Variable Star (5 page)

This was
real
. I was back home on Ganymede—so convincingly that for just a startled moment, two-thirds of my weight seemed to leave me. I realized with astonishment that the air even
smelled
like Ganymede air, tasted like it, different from terrestrial air in ways subtle but unmistakable. I was standing in the middle of a newly made field, the soil only just coming to life. Beneath my feet, earthworms were shaking off the grogginess of cold sleep and beginning to realize they weren’t on Terra anymore. On the edge of the field, fifteen or twenty meters away, was a new-built farmhouse, smoke spiraling from its chimney. Try and build a fire anywhere else on Terra and they’d fine you the equivalent of two months’ tuition—for a first offense. Until today, I hadn’t seen a square meter of naked soil since I’d landed on its namesake. I felt my eyes begin to sting and water, and with no further warning a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me.

I spun around in time to see Rennick come through the doorway. From this side too it looked like it was full of pink smoke. But it was no longer a door
in
anything: it just stood by itself in the middle of the field, a rectangle of pink smoke without any wall to be a hole in. I turned my back on hole and house master alike.

“Miss Jinny thought you’d find this congenial,” he said from just behind me.

I nodded.

“Follow me please.”

That didn’t require an answer either. We walked to the farmhouse and went inside. “The ’fresher and entertainment center are in the obvious places. You’ll find clothing in that closet, Unlimited Access at that desk. If you want anything—anything whatsoever—state your wishes to the house server. His name is Leo.”

I had the homesickness under control now, enough that I trusted myself to speak at least. “Leo is listening at all times?”

“Leo listens at all times,” he agreed. “But he cannot
hear
anything unless he is addressed. Your privacy and security as a guest are unconditionally guaranteed.”

“Of course,” I said as if I believed him. I idly opened the closet he’d indicated, and found all my own clothing. Boggle.

On closer inspection it proved to be
copies
of nearly every piece of clothing I owned—all the ones Jinny had seen. They were not quite identical copies. For one thing, in nearly every case the quality of the copy was slightly better than that of the original.

Suddenly I felt vastly tired. I didn’t feel like boggling anymore, or struggling not to. “Mr. Rennick—Alex—I thank you for your offer of a tour of the North Keep, but I believe I will pass, at least for tonight.”

“Certainly, Joel. If there’s nothing further I can do for you now, I’ll leave you to rest.”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“Good night.” He left. I watched through a window as he walked across the field and through the pink smoke of the door-without-a-wall. I looked around the “farmhouse,” then back out the window at a sky with two moons, and thought about bursting into tears, but I decided I was too manly.

“Leo?”

“Yes, Mr. Johnston?”

“Can I get a cup of coffee?”

“On the desk, sir.”

I blinked, looked—a steaming cup of coffee sat on the desk beside me. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, but I hadn’t noticed it arrive. Without a word I picked it up and tried it. The superbness of the coffee was no surprise at all. The
perfect
drinking temperature was only a mild one. But the cream and two sugars…

“Did Jinny tell you how I like my
coffee
, Leo?”

“Miss Jinny has told me many things about you, Mr. Johnston.”

“Call me Joel.”

“Yes, Mr. Joel.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. There must be something sillier than arguing with software, but I can’t think offhand what it would be. I sat down on a rocking chair that creaked authentically, put my feet up on a hassock, and began to dismiss Leo from my mind, to prepare for the upcoming conversation with Jinny. Then a thought occurred. Carefully not addressing him by name I asked, “How long do you keep listening after I stop speaking, before you conclude I’m done and stop listening again?”

Answer came there none. Which answered me: somewhere between five and ten seconds. Useful datum.

“Leo?”

“Yes, Mr. Joel?”

“Can you let me know just before Miss Jinny arrives here?”

“No,” she said from the doorway. “He can’t.”

W
e were
both tired, and both emotionally upset. But we both knew there was more to be said before we could sleep. I took my feet down off the hassock, and she came and sat before me on it, and took both my hands in hers.

“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.

J
oel. 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, lot 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 0J. 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.