Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  Bach grimaced, knowing he was right. She was too impatient.

  The coffee arrived, and while they poured and took the first sips, she looked around the big monitoring room. This is where impatience gets you.

  In some ways, it could have been a lot worse. It looked like a good job. Though only a somewhat senior Recruit/Apprentice Bach was in command of thirty other R/A's on her watch, and had the rank of Corporal. The working conditions were good: clean, high-tech surroundings, low job stress, the opportunity to command, however fleetingly. Even the coffee was good.

  But it was a dead-end, and everyone knew it. It was a job many rookies held for a year or two before being moved on to more important and prestigious assignments: part of a routine career. When a R/A stayed in the monitoring room for five years, even as a watch commander, someone was sending her a message. Bach understood the message, had realized the problem long ago. But she couldn't seem to do anything about it. Her personality was too abrasive for routine promotions.

  Sooner or later she angered her commanding officers in one way or another. She was far too good for anything overtly negative to appear in her yearly evaluations. But there were ways such reports could be written, good things left un-said, a lack of excitement on the part of the reporting officer...

  all things that added up to stagnation.

  So here she was in Navigational Tracking, not really a police function at all, but something the New Dresden Police Department had handled for a hundred years and would probably handle for a hundred more.

  It was a necessary job. So is garbage collection. But it was not what she had signed up for, ten years ago.

  Ten years! God, it sounded like a long time. Any of the skilled guilds were hard to get into, but the average apprenticeship in New Dresden was six years.

  She put down her coffee cup and picked up a hand mike.

  "Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Do you read?"

  She listened, and heard only background hiss. Her troops were trying every available channel with the same message, but this one had been the main channel back when TC-38 had been a going concern.

  "Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Come in, please."

  Again, nothing.

  Steiner put his cup close to hers, and leaned back in his chair.

  "So did he remember what the reason was? Why we can't approach?"

  "He did, eventually. His first step was to slap a top-priority security rating on the whole affair, and he was confident the government would back him up."

  "We got that part. The alert came through about twenty minutes ago."

  "I figured it wouldn't do any harm to let him send it. He needed to do something. And it's what I would have done."

  "It's what you did, as soon as the pictures came in."

  "You know I don't have the authority for that."

  "Anna, when you get that look in your eye and say, 'If one of you bastards breathes a word of this to anyone, I will cut out your tongue and eat it for breakfast,'... well, people listen."

  "Did I say that?"

  "Your very words."

  "No wonder they all love me so much."

  She brooded on that for a while, until T/A3 Klosinski hurried up the steps to her office.

  "Corporal Bach, we've finally seen something," he said.

  Bach looked at the big semicircle of flat television screens, over three hundred of them, on the wall facing her desk. Below the screens were the members of her watch, each at a desk/console, each with a dozen smaller screens to monitor. Most of the large screens displayed the usual data from the millions of objects monitored by NavTrack radar, cameras, and computers. But fully a quarter of them now showed curved, empty corridors where nothing moved, or equally lifeless rooms. In some of them skeletons could be seen.

  The three of them faced the largest screen on Bach's desk, and unconsciously leaned a little closer as a picture started to form. At first it was just streaks of color. Klosinski consulted a datapad on his wrist.

  "This is from camera 14/P/delta. It's on the Promenade Deck. Most of that deck was a sort of PX, with shopping areas, theaters, clubs, so forth. But one sector had VIP suites, for when people visited the station. This one's just outside the Presidential Suite."

  "What's wrong with the picture?"

  Klosinski sighed.

  "Same thing wrong with all of them. The cameras are old. We've got about five percent of them in some sort of working order, which is a miracle. The Charlie computer is fighting us for every one."

  "I figured it would."

  "In just a minute... there! Did you see it?"

  All Bach could see was a stretch of corridor, maybe a little fancier than some of the views already up on the wall, but not what Bach thought of as VIP. She peered at it, but nothing changed.

  "No, nothing's going to happen now. This is a tape. We got it when the camera first came on." He fiddled with his data pad, and the screen resumed its multi-colored static. "I rewound it. Watch the door on the left."

  This time Klosinski stopped the tape on the first recognizable image on the screen.

  "This is someone's leg," he said, pointing. "And this is the tail of a dog."

  Bach studied it. The leg was bare, and so was the foot. It could be seen from just below the knee.

  "That looks like a Sheltie's tail," she said.

  "We thought so, too."

  "What about the foot?"

  "Look at the door," Steiner said. "In relation to the door, the leg looks kind of small."

  "You're right," Bach said. A child? she wondered. "Okay. Watch this one around the clock. I suppose if there was a camera in that room, you'd have told me about it."

  "I guess VIP's don't like to be watched."

  "Then carry on as you were. Activate every camera you can, and tape them all. I've got to take this to Hoeffer."

  She started down out of her wall-less office, adjusting her cap at an angle she hoped looked smart and alert.

  "Anna," Steiner called. She looked back.

  "How did Hoeffer take it when you reminded him Tango Charlie only has six more days left?"

  "He threw his pipe at me."

  Charlie put Conrad and Helga back in the whelping box, along with Dieter and Inga. All four of them were squealing, which was only natural, but the quality of their squeals changed when Fuchsia jumped in with them, sat down on Dieter, then plopped over on her side. There was nothing that sounded or looked more determined than a blind, hungry, newborn puppy, Charlie thought.

  The babies found the swollen nipples, and Fuchsia fussed over them, licking their little bottoms.

  Charlie held her breath. It almost looked as if she was counting her brood, and that certainly wouldn't do.

  "Good dog, Fuchsia," she cooed, to distract her, and it did. Fuchsia looked up, said I haven't got time for you now, Charlie, and went back to her chores.

  "How was the funeral?" asked Tik-Tok the Clock.

  "Shut up!" Charlie hissed. "You... you big idiot! It's okay, Foosh."

  Fuchsia was already on her side, letting the pups nurse and more or less ignoring both Charlie and Tik-Tok. Charlie got up and went into the bathroom. She closed and secured the door behind her.

  "The funeral was very beautiful," she said, pushing the stool nearer the mammoth marble washbasin and climbing up on it. Behind the basin the whole wall was a mirror, and when she stood on the stool she could see herself. She flounced her blonde hair out and studied it critically. There were some tangles.

  "Tell me about it," Tik-Tok said. "I want to know every detail."

  So she told him, pausing a moment to sniff her armpits. Wearing the suit always made her smell so gross. She clambered up onto the broad marble counter, went around the basin and goosed the 24- karat gold tails of the two dolphins who cavorted there, and water began gushing out of their mouths.

  She sat with her feet in the basin, touching one tail or another when the water got too hot, and told Tik-Tok all about it.


  Charlie used to bathe in the big tub. It was so big it was more suited for swimming laps than bathing.

  One day she slipped and hit her head and almost drowned. Now she usually bathed in the sink, which was not quite big enough, but a lot safer.

  "The rose was the most wonderful part," she said. "I'm glad you thought of that. It just turned and turned and turned..."

  "Did you say anything?"

  "I sang a song. A hymn."

  "Could I hear it?"

  She lowered herself into the basin. Resting the back of her neck on a folded towel, the water came up to her chin, and her legs from the knees down stuck out the other end. She lowered her mouth a little, and made burbling sounds in the water.

  "Can I hear it? I'd like to hear."

  "Lord, guide and guard all those who fly..."

  Tik-Tok listened to it once, then joined in harmony as she sang it again, and on the third time through added an organ part. Charlie felt the tears in her eyes again, and wiped them with the back of her hand.

  "Time to scrubba-scrubba-scrubba," Tik-Tok suggested.

  Charlie sat on the edge of the basin with her feet in the water, and lathered a washcloth.

  "Scrubba-scrub beside your nose," Tik-Tok sang.

  "Scrubba-scrub beside your nose," Charlie repeated, and industriously scoured all around her face.

  "Scrubba-scrub between your toes. Scrub all the jelly out of your belly. Scrub your butt, and your you-know-what."

  Tik-Tok led her through the ritual she'd been doing so long she didn't even remember how long. A

  couple times he made her giggle by throwing in a new verse. He was always making them up. When she was done, she was about the cleanest little girl anyone ever saw, except for her hair.

  "I'll do that later," she decided, and hopped to the floor, where she danced the drying-off dance in front of the warm air blower until Tik-Tok told her she could stop. Then she crossed the room to the vanity table and sat on the high stool she had installed there.

  "Charlie, there's something I wanted to talk to you about," Tik-Tok said.

  Charlie opened a tube called "Coral Peaches" and smeared it all over her lips. She gazed at the thousand other bottles and tubes, wondering what she'd use this time.

  "Charlie, are you listening to me?"

  "Sure," Charlie said. She reached for a bottle labeled "The Glenlivet, Twelve Years Old," twisted the cork out of it, and put it to her lips. She took a big swallow, then another, and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm.

  "Holy mackerel! That's real sippin' whiskey!" she shouted, and set the bottle down. She reached for a tin of rouge.

  "Some people have been trying to talk to me," Tik-Tok said. "I believe they may have seen Albert, and wondered about him."

  Charlie looked up, alarmed—and, doing so, accidentally made a solid streak of rouge from her cheekbone to her chin.

  "Do you think they shot at Albert?"

  "I don't think so. I think they're just curious."

  "Will they hurt me?"

  "You never can tell."

  Charlie frowned, and used her finger to spread black eyeliner all over her left eyelid. She did the same for the right, then used another jar to draw violent purple frown lines on her forehead. With a thick pencil she outlined her eyebrows.

  "What do they want?"

  "They're just prying people, Charlie. I thought you ought to know. They'll probably try to talk to you, later."

  "Should I talk to them?"

  "That's up to you."

  Charlie frowned even deeper. Then she picked up the bottle of Scotch and had another belt.

  She reached for the Rajah's Ruby and hung it around her neck.

  Fully dressed and made up now, Charlie paused to kiss Fuchsia and tell her how beautiful her puppies were, then hurried out to the Promenade Deck.

  As she did, the camera on the wall panned down a little, and turned a few degrees on its pivot. That made a noise in the rusty mechanism, and Charlie looked up at it. The speaker beside the camera made a hoarse noise, then did it again. There was a little puff of smoke, and an alert sensor quickly directed a spray of extinguishing gas toward it, then itself gave up the ghost. The speaker said nothing else.

  Odd noises were nothing new to Charlie. There were places on the wheel where the clatter of faltering mechanisms behind the walls was so loud you could hardly hear yourself think.

  She thought of the snoopy people Tik-Tok had mentioned. That camera was probably just the kind of thing they'd like. So she turned her butt to the camera, bent over, and farted at it.

  She went to her mother's room, and sat beside her bed telling her all about little Albert's funeral.

  When she felt she'd been there long enough she kissed her dry cheek and ran out of the room.

  Up one level were the dogs. She went from room to room, letting them out, accompanied by a growing horde of barking jumping Shelties. Each was deliriously happy to see her, as usual, and she had to speak sharply to a few when they kept licking her face. They stopped on command; Charlie's dogs were all good dogs.

  When she was done there were seventy-two almost identical dogs yapping and running along with her in a sable-and-white tide. They rushed by another camera with a glowing red light, which panned to follow them up, up, and out of sight around the gentle curve of Tango Charlie.

  Bach got off the slidewalk at the 34strasse intersection. She worked her way through the crowds in the shopping arcade, then entered the Intersection-park, where the trees were plastic but the winos sleeping on the benches were real. She was on Level Eight. Up here, 34strasse was taprooms and casinos, second-hand stores, missions, pawn shops, and cheap bordellos. Free-lance whores, naked or in elaborate costumes according to their specialty, eyed her and sometimes propositioned her.

  Hope springs eternal; these men and women saw her every day on her way home. She waved to a few she had met, though never in a professional capacity.

  It was a kilometer and a half to Count Otto Von Zeppelin Residential Corridor. She walked beside the slidewalk. Typically, it operated two days out of seven. Her own quarters were at the end of Count Otto, apartment 80. She palmed the printpad, and went in.

  She knew she was lucky to be living in such large quarters on a T/A salary. It was two rooms, plus a large bath and a tiny kitchen. She had grown up in a smaller place, shared by a lot more people. The rent was so low because her bed was only ten meters from an arterial tubeway; the floor vibrated loudly every thirty seconds as the capsules rushed by. It didn't bother her. She had spent her first ten years sleeping within a meter of a regional air-circulation station, just beyond a thin metal apartment wall. It left her with a hearing loss she had been too poor to correct until recently.

  For most of her ten years in Otto 80 she had lived alone. Five times, for periods varying from two weeks to six months, she shared with a lover, as she was doing now.

  When she came in, Ralph was in the other room. She could hear the steady huffing and puffing as he worked out. Bach went to the bathroom and ran a tub as hot as she could stand it, eased herself in, and stretched out. Her blue paper uniform brief floated to the surface; she skimmed, wadded up, and tossed the soggy mass toward the toilet.

  She missed. It had been that sort of day.

  She lowered herself until her chin was in the water. Beads of sweat popped out on her forehead. She smiled, and mopped her face with a washcloth.

  After a while Ralph appeared in the doorway. She could hear him, but didn't open her eyes.

  "I didn't hear you come in," he said.

  "Next time I'll bring a brass band."

  He just kept breathing heavy, gradually getting it under control. That was her most vivid impression of Ralph, she realized: heavy breathing. That, and lots and lots of sweat. And it was no surprise he had nothing to say. Ralph was oblivious to sarcasm. It made him tiresome, sometimes, but with shoulders like his he didn't need to be witty. Bach opened her eyes and smiled at him.

  Luna's
low gravity made it hard for all but the most fanatical to aspire to the muscle mass one could develop on the Earth. The typical Lunarian was taller than Earth-normal, and tended to be thinner.

  As a much younger woman Bach had become involved, very much against her better judgment, with an earthling of the species "jock." It hadn't worked out, but she still bore the legacy in a marked preference for beefcake. This doomed her to consorting with only two kinds of men: well-muscled mesomorphs from Earth, and single-minded Lunarians who thought nothing of pumping iron for ten hours a day. Ralph was one of the latter.

  There was no rule, so far as Bach could discover, that such specimens had to be mental midgets.

  That was a stereotype. It also happened, in Ralph's case, to be true. While not actually mentally defective, Ralph Goldstein's idea of a tough intellectual problem was how many kilos to bench press.

  His spare time was spent brushing his teeth or shaving his chest or looking at pictures of himself in bodybuilding magazines. Bach knew for a fact that Ralph thought the Earth and Sun revolved around Luna.

  He had only two real interests: lifting weights, and making love to Anna-Louise Bach. She didn't mind that at all.

  Ralph had a swastika tattooed on his penis. Early on, Bach had determined that he had no notion of the history of the symbol; he had seen it in an old film and thought it looked nice. It amused her to consider what his ancestors might have thought of the adornment.

  He brought a stool close to the tub and sat on it, then stepped on a floor button. The tub was Bach's chief luxury. It did a lot of fun things. Now it lifted her on a long rack until she was half out of the water. Ralph started washing that half. She watched his soapy hands.

  "Did you go to the doctor?" he asked her.

  "Yeah, I finally did."

  "What did he say?"

  "Said I have cancer."

  "How bad?"

  "Real bad. It's going to cost a bundle. I don't know if my insurance will cover it all." She closed her eyes and sighed. It annoyed her to have him be right about something. He had nagged her for months to get her medical check-up.

  "Will you get it taken care of tomorrow?"