Variable Star (42 page)

Those facing away from me took several seconds longer to identify.

I got no instant-recognition hits from size or body language, nor from clothes—in fact, there was something subtly not right about their clothes I was too busy to analyze. The seven of them broke down into two het couples and three singletons, two female, one male. Something about placement and stance gave me the idea the taller of the single fems might have deliberately interposed herself between the other two, but I couldn’t be sure. Without exception, they all seemed to carry themselves with an air of enormous confidence, as if they were used to being listened to respectfully.

Nobody had noticed me enter. I hadn’t identified any of the ones facing away yet, and some instinct or insecurity made me keep my hand hold just inside the door until I had. So I went with my strengths. Four people were talking at once and none would yield; probably anybody else would have called the result noise. I chose to treat it as a quartet—and used my composer’s ear to pick out the individual horns by their timbre and range rather than the mangled notes. Whatever they were saying could be repeated to me later; now I wanted to know who was saying them. The enhanced free-fall airflow worked for me, now, bringing me their voices with unusual clarity.

Three of the instruments I knew at once, would have even if I could not have seen them being played: Captain Bean, Jarnell, and Lieutenant Bruce, working as a trio, alto, trombone, and trumpet. That fourth horn doing the counterpoint, the baritone—

Damn, it was strange. It teased at the edges of memory. Long-term storage. Whoever he was, I’d met him briefly years ago, probably shortly after we’d left, and hadn’t encountered him since. I hadn’t liked him much for some reason. The penny resolutely refused to drop farther.

Another voice entered, causing the others to fall silent. A clarinet, but with the quiet authority of Goodman. This one I was sure I didn’t know; its timbre was so unique I knew if I’d ever heard him speak I’d have tried to get him to sing for me. His couple-partner remained silent, contributing no harmonies.

He stated a brief theme. Captain Bean picked it up and restated it three times, changing it slightly each time. The third time, the clarinet joined in in unison, to tell him he had it right.

Lieutenant Bruce began a counterstatement, but had traded his trumpet for a kazoo; in compensation he blew so hard it broke.

The baritone entered again, but allowed itself to be interrupted by a cello in its lower register. I didn’t know this voice either, I was sure of it. And I didn’t much care for it. It had an undertone of menace, of unstated threat.

My strangeness meter was beginning to max. In a small town of less than five hundred, there can be one or two people you’ve just never chanced to run into. But
three
of them, that you’re sure you’ve never even passed within earshot of? I had to be mistaken.

Captain Bean’s alto reply started out softly, but built to a small angry crescendo, like the first harbinger of trouble ahead in Wagner.

The next voice, the tall singleton female, I knew at once, and started to relax. Her name would come to me in a second. I hadn’t seen her in years, but had always liked her. This one was no horn, but a singer: smokey voice, like late period Annie Ross. Some sort of joke in her name. Miss Steak? Miss Fortune? Ms. Rhee? Something literary about the joke. Miss Elenius? An adolescent erotic undertone too, somehow. Something dirty…female honorific…last name that made it all a quote or literary reference… I was almost there…famous character? Title?
Title
. That felt right.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, of course.
Les Misérables
. “Lay Ms. Robb.” Dorothy Robb, sweet old lady, had been kind to me the last time we met. What was that funny job title of hers? Chief Enabler, that was it…

Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.

Given that context, I recognized the baritone at once. “Smithers.” Alex Rennick, Master of the North Keep.

Well,
hell
. That was annoying. Clearly my wiring was misfiring. Not that I blamed it, given the events of recent weeks. But I could not even override it—no matter how hard I assured my ears that they were mistaken, they both stubbornly insisted we were all hearing Dorothy Robb together. Slightly older, perhaps, but her.

All right, this did not necessarily mean I was losing it. People can have vocal doubles. I’d have remembered a colonist in her nineties, but it was not impossible this woman was imitating one for some—

Once while colossally drunk, Herb had spoken of himself as “hanging by my fingertips from my own anus, to keep from falling out.” I was in that mindset, clutching for dear life.

Then from the couple with the cello female came the unforgettable, unmistakable, inarguable, utterly impossible voice of Conrad of Conrad, and I lost my grip.

B
ut I
was in zero gravity. I didn’t
go
anywhere.

Naturally I felt instant fear. But not terror.

When the impossible happens—when a planet
moves
beneath your feet, and won’t stop—when you look up on a gorgeous morning and see something huge fly majestically into the side of a tall building—when a man you buried shows up at your door with a six-pack—you’re supposed to feel a primal terror, a superstitious dread. It’s in all the books. You pass out, or vomit, or your bowels and bladder void, or you howl. If the universe is prepared to
cheat
, you’re screwed, right? The only alternative is to decide it’s all a bad dream or sustained hallucination and just go with it.

I didn’t any of those things. I can’t say why not. Maybe I was simply too far gone. I’d been electroshocked so many times, they no longer had a voltage that would put me into convulsions. In a twisted way, it was almost starting to get good to me.

The fabric of the universe itself was coming apart? Fine—bring it. Fucking thing hadn’t turned out that well anyway. The dead were rising, Time itself flowing back up over the dam? Great. Gee, if I unaged slower than normal because I was on a nearly luminal starship, I might finally get to meet my mom. Go on, disintegrating reality, give me your best shot.

It is
never
a good idea to say that.

It seemed perfectly clear to me that I had fried my operating system. Deep down, I
knew
I had. I did
not
believe in ghosts, never had…well, not since I was real little. No more did I actually believe in universes that cheated. Given the insistent evidence of my senses, I knew I was nuts—the kind of nuts hardly anyone ever went anymore. There seemed only one sensible response to that.

I roared with laughter.

In a timeless instant, I saw my life as a whole, saw the
shape
of it, and the flavor of it, saw that it led inexorably from hope and great promise to gibbering madness in a doomed can full of tragedies ten light-years from the hole where the human race used to be, haunted by the ridiculous shade of the evil old bastard who’d forced me onto this donkey ride to heaven in the first place—all because some nameless unknowable alien vigilante other had concluded that mankind was not a feature but a bug in the Galaxy—and there just wasn’t anything else to do, not to do
about it
, but just to
do
, except to laugh my ass off. Part of me was aware the Captain had wanted my participation in an important meeting—but since he wasn’t going to get it anyway, why
not
disrupt the silly thing? I didn’t even try to hold back; I laughed like a buffalo, like a bull ape, like a brontosaur—they might all be extinct, but by God they were still funny.

Naturally everyone stared at me as if I had lost my mind. I thought I had, too.

Especially when the people facing away from me started turning around.

Yep, that was Dorothy Robb, older but still as vital as I remembered.

Yes, that was Smithers, his hairline strangely receded.

Yes indeedy, absolutely beyond question, the man in the center was Richard Conrad, Conrad of Conrad, and he
still
didn’t look the part. He still looked like some sort of gruff lovable academic don, now well past retirement age but quite vigorous.

His companion was a short compact woman I had never seen in my life, and I was oddly grateful for that. At last, a hallucination with a trace of creativity! She seemed my age or a little older, remarkably fit, and as focused as a comm laser.

On Conrad’s other side was another total stranger, about ten years older than me. This one was more interesting. His short stature,
pale
skin, and overdeveloped limbs told me he was a Terran. He had an overall air of sweet hayseed innocence, a gullibility based on intrinsic decency, which usually assumes itself in others. He wore a small dopey mustache like the one Jinny had once tried to get me to grow. But his eyes—his eyes had a contradictory quality I cannot express with words. I would have to show you a similar pair, and say, “Like those.” I had only seen such eyes twice. My father had had them. And so had one of his best friends, whom everyone knew should
also
have won the Nobel, and who I called Uncle Max. They were the kind of eyes that caused other great geniuses to drop their egos and just stare. I wondered what his field was.

I was giving myself creative credit for having finally produced a really intriguing hallucination, when the last two people present finished turning around.

Given the mental state and emotional shape I was in right then—and the seeming theatricality with which they had both turned so slowly—I was actually fully expecting one of them to turn out to be Jinny.

I was
not
expecting
both
of them to.

T
he one
farthest from me, standing beside the man with kaleidoscope eyes, did not
look
like Jinny as I remembered her. What she looked remarkably like, I realized, was the mental picture I had always had of “fellow orphan” Jinny’s imaginary “dead mother, Mrs. Maureen Hamilton.”

This one was—convincingly appeared to be—the real, actual Jinny Conrad. If she were alive, she would have been about thirteen years older than when I’d last seen her. If this was her, she had apparently lied to me about her age. Despite excellent cosmeticizing, she looked thirty-five. That too would fit.

But it was difficult to focus analytical thought on anything at all, let alone a psychotic puzzle like this, because the
other
Jinny was
so
much closer to the Jinny I still carried in my heart’s memory that it threatened to stop my heart. Jinny at eighteen or nineteen—an honest eighteen or nineteen—so beautiful it wasn’t even fair, a perfect rose just unfolding. Jinny as I had seen her then—wise and smart and compassionate and strong and certain—transported through time. Looking back at me now exactly the way she had back then, with eyes that were lamps, whose pupils were black holes, calling me to fall in.

“Hello, Joel,” they both said at once.

I
had
begun to stop laughing when they both turned around, and finished a few seconds after they were done, with a last few “ha’s.”

But a split second after they both greeted me, I finally got it.

I may have been in ragged shape, an emotional basket case with a malfunctioning brain, belabored by too many impossible stimuli at once—but I had started the course with a pretty decent thinking machine. Presented with a series of clues that allowed only one rational explanation, I was bound to get there eventually. I was aware of the ancient dictum that if you’re certain you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, however unlikely, must be the answer.

Once I got the premise, everything else made sense half a second later. I even had a pretty good idea who the two strangers were, and why they were present.

This time I laughed so hard I went into a tumble, and lost my vertical. I would have literally rolled on the floor laughing if there’d been any gravity to put me there. I had always thought it a hyperbolic expression. There was simply no position that could contain or properly brace my titanic mirth; yearning to laugh even harder, I would curl into fetal position, then explode like a starfish, then punch and kick the air the way I’d learned in Tiger’s dojo, desperate to force all the laughter out before it burst me.

The moment I could spare the air, I managed to squeeze four words into the outgoing message traffic, two at a time.

First: “Hello, Evelyn.”

And then: “Hello, Jin.”

T
wo things
made my father special, and only one of them was that he could think better than practically anybody else.

The other was that he could think
faster
than practically anybody else.

That means more than just getting to the answer before anyone else can. It means you reach answers no one else will. The faster you can think, the longer a logic chain you can follow out before you get tired and decide to stop. In modern physics, that can be crucial. He told me once, “The universe is so simple, it takes very complicated thought to touch it.”

I inherited a touch of his freak speed. It became clear quite early that I emphatically had not inherited Dad’s gift for exotic mathematics—but it was just as clear that he genuinely did not give the least sub-subatomic particle of a damn about that, and maybe that indicates genius of another, completely different kind on his part. But I had mastered the alto sax at seven, playing with a speed that had literally frightened my first teacher, Francis Layne—who himself was called “Fast Layne.” In my secret heart of hearts, I had always honestly believed I was one of the best composers alive, and one of the best saxophonists, too, although I had expected it to be decades before there was much agreement on that. Now, of course, I had it in the bag.

But I had also noticed quite early that I was usually faster on the uptake than most people. Unless the subject was me, anyway. I spent the better part of most conversations waiting for everyone else to catch up. Patterns form and combine in my mind like crystals reproducing at fast forward, sometimes so fast that even to me it seems like I skip whole steps in my logic process and just thumb to the back of the book for the answer. Telepathy is literally instantaneous; maybe sometimes other kinds of thought are, too.