The Ophiuchi Hotline

4

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 Vaffa 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...

She was looking at two bare feet. Her eyes went up a pair of legs, past hairless genitals, and a flat chest to a bald head. The knees were bent, the arms slightly away from the sides. Her lips were pulled away from fashionably stained teeth. She wanted Lilo to attack. One of the Vaffas had moved between Lilo and Tweed before the thought even began to form in Lilo's head. The anger drained away to a hard knot in her stomach. Vaffa relaxed a little.

"She knew where to be," Tweed was saying. "Do you see that?"

"Yes, I see."

"You are predictable, Lilo."

"I see that, too."

"Would you like to hear what has happened to you? You're four months out of date, you know."

"I guess I'd better."

I had been foolish. I saw it now, how ridiculously easy the escape had been.

They had taken me on survival training in the Amazon disneyland, three hundred square kilometers of climate-controlled tropical rain forest twenty kilometers below Aristillus. It was in the back country, the part the public never sees, where the rain falls all day and the clothes rot off your back in the suffocating humidity.

We were on our way home through the public corridors. There was only one guard this time; Vaffa had been called away at the last minute. I had stolen the skin sample I needed from Mari's workshop. I was watching for an opening. The guard looked away—

I bolted through the crowd. In two seconds I was invisible. In thirty seconds I was two levels down and a thousand meters east on a crosstown slidewalk, doubling back. I passed customs with the skin sample in my palm, boarded a train to Clavius.

The car stopped for an override signal. Thirty minutes later the door sighed open at a familiar station. I wondered what they would do to me.

Vaffa stood there, the woman, the face I had come to know so well. I looked down at the dark metal thing in her hand, then back at her bared teeth. I still didn't understand.

Lilo retched helplessly. She had long since emptied her stomach, but she continued to be sick. Mari held her as she knelt on the grass above the mess of bile and vat fluid she had brought up, while Tweed put the pictures away.

"Vaffa is rather direct," Tweed said. "As I told you a long time ago, they are useful." He glanced at the two. Lilo saw the look, and wondered for a moment if he might be a little afraid of them, too. "Are you able to go on?"

She sat back on her heels. There was Vaffa, the woman who had shot someone who looked just like Lilo and then held up the bloody body with the face and chest caved in for someone to take a picture. Her face moved only when she blinked.

"There's more?"

"I'm afraid so. You don't give up easily. If you did, you wouldn't be the kind of person I'm looking for."

"And more pictures?"

"Yes. You must see them."

"Let's get it over with."

I had been foolish.

I saw it now, and prayed forgiveness from my two earlier incarnations. I had thrown away their deaths by my failure. It didn't seem likely that I would be given another chance.

And the cost: Mari, Mari...

Perhaps Tweed would not bring me back again. Or if he did, maybe he wouldn't tell me about Mari and my shame.

Vaffa appeared at the door to my room. I welcomed him.

Tweed had lit another of his cigars. He blew a cloud of smoke, and Lilo saw the female Vaffa edge a step away from him. Her nose twitched.

"The first time, you bolted," he said. "You saw the chance I had arranged for you to see, and you took it." The elk, which turned out not to have been a hallucination, had entered the clearing and was cropping the grass behind Tweed. Lilo watched the light refract from the antlers as Tweed talked. She did not want to think.

"The second time you had learned, but not the lesson I want you to learn. You had decided to be more careful. I presented you with the same opportunity, and you wisely turned it down. You were going to make your own escape this time."

"What did I do?"

"Now we come to the point of this whole distasteful exercise. I will not tell you how you tried to escape. Can you see why?"

Lilo tried to think about it, but it did her no good. All she knew was that she felt trapped. Nothing made sense.

"All right. I don't expect you to absorb all this at once. It will take some getting used to. What I want you to try to understand is that you did your very best to get away from me. You had no help this time. You planned for two months, and to all appearances you were cooperating with me. You came up with a plan. What you must understand is that it was the best plan you will ever come up with." He thundered the words. Everyone looked at him; they could not help it. He could be a powerful speaker when he wished to be.

"That's what the demonstration with the script was meant to point out to you. I have seen you revived twice now. You reacted exactly the same each time. You had no choice; you can only be what you are. You started off each time with memories identical to the day you were last recorded, right here in this clearing. You became a slightly different person each time. The original Lilo was foolish, she didn't think it out far enough, and she paid for it. The second was very crafty. She killed Mari, and came as close as you will ever—"

"She what?"

"You heard me."

Mari was at her side. "Lilo, don't get—"

Lilo recoiled from the woman in horror. "No! I couldn't have. I could have killed... that," she pointed to the paired Vaffas. "I could have killed either of those things. But not Mari."

"I didn't say there was no remorse," Tweed said. "Vaffa says you seemed relieved when he killed you."

"Lilo, I don't hold it against you," Mari said. "I know it sounds strange, but I got to know you... I got to know you twice now. I like you. You did what you thought you had to, and you waited until I'd had a recording taken. I only lost a few days. The Boss told me it was painless, you didn't make me suffer."

"That's true," Tweed said. He was studying Lilo.

"But I just can't believe..."

"You must. And know this, too. I know you now. There are signs I can look for, things you will not be able to hide from me. If I see them, I will know you are following the script. You, on the other hand, will never be sure." His fat fingers, ticking off the arguments, were like the bars of a cage closing around her.

"I'll leave you to think about what I've said. When you've decided if you'll cooperate, come and tell me. It's your choice, and I want a firm decision from you this time, not the lies you told me at the institute. I've spent enough time and energy on you already."

He left, trailing the male Vaffa behind him like a faithful dog. Lilo and Mari were left virtually alone, as the other Vaffa seemed to have forgotten about them. Lilo watched her as she tried to coax her snake down from a tree, then scrambled up a vertical trunk to join it.

The silence grew uncomfortable.

"I wish I knew what to say," Lilo whispered. "I really wish I knew."

"Say you'll do what he says. You don't have any choice."

"No, I... I wasn't talking about that. I don't... don't have much choice about that, I guess. That's how it looks, anyway. I just don't know what to say to you."

"There's nothing you need to say. You didn't do anything. I have nothing but good memories of you. So who was hurt? Someone who used to be me, and someone else who was you."

Lilo wished she could look at it that way. She knew she would be eternally shamed by what that person had done. But the only way to cope with it was to see it as Mari suggested.

"I fixed your legs the way you like them," Mari said. Lilo looked down. It hadn't occurred to her that her legs would be different, but of course they would have been. The design in her genes did not include the hair.

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"I knew you would."

Lilo gritted her teeth. She knew Mari meant no harm by it, but she would never be able to hear those words again without emotion. She did not relish being predictable. Not at all.

Wondering if it was what she had said the last time around, she said, "I guess I'd better go talk to the Boss."