The Ophiuchi Hotline

She had seen them before, below her, as she fell through the Jovian atmosphere, just before her senses fragmented and she found herself on the beach—found that she had been on the beach for some time, as she was still falling through Jupiter. She had blanked the experience from her mind; now it came back: the incredible, stop-action, living lap dissolve that had left her on Earth.

Again she could not control her shaking, but this time it was much more from anger than fear.

She cut down a suitable tree and spent her days sitting on the sand looking out over the water, working the wood. She made it three meters long, and tipped it with steel painstakingly beaten from scraps she had collected. Then she waited.

The spouts appeared early one morning. Lilo watched them, taking deep breaths of the sea air until her fingertips tingled. Every nerve in her body was singing as she stripped away her leather jerkin and loincloth and raced across the sand to her boat. She was no longer afraid to die. The day was right for it, and the whales waited to taste her harpoon.

Did they know she was there, intent on killing them? She did not know or care. She rowed strongly out to the mass of rolling black bodies.

Overhead, the Invaders darted. They did not accelerate or slow down; they simply moved. They entered and left the water without sound or splash, occupying one volume of space as easily as any other. Lilo stood and shook the harpoon at them, then checked herself. Even in the mania of her anger, the blood-red depths of her rage at them and what they had done to her people, she knew that certain things were beyond her. She would take her revenge on flesh and blood, then die because there was nothing left to do, no sense in walking endlessly down bare beaches or in sitting placidly beside a mud hut.

It was there in the water beside her, a broad dappled black hide just below the surface. She reached to the metal flower on her collarbone and was transformed into a creature of bright blue distortion, hot as the broken sun that blazed from her face.

She heard a scream. Her arm came up, straightened, jerked, and the wooden shaft shivered in her hand as it sank into the mountain of blubber.

The Silver Huntress, Diana, stood on the whale's back, shouting. She held the harpoon in both hands as the monster's tail came up and smashed down on the boat.

The whale dived.

24

The film reached its end, and for a moment it flapped noisily around the reel until one of the men reached over to turn the projector off. The lights came up, and Lilo, Javelin, Vaffa, and Cathay were confronted with eight faces, all looking at them expectantly. The atmosphere in the room was tense; the Traders were waiting for something.

For some reason, Lilo was convinced they were about to break into a song-and-dance routine. The situation was divorced from reality in almost the same way as a musical comedy, where characters pause in the midst of action to sing. If they do, I'll go crazy, Lilo thought.

"Well," William said. "Well. What do you think?"

Lilo looked from William to Alicia to Thomas to... whatever her name was.

"Effective," Cathay ventured.

"Solid. To the point," said one of the Traders.

Javelin cleared her throat.

"Uh... yes. It's a nice piece of work. But did we really come here to discuss the artistic merits of your propagandists?"

"We would like to know what you think," William said. His voice oozed sincerity. "Of course we realize you have no powers of your own to either accept or reject what we've offered. You're not envoys for your race."

"What are you going to do with it? I assume you didn't put it together just for us."

"We'll broadcast it. Not over the Hotline; this time it goes directly to every inhabited planet of your system. It's customary for us to work this way. You must have realized that we have never used our transmitter at full strength. Our laser is not big enough to broadcast across seventeen light-years, but we can send a stronger signal than any you have yet received. We deliberately garble and distort the signal at this end, simulating what you would expect to happen to it if it had come from 70 Ophiuchi. We wanted you to think of us as being very far away.

"When we know that being discovered is only a matter of time, we send the first message that you received. Someone usually shows up. If no one does, we wonder if we're wasting our time. You did very well."

Javelin shifted in her chair, a sour look on her face.

"Yes, but what do you expect anyone to make of it?"

"Please?" William looked down his nose at her.

"What I'm saying is, you want something in trade for the free information you've been sending us. Okay, anyone can understand that. But what you want is our culture. I'm afraid I didn't follow just how you intended to get it."

"I thought the film made that clear."

"Not to me," Cathay put in. "I didn't understand that, or just what the alternatives are to the human race if we don't cooperate."

"Ah." William pursed his lips. "Perhaps we need to make some changes in the final sections before we release it. You see how valuable this can be to us? I'll turn you over to our Minister for Assimilation. Alicia?"

If William seemed stilted and slightly unreal in his ma

"As I hope you understood from the film," she said, "what you see before you is not the result of Trader culture or Trader genes. This room and our bodies were tailored for this meeting. We had been studying you for nearly eight hundred years, listening to your radio and television broadcasts. We have been here much longer than that; our first visit to Earth was twenty thousand years ago. Since then we have waited for you to come to us.

"We have been learning how to be humans."

She spread her hands. "It is an impossible task to do at a distance, but this station is an experimental laboratory for the assimilation of human cultures. There are two hundred environmental cells below us, duplicating the conditions of various human societies of the present and past. In addition, we are prepared to conduct crossbreeding experiments, merging cultures already in our possession with what we learn of human culture. As you can see, we have at this time only an imperfect grasp of the essential outlooks and mind-sets that make a human a human."

"Yes, I understand that," Lilo said. "Or I think I do, anyway. You're saying that you have no culture of your own, that you lost it, or it was assimilated into others so thoroughly that you can't separate it out any more."

"True," Alicia said, "so far as it goes. But this was not accidental. We had observed in the other races around us that the vitality tends to be sapped from a people when they are forced to live a million years of a transitory and nomadic existence. That spark that each race possesses—each one of them different—is extinguished, and they vanish. This had happened to many races. So we have made the deliberate effort to change ourselves at every opportunity. Individuals persist—I myself am over two million years old as a group consciousness. I think it would be futile to try and explain to you what that means."

"Yes, you said that in the film," Javelin said, impatiently. "What you still haven't told me is what you want to do. With us. The human race."

"It's very simple. We wish to coexist with some of you for a time. The only way to learn a culture is from the inside out. There are techniques—very like the memory recording that you developed independently, and which we helped you refine—for the superposition of one mind over another. We wish to hitchhike in your minds for a few years. After that time, we will be as human as you are, not the imperfect constructs that you see."