The John Varley Reader (87 page)

“How can they do that?” I asked.

He looked confused for a moment, then grabbed a sheet of motel stationery and attacked it with one of the pens in his pocket. I looked over his shoulder as he made a sketch of a man, writing L by one hand and R by the other. Then he folded the sheet without creasing it, touching the stick figure to the opposite surface.

“Flatland doesn't have to be flat,” he said. He traced the stick man onto the new surface, and I saw it was now reversed. “Flatlanders can move through the third dimension without knowing they're doing it. They slide around this curve in their universe. Or, a third-dimensional being can lift them up
here,
and set them down
here
. They've moved, without traveling the distance between the two points.”

We both studied the drawing solemnly for a moment.

“How is Paulson?” I asked.

“Catatonic. Reversed. He's left-handed now, his appendectomy scar is on the left, the tattoo on his left shoulder is on the right now.”

 
“He looked older.”

“Who can say? Some are saying he was scared gray. I'm pretty sure he saw things the human eye just isn't meant to see . . . but I think he's actually older, too. The doctors are still looking him over. It wouldn't be hard for a fourth-dimensional creature to do, age him many years in seconds.”

“But why?”

“They didn't hire me to find out ‘why.' I'm having enough trouble understanding the ‘how.' I figure the why is your department.” He looked at me, but I didn't have anything helpful to offer. But I had a question.

“How is it they're shaped like men?”

“Coincidence?” he said, and shook his head. “I don't even know if ‘they' is the right pronoun. There might be just one of them, and I don't think it looks
anything
like us.” He saw my confusion, and groped again for an explanation. He picked up another piece of paper, set it on the desk, drew a square on it, put the fingertips of his hand to the paper.

“A Flatlander, Mr. Square, perceives this as five separate entities. See, I can surround him with what he'd see as five circles. Now, imagine my hand moving down,
through
the plane of the paper. Four circles soon join together into an elliptical shape, then the fifth one joins, too, and he sees a cross section of my wrist: another circle. Now extend that . . .” He looked thoughtful, then pulled a comb from his back pocket and touched the teeth to the paper surface.

“The comb moves through the plane, and each tooth becomes a little circle. I draw the comb through Flatland, Mr. Square sees a row of circles coming toward him.”

It was making my head hurt, but I thought I grasped it.

“So they . . . or it, or whatever, is combing the planet . . .”

“Combing out all the butterflies. Like a fine-tooth comb going through hair, pulling out . . . whaddayou call 'em . . . lice eggs . . .”

“Nits.” I realized I was scratching my head. I stopped. “But these aren't circles, they're solid, they look like people . . .”

“If they're solid, why don't they break tree branches when they go out on them?” He grabbed the gooseneck lamp on the desk and pointed the light at the wall. Then he laced his hands together. “You see it? On the wall? This isn't the best light . . .”

Then I did see it. He was making a shadow image of a flying bird. Larry was on a roll; he whipped a grease pencil from his pocket and drew a square on the beige wall above the desk. He made the shadow-bird again.

“Mr. Square sees a pretty complex shape. But he doesn't know the half of it. Look at my hands. Just my hands. Do you see a bird?”

“No,” I admitted.

“That's because only one of many possible cross sections resembles a bird.” He made a dog's head, and a monkey. He'd done this before, probably in a lecture hall.

“What I'm saying, whatever it's using, hands, fingers, whatever shapes its actual body can assume in four-space, all we'd ever see is a three-dimensional cross section of it.”

“And that cross section looks like a man?”

“Could be.” But his hands were on his hips now, regarding the square he'd drawn on the wall. “How can I be sure? I can't. The guys running this show, they want answers, and all we can offer them is possibilities.”

 
By the end of the next day, he couldn't even offer them that.

I could see he was having tough sledding right from the first. The floating blackboard covered itself with equations again, and the . . . Instructor? Tutor? Translator? . . . stood patiently beside it, waiting for Larry to get it. And, increasingly, he was not.

The troops had been kept back, almost a quarter mile behind the line. They were on their best behavior, as that day there was some brass with them. I could see them back there, holding binoculars, a few generals and admirals and such.

Since no one had told me to do differently, I stayed up at the Line near Larry. I wasn't sure why. I was no longer very afraid of the Linemen, though the camp had been awash in awful rumors that morning. It was said that Paulson was not the first man to be returned in a reversed state, but it had been hushed up to prevent panic. I could believe it. The initial panics and riots had died down quite a bit, we'd been told, but millions around the globe were still fleeing before the advancing Line. In some places feeding these migrant masses was getting to be a problem. And in some places, the moving mob had solved the problem by looting every town they passed through.

Some said that Paulson was not the worst that could happen. It was whispered that men had been “vanished” by the Line and returned everted. Turned inside out. And still alive, though not for long . . .

Larry wouldn't deny it was possible.

But today Larry wasn't saying much of anything. I watched him for a while, sweating in the sun, writing on the blackboard with a grease pencil, wiping it out, writing again, watching the Lineman patiently writing new stuff in symbols that might as well have been Swahili.

Then I remembered I had thought of something to ask the night before, lying there listening to Larry snoring in the other king-size bed.

“Excuse me,” I said, and instantly a Lineman was standing beside me. The same one? I knew the question had little meaning.

“Before, I asked ‘Why butterflies?' You said because they are beautiful.”

“The most beautiful things on your planet,” he corrected.

“Right. But . . . isn't there a second best? Isn't there anything else, anything at all, that you're interested in?” I floundered, trying to think of something else that might be worth collecting to an aesthetic sense I could not possibly imagine. “Scarab beetles,” I said, sticking to entomology. “Some of them are fabulously beautiful, to humans anyway.”

“They are quite beautiful,” he agreed. “However, we do not collect them. Our reasons would be difficult to explain.” A diplomatic way of saying humans were blind, deaf, and ignorant, I supposed. “But yes, in a sense. Things are grown on other planets in this solar system, too. We are harvesting them now, in a temporal way of speaking.”

Well, this was new. Maybe I could justify my presence here in some small way after all. Maybe I'd finally asked an intelligent question.

“Can you tell me about them?”

“Certainly. Deep in the atmospheres of your four gas giant planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—beautiful beings have evolved that . . . our leader treasures. On Mercury, creatures of quicksilver inhabit deep caves near the poles. These are being gathered as well. And there are life forms we admire that thrive on very cold planets.”

Gathering cryogenic butterflies on Pluto? Since he showed me no visual aids, the image would do until something better came along.

The Lineman didn't elaborate beyond that, and I couldn't think of another question that might be useful. I reported what I had learned at the end of the day. None of the team of expert analysts could think of a reason why this should concern us, but they assured me my findings would be bucked up the chain of command.

Nothing ever came of it.

 
 
The next day they said I could go home, and I was hustled out of California almost as fast as I'd arrived. On my way I met Larry, who looked haunted. We shook hands.

“Funny thing,” he said. “All our answers, over thousands of years. Myths, gods, philosophers . . . What's it all about? Why are we here? Where do we come from, where do we go, what are we supposed to do while we're here? What's the meaning of life? So now we find out, and it was never about us at all. The meaning of life is . . . butterflies.” He gave me a lopsided grin. “But you knew that all along, didn't you?”

 
Of all the people on the planet, I and a handful of others could make the case that we were most directly affected. Sure, lives were uprooted, many people died before order was restored. But the Linemen were as unobtrusive as they could possibly be, given their mind-numbing task, and things eventually got back to a semblance of normal. Some people lost their religious faith, but even more rejected out of hand the proposition that there was no God but the Line, so the holy men of the world registered a net gain.

But lepidopterists . . . let's face it, we were out of a job.

I spent my days haunting the dusty back rooms and narrow corridors of the museum, opening cases and drawers, some of which might not have been disturbed for decades. I would stare for hours at the thousands and thousands of preserved moths and butterflies, trying to connect with the childhood fascination that had led to my choice of career. I remembered expeditions to remote corners of the world, miserable, mosquito-bitten, and exhilarated at the same time. I recalled conversations, arguments about this or that taxonomic point. I tried to relive my elation at my first new species,
Hypolimnes lewisii
.

All ashes now. They didn't even look very pretty anymore.

 
On the twenty-eight day of the invasion, a second Line appeared on the world's western coasts. By then the North American Line stretched from a point far in the Canadian north through Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico, reaching the Gulf of Mexico somewhere south of Corpus Christi, Texas. The second Line began marching east, finding very few butterflies but not seeming to mind.

It is not in the nature of the governmental mind to simply do nothing when faced with a situation. But most people agreed there was little or nothing to be done. To save face, the military maintained a presence following the Line, but they knew better than to do anything.

 
On the fifty-sixth day the third Line appeared.

Lunar cycle? It appeared so. A famous mathematician claimed he had found an equation describing the Earth-Moon orbital pair in six dimensions, or was it seven? No one cared very much.

 
When the first Line reached New York I was in the specimen halls, looking at moths under glass. A handful of Linemen appeared, took a quick look around. One looked over my shoulder at the displays for a moment. Then they all went away, in their multidimensional way.

And there it is.

I don't recall who it was that first suggested we write it all down, nor can I recall the reason put forward. Like most literate people of the Earth, though, I dutifully sat down and wrote my story. I understand many are writing entire biographies, possibly an attempt to shout out
“I was here!”
to an indifferent universe. I have limited myself to events from Day One to the present.

Perhaps someone else will come by, some distant day, and read these accounts. Yes, and perhaps the Moon is made of green butterflies.

 
 
It turned out that my question, that last day of my military career, was the key question, but I didn't realize I had been given the answer.

The Lineman never said they were growing creatures on Pluto.

He said there were things they grew on cold planets.

After one year of combing the Earth, the Linemen went away as quickly as they appeared.

On the way out, they switched off the light.

It was night in New York. From the other side of the planet the reports came in quickly, and I climbed up to the roof of my building. The moon, which should have been nearing full phase, was a pale ghost and soon became nothing but a black hole in the sky.

Another tenant had brought a small TV. An obviously frightened astronomer and a confused news anchor were counting seconds. When they reached zero, a bit over twenty minutes after the events at the antipodes, Mars began to dim. In thirty seconds it was invisible.

He never mentioned Pluto as their cold-planet nursery
. . .

In an hour Jupiter's light failed, then Saturn.

When the Sun came up in America that day it looked like a charcoal briquette, red flickerings here and there, and soon not even that. When the clocks and church bells struck noon, the Sun was gone.

Presently, it began to get cold.

INTRODUCTION TO
“The Flying Dutchman”