John Varley - The Golden Globe

That's why I'm putting parts of this in the third person: because I dreamed it. And the reason I'm back in first is, I woke up. Far too soon.

I didn't know it at first. Apart from the grogginess natural to the dosage of "deadballs" I'd taken, there is nothing in space to give one cues as to elapsed time, particularly in the Outer Planets; Pluto would have vanished from sight during the first hours of acceleration. After that, there was nothing visual to show time's passage until arrival at Uranus.

But among the Pantech's equipment is a clock, and I soon became alert enough to fumble open the protective hatch and consult it. I found we'd been gone for only three days.

I was alarmed.

The illegal mixture of drugs sold on the street as deadballs enabled the human body to do something it was never designed to do: sleep for a week, with few deleterious side effects. Hibernate, if you will (or estivate, take your pick, since there were no seasons in space).

Why ban a drug? After all, this isn't the Dark Ages. Getting high isn't illegal on any civilized planet—not that deadballs made you high.

My father's explanation made as much sense as any.

"Profit, Dodger, simple profit," he said. "Ninety percent of interplanet travel is tourism, people running away from their humdrum lives to experience humdrum amusements far from home. And every mile of that travel is the most boring experience imaginable. The owners of the ships that make these useless trips realize this, and devise endless amusements for the passengers— not included in the price of the ticket. A comatose passenger doesn't do any gambling or eating. We can't have that, so deadballs are illegal."

Cynical? Perhaps, but then why are deadballs sold legally to people traveling on errands for the government? Why do the staterooms of high-powered business executives on high-powered fast courier ships remain closed for days at a time? The people who do that other ten percent of space traveling usually do it on hibernation drugs, from the movers and shakers to the immigrants stacked like cordwood in the steerage holds of many a cargo ship.

(Oddly, I never could find a deadball in my hasty flight from Brementon. Judging from the waking state of my fellow passengers, neither could anyone else. In a place where every drug known to man could be had simply by walking up to a guard and paying for it, deadballs were unknown. Apparently the living hell of the trip to and from the prison station was seen as part of the punishment.)

A more legitimate reason for banning them was the informal type of travel I found myself indulging in at that very moment. Without deadballs, only the shortest ride on the rods was survivable.

Now I was beginning to wonder if I would survive this one. Adding it up, it didn't look good.

I had expected to awaken during the course of the voyage; I estimated between ten and a dozen half-day surfacings would be about right. When you wake from a deadball you either need to urinate very badly, or find you have already done so. Though your metabolism has been drastically slowed, you will be very hungry. Usually, a bowel movement will not be necessary. (After the trip you will with great heartbreak deliver yourself of a hard, dried... but let's skip on over that part.)

You can do two weeks of deadballs standing on your head. A month is no real problem. Two months... you would really rather not, for reasons of both comfort and health. Three months, four months... you're pushing it. A few people have survived six months of continuous deadballing, but most would rather not speak of it, like victims of torture.

I had plenty of air, heat, and water. In a cramped environment like the Pantechnicon, or a packing case, food becomes the dearest commodity. Try packing even very light rations for ninety days into a space you can't even stand up in. Just try it. Even if you could, are you able to endure ninety days of solitary confinement? No shuffleboard courts or slot machines. Just you, squatting in the dark, watching your toenails grow.

But if my deadballs had been cut with something, I faced forty or fifty days of that. I would probably not starve. Part of the price of the ticket is the loss of thirty to forty pounds. With bad drugs, I might expect to lose a hundred or more on the Miracle Deadball Diet.

"If you've learned your part cold," my father used to say, "then you've got nothing else worth worrying about. Just take the rest as it comes." Or, don't fret about things you can't do anything about. The future will deliver up its load of misery in due time.

With that semicomforting thought, I began treating this as just a normal, expected comfort stop. I set about tidying my small space and preparing a cold meal of beef jerky and maple syrup. It's better than it sounds, when you haven't eaten anything in three days.

I dialed the shelter to transparency.

The first thing I saw was a thundering herd of horses.

The drugs, right? No, I never even thought of that, though they can cause hallucinations. These horses were frozen in attitudes of great speed, as though they had galloped through a puddle of liquid helium. The freezing was certainly plausible, given the outside temperature. But they were carved from wood. I had been stowed next to a cargo of merry-go-round horses.

They were hanging from racks inside a large packing crate that, for some delightful reason, was transparent. I assumed the case was pressurized and heated. When I played my flashlight over them a thousand jolly colors leaped out at me. I was enchanted.

Where were they going? Who had made them? I never found out.

Like most miscellaneous-cargo vessels, this one consisted of the bare minimum. Basically, it was a central core that contained the drive and the life support systems for cargo and crew—typically, only two or three people. It was over a mile from stem to stern, and along its length it sprouted long composite racks, not much different from a pole you would hang your clothes on. The cargo modules, including the Pantech, had standard couplers that simply and easily snapped over the "horizontal" poles—they were horizontal at launch, anyway—where it was free to swing and sway and orient itself according to the direction of thrust: "riding the rods," just like the Old Earth hoboes. When the ship landed, the rods would be depressed slightly, and the modules would slide off the ends and onto ground carriers. It was a simple system, in use for decades, standard throughout the inhabited planets.

The Pantech was the last module on a rod near the front of the ship. I'd paid a small premium for the outside berth, since I get claustrophobic if I'm stacked in the middle, surrounded by heavy crates that could crush me if they swung in the wrong direction.

I soon saw something odd. It was the crate Lou had abandoned on our way out to the ship. It seemed to have sprung a leak.

I could see it a few rings forward, and one rod over. The corner he had pried up to get in and out now sported a long, white tail. It reminded me of a picture I'd once seen of a tapestry from the Middle Ages. The artist had represented a comet as a many-rayed star with a long tail to one side as it arched across the heavens. This tail was ice of some kind—hard to tell what; hell, everything froze out here. For a while the leak had been in one direction as the ship accelerated. Then, in free fall, the liquid had seeped out in all directions, making a rather pretty Christmas-tree ornament.

I chose to take it as good news. Lou had detected something wrong with his proposed abode before it was even loaded on the ship, like a squirrel finding a leak in his hollow tree just before turning in for his winter's snooze. I hoped his new home proved a little more solid.

Of course, he might be freezing or starving or slowly dying of thirst and there was absolutely nothing I could do to help him.