The Ophiuchi Hotline (6 page)

She was looking at two bare feet. Her eyes went up a
pair of legs, past hairless genitals, and a flat chest to a bald head. The knees were bent, the arms slightly away from the sides. Her lips were pulled away from fashionably stained teeth. She
wanted
Lilo to attack. One of the Vaffas had moved between Lilo and Tweed before the thought even began to form in Lilo’s head. The anger drained away to a hard knot in her stomach. Vaffa relaxed a little.

“She knew where to be,” Tweed was saying. “Do you see that?”

“Yes, I see.”

“You are predictable, Lilo.”

“I see that, too.”

“Would you like to hear what has happened to you? You’re four months out of date, you know.”

“I guess I’d better.”

I had been foolish. I saw it now, how ridiculously easy the escape had been.

They had taken me on survival training in the Amazon disneyland, three hundred square kilometers of climate-controlled tropical rain forest twenty kilometers below Aristillus. It was in the back country, the part the public never sees, where the rain falls all day and the clothes rot off your back in the suffocating humidity.

We were on our way home through the public corridors. There was only one guard this time; Vaffa had been called away at the last minute. I had stolen the skin sample I needed from Mari’s workshop. I was watching for an opening. The guard looked away—

I bolted through the crowd. In two seconds I was invisible. In thirty seconds I was two levels down and a thousand meters east on a crosstown slidewalk, doubling back. I passed customs with the skin sample in my palm, boarded a train to Clavius.

The car stopped for an override signal. Thirty minutes later the door sighed open at a familiar station. I wondered what they would do to me.

Vaffa stood there, the woman, the face I had come to know so well. I looked down at the dark metal thing in
her hand, then back at her bared teeth. I still didn’t understand.

Lilo retched helplessly. She had long since emptied her stomach, but she continued to be sick. Mari held her as she knelt on the grass above the mess of bile and vat fluid she had brought up, while Tweed put the pictures away.

“Vaffa is rather direct,” Tweed said. “As I told you a long time ago, they are useful.” He glanced at the two. Lilo saw the look, and wondered for a moment if he might be a little afraid of them, too. “Are you able to go on?”

She sat back on her heels. There was Vaffa, the woman who had shot someone who looked just like Lilo and then held up the bloody body with the face and chest caved in for someone to take a picture. Her face moved only when she blinked.

“There’s more?”

“I’m afraid so. You don’t give up easily. If you did, you wouldn’t be the kind of person I’m looking for.”

“And more pictures?”

“Yes. You must see them.”

“Let’s get it over with.”

I had been foolish.

I saw it now, and prayed forgiveness from my two earlier incarnations. I had thrown away their deaths by my failure. It didn’t seem likely that I would be given another chance.

And the cost: Mari, Mari…

Perhaps Tweed would not bring me back again. Or if he did, maybe he wouldn’t tell me about Mari and my shame.

Vaffa appeared at the door to my room. I welcomed him.

Tweed had lit another of his cigars. He blew a cloud of smoke, and Lilo saw the female Vaffa edge a step away from him. Her nose twitched.

“The first time, you bolted,” he said. “You saw the chance I had arranged for you to see, and you took it.” The elk, which turned out not to have been a hallucination, had entered the clearing and was cropping the grass behind Tweed. Lilo watched the light refract from the antlers as Tweed talked. She did not want to think.

“The second time you had learned, but not the lesson I want you to learn. You had decided to be more careful. I presented you with the same opportunity, and you wisely turned it down. You were going to make your own escape this time.”

“What did I do?”

“Now we come to the point of this whole distasteful exercise. I will not tell you how you tried to escape. Can you see why?”

Lilo tried to think about it, but it did her no good. All she knew was that she felt trapped. Nothing made sense.

“All right. I don’t expect you to absorb all this at once. It will take some getting used to. What I want you to try to understand is that you did your very best to get away from me. You had no help this time. You planned for two months, and to all appearances you were cooperating with me. You came up with a plan. What you must understand is that
it was the best plan you will ever come up with.
” He thundered the words. Everyone looked at him; they could not help it. He could be a powerful speaker when he wished to be.

“That’s what the demonstration with the script was meant to point out to you. I have seen you revived twice now. You reacted exactly the same each time. You had no choice; you can only be what you are. You started off each time with memories identical to the day you were last recorded, right here in this clearing. You became a slightly different person each time. The original Lilo was foolish, she didn’t think it out far enough, and she paid for it. The second was very crafty. She killed Mari, and came as close as you will ever—”

“She
what
?”

“You heard me.”

Mari was at her side. “Lilo, don’t get—”

Lilo recoiled from the woman in horror. “No! I couldn’t have. I could have killed…
that
,” she pointed to the paired Vaffas. “I could have killed either of those things. But not Mari.”

“I didn’t say there was no remorse,” Tweed said. “Vaffa says you seemed relieved when he killed you.”

“Lilo, I don’t hold it against you,” Mari said. “I know it sounds strange, but I got to know you…I got to know you twice now. I like you. You did what you thought you had to, and you waited until I’d had a recording taken. I only lost a few days. The Boss told me it was painless, you didn’t make me suffer.”

“That’s true,” Tweed said. He was studying Lilo.

“But I just can’t
believe
…”

“You must. And know this, too. I
know
you now. There are signs I can look for, things you will not be able to hide from me. If I see them, I will know you are following the script. You, on the other hand, will never be sure.” His fat fingers, ticking off the arguments, were like the bars of a cage closing around her.

“I’ll leave you to think about what I’ve said. When you’ve decided if you’ll cooperate, come and tell me. It’s your choice, and I want a firm decision from you this time, not the lies you told me at the institute. I’ve spent enough time and energy on you already.”

He left, trailing the male Vaffa behind him like a faithful dog. Lilo and Mari were left virtually alone, as the other Vaffa seemed to have forgotten about them. Lilo watched her as she tried to coax her snake down from a tree, then scrambled up a vertical trunk to join it.

The silence grew uncomfortable.

“I wish I knew what to say,” Lilo whispered. “I really wish I knew.”

“Say you’ll do what he says. You don’t have any choice.”

“No, I…I wasn’t talking about that. I don’t…don’t have much choice about that, I guess. That’s how it looks, anyway. I just don’t know what to say to
you.
”

“There’s nothing you need to say.
You
didn’t do anything. I have nothing but good memories of you. So who was hurt? Someone who used to be me, and someone else who was you.”

Lilo wished she could look at it that way. She knew she would be eternally shamed by what that person had done. But the only way to cope with it was to see it as Mari suggested.

“I fixed your legs the way you like them,” Mari said. Lilo looked down. It hadn’t occurred to her that her legs would be different, but of course they would have been. The design in her genes did not include the hair.

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“I knew you would.”

Lilo gritted her teeth. She knew Mari meant no harm by it, but she would never be able to hear those words again without emotion. She did not relish being predictable. Not at all.

Wondering if it was what she had said the last time around, she said, “I guess I’d better go talk to the Boss.”

Consider the shape of my life
:

I had lived fifty-seven years rather normally. Like everyone, I got a memory recording every few years. Then I was arrested.

The recording I owned had been confiscated and held pending the outcome of my trial. When I was condemned, it was destroyed, along with the tissue sample that would have been used to grow a clone body if I were to die.

At the time of my stay of execution Man must have made another recording of me. I had probably been drugged; it would have been easy enough.

I had been confronted with the clone Tweed had grown, who had then gone to The Hole in my place. (In whose place? After all, she was as much me as I am. It gets confusing
.)

That person—the original me; though it’s hard to accept, I’m now living in a clone body—had managed to survive only a few weeks beyond the
next
recording, taken in the forest at Tweed’s. Return to square one, in the first step of a depressingly repetitive process. A new “me” was awakened, missing those weeks from the original recording until the death of the original “me.” This second clone was started on the same course as the original. She played it safe for two or three months
,
made her break, was caught and killed. Number four—me, me dammit—wakes up in the forest and sees Mari smiling down on her. But this time Mari is a clone, too. Number three had killed her while escaping.

Think of it in four dimensions. Think of the long worm with arms and legs that’s used in school to illustrate the idea. Picture an infant as one end of the worm, emerging from Mother’s vagina or the placentary, depending on how mother likes to do it. On the other end is death. Make marks on the worm each time a person’s memories are recorded. Each mark is a potential branch.

Eight or nine months ago, at the time of my reprieve, my four-dimensional cross-section had diverged into four branches. (Or could it be five, or six? Tweed had grown several clones of me while I was in jail, since as soon as I died each time he was able to revive me in a new body the next day. He must keep clones of Mari, too, or else she could not have been there the day after number three killed her.) Each had started with the same memories, ending on the day Mari recorded me. Three of those branches were terminated, dead. I was traveling, second by second, down the fourth branch.

Five years before
that,
when I made my own recording in the capsule orbiting Saturn, there was the potential for another branch. I had no way of knowing if that one had produced another Lilo, but it was possible. I hoped I would never meet her. I had met myself once, and learned something about myself I would have been happier not knowing.

But since I
did
know it, since I had seen what lengths I would go to stay alive, I intended to
live.

I intended to live forever.

Survival training took Lilo three months to complete. At that, she gathered she was getting the short course.

She never complained, but it seemed a lot of foolishness to her, and highly uncomfortable foolishness. Unless Tweed was seriously preparing to establish a beachhead on Old Earth, it seemed pointless.

But she went along with it, from the Amazon to Egypt. She spent a week in each of the major disneylands. The Free Earth Party spent a lot of money to be allowed in the wilderness areas of the environmental parks. In return they had the pleasure of dehydrating under desert suns and getting frostbite in Siberia.

Lilo was in a class of twenty. All the others were initiates into the cult-party, with the exception of Vaffa-female, who accompanied Lilo and made everything look easy. She got to know the Free Earthers. She suspected many of them were not as fanatic as Tweed about the actual liberation of Earth. Many were there for the interesting experiences.

She grew to have a great deal of respect for Tweed’s profile of her. He was sticking his neck out every time he allowed her to come in contact with someone who was not a member of the tight inner circle of Free Earthers. Presumably she could tell someone who she was. Tweed could not be sure that any of her classmates were sufficiently committed to the cause not to report her to the government. If anyone did, if the State found out Tweed had abducted her from the institute, his ass was in the recycler.

The catch was that Lilo would be condemning herself to death along with him. He knew she would not do that.

Actually, though she would never have admitted it, she came to like living in the bush. Slogging through a snowstorm was no fun, but huddling in your igloo with five other people under a polar-bearskin blanket was. There were many good moments.

There was also loneliness. It was much harder to take than the physical hardships. She had learned to live alone during her year at the institute. Now she ached to have friends again, to find a lover. But she could not be friends with anyone in the survival class. It was unthinkable to love someone and not be able to open up, to tell everything, and she could not do that. There were secrets she must guard. The people at Tweed’s residence were even worse. They knew all her secrets, but they
knew she was not one of them. She was treated with civility, but would never be trusted. Only with Mari could she begin to get close. Lilo knew Mari liked her, but it was the broad, uncritical affection that was a part of her personality. Mari thought genetic experimentation on human DNA was wrong, and Lilo thought the dream of the Free Earthers was crazy. There was little for them to talk about.

So she was alone in a crowd. In some ways, it was worse than the confinement of prison. She began to hang back during the nights around the campfire when everyone got together for singing and telling stories and copping. She told herself it was because she didn’t care for sex in the Great Outdoors. “Cop on the beach,” she told Mari, “and spend the next day digging sand out of yourself.” Only when the yearning became unbearable would she find a partner, but increasingly, her most trusted lovers had been the fingers of her right hand.