Variable Star Read online

  “I remember what we said!”

  Well, then, maybe I didn’t. To settle it, I summoned that conversation up in my mind—or at least fast-forwarded through the storyboard version in the master index. And partway through, I began to grow excited. There was indeed one contingency we had discussed that night on Luckout Hill, one that I hadn’t really thought of again, since I couldn’t really picture Jinny opting for it. I wasn’t sure she was suggesting it now… but if she wasn’t, I would.

  “See here, Skinny, you really want to change your name from Hamilton to Johnston right away? Then let’s do it tomorrow morning—and ship out on the Sheffield!” Her jaw dropped; I pressed on. “If we’re going to start our marriage broke, then let’s do it somewhere where being broke isn’t a handicap, or even a stigma—out there around a new star, on some new world eighty light-years away, not here on Terra. What do you say? You say you’re an old-fashioned girl—will you homestead with me?”

  A look passed across her face I’d seen only once before—on Aunt Tula’s face, when they told us my father was gone. Sadness unspeakable. “I can’t, Joel.”

  How had I screwed up so badly? “Sure you could—”

  “No. I can’t.” She swiveled away from me.

  The sorrow on her face upset me so much, I shut up and began replaying everything since our dance, trying to locate the point at which my orbit had begun to decay. Outside the car, kilometers flicked by unseen. On the third pass, I finally remembered a technique that had worked for me more than once with women in the past: quit analyzing every word I’d said and instead, consider words I had not said. Light began to dawn, or at least a milder darkness. I swiveled her seat back to face me, and sought her eyes. They were huge.

  I dove right in. “Jinny, listen to me. I want to marry you. I ache to marry you. You’re the one. Not since that first moment when I caught you looking at me have I ever doubted for an instant that you are my other half, the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Okay?”

  “Oh.” Her voice was barely audible.

  “You give me what I need, and you need what I can give. I want the whole deal, just like you’ve told me you want it—old-fashioned death do us part, better or worse monogamy, like my parents. None of this term marriage business, no prenup nonsense, fifty-fifty, mine is thine, down the line, and I don’t care if we live to be a hundred. I want to marry you so bad, my teeth hurt. So bad my hair hurts. If you would come with me, I would be happy to walk to Boötes, carrying you on my back, towing a suitcase. My eyeballs keep drying out every time I look at you. Then when you’re out of their field of vision, they start to tear up.”

  Her eyes started to tear up. “Oh, Joel—you do want to marry me.” Her smile was glorious.

  “Of course I do, Skinny you ninny. How could you not know that?”

  “So it’s just—”

  “Just a matter of financing. Nothing else. We’ll get married the day we can afford to.” I loosened my seat belt, so I’d be ready for the embrace I was sure was coming.

  Her smile got even wider. Then it fell apart, and she turned away, but not before I could see she was crying.

  What the hell had I said now?

  Of course, that’s the one question you mustn’t ask. Bad enough to make a woman cry; to not even know how you managed it is despicable. But no matter how carefully I reviewed the last few sentences I’d spoken, in my opinion they neither said anything nor failed to say anything that constituted a reason to cry.

  Silver slowed slightly, signaling that we were crossing the Georgia Strait. We’d be at Jinny’s little apartment on Lasqueti Island, soon. I didn’t know what to apologize for. But then, did I need to? “Jinny, I’m sorry. I really—”

  She spoke up at once, cutting me off. “Joel, suppose you knew for sure you had your scholarship in the bag? The whole ride?” She swiveled her seat halfway back around, not quite enough to be facing me, but enough so that I was clearly in her peripheral vision.

  I frowned, puzzled by the non sequitur. “What, have you heard something?” As far as I knew, the decisions wouldn’t even be made for another few weeks.

  “Damn it, Stinky, I’m just saying: Suppose you knew for a fact that you’re among this year’s Kallikanzaros winners.”

  “Well… that’d be great. Right?”

  She turned the rest of the way back around, so that she could glare at me more effectively. “I’m asking you: If that happened, how would it affect your marriage plans?”

  “Oh.” I still didn’t see where she was going with this. “Uh, it’d take a lot of the pressure off. We’d know for sure that we’re going to be able to get married in as little as four years. Well, nothing’s for sure, but we’d be a whole lot more…”

  I trailed off because I could see what I was saying wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I had to shift my weight slightly as Silver went into a wide right turn. I didn’t have a clue what she did want to hear, and her face wasn’t giving me enough clues. Maybe I ought to—

  Wide right turn?

  I cleared my side window. Sure enough, we were heading north; almost due north, it looked like. But that was wrong: we couldn’t be that far south of Lasqueti. “Jinny, I—”

  She was sobbing outright, now.

  Oh, God. As calmly as I could, I said, “Honey, you’re going to have to take manual control: Silver has gone insane.”

  She waved no-no and kept sobbing.

  For a second I nearly panicked, thinking… I don’t know what I was thinking. “Jinny, what’s wrong?”

  Her weeping intensified. “Oh, Jo-ho-ho-ho—”

  I unbuckled, leaned in, and held her. “Damn it, talk to me! Whatever it is, we’ll fix it, I know we will. Just tell me.”

  “Oh, God, I-hi-hi’m sorry… I screwed it all up-hup-hup-hup…” She clutched me back fiercely.

  I was alarmed. I’d seen Jinny cry. This was hooting with sorrow, rocking with grief. Something was seriously wrong. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, you hear me? Whatever it is.”

  She writhed in my arms. “Joel, I lie-hi-hi-hi-hied… I’m so stu-hoo-hupid…”

  Ice formed on the floor of my heart. I did not break our embrace, but I felt an impulse to, and I’m sure she felt it kinesthetically. She cried twice as hard. Well, much harder.

  It took her several minutes to get back under control. During those minutes, I didn’t breathe or think or move or digest food or do anything at all except wait to learn what my Jinny had lied about. Then, when she took in a deep breath and pulled away from my arms, suddenly I didn’t want to know. So I thought of a different question she could answer instead. “Where are we going?”

  Her eyes began to slide away from mine, then came back and locked. “To my home.”

  This time I caught the subtle change. Usually the instruction she gave Silver was “my place.”

  “So? And it’s north?”

  She nodded.

  “How far?”

  “Silver: step on it,” she said. The car acknowledged. Then to me, as Silver faced our chairs forward and pressed us back into them with acceleration, she said, “About twenty minutes, now.”

  I consulted a mental map and glanced out the window—with difficulty, as we were now pulling serious gees. Jinny’s car was exceedingly well loved, but nonetheless it was just short of an antique. There was simply no way it could go anywhere near this fast. I made myself breathe slowly. This just kept getting better and better.

  Twenty minutes north of Lasqueti at this speed would, it seemed to me, put us smack in the middle of a glacier somewhere, just below the border with Yukon Province. I was dressed for a ballroom, didn’t have so much as a toothbrush. Not that it mattered, because we were doing at least four times the provincial exurban speed limit; long before we reached that glacier the Mounties (local cops) were going to cut our power and set us down to await the Proctors… probably in raw forest. Unless, of course, Silver tore himself apart first, traveling at four times the best speed he’d been ca
pable of the day he left the factory.

  Less than half an hour before, I’d been as perfectly happy as I’d ever been in my life, dancing with my Jinny. I opaqued my window, surrendered to the gee forces, and stared straight ahead at nothing. To my intense annoyance, she let me.

  Life is going to continue to suck until somebody finds the Undo key.

  2

  Howe’er it be, it seems to me

  ’Tis only noble to be good.

  Kind hearts are more than coronets,

  And simple faith than Norman blood.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Lady Clara Vere de Vere

  The engine did not explode. It didn’t even sound any louder than usual. The Mounties somehow failed to notice us blazing across their radar, or to log any complaints about shattered windows; we crossed the province unmolested. For most of the trip we were above atmosphere, so high that the horizon showed a distinct curve—we pretty much had to be at that speed, I think—but if the Peace Forces satellites noticed us, they kept it to themselves. Nineteen minutes later, the car finished decelerating, came to a dead stop, and went into hover mode, glowing softly from the heat of our passage and reentry into atmosphere.

  “Wait,” Jinny said—whether to Silver or to me, I was unsure.

  I glanced at her, then turned to my side window once again and looked down. Sure enough, what lay some three thousand meters below us was a nearly featureless glacier. There was a big rill to the east, and a shadowy crevasse almost directly below that was much smaller, but still large enough to conceal several dozen cars the size of Silver. I looked back to Jinny. She was staring straight ahead at the windshield, which was still opaque.

  Keeping my mouth shut was easy this time. I not only didn’t know how I felt, I didn’t even know what I felt it about. I couldn’t have been more clueless if I’d had my head in a sack. Anything I said was likely to sound stupid in retrospect, and there are few things I hate more.

  “I rehearsed this a hundred times,” she said finally. “Now I’ve screwed it up completely.”

  I suspected this was true, but kept my mouth shut.

  She swiveled my way and unbuckled her crash harness, though we were still three klicks above hard ice. It gave her enough freedom of movement to lean forward and take one of my hands in both of hers. I noted absently that the skin of her palm was remarkably hot. “Have you ever heard of Harun al-Rashid?” she asked me.

  “Plays defense for the Tachyons?”

  “Close,” she said. “You’re only off by, let me see, a little more than a millennium and a half. Fifteen hundred and some years.”

  “But he does play defense.”

  “Stinky, please shut up! He was a rich kid, from a powerful military family in ancient Persia. His father was a Caliph, roughly equivalent to premier of a province today, a man so tough he invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, which was then ruled by the Empress Irene.”

  “You’re making this up,” I charged.

  Her eyes flashed. “I said ‘please,’ Joel.”

  I drew an invisible zipper across my lips.

  “Harun became Caliph himself in the year 786.” Over a thousand years before man could even travel anywhere. “He was probably as wealthy and powerful as anybody in living memory had ever been. Yet somehow, he was not an ignorant idiot.”

  “Amazing,” I said, trying to be helpful.

  Go try to be helpful to a woman who’s talking. “He had the odd idea it was important to know what his people were really thinking and feeling about things,” she went on as if I had not spoken. “He wanted more than just the sanitized, politically safe version they would give to him or to anyone he could send to talk to them. He understood that his wealth and power distorted just about everything in his relations with others, made it difficult if not impossible for truth to pass between them. You can see how that would be, right?”

  “Sure. Everybody lies to the boss.”

  “Yes!” Finally, I’d gotten one right. “Then one day he overheard one of his generals say that nobody knows a city as well as an enemy spy. It gave him an idea.

  “That night he disguised himself as a beggar, sneaked out of his palace alone, and wandered the streets of Baghdad, a spy in his own capital. Everywhere he went, he listened to conversations, and sometimes he asked innocent questions, and because he was thought a beggar, no one bothered to lie to him. He got drunk on it. He started to do it whenever he could sneak away.”

  Her eyes were locked on mine, now. It was important that I get this.

  “Do you see, Joel? For the first time in his life Harun got an accurate picture of what the common people honestly thought… more than just what they thought, he experienced firsthand what life was really like for them, came to understand the things they didn’t even think about because they simply assumed them… and their perspective informed and improved his own thinking from then on. He became one of the most beloved rulers in history—his name means Aaron the Just, and how many rulers do you suppose have ever been called that? One time fifteen thousand men followed him into battle against one hundred twenty-five thousand—and whipped them, left forty thousand legionaries dead on the ground and the rest running for their lives. He lived to a ripe old age, and when he died the whole Muslim world mourned. Okay?”

  I was nodding. I understood every word she said. I had no idea what she was driving at.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Now, imagine you’re a young Persian girl in Baghdad. I see your mouth opening, and so help me God, if a wisecrack should come out of it… that’s better. You’re a poor-but-decent young Persian girl, working hard at some menial trade, struggling to better yourself, and so is—”

  A strange alto voice suddenly spoke, seemingly from the empty space between Jinny and me, just a little too loudly. I was so startled I nearly jumped out of my seat. “Your vehicle’s hull temperature has dropped sufficiently to permit safe debarking now, Miss Jinny.”

  If I was startled, Jinny was furious. I could tell because her face became utterly smooth, and her voice became softer in pitch and tone and slower in speed as she said, “There are only four letters in the word ‘wait,’ Smithers. There seems little room for ambiguity.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Jinny,” Smithers said at once, and although there was no noticeable cessation of any background hiss or power hum, somehow I knew he was gone.

  “And so,” she went on before I could ask who Smithers was, “is your boyfriend… call him Jelal. The two of you are very much in love, and want to get married, but you just don’t have the means. And then one day—”

  “Wait,” I said, “I think I see where this is going… sort of. One day the beggar who lives next door comes over, right, and it turns out he’s incredibly rich and he says he’s been eavesdropping and he understands our problem and he offers Jelal a—”

  I stopped talking. The penny had just dropped. All of sudden, I actually did see where this was going, at least in general terms. “Oh… my… God…” I breathed. “I’ve got it just backward, don’t I?”

  Her eyes told me I was right. “There wasn’t any other way, do you see? Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton, I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, the whole point was to—”

  “You’re Harun al-Rashid!”

  “Well, his granddaughter,” she said miserably.

  I was stunned. “You’re rich.”

  She nodded sadly. “Very.”

  Tumblers began to click into place. I tried to think it through. “You’re not even an orphan, are you?”

  Headshake. “I couldn’t let anyone at Fermi meet my parents. They’re… pretty well known. Hiring a pair of Potemkin parents for social purposes seemed grotesque.”

  “And you came to Fermi, instead of Lawrence Campbell or one of the other top prep schools, so you could—what? See how the other half lives?”

  “Well… in part.”

  I was ranging back through my memories, adding things up with the benefit of hindsight, understanding little things th
at had puzzled me. Silver’s previously unsuspected power. Jinny’s extraordinary confidence and poise, so unexpected in an orphan. How, whenever someone brought up one of the really fabulous vacation destinations—Tuva, or the Ice Caves of Queen Maud Land in the Antarctic, or Harriman City on Luna—Jinny always seemed to have seen a good documentary about it recently. The way, when we ate pistachios, she always threw away the ones that were any trouble at all to open—

  I became aware that Jinny was absolutely still and silent, studying my face intently for clues to what I was thinking. It seemed like a good idea; maybe I should get a mirror and try it. I thought about banging my head against the dashboard to reboot my brain.

  Instead I looked at her and spread my hands. “I’m going to need some time to process this,” I admitted.

  “Of course,” she said at once. “Sleep on it. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my real father. And meantime I’ll answer any questions you have—no more evasions, no more white lies.”

  I didn’t feel as though I knew enough to formulate a coherent question yet. No, wait, I did have one—purely for form’s sake; I didn’t see how the answer could help me. Still—

  “What is it really?”

  She blinked. “Crave pardon?”

  “You said, ‘Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton…’ So that’s not your real name. Okay, I’ll bite. What is?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “‘Jinny Oh.’ Chinese, dear?”

  Not amused. “Joel—”

  “Come on, how bad could it be? Look, let’s meet for the first time all over again. Hi there, I’m Joel Johnston, of Ganymede. And you are—?”

  She stared at me, blank-faced, for so long I actually began to wonder whether she was going to tell me. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her hesitate about anything before, much less this long. One of the many things I liked about her was that she always knew what she wanted to be doing next. Finally she closed her eyes, took in a long breath, released it… squared her shoulders and opened her eyes and looked me right in the eye.