The John Varley Reader by John Varley Page A

robed figure flow and writhe and become a tall, uniformed woman. With a surge of joy, he knew who it was. Then the joy became ashes in his mouth, which he hurriedly spit out.
    â€œI always knew you’d choke on a figure of speech,” she said, laughing tiredly.
    â€œYou’re here,” he said. He could not quite believe it. He stared dully at her, grasping her hand and the diploma with equal tenacity. She was tall, as the prophecy had said, and handsome. Her hair was cropped short over a capable face, and the body beneath the uniform was muscular. The uniform was open at the throat, and wrinkled. There were circles under her eyes, and the eyes were bloodshot. She swayed slightly on her feet.
    â€œI’m here, all right. Are you ready to go back?” She turned to the assembled students. “How about it, gang? Do you think he deserves to go back?”
    The crowd went wild, cheering and tossing mortarboards into the air. Fingal turned dazedly to look at them, with a dawning realization. He looked down at the diploma.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. Back to work at the data room?”
    She clapped him on the back.
    â€œNo. I promise you that.”
    â€œBut how could it be different? I’ve come to think of this piece of paper as something . . . real. Real! How could I have deluded myself like that? Why did I accept it?”
    â€œI helped you along,” she said. “But it wasn’t all a game. You really did learn all the things you learned. It won’t go away when you return. That thing in your hand is imaginary, for sure, but who do you think prints the real ones? You’re registered where it counts—in the computer—as having passed all the courses. You’ll get a real diploma when you return.”
    Fingal wavered. There was a tempting vision in his head. He’d been here for over a year and had never really exploited the nature of the place. Maybe that business about dying in the memory bank was all a shuck, another lie invented to keep him in his place. In that case, he could remain here and satisfy his wildest desires, become king of the universe with no opposition, wallow in pleasure no emperor ever imagined. Anything he wanted here he could have, anything at all.
    And he really felt he might pull it off. He’d noticed many things about this place, and now had the knowledge of computer technology to back him up. He could squirm around and evade their attempts to erase him, even survive if they removed his cube by programming himself into other parts of the computer. He could do it.
    With a sudden insight he realized that he had no desires wild enough to keep him here in his navel. He had only one major desire right now, and she was slowly fading out. A lap dissolve was replacing her with the old college president.
    â€œComing?” she asked.
    â€œYes.” It was as simple as that. The stage, president, students, and auditorium faded out and the computer room at Kenya faded in. Only Apollonia remained constant. He held onto her hand until everything stabilized.
    â€œWhew,” she said, and reached around behind her head. She pulled out a wire from her occipital plug and collapsed into a chair. Someone pulled a similar wire from Fingal’s head, and he was finally free of the computer.
    Apollonia reached out for a steaming cup of coffee on a table littered with empty cups.
    â€œYou were a tough nut,” she said. “For a minute I thought you’d stay. It happened once. You’re not the first to have this happen to you, but you’re no more than the twentieth. It’s an unexplored area. Dangerous.”
    â€œReally?” he said. “You weren’t just saying that?”
    â€œNo,” she laughed. “Now the truth can be told. It is dangerous. No one had ever survived more than three hours in that kind of cube, hooked into a computer. You went for six. You do have a strong