The Ophiuchi Hotline (16 page)

“I want you to swear to me that you will not try to escape while we’re on Pluto. I appeal to your honor.”

“What happens if I won’t swear? You kill me now, and tell Tweed I was escaping?”

Vaffa looked surprised, and slightly offended. “No. I won’t harm you further, no matter what happens, unless you try to escape. I’m not threatening you to make you swear. A promise made under duress is not binding.” She stated it like a natural law of the universe.

“All right. I swear I won’t try to escape on Pluto.”

They sealed the oath in blood, of all things. Making the cut in her own palm without deadening her nerves was one of the most courageous things Lilo had ever done.

It wasn’t until later that Lilo realized how childlike the whole thing had been. Was a solemn oath enough to bind her to Vaffa when the stakes were her life and freedom? She didn’t see how it could be, but the question troubled her more than she was willing to admit.

Later, Vaffa turned to Lilo in the dim light of the sleeping room. Iphis was snoring.

“We’ve got to talk.” Lilo had been afraid Vaffa wanted to cop again. While Lilo got along well sexually with Iphis, Vaffa frightened her. They moved out into the tiny freefall gym.

“You should read this first.” Vaffa handed her a sheet of faxpaper. It was covered with code groups, and under them was a messy translation in Vaffa’s seismographic writing. Lilo noted the StarLine name, and the Topsecret, AAA rating.

“I don’t know where the Boss got it,” Vaffa volunteered. “He has his sources.”

Lilo read it through, then again, carefully. She was familiar with the weighting system used in decoding Hotline transmissions. Often the Hotline signal, after traveling seventeen light-years, was considerably garbled. But that couldn’t be the case here, not with thirty
repeats. So the uncertainty attached to key words was the result of the computer’s lack of context for a good translation.

It did not surprise Lilo. She knew most people thought of Hotline transmissions as a sort of substitution code; when cracked, the result would be in good, grammatical System Speech.

But the data received over the Hotline was the result of alien thinking. As long as it stuck to data of a scientific nature, couched in mathematical terms, reasonable translations could be made. Even so, there were huge “gray areas” which were thought to be data but could not be interpreted by any computer programs yet devised. Lilo had her own opinions about the gray areas. Her research into them had put her in jail.

The few times messages had come through which the computers tagged as being something like language, the translations were hedged with uncertainties. The linguists were not surprised at this. Languages embody cultural assumptions, inconsistencies; even contradictions. Given a large body of transmissions, the computers could get closer and closer to the meanings of words. But the Ophiuchites had not shown much interest in talking about themselves, or in doing anything but sending oceans of engineering data. The few verbal messages could have been anything from commercials to religious evangelism, or something that had no human analogue at all.

Lilo read it a third time.

“What’s this blowout about accounts, and termination of service? and
payment
? What could they possibly want? What could we give them?”

“Maybe what they’re giving us. Information.” Vaffa shrugged.

“But we…what does it mean?”

“I’m assuming it means just what it says. This is a phone bill for four hundred years of service.”

“But…that’s
crazy.
.”

“Is it? Why did we think the Hotline should just go on forever, without us giving anything in return? Why
should we expect them to be any less mercenary than we are?”

Lilo calmed down and thought about it before she replied.

“Okay. I can see that. But what would we give them? And
how
? I guess we could build a big laser like they have—I’m not saying it’s within our power for sure, but we might—but what do we transmit? Everything we’ve gotten from the Hotline has been two or three thousand years beyond where our science was at the time. It’s like…like asking an Earth primitive for advice on how to fix your fusion motor. What could we have that they want to learn?”

Vaffa grimaced, and took the message back. “I was hoping you’d have some ideas about that. I can’t think of anything, and it’s got me worried. I guess what I’m really wondering is, what are the ‘severe penalties’?”

“I don’t see what it could be except a disconnection. I mean, they’re seventeen light-years away. What could they do?”

“I don’t know.” Vaffa brooded for a while as Lilo tried to figure it out. Then she looked up. “Everybody says star travel is impossible, or at least it would take so long it wouldn’t be worthwhile. One of the big reasons they give is the Ophiuchites. If they had star travel, they’d
be
here, right? They wouldn’t be sitting home beaming messages.” She shook her head. “Now I wonder. Maybe we’ve got them all wrong. Maybe they had another reason for staying away. But I don’t think they’d send this unless they meant business.”

Lilo wanted to talk about it some more, but Vaffa had withdrawn into a private world. The woman was scared. Lilo wasn’t, yet, but she would be.

Even at the best of economic times, there was little a traveler would choose to bring to Pluto. The import duties were the highest in the system, and the weight penalties charged by the shipping lines made it more sensible to leave all luggage at home and buy a new wardrobe on arrival. Normally, the only thing worth bringing to Pluto was information, and even that was carried as compactly as possible.

But Pluto was in a depression. The government had been on the losing end of an economic war with Mercury for two years, and the effects were drastic. Vaffa had used her Intersystem Credit Card on Mars to get a small amount of cash. Even so, the weight penalty was steep.

Lilo and Vaffa stepped out of the five-gee express at Florida Port, groggy and miserable from eight days spent floating in an acceleration tank. Lilo kept coughing up unpleasant substances, and there was a steady drip of fluid from her nose. She had licked it once, which proved to be a mistake.

Looking for something to wash away the taste, she spotted a drink-vending machine and inserted one of the Martian bills Vaffa had given her.

“I can’t change that,” said the machine. “Tell you what. If you
deposit
the money, we can do business.” The machine explained that it was an authorized branch
of the Florida Planetary Bank. A light came on that said
INTEREST
ACCRUING
. It went off in a few seconds. Lilo got her flask of drink, and her bill was returned along with a few Plutonian coins. Vaffa advised her to toss them in the recycler, since they were virtually worthless.

Pluto was in the middle of an inflationary spiral. Money was being dated as it was printed, and it had to be spent quickly before the value dropped. Every Monday one thousand Old Marks became equal to one New Mark. If your money was more than a week old, it would make an economical fire; it would not buy its weight in paper.

Lilo and Vaffa waited in the recovery room of the spaceport lounge until the medicos certified them as being over the effects of high-gee travel. A few steps away was a line of shops which specialized in outfitting naked travelers as they emerged from Inner Planet flights. Lilo wanted to stop.

“Don’t shop here,” Vaffa advised. “They gouge you.”

“What’s the difference?” Lilo asked. “We’re rich, right?” She entered The Underworld Boutique.

Inside, she was soaped, showered, oiled, and massaged until she felt more human and less like something pickled. She began to lose some of the muscle kinks that plague high-gee passengers for days after a flight. She told the clerks to dress her.

From the things they brought, she selected a red shirt with buckles at the waist and wrists and neck. It had puffed sleeves, but otherwise was quite utilitarian, with plenty of pockets and a built-in chronometer. They wanted to paint her legs, but she refused firmly. She bought a hat, and slippers, mainly because the soles of her feet were wrinkled like prunes. The clerks tried to sell her face paint, a holomist suit, dildopants, and a live mink coat, so she paid and left. She wasn’t used to pressure selling, and didn’t like it. Vaffa bought nothing.

“Don’t you ever wear clothes?” Lilo asked her.

“I don’t like them. They can get in your way in a
fight. Sometimes I wear a belt with a holster, but not in public.”

Vaffa was glancing around nervously. Lilo had observed that the other woman didn’t like crowds, even on Luna. Here, she seemed very jumpy. Her movements were quick and jerky as she tried to cover all angles at once.

“Where do we go?”

“I have an address. Maybe we’d better find a map.”

Pluto liked to think of itself as the frontier. After three hundred years of steady colonization, the idea was showing signs of wear. In most ways, Pluto was as urban as any of the Eight Worlds. But Plutonian cities tended to be louder and gaudier. There was an air of ostentation, a constant assault of bad taste and commercial and personal display. It was distasteful to both the Lunarian women.

Rough edges of construction were sometimes left unfinished. The carpet in the corridors was thick and soft, but in places it did not fit together right, with raveled edges stopping short of the walls and gobs of light brown pitch in the corners. At one point the slideway carried them past a section of bare rock where workers were installing insulation and plastic facing. The rock was caked with frost; it sucked heat from one side of Lilo’s body.

They came to Center, hub of the city’s slidewalk network and the main transit nexus where tube capsules departed for outlying suburbs, enclaves, and communes. They got off and looked around. The ceiling was two kilometers above them, but some of the trees in Center Park seemed to scrape it. Eight arcades circled the vast cylindrical area, reached by glass elevators hung from transparent cables. Everything seemed to be in motion or flashing for their attention.

Lilo was feeling oppressed, an outlander. It was dizzying. She was a born Lunarian, conservative in many ways. She dressed for convenience, not decoration. Waste and frivolity offended her. It was the legacy of the Invasion, and in many ways it set Lunar society
apart from the rest of human space.

Luna was the planet that was colonized directly from Earth. When the Invaders came, the few thousand humans on Luna dug in for the long struggle for self-sufficiency. They had not been ready; autonomy was supposed to have been thirty years away. But species survival would be decided by what they did.

The first fifty years had been extremely hard. Many had died in selective lotteries or in violent resistance to them when it became clear the population had to be thinned. The survivors had sacrificed all the harder to insure that the martyrs had not died in vain.

The struggle left its mark on Lunarians. They tended to be conservative in politics and morals. They clung to a ghost of representative democracy while the colonies were trying Ordeal-Selectivism. Neutersex had never caught on. Current fashions of Mars and Mercury sold poorly on Luna. With the modesty taboo an almost forgotten aberration, the average Lunarian usually wore a vest-of-pockets, carried a shoulder purse, or went nude. It was almost a uniform, and the rest of humanity made endless jokes about it.

A creative surgeon could go broke in Luna. Few were interested in extra legs in odd places, reversed heads, new nose designs, or prehensile tails. They changed their sex an average of once every eight years, a system-wide low. The ratio of maintenance to cosmetic surgery was nine to one. Most Lunarians who wanted a face change did it at home as a hobby.

Pluto was at the other end of the spectrum. Lilo thought it vulgar. It was a deep-seated distaste that was beyond her power to reason away. Plutonians were peacocks. They wore their social status on their skins.

Lilo and Vaffa moved through a maze of floating advertisements of ghostsmoke and holomist that followed the prospective customer and played breath-catching tricks with perspective, all the time broadcasting direct to the inner ear, thus evading the noise-pollution laws.