Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  An odd by-product to learning to use an exoskeleton was the development of skills that made it possible to excel in the new technology of emotional recording: the "feelies." The world was briefly treated to the sight of quadriplegics dominating a new art form. It made Galloway famous as the best of the Trans-sisters. It made her rich, as her trans-tapes out-sold everyone else's. She made herself extremely rich by investing wisely, then she and a friend of Bach's had made her fabulously rich by being the first to capture the experience of falling in love on a trans-tape.

  In a sense, Galloway had cured herself. She had always donated a lot of money to neurological research, never really expecting it to pay off. But it did, and three years ago she had thrown the Golden Gypsy away forever.

  Bach had thought her cure was complete, but now she wondered. Galloway carried a beautiful crystal cane. It didn't seem to be for show. She leaned on it heavily, and made her way through the tables slowly. Bach started to get up.

  "No, no, don't bother," Galloway said. "It takes me a while but I get there." She flashed that famous smile with the gap between her front teeth. There was something about the woman; the smile was so powerful that Bach found herself smiling back. "It's so good to walk I don't mind taking my time."

  She let the waiter pull the chair back for her, and sat down with a sigh of relief.

  "I'll have a Devil's Nitelite," she told him. "And get another of whatever that was for her."

  "A banana Daiquiri," Bach said, surprised to find her own drink was almost gone, and a little curious to find out what a Devil's Nitelite was.

  Galloway stretched as she looked up at the balloons and gliders.

  "It's great to get back to the moon," she said. She made a small gesture that indicated her body.

  "Great to get out of my clothes. I always feel so free in here. Funny thing, though. I just can't get used to not wearing shoes." She lifted one foot to display a slipper. "I feel too vulnerable without them. Like I'm going to get stepped on."

  "You can take your clothes off on Earth, too," Bach pointed out.

  "Some places, sure. But aside from the beach, there's no place where it's fashionable, don't you see?"

  Bach didn't, but decided not to make a thing out of it. She knew social nudity had evolved in Luna because it never got hot or cold, and that Earth would never embrace it as fully as Lunarians had.

  The drinks arrived. Bach sipped hers, and eyed Galloway's, which produced a luminous smoke ring every ten seconds. Galloway chattered on about nothing in particular for a while.

  "Why did you agree to see me?" Galloway asked, at last.

  "Shouldn't that be my question?"

  Galloway raised an eyebrow, and Bach went on.

  "You've got a hell of a story. I can't figure out why you didn't just run with it. Why arrange a meeting with someone you barely knew ten years ago, and haven't seen since, and never liked even back then?"

  "I always liked you, Anna-Louise," Galloway said. She looked up at the sky. For a while she watched a couple pedaling a skycycle, then she looked at Bach again. "I feel like I owe you something. Anyway, when I saw your name I thought I should check with you. I don't want to cause you any trouble." Suddenly she looked angry. "I don't need the story, Bach. I don't need any story, I'm too big for that. I can let it go or I can use it, it makes no difference."

  "Oh, that's cute," Bach said. "Maybe I don't understand how you pay your debts. Maybe they do it different on Earth."

  She thought Galloway was going to get up and leave. She had reached for her cane, then thought better of it.

  "I gather it doesn't matter, then, if I go with the story."

  Bach shrugged. She hadn't come here to talk about Charlie, anyway.

  "How is Q.M., by the way?" she said.

  Galloway didn't look away this time. She sat in silence for almost a minute, searching Bach's eyes.

  "I thought I was ready for that question," she said at last. "He's living in New Zealand, on a commune. From what my agents tell me, he's happy. They don't watch television, they don't marry.

  They worship and they screw a lot."

  "Did you really give him half of the profits on that... that tape?"

  "Did give him, am giving him, and will continue to give him until the day I die. And it's half the gross, my dear, which is another thing entirely. He gets half of every Mark that comes in. He's made more money off it than I have... and he's never touched a tenthMark. It's piling up in a Swiss account I started in his name."

  "Well, he never sold anything."

  Bach hadn't meant that to be as harsh as it came out, but Galloway did not seem bothered by it. The thing she had sold...

  Had there ever been anyone as thoroughly betrayed as Q.M. Cooper? Bach wondered. She might have loved him herself, but he fell totally in love with Megan Galloway.

  And Galloway fell in love with him. There could be no mistake about that. Doubters are referred to Ghana de Oro catalog #1, an emotional recording entitled, simply, "Love." Put it in your trans-tape player, don the headset, punch PLAY, and you will experience just how hard and how completely Galloway fell in love with Q.M. Cooper. But have your head examined first. GDO #1 had been known to precipitate suicide.

  Cooper had found this an impediment to the course of true love. He had always thought that love was something between two people, something exclusive, something private. He was unprepared to have Galloway mass-produce it, put it in a box with liner notes and a price tag of LM14.95, and hawk copies in every trans-tape shop from Peoria to Tibet.

  The supreme irony of it to the man, who eventually found refuge in a minor cult in a far corner of the Earth, was that the tape itself, the means of his betrayal, his humiliation, was proof that Galloway had returned his love.

  And Galloway had sold it. Never mind that she had her reasons, or that they were reasons with which Bach could find considerable sympathy.

  She had sold it.

  All Bach ever got out of the episode was a compulsion to seek lovers who looked like the Earthmuscled Cooper. Now it seemed she might get something else. It was time to change the subject.

  "What do you know about Charlie?" she asked.

  "You want it all, or just a general idea?" Galloway didn't wait for an answer. "I know her real name is Charlotte Isolde Hill Perkins-Smith. I know her father is dead, and her mother's condition is open to debate. Leda Perkins-Smith has a lot of money—if she's alive. Her daughter would inherit, if she's dead. I know the names of ten of Charlie's dogs. And, oh yes, I know that, appearances to the contrary, she is thirty-seven years old."

  "Your source is very up-to-date."

  "It's a very good source."

  "You want to name him?"

  "I'll pass on that, for the moment." She regarded Bach easily, her hands folded on the table in front of her. "So. What do you want me to do?"

  "Is it really that simple?"

  "My producers will want to kill me, but I'll sit on the story for at least twenty-four hours if you tell me to. By the way," she turned in her seat and crooked a finger at another table. "It's probably time you met my producers."

  Bach turned slightly, and saw them coming toward her table.

  "These are the Myers twins, Joy and Jay. Waiter, do you know how to make a Shirley Temple and a Roy Rogers?"

  The waiter said he did, and went off with the order while Joy and Jay pulled up chairs and sat in them, several feet from the table but very close to each other. They had not offered to shake hands.

  Both were armless, with no sign of amputation, just bare, rounded shoulders. Both wore prosthetics made of golden, welded wire and powered by tiny motors. The units were one piece, fitting over their backs in a harness-like arrangement. They were quite pretty—light and airy, perfectly articulated, cunningly wrought—and also creepy.

  "You've heard of amparole?" Galloway asked. Bach shook her head. "That's the slang word for it.

  It's a neo-Moslem practice. Joy and Jay were convicted of murder."
>
  "I have heard of it." She hadn't paid much attention to it, dismissing it as just another hare-brained Earthling idiocy.

  "Their arms are being kept in cryonic suspension for twenty years. The theory is, if they sin no more, they'll get them back. Those prosthetics won't pick up a gun, or a knife. They won't throw a punch."

  Joy and Jay were listening to this with complete stolidity. Once Bach got beyond the arms, she saw another unusual thing about them. They were dressed identically, in loose bell-bottomed trousers.

  Joy had small breasts, and Jay had a small mustache. Other than that, they were absolutely identical in face and body. Bach didn't care for the effect.

  "They also took slices out of the cerebrums and they're on a maintenance dosage of some drug.

  Calms them down. You don't want to know who they killed, or how. But they were proper villains, these two."

  No, I don't think I do, Bach decided. Like many cops, she looked at eyes. Joy and Jay's were calm, placid... and deep inside was a steel-gray coldness.

  "If they try to get naughty again, the amparole units go on strike. I suppose they might find a way to kill with their feet."

  The twins glanced at each other, held each other's gaze for a moment, and exchanged wistful smiles.

  At least. Bach hoped they were just wistful.

  "Yeah, okay," Bach said.

  "Don't worry about them. They can't be offended with the drugs they're taking."

  "I wasn't worried," Bach said. She couldn't have cared less what the freaks felt; she wished they'd been executed.

  "Are they really twins?" she finally asked, against her better judgment.

  "Really. One of them had a sex change, I don't know which one. And to answer your next question, yes they do, but only in the privacy of their own room."

  "I wasn't—"

  "And your other question... they are very good at what they do. Who am I to judge about the other?

  And I'm in a highly visible industry. It never hurts to have conversation pieces around. You need to get noticed."

  Bach was starting to get angry, and she was not quite sure why. Maybe it was the way Galloway so cheerfully admitted her base motives, even when no one had accused her of having them.

  "We were talking about the story," she said.

  "We need to go with it," Joy said, startling Bach. Somehow, she had not really expected the cyborgthing to talk. "Our source is good and the security on the story is tight—"

  "—but it's dead certain to come out in twenty-four hours," Jay finished for her.

  "Maybe less," Joy added.

  "Shut up," Galloway said, without heat. "Anna-Louise, you were about to tell me your feeling on the matter."

  Bach finished her drink as the waiter arrived with more. She caught herself staring as the twins took theirs. The metal hands were marvels of complexity. They moved just as cleverly as real hands.

  "I was considering leaking the story myself. It looked like things were going against Charlie. I thought they might just let the station crash and then swear us all to secrecy."

  "It strikes me," Galloway said, slowly, "that today's developments give her an edge."

  "Yeah. But I don't envy her."

  "Me, either. But it's not going to be easy to neglect a girl whose body may hold the secret of eternal life. If you do, somebody's bound to ask awkward questions later."

  "It may not be eternal life," Bach said.

  "What do you call it, then?" Jay asked.

  "Why do you say that?" Joy wanted to know.

  "All we know is she's lived thirty years without growing any older—externally. They'd have to examine her a lot closer to find out what's actually happening."

  "And there's pressure to do so."

  "Exactly. It might be the biggest medical breakthrough in a thousand years. What I think has happened to her is not eternal life, but extended youth."

  Galloway looked thoughtful. "You know, of the two, I think extended youth would be more popular."

  "I think you're right."

  They brooded over that in silence for a while. Bach signaled the waiter for another drink.

  "Anyway," she went on, "Charlie doesn't seem to need protection just now. But she may, and quickly."

  "So you aren't in favor of letting her die."

  Bach looked up, surprised and beginning to be offended, then she remembered Doctor Wilhelm. The good Doctor was not a monster, and Galloway's question was a reasonable one, given the nature of Neuro-X.

  "There has to be a way to save her, and protect ourselves from her. That's what I'm working toward, anyway."

  "Let me get this straight, then. You were thinking of leaking the story so the public outcry would force the police to save her?"

  "Sure, I thought..." Bach trailed off, suddenly realizing what Galloway was saying. "You mean you think—"

  Galloway waved her hand impatiently.

  "It depends on a lot of things, but mostly on how the story is handled. If you start off with the plague story, there could be pressure to blast her out of the skies and have done with it." She looked at Jay and Joy, who went into a trance-like state.

  "Sure, sure," Jay said. "The plague got big play. Almost everybody remembers it. Use horror show tapes of the casualties..."

  "...line up the big brains to start the scare," Joy said.

  "You can even add sob stuff, after it gets rolling."

  "What a tragedy, this little girl has to die for the good of us all."

  "Somber commentary, the world watches as she cashes in."

  "You could make it play. No problem."

  Bach's head had been ping-ponging between the two of them. When Galloway spoke, it was hard to swing around and look at her.

  "Or you could start off with the little girl," Galloway prompted.

  "Much better," Joy said. "Twice the story there. Indignant expose stuff: 'Did you know, fellow citizens...' "

  " '...there's this little girl, this innocent child, swinging around up there in space and she's going to die!' "

  "A rich little girl, too, and her dying mother."

  "Later, get the immortality angle."

  "Not too soon," Joy cautioned. "At first, she's ordinary. Second lead is, she's got money."

  "Third lead, she holds the key to eternal youth."

  "Immortality."

  "Youth, honey, youth. Who the fuck knows what living forever is like? Youth you can sell. It's the only thing you can sell."

  "Megan, this is the biggest story since Jesus."

  "Or at least we'll make it the biggest story."

  "See why they're so valuable?" Galloway said. Bach hardly heard her. She was re-assessing what she had thought she knew about the situation.

  "I don't know what to do," she finally confessed. "I don't know what to ask you to do, either. I guess you ought to go with what you think is best."

  Galloway frowned.

  "Both for professional and personal reasons, I'd rather try to help her. I'm not sure why. She is dangerous, you know."

  "I realize that. But I can't believe she can't be handled."

  "Neither can I." She glanced at her watch. "Tell you what, you come with us on a little trip."

  Bach protested at first, but Galloway would not be denied, and Bach's resistance was at a low ebb.

  By speedboat, trolley, and airplane they quickly made their way on the top of Mozartplatz, where Bach found herself in a four-seat PTP—or point-to-point—ballistic vehicle.

  She had never ridden in a PTP. They were rare, mostly because they wasted a lot of energy for only a few minutes' gain in travel time. Most people took the tubes, which reached speeds of three thousand miles per hour, hovering inches above their induction rails in Luna's excellent vacuum.

  But for a celebrity like Galloway, the PTP made sense. She had trouble going places in public without getting mobbed. And she certainly had the money to spare.

  There was a heavy initial acceleration, then weightlessness. Bach had
never liked it, and enjoyed it even less with a few drinks in her.

  Little was said during the short journey. Bach had not asked where they were going, and Galloway did not volunteer it. Bach looked out one of the wide windows at the fleeting moonscape.

  As she counted the valleys, rilles, and craters flowing past beneath her, she soon realized her destination. It was a distant valley, in the sense that no tube track ran through it. In a little over an hour. Tango Charlie would come speeding through, no more than a hundred meters from the surface.

  The PTP landed itself in a cluster of transparent, temporary domes. There were over a hundred of them, and more PTP's than Bach had ever seen before. She decided most of the people in and around the domes fell into three categories. There were the very wealthy, owners of private spacecraft, who had erected most of these portable Xanadus and filled them with their friends. There were civic dignitaries in city-owned domes. And there were the news media.

  This last category was there in its teeming hundreds. It was not what they would call a big story, but it was a very visual one. It should yield spectacular pictures for the evening news.

  A long, wide black stripe had been created across the sundrenched plain, indicating the path Tango Charlie would take. Many cameras and quite a few knots of pressure-suited spectators were situated smack in the middle of that line, with many more off to one side, to get an angle on the approach.

  Beyond it were about a hundred large glass-roofed touring buses and a motley assortment of private crawlers, sunskimmers, jetsleds, and even some hikers: the common people, come to see the event.

  Bach followed along behind the uncommon people: Galloway, thin and somehow spectral in the translucent suit, leaning on her crystal cane; the Myers twins, whose amparolee arms would not fit in the suits, so that the empty sleeves stuck out, bloated, like crucified ghosts; and most singular of all, the wire-sculpture arm units themselves, walking independently, on their fingertips, looking like some demented, disjointed mechanical camel as they lurched through the dust.

  They entered the largest of the domes, set on the edge of the gathering nearest the black line, which put it no more than a hundred meters from the expected passage.