The Ophiuchi Hotline

14

The gravity trains departed from the level just below Center. Lilo bought two tickets, nervously sticking her hand into the slot of the genoprinter before doing so. It had worked well enough on Mars.

Tweed's nixonian hand reached across five billion kilometers. She felt the scrape of the sampler across her palm, the machine whirred, and somewhere in the banks of the Pluto Central Computer an entry was made:

JOVIAN-342 (ID-L-502-KC-98) BOARDED FLORIDA-BARROW SHUTTLE 0349 HRS. 4/8/71.

The security check was automatic, and it came up green. The name Jovian-342 did not appear on any list of wanted persons, and that was the end of it. Had the Pluto computer felt the need to check further with Lunar records, it would have learned twelve hours later that Jovian-342 was a member of the Church of Cosmic Engineering, an upstanding citizen of Luna, and an enthusiastic traveler. What it would not have learned was the fact that Jovian-342 had emigrated ten years before and was now presumably paired in the Rings, cut off from the rest of human civilization and unable to protest the theft of her identity.

Lilo did not know how Tweed had done it. She did know that the people who ran the main computers were potentially above the law, so the safeguards against illegal tampering were stringent. But it had happened in the past, and would happen again.

The inside of the car was plush brown velvet and subdued lights on chrome. She sank into one of the couches and strapped in, with Vaffa taking the seat beside her. The car eased into a tunnel and glided slowly upward. Airlock doors got out of the way and closed behind the car as it picked up speed. Lilo counted twelve of them. Then stars appeared outside the window. She pulled her feet up under her and rubbed them. She was cold.

It was purely psychological, but the frozen gas outside seemed to claw at her. She hated the cold. There was nothing warm here, even in the daytime.

A large man came down the aisle and sat on the arm of Vaffa's chair. He gave her a big grin, then tried to sell her a membership in a sexcircle. Vaffa was annoyed, but when she tried to push him away her hand went through him. He was only the first. Soon they were surrounded.

Vaffa jumped when one of them touched her.

"Pardon me," the man said. "I see you're from Luna."

"Yes," Lilo said. "Is it that obvious?"

"Your nose," he said. "It's pointed." His own was as flat as a bad prizefighter's. He had eyelashes half a meter long. It made him blink in slow motion. "And other things. No offense, I hope. I just thought you might be interested in what I'm selling."

"You know, you could be replaced by an illusion," Vaffa said.

"What are you selling that couldn't be hawked by a holo?" Lilo asked.

"An antiholo generator," he said.

It was a small bracelet, stamped with a number to call for repairs. They were leased, not sold, like a computer terminal. They came in a range of prices and models. Some merely held the holos at arm's length. Most Plutonians thought this was enough. If you couldn't see the ads, how would you know what was fashionable?

The man showed no surprise when Lilo and Vaffa took the heavy-duty Annihilator model.

The train pulled into Barrow and the windows fogged. The outside of the car was coated with frost as they debarked. Melting slush dripped from the sides of the car into gutters in the carpeted platform.

"What can you tell me about this guy?" Lilo asked.

Vaffa was scanning the walls. She never seemed to relax.

"Ex-teacher. The guy's weird. Never really got over being kicked out of the Educational Association. But the Boss lets him work Pluto alone. His job isn't that important. Not until now, anyway."

"Did he have something to do with intercepting that transmission?"

"Yeah. That last message from the Boss filled me in on some of that. He has access to Hotline data. He sends it to the Boss, and we get it about the same time as the StarLine board of directors."

"Why? I mean, up to now, what good has it done you?"

Vaffa shrugged. "He likes to know things. We're fighting a war."

Lilo had to keep reminding herself of that. The Free Earth Party versus the Invaders. No shots had been fired as yet. Lilo had little hope for the outcome if Tweed ever managed to get the conflict heated up.

But it was the most important thing in Vaffa's life. She was always alert for enemies. Now she was edgy, and Lilo thought she knew why. Vaffa had traveled many times to Titan, but had never strayed far from the spaceport. Luna was the only environment she knew well. She was suffering from culture shock.

Lilo was familiar with the phenomenon. It is not true that one corridor is just like another. There are trifles a person does not consciously notice: the shape of the ceiling fixtures, the foreign arrangement of dials on the corner air sniffers, the unfamiliar designs of fountains, callboxes, sprinklers, door flanges, medical terminals, and crash locks. Even the air smelled wrong. Pluto air was scrubbed only seven times before reuse. It was heavy with humanity.

They reached their destination and rang the bell. The door flange popped and they stepped over the lip into chaos.

The room was large, but it seemed filled by seven or eight children. They never stopped moving and yelling. A foot-race was in progress, with furniture serving as obstacles. Lilo and Vaffa backed against a wall to be out of the way, and waited. Across the room, a man was talking to a pregnant woman. He looked up.

"Party's over!" he yelled. "Come back later. You, would you hold the door for them?" Vaffa held it open, and the man herded the children. They giggled, and lunged at him, but he held out an arm and they fell back, laughing. He seemed to have an almost magical power over them. Soon they were all in the corridor.

"You'll have to come back later," he was telling the woman. He took her hand and guided her to the door. Lilo looked at her bare belly. It couldn't be many more days.

When she was gone, the man looked at them and shrugged.

"She wants a bootleg teacher," he told them. "Some foul-up. She didn't get an ironclad contract with the teacher she picked out, I guess. I get them all the time."

"You'd think that with only one chance, people would be more careful," Lilo said.

"Ain't it the truth? She could have at least had someone explain the contract to her, even if she is illit. I..." He looked at her, and smiled. He held out his hand, "I'm Cathay."

"Lilo." She took his hand. He glanced at Vaffa.

"I know you," he said, evenly.

"Nevertheless, we've never met," Vaffa said.

"Then it was your brother. Your clone. I know you." He seemed about to say more, but left it at that. "Well, have a seat, I guess. Whatever looks comfortable. Can I get you anything?" He was looking at Lilo.

"Something mildly intoxicating," she said. "I'm not choosy."

"Got just the thing." He disappeared into another room. Vaffa waited a moment, then got up and followed him. They came back one at a time, Vaffa with one drink, Cathay with two. Both seemed tense. He handed her a glass of green liquid.

The drink made her feel better. She relaxed into her chair and studied Cathay. He had a lot of curly brown hair, long legs, and a boyish face. He was handsome without overdoing it, and Lilo liked that. She felt a physical attraction without having touched or smelled him, and that was rare for her.

"To what do I owe the extreme pleasure of this visit?" Cathay asked. "Wait, let me guess. Tweed's pregnant, and he's looking for a bootleg teacher."

Vaffa, who had taken a seat facing the door, sat even straighter in her chair. Lilo felt herself tensing, and realized how attuned she was to the other woman's moods. On the trip from Luna to Mars she had become adept at staying out of Vaffa's way in the small ship.

"I will warn you once," Vaffa said. "I won't listen to jokes about the Boss." She glared from Cathay to Lilo, and back again. Lilo looked helplessly at Cathay, wanting to tell him what form the second warning would take. To her surprise, he seemed to understand. He gave her an almost imperceptible nod, and sat back in his chair.

"Okay. Go on. It's about the Hotline, isn't it? What else could it be? The Boss is scared, and I don't blame him."

"You are aware of the content of the message?" Vaffa asked, half rising from her seat. "I think I would have been told if you were authorized to read it."

"Well, I don't know if I was authorized or not," he said. "But it was already translated when I got it. Did the Boss tell you my source is in the translation department? I can't get the raw data."

Vaffa relaxed a little. "Yes, he did say that. But you shouldn't have read it. Your function is to pass it on to the Boss."

Cathay shrugged. "I had to encode it to send it to him, and I'm as curious as the next fellow. No one told me to forget what I'd read. But I'll bear it in mind. What I still can't understand is what you're here for. I don't know what the Boss thinks you can do that I can't do better. I have contacts out here. I know my way around. You... well, you're muscle, I know that. Does he plan to have you bully the Hotline into a deadline extension?"

Lilo shifted nervously in her chair, but apparently Vaffa was not insulted.

"No. Our mission will be simple. You said the Boss is scared. That isn't quite right, but it's fair to say he is concerned. The message seems to be quite important, and potentially dangerous."

Lilo couldn't help laughing. "I guess you might say that. It's got to make you wonder, if nothing else."

"The way I read it," Cathay said, seriously, "is that we've been presented with a phone bill."

"But we never subscribed," Vaffa pointed out.

"That's an evasion," Cathay said. "It's true we never asked for the service. But we used it. We've been using it for centuries, and as far as I know no one has ever tried to send anything back in return."

"The costs..."

"That's beside the point. I've been thinking about this ever since I saw the message. What amazes me now is that no one ever saw this possibility. We've treated the Hotline as a natural resource, like vacuum. We wondered what the Ophiuchites might be like, but when they didn't volunteer anything about themselves I guess we just wanted to believe it was a... a sort of interstellar welfare program."

"When it was really more like cultural exchange?" Lilo suggested.

"Maybe. If that's it, they must be insulted that we never sent them anything."

"But what do we have that they could want?" Lilo asked. "They're so far ahead of us."

"Who knows? Listen, they probably asked themselves the same question. And what they did, apparently, was to send everything. We've used the new inventions, the biological engineering techniques and so forth. But we still can't tell what ninety percent of it is. Maybe it's art, or philosophy. Or gossip. Or nine billion Ophiuchites advertising for sex partners. But I don't really think the Hotline is cultural exchange. I think it's just what the message implies; it's a commercial venture. We're expected to pay for what we get, value given for value received. I wish I knew what the 'extreme penalties' business is all about, though."

Vaffa's brow had wrinkled as she followed Cathay's reasoning. Now her face smoothed as she got back on more familiar ground.

"We've drifted away from the subject," she said. "We were talking about our mission, why Lilo and I were sent to join you. It's simple. In a matter as potentially serious as this, the Boss feels the need of further information. It's impossible to know how to meet this on the information we have so far. Since it is impossible to ask the Ophiuchites the questions he must find answers for, we must try our best to find them in the original message."

"That makes sense," Lilo said. Vaffa looked at her, and Lilo knew Vaffa was grateful to hear that. It had not made much sense to Vaffa. She had been accepting the Boss's judgment of the situation largely on faith.

"What I mean," Lilo went on, "is that it's hard to imagine they wouldn't have put everything we need to know into the message. Even if we could ask them questions, it would take thirty-four years for a reply."

"Exactly. You notice the message contains many words which are assigned a translation probability."

"That's normal in Hotline data," Cathay put in.

"So I understand. But all we have to go on is the translated message you obtained. What we need is the raw data. The Boss wishes to have it so he can analyze it independently."

Cathay frowned. "That's not going to be easy. In fact, it's not possible."

"Explain that, please."

"Well, I... all right. My source works in the translation department of StarLine. She... you know how they get their data?" He looked at the two women, nodded, and went on. "StarLine has a station out in the zone of maximum signal strength of the Hotline. There used to be several other stations out there. Now Star-Line has a monopoly charter from the Pluto government. Luna's challenged it a couple times... but I guess the political situation isn't important to this. Practically, Pluto controls everything outside its orbit.

"The people on the station don't broadcast anything back to Pluto because the signal could be pirated. They record everything that comes over the Line, and send it in drone rockets, high-gee jobs, that are retrieved here under tight security.

"Back when there was competition, they had some extremely fast drones. The people at the station acted as filters. When they saw something in the preliminary computer translation that might be valuable, they put it in one of these rockets to try and edge out the competition in patents, marketing, so forth. That doesn't matter now, but they still had one of the special delivery rockets. When they got this message, they used it. My contact told me how it came in, and that she didn't think she could get this one to me. I applied all the pressure I could, and she managed it. But she says that's strictly it. Security's so tight on this thing that no printout exists of the original data. It's stored in StarLine's computer, and if you think you can break in there and rob the memory, good luck."

Vaffa frowned. "No, that's out. The Boss explored that avenue before he dispatched us to Pluto. He's still working on an information raid, but the defense programs are formidable."

"The best on Pluto," Cathay said. "I don't know what you have on Luna."

"What about having your contact do the raid for us, from the inside?"

Cathay considered it. "This is restricted to the top four or five people. Only about twenty even know of the existence of the message. She wouldn't be given the top-rated access codes, and would have no way to get them."

"What is your means of pressuring this woman?"

"I... uh, her child is one of my students. She got herself in a bind, like that woman who was just here. Pregnant, and no teacher lined up. She came to me, and I cleared it with the Boss. Also, and I guess this is pretty important, I had to give her a lot of Tweed's money this time, for this message. In addition to threatening... well, to telling her I'd walk out on her child." He looked away from them. Lilo was embarrassed for him. The only acceptable reason for abandoning a child in the middle of the educational process was the death of the teacher.

Vaffa seemed not to have noticed. "Why won't that work again?"

"She made enough money last time to hire a licensed teacher, under the table. It can be done, no matter what the EA tells you."

"Still, you'd better explore it with her."

"Okay."

Vaffa frowned again. "In the meantime, we'll have to assume your estimation is accurate, and look into the alternative."

Lilo glanced at Cathay; he looked as puzzled as she felt.

"What alternative?" she asked. "You said the only copy of the original message is in the StarLine computer. What other way is there to get it out?"

"None. Oh, the Boss made inquiries, but has found no one placed even as well as Cathay's source. And work will go on toward gaining access to the computer itself via its regular output channels. But none of that is likely to work. So we'll have to get it directly. We'll buy a ship and go to the Line."

Cathay had not taken it well, once it became clear that Vaffa meant for all three of them to go. He argued for hours, and finally reached a position he swore he would not abandon.

"It's just not possible. I can't leave for at least three years, even if I don't take on another child. The youngest one I have now will be needing me for that long."

"You were not authorized to enter into any educational contracts," Vaffa pointed out. "That you did is your own affair, but your first loyalty—your only important loyalty—is to the Boss."

"Crap. You can't ask me to abandon those children. It's a sacred trust. When you take on a contract, you finish it."

"You will not finish these." Lilo noticed Vaffa's carefully formal speech and the complete calm that had settled over her. Look out, she thought.

"I will finish them. Nothing you can do will—" Vaffa delivered a chopping blow to the side of his neck, and turned in a crouch to face Lilo, who was sitting very still. Vaffa gradually relaxed and sat down, brooding. She ignored the unconscious man on the floor. Lilo picked him up and staggered into his bedroom. She put him on the bed and sat down beside him in the darkness.

"Lilo, come in here." She got up and went back to the main room.

"I think I'll have to kill him," Vaffa said.

Lilo sat down slowly. "Why? He hasn't done anything, has he?"

"It's what he's likely to do that bothers me." She sighed and rubbed her neck. She looked as though she might be unhappy about what she was going to have to do, but she also looked determined to do it.

"It was a mistake to send just me out here," she said. "I can't trust either of you, and I can't watch both of you at the same time. One of you will have to go."

"Why can't he stay behind? He's been here alone all this time, hasn't he?"

"The Boss is worried about what he might do. He knows too much now about this Hotline message. Aside from the company people, he's the only one on Pluto except you and me who knows about it."

"But isn't he... I mean, like me? A condemned criminal?"

"No. He's nothing but a disbarred teacher. The Boss contacted him when he was on the skids, and promised that if he'd do some work for the party, he'd get a chance to teach again with a new identity. He's supposed to wait another couple years. We didn't know about this bootleg teaching. It looks like he's getting restless, and he shouldn't be doing that according to what we—" she stopped abruptly, looked helplessly at Lilo, and put her head in her hands.

Lilo suspected Vaffa had been getting into an area she wasn't supposed to talk about. But she clearly wanted to talk.

"I can't help you make a decision if you won't tell me all the details."

"Who said I was asking for your help?"

"Nobody. But you said you'd trust me. We made a deal."

"I know. I want to trust you. I'll have to trust you if I'm going to let him live."

"But you don't know if you can. And it's no good telling the Boss that you made a deal with me. You went beyond your orders on that, didn't you?"

"Yes." She looked miserable. Vaffa's life was based on following orders; it disturbed her deeply to do something on her own.

"You'd better check with the Boss first, anyway," Lilo suggested. "See what he thinks about Cathay. Maybe he still needs him. You don't have to tell him about the deal we made."

Vaffa thought about it a long time, then nodded. Lilo relaxed. There would be at least twelve hours before Vaffa could get an answer from Tweed.

Cathay was still out. Lilo got a basin of water and sat on the bed beside him. She sponged the mark on his forehead where he had hit as he fell. He moaned, opened his eyes for a moment, then closed them again. Lilo plugged him into the bedside medical monitor and was told that he was sleeping, and did not have a concussion.

She undressed and got into bed with him. She put her arms around him from behind and hugged him close.

For an hour she stayed perfectly still. She tried to drift off to sleep, but her mind kept coming back to Cathay and what she could do about him.

Eventually she decided to wake him. She moved her hands slowly down his chest, over his belly. It was flat and hard. He had an erection. She grasped it and ran her thumb lightly over the rubbery glans. He stirred.

"How's your head?"

He felt it carefully. "Not so bad, I guess. My cheek's tender."

"Keep it quiet," Lilo cautioned. "Do you know anything about fighting?"

He turned onto his back. "Well, I think I could do a little better than what you saw. She got me completely by surprise. But no, I'm not a fighter. She'd demolish me. What about you?"

"No. You're going to have to go with us, you know. She has a direct order not to leave you here. There's only one alternative."

"I know. I guess I knew it from the start, with her."

"So what are you going to do? Uh, would you like me to stop this?"

"No, please. It feels wonderful." He turned to face her and began stroking her body. "I don't want to talk about this, anyway. It's too painful."

"We have to talk a little more. I need to know what you're going to do. We have about a day."

He rolled onto his back again. She was still gently rubbing his penis; now he put his hand over her hand. They were both still for a long time.

"Why?" he said, at last.

"If you're staying, she's going to kill you. You'll want to do what you can think of to stop her. I... was thinking. Oh, hell. What I wondered was if I should... should take a chance with you and maybe together we—I'm not proposing this, mind you, I just thought we ought to discuss—"

"Would you trust me that far? You don't even know me. If I decided to stay, I don't have anything much to lose by plotting with you. Maybe I'd even have a chance to stay alive. Buy why should you get into it?"

"It may be the last chance I'll ever have. Do you know anything about me?"

He faced her again. "Nothing specific, and I don't want to. It doesn't matter to me what you did. I know you're one of his cloned criminals." He noted the surprise on her face. "Yeah, I've learned a few things about him. Enough to get him into big trouble. He's right to want to get rid of me." He sighed, and rolled onto his back again, away from her. He laced his fingers behind his head.

Lilo thought he was through talking, and found that she really didn't mind. They could talk afterward. Right now she was getting aroused. He was a beautiful man. She liked his smell, and the feel of his hands on her. She scooted down the bed and raised herself up one elbow, then bent over him.

"He collects them," Cathay said, absently massaging her scalp with one hand. "He's got dozens of them on a secret base somewhere, poor bastards. They're plotting the overthrow of the Invaders." He laughed bitterly, and looked down at her. "But if you are a Free Earther you wouldn't be so afraid of that woman. I mean, you'd be afraid, but you'd be respectful, you know what I mean?"

She let her breath out slowly and rested her cheek on his belly. All right, he wanted to talk after all.

"I've seen what she can do. I also think I know some of her weaknesses. She's very confused right now. Tweed should never have sent her on this trip alone."

"He didn't," Cathay said. "He sent you, too."

"What do you mean by that? You think I'm a Free Earther?"

"No. But he sent you. He would have a reason."

She lifted her head to look at him. "My being here seems to be an accident. We were on the way to Titan when he got word of this message you sent—"

"No. It wasn't that way at all. I sent him that message three months ago. I don't care where he told you and Vaffa you were going; your destination was right here. Probably the pilot didn't even know it. The message would have gotten to you just in time to divert to Mars."

"It was a pretty close thing," she conceded.

"Not at all. That means he wanted you out here. He wanted Vaffa as his only loyal agent among us. If he thought Vaffa couldn't handle you, be sure he would have sent someone else to trail you from the spaceport."

"I don't get it. It sounds like a game. Does he want us to do anything for him out here, or just to tear each other apart?"

"It's never simple," Cathay sighed. He took her arm and gently coaxed her up alongside him. She pressed close to his side, enfolded in his arm. "I've dealt with him for fifteen years. Five more... well, he promised me a new identity. I've begun to doubt it, but you have to have something to live for."

Now he no longer wanted to talk about it. He hugged her closer, then moved down and began kissing her breasts. But now it was Lilo's turn to push him away and raise her head to study him.

"I still don't understand what you're saying."

"All right. Vaffa's a great soldier, but a lousy general. She has no initiative. That's what you're here for; to make the hard decisions that might come up, things that can't wait a day to be resolved by the Boss. Not the life-or-death ones, nor the ethical ones—Free Earther ethics. He can trust Vaffa to be right on those. He has you judged very well. I know something of what you've been through, and how well he does know you. You won't gang up on Vaffa. That's out of the question."

"How can you say that?" she demanded. She felt her cheeks heating up; it was part anger, part shame. She had just about decided that resistance at this point would be futile, that her best chance would be to wait until they returned to Pluto and she knew more about her opponent.

"For one reason, because your best chances of escape will be later. You can see that. Your cage is insubstantial. You won't learn the limits of it by rattling bars. You will win your freedom piece by piece, by slowly finding out what you can get away with and putting it together into a successful escape. If that's possible, which has not yet been proved, so far as I know. At this point, there's a very good chance that Vaffa is not alone. Tweed would not have to tell her that he has someone else watching you. He thinks you'll realize this, and not try to get away."

It did look like the sort of tantalizing chance her first clone, Lilo 2, must have taken, Lilo realized. She remembered her resolve to suspect the easy escape, to look for the unlikely one. But she was still angry.

"What if I say the hell with common sense? Damn him, anyway. Go for broke, throw in with you, and we knock her off. How can he tell that I won't make an irrational decision? Unless this is just another test and there's really no message from the Hotline."

"There is, but I'm glad you saw that possibility. You've trusted me entirely too quickly for your own good, you know." His tongue was at her nipples again, and this time she didn't protest. She stroked his back and let her eyes close slowly. The last of the muscle kinks from the high-gee trip were fading beneath an enveloping warmth, a tingling that went from her hot earlobes to her toes. But she opened her eyes again and looked down at him.

"You didn't answer my question."

"He doesn't know. Your best chance might actually be to make a try right now. He has no real defense against your doing something totally illogical. He can't predict that."

"Then how can he chance it?"

Cathay sighed. "Because he knows me pretty well, too. You can't join me if I'm not willing. And I'm not. I'm going. I'm choosing to live. I will abandon my students, abandon my self-respect, or what's left of it, one more time. Now that I've revealed that, bared my shame to you, will you please shut up and open your legs?"

He said it with lightness in his voice and a half-smile, but when he entered her he was fierce, determined to lose himself in an excess of passion. Lilo surrendered and let him set the tempo, at least for the first time. To her surprise, she was responding well. Part of that was her physical need; it had been a long time. Another part was feeling sorry for him. It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living. But part of it was something else again, maybe the beginnings of that sort of feeling that could one day transform a simple act of recreational copping into that thing which is so subtly and yet so hugely different—the act of love.