The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  LEAR: What about you, sweets?

  CORDELIA: You're cool, Pops.

  LEAR: Well, fuck you! You don't get nothing. You two bitches split it up.

  KENT: You're fuckin' up, big man.

  LEAR: Fuck you, too! Screw!

  (Exit Kent; Enter Duke of Burgundy and King of France)

  BURGUNDY: No cash? Fuck me! I don't want her, then!

  FRANCE: I'll take her.

  CORDELIA: Cool!

  LEAR: Take the bitch, then. I'm outta here.

  (Exit Lear and court)

  FRANCE: Let's screw.

  CORDELIA: Cool!

  (Exit France and Cordelia)

  GONERIL: He's one nutty old fuck!

  REGAN: Let's fuck him over.

  GONERIL: Okay.

  (Exit Goneril and Regan)

  EDMUND: (aside) I'm one double-crossing bastard!

  (Exit)

  * * *

  There are seasons in the life of a Shakespearean actor, natural milestones he can expect along the path of his career. The two most important are Romeo and Lear.

  Romeo is a young man's game. Impetuous and energetic, thunderstruck by the storms of puberty, stunned by love. It's not a part for the mature, though God knows it's been played by enough codgers. As I've just related, Romeo was a disaster for me. I don't have much affection for the role.

  Macbeth is on his way up. Hamlet and Henry V are vigorous and youthful. Othello and Julius Caesar are in the full flower of their careers.

  There are innumerable other roles an actor can essay—a few he can find himself stuck in as a second stringer or a comic. But if one has hopes of being written in the annals of the great, if one aspires to acquire the mantle of Burbage and Olivier, then the capstone of his career will be Lear.

  Lear.

  In the seventy years since my days as Sparky, the closest I had ever come to playing Lear was in an engaging little trifle called The Five-Minit Bard, a small part of which is set out above.

  Oh, the fun we had. The premise was simple: all Shakespeare in one night, no play longer than five minutes. Each was done in a different style. Hamlet as if by Gilbert and Sullivan, with a patter song and a happy ending. All's Well That Ends Well as rewritten by Beckett, with performers sitting in chairs, muttering bits of dialogue and abandoning the project after three minutes. Richard III the radio serial, one-minute episodes with sound effects scattered through the performance. Henry VI, all three parts, narrated by a super-rapid square-dance caller and done as a ballet a la Copland.

  And A Midsummer Night's Dream as played by Sparky and his Gang, with guess who as Puck/Sparky. No one ever suspected.

  Some were a lot shorter than five minutes, or the night would have run three hours, much too long for comedy. Timon of Athens: a man walks to center stage and says, "Nobody gives a damn about Timon of Athens," and walks off. Titus Andronicus: all cast members line up onstage, and at a signal, begin hacking at each other with swords, blood bladders spraying high-pressure Max Factor Red #2.

  Then there was King Lear, as if done by the turn-of-the-century Rude Theater. Most critics hated 5MB, but it was a long-running hit. I played dozens of parts, including Lear.

  I say these things in an attempt to explain why, after an absence of more than thirty years, I was returning to Luna. I had been there only twice since my hasty departure from Romeo. Things had been all too hot for me the last time I left—misunderstandings not affected by any statute of limitations—and I'd sworn a mighty oath never to return. Things would be even hotter now, with Isambard and the whole stinking planet of Charon on my trail, possibly already waiting for me. I didn't pretend they'd have any more trouble finding me here than they had at Oberon. If I had a brain in my head, I'd be hopping the first tramp free-faller to points unspecified and mysterious. I'd be doing the thing I had become so good at: losing myself in the vast spaces of the solar system.

  But I never even thought of that, and the reason was simple.

  Lear.

  Not only Lear, but Lear staged by the greatest director of our time, my long-ago sidekick and onetime best friend—only friend—Kaspara Polichinelli.

  And by now Polly probably didn't have a lot of time left.

  * * *

  Almost from the first blast at Oberon, I had been absorbed with the question of where to land when we reached Luna. Adept though I am at producing false identification and talking my way through any difficulties, simply setting down at the King City Spaceport in a spent lifeboat was bound to draw unwanted attention.

  But I had some advantages. By the nature of space and of space travel, "border patrol" around a place like Luna is an iffy proposition. Radar and computers can certainly track all the millions of approaching, departing, and orbiting vehicles in the vast sphere, one thousand miles from the surface, that the lawyers have defined as Lunar territorial space. But having done that, what do you do next? Allow landings and takeoffs only at designated spots, like major spaceports? Ten million weekend orienteers, campers, and renters of shorthoppers would raise quite a howl about that one. Not to mention a million freeholders living in self-sufficient isolation, scattered over the entire Lunar surface. Should we ask these folks to hoof it to the nearest train? Allow only surface transportation to hiking trails and camp resorts? No, Lunarians will surrender certain of their civil rights, just like anyone else, if the reason is strong enough. If people are blowing up spaceships with bombs, they will submit to searches before boarding a spaceship. But ban private hoppers, orbiters, or even deep-space RVs... to stop smugglers? To keep a lid on illegal immigration? 'Fraid not, Senator.

  So. How about employing sophisticated computer programs to keep track of deep-space arrivals, matching these up with vehicle transponder codes and criminal rap sheets and travel patterns and godknowswhatelse, and following suspicious ships to ask a few questions and conduct a quick Gestapo-style shakedown?

  Tried that. Didn't work. Nabbed a few pathetic amateurs, first offenders, got off with a warning. Big waste of time and money.

  So how about... open borders?

  But... but... open borders? Absolute anathema to the bureaucratic mentality. Never mind that there has never been a border quite so tenuous or so permeable as the one surrounding Luna, or the ones around any planet. We can't just let people come and go as they please, can we? Carrying any damn thing they want to carry? Precious close to anarchy, that.

  And so... actually, no. Not what you're probably thinking. For once, rationality prevailed. It helped that there is little worth smuggling on a small scale, since little is illegal these days. Avoiding duty on large cargoes is another matter entirely, and it's easy to keep track of the big ships if they land where they oughtn't. As for illegal immigration... what illegal immigration? It's not a problem on Luna. Just step right up and ask for citizenship papers, and after a sixty-second search of InterSystem crime records, a credit check (we don't want your welfare cases), and payment of a nominal fee, you're a Lunarian. Welcome, cobber!

  So the situation is like this, for those of you who thought getting into Luna for a criminal type like myself would be a big hairy deal: it ain't. Not at first, anyway. There are plenty of wanted folks in those freeholds I mentioned a moment ago, and if they stay put and don't try to enter the mainstream of civilization, they can stay there for a million years as far as the Lunar federal government is concerned. No one will come looking for them.

  It's the next step that's tough.

  Did I say the spherical "border" around Luna is really a laughable fiction? I did, and it is. Did I imply that means one can then just walk the main thoroughfares of King City? I did not. That border is tighter than a tick's tush. That border makes the old "Iron Curtain" seem like a vague, unpatrolled line in the sand and a few desultory formalities. Because the border between the surface of Luna and the cities of Luna is nothing less than the line between life and death. Between vacuum and air. Every entrance into the main corridors of Luna is, of necessity, a fortress designed to
keep air inside and the Breathsucker out. If a molecule of oxygen has no chance of passing through without the proper authorization, how much chance does several trillion molecules of actor have of entering without a visa?

  Well, anything can be done, if you know your way around. The easiest way is through your friends, but you have to have the right sort of friends. The sort who do this sort of thing every day.

  I chose to go through the Heinleiners.

  * * *

  Before the Big Glitch, not long ago, nobody knew anything about the Heinleiners. In fact, they didn't even have that name; it was given to them later by media reports after the pivotal part they played, involuntarily, in the Glitch itself. Now everybody thinks they know everything about Heinleiners, but the truth is, most of it is wrong.

  First, and most basic, it's pretty silly to refer to them as a group. They're not group-type people. Nobody elects officers, no meetings are held. You "join" by being invited to one of several secret locations by a friend. What you actually do, however, is to opt out of the aboveground society. You can do it totally, choosing to live in one of the secret enclaves, or partially, maintaining a life and an identity while moving back and forth between the two realms.

  When the Lunar Central Computer, the CC, had the nervous breakdown we've all come to call the Big Glitch, the Heinleiners were one of its main targets. There's been endless speculation as to why. The short answer so far is, We don't know. The popular theory, and one I think makes sense, is the CC was deeply offended by a high-tech group living beyond its reach, and possessing technology not available to the CC. Accordingly, the CC organized and trained, in secret, a cadre of extra-legal police that you might as well call an army. This bunch invaded the main Heinleiner compound, intending to wipe it out, and got a big surprise: these people fought back. The takeover failed, the CC retreated into a semicatatonic state from which it is only now being coaxed, and Lunar life was turned topsy-turvy.

  Intimately tied up in all this, again involuntarily, was one Hildy Johnson, ace reporter for the News Nipple. Yes, that Hildy Johnson.

  She has told some of her story publicly. She's told more of it to me. There is much she still has to tell, which she'll get to when she thinks it wise. And this presents me with a problem. As a sort of "member" of the group, I am constrained in what I can reveal about it. Luckily, much of it is superfluous to the story I'm telling. Here is what I can reveal:

  1) The group got its name from a space vessel called the Robert A. Heinlein, named for a twentieth-century writer and radical political philosopher. The ship is very large, even by today's standards, and quite old. It was originally intended as an Orion-type starship, that is, a ship powered by large numbers of nuclear bombs exploding against a massive pusher plate. You can find the plans for one in any public library. Long ago the original builders went broke, and the shell of the ship ended up derelict on the edge of a vast junkyard. The Heinleiners took it over, and the junkyard as well. Today the ship, or parts of it, serve as the public face of the Heinleiners, the place reporters and politicians go when they want to talk to one. (Good luck! They don't do a lot of talking.)

  2) These people do share some of Mr. Heinlein's political philosophy, the part that can be summed up as "Leave me alone!" They are not anarchists, but they brook little interference from the government. They are happiest where there is no government, and you'll find many of them, or their sympathizers, in the more remote regions of the system. But a lot of folks can't take that kind of isolation (me, for instance), and so live well concealed (if they are doing illegal things) or openly (where they work for a quasi-libertarian form of government). They don't plan to overthrow any governments; that would be entirely too much trouble and, as even the most doctrinaire of them will admit, the yoke of present-day governments is not intolerably onerous, when viewed historically. Things could be worse, and would likely get worse if there was a lot of radical political agitation to suppress. Don't look for Heinleiners to be publishing any manifestos, nailing any lists of demands to courthouse doors, storming any Bastilles. But they do have one secret, jealously guarded, in whose pursuit they are implacable:

  3) They're going to the stars.

  Hah! you say. Secret! you say. Tell me another one.

  Very well. The fact that they intend to travel to the stars is very well known, and almost universally dismissed. Any number of Eminent Scientists will explain to you in great detail why the project is impossible. The Heinleiners think this is just fine. The fewer people take them seriously, the fewer there will be trying to discover the real secret, which is how they intend to do it.

  Trust me. They're going to do it.

  I am the least-qualified person in the system to look at a stardrive and say, "Aha! That will work!" You could spend a year showing it to me, explaining it to me, drawing nice pretty pictures and reading the manual (if there was such a thing) out loud, and at the end I would still be in a state of perfect ignorance concerning stardrives.

  But others, people who know, tell me I can count on it. In a year, two years—however long it takes to patch it up—that magnificent hulk sitting out there on the surface is going to leap up and violate the virgin sky. How fast will it go? No one will say. But no one will raise a family during the journey, and you won't return to find all your friends a hundred years older than you.

  Swamp gas, you say. How many "starships" have been sold to how many suckers in the last century? Hyperspace is to our age as lost treasure maps and gold mines and oil wells and Florida real estate were to a previous generation of confidence men. I should know; I've sold enough starships in my time.

  Yes, and the way to sell them is not to hide out by a garbage dump and not tell anyone about it. You can invest, and this may be your last chance before the stock goes intergalactic. Check out the prospectus. It claims nothing, promises nothing. Believe me, this is not how you sell pirate gold. Call your broker at once. You'll thank me later.

  And that is the secret, you see. Not that they are going, but how they're going to get there. The inventors and investors in this new space drive do not intend to turn it over to a grateful government, or have it confiscated by storm troopers. They don't intend to patent it, either. Patent examiners can be bribed, information can leak. If the Heinleiners have a religion, it is Free Enterprise. They intend to sell this new technology, and they intend to become dirty, rotten, filthy, stinking rich from it.

  * * *

  It was a short hike to the nearest entrance to the Heinlein. A few years ago there had been no way in but to stand around and wait for one of the inhabitants to notice you and invite you in or tell you to get lost. Now there were three or four standard air locks. Beyond them were rudimentary reception rooms, "customs shacks" to the Heinleiners. The notoriety of the Big Glitch had forced them to assume an unaccustomed organization, which they went about grudgingly and haphazardly, as was their style. These entrances were manned by volunteers, which were hard to come by in such an individualistic group. I heard later that it was standard procedure to cool your heels for hours at these entrances, waiting for someone to arrive at the security desk.

  And if you didn't know somebody, the custom shack was as far as you'd get.

  We got lucky. Someone was manning the desk when Poly and I entered. Even better, the name I dropped was still worth something. I'd worried about that, since it had been quite some time since I'd dealt with this person and there had been absolutely no way to get in contact with him other than simply walking up to the door and asking. But the guard at the desk simply nodded, and jerked her thumb at the second lock behind her. Then she went back to the book she was reading.

  "Keep your helmet on," I told Poly as we cycled through. "You never know what you'll run into in here."

  She soon saw what I meant, and her reaction was the usual one.

  "These people must be crazy," she said.

  It's not so bad within the ship itself. You see building and renovation happening here and there, but thi
ngs always look a little loose around a construction site. Then you move out of the ship and into the vast junk pile behind it. And things just don't look right.

  Everything has a haphazard, thrown-together look. Tunnel walls are made out of whatever was handy when a new tunnel was needed. Lights are burned out and if you can still see reasonably well, just stay burned out. There are no municipal crews to replace them. If you stumble in the dark, then replace it yourself, citizen! There ain't no City Hall to sue if you trip. Air 'cyclers have flashing yellow, or even red lights. Most Lunarians can go five years without even seeing a flashing green.

  "Do they have a death wish?" Poly asked, after a mile of this.

  "They have a safety net," I told her, and didn't explain further. But I knew what she meant. People raised to the exacting safety standards of Lunar engineering were always shocked to see how the Heinleiners lived. Sort of like how you might feel to go up in an airplane, then look out the window and see a wing was being held on by two rusty bolts and a wad of gum.

  But that wouldn't bother you if you were a bird. Something goes wrong, you just fly to the ground. And that's how the Heinleiners had come to view the world, because they had a safety net in the form of the force-field suit. Maybe we'd all come to view the world that way if they ever decided to sell the technology. If a blowout happened, a field was instantly generated around their bodies from a unit implanted in place of one lung. The unit also contained about an hour of highly compressed oxygen, dispensed directly into the bloodstream. To someone wearing a device like that, a blowout was nothing more than an inconvenience. Thus, Heinleiners didn't waste a lot of time and effort on making things triple-triple-triple redundant. One system and maybe a backup was good enough for them. Many things they made were no better than they had to be. These were busy people—they were going to the stars!—and there was always something else to do.

  Of course, it made things a little edgy when you realized their safety net didn't do you a damn bit of good. When I had to go to the enclave, I got my business done quickly, and got out. Which is just how the Heinleiners wanted it.