The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  On Charon, possession or use of any pain suppressor was illegal. You need to have studied Charon to understand how awful that was. The Charonese had almost no laws at all. You were expected to do anything you could get away with. Every law they did have was a capital offense. But because pain was good, pain was to be sought, a Charonese execution consisted of confinement to a sensory deprivation tank where one could not harm oneself in any way, and kept alive there for whatever period the court deemed fit for the crime. Typically that was a couple of weeks. The miscreant was usually insane—and defining "insanity" for a Charonese was a pretty problem—within a few days.

  The Charonese religion was based around pain and death. Torture began at an early age, some authorities said in infancy. To my way of thinking, any Charonese living at the age of four or five years must already be insane, by any standard I can understand. Others maintain that the Charonese are the next step in evolution. Pain, they note, evolved to warn an organism of damage (why God couldn't just send down a written memo: "Hey, buddy, you're damaged!" was never explained to me). Now that damage was no big deal we ought to just ignore pain. Well, why not eliminate it? sez I, but I'm not writing a doctoral thesis.

  There's no need to disturb your sleep with tales of Charonese bloodbaths, self-mutilations, orgies of sex and violence. A description of Charonese love-making alone would haunt you for days. And besides, the information gets very sketchy here. All the authors are dead, and accounts differ; who can say what is true and what is fancy? One example will suffice for all: the Charonese equivalent of a bar mitzvah involves self-disembowelment, after which the honoree amputates both legs and an arm, and then chews off... but I can't go on. It's all healed immediately, so what's the big deal, eh? Unless you have more sensitivity than a garden slug, that is.

  Needless to say, such a lifelong regimen has produced a breed of human with not much in common with the rest of us. Nothing but death will stop them, and death is meaningless if you're in my shoes, because if, for instance, Izzy had not completed his mission at the time of his death, someone else would be along soon to rectify the oversight. And if I managed to kill Charonese number two, there would be a number three, and a number four.

  The population of Charon was about five million. I'd have to kill a few hundred a day just to break even.

  As if. So far I'd killed one through luck and evaded another twice, again, mostly through luck. And if I killed Isambard...

  What would number two be like? I didn't think they had sent their champion killer to snuff an actor.

  * * *

  THE DISCOVERY OF SEX

  Part Four of a Series

  by Hildy Johnson

  * * *

  They tried to warn him.

  "It's not like anything you've experienced as a boy," they said.

  "Come on, Doc," Sparky said. "I'm thirty years old. You think I haven't had sex?"

  Well, of course he'd had sex. Or what passes for sex in one whose puberty has been arrested for many years. And I'm sure he enjoyed it. There was a joke going around school when I was young: Sparky is about to get into bed with one of his young fans. (We all assumed that young fan would someday be us.) He pulls down his trousers and the girl stares. "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that little thing?" She laughs. And Sparky says, "Me."

  They say size doesn't matter, and it's true, to a point. Sixteen inches would be nightmarish. Two inches... Are you in yet, darling? Sparky's measurement has never been a secret. One must assume he had a lot of charitable partners.

  So that alone would be a big difference in his experience: being with a woman who wasn't faking anything.

  But no matter how considerate we are in the sack, for most of us the primary urge is a rather selfish one, isn't it? Fess up. Is the experience a total loss if you get off, even if he or she didn't? Gee whiz, I'm sorry, hon, I'll do better next time, and... zzzzzzzzz.

  The doctors told him what he'd been having were "dry" orgasms, sometimes called "infantile" erections. He felt like he was turned on, and he felt like he was coming, but he didn't know the half of it.

  Puberty. A time of exciting and dreadful change. A time of confusion. A time of exploration. Most of us get about a year to adjust to it.

  Sparky had about a week....

  * * *

  Ken Valentine leaped up, bounced once on the giant bed, and hit the floor running. He ran right up the wall, seeing himself as Donald O'Connor in Singin' in the Rain, only Donald O'Connor wasn't naked. Turned a back flip and landed running again. Jumped to the ceiling, shoved himself down to the floor, and began caroming off the walls like a demented kangaroo.

  Back in the bed, a lump of sheets and comforters stirred. A hand emerged and cautiously peeled back enough covers to expose disheveled hair, a forehead, and two slightly bruised eyes. The eyes followed Ken's progress around the room. Then the rest of the face was exposed and Hildy Johnson sat up in the bed.

  "You've got more energy than three litters of puppies," she said.

  "I know, I know!" he shouted, and bounced some more.

  They were in the penthouse suite of one of the better hotels in King City. It had been the nearest refuge when Ken began feeling the urge down in the lobby, while Hildy was making yet another attempt to interview him concerning the onset of puberty. Perhaps onslaught would be a better word, she thought. Or maybe attack.

  Try blitzkrieg.

  There was no law against going at it right there in the lobby, but that wasn't Hildy's style; she had been raised to believe public sex was uncouth. Besides, Kenneth was filthy rich, and she'd always wanted to stay in a room like this. She'd managed to restrain him long enough to reach the elevator. By then, there was a real danger he'd start humping the potted plants. Since this biological banzai, Sparky really needed to be kept on a leash.

  The room had a spa big enough to bathe a herd of elephants. She'd pushed him into it and surrendered to the inevitable. The bed was fifteen feet on a side and they'd debauched every square foot. Sometimes it seemed more of a war game than lovemaking. Hildy saw her redoubts of pillow and blanket fall to his relentless assaults over and over again. Not that she was much of a fighter. But with such an aggressive partner, she got a kick out of resisting for a while, before allowing her positions to be invaded. She even had a few bruises, a first for her. But she gave as good as she got.

  It was just about the best sex she'd ever had, but now she was in the mood for an armistice. She didn't think Ken was.

  "Why didn't anyone ever tell me?" he shouted, for possibly the three hundredth time. He leaped into the bed, bounced over to Hildy, and yanked the blankets away from her. She was pale and nude and perfect, with patches of pinkness here and there. He crawled from her feet to her chest, making obeisance at various stations of the corpus, fondly remembering what this was for, what they'd done with that, what had happened here and here and here. He collapsed across her body, resting his head on her moist breasts.

  "If I'd only known," he breathed in her ear. "I feel like I wasted fifteen years. Hell, I only have maybe three, four hundred years left! And there are billions of women in the system. Billions!"

  "Maybe even a few dozen who don't want to fuck you," Hildy pointed out.

  "Impossible! How could they possibly want to miss... this!"

  "How indeed. Just plain cruelty, I'd think."

  "Exactly! Exactly! Cruel to both of us! What possible reason could there be to not make love?"

  "Hmmm. Soreness?"

  He frowned. "You aren't sore, are you?"

  "Honey, I... never mind. Aren't you?"

  "A little," he admitted.

  "Then why don't we call a time-out, and finish the interview?"

  "Interview? Interview? Is that what you call this?" He kissed her lips, and her breasts.

  "That's what it started out to be. Remember? This morning? The hotel lobby? We were going to have breakfast?"

  "Breakfast?" He seemed to be having trouble with words longer than
four letters. "Oh, yeah. Breakfast. God, am I ever hungry." He reached across her and punched a button on the headboard. "Send up a lot of breakfast," he said.

  "Yes, sir. What would you like?" a female voice replied.

  "A lot. A lot of everything. Make it real fast, and I'll tip triple. Including you, sweetheart, if you aren't a computer."

  "I'm not a computer," said the voice, "and it will be real fast."

  "Okay," said Sparky, turning back to Hildy. "What do you want to know?"

  Hildy put a fingertip to her left temple and twisted. The pupil of her left eye began to glow a deep red, like a deer caught in headlights.

  "Recording," she said, formally. Sitting there naked on the bed, she noticed an almost imperceptible change in his attitude. It was something performers, actors, fashion models did. The director yells "Action!" The spotlight hits the singer on the stage, the photographer lifts his camera, and the people turn on. Or switch to a different level of reality, Hildy thought. The shoulders move, the teeth get brighter somehow, the eyes twinkle. It was a little scary, but not half so much as the other end of the process, when the director yells "Cut!" The smile collapses. The charisma is stored, way back wherever people who have it, keep it. She had to cut through that before she'd get anything useful.

  "On the record..." she said, finishing the legal litany. "Sparky, would you agree with the proposition that the pubescent human male is the stupidest animal on two legs?"

  He laughed. "If you want to take me as an example... yeah. Or on four legs, or six, or eight." He glanced down at his semierect penis. "Maybe we should say three legs."

  Hildy glanced down, too—or at least her right eye did. The left remained stabilized on the establishing shot, recording a solid image she would use mainly as earlier reporters had used sound recorders. There would be Hyper-Text image bites, of course, but she doubted she would use much from this particular session. Sparky was still gazing down with boundless affection. It was like he had a new friend. In a way, he did.

  "Say," he said, brightly. "Maybe it's not me that's dumb at all. Maybe when your cock starts to grow, it sort of sucks up your brains." He made a sucking sound with his lips. "Pow! And your IQ drops like a stone. You're at the mercy of any female who walks past you. You'd do anything to... sure, sure, that's it." He grasped his newly burgeoned manhood and waved it more or less in Hildy's direction. "This fellow gets it into his head... so to speak—"

  "Off," Hildy said. "Sparky, it's a very bad sign when you start referring to your cock in the third person. Next thing you know you'll give it a name... and I'm out of here."

  "You're right, you're right." Sparky apologized. "I'm crazy, but I'm not loony." That look came into his eyes again and his gaze dropped down her body. It landed where it usually did, and he was no longer semierect. "How about it, while we're off the record? Do you think we could—"

  The bedroom door swung open and three bellhops hurried in, pushing carts groaning with bacon and eggs and pastries and fruit. For a moment there Sparky was so funny, his head moving rapidly back and forth between Hildy and the food, back to Hildy again, back to the food, totally unable to decide which he wanted more... she fell over laughing.

  * * *

  ...and by Friday, though he was not back to anything like "normal," he could at least be trusted again around livestock.

  * * *

  NEXT WEEK:

  Part Five

  The New Sparky, as Romeo!

  * * *

  What amused Kenneth the most was that growing up felt like the world was shrinking. He wondered if normal boys, growing up in the normal way, experienced it like that. Did it seem their clothing had gotten too tight? That doorways were lower now, so they could reach up and touch them as they passed through? Or was it all too gradual?

  Rooms imploding, shoes pinching, stumbling on stair risers that seemed to get lower even as he climbed them... these he could handle.

  But people getting smaller...

  He was now the same height as his father. He found it enormously disconcerting. For thirty years his father had been this vast presence, towering, stern, but loving. The fact that other men were taller was completely beside the point. In the ways that mattered, John Valentine had been the tallest man in the world.

  But in this new, changed world, his father was only slightly over average height. He had a way of standing that made people think he was taller than he was, a way of dominating a gathering of people so that, from Kenneth's old perspective and even without the elevator shoes the loving son's uplifted gaze provided, made him stand out above anyone but a basketball team. But now they were eye to eye.

  This was inconceivable.

  This was preposterous.

  This was... something a billion sons had encountered during their youth, nothing unusual at all. Except they had crept up on the idea. They had done it as a proper son should, a millimeter a week, not sprouted insolently like some demented beanstalk.

  Kenneth was profoundly embarrassed by it. He now habitually stood slumped, slouched, hipshot. It just made him look sullen, and didn't really help anyway.

  John Valentine put his hand on Kenneth's shoulder and squeezed affectionately.

  "Who says dreams can't come true? Right, son?"

  "That's right, Dad."

  They were standing in the almost-finished park across from the dream. The park was three acres in area and ten levels high. The ground was bare soil, with sprinklers and electrical outlets naked. Soon they would be covered with sod. But a fountain was bubbling off to their left, and a white gazebo to their right sported electric flags that snapped in the nonexistent wind. In a few hours the orange fences would come down and people would begin using the paths, sitting on the benches. Children would climb in the small playground and splash in the pond with golden koi and the park's resident pair of otters.

  John Valentine barely noticed any of this. The park had been part of his specifications for the project—and he would never know how many headaches this had caused-—but it had really been no more important to him than the color of the ushers' uniforms. A thing he would notice if it were done wrong, never see if it was right. He had said the theater should be across from a park. Here was the park. Enough said.

  His attention was fixed firmly on the edifice across the wide pedway.

  The Valentine. His dream. Well, Kenneth's, too.

  "You remember that day at the spaceport, Kenneth?" he asked. "It was the day after I took you to the Sparky audition. Maybe you were too young."

  "I remember it, Father."

  "It's funny," John Valentine went on. "I don't recall exactly where we were going. Mars, wasn't it?"

  "Yes, Father."

  "Can't think why we'd want to go to Mars. Brutal gravity on Mars. Anyway, we'd had this offer, and we didn't know what to do with it. Television. A series. The money sounded good, but... television! Remember?"

  "Oh, yes," Kenneth said, with a smile.

  "And that's where the dream was born. The Valentine." He waved his arm grandly at the marquee. "Shakespearean repertory. We never knew it would take this long. This many years, you laboring with the kiddie schlock, me languishing in the sticks. But we got the money, and now we have the time."

  Kenneth knew his father had no notion of just how much money. But following John Valentine's gaze, he had to admit it was money well spent.

  The facade was wood, recalling what the exterior of the Globe Theater might have looked like. It stretched for half a city block, facing the park. The actual entrance took up half that much of the frontage: four sets of wood-and-glass doors, a small box office off to one side. Above it was a tasteful marquee, brightly lit, but with nothing that flashed or moved. "This ain't a casino," Valentine had said. On all three sides it advertised:

  * * *

  ROMEO AND JULIET

  Kenneth Valentine

  Maya Chang

  John Valentine

  * * *

  with the tasteful logo featurin
g a rose and a sword that had come from the top graphic-design firm in King City. And not cheaply. Above that was a two-story tower with THE VALENTINE spelled vertically, THE floating over the v, in a type style called BROADWAY.

  It had once been the Roxy Theater. Even in its heyday the Roxy had not been a premiere venue. Located on a seldom-traveled side street just off the Rialto, it had struggled along for almost twenty years presenting the sort of experimental works beloved of acting students and practically nobody else, playing to audiences composed mostly of relatives of those students. It was far too large a house for that. The balcony had been walled off early on, but even then the four hundred main-floor seats were usually half-empty. Sometimes nine-tenths empty. The theater had been owned by a man with some money, a man almost as eccentric as John Valentine. He was content to lose small sums yearly, until a change in the tax situation made it impossible to continue. And it sat there, dark, boarded up, for fifteen years until Sparky's real-estate scouts discovered it. Valentine didn't give a hoot about the bad location: "They'll come to us; you wait and see."

  Renovation had kept Valentine busy for the better part of six months, and now it was ready.

  Father and son crossed the pedway and entered their theater. The lobby was dark wood and thick maroon carpet. Heavy curtains covered the back walls, pulled away from the four entrances. They could be raised entirely so standees could look through wide openings in the rear wall. Valentine fully expected standees, at every performance.

  They walked down the sloping aisle between the left and the center sections of seats, which were wide, and plushly upholstered in the same shade as the carpet. They reached the orchestra and turned around.