Variable Star Page 4

  “No more ducking and weaving. Spell it out for me,” I said. “In words of one sound bit, what’s the deal?”

  She was through dodging. “I’m proposing marriage, Joel. Just as we’ve discussed: lifetime, exclusive, old-fashioned matrimony. And I’m offering to support us… uh, at least until you get your degree and start to become established as a composer and start earning. I can afford it. I’m quite sure you’ll get that Kallikanzaros Scholarship—but if you don’t, it won’t matter. And best of all, we can start our first baby right away—tomorrow night, if you want.”

  “Huh? Skinny, what about your degree—your career?”

  “My second career, you mean. It’ll keep. I’ve always known what my first career has to be.” She tightened her grip on my hands and leaned slightly closer. “Stinky, maybe now you’ll understand why I’ve been so…” She blushed suddenly. “So frimpin’ stingy. So square, even for a Terran girl. Why I don’t park, or pet, or sneak out after curfew, and why our clinches never got out of hand—or even into it, so to speak. I think you know I haven’t wanted to be that way. But I had no choice. It may be all right for some other girls to bend the rules and take risks, but me, I’ve had it beaten into my head since I was three that I have responsibilities.”

  “The family name.”

  “The family name my left foot! The family genes. Stinky, I’m a female human animal; my number one job is to get married and make babies. And because I’m who I am, a member of a powerful dynasty, it makes all the difference in the world what baby I have—and who its father is.” She let go of my hands and sat up straight. “You’re it. This is not a snap decision.”

  It began to dawn on me that I was not merely being offered acceptance into the fringes of the Conrad family. I was being asked to father its heirs.

  On Ganymede I’d grown up seeing stud bulls brought in and put to work. They were always treated with great care and respect, very well fed, and certainly got all the healthy exercise a male animal could possibly want. Their DNA was vastly more successful than that of most other bulls, and their own lives vastly longer. Nobody made jokes about them in their hearing.

  But I couldn’t recall one who had looked very happy about the business.

  “Don’t look so worried, Stinky. It’s going to work out fine. You do want to marry me, we settled that, right?”

  I opened my mouth—realized I was harpooned, and closed it again. I had stated that only money prevented me from proposing; I didn’t have a leg to stand on.

  Nevertheless I found myself on my feet and being embraced. I had to admit it was a very nice embrace, warm and close and fragrant. “Then it’s all really very simple. All you need is a nice long chat with Gran’ther Richard. You’ll love him, really. And I know he’ll love you.”

  I stiffened in her arms, and fought with the impulse to faint. Good old Grandpa Richard. Known to the rest of the Solar System as Conrad of Conrad. The patriarch. The Chairman. I’d heard he had broken premiers. But perhaps the most awesome thing about his wealth was that, when I thought about it, I didn’t actually know a single fact about him, save his name and exalted position. I’d never read an article about him, or viewed a bio, or even seen a picture of his face. For all I knew he had taken my cloak when I arrived. Harun el-Hatchek.

  She released me and stepped back. “You’ll see him first thing tomorrow. He’ll explain things. And then afterward you and I will have breakfast together and start to make some plans. Good night, Stinky.”

  We parted without a kiss. She didn’t offer, and I didn’t try. I was starting to feel resentment at having been played for so long—and also I flatly did not believe there were no cameras on us.

  After she was gone, I thought about firing up that Universal Access Rennick/Smithers had mentioned, and researching the size and scope of the Conrad empire. But I knew if I did so here, now, on this computer system, Gran’ther Richard would know about it. It just smelled ripe to me. Milady brings home a handsome hick, and the first thing he does is start pricing the furniture. The thought made my cheeks burn.

  Instead I used that UA to google around until I had figured out the “Smithers” gag. It turned out to be just as well Rennick didn’t know the reference—if in fact he really didn’t. Jinny was comparing him to an ancient cartoon character who was a cringing bootlicker, a toady, a completely repressed monosexual, and an unrequited lover. I wondered how much of that was accurate and how much libel. And just how far the analogy was meant to go: Smithers’s employer in the cartoon, a Mr. Burns, was vastly rich, impossibly old, and in every imaginable way a monster. Did he represent Jinny’s grandfather? Or father?

  Well, I would find out in the morning. Or maybe I would get lucky and be struck by a meteorite first.

  The bed turned out to be just like mine back at the dorm, except the mattress was better, the sheets were infinitely softer and lighter, and the pillow was gooshier. Was I hallucinating, or did the pillowcase really smell faintly of Jinny’s shampoo? It certainly did put a different perspective on things. It might be nice to smell that on my pillow every night from now on. And every morning. If in fact I was really smelling it now. While I was wondering, I fell asleep.

  3

  “Joel. It’s time to wake up, dear.”

  Yes, that was definitely her hair I smelled.

  I had heard Jinny say just those words, in much that low throaty tone of voice, at the start of more than one pleasant dream. It was a novel experience to hear them at the end of one. Now if only everything else would continue to unfold as it usually did in the dream….

  I opened my eyes and she was not there. The scent was either vestigial or imagined. Drat.

  “You really need to wake up now, Joel,” she murmured insistently from somewhere nearby.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Wake up, Joel. It’s time t—”

  I sat up, and she chopped off in midword. She wasn’t there. Anywhere.

  I wake up hard. I had to sit there, blinking, for a few seconds before I had it worked out. The speaker was not Jinny but Leo the AI server, perfectly imitating her voice while acting as an alarm clock. Doing the job well, too: I could fool my own alarm at the dorm by simply telling it I was getting up. Leo was programmed to accept nothing less than verticality as proof of compliance.

  Why did I need to get up now? I could tell I had not had eight hours’ sleep. I had graduated, for Pete’s sake—what was so urgent?

  It all came back to me at once. Oh, yes. That’s right. Today I was going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. Had I supposed it would be scheduled for my convenience? A man like Conrad of Conrad would doubtless want to dispose of matters as trivial as meeting his grandchild’s fiancé as early as possible in the business day.

  “How soon am I expected?” I asked.

  “In half an hour, Mr. Joel,” Leo said in his own voice.

  “How do I get breakfast?”

  “I can take your order, sir.”

  I started to say scrambled on toast, bucket of black coffee, liter of OJ. Then I thought to myself, this morning you are going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. “Eggs Benedict, home fries, Tanzanian coffee—French Press, please, two sugars and eighteen percent cream, keep it coming—and squeeze a dozen oranges.”

  Leo returned the serve. “Very good, Mr. Joel. Do you prefer peaberry or the normal bean?”

  “The peaberry, I think,” I managed.

  There was a scratching sound at the door. It opened, and a servant entered, pushing a tray ahead of him at shoulder height with two fingers. He was easily as old and as ugly as the servants I’d seen the night before, but nowhere near as surly. Maybe day shift was better.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He steered the tray to a table near the bed, and somehow persuaded it to sit down. “Eggs Benedict, potatoes, coffee, fresh orange juice, and this morning’s news, sir,” he said, pointing to each
item as he named it. Nothing in his manner suggested that only an idiot would need these things named.

  I promised myself that just as soon as I had the time, I would wonder, very hard, about how any of those items could have been produced instantly, much less all of them at once. But meanwhile, there was no sense pretending they had not caught me by surprise. “If I’d known how fast the service is here, I’d have asked them to wait ten minutes, while I used the ’fresher,” I said with a rueful grin.

  He turned to the tray, made some sort of mystic gesture. The food became obscured by a hemisphere of… well, it looked like shimmery air. “Take as long as you like, sir. Everything will be the same temperature and consistency when you get back out.”

  Oh. Of course. I wondered how the hell I would get the air to stop shimmering, but I was determined not to ask. I’d figure it out somehow.

  “Just reach right through it, whenever you’re ready, sir,” he volunteered. “That collapses the field.”

  I opened my mouth to ask what kind of field, how was it generated, what were its properties—and stifled myself. There would be time for that later. “What is your name?”

  “Nakamura, sir.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Nakamura. You’re very kind.”

  “You’re welcome, sir. And thank you.” Somehow he was gone instantly, without hurrying.

  I started to get out of bed… and the damned thing helped me. The part right under my knees dropped away, and the part under my butt rose, and I was on my feet. I reacted pretty much as if I’d been goosed—the physical sensations were not dissimilar. I said the word “Whoa!” louder and an octave higher than I might have wished, leaped forward a meter or so, and spun around to glare accusingly at the bed.

  “Is something wrong, Mr. Joel?” Leo asked.

  I took a deep breath. And then another. “Not yet,” I stated cautiously.

  On the way to the ’fresher, I passed close to the tray of food. I could see a cup of coffee in there, and wanted it so badly it brought tears to my eyes. But I knew if I “collapsed the field” now, I probably wouldn’t be able to re-create it again. And besides, there was the question of making room for the coffee.

  So okay, I would hurry and be out of the ’fresher in five minutes instead of ten. I stepped in….

  On Ganymede we’re more reticent about such matters than Terrans—for complex sociocultural reasons I’d be perfectly happy to explain any time you have an hour to kill listening to a guy who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. So I’ll just say that this ’fresher was about ten times better equipped and programmed than I had ever imagined possible, and let it go at that. It was more like fifteen minutes before I was able to make myself end the sybaritic cycle.

  When I came out, my clothes were gone.

  I remarked on this, as casually as I could manage. Leo explained that they had been taken away for laundering. He invited me to wear any of the fakes in the closet that pleased me, and assured me, unnecessarily, that they would all fit me perfectly.

  I was not at all happy about this, but I could see my wallet, phone, and keys on the bedside table, so I postponed the matter until after coffee.

  By the end of the first cup, I had no strong objection to anything short of disembowelment or denial of a second cup. If you are ever given the choice, insist on the peaberry. Trust me.

  When I was ready to dress, I automatically reached for the copy of my best suit, comforting myself as best I could with the guess that this version of it, at least, would be freshly cleaned, and would not be worn nearly through in spots. But as I took it from the closet, I noticed an item hanging just behind it that certainly was not a copy of any garment I owned. It was a J. L. Fong suit. Top of the line, of the latest cut and style. In a color, I noticed, that would complement Jinny’s hair. It was worth more than my entire wardrobe—more than my passage to Earth had cost. The tights were just a bit daring, but I decided I had the calves to carry them off. I was unsurprised to find suitable underwear and other necessary accessories in drawers, tucked in among my own trash.

  The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend—and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew things about me I wouldn’t learn for years yet, and approved of them all. Wearing a suit like that, you could break up a knife fight with an admonishment, secure a million-dollar loan without being troubled for a signature, walk away from a crime scene, or obtain illicit drugs on credit. I examined the effect in the ’fresher room mirror, and decided that on me, it looked good. Perhaps, I felt, I could even survive an interview with Conrad of Conrad without soiling it. If it was a brief interview.

  “Will Jinny be present at this meeting, do you know?” I asked Leo.

  “No, Mr. Joel. Only Mr. Conrad, Mr. Albert, and yourself.”

  I blinked. “Wait a second. Which Mr. Conrad—Jinny’s father, or her grandfather? And who’s this Albert bloke?”

  “Ah. Pardon me, Mr. Joel. There are over a dozen adult males in the immediate family whose last name is or incorporates Conrad—but by long-standing family and corporate tradition, there is only one ‘Mr. Conrad’ at any one time. At present that is Jenny’s grandfather, Mr. Richard Conrad—Conrad of Conrad. The others are Mr. Joseph, Mr. Chang, Mr. Akwai-N’boko, and so on. Mr. Albert is Jinny’s father.”

  “I see,” I said. “Thank you.” I began to understand Leo’s insistence on putting Mr. before my name. I started to ask where Jinny was now, and realized the answer would probably mean nothing to me.

  I paid attention to my breathing, trying to make it slower and deeper, for another twenty seconds. Then I said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

  “Very good, Mr. Joel.”

  I left the faux farmhouse, and walked through faux fields. It smelled convincingly like morning on Ganymede, and don’t ask me to explain that. It felt inexpressibly weird to be walking through a colonial homestead, in the wrong gravity, dressed like an aristocrat, heading for a doorway of pink smoke. It was a bit of a relief to walk through the smoke and find myself in an ordinary corridor that smelled like Terra instead of Wonderland.

  “I’ll guide you from here, sir,” Leo said. “Do you see the light at your feet?”

  I glanced down, and there was a soft green light at the baseboard of the left-hand wall, pulsing on and off. It was about the size and intensity of a firefly: discreet, but impossible to miss. “Lead on,” I said. It moved away.

  “If you’ll forgive a personal observation, sir,” Leo said as I followed his blinking firefly down the corridor, “you have an excellent time sense for a human.”

  “Excuse me?’”

  “You said, ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ twenty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds after I advised you that you had thirty minutes to prepare.”

  “Ah.” I nodded. “A couple of people have told me I have a pretty accurate internal clock.”

  “Extremely so, sir, if this example is representative.”

  I shrugged. “I never burn the toast. Look, I have some thinking to do, all right?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d just like to—”

  “Later, Leo.”

  “But, sir—”

  I was raised to be polite to gadgets—Dad always said it was good practice—but I was trying to get some fretting done and Leo was distracting me. “Quiet!”

  He shut up, and I put my full attention on the predicament I was in. First I scanned my memory for everything I had ever heard or read about high-level etiquette, manners, or protocol. Unfortunately that only took me about two steps. Then I examined my own autobiography, looking first for things that might impress a multi-octillionaire—and when that failed, making a short list of spots that might alienate one, and going over my excuses. A step and a half, tops. As I followed the blinking green firefly around a corner, I was trying to decide whether the next priority was to imagine all the possible ways this upcoming meeting could go wrong, or to try and work out
exactly how I had gotten myself into this, where I had taken my first misstep—

  —when I rounded the corner, and encountered eighteen kilograms of mass coming in the other direction.

  I weighed four times that much. But it caught me well above my center of gravity—square in the face—and was moving much faster, packing more kinetic energy. I believe the Terran expression is, who knows why, “ass over teakettle.”

  I’ve taken self-defense courses. I know how to fall properly, and do so as a matter of reflex in normal conditions. But not in a one-gee field. I went down hard on my back, and all my air left me in a single explosive syllable, and only the extreme thickness of the carpet kept me from cracking my skull. I remember feeling quite unhappy for a moment, there. Then the eighteen-kilo mass landed on my groin, and I felt much worse.

  Sometime later I forced my eyes open. Closed them quickly. Reopened them cautiously. Half a meter from my nose, a little girl—

  “Why don’t you look where you’re going?” she asked.

  Make a mental note, Joel: next time you tell an AI you want quiet and it keeps talking—listen. “Because I’m a dolt.”

  “Oh.” She thought about that. “I’m a Conrad.”

  I looked her over. She appeared to be somewhere around seven Terran years old. And adorable. “Are you all right?”

  She frowned, and stuck her chin out slightly. “Yes, I am. Daddy says I don’t have bones.” She moved her gaze away. “But I think my skyboard’s broke.”

  The object named lay beside us. It looked like a conventional skateboard—minus the usual wheels, motor housing, onboard computer, and data port. Like a miniature surfboard, in other words. I had no doubt that it could fly—when it wasn’t broken—because it had been at head height when I’d first encountered it. But I could not guess how.

  “I’m sorry.” I’d have to replace it. There went my scholarship, probably. “Uh, what’s your name?”