The Ophiuchi Hotline

12

STARLINE LTD.

TOPSECRET; AAA RATINGS ONLY

SUBJECT: OPHIUCHI HOTLINE TRANSMISSION OF 1249 HOURS 44.3 SECONDS UT, 8/14/570.

TRANSLATION FOLLOWS: (PROBABILITY WEIGHTED)

FOR (A PERIOD OF TIME: CONJECTURE: 400 EARTH YEARS?) DATA HAS BEEN SENT. NEW SUBSCRIBERS (43%) ARE GIVEN A (UNTRANSLATABLE) TO ADJUST. YOUR TIME PERIOD IS EXPIRED (TERMINATED?) (EXTENDED?). PLEASE REMIT THE (BALANCE DUE?) (REMAINDER?) OR FACE TERMINATION (45%) OF SERVICE. YOUR ACCOUNT (22%) WILL BE REFERRED (45%) TO A (UNTRANSLATABLE). SEND PAYMENT (30%) IN THE FORM OF (UNTRANSLATABLE) IN THE NEXT (PERIOD OF TIME: CONJECTURE: 10 EARTH YEARS?). CREDIT (58%) IS AVAILABLE TO (NEW?) (OLD?) STRUGGLING LIFE-FORMS. SEVERE PENALTIES, SEVERE PENALTIES, SEVERE PENALTIES (97%).

ENDS.

MESSAGE REPEATS THIRTY TIMES.

TOTAL BITS: APPROX. 2.3 X 10⁸

Gold.

The memory and premonition of yellow gold.

Somewhere was a forest under a blue sun.

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

"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 trees. They had been green, and now the branches were bare.

They trained her. She had a lot of time to brood about her situation. It was hard to believe that the year was now 571, that it had been two years since Mari had recorded her in the clearing.

Tweed had shown her his frightening script. He had now seen her revived three times in the same place. Three. She heard the story of how her original self had tried to escape soon after being set free from the Institute, and how she died. Tweed had pictures. She knew how her first clone, Lilo 2, had died. Then there was Lilo 3, who killed Mari and was herself caught and killed. No one would tell her what had happened to Lilo 4, but she must have been the smartest of the bunch. Or the most intimidated. She had lasted a year.

She was Lilo 5. (And what of the life capsule in the Rings? Was there a number six stirring?)

She intended to be very careful.

They put her on a ship bound for Titan with the female Vaffa and a man called Iphis.

The ship was three days out of Luna when the signal came from Tweed. Lilo wasn't allowed to see it; Iphis and Vaffa took the decoded message and went to the bridge. She could hear angry voices, the loudest belonging to Iphis. Something about schedules, missing the other ship, and reaction mass. But when they came out it was clear who had won. Iphis was glowering, and it seemed like a good time to stay out of his way. Vaffa was her usual imperturbable self, with perhaps a touch more ice around the eyes.

It seemed they were diverting to Mars.

Vaffa wanted to talk to Lilo. She had a rather direct way of letting her know; she grabbed her by the ankle and towed her like a toy balloon.

"We're stopping on Mars long enough to catch the high-gee run to Pluto," Vaffa said, after locking Lilo and herself in the small sleeping area.

"How interesting."

"Yes." She looked thoughtful, relaxed. Then she exploded. Lilo found herself strapped to an acceleration couch with Vaffa's face very close to hers. Her cheek hurt terribly, and she tasted blood in her mouth.

"Yes," Vaffa said, again. "Interesting." She did not look interested. If anything, she was distracted. Lilo had learned that Vaffa was not exceptionally bright, and that she seldom had doubts to resolve. Now she had a problem, and was working it out to her satisfaction. Lilo felt something cool and hard against her throat, and forced herself to swallow.

"The Boss says there's an emergency," Vaffa went on. "I have to go look into it, and he wants you along, too. I know why. There'll be a problem to solve out there, and I'm not so good at that. So you'll be solving it, and I'll be watching you."

"Listen," Lilo said, keeping her voice low. "Surely you can handle it. I'd be happy to stay locked in the ship and out of trouble until you—"

It was only the slightest increase of pressure on her neck, but suddenly she could not breathe.

"No. We'll do it the way the Boss says. I'm supposed to make sure you don't get away. We'll be meeting someone else who's supposed to help me, but I'll have to watch him, too. I want you to know I've studied the character profile the Boss made of you. I know pretty well how you think."

"I believe you—"

She grabbed the straps on each side of Lilo and placed her knee on the hard bone between Lilo's breasts. She pulled, and pressed with her knee.

"I won't say anything against the Boss," she said, pressing a little harder. "But I think he puts too much faith in those profiles. I thought you might be easier to control if you feared me more than you do."

"Vaffa, I fear you already, honestly, I don't know when—" But Vaffa motioned her into silence with a slight movement of her head. For the first time, her brow wrinkled slightly. This was proving to be a tough problem.

"I thought you would fear me if I amputated your arm or leg without turning off your nerve centers. I have the skill to save your life and restore the limb, but it would involve more pain than you've ever imagined. Would that persuade you to behave?"

Lilo was amazed to realize that it was a sincere question, one that Vaffa really wanted her opinion on.

"No. No... I, Vaffa, I don't know. Please don't do it. I... I think it's more likely I'd just hate you more." She didn't know what else to say. To her extreme relief, Vaffa was nodding.

"I thought of killing you now. I might lie to the Boss, but... no, I don't think I could. I'll make a threat, then. I think that if you try to escape from me, I have a good chance of catching you. If you do manage to get free, I'll certainly devote all my time to getting you back. Here's the threat. If I catch you, I'll take a very long time killing you."

"I understand that."

Vaffa was still puzzling over it. She massaged the shiny skin on her scalp, and eased the pressure on Lilo's chest. Lilo breathed a little easier. Finally Vaffa unbuckled her and let her get up. She grabbed Lilo's head, not roughly, and made her look into her eyes.

"I want you to swear to me that you will not try to escape while we're on Pluto. I appeal to your honor."

"What happens if I won't swear? You kill me now, and tell Tweed I was escaping?"

Vaffa looked surprised, and slightly offended. "No. I won't harm you further, no matter what happens, unless you try to escape. I'm not threatening you to make you swear. A promise made under duress is not binding." She stated it like a natural law of the universe.

"All right. I swear I won't try to escape on Pluto."

They sealed the oath in blood, of all things. Making the cut in her own palm without deadening her nerves was one of the most courageous things Lilo had ever done.

It wasn't until later that Lilo realized how childlike the whole thing had been. Was a solemn oath enough to bind her to Vaffa when the stakes were her life and freedom? She didn't see how it could be, but the question troubled her more than she was willing to admit.

Later, Vaffa turned to Lilo in the dim light of the sleeping room. Iphis was snoring.

"We've got to talk." Lilo had been afraid Vaffa wanted to cop again. While Lilo got along well sexually with Iphis, Vaffa frightened her. They moved out into the tiny freefall gym.

"You should read this first." Vaffa handed her a sheet of faxpaper. It was covered with code groups, and under them was a messy translation in Vaffa's seismographic writing. Lilo noted the StarLine name, and the Topsecret, AAA rating.

"I don't know where the Boss got it," Vaffa volunteered. "He has his sources."

Lilo read it through, then again, carefully. She was familiar with the weighting system used in decoding Hotline transmissions. Often the Hotline signal, after traveling seventeen light-years, was considerably garbled. But that couldn't be the case here, not with thirty repeats. So the uncertainty attached to key words was the result of the computer's lack of context for a good translation.

It did not surprise Lilo. She knew most people thought of Hotline transmissions as a sort of substitution code; when cracked, the result would be in good, grammatical System Speech.

But the data received over the Hotline was the result of alien thinking. As long as it stuck to data of a scientific nature, couched in mathematical terms, reasonable translations could be made. Even so, there were huge "gray areas" which were thought to be data but could not be interpreted by any computer programs yet devised. Lilo had her own opinions about the gray areas. Her research into them had put her in jail.

The few times messages had come through which the computers tagged as being something like language, the translations were hedged with uncertainties. The linguists were not surprised at this. Languages embody cultural assumptions, inconsistencies; even contradictions. Given a large body of transmissions, the computers could get closer and closer to the meanings of words. But the Ophiuchites had not shown much interest in talking about themselves, or in doing anything but sending oceans of engineering data. The few verbal messages could have been anything from commercials to religious evangelism, or something that had no human analogue at all.

Lilo read it a third time.

"What's this blowout about accounts, and termination of service? and payment? What could they possibly want? What could we give them?"

"Maybe what they're giving us. Information." Vaffa shrugged.

"But we... what does it mean?"

"I'm assuming it means just what it says. This is a phone bill for four hundred years of service."

"But... that's crazy."

"Is it? Why did we think the Hotline should just go on forever, without us giving anything in return? Why should we expect them to be any less mercenary than we are?"

Lilo calmed down and thought about it before she replied.

"Okay. I can see that. But what would we give them? And how? I guess we could build a big laser like they have—I'm not saying it's within our power for sure, but we might—but what do we transmit? Everything we've gotten from the Hotline has been two or three thousand years beyond where our science was at the time. It's like... like asking an Earth primitive for advice on how to fix your fusion motor. What could we have that they want to learn?"

Vaffa grimaced, and took the message back. "I was hoping you'd have some ideas about that. I can't think of anything, and it's got me worried. I guess what I'm really wondering is, what are the 'severe penalties'?"

"I don't see what it could be except a disconnection. I mean, they're seventeen light-years away. What could they do?"

"I don't know." Vaffa brooded for a while as Lilo tried to figure it out. Then she looked up. "Everybody says star travel is impossible, or at least it would take so long it wouldn't be worthwhile. One of the big reasons they give is the Ophiuchites. If they had star travel, they'd be here, right? They wouldn't be sitting home beaming messages." She shook her head. "Now I wonder. Maybe we've got them all wrong. Maybe they had another reason for staying away. But I don't think they'd send this unless they meant business."

Lilo wanted to talk about it some more, but Vaffa had withdrawn into a private world. The woman was scared. Lilo wasn't, yet, but she would be.