by John Varley
But Luna was alone in seeing the Invaders as a continuing threat. The rest of the system would just as soon not think about Jupiter and the horrors it might conceal, which meant no one watched too closely. If you assumed an orbit and looked as if you planned to stay awhile, a ship would be dispatched to take you into custody. If you just used the gas giant's gravity well for a boost or a course change, as people in a hurry sometimes did... well, it was easy to lose yourself in traffic once back in the crowded trajectories of the inner planets. Space was vast.
I don't pretend to know just what Hal did to get us a course change with minimal expenditure of fuel. Something about coming around in front of the hideous planet, braking a bit, swinging around, and boosting again. I know we were under acceleration twice, neither time anything like the agony of the first boost at Uranus. When it was all done, we were aimed almost directly at the sun. Hal told me that getting to the sun was the most difficult destination in the system, in terms of energy. Which makes no sense at all, since it is so damn big and has so much gravity, right? But that's what he said, and at the price somebody paid for him, he ought to know. He said it was easier to aim for the sun from out here, where our orbital velocity was low, than farther in, where we'd have picked up too much speed. To which I might have said "Huh?" if I wasn't so dignified. I thought speed was the whole point.
There was a circular room atop the habidome that we called the cockpit. It was set up with Buck Rogers panels that theoretically could control all aspects of the ship's systems, but which had never been used, since Hal could do it all so much better. I imagined the original owner had liked to do what I did from time to time, which was sit in the captain's chair with my feet up on the "dashboard," studying the cosmos with a feeling of power, king of all I surveyed.
The view up there was of a hemisphere of space, like being under a glass dome, or in a planetarium. The second image was more accurate, because what we saw was an artifact, created by Hal. It looked real enough. But remember we were spinning almost all the time, at the end of a long rope with the engines at the other end. If the dome had been glass the stars would have whirled around us, too fast for comfortable viewing. Hal cleaned all that up, made it look like we were motoring down a vast, black highway, smooth as glass. There was a control at my fingertips which would give me any angle I wanted. Of course, except near Jupiter no motion was visible at all.
I almost skipped the show entirely. Coming from Luna, I'd had it impressed on me in no uncertain terms that Jupiter was to be avoided. That it was dangerous. The image of Jupiter was a fearful one, dominated by that vast red eye a hundred times larger than my home planet.
Poly felt no such qualms. It was just a big ball of gas to her, a great photo opportunity.
I decided to tough it out. Poly wasn't scared, how could I be? Usually I'm not subject to that kind of bullshit macho, so maybe I was curious, too.
You get close enough, any planet has a lot in common with any other planet. You lose the curve of the edge, it becomes a vast plane filling half the universe. We were close. Hal showed me the gauge, creeping up very slowly, indicating rising hull temperature as we grazed the poisonous edges of the atmosphere.
Closer and closer. It was like one of those mathematical things, the chaotic figures, squiggly lines that as you magnify them reveal more and more detail. Infinitely. Fractals, that's it. Tiny swirls of yellow and orange became monstrous storms, and along their edges, more tiny swirls. Then those grew, and you realized they were gigantic. And on their edges, more storms...
It was a Technicolor Rorschach test from hell.
After a while I couldn't look at it any longer. Poly and I were strapped in, but the tigers and Toby were floating free. I watched them for a while. Toby and Shere Khan had invented a game you might call Tobyball. Shere would bat him across the room with a massive paw. Toby would go caroming around like a fuzzy zero-gee cue ball, yelping happily, until he got straightened out and leaped back toward the big cat. Shere Khan would bat him again. She seemed to regard him as better than a ball of yarn—which he resembled, the free fall making him even fluffier than usual.
When Toby came close to Hobbes he would bark at him a few times, as he'd recently taken to doing. Hobbes would watch him sail by, thoughtfully, as if trying to make up his mind. One bite, or two? Swallow him tailfirst, or head-first? Decisions, decisions.
Toby had always been as spry as a snark in zero gee, but I was surprised at how well the tigers bore it. Not that cats aren't innately more graceful than dogs, but I'd once seen a house cat twisting endlessly, knowing he was falling but unable to figure out where he was going to land. Shere Khan and Hobbes just hooked their claws in the thick carpet and walked around as usual. I suppose they had been made fearless and maybe a little stupid by the same treatments that had left them free of aggression and the urge to hunt.
When Hal warned us we were about to boost again the tigers immediately reclined on the floor. I snagged Toby and held him in my lap. The weight, when it came, was about one gee, and didn't last very long. When it was over, Jupiter had swung around behind us and was shrinking rapidly. One twist of the dial on my console would have brought it around front again, in the false image we were watching, but Poly was tired of it and I had no desire to watch anymore. So we were weightless for another half hour until Hal put spin on the ship again, and then things continued as before.
But not quite. Poly and I started sharing a bed, and I began to spend a lot of time in the library, researching the Charonese.
I don't know what decided Poly, why she finally forgave me. I never asked, because I rather suspected it was mostly loneliness. Not that I wanted a burning love affair, but who needs to know that any male body would have served her as well? Poly was not the sort to go to bed with a guy she didn't like simply to scratch an itch, but she made it clear to me before we made love that she wasn't looking for a life companion at this point in her career. Hey, at this point in my career, neither was I. So that was understood. But we were affectionate with each other. She didn't come to my bed simply for sex. She stayed to cuddle, and eventually to sleep.
It had been a long time since I'd been able to awaken in the morning with a warm body at my side. A girl who didn't mind when I reached over and stroked her thigh, her hip, who would turn over and be in my arms. I've formed few long-term relationships in my life. This one wouldn't be long, either, but while it lasted it was good for me. No hot, sweaty details here, my friend. Let it stand that she was an inventive and enthusiastic lover, able to adjust to whatever mood seized me, and more than capable of bending me to her own will, if the mood suited her. We had some jolly, slippery times.
But the universe compensates. If something good comes into your life, the odds are something bad is not far away.
In this case, it was as near as the library.
After Jupiter, I was no longer satisfied to fish from my hammock. At least not all day long. I began thinking about Isambard Comfort, his dead sister, and the whole race that had spawned them. I had no illusions about Izzy. He might not be waiting for me on Luna, but if he was alive—and I felt sure he was—he'd be there soon. It made sense that the more I knew about his people, the better I'd be able to survive a third encounter with him. What did I need to do, for instance, to square things with them? Was it possible? Everyone had heard of the Charonese tenacity, of their reputation for always fulfilling a contract, no matter what. Was it really that bad?
It was worse. Much worse.
The first thing that struck a researcher—me—was the paucity of information. Hal had a UniKnowledge module, which was the nearest thing we'd ever get to summing up all human information collected since the days of the Cro-Magnon. It held all the libraries of Old Earth. All the movies, television shows, photo files. Billions of billions of bits of data so obscure a researcher might visit some of it once in two or three hundred years, and then only long enough to find it no longer had any reasonable excuse for being. But it wasn't thrown out.
Capacity was virtually infinite, so nothing was ever tossed. Who knew? In ten centuries the twenty years of telemetry from Viking I might be of use to somebody. A vanity-press book, published in 1901, all about corn silage in Minnesota, of which no hard copy existed, might be just the reading you were looking for some dark and stormy night. The UniKnowledge held thousands of books printed in Manx, a language no one had spoken in a hundred years. It held Swahili comic books teaching methods of contraception. It contained cutting-room debris saved from a million motion pictures, discarded first drafts of films never made. A copy of every phone book extant at the time we began to record data by laser, and every one printed since. Fully half of the information in the UK had never been cataloged, and much never referenced in the centuries since its inception, and most of it was likely never to be cataloged. That would be taking the pack-rat impulse too far. Librarians had other things to do, such as develop more powerful search engines to sort through the inchoate mass of data when somebody wanted to find out something truly obscure.
But it was all in there. And if you set it for CHARONESE: Search, it began to spew out mountains of information. Or at least it seemed like mountains, at first glance. However, if you set it for ALBANIAN NAVY, 1936, it would spew out a mountain of information as well. You had to keep it in perspective.
So the first thing was to set the UK to sorting, organizing, comparing. It produced helpful graphs, statistical analysis, suggested routes of exploration. It spotted anomalies, pointed out the unexpected. The first thing it showed me was that, for an entire inhabited planet, there was practically no information at all. Economic data was very skimpy. Social analysis was sketchy. And most striking, items written by actual Charonese were unknown. Zip. Zero. Not one manuscript. The Charonese were not contributing information to the universal human database. They were hoarding their holdings like a paranoid poker player. Why?
The UK could help me with that, too. It searched for things written by ex-Charonese, expatriates. There had been a few, over the years. The bulk of these had spent their lives trying to make themselves very, very small, but a few had spoken out in print.
For a short time.
The UK produced a graph showing average life expectancy of an ex-Charonese. Ten months. Ninety percent were dead within one month of defection. The tougher ones lasted a little longer; one fellow was thought to be alive twenty years after leaving his home planet, but no one had seen him in five years, so it was anybody's guess.
They tended to die in accidents. In the same way that a boot crushing an ant might be seen as an accident.
Some of this stuff I knew, or had been told was probably true, but it was interesting to see it confirmed. Charonese didn't abide traitors. They kept their business secret, at any cost.
I could spin you quite a detective story about how I tracked my facts down. It's all in there, all in the UK, but finding it, putting it together, drawing conclusions, that's something else. As usual, there were reams of references from the Net, and they were about as useful as you'd expect, which is not much. Unattributed tales, anecdotal evidence, wildly contradictory accounts of How I Survived an Encounter with a Charonese. I spent more time than I usually would have with this material, because reliable sources were rare. The authors of such material were usually to be found in the obituary column a few weeks after publication. Venues that published anonymous articles about Charonese tended to announce new editorial staff for the next issue. Even printers and broadcasters had been assassinated.
So, Charonese Fact One: You write about us, you die.
I assumed there were people in law enforcement who knew about this, but what could they do? You write a nasty article about John Q. Mobster, and you die violently, somebody's going to suspect old John Q. There's a place to start. But though you might know these people were wiped out by a Charonese... which one? Someone who never met the victim, you could be sure of that. You couldn't just indict everybody with a Charonese passport, even though that would be a small group. They would certainly alibi each other, and you could rely on the fact there would be no deals cut, no testimony bargained for. If the hit was ordered by a boss, a capo, you could be sure he was back on Charon. But in fact it probably did not have to be ordered. Someone at the Charonese embassy would have the full-time job of monitoring all public media, and when something appeared they didn't like, maybe they just posted the name on a bulletin board. One writer, since deceased, said this was in fact the case. Whoever could work the job into his busy day did the hit. There were never any witnesses. The accident that claimed the life of the target invariably killed all the witnesses as well. On the very rare occasion a Charonese was surprised in the act, captured, caught red-handed, he always pleaded guilty. Charonese never hired lawyers. They never said anything at all to police, not even their name, and the only word they ever uttered in court was guilty. And then they did their time without a peep of complaint. A Charonese never complained about anything. If he had a problem with you, he killed you.
Charonese Fact Two: We always get our man.
Always. I searched long and hard for evidence of a contract unfulfilled, and found nothing. All the deceased experts agreed on this, even when they didn't agree on much else. If the Charonese agreed to do something, they did it. What they mostly did, off-planet, anyway, was enforce other people's contracts, the sort of contract you didn't want to bring into court or bother a lawyer about. Or it could even be a legal contract. There were no endless appeals from Charonese courts, no escape clauses. No excuses at all. If the Charonese guaranteed your contract, you could count on it being fulfilled, in cash, the equivalent, or if there was absolutely nothing left to take from the welsher, blood. Sometimes you got a warning in the form of a just-less-than-lethal torture session. Then you paid up, or you died.
I wish I'd known that. The next time I saw Uncle Roy I was going to have some very cross words to say to him.
So in these things the Charonese were much like other crime syndicates, past and present, though I'd never heard of any quite so harsh, nor any with a perfect record. Nor any who had never suffered a permanent defection, had a member squeal in court, cut a deal with the prosecutor. I inferred that something extraordinary was keeping these people in line, and I set out to find out what that was. I almost wish I hadn't. I had hoped it might provide me with a loophole of some kind, a spot of leverage. A window of hope.
I don't wish to depress and frighten you with the miserable history of Charon and its denizens. Just a short refresher course:
Luna and some other planets export criminals, misfits, and undesirables to Pluto for about a century. Most are garden-variety criminals, some are politicals, and a handful are very scary people. The Plutonians don't want these last around any more than you or I would; off they go to Charon. Transportation is a wonderful way to handle criminals; you might as well flush them down the toilet. There is very little in the way of maintenance, no costly per-bunk per-year figures to upset the taxpayers. Ship 'em as much or as little food as you wish, and let them fight it out. You need budget cuts? Prison food was always a good place to start. You don't need to pay salaries for guards, or worry about what they're bringing in to the convicts. There's no need for parole boards or probation officers. All sentences are for life. And if they wish to escape, all they need to do is fly through a million miles of vacuum.
But they had brought something with them to Charon, other than psychosis and criminal skills and their own brand of situational ethics. The dominant religion of Pluto, back from the days when they had been the outcasts of the system was Satanism. Diabolism. Devil worship. Mystical, scary stuff.
Well, not really. It's true no one was allowed into a Satanist Temple but a true believer, and it is true the rituals and belief system are secret. But the secret is an open one, and the interior of the temple is no more mysterious than that of the Mormons. If you leave the church, no one comes to hunt you down and kill you. No one cuts out your tongue. You can blab all you wish, and ex-Sa
tanists over the years have blabbed it all. And a more prosaic, boring story has seldom been blabbed. Forget the tales of human sacrifice, of Christian babies slaughtered on black altars and eaten by the congregation. They used to tell those same stories about Catholics. No, Plutonian Satanism was all ritual and show, symbolic as a Christian sacrament. Although I'll have to admit, reading about it, it sounded like a darn good show.
There was nothing symbolic about the Charonese religion. Real people bled real blood and died on Charonese altars.
If that was all, it would be disgusting, but nothing new in the world of religions. The Charonese couldn't hold a candle to the Aztecs for sheer volume of blood shed, or to the Spanish Inquisition for inventiveness. The sheer depravity of the Charonese way of life owed more to medical science than to man's endless capacity for inhumanity to man. The Charonese did it to themselves.
It's been a long time since any slashing or crushing injury below the brain-case could do any permanent harm to anyone, as long as you didn't bleed to death before medical attention arrived. One of the first things medics did to an injury was turn off the pain. In some professions—stunt performers, or even my own work, when I was required to take a sword thrust in the final act—pain would be turned off ahead of time. (For me, anyway. I trust my acting ability to sell the audience on my pain; I don't hold with "method" fanatics who insist only the real thing will do.) There are those who enjoy being mutilated ritually, and have the pain suppressed, and a very small number who actually enjoy that much pain. All perfectly normal, today. Everything can be fixed.
