Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  He looked at it from all angles, taking his time. He thought it would be too painful to put into words, but he gave it a try.

  "She could keep me, or she could keep her body. She couldn't keep both."

  "I'm afraid that's the equation. There's a rather complex question of self-respect in there, too. I don't think she figured she could save much of that either way."

  "And she chose the machine."

  "You might have, too."

  "But she loved me. Love is supposed to be the strongest thing there is."

  "Get your brain out of the television set, Q.M."

  "I think I hate her."

  "That would be a big mistake."

  But he was no longer listening.

  He tried to kill her, once, shortly after the tape came out, more because it seemed like the right thing to do than because he really wanted to. He never got within a mile of her. Her security had his number, all right.

  The tape was a smash, the biggest thing ever to hit the industry. Within a year, all the other companies had imitations, mostly bootlegged from the original. Copyright skirmishes were fought in Hollywood and Tokyo.

  He spent his time beachcombing, doing a lot of swimming. He found that he now preferred flat water. He roamed, with no permanent address, but the checks found him, no matter where he was.

  The first was accompanied with a detailed royalty statement showing that he was getting fifty percent of the profits from sales of the tape. He tore it up and mailed it back. The second one was for the original amount plus interest plus the new royalties. He smeared it with his blood and paid to have it hand-delivered to her.

  The tape she had left behind continued to haunt him. He had kept it, and viewed it when he felt strong enough. Again and again the girl in the wheezing sidekick walked across the room, her face set in determination. He remembered her feeling of triumph to be walking, even so awkwardly.

  Gradually, he came to focus on the last few meters of the tape. The camera panned away from Megan and came to rest on the face of one of the nurses. There was an odd expression there, as subtle and elusive as the face of the Mona Lisa. He knew this was what Megan had wanted him to see, this was her last statement to him, her final plea for understanding. He willed himself to supply a trans-track for the nurse, to see with her eyes and feel with her skin. He could let no nuance escape him as he watched Megan's triumphant walk, the thing the girl had worked so long and hard to achieve. And at last he was sure that what the woman was feeling was an uglier thing than mere pity.

  That was the image Megan had chosen to leave him with: the world looking at Megan Galloway. It was an image to which she would never return, no matter what the price.

  In a year he allowed himself to view the visual part of the love tape. They had used an actor to stand in for him, re-playing the scene in the Bubble and in the steam-boat bed. He had to admit it: she had never lied to him. The man did not even resemble Cooper. No one would be studying his lovemaking.

  It was some time later before he actually transed the tape again. It was both calming and sobering.

  He wondered what they could sell using this new commodity, and the thought frightened him as much as it had Anna-Louise. But he was probably the only spurned lover in history who knew, beyond a doubt, that she actually had loved him.

  Surely that counted for something.

  His hate died quickly. His hurt lasted much longer, but a day came when he could forgive her.

  Much later, he knew she had done nothing that needed his forgiveness.

  Tango Charlie and Foxtrot Romeo

  The police probe was ten kilometers from Tango Charlie's Wheel when it made rendezvous with the unusual corpse. At this distance, the wheel was still an imposing presence, blinding white against the dark sky, turning in perpetual sunlight. The probe was often struck by its beauty, by the myriad ways the wheel caught the light in its thousand and one windows. It had been composing a thought-poem around that theme when the corpse first came to its attention.

  There was a pretty irony about the probe. Less than a meter in diameter, it was equipped with sensitive radar, very good visible-light camera eyes, and a dim awareness. Its sentient qualities came from a walnut-sized lump of human brain tissue cultured in a lab. This was the cheapest and simplest way to endow a machine with certain human qualities that were often useful in spying devices. The part of the brain used was the part humans use to appreciate beautiful things. While the probe watched, it dreamed endless beautiful dreams. No one knew this but the probe's control, which was a computer that had not bothered to tell anyone about it. The computer did think it was rather sweet, though.

  There were many instructions the probe had to follow. It did so religiously. It was never to approach the wheel more closely than five kilometers. All objects larger than one centimeter leaving the wheel were to be pursued, caught, and examined. Certain categories were to be reported to higher authorities. All others were to be vaporized by the probe's small battery of lasers. In thirty years of observation, only a dozen objects had needed reporting. All of them proved to be large structural components of the wheel which had broken away under the stress of rotation. Each had been destroyed by the probe's larger brother, on station five hundred kilometers away.

  When it reached the corpse, it immediately identified it that far: it was a dead body, frozen in a vaguely fetal position. From there on, the probe got stuck.

  Many details about the body did not fit the acceptable parameters for such a thing. The probe examined it again, and still again, and kept coming up with the same unacceptable answers. It could not tell what the body was... and yet it was a body.

  The probe was so fascinated that its attention wavered for some time, and it was not as alert as it had been these previous years. So it was unprepared when the second falling object bumped gently against its metal hide. Quickly the probe leveled a camera eye at the second object. It was a single, long-stemmed, red rose, of a type that had once flourished in the wheel's florist shop. Like the corpse, it was frozen solid. The impact had shattered some of the outside petals, which rotated slowly in a halo around the rose itself.

  It was quite pretty. The probe resolved to compose a thought-poem about it when this was all over.

  The probe photographed it, vaporized it with its lasers—all according to instruction—then sent the picture out on the airwaves along with a picture of the corpse, and a frustrated shout.

  "Help!" the probe cried, and sat back to await developments.

  "A puppy?" Captain Hoeffer asked, arching one eyebrow dubiously.

  "A Shetland Sheepdog puppy, sir," said Corporal Anna-Louise Bach, handing him the batch of holos of the enigmatic orbiting object, and the single shot of the shattered rose. He took them, leafed through them rapidly, puffing on his pipe.

  "And it came from Tango Charlie?"

  "There is no possible doubt about it, sir."

  Bach stood at parade rest across the desk from her seated superior and cultivated a detached gaze.

  I'm only awaiting orders, she told herself. I have no opinions of my own. I'm brimming with information, as any good recruit should be, but I will offer it only when asked, and then I will pour it forth until asked to stop.

  That was the theory, anyway. Bach was not good at it. It was her ineptitude at humoring incompetence in superiors that had landed her in this assignment, and put her in contention for the title of oldest living recruit/apprentice in the New Dresden Police Department.

  "A Shetland..."

  "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 American—"

  "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 longago 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 dentalplaque- 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 and 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."