'Saur-punchers. 'Saurboys 'n 'Saurgirls. Sparky liked it. Brontoboys. Yuck. He lined it out. There were lists of words used by actual cowboys, suggestions how they might be adapted. Dogies. Chuckwagon. Brandin' and calf-ropin' and hog-tyin'. Bobbing off their tails. Did they really do that? Cayuses and fillies and remudas and geldings and poontangs and chaps and spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle. He'd heard somebody was using a T. Rex to round up his herd. True? Make a note, find out. And what the heck was a dogie? Some kind of cow dog?
Sparky was enjoying himself. This was the kind of work he liked. It was like studying for a role, something he still did, faithfully, as his father had taught him, even though he hadn't played any role but Sparky for a long time. His memory was practically photographic, and jammed with odd facts that had been learned for one role or another. At the same time there were vast gaps, and for the same reason. If he were called on to play, for instance, Christopher Columbus, he would soak up everything he could learn about fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, but quite likely remain ignorant of the fourteenth century. And why not? What was the point of learning all those things unless you planned to use them? Life was too short.
He was so immersed in his reading that he didn't hear Rocko approach. The bodyguard tapped him on the shoulder. "He's here," he said.
"He's... oh, right." Sparky left his pad on the table and struggled out of the chair, which was too big and too plush for his comfort. He and Rocko stood together, the big man a little behind, ever alert, as a commotion drew nearer and nearer in the direction of the jetways. Someone was shouting over other voices. Then six or seven people burst into the room in a tumbling chatter, all centering around a tall, handsome figure.
"—criminal!" the man was saying. "I expect you to find out who's responsible and..."
John Valentine had spotted his son, and his face broke open in that well-remembered, well-loved smile. Sparky felt his knees grow weak. He thought his heart might burst.
"Dodger!" Valentine shouted, and covered the last twenty yards at a run. He lifted Sparky into the air, spun him around, then embraced him. Sparky wrapped his arms around his father's neck. He was determined not to cry.
John Valentine held his son at arm's length, Sparky's feet dangling high above the floor.
"Let me look at you! My god, you look great! Doesn't he, guys?" Everyone murmured how good Sparky looked. Sparky wondered who these people were, and what they had to do with his father. He supposed he'd learn soon enough.
"Great things ahead of us, son," Valentine said, warmly, putting Sparky down again and taking his hand. "Great things. I've got so much to tell you. Come on, let's get out of this damn place."
With that, John Valentine set off. Sparky clung to his father's hand, feeling a little like a balloon on the end of a string. It wasn't a bad feeling, but it wasn't a real secure one, either. There was nothing to be done about it.
Sparky was twenty-nine.
But Sparky is one hundred. He is a lot bigger than he was at eight, at eleven, at twenty-nine, but in many ways he is the same person. We're all that way, I think. We may shift our political ideas here and there, grow more cynical with age, accumulate experience like barnacles, but at our cores there is that same young person. It's the same today, when my apparent age is thirtyish, as it was in the old days, when a centenarian was a mass of leathery skin, rotten teeth, brittle bones, rheumy eyes, and involuntary flatulence. How awful it must have been for the young men and women trapped in such a degenerating hide. I can hear them screaming: "I'm young! Can't you see me?"
I must offer an apology here, and a brief explanation.
My background is in drama, but like any educated person I've read novels, biographies, and autobiographies. My preference is for the old, traditional form of dramatic presentation known as the proscenium theater: three walls, and an imaginary fourth wall between the players and the audience. Over the centuries many methods have been used to break that fourth wall for various reasons. Sometimes it works. From the early days, there was a technique known as the aside, where a cast member pauses and speaks to the audience directly, offers private thoughts, commentary on the action, the author's message.
The written word is different. There are many auctorial voices that may be assumed, but we don't need to get too deeply into that. I have chosen the first person for most of this narrative, for reasons that suit me. I have dropped into third person, as in the preceding pages, for other reasons that make me comfortable. From time to time I have addressed you, the reader, and this is usually considered bad form in a novel. Well, this isn't a novel, of course, but I don't claim it as autobiography, either, though most of it is true. Almost all of it. And it did happen to me. The voice almost never used in prose is the second person. Talking directly to you, the reader. I've never quite been sure why. Maybe it sounds too much like a questionnaire. Did you? Have you? Could you? At any rate, it seems the only appropriate voice to use for some parts. Though I don't know who you are any more than I know who the audience is in the live theater, I have to apologize to you, the reader, for the way I ended that last chapter.
"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"
Chord of ominous music, and bam, the acceleration hits and we cut to seventy years ago, leaving you, the poor reader, to either put up with it or leaf through a few pages to see what the fuck happened next!
I hate that, when a novelist does it to me. It's almost as annoying in a movie. I would never have done it but for two reasons. One, it is exactly the way it happened. The shocker, then the shoe drops. Two, it is the only way I could convey to you the anger and frustration—not to mention cold, constant fear—I had to endure for the next hours.
My powers of description have failed me when trying to come up with a way to describe an hour and a half at five gees. One could get a transitory experience of five gees by jumping off a medium-sized building and landing on one's back. A longer version of the same thing would be lying beneath four people your own size for an hour and a half. Neither would really convey the choking, suffocating, bone-breaking and inexorable feeling of panic I endured. Each breath is a labor of Hercules. Lifting a finger is an aerobic workout. The water in my bladder was five times too heavy, like liquid lead. Poly and I both wet ourselves. You don't want to hear the rest.
We're talking five Earth gees here, remember. I grew up in one sixth of an Earth gravity; did that mean what I was feeling was thirty gees? No, because Lunarians are not one sixth as strong as old Earthers. Depending on what sort of shape we're in, we range from about a third, to full one-gee strength. I figure I was perhaps half as strong as an Earthling, so make it an effective ten gees.
The only relief to be found was that after a few minutes, a druggy feeling of lassitude overcame me. Better call it weariness, fatalism, or resigned apathy. I hurt everywhere, I was sure I wouldn't survive this, but I didn't give much of a damn. Dying would be a relief.
There's no mystery as to the source of this druggy feeling. Mechanical arms hovered and darted over us, moving in for the strike from time to time, pumping us full of sweet nepenthe. God knows what it was. I never asked. There were machines to monitor our vital signs, and something that carefully lifted our arms and legs from time to time, moved us around a little. I fancied a bedsore could form in about three seconds at five gees.