Variable Star (9 page)

Maybe it shook loose some brains. When I finally spoke, what I said surprised me. I expected to hear myself say something polite, banal, phony. What came out was, “Can you tell me how to get a cab around here?”

As I heard the words come out of my mouth I realized I very badly wanted to be away from here. To be back home. Alone. As quickly as possible. So I needed transportation. And I had no idea how to get any. And here before me, by happy chance, was about the only person in the entire compound, including Leo the AI, that I felt comfortable asking.

She just stared at me, unblinking.

“Transportation from here back to the Lower Mainland,” I amplified.

When she stared like that she looked remarkably like an owl.

“I came here in Jinny’s car, but right now she’s taken it offsite, and I need to get back home as soon as p…you’re imitating an owl, aren’t you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I was. I’ll stop.”

“Thanks. As I was s—”

“I’m not really sorry. But I’ll pretend, as long as I don’t have to do a very good job.”

“Evelyn, honey—”

The owl lit up. “You remember my name.”

“Look, I really need to—”

“Most grown-ups don’t.”

“Evelyn, how do—”

“You can’t get a cab here, silly. There’s no here.”

I nodded. “I figured as much. But that implies there has to be some way to get guests where they need to go, when they need to be there. Do you know what it is?”

I nearly lost her with that question. Then her ferocious frown relaxed. “I deserved that. I was the one playing dumb. Yes, Joel, I do know. I’ll help you.”

I sighed. “Thank you, Ev. Will it take very long?”

“Is there anything in your room you have to go back for?”

I thought about it and shook my head no.

“Follow me, then.”

Three turns and perhaps a hundred meters later, she stopped, and touched a wall, and an elevator door opened up where not even a visible seam had been a moment ago. She touched the wall just beside the door, in a different way, and the wall developed a monitor and extruded a keypad—at a height convenient for a seven-year-old. She typed something on it, with only her index fingers, but at a speed that would have been remarkable even if she’d been using all ten. Finally she made a small grunt of satisfaction, and turned to me.

“You’ll find a car waiting at ground level. Just state your destination; it’ll find it.”

“How do I—”

“When you get where you’re going, just get out and say, ‘Dismissed.’ It homes.”

Of course it did. I started for the elevator, then paused. “Ev, honey?”

“Yes, Joel?”

“Is this… I mean, are you going to get in trouble for this?”

She grinned. “Not unless you rat me out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Guest cars aren’t a secret. Anybody could have called you one.”

“But won’t the record show that it was you who did?”

She grinned again. “The record says Jinny did.”

I nodded. “Okay, then. Thank you. I owe you one.” It didn’t seem adequate. I bent, took her hand in mine, lifted it to my lips, and planted one just behind the knuckles. Then I straightened up and stepped into the elevator. “So long, Ev.”

Her eyes were huge. “Hot jets.”

“Clear skies.” The door slid closed, and I rose rapidly enough to pull gee forces, reaching the surface in no time.

The car waiting for me there was generic, but much more luxurious—to the eye, at least—than the
faux
heap Jinny had driven me there in. The feature I found most praiseworthy was an exceedingly well-stocked bar. It contained the most expensive liquids, solids, vapors, sprayers, and essences then popular for the radical adjustment of attitude, mood, and energy. Being a poor student, from a frontier world with conservative customs, I was familiar with most of them only…well, academically—and about their synergistic effects in multiple combination I knew nothing whatsoever. I decided to remedy this deficiency by personal experiment. I attempted to try at least one of
everything
, and for all I know may have succeeded. I never noticed the takeoff, or indeed any of the trip, and I have no recollection of arrival back at my place.

I never did get my shoes back.

L
ike the fabulous Conrad compound, my apartment was mostly underground, and did not appear on any map. But there the similarities ended.

For one thing, it was not located in the middle of a glacier somewhere, but smack in the midst of some of the most densely populated land in the U.S.N.A., the White Rock district of Greater Vancouver. For another, it was the polar opposite of opulent or luxurious, as comfortable as a coffin. Vancouver itself has a tradition of quasilegal “basement suites” dating back centuries to some World’s Fair, or perhaps Olympics, but outlying suburbs like White Rock acquired theirs so recently that they’re still illegal, hence unrecorded, hence unregulated, hence mostly shitholes. In sharp contrast to Conradville, it had only a single virtue to recommend it.

But right then, that virtue rated high in my scale of values. It was
mine
.

I take it back: it had one other thing going for it. The thing that had recommended it to me in the first place, back when I’d first grounded on Terra: like most caves, it was a terrific place to hole up. It had been my first refuge from the unbelievable crowding Terrans considered normal, from the appalling crime rate they considered acceptable, from my own sudden shocking physical weakness, from unexpectedly crushing homesickness and loneliness, and from my own unaccustomed social ineptitude. A womb with a view.

What I needed when I woke up, that horrible morning after, was refuge from my own thoughts and feelings. The apartment did its best, but I suspect a riot would have been insufficient distraction.

The emotion foremost in me when consciousness first reconstructed itself again was sadness, grief insupportable, but it took me a while to recall exactly what I was so sad about. Then it all came back in a rush, and I sat bolt upright in bed. My skull promptly exploded with the force of an antimatter collision—I’d obviously forgotten to take antihangover measures the night before—but the blinding white light and total agony seemed merely appropriate. I’d have howled like a dog if I’d had the strength. Instead I whimpered like a puppy.

For the last—I couldn’t remember
how
many mornings, I had woken up thinking of Jinny. Yearning for Jinny. Aching for Jinny. Had woken every time from dreaming of Jinny—of us—of us together—of the distant but attainable day when she would be there in the morning, there all night, the day when I would finally possess her fully.

Possess her? Ha! My lifetime net worth would probably not suffice to lease an hour of her time.

And yet she wanted me.

And God help me, I still wanted her—as fiercely as ever. I could still have her, if I chose. So why was I so sad I wanted to fall out of bed and bang my face against the floor?

The sadness was because my dream was gone. Whatever the future might hold for me and Jinny, it would not, could not, remotely resemble anything I had ever envisioned. Conceivably it could be a better future, perhaps much better—but right now, at this remove, mostly what it was, was unimaginable.

Unless it was nothing at all. I could imagine that easily enough. I just didn’t want to. Like life before I met Jinny—minus hope.

Let’s not be hasty, Joel. I couldn’t rent an hour of her time…but I could have
all
of her hours, if I wanted, without paying a single credit. What
would
it cost me, though? Let’s see. All my plans for my, our, future, for a start. The identity and goals and place in the world I had picked for myself. The rustic notion that the husband should be the one who supported the family, which I had already admitted to myself months ago was archaic nonsense anywhere but a frontier society like Ganymede. It hadn’t been customary for the majority of the human race for well over a century now.

And let’s not forget one other little cost that Conrad had been quite upfront about: most of my waking hours for the rest of my days, which would be spent working very long and hard on things for which I had little interest, training, or talent. With the very best of medical care assuring that I’d be in harness as long as possible. I would have to assume and hear a yoke of almost inconceivable responsibility—responsibility to literally billions of people, all with their own loves and dreams and plans for their futures.

And even if I washed out personally, my children would be groomed and fitted and trained for that same responsibility from birth. All of them. In my vague eighteen-year-old imaginings of the children I might have one day, I had always pictured myself advising them to pursue whatever really interested them, to follow their hearts, the way my father had with me. That would no longer be an option if they were Conrads.

I’m making my hungover maunderings seem far more coherent and organized and cogent than they really were. At the very same time that all the thoughts I’ve just described were going through my head, for instance, I was also simultaneously asking myself over and over again just what, exactly, was so horrible about becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in human history, if that was what it took to win the most beautiful woman in the Solar System?

Well, for a start, myself kept answering, you haven’t
earned
it. What good is a prize, any prize, if you don’t deserve it, if you haven’t done the work? Face it, Joel: you don’t even have the vaguest idea what the work
is
.

To which my ongoing rebuttal was: Oh, give me a break, self. Do you think even Conrad of Conrad truly
earned
that much power and money? Do you think
anyone
could? Do you honestly believe any conceivable human being, however talented and however hardworking, could possibly
deserve
that much compensation,
merit
that much authority? The most anyone can do is
have
it. Old man Conrad happened to have been born from the right womb at the right time, and must have behaved thereafter more intelligently than any of his rivals, that was all. That was as close as he came to deserving what he had: it had been handed to him, and he had not fumbled it. Now it—or at least a piece of it—was being handed to me—or at least to my—

—children. Mine and Jinny’s—

How could she
do
this to me
?

D
istraction. Distraction.
Change the ch—ah, that was it. I found the remote—thank you, Mr. Tesla—turned on the tube, and selected passive entertainment, genre search.

First, drama: on some unimaginably distant colony planet—because there were two moons in the sky, one of them ringed—a beautiful woman with red hair was crying as if her heart were broken. No, thank you;
change
channel—

Comedy, next: a young man my age—we did make great natural comedic victims, didn’t we?—had done something incredibly stupid, and a roomful of people and Martians were laughing openly at his humiliation. Next, please—

Erotica. I was utterly disinterested, and noticed that my right arm was extremely weary. Apparently that car’s drug supply had included libido enhancers. Next—

Sports. Free-fall soccer semifinals, O’Neill versus the Belt, winner to face Circum-Terra in the fall. As it came on, the mob outside the globe roared: a forward as long and lean as a Ganymedean had just frozen, fumbled his chance, blown an easy shot by hesitating. Zoom in for extreme close-up of his anguished features, his obvious shame. Next—

News, Systemwide: Luna Free State was saying very rude things about Ganymede’s trade policy, and Terra was making no comment; while nobody had actually used the words “trade war” yet, everyone was thinking them, louder than they had last week. And here I was, trapped at the bottom of the gravity well. Next—

News, Global: The outfitting and provisioning of the latest colony ship, RSS
Charles Sheffield
, was nearly complete. It was expected to leave orbit in a few days, and a few days after that, assuming its drive lit without incident, its complement of some five hundred souls should go bye-bye in a big hurry. Hopefully to a star called Immega 714—known also, for reasons I could not imagine, as “Peekaboo.” Only the day before yesterday, I had considered most of them to be idiots, a company of mist its, malcontents, romantics, failures, crackpot visionaries, runaways, transportees, and other defective personalities. Now I found myself fiercely envying them. Just a couple more days, and nothing the Conrad dynasty or any individual Conrad could possibly do would ever again affect them in the slightest. What dominated my future and my children’s future was shortly to become as irrelevant to them as the Roman Empire. Sigh. Next—

Local news. Housing riots again. This time the demonstrators had somehow overwhelmed or outsmarted both proctors and private security, and penetrated to the very heart of Vancouver’s most upscale neighborhood, the tiny intersection of Main and Hastings. Standard anticrowd measures could not be taken for fear of excessive damage to private property.

I switched to the fiction channel, scanned my favorites index for a story I wanted to reread, something really good and solid and dependable—and long, at least a trilogy. As I did, random sentences from old favorite books kept running through my head. You don’t turn down a promotion…if someone puts money in your hand, close your fingers and keep your mouth shut…let this cup pass from me…he played the hand he was dealt…opporknockity tunes but once, and you’d better be in tune with it…

Forget fiction. I was way too scattered to read. Even focusing on titles was beyond me. I didn’t bother with any of the music channels: I just knew that whatever I got would be heartbreaking. I shut the screen altogether and flung the remote across the room.

God damn it, how could she
do
this to me
?

H
ow could
she lie to me that way, hide the truth from me for so long, tell so many lies to me, play me for a fool? My innocent, loving maiden turned out to be a slumming aristocrat, Harun al-Rashid’s granddaughter in clever disguise, casing the marketplace for a strapping young peasant lad with acceptable features and good teeth, to serve as stud back at the palace…smiling fondly inside at his earnest naïveté and childish dreams…