Varley, John - The Barbie Murders

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The Barbie Murders

THE BARBIE MURDERS

John Varley

"The Barbie Murders" was purchased by George Scithers, and appeared in the

January/February 1978 issue of Asimov's, with a cover by Paul Alexander and an interior

illustration by Jack Gaughan. Some of Varley's earliest stories appeared in Asimov's, two

of them in our very first issue (one of them his classic story "Air Raid'), and although the

magazine has seen less of him in recent years as his career as a novelist predominated, we

still hope to coax more stories out of him in the future. John Varley appeared on the SF

scene in 1975, and by the end of 1976-in what was a meteoric rise to prominence even for

a field known for meteoric rises-he was already being recognized as one of the hottest new

writers of the seventies. His books include the novels Ophiuchi Hotline, Titan, Wizard, and

Demon, and the collections The Persistence of Vision, The Barbie Murders, Picnic on

Nearside, and Blue Champagne. His most recent book was the major novel, Steel Beach.

He has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for his short fiction.

In the vivid and wildly inventive high-tech thriller that follows, one of SF's best murder

mysteries, he postulates a case where the detective, before he can determine Who Done It,

first has to figure which of the suspects is which ...

The body came to the morgue at 2246 hours. No one paid much attention to it. It was a Saturday night,

and the bodies were piling up like logs in a millpond. A harried attendant working her way down the row

of stainless steel tables picked up the sheaf of papers that came with the body, peeling back the sheet over

the face. She took a card from her pocket and scrawled on it, copying from the reports filed by the

investigating officer and the hospital staff:

Ingraham, Leah Petrie. Female. Age: 35. Length: 2.1 meters. Mass: 59 kilograms. Dead on arrival,

Crisium Emergency Terminal. Cause of death: homicide. Next of kin: unknown.

She wrapped the wire attached to the card around the left big toe, slid the dead weight from the table and

onto the wheeled carrier, took it to cubicle 659a, and rolled out the long tray.

The door slammed shut, and the attendant placed the paperwork in the out tray, never noticing that, in his

report, the investigating officer had not specified the sex of the corpse.

Lieutenant Anna-Louise Bach had moved into her new office three days ago and already the paper on her

desk was threatening to avalanche onto the floor.

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The Barbie Murders

To call it an office was almost a perversion of the term. It had a file cabinet for pending cases; she could

open it only at severe risk to life and limb. The drawers had a tendency to spring out at her, pinning her in

her chair in the corner. To reach "A" she had to stand on her chair; "Z" required her either to sit on her

desk or to straddle the bottom drawer with one foot in the legwell and the other against the wall.

But the office had a door. True, it could only be opened if no one was occupying the single chair in front

of the desk.

Bach was in no mood to gripe. She loved the place. It was ten times better than the squadroom, where she

had spent ten years elbow-to-elbow with the other sergeants and corporals.

Jorge Weil stuck his head in the door.

"Hi. We're taking bids on a new case. What am I offered?"

"Put me down for half a Mark," Bach said, without looking up from the report she was writing. "Can't

you see I'm busy?"

"Not as busy as you're going to be." Weil came in without an invitation and settled himself in the chair.

Bach looked up, opened her mouth, then said nothing. She had the authority to order him to get his big

feet out of her "cases completed" tray, but not the experience in exercising it. And she and Jorge had

worked together for three years. Why should a stripe of gold paint on her shoulder change their

relationship? She supposed the informality was Weil's way of saying he wouldn't let her promotion

bother him as long as she didn't get snotty about it.

Weil deposited a folder on top of the teetering pile marked "For Immediate Action," then leaned back

again. Bach eyed the stack of paper-and the circular file mounted in the wall not half a meter from it,

leading to the incinerator-and thought about having an accident. Just a careless nudge with an elbow ...

"Aren't you even going to open it?" Weil asked, sounding disappointed. "It's not every day I'm going to

hand-deliver a case."

"You tell me about it, since you want to so badly."

"All right. We've got a body, which is cut up pretty bad. We've got the murder weapon, which is a knife.

We've got thirteen eyewitnesses who can describe the killer, but we don't really need them since the

murder was committed in front of a television camera. We've got the tape."

"You're talking about a case which has to have been solved ten minutes after the first report, untouched

by human hands. Give it to the computer, idiot." But she looked up. She didn't like the smell of it. "Why

give it to me?"

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The Barbie Murders

"Because of the other thing we know. The scene of the crime. The murder was committed at the barbie

colony."

"Oh, sweet Jesus."

The Temple of the Standardized Church in Luna was in the center of the Standardist Commune,

Anytown, North Crisium. The best way to reach it, they found, was a local tube line which paralleled the

Cross-Crisium Express Tube.

She and Weil checked out a blue-and-white police capsule with a priority sorting code and surrendered

themselves to the New Dresden municipal transport system-the pill sorter, as the New Dresdenites called

it. They were whisked through the precinct chute to the main nexus, where thousands of capsules were

stacked awaiting a routing order to clear the computer. On the big conveyer which should have taken

them to a holding cubby, they were snatched by a grapple-the cops called it the long arm of the law-and

moved ahead to the multiple maws of the Cross-Crisium while people in other capsules glared at them.

The capsule was inserted, and Bach and Weil were pressed hard into the backs of their seats.

In seconds they emerged from the tube and out onto the plain of Crisium, speeding along through the

vacuum, magnetically suspended a few millimeters above the induction rail. Bach glanced up at the

Earth, then stared out the window at the featureless landscape rushing by. She brooded.

It had taken a look at the map to convince her that the barbie colony was indeed in the New Dresden

jurisdiction- a case of blatant gerrymandering if ever there was one. Any-town was fifty kilometers from

what she thought of as the boundaries of New Dresden, but was joined to the city by a dotted line that

represented a strip of land one meter wide.

A roar built up as they entered a tunnel and air was injected into the tube ahead of them. The car shook

briefly as the shock wave built up, then they popped through pressure doors into the tube station of

Anytown. The capsule doors hissed and they climbed out onto the platform.

The tube station at Anytown was primarily a loading dock and warehouse. It was a large space with

plastic crates stacked against all the walls, and about fifty people working to load them into freight

capsules.

Bach and Weil stood on the platform for a moment, uncertain where to go. The murder had happened at a

spot not twenty meters in front of them, right here in the tube station.

"This place gives me the creeps," Weil volunteered.

"Me, too."

Every one of the fifty people Bach could see was identical to every other. All appeared to be female,

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Varley, John - The Barbie Murders

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