Free The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley Page A

Iphis I, a clone, whom number two had never met and probably never would.
    “Customs, by its nature,” Iphis explained, “is only interested in
incoming
ships. I take off for Titan, listing only Vaffa as a passenger. I come to Jupiter, and meanwhile my clone and another Vaffa are on their way down from Poseidon. He takes my place on the course Iwas traveling. Everything’s airtight at Titan, because he’ll get there carrying only what I declared at Luna. If anyone’s ever noticed my exhaust out here in the moons, no one’s ever said anything about it. They probably think it’s Invaders up to something.”
    Lilo sobered at the mention of Invaders. It had been twenty hours since they had swung around Jupiter. It was not something she liked to recall.
    She looked out the port again. “Isn’t it about time you thought about landing us?” The moon was getting uncomfortably large; she could no longer see the edges. Something moved on the surface. With a shock, she realized it was a person. They were that close.
    “Don’t worry. You don’t land a ship like this on a pebble like that. You could fart your way right into orbit.” He glanced out the port, and his hands went to the controls. With a few pops from the attitude jets, they seemed stationary. “Now they’ll pull us in with ropes and tie us down. You can get out now, if you want to.” He vaulted from his couch. It astounded Lilo how graceful he was. She knew that legs were encumbrances in weightlessness, too overpowered for any job they might be called on to do. She had not realized they were actually dangerous. She had nearly split her head three times on the first day of the flight. All her traveling had been done on one-gee ships.
    She found herself looking around for something. Her suit. A deeply ingrained reflex was trying to keep her from stepping into the lock in only her vest and kilt. Those horrible seconds escaping from the Institute came back to her. She repressed the memory. It annoyed her to be prey to unreasoning fears. She knew the null-suit worked; it had come to life a few hours from Jupiter, when the radiation level in the ship had become dangerous.
    Sealing herself into the lock as soon as Iphis and Vaffa had gone out, she pressed the cycle button. Goose pimples broke out on her bare skin; then the suit came on and she was fighting for breath. She suppressed the reflex to gasp.
    A null-suit was not easy to get used to. Some of it was merely disconcerting, such as finding yourself wrapped in a mirror that followed every curve of your body at a distance of one to one and a half millimeters. When she looked at herself, what she saw was a distorted picture of the things around her, twisted like a funhouse mirror. But some of it was downright alarming. Lilo had been breathing air for fifty-seven years, and suddenly to stop was not easy.
    The suit contained a neural link that suppresed the part of the automatic nervous system that controlled her diaphragm. When the suit was on, the breathing reflex was turned off. But it was not quite that simple. Below even the level where digestion, heartbeat, and breathing are controlled was a primitive ape that was just smart enough to realize she was not breathing, but not smart enough to understand the suit was taking care of it. The result was a near-panic reaction.
    Lilo knew she could not cope with it. Others had done so; on Mercury and Venus people grew up in null-suits. But for the first five minutes she just held the side of the lock and tried to stop shaking. She found it helpful to think of the process that was keeping her alive. She visualized the irregular metal implant Mari had put in place of her left lung. It contained the nullfield generator, a thirty-hour supply of oxygen, and artificial alveoli that connected with her pulmonary circulation system. The null-suit exchanged oxygen for carbon dioxide, but much more efficiently than her lungs could. The oscillation of her suit’s field created a