The Ophiuchi Hotline (14 page)

She could see there were lessons she had better learn.

The land was less marshy now. After following the beach along the inside of the bay for a while, she had decided to go overland when the beach began to curve westward. There had been nothing edible by the water; she hoped for better luck inland.

Lilo noticed that when she moved due north—or as nearly so as she could estimate—she encountered little difficulty. If she went east or west the ground was interrupted with large pits. The trees and underbrush obscured her view of the area, so it was not until she mounted a small hill and could look down that she realized she was moving through the remains of the city. She had been walking down a broad avenue. On either side were regular rows of pits, most of them choked with brambles and half-full of water. Houses had been there, and now nothing was left but the slope-sided basements.

The destruction had been methodical, but not absolutely thorough. There was evidence of subterranean artifacts, half-buried objects of concrete and stainless steel. She found one twisted section of copper pipe sticking two meters out of the ground.

She walked all day, and when there was only an hour of daylight left she came to a place where the bay narrowed and seemed to be more like a river. It astounded
her to realize how little she could tell about the land by actually being there and walking on it. The land across the river looked much the same as what she had already seen. Some of it was less than a kilometer away, but there was more in the distance. She couldn’t tell if the closer land was an island in the river or a point curving around from the other shore.

But there were two small islands in the middle of the water before her, and she was sure they were artificial. Looking closer at the hill she stood on, she discovered masonry. There had once been a suspension bridge crossing the river; she was sure of it.

She went down the hill and explored its sides, hoping to find the entrance to any hidden room that might be there. Darkness was approaching, and she hoped to find some kind of shelter. But there was nothing.

A large spotted cat looked down at her from the branches of a tree. Aside from sea gulls and crabs, it was the first animal life she had encountered. Lilo knew something about animal species, but was unable to place this one. It seemed to have jaguar blood in it, but was more the size of an African lion. She turned her back on it and started off again.

Something made her turn around.

She saw the cat out of the corner of her eye, then face to face. It was on the ground, running at her with impossible speed. Its head zoomed larger and larger in her vision. It opened its mouth and leaped.

Things happened too fast for Lilo to follow. She remembered hearing the sound of an impact, and the cat hitting her, knocking her over. There was a confused vision of the cat gnawing at its hind leg, and blood spurting out around a long wooden shaft. Then the cat was up and moving, and so was Lilo. The next thing she remembered was being three meters up in a tree with her hands bleeding.

There was a human down there, struggling with the cat. It had him by the arm, and he was hacking at it with a small ax. She saw the cat fall away, and the man straighten. He glanced up at her, then down at his forearm
and at the cat, with its head split open, still twitching. Lilo slowly came down from the tree.

“You’re only a boy,” she said in surprise. He glanced at her again, nervously, but apparently without comprehension. She began to wonder if he really was a child.

He was short, not even two meters tall. He could have stood under Lilo’s outstretched arm. His hair was blond and he wore brief leather garments and shoes. She dug through her memory of ancient racial types, and decided he was Scandinavian. His face was long, with a high forehead.

“Thank you for what you did,” Lilo said. “But you don’t understand, do you?”

He looked up at her and smiled. Three of his front teeth were missing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything as dirty as you are,” Lilo said. “Except possibly me.” She kept her voice friendly, and the fact was that she was not afraid of him. Then she wondered if she ought to be, and moved back a step. She had made two mistakes already, with the sun and the cat, and didn’t want him to be the third. She tried to remember something about primitive tribes on Old Earth. The few scraps she could recall did nothing to make her think she could trust him.

He said something, and she thought she could recognize a few words. He nodded and grinned at her, made a few gestures that confused her until he pointed at the sun repeatedly.

He was speaking a corruption of American, and probably talking of the approaching night. Lilo was delighted. American was supposed to have come from the same roots as English, or was it the other way around? Lilo was not a student of history. But she did know that her own System Speech was a mix of English and Russian roots. She thought she could learn to talk to him.

She decided to follow him to see if he had food and shelter he would share. He seemed to approve when he looked back and saw her. She had to keep reminding herself that he could be dangerous, especially if he was
going back to a tribe of others like him. But the fact was that she had no instincts to make her wary of strangers. The thought of him doing violence to her was so foreign that she soon forgot about it.

He took her to a concealed cavern. It was reached by concrete stairs beneath a thicket of bushes, and was large and flat on the inside. She thought at first that it was a basement that had retained its roof, but when he lit a fire she saw the place for what it was: The design of a train station for short-range rapid transit was still very much the same in Luna.

Lilo was wondering what to expect of the man. Her knowledge of the lives and customs of barbarous peoples was near zero. She did, however, recall some stories of how women had occupied a social position distinctly different from men, back in the days before routine sex changing had obviated the whole question. She wondered if he would want to cop, then, with a shock, wondered if he felt it might be his right to do so. He would get a big surprise in that case, she promised herself.

But he seemed a little in awe of her. He kept glancing at the hair on her lower legs, and when she stood up he gaped as he looked at her. Lilo soon discovered that he was in pain from his wounds. She looked at his injured arm. He didn’t protest, and when she smiled encouragingly, he smiled back. It didn’t look serious—just four deep punctures and a few ragged cuts.

Once again she had to stop herself. Such a wound on Luna would be of absolutely no consequence once the pain had been stopped. Here, it might take days to heal.

His name was Makel, and five days later he was dead.

The wound never healed. He tended it with water and various leaves and ointments, but each day it grew worse. It began to stink.

Lilo now understood her oversight, and cursed her stupidity. But considerations of sterility were as alien to her as the predatory instincts of the wild cat that had nearly killed her. Luna had been, from the very first, a
germ-free environment. Rubber gloves, face masks—even boiled water, which she might have used to treat him—were unknown in Lunar surgery.

He remained vigorous until the last day, ignoring the spreading infection. Every day he hunted, and she went along with him. There was not time to learn a great deal from him, but she picked up some basic survival tactics. She learned to be always alert. It was a different world out there, and it would kill her if she gave it the chance. She learned which berries and fruits to eat, which roots to dig.

Finally he collapsed in a fever. She stayed with him, wiping the sweat from his brow, giving him sips of water when he asked for them. She stripped him and bathed him, and found that her first impression had been correct. He was not an adult, but not a child, either. He must have been in his early teens.

In the middle of the night she discovered that he was cold. She had no way of knowing how long he had been dead.

Lilo cradled his head in her lap and rocked back and forth, crying quietly. She had never seen a human die. She kept trying to tell herself that it wasn’t her fault, but she never did believe it.

Gold. Everything was yellow gold.

I floated in the dim light, aware, detached from everything but the single color. The liquid began to drain from the tank and still I floated, dry, in midair.

A shock came and made me aware of sixteen needle-tiny sources of agony; my arms and legs jerked convulsively but my heart did not start beating. Then a familiar sensation: I had banged one of my knees.

Another shock, and my heart thumped. I was alive, and about time, too. I’d rather have died than go through another shock. I took a breath and was choked by racking coughs. I bumped my head on the lid of the tank and drew cold hands away from the lump to find they were streaked with blood. Some had run into my left eye, tinting the gold with pink.

The cover of the tank popped with a wet hiss of rubber seals. There was a strap around my middle and I fumbled over it with hands that felt like inflated rubber gloves. As I sat there massaging my wrinkled feet, the rest of my senses crept up on me and made me sick. I wanted to spit out my tongue.

My fingertips and the soles of my feet looked ancient, mummified. I tried to get my eyes to focus around the room, squinting, wiping away the blood—

“Who the hell are you?”

The room was small, never meant to hold three people. Luckily, no one had to sit down in free-fall, not even Lilo, who was so weak she could not have lifted her arms in a gravity field. She floated, warming her hands around a tube of broth. She took tiny sips from the nipple, having found out what disaster she faced if she tried to drink it faster.

“I think you lost me again,” she said, tiredly. More than anything, she wanted to go back to sleep. Her head was throbbing, and the voices sounded fuzzy. “What year is it, did you say?”

Cathay sighed, which irked Lilo and made it harder than ever for her to believe what he had told her. The story was incredible enough without having to believe her dead clone had loved this man.

But Parameter went on with infinite patience.

“The year is 571, the month of Capricorn. You were arrested in Sagittarius, 568, and executed one year later. That is, your clone was executed, according to Cathay. The original Lilo lived for a short time after that, then she was killed, too. A second clone—apparently already prepared, if the times are to add up right—”

“That’s Tweed’s standard procedure,” Cathay put in.

“Yes. The second clone was killed escaping, like the original Lilo. The third clone was sent to Jupiter, where she met Cathay and was—”

“Yes, yes, I remember that part all right,” Lilo said. Actually she did not want to hear someone say again that she had been killed. The details of her clone’s adventures on Poseidon were murky to her. That could be straightened out later.

“Now, why the…. It seems like I should have been awakened here sooner. What happened?”

Parameter paused, seeming to sense that Lilo was disturbed by the story.

“Maybe we should let you get some rest before we go on.”

Lilo looked up. Parameter/Solstice was a comic figure, a human sculpted by a child out of green Silly
Putty. The only visible part of Parameter’s body was her mouth, from which Solstice had retracted so her partner could speak to the others. The figure had bulging hips, a narrow waist, and no neck; just a huge lump of Solstice’s body that covered the head and shoulders. But Lilo was not laughing. Unlike most humans, she was a little in awe of the perfect symmetry they represented.

“No, go on. I’ll rest later. But thanks.”

“Very well. You’re in a clone body; you knew that and you expected it. But it isn’t the clone body you left behind seven years ago, when you set up this station. That one died.”

“What? Why?”

“Are you sure you want to go on? I can see this is upsetting you.”

There was nothing she wanted more than sleep, but she was determined to plow on. It was important to know the extent of the situation, frightening though it might be.

“We don’t know why, really. When we arrived, it was dead. You said that might happen, but you didn’t say what to do. We went over our discussions with you and concluded we had agreed to awaken you. The trick was in defining what that meant. We decided we had an obligation to produce another clone, and awaken
it.
We weren’t very experienced with your machines, so the waking up was a problem, I fear…”

“No, don’t worry. You did very well, considering. So I’m the second one. Let’s see, with the three that were grown on Luna, and my original body, that makes—”

“I’m afraid not,” Parameter said. “We studied the problem carefully before we started growing another clone, but I guess we had to learn as we went along. The second clone was a failure. It died when we tried to awaken it. You’re the third. Cathay helped. He arrived here three months ago.”