Variable Star Read online

  “I’m Evelyn.”

  “Hello, Evelyn. That was my mother’s name, too. I’m—”

  “You’re Joel, of course. I’m not a baby.”

  “Certainly not! Not by a good ten kilos.”

  She giggled—then frowned. “Am I hurting you?”

  “Only when I breathe.”

  She was off me and up on her feet at once. “Jinny is my favorite cousin. I think she’s rickety all through. Don’t you?”

  “Yes. I think I do, anyway.” I sat up. When that didn’t kill me, I got to my feet and examined my costume for damage.

  “Are you going to marry her?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again, twice. “We’re still discussing that,” I managed finally.

  “Do you love her?”

  “Evelyn, I’m afraid we’ll have to finish this conversation another time. I’m late for an appointment with your—” What would the relationship be? “For a very important appointment. Please excuse me.”

  She grinned. “Never mind. I saw you blush.”

  I did it some more. This was Jinny’s cousin, all right. “I really mustn’t be late.”

  She waved a hand majestically. “Don’t matter about it. Just tell Grandfather Rich I made you late.”

  I realized my flashing-firefly guide was beginning to move off down the corridor: hinting. “It was wonderful to meet you,” I said hastily. “Sorry I broke your board. I’ll get a new one to you as soon as I can.”

  She giggled. “You’re silly.”

  I followed her pointing finger. A new skyboard was just arriving, gliding along the corridor at knee height. It was as featureless as the other, not so much as an antenna showing. Suddenly I saw that the firefly had nearly reached a corner. In another few seconds it would be around the bend. “Great. I’ll see you around.”

  “It’s okay, Joel. Gran’ther Rich will think you’re rickety-tickety. You’ll see.”

  I know a compliment when I hear one. I bowed—and did not quite sprint away. I found the firefly around the corner, waiting for me, but pulsing faster to indicate impatience. I breezed right past it at double time, made it scramble to catch up and pass me again, and felt the tiny satisfaction that comes to an idiot who has successfully insulted a piece of software. I slowed to walking pace—and it kept on going at double time. I ended up reaching my destination slightly out of breath, and not quite dripping sweat.

  I planned to pause outside the door for at least two or three deep breaths. But the infernal thing opened as soon as I reached it. I allowed myself one breath, mostly because I had to, and entered.

  But it was only Rennick’s office.

  He did not say, “You’re late,” even by facial expression. But in the time it took me to walk three steps into the room, he had risen from his workstation, come all the way round it, and reached my side, without seeming to hurry. “Good morning, Joel,” he said pleasantly. He took my elbow, turned me, and we were back out in the corridor and walking again—not as fast as I had arrived, but not slowly either. “I trust you slept well.”

  “Yes, thank you, Alex. And yourself?”

  “There are things I must tell you, and we no longer have time for the standard set speech. As you know, there is only one Mr. Conrad in this house, and that is what he is called in his presence or out of it. But when one directly addresses him, he prefers, strongly, to be called simply Conrad. Thus, you might hear someone say, for instance, ‘Mr. Conrad approves of this—isn’t that so, Conrad?’ Am I clear?”

  “No honorific to his face. Not even ‘sir’?”

  “Not even ‘sir.’ ‘Yes, Conrad.’ ‘No, Conrad.’”

  I nodded. “Got it. Thanks. Do I call Mr. Albert ‘Albert’ to his face, too?”

  “Not unless he invites you to. Which is unlikely. Until then he is Mr. Albert.”

  We came to a checkpoint. Five large men, four of them heavily armed and the deadliest one sitting at a workstation. Rennick didn’t even slow down, and nobody killed him, so I didn’t slow down either.

  “Mr. Conrad does not shake hands. Mr. Conrad does not care for humor. Mr. Conrad is not interrupted.”

  Right turn. Another checkpoint. Another five armed men, but not large this time. Gurkhas. Their knives were sheathed. Rennick came to a halt and stood still, but ignored them. I did likewise. I could almost feel myself being scanned and sniffed and candled by invisible machinery.

  “When Mr. Conrad says ‘Thank you,’ he means ‘good-bye.’ The correct response is not ‘You’re welcome,’ but ‘Yes, Conrad.’ You say it on your way to the door.”

  “Got it.” A Gurkha produced something I’d only seen in cop or spy stories, and gave it to Rennick: an identifier. He held it up to his eyes like binoculars for a moment, then poked his right index finger into a socket on the side, and removed it. Almost at once there was a soft chiming sound, and a blue light on top of the device flashed three times. Rennick passed the device to me.

  Fighting an impulse to grin like an imbecile, I lifted it to my own eyes and looked into the lenses. Nothing but a white field. I lowered it, hesitated a second, and stuck my finger in the slot. I expected to be poked for a blood sample, but what I got was even more disconcerting, a sensation as if someone were sucking gently on that fingertip. Whether it was taking skin scrapings or sampling my fingernail I couldn’t say. In any event it decided it approved of my DNA and my retinas, and awarded me the same chime and flash Rennick had received.

  The Gurkha’s forearms and hands relaxed slightly, and his cousins relaxed too, slightly. He accepted the identifier back from me, saluted to both me and Rennick, held it, and stepped smartly backward out of our way. Rennick was off again at once, with me at his heels.

  I wondered if anyone else in the Inner System was as paranoid as these people. Or, now that I came to think of it, had better reason to be.

  The pause had been almost enough to let me get my breath back. “Anything else?”

  “Yes. A piece of personal advice. There’s only one way to say this. Don’t bullshit. If Mr. Conrad asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, there is only one acceptable response—‘I don’t know, Conrad.’ Try and bluff, and he’ll smell it.”

  We came to a large door that looked like a polished slab of real wood. It lacked the customary ID scanner, but at about the same location it had an antique fitting I guessed at once must be the fabled doorknob: a flattened toroid like a brass onion, sticking out from the door on a short horizontal stalk. I wasn’t quite quick enough to catch the procedure Rennick used to operate it. It was hard to follow: some sort of small probe, a quick torquing motion, and a small clack sound. Cued by the sound, I was not too surprised when the door swung inward away from us instead of dilating: it actually was a polished slab of real wood, a good fifteen centimeters thick. I followed him through the doorway, and had to step out of the way so he could swing it shut behind us. I was sure we had reached the Holy of Holies, at last.

  Wrong again.

  It certainly looked very like what I had been expecting to see: the serious working office of a major CEO or senior politician, tastefully decorated and lavishly equipped. It had every imaginable sort of monitor screen, display, input device, peripheral or other gadget, but the utilitarian effect was softened by a carefully chaotic profusion of exotic and lovely plant life. Dominating the room was a huge piece of furniture as obsolete as the doorknob, for some reason called a desk even though it had no graphic interface or surface icons—not even a trash can. It was basically an elaborate table intended to provide a stable flat work surface plus storage drawers. In films, such a desk is usually covered with items: a primitive telephone, a keypad and monitor, family flat photos, styli, and so on. This one was as austerely, majestically bare as I would have expected from a man of great power.

  Two things immediately spoiled the picture, though. First, the absence of any men in the room. And then, the presence of a woman behind the desk. Her apparent age was five years higher than my own,
and the fake was very impressive, but there were at least seventy years of skepticism in those eyes and the set of her mouth.

  “Morning, Dorothy,” Rennick said. “This is Joel Johnston. Joel, Dorothy Robb.”

  “Good morning, Alex,” she greeted him. “Relax: you’re early. And good morning to you, too, Mr. Johnston.” She offered me her hand. Her voice was wonderfully husky, like a great jazz singer near the end of her career; I wondered if she sang.

  In my social circle, my move would now have been to shake her hand firmly and release. I had no idea what was done at this altitude—even if I’d had a clue what our relative status was. Deep breath. What would Dad do? “Good morning, Ms. Robb,” I said, did my second-best bow, and kissed her hand.

  She removed it quickly and said, “Dorothy!” sharply, but I knew she was not offended because almost at once she softened it by adding, “‘Ms. Robb’ sounds too much like—”

  I nodded. “A Victor Hugo novel. In that case, I’m Joel.”

  Those cynical eyes opened a bit wider. “You read!”

  “My parents infected me before I knew any better. There was no bedtime, as long as I was reading a book.”

  “What splendid parents.”

  Suddenly I felt myself blush. My multitrack mind was still playing with our pun, and it had suddenly realized that the full title of the book we were discussing would have been Lay Ms. Robb. Her sharp eyes caught me blushing, and twinkled. I realized I’d made no response to her compliment, and was too flustered to formulate one.

  She saved me. “Do you know the story of the American farm wife who wrote a letter to Victor Hugo, Joel?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said gratefully.

  “She wrote, ‘Dear Vic—’” I couldn’t help smiling; her accent and deadpan delivery were good. “‘We shore liked that book you wrote there, Less Miserables’”—I began to grin broadly, and Rennick did, too—“‘but we wanted to ask you one thing we cain’t figger out: which one o’ them characters was Les?’” I broke up, turned to Rennick, and saw that he was chuckling, too—and had absolutely no idea why. Oops. Oh, well—no reason his education should include period French literature. No reason anyone’s should, really.

  “What a glorious story,” I said to Dorothy. “Is it apocryphal?”

  “Oh, I hope so. Imagine the poor man trying to compose a response.”

  I decided to take the bull by the horns. “May I ask your job title, Dorothy?”

  She snorted. “Professional bureaucratic-gibberish composers have wept with frustration over that one. There doesn’t seem to be an adequate descriptive that any of them liked. For accounting purposes we finally settled on Enabler, which they simply hate.”

  “Like a personal secretary, sort of?”

  She did not smile. “Mr. Conrad has seven personal secretaries. One executive secretary, two research secretaries, a social secretary, a scheduling secretary, a record-keeping secretary, and a personal private secretary. Plus assorted personal executive assistants and chiefs of staff and first facilitators and chief counselors and senior advisors and legal counsels and a personal physiotherapist and several personal physicians and psychiatrists—a clinic, really—plus an incredibly complex impossibly sprawling extended personal family. And then of course there is the empire itself, with its hundreds of CEOs, comptrollers, and so on. And finally there are the various executives, and executive, legislative, and judicial branches, of a great many governments. I am one of two people through whom he accesses all those people. And vice versa. I have the 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. shift—or 1:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. Greenwich.”

  I blinked. “And you have time to tell me Victor Hugo jokes?”

  “No. That’s why I enjoyed it so much. You looked like you needed relaxing.”

  “I still do! How much time do I have?”

  “None,” she said. A previously unsuspected door occurred behind her. “Good luck, Joel.”

  Rennick stepped forward and entered. I didn’t. The powers of motion and speech had deserted me.

  “You’ll be fine,” she murmured. “The suit looks terrific on you.”

  When you’re too scared to move, there’s a simple fix. I’m not saying easy—but simple. Just lean forward. That’s all you need to do. Keep it up long enough and you’ll fall on your face—but your body won’t let you. It will automatically put a foot out… and now you’re moving forward. Repeat as needed. Remember to alternate feet.

  Before I knew it I was passing through the doorway, lurching only slightly.

  4

  To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but what he aspires to.

  —Kahlil Gibran

  The room was not small, but smaller than I had expected, and further surprised me by being furnished more like a den or a study than an office. At the far end of the room was a conversational grouping of four chairs. Rennick was just reaching the leftmost of the two that faced away from me. The two facing toward me were already occupied. In each sat a man who appeared to be approximately Rennick’s age. The fourth chair, its back to me, was obviously the hot seat.

  My feet wanted to stop in their tracks again. But I managed to keep leaning forward. As I headed for the death chair, I invoked my very sharpest self-criticism. You have not thought this through.

  Myself replied with some asperity, And how the hell was I supposed to do that, chum? Using what data?

  Social customs on Ganymede are considerably simpler and more direct than those on Earth: a frontier society is just too busy for indirection, innuendo, and ceremony. Nevertheless, I had, under Jinny’s tutelage, gradually managed to soak up enough Terran manners to get by, in the sorts of social situations in which I found myself. It had been some time since I’d heard anyone mutter, “Hayseed!” under their breath after a conversation with me.

  But college life had not prepared me for this. I was in a milieu where I knew I had no faintest idea what constituted correct behavior—and I was already saddled with some complex and difficult social problems that I had about a dozen steps to solve, for the toughest audience on the planet.

  When in doubt, I decided, fall back on analogy. Okay… royalty always takes precedence, that gets you started. Which one next? And how…?

  I’d expected those twelve steps would seem to take forever. They turned out to be just long enough.

  Part of what threw me was the apparent ages. Both men I was here to meet seemed to be middle-aged, somewhere between thirty and sixty. Neither visibly deferred to the other by body language or chair placement. Both were dressed equally well, which was very well. Both carried themselves with authority and confidence, and had “the look of eagles”—a constant hyperalertness I had seen before only in certain very good bodyguards like the Gurkhas out in the hallway, and in a Zen priest I met once.

  So which one was Jinny’s dad… and which one merely owned half the inner Solar System?

  When I reached the decision point, I put down my money, made my bet, and quit worrying. The rest of the necessary choices seemed to have been made while I was busy.

  I stopped in front of the man to my right, bowed almost as deeply as I would have for the Secretary General or for Jinny, and said, “Good morning, Conrad. I am Joel Johnston. Thank you for taking me into your cubic. Your home is most gracious. Pardon me a moment, please.”

  Without waiting for a response I turned on my heel and gave Rennick my warmest smile. “It was very kind of you to escort me here, Alex. I’m sure with Leo’s help I’ll find my way back to my quarters.”

  His own smile congealed slightly at the edges, and he opened his mouth as if to reply.

  “Thank you,” I said pointedly.

  After an instant’s hesitation, spent in reappraisal of me, he did a little indescribable thing with his mouth that was a rueful salute, and nodded. He said, “You’re welcome,” on his way to the door.

  Again without pausing, I turned to the second man, bowed almost as deeply as I had to the
first, and said, “Mr. Albert, I am Joel Johnston of Lermer City, Ganymede. My parents were Ben and Evelyn Johnston of that city. I am a recent graduate of Fermi Junior College. I love your daughter Jinnia—more than I can say!—and she loves me. I’m declaring now my intention to ask you for her hand as soon as I can. I will supply Dorothy Robb with what is necessary to allow you to inspect my background and records.”

  I was done. I had shot my bolt—nothing to do now but wait and see just how badly I’d screwed things up. The door whispered shut behind Rennick, and sealed me in here in the lions’ den.

  The man last addressed stared up at me, absolutely expressionless, yet with an attention that was almost a physical force, as if any slightest muscle twitch on my face might tell him something crucial. He stared for so long I began to suspect that I had botched the whole thing, guessed wrong—that he was not Mr. Albert, but the Lord God Conrad himself. I wished I could sneak a glance at the other man for a clue, but did not dare take my gaze away from his.

  “Well and boldly spoken,” he said at last. “My daughter has made an interesting choice, Mr. Johnston. Good luck to you.”

  It wasn’t until I exhaled that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Those were the last words he said to me.

  “How did you know which of us was which?” the other man asked. “You can’t have seen a picture of me. There are none.”

  For a split second I thought about claiming to have had the foresight to google up a picture of my fiancée’s father, last night. Rennick’s advice came back to me. Don’t bullshit. “I did not know, Conrad. I was forced to guess.”

  He nodded. “On what basis?”

  I didn’t have a clue. But my mouth did. It opened, and out came, “Jinny’s cheeks.”

  “What did you say?”

  Why, yes. I could see what my mouth meant, now that I looked. “Jinny’s cheekbones, s—Conrad. Cheekbones and ears. They’re distinctive. Mr. Albert has them, too.”

  He mimed the word “ah,” without actually emitting sound. Mr. Albert was poker-faced.