Millennium by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page B

cables running from theirbacks. Those cables ran into their chairs and down into hundreds of bulky machines in the basement.
    Larry hadn’t seen any use in living on a leash. If he couldn’t leave the building, what was the point of phony legs? So Larry’s chair was part of Larry. It had no back. He sort of grew from it, planted there on the floor in front of his console. He looked like a bizarre chess piece.
    From the waist up he looked like a normal human being. I knew most of that was a lie, too. Even when I’d known him he had only one real arm. His face had been hit-and-miss the one time I’d seen it without the skinsuit: nose gone, lips eaten away, only one ear. I didn’t know which diseases he had. One doesn’t ask. I didn’t know which parts of him were actually organic; probably not much more than the brain. One doesn’t ask that, either.
    Nobody but me and my doctor and Sherman know which of my organs and limbs are my own, and I’m happy to keep it that way. I must care, or I wouldn’t live in this lying skinsuit pretending to be a film star from the year 2034. That’s right: the me everybody knows is patterned, down to the last birthmark, on a glamor queen we snatched from a terrorist explosion.
    It struck me, sitting there with him in a rare moment of quiet, that when I could no longer carry all my prostheses I would do well to emulate Larry. Then the time for attractive lies would be over. Then it would be time to face, finally, what I am, what all of us here in the glorious future really are.
    The Last Age.
    *    *    *
    I got up and wandered from the Operations room. I found some clothes and got dressed, had breakfast from machines in the Snatch Team Ready-Room, and just sat for a while. I realized the day was still young.
    So far it had been pretty typical.

(3)
“Let’s Go to Golgotha”
    Testimony of Bill Smith
    The chopper pilot told me Roger Keane had already spent three hours at the DC-10 site.
    I wasn’t quite sure what to do. We had two big planes separated by twenty miles, and seven people to begin the investigation. What I saw below me was unpromising. In the absence of any better guidelines, I turned to my team and polled them.
    “I’d like to get out here,” Eli said. He’d been looking down at what might have been one of the engine cowlings, and I could see he was eager to get his hands on it. “I mean, what’s the difference? We’ll see them both eventually so I might as well start here.”
    “I’ll get off, too,” Carole said. “It’s close enough to those farmhouses that I might get some useful eyewitness accounts. Isn’t the other one up on top of a mountain?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” the pilot said. “Mount Diablo. I doubt anyone was close when it came down.”
    Craig and Jerry said they’d just as soon start here, too, which left me and Tom Stanley.
    “Keep your eyes open for the recorders,” I told Craig as he was getting out. The pilot heard me.
    “You mean the black boxes?” he asked. “They already got those. I flew ’em back to Oakland an hour ago.”
    I nodded at him, and jerked my thumb into the air. How the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder got nicknamed black boxes has always been a minor mystery to me. For one thing, they’re usually red. To me, a “black box” has always been some esoteric gizmo that does something mysterious. The CVR’s and FDR’s were perfectly straightforward devices. Anybody who could run a car stereo could understand them.
    *    *    *
    It looked like the 747 had flown a little after the collision. It had plowed a long furrow up the side of the mountain.
    Tom and I reconstructed it from the air, hovering over a site that was not nearly so crowded as the other, and which had much more to tell us.
    The plane had come in on its belly. The impact had demolished the nose, and probably cracked the fuselage. It had bounced, then bellied down again, and this time the fuselage broke into four distinct