John Varley - Pusher

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Pusher

John Varley

John Varley didn't send any biographical information with his manuscript; when I called him he

said he didn't believe in that sort of thing. Just make something up. Oh, the temptation. For the

sake of the publisher's legal department, though, I won't yield to it.

Varley is generally considered to have been one of the two or three most important writers

to emerge in the 1970s. His novella "The Persistence of Vision" won both Hugo and Nebula awards,

and provides the title for his collection of short stories. His latest novel, Demon, completes the

trilogy started with Titan and Wizard. He lives in a land where the river runs backwards and he is

named after an herb.

Things change. Ian Haise expected that. Yet there are certain constants, dictated by function and

use. Ian looked for those and he seldom went wrong.

The playground was not much like the ones he had known as a child. But playgrounds are

built to entertain children. They will always have something to swing on, something to slide down,

something to climb. This one had all those things, and more. Part of it was thickly wooded. There

was a swimming hole. The stationary apparatus was combined with dazzling light sculptures that

darted in and out of reality. There were animals too: pygmy rhinoceros and elegant gazelles no

taller than your knee. They seemed unnaturally gentle and unafraid.

But most of all, the playground had children.

Ian liked children.

He sat on a wooden park bench at the edge of the trees, in the shadows, and watched them.

They came in all colors and all sizes, in both sexes. There were black ones like animated licorice

jellybeans and white ones like bunny rabbits, and brown ones with curly hair and more brown ones

with slanted eyes and straight black hair and some who had been white but were now toasted browner

than some of the brown ones.

Ian concentrated on the girls. He had tried with boys before, long ago, but it had not

worked out.

He watched one black child for a time, trying to estimate her age. He thought it was

around eight or nine. Too young. Another one was more like thirteen, judging from her shirt. A

possibility, but he'd prefer something younger. Somebody less sophisticated, less suspicious.

Finally he found a girl he liked. She was brown, but with startling blond hair. Ten?

Possibly eleven. Young enough, at any rate.

He concentrated on her and did the strange thing he did when he had selected the right

one. He didn't know what it was, but it usually worked. Mostly it was just a matter of looking at

her, keeping his eyes fixed on her no matter where she went or what she did, not allowing himself

to be distracted by anything. And sure enough, in a few minutes she looked up, looked around, and

her eyes locked with his. She held his gaze for a moment, then went back to her play.

He relaxed. Possibly what he did was nothing at all. He had noticed, with adult women,

that if one really caught his eye so he found himself staring at her, she would usually look up

from what she was doing and catch him. It never seemed to fail. Talking to other men, he had found

it to be a common experience. It was almost as if they could feel his gaze. Women had told him it

was nonsense, or if not, it was just reaction to things seen peripherally by people trained to

alertness for sexual signal's. Merely an unconscious observation penetrating to the awareness;

nothing mysterious, like ESP.

Perhaps. Still, Ian was very good at this sort of eye contact. Several times he had

noticed the girls rubbing the backs of their necks while he observed them, or hunching their

shoulders. Maybe they'd developed some kind of ESP and just didn't recognize it as such.

Now he merely watched her. He was smiling, so that every time she looked up to see him-

which she did with increasing frequency-she saw a friendly, slightly graying man with a broken

nose and powerful shoulders. His hands were strong too. He kept them clasped in his lap.

Presently she began to wander in his direction.

No one watching her would have thought she was coming toward him. She probably didn't know

it herself. On her way, she found reasons to stop and tumble, jump on the soft rubber mats, or

chase a flock of noisy geese. But she was coming toward him, and she would end up on the park

bench beside him.

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He glanced around quickly. As before, there were few adults in this playground. It had

surprised him when he arrived. Apparently the new conditioning techniques had reduced the numbers

of the violent and twisted to the point that parents felt it safe to allow their children to run

without supervision. The adults present were involved with each other. No one had given him a

second glance when he arrived.

That was fine with Ian. It made what he planned to do

much easier. He had his excuses ready, of course, but it could be embarrassing to be confronted

with the questions representatives of the law ask single, middle-aged men who hang around

playgrounds.

For a moment he considered, with real concern, how the parents of these children could

feel so confident, even with mental conditioning. After all, no one was conditioned until he had

first done something. New maniacs were presumably being produced every day. Typically, they looked

just like everyone else until they proved their difference by some demented act.

Somebody ought to give those parents a stern lecture, he thought.

"Who are you?"

Ian frowned. Not eleven, surely, not seen up this close. Maybe not even ten. She might be

as young as eight.

Would eight be all right? He tasted the idea with his usual caution, looked around again

for curious eyes. He saw none.

"My name is Ian. What's yours?"

"No. Not your name. Who are you?"

"You mean what do I do?"

"Yes."

"I'm a pusher."

She thought that over, then smiled. She had her permanent teeth, crowded into a small jaw.

"You give away pills?"

He laughed. "Very good," he said. "You must do a lot of reading." She said nothing, but

her manner indicated she was pleased.

"No," he said. "That's an old kind of pusher. I'm the other kind. But you knew that,

didn't you?" When he smiled, she broke into giggles. She was doing the pointless things with her

hands that little girls do. He thought she had a pretty good idea of how cute she was, but no

inkling of her forbidden eroticism. She was a ripe seed with sexuality ready to burst to

the surface. Her body was a bony sketch, a framework on which to build a woman.

"How old are you?" he asked.

"That's a secret. What happened to your nose?"

"I broke it a long time ago. I'll bet you're twelve."

She giggled, then nodded. Eleven, then. And just barely.

"Do you want some candy?" He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pink-and-white-

striped paper bag.

She shook her head solemnly. "My mother says not to take candy from strangers."

"But we're not strangers. I'm Ian, the pusher."

She thought that over. While she hesitated, he reached into the bag and picked out a

chocolate thing so thick and gooey it was almost obscene. He bit into it, forcing himself to chew.

He hated sweets.

"Okay," she said, and reached toward the bag. He pulled it away. She looked at him in

innocent surprise.

"I just thought of something," he said. "I don't know your name. So I guess we are

strangers."

She caught on to the game when she saw the twinkle in his eye. He'd practiced that. It was

a good twinkle.

"My name is Radiant. Radiant Shining star Smith."

"A very fancy name," he said, thinking how names had changed. "For a very pretty girl." He

paused, and cocked his head. "No. I don't think so. You're Radiant . . . Starr. With two r's. . .

. Captain Radiant Starr, of the Star Patrol."

She was dubious for a moment. He wondered if he'd judged her wrong. Perhaps she was really

Miz Radiant Fainting heart Belle, or Mrs. Radiant Motherhood. But her fingernails were a bit dirty

for that.

She pointed a finger at him and made a Donald Duck sound as her thumb worked back and

forth. He put his hand to his heart and fell over sideways, and she dissolved in laughter. She was

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careful, however, to keep her weapon firmly trained on him.

"And you'd better give me that candy or I'll shoot you again."

The playground was darker now, and not so crowded. She sat beside him on the bench, swinging her

legs. Her bare feet did not quite touch the dirt.

She was going to be quite beautiful. He could see it clearly in her face. As for the body

. . . who could tell?

Not that he really gave a damn.

She was dressed in a little of this and a little of that, worn here and there without much

regard for his concepts of modesty. Many of the children wore nothing. It had been something of a

shock when he arrived. Now he was almost used to it, but he still thought it incautious on the

part of her parents. Did they really think the world was that safe, to let an eleven year-old girl

go practically naked in a public place?

He sat there listening to her prattle about her friends-the ones she hated and the one or

two she simply adored-with only part of his attention.

He inserted um's and uh-huh's in the right places.

She was cute, there was no denying it. She seemed as sweet as a child that age ever gets,

which can be very sweet and as poisonous as a rattlesnake, almost at the same moment. She had the

capacity to be warm, but it was on the surface. Underneath, she cared mostly about herself. Her

loyalty would be a transitory thing, bestowed easily, just as easily forgotten.

And why not? She was young. It was perfectly healthy for her to be that way.

But did he dare try to touch her?

It was crazy. It was as insane as they all told him it was. It worked so seldom. Why would

it work with her? He felt a weight of defeat.

"Are you okay?"

"Huh? Me? Oh, sure, I'm all right. Isn't your mother going to be worried about you?"

"I don't have to be in for hours, and hours yet." For a moment she looked so grown-up he

almost believed the lie.

"Well, I'm getting tired of sitting here. And the candy's all gone." He looked at her

face. Most of the chocolate had

ended up in a big circle around her mouth, except where she had wiped it daintily on her shoulder

or forearm. "What's back there?"

She turned.

"That? That's the swimming hole."

"Why don't we go over there? I'll tell you a story."

The promise of a story was not enough to keep her out of the water. He didn't know if that was

good or bad. He knew she was smart, a reader, and she had an imagination. But she was also active.

That pull was too strong for him. He sat far from the water, under some bushes, and watched her

swim with the three other children still in the park this late in the evening.

Maybe she would come back to him, and maybe she wouldn't. It wouldn't change his life

either way, but it might change hers.

She emerged dripping and infinitely cleaner from the murky water. She dressed again in her

random scraps, for whatever good it did her, and came to him, shivering.

"I'm cold," she said.

"Here." He took off his jacket. She looked at his hands as he wrapped it around her, and

she reached out and touched the hardness of his shoulder.

"You sure must be strong," she commented.

"Pretty strong. I work hard, being a pusher."

"Just what is a pusher?" she said, and stifled a yawn.

"Come sit on my lap, and I'll tell you."

He did tell her, and it was a very good story that no adventurous child could resist. He had

practiced that story, refined it, told it many times into a recorder until he had the rhythms and

cadences just right, until he found just the right words not too difficult words, but words with

some fire and juice in them.

And once more he grew encouraged. She had been tired when he started, but he gradually

caught her attention. It was

possible no one had ever told her a story in quite that way. She was used to sitting before the

screen and having a story shoved into her eyes and ears. It was something new to be able to

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