Varley, John - In The Bowl

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 63.48KB 21 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt

VERSION 1.0 dtd 032900

JOHN VARLEY

In the Bowl

John Varley is from Texas. He lived in California most of his adult life and now makes his home in

Oregon with his family. He started writing science fiction in 1973, is thirty years old, and one

of the most interesting of the newer writers. A large number of people have been predicting great

things for John Varley. He has the narrative gift which is to say that it is impossible to start

reading him without getting caught up in the action behind his words. This, by itself, has always

been an ability much prized among story tellers. But John Varley has something else. His thinking

is the thinking of the seventies; and the ideas, the themes and concepts of his stories are those

of the 1970's. "In the Bowl"-the story by him that follows-is a thematic story, but in typical

Varley fashion, it is a thematic story that will pick you up by the ears and carry you away.

Never buy anything at a secondhand organ bank. And while I'm handing out good advice, don't outfit

yourself for a trip to Venus until you get to Venus.

I wish I had waited. But while shopping around at Coprates a few weeks before my vacation, I

happened on this little shop and was talked into an infraeye at a very good price. What I should

have asked myself was what was an infraeye doing on Mars in the first place?

Think about it. No one wears them on Mars. If you want to see at night, it's much cheaper to buy a

snooperscope. That way you can take the damn thing off when the sun comes up. So this eye must

have come back with a tourist from Venus. And there's no telling how long it sat there in the vat

until this sweet-talking old guy gave me his line about how it belonged to a nice little old

schoolteacher who never . . . ah, well. You've probably heard it before.

If only the damn thing had gone on the blink before I left Venusburg. You know Venusburg: town of

steamy swamps and sleazy hotels where you can get mugged

as you walk down the public streets, lose a fortune at the gaming tables, buy any pleasure in the

known universe, hunt the prehistoric monsters that wallow in the fetid marshes that are . just a

swampbuggy ride out of town. You do? Then you should know that after hours -when they turn all the

holos off and the place reverts to an ordinary cluster of silvery domes sitting in darkness and

eight hundred degree temperature and pressure enough to give you a sinus headache just thinking

about it, when they shut off all the tourist razzle-dazzle -it's no trouble to find your way to

one of the rental agencies around the spaceport and get medicanical work done. They'll accept

Martian money. Your Solar Express Card is honored. Just walk right in, no waiting.

However . . .

I had caught the daily blimp out of Venusburg just hours after I touched down, happy as a clam, my

infraeye working beautifully. By the time I landed in Cui-Cui Town, I was having my first inklings

of trouble. Barely enough to notice; just the faintest hazing in the right-side peripheral vision.

I shrugged it off. I had only three hours in Cui-Cui before the blimp left for Last Chance. I

wanted to look around. I had no intention of wasting my few hours in a body shop getting my eye

fixed. If it was still acting up at Last Chance, then I'd see about it.

Cui-Cui was more to my liking than Venusburg. There was not such a cast-of-thousands feeling

there. On the streets of Venusburg the chances are about ten to one against meeting a real human

being; everyone else is a holo put there to spice up the image and help the streets look not quite

so empty. I quickly tired of toot-suited pimps that I could see right through trying to sell me

boys and girls of all ages. What's the point? Just try to touch one of those beautiful people.

In Cui-Cui the ratio was closer to fifty-fifty. And the theme was not decadent corruption, but

struggling frontier. The streets were very convincing mud, and the wooden storefronts were

tastefully done. I didn't care for the eight-legged dragons with eyestalks that constantly

lumbered through the place, but I understand

they are a memorial to the fellow who named the town That's all right, but I doubt if he would

have liked to have one of the damn things walk through him like a twelve-ton tank made of pixie

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt (1 of 21) [2/14/2004 12:22:46 AM]

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt

dust.

I barely had time to get my feet "wet" in the "puddles" before the blimp was ready to go again.

And the eye trouble had cleared up. So I was off to Last Chance.

I should have taken a cue from the name of the town. And I had every opportunity to do so. While

there, I made my last purchase of supplies for the bush. I was going out where there were no air

stations on every corner, and so I decided I could use a tagalong.

Maybe you've never seen one. They're modern science's answer to the backpack. Or maybe to the mule

train, though in operation you're sure to be reminded of the safari bearers in old movies,

trudging stolidly along behind the White Hunter with bales of supplies on their heads. The thing

is a pair of metal legs exactly as long as your legs, with equipment on the top and an umbilical

cord attaching the contraption to your lower spine. What it does is provide you with the

capability of living on the surface for four weeks instead of the five days you get from your

Venus-lung

The medico who sold me mine had me laying right there on his table with my back laid open so he

could install the tubes that carry air from the tanks in the tagalong into my Venus-lung. It was a

golden opportunity to ask him to check the eye. He probably would have, because while he was

hooking me up he inspected and tested my lung and charged me nothing. He wanted to know where I

bought it, and I told him Mars. He clucked, and said it seemed all right: He warned me not to ever

let the level of oxygen in the lung get too low, to always charge it up before I left a pressure

dome, even if I was only going out for a few minutes. I assured him that I knew all that and would

be careful. So he connected the nerves into a metal socket in the small of my back and plugged the

tagalong into it. He tested it several ways and said the job was done.

And I didn't ask him to look at the eye. I just wasn't thinking about the eye then. I'd not even

gone out on the surface yet. So I'd no real occasion to see it in action. Oh, things looked a

little different, even in visible light. There were different colors and very few shadows, and the

image I got out of the infraeye was fuzzier than the one from the other eye. I could close one

eye, then the other, and see a real difference. But I wasn't thinking about it.

So I boarded the blimp the next day for the weekly scheduled flight to Lodestone, a company mining

town close to the Fahrenheit Desert. Though how they were able to distinguish a desert from

anything else on Venus was still a mystery to me. I was enraged to find that, though the blimp

left half-loaded, I had to pay two fares: one for me, and one for my tagalong. I thought briefly

of carrying the damn thing in my lap but gave it up after a ten-minute experiment in the depot. It

was full of sharp edges and poking angles, and the trip was going to be a long one. So I paid. But

the extra expense had knocked a large hole in my budget.

From Cui-Cui the steps got closer together and harder to reach. CuiCui is two thousand kilometers

from Venusburg, and it's another thousand to Lodestone. After that the passenger service is

spotty. I did find out how Venusians defined a desert, though. A desert is a place not yet

inhabited by human beings. So long as I was still able to board a scheduled blimp, I wasn't there

yet.

The blimps played out on me in a little place called Prosperity. Population seventy-five humans

and one otter. I thought the otter was a holo playing in the pool in the town square. The place

didn't look prosperous enough to afford a real pool like that with real water. But it was. It was

a transient town catering to prospectors. I understand that a town like that can vanish overnight

if the prospectors move on. The owners of the shops just pack up and haul the whole thing away.

The ratio of the things you see in a frontier town to what really is there is something like a

hundred to one.

I learned with considerable relief that the only blimps I could catch out of Prosperity were

headed in the direction I had come from. There was nothing at all going the other way. I was happy

to hear that and felt it was only a matter of chartering a ride into the desert. Then my eye faded

out entirely.

I remember feeling annoyed; no, more than annoyed. I was really angry. But I was still viewing it

as a nuisance rather than a disaster. It was going to be a matter of some lost time and some

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt (2 of 21) [2/14/2004 12:22:46 AM]

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt

wasted money.

I quickly learned otherwise. I asked the ticket seller (this was in a saloon-drugstore-arcade;

there was no depot in Prosperity) where I could find someone who'd sell and install an infraeye.

He laughed at me.

"Not out here you won't, brother," he said. "Never have had anything like that out here. Used to

be a medico in Ellsworth, three stops back on the local blimp, but she moved back to Venusburg a

year ago. Nearest thing now is in Last Chance."

I was stunned. I knew I was heading out for the dead lands, but it had never occurred to me that

any place would be lacking in something so basic as a medico. Why, you might as well not sell food

or air as not sell medicanical services. People might actually die out here. I wondered if the

planetary government knew about this disgusting situation.

Whether they did or not, I realized that an incensed letter to them would do me no good. I was in

a bind. Adding quickly in my head, I soon discovered that the cost of flying back to Last Chance

and buying a new eye would leave me without enough money to return to Prosperity and still make it

back to Venusburg. My entire vacation was about to be ruined just because I tried to cut some

comers buying a used eye.

"What's the matter with the eye?" the man asked me.

"Huh? Oh, I don't know. I mean, it's just stopped working. I'm blind in it, that's what's wrong."

I grasped at a straw, seeing the way he was studying my eye.

"Say, you don't know anything about it, do you?"

He shook his head and smiled ruefully at me. "Naw, Just a little here and there. I was thinking if

it was the

muscles that was giving you trouble, bad tracking or something like that-"

"No. No vision at all."

"Too bad. Sounds like a shot nerve to me. I wouldn't try to fool around with that. I'm just a

tinkerer." He clucked his tongue sympathetically. "You want that ticket back to Last Chance?"

I didn't know what I wanted just then. I had planned this trip for two years. I almost bought the

ticket, then thought what the hell. I was here, and I should at least look around before deciding

what to do. Maybe there was someone here who could help me. I turned back to ask the clerk if he

knew anyone, but he answered before I got it out.

"I don't want to raise your hopes too much," he said, rubbing his chin with a broad hand. "Like I

say, it's not for sure, but---2'

"Yes, what is it?"

"Well, there's a kid lives around here who's pretty crazy about medico stuff. Always tinkering

around, doing odd jobs for people, fixing herself up; you know the type. The trouble is she's

pretty loose in her ways. You might end up worse when she's through with you than when you

started."

"I don't see how," I said. "It's not working at all; what could she do to make it any worse?"

He shrugged. "It's your funeral. You can, probably find her hanging around the square. If she's

not there, check the bars. Her name's Ember. She's got a pet otter that's always with her. But

you'll know her when you see her."

Finding Ember was no problem. I simply backtracked to the square and there she was, sitting on the

stone rim of the fountain. She was trailing her toes in the water. Her otter was playing on a

small waterslide, looking immensely pleased to have found the only open body of water within a

thousand kilometers.

"Are you Ember?" I asked, sitting down beside her.

file:///G|/rah/John%20Varley%20-%20In%20The%20Bowl.txt (3 of 21) [2/14/2004 12:22:46 AM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Varley, John - In The Bowl.pdf

共21页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Varley, John - In The Bowl

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: