The Golden Globe

It was worse. Much worse.

The first thing that struck a researcher—me—was the paucity of information. Hal had a UniKnowledge module, which was the nearest thing we'd ever get to summing up all human information collected since the days of the Cro-Magnon. It held all the libraries of Old Earth. All the movies, television shows, photo files. Billions of billions of bits of data so obscure a researcher might visit some of it once in two or three hundred years, and then only long enough to find it no longer had any reasonable excuse for being. But it wasn't thrown out. Capacity was virtually infinite, so nothing was ever tossed. Who knew? In ten centuries the twenty years of telemetry from Viking I might be of use to somebody. A vanity-press book, published in 1901, all about corn silage in Mi

But it was all in there. And if you set it for CHARONESE: Search, it began to spew out mountains of information. Or at least it seemed like mountains, at first glance. However, if you set it for ALBANIAN NAVY, 1936, it would spew out a mountain of information as well. You had to keep it in perspective.

So the first thing was to set the UK to sorting, organizing, comparing. It produced helpful graphs, statistical analysis, suggested routes of exploration. It spotted anomalies, pointed out the unexpected. The first thing it showed me was that, for an entire inhabited planet, there was practically no information at all. Economic data was very skimpy. Social analysis was sketchy. And most striking, items written by actual Charonese were unknown. Zip. Zero. Not one manuscript. The Charonese were not contributing information to the universal human database. They were hoarding their holdings like a paranoid poker player. Why?

The UK could help me with that, too. It searched for things written by ex-Charonese, expatriates. There had been a few, over the years. The bulk of these had spent their lives trying to make themselves very, very small, but a few had spoken out in print.

For a short time.

The UK produced a graph showing average life expectancy of an ex-Charonese. Ten months. Ninety percent were dead within one month of defection. The tougher ones lasted a little longer; one fellow was thought to be alive twenty years after leaving his home planet, but no one had seen him in five years, so it was anybody's guess.

They tended to die in accidents. In the same way that a boot crushing an ant might be seen as an accident.

Some of this stuff I knew, or had been told was probably true, but it was interesting to see it confirmed. Charonese didn't abide traitors. They kept their business secret, at any cost.

I could spin you quite a detective story about how I tracked my facts down. It's all in there, all in the UK, but finding it, putting it together, drawing conclusions, that's something else. As usual, there were reams of references from the Net, and they were about as useful as you'd expect, which is not much. Unattributed tales, anecdotal evidence, wildly contradictory accounts of How I Survived an Encounter with a Charonese. I spent more time than I usually would have with this material, because reliable sources were rare. The authors of such material were usually to be found in the obituary column a few weeks after publication. Venues that published anonymous articles about Charonese tended to a

So, Charonese Fact One: You write about us, you die.

I assumed there were people in law enforcement who knew about this, but what could they do? You write a nasty article about John Q. Mobster, and you die violently, somebody's going to suspect old John Q. There's a place to start. But though you might know these people were wiped out by a Charonese... which one? Someone who never met the victim, you could be sure of that. You couldn't just indict everybody with a Charonese passport, even though that would be a small group. They would certainly alibi each other, and you could rely on the fact there would be no deals cut, no testimony bargained for. If the hit was ordered by a boss, a capo, you could be sure he was back on Charon. But in fact it probably did not have to be ordered. Someone at the Charonese embassy would have the full-time job of monitoring all public media, and when something appeared they didn't like, maybe they just posted the name on a bulletin board. One writer, since deceased, said this was in fact the case. Whoever could work the job into his busy day did the hit. There were never any witnesses. The accident that claimed the life of the target invariably killed all the witnesses as well. On the very rare occasion a Charonese was surprised in the act, captured, caught red-handed, he always pleaded guilty. Charonese never hired lawyers. They never said anything at all to police, not even their name, and the only word they ever uttered in court was guilty. And then they did their time without a peep of complaint. A Charonese never complained about anything. If he had a problem with you, he killed you.

Charonese Fact Two: We always get our man.

Always. I searched long and hard for evidence of a contract unfulfilled, and found nothing. All the deceased experts agreed on this, even when they didn't agree on much else. If the Charonese agreed to do something, they did it. What they mostly did, off-planet, anyway, was enforce other people's contracts, the sort of contract you didn't want to bring into court or bother a lawyer about. Or it could even be a legal contract. There were no endless appeals from Charonese courts, no escape clauses. No excuses at all. If the Charonese guaranteed your contract, you could count on it being fulfilled, in cash, the equivalent, or if there was absolutely nothing left to take from the welsher, blood. Sometimes you got a warning in the form of a just-less-than-lethal torture session. Then you paid up, or you died.

I wish I'd known that. The next time I saw Uncle Roy I was going to have some very cross words to say to him.

So in these things the Charonese were much like other crime syndicates, past and present, though I'd never heard of any quite so harsh, nor any with a perfect record. Nor any who had never suffered a permanent defection, had a member squeal in court, cut a deal with the prosecutor. I inferred that something extraordinary was keeping these people in line, and I set out to find out what that was. I almost wish I hadn't. I had hoped it might provide me with a loophole of some kind, a spot of leverage. A window of hope.

I don't wish to depress and frighten you with the miserable history of Charon and its denizens. Just a short refresher course:

Luna and some other planets export criminals, misfits, and undesirables to Pluto for about a century. Most are garden-variety criminals, some are politicals, and a handful are very scary people. The Plutonians don't want these last around any more than you or I would; off they go to Charon. Transportation is a wonderful way to handle criminals; you might as well flush them down the toilet. There is very little in the way of maintenance, no costly per-bunk per-year figures to upset the taxpayers. Ship 'em as much or as little food as you wish, and let them fight it out. You need budget cuts? Prison food was always a good place to start. You don't need to pay salaries for guards, or worry about what they're bringing in to the convicts. There's no need for parole boards or probation officers. All sentences are for life. And if they wish to escape, all they need to do is fly through a million miles of vacuum.