The Golden Globe

"Probably not. My name is Poly." She held out her hand, and I took it.

"No kidding? I knew a Polly, once."

"And don't mention Polly and Sparky, from that old kids' show. Everybody does that. It's short for Polyhymnia."

I admit I was taken aback for a moment, but her expression told me she had no idea who she was talking to. Boy, couldn't I have given her a shock? But I quickly recalled the name on the passport I was using—one I had paid good money for in the back alleys of Pluto. So she'd never know.

"I'm Trevor," I said. "Trevor Howard."

"And I'm just Polyhymnia, for now," she said.

"That name rings a bell...."

"One of the Muses."

"I was going to say Graces."

"There are only three of them. There are nine Muses."

"So you come from a large family?"

She laughed. "Only four, so far. But you're right, we're all named for Muses. Mother thought we should get into the arts."

"Polyhymnia must be a singer," I ventured.

"Sacred song, to be exact."

"And are you?"

"Not hymns. But music is my racket."

I made a sour face. "That one's old as the hills."

"So's that expression. Where are these hills, anyway?"

"Don't ask me. I'm from Luna."

There was a little more banter like this. Basically we were both trying to decide if a temporary berth was in order, neither in too big a hurry to make up our minds. I learned she was a violinist.

"With an orchestra?"

"Someday. Right now I mostly work in the theater pit. Utility string hacker. But I'm available for square dances, too."

"You're in the theater? That's great. I've spent some time on the stage, myself."

"You know, I thought your face looked vaguely familiar. Maybe you were in a show I played in. We don't get much chance to look at the actors, you know. Our backs are usually to them, and we're down so low."

"It's possible," I said, dubiously. "But this is my first trip to Oberon in about twenty years."

"I guess not, then. I've never been out of the system."

We were hedging around the issue of age. It's not polite to ask, and for my money, it's not good form to let it bother you. In this era when not many people look much over thirty, some of us are better than others at estimating. I'm usually pretty good, and I had her pegged for mid-twenties, both from body attitudes and gestures and from the fact that she was looking to climb up the ladder in the music world. After you've reached sixty or so, you stop thinking things are going to change a great deal.

A difference of seventy-five years can be a problem, if you let it be. I try not to let it. If she was fifty or so, there would be no generation gap. After the fifties, we're all more or less in the same generation.

I asked her where she lived and she said Six Arc. But her job was at Eleven, Wednesday through Sunday. It meant sleeping on a sofa at a friend's place and a twice-weekly twelve-hour commute.

"I've got a cute little apartment at Seven," she said, "but I only see it on my days off. With the housing situation the way it is, I don't dare give it up. To go to work I have to take a light train to Six, catch the Six elevator, the hub shuttle to the Noon elevator, down to Noon, and a heavy train to Eleven. The actual distance from my home to my job, as the vacuum-breathing crow would fly, is only about eight hundred miles. The route I take is about fifteen hundred miles. The Rim Express does the trip in forty minutes, but who can afford that?

This all had my head spi

"Aren't there elevators from Seven and Eleven—"

"And One and Five?" she finished for me. "It would save me a few minutes of travel time, but it doesn't make sense, economically. Elevators will be built on Three and Nine spokes, when they're finished. On that great, glorious day. Golden Spike Day. Buy your tickets now."

"Golden Spike?"

"After the American Transcontinental Railroad. They drove a golden spike where the trains from the east met the rails from the west. Besides, there's not a whole lot of commuters like me. Not a whole lot of traffic at all between the Sixers and the Mad Dogs."

Feeling a little like a straight man, I said, "Mad Dogs?"

"Sure. They aren't Englishmen, and they go out in the Noonday sun."

"I get it."

"They call us Aussies, after the old penal colony back on Earth."

"I get the feeling there's not a lot of love lost there."

She made a dismissive gesture. "Most of the government is at Noon. The bulk of white-collar workers live there, bureaucrats, agencies. Six is more working-class. They say the two arcs are growing apart, politically and culturally. We're already as different as Mirandans and Arielites. Before long we're going to be as distinct as East and West Germans were, hundreds of years ago, before they reunified.

I had no idea what she was talking about, but rather than pipe up with "Germans?" I just nodded my head wisely. That usually works, and it did this time, too, with a little help from a spider the size of a brontosaurus.

The elevator slowed to a stop again, and when our chairs reoriented themselves we could see something large and black in the distance.

"It's a D-9 Motherspi

"That's the big ones, right? I mean, I hope so. I don't like to think of an animal much bigger than that." She nodded, and we watched it approach our capsule.

It was hard at first to make out just what I was seeing, or to realize how huge it really was. It's always a problem in space, with no references. Here, the reference points I could see were already so outlandish in size that at first it seemed the arachnid was really no larger than a big horse. Then it got closer. Oh, my, an elephant, maybe? Then it got closer again, and the light got a little better. Jesus, at least a brontosaurus.

The captain of our elevator (that still sounds weird to me, like the general of our sidewalk) threw a light on it for us. It didn't help as much as you'd think, because the creature was such a deep, perfect shiny black. Its carapace didn't reflect light so much as it reflected highlights, like chrome trim. I'm sure you could shave by looking at its skin.

"Vacuum-proof, of course," Poly said. "It has some beetle genes in it."

"Right," I said. "Cross a beetle with a battleship, and there you go."

"My father works a D-9," she said, proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back.

"My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?"

"No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one. And that's not Miss Dixie."

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspi

"Miss Dixie," I muttered.

"All Motherspi

And those who ride 'em, much braver than I, I decided.

The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, businesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward.