The Ophiuchi Hotline (17 page)

They managed to whirl out of the mainstream into a green eddy of parkland. The trunk of a tree provided
sculptured seats growing from the bark. Lilo looked up, and decided it would take her five minutes just to walk around the tree.

It was like the eye of a hurricane. Holo ads approached them, but were stopped by an invisible wall.

The park was deserted. Plutonians did not seem to need peace and quiet. Lilo and Vaffa sat and watched the people go by.

“Breasts seem popular this year,” Vaffa observed after a while. “Nearly everybody has at least two. Hey, what do you call
that
?”

“Electric testicles. I read about them.”

“Kind of pretty,” Vaffa mused. “Like lanterns.”

“It’s supposed to be the quickest way to assure a copping partner that you’re sterile. Look, do you have any idea where we’re going? I need another bath, and a quiet place.”

The gravity trains departed from the level just below Center. Lilo bought two tickets, nervously sticking her hand into the slot of the genoprinter before doing so. It had worked well enough on Mars.

Tweed’s nixonian hand reached across five billion kilometers. She felt the scrape of the sampler across her palm, the machine whirred, and somewhere in the banks of the Pluto Central Computer an entry was made:

The security check was automatic, and it came up green. The name Jovian-342 did not appear on any list of wanted persons, and that was the end of it. Had the Pluto computer felt the need to check further with Lunar records, it would have learned twelve hours later that Jovian-342 was a member of the Church of Cosmic Engineering, an upstanding citizen of Luna, and an enthusiastic traveler. What it would not have learned was the fact that Jovian-342 had emigrated ten years before and was now presumably paired in the Rings, cut off from the rest of human civilization and unable to protest
the theft of her identity.

Lilo did not know how Tweed had done it. She did know that the people who ran the main computers were potentially above the law, so the safeguards against illegal tampering were stringent. But it had happened in the past, and would happen again.

The inside of the car was plush brown velvet and subdued lights on chrome. She sank into one of the couches and strapped in, with Vaffa taking the seat beside her. The car eased into a tunnel and glided slowly upward. Airlock doors got out of the way and closed behind the car as it picked up speed. Lilo counted twelve of them. Then stars appeared outside the window. She pulled her feet up under her and rubbed them. She was cold.

It was purely psychological, but the frozen gas outside seemed to claw at her. She hated the cold. There was nothing warm here, even in the daytime.

A large man came down the aisle and sat on the arm of Vaffa’s chair. He gave her a big grin, then tried to sell her a membership in a sexcircle. Vaffa was annoyed, but when she tried to push him away her hand went through him. He was only the first. Soon they were surrounded.

Vaffa jumped when one of them touched her.

“Pardon me,” the man said. “I see you’re from Luna.”

“Yes,” Lilo said. “Is it that obvious?”

“Your nose,” he said. “It’s pointed.” His own was as flat as a bad prizefighter’s. He had eyelashes half a meter long. It made him blink in slow motion. “And other things. No offense, I hope. I just thought you might be interested in what I’m selling.”

“You know, you could be replaced by an illusion,” Vaffa said.

“What are you selling that couldn’t be hawked by a holo?” Lilo asked.

“An antiholo generator,” he said.

It was a small bracelet, stamped with a number to call for repairs. They were leased, not sold, like a computer terminal. They came in a range of prices and models. Some merely held the holos at arm’s length. Most Plutonians
thought this was enough. If you couldn’t see the ads, how would you know what was fashionable?

The man showed no surprise when Lilo and Vaffa took the heavy-duty Annihilator model.

The train pulled into Barrow and the windows fogged. The outside of the car was coated with frost as they debarked. Melting slush dripped from the sides of the car into gutters in the carpeted platform.

“What can you tell me about this guy?” Lilo asked.

Vaffa was scanning the walls. She never seemed to relax.

“Ex-teacher. The guy’s weird. Never really got over being kicked out of the Educational Association. But the Boss lets him work Pluto alone. His job isn’t that important. Not until now, anyway.”

“Did he have something to do with intercepting that transmission?”

“Yeah. That last message from the Boss filled me in on some of that. He has access to Hotline data. He sends it to the Boss, and we get it about the same time as the StarLine board of directors.”

“Why? I mean, up to now, what good has it done you?”

Vaffa shrugged. “He likes to know things. We’re fighting a war.”

Lilo had to keep reminding herself of that. The Free Earth Party versus the Invaders. No shots had been fired as yet. Lilo had little hope for the outcome if Tweed ever managed to get the conflict heated up.

But it was the most important thing in Vaffa’s life. She was always alert for enemies. Now she was edgy, and Lilo thought she knew why. Vaffa had traveled many times to Titan, but had never strayed far from the spaceport. Luna was the only environment she knew well. She was suffering from culture shock.

Lilo was familiar with the phenomenon. It is not true that one corridor is just like another. There are trifles a person does not consciously notice: the shape of the ceiling fixtures, the foreign arrangement of dials on the corner
air sniffers, the unfamiliar designs of fountains, callboxes, sprinklers, door flanges, medical terminals, and crash locks. Even the air smelled wrong. Pluto air was scrubbed only seven times before reuse. It was heavy with humanity.

They reached their destination and rang the bell. The door flange popped and they stepped over the lip into chaos.

The room was large, but it seemed filled by seven or eight children. They never stopped moving and yelling. A foot-race was in progress, with furniture serving as obstacles. Lilo and Vaffa backed against a wall to be out of the way, and waited. Across the room, a man was talking to a pregnant woman. He looked up.

“Party’s over!” he yelled. “Come back later. You, would you hold the door for them?” Vaffa held it open, and the man herded the children. They giggled, and lunged at him, but he held out an arm and they fell back, laughing. He seemed to have an almost magical power over them. Soon they were all in the corridor.

“You’ll have to come back later,” he was telling the woman. He took her hand and guided her to the door. Lilo looked at her bare belly. It couldn’t be many more days.

When she was gone, the man looked at them and shrugged.

“She wants a bootleg teacher,” he told them. “Some foul-up. She didn’t get an ironclad contract with the teacher she picked out, I guess. I get them all the time.”

“You’d think that with only one chance, people would be more careful,” Lilo said.

“Ain’t it the truth? She could have at least had someone explain the contract to her, even if she is illit. I…” He looked at her, and smiled. He held out his hand.

“I’m Cathay.”

“Lilo.” She took his hand. He glanced at Vaffa.

“I know you,” he said, evenly.

“Nevertheless, we’ve never met,” Vaffa said.

“Then it was your brother. Your clone. I
know
you.” He seemed about to say more, but left it at that. “Well,
have a seat, I guess. Whatever looks comfortable. Can I get you anything?” He was looking at Lilo.

“Something mildly intoxicating,” she said. “I’m not choosy.”

“Got just the thing.” He disappeared into another room. Vaffa waited a moment, then got up and followed him. They came back one at a time, Vaffa with one drink, Cathay with two. Both seemed tense. He handed her a glass of green liquid.

The drink made her feel better. She relaxed into her chair and studied Cathay. He had a lot of curly brown hair, long legs, and a boyish face. He was handsome without overdoing it, and Lilo liked that. She felt a physical attraction without having touched or smelled him, and that was rare for her.

“To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this visit?” Cathay asked. “Wait, let me guess. Tweed’s pregnant, and he’s looking for a bootleg teacher.”

Vaffa, who had taken a seat facing the door, sat even straighter in her chair. Lilo felt herself tensing, and realized how attuned she was to the other woman’s moods. On the trip from Luna to Mars she had become adept at staying out of Vaffa’s way in the small ship.

“I will warn you once,” Vaffa said. “I won’t listen to jokes about the Boss.” She glared from Cathay to Lilo, and back again. Lilo looked helplessly at Cathay, wanting to tell him what form the second warning would take. To her surprise, he seemed to understand. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and sat back in his chair.

“Okay. Go on. It’s about the Hotline, isn’t it? What else could it be? The Boss is scared, and I don’t blame him.”

“You are aware of the content of the message?” Vaffa asked, half rising from her seat. “I think I would have been told if you were authorized to read it.”

“Well, I don’t know if I was authorized or not,” he said. “But it was already translated when I got it. Did the Boss tell you my source is in the translation department? I can’t get the raw data.”

Vaffa relaxed a little. “Yes, he did say that. But you shouldn’t have read it. Your function is to pass it on to the Boss.”

Cathay shrugged. “I had to encode it to send it to him, and I’m as curious as the next fellow. No one told me to forget what I’d read. But I’ll bear it in mind. What I still can’t understand is what you’re here for. I don’t know what the Boss thinks you can do that I can’t do better. I have contacts out here. I know my way around. You…well, you’re muscle, I know that. Does he plan to have you bully the Hotline into a deadline extension?”

Lilo shifted nervously in her chair, but apparently Vaffa was not insulted.

“No. Our mission will be simple. You said the Boss is scared. That isn’t quite right, but it’s fair to say he is concerned. The message seems to be quite important, and potentially dangerous.”

Lilo couldn’t help laughing. “I guess you might say that. It’s got to make you wonder, if nothing else.”

“The way I read it,” Cathay said, seriously, “is that we’ve been presented with a phone bill.”

“But we never subscribed,” Vaffa pointed out.

“That’s an evasion,” Cathay said. “It’s true we never asked for the service. But we
used
it. We’ve been using it for centuries, and as far as I know no one has ever tried to send anything back in return.”

“The costs…”

“That’s beside the point. I’ve been thinking about this ever since I saw the message. What amazes me now is that no one ever saw this possibility. We’ve treated the Hotline as a natural resource, like vacuum. We wondered what the Ophiuchites might be like, but when they didn’t volunteer anything about themselves I guess we just wanted to believe it was a…a sort of interstellar welfare program.”

“When it was really more like cultural exchange?” Lilo suggested.

“Maybe. If that’s it, they must be insulted that we never sent them anything.”

“But what do we have that they could want?” Lilo asked. “They’re so far ahead of us.”

“Who knows? Listen, they probably asked themselves the same question. And what they did, apparently, was to send
everything.
We’ve used the new inventions, the biological engineering techniques and so forth. But we still can’t tell what ninety percent of it is. Maybe it’s art, or philosophy. Or gossip. Or nine billion Ophiuchites advertising for sex partners. But I don’t really think the Hotline is cultural exchange. I think it’s just what the message implies; it’s a commercial venture. We’re expected to pay for what we get, value given for value received. I wish I knew what the ‘extreme penalties’ business is all about, though.”

Vaffa’s brow had wrinkled as she followed Cathay’s reasoning. Now her face smoothed as she got back on more familiar ground.

“We’ve drifted away from the subject,” she said. “We were talking about our mission, why Lilo and I were sent to join you. It’s simple. In a matter as potentially serious as this, the Boss feels the need of further information. It’s impossible to know how to meet this on the information we have so far. Since it is impossible to ask the Ophiuchites the questions he must find answers for, we must try our best to find them in the original message.”

“That makes sense,” Lilo said. Vaffa looked at her, and Lilo knew Vaffa was grateful to hear that. It had not made much sense to Vaffa. She had been accepting the Boss’s judgment of the situation largely on faith.

“What I mean,” Lilo went on, “is that it’s hard to imagine they wouldn’t have put everything we need to know into the message. Even if we could ask them questions, it would take thirty-four years for a reply.”

“Exactly. You notice the message contains many words which are assigned a translation probability.”

“That’s normal in Hotline data,” Cathay put in.

“So I understand. But all we have to go on is the translated message you obtained. What we need is the
raw data. The Boss wishes to have it so he can analyze it independently.”

Cathay frowned. “That’s not going to be easy. In fact, it’s not possible.”

“Explain that, please.”

“Well, I…all right. My source works in the translation department of StarLine. She…you know how they get their data?” He looked at the two women, nodded, and went on. “StarLine has a station out in the zone of maximum signal strength of the Hotline. There used to be several other stations out there. Now Star-Line has a monopoly charter from the Pluto government. Luna’s challenged it a couple times…but I guess the political situation isn’t important to this. Practically, Pluto controls everything outside its orbit.