Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  "Why don't you quit?"

  "What... you mean—"

  "Just quit. She wouldn't even notice the money she spent to support you."

  He grinned at her. "You've got the wrong guy, A.L. I don't have any objections to being supported by a woman. Did you really think I was that old-fashioned?"

  She shook her head.

  "But you think money will be a problem."

  She nodded. "Not the fact that she has it. The fact that you don't."

  "Come on. She doesn't care that I'm not rich."

  Anna-Louise looked at him a long time, then smiled.

  "Good," she said, and kissed him. She hurried into the shuttle, waving over her shoulder.

  Megan received a full sack of mail every day. It was the tip of the iceberg; she employed a staff on Earth to screen it, answer fan mail with form letters, turn down speaking engagements, and repel parasites. The remainder was sent on, and fell into three categories. The first, and by far the largest, was the one out of a thousand matters that came in unsolicited and, after sifting, seemed to have a chance of meriting her attention. She read some, threw most away, unopened.

  The last two categories she always read. One was job offers, and the other was material from facilities on Earth doing research into the nervous system. Often the latter was accompanied by requests for money. She usually sent a check.

  At first she tried to keep him up on the new developments but she soon realized he would never have her abiding and personal interest in matters neurological. She was deeply involved with what is known as the cutting edge of the research. Nothing new was discovered, momentous or trivial, that did not end up on her desk the next day. There were odd side effects: The Wacky Dust which had figured in their first meeting had been sent by a lab which had stumbled across it and didn't know what to do with it.

  Her computer was jammed with information on neurosurgery. She could call up projections of when certain milestones might be reached, from minor enhancements all the way up to complete regeneration of the neuron net. Most of the ones Cooper saw looked dismal. The work was not well funded. Most money for medical research went to the study of radiation disease.

  Reading the mail in the morning was far from the high point of the day. The news was seldom good.

  But he was not prepared for her black depression one morning two weeks after Anna-Louise's departure.

  "Did someone die?" he asked, sitting down and reaching for the coffee.

  "Me. Or I'm in the process."

  When she looked up and saw his face she shook her head.

  "No, it's not medical news. Nothing so straightforward." She tossed a sheet of paper across the table at him. "It's from Allgemein Fernsehen Gesellschaft. They will pay any price... if I'll do essentially what I've been doing all along for Feeli-corp. They regret that the board of directors will not permit the company to enter any agreement wherein AFG has less than total creative control of the product."

  "How many does that make now?"

  "That you've seen? Seventeen. There have been many more that never got past the preliminary stage."

  "So independent production isn't going to be as easy as you thought."

  "I never said it would be easy."

  "Why not use your own money? Start your own company."

  "We've looked into it, but the answers are all bad. The war between GWA and Royal Dutch Shell makes the tax situation..." She looked at him, quickly shifted gears. "It's hard to explain."

  That was a euphemism for "you wouldn't understand." He did not mind it. She had tried to explain her business affairs to him and all it did was frustrate them both. He had no head for it.

  "Okay. So what do you do now?"

  "Oh, there's no crisis yet. My investments are doing all right. Some war losses, but I'm getting out of GWA. The bank balance is in fair shape." That was another euphemism. She had begun using it when she realized he was baffled by the baroque mechanism that was Gitano de Oro, her corporate self. He had seen some astounding bills from Sidekick Inc., but if she said she was not hurting he would believe her.

  She had been toying with the salt shaker while her eggs benedict grew cold. Now she gave a derisive snort, and glanced at him.

  "The funny thing is, I've just proved all the theoreticians wrong. I've made a breakthrough no one believed was possible. I could set the whole industry on its ear, and I can't get a job."

  It was the first he heard of it. He raised one eyebrow in polite inquiry.

  "Damn it, Cooper. I've been wondering how to tell you this. The problem is I didn't realize until something you said a few days ago that you didn't know my transcorder is built in to my sidekick."

  "I thought your camera crew—"

  "I know you did, now. I swear I didn't realize that. No, the crew makes nothing but visual tapes. It's edited into the trans-tape which is made by my sidekick. I leave it on all the time."

  He chewed on that one for a while, and frowned at her.

  "You're saying you got love on tape."

  "The moment of falling in love. I got it all."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  She sighed. "Trans-tapes have to be developed. They aren't like viddies. They just came back from the lab yesterday. I transed them last night, while you slept."

  "I'd like to see them."

  "Maybe someday," she hedged. "For right now, it's too personal. I want to keep this just for myself.

  Can you understand that? God knows I've never sought privacy very hard in my life, but this..." She looked helpless.

  "I guess so." He considered it a little longer. "But if you sell them, it'll hardly be personal then, will it?"

  "I don't want to sell them, Q.M."

  He said nothing, but he had been hoping for something a little stronger than that. For the first time, he began to feel alarmed.

  He did not think about money, or about trans-tapes, in the next two weeks. There was too much else to do. He took his accumulated vacation and sick leave and the two of them traveled to Earth. It might as well have been a new planet.

  It was not only that he went to places he had never seen. They went there in a style to which he was not accustomed. It was several steps above what most people thought of as first class. Problems did not exist on this planet. Luggage took care of itself. He never saw any money. There was no schedule that had to be met. Cars and planes and hypersonic shuttles were always ready to whisk them anywhere they wanted to go. When he mentioned that all this might be costing too much she explained that she was paying for none of it. Everything was provided by eager corporate suitors.

  Cooper thought they behaved worse than any love-smitten adolescent. They were as demonstrative as puppies, and as easily forgiving when she snubbed them while accepting their gifts.

  She did not seem afraid of kidnapping, either, though he saw little in the way of security. When he asked, she told him that security one kept tripping over was just amateur gun-toting. She advised him never to think of it again, that it was all taken care of.

  "You wouldn't market that tape, would you?" There, he finally had it out in the open.

  "Well, let me put it this way. When I first came to you, I was near a nervous breakdown from just thinking about going into the sex tape business. This is much more personal, much dearer to me than plain old intercourse."

  "Ah. I feel better."

  She reached across the bed and squeezed his hand, looked at him fondly.

  "You really don't want me to market it, do you?"

  "No. I really don't. The first day I saw you, a good friend warned me that if I got into bed with you my technique would be seen by ninety million slobs."

  She laughed. "Well, Anna-Louise was wrong. You can put that possibility right out of your mind.

  For one thing, there were no vidicams around, so no one will ever see you making love to me. For another, they wouldn't use my sensations while I'm making love if I ever get into the sex-tape business. Those are a little esoteric for my
audience. That would all be put together in the editing room. There would be visuals and emotionals from me—showing me making love in the regular way—and there'd be a stand-in for the physical sensations."

  "Pardon my asking," he said, "but wasn't your reaction that first day a little overblown, then?"

  She laughed. "Much ado about nothing?"

  "Yeah. I mean, it'd be your body on the screen—"

  "—but I've already shown you I don't care about that."

  "And if you were making love in the conventional way, you'd hardly be emotionally transported—"

  "It would register as sheer boredom."

  "—so I presume you'd splice in the emotional track from some other source, too." He frowned, no longer sure of what he was trying to say.

  "You're catching on. I told you this business was all fake. And I can't really explain why it bothers me so much, except to say I don't want to surrender that part of myself, even a little bit. I taped my first intercourse, but I didn't show it to anybody until you saw it. And what about you? You're worried that I might sell a tape of falling in love with you. You wouldn't be on it at all."

  "Well, it was something we shared."

  "Exactly. I don't want to share it with anyone else."

  "I'm glad you don't plan to sell it."

  "My darling, I would hate that as much as you would."

  It was not until later that he realized she had never ruled out the possibility.

  They went back to the Bubble when Cooper's vacation time was over. She never suggested he quit his job. They checked into a different suite. She said the cost had little to do with it, but this time he was not so sure. He had begun to see a haunted expression around her eyes as she read letter after letter rejecting increasingly modest proposals.

  "They really know the game," she told him bitterly, one night. "Every one of those companies will give me any salary I want to name, but I have to sign their contract. You begin to think it's a conspiracy."

  "Is it?"

  "I really don't know. It may be just shrewdness. I talk about how stupid they are, and artistically they live up to that description. Morally, there's not one of them who wouldn't pay to have his daughter gang-raped if it meant a tenth-point ratings jump. But financially, you can't fault them. These are the folks who have suppressed the cures for a dozen diseases because they didn't cost enough to use. I'm speaking of the parent congloms, of course, the real governments. If they ever find a way to profit off nuclear war we'll be having them every other week. And they have obviously decided that television outside their control is dangerous."

  "So what does it mean to you and me?"

  "I got into the business by accident. I won't go crazy if I'm not working."

  "And the money?"

  "We'll get along."

  "Your expenses must be pretty high."

  "They are. No sense lying about that. I can cut out a lot, but the sidekick is never going to be cheap."

  As if to underscore her words of the night before, the Golden Gypsy chose the next morning to get temperamental. The middle finger of Megan's right hand was frozen in the extended position. She joked about it.

  "As they say, 'The perversity of the universe tends toward the maximum.' Why the middle finger?

  Can you answer me that?"

  "I guess you'll have the repairman up here before I get back."

  "Not this time," she decided. "It'll be hard, but I'll struggle through. I'll wait until we return to Earth, and drop by the factory."

  She called Sidekick while he dressed for work. He could hear her without being able to make out the words. She was still on the phone when he came out of the bathroom and started for the door. She punched the hold button and caught him. turned him around, and kissed him hard.

  "I love you very much," she said.

  "I love you, too."

  She was not there when he returned. She had left a tape playing. When he went to turn it off he found the switch had been sealed. On the screen, a younger Megan moved through the therapy room in her Mark One sidekick. It was a loop, repeating the same scene.

  He waited for almost an hour, then went to look for her. Ten minutes later he learned she had taken the 0800 shuttle for Earth.

  A day later he realized he was not going to be able to get her on the telephone. That same day he heard the news that she had signed a contract with Telecommunion, and as he turned off the set he saw the trans-tape which had been sitting on top of it. unnoticed.

  He got out the Transer she had left behind, donned the headset, inserted the cassette, turned on the machine. Half an hour later it turned itself off, and he came back to reality with a beatific smile on his face.

  Then he began to scream.

  They released him from the hospital in three days. Still numb from sedation, he went to the bank and closed his account. He bought a ticket for New Dresden.

  He located Anna-Louise in the barracks of the police academy. She was surprised to see him, but not as much as he had expected. She took him to a lunar park—an area of trees with a steel roof and corridors radiating in all directions—sat him down, and let him talk.

  "...and you were the only one who seemed to have understood her. You warned me the first day. I want to know how you did that, and I want to know if you can explain it to me."

  She did not seem happy, but he could see it was not directed at him.

  "You say the tape really did what she claimed? It captured love?"

  "I don't think anyone could doubt it."

  She shivered. "That frightens me more than anything I've heard in a long time." He waited, not knowing exactly what she meant by that. When she spoke again, it was not about her fears. "Then it proved to your satisfaction that she really was in love with you."

  "Absolutely."

  She studied his face. "I'll take your word for it. You look like someone who would recognize it." She got up and began to walk, and he followed her. "Then I've done her an injustice. I thought at first that you were just a plaything to her. From what you said, I changed my mind, even before I left the station."

  "But you were still sure she'd hurt me. Why?"

  "Cooper, have you studied much history? Don't answer that. Whatever you learned, you got from corporate-run schools. Have you heard of the great ideological struggles of the last century?"

  "What the hell does that have to do with me?"

  "Do you want my opinions or not? You came a long way to hear them." When she was sure he'd listen, she went on.

  "This is very simplified. I don't have time to give you a history lesson, and I'm pretty sure you aren't in the mood for one. But there was capitalism, and there was communism. Both systems were run, in the end, by money. The capitalists said money was really a good thing. The communists kept trying to pretend that money didn't actually exist. They were both wrong, and money won in the end. It left us where we are now. The institutions wholly devoted to money swallowed up all political philosophies."

  "Listen, I know you're a crazy Loonie and you think Earth is—"

  "Shut up!" He was caught off guard when she spun him around. For a moment he thought she would hit him. "Damn you, that might have been funny in the Bubble, but now you're on my territory and you're the crazy one. I don't have to listen to your smoggie shit!"

  "I'm sorry."

  "Forget it!" she shouted, then ran her hand through her short hair. "Forget the history lesson, too.

  Megan Galloway is trying to make it as best she can in a world that rewards nothing so well as it rewards total self-interest. So am I, and so are you. Today or yesterday, Earth or Luna, it doesn't really matter. It's probably always been like that. It'll be that way tomorrow. I am very sorry, Q.M., I was right about her, but she had no choice, and I could see that from the start."

  "That's what I want you to explain to me."

  "If she was anybody but the Golden Gypsy, she might have gone with you to the ends of the world, endured any poverty. She might not have cared
that you were never going to be rich. I'm not saying you wouldn't have had your problems, but you'd have had the same chance anyone else has to overcome them. But there is only one Golden Gypsy, and there's a reason for that."

  "You're talking about the machine now. The sidekick."

  "Yes. She called me yesterday. She was crying. I didn't know what to say to her, so I just listened. I felt sorry for her, and I don't even like her. I guess she knew you'd seek me out. She wanted you to hear some things she was ashamed to tell you. I really don't like her for that, but what can I do?

  "There is only one Golden Gypsy. It is not owned by Megan Galloway. Rich as she is, she couldn't afford that. She leases it, at a monthly fee that is more than you or I will ever see in our lives, and she pays for a service contract that is almost that much money again. She had not been on television for over a month. Babe, it's not like there aren't other people who would like to use a machine like that. There must be a million of them or more. If you ran a conglom that owned that machine, who would you rent it to? Some nobody, or someone who will wear it in ten billion homes every night, along with a promo for your company?"

  "That's what they told her on the phone? That they were going to take the machine away."

  "The way she put it was they threatened to take her body away."

  "But that's not enough!" He was weeping again, and he had thought he was past that stage. "I would have understood that. I told her I didn't care if she was in a sidekick, in a wheelchair, in bed, or whatever."

  "Your opinion is hardly the one that matters, there," Anna-Louise pointed out.

  "No, what I'm saying is, I don't care if she had to sign a contract she didn't like to do things she hates. Not if it means that much to her. If having the Golden Gypsy is that important. That wasn't enough reason to walk out on me."

  "Well, I think she gave you credit for that much. She was less certain you'd forgive her for the other thing she had to do, which was sell the tape she made of her falling in love with you. But maybe she'd have tried to make you understand why she had to do that, too... except that wasn't her real problem. The thing is, she couldn't live with it, not with her betrayal of herself, if you were around to remind her of the magnitude of the thing she had sold."