The Golden Globe

by John Varley

  "I have often walked down this street before," he said.

  "If that's my cue to burst into song, forget it," I said.

  "I spend a lot of time here. Right here in this park."

  He hitched at his pants, sat beside me on the bench. He took a crumpled bag of peanuts from his coat pocket, shelled one, and popped it into his mouth. Immediately two yellow-headed parrots and a cardinal swooped in from the surrounding trees, waiting for a handout. Elwood tossed them a peanut.

  "Pigeons too prosaic for this park," he observed.

  The problem of Elwood seems to me to boil down to a problem of pigeons. Or parrots, or any other animal. Toby doesn't see Elwood, but knows when he's around. Most likely he's just picking up my reactions, I've always told myself. But other animals seem to see him. Another cardinal flew in and sat on Elwood's shoulder.

  So how do you explain that? Was I imagining the birds? Was I imagining the peanuts? I knew that if he offered me one, I'd be able to put it in my mouth and taste it, and swallow it. Did I bring a sack of peanuts with me? Were there real birds here, only not doing what I saw them doing?

  Expressed in terms of nuts and birds, the problem seems trivial, even funny. Considered as the central fact of an act of murder, my delusional states don't seem funny at all. Every time Elwood appears he presents me with these perceptual conundrums. Spend too much time thinking about them and I'm sure I'd go... well, nuts. Not the sort of nuts I already am—which is at least a functional insanity—but rubber-room, spit-slinging, lobotomaniacal bull-goose looney.

  But I've spent a lot of time with him. And while my worldview is not to be trusted and though I don't buy any nonsense about ghosts, spirit worlds, other dimensions, or leprechauns, there is one statement on existence I do accept, fully. There is more under Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Mr. Rationalist.

  Let's leave it at that, and let the details be worked out at the psychiatric hearing.

  "Didya have a nice trip?" Elwood asked.

  "Except for the first few miles. After that, it was the lap of luxury. You should have visited."

  He wrinkled his nose.

  "Don't like flying much anymore."

  "Don't like... Charles Lindbergh would be ashamed of you."

  "I think ol' Charlie would have been bored. He was a big one for adventure, Charlie was. That's how I played him, anyway. Never played any astronauts, though. That was a bit after my time."

  I gestured at his 1950s-era baggy gray suit.

  "So, do you know something I don't? Am I going to need a lawyer? Are the police closing in on me?"

  "Well, there is no statute of limitations. And you know you have no business being here. You know that as well as I do. But as far as I've heard, there's no active search for you. Yet."

  "I've been sitting here trying to think of a defense," I said. "How do you think this one would play? 'I was framed, Your Honor! Some dirty rat put that gun in my hand!' "

  "I think you'd get charged with a miserable James Cagney impression."

  "Stick to the point, counselor. Stick to the facts."

  "The facts in this case are in considerable dispute. I think a competent attorney could create a reasonable doubt concerning a possible accomplice. But I'd have to bow out of the case, of course. Conflict of interest."

  "I'd rather be represented by that Ransom Stoddard fellow, anyway."

  "The man who didn't shoot Liberty Valance? He's good."

  We sat in silence for a while, watching the parrots break open and eat the peanuts. There were half a dozen of them now.

  "But if I can get serious for a minute," he said, "neither one of us would be the right choice for you, if you should find yourself in trouble."

  "You mean, for some reason other than the fact that you don't exist? 'That's right, Your Honor, I wish to be represented by my good friend Jesus Christ, seated in this empty chair on my right. Ably assisted by Tinker Bell, who'll circle near the ceiling dispensing pixie dust.' "

  He waited patiently until I settled down again.

  "No, it's something else entirely. I think you'd do well with counsel a little more versed in modern legal issues. Things I wouldn't know a lot about, nor Mr. Stoddard, either."

  I asked him what he meant by that, and he just shook his head. When Elwood wants to be stubborn, there is no moving him, so I eventually had to let it go.

  "So what are you going to do, my friend?" he asked, after a long silence.

  "Do? Elwood, what do you think I ought to do?"

  "Get off this planet and try to lose yourself," he said, without hesitation. "That Comfort fellow isn't going to give up, you know, and it won't be hard to trace you here."

  "He's probably here already," I agreed.

  "Well, you made it pretty fast. I'd say he'll get here in the next week or so."

  "Maybe. But I've got this little problem, Elwood." I thought of the image of the pachinko game. The feeling that all my running, seventy years of looking over my shoulder, had brought me here. To this bench. I hadn't tried to stand up since he sat down beside me. I was afraid to.

  "I feel like I've been in this big bathtub," I told him. "The water is swirling out the drain, and I've been swimming as hard as I can for a very long time. And now the water is all gone, and I'm sitting on the bottom, naked and wet as a newborn baby. Only I feel like I've wasted seventy years. All that running, and here I am. I just don't seem to want to move."

  "So you're going to stay here? That's what you want to do?"

  I sighed.

  "What I really want to do, more than anything, is turn myself in."

  I don't think I was sure until the moment I said it that I really did want to surrender. But saying it, I felt such a sense of relief, such a feeling of freedom as I hadn't experienced since that day on the stage of the John Valentine Theater.

  With a shock, I realized I'd felt that sense of freedom after I'd killed my father.

  Elwood was looking at me, shaking his head.

  "Well, I don't entirely disagree with you on that," he said. "And I'd be more than willing to go in with you. Perhaps I could speak to your psychiatrist, give him a little insight into your life, from the perspective of somebody who's spent a lot of time around you. Maybe contribute to an insanity defense, though I don't know how they handle things like that these days. But there's one thing I think you should do first."

  "And what is that?"

  "Take your shot at King Lear. Never know when you might get another chance." He stood up and held his hand out to me.

  I never touch Elwood, for obvious reasons. But this time I didn't even look around to see who might be watching. I took his hand, and he lifted me off the bench.

  * * *

  Bayou Teche is an old "pocket" disneyland just a ten-minute tube ride from the center of King City. When it was first built, they simply called it a disneyland, since an artificial "Earthly" environment almost a mile across and a quarter of a mile high was a very big deal in those days. At first it was hard to get people to visit. "How ya gonna hold the roof up, huh?" Many people never could come, and many still can't, agoraphobia being quite common amongst the tunnel-raised population.

  Later, when they began building the serious disneys like Texas, Mekong, Kansas, Serengeti, a hundred miles deep and thirty, forty, sixty miles across, the original parks came to be called minis. Now the trend has come full circle as more and more people—those who can afford it—aspire to move into a "natural" environment. Micro-disneys are popping up like bubbles in champagne, but they are not notably wild. Most have golf courses. All modern amenities are just minutes away.

  The older parks had a problem. Many turned themselves into "modern" parks, not much different from suburbia on Old Earth: communities of houses from one era or another. Traditionalists pointed out that the whole idea of disneys was to provide a taste of life on Earth before the Invasion, even before civilization. Most compromised, allowing some settlement by "townies," as opposed to permanen
t "authentics," like Doc in West Texas. Some tried to qualify for government heritage grants by providing environments people might not necessarily want to live in, but which the Antiquities Board felt were worth supporting in spite of their inhospitality.

  At Bayou Teche, it was night, and bugs. Twenty-two hours of night every day, and billions and billions of bugs.

  This was where Kaspara Polichinelli, the greatest stage director of her time, had chosen to spend her retirement. You may remember her as Sparky's sidekick, Polly.

  The only way to Polly's house was by water, in a little boat called a pirogue. Pronounced pee-row. There were no maps. No roads. Hardly any land. The bayous wound in an impenetrable maze designed to re-create the delta country at the end of the Mississippi River.

  My guide/taxi driver was a smiling man who introduced himself as Beaudreaux—pronounced boo-drow—who helped me into the little flat-bottomed cockleshell that seemed to be made of scrap lumber and gumbo mud. The bottom was awash in water. I took a seat up front and Beaudreaux started up a little outboard engine no bigger than a football, pulling a rope until it choked to life in a cloud of blue smoke and then settled into a steady puttering. We eased away from the ramshackle dock just inside the visitors' entrance, and into a landscape right out of your worst prehistoric nightmare.

  At a dizzying three miles per hour.

  Over water black as ink, flowing at a tenth our speed.

  Water smooth as old bourbon, but not nearly so sweet smelling.

  Luckily, I'd taken my motion-sickness pills.

  I was dressed in the only sensible clothing for the Bayou: a head-to-toe silk khaki jumpsuit pulled over my own clothes, rubber boots and gloves, topped off by a safari hat fitted with a mesh beekeeper's veil. Wrists and ankles of the suit were elastic, worn over the sleeves and legs.

  They told me the suit was sprayed with a harmless repellent, which had sounded like overkill at the time. The insects couldn't get to me, I reasoned, so what was the point?

  Five minutes into the boat ride I decided, with a touch of awe, that without the repellent the bugs might actually pick me up and carry me off, to devour at their leisure.

  Though it was night in the Bayou, it was far from pitch black. We frequently passed homes set on stilts, or built on flat-bottomed boat hulls. Most had kerosene lamps hanging outside the porch and a softer light spilling from the windows. There was a lamp on a pole at the bow of the pirogue, as well. All these light sources were swarming with clouds of flying insects. Moths and lacewings and dragonflies—"skeeter hawks," to Beaudreaux—and beetles and lightning bugs and June bugs and gnats and I don't know what all.

  And mosquitoes. Enough mosquitoes to suck you dry in ten seconds.

  I hate bugs.

  * * *

  I'd been hearing what sounded like flapping wings since shortly after the trip began. About halfway to Polly's something whooshed by my head, inches away. I ducked, and Beaudreaux laughed. Beaudreaux, who somehow was enduring this trip dressed in denim overalls and a short-sleeved chambray shirt, no hat, no gloves.

  "Bat," he told me. "We got many t'ousan bat in hya. We got de froo' bat, de Mex'can bat, de pug-nose bat, de leaf-nose bat, de red bat, de gray bat, and de renard volant, de flyin' fox, en anglais." At least I think that's what he said. He spoke with an odd accent, a patois of broken English and the occasional French word, and he called himself a "Cajun." Pronounced kay-jun.

  He kept up a running commentary throughout the trip, pointing to things I mostly didn't see. We threaded our way through gnarled cypress with long gray beards of moss. I never had a chance to ask him a question, but if I had, it would have been "How do you keep from being eaten alive?" I later learned the answer, which was that residents got a small gene alteration that caused their skin to exude an insect repellent.

  According to Beaudreaux there were seventeen species of bat in the Bayou, and they worked in two shifts separated by the two brief light periods known as dawn and dusk. How they got the plants to grow and all the insects to breed with so little light I never found out. I'm sure they could fill you in at the visitors' center. No doubt it's a fascinating story, but keep it to yourself, all right?

  Other than the close encounter with the bat, the trip proceeded without incident until I heard a splash and felt the boat rock as if we'd passed the wake of another boat. Beaudreaux stood up and used a long pole to poke at something in the water. He shouted at it, poked again, then sat down and grinned at me.

  "Gator," he said.

  I hate alligators. Bats, too, now that I think of it.

  * * *

  Polly's shack stood three feet above the water on cypress pilings. A ramp led down to a floating dock where another pirogue was tied up. This one sported a bright red paint job and looked much more seaworthy than Beaudreaux's. Maybe Polly could give me a ride back to town.

  The dock shifted under me as I stepped from the boat and I almost fell in the water. Beaudreaux grabbed my arm, probably saving me from being stripped to the bone in ten seconds by ravenous piranha. I heard a screen door creak and then slam shut, and a hoarse female voice.

  "Hey, Beaudreaux! Where dat bucket ecrevisses you gon' brought me?"

  "You get you crawfish, ma p'tit, jus' soon as I cotched 'em." He laughed, and motored quietly into the darkness. I went up the ramp to a screened-in porch, where the woman was holding the door for me. She was gray-haired and stooped, wearing a long gingham dress with a daisy print. She waved gnarled hands around me as I hurried in the door.

  "Vite, mon cher! Vite! Don't let the skeeters in."

  The inner door was closed. Sort of an air lock for mosquitoes, I realized. I let myself through into a small, rustic room with a small fire blazing in the hearth, knitted rugs on the wood floor. The light came from two dim floor lamps with shades dripping tassels in lavender and gold and yellow. Hideous things, by themselves, but not bad in this context. I looked around for Polly, and the old lady spoke from behind me.

  "I thought you'd never get here, cher," she said.

  I don't know who I had thought she was. Being in a disney, I had probably pegged her as an authentic. Disneys are one of the places you can go to see "old" people, folks who look like humans did when age was pretty much synonymous with decay. Almost all of these are only old on the surface, with wrinkled sagging skin and gray hair and perhaps a "colorful" age-related bit of ghastliness like missing teeth, eyeglasses, arthritis. They limped, they doddered and tottered and feigned deafness, but under the epidermis they were as hale and hearty as I am.

  To see "real" aging you generally had to go to a fundamentalist enclave of one type or another. They seldom visited the public corridors; they kept to themselves like the Amish.

  Polly had joined such a sect shortly before her departure from Sparky and His Gang. I can't even remember the name; there are scores of them, all with different beliefs. Some go so far as to reject all medical treatment of any sort, and you hear of people dying horribly in their thirties and forties, even in their teens, though the authorities sometimes stepped in to stop that.

  Polly's group was more moderate. They didn't reject all medical care, just that group of therapies usually called "long life." "Eternal life" by the optimists, though no one really believes a human can live for even a million years. But it's true we don't seem to be anywhere near the outer limits, and there are people well over two hundred years old now, thriving.

  It was a sobering thought, though, to look at her and realize she was only a year older than I.

  On the other hand, for a natural centenarian she was in pretty good shape. It's all relative, I guess.

  "Don't ask how I'm doing," she said. "It would take all day. Never get old folks started on their aches and pains."

  "All right, Polly," I said. "And I won't tell you how well you look."

  She laughed, and I smiled, and suddenly I realized how good it was to see her again. I went to her and we embraced. She had shrunk several inches.

  "Don't squeez
e too hard, cher," she whispered. She didn't need to tell me that; she was brittle and dry. I could feel every bone.

  I don't want to get into details of her appearance. The elderly share a suite of atrocities as they are battered by the tides of age. They erode in much the same way. Much of it has always seemed to me to be a struggle by the skeleton, the symbol of death, to emerge from its soft shell. The fat is blasted away, the skin grows loose, sags, becomes translucent. Soon you can see the skull beneath the skin. There's a morbid little computer program you can buy. Feed somebody's picture into it and it will age that person fifty, sixty, a hundred years. If you'd like to see Polly as I saw her, find a picture of her from the old show. She hasn't allowed herself to be photographed since then.

  "Come on in, Sparky, mon ami." She took my hand and led me into a small kitchen. It looked like the only other room in the house. Her hand was cool and the joints were swollen.

  She sat me down at a table with a red and white checkerboard cloth and poured strong coffee into a china cup and saucer. She eased herself into a chair facing me and let me take a sip.

  "Now," she said. "Who is chasing you this time?"

  * * *

  Predictable? I don't suppose I can deny it.

  I had not communicated with Polly in any way since the one telegram from Pluto. Several times I had been tempted, just a short message to be sure she really was going to hold the role for me. But I knew she would. Polly's word is unbreakable. So how did she know someone was chasing me? Consistency, I guess.

  During my first twenty years on the run I had twice risked a trip back to Luna. Both times I had seen Polly—this before the effects of her medical fundamentalism had really begun to ravage her. And both times there had been those who urgently wanted to talk to me about this or that misunderstanding. I admit it, I have a talent for getting into these situations. But bear in mind, when you're on the run you find yourself having to do things you might not ordinarily do. I submit my clean record between my eighth and twenty-ninth years as evidence that I am not a fundamentally bad person. Luckily for me, my first eight years—for which, legally, I can't be held responsible—provided me the criminal skills I've needed for my last seventy.