by John Varley
"Please, please, please!" he groveled.
"All right," I said. "I accept." Or that's what I opened my mouth to say, but what came out was more like "Awwwrrrgh," followed by a strangling sound I can't transliterate, as Elwood was now drawing a finger across his throat—
—and the full depth of my folly was revealed to me in a blinding burst of temporary sanity. I'd been on Pluto three, four weeks? Already I'd committed at least two felonies—ones I was aware of, though the place had so many new laws now it was likely I'd committed a handful more simply by getting up and going about my daily business. So what did I now propose to do? Nothing but get put down on the shit list of one of the most powerful men on Pluto, in letters ten meters tall and written in fire: The Man Who Wrecked My Daughter's Life.
No thank you! No, I thank you! And again, I thank you!
"I'm really sorry, Roy," I said. "I have a previous engagement on... on the, er... the Titanic."
"Dinner theater? You're giving up Anna Livia for dinner theater?"
"At least I won't get trampled by elephants."
"And between shows you can bus tables. I never heard of—"
I slapped the bag of swag onto the desk between us, possibly the only action I could have taken at that moment that would get his attention. He looked at it suspiciously, then took it and zipped it open. He hauled out the wad of crisp, new banknotes and then looked at me.
"Any trouble at all?"
"No trouble. She was just like you said."
He nodded. He'd met her before, having been the original bank examiner in our little true-life sketch. He moistened a thumb and started shuffling through the bills, sorting them into two piles: nine for him, one for me. Hey, I'm not complaining. Ten percent is not bad for coming in so late in the sting. They'd done all the groundwork.
"All right, Sparky. Here's your share."
I pocketed the loot, and placed a small object on the desk in front of him. He frowned at it, picked it up.
"What is this? A chessman?"
"It's called 'Dutchman.' It's netsuke, nineteenth century, dating from a few years after the opening of Japan. This is how the Japanese saw the Western invaders. Notice how his little eyes are slanted?"
"You got this from Mayard-Tate?"
"No, I found it lying in the street. Jesus, Roy."
He frowned at the tiny mannequin while his thumb absently caressed it.
"Reason I asked," he said, "we talked about it before you went in. The Charonese Mafia."
"We sure as hell did talk about it. You said it wouldn't be a problem."
"It ain't. Only I didn't figure on you pinching any sukiyaki."
"Netsuke. What's the difference?"
He rolled his shoulders, nervously rubbed the back of his neck.
"Come on, Roy. Don't do this to me. You said the Mayard-Tates wouldn't bother to tell the Mafia."
"Normally, no, they wouldn't. They'd be embarrassed, for one thing. And it's a small enough amount of money—to them—it's easier just to let it go. In fact, I was gonna ask you if you'd like to be in on stage three of the sting. We're planning to—"
"Not for all the netsuke in Pluto."
"Okay. Just a thought. They didn't do anything after the first sting, and I don't see why they'd do it now, 'cause it's even more embarrassing to fall for it twice. Still, I didn't count on you lifting the furniture."
"Get real, Roy. I walk into a house like that, you think I'm walking out with my pockets empty? Would you?"
He grinned. "There's that," he admitted. "What do you want for it?"
"What'll you give?"
He named a ridiculous price. I just shook my head. But instead of making a counteroffer, he shook his head, too.
"I'm out of my element here," he said. "I never dealt in Nipponiana. Let me talk to a few people." He swiveled his chair to the side and started typing on his keyboard, studying the results on a clear glass pane whose angle made the returning answers invisible to me.
"What do you hear these days?" I asked him, more to be making conversation than anything else. "Anything interesting going on?"
"My show's just about it," he said. "A few other revivals here and there. I don't think there's been three new plays debuted on Pluto this year. Things are pretty dead." He glanced at me, smiled. "Unless you count Polichinelli coming out of retirement to direct King Lear."
Sure. I returned his smirk. "And I heard Hitchcock's come back from the dead to direct John Wilkes Booth in Our American Cousin, too." Both events were about equally likely. If there was something good coming up, Roy wouldn't tell me. He wanted me for Work in Progress.
His attention had returned to his screen.
"I hope those questions aren't going out over the public cables."
"Don't teach grandpa how to get under a skirt, little boy," he said. "This is encoded nine different ways. The police could never trace it. Of course, if the Charonese are looking for you, nothing's gonna help."
Did he have to bring that up? I expected Elwood to stick his nosy phiz back through the door again and croon, Don't say I didn't warn you.
He had warned me, not that I'd really needed it. The hardest part of the Mayard-Tate sting had been knocking on that front door with the red handprints on each jamb, like the fresh lamb's blood beside the doors of the Israelites. Those prints meant, to anyone who had spent any time on Pluto, "This residence protected by the Red Hand." I read them in a more colorful way: Burglar, pass by this place. Had a more Biblical sound, and the Charonese Mafia was nothing if not Biblical.
After the end of the penal system on Pluto and the establishment of democracy, there was never much enthusiasm for the institution of police. Too many voters—ex-transportees—had nothing but negative associations with the color blue. No very large society can get along without something in the way of law enforcement, and Pluto did have police, both municipal and planetary. But they were weaker than on any other major planet.
The trouble was that crime doesn't stop just because the people don't like cops. The resulting gap between an anemic constabulary and a healthy and growing—some even argued genetically predisposed—criminal class was filled, as such gaps always are, by free enterprise, in the form of vigilance committees, posses, and protective associations. And of these sellers of protection, the greatest and most feared was the Charonese Mafia.
If you'd like an historical parallel, there's a good one from the Old Earth. The nation of Italy had organized crime, like many other countries. But in one particular province, known as Sicily, the Cosa Nostra, or Black Hand, was far more ruthless and relentless than in any other region. They were so good at what they did that they ended up actually exporting their brand of gangsterism to other countries, particularly America. I know this because I had to study it when I played in The Martian Godfather ("Valentine is effective in the role of Don Tharsisini, mugging and brandoing his way through some lines that might have choked a less professional thespian. Go see it, or I'll break ya fuckin' kneecaps."—The Quicksilver Messenger).
You'd think being an inmate in a planetary prison was about as low as one could sink. You'd be wrong. In any prison there is a hierarchy. It may be topsy-turvy to outside eyes—murderers usually got more respect than embezzlers, for instance—and it varies from culture to culture, but there are always those who the run-of-the-mill convict views with the same contempt that civilians view him. Baby killers, for instance. Cannibals. Crazed serial murderers. Try to parole such people into a population of ex-transportees and you'll get the same uproar you'd get anywhere. So Pluto found itself in need of a prison planet of its own, and the logical choice was forlorn, useless, and neglected little Charon, Pluto's largest moon, named for the ferryman of Hell.
Taxpayers are loath to squander a lot of money on the care of people such as they were exporting to Charon. They must have air, water, and, Charon being from two to four billion miles from the sun, a certain amount of heat. Those things were provided, though not generously. As for food,
they could learn hydroponic farming or they could damn well eat each other. I think the Plutonian electorate had the Kilkenny cats in mind: throw them together, stand back, and in a little while there would be just teeth, hair, and eyeballs left.
But politics has a natural ebb and flow. Regimes came and went for nearly two hundred years. Sometimes standards relaxed and genetic criminals were sent to Charon. During a brief right-wing coup any number of political prisoners were transported. There were times when no one went to the rock, as do-gooders tried one more futile time to "reform" the worst of the worst with some new "therapy," or as more pragmatic souls scrambled offenders' brains with the newest lobotomy equivalent that left them happy droolers, or, as the pragmatists would have it, "perfect citizens."
It had been over fifty years since the penal colony was closed and Charon became a more-or-less-equal member of the Plutonian Fed. But in the century before that something had been bred that, save for Areoformed Martians, was nearer to a subspecies of human than anything yet seen in this tired old solar system. They were the Charonese.
They looked like normal human beings, though they tended to a choleric complexion and red hair. Where they differed from the bulk of humanity was not so visible. This difference has been described in a dozen ways, depending on what sort of expert you're talking to. They were said to be empathically dysfunctional. That, or they lived their lives according to an antisocial cultural ethic. Or they suffered from a planetary traumatic stress syndrome. Or, as my father had once put it, "They are mean sumbitches."
Traumatic, dysfunctional, antisocial, deprived, depraved, depraved on account o' being deprived, genetically abnormal, or just plain mean, I lean toward a simpler explanation. They had no souls.
I know it's not scientific, but I never laid claim to a rigorous point of view. Don't ask me to define a soul because I can't. But I know one when I see one, and the Charonese don't have them. I have one. Uncle Roy does, though we're both not very nice. Toby has one, and I'll bet you do, too.
Basically, all Charon had to export was viciousness. And they made a hell of a good living at it. There have always been people who have need of really tough guys.
Charonese were often referred to as "ferrymen."
This was all unprofitable reflection, and I was glad to be drawn away from it when Roy turned from his screen and named a much more satisfactory figure. I might as well admit it: I had no idea what the thing was worth. I was merely following another valuable piece of advice from my father. "Never take the first offer," he said. "It makes you look hungry." A corollary to that was to try not to take the second offer, either, so I named a higher figure and, sure enough, he came up a little bit.
I'm sure we would have ended up splitting the difference if we could have spent the next hour haggling, but he was due back onstage, and he didn't know something, which was that he would have to do this twice more.
"Deal," I said, and put a lovely little recumbent water buffalo on the table between us. "Now how much for this?"
* * *
The rest of our negotiations were quickly concluded, on terms a bit more favorable to me, I like to think. Then he was hustling me out of his office, into the breathless rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky that is backstage at a major musical before the second curtain. He guided me to the stage door, which disgorged me into the end of the traditional long, dark alley, the door lit by a single overhead bulb. With the door already closing behind him, he stuck his head out again.
"You want to come tonight and catch the opening? I'll leave a ticket at the box office."
"No, thanks," I said, with a tip of my hat and a bow. "I'll come tomorrow night, and catch the closing."
He extended his middle finger, then smiled and waved.
"Break a leg!" I shouted as the door clicked shut.
* * *
For the last ten days I had been staying in modest quarters at the Lambs Club. For the last three of those days I had been making my entrances and exits while the front desk was not occupied, or when the clerk was busy with something else. A few times I'd been reduced to the back stairs and the freight doors. At the Lambs they know actors, you see, most of them being either aspiring or ex-actors themselves. One of the things they know is that an actor with a hit series or a big part in a picture doesn't stay at the Lambs. Another is that an actor lies. It's his business. They have heard every variation on I-Shall-Positively-Pay-You-Next-Tuesday. Your best story about how your saintly mother needed the dough to pay off an unsympathetic bookie will be met by a stony silence. They will regard your crystal martini mixer, said to have belonged to Shirley Temple, with sneering disbelief, and direct you to a pawnbroker known to have a heart of pure flint. Or they'd simply point to the big sign behind the front desk: ALL ROOMS TO BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.
Yesterday I'd been ready to throw myself on the mercy of a desk clerk. There was one who looked like Mickey Rooney. Could such a man be a rogue?
Today I swept into the seedy marble-columned lobby in my best black cape and top hat. There was a shine on my shoes and a melody in my heart. I don't think I mentioned it, but when I smile, I can look a lot like Fred Astaire. That thought so cheered me that I actually danced a few steps, past the eternal contingent of office boys, barmaids, and young mechanics who come from Chillicothes and Paducahs with their bazookas to get their names up in lights. And they end up sitting hunched in the Lambs' shabby novodeco armchairs with their attractive but worried faces buried in copies of Casting Call and Pluto Variety. I grabbed the hand of one comely lass, pulled her from her chair, and we Fred'n'Gingered through the dusty potted palms, up the seven steps from the lounge, where I rolled her into my arms and planted a kiss of purest em-gee-em on her rosebud mouth.
I was striding by the front desk on my way to the elevators when I suddenly stopped and looked thoughtful, as if remembering something... just as the clerk held up a finger and opened his mouth. (I admit it. I was watching from the corner of my eye for just such a moment.) I hurried to the desk, taking out my wallet as I went. I let him see the stack of bills inside as I peeled off three large ones and placed them on the blotter.
"I believe this will cover any arrears, my good man," I said.
The clerk (not Mickey Rooney) gave me a sour look that told me he'd been anticipating my ouster with relish. But he took the money and turned to his computer. I dug in the pocket of my cape and removed Toby and set him on the counter. He sniffed at the inkwell, and promptly knocked over the "No Pets Allowed" sign. I told him to sit, which he did.
The clerk's already prunelike mouth wrinkled even further when he turned from his ledgers with my change.
"I'm afraid no pets are allowed in the guest rooms, sir," he said.
"Toby is not a pet. He is a performer." I put my palm flat on the blotter between us.
"Nevertheless, I'm afraid..." He had finally noticed the edge of the twenty sticking out from under my hand.
"Seems there's a lot you're afraid of," I said. "You'll have to stop going around in such a frightened state." I pushed the bill a little closer, and he took it, making no effort to be discreet. A bribe's a bribe, as far as he was concerned.
"No need for any change just now," I said, airily. "We shall be checking out tomorrow morning, and I may be charging some interplanetary calls to my room. Tomorrow I shall need my bags delivered to dockside, H.M.S. Britannic, in time for the afternoon sailing."
"Of course," he said, making a note. Then he looked up, sneering. "Shall I have them sent to the crew deck?"
"And have your mother drop them over the side? You should let that old woman retire. No, no, send them to my dressing room. It's the one with the star on it."
I picked up Toby while the clerk was still sputtering, and swept away to the elevators.
* * *
It's always a melancholy time when I must once more put Toby down. Melancholy for me, not him. He always knows it's coming because for the two days prior I stuff him with food. A full belly extends hi
s downtime and makes him recover more rapidly from the effects of hibernation, but the real reason I do it is guilt. It's entirely self-induced. Toby never offers a word of reproach.
I'm sure dogs don't experience the passage of time in the same way we do. He's sharp enough, I think, to know a hibernation is not the same as a regular night's sleep. While there are no actual seasons in our modern environments, there are periodic daily, weekly, and quarterly changes in temperature, humidity, pressure, and so forth, because it's been found people do better that way. Toby surely noticed those when awakened. But I doubt he had any notion of how much time had passed. So it was no skin off his nose, right?
I just hated treating him like a little, warm machine. I'd never thought of him as property. A dog sticks to you out of loyalty. And, pragmatically, because you're his meal ticket.
I called him over and tossed the sleepy pill in his direction. He leaped into the air and caught it. I heaped praise on him, which he took as only his due, clever dog, smart dog. Then, old hand that he is, he sat down and waited. He used to stagger about, run into things. He didn't like to be held at such times, as he sometimes became delirious, hallucinated. Once he bit my hand, and felt rotten about it for days after I woke him up. So he just sits there, and pretty soon he begins to nod. Sometimes he growls at things I can't see. But in no time his heart rate is falling, along with all his other metabolic signs.
He fell over and I scooped him up.
When I bought him he came with a little hard-sided carrying case, about the size of a hatbox. It was a hideous aluminum color. I had it covered with the finest crocodile skin, replaced the plastic handle with leather. I put him in the case, curled into a fluffy ball, and pasted a sensor to his pink belly. Green lights came on in the lid, which I then snapped closed. If anything went wrong, alarms would sound, and if I was close enough to hear I could rush him to a vet. Nothing had ever gone wrong.
I packed him into the Pantechnicon, laid out my clothing for the next day, then showered, brushed my teeth, put on my nightgown and cap, said my prayers, and crawled into the narrow, lumpy bed provided by the Lambs.