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.
But they had brought something with them to Charon, other than psychosis and criminal skills and their own brand of situational ethics. The dominant religion of Pluto, back from the days when they had been the outcasts of the system was Satanism. Diabolism. Devil worship. Mystical, scary stuff.
Well, not really. It's true no one was allowed into a Satanist Temple but a true believer, and it is true the rituals and belief system are secret. But the secret is an open one, and the interior of the temple is no more mysterious than that of the Mormons. If you leave the church, no one comes to hunt you down and kill you. No one cuts out your tongue. You can blab all you wish, and ex-Satanists over the years have blabbed it all. And a more prosaic, boring story has seldom been blabbed. Forget the tales of human sacrifice, of Christian babies slaughtered on black altars and eaten by the congregation. They used to tell those same stories about Catholics. No, Plutonian Satanism was all ritual and show, symbolic as a Christian sacrament. Although I'll have to admit, reading about it, it sounded like a darn good show.
There was nothing symbolic about the Charonese religion. Real people bled real blood and died on Charonese altars.
If that was all, it would be disgusting, but nothing new in the world of religions. The Charonese couldn't hold a candle to the Aztecs for sheer volume of blood shed, or to the Spanish Inquisition for inventiveness. The sheer depravity of the Charonese way of life owed more to medical science than to man's endless capacity for inhumanity to man. The Charonese did it to themselves.
It's been a long time since any slashing or crushing injury below the brain-case could do any permanent harm to anyone, as long as you didn't bleed to death before medical attention arrived. One of the first things medics did to an injury was turn off the pain. In some professions—stunt performers, or even my own work, when I was required to take a sword thrust in the final act—pain would be turned off ahead of time. (For me, anyway. I trust my acting ability to sell the audience on my pain; I don't hold with "method" fanatics who insist only the real thing will do.) There are those who enjoy being mutilated ritually, and have the pain suppressed, and a very small number who actually enjoy that much pain. All perfectly normal, today. Everything can be fixed.
On Charon, possession or use of any pain suppressor was illegal. You need to have studied Charon to understand how awful that was. The Charonese had almost no laws at all. You were expected to do anything you could get away with. Every law they did have was a capital offense. But because pain was good, pain was to be sought, a Charonese execution consisted of confinement to a sensory deprivation tank where one could not harm oneself in any way, and kept alive there for whatever period the court deemed fit for the crime. Typically that was a couple of weeks. The miscreant was usually insane—and defining "insanity" for a Charonese was a pretty problem—within a few days.
The Charonese religion was based around pain and death. Torture began at an early age, some authorities said in infancy. To my way of thinking, any Charonese living at the age of four or five years must already be insane, by any standard I can understand. Others maintain that the Charonese are the next step in evolution. Pain, they note, evolved to warn an organism of damage (why God couldn't just send down a written memo: "Hey, buddy, you're damaged!" was never explained to me). Now that damage was no big deal we ought to just ignore pain. Well, why not eliminate it? sez I, but I'm not writing a doctoral thesis.
There's no need to disturb your sleep with tales of Charonese bloodbaths, self-mutilations, orgies of sex and violence. A description of Charonese love-making alone would haunt you for days. And besides, the information gets very sketchy here. All the authors are dead, and accounts differ; who can say what is true and what is fancy? One example will suffice for alclass="underline" the Charonese equivalent of a bar mitzvah involves self-disembowelment, after which the honoree amputates both legs and an arm, and then chews off... but I can't go on. It's all healed immediately, so what's the big deal, eh? Unless you have more sensitivity than a garden slug, that is.