"John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

About once a week I was visited by teams of graduate students. They would sit on my sofa and fidget,
a series of girls and boys with earnest faces, brows furrowed in concentration. They would interview
me for an hour, plainly not knowing what to think of me. At first, I thought up bizarre answers to
their questions, but I tired of that, too. Sometimes I just sat there for the whole hour.
My life crawled toward its termination.


Lilo-Alexandr-Calypso sat in her cell and waited for morning. She still had not decided if she could
bear to mount those lonely stairs. A year ago, when it hadn't been so goddamn imminent, it had been
easy to be brave. Now she could see that her bravado had come from the deep inner conviction that
no one would actually kill her. But she had had plenty of time to think.
Gas chamber, gallows. Electric chair, stake, firing squad. Hang by the neck till you're dead, dead,
dead, and may God recycle your soul.
Imaginative as those devices had been, they had an extremely simple purpose. They were intended to
stop a human heart from beating. Later, the criterion for determining death was brain activity.
That was no longer enough. The sad fact was that it was no longer possible to kill someone and be


file:///F|/rah/John%20Varley/John%20Varley%20-%20The%20Ophiuchi%20Hotline.htm (3 of 152) [8/28/03 1:12:01 PM]
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley

absolutely sure the person would not show up again. Lilo's execution in the morning was therefore
largely symbolic, from the viewpoint of society.
From Lilo's viewpoint, it was much more than that. She was toying with an idea she had entertained
only once before in her life: six months earlier, just before her stay of execution. She was thinking of
committing suicide.
"And why not?" she asked herself, a little startled when she realized she had said it aloud.
Why not, indeed? A few years earlier she could have given a thousand reasons why not. She had been
in her early fifties, still young, with her life stretching endlessly in front of her. But now she was fifty-
seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can't get any more ancient than
that.
Physically, Lilo was twenty-five. It was a popular age to be, and though Lilo did not like to ape
popular trends, she had never felt good looking any older than that. Her body was largely her own,
with a few surgical modifications. Her hair was light brown, her eyes were set far apart to
accommodate a wide, slightly flat nose. She was tall and slim, and it suited her.
Her one vanity was her legs. She had added ten centimeters to her leg bones, making her two point
two meters tall, slightly above average height. She wore fine brown hair, like chinchilla, from
midway down her calves to the tops of her feet.
She got up and restlessly paced the room. What amazed her was that, once she had accepted that she
was going to die, suicide began to seem like an attractive possibility. The State of Luna did not care if
she killed herself; she was going to The Hole in the morning, dead or alive. No attempt had been
made to clear her cell of harmful tools.
The tool she was examining now was a knife. It was a lovely thing. Stainless steel, mirror-bright—it
had a symmetry of line she found appealing. Cross-hatched grooves wound around the handle, giving
a sure grip on cool metal. She drew it across her throat, keeping her mind blank. Her hand shook as
she brought her fingers up to her neck. No blood.
She thought about the two alternatives facing her.
Tomorrow would be an emotional moment. She was sure nothing could possibly match the
anticipation of mounting the stairs over The Hole. She had a horror of breaking down completely, of
having to be restrained and thrown over the brink rather than stepping off by her own volition.