by John Varley
He's also something of a mathematical whiz, being able to count to five. I know this to be true because numbers six and above confuse and depress him. He'll worry for hours about the difference between a pile of six coins and a pile of eight coins. Ask him which is larger and he'll mope all day. But he can make change for a nickel.
I've often thought that, with just double the IQ, he could master the decimal system and become a stockbroker.
I counted the day's take as we strolled the eighteenth promenade of Cerberus Place, and realized this was going to be a big day for us.
"Looks like we've got enough, Toby," I said. "With a few shekels left over for some dinner." He understood only the last word of that, but he understood that word very well, and turned a back flip in celebration. Then he led me to the pushcart on the nineteenth level, no doubt recalling how we'd had to pass it by the evening before, a terrible day for the theater. I bought two hot pretzels and two steaming, juicy bratwurst on sourdough buns, slathering mustard, relish, and a little sauerkraut on the latter. I cajoled the vendor into giving us a cup of water and a plastic bowl, then carried the whole glorious mess to a nearby picnic table, where we sat down, just like citizens, and had our evening's repast.
Well, I sat. Toby stood on the table and watched me cut the brat with my pocketknife and put the slices in the plastic bowl. I added a dab of the pickle relish and more of the mustard.
"Is that enough mustard?" I asked him, and he barked once. "Enough" was the key word there; I don't think he knew "mustard." He knew he liked it, you understand. He just wouldn't recognize the word if I said it to him. Toby likes mustard, can deal with relish, prefers to leave the sauerkraut alone.
The one bark, you may have figured out, meant "yes." One for yes, two for no. Can you count to two, boys and girls?
"Too bad there's no wine, eh, Toby?" He didn't answer, too busy with his little muzzle in the bowl, chowing down. And I wasn't really complaining. For weeks we'd had mostly rice cakes. Twice I'd splurged on a jar of peanut butter. The brats were straight from heaven.
The business day was winding down around us. Cerberus Place was not a big mall, just another dozen levels above us, possibly half a mile across and two miles long. It looked to have been a natural surface feature at one time, roofed over, pressurized, heated, then terraced like a farmer contour plowing, tunneled, excavated, paved, lighted, landscaped, painted, decorated, and presto! Open for business. What nightlife there was seemed to be concentrated on the upper levels. Down here on the nineteenth the stores were closed, a few employees locking the doors and trudging off to the slideways, patrolbots and a few human security guards making their entrances. The vendor had shut down his grill and wheeled his cart away. Toby and I were left with the little pocket park to ourselves. I gazed out over the mall as I ate, registering nothing really novel. The floor was a manicured park, with tidy trees and streetlights lining the walking paths, a little railroad running around the edges. There were half a dozen freestanding apartment buildings in the park, all fifteen stories high, all mounted on turntables so the residents had ever-changing views. Rents would be high in those sparkling jewel boxes.
I could see a little amusement park down there. A carousel turned, the horses bobbing up and down with no one riding them. For some reason it made me sad.
We finished our meal. I poured a little water in Toby's dish and let him lap it up. He had mustard stains around his mouth, so I wet part of my handkerchief and dabbed at him until he was clean, then combed the hair on his head until it stood out as it was supposed to. He never trusts me on that; he began to bark, so I sighed and took out the small hand mirror and held it up for him. He studied his image until he was satisfied he was in a fit state to meet his public, then graciously allowed me to carry the wrappings to a garbage can.
Two of the human security guards had paused as they walked by our table. A person alone is suspicious to the cop mind. Two people together, of course, are probably planning something. Three is a gang, and five is a riot waiting to happen. You can't win. Can you count to five, Officer?
We set off for the Outland Lines freight office.
* * *
The second thing I hadn't counted on in my journey from Brementon to Pluto, after the eighty percent surcharge, was the new Wandering Thespian Harassment Assessment Fee. They didn't call it that, naturally—some bullshit about a Spaceport Improvement Luggage Excise—but that was the effect. There now was a duty on each piece of luggage you brought in to Pluto. I spent most of my first day on Pluto shouting at an endless series of obstinate officials. Result: no tickee, no luggee. The one bright point was that they couldn't simply confiscate my trunk, though it was plain in their eyes they all viewed this as an unfortunate technical oversight in the law, soon to be remedied. But they could damn sure keep it until I paid the fee. I left there with my tail between my legs—and my dog in my hand. Arguments that the tools of my trade, my means of making the money to pay their goddam extortion, were all in my trunk, fell on the usual deaf ears. But I told them that if I couldn't get my hibernating dog out of his box and feed him he would die in a week and I'd hit the spaceport, the city, the county, and most important, you, asshole, with a lawsuit the likes of which this stinking iceball of a planet had never seen. They leafed through their books of regulations and found nothing to cover the situation and so, grudgingly, let me open the trunk and get Toby out. While I did it I got my bedroll and my puppets, as well, and no one said anything.
All bunkum. Toby would have been fine for five months. I was dying to tell one of them that, but when we entered the freight office and announced I was ready to pay the ransom on my belongings, none of the officials there had been present at my disembarking. That's the way it is with these people, you know. You never see the same ones twice. I think they're composted at the end of the day, and new ones spring full-grown from the muck, like toadstools.
* * *
"All the world's not a stage," my father had been fond of saying. "Only the best part of it. Between shows, you'll need good luggage."
It's good advice, and I've always taken it to heart. In my career I've lived in nine-room hotel penthouse suites and plush-carpeted modular winnies trucked to location sites. I've owned luxury condos and homes in the most exclusive Disneylands. At times I've owned enough things to lease storage modules simply to accommodate the excess.
More often, everything I own could be packed into one trunk. It's a big trunk, granted, but if you think it's easy, look around your own surroundings and ask yourself if you could do it.
Remember I talked about a return ticket, when going on the road? My attachment to that ticket would rate as a pale thing indeed compared to the tenacity with which I would hold on to that trunk. Imagine how you'd feel if murdering rapists were holding your children hostage, and you'll get some idea how upset I was to learn I couldn't take my trunk with me on arrival.
Pawnbrokers weep with joy when they see me coming, begin planning that long-delayed rumpus room in the basement or a nice vacation on Oberon. But while the trunk may contain many items I'll cheerfully hock, the trunk itself is sacred. It contains everything of any importance to me.
Don't shop for one like it at your local outfitter. It was custom-made for me thirty years ago by the firm of Signe Powell, christened the Pantechnicon Mark III. (I also owned the original, and the Mark II, replacing each not so much because it had worn out or become obsolete, but because I had the money, and a few new ideas.) It is waterproof, vacuumproof, fireproof, and proof against most forms of radiation. It's... well, it has so many features that any useful description would quickly start sounding like an operator's manual, so perhaps it's best just to mention them as needed. But if in the course of my story the Pantechnicon blacks up, gets down on one knee, and starts to belt out "Swanee River," don't be too surprised.
* * *
The nine-room penthouse suites were but a passing memory these days. Lately, Toby and I had been sleeping rough in mall service co
rridors.
You can spend a long life beneath the surface of one of the Eight Worlds without ever visiting a service corridor, unless you are a delivery person or work in the stockroom of one of the stores it adjoins. These are not exactly public spaces, but they're not precisely private, either. You don't need a permit or a security badge to enter most of them, but finding the entrance is usually beyond the powers of the uninitiated, at least the sort of entrance I was looking for. Getting to them should have been easy. Simply walk into any store, any retail outlet at all, follow the signs to the emergency fire exit. This will take you through the stockroom... where you will be seen, bothered, and usually turned back by some meddlesome employee, especially if you're wheeling a trunk the size of a small asteroid. No, it was seldom that easy in practice. The public and service corridors are like the human circulatory system. Arteries carry goods from the factories to the point of sale, veins carry them back to consumers' homes. The great engine of commerce flows freely at all points, but the two flows never mix.
But if you know how to get back there, unchallenged—and I'd learned it at my father's knee—you will find a Spartan realm free of the madding crowds. It is a place of dim lighting, high ceilings, gray walls, completely utilitarian as few places in the public world are.
It's a dangerous place until you know the ropes. Robot and manned vehicles zip along paths whose system is not intuitively obvious, following signals and signs you may not even see unless you know what to look for. It's a good place to get squashed like a bug beneath a fifty-wheel flatbed goods train equipped with only token lights and brakes; the operator usually will never know he hit you. So don't go back there unless you're with somebody like Uncle Sparky, who knows the ropes, okay, boys and girls?
The great advantage to this huge, unknown city is that people will usually leave you alone once you've gained entrance. This is where the down-and-outers hide from the rousting nightstick and the contemptuous stare. Winos, tramps, vagabonds, swagmen, and other ladies and gentlemen of leisure drift away from their daytime endeavors to find a private corner here where one can spread his kip and not be bothered. Did you ever wonder where city pigeons go to build their nests and raise their pidglings? This is the place.
This is also the site of that peculiar abode known as the jungle. By following a few seemingly random chalk marks on walls, marks that you probably would not even have seen, and certainly couldn't have read even if you knew there was information in them, I made my way to a warehouse door. There was a court seal on it, promising me that if I broke it I would be subject to a fine and jail time. But the date was twenty years previous and the printing was almost illegible. Places like these, full of useless merchandise attached in connection with a bankruptcy dating to when dinosaurs walked the Earth, were among the least frequented and policed areas on any civilized planet. Which was just fine with the hoboes who came here to gather around the fire and swap stories just as they had in the heyday of the railroads on Earth. Toby and I picked our way through towering stacks of dusty crates in the darkness, guided only by a light from the Pantechnicon. We came to a huge open space, at the far end of which was a flickering orange light with human shapes sitting around it. Toby took off, barking. You don't sneak up on a group of 'bos, but I never had to worry about announcing myself when Toby was up and around.
I got there to find Boots Lumpkin putting down a plate for the dog. Toby himself was working his way around the circle, greeting his friends, some of whom he'd known for thirty years, others he'd met the night before.
"Easy on the mulligan, Boots," I said, setting the trunk down on its end. "That rascal put away a sausage big as his own hind leg an hour ago."
"Gotcha," said Boots, and ladled a bit of stew into the bowl while Toby threw me a reproachful look. The crazy hound would have eaten whatever was put in front of him, though his belly was round as a beach ball, because it's rude to turn down stew in a hobo jungle, and because that's just what dogs do.
I was greeted around the circle by those who knew me, introduced to those few I hadn't met.
"Looks like you finally got your bindle back," Sarge Pollito called out, which was always good for a laugh. While nobody there actually had his goods tied in a handkerchief and hung from a stick, comparing the Pantechnicon Mark III with the canvas backpacks, haversacks, kitbags, portmanteaux, and valises that contained the belongings of these happy mudlarks was comical indeed.
"Will the butler be arriving soon?" someone called out.
"Had to let the blighter go, Skids," I said, ruefully. "He just wouldn't keep the silver polished." I accepted a plate of stew, shook my head to the offer of coffee. It keeps me awake.
"Hard to get good help these days," said Rivkah the Jewess.
"You said it, Riv. I'm looking for a new upstairs maid. Interested?"
She punched my shoulder, and I sat on the trunk and spooned up the stew.
One night in 1867, in a railyard in Ohio—so the story goes—a 'bo knocked over a rabbit with a good toss of a stone. He skinned it, chopped in a potato and a few wild onions and carrots he found growing trackside, added some flour and salt and pepper, then tossed the whole mess in his billy and boiled it up. It tasted so good he saved some for the next night, when another hobo offered some venison jerky to add to the mix. The third night he met a man who had some beans and a chili pepper. The night after that it was raccoon. And since that unfortunate coney met his maker, every bird of the air and beast of the earth, every fish that swims in the sea, every creep-crawlie that wriggles on its belly or burrows in the mud has had its turn in the stewpot. The mulligan had been ladled over chow mein noodles, spooned over eggs, slapped into sloppy joe sandwiches, sizzled with dumplings, rolled up in crepes, and slipped under mashed potatoes. The Eternal Mulligan is boiled anew every night; you donate what you can to the pot, take out what you need—it is always shared with all present.
And somewhere on my plate, I fancied, was the tiniest bit of that jackrabbit who was just a little bit too slow one night in Ohio, almost four hundred years ago, on the poor Old Earth.
Highly unlikely, I'm well aware. But hey, cobber, there's no need to rain on my parade, eh? A sense of continuity is nothing to sneer at in this impermanent world. Does it matter if that continuity is a fable? Is reality that sacred to you?
* * *
I put a few bread loaves, scrounged from a bakery's waste bin only an hour before, beside the stewpot as my part of the night's meal. Then I rolled the Pantech into a dim corner and prepared for the night.
The trunk sprouts two wheels and a handle for upright movement, a wheel on each corner if you'd prefer to get behind it and shove. I popped the wheels back into their sockets and opened a panel on what had been the top end before I laid the trunk on its side. An air compressor began to chug quietly, and my tent began to inflate itself.
It's made out of memory plastic. Folded, it adds about an inch to the thickness of the trunk. Deployed, it makes a cube about five feet on a side. Five of those sides are rigid as plywood and much stronger; an elephant could dance on my tent roof. The floor is full of pockets and makes quite a good air mattress.
I shoved my bedroll through the sphincter door that, in a pinch, can be almost as effective as a formal airlock. Then I squeezed myself in, reached out, and snapped on the light. I just sat there a moment, breathing my own air. It was the first time, literally the first moment I had felt safe and secure since the PI tapped me on the shoulder in Brementon.
This was the second thing that kept me sane in the Guy Fawkes. When I was feeling the worst, I'd slip down to the cargo hold, deploy the tent, crawl in, and sit there and shake. I'd have cheerfully passed the whole voyage in here, but the cargo area was off-limits to passengers and I lived in fear I'd be discovered and watched more carefully, so I rationed my time. What luxury to sit on my own bed, with my own six walls around me!
I ran a quick systems check, determined that the Hadean Customs Service hadn't managed to wreak any real harm,
probably not from lack of trying.
Most of one wall was the top end of the trunk. I lowered a shelf from it, a shelf containing a hot plate and a teapot. I brewed up and poured into a porcelain cup that had once been the property of Judy Garland. Luckily, there was no way of authenticating this, so I was never tempted to pawn it since, in the world of collectible Terriana, provenance is all. I pulled out a drawer and using the spoon and freeze-dried cream I found there, made the tea the proper color. I noticed I was almost out of cream. (Actor: "I'll have a cuppa tea, without cream." Waiter: "We're out of cream, sir. It'll have to be without milk." Rimshot.) Where the shelf had been there was (what else) a mirror lined with strip lights, so the tent could be used as a dressing room. The whole side would fold away, providing me access to the trunk without lifting the upper lid or leaving the tent.
I spread my blankets and took off my coat, and in the process remembered something else I'd filched from the baker's garbage. Toby slipped through the lock as I took the cupcake out of my coat pocket and set it on the shelf. He watched me curiously as I rummaged in another drawer and came up with a single candle. I poked it into the cupcake.
I'd been trying to forget it, trying to make it add up another way, but there was no avoiding it. Today was my birthday. Please, in lieu of presents, send your contributions to Actors' Relief. It was a rather significant birthday, too.