The John Varley Reader

by John Varley

  Charlie seemed cheerful, and cooperated with Blume’s requests. He worked through robotic instruments, and it was frustrating. But she learned to take her own blood and tissue samples and prepare them for viewing. Blume was beginning to learn something of the nature of Neuro-X, though he admitted that, working alone, it might take him years to reach a breakthrough. Charlie didn’t seem to mind.

  The isolation techniques were rigorous. The crawler brought supplies to within one hundred yards of the habitat and left them sitting there on the dust. A second crawler would come out to bring them in. Under no circumstances was anything allowed to leave the habitat, nor to come in contact with anything that was going back to the world—and, indeed, the crawler was the only thing in the latter category.

  Contact was strictly one-way. Anything could go in, but nothing could come out. That was the strength of the system, and its final weakness.

  Charlie had been living in the habitat for fifteen days when she started running a fever. Dr. Blume prescribed bed rest and aspirin, and didn’t tell Bach how worried he was.

  The next day was worse. She coughed a lot, couldn’t keep food down. Blume was determined to go out there in an isolation suit. Bach had to physically restrain him at one point, and be very firm with him until he finally calmed down and saw how foolish he was being. It would do Charlie no good for Blume to die.

  Bach called Galloway, who arrived by express liner the next day.

  By then Blume had some idea what was happening.

  “I gave her a series of vaccinations,” he said, mournfully. “It’s so standard . . . I hardly gave it a thought. Measles-D1, the Manila-strain mumps, all the normal communicable diseases we have to be so careful of in a Lunar environment. Some of them were killed viruses, some were weakened . . . and they seem to be attacking her.”

  Galloway raged at him for a while. He was too depressed to fight back. Bach just listened, withholding her own judgment.

  The next day he learned more. Charlie was getting things he had not inoculated her against, things that could have come in as hitchhikers on the supplies, or that might have been lying dormant in the habitat itself.

  He had carefully checked her thirty-year-old medical record. There had been no hint of any immune system deficiency, and it was not the kind of syndrome that could be missed. But somehow she had acquired it.

  He had a theory. He had several of them. None would save his patient.

  “Maybe the Neuro-X destroyed her immune system. But you’d think she would have succumbed to stray viruses there on the station. Unless the Neuro-X attacked the viruses, too, and changed them.”

  He mumbled things like that for hours on end as he watched Charlie waste away on his television screen.

  “For whatever reason . . . she was in a state of equilibrium there on the station. Bringing her here destroyed that. If I could understand how, I still might save her . . .”

  The screen showed a sweating, gaunt-faced little girl. Much of her hair had fallen out. She complained that her throat was very dry and she had trouble swallowing. She just keeps fighting, Bach thought, and felt the tightness in the back of her own throat.

  Charlie’s voice was still clear.

  “Tell Megan I finally finished her picture,” she said.

  “She’s right here, honey,” Bach said. “You can tell her yourself.”

  “Oh.” Charlie licked her lips with a dry tongue, and her eyes wandered around. “I can’t see much. Are you there, Megan?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Thanks for trying.” She closed her eyes, and for a moment Bach thought she was gone. Then the eyes opened again.

  “Anna-Louise?”

  “I’m still right here, darling.”

  “Anna, what’s going to happen to my dogs?”

  “I’ll take care of them,” she lied. “Don’t you worry.” Somehow she managed to keep her voice steady. It was the hardest thing she had ever done.

  “Good. Tik-Tok will tell you which ones to breed. They’re good dogs, but you can’t let them take advantage of you.”

  “I won’t.”

  Charlie coughed, and seemed to become a little smaller when she was through. She tried to lift her head, could not, and coughed again. Then she smiled, just a little bit, but enough to break Bach’s heart.

  “I’ll go see Albert,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

  “We’re right here.”

  She closed her eyes. She continued breathing raggedly for over an hour, but her eyes never opened again.

  Bach let Galloway handle the details of cleaning up and covering up. She felt listless, uninvolved. She kept seeing Charlie as she had first seen her, a painted savage in a brown tide of dogs.

  When Galloway went away, Bach stayed on at the Mozartplatz, figuring the woman would tell her if she had to get out. She went back to work, got the promotion Galloway had predicted, and began to take an interest in her new job. She evicted Ralph and his barbells from her old apartment, though she continued to pay the rent on it. She grew to like Mozartplatz even more than she had expected she would, and dreaded the day Galloway would eventually sell the place. There was a broad balcony with potted plants where she could sit with her feet propped up and look out over the whole insane buzz and clatter of the place, or prop her elbows on the rail and spit into the lake, over a mile below. The weather was going to take some getting used to, though, if she ever managed to afford a place of her own here. The management sent rainfall and windstorm schedules in the mail and she faithfully posted them in the kitchen, then always forgot and got drenched.

  The weeks turned into months. At the end of the sixth month, when Charlie was no longer haunting Bach’s dreams, Galloway showed up. For many reasons Bach was not delighted to see her, but she put on a brave face and invited her in. She was dressed this time, Earth fashion, and she seemed a lot stronger.

  “Can’t stay long,” she said, sitting on the couch Bach had secretly begun to think of as her own. She took a document out of her pocket and put it on a table near Bach’s chair. “This is the deed to this condo. I’ve signed it over to you, but I haven’t registered it yet. There are different ways to go about it, for tax purposes, so I thought I’d check with you. I told you I always pay my debts. I was hoping to do it with Charlie, but that turned out . . . well, it was more something I was doing for myself, so it didn’t count.”

  Bach was glad she had said that. She had been wondering if she would be forced to hit her.

  “This won’t pay what I owe you, but it’s a start.” She looked at Bach and raised one eyebrow. “It’s a start, whether or not you accept it. I’m hoping you won’t be too stiff-necked, but with loonies—or should I say Citizens of Luna?—I’ve found you can never be too sure.”

  Bach hesitated, but only for a split second.

  “Loonies, Lunarians . . . who cares?” She picked up the deed. “I accept.”

  Galloway nodded, and took an envelope out of the same pocket the deed had been in. She leaned back, and seemed to search for words.

  “I . . . thought I ought to tell you what I’ve done.” She waited, and Bach nodded. They both knew, without mentioning Charlie’s name, what she was talking about.

  “The dogs were painlessly put to sleep. The habitat was depressurized and irradiated for about a month, then reactivated. I had some animals sent in and they survived. So I sent in a robot on a crawler and had it bring these out. Don’t worry, they’ve been checked out a thousand ways and they’re absolutely clean.”

  She removed a few sheets of paper from the envelope and spread them out on the table. Bach leaned over and looked at the pencil sketches.

  “You remember she said she’d finally finished that picture for me? I’ve already taken that one out. But there were these others, one with your name on it, and I wondered if you wanted any of them?”

  Bach had already spotted the one she wanted. It was a self-portrait, just the head and shoulders. In it, Charlie had a faint smile . . . or
did she? It was that kind of drawing; the more she looked at it, the harder it was to tell just what Charlie had been thinking when she drew it. At the bottom it said “To Anna-Louise, my friend.”

  Bach took it and thanked Galloway, who seemed almost as anxious to leave as Bach was to have her go.

  Bach fixed herself a drink and sat back in “her” chair in “her” home. That was going to take some getting used to, but she looked forward to it.

  She picked up the drawing and studied it, sipping her drink. Frowning, she stood and went through the sliding glass doors onto her balcony. There, in the brighter light of the atrium, she held the drawing up and looked closer.

  There was somebody behind Charlie. But maybe that wasn’t right, either, maybe it was just that she had started to draw one thing, had erased it and started again. Whatever it was, there was another network of lines in the paper that were very close to the picture that was there, but slightly different.

  The longer Bach stared at it, the more she was convinced she was seeing the older woman Charlie had never had a chance to become. She seemed to be in her late thirties, not a whole lot older than Bach.

  Bach took a mouthful of liquor and was about to go back inside when a wind came up and snatched the paper from her hand.

  “Goddamn weather!” she shouted as she made a grab for it. But it was already twenty feet away, turning over and over and falling. She watched it dwindle past all hope of recovery.

  Was she relieved?

  “Can I get that for you?”

  She looked up, startled, and saw a man in a flight harness, flapping like crazy to remain stationary. Those contraptions required an amazing amount of energy, and this fellow showed it, with bulging biceps and huge thigh muscles and a chest big as a barrel. The metal wings glittered and the leather straps creaked and the sweat poured off him.

  “No thanks,” she said, then she smiled at him. “But I’d be proud to make you a drink.”

  He smiled back, asked her apartment number, and flapped off toward the nearest landing platform. Bach looked down, but the paper with Charlie’s face on it was already gone, vanished in the vast spaces of Mozartplatz.

  Bach finished her drink, then went to answer the knock on her door.

  INTRODUCTION TO “Options”

  When I was thinking about what society might be like in the Eight Worlds, naturally I was influenced by the social and political ferment that was all around me at the time. I grew up in Texas in the 1950s, where there were segregated restrooms and drinking fountains. In my life I have gone from referring to a certain minority group as something we now call “The N-word,” which I didn’t even know was pejorative, to Negroes, to “spades” when that was fashionable in the Haight-Ashbury, to Afro-Americans, to black people, to people of color, to the current usage of African-American. My racism was of the unconscious, liberal variety. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was praised from the pulpit of my Lutheran church for the work he was doing in the South, but nobody in the pews, or in the pulpit for that matter, would have wanted him to marry their daughter.

  When I began writing, we were in the most exciting years of the feminist movement. A few women somewhere burned a few bras as a lark, someone took a picture of it, and people started calling feminists bra-burners. That, or women’s-libbers, lesbians, ball-busters, or harpies. A favorite word to describe them was “strident.” I read a lot of the literature, saw their point, and did my best to shake off my sexism as I had shed myself of racism.

  The gay rights movement was just getting started, hadn’t really made a lot of noise yet. No need to go through the terms that were thrown around at them.

  We have come such a long way. Consider, in this day and age when Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a big hit on television, that in my high school days it would have been about the deadliest insult you could hurl. Fightin’ words. Now it is a word of pride. Sure, there are still toothless rednecks who feel themselves superior to Nelson Mandela because they are white. There are those who love to beat the crap out of people because of who they choose to go to bed with. There are those like a certain big fat lying hypocritical junkie crybaby felon who calls progressive women “feminazis.” There is much still to do and I don’t know where it will all end up, but compare today in America to 1955 in Texas, like I do, and you will know there has been much progress.

  Back when I started writing, everyone was exploring sex roles, redefining what it was to be a man or a woman, of whatever orientation. Nature or nurture? Is testosterone or estrogen all-powerful? Is a man gay because his mother made him wear dresses, or was he born that way? I spent a long time thinking about sex, and came to the conclusion that there is not one statement you can make about all men or about all women that is valid. People are now seeking equal rights for “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered.” I’m not even sure if that includes hermaphrodites, or the small minority of people who just plain don’t have any interest in sex at all. Neuters.

  So what would things be like in . . . two or three hundred years? (I was always deliberately vague about dates in the Eight Worlds stories.) With the Earth subjugated by aliens who, if they weren’t actually God, could pinch-hit for him?

  If you take a jump that far ahead in the world of science fiction, you can postulate absolutely anything you want. Just look what has happened in fifty years in the field of electronics. Not a single one of the great technological writers came anywhere near imagining the computers we have now, not Asimov, not Clarke, not Heinlein. (They imagined plenty of things we don’t have, like 3D television.)

  I decided that the advances in biology would be far beyond what we could imagine in 1974. We’re well on our way there thirty years later. The human genome has been mapped; nanotechnology is still in its infancy but presents stunning possibilities in medicine. What could all this mean to that great engine that drives all human endeavors, the primal urge of sex?

  One of the key postulates of the Eight Worlds was that it would be possible to jump over the divide of gender, to see how the other 50 percent experiences the world. I wasn’t talking about sex-reassignment surgery, which merely rearranges some skin and I’m sure is a great comfort to those who feel they were born in the wrong body, but does nothing at the genetic level. And you can’t go back next week and tell the doctor it was all a big mistake, I hate being female and I want my penis back. I was considering a quick, painless, and totally reversible procedure so complete that someone who had once been male would now be able to bear a child. How would that affect society?

  (How would this be done? I haven’t got a clue, any more than Robert Heinlein had a clue about silicon chips, which were on the horizon, or Larry Niven has about hyperspace, which may or may not be in the future. In science fiction you usually just skip over all that hard stuff—how it was developed, how it works—and simply say, “Beam me up, Scotty!”)

  I wrote several stories exploring these possibilities, including my very first sale, “Picnic on Nearside.” I must say I had considerable trepidation about how these stories might be received. Trepidation? I was scared stiff. Would I be seen as some sort of pervert? Would people call me a queer? (I’ll admit, that still would have hurt me back then. Hey, it was the worst thing you could say about a guy.)

  To my relief, they were well received. There were even a few people who, reading some of the stories, wondered if I was a woman writing under a pen name, as “James Tiptree Jr.” turned out to be. I took this as flattering. I took it as meaning that I got it right, or at least as right as a male could.

  Over the years I have posed the question to many people, on panels and in discussions. If you could change sex, easily, painlessly, and most of all, reversibly, would you buy a ticket on that particular weekend cruise? The answers have been almost unanimous: sign me up.

  Now, I know science fiction readers are an adventurous crew, I know there are millions and millions of others who would be scandalized by the very idea, would sooner cut off their own legs
with a hacksaw . . . but what if it was a technology that had been around for a hundred years? Except for oddball religious cults, like Christinanity or Islam, I don’t think there would be many left who wouldn’t try it for a day or two, like teenagers sneaking their first beer or cigarette if for no other reason.

  Terry Carr had reprinted a few of these stories in his Best of the Year collections, and one day he posed me a question. I like these stories, he said, but they all happen in a time when sex changing is as accepted as boarding a jet plane and flying to Miami. What I’d like to know is, how do we get from here to there? What was it like when this was a new technology? What would it do to society, and particularly, to the family? Write me a story like that, he said.

  I did, and this is it. I sent it to him for publication in his anthology of original stories, Universe.

  He liked it, and handed it to his wife, Carol, for a second opinion. She read it, Terry told me, smiling from time to time. Then she came to the last line and let out a shriek. “That last line is awful,” she said. “It completely undercuts everything he was saying about gender roles.”

  In my defense, Terry hadn’t gotten it, either, but when Carol was through blistering his ears, he sure did. He pointed it out to me, and when I saw what she was talking about I wanted to sink through the floor. I saw what she meant. It was more than awful, it was stupid.

  It was the work of five minutes to write a new last line, and Carol smiled again.

  Maybe you want to know what that original last line was.

  No way in hell.

  OPTIONS

  CLEO HATED BREAKFAST. Her energy level was lowest in the morning, but not so the children’s. There was always some school crisis, something that had to be located at the last minute, some argument that had to be settled.

  This morning it was a bowl of cereal spilled in Lilli’s lap. Cleo hadn’t seen it happen; her attention had been diverted momentarily by Feather, her youngest.