The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  Sparky had thought it would take a great leap of logic for Amish to board a spaceship and leave for Luna, but was it really that different than crossing the Atlantic? America wasn't mentioned in the Bible, but the moon was. Once there, of course, they could not survive entirely with Biblical technology, but they did surprisingly well, and used as few modern things as possible. What had drawn them was the prospect of twelve two-week growing seasons per year. Farmers to the bone, Amish had actually been in the agricultural forefront in matters like crop rotation and soil conservation. They were familiar with hybridization, and genetic engineering was only breeding and selection speeded up, or at least it was to the schismatic leader of the Outers. And they had never been averse to accepting a little help from their neighbors. So while they themselves never entered a bioengineering laboratory, they were instrumental in developing the first strains of Lunar-adapted crops. They put up domes, conditioned the Lunar dust with compost, bacteria, worms—whatever was needed—plowed the resulting soil, planted, and harvested. The new breeds of plants drank the intense sunlight beneath the UV-filtering plastic domes and grew so fast "it could break your arm if you held it too long over a corn seedling," according to Sparky's friend Jan Stoltzfus, the boy who had first invited him into the Amish enclave. "Two weeks of summer growing season, and two weeks of winter... without the snow!"

  Self-sufficiency had always been their ideal, but they also had to make a living, so much of the produce they grew was taken into King City and sold at a public market, to health fanatics, antichemical believers, and the very wealthy, at astonishing prices.

  "These are crops just as artificially produced as those grown on any corporate farm," Jan had pointed out, enjoying the joke on the "English." "Our food tastes no better and no worse than anyone else's. The only way to distinguish it is our fruits and squashes and melons and tomatoes tend to be a bit smaller, sometimes a lot smaller, more like back on Old Earth. And you find the occasional blemish on a tomato, the odd worm in the apple.

  "And do you think we eat it? Very little of it. We buy our vegetables at the market, just like ordinary folks, and bank the difference."

  Their lives had seemed full of odd contradictions to Sparky when he first started coming out here. They read old-fashioned books by the light of candles or kerosene lamps, but kept their orchard trees thriving during the two-week "winter" with banks of grow lights suspended overhead. They plowed the ground with teams of horses and wood-and-iron plowshares, then baled hay for the cows with gas-powered machines. In one dome they might heat with a wood-stove or a fireplace—they could not afford real wood, and so used compacted waste from various outside agricultural concerns—and in the next dome over it was thought to be ethical to heat with methane gas. They had endless arguments over what was proper and what was not. But they were good people, and there was one thing they all agreed upon: television was the tool of the devil.

  He had been out at the Amish settlements location scouting for a story arc that would have involved an Amish boy and girl. The plan fell through quickly when it became clear the Plain People did not like to be photographed, to have a "graven image" made of them—who knew?—but while there Sparky had made an interesting discovery. Nobody knew who he was. This was a revelation to him. Of course, nobody had a show that everybody watched, but these were surely the only sane people on Luna who had never heard of him.

  He began showing up for baseball games, informal gatherings where sides were chosen up on the spot. At first, he was picked last, and he loved it! At any park in King City he would be the first pick every time, regardless of talent or lack of it. Worse, as a practical matter, it was impossible for him to play. Do you really want three hundred photographers clogging the first-base line? Jostling for a shot in the shower room? Clamoring for interviews in the dugout? Even in the pathetic league they formed for studio children Sparky saw little point in playing. Those kids knew who signed their parents' paychecks, and would not work very hard to strike him out or catch his rare fly balls. Sparky got no charge from that sort of competition.

  But the Amish gave him something he hadn't had since he was eight: a chance to be just another kid. They knew he was famous, and rich, and it made no difference to them. All that was an "English" matter, not part of their world. If he wanted to play with them, he'd better be good.

  He never got past mediocre, and that was okay. The first time he'd been chosen second to last was one of his best days. He'd earned that measly promotion. When you're rich and famous, and don't have the ego of John Valentine, you never know what you've earned. Whatever Sparky did worthy of praise was always the result of a team of people employed to make him look good. He never forgot that, no matter how many awards came his way.

  Sometimes he wished he had inherited his father's massive self-assurance, but most of the time he was happier to be the way he was, a moderately insecure fellow with a touch of the impostor complex, that maddening feeling that people secretly know you aren't as good as you're cracked up to be, that they know you know it, and that they know you know they know it.

  Here he knew exactly how good he was.

  The batter suddenly backed out of the box, and the pitcher relaxed. Seemed the batter didn't like something there in the dirt, because he was raking the ground with his cleats. He dug himself a little hole, fanned the bat around his head, swiveled his hips, and faced the pitcher. The pitch, the swing, the crack... another foul.

  God, Sparky loved baseball. How could a game that moved so slowly produce such tension? It might be another two, three minutes before the next pitch, and the suspense was getting unbearable.

  So was his hunger. There was no more candy in his pocket. And three long innings until the feast.

  The Plain People wouldn't call it anything so vain as a feast, but that's what it was. Sparky would walk past tons of the sort of delicacies they'd had at the recent wrap party to get to one plateful of Amish food.

  There would be sweating glass pitchers full of tart pink lemonade, with lemons and cherries still floating in it. Sweet cider. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. Something made with beans and ham hocks. Roast beef sliced thin. Ears of fresh golden corn. Cupcakes and rows and rows of pies: cherry, lemon, mince, pumpkin. Shoofly pie, a treat made in heaven but served only by the Amish.

  And Sparky's favorite, the muffins. Blueberry muffins and corn muffins, that you could twist apart in your fist and see the steam rising from the golden centers and slather with butter scraped from a wooden churn.

  Life didn't get any better.

  If you play baseball long enough, you develop a computer in your head. Each play adds to the programming, until you reach the point where you hardly have to think about it at all. Your eyes see, and your arms and legs react.

  The crack of the bat activated Sparky's computer. It was a bloop single into the hole, coming right at Sparky. The first and second basemen started toward it, saw it was impossible, headed back to their bags as Sparky charged the ball. No hope of catching it; play it on the bounce. He saw the catcher standing on the third-base line, the pitcher heading toward the plate to back him up, the shortstop moving toward the mound to cut off the throw. His eye went back to the ball—Jesus! He was too close in. The ball hit the ground and bounced as he moved his glove down. It hit the heel of his glove, hit him in the chest, and bounced... and there it was, hanging in the air right in front of him, as if time was suspended. He bare-handed it and in one motion pegged it toward the shortstop. He saw the third-base coach waving the runner toward home. He'd been told Sparky didn't have the arm to get the ball to the catcher.

  It was a good call, but something had happened to Sparky's arm. The shortstop started to jump for it, might have caught it, but then ducked and let it go over his head... and it reached the catcher right on the numbers. The runner was so surprised he tried to stop and his feet went out from under him. The catcher ambled over and tagged him out. The fans went wild.

  Sparky jogged toward the dugout, arms loose,
eyes on the ground, showing both coolness and humility. There was no way he'd ever tell anyone he'd been throwing to the shortstop. Everything had worked out all right, so who needed to know?

  He accepted the high-fives and pats on the ass as only his due, then sat on the bench to wait his turn at bat. His feet were killing him.

  For the first time he noticed that there was a strip of skin visible between the top of his socks and the bottom of his pants.

  Well, that accounted for it. His legs were longer, and so were his arms. Charging the ball, taking an inch or two more ground with each stride, he'd come up on it too fast. Then throwing, he'd made more distance than he ever had before. The long legs almost caused a disaster. The arm had compensated for it. Neat. But he was going to have to make some adjustments, watch himself more closely.

  He looked up when the umpire called time-out. His father was striding across the infield. Sparky saw him look up, vaguely, as if only now aware that something was going on here, that he might be interrupting it. He smiled, and waved to the players, clutching a rolled-up newspad in his other hand.

  John Valentine skipped lightly down the three steps into the dugout, smiling broadly at Sparky, who smiled back as well as he could. Valentine motioned for Jeff, the second baseman, to slide over a bit, then seated himself with his hip touching Sparky's.

  "Baseball, eh?" he said. "Looks like fun. I had a hell of a time tracking you down out here."

  "I don't tell anyone where I'm going," Sparky explained. Valentine seemed not to have heard him, held out the newspad, and pointed to the first installment of Hildy Johnson's series about Sparky.

  "Have you seen this?"

  Sparky studied it, trying to give himself a little time. Valentine thumbed the pager down in the corner, came to the part he was interested in, and pointed to a paragraph.

  "Where does this bitch get off writing this stuff about me?" he said.

  Sparky only then realized how furious his father was. He glanced up in the stands at Hildy, no more than thirty feet away, decided this wasn't the time to introduce them.

  "It says this is an authorized article," Valentine plowed on. "You've been granting this woman interviews?"

  "She's been around," Sparky allowed. "We've granted her access."

  "If she has access," Valentine grated, "we need to control the access. There's no need to let her in on family secrets, and if she's going to make up lies like this, there's no need to have her around at all."

  "I didn't tell her anything," Sparky said. "Not about you."

  Valentine put his arm around his son, patted his shoulder.

  "Of course not," he said, smiling. "I never thought you did."

  "We'll look bad if we just cancel at this point," Sparky said. "The pad's been hawking this series for a week now. I thought it'd be good publicity."

  Valentine considered that, began nodding slowly.

  "Besides," Sparky pointed out, "it's not a review. People have printed nasty things about you before. You know how it is."

  "Maybe you're right," Valentine said.

  "You said it yourself. You're not an easy man to like." Sparky knew his father took pride in this, attributed it to his artistic perfectionism. It was even partly true.

  Valentine laughed, and squeezed his son's shoulder.

  "You're right. Nothing to get upset about. I guess I'm just on edge, with the theater so close to completion." He tossed the newspad down on the dirt dugout floor, where it mingled with a hundred old pink wads of bubble gum and puddles of spilled cola. "That's not what I came out here for, anyway. A few things have come up we're going to have to go over together."

  "About the theater?'

  "That's right. If we hurry we can make it back before they shut down for the day."

  "But I've got a game going—"

  "It really can't wait, Kenneth." He looked around him, taking in the players and the green grass and the mothers and fathers in the grandstand behind the backstop. "I'm sure this is a lot of fun," he said, clearly not thinking anything of the sort, "but isn't it all a bit... childish? I mean, Kenneth, I really hate to spoil it for you, but in another month you'll be too big to play with these boys."

  Sparky felt his face grow warm. Jeff and some of the other boys were carefully studying the field.

  The hell of it was, it was true. An inch this week, a few more inches the next, in no time he'd be a man.

  He already was a man, inside. He'd been an impostor here from the beginning. Though they didn't partake of the modern world, the Amish were aware of it. They understood that arcane biological science had kept Sparky preadolescent for twenty years. They knew he would outlive them. They were one of many groups who, for one reason or another, kept to the Biblical threescore and ten—actually, more like fivescore for most of them, with reasonable care—refusing all long-life treatments.

  It was over here, and Sparky knew it.

  But couldn't he have finished this last game?

  "Gotta go, fellas," he said, getting up. "Sorry, but it's an emergency."

  "Sure, Sparky."

  "Hey, good game, Spark-man!"

  "What a play! They'll be talking about that one tonight."

  He went down the line, shaking hands, getting pats on the rump, nobody mentioning he wouldn't be back, but everyone aware of it.

  Suddenly he knew, without knowing how he knew, that these boys knew exactly who he was, and had from the first. He had a vivid vision of a group of them hiding in the hayloft, alert for approaching parents, gathered around a clandestine throwaway television set. Tuning in to the latest episode of Sparky and His Gang. Of course they knew. And the wonderful thing was, in all the time he'd been coming here no one had ever asked him for an autograph or a souvenir from the set. But they knew he was about to grow up, and they knew they would never see him again. He looked at the ground where his father had thrown the newspad. It had vanished. Soon it would be squirreled away in somebody's sock drawer, to be brought out in the dead of night and read by candlelight.

  Impulsively, he thrust his prized outfielder's mitt into the hands of a surprised Jan Stoltzfus, another boy about to become a young man, but at the normal rate. Soon he'd be playing with the grown-ups. They embraced, and Sparky turned away, followed his father around the backstop and off the field.

  * * *

  The tunnel from the Amish settlements to the fringes of King City was five miles long, paved with packed dirt, lit by gas jets that had blackened the stone tunnel walls every fifty feet. They were two hundred feet beneath the Lunar surface, safe as houses. Sparky and his father sat on the lowered wooden tailgate of a wagon piled high with fresh produce in bushel baskets and slatted crates. The wagon had rubber-rimmed wheels. It creaked from every joint as it rolled slowly over the packed dirt. There was the steady clop-clop of the two placid Percherons who had been over this road a thousand times, and there was the sound of his father's voice, droning on about some problem or other concerning his dream, the John Barrymore Valentine Theater. Sparky heard none of it. He was off in a world of his own.

  He hadn't really thought this growing-up business was going to change his life that much. The thing was, he had already thought of himself as grown up. True, he was small, he had a child's body, but his mind was that of a mature man. For that matter, he sometimes thought he'd been born mature. He didn't recall a time when he hadn't had an adult's outlook on life, shouldered a man's burdens. His relationship to John Valentine was sometimes more of a father to a reckless son than the other way around.

  But this was going to change everything. You didn't just get a larger uniform when you grew up, when you got bigger. You put away baseball for good.

  Sure, he could get into an adult league of duffers, smack the ol' pill around in his spare time, weekends, after work. But he knew without even trying it that it wouldn't be the same. Adult baseball was a way to keep the weight off without surgery, stretch the muscles. Maintenance on the old ticker, you shouldn't need a new one every five y
ears. For the pros it was a job, but Sparky would never be that good. To a kid, baseball was a world unto itself. Baseball was youth.

  "Why do I get the impression you haven't heard a word I've said?"

  "What?" Sparky looked up. "Oh, I guess I was just somewhere else."

  John Valentine made a noncommittal grunt, then reached behind him and took a twenty-dollar beefsteak tomato from a basket full of them. He bit into it. Juice and seeds ran down his chin.

  "I never even knew these people were out here," Valentine said. "Had a hell of a time finding the place."

  "They don't get a lot of visitors," Sparky said.

  "No television, you said. No movies. What do they do for entertainment? Any live theater?"

  "I don't think they approve of that, either. They farm, mostly. Work the soil. The women quilt, you know, sew these big blanket things. They're worth a fortune when they're done. They cook wonderful food."

  "Maybe we should have bought a pie or something."

  "They don't sell those. Or the muffins."

  "Smelled pretty good to me." He took another bite of the tomato. "This is a good tomato, too, but not worth what they were charging up there at the farmer's market." He tossed the remains of the tomato off the back of the wagon.

  "No," Sparky said. "Probably not."

  * * *

  I never did get another of those muffins. But to this day, when I smell cornbread, I think of Amish baseball.

  The first leg of the Halley's odyssey was Uranus to Jupiter, a trip not often made since the Invasion, two hundred years ago. Technically, it was illegal to approach Jupiter, but people did it from time to time and almost always got away with it. Space had always been too vast to really police, and Jupiter wasn't in the jurisdiction of any human-inhabited world. The only nation really interested in total interdiction was Luna, the grandly and rather nervously named Outpost State, which had existed for two hundred years only a quarter of a million miles away from the Invaders. The aliens had landed on Earth and on Jupiter. On Earth, they had wiped out all human life and destroyed all trace of human existence. What they did on Jupiter was anybody's guess. There had been no commerce humanity was aware of between the two planets in all that time. Luna would like it to stay that way. There was no reason to doubt the Invaders could finish the job, destroy all humanity, in a weekend if they took the notion. It seemed wise never to give them a reason, and therefore wise never to call too much attention to the affairs of humans.