The Ophiuchi Hotline

I stood up in the surf and swayed drunkenly, naked, soaking wet, dizzy. I took a step and fell over as the ground lurched. On hands and knees, I vomited into the foamy water. I began to crawl, dazed, my whole attention focused on the wet strands of hair dangling down in front of me, swaying back and forth. I saw my hands grip the sand, and they might have belonged to someone else.

The sun was setting. It was the most glorious thing Lilo had ever seen.

She huddled under a clump of windblown shrubbery, hugging her legs close to her. The wind was coming off the sea, and it was cold. Her teeth chattered. It was possible that she would freeze to death before the night was over, and she had no idea of what to do about it.

It was impossible for her to recall when she had decided that she was not dead, that this was not the afterlife. For many hours she had sprawled in the sand, insensible, her mind overloaded with too many impossible things. Rational awareness had returned only gradually, cautiously, ready to retreat at any moment.

The cold had helped. Awareness of discomfort had forced her to marshal her wits, to crawl into the thin shelter of the tree, to draw her body into compactness to combat the chill.

Looking out over the ocean with the sun setting behind her, it had come to her that she knew where she was. Stars came out one by one and flickered weakly. So they did twinkle, it wasn't a fairy tale for kids.

Night fell, and after many hours of shivering and growing hunger, something rose over the water. It was Luna.

She was sitting on the continent of North America, looking out over the Atlantic Ocean.

The land was flat. Lilo had been walking south along the beach for several hours. Once she had gone inland a few hundred meters, but the ground was soft and wet and clouds of insects rose to torment her. Her skin was dotted with welts.

Thus far she had no real plan except to keep moving. She hoped to find some sort of shelter, and possibly plants that she could eat. She had studied some green berries and a type of brown seaweed, tasted both, and moved on. It would take a lot more hunger to drive her to that. The idea of trapping and eating animals was one she was avoiding. All the meats she had ever eaten came from mutated plants. She had not yet considered that she might not be able to catch anything. Part of her mind could not stop thinking that this was a disneyland beneath the Lunar surface. It would be easy to believe that, except for the constant heaviness she felt. Her ankles and calves were throbbing from the gravity and the constant sliding of the sand underfoot.

The beach narrowed to a point; the north arm of a large bay lay to the west. She sank down on the sand and looked across to the land on the other side. It was too far to swim, so she had to decide if she should retrace her steps or strike out along the inside of the bay. There was no way to tell from where she sat if it really was a bay, or if she was on an island.

It was a shock to realize how tired she was. Her head was spi

Lilo woke to pain such as she had never known.

She came to her feet screaming, feeling that she was on fire, frantic to put it out. But touching herself only brought more pain.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for it. The few times she had hurt herself the pain had been easily controllable; help had been as near as the first-aid terminal on every corner. When the pain had gone on for fifteen minutes and gave no sign of abating, she became hysterical and ran blindly down the beach until she fell.

After a while she noticed something. It hurt just as badly as before, but it could be lived with. She sat up, wiped the tears away, and examined herself. She was cherry-red from her ankles to her shoulders. She had received first-degree radiation burns all over her backside.

It had not occurred to her that this could happen on Earth. The atmosphere was supposed to act as a shield against ultraviolet radiation, or else how could life survive? Never had she needed to think about the possible harmful effects of sunlight. The only times she had encountered it, she had been either in a suit or beneath screening plastic in a public solarium.

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, ru

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.