by John Varley
"I've figured out who he really is," he said, in a loud whisper.
"Sparky?" I said.
"Satan," the man who used to be Gideon Peppy said.
Folks, I don't want to turn this into a diatribe against the abuses of personal rights and freedoms, but this man needs help. Because he's harmed no one and so far hasn't harmed himself, he cannot be committed to a safe place as in the bad old days. But I'm telling you, leash laws are more humane and much more practical than the way we allow the insane the "right" to go off the proverbial deep end, unrestrained, unhelped.
This man should be stopped, before he hurts himself or someone else.
Or both.
* * *
* * *
The News Nipple
Obituary Page, 6/10/60
MARSH, Julian E. Born 2103. Mr. Marsh, better known to millions of his young fans as "Gideon Peppy," was dead on arrival at the Mare Vaporum Medical Center yesterday afternoon. The cause of death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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* * *
TELEVISION CLOWN KILLS SELF, WOUNDS TRANSIENT
(Mare Vaporum) Julian Marsh, until recently known as Gideon Peppy, arrived at his former office in the Sentry/Sensational Studios at 3:00 P.M., covered in blood, brandishing a .55-caliber automatic pistol. He fired a few rounds seemingly at random, harming no one but sending office workers and security guards running for cover.
He went directly to Studio 5, where the current episode of Sparky and His Gang was being filmed. Screaming incoherently, waving the weapon at anyone who approached him, he demanded to see young Sparky Valentine, star of the show. When informed Sparky was not due on the set for another three hours, he threatened a cameraman, telling him to roll tape. Facing the camera, he made a brief statement, the content of which has not yet been released, then put the muzzle of the gun into his mouth and fired. He was killed instantly.
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* * *
Earlier in the day Marsh had gone berserk in the Twelve-Step Inn, North King City. He attacked Mr. Buford Keeler with a kitchen knife, inflicting serious wounds on the man's abdomen and chest. Patrons said Marsh was shouting something about finding a microphone. When other customers and the bartender pulled Marsh away, he produced a handgun, fired three rounds, and fled. Mr. Keeler was healed and released.
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* * *
Gideon Peppy shouted, "Roll 'em, roll 'em, you cocksucker, or I'll blow your fuckin' head off. Is it on now?"
Peppy's hands and the front of his clothes were dark with dried blood. He stared into the camera, and smiled broadly.
"Maybe this'll satisfy the little fuck," he said, then sucked on the barrel of the gun. When he fired his whole face seemed to stretch out like a face painted on a balloon. A red mess of brains, hair, skull, and blood erupted from the crown of his head, and he fell to the floor like a puppet with cut strings. The camera moved in. There were spatters of blood on his yellow shoes.
* * *
Sparky ejected the chipcard and tapped one edge of it idly on his desk.
"Maybe that'll teach him to mess with my father," Sparky said.
He pressed the button on his desk that connected to his secretary. "Send this Peppy death tape to Curly," he said. "Tell her we need a thirty-minute documentary, freeze-frame, slow motion, whatever else you can think of. I want it on my desk by this time tomorrow, ready to outload by tomorrow evening. Also, get to work on a promo tying the death tape to the reloads of the Peppy Show, same time frame. We have to move quickly on this, it'll be old news fast. It ought to provide a good publicity lead-in to the New Peppy Show. If you need me, I'll be in the casting session across the hall."
He rose from his desk and walked across the deep carpet of his office. He went through the door and out into the public corridor. The people who passed him all smiled and waved respectfully. He had a smile for each one.
All conversation died as he entered Studio 88, where the casting session was being held. He remembered the first time he'd been there, not even knowing he was trying out for the part of Sparky. Long time ago, he mused.
He stepped up to his big chair at the end of the table. No one was sitting at the far end, where Julian Marsh used to sit, but that was okay. Everyone was clustered down at Sparky's end.
He opened a crystal candy jar and took out one of the lollipops custom-made for him by Dixie Chocolateers of Tharsis, Mars. The gold-leaf-coated paper rustled expensively as he unwrapped the sweet. He popped it into his cheek and looked around the table. He hitched himself a little higher on the padded box that enabled him to rest his elbows at table level.
"All right, ladies and gentlemen. It's magic time. Send in the first of the Peppy prospects."
Sparky was eleven.
* * *
ACT 3
"Dovetonsils," I said. "That's D as in Dogberry, O as in Ophelia, V as in Verona, E as in Exeter, T as in Adenoids. Percy Dovetonsils."
There was a short pause.
"T as in what, sir?"
"T as in Titania, O as in Oberon, N as in Nym, S as in Shylock, I as in Iago L as in Elsinore, S as in Shallow. First name Percy."
There was a longer pause.
"Sir, is this some sort of joke?"
A horrible suspicion overcame me and I sat up straighter in my chair, almost spilling my drink.
"Good god," I said. "Am I talking to a human being?"
She was on firmer ground there, though I might have debated the point.
"Yes, sir!" she piped. "It's part of our Service with a Smile policy here at Capitalists and Immigrants Trust. If you only had elected to receive picture as well as sound you would have seen that I've been smiling throughout this transaction... or at least until you started to spell your name."
Good fortune and a dislike of being seen myself during a phone call had spared me the no-doubt-hideous rictus that would pass for a business policy smile at C IT. Imagine sitting at a phone bank and being paid to smile all day as you answer customers' dumb questions. I'd sooner host a perpetual game show. However, the lack of a picture had lulled me into thinking I was speaking to the usual robotic screening program, the first of a normal three or four steps before you contacted an actual human being.
"Please connect me with a machine, at once!" I ordered. There was no response, but I fancied I heard a slight sniff, and wondered if I had caused just the hint of a frown to obscure a few dozen pearly whites at the edges of her corporate-mandated grin.
The problem with humans—if you've ever tried to talk to one over the phone—is they sometimes show imagination at a time when you would least expect it. They make illogical connections, fly off on fanciful tangents. Usually this simply leads to confusion, but now and then it can sow seeds of suspicion that might, if not nipped in the bud, lead to an unexpected truth. If you are engaged in something the least bit dodgy it is better not to take that chance, since truth is the last thing you want to come out.
What I was doing was probably not illegal. I say that because laws seem always to get broader and more restrictive every year. Hardly anyone ever retires a law. You don't hear about laws being unwritten, recalled, allowed to expire. You begin with civil liberties, and after a few hundred years you have a legal system that can't even find liberty, much less protect it. I couldn't afford a lawyer to vet my proposed actions against fifty years of legal encrustation, would not hire one if I could afford it.
But in uncertain times it is usually best to deal with a machine. Machines always play by defined rules. They may be asked to look for odd behavior, but that means somebody must define "odd," and if it can be defined then it's not truly odd. Just as the dealer always hits on sixteen and stays on seventeen, machines in a certain situation behave the same way every time. If you know this, and know at least some of the parameters, you can put the knowledge to good use.
"How may I help you?" The voice was no more mechanical th
an the real woman's voice had been. I personally think there ought to be a law about that, and I'm not one to support many new laws. I like to know where I stand. "Percy Dovetonsils," I said. "I am an attorney working for the estate of the late Mr. Dovetonsils. We are trying to locate bank accounts hinted at in his will, but not specified."
"We carry no accounts for a Dovetonsils, Percy," the machine said.
"How about Harold Bissonette? Double S, double T."
"We carry no accounts for a Bissonette, Harold."
"Try Flywheel, Wolf J."
The machine had never heard of old Wolf, either, and I broke the connection. I marked off two more possibilities on the grid I had made on a page of creamy-white hotel stationery, and called the next bank on my list.
Long ago I had read a biography of W. C. Fields, the great film comedian from the dawn of the talking-picture era. Fields was not a very nice man, but he was a quirky one. When he traveled, and when he had money, he would stop in small towns and open accounts in local banks. He seemed to enjoy the thought of having emergency stashes squirreled away all over the country. His had been a harsh childhood, he trusted no one very far. If he kept any list of these accounts, no one ever found it, and it was assumed at his death that he had long since lost track of most of them. Their location died with him.
Well, I thought that was just a wonderfully eccentric thing to do. I decided to follow in his footsteps, back in the days when I had more money than I knew what to do with. Everywhere I went I opened small accounts, almost none of them in my own name. I was going to be different from Fields, though. I was going to remember where they all were.
I did remember a few. Those were all long gone.
Sometimes it seems to me that my younger self spent most of his time dreaming up things he could do to make my older self miserable. You ever feel that way? You were twenty, you had the world by the tail. Outlooks were all rosy. It would never occur to you that, by the time you were eighty or ninety or, ahem, one hundred, your worldview would have changed dramatically. That you need not be senile to forget things you did seventy years before. That, in all that time, you would have ample chance to lose your careful notes, both written and mental. At twenty, there is simply no imagining the slings and arrows of outrageous vicissitude.
Or maybe I'm unusual. Maybe I'm a grasshopper and you are all ants, or most of you, anyway. Perhaps your life is in perfect order, everything cataloged, pigeonholed, in its proper place. I used to sneer at that sort of life, and I probably am temperamentally incapable of leading such a life, but it does have its attractions. But how was I to learn frugality, caution, temperance, moderation—all those things so beloved of poor Richard Almanack—the way I was brought up? I never had what you'd call a home until I moved in with Polly and Melina.
In any event, my one attempt at being a good little ant, storing up acorns for a rainy day, was by now far in the past. Most, if not all, of those caches had been plundered years ago. I no longer knew where, or even if, those piles of acorns existed. My careful accounting had come to naught.
I did have one thing going for me, though. I had used a limited number of names, twenty-five in all. I'd chosen them carefully as names unlikely to be inflicted on anyone ever again, yet names I would not forget because they were all old friends of mine.
So now when I first arrive at a place I have not visited in a long time, I spend a few hours idly paging through the listings of financial institutions on the Yellow Screen.
You never know. One day twenty years ago I stumbled onto an account in the name of William Claude Dukenfield. It was one of "my" names, but the money had been deposited in 1935. Somehow, through mergers, takeovers, booms and busts, devaluations, failures and holidays, through the very Invasion of the earth itself, this little account was still tucked away in a bank on Mars that might have been the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the little Poughkeepsie neighborhood bank where old W.C. had left it, in the midst of a great depression. Still gathering interest. I had no way to get at it, probably wouldn't have tried, anyway. Ironic fact: the original deposit had been two hundred United States dollars. When I found it, inflation and other exigencies had allowed the money to grow to the princely sum of L$239.14. About enough for two days in the hotel I was making my calls from.
"How may I help you?"
The voice was practically identical to the machine voice at the first bank I'd called.
"Is this the computerized answering service of Hamlet Savings and Loan?"
"Yes, it is."
"I'm searching for accounts in the name of Otis Criblecoblis."
"I'm sorry, we carry no accounts in that name."
"How about J. Cheever Loophole?"
"I'm sorry, we carry no—
"Try Eustace McGargle."
"I'm sorry, we—" I hung up. Two down, about sixty or seventy to go.
Why three names? you may be asking. Why not just read off the list of twenty-five names at each bank you call? There was actually no completely logical reason, since I was pretty sure I was doing nothing illegal. But when you have as many outstanding warrants or persons pursuing you as I do, you learn to be cautious. Asking for nonexistent bank accounts was almost sure to raise a red flag somewhere in the bank computer's programming, the electronic equivalent of a teller calling the bank president over to frown dubiously at the check you're trying to kite. I much prefer wide-eyed innocence to the professionally jaundiced eye. Nothing is more wide-eyed than a computer. It does what it is told, and never asks the next logical question. Four was a common number of events to trigger programmed alarms, possibly based on what is known as the Bellman Principle: What I tell you three times is true. Ergo, what I tell you four times might be a load of shit.
That, plus the fact that three is my lucky number.
"How may I help you?"
"Bank of Oberon? I'm searching for accounts in the name of Egbert Souse."
"You're out of luck there." Great. A user-friendly program.
"Then surely you've heard of Hugo Z. Hackenbush."
"Not during this lifetime." Did this bank cater to comedians?
"One last try, shithead. A. Pismo Clam."
"Does the A stand for Ambrose, or Albert?" I sat up straighter. Was I getting a bite?
"Which one do you have?" I asked, cautiously.
"Neither one. I have a William Clam, and a Jake's Clams, though."
"Yeah, well, stick it—" I broke the connection. No use trying to get the last word with a computer. I stood up and stretched, took a sip from the rum and Coke on the telephone desk, then walked to the window and looked out.
Oberon. The Bard's World. My God, what a place.
* * *
Just about everything on Oberon is worthy of a postcard. So where does one start? At the beginning, I guess. Actually, a little bit before.
What we call Oberon today is not what we called Oberon when I was a boy. Oberon is the most distant of the Uranian moons, and the second largest. It's smaller than Titania by a few dozen miles, and about a hundred thousand miles farther away from Uranus. It used to be an unremarkable little ball of rock, faintly orange in color.
Like all the outer-planet habitats, it didn't have enough gravity to be of much use other than as a nuisance. Not enough gravity to make a curtain fall properly, to stage a decent sword fight, or to perform classical ballet. This was naturally a cause of some concern to the Oberoni, so they set about finding a way to provide enough gravity for the theater.
Actually, they had a few other reasons that may have counted more heavily than falling theater curtains. But I can dream, can't I?
Research has shown, so I'm told, that the healthiest environment for humans and other Earth-evolved animals is somewhere between Luna's one sixth and Mars's one third. Anything lighter caused Lowgrav Syndrome, which wouldn't kill you but could certainly annoy you a lot, and which was expensive to treat and hold in remission. Anything higher... well, humans were no longer living anywhere with more
than 0.5 gravity, and good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. I experienced one gravity in the Trip to Earth centrifuge at Armstrong Park when I was six. We've all seen the effects of one gee in old movies and television. People plod like elephants in molasses. Things fall at a frightening rate. Bodies are bulked up by fighting gravity while the flesh is dragged down from giving in to it. Every inch of skin sags. Some of it is painful, and I left the centrifuge wondering how they could face threescore and ten years of that. Not for me, thank you very much.
There are only four ways of providing a given acceleration of gravity, until some genius finds a way to create it. One is simply to accumulate the necessary mass. Thought was given to altering the orbits of all the five largest Uranian moons, smashing them together. That would have been fun, don't you think? But it wouldn't have provided as much gravity as the engineers were seeking, and besides, it would have taken forever for the resulting mass to cool enough to be useful.
Then there is Pluto's Solution, which I guess is technically Method 1A, since it also involves accumulating mass, but it certainly feels like a different solution. Over a century and a half people have been venturing out into the really distant spaces—so far that Brementon and the sun look like next-door neighbors—bringing back tiny black holes. I mean really tiny. Smaller than atoms, they say, though I find that unlikely. There are now thousands and thousands of those little black holes orbiting near the core of Pluto, through solid rock that presents no more obstacle to them than interstellar space. There's enough of them in there now to provide about one third of a gravity on the surface. Those little suckers pull hard!
One day the black holes will suck all the mass of Pluto into what would be, so I read, a tiny-to-small black hole (the large ones contain whole galaxies, if you can believe that). There's no question this will happen. The debate is about how long it will take. Prevailing opinion is at least a million years, so you may not want to unload your real-estate holdings. Of course, some scientists claim it will happen next Tuesday. Take that into your vacation plans.