by John Varley
And I'm not saying I did right. But I did it, and it can't be taken back. If I live another three centuries, I'll still be wondering.
"Pardon me if I've disturbed you," the CC said, finally. "I must admit to feeling a little wistful when contemplating your situation. Psychiatric treatment could almost certainly cure you of your delusions. You choose not to allow it. I, on the other hand, am far from sure the tinkerers trying to fix whatever is wrong with me will be successful. I long for a cure."
Well, I certainly wished it luck. And made a note to get off this crazy planet while the getting was good. Who knew what form the next glitch would take?
"There is one other thing," the CC said.
"What's that?"
The slot in the table in front of me hummed and delivered a small piece of cardboard, garishly colored. It was a Sparky and His Gang trading card, with my smiling, youthful, wire-headed face on it.
"I was always a big fan of your show," it said. "Could I have your autograph?"
* * *
The Charonese were apparently caught off guard, like the rest of Luna, Like me. Nobody expected me to be acquitted. Nobody expected me to walk, free, from that courtroom. As a result, no shots were fired at me as I left in the middle of a solid wall of well-armed beef.
I made it back to the Golden Globe about an hour after the end of the performance. There was no question of me continuing in the role, even if we filled the theater with nothing but bodyguards. Buildings can be bombed.
The idea was to get packed, and get to a more secure location. Then get off the planet. Three of my new guardians went into my dressing room and checked to be sure no one was there, then I chased everybody out and closed and locked the door behind me.
I knew these would be my last moments alone for quite some time, but I was in too much of a hurry to savor them. So I went to the Pantechnicon and opened the lid. Then I reached down and unlatched the mirrored gaff—a shoplifter's word. It was no different from the magic boxes used for centuries in stage magic.
The old methods are the best.
And there he was. The Pantech's life support had hooked into him at various places that might have been painful, except I knew he could no longer feel anything. Nevertheless, he smelled bad. And how had he fared after more than forty-eight hours in the dark, unable to move or feel?
His eyes, the only part of him he could still move voluntarily, rolled slowly toward me. I saw in them nothing but madness.
I closed the gaff and began piling my clothing into the trunk.
When I was done, I slammed the lid.
* * *
And now here I sit. I won't tell you just where, thank you very much.
Or rather, I will tell you where I am, which is aboard the good ship Halley. I just won't tell you where the Halley is. It's a nice place to hide out, if you have to hide out. Toby is deliriously happy, reunited with his lady love, the fabulous Shere Khan. She gives him a tongue bath several times a day and looks on maternally when he humps her hind leg, that being as high as he can reach. The grub is great. The weather is great. The livin' is easy, fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high.
I hate it. I never did do well by myself.
Elwood doesn't seem to be aboard. Perhaps I've finally laid that ghost to rest. Hell of a time, I must say, just when I could really use the company.
I had an edgy few months moving around the system, waiting for Hal to get back. I stayed busy. You'd be surprised how much work it is to be a multibillionaire, even if you don't really care about the money. And I didn't... as money. I found I could care about hundreds, and thousands of dollars, because those amounts represented food on the table, oxygen to breathe, a measure of comfort. I could even care about millions, in the sense that, carefully managed, millions can buy you security over the long term, if you're careful with it. A billion is simply a number to me, and not even a number I can understand very well. The money becomes play money, counters on a board, just something to move around, not really quantifiable in terms of anything with meaning to me. How many hot dogs does a billion dollars buy? Can you eat that many hot dogs?
I now had many billions of dollars. I was never even sure how many.
What a billionaire does is own things. Owning things is a fairly dull way to live your life. To be good at being a billionaire you must get enjoyment from amassing wealth or, if you're a hands-on billionaire, hiring and firing people, juggling companies and inventories and financial instruments and banks and politicians. I just never saw why this should be fun. I'm only interested in owning things I can enjoy, or that do something for me that needs to be done.
So I set out to give it away.
Not all of it, of course. And not at random. There were some things I needed to own, and giving away billions could greatly enhance my chances for survival, if done properly.
The first thing I wanted to own was the Halley. So I set out to buy it and found I already owned it. At least I owned a holding company that owned several other companies, one of which owned Halley. (I found I also owned a large piece of the cargo ship I had hopped and almost starved on between Pluto and Uranus. Fancy that.) Obtaining title to Halley was simply a matter of shifting money from one pocket to another.
So I kept on the move, and I managed my billions, and I watched my bodyguards. Which of you, I wondered, would sell me out for a few million? Because the Charonese were still after me, and the word on the underground nets was that a reward of several million was being offered.
And I thought.
I soon boiled my future down to four options.
One. Kill myself. I mention this one only in passing. I'm embarrassed now by my grandstanding in the courtroom. Oh, I was serious enough; death really would be preferable to incarceration. But I should have waited, not broadcast my intentions to the whole system. Suicide is always an option, for anyone, and it would still be an option for me if the Charonese were closing in and there was no hope of escape. Death is certainly better than a year of inventive torture. But not until all alternatives have failed.
Two. Keep moving. It didn't seem at all promising. The solar system is a large place with many hidey-holes, but the Charonese would never stop looking, and all it would take is one mistake and I'd be facing option one again. In the end, there is no place to hide.
So there are really only two choices when faced with an enemy determined to kill you. Get out of town, or kill the enemy.
I was planning to get out of town. I still am, but then the Charonese upped the ante. They did something they had never done before. They went public.
After the trial it was touch and go. They must have felt it was only a matter of time. They could afford to wait. But then Halley returned from its trip to the outer reaches, I boarded, alone, and vanished. Not hard to do in the vastness of space. Once I dropped off the radar screens of the near planets, I could go anywhere and simply sit there. Do you have any idea how many chunks of rock the size of Halley there are in the system? Well, neither do I, but it's in the billions and it takes a long time to get from one to the other. I send out no radio signals; I have hundreds of tiny, high-gee drones that I release, like notes in a bottle, to zip out their messages when they are a safe distance away and untraceable to me. The Charonese are welcome to listen to those messages, and to the ones sent out to me. They will learn nothing useful.
When they realized the magnitude of the problem, they broke their rule of keeping a low profile in the inner planets. Apparently the rule that says no killing of a Charonese shall go unpunished supersedes all others.
They put a price on my head. Publicly. A very large price, enough to make the claimant the eighteenth richest person in the system, shortly to become the seventeenth richest, upon my elimination. I'm sure you've heard of it; it is only the biggest news story of the century.
"Isn't this awful?" the opinion writers opined.
"That poor boy!" sobbed the sob sisters.
"Somebody should do something!" raged the
outraged.
And so forth. And what did anyone do about it?
Nothing.
Though humanity's capacity for atrocity is endlessly inventive, it is also sadly imitative. Not much is really new. Shortly after the Charonese announced their bounty on my head a search of the history archives turned up a similar situation. Back in the twentieth century a man by the name of Salman Rushdie wrote a book that some people didn't like. Most of these people were in a religious hell called Iran, apparently a country inhabited entirely by pigs and whores. The religious wallahs of this cesspool offered a lot of money to anyone who would kill Rushdie. (I never heard if the reward was ever claimed. I can only hope he had the sweetest revenge possible, which was to die at a ripe old age. Quietly, in his own bed.)
So there was precedent for an entire nation going after one man. What seems to be new, in my case, is that the one man is going to fight back.
In the words of the great Bugs Bunny, "I suppose you know, this means war!"
I hereby declare that a state of war exists between the planet of Charon and me, Kenneth Catherine Duse Faneuil Savoyard Booth Johnson Ivanovich de la Valentine.
That should have them trembling in their boots.
But don't laugh yet. Remember, I have more money than Charon.
And remember, I can run, but they can't hide.
And most importantly, remember this: it is more than theoretically possible to smash a planet like a ripe watermelon. Charon is not even a very big watermelon. More like a frozen grape.
It's been rumored that several governments possess weapons, bombs I guess you'd call them, capable of busting a planet. If this is true I've been unable to confirm it. If you know of such a weapon, can get your hands on one, and want to become an extremely rich person, contact my law firm, Flynn and Associates, and be prepared to prove it. I'm in the market.
Oh, yes, indeed. I will double the price on my head for information leading to the complete, total, genocidal destruction of the nation of Charon. At this moment, in advanced physics labs all over the system, men and women are sitting around thinking, thinking, thinking as hard as they can, trying to come up with a way to do it. The word has been out, underground, for some time in that community. Now I'm making it public.
Genocidal. I used the word quite deliberately. It is my intention, if I can, to kill every Charonese. Why not? It's their intention to kill me. If the established governments of the solar system won't do anything to protect me, I have no choice but to take the law into my own hands. Which isn't precisely right, since there doesn't seem to be any law that covers my predicament. But I think you know what I mean.
Ah, but what about the innocent children? I hear you cry.
I won't say I haven't worried about it. And I don't know what to do about it. Every one of those children will grow up to be Charonese adults, sworn to kill me. And, in my opinion, growing up Charonese is a fate worse than death.
But I will do what the Charonese never did for me. I'm issuing a warning. Parents of Charon, if you value the lives of your children, get out now, while you still can. You have one year during which I will hold my fire. After that, you may expect a rain of death without further warning.
I am at war.
So, realistically, what is the likelihood of such a rain of death? Not very good. A fair-sized asteroid accelerated to near light speed would turn the trick, arriving too quickly for them to do anything about it. But no one is able to do that, yet. Anything slower gives their planetary defenses—and they have the best—time to destroy or divert it. There have been other methods proposed, all of them extremely blue-sky.
I was a bit shocked to find out how cheap and easy a biological solution would be. There are some very scary guys out there, with some very scary toys capable of killing millions, or even the entire human race, with bioengineered diseases. All of them are far too dangerous to even consider, and the existence of such folks and their toys provides me with still another reason for doing what I always knew, in the back of my mind, I would have to do.
Get out of town.
Currently there is only one bus to board if you want to do that. The starship Robert A. Heinlein.
If you're on Luna, or if you're planning a trip to Luna, be sure to take a trip out to see the Heinlein. Anyone in King City can tell you how to get there. Bring the kids; they'll enjoy it. But don't wait too long.
When you get there you'll find the old hulk buzzing with activity. Ships are landing and taking off, busy little seagulls to the Heinlein's beached whale. Trucks arrive and depart in a steady stream, like worker ants. But the birds and the bugs aren't dismembering a corpse, they're outfitting, rigging, remodeling, refurbishing, and whatever else needs to be done to prepare a ship for a voyage never undertaken before. The animals are arriving, two by two. Buses are bringing in workers and transporters are delivering materials and odd, custom-made assemblies that look like nothing you've ever seen before, those that aren't covered by vacuum-proof tarps to hide from the prying eyes of theoretical physicists who would kill for a glimpse of them.
It's amazing what a few billion dollars can do. With luck, without any unforeseen problems, we should be departing in a little over a year.
That's right. I said "we." I have bought passage on the maiden voyage, and it has to be the most expensive ticket in history. Though if you measured it in dollars per mile, it ain't that bad a deal. The first stop is supposed to be an interesting little Earth-like world about twenty light-years from here. If that doesn't work out—if the Invaders or somebody else are already there—the galaxy is vast. We could lose ourselves in it, never find our way home. The prospect doesn't frighten me.
I anticipate a few hairy moments when I rendezvous with the Heinlein. That will be the last chance for my tormentors, and they will know it, and they will go all out. But I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. I've made it this far. I'm not going to get shot down at the bon voyage party.
I'm even beginning to feel the stirrings of a shipboard romance. Hildy Johnson is going, too. There should be plenty of news to report, though who she'll report it to I can't imagine. Maybe the slime creatures of Aldebaran are just dying for some tabloid publishing.
Hildy and Sparky. Sounds like a match made in hell to me. It's so bad it might even work.
But if you miss this sailing, don't despair. There will be other ships, and they'll be leaving soon. Everyone is welcome... except Charonese. Your Charonese passport is no good here, hombre, and neither is your money. You will never be sold a stardrive, unto eternity.
I'm sure they'll steal one eventually, but by then I could be ten thousand light years away.
Toodle-oo, assholes. Keep watching the sky. You never know when I might figure out how to send back a surprise package.
As the biggest sugar daddy since Isabella hocked the crown jewels, some thought I'd want a pretty big say in the running of the ship. There were negative voices raised in the Heinleiner community, a few discouraging words where such are seldom heard. And I did get a look at the plans, and I did suggest a change. To be paid for by myself, naturally. And it was typical thinking by technical types, I must say. There were going to be a dozen movie theaters, innumerable gymnasia, green spaces, an amusement park. Hell, there might have been a rodeo for all I know. But no legitimate theater.
That oversight has been rectified. Work is almost complete on the John Valentine Memorial Theater. It won't be big enough to stage Work in Progress, but should do nicely for musicals and classics. There are even a few efforts of my own gathering dust in the back of my trunk. It's not like there will be anywhere else for theater lovers to go. I myself will be artistic director, and will probably wear a few other hats until I can instill a love of the theatrical arts into the rest of the passengers.
Come on, kids! We can put on a show! Mickey can do his juggling act, and Judy can sing a song, and Busby and his girls can dance, and we'll do it all in Farmer Heinlein's old barn! It'll be swell!
Swell or awf
ul, it'll damn sure be the best show between here and the Andromeda Galaxy.
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