The Golden Globe

"May I ask how old you are?" she said.

I put my hand behind her neck and drew her to my lips. She didn't seem to object. When I broke away a little, she was smiling.

"Old enough to know a gentlewoman never asks that question."

"Who said I was gentle?"

She was, though. Quite gentle when she wanted to be. Something else entirely when sterner measures took her fancy.

"Hello. Uh... is this..."

"Oberon Mutual?" the voice said, helpfully.

"Uh... yes." Had I called them already? It seemed I'd been living a tape loop, the same conversation over and over.

"Do you have an account for... T. Frothingwell Bellows?"

"I'm sorry, we do not."

They'd never heard of Woolchester Cowperthwaite Fields or Elwood Dunk, either. I looked at the little handset phone, and rubbed my ear, which felt hot and sweaty. Maybe I ought to get one of those implanted phones, like the huge majority of my fellow citizens. I'd had to ask for this handset at the front desk; they no longer put phones in rooms.

Ah, but the key word was "citizen." I was not a citizen, except in the narrow, textbook meaning of one who resides, or someone born in a certain administrative district. Citizens didn't break the law. It seemed, these days, that I couldn't help breaking three or four laws before breakfast.

If I ever started thinking of myself as a citizen, I was sure arrest would follow within days.

I put the phone down, along with any thought of having Big Brother's favorite listening device implanted in my head. I picked up the pack of reefer I'd bought at the drugstore downstairs, withdrew a yellow paper cylinder, and struck it. As I drew in the smoke I moseyed over to the big window and stood looking out over the city of Noon.

I guess you had to call it a city. It was a big clump of tall buildings, like you'd see on Old Earth or Mars. Everywhere else cities are underground, defined by internal space, "cubic," not by external walls. Surface cities are defined by buildings, crisscrossed by open-topped streets, speckled with parks and fountains and many other things, all open to the sky. It can produce agoraphobia in people raised underground.

But after you'd called it a city, you had to add that it was like no city ever seen on Earth or Mars. These buildings were not anchored on bedrock; everything below them was man-made for about two or three hundred feet, then there was nothing but vacuum in the basements. You'll have to put the rec room somewhere else, Dad.

The realization that the buildings did not have to be tied to something as stable as a planetary crust had quickly sunk in among the Oberoni architectural community, and it had liberated them. Or driven them crazy, depending on who you talked to. Liberated architects, men and women with a newfound freedom to explore, a new Zeitgeist, if you will, can create a Parthenon on the one hand, and a Bauhaus on the other.

The revolution that had produced Noon City and the several other clumps of madness on the rim of Oberon was the realization that they need not be tied down. In fact, it was better if they weren't. The construction of the wheel in the early stages had often required the shifting of large masses up to several miles to maintain balance with the opposite arc. Instead of wasting their time building big blocks of nothing, the engineers had made buildings on rails. If the wheel started to wobble a little, by golly, why they'd just get a few skyscrapers in gear and motor on down the road.

I told you the Oberoni were different.

And then, since you were literally building everything, first building the ground, then building from the ground up, and since the rails were already in place, why not utilize the long-established efficiencies of the production line? Why not build all the structures in one spot and roll them to where you wanted them? Build your city like Henry Ford built Model Ts.

Now, old Henry was famous for saying you could have a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Applying that rule here, the Oberoni might have come up with a monumentally drab and depressing place ("Hey, Charley, got an order here for half a dozen thirty-five-story Neo-Leninist apartment monads by next Thursday. Do they get a discount for a six-pack?").

It never happened, mostly because construction on the wheel began at the height of a trend we're all familiar with: Custom Construction. Remember when no two washing machines looked alike? When it was a mark of your rejection of "herd values," and "urban sameness," and "standardized thought" to own only items that reflected your unique persona? How it became necessary to own a washing machine that was at least as unique as the Joneses' washing machine? The guts of the machines were identical, of course, since the job of mixing water and soap and clothes and then drying them could only be done in a certain small number of ways. But the surface, that was the point! Computers could design you a machine that looked like no other machine on the block. And ditto for bicycles, and hockey sticks, and living-room carpet, and popcorn poppers. I don't need to look at the serial number, Jack. That goddamn ice bucket is mine!

It was hell on thieves and fences while it lasted.

Luckily, society moved on to another fashion in about twenty years. But once you start customizing buildings, things that are designed to last several hundred years, it hardly makes sense to stop. What are you going to do? Park your new boxy glass monstrosity next to a structure that looks like a butterfly on the back of a turtle? There goes the neighborhood.

On Oberon, if you don't like the neighborhood, so the saying goes, just wait half an hour.

New buildings went up amazingly fast. They were all designed and built, on the Noon Arc, anyway, at a place called—I'm not making this up—Squiggle City. Supposedly an architect brought his four-year-old daughter in to work one day. Playing with her crayons, the kid produced the kind of picture a child that age will. Squiggles. The drawing got into the production line by accident and alakazam! Three days later it rolls off the line, ready to be lived in by some seriously deranged people. One of those urban legends that probably isn't true but ought to be.

It struck me as confusing enough already. But when the wheel was complete, people like Poly could probably just wait awhile, and their commuting problems would be solved. Unless those snobby Mad Dogs threw up some sort of zoning barriers against those folks from the other side of the tracks. Did you see the building that moved in next door last night, Marge? Well! Don't they know that their sort aren't welcome here? Somebody should do something, really! I mean, I'm as tolerant as the next person, but would you want one to subdivide with your sister?

So the view from my window was a marvelous one, but not one I could really describe. Many, many big structures, a few that actually resembled things you've seen in other cities, or in history books. I'd send you a postcard, but by the time it got to you everything would have changed.

Not quick as a wink, you realize. This was no Cross-Crisium Dash here. No need to fasten one's seat belt. If they did race these things (and one day someone will, you can count on it) you wouldn't need a high-speed camera at the finish line. Any garden-variety snail would give the Othello Hotel a run for its money. No, what happened was, you'd look out the window and nothing would happen. Your mind would tend to wander, and then you realize that you can't find that green-and-yellow mushroom-shaped apartment house that was there just a minute ago. Did it slide behind the Criminal Courts Building?

Quite a view. And I was paying well for it, too.