Variable Star Read online

  I remember the first rush of it, whatever it was—it was memorable, even to a man in my condition—and after that I have only one other brief scrap of memory that seems even remotely likely to be real.

  I became aware that I was chilly. This rekindled enough awareness for me to notice that I was on the west side of Stanley Park—halfway up a tall tree. (How did I get to the Park from Spanish Banks on foot? Persuade someone to drive me? Stow away on a bus? Teleport? No idea.)

  It seems clear in retrospect that my intention must have been to commit suicide. Ganymedeans do not climb tall trees in Terran gravity for any other reason I can think of. Amazing I got as far as halfway up; I had never climbed a tree in my life. Apparently I had become distracted by the magnificent view, staring across the Georgia Strait at distant Vancouver Island, just visible low on the horizon, and beyond that the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Pacific Ocean and ultimately Vladivostok, I suppose.

  I should not have been chilly—I don’t wear stupid clothes—but I’d obviously forgotten to recharge them. It made sense that my face would be the chilliest part of me… but why was the coolness there moving, running down toward my neck? I had just worked out that it was tears, sheets of them, when my phone went off. I knew who it was, but checked the display anyway, just on the off chance that it was a major university offering me a full scholarship and bursaries.

  It was Jinny, of course.

  I turned up the volume to hear the message she was recording. “—been trying to give you room, give you time to get ov—uh, to adjust to the situation. I know I’ve given you a lot to deal with. I understand why you ran away. But I can’t wait anymore, I’m going out of my mind. Pick up, Joel, we have to talk. Please pick up. I probably won’t be able to call you again, and if you try and call me back, it won’t… oh, God damn it, I love you, Joel. I really do. You know that. Just give me—”

  I plucked the earbeads out of my ears, held them at arm’s length. Jinny’s voice became a faint cricket sound. That seemed a distinct improvement. If a little was good, then—I threw the earbeads so hard, they cleared the sea wall below and plunked into the Georgia Strait. Yes, that was the ticket: no more cricket.

  “‘Ran away’?” I muttered. “I’ll show you run away, lady. Watch me.”

  How did I get back down from that tree without breaking anything? I reject memory, which says I was assisted by a team of swans, but have no better explanation to offer.

  There are, as I said, a few more shards of memory after that, but I don’t think any of them represent real experiences. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s possible to do that with even an extremely cooperative goat. Certainly not without paying in advance.

  And then, with the shocking suddenness of running full tilt into an unseen wall, I was instantly a hundred percent cold sober, and an ugly man with lemon breath was staring into my eyes from no more than ten or twenty centimeters away, so fixedly and intently that I sensed he was grading them, by some unknown criteria.

  I couldn’t stop him, so I decided to grade his eyes. At first they seemed the eyes of a man so tired he was on the verge of a temper tantrum. But on second look I could see that he was always that angry, and the fatigue merely blew his cover. On the third look, I learned something new. Until then I had believed that anger is always fear in disguise. My father had told me so once, in memorable circumstances, and I’d never seen a counterexample. But now I could see that at least some of this man’s anger derived not from fear, but from shame. In some way he had failed himself irredeemably—so irredeemably that there was no longer anything left to fear. His face tried to say that was my fault, especially his mouth—but his eyes knew damn well it wasn’t.

  “Am I finally addressing a sentient being?” he asked.

  Early sixties. Ruddy face. Strong lemon breath. Sour lemon. “I doubt it,” I said. “But I’m probably close enough to run for Parliament, at least.”

  He grunted and moved away. As his face receded I tried to follow it and fell off my chair, thereby learning that I had been sitting in a chair. Where this chair, mein Herr? There, mon cher. Well, I swear.

  He let me make my own way back up into the chair, leaning into the force of his contempt as if it were a strong wind. It took me a while. Before I had time to congratulate myself, he said, “I’m Dr. Rivera. Do you know where you are?”

  I rubbed a sore spot on my face. “On Terra, obviously. Barbaric gravity.”

  He didn’t have the energy to be impatient. “Where on Terra, specifically?”

  “In these pants,” I said, and giggled.

  “After what I gave you, you should be straight by now,” he said. “I conclude you must be a natural horse’s ass.”

  “Nonsense! I’ve had to work hard at it.”

  Humor was wasted on him. Or being wasted was not humorous to him. One of those. “You are in Tampa, Florida.”

  I giggled again. “Home of the tampon. Is this your pad?”

  “You are at the Tampa Spaceport.”

  “You don’t want to Tampa with a spaceport. Your complexion could end up even Florider.” I cracked myself up with that one. But as I laughed, rusty wheels finally began to turn slowly in my head.

  Tampa? Why the hell would I go to Tampa? Even if I had found some sort of pressing reason to visit a spaceport, Albuquerque was a hell of a lot closer to Vancouver than Tampa was—

  “Do you know why you are—”

  What did Tampa have that Albuquerque didn’t? Nothing. In fact, these days Tampa was almost completely closed to normal commercial traffic, due to—something. I forgot.

  “I said, do you even remember what you—”

  What made Tampa different from any other spaceport in this hemisphere?

  “Forget it,” he said suddenly. “You’re not up to this.”

  “The hell I’m not,” I said automatically. Whatever he was talking about, who the hell was he to be talking about it?

  His contempt reached a crescendo. “Young man, I doubt you’d be up to it even if your bloodstream were completely clean. It’s a big decision. Too big for you. Try again another time. You probably won’t be any smarter, but you will at least be older.”

  Wait a minute, now—there was one thing you could do at Tampa that you couldn’t do at any other spaceport in this hemisphere, right at this time—

  “I’m old enough to make up my own mind, Dr. Rivera,” I snapped.

  —wait a minute—

  He blinked. “See here, son—you are indeed, as you point out, legally old enough to make up your mind as neat and tight and tidy as your bed used to be made up when you lived with your mother. But you have not done so yet. Half your blankets are on the floor, the sheets are a tangled wreck. Go sleep it off, come back in a day or two, and we’ll talk. In my professional judgment, you’re not ready to go to Immega 714.”

  My jaw fell. On my first attempt, I had very nearly gotten stoned enough to fall right out of the Solar System.

  When the Shock wore off, I found I was more than half tempted to go through with it. Sign onto the Sheffield, become a Gentleman Adventurer, and head for the stars. Partly just to spite that sourpuss with the sour lemon breath, for telling me I couldn’t. But mostly because it suited my mood. Star travel would certainly be a way out of the trap I’d put myself in, the trap Jinny had led me into—

  —one that involved gnawing off both my own legs. No thanks. I told Lemon-Breath Rivera I would be back in a day or two, but we both knew I was fronting. I found myself on the street, blinking against the Tampa sunshine, sweating in the Tampa heat.

  I considered various options for getting home again, balancing speed against expense with the miserliness of a student on a short budget. Then I thought to consult my credit balance, and my options shrank to one. If that. In choosing my route to Tampa, I had apparently assumed it was okay to burn bridges, and had chosen a semiballistic. Fast, comfortable—and very expensive, what with the price of hydrogen. I was just short of totally tapped out.
r />   I consulted an atlas, and calculated that with a little luck, the high-speed public slidewalks ought to get me back to Vancouver in no more than seventeen hours or so. If I could just avoid getting hungry or thirsty or bored for that long, I’d end up back in my tiny basement apartment, free to gorge on whatever I had left in the pantry and all the water I wanted, while enjoying any book or film I already owned. Then I would have to start praying that my scholarship came through before the next rent payment was due. This was a bad time to go into debt; interest rates were approaching body temperature.

  I made a mental note: never go on a bender without taping a fifty-credit bill to the sole of your foot.

  I found slidewalk access without too much trouble, transferred my way up to the 320 kph strip in due course, found a seat without difficulty, and hunkered down for the trip. It took me all of half an hour to go from terminal nausea to ravening hunger. Did you know that you smell at least partially with your mouth? Holding my nose didn’t help nearly enough in suppressing food smells. I had to keep resisting a temptation to suck on my own hand. I was already drawing enough unwanted attention as it was: it turned out that I looked like someone on a bender. Why wouldn’t I?

  After a lonely half hour I spent watching countryside whip past too fast to really see, someone sat down near me. That cheered me up until I realized the reason for his tolerance: he was well into a bender of his own, and might not have noticed if I’d been on fire. Ignoring public privacy laws, he was listening to music on speaker rather than his earbeads. I started to object—and got sucker-punched by the song that was emanating from his wrist.

  It’s the reason we came from the mud, don’t you know

  ’cause we wanted to climb to the stars

  Instantly, I was back in the ballroom of the Hotel Vancouver, in Jinny’s arms, dancing with her at our prom. The last happy moment I could recall. Maybe the last one I was ever going to have. I know that sounds melodramatic, but that’s because you’re not eighteen anymore. I didn’t burst into tears—quite. But it was a near thing.

  Ask anyone which way is God, and you know

  he will probably point to the stars…

  Not everyone, I thought. Some of us would point to a glacier somewhere in northern British Columbia.

  All at once I understood the real reason I had chosen not to hop a starship after all. I wasn’t done yet. I couldn’t even think about thinking about leaving for Immega 714 as long as my situation was still unresolved. Not until I’d done everything I could to try and fix it. I was still alive. Jinny was still alive.

  Well, there was no time like the present. Automatically, I started to look round for a ’fresher, to fix my appearance—then decided it could wait. Let Jinny see the state she’d reduced me to, first. All I wanted from her right now was a phone code, anyway. Then I’d get cleaned up. She and I would have our own conversation, after this upcoming one was done. I punched her code from memory—my own, I mean, not pod storage—and then the call went through, and—

  I flipped my wrist over to make the screen go away and shouted “Coventry!” loud enough to startle my zoned neighbour into muting his music.

  Why was I so surprised? Ask me which way is God, I thought, and I’ll point to my phone.

  I turned my wrist back over, and Conrad of Conrad frowned up at me.

  I had Wanted to talk to him, planned to talk to him, with great firmness and determination. In a few minutes, once I’d gotten his code from Jinny and prepared my lines. Now I was off balance. Great start.

  He began speaking nearly at once. I could see his lips move. But I was now forcibly reminded that I had thrown my earbeads into the Georgia Strait, last night. I could only point at my ears and shake my head, feeling like an idiot, even further off balance.

  He glanced way offscreen at someone to his right, lifted an eyebrow, and my phone put itself on speaker. I’d have thought of it myself in a second. I could feel my cheeks burning.

  “I said, I understand your problem, Joel.”

  I hoped to call myself a man one day. It simply did not matter if I was unprepared, or my hair was uncombed, or my pants were on. Showtime! “I’m very glad to hear that, Conrad.” There now—I’d remembered in time not to call him “sir.”

  “You have grave doubts that you’ll measure up.” I tried to respond, and he kept talking right over me until I stopped. “Any sane man in your position would. You have no life experience to reassure you yet. Or to reassure me, for that matter. Women’s intuition has historically been a chancy method of selecting winners—else Troy would still stand. But your genes and grades are excellent, for what that’s worth. And you have off-planet experience, which broadens a man. Maybe you are what we need. I think you are. In any case you are going to be given a chance. One moment, Joel.”

  His gaze shifted up and to his left slightly, and he began a conversation with someone in a corner of his screen. The audio cut off, and the image of his mouth fuzzed so that his lips could not be read. Very slick.

  I used the pause to get hold of myself, control my breath, and figure out what to say to cure his misconceptions. I even had a second or two to appreciate the surreality of having a phone conversation on a public slidewalk with one of the wealthiest living humans. Then I waited to seize control of the conversation the moment his eyes returned to mine.

  Waste of time; once again he simply ignored the fact that I was speaking. “If you do measure up, you will become a Conrad, with all that implies. If you don’t—well, you and your children will be Johnstons, but considerably better off than you would otherwise be. One of the pleasant things about this dynasty is that we can be liberal in pensioning off those who don’t quite make it.” I’d have tried to interrupt if there’d been any point. “If you turned out to have no real head for business but were tops in research, say, you might end up as Dr. Johnston, Chief of Kindelberger Research Laboratories. Or you might choose to simply lie in the sun in Cairns, and that can be arranged, too—we can afford to be generous. One moment.”

  Once again he spoke briefly and inaudibly with someone else, this time in his lower right-hand corner. This time when his gaze returned to me I was ready with a very loud, “Mr. Conrad, sir!”

  I think he literally didn’t know how to process insolence. Insufficient experience. It shut him up long enough for me to wedge four more words in edgewise. It took a surprising amount of courage to say them.

  “The answer is no.”

  He tried to frown and raise his eyebrows in surprise at the same time. Even Conrad of Conrad must have heard those words before—or he’d own everything, instead of only about a quarter of it. But he clearly hadn’t expected to hear them now, from me. “You mean you don’t want to marry my granddaughter?”

  Surprising him cheered me up. I reminded myself that I had once bitten this man. Hard, as I recalled. “Don’t misunderstand me. If Jinny wants to get married right away, we’ll get married. I’ll swing it somehow. But I do not intend to let someone else lay out my life according to some kind of time table and tell me when to wipe my nose—no matter how well the job pays. It’s not a question of measuring up. I’ll do my own measuring. And I’ll pay my own way. Thanks anyway, I appreciate it, I do appreciate it—but keep your free lunch, it’s not for me.”

  He glanced up and to the right, and this time forgot to mute his audio. “Tell the Secretary of State I will be a few minutes late.” I think he really did forget, because when he said those words his voice was flat and cold, and when he turned back to me it had become warm and fatherly. “I admire spirit in a young man, I really do. We can’t hold this thing together with yes-men and flunkies at the top. Your answer convinces me more than anything else that little Jinnia Anne has made a wise choice. Nevertheless, I must convince you that we need you—and that you need training. We’ve got to crowd thirty years of training into the next ten—it’s been proved over and over again that, despite the wonders of modern geriatrics, young men must be allowed to make top decisions
before age, experience, and caution grow on them like rust or mold. We must strive for a young man’s drive and an old man’s knowledge. Not easy.” He sighed. “And the young have all the time in the world. I wish I did. You want to sleep on it, I can see that. Looks like you could use the sleep, too.” Without taking his eyes from mine, he told someone, “Joel will call me at this code tomorrow at 0900 PST.”

  I started to ask him what code to use to reach Jinny—but he had already broken the connection.

  I tried Redialing the number—and was told it was a null. I could guess it would remain one, at least for me, until tomorrow morning at nine.

  I went to Jinny’s apartment that night. She had moved out. No forwarding address. I caught one of her neighbors looking at me with pity. I agreed with her.

  I did not call Conrad at 0900 the next morning. For the next half hour, I was braced for him to call me, or have some flunky summon me, but he did not. For the rest of the morning, I was halfway prepared for two large men to bust in my door and drag me out to a black limo, but nothing of the sort occurred.

  A little after noon, there was incoming mail, a text-only message. It was a letter from Stony Brook, informing me without even a polite pretense of regret that my scholarship had been turned down. It didn’t say why, but it didn’t need to.

  Every single plan I had made for my life lay in ruins. No degree, no career, no future, no Jinny, no family—unless I consented to serve at stud while training to run a multiplanet dynasty. My only two lifestyle choices were to be a dole bludger, or one of the wealthiest gigolos alive.

  I wanted, very badly, to get so wasted that my previous bender would seem a mere preamble.

  Instead, I did not so much as drink a beer or take an acetaminophen. I spent the day taking care of a number of tedious details and formalities. I ate a healthy dinner, retired early, got a good night’s sleep. In the morning, I filled a backpack with the belongings and food I hadn’t disposed of the day before, locked the apartment behind me for the last time, and headed for a crosstown slidewalk.