The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  Everybody went about his business without a single cheer being raised, nor a solitary high-five exchanged. They call it theater, but it's not, to my mind. I know it's hard to maintain enthusiasm after a long run. The solution to that is to get out when you no longer feel excitement as the curtain falls. This particular Vegas had been running for twenty years. Some of the people around me were the children of the original cast. Their own children would no doubt take over the jobs when this generation moved on to something else. I found these disneyland shows overproduced and cheerless. If you want a history lesson, a holograph movie would serve.

  Ah, well. It created a lot of jobs in the system's number-one industry: tourism. I'll confess I've played in them when at liberty from more rewarding projects.

  No one gave me a glance as I found my way to the freight elevator that took me down into the bowels of Pacifica and deposited me at the employees' train station, which in turn dumped me at the spaceport fifteen minutes later. Even on the train car I drew no curious stares as I dripped Hawaiian water onto the red seats and black carpet. Plutonians are a mind-your-own-business crowd, one of the best things about them.

  One more train ride and I was at the freight terminal at the most remote point of the spaceport. If I'd come there two weeks before, I could have avoided a great deal of trouble, and Isambard Comfort could have missed a monumental headache.

  I hadn't come here for one big reason. It scared me to death. Now the alternative was worse, so I marched resolutely up to the express counter of Pillock and Burke Interplanet Carriers and inquired as to the cost of mailing myself to Uranus.

  I didn't put it in just those words, of course.

  "What's in it?" the clerk asked, with a big yawn, looking without interest at the Pantech, sitting there seeming as new as the day it was built, having shaken off all signs of its recent adventure like a duck's back sheds water.

  "Personal effects," I said. "Tools of my trade." I knew that would get me a discount, under the Interplanetary Artists' Convention.

  "Anythin' t'd'clare?"

  "No contraband. There's a Bichon Frise inside."

  "A what?"

  "A dog. Here's his license. I'll need Oh-two and H-two-Oh feeds, and a two-twenty power connection." I didn't really need the power, since the Pantech has its own internal source, but it was illegal to ship that power plant without having it inspected and certified, and why bother them with all that red tape? Better to pay for the power hookup and not raise any questions.

  Such as the one he now asked.

  "What about food? The dog gonna need food?"

  "He has his own." He looked at me and raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't eat much," I explained. "It's a small dog." I could feel myself getting too elaborate. My father always said to keep your lies simple, and never answer a question you're not asked. But he kept looking, so I shoved the license closer to him and let the P$20 bill peek out from under it. His eyes shifted, and he picked up the license and shoved it into a machine. The bill was gone. He handed the license back to me with a new stamp on it. I really hated to do this, since anyone who knew about Toby might be able to trace me through him, but I had no choice.

  He took a yellow form from a stack and started filling it in with a pencil. It was almost Dickensian, and a blatant waste of time since he had a voice-capable computer at his elbow, but Pluto, like most planets, had some archaic and fiercely protected labor laws. Reading upside down, I saw him fill in the spot for breed of dog as Bitching Freeze.

  Finally he slapped a shipping tag on the side of the Pantech, and I watched it trundle away on a conveyor belt into unknown depths. Now I was in a big hurry.

  * * *

  There was a convenience store at the train station. I filled a grocery bag full of granola bars, jerky, honey, corn syrup, and as many other items of concentrated fat, sugar, and carbohydrates as I could carry. Then I set off in search of the sort of merchant you can always find hanging around a spaceport. The sort who doesn't display his wares on shelves, or hang out a sign.

  She wasn't too hard to find. Most drugs are legal on Pluto, and even the ones they try to control are readily available if you know where to look—as has always been the case. I was directed to a back booth of a coffee shop on one of the lower levels. I sipped a hot chocolate while we haggled about price, then she left and I sat looking out a big picture window overlooking the freight-sorting yard. Millions of crates and parcels slid down ramps and along conveyors until they fetched up at the doors that would soon open and disgorge their loads onto shuttle trucks.

  The pusher returned with a small plastic envelope, and told me the quickest way to the yard.

  * * *

  This place was probably more dangerous than Pearl. The mechanized mayhem of the Vegas was predictable, most of it was smart, and programmed to be on the lookout for fragile humans getting in the way. Not so in the freight yard. If you didn't stay on your toes something might roll up behind you and crush you like a bug under silent wheels. I moved quickly, following the homer beacon in my pocket, and soon I was standing where the Pantechnicon had come to rest, midway down a line of larger crates.

  I was about to activate it when a movement in the corner of my eye made me stop and duck down. I looked up cautiously... and let out a deep breath. Two lines over a man was on his hands and knees, crawling under the metal frame of a conveyor. This was all right with me; cops never crawl, and they never look furtive. Neither do yard bulls. They can sneak just fine, but they do it with entirely different body language.

  In fact... I thought I knew this guy.

  I gave a low whistle, three notes known to hoboes throughout the system, and he looked up at me and grinned.

  "Sparks," he said, in a husky voice.

  "Lou? Is that the uke man?"

  "You don't believe me, I'll play you a tune."

  Ukulele Lou was a legend in his own time. He was rumored to have some sort of brain damage, which made his conversations a little hard to follow, and he was crazy as a mudlark. But his memory for music was amazing. He claimed to know words and music to fifteen thousand songs, and I'd never doubted him. He was wearing a battered pressure suit. His precious ukulele was in his hand.

  I swear, the helmet faceplate had a crack in it. It made me sweat just to think about it. Lou and some of the other 'bos always traveled this way, and without the comforts of top-of-the-line luggage.

  "Where you bound?" I asked him.

  "Where else? Uranus." He pronounced it your-anus.

  Where else, indeed? I'm largely ignorant of these things, but my understanding was that due to orbital dynamics, nearly all the outer planet commerce for the last decade, and for a few decades to come, was the triangle of Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune, then back to Pluto, in that order. It had to do with the relative positions of the planets. Pluto had for some years been at the lowest point in its orbit, which meant it was closer to the sun than Neptune. Uranus was about sixty degrees ahead, and Neptune clear around the sun from Uranus. No orbit in the outer planets that gets you there in a reasonable time is a truly economical orbit, but going against the direction of planetary motion is the least economical orbit of all. It's like stepping off a moving train. Before you go anywhere else, you first have to kill your own motion.

  "What about you?" Lou asked.

  "Uranus," I confirmed. I pronounced it Urine-us. Was there ever an orb so inelegantly named? Nobody's ever agreed on how to say it, and both ways stink.

  "The Bard's World?" he asked, with a cackle.

  "Where else?"

  "Can't get them stars outta your eyes, is that it? Gonna stand at the corner of Columbia and Paramount and gawk at the names in the pavement? Buy a map to the stars' condos? See how your feet fit in Henry Collyer's footsteps?"

  I ignored the ribbing and saluted him. "Good luck, Lou," I said.

  "Break a leg," he urged. Then he pried up a corner of a three-story packing crate and squeezed himself inside. I could hear him working, faintly, as I activat
ed the shelter on the Pantech.

  * * *

  I did a little research on tramps and hoboes while struggling through an ill-advised update of The Grapes of Wrath. ("Kenneth Valentine struggles through this ill-advised update as Tom Joad, an asteroid miner thrown out of work when the 'Tailings Crisis' of '86 shuts down all operations. He would have been better off playing this material for laughs, of which there are many, few of them intended."—Daily Cereal) Back then it was boxcars on freight trains, and you would weep in terror to know what these men went through. They rode in them, on them, and under them—"riding the rods"—their bodies inches from the murderous wheels.

  Then, as now, the owners of the railroads were aware of the informal passengers, and then, as now, they didn't like it much. What they did about it depended largely on where you hopped the freight, or where you got off.

  The clerk I'd bribed had been fully aware of my real intentions. Declaring a live animal was the most common ruse to obtain air and water en route. He'd heard that story about the dog before. (Ironically, I really had a dog, of course, but he would not need any consumables.)

  Maybe that clerk meant what he said when he wrote "bitching freeze." It would be one hell of a bitchin' freeze if anything went wrong with any of the Pantech's systems along the way. Or any of the freighter's systems, for that matter, and let's face it, they just aren't as careful about things as they are in even the worst passenger liner. You lose a passenger and it's lawsuit time. If the Pantech sprang a leak I'd be little more than spoiled freight, who shouldn't have been in there in the first place. Like those old 'bos who fell off the rods; gathered up, bagged, and tossed in a hole in potter's field. Maybe a token effort to contact the kinfolk.

  We are used to a high standard of safety, and fear of vacuum is the most common phobia, one I share with eighty percent of humanity. Though I believe I have it in a greater degree than most.

  Then there are the old space rats like Ukulele Lou. Cracked faceplate and all. He seemed immune to the fears that now began to bore into my spine like an electrified dental drill.

  I heard him as I squeezed myself through the lock and into the newly deployed shelter half-made of memory plastic. He was doing what you might expect a guy named Ukulele Lou to do: singing.

  The memory plastic can remember a variety of shapes. This time, since the Pantech was standing on end, and since we'd soon be in vacuum, it was best to be spherical. From the outside it looked like a cubist's idea of an icecream cone, and from inside, the hatch I could open to gain access to the interior was now under my feet, the Pantech becoming my basement. I lifted this hatch and fiddled with the environmental controls, preparing it to accept the external air and water feeds when they were hooked up, just prior to loading aboard the ship.

  Luck. I'd need some of it. The trip would be eighty-four days. I had enough food to stretch for about thirty... if I stayed awake and my metabolism worked as usual. I didn't plan on staying awake.

  I broke open the package I'd bought from the pusher, took out two of the pills, and swallowed them.

  I heard the vacuum alarm going off outside, and I took a deep breath. I realized I'd been taking a lot of them. Now the huge doors to the outside started to rumble up toward the ceiling, and the sound died away as the air puffed out into space.

  I felt like I was choking. My tongue seemed to swell until it filled my mouth, and became dry as an old wool sock. I could see the curved wall of my tent bulge outward the tiniest bit, and I was suddenly drenched in sweat.

  "To be, or not to be," I gasped. "That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them."

  That felt a little better. The conveyor began to move. I was bumped along quickly, and soon loaded onto a cargo pallet. Small robot handlers were climbing all over the pressure crates, metal spiders no bigger than my hand, stabbing shipping labels with red laser lights. I watched as they snapped lines to the pallet's air and water tanks. I saw the two yellow lights at my feet turn to green; I closed the basement hatch and sat down in lotus position as the shuttle truck lumbered out onto the dark surface of Pluto at high noon of a midsummer's day.

  I was reminded of a postcard I once saw. Christmas in Vermont. A horse-drawn sleigh wound down a lane between leafless trees, snow-covered hills in the background. Out here the sun cast about as much light as the full moon in that postcard. Dozens of distant, skeletal cargo ships might have been Vermont maples designed by a mad geometer. There was a tractor moving along beside mine, pulling a cargo pallet on skids, that could do for a one-horse open sleigh...

  No, sorry. Let's face it. This wasn't Currier and Ives. Those snow-covered hills were massive bergs of frozen methane. The glaciers coming down the sides were solid oxygen and nitrogen—pollutants, actually, not present on Pluto's crust until man arrived. On a busy day at the spaceport the rocket exhausts sometimes melted parts of these glaciers and they became murmuring streams. What a shame no Plutonians actually came out here for a sleigh ride, or to picnic by the little brooks a-gurgling.

  I was choking up again, and didn't feel the least bit sleepy.

  "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines."

  A movement caught my eye. On the next crawler the corner of a packing crate had popped open from the inside. I saw Lou scramble out and start moving like a scuttling crab, over and around and under the other crates.

  Jesus, Lou! He was holding one hand over the crack in his faceplate, and I fancied I could see a fine mist of oxygen snow like a halo around his head. Baby, it was cold outside. Midsummer, and the weather forecast was for another scorching day at 370 below zero. Something must have been wrong with the first crate to force Lou to change his lodgings this late in the game. A problem with the hookups, a defective seal, who knows? But there wasn't a thing I could do to help him.

  Like a swimmer in a Siberian lake, you only get a couple of minutes. No spacesuit yet built protects well from frozen methane, and Lou's was an antique.

  I watched him pry up the corner of another crate and slither inside. The corner was pulled back into place... and I realized I wouldn't know for another eighty-four days whether or not he was alive or frozen stiff.

  When I turned away I seemed to be moving in slow motion. That's when I realized the drugs had started taking effect. It was a pleasant feeling, a warm heaviness in my limbs. My breathing became slow and deep and relaxed. I smiled. I closed my eyes.

  I heard a distant wind blowing. There was the sound of dry leaves being swept along. I saw a great hourglass, grains of sand the size of houses rolling silently through the narrow neck. Slowly, the glass turned, the sand tumbled from the bottom to the top, and began to flow quickly in the other direction.

  And I'm sorry as hell about this, but I can only report what happened. I'd been watching old movies all my life, and when it came time to flash back on my own life there was no way in the world it would come to me as anything but a black-and-white montage of whirling clock hands and fluttering calendar pages going backward, backward, ever backward in time....

  * * *

  ACT 2

  The warm water filled his ears. It made a deep roaring sound. He heard splashes that sounded far away, and he heard his own heartbeat. Air trickled from his lips and nose.

  Friends, Romans...

  Looking up, he saw the shimmery surface of the water, and beyond that, the dark figure with the ceiling light behind his head, making a halo.

  Maybe that's what God looks like, he thought.

  Sometimes he could almost see through things. Sometimes things seemed to shimmer, like the water, and he could see beyond them, to some shapeless otherness he could never quite remember. Was he dreaming when he saw these things? Was it remembering?

  Remembering...

  Friends and Romans and
countrymen and ears and... something something something, not to praise him.

  Quicksilver bubbles rose toward the looming, dark face. Strong hands on his shoulders. Strong, loving hands, good hands. I only want the best for you, Dodger.

  It felt good to lie here. It was warm and it was safe and it was wet, and this is what a baby must feel like in its mommy's tummy.

  His heart was pounding louder now. It wasn't fear. He just needed some air, that was all. Babies in their mommies' tummies didn't need air. But once you took that first breath, you sort of got used to it, air got to be something you needed.

  Friends Romans lend me your praise him.

  A big burst of air broke free and he began to struggle. He didn't want to, he'd been so good, so good so far, but his arms and his legs just wanted to move, and his lungs ached for a sweet breath of air. His small naked shoulders squirmed under the big hands, the good hands. He was so ashamed of himself. Maybe he should just take a big breath of water. Maybe he could learn to breathe water again, since he couldn't seem to learn the important things.

  He'd heard it three times now. What was wrong with him, that he couldn't remember after hearing it three times?

  It wasn't so bright now. Things were getting dim around the edges. The last of his air leaked from his nose, making hardly any sound at all.

  And he had it. He became still as a stone and felt it all burst up from whatever depths it had fallen to when he lost it, and it flowed through his mind and his body, and he was nodding frantically as things got darker and darker.

  He was pulled into the air and made a tremendous croaking sound as he filled his lungs and began to spew it out, like vomit.

  "Frens romans countrymen lend me yerrears I come to, come to, come to bury Zeezer not t'praze'm," all the air was gone again, so he gasped in another breath, "lives after dem d'good 'soft enter'd with their bones." Pause. Breath. "The noble Brutes has tol' you Zeezer was... was..."