The trouble was that crime doesn't stop just because the people don't like cops. The resulting gap between an anemic constabulary and a healthy and growing—some even argued genetically predisposed—criminal class was filled, as such gaps always are, by free enterprise, in the form of vigilance committees, posses, and protective associations. And of these sellers of protection, the greatest and most feared was the Charonese Mafia.
If you'd like an historical parallel, there's a good one from the Old Earth. The nation of Italy had organized crime, like many other countries. But in one particular province, known as Sicily, the Cosa Nostra, or Black Hand, was far more ruthless and relentless than in any other region. They were so good at what they did that they ended up actually exporting their brand of gangsterism to other countries, particularly America. I know this because I had to study it when I played in The Martian Godfather ("Valentine is effective in the role of Don Tharsisini, mugging and brandoing his way through some lines that might have choked a less professional thespian. Go see it, or I'll break ya fuckin' kneecaps."—The Quicksilver Messenger).
You'd think being an inmate in a planetary prison was about as low as one could sink. You'd be wrong. In any prison there is a hierarchy. It may be topsy-turvy to outside eyes—murderers usually got more respect than embezzlers, for instance—and it varies from culture to culture, but there are always those who the run-of-the-mill convict views with the same contempt that civilians view him. Baby killers, for instance. Cannibals. Crazed serial murderers. Try to parole such people into a population of ex-transportees and you'll get the same uproar you'd get anywhere. So Pluto found itself in need of a prison planet of its own, and the logical choice was forlorn, useless, and neglected little Charon, Pluto's largest moon, named for the ferryman of Hell.
Taxpayers are loath to squander a lot of money on the care of people such as they were exporting to Charon. They must have air, water, and, Charon being from two to four billion miles from the sun, a certain amount of heat. Those things were provided, though not generously. As for food, they could learn hydroponic farming or they could damn well eat each other. I think the Plutonian electorate had the Kilkenny cats in mind: throw them together, stand back, and in a little while there would be just teeth, hair, and eyeballs left.
But politics has a natural ebb and flow. Regimes came and went for nearly two hundred years. Sometimes standards relaxed and genetic criminals were sent to Charon. During a brief right-wing coup any number of political prisoners were transported. There were times when no one went to the rock, as do-gooders tried one more futile time to "reform" the worst of the worst with some new "therapy," or as more pragmatic souls scrambled offenders' brains with the newest lobotomy equivalent that left them happy droolers, or, as the pragmatists would have it, "perfect citizens."
It had been over fifty years since the penal colony was closed and Charon became a more-or-less-equal member of the Plutonian Fed. But in the century before that something had been bred that, save for Areoformed Martians, was nearer to a subspecies of human than anything yet seen in this tired old solar system. They were the Charonese.
They looked like normal human beings, though they tended to a choleric complexion and red hair. Where they differed from the bulk of humanity was not so visible. This difference has been described in a dozen ways, depending on what sort of expert you're talking to. They were said to be empathically dysfunctional. That, or they lived their lives according to an antisocial cultural ethic. Or they suffered from a planetary traumatic stress syndrome. Or, as my father had once put it, "They are mean sumbitches."
Traumatic, dysfunctional, antisocial, deprived, depraved, depraved on account o' being deprived, genetically abnormal, or just plain mean, I lean toward a simpler explanation. They had no souls.
I know it's not scientific, but I never laid claim to a rigorous point of view. Don't ask me to define a soul because I can't. But I know one when I see one, and the Charonese don't have them. I have one. Uncle Roy does, though we're both not very nice. Toby has one, and I'll bet you do, too.
Basically, all Charon had to export was viciousness. And they made a hell of a good living at it. There have always been people who have need of really tough guys.
Charonese were often referred to as "ferrymen."
This was all unprofitable reflection, and I was glad to be drawn away from it when Roy turned from his screen and named a much more satisfactory figure. I might as well admit it: I had no idea what the thing was worth. I was merely following another valuable piece of advice from my father. "Never take the first offer," he said. "It makes you look hungry." A corollary to that was to try not to take the second offer, either, so I named a higher figure and, sure enough, he came up a little bit.
I'm sure we would have ended up splitting the difference if we could have spent the next hour haggling, but he was due back onstage, and he didn't know something, which was that he would have to do this twice more.
"Deal," I said, and put a lovely little recumbent water buffalo on the table between us. "Now how much for this?"
The rest of our negotiations were quickly concluded, on terms a bit more favorable to me, I like to think. Then he was hustling me out of his office, into the breathless rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky that is backstage at a major musical before the second curtain. He guided me to the stage door, which disgorged me into the end of the traditional long, dark alley, the door lit by a single overhead bulb. With the door already closing behind him, he stuck his head out again.
"You want to come tonight and catch the opening? I'll leave a ticket at the box office."
"No, thanks," I said, with a tip of my hat and a bow. "I'll come tomorrow night, and catch the closing."
He extended his middle finger, then smiled and waved.
"Break a leg!" I shouted as the door clicked shut.
For the last ten days I had been staying in modest quarters at the Lambs Club. For the last three of those days I had been making my entrances and exits while the front desk was not occupied, or when the clerk was busy with something else. A few times I'd been reduced to the back stairs and the freight doors. At the Lambs they know actors, you see, most of them being either aspiring or ex-actors themselves. One of the things they know is that an actor with a hit series or a big part in a picture doesn't stay at the Lambs. Another is that an actor lies. It's his business. They have heard every variation on I-Shall-Positively-Pay-You-Next-Tuesday. Your best story about how your saintly mother needed the dough to pay off an unsympathetic bookie will be met by a stony silence. They will regard your crystal martini mixer, said to have belonged to Shirley Temple, with sneering disbelief, and direct you to a pawnbroker known to have a heart of pure flint. Or they'd simply point to the big sign behind the front desk: ALL ROOMS TO BE PAID FOR IN ADVANCE.
Yesterday I'd been ready to throw myself on the mercy of a desk clerk. There was one who looked like Mickey Rooney. Could such a man be a rogue?
Today I swept into the seedy marble-columned lobby in my best black cape and top hat. There was a shine on my shoes and a melody in my heart. I don't think I mentioned it, but when I smile, I can look a lot like Fred Astaire. That thought so cheered me that I actually danced a few steps, past the eternal contingent of office boys, barmaids, and young mechanics who come from Chillicothes and Paducahs with their bazookas to get their names up in lights. And they end up sitting hunched in the Lambs' shabby novodeco armchairs with their attractive but worried faces buried in copies of Casting Call and Pluto Variety. I grabbed the hand of one comely lass, pulled her from her chair, and we Fred'n'Gingered through the dusty potted palms, up the seven steps from the lounge, where I rolled her into my arms and planted a kiss of purest em-gee-em on her rosebud mouth.