The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  I dipped my hand in the pool and splashed some on Toby, and we watched the blood wash away. Toby endured this with his tongue hanging out, then looked thoughtful, trotted a few steps away, and retched up a chunk of meat the size of a golf ball. He studied it, then looked back at me, pink tongue lolling again, as if to say, "Would you get a load of that!" Dogs are disgusting sometimes.

  We tracked pink footprints out of the spa, down a passageway, and into a room with a sign overhead reading GALLEY. Coming from the other direction was a hemispherical cleaning robot, a foot in diameter, painted to look like a ladybug. It was cleaning up the bloody spoor. Okay, so the logical place to find raw meat was in the galley, but how had Toby found it?

  He looked up at me, read my mind, and trotted to a corner, where he sniffed the floor thoroughly, then stepped onto a pressure plate in the floor. There was a rattle and a gurgle, and a hunk of raw meat the size of a Virginia ham plopped out of a chute and onto the floor. Blood oozed from it. I touched the meat and found it was body temperature.

  "Hal," I said. "What's this all about?" Toby had grabbed the thing and was trying to pull it away from me. God knows what he intended to do. Bury it?

  "I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking me the meaning of life?"

  "No, I'm asking how Toby got all this meat."

  "Ah. There is a scent of food on the pressure plate. No doubt he smelled it, and in his explorations, activated the meat dispenser."

  I wondered if he was acting like a literal-minded machine just for the fun of it, put one over on the stupid humans.

  "One more time," I said. "Why is there a meat dispenser that dispenses ten pounds of raw flesh at a time?"

  "That is to feed the tigers," Hal said.

  Well, silly me. Of course a billionaire's yacht would come equipped with tigers. And speak of the devil...

  "Oh, my god!" Poly whispered. "He's so beautiful!"

  The tiger paused in the doorway, looked at me. Looked at Poly. Glanced at Toby. Cocked his head a little and looked at Toby again. Yaaaaaaawned. Then padded into the galley, five hundred pounds of silent power. He sniffed at the meat, glanced at Toby a third time—the dog was transfixed, not a whisker twitching—and settled down with one paw on the food and began ripping off chunks. In a moment another big cat came through the door. This one didn't even break stride, though she gave us a cursory once-over. She went straight to the meat and stole it right out of the jaws of the first one. He growled at this thievery—a sound that, even though you know they are perfectly harmless, makes every hair follicle on my body seal up tight as a spinster's butt—then stepped on the pressure plate and snagged the meat as it tumbled out. He carried it to another corner and chowed down.

  So that was our first adventure on the Halley. After that, things became pretty much routine until we reached Jupiter.

  The Halley, or her living quarters, anyway, was shaped pretty much like a flying saucer. A thick frisbee with a half dome on top. The saucer part consisted of a circular passageway with doors leading to rooms that lined the outer rim of the saucer. (Should that be hatches leading to compartments? I'm going to dispense with the phony nautical terminology spacers love so much.) We've seen the spa, and the galley. Also out there were the owner's cabin, guest cabins, a billiard room, a library, a formal dining room with places for eight, and two holocabins. One simulated beach settings, and the other let you pretend you were in various forest environments.

  There were no servants' quarters, since Halley carried no human staff. Everything was done by robots who were seldom seen, popping in and out of hidey-holes mostly when you weren't looking. But they kept everything scrupulously clean, and if you needed something, they delivered it promptly.

  I would have thought a ship like that would have accommodations for a larger number. Instead, the builder had opted for larger and more luxurious quarters for a smaller number of people. Though naturally the Halley could carry scores of people in a pinch, she was designed for no more than eight.

  But the tastiest stuff was in the middle, under the dome.

  The original owner must have been a nature lover. The center of his ship was a circular mini-disney called the habidome and the theme was rain forest. There was a waterfall, a babbling brook, a pond, and a few dozen trees festooned with vines and orchids and bromeliads and other such lush tropical flora. The floor was grass or packed dirt. No attempt had been made to deceive the eye, as in the holos. The dome was simply a dome, not a blue sky. It was all too orderly and well tended to look like the real thing. What it reminded me of was the big bird enclosure at the King City Zoo. Aptly enough, I guess, since the place had a lot of birds in it. Toucans, macaws, cockatoos, parrots, I don't know what-all. Hummingbirds no bigger than your thumb, in any color you wanted.

  We'd been aboard a couple of days before I wondered where all the critters had been during the high boost. The answer was, suspended in liquid, revived only when the environment was ready for them. Floating in liquid was a good way, it turned out, to miss most of the bad effects of high gee. "So why didn't you float us in liquid?" I asked Hal. "Next time I will. But it takes about a day to prepare your body for it. We didn't have time."

  "Next time?" I asked, cautiously.

  "Next time won't be so bad," he said. I didn't pursue it. Most of the trees and bushes bore edible fruit of some kind. Not always what you'd expect, either. One tree I knew was not an apple tree, because I looked it up in the library, bore tart, crisp Mclntoshes on one side, and Valencia oranges on the other.

  It seemed the tigers and the birds came with the territory. Hal had revived them without being told to. The rest of it was up to us. The choices were not unlimited—no rhinos, no aardvarks, no baboons—but we could have turned the place into a reasonable imitation of Noah's Ark, if Noah had only saved small-to-medium animals. We were a bit more selective. Poly chose a dozen different types of lizard and another dozen poison arrow frogs, looking like porcelain or enamelware in screaming bright colors, not looking real at all until they jumped. I'd say there were a few hundred of them, but you'd never know it unless you looked for them.

  She also revived a twenty-foot python. I told her I didn't like snakes much, and it had no effect at all. The snake and I gave each other a wide berth.

  I scrolled through the catalog, bemused to think these creatures were sleeping in some secret recess of the ship. Made you feel God-like, you know? Which I suppose a billionaire thought he was entitled to feel. How about a brace of crocodiles? How would Poly like that? Maybe they'd eat the snake. I'd always liked monkeys; I'd had a pet chimp back in my glory days. But they were a little too noisy and active, it seemed to me.

  "I have well-behaved monkeys," Hal advised me, and we selected a family of golden lion tamarins and a pair of slow lorises. There is no such thing as a fast loris; I checked.

  Hal may have fudged a bit about the tamarins. They squeaked and peeped, but it wasn't an unpleasant or intrusive sound. It fit right in with the birdcalls.

  Both Poly and I started out in staterooms. We flipped a coin, and she won the captain's suite. Within a week we were both camping out in the habidome. There was a Peter Pan tree house midway up a towering live oak: three rooms, running water, view of the falls. Poly moved into that. The other structure was a shack on stilts, sort of leaning out over the pond, like a Dogpatch backdrop in "L'il Abner." ("The part of Marryin' Sam has evolved, over the years, into an opportunity for political jokes and jabs at celebrities. Keith Van Tyne steals scene after scene from Abner and Daisy Mae."—Hermes Blaze) Sitting on my porch, I could drop a line into the pond and usually come up with a catfish or bass. For a while Poly and I played Adam and Eve, frying the fish and serving it with wild fruits and veggies we gathered ourselves. I began to buy into that ancient idea of the "natural man," free of civilization's encumbrances. I mentioned it to Hal.

  "Bugs," Hal said.

  "Beg your pardon?"

  "There are no noxious insects in the habidome. Butte
rflies, moths, all selected for color, and dragonflies, likewise. There are beetles you'll seldom see, and insects belowground. But you wouldn't like this place nearly as much if it came equipped with black clouds of mosquitoes. Tarantulas. Centipedes a foot long that crawl into bed with you—"

  "I get the picture."

  After a few weeks we went back to the gourmet meals prepared by the galley. It's amazing how quickly you can get tired of fried fish.

  Still, I recall my time aboard the Halley as one of the two or three best times of my life. Partly that is because... nothing happened. Though I was still running as fast as I could, though a human monster was still yapping at my heels, there was nothing to be done about it until I left the Halley. I could kick back, relax, for the first time in what felt like decades. I could stop and think about things. One day was much like the next; we fell into comfortable routines. Poly stopped being pissed off with me, for no real reason I could see other than that... I was Sparky. Somehow that made a difference. Maybe the shock of finding out I hadn't lied about that made her reexamine what had gone down with Comfort and his evil sister, and allowed her to see it wasn't entirely my fault. That though I had made a terrible mistake in leaving her alone in the room, there had been no malice, only carelessness, involved. And I had come back.

  * * *

  "There are three ways you can go about this, Mr. Valentine," the medtech said. "First, we can put you to sleep and have the whole thing over in less than a month."

  "I like the sound of that," Sparky said.

  "It has its attractions," admitted the tech. "However, when you wake up, you'll be... oh, I'd guess you're going to run six feet, six-one, something in there. You'll be well over twice your current weight. You'll have to learn how to shave."

  "That should be easy enough."

  "Shaving? No problem. But longer arms and legs will be a big problem. I've followed several cases, and you should expect half a dozen major, painful accidents in the first year. That's not counting the dozens of scrapes and bruises you'll pick up every day, the number of times you'll bang your head on the ceiling."

  "I see," Sparky said, thinking it over.

  "You'll be the clumsiest man in Luna," he said, with a chuckle. "In the normal course of things, we adjust to our bodies gradually, as they change gradually. In Luna, of course, those bodies are dangerously overpowered. You know how to handle it at your current dimensions and musculature. It would be like letting a baby operate heavy equipment... if you'll pardon the expression."

  "That's okay, Doc." Sparky liked the guy. So few people just came right out and laid the truth on the line.

  "The second option," the tech went on, "is simply to stop the inhibitors that have kept you prepubescent for twenty years. You'd grow up at the normal rate, reach your full growth in five or six years. This is really the optimum way of doing it."

  "I don't have that kind of time."

  "No one ever seems to. Why are we all so much in a hurry? We don't even know how long we can live. We're sure three hundred years is possible, perhaps a lot more. All the strides we've made since 'threescore and ten,' and still we rush around, frazzle our nerves, ruin our digestion... and you don't want to hear any of this.

  "Third approach. We combine the first two methods. We don't put you to sleep. We can hurry it up and have you fully grown in six months, or stretch it out to more like two years."

  "Six months sounds good."

  "Why did I know you were going to say that? Six months it is." He made a notation on Sparky's chart, then webbed it off to the machines that would handle the actual treatment.

  "You're still gonna be clumsy," he pointed out. "At least you'll take it an inch at a time, though. There are some unpleasant side effects, but we can help with most of them. You'll be hungry almost all the time. There could be some stomach and bowel trouble. You may not grow entirely at the same rate, head to toe. Usually it's the legs that grow a little too fast; you may look a bit odd for a few months. There's a chance you'll get a really disgusting crop of zits. It'll be so bad you might want to stay home so you won't frighten little children; a week, two weeks, tops. You'll yodel like a Swiss accordion player until your voice stabilizes. Then there's the matter of sex...."

  "Yeah? What about it?"

  "Never mind. You might actually enjoy that part."

  Sparky laughed. "Doc, I am twenty-nine years old, you know. I know about sex. I've been having sex a long time now."

  "Whatever you say."

  The treatment itself took only a few minutes. Some mysterious, disgusting brown goo was forced into a vein. He tasted metal in the back of his mouth for a moment, then a violent red brew was pumped into him and the taste went away. His vision blurred; he imagined steam blowing out of his ears, and smiled at the image. Wouldn't that be cool? Then his eyes could roll around in their sockets like slot machine tumblers....

  He realized he was roughing out a Sparky routine. No need for that anymore. He felt a strange mixture of loss and relief at the thought.

  He left the treatment room and was met by a lovely young woman in the starched whites of the Nurses' Guild. She smiled, and indicated he should follow her.

  This was not his regular medical facility, which was in the exclusive Pill Road district. After the decision to fold Sparky, Sparky had realized he no longer had to live his life in a fishbowl. That is, he needn't cater to his fans, something he'd always felt obliged to do before. It had been fun, before. Now he felt the urge for more privacy, and as nothing more than the studio cohead he didn't need to seek the limelight. It was a new idea for him, and one that held a lot of appeal. So he had booked his hormonal adjustment at this ordinary clinic in a middle-class part of town, far from celebrity haunts. He wore a pair of dark glasses and a King City Loonies baseball hat and a pair of denim pants—something "Sparky" had never worn on the show. He'd done it before and got away with it, and back then he'd still had his odd hair and tonsure to conceal. Now it had been whacked off and was growing in brown, a shade he hadn't seen in years.

  "Did everything go smoothly?" the nurse asked.

  "Sure, no problem."

  Sparky almost missed it, kept walking down the hall with the nurse. If they'd kept on talking he probably never would have noticed. But he had a sharp ear for dialogue, and as the line repeated itself in his head it soon began sounding wrong. It was a line that would have been cut in rehearsals. Go smoothly? What was to not go smoothly? Which meant she didn't know anything about the procedure. Which meant she wasn't a nurse. He took another look at her.

  "Don't I know you?" he asked her.

  "Yeah," she said, giving it up right away. "I'm Hildy Johnson. Reporter? Cornered you in the spaceport when your father returned?"

  "I remember. You wanted an interview."

  "You said you'd give me one. And you didn't return my calls."

  "That was damn inconsiderate of me." They walked a few steps farther, pondering the situation. "You pissed off?"

  "What's the point of being pissed off? For you to give me an interview, you're going to have to like me, and why would you like me if I was pissed off? I tracked you down here to ask you again. I can't seem to make it into your office."

  "I don't think—"

  "And you'd be pissed off if I did."

  He smiled. She was right. But there was something else he didn't like.

  "You say 'tracked me down.' What you mean is somebody at the studio told you where I'd be."

  "You don't think I could have followed you here?"

  Sparky thought about it a moment. "No. I don't think so."

  She shrugged. "You're right. But I won't reveal my source."

  "That's fair enough, I guess."

  They turned a corner and at the end of a corridor there was a glass door with a mass of people milling around on the other side. The door must have been locked—there were two security guards standing on the inside—because no one was coming through it, and they certainly would have had it been possible,
because this was the traveling shark pack known as the Celebrity Press.

  "Looks like they found me, too," Sparky said.

  "If you want to avoid them, I know a back way out of here. It's the way I got in."

  "Great. Let's go."

  "How about that interview?"

  "What's the big deal?" Sparky asked. "I'm not little Sparky anymore, and pretty soon I won't even be little."

  "Are you kidding? 'Sparky Grows Up!' It'll be the biggest story of my career."

  "So what you really want is a series."

  "Well, I would have gotten around to that at the interview."

  "Okay, Hildy. You get me out of here, you can follow me around till I'm a grown-up. If that ever happens. You can have an exclusive."

  "Over this way," she said, touching him on the shoulder. They turned away from the mob at the end of the hall and entered a stairwell. They started to climb.

  "I guess the leak in my office is pretty bad," he said.

  "Why do you say that?"

  "All those reporters. What happened, somebody in my office put out a press release?"

  "Oh, no," Johnson said. "My source speaks only to me. I'm the one who told that bunch. I made the call after I got here so they'd be in a hurry and really frantic. Don't you think they looked frantic?"

  Sparky stared at her, then laughed.

  "To get on my good side, right?"

  "Exactly."

  "Must have been a lot of calling."

  "Sparky, I try to do as little work as possible. I called D. Mentua Precox and made her promise not to tell a soul."

  Sparky was still laughing well after they made their escape.

  * * *

  It's been many years now since I've had to dodge crowds of reporters. You say you hate it, and you do, and yet of course a part of you likes it very much. Who could resist? All those people, with absolutely nothing to do but chase you. It goes to your head, and when it's gone, it leaves you off balance, like you'd been climbing stairs for years and now you're at the top and your foot keeps reaching for one more.

  Even in my heyday I never lived in a place like the Halley.