The John Varley Reader (6 page)

It didn't really surprise me that Carnival was right about the Change, either. In another lunation I was male again, then female, male; back and forth for a year. There's no sense in that. I'm female now, and I think I'll stick with it for a few years and see what it's about. I was born female, you know, but only lasted two hours in that sex because Carnival wanted a boy.

And Halo's a male, which makes it perfect. We've found that we do better as opposites than we did as boyfriends. I'm thinking about having my child in a few years, with Halo as the father. Carnival says wait, but I think I'm right this time. I still believe most of our troubles come from her inability to remember the swiftly moving present a child lives in. Then Halo can have her child—I'd be flattered if she chose me to father it—and . . .

We're moving to Nearside. Halo and me, that is, and Carnival and Chord are thinking about it, and they'll go, I think. If only to shut up Adagio.

Why are we going? I've thought about it a long time. Not because of old Lester. I hate to speak unkindly of him, but he was inarguably a fool. A fool with dignity, and the strength of his convictions; a likable old fool, but a fool all the same. It would be silly to talk of “carrying on his dream” or some of the things I think Halo has in mind.

But, coincidentally, his dream and mine are pretty close, though for different reasons. He couldn't bear to see the Nearside abandoned out of fear, and he feared the new human society. So he became a hermit. I want to go there simply because the fear is gone for my generation, and it's a lot of beautiful real estate. And we won't be alone. We'll be the vanguard, but the days of clustering in the Farside warrens and ignoring Old Earth are over. The human race came from Earth, and it was ours until it was taken from us. To tell the truth, I've been wondering if the aliens are really as invincible as the old stories say.

It sure is a pretty planet. I wonder if we could go back?

INTRODUCTION TO
“Overdrawn at the Memory Bank”

I already mentioned that my first attempt at a novel,
Gas Giant,
was a disaster. That's okay; I just read Heinlein's unpublished first novel, soon to be in print, and it was even worse than mine. My chief regret is that
Gas Giant
was the basis for many of my stories to come. It told the tale of how alien beings from a giant planet like Jupiter invaded our solar system. Their purposes were mostly incomprehensible to us, but the one thing we
did
get was that these invaders viewed aquatic mammals like dolphins and whales as the only intelligent species on the third planet. Humans were despoiling their environment, thus it became necessary to evict and/or exterminate us. They killed billions, but couldn't be bothered to completely wipe us out, so humanity survived and eventually thrived on the junk planets like Mercury, Venus, Luna, and Mars.

At the outset I had very little idea that
Gas Giant
would become the basis for the stories I would eventually call “The Eight Worlds.”

I had always been a compulsive reader, and I read mostly science fiction. I still am a compulsive reader, but during my hippie years I was not. I'm not sure why. Part of it was that I was sometimes too high to deal with words on paper, but I was not a steady or heavy drug user. We didn't watch TV, either. Didn't even own one for many years. I completely missed
Star Trek,
and have never regretted it. I read some of the standard texts by the gurus of the sixties, found them to be mostly dreck. My main artistic pursuit at the time was making films on an old Bolex 8 mm camera. The rest of my time was divided between scrambling for a living, dodging the draft, attending
the occasional protest march in Berkeley (and always leaving when the tear gas started to fly), and just having fun. Being a hippie, somehow, was a full-time job.

Then one day while I was casting around for a means of livelihood that didn't involve holding my hand out to strangers, I found a secondhand copy of a book called
Ringworld,
by Larry Niven. It blew me away. There had been some exciting changes in science fiction since I graduated high school in the Nederland, Texas, Class of '65.

I had been aware of the New Wave in SF, enough to know that some of it was a pretentious waste of paper and some of it was very, very good. But I didn't think I could write that way. I found other books by Larry, and saw that he was following in a tradition I had first encountered in junior high: the “Future History” stories of Heinlein. Niven called his future history “Known Space,” and it was populated with strange and inventive aliens, a history reaching back billions of years, and marvelous technological advances. It seemed wonderfully rigorous, and the stories were
fun.

I can't say that I immediately got to work mapping out a history and milieu for the Eight Worlds as I was reading the Niven stories. I had to get
Gas Giant
out of my system first . . . so to speak. But when that was done, I began to think about what life might be like for the survivors of the alien invasion. What kind of stories could I write about them? What would life be like for them?

All that was easy. Much harder was to decide what the people would be like. What new technologies would they have? How would these new things affect human behavior? What would it be like to
know
that we were not the smartest or most powerful species in the galaxy, that we weren't even a good second place?

IT WAS SCHOOLDAY at the Kenya disneyland. Five nine-year-olds were being shown around the medico section where Fingal lay on the recording table, the top of his skull removed, looking up into a mirror. Fingal was in a bad mood (hence the trip to the disneyland) and could have done without the children. Their teacher was doing his best, but who can control five nine-year-olds?

“What's the big green wire do, teacher?” asked a little girl, reaching out one grubby hand and touching Fingal's brain where the main recording wire clamped to the built-in terminal.

“Lupus, I told you you weren't to touch anything. And look at you, you didn't wash your hands.” The teacher took the child's hand and pulled it away.

“But what does it matter? You told us yesterday that the reason no one cares about dirt like they used to is dirt isn't dirty anymore.”

“I'm sure I didn't tell you exactly
that
. What I said was that when humans were forced off Earth, we took the golden opportunity to wipe out all harmful germs. When there were only three thousand people alive on the moon after the Occupation it was easy for us to sterilize everything. So the medico doesn't need to wear gloves like surgeons used to, or even wash her hands. There's no danger of infection. But it isn't polite. We don't want this man to think we're being impolite to him, just because his nervous system is disconnected and he can't do anything about it, do we?”

“No, teacher.”

“What's a surgeon?”

“What's ‘infection'?”

Fingal wished the little perishers had chosen another day for their lessons, but as the teacher had said, there was very little he could do. The medico had turned his motor control over to the computer while she took the reading. He was paralyzed. He eyed the little boy carrying the carved stick, and hoped he didn't get a notion to poke him in the cerebrum with it. Fingal was insured, but who needs the trouble?

“All of you stand back a little so the medico can do her work. That's better. Now, who can tell me what the big green wire is? Destry?”

Destry allowed as how he didn't know, didn't care, and wished he could get out of here and play spat ball. The teacher dismissed him and went on with the others.

“The green wire is the main sounding electrode,” the teacher said. “It's attached to a series of very fine wires in the man's head, like the ones you have, which are implanted at birth. Can anyone tell me how the recording is made?”

The little girl with the dirty hands spoke up.

“By tying knots in string.”

The teacher laughed, but the medico didn't. She had heard it all before. So had the teacher, of course, but that was why he was a teacher. He had the patience to deal with children, a rare quality now that there were so few of them.

“No, that was just an analogy. Can you all say analogy?”

“Analogy,”
they chorused.

“Fine. What I told you is that the chains of FPNA are very much
like
strings with knots tied in them. If you make up a code with every millimeter and every knot having a meaning, you could write words in string by tying knots in it. That's what the machine does with the FPNA. Now . . . can anyone tell me what FPNA stands for?”

“Ferro-Photo-Nucleic Acid,” said the girl, who seemed to be the star pupil.

“That's right, Lupus. It's a variant on DNA, and it can be knotted by magnetic fields and light, and made to go through chemical changes. What the medico is doing now is threading long strings of FPNA into the tiny tubes that are in the man's brain. When she's done, she'll switch on the machine and the current will start tying knots. And what happens then?”

“All his memories go into the memory cube,” said Lupus.

“That's right. But it's a little more complicated than that. You remember what I told you about a divided cipher? The kind that has two parts, neither of which is any good without the other? Imagine two of the strings, each with a lot of knots in it. Well, you try to read one of them with your decoder, and you find out that it doesn't make sense. That's because whoever wrote it used two strings, with knots tied in different places. They only make sense when you put them side by side and read them that way. That's how this decoder works, but the medico uses twenty-five strings. When they're all knotted the right way and put into the right openings in that cube over there,” he pointed to the pink cube on the medico's bench, “they'll contain all this man's memories and personality. In a way, he'll be in the cube, but he won't know it, because he's going to be an African lion today.”

This excited the children, who would much rather be stalking the Kenya savanna than listening to how a multi-holo was taken. When they quieted down the teacher went on, using analogies that got more strained by the minute.

“When the strings are in . . . class, pay attention. When they're in the cube, a current sets them in place. What we have then is a multi-holo. Can anyone tell me why we can't just take a tape recording of what's going on in this man's brain, and use that?”

One of the boys answered, for once.

“Because memory isn't . . . what's that word?”

“Sequential?”

“Yeah, that's it. His memories are stashed all over his brain and there's no way to sort them out. So this recorder takes a picture of the whole thing at once, like a hologram. Does that mean you can cut the cube in half and have two people?”

“No, but that's a good question. This isn't that sort of hologram. This is something like . . . like when you press your hand into clay, but in four dimensions. If you chip off a part of the clay after it's dried, you lose part of the information, right? Well, this is sort of like that. You can't see the imprint because it's too small, but everything the man ever did and saw and heard and thought will be in the cube.”

“Would you move back a little?” asked the medico. The children in the mirror over Fingal's head shuffled back and became more than just heads with shoulders sticking out. The medico adjusted the last strand of FPNA suspended in Fingal's cortex to the close tolerances specified by the computer.