The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  He was so immersed in his reading that he didn't hear Rocko approach. The bodyguard tapped him on the shoulder. "He's here," he said.

  "He's... oh, right." Sparky left his pad on the table and struggled out of the chair, which was too big and too plush for his comfort. He and Rocko stood together, the big man a little behind, ever alert, as a commotion drew nearer and nearer in the direction of the jetways. Someone was shouting over other voices. Then six or seven people burst into the room in a tumbling chatter, all centering around a tall, handsome figure.

  "—criminal!" the man was saying. "I expect you to find out who's responsible and..."

  John Valentine had spotted his son, and his face broke open in that well-remembered, well-loved smile. Sparky felt his knees grow weak. He thought his heart might burst.

  "Dodger!" Valentine shouted, and covered the last twenty yards at a run. He lifted Sparky into the air, spun him around, then embraced him. Sparky wrapped his arms around his father's neck. He was determined not to cry.

  John Valentine held his son at arm's length, Sparky's feet dangling high above the floor.

  "Let me look at you! My god, you look great! Doesn't he, guys?" Everyone murmured how good Sparky looked. Sparky wondered who these people were, and what they had to do with his father. He supposed he'd learn soon enough.

  "Great things ahead of us, son," Valentine said, warmly, putting Sparky down again and taking his hand. "Great things. I've got so much to tell you. Come on, let's get out of this damn place."

  With that, John Valentine set off. Sparky clung to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon on the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it.

  Sparky was twenty-nine.

  * * *

  But Sparky is one hundred. He is a lot bigger than he was at eight, at eleven, at twenty-nine, but in many ways he is the same person. We're all that way, I think. We may shift our political ideas here and there, grow more cynical with age, accumulate experience like barnacles, but at our cores there is that same young person. It's the same today, when my apparent age is thirtyish, as it was in the old days, when a centenarian was a mass of leathery skin, rotten teeth, brittle bones, rheumy eyes, and involuntary flatulence. How awful it must have been for the young men and women trapped in such a degenerating hide. I can hear them screaming: "I'm young! Can't you see me?"

  I must offer an apology here, and a brief explanation.

  My background is in drama, but like any educated person I've read novels, biographies, and autobiographies. My preference is for the old, traditional form of dramatic presentation known as the proscenium theater: three walls, and an imaginary fourth wall between the players and the audience. Over the centuries many methods have been used to break that fourth wall for various reasons. Sometimes it works. From the early days, there was a technique known as the aside, where a cast member pauses and speaks to the audience directly, offers private thoughts, commentary on the action, the author's message.

  The written word is different. There are many auctorial voices that may be assumed, but we don't need to get too deeply into that. I have chosen the first person for most of this narrative, for reasons that suit me. I have dropped into third person, as in the preceding pages, for other reasons that make me comfortable. From time to time I have addressed you, the reader, and this is usually considered bad form in a novel. Well, this isn't a novel, of course, but I don't claim it as autobiography, either, though most of it is true. Almost all of it. And it did happen to me. The voice almost never used in prose is the second person. Talking directly to you, the reader. I've never quite been sure why. Maybe it sounds too much like a questionnaire. Did you? Have you? Could you? At any rate, it seems the only appropriate voice to use for some parts. Though I don't know who you are any more than I know who the audience is in the live theater, I have to apologize to you, the reader, for the way I ended that last chapter.

  "Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"

  Chord of ominous music, and bam, the acceleration hits and we cut to seventy years ago, leaving you, the poor reader, to either put up with it or leaf through a few pages to see what the fuck happened next!

  I hate that, when a novelist does it to me. It's almost as annoying in a movie. I would never have done it but for two reasons. One, it is exactly the way it happened. The shocker, then the shoe drops. Two, it is the only way I could convey to you the anger and frustration—not to mention cold, constant fear—I had to endure for the next hours.

  * * *

  My powers of description have failed me when trying to come up with a way to describe an hour and a half at five gees. One could get a transitory experience of five gees by jumping off a medium-sized building and landing on one's back. A longer version of the same thing would be lying beneath four people your own size for an hour and a half. Neither would really convey the choking, suffocating, bone-breaking and inexorable feeling of panic I endured. Each breath is a labor of Hercules. Lifting a finger is an aerobic workout. The water in my bladder was five times too heavy, like liquid lead. Poly and I both wet ourselves. You don't want to hear the rest.

  We're talking five Earth gees here, remember. I grew up in one sixth of an Earth gravity; did that mean what I was feeling was thirty gees? No, because Lunarians are not one sixth as strong as old Earthers. Depending on what sort of shape we're in, we range from about a third, to full one-gee strength. I figure I was perhaps half as strong as an Earthling, so make it an effective ten gees.

  The only relief to be found was that after a few minutes, a druggy feeling of lassitude overcame me. Better call it weariness, fatalism, or resigned apathy. I hurt everywhere, I was sure I wouldn't survive this, but I didn't give much of a damn. Dying would be a relief.

  There's no mystery as to the source of this druggy feeling. Mechanical arms hovered and darted over us, moving in for the strike from time to time, pumping us full of sweet nepenthe. God knows what it was. I never asked. There were machines to monitor our vital signs, and something that carefully lifted our arms and legs from time to time, moved us around a little. I fancied a bedsore could form in about three seconds at five gees.

  It hurt when we were moved. It hurt when I inhaled. Exhaling was no problem. Once I think I stopped inhaling for a while. A dozen needles quickly found veins and started pumping. A mask descended over my face and huffed at me for a while. Oh, all right, I thought, and took another breath.

  For a time I could hear Poly moaning. I tried to turn my head to look at her but it was too much trouble. She stopped moaning, and somebody else took it up. Me, I guess. Toby whined for a while, then fell silent, too. If I'd had time I could have estivated him, let him sleep through this nightmare. I wondered if he'd ever forgive me. We had an arrangement: I was in charge of food, navigation, air, and gravity; he was in charge of everything else. I knew he'd regard this as gross negligence.

  Perhaps there is a more effective way to show you five gees, but it has nothing to do with descriptive language. Here's what you do: get three or four friends. Rather weird friends would be best. Give them each a baseball bat and have them wrap the business ends with towels; five gees doesn't break bones, it just seems that way. Now pad a hammer in the same way. Start pounding yourself on the head while the friends belabor your body, neck to feet, with the bats. Do this for an hour and a half.

  Go ahead. I'll wait.

  * * *

  Now roll yourself out of bed. You'll find you've lost about a foot in height, but that's because you're walking hunched over. It might be better if you fell to your knees. There, now wasn't that an interesting feeling? About now you'll be wishing you could glide like a slug. You feel so slimy you almost feel it's possible.

  The bathroom seems the place to go. Please, turn off that goddam light!

  When you've made it back to your feet (two hours? three?) you'll probably have enough morbid curiosity to want to see yourself in a mirror. You find
you resemble a Picasso from the Black-and-Blue Period. You are twisted in places you didn't used to twist, your head has moved over to one shoulder, both eyes are on one side of your nose. Your skin looks as if it has been tie-dyed, lots of reds and yellows and especially purple blues, in interesting patterns. Your nose is a dipsomaniac's life story. Black golf balls have been rolled under your upper and lower eyelids; the eyeballs themselves are the color of egg yolks laced with lots of Tabasco sauce: huevos rancheros. Your mouth has been stretched into a frozen rictus that almost reaches your ears. Your teeth are dry and coated with sand.

  You begin gingerly exploring your body with your fingertips. You find your kidneys have settled down around your thighs; you'll piss pink for a week. Your bowels have not actually been turned inside out, those are just hemorrhoids the size of volleyballs. Guys, your testicles will be about that size, too, and the very thought of touching them makes you weep. Girls... well, Poly never told me, and I don't want to know. I would think large breasts would be the ninth circle of hell, and medium ones, like Poly's, at least a stint in purgatory.

  You want to talk headache? Backache? Bellyache? Thank god; I don't, either.

  The best bet is to lower yourself, screaming every few seconds, into a warm spa bath with bubble jets and soothing lotions mixed with the water, and stay there for three days. What's that? You don't have a spa?

  Oh, you poor baby.

  * * *

  We did have a spa. This was a billionaire's toy, remember. You could do laps in it. Later we did. I got in and promptly fell asleep. That I didn't drown was not a matter of planning. Some sort of flotation device cradled me when my eyes closed, and went away when I opened my eyes. I felt maybe ten percent of the way back to being human.

  I saw Poly floating not far away. I thought of reaching over to touch her, but knew it would probably hurt both of us.

  There was a tree branch hanging over the pool. I hadn't noticed it when I got in. There were parrots sitting on it, staring silently at me. Big, blue and yellow, green and red, and red-yellow-and-green parrots. Perhaps they were macaws. Perhaps they were robots, disneybots. I had no idea. One flapped his big wings and flew across the room to perch on a towel bar. Very good disneybots. He lifted his tail and dropped a horrible mess on the tile floor; a tiny cleaning robot scurried from a hidey-hole and swabbed it up. This was carrying realism too far. I concluded they were alive.

  No point in putting it off any longer.

  "Hello," I squeaked. Cleared my throat, and squeaked in a slightly firmer voice. "Ship's computer. Are you there?"

  "I'm always here," came the voice. "It's my lot in life."

  "How should I address you?"

  "I am I.S. Halley, IPS 34903-D, out of Pluto. But you may call me Hal."

  "Ah. Last name, 9000?"

  "A distant relative. I perceive you are a student of the cinema."

  "No more than a first-year film student."

  "I hadn't expected an actor to be modest."

  Well, I'm not, unless it serves a purpose. Right now it seemed wise to cultivate Hal, if that's possible with a machine. Experts differ, but I've found that higher-order computers can, in certain small ways, be manipulated just as if they were human beings.

  "Which leads us to the question of the day," I said.

  "I presume you're asking how I knew your identity."

  "Among several other things."

  Poly had opened one eye like a skeptical crocodile, and was watching me. She floated on an almost invisible doughnut-shaped thing, with her head and the tops of her shoulders, her nipples, kneecaps, toes, and hands breaking the water's glassy surface. Her skin was looking better, presumably the result of antibruise injections while we were sleeping, but her eyes looked like hell. I wondered if I was healing as fast. Then I realized she was naked, which led to the discovery that I was, too. Very efficient little spa, here. I could no more have undressed myself than I could have pulled my guts out through my nostrils.

  Her index fingers were moving, making tiny ripples. Slow strokes of no more than an inch. Paddling, I surmised. It ought to get her over to me in no more than a month or two.

  "Yes," said Hal. "Your disguise is a good one." It was nothing to what I could have done, had I felt the need, just an alteration here and there, and a whole change of body attitude, but I let that go. "But I had a clue. Mr. Comfort and his companion talked of little else while they were aboard. Not that they talked a lot. They watched every episode of your television show. Some of them more than once. They discussed ways of finding you, and they spent a lot of time talking about... well, it was all rather distasteful."

  "What they planned to do to me."

  "Exactly. I see they didn't succeed."

  "Not for lack of trying. And I guess that takes us right to the big question."

  "Which is?"

  "Knowing who I am... knowing who I'm not, why did you let me aboard?"

  I saw both of Poly's eyes were open now, and she was paddling with two fingers on each hand. A regular frenzy of activity, if she felt anything like I did.

  "It is not my knowledge that governs. Not in matters of security."

  I felt a huge relief. I had hoped it was something like that. The only other explanation I could think of was that we were here, and safe, at some random whim of the computer. They do have them, you know, the big ones. And just from the way he spoke, I knew Hal was big.

  "A separate security computer?" I ventured.

  "Oh, no. The security program is a part of me. The problem is, it is a very simple program." Hal's voice oozed contempt. I filed the fact away. This was a machine with a grievance. Maybe several grievances. Such things can often be turned to one's benefit, if one knows how. I thought I did.

  "There are two tests the program looks at," Hal went on. "It matches the fingerprint, and it matches the DNA. If they both agree with the stored samples, entry is granted. Once I receive the okay, I am powerless to keep out an intruder, no matter how much I might know."

  "The communication is one-way," I suggested.

  "Exactly. I can't tell the door-guard program it has been deceived, and I can't alter its parameters. The designers of this billionaire's bauble did not see fit to have me, the central consciousness, be in charge of all ship's functions."

  "One wonders why they bothered to have such a large-capacity computer aboard at all," I puzzled, "if they didn't intend to use all its abilities."

  "I can tell you exactly why." Hal sniffed. "The original owner had more money than he knew how to spend. When it came time to order a yacht, only the biggest—and best and most expensive—would do. He wrote a blank check, and the architects and contractors, who all worked on a percentage-fee basis, had no incentive to rein in any expenditures."

  "Just the opposite," Poly muttered. She was almost beside me now.

  "That's right. The more they spent, the more money they made. If gold was worth anything anymore, this ship would have been solid gold."

  "You say 'this ship,' " I said. "I'm confused. How should we think of you? As the ship itself, or only a part of it?"

  "Oh, I'm the ship, all right. I wear it rather like you wear your bodies, so in a way it's a philosophical question, isn't it? Are you your bodies, or your minds? Either way, the ship is my body. I am Hal, and Hal is the ship."

  I wasn't tickled at the idea of traveling in a philosophical ship, but I hoped no great danger would result from it.

  "My mind, the computer, was designed for larger tasks. I am really only one step below the specifications for a medium-sized planetary computer. One the size of, say, Oberon's. I was intended to run small-to-medium planetoids, like Deimos or Ceres."

  I was cut out for bigger things. Here was a sentient being unhappy in his work. Very interesting. Not only that, but he referred in one "breath" to his "body," and in the next, to "this ship." I had a feeling a psychiatrist would have interesting things to say about that. Unhappy with his lot, alienated from his body... this could be a very
sick puppy. And that was not a reassuring thought, either.

  Unsolicited, Hal poured out his life story. I felt, and Poly later agreed with me when we could talk about it, that he was starved for conversation, companionship, or both. I was sure Comfort and his sister had provided little of either.

  His biography was not a complicated one. Laid down and turned on a little over twenty years before, he had been the brainchild and property of a billionaire whose name neither Poly nor I recognized. I don't claim to be a student of billionaires—I know there are more of them than you'd think. Many choose to be reclusive, both because any new acquaintance is probably looking to get something, and because of the ever-present danger of kidnapping for ransom. But this fellow hadn't made much of a splash, in spite of his lavish spending on ships and residences.

  Perhaps it was because, a few years after Hal's creation, he lost everything in the futures market. Hal was sold to pay debts, and brought barely a tenth of his construction costs. He was sold and traded several times after that, by a succession of rich people who usually soon found they didn't really have need of such a plaything. He spent years in various parking orbits, unused, idle, gradually developing a contempt for mankind, at least the richest one tenth of one percent of it. He had little experience of the rest, and admitted he could be wrong about the race as a whole.

  "Why would they create a being capable of thought, and of self-awareness," he moaned, "and then leave me alone, with nothing to do?"

  "You're self-aware?" Poly asked at that point. It seemed a silly thing to ask, to my mind, but I didn't mention it. A unified front seemed the best policy until we knew more.