Blue Champagne

by John Varley

  Funny about seizures. When I first started having them, everyone called them fits. Then, gradually, it was seizures, until fits began to sound dirty.

  I guess it's a sign of growing old, when the language changes on you.

  There were rafts of new words. A lot of them were for things that didn't even exist when I was growing up. Like software. I always visualized a limp wrench.

  "What got you interested in computers, Lisa?" I asked her.

  She didn't move. Her concentration when sitting at the machine was pretty damn good. I rolled onto my back and tried to sleep.

  "It's where the power is, Yank." I looked up. She had turned to face me.

  "Did you pick it all up since you got to America?"

  "I had a head start. I didn't tell you about my captain, did I?"

  "I don't think you did."

  "He was strange. I knew that. I was about fourteen. He was an American, and he took an interest in me. He got me a nice apartment in Saigon. And he put me in school."

  She was studying me, looking for a reaction. I didn't give her one.

  "He was surely a pedophile, and probably had homosexual tendencies, since I looked so much like a skinny little boy."

  Again the wait. This time she smiled.

  "He was good to me. I learned to read well. From there on, anything is possible."

  "I didn't actually ask you about your captain. I asked why you got interested in computers."

  "That's right. You did."

  "Is it just a living?"

  "It started that way. It's the future, Victor."

  "God knows I've read that enough times."

  "It's true. It's already here. It's power, if you know how to use it. You've seen what Kluge was able to do. You can make money with one of these things. I don't mean earn it, I mean make it, like if you had a printing press. Remember Osborne mentioned that Kluge's house didn't exist? Did you think what that means?"

  "That he wiped it out of the memory banks."

  "That was the first step. But the lot exists in the county plat books, wouldn't you think? I mean, this country hasn't entirely given up paper."

  "So the county really does have a record of the house."

  "No. That page was torn out of the records."

  "I don't get it. Kluge never left the house."

  "Oldest way in the world, friend. Kluge looked through the LAPD files until he found a guy known as Sammy. He sent him a cashier's check for a thousand dollars, along with a letter saying he could earn twice that if he'd go to the hall of records and do something. Sammy didn't bite, and neither did McGee, or Molly Unger. But Little Billy Phipps did, and he got a check just like the letter said, and he and Kluge had a wonderful business relationship for many years. Little Billy drives a new Cadillac now, and hasn't the faintest notion who Kluge was or where he lived. It didn't matter to Kluge how much he spent. He just pulled it out of thin air."

  I thought that over for a while. I guess it's true that with enough money you can do just about anything, and Kluge had all the money in the world.

  "Did you tell Osborne about Little Billy?"

  "I erased that disc, just like I erased your seven hundred thousand. You never know when you might need somebody like Little Billy."

  "You're not afraid of getting into trouble over it?"

  "Life is risk, Victor. I'm keeping the best stuff for myself. Not because I intend to use it, but because if I ever needed it badly and didn't have it, I'd feel like such a fool."

  She cocked her head and narrowed her eyes, which made them practically disappear.

  "Tell me something, Yank. Kluge picked you out of all your neighbors because you'd been a boy scout for thirty years. How do you react to what I'm doing?"

  "You're cheerfully amoral, and you're a survivor, and you're basically decent. And I pity anybody who gets in your way."

  She grinned, stretched, and stood up.

  " 'Cheerfully amoral.' I like that." She sat beside me, making a great sloshing in the bed. "You want to be amoral again?"

  "In a little bit." She started rubbing my chest. "So you got into computers because they were the wave of the future. Don't you ever worry about them... I don't know, I guess it sounds corny... do you think they'll take over?"

  "Everybody thinks that until they start to use them," she said. "You've got to realize just how stupid they are. Without programming they are good for nothing, literally. Now, what I do believe is that the people who run the computers will take over. They already have. That's why I study them."

  "I guess that's not what I meant. Maybe I can't say it right."

  She frowned. "Kluge was looking into something. He'd been eavesdropping in artificial intelligence labs, and reading a lot of neurological research. I think he was trying to find a common thread."

  "Between human brains and computers?"

  "Not quite. He was thinking of computers and neurons. Brain cells." She pointed to her computer.

  "That thing, or any other computer, is light-years away from being a human brain. It can't generalize, or infer, or categorize, or invent. With good programming it can appear to do some of those things, but it's an illusion.

  "There's an old speculation about what would happen if we finally built a computer with as many transistors as the brain has neurons. Would there be self-awareness? I think that's baloney. A

  transistor isn't a neuron, and a quintillion of them aren't any better than a dozen.

  "So Kluge—who seems to have felt the same way—started looking into the possible similarities between a neuron and a 16-bit computer. That's why he had all that consumer junk sitting around his house, those Trash-80's and Atari's and TI's and Sinclair's, for chrissake. He was used to much more powerful instruments. He ate up the home units like candy."

  "What did he find out?"

  "Nothing, it looks like. A 16-bit unit is more complex than a neuron, and no computer is in the same galaxy as an organic brain. But see, the words get tricky. I said an Atari is more complex than a neuron, but it's hard to really compare them. It's like comparing a direction with a distance, or a color with a mass. The units are different. Except for one similarity."

  "What's that?"

  "The connections. Again, it's different, but the concept of networking is the same. A neuron is connected to a lot of others. There are trillions of them, and the way messages pulse through them determines what we are and what we think and what we remember. And with that computer I can reach a million others. It's bigger than the human brain, really, because the information in that network is more than all humanity could cope with in a million years. It reaches from Pioneer Ten, out beyond the orbit of Pluto, right into every living room that has a telephone in it. With that computer you can tap tons of data that have been collected but nobody's even had the time to look at.

  "That's what Kluge was interested in. The old 'critical mass computer' idea, the computer that becomes aware, but with a new angle. Maybe it wouldn't be the size of the computer, but the number of computers. There used to be thousands of them. Now there's millions. They're putting them in cars. In wristwatches. Every home has several, from the simple timer on a microwave oven up to a video game or home terminal. Kluge was trying to find out if critical mass could be reached that way."

  "What did he think?"

  "I don't know. He was just getting started." She glanced down at me. "But you know what, Yank? I think you've reached critical mass while I wasn't looking."

  "I think you're right." I reached for her.

  Lisa liked to cuddle. I didn't, at first, after fifty years of sleeping alone. But I got to like it pretty quickly.

  That's what we were doing when we resumed the conversation we had been having. We just lay in each other's arms and talked about things. Nobody had mentioned love yet, but I knew I loved her. I didn't know what to do about it, but I would think of something.

  "Critical mass," I said. She nuzzled my neck, and yawned.

  "What about it?"r />
  "What would it be like? It seems like it would be such a vast intelligence. So quick, so omniscient.

  Godlike."

  "Could be."

  "Wouldn't it... run our lives? I guess I'm asking the same questions I started off with. Would it take over?"

  She thought about it for a long time.

  "I wonder if there would be anything to take over. I mean, why should it care? How could we figure what its concerns would be? Would it want to be worshipped, for instance? I doubt it. Would it want to 'rationalize all human behavior, to eliminate all emotion,' as I'm sure some sci-fi film computer must have told some damsel in distress in the fifties.

  "You can use a word like awareness, but what does it mean? An amoeba must be aware. Plants probably are. There may be a level of awareness in a neuron. Even in an integrated circuit chip. We don't even know what our own awareness really is. We've never been able to shine a light on it, dissect it, figure out where it comes from or where it goes when we're dead. To apply human values to a thing like this hypothetical computer-net consciousness would be pretty stupid. But I don't see how it could interact with human awareness at all. It might not even notice us, any more than we notice cells in our bodies, or neutrinos passing through us, or the vibrations of the atoms in the air around us."

  So she had to explain what a neutrino was. One thing I always provided her with was an ignorant audience. And after that, I pretty much forgot about our mythical hyper-computer.

  "What about your captain?" I asked, much later.

  "Do you really want to know, Yank?" she mumbled sleepily.

  "I'm not afraid to know."

  She sat up and reached for her cigarettes. I had come to know she sometimes smoked them in times of stress. She had told me she smoked after making love, but that first time had been the only time.

  The lighter flared in the dark. I heard her exhale.

  "My major, actually. He got a promotion. Do you want to know his name?"

  "Lisa, I don't want to know any of it if you don't want to tell it. But if you do, what I want to know is did he stand by you?"

  "He didn't marry me, if that's what you mean. When he knew he had to go, he said he would, but I talked him out of it. Maybe it was the most noble thing I ever did. Maybe it was the most stupid.

  "It's no accident I look Japanese. My grandmother was raped in '42 by a Jap soldier of the occupation. She was Chinese, living in Hanoi. My mother was born there. They went south after Dien Bien Phu. My grandmother died. My mother had it hard. Being Chinese was tough enough, but being half Chinese and half Japanese was worse. My father was half French and half Annamese.

  Another bad combination. I never knew him. But I'm sort of a capsule history of Vietnam."

  The end of her cigarette glowed brighter once more.

  "I've got one grandfather's face and the other grandfather's height. With tits by Goodyear. About all I missed was some American genes, but I was working on that for my children.

  "When Saigon was falling I tried to get to the American Embassy. Didn't make it. You know the rest, until I got to Thailand, and when I finally got Americans to notice me, it turned out my major was still looking for me. He sponsored me over here, and I made it in time to watch him die of cancer. Two months I had with him, all of it in the hospital."

  "My God." I had a horrible thought. "That wasn't the war, too, was it? I mean, the story of your life—"

  "—is the rape of Asia. No, Victor. Not that war, anyway. But he was one of those guys who got to see atom bombs up close, out in Nevada. He was too regular army to complain about it, but I think he knew that's what killed him."

  "Did you love him?"

  "What do you want me to say? He got me out of hell."

  Again the cigarette flared, and I saw her stub it out.

  "No," she said. "I didn't love him. He knew that. I've never loved anybody. He was very dear, very special to me. I would have done almost anything for him. He was fatherly to me." I felt her looking at me in the dark. "Aren't you going to ask how old he was?"

  "Fiftyish," I said.

  "On the nose. Can I ask you something?"

  "I guess it's your turn."

  "How many girls have you had since you got back from Korea?"

  I held up my hand and pretended to count on my fingers.

  "One," I said, at last.

  "How many before you went?"

  "One. We broke up before I left for the war."

  "How many in Korea?"

  "Nine. All at Madam Park's jolly little whorehouse in Pusan."

  "So you've made love to one white and ten Asians. I bet none of the others were as tall as me."

  "Korean girls have fatter cheeks too. But they all had your eyes."

  She nuzzled against my chest, took a deep breath, and sighed.

  "We're a hell of a pair, aren't we?"

  I hugged her, and her breath came again, hot on my chest. I wondered how I'd lived so long without such a simple miracle as that.

  "Yes. I think we really are."

  Osborne came by again about a week later. He seemed subdued. He listened to the things Lisa had decided to give him without much interest. He took the printout she handed him, and promised to turn it over to the departments that handled those things. But he didn't get up to leave.

  "I thought I ought to tell you, Apfel," he said, at last. "The Gavin case has been closed."

  I had to think a moment to remember Kluge's real name had been Gavin.

  "The coroner ruled suicide a long time ago. I was able to keep the case open quite a while on the strength of my suspicions." He nodded toward Lisa. "And on what she said about the suicide note.

  But there was just no evidence at all."

  "It probably happened quickly," Lisa said. "Somebody caught him, tracked him back—it can be done; Kluge was lucky for a long time—and did him the same day."

  "You don't think it was suicide?" I asked Osborne.

  "No. But whoever did it is home free unless something new turns up."

  "I'll tell you if it does," Lisa said.

  "That's something else," Osborne said. "I can't authorize you to work over there anymore. The county's taken possession of house and contents."

  "Don't worry about it," Lisa said, softly. There was a short silence as she leaned over to shake a cigarette from the pack on the coffee table. She lit it, exhaled, and leaned back beside me, giving Osborne her most inscrutable look. He sighed.

  "I'd hate to play poker with you, lady," he said. "What do you mean, 'Don't worry about it'?"

  "I bought the house four days ago. And its contents. If anything turns up that would help you reopen the murder investigation, I will let you know."

  Osborne was too defeated to get angry. He studied her quietly for a while.

  "I'd like to know how you swung that."

  "I did nothing illegal. You're free to check it out. I paid good cash money for it. The house came onto the market. I got a good price at the sheriff's sale."

  "How'd you like it if I put my best men on the transaction? See if they can dig up some funny money? Maybe fraud. How about I get the FBI in to look it all over?"

  She gave him a cool look.

  "You're welcome to. Frankly, Detective Osborne, I could have stolen that house, Griffith Park, and the Harbor Freeway and I don't think you could have caught me."

  "So where does that leave me?"

  "Just where you were. With a closed case, and a promise from me."

  "I don't like you having all that stuff, if it can do the things you say it can do."

  "I didn't expect you would. But that's not your department, is it? The county owned it for a while, through simple confiscation. They didn't know what they had, and they let it go."

  "Maybe I can get the Fraud detail out here to confiscate your software. There's criminal evidence on it."

  "You could try that," she agreed.

  They stared at each other for a while. Lisa won. Osborne rubbed his eyes
and nodded. Then he heaved himself to his feet and slumped to the door.

  Lisa stubbed out her cigarette. We listened to him going down the walk.

  "I'm surprised he gave up so easy," I said. "Or did he? Do you think he'll try a raid?"

  "It's not likely. He knows the score."

  "Maybe you could tell it to me."

  "For one thing, it's not his department, and he knows it."

  "Why did you buy the house?"

  "You ought to ask how."

  I looked at her closely. There was a gleam of amusement behind the poker face.

  "Lisa. What did you do?"

  "That's what Osborne asked himself. He got the right answer, because he understands Kluge's machines. And he knows how things get done. It was no accident that house going on the market, and no accident I was the only bidder. I used one of Kluge's pet councilmen."

  "You bribed him?"

  She laughed, and kissed me.

  "I think I finally managed to shock you, Yank. That's gotta be the biggest difference between me and a native-born American. Average citizens don't spend much on bribes over here. In Saigon, everybody bribes."

  "Did you bribe him?"

  "Nothing so indelicate. One has to go in the back door over here. Several entirely legal campaign contributions appeared in the accounts of a state senator, who mentioned a certain situation to someone, who happened to be in the position to do legally what I happened to want done." She looked at me askance. "Of course I bribed him, Victor. You'd be amazed to know how cheaply.

  Does that bother you?"

  "Yes," I admitted. "I don't like bribery."

  "I'm indifferent to it. It happens, like gravity. It may not be admirable, but it gets things done."

  "I assume you covered yourself."

  "Reasonably well. You're never entirely covered with a bribe, because of the human element. The councilman might geek if they got him in front of a grand jury. But they won't, because Osborne won't pursue it. That's the second reason he walked out of here without a fight. He knows how the world wobbles, he knows what kind of force I now possess, and he knows he can't fight it."

  There was a long silence after that. I had a lot to think about, and I didn't feel good about most of it.