The Ophiuchi Hotline

The silence grew uncomfortable.

"I wish I knew what to say," Lilo whispered. "I really wish I knew."

"Say you'll do what he says. You don't have any choice."

"No, I... I wasn't talking about that. I don't... don't have much choice about that, I guess. That's how it looks, anyway. I just don't know what to say to you."

"There's nothing you need to say. You didn't do anything. I have nothing but good memories of you. So who was hurt? Someone who used to be me, and someone else who was you."

Lilo wished she could look at it that way. She knew she would be eternally shamed by what that person had done. But the only way to cope with it was to see it as Mari suggested.

"I fixed your legs the way you like them," Mari said. Lilo looked down. It hadn't occurred to her that her legs would be different, but of course they would have been. The design in her genes did not include the hair.

"Thank you. I appreciate that."

"I knew you would."

Lilo gritted her teeth. She knew Mari meant no harm by it, but she would never be able to hear those words again without emotion. She did not relish being predictable. Not at all.

Wondering if it was what she had said the last time around, she said, "I guess I'd better go talk to the Boss."

5

Consider the shape of my life:

I had lived fifty-seven years rather normally. Like everyone, I got a memory recording every few years. Then I was arrested.

The recording I owned had been confiscated and held pending the outcome of my trial. When I was condemned, it was destroyed, along with the tissue sample that would have been used to grow a clone body if I were to die.

At the time of my stay of execution Mari must have made another recording of me. I had probably been drugged; it would have been easy enough.

I had been confronted with the clone Tweed had grown, who had then gone to The Hole in my place. (In whose place? After all, she was as much me as I am. It gets confusing.)

That person—the original me; though it's hard to accept, I'm now living in a clone body—had managed to survive only a few weeks beyond the next recording, taken in the forest at Tweed's. Return to square one, in the first step of a depressingly repetitive process. A new "me" was awakened, missing those weeks from the original recording until the death of the original "me." This second clone was started on the same course as the original. She played it safe for two or three months, made her break, was caught and killed. Number four—me, me dammit—wakes up in the forest and sees Mari smiling down on her. But this time Mari is a clone, too. Number three had killed her while escaping.

Think of it in four dimensions. Think of the long worm with arms and legs that's used in school to illustrate the idea. Picture an infant as one end of the worm, emerging from Mother's vagina or the placentary, depending on how mother likes to do it. On the other end is death. Make marks on the worm each time a person's memories are recorded. Each mark is a potential branch.

Eight or nine months ago, at the time of my reprieve, my four-dimensional cross-section had diverged into four branches. (Or could it be five, or six? Tweed had grown several clones of me while I was in jail, since as soon as I died each time he was able to revive me in a new body the next day. He must keep clones of Mari, too, or else she could not have been there the day after number three killed her.) Each had started with the same memories, ending on the day Mari recorded me. Three of those branches were terminated, dead. I was traveling, second by second, down the fourth branch.

Five years before that, when I made my own recording in the capsule orbiting Saturn, there was the potential for another branch. I had no way of knowing if that one had produced another Lilo, but it was possible. I hoped I would never meet her. I had met myself once, and learned something about myself I would have been happier not knowing.

But since I did know it, since I had seen what lengths I would go to stay alive, I intended to live.

I intended to live forever.

Survival training took Lilo three months to complete. At that, she gathered she was getting the short course.

She never complained, but it seemed a lot of foolishness to her, and highly uncomfortable foolishness. Unless Tweed was seriously preparing to establish a beachhead on Old Earth, it seemed pointless.

But she went along with it, from the Amazon to Egypt. She spent a week in each of the major disneylands. The Free Earth Party spent a lot of money to be allowed in the wilderness areas of the environmental parks. In return they had the pleasure of dehydrating under desert suns and getting frostbite in Siberia.

Lilo was in a class of twenty. All the others were initiates into the cult-party, with the exception of Vaffa-female, who accompanied Lilo and made everything look easy. She got to know the Free Earthers. She suspected many of them were not as fanatic as Tweed about the actual liberation of Earth. Many were there for the interesting experiences.

She grew to have a great deal of respect for Tweed's profile of her. He was sticking his neck out every time he allowed her to come in contact with someone who was not a member of the tight i

The catch was that Lilo would be condemning herself to death along with him. He knew she would not do that.

Actually, though she would never have admitted it, she came to like living in the bush. Slogging through a snowstorm was no fun, but huddling in your igloo with five other people under a polar-bearskin blanket was. There were many good moments.

There was also loneliness. It was much harder to take than the physical hardships. She had learned to live alone during her year at the institute. Now she ached to have friends again, to find a lover. But she could not be friends with anyone in the survival class. It was unthinkable to love someone and not be able to open up, to tell everything, and she could not do that. There were secrets she must guard. The people at Tweed's residence were even worse. They knew all her secrets, but they knew she was not one of them. She was treated with civility, but would never be trusted. Only with Mari could she begin to get close. Lilo knew Mari liked her, but it was the broad, uncritical affection that was a part of her personality. Mari thought genetic experimentation on human DNA was wrong, and Lilo thought the dream of the Free Earthers was crazy. There was little for them to talk about.

So she was alone in a crowd. In some ways, it was worse than the confinement of prison. She began to hang back during the nights around the campfire when everyone got together for singing and telling stories and copping. She told herself it was because she didn't care for sex in the Great Outdoors. "Cop on the beach," she told Mari, "and spend the next day digging sand out of yourself." Only when the yearning became unbearable would she find a partner, but increasingly, her most trusted lovers had been the fingers of her right hand.

She was lonely, her sex life was terrible, and she began to suffer anxieties of recapture by the authorities. It would be awful to face execution at this point, after all she had been through and the shameful things she had done. If she died now, somehow, all the previous deaths would have been for nothing.