The Ophiuchi Hotline (22 page)

“Don’t knock it,” Lilo said. “It seems to work pretty
well. She makes me feel almost…outmoded, you know?”

“Yeah. But she’d be a real sight in a gravity field.”

“I gather she never goes down.
Never.
”

Javelin was waiting for them at the end of the corridor, at the first of two locks. She ushered them through, with comments about the ship’s air-integrity routines that she expected them to follow with no nonsense. Then they were into the living quarters.

“Sorry about the size,” Javelin said, opening the doors to two small rooms. “This isn’t the
Queen Mary.
As it was, I had to move out my stamp collection. So two of you will have to room together, unless one of you bunks on the couch in the solarium. Go ahead, stow your luggage. Now come this way.”

Lilo was dazzled. She was not sure how much Javelin was underplaying, whether she actually regretted that there were only two “guest rooms” on a ship that by all economic laws should have had none at all. The rooms were small, but lavishly furnished, paneled, and carpeted, like everything else she had seen. They passed two more facing doors, one leading to a workshop and another to a medical laboratory. Lilo got only a glimpse of each.

The solarium was the biggest part of the living area. Javelin led them in, and kept going forward.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Make yourselves at home. Coffee bulbs over there, drinks in the bottles against that wall.” She darted through a small hole in the forward bulkhead.

“This place is crazy,” Cathay said. “Absolutely crazy.”

Lilo agreed with him. She had been in all types of ships, and had seen nothing like the
Cavorite.

“What do you call this?” she asked. “Early Victorian? Late Captain Nemo?” But Cathay had no answer, and Javelin was gone.

The solarium was about ten meters in length, and four meters across. Unlike the rest of the ship, it had a definite floor, which made no sense at all to Lilo.

Things can be done so much more economically in free-fall. Not only that, but the floor was parallel to the axis of thrust. Under boost, the room would stand on end. At
no
time would down be in the direction of the floor. Vaffa pointed this out.

“Well, when you think of it, she spends such a tiny part of her trip boosting…” But it still didn’t make sense.

The ceiling was curved, following the cylindrical shape of the outer hull. Twelve great panes of glass, six on each side of the room, curved overhead to meet at an ornate wooden beam that ran the length of the room. It was obvious why she called it the solarium.

The room was festooned with plants, vines, and flowers. It featured a two-keyboard pipe organ at one end, and a slowly spinning toroidal aquarium at the other; tiny angel-fish gaped at Lilo when she put her face close to their revolving world. In between, the motif was plush velvet-upholstered chairs and sofas, carved wood, and lots of brass trim. Lilo felt swamped with detail; everything was infested with curlicues.

Lilo stuck her head through the hole where Javelin had gone, and she got a surprise. As she had suspected, the room beyond was the control center for the ship—though again, it was very different, with its brass-ringed instruments, its lack of digital readouts, and several things that looked like manual controls. Beside the narrow pilot’s chair there was one long lever, capped with a crystal knob, that was plainly marked
STOP
and
GO
. But the real surprise was that the room was empty. Since it was at the nose of the ship with nothing beyond it but space, Lilo thought it odd.

She backed out in time to see Javelin enter the solarium from the aft corridor. So she had her own ways of getting around.

“This is an astounding ship,” Cathay said to her.

“Do you think so? Thank you. I like it. I should—it’s been home for nearly three hundred years. I lifted the basic design—the outside, that is—from an old magazine cover. Pre-Invasion. Pre-space, for that matter.”

“That’s crazy,” Vaffa said, flatly.

“Do you think so? I don’t. Obviously the artist who thought up the design knew nothing about spaceships. He was trying to sell magazines, so he made it sexy instead of logical. I liked that.”

“But the weight penalties,” Lilo said, feeling baffled. “If form doesn’t follow function, don’t you lose efficiency?”

“It’s funny you should say that. It’s true, mostly, but don’t you have any poetry in your soul? I’ve been battling hard-assed engineers since the first moon colony. We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a
beautiful
railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency. But deep-space ships still look like a hat rack fucking a Christmas tree.”

“Pardon me?”

“Copping. Sorry, it was an archaic word. Come to think of it, all the concepts in that metaphor were archaic. But
Cavorite
is less inefficient than you’d think. Once I’d made the one extravagant decision—to go out alone in a ship five times bigger than what I need for the bare necessities—the rest of it was virtually free. A little thin metal for the false shell outside. Some furniture that looks massive but really isn’t; the wood is a thin veneer over standard structural foam. The organ doubles as input to the ship’s computer and library, which is out of sight. The aquarium is part of the recycling system, and if the fish are okay, so am I. You’ll see. It works.”

Lilo still had her doubts. But Quince had spoken of her with awe. She was said to be the most successful hunter of all time.

“If you’re about ready to go, I should start on the final countdown. Still some things to do. I searched your luggage, and studied the X rays I took of you as—”

“You
what
?” It was Vaffa. Her face was quickly turning red.

Javelin looked her up and down. “Yes, I’m not surprised at your reaction,” she said, dryly. “You had several crystals and several other components in your things. With a little spit and bubble gum, you might have turned them into a pair of hand lasers. I ditched them, in the interest of a safe, calm voyage.”

Vaffa had planted her feet against the aft bulkhead. She launched herself across the room, toward Javelin. Her arms were extended, her mouth open in a snarl. Lilo didn’t want to watch. Javelin was so tiny, so fragile-looking. Vaffa started to twist in the air, coming around for a blow at Javelin’s midsection.

It was over almost before it began. Javelin twisted, bent at impossible places, planted one hand against the floor. She shoved, turned as Vaffa sailed past her, and chopped across the larger woman’s neck. Vaffa hit the pipes above the organ, loosely, and floated.

Javelin glanced at her once, then turned her attention to Lilo.

“I have to know the nature of the device implanted in your abdomen,” she said. “Also the thing attached to the left side of your pelvic bone.”

“I don’t know what they are,” Lilo said. “I’ve suspected there might be something in me, though.”

Javelin nodded. “Like that, huh? All right. One of them looks like a simple homing device. I thought the other was a bomb, but decided it wasn’t. More likely it’s a narcotic drug ampule. That would go along with the homer, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.” Lilo’s cheeks were burning.

“Fine.” Javelin seemed to want to get off the subject, too. “You’ll want to remove them. Feel free to use the surgery. I can put them overboard, or you might think of something else to do with them.” She let her eyes move slowly to Vaffa, still dangling loosely in midair, then smiled at Lilo.

“Boost in six hundred seconds. You’d better get to your cabins.”

Cathay and I moved Vaffa to one of the cabins, and we decided to share the other. As we belted her into her bunk, the ship was undergoing changes. Vaffa’s bunk moved from the floor and positioned itself against the aft bulkhead. In the solarium, the fish tank was draining.

Boost was one gee, about what I’d got used to on Pluto. Now we were living on the wall. But the washbasin and refresher facilities had done a flip-flop, and the lighting shifted as we moved so it was never in our eyes.

Outside, the corridor was now a vertical shaft. I could live with it for the twenty-four hours we’d be boosting.

They spent most of their time in their cabins, and they didn’t see Javelin. Lilo went to the solarium once, but to do it she had to climb eight meters on a ladder which had extruded itself from the corridor wall. And now the solarium was not a pleasant place to be. The organ was now on the ceiling, hanging ten meters over her head. There was another ladder, and she climbed it to poke her head into the control room, but Javelin wasn’t there. She realized that they were not likely to see her until the ship stopped boosting. Javelin would get around by means of her system of narrow pipes, where
the rest of them could not follow.

Cathay and Lilo could see Vaffa across the hall. She made no move to visit them, spending her time pacing. Lilo was nervous about it, wondering how much of the blame for the situation she was going to have to take. Vaffa was going to suspect a deal between Lilo and Javelin, and would be hard to live with.

There was not much to do but sleep. They went through one night period, with the ship’s lights dimmed. It was not until they had been boosting for twenty hours that Javelin contacted them. Again, it was by a flat television screen, this time set into their ceiling.

“You’re gonna hate me,” she said, “but it’s decision time, kids. Time for the laying of cards upon tables, for the revelation of hidden motives. Possibly you’ve wondered why I was willing to take you on this little jaunt.”

“We have, some. Are you going to tell us?” Lilo glanced across the hall. Vaffa was at her door, leaning out over the drop-off, listening intently.

“Yeah. Well, insofar as I know myself. As to why I
took
you, I guess a lot of that was simple perversity. It’s not what I might normally do, so I did it. You’ve got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust.”

“How do you know?” Cathay asked.

“I don’t. But it’s worked so far. I’d be a fool to change my tactics now. As to why I was willing to
go
, in the sense of with or without you, to the Hotline…I’ve become very interested in the Hotline in the last few months.”

Lilo saw Vaffa step quickly onto the ladder, then into the room with them. She stood beside them, looking up at the screen.

“Why are you interested?” Vaffa asked.

“The same reason you are. Anyone would be, don’t you think?”

“How would you know about that? It’s restricted information, limited to a few…”

Javelin raised one eyebrow. “I might ask how
you

know about it. But I’ve got my own theories on that. How I know is the same way I know anything about the Line. At any given time there’s always a couple holehunters in the path of the Hotline signal. There’s not much else to do; they listen in. And we talk to each other. It may take a few years to finish a conversation, but we’ve got plenty of time; we’re not in a hurry. The hunter community knew about the message before the StarLine board of directors did. We’ve been talking about it for months now. It’s been a cause of some concern to us. So I’m going to check it out.”

“You want to see if it really translates the way it seems to?”

“No, no,” Javelin laughed. “It does. There’s no doubt about that. It’s a threat, all right. Listen, you’re going out there to get the message in its original form; that’s your only possible motive for wanting to go out there at all. Well, I’ve got it, in my computer. We’ve checked it six ways from Sunday. Now we’re interested in finding out what the ‘severe penalties’ are all about. I’ve been…well, sort of elected, though that’s a pretty formal way of describing it—to go out and see. If they’ve got the muscle to back up their threat, we hunters might need to look for some new customers.”

The statement shocked Lilo, but it scandalized Vaffa.

“Just like that? You want to find out which way the wind is blowing?”

“More or less.”

“Whom do you plan on selling to?” Vaffa snorted. “The Ophiuchites? The Invaders?”

“Either one if the price is right.”

“Then I spit on you and all your kind. You’re talking of treason to your race.”

“Piss on your race, Free Earther.”

Lilo quickly stepped in. “Are you expecting some kind of second message? Spelling out penalties, perhaps?”

“It’s possible. But that’s not why I’m going.”

“Then I don’t understand. What good is this trip to you?”

Javelin smiled again. “Here we come to the decision I spoke of. Our bargain said I’d deliver you to some point along the line of transmission of the Hotline. But it’s a long line. You probably had in mind the closest point, but you didn’t specify it, did you? What I propose to do is take all of us to a point half a light-year from the sun, and on that line. I have reason to believe it could be very interesting.”

“Why?”

“For the purpose of meeting the Ophiuchites face to face.”

Vaffa seemed puzzled by the idea. Cathay grinned, as if at some private joke, but when Lilo looked at him he shrugged. Lilo’s neck was hurting from looking up. She followed Cathay’s example by stretching out on the floor and folding her arms under her head. They waited.

“You’re probably curious as to why I think they’re out there.” Javelin looked a little disappointed in their reaction.

“That’s a fair statement,” Cathay said. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“Okay. Hunters have a different perspective on the Hotline than the StarLine company does. They sit in a station spang in the middle of the area of greatest signal strength. And why shouldn’t they? The messages are garbled enough even there. But it limits their viewpoint. Essentially, they listen from one motionless point in space.

“Hunters criss-cross the Line in all directions, at various distances from the sun, and both closer and farther away from 70 Ophiuchi than the StarLine station. When we cross it, we listen in. Our computers note when we first receive the signals and when we finally lose them.