Variable Star Read online

  Fortunately nudity was not taboo aboard the Sheffield. It was not commonplace either—but nobody got upset if I sat around the laundry room naked while waiting for my only set of clothing to dry, each day, or went to and from the ’fresher without a robe. (There were ship-issue jumpsuits and robes I could have had. I preferred skin. They were, visibly, the plasteel bolts of the clothing world.)

  I did end up with a lot of time to reflect that most of the Conrad empire products I had ever purchased had worked pretty reliably. And I retained just enough sanity to realize this was probably an omen of some kind, perhaps even an unfavorable one.

  But I had told Herb the truth. It was way too late to change my mind. The center of my personal Solar System had turned out to be a dangerously variable star. It was imperative to break free of her pull, while I still could, and go somewhere else, far far away.

  7

  I only know we loved in vain—

  I only feel—Farewell!—Farewell!

  —Lord Byron

  Jinny phoned two days later, about eight hours before we left.

  Theoretically she should not have been able to. I’d contributed my phone to the ship’s recycler on arrival, and gotten a new one—under a false name, using nonexistent credit, and paying a premium for a super-unlisted code. That account would vanish like a bubble when the first bill went unpaid, of course. But by then I expected I would no longer need one. I only needed it now to say good-bye to a few friends and acquaintances, and to dispose of my few remaining assets on Ganymede.

  I think that might just have been good enough to foil, or at least slow, a Federation agent hunting me. Against a Conrad, it was a gesture. As I slipped in my earbead, I reflected that she could probably have called me five minutes after I’d activated the phone. Her first words practically admitted as much.

  “Damn it, Joel, I admire your stubbornness. I really do. You’ve held out to the last possible second, I give you that. But we are out of time now. Stop this foolishness and come home, this fucking minute!”

  I’d known this call would come. It wasn’t surprise, even at the word I had never heard her use, that kept me from answering her for several seconds. It was just her face. There on the inside of my wrist, thumbnail-sized, poor quality 2-D image. I had never seen her so clearly or so vividly.

  She had never looked more beautiful. I wanted to eat my whole forearm. Her image cut off at her waist, but I could see the rest of her almost as clearly in my mind’s eye. What blurred it a bit was that she was wearing an outfit considerably more expensive than anything I had ever seen her in. That realization restored the power of speech to me.

  “I can’t, Jinny. It’s too late. We were out of time yesterday. The last boat has—”

  “You idiot, I can be there to get you in two hours! How long do you need to pack your four saxo—”

  “Bring me where, did you say?”

  “—phones and your one spare—what?”

  “Where exactly is this home you speak of? Certainly not your apartment. Some mansion in Nepal accessible only by copter? A secret village at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? A stealthed palace at L-1 or—no, why would you care about saving fuel—somewhere in space, then? Or perhaps a few kilometers below the apparent surface of Jupiter, there floats a—”

  She overrode me by yelling, “I deserve that!” I was so surprised I stopped talking. “And I ask you to believe that I have already administered it to myself, and to trust that I will continue to do so, okay? You can kick me all you like, I agree I have it coming—but you won’t be able to if I don’t come get you and bring you back home, and even my window is closing!”

  I shook my head wearily. “I meant what I said. Where is ‘home’ for us? No place we’ve ever been. No place I’ve ever been. I don’t think we even mean the same things by the word—or have any clear idea what the discrepancies are, either one of us.”

  “Joel, I didn’t have any choice, why can’t you see that? I couldn’t tell you, not until—”

  “I know that.”

  “You do? Then—”

  “Jinny, we’ve never really met.”

  “We can. We will meet, and we’ll love each other—we already know how—and the money won’t make any damn difference, none at all.”

  I had to grab something with my left hand just then to keep myself from colliding with a bed; I’d been drifting free since her incoming call had caused me to lose my handhold on my own desk. I guess from her perspective it looked like I was turning away. “Joel, I love you!” she cried.

  I started to regain eye contact… and paused. I found myself looking around my room. My cruddy little dump of a room, just a bit worse than what I’d have expected as a freshman at university, possessed of few and feeble amenities, shared with three other smelly hairy creatures. In a place where nearly everyplace smelled faintly like feet, and all the water tasted like a school hallway water fountain, and the food aspired to be two-star, and you always saw the same people. The Sheffield would in fact be remarkably like another nineteen years of our courtship as we had known it until recently. Freshman year of university, forever. The only thing the big tin can had to recommend it, really, was that it was going to leap the Big Deep—

  I yanked the phone back up to my eyes. “Jinny, come with me!”

  Shocked silence. On both sides. I recovered first.

  “Right now. Without a suitcase. Without a pot. If the money really doesn’t matter, walk away—come homestead with me on the other end of the rainbow. I know you don’t know how, any more than I know about your world—but I’ll teach you. Trust me: it’s a lot easier to grow potatoes than empires. It’s more satisfying to get in a good crop than to play with billions of people’s lives and fortunes. It leaves you time to make babies, and to pay attention to them, and to occasionally notice each other past the babies and make more of them. For God’s sake, Jinny, you remember the song. Let’s die on the way to the stars! Together…”

  I knew exactly how stupid and romantic and naïve my words were. I had never intended to speak them—aloud. They left my mouth with the force and honesty of vomit, but with the same despair as well. Without a particle of hope.

  That was only born when a full second had gone by and she still had not answered yet. At birth, it was tinier than a lepton’s shadow at noon. It took less than another second to grow into something large enough to choke on. I was beginning to worry by the time she broke the silence.

  But the problem solved itself, when my heartbeat ceased. “God damn you, Joel, you gave me every reason to believe you were an adult. With a pair of balls, and at least half a brain. You cannot be this cowardly and stupid and prideful, I won’t tolerate it. I’ve invested too much time in you! I’m coming up there, and I’m—Joel? Joel!”

  My arms had gone limp with cessation of pulse, of course: she was looking at my left hip. Purely from reflex politeness I pulled my wrist back up. So then I had to say something, and thus began breathing again.

  “Jinny, listen to me. Please. I honestly don’t know if I have what it takes to be a Conrad, I admit that. But I don’t know if anybody does, so I’m not at all afraid to find out. What I do know is, it’s not something I want to be. I guess it seems self-evident to you that any rational man would. So you won’t want an irrational husband.” She tried to interrupt, and for once I overrode her. “If you think even your gran’ther has enough proctors and bailiffs to delay the launch of a Kang/da Costa Cartel starship by five minutes so you can arrest a junior apprentice farmer for breach of promise, you’re being irrational yourself. Now, listen to this last part, and don’t interrupt until I’m done, and then you can call me any dirty names you like until they light the candle in eight hours and reception goes to hell for a while. Okay?”

  “Go ahead.”

  She was deploying her ultimate weapon and we both knew it: her voice was trembling on the edge of tears, and they were absolutely genuine.

  My own voice tightened. “Jinny—Jinny Hamilt
on—you were my first love. You may be the last. You certainly are the last I will have in this Solar System. For what it’s worth, I forgive you for not telling me who—what—you really were. I understand, I really do: you had no choice, no other way to play it. I am sorry, genuinely sorry, that you wasted your investment. Maybe nobody is as sorry as I am. I’m pretty certain I’m in the top five, anyway. All I can tell you is that the prospectus you were offered was complete and accurate in every particular. I answered every question I was asked. Honestly.” I took a deep breath. “My own investments haven’t done too well lately, either. Thanks for teaching me to dance, and listening to me play my music. Really. Good luck in your future investments. Maybe I’ll see you in a couple of hundred years, and we can swap notes.” Anything else to say? Yes—but all of it angry. Delete it. It was way too late for anger to serve any purpose worth the indignity. “Your turn.”

  The pause this time was probably as long as the earlier one, but with no hope in it, it went by faster.

  “Good luck, Joel. I really am sorry.” She let go on the last word, cried so hard the screen image became a sideways close-up of her scrunched-up left eye.

  Somehow I held on myself. “I know, honey. Me, too. Really.”

  “Good-bye.”

  The phone was dead.

  For some reason I was not. So I went looking for strong drink, and did the best I could. By the time we left the Solar System I was far from feeling no pain—I was probably in maximum emotional pain, and in considerable physical discomfort from being loaded in free fall—but I was momentarily too stupid to mind either. Terra sure looked pretty, shimmering there in the simulated window, and slow shrinking didn’t spoil the effect at all. In fact, the smaller she got, the prettier she looked.

  The same seemed to hold true for Mama Sol. She was prettiest just before I passed out, as a single pixel of pure white in a sea of ink.

  We did not really achieve enough initial velocity for the sun to show detectable shrinkage, that first day: that last view was an effect of my vision graying out. A matter/antimatter torch is not something you want to start up quickly and max the throttle—certainly not in the vicinity of an inhabited planet! We left High Orbit under conventional fusion drive, albeit a hellacious big one. Even in my stupor, it seemed noisy.

  Unsurprisingly, the menu of recreational drugs obtainable on board was considerably shorter and tamer than what I’d had available to me back in Vancouver. A man who wished to stupefy himself pretty much had to rely on alcohol and/or marijuana. They did the job, in combination.

  But once you used your month’s ration of either one it was gone, so the binge burned itself out faster than it might have if I’d had more powerful tools. By the time I had binged, crashed, died, revived, and been restored to feeble continued interest in events outside my own skull and thorax and indigestive system, the Captain had just throttled the fusion plant back from a space drive to a mere power plant, and things got much quieter again for a while. The sun looked just perceptibly smaller in disk size, there in my simulated window… and considerably dimmer than normal, even though all the other stars now seemed brighter than usual. I thought of trying to locate Ganymede by eye, to bid farewell to my birth planet, but it was already way too late; she was in opposition.

  Within an hour, the Old Man had gotten the antimatter torch lit, and some noise and other vibration did resume, but by no means as much, or as loud. Or as unpleasant. Less like an ongoing earthquake, more like a waterfall, or rapids in a stream.

  Then the sun’s dwindling could be detected, if you had the patience to watch long enough.

  I did. For far longer than made any sense I can explain. There could be no Key West sunset, no final Last of the Light. I knew that even by the end of my journey I would not have traveled so far that Sol’s light could not still reach me. It would be old light, that was all.

  And still I watched, until Herb came and dragged me off for dinner. I felt so weary, it was a noticeable strain to be back in normal gravity again, for the first time in so many months. Free fall is as addictively comfortable as the womb.

  Three kinds of gentleman adventurers participated in the Sheffield’s voyage. The real gents, senior partners, invested very large amounts of money, and remained behind at Sol System to see how it all worked out. Just below them were the limited partners, who put in considerably less money, but tossed their personal bodies and futures into the pot as well. At the bottom rung were the provisional partners, whose entire stake was their head, hands, and health.

  Chumps like me.

  My father died thinking he had provided well for me, because he had. But such provisions don’t always last. By the time my orphan’s allowance had run out at eighteeen, market shifts (as always, unexpected) had all but wiped out the value of the stock Dad had left me; I’d had to sell nearly everything to finance that last semester at Fermi. After that, I’d been pinning all my hopes on the scholarship that Conrad had blocked.

  Now my only remaining assets were nominal: some shares in one of the very earliest starships—which had vanished in the Big Deep years ago. They were worth so little I’d instructed my guardian not to bother selling them; the income would scarcely have covered the assorted charges and taxes. They weren’t worthless, quite: there was always the infinitesimal chance that the New Frontiers might be found and rescued one day. But no missing starship had ever been heard from again. Only once had they even been able to establish just what had gone wrong.

  So I took my meals with most of the others, in Stark Hall, one of the ship’s three mess halls, designed to accommodate up to a third of us at any one time with good solid unspectacular food, drink, and ancillaries, without charge. But for those who had the money and inclination, there were also alternatives. Such as the Horn of Plenty, the Sheffield’s equivalent of an upscale nightclub, with four-star food and more expensive amusement options, open all three shifts.

  I had not expected to ever set foot in the place, unless a live waiter’s job should open up, but it was there that Herb insisted on dragging me for my last dinner in the Solar System.

  I did try to resist. I had known several novelists, but none with even as much money as I had. “Herb, I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford this. There’s an old PreCollapse blues song that goes, ‘If money did my talkin’/I couldn’t breathe a sigh—’ and that’s…”

  And my voice trailed off, because the next lines of the song suddenly loomed up out of memory and clotheslined me: “But my baby’s love is one thing/even money can’t buy/Ain’t that fine?”

  Herb said, “This meal is on me. You have almost nothing in your system but poisons and toxins. The food you take on to absorb it all should be of the highest quality.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you back.”

  “I know: you probably won’t, and I’ll get to hold it over you forever. Cheap dominance. Come on, it’s right up ahead.”

  I stopped us at the door and tried to thank him, but he brushed it away. “Sheer self-interest. I have to live with you.”

  They seemed to know him inside. As we were conducted to our booth, I had that weird feeling you get entering a place that’s a little out of your reach, the irrational sensation that everyone is looking at you and can tell you’re out of place, which is caused by everyone looking at you and knowing you’re out of place. Herb had a way of walking as though they were out of place, but he was a broad-minded man. Jinny had had it, too….

  A dance performance was in progress on a cleared area of the floor, something classic-modern, I think, though I have trouble keeping the distinctions straight. I don’t think ballet is ever done in silence. Serious dance, at any rate, not mating dance, and apparently very well done, by three energetic people a little older than me. They finished to thunderous applause as we crossed the room, and sprinted backstage.

  I did notice a bandstand, an interesting one, just beyond the dancers’ Marley floor. It was powered down at the moment, unoccupied, b
ut it looked nicely equipped. The keyboard system was built into a very good replica of a PreCollapse grand piano; it looked as though the player could produce “real,” mechanically produced acoustic sound with the thing if he chose. The drum kit too could have produced reasonable accompaniment for most purposes even powered down. The stringed instrument cases I saw were all obviously for either acoustic or hybrids. I mentioned that to Herb as we were seated.

  “You watch,” he said, “pre-electric music is going to become very popular in this ship over the next twenty years. We all know deep down we’re going to a place where we may not have power to spare for luxuries for some time to come. Subconsciously we’re preparing. Brunch menus, coffee and orange juice for two, please.”

  I hadn’t noticed the waitress approach until he spoke, and she was gone by the time I turned around. Yet I later learned she was human. “Brunch?” I asked, checking the time.

  “In a restaurant that never closes, in a ship with three shifts, it’s always brunchtime. Or dinnertime. Or midnight snacktime, or tea. You need serious food that doesn’t challenge digestion; ergo, brunch.”

  The food was indeed wonderful. It penetrated my depression, forced me to concede to myself that I did have some interest in continued life, even if I had no idea why. I was continually conscious of a sensation of having gnawed off one of my feet to escape a trap, a pit-of-the-stomach feeling that wouldn’t go away. But for some reason it didn’t interfere with my appetite much, or even my mood.

  Herb, I was very gratified to learn, was the kind of man who did not chatter over his food. Save for a handful of conversational politenesses, he used his mouth for intake only. It gave me permission to do the same. We already knew we were going to be friends. And there was going to be plenty of time to use up our conversation stores.

  When he did speak, it was with a friend’s directness. “So,” he said, setting down his fork, “have you decided whether you’re going to cut your throat or not? Inquiring minds want to know.”