The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  Then we hit one.

  No sound, no impact. No warning at all. One moment I was watching the distant disks, and the next the universe was bisected by an infinite plain of multicolored light.

  It was a sight few people have been granted. The only way to touch an angel is to hit it at high speed. If you decelerate, the force of your engines will destroy it long before you get there. But at the speed we were traveling, the ship punched right through its diaphanous body without warning. I don't think the crew had any idea it was in front of them. How would they? It was between us and the sun, and we could only see it after we'd gone through. Not that they could have done anything if they had been aware of it.

  At our speed, any object of reasonable size would be there and gone before your eye could register it. Not the angel. There it was, stretching away to infinity, shrinking not at all as I watched.

  Its surface was a fractal swirl of every color of the rainbow. It was like a drop of oil on water, or the surface of a soap bubble. Or something like an aurora I once saw on Mars, but frozen.

  Except for one spot. That spot was no color at all, and it seemed to be centered in the endless plain. Well, of course it would be. I could never tell if we'd hit the angel dead center or near the edge, but it was so vast that unless we were very near the edge, it just didn't matter. It was endless in all directions.

  The spot was like a hole in space, full of blackness, but then I began to see stars at the bottom of it. It seemed to be getting bigger slowly. It finally dawned on me that I was seeing the hole the ship had punched through the surface of the angel, and considering the speed at which we were leaving it behind, the hole was growing at a monstrous rate.

  It kept growing for the twenty minutes or so that I watched it, and then, as suddenly as it appeared, the angel was gone. All at once, from edge to edge.

  It must have taken a considerable time for the hole to consume the entire angel. What had happened was we had moved far enough that the sun's light no longer reflected from the angel. It was still there, though going away to wherever punctured angels go.

  The whole thing made me quite happy for a time. I hardly tasted the awful stuff I was chewing on. But eventually reality intruded again, and I knew it was time to get back to sleep. I really didn't want to, I sort of wanted to skip over what was coming next.

  And it was history, after all. Over and done with. In the past.

  Oh, poor Sparky.

  * * *

  The Daewoo Caterpillar lurks in cold, airless tunnels far beneath the Lunar surface. Some say the Breathsucker is the worst thing that can happen to you, the worst way you can die. Dodger knew better. Even the Breathsucker was afraid of the Daewoo Caterpillar.

  He had encountered the beast twice before. He never got a good look at it, not that he minded. This time he feared he might have to look directly into its dreadful countenance. He was sure it was the last thing his living eyes would see.

  Once more Dodger was a toy balloon, hurrying to keep up with his father's headlong progress down the deserted corridor. Deserted? Abandoned, actually. Here and there were piles of steel rods and ceiling panels and other, mysterious building blocks, some under plastic tarps, all of it dusty. It was entirely possible that no one but Dodger and his father had been down this corridor in the last ten years.

  Dodger had been down it twice before. He didn't want to get to the end of it again.

  His father was holding his hand too tightly. But that was the least of his problems.

  He searched for the words that would bring them to a halt.

  To be or not to be.

  Friends, Romans, countrymen.

  Now is the winter of our discontent.

  But, soft!

  It was useless. He knew all the words, and none would do him any good, because this wasn't about learning, this wasn't the bathtub. This was the Breathsucker, and the Daewoo Caterpillar. This was as bad as it gets.

  "Please," he whispered. He tried not to, but the word had just come bubbling from his mouth. He felt a string of spit rolling down his chin, and he wiped at it with his free hand. "Please, what?" his father said. "Please, Father. Please don't."

  Those weren't the words; his father kept up his relentless progress toward the end of the corridor. He could see it now, in the widely spaced work lights hanging from strings overhead. The end of the world.

  "I'll tell him," he burst out. "I'll tell him how wrong I was. I'll tell Mr. Peppy I'll wear the pants." No reaction. Only a few more yards to go now.

  "Let's... let's just go to Mars! Let's forget the whole thing. We have lots of money now. We—"

  Suddenly his father's face was before him, filling the whole universe. Those beloved ice-blue eyes. Eyes that flashed now, eyes that glistened with sincerity, eyes that could be bottomless pools of love, eyes you could swim in, warm eyes. But eyes that now betrayed their sadness, that told Dodger he had let his father down. Mad eyes.

  John Valentine spoke barely above a whisper.

  "This is not about pants, Dodge," he said. "This is not about money. This is about... artistic control."

  "Sure," Dodger said, nodding furiously. "I'll tell Mr. Peppy—"

  "This is about presenting a united front. This is about you and me, about family. It's us against them, Dodger. Us against them. We're outnumbered, always will be. If I can't count on you, who can I count on?"

  "You can count on me, Father, I swear I—"

  "I don't want to do this, son. But I'm convinced it's the right thing to do. It's the way I learned my lesson, and I think you'll learn from it, too."

  "I've already learned, Father."

  "Never." Valentine had barely raised his voice, yet somehow the word rang in the empty corridor. He held up a forefinger, wagged it back and forth in front of Dodger's face.

  "Never contradict your father in public."

  "I won't. I promise."

  "Never disagree with me in front of strangers."

  And before Dodger could promise again never to go against the family, his father picked him up and shoved him through the open door of the ancient airlock.

  This was no ordinary airlock. Regular airlocks had a dozen safety devices. They were connected to the Central Computer, who would become aware each time the lock was cycled. Officially, this airlock didn't exist. It was a fifty-year-old temporary structure, meant to pass pressure-suited work gangs from the completed part of the tunnel to the construction area beyond. Just a great big cylinder, really, nested inside a slightly larger, stationary cylinder. The inner cylinder had a door-sized opening in it. The outer one had two, 180 degrees apart. When the inner opening lined up with the second door, all the air in the smaller cylinder simply blew into vacuum. Simple, quick, and dirty, not the sort of thing that was supposed to exist in the ultrasafe Lunar environment.

  That it did exist was the result of oversight. The construction project had gone bankrupt, and all the plans and permits were long forgotten now, moldering in some disused memory chip, filed away with the dissolution papers of the bank that had funded it and the company that had started building it. Years had passed, a building boom had come and gone, and this tunnel and its terminus were now as remote and mysterious as the Roman catacombs or the sewers of Paris. A handful of hoboes knew of it. A few hoboes, and John Valentine.

  Dodger had been there twice before. He knew to an exquisite interval how fast the lock rotated. Thirty-five seconds. Fifteen to align the doorways, and another fifteen to complete the cycle, to bring the inner door back into congruence with the door where his father waited. A five-second pause while some machinery reset itself. For the first fifteen seconds Dodger would have air. For the five-second pause, and the fifteen seconds beyond that, he would have none.

  But the last fifteen seconds were not what had Dodger worried. He knew people didn't blow up when exposed to vacuum, in spite of some lurid movies he had seen. He'd been there twice before. He knew the human body could easily survive twenty seconds of airlessness. Y
ou might bleed a little, and your ears would sure as hell hurt, but it wouldn't kill you. It would scare the shit out of you, make those sessions in the bathtub seem like a walk in the park, but if it would kill him, his father would never have done it.

  No, it was the five seconds that worried him. The five seconds when he would once again confront the Daewoo Caterpillar. When the door would yawn wide and he'd see it again, lurking in the shadows.

  His father didn't know about the Daewoo Caterpillar, Dodger was convinced of that. If he'd known, he'd never have put his son into the airlock. Dodger had tried to tell him about it, tried more than once, but his tongue seemed to freeze before he could even pronounce the creature's name.

  If he lived this time, he promised himself he'd tell his father.

  Meantime, he had to hurry.

  He was on his knees, and that was no good. Lining the walls of the lock were handholds, and Dodger scrambled to his feet and grabbed two of them. When the air went, it would go violently. The first time he'd been here, his father had tied him to a handhold, and the outrush of air had lifted him from his feet and tried to carry him out with it, out to the Caterpillar.

  Five seconds. That's all he had to endure. Five seconds. Maybe the beast was sleeping. It had to sleep, didn't it? Probably not.

  The lock was turning now. He could feel the slight vibration under his feet. He looked over his shoulder and saw his father being eclipsed, vanishing as the lock turned away from him. Standing there sternly, his arms folded, his brow furrowed with concern. He knew his father loved him. He knew he was doing this to his son because it was for the best. He'd been wrong. So wrong, to speak up, to take Peppy's side. What could he have been thinking?

  He'd been thinking like a star, that's what the trouble was. His father had warned him about that. How money and fame can go to your head, make you feel you were special, like your shit didn't stink.

  "And you are special, Dodger," John Valentine had said. "You're special to me, and you have a special talent. A special art. But it doesn't give you the right to be impolite."

  And certainly not the right to contradict his father in public. What could he have been thinking? They were a team, surely, but a team had to have a leader, and John Valentine was older and stronger and wiser. He'd been there. He'd seen it and done it. Dodger was still learning.

  "Dirty laundry is only to be aired backstage," John Valentine had told his son many times. "Never before the audience. And never in front of the producer."

  What had he been thinking?

  Well, they'd work it out. He would survive this, and he and his father would be a team again. They'd talk things over in the dressing room, like they always did. They'd present a united front on everything.

  Dodger pressed his face against the wall. He was as far from the door as he could get. Maybe it would be safer not to look. Maybe he could cower here, keep his back to the thing, and it would overlook him.

  Fat chance.

  Unlikely the monster would miss him, and impossible that he could last five seconds without looking.

  He didn't last one second.

  It started very loudly, as the air tried to force itself through the tiny crack. A shriek, deafening, reminding Dodger of a film he'd seen where an evil witch was pushed into a deep well, screaming all the way down. Screaming, but getting fainter, more distant. This sound quickly lost all its punch, too. The air around Dodger plucked at his clothes with cold fingers, pulled at him, became an instant gale that puffed out his cheeks and drove ice picks into his ears, and brought up a monstrous belch from deep inside him. Then there was nothing but the ringing silence, a sound he knew was not a sound but his tortured ears crying in agony. He turned around.

  His heart turned to stone. The Daewoo Caterpillar was there. And it wasn't just lurking in the shadows this time, it was lurching toward him. It was huge, a thing of metal teeth and flailing arms and a hideous, bright yellow body and six great glassy eyes. It reached out one skeletal hand toward Dodger, and the cylinder began to turn. Dodger was frozen tight to the spot, watching in dreadful fascination. Would the door turn away in time, or would the creature reach inside and begin feasting?

  With the silence of death, the hand entered the doorway.

  The inner-lock cylinder kept trying to close, but the claw was in the way. The lock stopped moving, retreated a few inches, and again tried to close. And again, and again, shuttling back and forth like the doors of an elevator when you stuck your hand between them. The creature seemed stymied by the door, but it wouldn't really matter much longer, because Dodger would soon be dead from lack of air.

  So the Breathsucker would get him. If it's not one thing, it's another.

  He started to slide down the side of the cylinder. Things were getting dark, blurry. He wiped at his eyes, and for a moment he thought he saw Elwood shoving the loathsome claw back into the outer darkness, thought he saw the cylinder begin to rotate again. Thought he felt Elwood's arms around him, cradling him, telling him it was going to be all right.

  But that couldn't be true. How would Elwood get in here?

  It was his last thought for some time.

  * * *

  Dodger woke to the smell of freshly washed sheets and the sound of a mockingbird's song. He didn't open his eyes for a while, fearing it was all too good to be true. That smell was one he associated with good times: high-class hotels he and his father lived in when the money was good. The sound was one he associated with Texas. And that couldn't be.

  But it was. He opened his eyes and sat up. He was tucked into a bed in a small room made entirely of wood. Beside the bed was an open window that looked out on an oak tree only a few feet away. The mockingbird was perched on a branch until he saw Dodger. Then he chirped a few more notes and flew away.

  Dodger lay back down. He'd been here before, and if he was here then everything must be all right.

  He was on the second floor of an authentic wooden building on the dusty main street of New Austin, in the middle of the Texas disneyland. These were the medical offices of Drs. Henry Wauk, M.D., and Heinrich Wohl, D.D.S, "Quick and Relatively Painless Dentistry," according to the shingle hanging outside. He'd never met Dr. Wohl, but he'd seen Henry Wauk several times. His father had brought him in from time to time for what he thought of as "good, old-fashioned doctoring." But even John Valentine, with his ingrained suspicion of all things modern, had not subjected himself or his son to the sort of butchery that had been practiced in places like this in the 1800s. The archaic medical equipment in this room, the colorful jars of powders and elixirs, and the instruments of torture surrounding the dental chair in the other room were merely for show, as was pretty much everything in Texas. Valentine came here for checkups and physical repairs, when needed, because Henry Wauk was an old friend of his, and because Henry would do the work off the books. The Central Computer and its various legal minions held little sway in Texas, a fact that endeared the place and all the other disneylands to John Valentine. They were virtually independent states, immune to many of the intrusive regulations of the larger civilization.

  "Social experiments, they call them," Valentine had said to his son, one day while they were out riding horses—real horses! Dodger had been in heaven—in the sagebrush country west of New Austin. "Living museums. They teach school the old-fashioned way in here, son. Back to basics. All the children learn to read, if you can believe that. They grow their own food, right in the dirt. They live in here, hold down jobs in here. Old jobs, like blacksmithing, and cooperage, and... and plenty of other things I don't pretend to know much about. They hold their own elections, and they don't pay taxes to Mama Luna. Misfits in here, most of them. People who weren't happy on the outside."

  Dodger had thought it was odd to call the corridors of Luna "the outside," but he knew what his father meant. Here, there was the illusion of endless space, just like out on the surface. And Texas was pretty large: miles and miles, his father said.

  "Doctor" Wauk was one of the
misfits. His was no general anomie or existential despair, however. Wauk was what would have been called, in early Texas, a dipsomaniac. He had a fondness for the bottle that he was not willing to be cured of. It had made a disaster of his acting career, and he had finally accepted a part that was to be lived, instead of performed: that of the alcoholic sawbones beloved of old black-and-white westerns.

  While Wauk did dispense patent remedies and salves and powders for a few ailments, all the real medical care was accomplished by a perfectly ordinary Medico machine concealed in a closet. More complex work was referred to a normal facility outside the disneyland. Wauk had been given the bare minimum of training to operate the Medico. "After all," as he'd told John Valentine, "it ain't like doctorin' is rocket science, or anything."

  Dodger thought he could hear voices from the next room. He rolled out of bed and crept carefully to the door, pressed his ear against it. If he held his breath he could hear his father and Dr. Wauk talking, but he could only get every other word. He looked around and found an antique stethoscope in a drawer. He put the rubber tips in his ears and pressed the metal disk on the end to the wooden door, and the sounds became as clear as a telephone.

  "Look, Henry," his father said. "We're rolling in cash. I want you to take this. Please. It would make me feel better."

  "Just my normal fee will be sufficient, John," said the doctor.

  "Come on. As a favor to me."

  "Right at this moment, my old friend, I'm not inclined to do any favors for you beyond the one I just done. No, sir, and I don't think I have much interest in makin' you feel any better, either. In fact, I think I just done you the last favor I'm ever goin' to do you."