by John Varley
In reality, I had only two things on my mind. My stomach, and my bowels.
I had been awake almost continuously for the previous week, having stretched the deadballs as far as I could. I had grown a beard, and my toenails looked like pruning hooks. There are 168 hours in a standard week. Ten thousand minutes. I had spent every one of them thinking about food.
I had eaten the last of my provisions. I had licked the wrapping paper and cardboard, then I ate the cardboard. Then I ate the paper. I chewed on rags, hoarded my last ten sticks of chewing gum like some wild-eyed troll at the bottom of a well. I hate to admit this, but several times I thought about Toby, snuggled safe and warm only a few feet beneath me. I began to wonder if he'd taste like chicken.
They say that historical fasters like Gandhi and Hornburg eventually didn't feel much in the way of hunger. That's what they say, but you couldn't prove it by me. It only got worse, hour by hour, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Then it got worse again.
There was really only one thing to distract me from my hunger, and that was the state of my lower digestive tract. Every ounce of high-nutrition food I'd eaten since the trip began was down there now, a bolus about the size and shape of Phobos and twice as hard. It was going to take surgery to pass it, I felt sure, and the medico had better go in with a sharp pickax and plenty of dynamite.
So pardon me if I sort of skip lightly over the arrival (thousands of ships at least as large as mine, floating inside a vast cylinder spangled with the light from a billion portholes), the transfer (swarms of robot tugs no bigger than park squirrels detaching each cargo pod, reading its destination, then jetting off toward the correct bay like ten thousand maniacs charging for a front-row seat at a Motomania Show), and my exit from the Pantechnicon and subsequent reentry into public pressure (my spine was trying to form some unusual letter—Q or Z, I think—and my legs promised never to be straight again). When I could walk I looked briefly, with little enthusiasm, at the cargo pod Ukulele Lou had rejected at Pluto. All I could determine was that whatever had been inside was spoiled, for sure. Then I had to step lively as a big cargobot plucked the damaged pod from the line and took it off somewhere, presumably to fill out quintuplicate insurance forms. I couldn't pick out the pod Lou had escaped to. It might have been delivered to a bay clear on the other side of the hub for all I knew. I wished him luck again, and found the exit to public corridors.
Thirty seconds later I was devouring the mother of all hamburgers, the National Gall'ry, the Garbo's sal'ry, the Camembert of hamburgers. Actually, it was a MacVending 15¢ Microwave Special, dab of ketchup, dab of mayo, hold the pickle, lettuce, purple Bermuda onion, beefsteak tomato, sprouts, mustard, slice of Cheddar cheese and everything else you might think of, but by then I was ready to lick dried soda pop and crushed peppermints off the auditorium floor... and like it. So I shall always treasure that burger.
I ate two more just like it, hurried to the bathroom and threw them all up, went back outside, and ate another that seemed likely to stay down. Then I sought out the nearest Minute Surgery franchise and had someone take care of the other problem. I promised you I would skip over that part, and I will, though I did take note of some of the medico's expressions of astonishment and merriment, and some of my own caustic replies for possible use in my next Punch and Judy show.
I shall similarly give short shrift to the most glorious meal I have ever eaten. I would gladly spend several hours describing it, which is about the time I spent eating it, but my powers of description would surely fail me. It was, after all, simply good, solid, restaurant food. There were no hummingbird livers or ocelot's tongues or jellied kumquat tidbits. Nothing exotic at all, really. A big steak and mashed potatoes and corn, stuff like that, followed by most of a cherry pie and a pint of ice cream. It wasn't the preparation that made it taste so wonderful, it was the special sauce starvation provides. And it didn't take three hours to eat because it was a trencherman's groaning board. I just took the time to savor every bite. You should try that sometime, though I doubt you could ever experience my intense delight unless you'd gone that long without eating.
Refueled, reamed out, beginning to feel a reasonable approximation of a human being, I found my way to the freight offices and reclaimed the baggage that until recently had been my home. I glanced at the telltales that showed Toby was alive and well and deflated the dome. Gad! Had I really spent three months in there? The air that came whistling out said it had been at least that long. Whew! Did I smell like that? Probably.
I'd been meaning to go direct to the elevators, but took the time to check into a coin-op shower 'n shave. I came out feeling, if not exactly ready to whip the world, at least ready to go a few rounds with it.
* * *
Normally I wouldn't spend much time describing an elevator ride. But on Oberon II, nothing is quite like it is on other planets, and elevators are one of the most different.
Oh, and I'll drop that "Oberon II" business right now. I quickly realized that, in the time I'd been away, Oberon II had become simply, Oberon. What we used to call Oberon, the rocky moon, was now called Old Oberon. It made sense. There were a few thousand holdouts still living on Old Oberon, and a few tens of thousands of demolition miners and so forth, but as the moon began increasingly to resemble a rotten apple with big bites taken out of it even those few residents would have to move.
I remembered some of the grand old theaters of Old Oberon: the Palace, the Olivier, the Streep, the Chicago, and wondered if any of them were still standing in the gloomy airless rubble. Not to worry. All of them, and many more, plus a great variety of other structures had been plucked bodily out of the path of the marauding bulldozers. Most of them were sitting in mothballs at the Ob4 Trojan point, waiting for enough of the rim to be built to support an historical disneyland, the first to re-create a time since the Invasion, to be known as (guess what) Old Oberon. If all these New, Old, II, and whatever Oberons have you a bit confused, join the club. And don't worry about it.
Elevators. First, stop thinking in terms of a box that opens and closes and moves up and down in a shaft. Now, follow me... and watch your step as you board, please....
* * *
"The Noon elevator will be departing from Level 20, Concourse B, at 9:00 A.M.," the announcer's voice said. "That is in ten minutes' time. The Noon elevator will be leaving promptly at nine. All aboard, please."
So already this elevator is different, right? In fact, Noon elevators departed every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Only here, Noon was a destination as well as a time. It's a source of great confusion in communication, but it's solidly entrenched by now, and the Oberoni don't seem to mind it.
The huge partly finished clock face that is Oberon seen from space is the original Twelve and Six spokes, Twelve being flanked by spokes going to Eleven and to One, Six being between Five and Seven. Got it? The one designated as the twelve o'clock position is known as Noon Arc, and the other is Six Arc. People from Twelve are called Nooners. People from Six are called Aussies. I don't know why.
I boarded with plenty of time to spare, found a seat, and strapped in. I spent my time looking out the window until the hatch was sealed. The elevator was only half full, on this level, anyway.
The deck under my feet began to flash in pale blue letters: FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. A bell sounded, and I sank gratefully into my chair as the car accelerated. Nice to be back in some gravity again.
"All clear," came a voice, and most of the people around me unbuckled and got up. So did I. The acceleration was mild, and didn't last for long. It was quickly followed by another period of weightlessness. The whole trip would be like that.
An elevator moving up and down the spoke of a spinning wheel has some difficult engineering feats to accomplish during the journey. During my first trips, when the wheel was new and consisted only of Twelve and Six, the elevator car was filled with seats mounted on gimbals, so the passengers could swing into any attitude, depending o
n where the force was coming from at the time. This was logical, but very boring. Stewards would escort you to and from the bathroom, if you were unlucky enough to have to go. I don't even want to try to describe those except for one little horror you can ponder at your leisure. Imagine standing at the toilet, answering nature's call, when suddenly the stream is splashing against the wall, then the ceiling. This happened to me when the gimbal got stuck. I imagine it would be even worse for women.
Now they had a new type of car. What it had to do was quickly and smoothly adjust to acceleration and deceleration, and to transform itself from a weightless environment to a 0.4 gee environment during the length of the trip.
There is no way I could describe all the ingenious dodges the engineers did to pull this off. If that was all they did, it would be impressive enough. But the car also had to be able to start and stop during the trip, and it had to deal with the angular force of Oberon's rotation. Just how this works is far beyond me, but you can see how the turning motion of the spoke would result in gradually increasing weight. It's called, I think, the Coriolanus Force, though why they should name it after him is beyond me. It produces a ride that even seasoned spacers sometimes find hard to take.
I was thinking of taking the elevator—the internal elevator—up to another level when the bell sounded again. A wall—I was pretty sure it had been the "ceiling" when we started—began to flash FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. The wall I was pretty sure had been the FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR when I sat down now had no chairs attached to it. I couldn't think where they had gone; stolen while my back was turned, no doubt. But being only "pretty sure" of one's location and attitude was a common experience in zero gee, so I didn't worry about it. I was reassured when chairs began sprouting from the new FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR, some of them with sleeping people already strapped in. I kicked over to one, turned my feet to touch the FLOOR3, and felt the weight return to me gradually. Which meant we were slowing down again already, right? Well, it would seem so, but from inside the elevator it was hard to tell just what was happening. I felt a moment of nausea when we abruptly went weightless again—meaning we were now motionless?—and felt that superb lunch turn a cartwheel in my stomach. But the urge to purge went away. I've always had good space legs.
If you think you have good equilibrium as well, the Noon elevator is a good place to give it an acid test. Many a traveler have been humbled by the constantly shifting tides of the trip. The Oberoni call the condition C-sickness. About a quarter of the passengers were wearing Chuck-O-Laters, basically heavy-duty barf bags that strap over your face like a gas mask, with a constant suction and replaceable trap. In spite of them and in spite of the Herculean efforts of cleaning robots, the Noon elevator always smells faintly of vomit.
Soon we were under way again—a new FLOOR, with new people sleeping in new chairs—and I took the elevator up six floors to the casino. That trip was a tummy-twister in itself.
What a delightful place the casino was. I've seen craps played in weightlessness, and in one-sixth gee, and 0.4 gee. But never had I seen craps tables and roulette wheels that had to quickly change from one state to the other. The place was a blur of motion and a haze of smoke and flashing lights, and it seemed every ten minutes or so it would all reorient itself, the croupiers would put away the gravity dice and wheels and break out the zero-gee stuff. It was fascinating to watch. Soon I was hopelessly disoriented, but it hardly seemed to matter.
I spent the next hour on a tour of the various levels. There were staterooms, sleeping berths, six restaurants, a carnival and game rooms for children, an infirmary, and movie theaters. No pool, though. The Oberoni engineers were not quite up to that one. And no legitimate stage.
The trip is five hundred miles. The elevator makes it in an average of five hours. It would do it a lot faster but for the constant stops and starts needed to avoid collision with the spiders. I wanted to see one. A steward told me they usually encountered one close enough to see, and directed me to the forward observation bubble. It was the first place I'd been to that gave me a clear view of the massive spoke itself, like a column of ice five miles thick. It dwindled in the distance, where the wide, bright band of the Noon Arc could be seen. A single rail mounted on the outside of the spoke was our guideline. To each side of it I could see huge pipes, wires, and mysterious structures, but never enough of them to spoil the clean, perfect line of the spoke itself, pure and pristine as the swooping cable of a suspension bridge.
I knew the cable was not made of ice, but that's what it looked like. Bright white in color, with a dull surface, crisscrossed with thousands of lines like ice-skater's tracks on a measureless rink.
Spider silk. Trillions and trillions of strands of spiderweb.
That was the breakthrough that had enabled the building of Oberon II. They had found a way to produce massive quantities of the strongest material known to man. As it so often turns out to be, the solution was obvious.
Build a bigger spider.
We stopped several times during the first hour, for no reason I or anyone else in the dome could see. I was starting to get discouraged, because I knew the largest spiders never went to the high-gee environments from about a third of the way down the spoke. Lower than that and their legs could not support the weight of their bodies.
"Some of the first experiments on animals in weightlessness were done on spiders," someone to my left said. I turned to look at her. She had not been in that chair when I sat down. Believe me, I would have noticed.
"Is that right?"
"Back in the twentieth century," she said. "They wanted to find out if they'd spin webs in zero-gee." She was lovely. Heart-shaped face, green eyes, a slender figure.
"Did they?" I asked.
"They built very strange webs."
"Not as strange as this one, I'll bet."
"Probably not. My name is Poly." She held out her hand, and I took it.
"No kidding? I knew a Polly, once."
"And don't mention Polly and Sparky, from that old kids' show. Everybody does that. It's short for Polyhymnia."
I admit I was taken aback for a moment, but her expression told me she had no idea who she was talking to. Boy, couldn't I have given her a shock? But I quickly recalled the name on the passport I was using—one I had paid good money for in the back alleys of Pluto. So she'd never know.
"I'm Trevor," I said. "Trevor Howard."
"And I'm just Polyhymnia, for now," she said.
"That name rings a bell...."
"One of the Muses."
"I was going to say Graces."
"There are only three of them. There are nine Muses."
"So you come from a large family?"
She laughed. "Only four, so far. But you're right, we're all named for Muses. Mother thought we should get into the arts."
"Polyhymnia must be a singer," I ventured.
"Sacred song, to be exact."
"And are you?"
"Not hymns. But music is my racket."
I made a sour face. "That one's old as the hills."
"So's that expression. Where are these hills, anyway?"
"Don't ask me. I'm from Luna."
There was a little more banter like this. Basically we were both trying to decide if a temporary berth was in order, neither in too big a hurry to make up our minds. I learned she was a violinist.
"With an orchestra?"
"Someday. Right now I mostly work in the theater pit. Utility string hacker. But I'm available for square dances, too."
"You're in the theater? That's great. I've spent some time on the stage, myself."
"You know, I thought your face looked vaguely familiar. Maybe you were in a show I played in. We don't get much chance to look at the actors, you know. Our backs are usually to them, and we're down so low."
"It's possible," I said, dubiously. "But this is my first trip to Oberon in about twenty years."
"I guess not, then. I've never been out of the system."
We were hedging aro
und the issue of age. It's not polite to ask, and for my money, it's not good form to let it bother you. In this era when not many people look much over thirty, some of us are better than others at estimating. I'm usually pretty good, and I had her pegged for mid-twenties, both from body attitudes and gestures and from the fact that she was looking to climb up the ladder in the music world. After you've reached sixty or so, you stop thinking things are going to change a great deal.
A difference of seventy-five years can be a problem, if you let it be. I try not to let it. If she was fifty or so, there would be no generation gap. After the fifties, we're all more or less in the same generation.
I asked her where she lived and she said Six Arc. But her job was at Eleven, Wednesday through Sunday. It meant sleeping on a sofa at a friend's place and a twice-weekly twelve-hour commute.
"I've got a cute little apartment at Seven," she said, "but I only see it on my days off. With the housing situation the way it is, I don't dare give it up. To go to work I have to take a light train to Six, catch the Six elevator, the hub shuttle to the Noon elevator, down to Noon, and a heavy train to Eleven. The actual distance from my home to my job, as the vacuum-breathing crow would fly, is only about eight hundred miles. The route I take is about fifteen hundred miles. The Rim Express does the trip in forty minutes, but who can afford that?
This all had my head spinning a bit, to tell the truth. I finally had to sit down, later, and sketch it out. Draw a clock with only eleven, twelve, and one at the top, and five, six, seven on the bottom. Forget about the hands; the clock itself is turning. Clockwise. A train moving against the spin is a light train, since the faster it goes the lighter you feel. A heavy train is one moving spinward, with the spin, thus adding its velocity to the speed of the turning wheel. You get heavy. When the wheel is finished all but the most local trains will travel antispinward. No trip will be longer than about forty-five minutes.