by John Varley
"Top o' the mornin' to you, Officer," I said, tipping my hat. He nodded, still regarding me thoughtfully, probably comparing my face with the ones he'd studied, pinned to the precinct wall, at the start of his shift. With any luck, he wouldn't make a match.
Or he could have been deciding whether or not to brace me on the matter of a performance permit, or a puppeteer's license, or a canine registration, or any of the thousand other forms citizens see fit to employ to harass people like me. I had no idea if any of the above were required here; it had been a long time since I'd been on this planet. I remembered it as reasonably loose, easygoing, even a little eccentric, like its orbit. But if history teaches us anything it is that frontiers become settled, then set, then rigidly bureaucratized, and the more bureaucrats there are, the more laws are needed to keep them fed. I hadn't been here in many years. It was time enough for lawyers to have sucked the blood from this society.
"Hey, you," said the minion of law and order. They are two of the most dreaded words I know, when coming from a blue suit. Well, Sparky, you can play deaf, you can play innocent, or you can run. But can you hide? I turned, and gave him Tom Sawyer. He made a poor Aunt Becky.
I barely got my hand up in time to snag the spinning coin that was coming my way.
"Good show," he said. A patron of the arts, a possibility I hadn't considered. "Nice dog, too," he added.
"Bless you, guv'nor," I said, tipping my hat again. "Punch thanks you, Judy thanks you, my dog thanks you, and I thank you."
And I sauntered away down the central promenade of a mall that could have been on Mercury, could have been on Mars, but happened to be on Pluto. Civilization at last.
* * *
The high-gee transport in which I made my hasty exit from Brementon was called the Guy Fawkes, following an Outlander tradition of naming their vessels after famous rogues. Fawkes was a Norwegian, I believe, who invented some sort of explosive. Our trip outward had been aboard the Quisling.
Ships in the outlands fell into three categories, I learned on the long inbound voyage. There were the medium-sized "hoppers" that served local city clusters and returned to Pluto or the Neptunian moons every decade or so. The Quisling (named, if I recall, after someone involved in rigging game shows in the early days of television), or Big Q as we called her, was one of these. She had started her days as an inner planet cruise ship, but had been obsolete for that purpose for a century. And she was showing her age.
Then there were the vast, slow cargo carriers, unmanned, that might take seventy or eighty years to reach the markets on Mars or Mercury. You know, I never did find out what it was they carried. You know something else? I never did really care. What I do know is it must be very valuable, and it must be found nowhere else. There's no other possible explanation for people being in the outlands in the first place. I postulate they were shaving the tails off comets. What else is out there?
And last, there were the "zipper" ships, small and fast, like the Guy. The Guy Fawkes was infinitely superior to the Big Q in one area, and that was velocity. In every other way, it suffered.
Certainly, the Quisling's staterooms smelled bad. Sure, the food was indifferently prepared and usually cold. Yes, the whole cast did come down with an infestation of fleas just short of Boondocks. The tiny bars of soap crumbled in your hand—if you could get the rusty water to flow in your shower in the first place—and the toilets muttered menacingly all night and flooded on some sort of lunar cycle. Ah, but a smelly stateroom is better than no room at all. The toilets were unreliable, but they were there, one to a room. There's an old joke about one actor turning to another and commenting on how terrible the food is in this hotel. To which the other replies, "Yes, and such small portions." I'd never really appreciated it until boarding the Guy. Soon I was thinking of my cantankerous toilet on the Quisling with real nostalgia: a poor thing, but mine own. There was one toilet on the Guy, for 150 passengers. There had been two, but one had exploded a few months before. That's right, I said exploded. You could still see blood stains on the ceiling above it. I'll say this: it reduced the waiting time. Most of us stalled until we were dancing, then sort of hovered over it, alert for any premonitory gurgle. Which proved to be a good idea, as one brave soul who actually sat became the victim of a "transient pressure deficit," a term I wrote down as soon as the captain told us, it being the best euphemism for vacuum—a word spacers avoid—I'd heard in my many years in space. If you want to know what happened, I propose an experiment for the curious student. Drop a few burning matches into a beer bottle, then set a hard-boiled egg over the mouth. We pried for fifteen minutes before we could get him loose. He described the experience as "like an enema in reverse" and improvised a bedpan for the rest of the trip, as did most everyone else.
I know it's in mighty poor taste to dwell at length on such a subject. Normally I wouldn't, but nothing else could so quickly and succinctly give you a picture of conditions aboard the Guy. It had all the stinks, fleas, cockroaches, rats, and rusty water the Quisling did, and it was crammed into a much smaller space. It had worse food, and not enough of it. We slept on drawers that rolled in and out of the wall like slabs in a morgue. This put you about a foot away from your neighbors on each side, above, and below, and gave you a unique opportunity for research into the sounds and smells of a class of humanity most people never get to meet.
I did mention that much of Brementon was a prison colony, didn't I? Then it stands to reason that more than half my fellow passengers were parolees, or people who had finished their terms. Mostly the latter, as Brementon didn't get a lot of the sort anybody would ever trust on parole. So night after night I lay there and listened to conversations that would curl your hair, and to other, involuntary sounds polite society tries to pretend don't exist. So that's what a man who murdered his mother sounds like when he farts. Interesting. And that smell, that's the dirty socks of a ritual cannibal.
"It's all material, Dodger," my father used to say when events had brought us to a particularly perilous pass. "You can use all of this. Next time you have to play despair, why, you can just think back to this." And he'd smile, and pinch my cheek.
I said "night after night," but that's misleading, too. Of course, there is no night in space, particularly out where we were. And my sleep period was not even ship's night. We shared the bunks, you see, in eight-hour shifts. And if you think the linen got changed between shifts you haven't been listening. I don't think the linen got changed between flights.
And while I've got the chance, I'd like to complain to the management about that transit time of six months. Is this any way to run a railroad? What we did was blast at an ungodly acceleration for what seemed like days (they swore it was more like hours), and then we coasted the entire trip, until it was time to slow down at Pluto. I tried complaining to the captain, but he was exasperating about it, as spacers always are. Trying to tell me it was more "economical" to use all our reaction mass in one big kick, as hard as we could stand it, and then another one at the end. I ask you, does that make sense? Wouldn't it be better to boost at a sane, comfortable one gee until we got halfway there, then do the same thing slowing down? Or if we didn't have enough fuel for that (I'll admit I'm a bit vague on some of the details), at least spread the acceleration out. It stands to reason we'd build up more speed that way, and I'm sure we'd get there more rapidly. I'm convinced we were cheated. I shall write my congressperson, really I shall.
Because the kicker to the whole sorry mess was that, for all that uncomfortable "economy," we ended up paying an eighty percent surcharge on our tickets! As if that third-rate cattle car were some crack liner! And what did we get for our money? Bone-breaking jackrabbit starts and stops, and six months of free fall with no soap or showers.
That eighty percent fee almost killed me. After beating a hasty retreat from the Playhouse, thinking the hounds were literally nipping at my heels, I trundled my trunk into the spaceport secure in the knowledge that I had a confirmed booking on the next
ship out, which was the Fawkes. Out of long habit I had made such a reservation, in Elwood's name, on every ship that was scheduled to leave Brementon. This wasn't much of a chore, as Bremen-ton was not King City Interplanetary; arrivals and departures were at an average rate of one every three days. At more civilized facilities I would memorize flight schedules for a selection of possible emergency destinations. At Brementon, it was take it or leave it.
One precept my father put right up there with "always cut the cards" was never to embark on a road trip without your return ticket in your pocket. If you were my best friend, and came to me swearing that without the loan of a fiver your dear sweet mother would die of a horrible disease, and all I had in my pocket was my return ticket, I would look you in the eye and swear I was penniless. I would cheerfully listen to the old broad croak her last, secure in the knowledge I'd done the right thing.
So I thought I was in good shape when I slapped my ticket down on the counter, trying not to look over my shoulder, and that's when I was let in on the closely guarded secret (actually, it was buried in the fine print when I looked, later) that sent me scrambling to my purse to discover that, even with gold fillings in my teeth, I couldn't do better than sixty percent. Not, that is, until I recalled the antique diamond brooch I'd discovered only the day before, carelessly and shamefully neglected upon Dahlia Smithson's dresser top. I'd just been passing by in the corridor, honest, when the thing seemed to call out to me. I feel that when you own something as fine as that you are obligated to be more careful with it. I'd meant to tell her that, too, but events intervened, and here I was shy a bit of cash, so there was nothing for it but to sell the brooch to a larcenous ticket agent for a twentieth of what it would have fetched in any pawnshop in Luna.
All this, mind you, when Larry held a tidy sum in his accounts, two weeks' pay, that rightly should have come to me but which I was by then powerless to collect. I gnashed my teeth, leveled a mighty curse on the ticket agent, his heirs and assigns unto the seventh generation, and boarded ship.
This is why I debarked at Lowell Interplanetary with three dollars and a set of Punch and Judy dolls.
You're probably wondering just what the private detective wanted to talk to me about. I know I was, though I didn't dwell on it. There's nothing to be gained by that, and certainly nothing to be gained by sticking around to find out. It was sheer luck he came searching for "Mercutio," armed with his picture from the playbill, and that the poor boy was by then a grave man. Fortune doesn't smile so brightly on me every day, and when she does I don't insult her by asking a lot of questions.
But I'll admit, I did wonder. Was it that business on Boondocks? I swear, I didn't know the girl was the governor's daughter.
* * *
This mall that happened to be on Pluto was called Cerberus Place, and that name forces me to admit that, though a mall is a mall is a mall, this one couldn't really be on Mars or Mercury. Not unless the Martian or Mercurian mall was attempting a Plutonian look.
It is a major failing of modern society, to my mind, that most of the inhabited planets don't have a style of their own. Oh, there are minor differences, of course, a few things here and there that would lead you to believe you were on Miranda and not on Luna. Mostly these are in the category of monuments, tourist attractions. As on Old Earth the Statue of Liberty was emblematic of New York, the Eiffel Tower meant Paris. There was no Lunar look, as there had been a Japanese, or a Danish, or Mexican or Nigerian look. No one would be walking around in "Lunarian" costume, living in Lunarian buildings, doing Lunarian folk dances in their peculiarly Lunarian steel shoes. Cultural and stylistic differences were dealt a death blow by the Invasion, which left only one human ethos really viable. That culture has been called Techno-English by its admirers, Judeo/Anglo/Cyber/NASA/Caucasian and much less flattering combinations by those who love it less. Certainly the Techno-part was indispensable; people who didn't take their machines seriously soon found themselves gulping vacuum.
Pluto was the exception to the rule of uniformity. The first thing you noticed was that there was a definite, strong Plutonian accent. Other planets had slight differences in word choice and pronunciations. Plutonians (or Stygians, or Hadeans, as they sometimes called themselves) spoke with a pronounced twang that could be indecipherable to the untrained ear.
Then there was the architecture. There was a distinct Hadean style, most pronounced in older structures. The remarkable thing was that a Hadean style existed at all. Its reason for being lay in Pluto's unique historical place among the Eight Worlds. For its first century of human habitation, it had been a prison planet.
There's a deep urge in the human soul to send the bad people as far away as possible from "decent folk." On Earth, Australia was a prime example. Post-Invasion, Pluto seemed to fit the bill, and today, it's Brementon. If society succeeds in pushing criminals any farther, we'll find we have achieved star travel. I don't know what Australia was like. Probably a fairly awful place for urban transportees. In the case of Pluto, the urge for distant exile was purely a psychological one. Living in one place where the atmosphere is inimical or nonexistent is pretty much like living in any other. You burrow underground, you husband your oxygen, you struggle to grow things you can eat, you bear and raise children. As time goes by, all these things get easier. Who really cares if the struggle is on Luna or on Pluto?
Obviously, the early Lunarian voters did. They sent their prisoners there by the thousands over the decades. There must have been a lot of self-righteous satisfaction in shipping your incorrigibles off to a place that was a synonym for hell.
Like remote prison colonies before it, Pluto had developed a convict/citizen society. Sentences were always for life, but could be served behind bars, in labor camps, or in relative freedom, depending on the offense. But even the "free" prisoners despised the guard class and the ruling elite, a social division that survives, in some respects, to this very day. The place is run, by and large, by descendants of criminals. But the richest families trace themselves back to the Regents, as they call themselves. Or "screws," as everyone else knows them.
Had enough history for today? Hold on, I'm almost through. The Hadeans, as many downtrodden people had before them, eventually made being outcasts a source of pride. Send us to Hell, will you? All right, we'll glory in it. We'll be hellcats, hellhounds, and hellions. We'll be hellacious hellraisers, hellborn and hellbred.
Aesthetically, the Plutonian style embraced the colors red and black—excessively, to my eye. Shapes were massive, and tended to loom. Fire was a frequent motif, stone a frequent building material. Hadeans were big on obsidian. There was something vaguely Egyptian to it all... if the Pharaohs had painted their temples glossy black, with crimson highlights.
Philosophically, the obsession with all things Abyssal led to the founding of one of the two great religions established since the Invasion: Diabolism.
Morally, the combination of distance, banishment, and rebellion (the result, I'd always felt, of a planetary inferiority complex) had formed a society viewed as permissive in a milieu not noted for social constraints. It was easier to murder someone on Pluto, for instance, than anyplace in the system. You could mount a valid defense based on a legal principle the locals summed up as "He needed killin'," and if you could prove it, not even pay a fine to your victim's survivors.
And practically, the interactions of frontier vigor, strong competitive instincts, a neurotic impulse to prove oneself better than one's rivals, and something hardly known elsewhere in the system—a solid work ethic—had produced a civilization perpetually nipping at the heels of those old-line bastions, those stuffier, more comfortable, and much more smug rival claimants to the mantle of Center of Humanity: Luna and Mars.
* * *
So it was through these infernal environs I trudged after my last show of the day. And I do mean trudged; Pluto's gravity is not much, but I'd been in free fall a very long time and didn't have my ground legs back yet. When you add in the fact that I'd
been standing in the castelli for almost six hours with only a few rests, you get one tired polymorphous, scenery-chewing, talentless, sorry excuse for a has-been actor.
Six months later, and that still stung!
But I wouldn't think about that now. I'd think about it tomorrow.
Toby had very little sympathy for the pains human flesh is heir to. He trotted along five or six steps ahead of me, pausing every ten or fifteen seconds to look back, impatient but too polite to say anything.
Toby? That's right, you haven't really been introduced, yet, have you?
I picked him up at a theatrical supply shop, it must be forty-five, fifty years ago. Toby comes from a line of show folk almost as long as my own. He's a Bichon Frise, in theory, which is French for "curly lapdog." His forebears capered in the court of the Sun King. They fared no better in the French Revolution than the Bourbons themselves, and afterward eked out a living in the circus ring. Like many other dog breeds, they were wiped out in the Invasion, revived during the following century from the Genetic Library, and in Toby's case, extensively tinkered with in the process.
He looks just like a standard pre-Invasion Bichon, which is to say he is covered with fleecy white curly hair, has beady black eyes set in a head like the puffball of a dandelion. When combed out and groomed he looks much bigger than he really is, which is about fourteen inches tall. Somewhere in his chromosomes are genes that evolved in squirrels before being snipped out and pasted into the canine species. This enables him to hibernate, with the proper chemical stimulus.
He doesn't seem to grow any older while he's hibernating. This, and a bit more genetic high jinks, accounts for his good health at such an extreme age. And there's something else in the mix. Some say it's monkey genes, some whisper that it's human—but that, of course, would be illegal, so I'm sure it's not true. Ahem. Whatever the source, he does have a remarkable brain. He learns very quickly, responds to over two hundred verbal commands and about as many gestures, and has even demonstrated initiative and discrimination, as when he recognized the idling cop as a possible source of trouble. On the other hand, being from a line of actors, he might have inherited that ability honestly. He tolerates costumes of all sorts. He knows his part in twenty-five Punch and Judy plays and learns his cues in new shows with no more than two rehearsals. He can prance all day on his hind legs, climb ladders, walk a tightrope, jump through a hoop of fire. He gets horribly depressed if the show bombs and would walk by a raw sirloin to steal that extra bow. In short, a trouper down to his little toenails.