John Varley, page 14
“I’ll be there,” Bach said, and broke the connection.
Charlie sang the Hangover Song most of the morning. It was not one of her favorites.
There was penance to do, of course. Tik-Tok made her drink a foul glop that—she had to admit—did do wonders for her headache. When she was done she was drenched in sweat, but her hangover was gone.
“You’re lucky,” Tik-Tok said. “Your hangovers are never severe.”
“They’re severe enough for me,” Charlie said.
He made her wash her hair, too.
After that, she spent some time with her mother. She always valued that time. Tik-Tok was a good friend, mostly, but he was so bossy. Charlie’s mother never shouted at her, never scolded or lectured. She simply listened. True, she wasn’t very active. But it was nice to have somebody just to talk to. One day, Charlie hoped, her mother would walk again. Tik-Tok said that was unlikely.
Then she had to round up the dogs and take them for their morning run.
And everywhere she went, the red camera eyes followed her. Finally she had enough. She stopped, put her fists on her hips, and shouted at a camera.
“You stop that!” she said.
The camera started to make noises. At first she couldn’t understand anything, then some words started to come through.
“…lie, Tango…Foxtrot…in, please. Tango Charlie…”
“Hey, that’s my name.”
The camera continued to buzz and spit noise at her.
“Tik-Tok, is that you?”
“I’m afraid not, Charlie.”
“What’s going on, then?”
“It’s those nosy people. They’ve been watching you, and now they’re trying to talk to you. But I’m holding them off. I don’t think they’ll bother you, if you just ignore the cameras.”
“But why are you fighting them?”
“I didn’t think you’d want to be bothered.”
Maybe there was some of that hangover still around. Anyway, Charlie got real angry at Tik-Tok, and called him some names he didn’t approve of. She knew she’d pay for it later, but for now Tik-Tok was pissed, and in no mood to reason with her. So he let her have what she wanted, on the principle that getting what you want is usually the worst thing that can happen to anybody.
“Tango Charlie, this is Foxtrot Romeo. Come in, please. Tango—”
“Come in where?” Charlie asked, reasonably. “And my name isn’t Tango.”
Bach was so surprised to have the little girl actually reply that for a moment she couldn’t think of anything to say.
“Uh…it’s just an expression,” Bach said. “Come in…that’s radio talk for ‘please answer.’”
“Then you should say please answer,” the little girl pointed out.
“Maybe you’re right. My name is Bach. You can call me Anna-Louise, if you’d like. We’ve been trying to—”
“Why should I?”
“Excuse me?”
“Excuse you for what?”
Bach looked at the screen and drummed her fingers silently for a short time. Around her in the monitoring room, there was not a sound to be heard. At last, she managed a smile.
“Maybe we started off on the wrong foot.”
“Which foot would that be?”
The little girl just kept staring at her. Her expression was not amused, not hostile, not really argumentative. Then why was the conversation suddenly so maddening?
“Could I make a statement?” Bach tried.
“I don’t know. Can you?”
Bach’s fingers didn’t tap this time; they were balled up in a fist.
“I shall, anyway. My name is Anna-Louise Bach. I’m talking to you from New Dresden, Luna. That’s a city on the moon, which you can probably see—”
“I know where it is.”
“Fine. I’ve been trying to contact you for many hours, but your computer has been fighting me all the time.”
“That’s right. He said so.”
“Now, I can’t explain why he’s been fighting me, but—”
“I know why. He thinks you’re nosy.”
“I won’t deny that. But we’re trying to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because…it’s what we do. Now if you could—”
“Hey. Shut up, will you?”
Bach did so. With forty-five other people at their scattered screens, Bach watched the little girl—the horrible little girl, as she was beginning to think of her—take a long pull from the green glass bottle of Scotch whiskey. She belched, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and scratched between her legs. When she was done, she smelled her fingers.
She seemed about to say something, then cocked her head, listening to something Bach couldn’t hear.
“That’s a good idea,” she said, then got up and ran away. She was just vanishing around the curve of the deck when Hoeffer burst into the room, trailed by six members of his advisory team. Bach leaned back in her chair, and tried to fend off thoughts of homicide.
“I was told you’d established contact,” Hoeffer said, leaning over Bach’s shoulder in a way she absolutely detested. He peered at the lifeless scene. “What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. She said, ‘That’s a good idea,’ got up, and ran off.”
“I told you to keep her here until I got a chance to talk to her.”
“I tried,” Bach said.
“You should have—”
“I have her on camera nineteen,” Steiner called out.
Everyone watched as the technicians followed the girl’s progress on the working cameras. They saw her enter a room to emerge in a moment with a big-screen monitor. Bach tried to call her each time she passed a camera, but it seemed only the first one was working for incoming calls. She passed through the range of four cameras before coming back to the original, where she carefully unrolled the monitor and tacked it to a wall, then payed out the cord and plugged it in very close to the wall camera Bach’s team had been using. She unshipped this camera from its mount. The picture jerked around for awhile, and finally steadied. The girl had set it on the floor.
“Stabilize that,” Bach told her team, and the picture on her monitor righted itself. She now had a worm’s-eye view of the corridor. The girl sat down in front of the camera, and grinned.
“Now I can see you,” she said. Then she frowned. “If you send me a picture.”
“Bring a camera over here,” Bach ordered.
While it was being set up, Hoeffer shouldered her out of the way and sat in her chair.
“There you are,” the girl said. And again, she frowned. “That’s funny. I was sure you were a girl. Did somebody cut your balls off?”
Now it was Hoeffer’s turn to be speechless. There were a few badly suppressed giggles; Bach quickly silenced them with her most ferocious glare, while giving thanks no one would ever know how close she had come to bursting into laughter.
“Never mind that,” Hoeffer said. “My name is Hoeffer. Would you go get your parents? We need to talk to them.”
“No,” said the girl. “And no.”
“What’s that?”
“No, I won’t get them,” the girl clarified, “and no, you don’t need to talk to them.”
Hoeffer had little experience dealing with children.
“Now, please be reasonable,” he began, in a wheedling tone. “We’re trying to help you, after all. We have to talk to your parents, to find out more about your situation. After that, we’re going to help get you out of there.”
“I want to talk to the lady,” the girl said.
“She’s not here.”
“I think you’re lying. She talked to me just a minute ago.”
“I’m in charge.”
“In charge of what?”
“Just in charge. Now, go get your parents!”
They all watched as she got up and moved closer to the camera. All they could see at first was her feet. Then water began to splash on the lens.
Nothing could stop the laughter this time, as Charlie urinated on the camera.
For three hours Bach watched the screens. Every time the girl passed the prime camera Bach called out to her. She had thought about it carefully. Bach, like Hoeffer, did not know a lot about children. She consulted briefly with the child psychologist on Hoeffer’s team and the two of them outlined a tentative game plan. The guy seemed to know what he was talking about and, even better, his suggestions agreed with what Bach’s common sense told her should work.
So she never said anything that might sound like an order. While Hoeffer seethed in the background, Bach spoke quietly and reasonably every time the child showed up. “I’m still here,” she would say. “We could talk,” was a gentle suggestion. “You want to play?”
She longed to use one line the psychologist suggested, one that would put Bach and the child on the same team, so to speak. The line was “The idiot’s gone. You want to talk now?”
Eventually the girl began glancing at the camera. She had a different dog every time she came by. At first Bach didn’t realize this, as they were almost completely identical. Then she noticed they came in slightly different sizes.
“That’s a beautiful dog,” she said. The girl looked up, then started away. “I’d like to have a dog like that. What’s its name?”
“This is Madam’s Sweet Brown Sideburns. Say hi, Brownie.” The dog yipped. “Sit up for mommy, Brownie. Now roll over. Stand tall. Now go in a circle, Brownie, that’s a good doggy, walk on your hind legs. Now jump, Brownie. Jump, jump, jump!” The dog did exactly as he was told, leaping into the air and turning a flip each time the girl commanded it. Then he sat down, pink tongue hanging out, eyes riveted on his master.
“I’m impressed,” Bach said, and it was the literal truth. Like other citizens of Luna, Bach had never seen a wild animal, had never owned a pet, knew animals only from the municipal zoo, where care was taken not to interfere with natural behaviors. She had had no idea animals could be so smart, and no inkling of how much work had gone into the exhibition she had just seen.
“It’s nothing,” the girl said. “You should see his father. Is this Anna-Louise again?”
“Yes, it is. What’s your name?”
“Charlie. You ask a lot of questions.”
“I guess I do. I just want to—”
“I’d like to ask some questions, too.”
“All right. Go ahead.”
“I have six of them, to start off with. One, why should I call you Anna-Louise? Two, why should I excuse you? Three, what is the wrong foot? Four…but that’s not a question, really, since you already proved you can make a statement, if you wish, by doing so. Four, why are you trying to help me? Five, why do you want to see my parents?”
It took Bach a moment to realize that these were the questions Charlie had asked in their first, maddening conversation, questions she had not gotten answers for. And they were in their original order.
And they didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense.
But the child psychologist was making motions with his hands, and nodding his encouragement to Bach, so she started in.
“You should call me Anna-Louise because…it’s my first name, and friends call each other by their first names.”
“Are we friends?”
“Well, I’d like to be your friend.”
“Why?”
“Look, you don’t have to call me Anna-Louise if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t mind. Do I have to be your friend?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“Why should I want to?”
And it went on like that. Each question spawned a dozen more, and a further dozen sprang from each of those. Bach had figured to get Charlie’s six—make that five—questions out of the way quickly, then get to the important things. She soon began to think she’d never answer even the first question.
She was involved in a long and awkward explanation of friendship, going over the ground for the tenth time, when words appeared at the bottom of her screen.
Put your foot down, they said. She glanced up at the child psychologist. He was nodding, but making quieting gestures with his hands. “But gently,” the man whispered.
Right, Bach thought. Put your foot down. And get off on the wrong foot again.
“That’s enough of that,” Bach said abruptly.
“Why?” asked Charlie.
“Because I’m tired of that. I want to do something else.”
“All right,” Charlie said. Bach saw Hoeffer waving frantically, just out of camera range.
“Uh…Captain Hoeffer is still here. He’d like to talk to you.”
“That’s just too bad for him. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Good for you, Bach thought. But Hoeffer was still waving.
“Why not? He’s not so bad.” Bach felt ill, but avoided showing it.
“He lied to me. He said you’d gone away.”
“Well, he’s in charge here, so—”
“I’m warning you,” Charlie said, and waited a dramatic moment, shaking her finger at the screen. “You put that poo-poo-head back on, and I won’t come in ever again.”
Bach looked helplessly at Hoeffer, who at last nodded.
“I want to talk about dogs,” Charlie announced.
So that’s what they did for the next hour. Bach was thankful she had studied up on the subject when the dead puppy first appeared. Even so, there was no doubt as to who was the authority. Charlie knew everything there was to know about dogs. And of all the experts Hoeffer had called in, not one could tell Bach anything about the goddamn animals. She wrote a note and handed it to Steiner, who went off to find a zoologist.
Finally Bach was able to steer the conversation around to Charlie’s parents.
“My father is dead,” Charlie admitted.
“I’m sorry,” Bach said. “When did he die?”
“Oh, a long time ago. He was a spaceship pilot, and one day he went off in his spaceship and never came back.” For a moment she looked far away. Then she shrugged. “I was real young.”
Fantasy, the psychologist wrote at the bottom of her screen, but Bach had already figured that out. Since Charlie had to have been born many years after the Charlie Station Plague, her father could not have flown any spaceships.
“What about your mother?”
Charlie was silent for a long time, and Bach began to wonder if she was losing contact with her. At last, she looked up.
“You want to talk to my mother?”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Okay. But that’s all for today. I’ve got work to do. You’ve already put me way behind.”
“Just bring your mother here, and I’ll talk to her, and you can do your work.”
“No. I can’t do that. But I’ll take you to her. Then I’ll work, and I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Bach started to protest that tomorrow was not soon enough, but Charlie was not listening. The camera was picked up, and the picture bounced around as she carried it with her. All Bach could see was a very unsteady upside-down view of the corridor.
“She’s going into Room 350,” said Steiner. “She’s been in there twice, and she stayed a while both times.”
Bach said nothing. The camera jerked wildly for a moment, then steadied.
“This is my mother,” Charlie said. “Mother, this is my friend, Anna-Louise.”
The Mozartplatz had not existed when Bach was a child. Construction on it had begun when she was five, and the first phase was finished when she was fifteen. Tenants had begun moving in soon after that. During each succeeding year new sectors had been opened, and though a structure as large as the Mozartplatz would never be finished—two major sectors were currently under renovation—it had been essentially completed six years ago.
It was a virtual copy of the Soleri-class arcology atriums that had spouted like mushrooms on the Earth in the last four decades, with the exception that on Earth you built up, and on Luna you went down.
First dig a trench fifteen miles long and two miles deep. Vary the width of the trench, but never let it get narrower than one mile, nor broader than five. In some places make the base of the trench wider than the top, so the walls of rock loom outward. Now put a roof over it, fill it with air, and start boring tunnels into the sides. Turn those tunnels into apartments and shops and everything else humans need in a city. You end up with dizzying vistas, endless terraces that reach higher than the eye can see, a madness of light and motion and spaces too wide to echo.
Do all that, and you still wouldn’t have the Mozartplatz. To approach that ridiculous level of grandeur there were still a lot of details to attend to. Build four mile-high skyscrapers to use as table legs to support the mid-air golf course. Criss-cross the open space with bridges having no visible means of support, and encrusted with shops and homes that cling like barnacles. Suspend apartment buildings from silver balloons that rise half the day and descend the other half, reachable only by glider. Put in a fountain with more water than Niagara, and a ski slope on a huge spiral ramp. Dig a ten-mile lake in the middle, with a bustling port at each end for the luxury ships that ply back and forth, attach runways to balconies so residents can fly to their front door, stud the interior with zeppelin ports and railway stations and hanging gardens…and you still don’t have Mozartplatz, but you’re getting closer.
The upper, older parts of New Dresden, the parts she had grown up in, were spartan and claustrophobic. Long before her time Lunarians had begun to build larger when they could afford it. The newer, lower parts of the city were studded with downscale versions of the Mozartplatz, open spaces half a mile wide and maybe fifty levels deep. This was just a logical extension.
She felt she ought to dislike it because it was so overdone, so fantastically huge, such a waste of space…and, oddly, so standardized. It was a taste of the culture of old Earth, where Paris looked just like Tokyo. She had been to the new Beethovenplatz at Clavius, and it looked just like this place. Six more arco-malls were being built in other Lunar cities.
And Bach liked it. She couldn’t help herself. One day she’d like to live here.
She left her tube capsule in the bustling central station, went to a terminal and queried the location of the Great Northern. It was docked at the southern port, five miles away.
