The Ophiuchi Hotline (4 page)

Mari scored most of the points. Lilo was too distracted to pay much attention to what her mouth and fingers were doing. She knew she had been a poor partner, but Mari said it was all right, and seemed to mean it. It was a nice gesture, but didn’t seem to merit the second upwelling of tears that it caused in Lilo. When it subsided she knew the medico had brought her out of the emotional pit she had occupied for the past year in a
way the intellectual knowledge of her reprieve could not have done.

She was going to live!

The crawler stopped at Herschel, one of the smaller warrens on the outskirts of the Central Highlands. Mari drove into town to catch the local tube to Panavision. Lilo kept her eyes open for a chance to run, but they were quickly joined by a man and woman. They laughed and joked with Mari, but it was clear they were watchful. The chance would come, she was sure of it. It would be best to wait until she knew a little more of the situation.

She put her hand into the customs machine and felt the sampler scrape along the dry skin of her palm. It clucked to itself, and was satisfied she was someone else. Too bad she wouldn’t be able to keep the new hand, she reflected. It would be invaluable. But tissue rejection made that impossible. In less than a week it would die.

Panavision was an artists’ town, full of performers and directors. Many of them had been altered into a part; it was an outlandish place. They joined the line for the gravity train to Archimedes. The four of them boarded, the car was sealed, and Lilo’s weight dropped away as the car fell down the inclined tunnel for almost four hundred kilometers. Somewhere under the Apennines the tunnel began to slope up again, gradually slowing their speed to a crawl as the car nosed into the elevator which took them back up to inhabited levels. The trip was over by the time Lilo felt settled in her seat.

The Grand Concourse at Archimedes was frightening. She had forgotten there were that many people or that much noise. There was no time to worry about it; she was hustled through the crowds to a private tube station. When she got her wits back, she saw she was alone again with Mari in an eight-seat capsule.

“Where now?”

“I’m not supposed to say,” Mari said, with a shrug.

It didn’t take Lilo long to figure it out. Most Lunarians
know little selenography. They might not get out on the surface more than once or twice in several years, most likely for a trip like that Lilo and Mari were taking: enclosed in a capsule riding an induction rail while landscape whizzed past the windows. But Lilo knew the surface map pretty well. They were going north into the Imbrium flats, and when peaks began to loom up over the horizon she knew it was the Spitzbergen Mountains. So that was where the Boss lived. That kind of information was not exactly a state secret; but it was not advertised, because of the constant danger of assassination.

Tweed’s home was on the surface—as it logically would be, Lilo realized, so he could see Earth at all times. Tweed was obsessed by Earth, and by the Invaders. There was one massive geodesic, surrounded by clusters of smaller ones. A spidery telescope with a twenty-meter mirror stood in the shadow of a cupola. It was trained on Earth.

Mari cut away the arm and replaced it with the original, then said Tweed was waiting for Lilo in the main dome. She pointed the way. Lilo took her time, looking into open doorways she passed. There would be just the one tube station, and the suits would be carefully watched. She fully realized this was as much a prison as the institute had been, but the time to start planning was right now.

Water was flowing down the hall. She splashed through it until the hall became a brook running through trees, in an artful mix of holos and real plants. She hadn’t detected the transition. The creek bed was lined with polished stones of varicolored crystal and the deeper pools were full of fish. A panther studied her from the shore, joined her as she reached dry land, and stropped himself against her after smelling the fur on her calves. She fussed with him for a while, then sent him away with a cuff on the head.

The trail led to a clearing, and in the clearing was Tweed, sitting in a chair with a nude woman standing
beside him. She spotted a man, also nude, in the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Lilo had been trying not to be impressed, but it was useless. She had no idea how much money it took to maintain a pocket disneyland like this, but she knew it was a great deal.

“Sit down, Lilo,” Tweed said, and a chair unfolded from the high grass. She did, putting one foot up on the seat. She searched the pockets of the robe, found a brush, and began to comb the burrs from the wet hair on her legs.

“You’ve already met Vaffa,” Tweed said, gesturing to the standing woman. Lilo glanced at her, noted the stance and the attitude of the hands. This woman could kill her in a second, and would. She had
thought
there was something familiar in the eyes.

“How many of them do you keep?” she said. There was a boa constrictor, fully twenty meters long, coiled in the grass at the woman’s feet. “That’s a hell of a pet.”

“You don’t like snakes?”

“I wasn’t talking about the snake.”

Tweed chuckled. “Vaffa is very useful, loyal, smart as can be, and totally ruthless. Aren’t you, Vaffa?”

“If you say so, sir.” Her eyes never left Lilo.

“In answer to your question, there are many Vaffas. One here, the other who helped you escape a few hours ago. Others in other places.” Lilo did not need to ask why Vaffa was so useful. Though the faces and bodies were entirely different in the two she had seen, the feeling was the same. This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.

“Tell me about the Rings,” Tweed said, unexpectedly.

“It was brought out at the trial,” Lilo stammered. “I thought you knew.”

“I knew, but I’m not convinced you were telling the whole truth. Where is the life capsule?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have ways of making you talk.”

“Don’t give me that crap.” Tweed had a habit of talking that way, like an actor reading his lines in a third-rate thriller. “It’s not a question of telling you,” she elaborated. “I admitted setting it up. If I knew where it was, it wouldn’t be much good to me, would it?”

At that moment, Lilo could see it might do her some harm instead of good. Tweed seemed unhappy, and that was disturbing. Keeping him happy had become very important.

Five years earlier, when her research began taking her into areas where she might expect to have trouble with the law, she had decided to build the capsule. She had contacts among the Ringers, and the money to get the project going. The idea, which had looked good at the time, was that if she got caught and convicted, her work could go on without interruption. Now she was not sure her motives had been that selfless. The urge to live is a strong one, as she had just learned.

“They questioned me with drugs,” she said. “I have a friend out there. When I left the capsule, she moved it. I can’t lead anyone to it. I don’t know where it is.”

“This accomplice,” he said. “Did you have any way of getting in touch with her?”

“Have you ever been out there?”

“No, there’s never time.” He shrugged expressively. Lilo had seen it before, on the cube. Tweed was adept at the self-effacement routine, playing the part of one who’s always busy with the People’s work.

“Well, the Rings are
big.
If you haven’t been there, you can’t know just how big. I might get in touch with her by radio, but we couldn’t think of a way she could be protected, too. I mean, anything could be drugged out of me, and she’d have no way of knowing if she was being lured into something. It was hard enough to get her involved in this, anyway. Ringers tend to be solitary. They don’t worry much about other people’s problems.”

“But you have a way of getting in touch with her?”

“If you mean finding her, no. I can leave a message at the Janus switchboard. She calls every twenty years, like clockwork.”

He spread his hands. “Not very efficient.”

“That was sort of the idea. If it was easy for
me
to stop this project, it would be easy for someone who knew what I knew.”

Tweed got up and walked slowly a few paces away, looking at the sky. The snake stirred, and coiled around Vaffa’s leg. She bent over to stroke it, never looking away from Lilo.

“What was the name of this accomplice?”

“Parameter. Parameter/Solstice.”

Parameter floated over a golden desert that no horizon could contain. She faced the sun, which was a small but very bright disc just to anti-spinward of Saturn. Saturn itself was a dark hole in space, edged by a razored crescent with the sun set in it like a precious stone.

She saw none of this. She perceived the sun as a pressure and a wind, and Saturn as a cold, deep well that pulled.

The sunrise had been delicious. She could still taste the flavors of it flowing through the wafer-thin part of her body that had opened to receive it. She was a sunflower.

Sunflower mode was a lazy, vegetable time. Parameter had Solstice, her symb, disconnect the visual centers of her brain so she could savor the simple pleasures of
beng a plant. Her arms were spread wide to the light and her feet were planted firmly in the fertile soil that was her symb. It was a good time.

Seen from the outside, Parameter was the center of a hundred-meter filmy parasol, slightly parabolic. She was a spider sitting in the middle of a frozen section of soap bubble, but the section was shot through with veins, like the inner surface of an eyeball. Fluids pumped through the veins, some milky, some deep red, others purplish-brown. From a point near Parameter’s navel a thin stalk extended, with a fist-sized nodule at the end of it. The nodule was at the focus of the parabola and received the small percentage of sunlight that was reflected from the sunflower. It was hot there, a steamy center for Parameter to revolve around. In the nodule and in the capillaries of the sunflower, chemical reactions were going on.

Activity in her brain was damped down to almost nothing, interrupted only by the passing peaks of Solstice, who never went completely to sleep.

“Parameter.” It was not a voice, even when Parameter was more fully conscious. It was words forming in her head, like thoughts, but they were not her own thoughts.

“(Recognition; slight reproach; receptivity)”

“Come on. Wake up.”

“What is it?” Coming awake was effortless.

“Are you ready for vision now?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Solstice, functioning as a switchboard in the back of the cerebrum, closed the contacts that would allow Parameter’s visual cortex to communicate with her forebrain: She saw.

“What a lovely morning.”

“Yeah. Very nice. Wait till you see the morning papers. You won’t be so happy.”

“Can it wait? Why ruin it?” Parameter felt no sense of urgency. It had been a century since she felt rushed.

“Sure. Let me know when you’re up to it.”

Parameter communicated wry amusement to her
symb. (Picture of herself buckling on sword, dagger, donning brass helmet and picking up embossed shield.) Solstice responded. (Picture of Parameter climbing a staircase, gazing at the stars, failing to see she was reaching for a top step that wasn’t there.)

Parameter stretched, causing the filmy parasol to undulate slowly. She made tight fists of all four hands—she had no feet, having surgically replaced them with oversized hands at the time of her pairing—then spread twenty fingers. One hand caught her attention. It was pale, but was turning pinker as she watched. She had the coloring of an albino; the skin under her nails was amber, turning quickly to orange. Solstice was packing up, pumping liquids around, getting ready to move.

Nothing she saw was real. Her eyes were protected behind the opaque substance of Solstice; no light had fallen on her retinas in over seven years. Had she looked at the sun with her eyes, as she seemed to be doing, cells would have been destroyed. What she saw was the product of nerve impulses sent to different areas of her brain by Solstice’s sensory receptors. But it looked to her as though she were floating naked in space, feeling the raw sunlight on her body. The illusion was complete.