The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Suddenly she knew what was happening.

  “It’s shooting at us!” she shouted. Everyone fell silent, and as they were still turning to look at her, she yelled again.

  “Suit up.”

  Her voice was drowned out by the sound every Lunarian dreads: the high, haunting shriek of escaping air.

  Step number one, she heard a long-ago instructor say. See to your own pressure integrity first. You can’t help anybody, man, woman or child, if you pass out before you get into your suit.

  It was a five-second operation to don and seal her helmet, one she had practiced a thousand times as a child. She glimpsed a great hole in the plastic roof. Debris was pouring out of it, swept up in the sudden wind: paper, clothing, a couple of helmets . . .

  Sealed up, she looked around and realized many of these people were doomed. They were not in their suits, and there was little chance they could put them on in time.

  She remembered the next few seconds in a series of vivid impressions.

  A boulder, several tons of dry lunar rock, crashed down on a bank of television monitors.

  A chubby little man, his hands shaking, unable to get his helmet over his bald head. Bach tore it from his hands, slapped it in place, and gave it a twist hard enough to knock him down.

  Joy and Jay, as good as dead, killed by the impossibility of fitting the mechanical arms into their suits, holding each other calmly in metallic embrace.

  Beyond the black line, a tour bus rising slowly in the air, turning end over end. A hundred of the hideous gray domes of explosions growing like mushrooms all through the valley.

  And there was Galloway. She was going as fast as she could, intense concentration on her face as she stumbled along after her helmet, which was rolling on the ground. Blood had leaked from one corner of her nose. It was almost soundless in the remains of the dome now.

  Bach snagged the helmet, and hit Galloway with a flying tackle. Just like a drill: put helmet in place, twist, hit three snap-interlocks, then the emergency pressurization switch. She saw Galloway howl in pain and try to put her hands to her ears.

  Lying there she looked up as the last big segment of the dome material lifted in a dying wind to reveal . . . Tango Charlie.

  It was a little wheel rolling on the horizon. No bigger than a coin.

  She blinked.

  And it was here. Vast, towering, coming directly at her through a hell of burning dust.

  It was the dust that finally made the lasers visible. The great spokes of light were flashing on and off in millisecond bursts, and in each pulse a trillion dust motes were vaporized in an eyeball-frying purple light.

  It was impossible that she saw it for more than a tenth of a second, but it seemed much longer. The sight would remain with her, and not just in memory. For days afterward her vision was scored with a spiderweb of purple lines.

  But much worse was the awesome grandeur of the thing, the whirling menace of it as it came rushing out of the void. That picture would last much longer than a few days. It would come out only at night, in dreams that would wake her for years, drenched in sweat.

  And the last strong image she would carry away from the valley was of Galloway, turned over now, pointing her crystal cane at the wheel, already far away on the horizon. A line of red laser light came out of the end of the cane and stretched away into infinity.

  “Wow!” said Charlotte Isolde Hill Perkins-Smith. “Wow, Tik-Tok, that was great! Let’s do it again.”

  Hovering in the dead center of the hub, Charlie had watched all of the encounter. It had been a lot like she imagined a roller-coaster would be when she watched the films in Tik-Tok’s memory. If it had a fault—and she wasn’t complaining, far from it—it was that the experience had been too short. For almost an hour she had watched the moon get bigger, until it no longer seemed round and the landscape was rolling by beneath her. But she’d seen that much before. This time it just got larger and larger, and faster and faster, until she was scooting along at about a zillion miles an hour. Then there was a lot of flashing lights . . . and gradually, the ground got farther away again. It was still back there, dwindling, no longer very interesting.

  “I’m glad you liked it,” Tik-Tok said.

  “Only one thing. How come I had to put on my pressure suit?”

  “Just a precaution.”

  She shrugged, and made her way to the elevator.

  When she got out at the rim, she frowned. There were alarms sounding, far around the rim on the wheel.

  “We got a problem?” she asked.

  “Minor,” Tik-Tok said.

  “What happened?”

  “We got hit by some rocks.”

  “We must of passed real close!”

  “Charlie, if you’d been down here when we passed, you could have reached out and written your name on a rock.”

  She giggled at that idea, then hurried off to see to the dogs.

  It was about two hours later that Anna-Louise called. Charlie was inclined to ignore it, she had so much to do, but in the end, she sat down in front of the camera. Anna-Louise was there, and sitting beside her was another woman.

  “Are you okay, Charlie?” Anna wanted to know.

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Damn, she thought. She wasn’t supposed to answer a question with another question. But then, what right did Anna have to ask her to do that?

  “I was wondering if you were watching a little while ago, when you passed so close to the moon.”

  “I sure was. It was great.”

  There was a short pause. The two women looked at each other, then Anna-Louise sighed, and faced Charlie again.

  “Charlie, there are a few things I have to tell you.”

  As in most disasters involving depressurization, there was not a great demand for first aid. Most of the bad injuries were fatal.

  Galloway was not hearing too well and Bach still had spots before her eyes; Hoeffer hadn’t even bumped his head.

  The body-count was not complete, but it was going to be high.

  For a perilous hour after the passage, there was talk of shooting Tango Charlie out of the sky.

  Much of the advisory team had already gathered in the meeting room by the time Bach and Hoeffer arrived—with Galloway following closely behind. A hot debate was in progress. People recognized Galloway, and a few seemed inclined to question her presence here, but Hoeffer shut them up quickly. A deal had been struck in the PTP, on the way back from the disaster. The fix was in, and Megan Galloway was getting an exclusive on the story. Galloway had proved to Hoeffer that Joy and Jay had kept tapes of his security lapse.

  The eventual explanation for the unprovoked and insane attack was simple. The Charlie Station Computer had been instructed to fire upon any object approaching within five kilometers. It had done so, faithfully, for thirty years, not that it ever had much to shoot at. The close approach of Luna must have been an interesting problem. Tik-Tok was no fool. Certainly he would know the consequences of his actions. But a computer did not think at all like a human, no matter how much it might sound like one. There were rigid hierarchies in a brain like Tik-Tok. One part of him might realize something was foolish, but be helpless to override a priority order.

  Analysis of the pattern of laser strikes helped to confirm this. The hits were totally random. Vehicles, domes, and people had not been targeted; however, if they were in the way, they were hit.

  The one exception to the randomness concerned the black line Bach had seen. Tik-Tok had found a way to avoid shooting directly ahead of himself without violating his priority order. Thus, he avoided stirring up debris that Charlie Station would be flying through in another few seconds.

  The decision was made to take no reprisals on Tango Charlie. Nobody was happy about it, but no one could suggest anything short of total destruction.

  But action had to be taken now. Very soon the public was going to wonder why this dangerous object had not been destroyed before the approach. The senior police present
and the representatives of the Mayor’s office all agreed that the press would have to be let in. They asked Galloway if they could have her cooperation in the management of this phase.

  And Bach watched as, with surprising speed, Megan Galloway took over the meeting.

  “You need time right now,” she said, at one point. “The best way to get it is to play the little-girl angle, and play it hard. You were not so heartless as to endanger the little girl—and you had no reason to believe the station was any kind of threat. What you have to do now is tell the truth about what we know, and what’s been done.”

  “How about the immortality angle?” someone asked.

  “What about it? It’s going to leak someday. Might as well get it out in front of us.”

  “But it will prejudice the public in favor of . . .” Wilhelm looked around her, and decided not to finish her objection.

  “It’s a price we have to pay,” Galloway said, smoothly. “You folks will do what you think is right. I’m sure of that. You wouldn’t let public opinion influence your decision.”

  Nobody had anything to say to that. Bach managed not to laugh.

  “The big thing is to answer the questions before they get asked. I suggest you get started on your statements, then call in the press. In the meantime, Corporal Bach has invited me to listen in on her next conversation with Charlie Perkins-Smith, so I’ll leave you now.”

  Bach led Galloway down the corridor toward the operations room, shaking her head in admiration. She looked over her shoulder.

  “I got to admit it. You’re very smooth.”

  “It’s my profession. You’re pretty smooth, yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I owe you. I’m afraid I owe you more than I’ll be able to repay.”

  Bach stopped, honestly bewildered.

  “You saved my life,” Galloway shouted. “Thank you!”

  “So what if I did? You don’t owe me anything. It’s not the custom.”

  “What’s not the custom?”

  “You can be grateful, sure. I’d be, if somebody pressurized me. But it would be an insult to try to pay me back for it. Like on the desert, you know, you have to give water to somebody dying of thirst.”

  “Not in the deserts I’ve been to,” Galloway said. They were alone in the hallway. Galloway seemed distressed, and Bach felt awkward. “We seem to be at a cultural impasse. I feel I owe you a lot; and you say it’s nothing.”

  “No problem.” Bach pointed out. “You were going to help me get promoted out of this stinking place. Do that, and we’ll call it even.”

  Galloway was shaking her head.

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to, now. You know that fat man you stuffed into a helmet, before you got to me? He asked me about you. He’s the Mayor of Clavius. He’ll be talking to the Mayor of New Dresden, and you’ll get the promotion and a couple of medals and maybe a reward, too.”

  They regarded each other uneasily. Bach knew that gratitude could equal resentment. She thought she could see some of that in Galloway’s eyes. But there was determination, too. Megan Galloway paid her debts. She had been paying one to Q.M. Cooper for ten years.

  By unspoken agreement they left it at that, and went to talk to Charlie.

  Most of the dogs didn’t like the air blower. Mistress Too White O’Hock was the exception. 2-White would turn her face into the stream of warm air as Charlie directed the hose over her sable pelt, then she would let her tongue hang out in an expression of such delight that Charlie would usually end up laughing at her.

  Charlie brushed the fine hair behind 2-White’s legs, the hair that was white almost an inch higher than it should be on a champion Sheltie. Just one little inch, and 2-White was sterilized. She would have been a fine mother. Charlie had seen her looking at puppies whelped by other mothers, and she knew it made 2-White sad.

  But you can’t have everything in this world. Tik-Tok had said that often enough. And you can’t let all your dogs breed, or pretty soon you’ll be knee deep in dogs. Tik-Tok said that, too.

  In fact, Tik-Tok said a lot of things Charlie wished were not true. But he had never lied to her.

  “Were you listening?” she asked.

  “During your last conversation? Of course I was.”

  Charlie put 2-White down on the floor, and summoned the next dog. This was Engelbert, who wasn’t a year old yet, and still inclined to be frisky when he shouldn’t be. Charlie had to scold him before he would be still.

  “Some of the things she said,” Tik-Tok began. “It seemed like she disturbed you. Like how old you are.”

  “That’s silly,” Charlie said, quickly. “I knew how old I am.” This was the truth . . . and yet it wasn’t everything. Her first four dogs were all dead. The oldest had been thirteen. There had been many dogs since then. Right now, the oldest dog was sixteen, and sick. He wouldn’t last much longer.

  “I just never added it up,” Charlie said, truthfully.

  “There was never any reason to.”

  “But I don’t grow up,” she said, softly. “Why is that, Tik-Tok?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie.”

  “Anna said if I go down to the moon, they might be able to find out.”

  Tik-Tok didn’t say anything.

  “Was she telling the truth? About all those people who got hurt?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have got mad at her.”

  Again, Tik-Tok was silent. Charlie had been very angry. Anna and a new woman, Megan, had told her all these awful things, and when they were done Charlie knocked over the television equipment and went away. That had been almost a day ago, and they had been calling back almost all the time.

  “Why did you do it?” she said.

  “I didn’t have any choice.”

  Charlie accepted that. Tik-Tok was a mechanical man, not like her at all. He was a faithful guardian and the closest thing she had to a friend, but she knew he was different. For one thing, he didn’t have a body. She had sometimes wondered if this inconvenienced him any, but she had never asked.

  “Is my mother really dead?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie stopped brushing. Engelbert looked around at her, then waited patiently until she told him he could get down.

  “I guess I knew that.”

  “I thought you did. But you never asked.”

  “She was someone to talk to,” Charlie explained. She left the grooming room and walked down the promenade. Several dogs followed behind her, trying to get her to play.

  She went into her mother’s room and stood for a moment looking at the thing in the bed. Then she moved from machine to machine, flipping switches, until everything was quiet. And when she was done, that was the only change in the room. The machines no longer hummed, rumbled, and clicked. The thing on the bed hadn’t changed at all. Charlie supposed she could keep on talking to it, if she wanted to, but she suspected it wouldn’t be the same.

  She wondered if she ought to cry. Maybe she should ask Tik-Tok, but he’d never been very good with those kind of questions. Maybe it was because he couldn’t cry himself, so he didn’t know when people ought to cry. But the fact was, Charlie had felt a lot sadder at Albert’s funeral.

  In the end, she sang her hymm again, then closed and locked the door behind her. She would never go in there again.

  “She’s back,” Steiner called across the room. Bach and Galloway hastily put down their cups of coffee and hurried over to Bach’s office.

  “She just plugged this camera in,” Steiner explained, as they took their seats. “Looks a little different, doesn’t she?”

  Bach had to agree. They had glimpsed her in other cameras as she went about her business. Then, about an hour ago, she had entered her mother’s room again. From there, she had gone to her own room, and when she emerged, she was a different girl. Her hair was washed and combed. She wore a dress that seemed to have started off as a woman’s blouse. The sleeves had been
cut off and bits of it had been inexpertly taken in. There was red polish on her nails. Her face was heavily made up. It was overdone, and completely wrong for someone of her apparent age, but it was not the wild, almost tribal paint she had worn before.

  Charlie was seated behind a huge wooden desk, facing the camera.

  “Good morning, Anna and Megan,” she said, solemnly.

  “Good morning, Charlie,” Galloway said.

  “I’m sorry I shouted at you,” Charlie said. Her hands were folded carefully in front of her. There was a sheet of paper just to the left of them; other than that, the desk was bare. “I was confused and upset, and I needed some time to think about the things you said.”

  “That’s all right,” Bach told her. She did her best to conceal a yawn. She and Galloway had been awake for a day and a half. There had been a few catnaps, but they were always interrupted by sightings of Charlie.

  “I’ve talked things over with Tik-Tok,” Charlie went on. “And I turned my mother off. You were right. She was dead, anyway.”

  Bach could think of nothing to say to that. She glanced at Galloway, but could read nothing in the other woman’s face.

  “I’ve decided what I want to do,” Charlie said. “But first I—”

  “Charlie,” Galloway said, quickly, “could you show me what you have there on the table?”

  There was a brief silence in the room. Several people turned to look at Galloway, but nobody said anything. Bach was about to, but Galloway was making a motion with her hand, under the table, where no one but Bach was likely to see it. Bach decided to let it ride for the moment.

  Charlie was looking embarrassed. She reached for the paper, glanced at it, then looked back at the camera.

  “I drew this picture for you,” she said. “Because I was sorry I shouted.”

  “Could I see it?”

  Charlie jumped down off the chair and came around to hold the picture up. She seemed proud of it, and she had every right to be. Here at last was visual proof that Charlie was not what she seemed to be. No eight-year-old could have drawn this fine pencil portrait of a Sheltie.

  “This is for Anna,” she said.