Variable Star (21 page)

“Banker: Well, thank you. But I don’t see what’s in it for
you
. For the same twenty years, you’re depriving yourself of that same money, receiving no payments.

“GMA (smiling broadly): Yes, but you see, I intend to age more slowly than you…”

He smiled.

“I get it—I think,” I told Paul. “It really is a clever swindle.”

“It’s not a swindle,” he said.

“It has to be. People are earning large sums of money for either sitting and waiting, or else for traveling expensively.
Somebody
has to be getting swindled for it. TANSTAAFL.”

“That principle doesn’t apply here. In this one case, there is such a thing as a free lunch. Wealth is being created by
time
. Nobody’s being swindled because nobody’s
losing
anything.”

I must have looked stubborn.

“The key phrase was, ‘You will have the use of that money for twenty years.’ Suppose the moment we get to Immega 714 we do an instant one-eighty, slingshot around it and hotfoot it right back to Sol at the same speed. It took us twenty years to get there, twenty years to come back; we arrive at Terra forty years older than we started. But what we find when we debark—”

I started to see it. “Finagle on fire!”

“—is a Terra more than one hundred and sixty years older than when we left it.”

“With a hundred and twenty years of free interest!” The beauty of it washed over me.

“Not free,” he said. “We had to get our butts up to a large fraction of c, and keep them there for forty years. But real cheap. Are you ready for more of the special blend?”

“Oh, that really is lovely, Paul,” I said as he poured generous refills for both of us. “You’re absolutely right: for the first time, I genuinely regret not having been able to kick any money into the pot myself.”

“Well, theoretically, of course, a person could choose to buy in even now—or for that matter, at any point in the trip, although the degree of participation would naturally go down some as the voyage gets longer.”

I grinned, and a faint tingling of the lips told me the special blend was beginning to hit me. “With what I make turning shit and piss back into food, plus what I hope in my wildest dreams to earn in tips playing at the Horn of Plenty, by the time we reach Peekaboo I can confidently expect to see profits in the low five figures.”

That mysterious smile had never quite left him, even when he was playing Banker and GMA. It was still there, and now his eyes were twinkling, too. “Joel, let me tell you about another starship, a long time ago. One of the unlucky ones. There was bad sickness aboard, one you didn’t get over. Both their telepaths died in the first wave, so the only reports were by radio and laser. Some of their Relativists died, and then it was reported that all the others were infected, and the quantum ramjet was being shut down. That cut the power for the radio and lasers, and the ship passed from human history.”

This was sounding oddly familiar. Hard to pin down the memory, though: when I closed my eyes to try, the room began to rotate around me. Counterclockwise. “Heard about a ship like that, once.” No, clockwise. “Lost in the stars, forever.”

“Only, not,” Paul said. “They were very lucky. Their first bit of luck was that their plague, whatever it was, burned itself out completely with seventy-five percent of them still alive. They were able to keep the antimatter engine alive, stroke of luck number two, which gave them enough power to survive, and run all the machinery. Including the databanks they’d brought along with them, the total accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the human race at that time.”

“Very important,” I agreed. “Keep them from going crazy with boredom and despair.”

“Way more important than that, because of their third bit of luck.”

I knew he was toying with me somehow but it didn’t feel unpleasant, so I played along. “And what was that, Mr. Interlocker… Mr. Inneroculator…what was that, Mr. Hattori?”

“One of the Relativists had conceived and bore twins on the voyage. The children lived.”

“Really? Oh.
Oh
. I think I get it! When they—”

“When they grew old enough, they studied everything they could find on their mother’s profession. One day when they felt they were ready, they somehow relit the quantum ramjet—and resumed the voyage.”

“That
is
amazing! What a story. Oh, they must have flipped back at Terra when they started getting radio messages from a ghost ship! How long did…wait a minute…oh, hell, I can’t do math when I’m
sober
.”

(The gene for my father’s kind of mathematical talent is, fairly self-evidently, recessive.)

“Nonetheless, your intuition izh correct—excuse me, is correct.” Nice to know he was feeling it, too. “If the happy news came by radio, we would not be receiving it for several years yet. That’s the fourth bit of luck. One of the twins inherited some of her father’s talent, as well—and Dad had been a Communicator. She scared the witch—the wits—out of her uncle back in Luna, the first time she made contact. He thought he was being haunted: his late brother had never mentioned any offspring.”

I shook my head, which stayed on. “Incredible! I have to tell my friend Herb that story—he’s a writer,
and
a Communicator, he’ll make a meal of it. A dozen movies will be made about it just in the next year, and at least one miniseries. Thanks for telling me, for, thanks for, why the hell did you
tell
me that, Paul? I mean, it’s a great story, but what has it got to do with what we were talking about, swindling money out of time? What’s the connection?”

That omnipresent smile suddenly blossomed into a full-blown grin that lit up his whole face, and his eyes beamed happiness. “The name of the prodigal starship, Joel.”

All the pieces finally fell into place, and I knew exactly what he was going to say next. Unfortunately it cost me the power of speech, so he said it anyway.

“It’s the
New Frontiers
.”

I suppose a similar effect could have been achieved by turning every other atom in my brain to antimatter.

“Your father meant for you to be a rich man, Joel,” Hattori’s voice said from the far side of the cosmos. “Now you are. All shares have been reactivated, and you have a
lot
of them. Should you choose to, you could become one of the
Sheffield
’s biggest investors…”

I began to laugh. Then I laughed some more, after which I kept on laughing, and finally realized I was not going to be able to stop anytime soon. I was on the floor by then, in fetal position, Hattori fussing futilely over me, and I discovered that I could convert the laughing to crying for minutes at a time, which was a change at least.

All I kept thinking was that I had abandoned everything there was, left everyone I knew, burned every bridge ever built, and literally fled the Solar System on a one-way trip, to escape the dread danger of becoming rich…

Some days, you just can’t lose a buck.

I
had
to do some fast talking to get out of Hattori’s office without being reported as emotionally unstable and sent for therapy. I’d freaked him out a little with my outburst of hilarity. And I had to edit what I said on the fly, too: if I had tried to convince him I’d been betrothed to a niece of Conrad of Conrad, he’d have been
certain
to send for a counselor. Especially once I told him I’d broken the engagement.

But after hearing a version of my recent history that dialed Jinny back to “a girl from a very wealthy family,” he finally agreed that hysterical laughter was an appropriate response to the way things had turned out, and stopped physically recoiling from me. He even had the grace to postpone picking my pocket, urging me to take my time, and come back for further discussion of my participation in the colonial partnership when I’d had a chance to, as he put it, “encompass everything.”

I thanked him and left, with every intention of finding Herb and asking him to be my designated keeper while I got hammered. If he was not interested, Balvovatz or Pat would do. And if none of them were available—well, I had survived a solo bender in Vancouver, a very tough town. I could probably handle the
Sheffield
.

But halfway back to my room I remembered that I had already
done
so. More than once. For most of my first week aboard, actually. Nobody had reported me because—well, a
lot
of us had spent some portion of that first week drinking or smoking or snorting more heavily than usual. But if I were to start back up again after only a day of sobriety, eyebrows would be raised, and sooner or later someone would mention my name to the Healers. I was damned if I wanted to waste hours explaining myself and my decisions to some well-meaning headcandler, who might take it into his head to start messing with my brain chemistry. Ganymedeans didn’t hold much with that sort of thing.

So I did the sensible thing instead, and didn’t get hammered.

That was a pity, because then I had no excuse at all for the fistfight. Or my miserable performance in it.

T
he way
I remember it, I plodded back to my room in a fog, like a cow on its way back to the barn, so confused by my own thoughts that I could barely lift my feet. And then I raised a weary arm and palmed my door open, and there were these two guys.

You know how sometimes you’ll meet a stranger, and it’s as if a closed caption appears at the bottom of the screen, summing them up in a word or two for those who just tuned in? “Professional victim,” or “Could bore the balls off a buffalo,” or “Wants money,” or the like? My first sight of these two went freeze-frame for a second, and below each of them I clearly saw the subtitle “Perpetrator.” Only after the action restarted did I notice their armbands, and realize I was meeting my first transportees.

They were big guys, too. Bigger than me, anyway. They didn’t look sophisticated enough to be political prisoners or incorrigible monoreligionists. The one sitting on Pat’s bunk had the arms, shoulders, and thighs of one who lifts weights regularly and faithfully while he’s in jail, but has been out for some time now. He had short black hair just beginning to thin and a short sanitary sideless black beard, of the type called a “doorknocker.” He had a glass of some dark fluid cupped in his right hand, and took a quick pull from it when he saw me—but he didn’t drop his eyes.

His partner, sprawled on Balvovatz’s desk chair, looked more as if he tended to win his fights by knowing more dirty tricks than the other guy. He had the body of a high school sports star…who had been expelled before graduation, and had expended as little effort as possible ever since. Instead of pumping iron when in jail, he just hung out near his friend. He wore his dirty blond hair in an arcane style that involved grease, and hinted that it came from a motorcycle or copter engine. There is no name for his beard type, nor is it likely any will be needed. Sweeping scimitar sideburns failed to reach
quite
as far as his mustachios…which did not descend
quite
far enough to reach the goatlike goatee. The net effect was of a satyr too dumb or drunk to realize his gay barber is making fun of him. He was as unguardedly furtive as his friend was poker-faced. That caused me to notice that Balvovatz’s desk monitor was darkened, not switched off.

“Oh, hi,” he said, too heartily “You’re back.”

The one on Pat’s bunk said, “We’re real sorry to barge in like this, okay?”

“Yeah, but everything’s totally cool,” Weird Beard said. “Nothing to freak out about.”

“How did you two get in here?” I asked the dark one sitting on the bunk.

He shrugged, being careful not to spill his drink. “Everybody’s got things they’re good at,” he said reasonably.

I nodded. “And this is okay with me because…”

The other one said, “Because this is one of those fuckin’ situations where, you know, like it says upfront, viewer discretion is the better part of value.”

His friend stared at him, took a deep breath, let it out, and turned back to me. “We have a proposal for you. A business opportunity. Joint venture. Low risk, high return. But yeah, Richie’s right, it’s definitely what you’d call a little gray-market.”

Well, I thought to myself, you happen to catch me at a moment when I have a few gigabucks I need to invest somewhere. “How gray?”

“Just barely beige,” Richie said. “And only right at the end. Up until then it’s mostly red, and some green. Tell him, Jules.”

“Richie, will you take it easy? Joel—can I call you Joel?—it’s real simple. You work down on the Farm Decks, right?”

I agreed that this was sometimes so.

“Dirt or High Japonics?” Richie asked.

I looked at Jules. Jules looked at me and his face said,
What am I supposed to do?

“Both,” I said.

“So you like to make stuff grow,” Jules suggested.

“Like you said, everybody’s got something they’re good at.”

“And you know your way around down there. Like, where things are, what parts get looked at all the time, what parts don’t get looked at so often.”

Light was beginning to dawn. “Why?”

“We got some stuff we’d like to grow.”

“Without bothering the Zog with a lot of fuckin’ paperwork and formalities,” Richie put in.

“And we figure a smart guy like you could work that out.”

I closed my eyes. The world spun as if I were drunk. But the moment I opened them again, it
slammed
to a halt. “What sort of plant are we talking about?”

“Just flowers,” Jules said.

“Herbs,” Richie amplified, pronouncing it like my roommate’s name. “From the country.”

“’Erbs,” Jules corrected, glaring at him.

“Well, sure,
now
,” Richie said, annoyed. “But
originally
they grew it in the country.”

Jules and I exchanged another glance, and he took a deep pull on his drink, wiping his mouth with his wrist.
YOU wanna try it
?

“Richie,” I said gently, “
which
Herb, exactly?” I pronounced it like my roommate’s name, and Jules nodded.
That’s the way to deal with him
.

Richie frowned. “Look, if you’re gonna get all technical on me—just because I haven’t got my grade eleven, you—”