The Ophiuchi Hotline (5 page)

“Okay. What’s up?”

“This is up. I monitored this broadcast two minutes ago. It came from the Janus transmitter, channel nineteen. Where do you want it?”

“I don’t care. Anywhere.”

A three-dimensional image built up between Parameter and the dark semicircle of Saturn. It looked as real as anything else she could see. The view was the interior of a room. It could have been any room, but the woman sitting in it was someone Parameter knew. The voice-over explained that Lilo, the convicted Enemy of Humanity, had been put to death. It gave the time, the place, and a brief summary of her crimes. As the commentary moved on to a lecture about the evils of genetic experimentation, Solstice tuned it out without Parameter needing to ask for it.

“We knew it would happen,” Parameter pointed out,
wondering why the news did not affect her more.

“So did she.”

“Okay. Where is she now?”

Her view shifted. Saturn appeared to rotate beneath her until she saw the Rings from the top. She seemed to be hovering over the north polar region.

At the bottom of the Ring, near where the shadow of Saturn cut across it, a small green arrow blinked on and off.

“That’s us,” Solstice said. Further around the curve of the Ring, about sixty degrees to spinward, a dark red arrow appeared. Its color told her the mass of the rock in question. It was on the edge of Ring Alpha, the outermost of the rings, where perturbations would not have been severe over five years.

Solstice caused the picture to zoom in. There was Lilo’s life capsule as Parameter had last seen it, retrieved by Solstice from areas in their common brain that Parameter could never reach without hypnosis.

It was a rock—slightly larger than average, but in all a quite ordinary rock. Inside it was a nuclear generator, a computer, a modest rocket engine, a life-support system—and Lilo. Or someone who could become Lilo; a clone who, when Lilo’s recorded memories were played into her, would become the Lilo of five years ago.

“Has it really been five years?”

“And sixty days and three hours, Old Earth Corrected Time.”

“Doesn’t seem like that.” She studied the two arrows again. It was a long distance.

“One hundred forty-one thousand eight hundred and ninety-five kilometers, as the rock rolls,” Solstice supplied.

“Well, we made a promise, didn’t we?”’

“I was waiting for you to say it.”

It was six years ago they had first met her. Lilo had set up her private research station on Janus, hoping that the status of that satellite as the interface between human and pair society would mean less vigilance, looser enforcement of the genetic statutes. Parameter/Solstice
had met her there on one of their infrequent visits, and they had immediately liked her. That was rare for them. Humans and pairs do not generally mix.

They had hung around her small lab while they were on Janus, and when they were ready to leave they had suggested she move her entire operation into the Rings. Lilo had not been willing to go that far, but had approached them with the idea of setting up a robot station on the edge of the Rings. She was worried about getting caught. They had agreed to supervise the awakening of the clone if she ever needed it.

Now the long journey was ahead of them. It was impossible to hurry. Though they could reach speeds of fifty kilometers per hour in their travels, they had to stop to feed each day. It would take them nearly a year to reach Lilo.

“Well, every trip starts with one push,” Solstice said. “Let’s go.”

I’m not a frequent visitor to any of the disneylands. To me, a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands and eat dirt-grown food is harmless, but silly. It makes us yearn for something we can never have, something that’s always up there in the Lunar sky. It leads to lunatic fantasies like the one that had obsessed Tweed for so long: the retaking of Earth, the liberation of our home planet from the Invaders.

I grew up surrounded by metal, and have never felt deprived because of it. Stories of Old Earth glories leave me unmoved. Our frontiers will be found not by trying to recapture the past, but by looking within ourselves. I had tried to do that, and ended up in jail.

Tweed must have set the thermostat on his private paradise at around forty degrees. I was sweltering. Maybe the plants needed a summer, but I definitely didn’t. And some unspeakable little vermin had found their way into my leg hair.
Nature.
I stripped off the bulky robe and tried to cool myself while Tweed pondered my fate.

Lilo saw Tweed make a signal to the man on the edge of the woods. She tensed. Was this it? He could decide she wasn’t worth the trouble—she
still
didn’t know
what he had in mind for her—and things could start to happen fast. She watched Vaffa carefully. If they came at her, she vowed to do some damage on the way out.

But Tweed was hurrying through the thick grass. Vaffa relaxed a little when Tweed had gone out of sight. She sat in the grass and stroked the snake. This female Vaffa was two and a half meters tall, had no breasts and very little fat anywhere, and was completely hairless. She was bone-white all over. A death’s-head: spare, economical of movement, powerful and lethal.

Someone came running through the field toward them. Lilo wondered why anyone would run in this heat. Was she in trouble? But it was sheer high spirits. She saw the tattoo first, then the face.

“Hello, Mari.”

“Hi,” she gasped. “Isn’t it
wonderful
? Being here, I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” Lilo slapped at something that buzzed; her hand came away red. Bloodsucker!

“Hi, Vaffa.” The woman nodded to Mari. The medico was covered in sweat, and seemed to love it. She stood for a moment, getting her breath back. “You’re supposed to come with me,” she said.

“What for?”

“I have to make a recording of you. Boss’s orders. Come on, it won’t take a minute.”

Lilo knew it took a bit longer than that, but followed her along a path leading into the woods. Turning, she saw that Vaffa was following, giving more attention to the snake than to Lilo. It wasn’t very flattering. It would have been nice to think of herself as dangerous, but Vafa did not seem impressed. Well, that was probably best. Maybe she’d get a surprise one day.

She had thought she would be taken back to the more conventional part of Tweed’s residence. Instead they went to a glade in the middle of a dense forest. There was a waterfall nearby. Mari had carried her bag with her; now she set it on the ground and gestured to Lilo. A thin plastic sheet had been spread on the ground.

“Right here?” Lilo said. “Don’t you need…” But Mari was opening what looked like a tree stump. Inside was metal.

“Why not? Don’t worry, you’ll love it.”

Lilo had to admit the setting was more restful than the standard medico’s operating room. Maybe it would help her over her nervousness.

Lilo’s fear of memory recording was a common one. She could tell herself as often as she wished that what she feared simply could
not
happen; she could not be awakened after the recording process to be told she had died and it was now several years later. A
clone
could wake up and learn that, but not her. Human consciousness is linear, and her mind was stuck in the body she lived in, for all time. What memory recording did was to make it possible for a second personality, exactly like her own, to be implanted into a second body, also exactly like her own. But Lilo could never participate in the life that clone would lead, though it had her memories to the time of the recording.

She tried to relax as Mari plugged her in. She felt herself go limp and numb all over as Mari turned the dials on her black bag. From then on, it was impossible to see what the medico was doing, but she knew the process well enough. The top of her head was opened—she could see the blood on Mari’s hands as they came into her range of vision.

There were tiny metal channels implanted in Lilo’s brain, put there when she was three years old. They enabled her to interface with a computer, and also served as conduits for the recording medium: single-molecule chains of ferro-photo-nucleic acid. Mari strapped a recording band around Lilo’s forehead. In operation, the recorder would render Lilo unconscious for three minutes.

It was simple enough in operation, impossibly complex in theory. Lilo often wondered if the human race would ever have perfected it without the information from the Ophiuchi Hotline.

Memory is a holographic process. A memory is stored
not in one place, but all over the brain. It cannot be recorded or deciphered by any linear process, such as magnetic tape running past a playback head. It must be grasped all at once, whole, like a snapshot or a hologram. The FPNA made that possible. Each strand, containing billions of bits, was interfered with by every other strand when the process took place. Unlike a visual hologram, where each segment of the photographic plate contains all the information of the whole picture, one strand of FPNA was useless by itself. Only in combination with the sheaf of other strands—forty-six in all—could the picture have meaning. The recording band would cause magnetic fields to be set up all through the brain, producing a code of nearly infinite permutations.

Lilo had never worried about whether the process was actually capable of holding everything. She was not too impressed with notions of a soul, a
karass
, a
karma
, or an
atman.
She knew people who had died and been brought back to life by memory recording and cloning, and there was no way to tell the difference.

Mari flicked the switch, and the last thing Lilo recalled was her smiling face.

The face was still there when she woke up, still smiling. Lilo smiled back, glad that it was over. She started to get up.

“Hold on, not so fast,” Mari said, lightly. “I have to unhook you first, and close you up.”

Something was different. She looked again, and realized it was the background. Something
behind
Mari’s face had changed.

It was the leaves on the trees. They had been green, and now they were a riot of red and gold and purple.

“O God, no. No, I…I don’t like this. I don’t want—”

Mari touched her forehead lightly. “I don’t want to have to turn you off.”

Lilo sagged. Gradually she became aware of a circle of faces at the edge of her vision, between Mari and the
canopy of trees, looking down at her. There was Tweed, and Vaffa, and…the other Vaffa. Male and female, looking down at her.

Mari finished her work. “Let me give you a hand up,” she said. “You’re going to need it.” Lilo let herself be pulled into a sitting position, then helped to her feet. She stood, dizzy for a moment but rapidly regaining her balance. She let herself feel, not daring to think: the grass under her feet, hair brushing her face, the cool skin and underlying warmth of Mari’s naked back under her arm, the play of muscles in her legs and feet. Mari put her arm around Lilo’s waist and walked her in a circle, like a drunk.

“You’ll get your legs back in no time,” she said, soothingly. “I exercised you all through the growth process, while you were in the tank. You’re strong, you’re just not used it yet. Feel ready to stand on your own?”

Lilo nodded, not trusting herself to speak. Mari let her go, and she stood facing Tweed. He had some papers in his hand.

“So I died,” she said. He glanced at his papers and made a check mark.

“Doesn’t anyone have anything to say to me?”

Tweed said nothing, just looked at his papers again and made another check. The male Vaffa was looking into the treetops, smiling. It was the first time Lilo had seen him smile. The female had her hand in front of her mouth, and Lilo realized she was trying not to laugh. Were they amused at
her
? What kind of people
were
they?

“What the hell is going on, would someone please tell me that?”

Tweed tore a sheet of paper and handed it to Lilo. She glanced down at it, looked back at Tweed, then had to look down again at what she was afraid she had seen.

“So I died.”

“Doesn’t anyone have anything to say to me?”

“What the hell is going on, would someone please tell me?”

The words were machine-printed, and each sentence
had a fat check beside it. She felt dizziness again. There was an apparition: at the edge of the clearing, a huge elk, with crystal antlers refracting blue sunlight. Hallucination? She looked away from it. She wanted out of this crazy place.

“You’d better sit down and rest,” Mari said, putting an arm around her again as Lilo’s knees buckled. “Maybe you should cry it out.”

“
No!
I’ll cry later. Right now I want to know what’s going on.”

“And you shall,” Tweed said. He gestured, and the male Vaffa unfolded a chair for him. He settled into it. “Mari, I told you not to interfere.”

“I’m sorry, Boss,” Mari said, helplessly. “I just can’t seem to…when someone’s in trouble, I just—”

“Never mind. I shouldn’t have had you here for this. It’s not that important, though. Lilo, as you already saw, you are not what you thought you were. You are a clone. Perhaps you know what happened to the original Lilo. I have reason to believe that she was hatching her plans even before I had her recorded. If not, she at least entered our partnership with a…a state of mind that was not the best. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“You’re saying I tried to escape. And I didn’t make it.” She glanced at the two Vaffas. Their expressions were unreadable.

“That’s it exactly. You were planning it from the moment you realized you were not going to be executed.”

“I guess there’s no sense not admitting it, is there?”

“No, there isn’t.”

I’m afraid
, she thought, but didn’t care to say it. He might have it written down somewhere. She felt something building in her, something that had to find release. She welcomed it, even if it meant her death. She was going to rip the skin from his face, expose the flayed bone, and crack it with her teeth. She was going to kill him. She looked at the ground while the bloodlust built in her. She was about to spring…