The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  I read those last stories with special care, as you might imagine. So far, there had been no hint that the papers had the slightest inkling of what had really gone on. It didn't reassure me much (I may never use the word "comfort" again). The police probably knew a lot more than they were releasing.

  All in all, it didn't seem a propitious time to present myself at the local precinct and unburden myself, tell them the true story. I felt sure I could justify my fight with Comfort, but it might get a little tricky convincing a judge that five bullets through a closed door was self-defense. Some people might even try to call it first degree murder. You never can tell. Prosecutors can be very contrary that way.

  And, of course, there was the matter of those old warrants I'd never gotten around to straightening out.

  It really seemed time to bid adieu to fair Oberon. And that was a lot harder than it sounded. So far, I'd had no luck at all.

  At least I didn't have Izzy on my back. That's another reason I watched the news hourly. Due to the notoriety and heinous nature of the crimes he stood accused of, he had not been released on bail. He was, in fact, to be prosecuted for offenses that, often, could be dealt with by a simple civil suit, fines paid, everybody goes home satisfied. This time, the public had to be satisfied, and the public was pissed. They identified with Miss Polyhymnia Reynolds, a hardworking member of the Oberon middle class. They wanted that fucking satanist to do some time!

  Yeah, right. Don't set your watch by that. When it all cooled down some, or possibly before, those friends in high places who had been bought, or who used the services best provided by a group like the Charonese Mafia, would step forward and get a new bail hearing and Izzy would be out the door. I checked the papers all the time so I'd be sure not to miss his release. Possibly I could arrange to be a thousand yards from the prison door, with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.

  I can dream, can't I?

  Toby came bounding up to me, a little red rubber ball in his mouth, and pawed at my arm. It's Toby's biggest weakness; he's got a regular ball-chasing jones. Toss anything round in his presence and he instantly forgets he is a civilized, serious, high IQ sort of dog who can count to five. His pink tongue hangs out and he reverts to puppyhood, his eyes fastened on the ball with that total concentration only a dog can achieve. God knows where he'd found this one. In the shrubbery, abandoned by another dog, judging from the well-chewed surface. I took it from his mouth.

  "Wanna fetch, Toby? Wanna go fetch?" He jumped up and down deliriously, wagging his entire body and yipping with joy. I made as if to throw the ball and he froze, ready to hold that position until Charon warmed up or I threw it, one or the other.

  I threw it, and away he went. In heaven. What a hard life he led.

  I was in one of the little roll-up parks the wheel engineers scattered along the Edge as construction progressed. There was a wading pool for children, a gazebo/bandstand structure, public toilets that really looked like brick, but weren't. A build-it-yourself playground in riotous plastic colors. About a hundred fine, sturdy trees: pines, maples, huge spreading oaks, and cherry, orange, apple, and banana trees that grew real fruit all year round. All it lacked was the Big Rock Candy Mountain and bubblers dispensing cold pop and lemonade. To look at it, you would never guess all the trees were in huge pots, all the grass only a veneer of sod that could be taken up and moved when the construction workers were ready to extend this section another few miles.

  The parks were there more for tourists than for local children. The attraction, naturally, was the Edge itself. The Oberoni shrewdly knew that once you get tourists to a scenic wonder, you'd better give them something to do besides gape. And while you're at it, sell them overpriced souvenirs and junk food. Not far from this sylvan setting was a portable amusement park featuring the Big Dip, a roller coaster that plunged off the Edge three times in the course of the ride.

  You would think the Edge would be enough. It was certainly more than enough for me.

  I was sitting on the concrete sidewalk that defined the Edge, doing what every tourist not afflicted with terminal acrophobia does when he gets there: sit with one's feet dangling over infinity. Three times already I had been asked to snap the picture of some group pretending to fall off, or peering cautiously down.

  It helps to sneak up on it, sit down securely, and then swing your legs over. I don't have any great trouble with heights, but there are heights and then there are heights. Nowhere was there anything as high as the Edge. At the Edge, you were standing at the top of infinity.

  All very safe, of course. No need to have a lot of frozen tourist corpses orbiting Uranus. Bad publicity.

  Every hundred yards or so along the Edge signs were prominently posted: JUMP AT YOUR OWN RISK. OB$100 FEE CHARGED FOR RETRIEVAL.

  Somewhere down there about a mile or two away was the all-but-invisible plastic substance that kept the air in at the Edges. A big bubble of it covered all the ends of the wheel. If you jumped or fell off the Edge, you would soon hit this stuff and bounce, and bounce again, and probably bounce a dozen times before coming to rest. Then the Edge Patrol would lower a rope harness to you and you would be hauled in like a trout. Unless you'd sprained an ankle or broken a bone, in which case it became a rescue, and they'd go down with a litter and charge you OB$500. It was a rather expensive way of getting a thrill, to my mind, but dozens of people did it every day. For five dollars, at sites all up and down the Edge, they could be attached to a bungee cord and get a better ride much more cheaply. But go figure tourists, eh?

  Here and there in the air before me like hundreds of varicolored butterflies were gull-winged gliders and gossamer-winged pedal fliers taking advantage of the updrafts along the Edge. There were at least that many kites of all shapes and sizes. It was a kaleidoscopic traffic jam in the air. Glorious!

  Toby returned with the ball and dropped it at my side, then stared at it as if willpower alone could lift it and toss it. I picked it up and gestured as if to throw it off the Edge. He got ready to jump. I should know better than to even tease about that. Toby is basically fearless; he'd go over the Edge in a minute. I turned and tossed it as far as I could toward the pressurehead.

  I said very safe. I did not say completely safe.

  The pressurehead is a wall of steel fifty miles wide and five miles high. An Edge City was defined as that space, not yet permanently occupied, between the pressurehead and the Edge. It was punctured in hundreds of places along the bottom by what looked like wide, inviting open doors, but were actually open air locks. At each door was a prominent sign warning you that you were leaving a category-B pressure environment and entering a category-D area. Many people live their whole lives without visiting a D area. Those rankings took many factors into account, I'd been told, but boiled down to how many surfaces there were between your tender and irreplaceable ass and hard vacuum. Category D meant there was only one barrier, the invisible plastic substance that provided a working environment for construction workers and visitors to Edge City. If that membrane was punctured, you'd hear all hell's klaxons and sirens, and find the air locks back to the safe world were now closed, and taking groups of twenty at their usual, maddeningly slow, now perhaps fatally slow, rate, as your ears popped and your nose started bleeding.

  How many times had this happened during the construction of the wheel? So far, zero. How much did I worry about a blowout? About the same. Most of the people around me seemed to feel the same way. They brought their children here, they came to play or stretch out on the grass, they camped out "overnight," when the great lights shining down from the hub were turned off for eight hours.

  When another five miles of wheel was complete, the pressurehead was detached from the huge bolts holding it in place, and rolled toward the Edge and its new mooring. I'd like to see that. They have big parades and fireworks and festivals and music. Clowns and troubadours and, of course, outdoor theater.

  I threw the rubber ball a few more times, when who should come sha
mbling down the walkway but Elwood P. Dowd. He stopped a few steps away and stood looking down at me, his hands thrust into his baggy gray slacks, playing pocket pool or fiddling with his spare coins or whatever it was he did when wearing that thoughtful expression on his face.

  "I didn't see you around on the trip from Pluto," I said.

  "No, you didn't," he drawled. "Claustrophobia. And you didn't pack enough to eat."

  He lowered himself down on my left side, dangled his feet with his clunky brown hard-leather shoes and argyle socks. He always sits on my left, because he's deaf in his left ear. He told me he'd fallen through an iced-over pond when he was young, back in Bedford Falls. Elwood had plenty of stories like that. He'd been a United States senator for three years, and he'd flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He'd been the leader of a swing band.

  "Yeah, I know," I said. "The old Pantechnicon's not good enough for you. Which way did you travel this time? On the buddy seat of some witch's broom? Borne on the gentle wings of angels? Scanned, digitized, strewn through the ether to fetch up here, at the edge of human folly?"

  He peered down between his shoes, swinging them idly.

  "Pretty fair edge, if you ask me." I could tell by the way he looked off into the distance that he was pissed. He doesn't like me to point out the lapses in logic his appearances usually imply.

  "If you don't like having me around, I can always go away," he drawled.

  I learned long ago not to put my arm around his shoulder or anything foolish like that. People stare. Rude, but there it is. Usually I don't even look directly at him, but now I did.

  "After better than ninety years, Elwood, I have trouble imagining what I'd do without you."

  That seemed to satisfy him. He squinted up at the hang gliders for a time.

  "Maybe I came here in a faster ship than you did," he said.

  "Using up your frequent-traveler miles on the Flying Dutchman?"

  "The old Spirit of St. Louis was a lot faster. No, but maybe I hitched a ride with somebody who did get here faster. Now, if I was you, I'd be asking myself, 'Who do I know that got here faster than me? And how'd he do it?' "

  * * *

  Two hours in the library looking at back postings of newspads and I had the information I needed. And yes, I actually went to the library. They exist, you know, and some of them even have a few books in them. Even on a spanking-new world like Oberon they have not entirely converted to over-the-phone service. And by law they have to maintain old-fashioned desk-bound terminals, for those folks who eschew direct interface and implanted modems: Amish, Christian Scientists, naturalists, washed-up ex-child telly stars, people who get Radio Free Betelgeuse on the fillings in their teeth. Weirdos.

  When I found what I was looking for, the beginnings of a wild idea took root like crabgrass and refused to go away. I walked for an hour, turning it over and over in my mind. Just too wild, I kept telling myself. And then I'd think of another angle and be right back, worrying at it.

  I found a restaurant that allowed dogs—that's right, some of them on Oberon don't; can you imagine? And they call themselves civilized—and spent a contemplative two hours eating pasta and drinking strong tea. Toby, after eating his portion and vainly trying to interest me in playing fetch with the last meatball, snoozed in his chair.

  What the heck? I thought. Toby opened one eye and I realized I'd said it aloud. I dropped money on the table and scooped him up, suddenly in a big hurry.

  "How'd you like to ride on the fast train?" I asked him. He allowed as how that was all right with him, and went back to sleep.

  * * *

  Toby is a trusting soul. Well traveled as he is, he might have had second thoughts if he'd known more about the Rim Express.

  The Express hadn't been operating the last time I was on Oberon, for what I thought of as an excellent reason: there wasn't much rim to speak of. There was a lot more rim now, but there was still the little matter of a five- or six-hundred mile gap between the arcs. How could a train get from one arc to the other if no rail connected them? Well, sometimes the simplest thing really is to let the mountain come to Muhammad.

  The train car was everything the spoke elevators were not: narrow, cramped, linear. Seats were four across, with an aisle between pairs. The top half of the car was transparent, though you couldn't see anything when you boarded since the car was in a tube, suspended an eighth of an inch above a magnetic induction rail. I settled into an aisle seat. It was deeply padded, and could recline almost forty-five degrees. When the car was about half-filled, the front and rear doors sealed and there was a loud hiss as the air in the tube was bled away. Then I was pressed back in my seat by rapid acceleration.

  In only a few minutes we burst silently into space. Toby floated up out of my lap, weightless. He's not bothered by this, simply looking around curiously until I snagged a hind leg and brought him back down. I twisted in my seat and saw the massive trailing edge of Noon Arc dwindling behind us. I could see the pressurehead, several tunnels including the one we had emerged from, the mysterious inner structure of the floor. We were traveling at three thousand miles per hour—

  —and standing dead still. It's all relative, you see. Or so I'm told. From a viewpoint on the rotating wheel, we were really skedaddling. But stand away from the wheel, motionless, and you'd see that the train car was just hanging there as the Noon Arc rotated away from it, and the Six Arc approached.

  All very neat. Hang suspended there for twenty minutes, then decelerate when the other arc sweeps you up. Travel time: thirty minutes. And, I hear you protest, why the hell would anyone take the fifteen-hour ordeal of a trip through the hub, as Poly did twice a week, when this magical chariot was available?

  Answer: money.

  There was no real physical reason why the Rim Express should be so expensive to ride. It was cheap to operate, it was safe, it was quick. And the government of Oberon hated the damn thing, wished it would just go away. Since it didn't, they taxed the hell out of it. They added surcharges for every screwball thing a government is likely to get up to, and then they added some more. On top of that, they subsidized the spoke elevators to the point that they were practically free. It was like bus fare as compared to rental of a limousine. The elevators didn't really need a fare box at all. Money from concessions and gambling enabled the service to turn a tidy profit, sort of like a theater that makes nothing at the box office but cleans up selling outrageously priced popcorn and drinks.

  But what was the problem with speed and efficiency? Why the hostility to the Express? The answer didn't make sense to me, until I considered the economics of a rotating world under construction.

  Since its inception not that many years before, and for some years to come, well over ninety percent of the freight traffic went down. Cargoes arrived at the hub—finished steel, composite, glass, web, imported food, merry-go-round horses, starving actors—and was lowered to the rim. Of that, only the starving actor was likely to return to the hub. And on Oberon, down meant slow. Each kilogram moved from the hub to the rim slowed the spin of the wheel by a few millionths of a second. Consider that millions of kilograms were lowered that way each day. Pretty soon, left to itself, the wheel would run out of juice like a music box winding down its spring. Everybody would get lighter, and lighter, and lighter... and rise up and blow away. (People did get lighter, though not by a lot. When the rotation speed had slowed to a certain point the engineers applied thrust and brought the wheel back up to speed, and slightly over. Included in Oberoni "weather forecasts," actually schedules, was the day's "gravity index." There were light days, and heavy days. Would you believe that suicide rates increased on heavy days? It's true. Also more fistfights, absenteeism from work, and complaints of constipation.) (This quirk of rotation also made spring scales illegal on Oberon. Only beam balances would give true weight.)

  Thrust means energy, and energy costs money. You'd think they'd have a kilogram-lowering tax to pay for it, and they did, but not a big one. It was
a complex equation, but one that eventually worked out to an outrageous tariff on the Rim Express, since these citizens weren't helping out by keeping the elevators in operation.

  There was another way of delivering cargo to the rim. It also involved slowing the wheel. This was a fact of physics that no amount of taxation would correct: more mass at the rim equals less speed, no matter how it got there. But it was quicker, like the Express itself. The wheel is turning, see, and it has these two huge gaps in it. Why not wait for an arc to pass, then move your cargo into position where it could be intercepted and magnetically slowed, much as we were sitting out here in space right now, waiting for the arc to arrive?

  Well... sounds great, but these are large shipments. You have twenty minutes to get them positioned exactly right. No margin for error, and it has to work right every time, hundreds of times a day... and I think this is my stop right up here, Mr. Conductorman. It's been fun, and send me a card if you... er, when you arrive safely.

  Imagining several million tons smashing into one of the pressureheads, the Oberoni came to the same conclusion I did. No thank you. We'll ease freight into the hub in a slow and civilized manner, then lower it gently to where it's needed. The Rim Express is excitement enough, for those who can afford it.