The Golden Globe

All this, mind you, when Larry held a tidy sum in his accounts, two weeks' pay, that rightly should have come to me but which I was by then powerless to collect. I gnashed my teeth, leveled a mighty curse on the ticket agent, his heirs and assigns unto the seventh generation, and boarded ship.

This is why I debarked at Lowell Interplanetary with three dollars and a set of Punch and Judy dolls.

You're probably wondering just what the private detective wanted to talk to me about. I know I was, though I didn't dwell on it. There's nothing to be gained by that, and certainly nothing to be gained by sticking around to find out. It was sheer luck he came searching for "Mercutio," armed with his picture from the playbill, and that the poor boy was by then a grave man. Fortune doesn't smile so brightly on me every day, and when she does I don't insult her by asking a lot of questions.

But I'll admit, I did wonder. Was it that business on Boondocks? I swear, I didn't know the girl was the governor's daughter.

This mall that happened to be on Pluto was called Cerberus Place, and that name forces me to admit that, though a mall is a mall is a mall, this one couldn't really be on Mars or Mercury. Not unless the Martian or Mercurian mall was attempting a Plutonian look.

It is a major failing of modern society, to my mind, that most of the inhabited planets don't have a style of their own. Oh, there are minor differences, of course, a few things here and there that would lead you to believe you were on Miranda and not on Luna. Mostly these are in the category of monuments, tourist attractions. As on Old Earth the Statue of Liberty was emblematic of New York, the Eiffel Tower meant Paris. There was no Lunar look, as there had been a Japanese, or a Danish, or Mexican or Nigerian look. No one would be walking around in "Lunarian" costume, living in Lunarian buildings, doing Lunarian folk dances in their peculiarly Lunarian steel shoes. Cultural and stylistic differences were dealt a death blow by the Invasion, which left only one human ethos really viable. That culture has been called Techno-English by its admirers, Judeo/Anglo/Cyber/NASA/Caucasian and much less flattering combinations by those who love it less. Certainly the Techno-part was indispensable; people who didn't take their machines seriously soon found themselves gulping vacuum.

Pluto was the exception to the rule of uniformity. The first thing you noticed was that there was a definite, strong Plutonian accent. Other planets had slight differences in word choice and pronunciations. Plutonians (or Stygians, or Hadeans, as they sometimes called themselves) spoke with a pronounced twang that could be indecipherable to the untrained ear.

Then there was the architecture. There was a distinct Hadean style, most pronounced in older structures. The remarkable thing was that a Hadean style existed at all. Its reason for being lay in Pluto's unique historical place among the Eight Worlds. For its first century of human habitation, it had been a prison planet.

There's a deep urge in the human soul to send the bad people as far away as possible from "decent folk." On Earth, Australia was a prime example. Post-Invasion, Pluto seemed to fit the bill, and today, it's Brementon. If society succeeds in pushing criminals any farther, we'll find we have achieved star travel. I don't know what Australia was like. Probably a fairly awful place for urban transportees. In the case of Pluto, the urge for distant exile was purely a psychological one. Living in one place where the atmosphere is inimical or nonexistent is pretty much like living in any other. You burrow underground, you husband your oxygen, you struggle to grow things you can eat, you bear and raise children. As time goes by, all these things get easier. Who really cares if the struggle is on Luna or on Pluto?

Obviously, the early Lunarian voters did. They sent their prisoners there by the thousands over the decades. There must have been a lot of self-righteous satisfaction in shipping your incorrigibles off to a place that was a synonym for hell.

Like remote prison colonies before it, Pluto had developed a convict/citizen society. Sentences were always for life, but could be served behind bars, in labor camps, or in relative freedom, depending on the offense. But even the "free" prisoners despised the guard class and the ruling elite, a social division that survives, in some respects, to this very day. The place is run, by and large, by descendants of criminals. But the richest families trace themselves back to the Regents, as they call themselves. Or "screws," as everyone else knows them.

Had enough history for today? Hold on, I'm almost through. The Hadeans, as many downtrodden people had before them, eventually made being outcasts a source of pride. Send us to Hell, will you? All right, we'll glory in it. We'll be hellcats, hellhounds, and hellions. We'll be hellacious hellraisers, hellborn and hellbred.

Aesthetically, the Plutonian style embraced the colors red and black—excessively, to my eye. Shapes were massive, and tended to loom. Fire was a frequent motif, stone a frequent building material. Hadeans were big on obsidian. There was something vaguely Egyptian to it all... if the Pharaohs had painted their temples glossy black, with crimson highlights.

Philosophically, the obsession with all things Abyssal led to the founding of one of the two great religions established since the Invasion: Diabolism.

Morally, the combination of distance, banishment, and rebellion (the result, I'd always felt, of a planetary inferiority complex) had formed a society viewed as permissive in a milieu not noted for social constraints. It was easier to murder someone on Pluto, for instance, than anyplace in the system. You could mount a valid defense based on a legal principle the locals summed up as "He needed killin'," and if you could prove it, not even pay a fine to your victim's survivors.

And practically, the interactions of frontier vigor, strong competitive instincts, a neurotic impulse to prove oneself better than one's rivals, and something hardly known elsewhere in the system—a solid work ethic—had produced a civilization perpetually nipping at the heels of those old-line bastions, those stuffier, more comfortable, and much more smug rival claimants to the mantle of Center of Humanity: Luna and Mars.

So it was through these infernal environs I trudged after my last show of the day. And I do mean trudged; Pluto's gravity is not much, but I'd been in free fall a very long time and didn't have my ground legs back yet. When you add in the fact that I'd been standing in the castelli for almost six hours with only a few rests, you get one tired polymorphous, scenery-chewing, talentless, sorry excuse for a has-been actor.

Six months later, and that still stung!

But I wouldn't think about that now. I'd think about it tomorrow.

Toby had very little sympathy for the pains human flesh is heir to. He trotted along five or six steps ahead of me, pausing every ten or fifteen seconds to look back, impatient but too polite to say anything.

Toby? That's right, you haven't really been introduced, yet, have you?

I picked him up at a theatrical supply shop, it must be forty-five, fifty years ago. Toby comes from a line of show folk almost as long as my own. He's a Bichon Frise, in theory, which is French for "curly lapdog." His forebears capered in the court of the Sun King. They fared no better in the French Revolution than the Bourbons themselves, and afterward eked out a living in the circus ring. Like many other dog breeds, they were wiped out in the Invasion, revived during the following century from the Genetic Library, and in Toby's case, extensively tinkered with in the process.