John Varley - The Golden Globe

"Did you see... I mean, has it been on—"

"The news? There is no news in here, Sparky. And before you launch into your story, let me assure you I don't want to hear it. What he did to you, what you did to him, I don't want to know. I can never be called to testify to something I don't know anything about. You fell down a staircase. Right?"

"...right."

"And I'm a ballet dancer. Of course, I'm free to deduce things. You want to get off Luna. You seem unable to simply walk up to the ticket counter and buy passage. Ergo, you are being hunted. You had an argument with this staircase. You seem to have lost."

"You haven't seen the staircase."

"Hah!" Uncle Ed was delighted. "Maybe you gave as good as you got! No, no, don't tell me any details, let me make them up in my own mind. It should provide me with no end of source material for months of quiet contemplation. That's what we mostly do here, if you were curious. Float, and contemplate."

"And eat," Sparky suggested.

Uncle Ed squinted dubiously. With all that fat around his eyes, it was a squint to remember.

"I wasn't—" Sparky began.

"Making fun of me. Of course not. Obviously we eat. I forbade you contempt, disgust. Curiosity I will allow you. Within limits. I'd venture to guess you're wondering how much I weigh."

Like the starlet insulted when asked her measurements, Sparky suspected the lady doth protest too much. Ed wanted to talk, he realized. Within limits. He'd have to be careful not to show too much nor too little interest.

"Three thousand two hundred and seven pounds, at last weighing. Probably a few more by today. A ton and a half of contentment."

Sparky hadn't known humans could get that large. He doubted it was possible without some modifications. Extra hearts, possibly, or mechanical ones. Or elephant hearts. He also suspected that if he asked about that, he could be there for hours.

"I believe I'm the third largest human who has ever lived. Numbers one and two are somewhere in the water below me."

"Are you shooting for first place?"

"Not in any determined way. I wouldn't mind, of course."

"You said 'we.' Who are you? I mean, a cult of some sort?"

"Just retirees who like to eat. People who find the modern world a bit too frantic, who have socialized too much. People on retreat. Who are seeking a lower level of consciousness. Who admire lizards basking on rocks, jellyfish drifting on warm currents. Who are happy to exist , but not eager to struggle, physically or mentally. We have no organization other than regular meals, six times a day, and no name for ourselves. The few outsiders who are aware of us—and that is very few, since we never go out—call us chubbies."

Sparky was reminded of a story of a hermit, isolated and silent for thirty years. Once his silence was broken he couldn't stop talking. Sparky couldn't recall the punch line.

But he could see some sort of forklift trucks congregating down at the far end of the pool. Cargo nets hung from manipulator arms, and there seemed to be a commotion in the water. Good God, it must be feeding time, he realized. He would rather not witness that.

"So can you help me?"

Uncle Ed bobbed in the water like a waterlogged inflatable beach ball, regarding his nephew silently. His expressions were very hard to read.

"I have a private yacht mothballed at a port on the Farside," Uncle Ed said, at length. "Nothing fancy, but it will get you as far as Mars in a reasonable time."

"I'll buy it from you."

"No need." The fat man chuckled. "A stroke of genius, your coming here. It is the absolute last place John would think to look for you. And my yacht is the least likely vehicle for him to watch for. And I suspect you knew I could never resist doing him a bad turn. Isn't that right?"

"You can see right through me," Sparky said. He had never entertained any such idea, had never even remembered he had an uncle until Doc brought it up. But why mention that?

"They tell me it can be made space-ready in two hours. I'll call and authorize it. When you get to Mars, hire someone to bring it back."

"Sure." Sparky had no intention of hiring anyone, or of going to Mars. But why complicate things?

"Good luck," Uncle Ed burbled, his head sinking beneath the water.

I had needed a little luck, and some thespian and confidence skills to talk my way past busybodies at the spaceport with too much time on their hands, but I had made it. (What had the name of Uncle Ed's yacht been? Eclair ? Bonbon? ? Something sweet and sticky, I remember that much.) Anyway, with visions of sugarplums—and Uncle Ed's bloated frame—dancing in my head, I had made my escape from Luna, from my father, from Sparky, from everyone who was looking to do me ill or do me good. For almost fifty years I had never shown my real face or revealed my real name. Only recently had I begun to admit once more to being "Sparky," though only in the outer planets, and found to my surprise that I was still remembered.

I had been back to Luna twice since then, when the lure of a role was just too much. I had used ironclad false identification, never the same name. All this had put a severe crimp in my career. No sooner would I start to get good notices, build up a reputation in my current pseudonym, than I'd feel the hot breath of pursuit and take off for a new venue, with a new identity. Practically speaking, no one had been looking for me for thirty or forty years now, I felt reasonably sure. But old habits die hard, and the guilty flee before the bad reviews are out.

And now I was about to return to Luna once more. Luna, the fabled Golden Globe. I could see it out the window of the lifeboat as Poly and I strapped ourselves in for the last leg of the journey. At certain distances it really does look golden, though usually I'd describe it as more of a buttermilk shade. Mount it on a gilt pedestal and you could give it out as an award.

There really had been an award called the Golden Globe once, years before the Invasion. My father had told me about it. It was handed out by a group called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in honor of the year's best work in motion pictures.

"Not the Foreign Film Critics, you'll notice," he had told me. "Just a bunch of reporters from other countries who used to get together, forty or fifty of them, to have a dinner and hand out awards to any film people desperate enough to show up and get drunk with them. After a while, being reporters, they started giving out press releases about who'd won. On a slow news day, some papers would pick up the story. And then things snowballed. Before long, they had their own television show, full of stars, just as if the award meant something. They managed to upstage the Oscars, and the awards might as well have been given out by the Podunk Rotary Club for all they had to do with film.

"Draw your own moral from this, Sparky. And remember, at the center of the cult of personality called stardom there is just a big empty hole. Awards don't matter. Acclaim doesn't matter. Only your craft matters."

We were already sore and a bit cranky from a day and a half at one gee. When the lifeboat engine fired it hit hard, and we didn't have the padding we'd used aboard Hal. But it wasn't a terribly long boost. The first lifeboat fell away—really nothing more than an engine and fuel tank, after Hal modified it in his repair shop. By the time the second one fired Luna was looming much larger in my window. This was a bit gentler, but still rough.

The lifeboat engine coughed out its last while we were still ten meters above the surface. Considering that all the calculations had been done at the orbit of Uranus, I would call this cutting it close . We dropped, and hit with a jar and a crunch of metal. There was a faint hiss audible from the cabin, a sound no Lunarian likes to hear, but we were in our suits, and the boat's tripod landing gear kept us from falling over.