The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  He breathed in and out frantically, staring down at the water, at his legs beneath the water, at his penis.

  "Ambitious." The voice came from above. He was flooded with gratitude and love. Everything was going to be all right.

  "...was 'bitious if it were so it were a grievious fault and—"

  "Grievous."

  "Huh?" He looked up into Father's face, searching for signs of anger. "Isn't that what I said?"

  "Grie-vous," the man intoned. He had a wonderful voice. It filled the small room. It made the water vibrate. "Grie-vous," he boomed again. Then he wrinkled his nose and upper lip and made his voice nasal, tinny, ridiculous. "You said gree-vee-ous. Where did you learn that?"

  "I think Gideon Peppy said it."

  "I think so, too. No more television for you, young man, especially the Peppy Show. That man is single-handedly destroying the language."

  The man lifted his son from the bathwater and set him on the mat. He wrapped him in a big fluffy white towel that said THARSIS HYATT on it. All their towels had the names of hotels on them.

  "Now, take it again, from 'it were a grievous fault, and...' "

  "...and grievi—and grievously hath Zeezer answer'd it. The boy continued through Marc Antony's funeral oration, happy as a kitten with a bowl of cream, stumbling only over "Lupercal" and "coffers." As he spoke his father's big hands pummeled him and rubbed him dry through the big towel, powdered him, sprayed him, combed his long yellow hair.

  "Very good, Dodger," he said, after the boy had gone through it three times. "But you must never say it that way again."

  "All right."

  "You must never 'say' it at all. From now on you will hear the words. You will learn what each word means, and what they mean together, and you will make the words live. Memorizing is all very good, but we are not phonographs, are we?"

  The boy agreed, having no idea what a phonograph was. Then he was lifted, still wrapped in the towel, and brought to his tiny bedroom, where he stood shivering—the landlord, through some misunderstanding, had stopped providing heat three days before—as his father found a pair of blue flannel pajamas with fluffy tassels on the feet, two sizes too small, and held them while his son stepped in and zipped them up in front.

  "We'll get you some new ones next week," his father said. "You're getting to be a big boy." He put his son in bed and tucked the big comforter under his chin.

  "Good night, Dodger," he said.

  "G'night, Father." The man left the door slightly ajar, as he always did, knowing his son was prone to bad dreams.

  Dodger lay there in the dark, looking at the sliver of light on the ceiling that came through the door, and thinking about Junior Zeezer, Octopus Zeezer, Marcus Bootless, Mark Anthony, Cashless, Sinna, Kafka, and the Smoothsayer. He knew those names were wrong but he found it helped him remember them to think of them that way. The real names made no sense at all to him. Neither did the play. That didn't bother him; none of the plays Father read to him made any sense, except Titus Andronicus (Tightest and Raunchiest, in Dodger-speak). Now, there was a story, with guys chopping off hands and pulling out tongues and stabbing each other with swords and stuff. It was almost as good as television.

  But not Junior Zeezer. Oh, there was all those guys stabbing Junior in the Senate (also in the heart and the back and the gut, if Dodger understood it right), but most of it was no better than Hambone, which other than a neat ghost and some sword fighting didn't make much sense to Dodger, either.

  His trouble was that, though he had a vocabulary ten times larger than most children his age, he didn't know what half the words meant.

  Now his father said he was supposed to hear the words. Know what they mean, one at a time and all together. The prospect excited Dodger. All his life he'd been hearing these stories by Shaky-Spear, stories none of his friends knew, stories he couldn't tell his friends because he didn't know what they meant himself.

  Now he would know. He suspected that learning what they meant would involve more time underwater.

  But maybe that was just for remembering. He was getting so good at remembering now that some bath times went by without getting dunked at all.

  The boy shivered, and pulled the covers more tightly around him. Soon he was asleep.

  Dodger was four years old.

  * * *

  It's me again. Mister First Person.

  And who are you? I might hear you ask. A certain amount of confusion at this point would be only normal.

  "Your name is just something to put up on the marquee," my father always said. "It doesn't mean a thing." He proved his point by giving me a handful of them: Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine, to mention just a few. Alias K.C., Casey, Ken, Cat, Kendall, Kelly, Kenton and Kelvin. A.K.A. Valencia, Valentine, Van den Troost, and Jones. In various combinations of these and others I may have neglected to mention, I had enough noms de theatre, de plume, and de guerre to make a list longer than the memory of most big-city police computers.

  "It gives you options," said my father, a man who was known throughout his life simply as John Valentine. "I have an enormous ego," he would say, with a twinkle in his eye. "I can't stand for the applause to go to anyone but John Valentine. But I am able to do the jail time, when it comes to that."

  Well, I can't do the time. I've never stayed in jail longer than it takes to make bail, get new paper, and catch the first available transport to a distant planet. This has prevented me from compiling the sort of credits that might lead to critical adulation, but after all, as my father also used to say, "The performance is the thing."

  But as I said earlier, all my friends call me Sparky.

  Or, before that, Dodger.

  But speaking of the printed page, here's a request to the typesetter:

  Could we lose the italics?

  Thank you.

  I've noticed that, in books, when the point of view is switched, the new part is often set in italics. Well, I don't like italics much, and I'm just going to assume that you, the reader, are smart enough to know when I'm in first person and when I'm using third. Hint: examine the pronouns.

  There is this odd thing about me: I usually dream in the third person. Frequently the dreams are in black-and-white, not Technicolor. The dreams are thus a little like out-of-body experiences. I see myself doing things, rather than seeing the things I do. I've spoken with other actors about this, thinking it might be an occupational disorder resulting from spending so much of my time thinking about how a motion or gesture would look, about makeup and staging and presence and all the other aspects of my craft. I found only one other actor who dreamed like I do. Shortly after he told me that he put a bullet through his head, and I stopped asking the question. I didn't like the way people looked at me when I asked, anyway.

  That's why I'm putting parts of this in the third person: because I dreamed it. And the reason I'm back in first is, I woke up. Far too soon.

  I didn't know it at first. Apart from the grogginess natural to the dosage of "deadballs" I'd taken, there is nothing in space to give one cues as to elapsed time, particularly in the Outer Planets; Pluto would have vanished from sight during the first hours of acceleration. After that, there was nothing visual to show time's passage until arrival at Uranus.

  But among the Pantech's equipment is a clock, and I soon became alert enough to fumble open the protective hatch and consult it. I found we'd been gone for only three days.

  I was alarmed.

  The illegal mixture of drugs sold on the street as deadballs enabled the human body to do something it was never designed to do: sleep for a week, with few deleterious side effects. Hibernate, if you will (or estivate, take your pick, since there were no seasons in space).

  Why ban a drug? After all, this isn't the Dark Ages. Getting high isn't illegal on any civilized planet—not that deadballs made you high.

  My father's explanation made as much sense as any.

  "Profit, Dodger, simpl
e profit," he said. "Ninety percent of interplanet travel is tourism, people running away from their humdrum lives to experience humdrum amusements far from home. And every mile of that travel is the most boring experience imaginable. The owners of the ships that make these useless trips realize this, and devise endless amusements for the passengers—not included in the price of the ticket. A comatose passenger doesn't do any gambling or eating. We can't have that, so deadballs are illegal."

  Cynical? Perhaps, but then why are deadballs sold legally to people traveling on errands for the government? Why do the staterooms of high-powered business executives on high-powered fast courier ships remain closed for days at a time? The people who do that other ten percent of space traveling usually do it on hibernation drugs, from the movers and shakers to the immigrants stacked like cordwood in the steerage holds of many a cargo ship.

  (Oddly, I never could find a deadball in my hasty flight from Brementon. Judging from the waking state of my fellow passengers, neither could anyone else. In a place where every drug known to man could be had simply by walking up to a guard and paying for it, deadballs were unknown. Apparently the living hell of the trip to and from the prison station was seen as part of the punishment.)

  A more legitimate reason for banning them was the informal type of travel I found myself indulging in at that very moment. Without deadballs, only the shortest ride on the rods was survivable.

  Now I was beginning to wonder if I would survive this one. Adding it up, it didn't look good.

  I had expected to awaken during the course of the voyage; I estimated between ten and a dozen half-day surfacings would be about right. When you wake from a deadball you either need to urinate very badly, or find you have already done so. Though your metabolism has been drastically slowed, you will be very hungry. Usually, a bowel movement will not be necessary. (After the trip you will with great heartbreak deliver yourself of a hard, dried... but let's skip on over that part.)

  You can do two weeks of deadballs standing on your head. A month is no real problem. Two months... you would really rather not, for reasons of both comfort and health. Three months, four months... you're pushing it. A few people have survived six months of continuous deadballing, but most would rather not speak of it, like victims of torture.

  I had plenty of air, heat, and water. In a cramped environment like the Pantechnicon, or a packing case, food becomes the dearest commodity. Try packing even very light rations for ninety days into a space you can't even stand up in. Just try it. Even if you could, are you able to endure ninety days of solitary confinement? No shuffleboard courts or slot machines. Just you, squatting in the dark, watching your toenails grow.

  But if my deadballs had been cut with something, I faced forty or fifty days of that. I would probably not starve. Part of the price of the ticket is the loss of thirty to forty pounds. With bad drugs, I might expect to lose a hundred or more on the Miracle Deadball Diet.

  "If you've learned your part cold," my father used to say, "then you've got nothing else worth worrying about. Just take the rest as it comes." Or, don't fret about things you can't do anything about. The future will deliver up its load of misery in due time.

  With that semicomforting thought, I began treating this as just a normal, expected comfort stop. I set about tidying my small space and preparing a cold meal of beef jerky and maple syrup. It's better than it sounds, when you haven't eaten anything in three days.

  I dialed the shelter to transparency.

  The first thing I saw was a thundering herd of horses.

  The drugs, right? No, I never even thought of that, though they can cause hallucinations. These horses were frozen in attitudes of great speed, as though they had galloped through a puddle of liquid helium. The freezing was certainly plausible, given the outside temperature. But they were carved from wood. I had been stowed next to a cargo of merry-go-round horses.

  They were hanging from racks inside a large packing crate that, for some delightful reason, was transparent. I assumed the case was pressurized and heated. When I played my flashlight over them a thousand jolly colors leaped out at me. I was enchanted.

  Where were they going? Who had made them? I never found out.

  Like most miscellaneous-cargo vessels, this one consisted of the bare minimum. Basically, it was a central core that contained the drive and the life support systems for cargo and crew—typically, only two or three people. It was over a mile from stem to stern, and along its length it sprouted long composite racks, not much different from a pole you would hang your clothes on. The cargo modules, including the Pantech, had standard couplers that simply and easily snapped over the "horizontal" poles—they were horizontal at launch, anyway—where it was free to swing and sway and orient itself according to the direction of thrust: "riding the rods," just like the Old Earth hoboes. When the ship landed, the rods would be depressed slightly, and the modules would slide off the ends and onto ground carriers. It was a simple system, in use for decades, standard throughout the inhabited planets.

  The Pantech was the last module on a rod near the front of the ship. I'd paid a small premium for the outside berth, since I get claustrophobic if I'm stacked in the middle, surrounded by heavy crates that could crush me if they swung in the wrong direction.

  I soon saw something odd. It was the crate Lou had abandoned on our way out to the ship. It seemed to have sprung a leak.

  I could see it a few rings forward, and one rod over. The corner he had pried up to get in and out now sported a long, white tail. It reminded me of a picture I'd once seen of a tapestry from the Middle Ages. The artist had represented a comet as a many-rayed star with a long tail to one side as it arched across the heavens. This tail was ice of some kind—hard to tell what; hell, everything froze out here. For a while the leak had been in one direction as the ship accelerated. Then, in free fall, the liquid had seeped out in all directions, making a rather pretty Christmas-tree ornament.

  I chose to take it as good news. Lou had detected something wrong with his proposed abode before it was even loaded on the ship, like a squirrel finding a leak in his hollow tree just before turning in for his winter's snooze. I hoped his new home proved a little more solid.

  Of course, he might be freezing or starving or slowly dying of thirst and there was absolutely nothing I could do to help him.

  So I drank a second dose of deadballs, turned the shelter opaque, and curled up in a warm blanket to sleep for a week. I hoped.

  * * *

  "Father, is this the Emerald City?"

  John Valentine chuckled and squeezed his son's hand.

  "It will do until something better comes along," he said.

  They were riding in a half-full tramcar that traced the edge of Hyginus Rima, in the southeast corner of Mare Vaporum, known far and wide as the entertainment capital of the system. Had they taken the tram to the end of the line young Kenneth would actually have seen the Emerald City, pretty much as Dorothy, Toto, and company had approached it in 1939 on a yellow brick road that was partly on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer soundstage and partly in the box of tricks of a process cinematographer.

  There were those who called the Hyginus Line the Yellow Brick Rail.

  The official name of the sector they were now entering was the Route of the Stars. The builders had taken their cue from the city fathers of Hollywood, U.S.A., but everything they did had to be a hundred times as large, a thousand times as spectacular—and even less substantial than the original.

  Where the stars in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard had been nothing more than small squares of masonry and brass, the ones in Hyginus were holographs the size of billboards, easily seen and read from a speeding tram-car. The giant stars seemed hammered out of pure gold, and in the center of each was a forty-foot fully animated three-dimensional image of the honoree. The stars' names were spelled out in diamonds bigger than watermelons.

  "So it's really Hollywood?" the boy asked.

  "Son of Hollywood," said his fa
ther. "Not much around here that's all that original."

  The real name of the area was the King City/Mare Vaporum Artistic and Industrial Park, but no one called it that. The King City part was gerrymandering of the most blatant sort. The actual city was over a hundred miles away, but the city limits ran on each side of the Hyginus rail until it reached Vaporum, where it ballooned to include all the area zoned for industry. The only real benefit reaped by the businesses there was the privilege of paying King City taxes.

  As for industry, the only industry in Vaporum was The Movies. Whether anything "artistic" was happening was endlessly debated among the more acerbic critics back in the city.

  Those who worked there called it The Park, The Vapors, or Hollywood, the Sequel. They spoke of going out to The Rima, or The Edge, or Yellow Bricktown. Everybody else just called it Hollywood. Since the original Hollywood was a memory, there was seldom any confusion.

  "And besides," John Valentine said to his son, "Hollywood was always just a state of mind, anyway."

  Young Kenneth pressed his face against the window beside his seat and watched the passing spectacle. The stars were only the beginning.

  Behind them were mountainous holograms of the logos of motion-picture studios, past and present, solvent and defunct. Dodger knew they were holograms, but since he had no idea what a hologram was, they were as real to him as the car he was riding in. The apparent heights of these juggernaut illusions could be measured in miles.

  There was a tapering iron tower sitting on the north pole of a half Earth globe, spitting stylized sparks and spelling out, letter by letter, A RADIO PICTURE. Next to that was a snow-covered mountain surrounded by drifting clouds and haloed with a starry diadem. A mile-high lion's head roared in the middle of an elaborate scroll of old-fashioned motion picture film, and then yet another globe, hanging suspended and massive above the barren plain, being endlessly circled by a winged machine. "An airplane, Father!"

  "That's right. Universal."

  "Look! Look!" the boy shouted, pointing to one he was more familiar with. "Sentry! That's where we're going, isn't it, Father?"