The Ophiuchi Hotline

23

How could I tell of my ten years on what used to be the Eastern seaboard of the United States of America?

What made me so sure I was on the American continent was for a long time a source of considerable bewilderment. For several days after the death of Makel I wandered in a more or less dazed condition. It seems as though it took nearly a month before I dared to ask any of the questions that would continue to puzzle me for ten years. They can be summed up as What happened?

One moment I had been falling through Jupiter's atmosphere, and the next, I was in the surf of the Atlantic Ocean. And I knew it was the Atlantic.

But that wasn't quite right. One event didn't follow the other; rather, they merged into each other. I'm sure I recall sitting under the bushes, shivering, before I was in the water. I recall crawling out of the water before I remembered being in it.

The whole experience was so subjective that I doubted from the first I would ever get any good answers by thinking about it. But it didn't stop me thinking. The conclusions I came to were so tenuous they might be worthless, and yet I felt good about them in the same way that I had no doubts about where I was.

I had fallen into an Invader—or a Jovian, if it makes any difference. For reasons of its own, the Invader had moved me. Perhaps I was told something in those scrambled seconds, minutes, hours, or centuries during which the transition took place. Or perhaps some level of my mind had been able to see how and to where I was moved.

Why? Why should the Invader care enough about me to do whatever was done? Was it accidental? I didn't know, but I had the persistent feeling that I had been displaced in space and time for some reason, and that it would become clear to me later. In the meantime, I had the hard task of survival facing me.

There were adventures by the hundreds. In a sense, every day was an adventure. But I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them. I never knew in the morning if I would live to see the sun set.

And yet with all the troubles, all the close calls, the story is mostly one of wandering, of slogging day after day down the woods and marshes and beaches of the Atlantic.

I always moved south. My knowledge of geography was not as good as it might have been, but I did know that it had to get warmer the farther south I went. After my first winter I had an abiding interest in staying warm.

My method was to pick an encampment when the leaves were starting to change colors. I would either build a hut from mud and sticks—Tweed, your training paid off!—or find an indigenous group of people and live with them while the snow fell.

I learned many skills: how to build a rude boat for crossing rivers, how to make and shoot a bow and arrows, how to set traps and track game. On a good day I might cover three kilometers, or I might settle down for weeks or months with some friendly group.

My size was a great help in everything I did. The people I met were in religious awe of me because of it. I never met anyone who was as tall as my shoulders.

It was tricky at first, learning to get along with them, finding the best way to enter a camp and set myself up as a sort of traveling goddess. But while they spoke a thousand dialects, they were all based on English. I could communicate with them. Tales of Diana, the great silver huntress with the legs of a horse, spread before me. Villages turned out to welcome me, and to see me turn into an apparition for a few seconds by switching on my nullfield. They eagerly and fearfully touched the metal flower above my breast. I became the warrior princess of legend, the metal-bodied Bride of Frankenstein, the Cyborg Diana.

I was subservient in their eyes to one thing only, and that was the Dolphin. Every holy place in every village had a wooden statue of a great fish with horizontal flukes and a blowhole.

She had been going north for some weeks now. She had gone northward before on her long journey, but it was always to go far enough up a river to find a suitable crossing. Once over, she had resumed her route south.

This time it looked as though it might be different. She had not been able to see any land to the west of her, and the ocean seemed to be a different color, more green than blue. The land was marshy, and she did most of her traveling with a canoe and a long pole. Huge reptiles lazed in the mud or swam slowly by her, but she did not fear them.

She had not seen snow for two years. The winters were mild, if this land could be said to have winters at all. She had kept moving from force of habit, and from the inability to decide what to do with her life. No call had come from the Invaders, no sign to tell her why she was there. But to stop moving would have been to face becoming part of a tribe. Even as a goddess, she did not think she could stand it.

She had done what she could, imparting to the people she met what knowledge she had that might be of use to them. There was no way to know if they heeded what she said after she was gone. And, truthfully, she did not know if it would do them any good. Possibly the solutions they had evolved to deal with their environment were the best for them, but they were not for her. Their lives were short, full of pain and suffering. The only thing they had that was good was the sense of community, the security of being surrounded by comrades, and she knew she could never participate in that. She was different, and could not be assimilated into a tribe except as a woman apart from the others.

Lilo was not the woman she had been. Her skin was brown and weathered now, her hair bleached by sun and salt water. She had no mirror, but knew there were unfashionable lines on her forehead, around her eyes and mouth. Ten years had aged her from a clone of the standard decanting age of nineteen apparent years to a woman of forty. There was a white, puckered scar from her right temple to her jaw, and another on her left thigh. The palms of her hands and the soles of her feet were thick with callous, and the hair on her calves was not as smooth and luxuriant as it used to be.

At the end of the fourth week of northward travel, Lilo decided she had come to the end of the long peninsula at the southeast of the continent. The natives called it Florda.

Now she stopped her journey. There was no reason why she should not continue up the gulf coast, around the curve to Mexico and finally South America. But she had no heart for it. She turned her boat around and started poling through the placid waterways, back to the Atlantic.

When the water was blue again she picked a spot near the ancient ruins of Miami and built a hut. For the first time she began to cultivate a patch of ground with seeds given to her by the natives, to experiment with pottery, and to raise wild chickens and rabbits.

The local tribes respected her privacy except for certain holy days when they came and asked for religious rites which were obscure to her but seemed mainly aimed at procuring good hunting. She was willing to pray for them, as long as they left her alone during the rest of the year.

There was plenty to do to keep busy. When she needed relaxation she went out in her boat and fished. She liked that; she could just sit and watch the water and not think about anything. She no longer felt bitterness for what had happened to her. When she thought of anything, it was of Makel.

Lilo had stayed aloof from everyone since the day he died. Nothing in her life had moved her as deeply as the boy's death. It had been such a pointless, such an ignominious way for a human being to die. Since then she had seen the deaths of many people, and it was always with the same feeling. We were not made for this. The human race deserves better.

Lilo was not used to such strong illogical feelings. She had wrestled with herself for years, on the one hand telling herself that a human was just another animal and could die like any other animal. But it never satisfied her. Logic wasn't enough. It could not encompass the issues. She began to feel that the land she walked on should belong to the human race. It had, once. Maybe the people who lived before the Invasion had done a sorry job of taking care of it, but they had been trying, even then. Now all the humans on Earth had been thrown back into savagery. It hurt her to see it.

Going to Earth had made Lilo a Free Earther.

One day a huge dark shape appeared from under the water, not three meters from her boat. There was a tremendous, hooting rush of air, and a column of spray dispersed around her.

She stood and stared at it. It was at least twenty meters long, and blunt at the front end. The Sperm Whale.

Lilo hurled her reed basket of fish at the shape, and it bounced into the water. The hide gleamed, unhurt. She threw her paddle, a rough clay bowl she used to hold bait, and anything else she could find in the bottom of the boat.

Slowly, the leviathan rolled. Huge flukes appeared and waved for a moment in the air, then sliced soundlessly into the water.

Lilo shook for an hour.

The next day, silent yellow shapes appeared at the horizon. She stood on the beach and watched them, though it hurt her eyes to do so. They were at the limits of visibility, but that was not the problem. They were shapes. They were all shapes at once; they would not hold still.

She had seen them before, below her, as she fell through the Jovian atmosphere, just before her senses fragmented and she found herself on the beach—found that she had been on the beach for some time, as she was still falling through Jupiter. She had blanked the experience from her mind; now it came back: the incredible, stop-action, living lap dissolve that had left her on Earth.

Again she could not control her shaking, but this time it was much more from anger than fear.

She cut down a suitable tree and spent her days sitting on the sand looking out over the water, working the wood. She made it three meters long, and tipped it with steel painstakingly beaten from scraps she had collected. Then she waited.

The spouts appeared early one morning. Lilo watched them, taking deep breaths of the sea air until her fingertips tingled. Every nerve in her body was singing as she stripped away her leather jerkin and loincloth and raced across the sand to her boat. She was no longer afraid to die. The day was right for it, and the whales waited to taste her harpoon.

Did they know she was there, intent on killing them? She did not know or care. She rowed strongly out to the mass of rolling black bodies.

Overhead, the Invaders darted. They did not accelerate or slow down; they simply moved. They entered and left the water without sound or splash, occupying one volume of space as easily as any other. Lilo stood and shook the harpoon at them, then checked herself. Even in the mania of her anger, the blood-red depths of her rage at them and what they had done to her people, she knew that certain things were beyond her. She would take her revenge on flesh and blood, then die because there was nothing left to do, no sense in walking endlessly down bare beaches or in sitting placidly beside a mud hut.

It was there in the water beside her, a broad dappled black hide just below the surface. She reached to the metal flower on her collarbone and was transformed into a creature of bright blue distortion, hot as the broken sun that blazed from her face.

She heard a scream. Her arm came up, straightened, jerked, and the wooden shaft shivered in her hand as it sank into the mountain of blubber.

The Silver Huntress, Diana, stood on the whale's back, shouting. She held the harpoon in both hands as the monster's tail came up and smashed down on the boat.

The whale dived.