The Ophiuchi Hotline

20

How can I summarize a trip that lasted ten years? To say that it was dull and that nothing much happened would be at the same time a terrible understatement and untrue.

I'm sure Javelin began to regret it within the first month. She had taken us on as a lark, as something to break the routine she had lived under for such a long time. But she would not have lived that way for so long if it wasn't, in reality, a very good routine for her. We saw little of her after the first month. Her quarters were accessible only to her. When we entered the solarium she would go to her own parts of the ship.

Vaffa opted out early. She had no great desire to sleep the trip away, being frightened of suspended animation, but in her own words, "If I don't do something soon I'm gonna kill something."

Cathay and I grew close. Several times. In between, we scarcely spoke to each other. I recall one blistering row over whose turn it was to feed the fish. It wasn't his fault, and it wasn't mine. In a different situation we might have evolved something lasting, but there was no one else, for loving or for hating, or for petty anger. Part of it was sheer stubbornness on my part, I admit it. I didn't wish to love him simply because there was no one else; I needed more reasons than that. He saw this as insane, and he was probably right. But there was no help for it.

We kept coming back together mainly because of my sexual needs. I've always found my hand an unsatisfactory sex partner. I've never been able to stay angry at a lover for too long; I begin to need him. Javelin was no alternative. I copped with her once—which was a great surprise to me, since I had thought she was actually neuter. Her solution to the problem of female genitals without a crotch to put them in was ingenious, functional, and fascinating, but ultimately disappointing. She was an indifferent lover, too self-centered to be concerned with satisfying me.

I ended up holding out two weeks longer than Cathay. Javelin looked relieved when she administered the injection that put me under for eight years of sleep.

They had been decelerating for three weeks.

Javelin had been right; there was something out there. It showed up on the radar screen as an object the size of a large asteroid. It was impossible as yet to look at it directly because the light of the ship's drive interfered with the telescope. Javelin had carefully aimed for a point a hundred kilometers away from the object, so that her drive would not be seen as a weapon.

But no one had yet seen Javelin. Cathay, Lilo, and Vaffa had been awake four weeks, exercising every day to get back in shape from the long sleep, but Javelin had stayed in her room. They could talk to her, but only over the audio circuits. Lilo assumed the woman was by now even more acutely aware of their presence on her ship, and even more unhappy about it.

When she did make an appearance, it was after first cutting a door from the inside of her room. She now had two arms and legs, and could no longer fit through the tiny entrance she had used. It was not the sort of surgery she could have accomplished by herself; Lilo assumed she had mechanical aids in her room.

Javelin seemed self-conscious about it. Lilo was going to make a comment, but when she saw how awkwardly Javelin moved in the one-gee acceleration—tending to forget about her left leg and right arm—she said nothing. There had been some neural rewiring done, Lilo felt sure. It was as if Javelin had suddenly donned glasses that inverted everything she saw; it would take a while for her brain to accept the change.

At first Lilo wondered why Javelin had done it. In the past she had accepted the brief periods of immobility enforced by the boost of the ship; they never lasted more than a month, and were a small price to pay for ten years of easy movement in free-fall.

But now every day brought them closer to the Ophiuchite outpost, and Javelin's reason became obvious. There was no way of knowing what they would find. It could be anything from weightlessness to many gravities, and Javelin had thought it best to be prepared.

The Hotline station was a torus, a thick, dark doughnut with an outer diameter of seventy kilometers, spinning slowly.

"It looks like a tire," Cathay said, staring over Javelin's tiny shoulder at the telescope screen. "See how it's flattened?"

"That would give them more flat surface on the inside," Javelin pointed out. "Flat on the bottom, and an arched roof overhead." She hit a few switches on her console. "They're pulling three quarters of a gravity on the inside. You know, it's pretty big for that kind of rotation. And the density fooled us. It's about twice as dense as water, which isn't much. There's not much metal in it."

"What do you think it's made of?" Vaffa asked. Nobody answered.

There was a tower growing from the inner edge of the wheel. It was massive at the base, but tapered quickly into a needle as it rose toward the center. There was a module at the hub of rotation. Javelin did some more computations.

"There must be something heavy inside, just opposite the base of the tower," she announced. "Otherwise the mass of the tower would throw the rotation off balance."

"And that's where we have to go, right?" Cathay asked. "To the top of the tower?"

"I don't know where else we could go," Javelin said. "Everything else is moving too fast. You'd better all strap in. I'm going to have to do some maneuvering."

"Shouldn't we try to contact them first?" Lilo asked. "They must know what frequencies we use. I imagine they've been listening to us for centuries."

"You're right. But what should we say?" Javelin looked uncertain for the first time since Lilo had known her. They all looked at each other, and no one seemed anxious to make the first contact. Javelin turned the dials on her screen and made the scope zoom in on the docking module in the center of the wheel. They had all noticed a faint light on one side of it; now Javelin brought it into focus.

No one said anything for a while. The light was actually several lights, and looked like nothing so much as tubes of ionized neon gas. They spelled out a word: WELCOME.

"We've been waiting," said a voice over the radio. "If you'll come in to about five hundred meters, we'll throw you a line. See you in about twenty minutes?"