Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  "Me?"

  "Yes. Take it." He handed it to her, and as he did so, he nicked it with his thumbnail. Red light spilled into her hands, flowed between her fingers, seemed to soak into her skin. When it was over, the crystal still pulsed, but dimmed. Her hands were trembling.

  "It felt very, very hot," she said.

  "That was the essence of the Princess."

  "And the Prince? Is he still looking for her?"

  "No one knows. I think he's still out there, and someday he will come back for her."

  "And what then?"

  He looked away from her. "I can't say. I think, even though you are lovely, and even though you have the Star stone, that he will just pine away. He loved her very much."

  "I'd take care of him," she promised.

  "Maybe that would help. But I have a problem now. I don't have the heart to tell the Prince that she is dead. Yet I feel that the Star stone will draw him to it one day. If he comes and finds you, I fear for him. I think perhaps I should take the stone to a far part of the galaxy, someplace he could never find it. Then at least he would never know. It might be better that way."

  "But I'd help him," she said earnestly. "I promise I'd wait for him, and when he came, I'd take her place. You'll see."

  He studied her. Perhaps she would. He looked into her eyes for a long time, and at last let her see his satisfaction.

  "Very well. You can keep it, then."

  "I'll wait for him," she said. "You'll see."

  She was very tired, almost asleep.

  "You should go home now," he suggested.

  "Maybe I could just lie down for a moment," she said.

  "All right." He lifted her gently and placed her supine on the ground. He stood looking at her, then knelt beside her and began to stroke her forehead gently. She opened her eyes with no alarm, then closed them again. He continued to stroke her.

  Twenty minutes later he left the playground, alone.

  He was always depressed afterwards. It was worse than usual this time. She had been much nicer than he had imagined at first. Who could have guessed such a romantic heart beat beneath all that dirt?

  He found a phone booth several blocks away. Punching her name into information yielded a fifteendigit number, which he called. He held his hand over the camera eye.

  A woman's face appeared on his screen.

  "Your daughter is in the playground, at the south end by the pool, under the bushes," he said. He gave the address of the playground.

  "We were so worried! What... is she... who is—"

  He hung up and hurried away.

  Most of the other pushers thought he was sick. Not that it mattered. Pushers were a tolerant group when it came to other pushers, and especially when it came to anything a pusher might care to do to a puller. He wished he had never told anyone how he spent his leave time, but he had, and now he had to live with it.

  So, while they didn't care if he amused himself by pulling the legs and arms off infant puller pups, they were all just back from ground leave and couldn't pass up an opportunity to get on each other's nerves. They ragged him mercilessly.

  "How were the swing-sets this trip, Ian?"

  "Did you bring me those dirty knickers I asked for?"

  "Was it good for you, honey? Did she pant and slobber?"

  " 'My ten-year-old baby, she's a-pullin' me back home.' "

  Ian bore it stoically. It was in extremely bad taste, and he was the brunt of it, but it really didn't matter. It would end as soon as they lifted again. They would never understand what he sought, but he felt he understood them. They hated coming to Earth. There was nothing for them there, and perhaps they wished there were.

  And he was a pusher himself. He didn't care for pullers. He agreed with the sentiment expressed by Marian, shortly after lift-off. Marian had just finished her first ground leave after her first voyage. So naturally she was the drunkest of them all.

  "Gravity sucks," she said, and threw up.

  It was three months to Amity, and three months back. He hadn't the foggiest idea how far it was in miles; after the tenth or eleventh zero his mind clicked off.

  Amity. Shit City. He didn't even get off the ship. Why bother? The planet was peopled with things that looked a little like ten-ton caterpillars and a little like sentient green curds. Toilets were a revolutionary idea to the Amity; so were ice cream bars, sherbets, sugar donuts, and peppermint.

  Plumbing had never caught on, but sweets had, and fancy desserts from every nation on Earth. In addition, there was a pouch of reassuring mail for the forlorn human embassy. The cargo for the return trip was some grayish sludge that Ian supposed someone on Earth found tremendously valuable, and a packet of desperate mail for the folks back home. Ian didn't need to read the letters to know what was in them. They could all be summed up as "Get me out of here!"

  He sat at the viewport and watched an Amity family lumbering and farting its way down the spaceport road. They paused every so often to do something that looked like an alien cluster-fuck.

  The road was brown. The land around it was brown, and in the distance were brown, unremarkable hills. There was a brown haze in the air, and the sun was yellow-brown.

  He thought of castles perched on mountains of glass, of Princes and Princesses, of shining white horses galloping among the stars.

  He spent the return trip just as he had on the way out: sweating down in the gargantuan pipes of the stardrive. Just beyond the metal walls, unimaginable energies pulsed. And on the walls themselves, tiny plasmoids grew into bigger plasmoids. The process was too slow to see, but if left unchecked the encrustations would soon impair the engines. His job was to scrape them off.

  Not everyone was cut out to be an astrogator.

  And what of it? It was honest work. He had made his choices long ago. You spent your life either pulling gees or pushing c. And when you got tired, you grabbed some z's. If there was a pushers'

  code, that was it.

  The plasmoids were red and crystalline, teardrop-shaped. When he broke them free of the walls, they had one flat side. They were full of a liquid light that felt as hot as the center of the sun.

  It was always hard to get off the ship. A lot of pushers never did. One day, he wouldn't either.

  He stood for a few moments looking at it all. It was necessary to soak it in passively at first, get used to the changes. Big changes didn't bother him. Buildings were just the world's furniture, and he didn't care how it was arranged. Small changes worried the shit out of him. Ears, for instance. Very few of the people he saw had earlobes. Each time he returned, he felt a little more like an ape who has fallen from his tree. One day he'd return to find that everybody had three eyes or six fingers, or that little girls no longer cared to hear stories of adventure.

  He stood there dithering, getting used to the way people were painting their faces, listening to what sounded like Spanish being spoken all around him. Occasional English or Arabic words seasoned it.

  He grabbed a crewmate's arm and asked him where they were. The man didn't know. So he asked the captain, and she said it was Argentina, or it had been when they left.

  The phone booths were smaller. He wondered why.

  There were four names in his book. He sat there facing the phone, wondering which name to call first. His eyes were drawn to Radiant Shining star Smith, so he punched that name into the phone.

  He got a number and an address in Novosibirsk.

  Checking the timetable he had picked—putting off making the call—he found the antipodean shuttle left on the hour. Then he wiped his hands on his pants and took a deep breath and looked up to see her standing outside the phone booth. They regarded each other silently for a moment. She saw a man much shorter than she remembered, but powerfully built, with big hands and shoulders and a pitted face that would have been forbidding but for the gentle eyes. He saw a tall woman around forty years old who was fully as beautiful as he had expected she would be. The hand of age had just begun to to
uch her. He thought she was fighting that waistline and fretting about those wrinkles, but none of that mattered to him. Only one thing mattered, and he would know it soon enough.

  "You are Ian Haise, aren't you?" she said at last.

  "It was sheer luck I remembered you again," she was saying. He noted the choice of words. She could have said coincidence.

  "It was two years ago. We were moving again and I was sorting through some things and I came across that plasmoid. I hadn't thought about you in... oh, it must have been fifteen years."

  He said something noncommittal. They were in a restaurant, away from most of the other patrons, at a booth near a glass wall beyond which spaceships were being trundled to and from the blast pits.

  "I hope I didn't get you into trouble," he said.

  She shrugged it away.

  "You did, some, but that was so long ago. I certainly wouldn't bear a grudge that long. And the fact is, I thought it was all worth it at the time."

  She went on to tell him of the uproar he had caused in her family, of the visits by the police, the interrogation, puzzlement, and final helplessness. No one knew quite what to make of her story.

  They had identified him quickly enough, only to find he had left Earth, not to return for a long, long time.

  "I didn't break any laws," he pointed out.

  "That's what no one could understand. I told them you had talked to me and told me a long story, and then I went to sleep. None of them seemed interested in what the story was about. So I didn't tell them. And I didn't tell them about the... the Starstone." She smiled. "Actually, I was relieved they hadn't asked. I was determined not to tell them, but I was a little afraid of holding it all back. I thought they were agents of the... who were the villains in your story? I've forgotten."

  "It's not important."

  "I guess not. But something is."

  "Yes."

  "Maybe you should tell me what it is. Maybe you can answer the question that's been in the back of my mind for twenty-five years, ever since I found out that thing you gave me was just the scrapings from a starship engine."

  "Was it?" he said, looking into her eyes. "Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying it was more than that.

  I'm asking you if it wasn't more."

  She looked at him again. He felt himself being appraised for the third or fourth time since they met.

  He still didn't know the verdict.

  "Yes, I guess it was more," she said at last.

  "I'm glad."

  "I believed in that story passionately for... oh, years and years. Then I stopped believing it."

  "All at once?"

  "No. Gradually. It didn't hurt much. Part of growing up, I guess."

  "And you remembered me."

  "Well, that took some work. I went to a hypnotist when I was twenty-five and recovered your name and the name of your ship. Did you know—"

  "Yes. I mentioned them on purpose."

  She nodded, and they fell silent again. When she looked at him now, he saw more sympathy, less defensiveness. But there was still a question.

  "Why?" she said.

  He nodded, then looked away from her, out to the starships. He wished he was on one of them, pushing c. It wasn't working. He knew it wasn't. He was a weird problem to her, something to get straightened out, a loose end in her life that would irritate until it was made to fit in, then be forgotten.

  To hell with it.

  "Hoping to get laid," he said. When he looked up, she was slowly shaking her head back and forth.

  "Don't trifle with me, Haise. You're not as stupid as you look. You knew I'd be married, leading my own life. You knew I wouldn't drop it all because of some half-remembered fairy tale thirty years ago. Why?"

  And how could he explain the strangeness of it all to her?

  "What do you do?" He recalled something, and rephrased it. "Who are you?"

  She looked startled. "I'm a mysteliologist."

  He spread his hands. "I don't even know what that is."

  "Come to think of it, there was no such thing when you left."

  "That's it, in a way." he said. He felt helpless again. "Obviously, I had no way of knowing what you'd do, what you'd become, what would happen to you that you had no control over. All I was gambling on was that you'd remember me. Because that way..." He saw the planet Earth looming once more out the view port. So many, many years and only six months later. A planet full of strangers. It didn't matter that Amity was full of strangers. But Earth was home, if that word still had any meaning for him.

  "I wanted somebody my own age I could talk to," he said. "That's all. All I want is a friend."

  He could see her trying to understand what it was like. She wouldn't, but maybe she'd come close enough to think she did.

  "Maybe you've found one," she said, and smiled. "At least I'm willing to get to know you, considering the effort you've put into this."

  "It wasn't much effort. It seems so long-term to you, but it wasn't to me. I held you on my lap six months ago."

  "How long is your leave?" she asked.

  "Two months."

  "Would you like to come stay with us for a while? We have room in our house."

  "Will your husband mind?"

  "Neither my husband nor my wife. That's them sitting over there, pretending to ignore us." Ian looked, caught the eye of a woman in her late twenties. She was sitting across from a man Ian's age, who now turned and looked at Ian with some suspicion but no active animosity. The woman smiled; the man reserved judgment.

  Radiant had a wife. Well, times change.

  "Those two in the red skirts are police," Radiant was saying. "So is that man over by the wall, and the one at the end of the bar."

  "I spotted two of them," Ian said. When she looked surprised, he said, "Cops always have a look about them. That's one of the things that don't change."

  "You go back quite a ways, don't you? I'll bet you have some good stories."

  Ian thought about it, and nodded. "Some, I suppose."

  "I should tell the police they can go home. I hope you don't mind that we brought them in."

  "Of course not."

  "I'll do that, and then we can go. Oh, and I guess I should call the children and tell them we'll be home soon." She laughed, reached across the table, and touched his hand. "See what can happen in six months? I have three children, and Gillian has two."

  He looked up, interested.

  "Are any of them girls?"

  Blue Champagne

  Megan Galloway arrived in the Bubble with a camera crew of three. With her breather and her sidekick she was the least naked nude woman any of the lifeguards had ever seen.

  "I bet she's carrying more hardware than any of her crew," Glen said.

  "Yeah, but it hardly shows, you know?"

  Q. M. Cooper was thinking back as he watched her accept the traditional bulb of champagne. "Isn't that some kind of record? Three people in her crew?"

  "The President of Brazil brought twenty-nine people in with her," Anna-Louise observed. "The King of England had twenty-five."

  "Yeah, but only one network pool camera."

  "So that's the Golden Gypsy," Leah said.

  Anna-Louise snorted. "More like the Brass Transistor."

  They had all heard that one before, but laughed anyway. None of the lifeguards had much respect for Trans-sisters. Yet Cooper had to admit that in a profession which sought to standardize emotion, Galloway was the only one who was uniquely herself. The others were interchangeable as News Anchors.

  A voice started whispering in their ears, over the channel reserved for emergency announcements and warnings.

  "Entering the Bubble is Megan Galloway, representing the Feelie Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of GWA Conglom. Feeliecorp: bringing you the best in experiential tapes and erotix.

  Blue Champagne Enterprises trusts you will not impede the taping, and regrets any disturbance."

  "Commercials, yet," Glen said in disgust. To
those who loved the Bubble—as all the lifeguards did—this was something like using the walls of the Taj Mahal for the Inter-conglomerate Graffiti Championship finals.

  "Stick around for the yacht races," Cooper said. "They should have at least told us she was coming.

  What about that sidekick? Should we know anything about it if she gets into trouble?"

  "Maybe she knows what she's doing," Leah said, earning sour looks from the other four. It was an article of faith that nobody on a first visit to the Bubble knew what they were doing.

  "You think she'll take the sidekick into the water?"

  "Well, since she can't move without it I sort of doubt she'll take it off." Cooper said. "Stu, you call operations and ask why we weren't notified. Find out about special precautions. The rest of you get back to work. A.L., you take charge here."

  "What will you be doing, Q.M.?" Anna-Louise asked, arching one eyebrow.

  "I'm going to get a closer look." He pushed off, and flew toward the curved inner surface of the Bubble.

  The Bubble was the only thing Q. M. Cooper ever encountered which caught his imagination, held it for years, and did not prove a disappointment when he finally saw it. It was love at first sight.

  It floated in lunar orbit with nothing to give it perspective. Under those conditions the eye can see the Earth or Luna as hunks of rock no bigger than golf balls, or a fleck of ice millimeters from the ship's window can seem to be a distant, tumbling asteroid. When Cooper first saw it the illusion was perfect: someone had left a champagne glass floating a few meters from the ship.

  The constricted conic-shape was dictated by the mathematics of the field generators that held the Bubble. It was made of an intricate network of fine wires. No other configuration was possible; it was mere chance that the generator resembled the bowl and stem of a wine glass.

  The Bubble itself had to be weightless, but staff and visitors needed a spin-gravity section. A disc was better than a wheel for that purpose, since it provided regions of varying gravity, from one gee at the rim to free-fall at the hub. The most logical place for the disc was at the base of the generator stem, which also made it the base of the glass. It was rumored that the architect of the Bubble had gone mad while designing it and that, since he favored martinis, he had included in the blueprints a mammoth toothpick spearing a giant green olive.