The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  "Aren't there elevators from Seven and Eleven—"

  "And One and Five?" she finished for me. "It would save me a few minutes of travel time, but it doesn't make sense, economically. Elevators will be built on Three and Nine spokes, when they're finished. On that great, glorious day. Golden Spike Day. Buy your tickets now."

  "Golden Spike?"

  "After the American Transcontinental Railroad. They drove a golden spike where the trains from the east met the rails from the west. Besides, there's not a whole lot of commuters like me. Not a whole lot of traffic at all between the Sixers and the Mad Dogs."

  Feeling a little like a straight man, I said, "Mad Dogs?"

  "Sure. They aren't Englishmen, and they go out in the Noonday sun."

  "I get it."

  "They call us Aussies, after the old penal colony back on Earth."

  "I get the feeling there's not a lot of love lost there."

  She made a dismissive gesture. "Most of the government is at Noon. The bulk of white-collar workers live there, bureaucrats, agencies. Six is more working-class. They say the two arcs are growing apart, politically and culturally. We're already as different as Mirandans and Arielites. Before long we're going to be as distinct as East and West Germans were, hundreds of years ago, before they reunified.

  I had no idea what she was talking about, but rather than pipe up with "Germans?" I just nodded my head wisely. That usually works, and it did this time, too, with a little help from a spider the size of a brontosaurus.

  The elevator slowed to a stop again, and when our chairs reoriented themselves we could see something large and black in the distance.

  "It's a D-9 Motherspinner," Poly said, pointing at it.

  "That's the big ones, right? I mean, I hope so. I don't like to think of an animal much bigger than that." She nodded, and we watched it approach our capsule.

  It was hard at first to make out just what I was seeing, or to realize how huge it really was. It's always a problem in space, with no references. Here, the reference points I could see were already so outlandish in size that at first it seemed the arachnid was really no larger than a big horse. Then it got closer. Oh, my, an elephant, maybe? Then it got closer again, and the light got a little better. Jesus, at least a brontosaurus.

  The captain of our elevator (that still sounds weird to me, like the general of our sidewalk) threw a light on it for us. It didn't help as much as you'd think, because the creature was such a deep, perfect shiny black. Its carapace didn't reflect light so much as it reflected highlights, like chrome trim. I'm sure you could shave by looking at its skin.

  "Vacuum-proof, of course," Poly said. "It has some beetle genes in it."

  "Right," I said. "Cross a beetle with a battleship, and there you go."

  "My father works a D-9," she said, proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back.

  "My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?"

  "No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one. And that's not Miss Dixie."

  It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspinner. I was still taken aback by the man riding the eight-legged behemoth. Until that moment I had not known they were piloted.

  "Miss Dixie," I muttered.

  "All Motherspinners are female," Poly said.

  And those who ride 'em, much braver than I, I decided.

  The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, businesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward.

  "The driver doesn't run the legs," Poly told me. "He steers, gets her where she needs to go, then stops her and lets the spinning begin."

  The closest I saw in a reference book, much later, was the black widow spider. I don't know if she had a red hourglass under her belly or not, but Poly said she definitely was not a black widow. She was a cross between many web-weaving species, with a lot of made-to-order genes stuck in there to make her do the sort of weaving the engineers wanted: a thousand-mile web anchored only at the center, precisely opposite of what most weaving spiders would naturally do.

  "The D-9s don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start running with them. She can put out thousands of miles of silk at one sitting. He's probably positioning her for that right now."

  The spider started moving, off our rail and to one side. The driver waved at us as he went by, and then the elevator started moving again. I got a last glimpse of the thousands of spinnerets on her underbelly. Behind her, very close to the cable itself, was what looked like a tide of black ink.

  "D-3s," Poly told me. With horror, I realized the tide was a million "small" spiders, no bigger than a collie dog.

  I'm not overly fond of any animal without fur. I don't like spiders at all. I listened with half an ear as Poly told me more than I wanted to know about the sex life, diet, pedigree, care of, and general all-around good social standing of ninety-ton arachnids. When she was a girl, she used to go to the "stables" and her father let her hand-feed Miss Dixie. A vision straight out of Dante, for my money. What did she feed the beast? Sugar cubes? Dead cattle? Giant house-flies? I didn't ask. Then something she said made me sit up straight.

  "Here, now," I said. "You say this spider was here to patch up the spoke? You're talking about the spoke that my own very precious body is currently dangling from? The spoke I was led to believe was strong enough to support three Noon Arcs if it had to? This is the spoke that spider is fixing?"

  She laughed, but I was only partly in jest. Who wants to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Grand Canyon like The Perils of Pauline and then see the rope start to fray? Not me.

  "I didn't say patching up. I said 'strengthening.' One reason it could support three times what it's called on to support is that we keep alert and ahead of any deterioration. Computers figure it out, naturally. The thing is, the stresses on the web are greater during construction than they will be when the rim is complete. Then it'll settle into a state of constant, easy-to-predict stress. We'll need only about one percent of the spiders we use today."

  Maybe so, I thought, but it struck me that moving into this damn thing before it was finished might not be such a hot idea. I mean, would you move a chair and a television into an apartment where they were still blasting the kitchen and bedroom out of rock?

  And another odd thought. What would happen to those other ninety-nine spiders when the wheel was complete? If their drivers were sentimental enough to name the monsters, would they be eager to see them tossed on a scrap heap? And don't forget about the animal-rights lunatics. Scarcely a flea can be poisoned in Luna without triggering a march. Think what a lobby these critters would have.

  Not to worry. I later learned the surviving D-9s (whose life span was not known) would be moved to the Ariel II project.

  I was about to make my move on Poly when she headed me off at the pass.

  "I was going up to the casino for a while," she said. "Would you like to go with me?"

  No, but I'd like to... strike that. I gave her a rueful smile.

  "One thing my daddy taught me well," I said. "Never gamble. And I never do."

  "I was thinking of going to one of the card tables, play a little five-card draw."

  "Poker?" I said. "Why didn't you say so? Lead the way."

  * * *

  I lost a small amount, and by the fifth hand I realized she was working with one of the other players. He looked to be about her age, and had a bad habit of tinkering with his ring that a really alert house would have quickly spotted. But there was no house here, except for the two percent they automatically extracted from each pot: table rental, basically. Few casinos make much money from the card tables. Apparently once
you were seated and had your chips in front of you, the house didn't care if you telegraphed your intentions to your partner by farting in Morse code, so long as the other players didn't object. None of the other four had any idea what was going on.

  By the tenth hand I had their system figured out, and I took them for several hundred dollars. By the fifteenth hand they knew I was onto them, so I cashed in my chips and winked at the guy as I left. I went up a level and ordered a drink and took it to a window seat. The Coriolanus Force was coming from a steep angle now, "down" was somewhere between a perpendicular to the spoke and another to the rim. The elevator accommodated this by turning the cable-side FLOOR into a series of three-foot-wide steps. It made everything look a little cockeyed. The row of windows I was looking through, for instance, had been horizontal when I first saw this deck. Now they were at a thirty-degree angle to my internal "level." Don't worry about it if you can't visualize it. I had to see a computer model of it before I got it straight in my head.

  "How long did it take you to catch on to us?" Poly said, placing her drink on the table beside mine, sitting beside me. (The glasses? Magnetic bases with clear glass hemispheres mounted on little gimbals. Turn them upside down and nothing would spill. In zero gee a top snapped over the liquid automatically and you sipped through a straw.)

  "You guys weren't bad at all," I told her, fudging a little. She wasn't bad. He was playing with fire. "Don't ever get in a rough game, for high stakes. Your boyfriend might not make it out alive."

  "His name is Brian, and he's not my boyfriend."

  "No?"

  "A classmate and violin rehearsal partner. We're really terrible, aren't we?"

  "Don't play with the big boys," I reemphasized.

  She shrugged. "It was just for fun. Kind of exciting, but we never took very much money. We didn't want to make anybody suspicious."

  "You win enough, somebody at the table's gonna be suspicious. Make sure he doesn't catch you in anything. Make him have to prove it. The other players'll back you, usually."

  "What if they don't?"

  "Make sure you're sitting close to the door. Not in front of it, not with your back to it. Then hope, if you're cornered, that the weapon you brought to the table is better than the ones they brought."

  "You carry a weapon to a poker game?" She looked excited at the idea.

  "Always."

  "What's the best one?"

  "The sense not to sit down with killers."

  "That's not a weapon."

  "Depends on how you employ it. It's the best one I know." And the one I've used the least, I added, dolefully, to myself.

  She cocked her head the way self-confident, lovely young girls do, girls who haven't suffered much yet. A girl who is trying to decide if you are a pearl in her oyster or just sand in her clam.

  "You've been around a bit, haven't you?" she asked.

  "Here and there."

  "I've never been off Oberon. It sounds like an exciting way to live."

  "You mean professional gambling?"

  "You said you never gamble."

  "Poker's not gambling. And I'm not a professional. It's too exciting a way to make a living." This was true, though over the years I've played here and there, depending on my circumstances and the qualifications of the other players. (Who do you want to play with? Rich people, people who won't miss it, and who fancy themselves card sharks.)

  "May I ask how old you are?" she said.

  I put my hand behind her neck and drew her to my lips. She didn't seem to object. When I broke away a little, she was smiling.

  "Old enough to know a gentlewoman never asks that question."

  "Who said I was gentle?"

  * * *

  She was, though. Quite gentle when she wanted to be. Something else entirely when sterner measures took her fancy.

  "Hello. Uh... is this..."

  "Oberon Mutual?" the voice said, helpfully.

  "Uh... yes." Had I called them already? It seemed I'd been living a tape loop, the same conversation over and over.

  "Do you have an account for... T. Frothingwell Bellows?"

  "I'm sorry, we do not."

  They'd never heard of Woolchester Cowperthwaite Fields or Elwood Dunk, either. I looked at the little handset phone, and rubbed my ear, which felt hot and sweaty. Maybe I ought to get one of those implanted phones, like the huge majority of my fellow citizens. I'd had to ask for this handset at the front desk; they no longer put phones in rooms.

  Ah, but the key word was "citizen." I was not a citizen, except in the narrow, textbook meaning of one who resides, or someone born in a certain administrative district. Citizens didn't break the law. It seemed, these days, that I couldn't help breaking three or four laws before breakfast.

  If I ever started thinking of myself as a citizen, I was sure arrest would follow within days.

  I put the phone down, along with any thought of having Big Brother's favorite listening device implanted in my head. I picked up the pack of reefer I'd bought at the drugstore downstairs, withdrew a yellow paper cylinder, and struck it. As I drew in the smoke I moseyed over to the big window and stood looking out over the city of Noon.

  I guess you had to call it a city. It was a big clump of tall buildings, like you'd see on Old Earth or Mars. Everywhere else cities are underground, defined by internal space, "cubic," not by external walls. Surface cities are defined by buildings, crisscrossed by open-topped streets, speckled with parks and fountains and many other things, all open to the sky. It can produce agoraphobia in people raised underground.

  But after you'd called it a city, you had to add that it was like no city ever seen on Earth or Mars. These buildings were not anchored on bedrock; everything below them was man-made for about two or three hundred feet, then there was nothing but vacuum in the basements. You'll have to put the rec room somewhere else, Dad.

  The realization that the buildings did not have to be tied to something as stable as a planetary crust had quickly sunk in among the Oberoni architectural community, and it had liberated them. Or driven them crazy, depending on who you talked to. Liberated architects, men and women with a newfound freedom to explore, a new Zeitgeist, if you will, can create a Parthenon on the one hand, and a Bauhaus on the other.

  The revolution that had produced Noon City and the several other clumps of madness on the rim of Oberon was the realization that they need not be tied down. In fact, it was better if they weren't. The construction of the wheel in the early stages had often required the shifting of large masses up to several miles to maintain balance with the opposite arc. Instead of wasting their time building big blocks of nothing, the engineers had made buildings on rails. If the wheel started to wobble a little, by golly, why they'd just get a few skyscrapers in gear and motor on down the road.

  I told you the Oberoni were different.

  And then, since you were literally building everything, first building the ground, then building from the ground up, and since the rails were already in place, why not utilize the long-established efficiencies of the production line? Why not build all the structures in one spot and roll them to where you wanted them? Build your city like Henry Ford built Model Ts.

  Now, old Henry was famous for saying you could have a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Applying that rule here, the Oberoni might have come up with a monumentally drab and depressing place ("Hey, Charley, got an order here for half a dozen thirty-five-story Neo-Leninist apartment monads by next Thursday. Do they get a discount for a six-pack?").

  It never happened, mostly because construction on the wheel began at the height of a trend we're all familiar with: Custom Construction. Remember when no two washing machines looked alike? When it was a mark of your rejection of "herd values," and "urban sameness," and "standardized thought" to own only items that reflected your unique persona? How it became necessary to own a washing machine that was at least as unique as the Joneses' washing machine? The guts of the machines were identical
, of course, since the job of mixing water and soap and clothes and then drying them could only be done in a certain small number of ways. But the surface, that was the point! Computers could design you a machine that looked like no other machine on the block. And ditto for bicycles, and hockey sticks, and living-room carpet, and popcorn poppers. I don't need to look at the serial number, Jack. That goddamn ice bucket is mine!

  It was hell on thieves and fences while it lasted.

  Luckily, society moved on to another fashion in about twenty years. But once you start customizing buildings, things that are designed to last several hundred years, it hardly makes sense to stop. What are you going to do? Park your new boxy glass monstrosity next to a structure that looks like a butterfly on the back of a turtle? There goes the neighborhood.

  On Oberon, if you don't like the neighborhood, so the saying goes, just wait half an hour.

  New buildings went up amazingly fast. They were all designed and built, on the Noon Arc, anyway, at a place called—I'm not making this up—Squiggle City. Supposedly an architect brought his four-year-old daughter in to work one day. Playing with her crayons, the kid produced the kind of picture a child that age will. Squiggles. The drawing got into the production line by accident and alakazam! Three days later it rolls off the line, ready to be lived in by some seriously deranged people. One of those urban legends that probably isn't true but ought to be.

  It struck me as confusing enough already. But when the wheel was complete, people like Poly could probably just wait awhile, and their commuting problems would be solved. Unless those snobby Mad Dogs threw up some sort of zoning barriers against those folks from the other side of the tracks. Did you see the building that moved in next door last night, Marge? Well! Don't they know that their sort aren't welcome here? Somebody should do something, really! I mean, I'm as tolerant as the next person, but would you want one to subdivide with your sister?

  So the view from my window was a marvelous one, but not one I could really describe. Many, many big structures, a few that actually resembled things you've seen in other cities, or in history books. I'd send you a postcard, but by the time it got to you everything would have changed.