The Ophiuchi Hotline (8 page)
Read The Ophiuchi Hotline Online
Authors: John Varley
“I hope so.”
Lilo did not see the ship. She followed Iphis and Vaffa through a collapsible tube into the living quarters. They were quite small. Iphis heaved himself out of his walker and into his couch, and Vaffa put the contraption out of the lock.
“Grab seats,” Iphis said. “We lift in two minutes.”
Lilo tried again. “To where?”
“Titan.”
They had planned a tacking maneuver on Jupiter. Lilo didn’t like it, but was not about to mention the fact. She had not bought a ticket, and couldn’t complain about the service.
But a few days before the insertion Vaffa had a surprise for her.
“We’re not really going to Titan. I am, eventually, but you’re not.”
“Where am I going?”
“Little place called Poseidon.”
“Where the hell is that?”
Vaffa and Iphis exchanged glances. Lilo had the uncomfortable feeling that the name should mean something to her.
“Try Jay-eight. Jay dash vee eye eye eye. Roman numerals.”
“One of Jupiter’s retrograde moons,” Iphis explained. “A chunk of rock about twenty kilometers through, twenty million kilometers out.”
“But that’s…”
“Illegal?” Vaffa laughed, and was joined by Iphis. “Tell it to the Invaders.”
“Invaders,” Lilo mumbled.
Why We Can’t Go Home.
The March 5 Oral Creative Co-op. (Illit. level transcribed tape)
They came in the year 2050, old style. (Two asteroid-sized objects entering the solar system from interstellar space. Palomar scope pans upward. Astronomer bends over eyepiece.) They were decelerating, heading for Jupiter.
Two astronauts, Purunkita and Mizinchikov, were diverted from a regular supply mission to the Mars base. (Stock footage of P & M boarding spaceship
U Thant.
Cut to actors in ship: watching instruments, getting radio message, firing engines, eating meals, copping.) They were to swing out to Jupiter in six months and arrive with empty tanks. Their orders: Sit tight, observe, and await the arrival of a robot tanker. (Process shot of P & M at port of
U Thant
, Jupiter outside. P is as black as space. Her arm is around M. She is pregnant.)
One of the objects did orbit Jupiter. The other changed course at the last moment and headed for Earth. It landed in the Pacific Ocean, near the equator. That was the Year One of the Occupation of Earth. (Flat newsreel footage of Invader ship, twenty-kilometer sphere sitting half-submerged in water, dull-surfaced, pocked with holes.)
What little we know of Invaders comes from Purunkita and Mizinchikov, the only people known to have entered one of the ships and returned. This is what happened to them. (The alien ship matches with the
U Thant
, swallows it. Camera follows P. M. and infant daughter through water-filled stone tunnels.) They met Doctor Ellen Bronson and her two companions, who had entered the ship that landed in the Pacific. They had been in the ship no more than a day, but had entered on the day of landing. On that day, the astronauts had still been three months from Jupiter.
If the story the astronauts told is true, space and time exist in a different manner inside the ships. There is little reason to doubt the story.
Doctor Bronson is thought to be the only human ever to have seen the aliens themselves and survived. (B alone, entering large chamber, as big as the interior of an engineered asteroid. It is half-full of water. In the distance, special-effect distortions represent Invaders. Tight shot of B’s face, indicating shock and fear. She turns and runs.)
Bronson claimed to have had a strange experience. Things were told to her in a mysterious way, and she could never account for it when she told Purunkita and Misinchikov. (Five figures gathered around a fire on a beach within the ship, whispering.) No one knows whether to believe her story, but it’s the only one we’ve got. This is what she said.
The Invaders come from a gas giant planet like Jupiter. Their purpose in coming to the solar system was not the invasion of Earth, but unknown motives concerned with the inhabitants of Jupiter. Bronson said there are intelligent Jovians who are much like the Invaders. (Animation sequence in the Jovian atmosphere. Huge shadowy shapes swim by.)
The invasion of Earth was secondary. It was
done for the benefit of the three intelligent species of Earth: sperm whales, “killer” whales, and bottle-nosed dolphins. (Stock footage of aquatic mammals.)
Bronson said there are levels of intelligence in the universe. On top are the Jovians and Invaders. One step below are the dolphins and whales. Humans, birds, bees, beavers, ants, and corals are not considered intelligent.
No one knows if any of this is right. But it’s all we have.
There were no explanations given to humanity. No ambassadors appeared, no ultimatums were offered. Humans resisted the Invasion, but the resistance was ignored. H-bombs would not go off, tanks would not move, guns would not fire. (Panic in the streets, helicopter shots of jammed highways.) No one ever saw an Invader. Pictures show distortions in the sky that no observer noticed at the time, like blind spots in the human eye. Perhaps these things were the Invaders. (Still, flat photos of buildings toppling, streets being uprooted, with colorful whirlpools in the sky.)
As far as anyone knows from information sent up before the transmitters went dead, the Invaders never killed a human. What they did was destroy utterly every artifact of human civilization. In their wake they left plowed ground, sprouting seedlings, and grass.
In the next two years, ten billion humans starved to death.
Poseidon is an irregular chunk of rock. It is the most distant object of any size that Jupiter can be said to claim. Being retrograde and inclined one hundred and fifty degrees from Jupiter’s equator, it is one of the more difficult bodies in the solar system to rendezvous with.
The
Earthhome II
was a free-faller, a cargo ship
designed to carry bulky, nonpriority freight. It traveled by hyperbolic orbits, not the straight lines of a high-booster.
“Congratulations, Captain,” Lilo said. “That was a neat bit of work.”
“Huh? Oh, you mean the approach?” He shrugged, but she saw he was pleased. She had gotten to know him pretty well on the twenty-nine-day trip to Jupiter.
“Really,” she said. “Most ship pilots are like slideway operators nowadays. They make travel pretty dull.”
“Yeah, I won’t argue with you on that.”
“You make me think of the days when people just set out. Nothing on the other end, no refueling stations, no air, nothing at all. And I think you like it.”
He smiled at her. “I guess I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t. I always felt born in the wrong age, though. No adventure. This run is about the most dangerous thing you can do, and it’s illegal. You must have wondered how we get away with this, going to Jupiter.” Iphis explained Tweed’s system.
It was illegal to assume a closed orbit around Jupiter, or to land on any of the moons. The loophole was that it was legal to use Jupiter to alter an orbit on the way to somewhere else. Passenger ships never did it—too many people were afraid to approach Jupiter at all. But there were plenty of independent operators who were willing if it would save them time and fuel.
The trick was to have two ships. Tweed had obtained one at Pluto, listed as missing and presumed lost. An identical ship had been purchased openly. Now both ships bore the same registration numbers. More important, they had the same captain. Lilo went to Jupiter in the
Earthhome II
, captained by Iphis II. But there was an
Earthhome I
, and an Iphis I, a clone, whom number two had never met and probably never would.
“Customs, by its nature,” Iphis explained, “is only interested in
incoming
ships. I take off for Titan, listing only Vaffa as a passenger. I come to Jupiter, and meanwhile my clone and another Vaffa are on their way down from Poseidon. He takes my place on the course I
was traveling. Everything’s airtight at Titan, because he’ll get there carrying only what I declared at Luna. If anyone’s ever noticed my exhaust out here in the moons, no one’s ever said anything about it. They probably think it’s Invaders up to something.”
Lilo sobered at the mention of Invaders. It had been twenty hours since they had swung around Jupiter. It was not something she liked to recall.
She looked out the port again. “Isn’t it about time you thought about landing us?” The moon was getting uncomfortably large; she could no longer see the edges. Something moved on the surface. With a shock, she realized it was a person. They were that close.
“Don’t worry. You don’t land a ship like this on a pebble like that. You could fart your way right into orbit.” He glanced out the port, and his hands went to the controls. With a few pops from the attitude jets, they seemed stationary. “Now they’ll pull us in with ropes and tie us down. You can get out now, if you want to.” He vaulted from his couch. It astounded Lilo how graceful he was. She knew that legs were encumbrances in weightlessness, too overpowered for any job they might be called on to do. She had not realized they were actually dangerous. She had nearly split her head three times on the first day of the flight. All her traveling had been done on one-gee ships.
She found herself looking around for something. Her suit. A deeply ingrained reflex was trying to keep her from stepping into the lock in only her vest and kilt. Those horrible seconds escaping from the Institute came back to her. She repressed the memory. It annoyed her to be prey to unreasoning fears. She knew the null-suit worked; it had come to life a few hours from Jupiter, when the radiation level in the ship had become dangerous.
Sealing herself into the lock as soon as Iphis and Vaffa had gone out, she pressed the cycle button. Goose pimples broke out on her bare skin; then the suit came on and she was fighting for breath. She suppressed the reflex to gasp.
A null-suit was not easy to get used to. Some of it was merely disconcerting, such as finding yourself wrapped in a mirror that followed every curve of your body at a distance of one to one and a half millimeters. When she looked at herself, what she saw was a distorted picture of the things around her, twisted like a funhouse mirror. But some of it was downright alarming. Lilo had been breathing air for fifty-seven years, and suddenly to stop was not easy.
The suit contained a neural link that suppresed the part of the automatic nervous system that controlled her diaphragm. When the suit was on, the breathing reflex was turned off. But it was not quite that simple. Below even the level where digestion, heartbeat, and breathing are controlled was a primitive ape that was just smart enough to realize she was not breathing, but not smart enough to understand the suit was taking care of it. The result was a near-panic reaction.
Lilo knew she could not cope with it. Others had done so; on Mercury and Venus people grew up in null-suits. But for the first five minutes she just held the side of the lock and tried to stop shaking. She found it helpful to think of the process that was keeping her alive. She visualized the irregular metal implant Mari had put in place of her left lung. It contained the nullfield generator, a thirty-hour supply of oxygen, and artificial alveoli that connected with her pulmonary circulation system. The null-suit exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide, but much more efficiently than her lungs could. The oscillation of her suit’s field created a bellows action that forced nearly pure carbon dioxide from the exhaust valve under her collarbone. There were ancillary systems, such as the binaural radio which she could work by subvocalizing in her throat.
She began to feel better. Below her, about five meters down, was the surface, which was a dirty gray color. Some attempt had been made to level it in places, especially the area around the
Earthhome
’s berth. A network of silver ropes stretched between metal supports. It was Poseidon’s equivalent of a road system.
Stepping out of the lock had seemed like a good idea, but after a few seconds Lilo saw her mistake. On the way down she had time to calculate the acceleration of gravity, which she found to be almost one centimeter per second squared, or six thousandths of a Lunar gravity. She landed—too hard, with too much reaction—and had time for more calculations as she drifted down again, a little frightened this time. But the escape velocity was quite a bit higher than her legs could deliver. The gravity well was three hundred thirty meters deep, under standard Lunar conditions.
When she approached the surface again she was more careful. She grabbed a rope and pulled herself down. The rope had the same mirror brightness as her body. She watched her silver hands wrap around it, and saw that her suit joined the rope seamlessly as she touched it.
She pulled herself toward the mirror the others had entered. It was another nullfield, protecting the entrance to an underground warren. She tried to go through it, but only got as far as her neck. Vaffa was inside, floating in a bare rock corridor, and she was smiling slightly. Lilo backed out and took off her vest and kilt, which had not been enclosed in her suit when it came on. There had to be a way to get them in, but she couldn’t see what it might be. She entered, leaving her clothes behind.