The Ophiuchi Hotline

13

Starline, by the Public Relations Master Program, Main Business Computer, StarLine, Ltd. Read-rating II.

Who'd a thought they'd miss? Nobody figured on it. People were looking for junk from the stars for God knows how long. Way back in old-style time, Project Ozma took a listen. No good. Later on, we turned the big ears on 'em. Centauri, Wolf, Lalande, Procyon, 40 Eridani. Quiet, real quiet. What gives? We listened to 'em all, and no buzz.

Then we started to get way far out. Beyond Pluto, twice that fuggin' far away, and what do you think? Voices!

Well, not voices, exactly, you readout? Computer bippety-bips and offedy-ons. Nobody could read 'em for a long time. (I mean, you should take a look at 'em! Press the printout and a zillion acres of flyspecks.) Even the computers didn't know what the message was. But a couple things were sure. Somebody was sittin' on 70 Ophiuchi with one fuggin' big laser, they wanted to talk, and they couldn't shoot piss into a pot!

Hold on! Maybe they weren't shootin' at us. So they looked around behind us, you know, but there's nothing but a couple of stars in Orion's armpit. They were yakkin' at us, all right. But how come they missed? You think they'd build a laser like that if they can't aim it?

No way. Somebody said, "Hey! Maybe they don't want to talk till we're ready! Like, we gotta be smart enough to get out there, or something." Sounds okay, huh? Sure enough. They've been talking for four hundred years now. They lead us by fifteen billion klicks, like a skeet shooter. You wanna listen, you gotta go out there.

Somebody else said, "How come we don't build us a big laser and talk back?" You kiddin'? Who's gonna pay for it?

Even at the best of economic times, there was little a traveler would choose to bring to Pluto. The import duties were the highest in the system, and the weight penalties charged by the shipping lines made it more sensible to leave all luggage at home and buy a new wardrobe on arrival. Normally, the only thing worth bringing to Pluto was information, and even that was carried as compactly as possible.

But Pluto was in a depression. The government had been on the losing end of an economic war with Mercury for two years, and the effects were drastic. Vaffa had used her Intersystem Credit Card on Mars to get a small amount of cash. Even so, the weight penalty was steep.

Lilo and Vaffa stepped out of the five-gee express at Florida Port, groggy and miserable from eight days spent floating in an acceleration tank. Lilo kept coughing up unpleasant substances, and there was a steady drip of fluid from her nose. She had licked it once, which proved to be a mistake.

Looking for something to wash away the taste, she spotted a drink-vending machine and inserted one of the Martian bills Vaffa had given her.

"I can't change that," said the machine. "Tell you what. If you deposit the money, we can do business." The machine explained that it was an authorized branch of the Florida Planetary Bank. A light came on that said INTEREST ACCRUING. It went off in a few seconds. Lilo got her flask of drink, and her bill was returned along with a few Plutonian coins. Vaffa advised her to toss them in the recycler, since they were virtually worthless.

Pluto was in the middle of an inflationary spiral. Money was being dated as it was printed, and it had to be spent quickly before the value dropped. Every Monday one thousand Old Marks became equal to one New Mark. If your money was more than a week old, it would make an economical fire; it would not buy its weight in paper.

Lilo and Vaffa waited in the recovery room of the spaceport lounge until the medicos certified them as being over the effects of high-gee travel. A few steps away was a line of shops which specialized in outfitting naked travelers as they emerged from Inner Planet flights. Lilo wanted to stop.

"Don't shop here," Vaffa advised. "They gouge you."

"What's the difference?" Lilo asked. "We're rich, right?" She entered The Underworld Boutique.

Inside, she was soaped, showered, oiled, and massaged until she felt more human and less like something pickled. She began to lose some of the muscle kinks that plague high-gee passengers for days after a flight. She told the clerks to dress her.

From the things they brought, she selected a red shirt with buckles at the waist and wrists and neck. It had puffed sleeves, but otherwise was quite utilitarian, with plenty of pockets and a built-in chronometer. They wanted to paint her legs, but she refused firmly. She bought a hat, and slippers, mainly because the soles of her feet were wrinkled like prunes. The clerks tried to sell her face paint, a holomist suit, dildopants, and a live mink coat, so she paid and left. She wasn't used to pressure selling, and didn't like it. Vaffa bought nothing.

"Don't you ever wear clothes?" Lilo asked her.

"I don't like them. They can get in your way in a fight. Sometimes I wear a belt with a holster, but not in public."

Vaffa was glancing around nervously. Lilo had observed that the other woman didn't like crowds, even on Luna. Here, she seemed very jumpy. Her movements were quick and jerky as she tried to cover all angles at once.

"Where do we go?"

"I have an address. Maybe we'd better find a map."

Pluto liked to think of itself as the frontier. After three hundred years of steady colonization, the idea was showing signs of wear. In most ways, Pluto was as urban as any of the Eight Worlds. But Plutonian cities tended to be louder and gaudier. There was an air of ostentation, a constant assault of bad taste and commercial and personal display. It was distasteful to both the Lunarian women.

Rough edges of construction were sometimes left unfinished. The carpet in the corridors was thick and soft, but in places it did not fit together right, with raveled edges stopping short of the walls and gobs of light brown pitch in the corners. At one point the slideway carried them past a section of bare rock where workers were installing insulation and plastic facing. The rock was caked with frost; it sucked heat from one side of Lilo's body.

They came to Center, hub of the city's slidewalk network and the main transit nexus where tube capsules departed for outlying suburbs, enclaves, and communes. They got off and looked around. The ceiling was two kilometers above them, but some of the trees in Center Park seemed to scrape it. Eight arcades circled the vast cylindrical area, reached by glass elevators hung from transparent cables. Everything seemed to be in motion or flashing for their attention.

Lilo was feeling oppressed, an outlander. It was dizzying. She was a born Lunarian, conservative in many ways. She dressed for convenience, not decoration. Waste and frivolity offended her. It was the legacy of the Invasion, and in many ways it set Lunar society apart from the rest of human space.

Luna was the planet that was colonized directly from Earth. When the Invaders came, the few thousand humans on Luna dug in for the long struggle for self-sufficiency. They had not been ready; autonomy was supposed to have been thirty years away. But species survival would be decided by what they did.

The first fifty years had been extremely hard. Many had died in selective lotteries or in violent resistance to them when it became clear the population had to be thinned. The survivors had sacrificed all the harder to insure that the martyrs had not died in vain.

The struggle left its mark on Lunarians. They tended to be conservative in politics and morals. They clung to a ghost of representative democracy while the colonies were trying Ordeal-Selectivism. Neutersex had never caught on. Current fashions of Mars and Mercury sold poorly on Luna. With the modesty taboo an almost forgotten aberration, the average Lunarian usually wore a vest-of-pockets, carried a shoulder purse, or went nude. It was almost a uniform, and the rest of humanity made endless jokes about it.

A creative surgeon could go broke in Luna. Few were interested in extra legs in odd places, reversed heads, new nose designs, or prehensile tails. They changed their sex an average of once every eight years, a system-wide low. The ratio of maintenance to cosmetic surgery was nine to one. Most Lunarians who wanted a face change did it at home as a hobby.

Pluto was at the other end of the spectrum. Lilo thought it vulgar. It was a deep-seated distaste that was beyond her power to reason away. Plutonians were peacocks. They wore their social status on their skins.

Lilo and Vaffa moved through a maze of floating advertisements of ghostsmoke and holomist that followed the prospective customer and played breath-catching tricks with perspective, all the time broadcasting direct to the inner ear, thus evading the noise-pollution laws.

They managed to whirl out of the mainstream into a green eddy of parkland. The trunk of a tree provided sculptured seats growing from the bark. Lilo looked up, and decided it would take her five minutes just to walk around the tree.

It was like the eye of a hurricane. Holo ads approached them, but were stopped by an invisible wall.

VISIT THE CHARON FERRYBOAT.

BUY EROTICON. USE IT, EAT IT, WIPE IT ON, RUB IT OFF, COP IT.

GIVE TO THE PERSONALITY BANK.

TRADE IN YOUR FEET TODAY. BUY NEW ASTAIRES. PUT ON THE RITZ.

The park was deserted. Plutonians did not seem to need peace and quiet. Lilo and Vaffa sat and watched the people go by.

"Breasts seem popular this year," Vaffa observed after a while. "Nearly everybody has at least two. Hey, what do you call that?"

"Electric testicles. I read about them."

"Kind of pretty," Vaffa mused. "Like lanterns."

"It's supposed to be the quickest way to assure a copping partner that you're sterile. Look, do you have any idea where we're going? I need another bath, and a quiet place."