to face him.

  “He did figure out there had to be a human aboard.”

  Steiner frowned. “You must have given him a clue.”

  “Well, I mentioned the airlock angle.”

  “See? He’d never have seen it without that.”

  “All right. Call it a draw.”

  “So then what did our leader want to do?”

  Bach had to laugh. Hoeffer was unable to find his left testicle without a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.

  “He came to a quick decision. We had to send a ship out there at once, find the survivors and bring them to New Dresden with all possible speed.”

  “And then you reminded him . . .”

  “. . . that no ship had been allowed to get within five kilometers of Tango Charlie for thirty years. That even our probe had to be small, slow, and careful to operate in the vicinity, and that if it crossed the line it would be destroyed, too. He was all set to call the Oberluftwaffe headquarters and ask for a cruiser. I pointed out that A, we already had a robot cruiser on station under the reciprocal trade agreement with Allgemein Fernsehen Gesellschaft; B, that it was perfectly capable of defeating Tango Charlie without any more help; but C, any battle like that would kill whoever was on Charlie; but that in any case, D, even if a ship could get to Charlie there was a good reason for not doing so.”

  Emil Steiner winced, pretending pain in the head.

  “Anna, Anna, you should never list things to him like that, and if you do, you should never get to point D.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re lecturing him. If you have to make a speech like that, make it a set of options, which I’m sure you’ve already seen, sir, but which I will list for you, sir, to get all our ducks in a row, Sir.”

  Bach grimaced, knowing he was right. She was too impatient.

  The coffee arrived, and while they poured and took the first sips, she looked around the big monitoring room. This is where impatience gets you.

  In some ways, it could have been a lot worse. It looked like a good job. Though only a somewhat senior Recruit/Apprentice Bach was in command of thirty other R/As on her watch, and had the rank of Corporal. The working conditions were good: clean, high-tech surroundings, low job stress, the opportunity to command, however fleetingly. Even the coffee was good.

  But it was a dead-end, and everyone knew it. It was a job many rookies held for a year or two before being moved on to more important and prestigious assignments: part of a routine career. When an R/A stayed in the monitoring room for five years, even as a watch commander, someone was sending her a message. Bach understood the message, had realized the problem long ago. But she couldn’t seem to do anything about it. Her personality was too abrasive for routine promotions. Sooner or later she angered her commanding officers in one way or another. She was far too good for anything overtly negative to appear in her yearly evaluations. But there were ways such reports could be written, good things left unsaid, a lack of excitement on the part of the reporting officer . . . all things that added up to stagnation.

  So here she was in Navigational Tracking, not really a police function at all, but something the New Dresden Police Department had handled for a hundred years and would probably handle for a hundred more.

  It was a necessary job. So is garbage collection. But it was not what she had signed up for, ten years ago.

  Ten years! God, it sounded like a long time. Any of the skilled guilds were hard to get into, but the average apprenticeship in New Dresden was six years.

  She put down her coffee cup and picked up a hand mike.

  “Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo, Do you read?”

  She listened, and heard only background hiss. Her troops were trying every available channel with the same message, but this one had been the main channel back when TC-38 had been a going concern.

  “Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Come in, please.”

  Again, nothing.

  Steiner put his cup close to hers, and leaned back in his chair.

  “So did he remember what the reason was? Why we can’t approach?”

  “He did, eventually. His first step was to slap a top-priority security rating on the whole affair, and he was confident the government would back him up.”

  “We got that part. The alert came through about twenty minutes ago.”

  “I figured it wouldn’t do any harm to let him send it. He needed to do something. And it’s what I would have done.”

  “It’s what you did, as soon as the pictures came in.”

  “You know I don’t have the authority for that.”

  “Anna, when you get that look in your eye and say, ‘If one of you bastards breathes a word of this to anyone, I will cut out your tongue and eat it for breakfast’ . . . well, people listen.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “Your very words.”

  “No wonder they all love me so much.”

  She brooded on that for a while, until T/A3 Klosinski hurried up the steps to her office.

  “Corporal Bach, we’ve finally seen something,” he said.

  Bach looked at the big semicircle of flat television screens, over three hundred of them, on the wall facing her desk. Below the screens were the members of her watch, each at a desk/console, each with a dozen smaller screens to monitor. Most of the large screens displayed the usual data from the millions of objects monitored by Nav/Track radar, cameras, and computers. But fully a quarter of them now showed curved, empty corridors where nothing moved, or equally lifeless rooms. In some of them skeletons could be seen.

  The three of them faced the largest screen on Bach’s desk, and unconsciously leaned a little closer as a picture started to form. At first it was just streaks of color. Klosinski consulted a datapad on his wrist.

  “This is from camera 14/P/delta. It’s on the Promenade Deck. Most of that deck was a sort of PX, with shopping areas, theaters, clubs, so forth. But one sector had VIP suites, for when people visited the station. This one’s just outside the Presidential Suite.”

  “What’s wrong with the picture?”

  Klosinski sighed.

  “Same thing wrong with all of them. The cameras are old. We’ve got about five percent of them in some sort of working order, which is a miracle. The Charlie computer is fighting us for every one.”

  “I figured it would.”

  “In just a minute . . . there! Did you see it?”

  All Bach could see was a stretch of corridor, maybe a little fancier than some of the views already up on the wall, but not what Bach thought of as VIP. She peered at it, but nothing changed.

  “No, nothing’s going to happen now. This is a tape. We got it when the camera first came on.” He fiddled with his data pad, and the screen resumed its multicolored static. “I rewound it. Watch the door on the left.”

  This time Klosinski stopped the tape on the first recognizable image on the screen.

  “This is someone’s leg,” he said, pointing. “And this is the tail of
a dog.”

  Bach studied it. The leg was bare, and so was the foot. It could be seen from just below the knee.

  “That looks like a Sheltie’s tail,” she said.

  “We thought so, too.”

  “What about the foot?”

  “Look at the door,” Steiner said. “In relation to the door, the leg looks kind of small.”

  “You’re right,” Bach said. A child? she wondered. “Okay. Watch this one around the clock. I suppose if there was a camera in that room, you’d have told me about it.”

  “I guess VIP’s don’t like to be watched.”

  “Then carry on as you were. Activate every camera you can, and tape them all, I’ve got to take this to Hoeffer.”

  She started down out of her wall-less office, adjusting her cap at an angle she hoped looked smart and alert.

  “Anna,” Steiner called. She looked back.

  “How did Hoeffer take it when you reminded him Tango Charlie only has six more days left?”

  “He threw his pipe at me.”

  Charlie put Conrad and Helga back in the whelping box, along with Dieter and Inga. All four of them were squealing, which was only natural, but the quality of their squeals changed when Fuchsia jumped in with them, sat down on Dieter, then plopped over on her side. There was nothing that sounded or looked more determined than a blind, hungry, newborn puppy, Charlie thought.

  The babies found the swollen nipples, and Fuchsia fussed over them, licking their little bottoms. Charlie held her breath. It almost looked as if she was counting her brood, and that certainly wouldn’t do.

  “Good dog, Fuchsia,” she cooed, to distract her, and it did. Fuchsia looked up, said I haven’t got time for you now, Charlie, and went back to her chores.

  “How was the funeral?” asked Tik-Tok the Clock.

  “Shut up!” Charlie hissed. “You . . . you big idiot! It’s okay, Foosh.”

  Fuchsia was already on her side, letting the pups nurse and more or less ignoring both Charlie and Tik-Tok. Charlie got up and went into the bathroom. She closed and secured the door behind her.