Now my only remaining assets were nominal: some shares in one of the very earliest starships—which had vanished in the Big Deep years ago. They were worth so little I’d instructed my guardian not to bother selling them; the income would scarcely have covered the assorted charges and taxes. They weren’t worthless, quite: there was always the infinitesimal chance that the New Frontiers might be found and rescued one day. But no missing starship had ever been heard from again. Only once had they even been able to establish just what had gone wrong.
So I took my meals with most of the others, in Stark Hall, one of the ship’s three mess halls, designed to accommodate up to a third of us at any one time with good solid unspectacular food, drink, and ancillaries, without charge. But for those who had the money and inclination, there were also alternatives. Such as the Horn of Plenty, the Sheffield’s equivalent of an upscale nightclub, with four-star food and more expensive amusement options, open all three shifts.
I had not expected to ever set foot in the place, unless a live waiter’s job should open up, but it was there that Herb insisted on dragging me for my last dinner in the Solar System.
I did try to resist. I had known several novelists, but none with even as much money as I had. “Herb, I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford this. There’s an old PreCollapse blues song that goes, ‘If money did my talkin’/I couldn’t breathe a sigh—’ and that’s…”
And my voice trailed off, because the next lines of the song suddenly loomed up out of memory and clotheslined me: “But my baby’s love is one thing/even money can’t buy/Ain’t that fine?”
Herb said, “This meal is on me. You have almost nothing in your system but poisons and toxins. The food you take on to absorb it all should be of the highest quality.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you back.”
“I know: you probably won’t, and I’ll get to hold it over you forever. Cheap dominance. Come on, it’s right up ahead.”
I stopped us at the door and tried to thank him, but he brushed it away “Sheer self-interest. I have to live with you.”
They seemed to know him inside. As we were conducted to our booth, I had that weird feeling you get entering a place that’s a little out of your reach, the irrational sensation that everyone is looking at you and can tell you’re out of place, which is caused by everyone looking at you and knowing you’re out of place. Herb had a way of walking as though they were out of place, but he was a broad-minded man. Jinny had had it, too…
A dance performance was in progress on a cleared area of the floor, something classic-modern, I think, though I have trouble keeping the distinctions straight. I don’t think ballet is ever done in silence. Serious dance, at any rate, not mating dance, and apparently very well done, by three energetic people a little older than me. They finished to thunderous applause as we crossed the room, and sprinted backstage.
I did notice a bandstand, an interesting one, just beyond the dancers’ Marley floor. It was powered down at the moment, unoccupied, but it looked nicely equipped. The keyboard system was built into a very good replica of a Pre-collapse grand piano; it looked as though the player could produce “real,” mechanically produced acoustic sound with the thing if he chose. The drum kit too could have produced reasonable accompaniment for most purposes even powered down. The stringed instrument cases I saw were all obviously for either acoustic or hybrids. I mentioned that to Herb as we were seated.
“You watch,” he said, “pre-electric music is going to become very popular in this ship over the next twenty years. We all know deep down we’re going to a place where we may not have power to spare for luxuries for some time to come. Subconsciously we’re preparing. Brunch menus, coffee and orange juice for two, please.”
I hadn’t noticed the waitress approach until he spoke, and she was gone by the time I turned around. Yet I later learned she was human. “Brunch?” I asked, checking the time.
“In a restaurant that never closes, in a ship with three shifts, it’s always brunchtime. Or dinnertime. Or midnight snacktime, or tea. You need serious food that doesn’t challenge digestion; ergo, brunch.”
The food was indeed wonderful. It penetrated my depression, forced me to concede to myself that I did have some interest in continued life, even if I had no idea why. I was continually conscious of a sensation of having gnawed off one of my feet to escape a trap, a pit-of-the-stomach feeling that wouldn’t go away. But for some reason it didn’t interfere with my appetite much, or even my mood.
Herb, I was very gratified to learn, was the kind of man who did not chatter over his food. Save for a handful of conversational politenesses, he used his mouth for intake only. It gave me permission to do the same. We already knew we were going to be friends. And there was going to be plenty of time to use up our conversation stores.
When he did speak, it was with a friend’s directness. “So,” he said, setting down his fork, “have you decided whether you’re going to cut your throat or not? Inquiring minds want to know.”
“No.”
He relaxed slightly. “Yes, you have. You’re not.”
“I really hate it when somebody tells me what I’m thinking. Or are you a telepath?”
“As a matter of fact, yes, but not the way you mean. A real one.”
I snorted. “Right. Your mind isn’t fast enough.”
In fiction, a telepath can read minds. A real telepath is just a glorified radio, with a single receiver. But really glorified—way faster than any radio. Our time rate and the System’s were already diverging very slightly under the constraints of Einsteinian physics, and would get steadily worse for the next twenty years. Every day, radio and laser signals took just a tiny bit longer to cross the widening gulf between us, and by the time we reached our destination it would take them the greater part of a century. But telepathy, for reasons nobody understands, takes place instantaneously, across any distance yet measured. That single perverse exception to the laws of the universe, and the fact that the gene for it is dominant, make a star-traveling civilization just barely possible. Our ship, like all of them, carried several people capable of telepathic rapport with a partner back in the System, usually, but not always, their identical twin. With luck, their children would be able to maintain the link.
Herb was looking at me strangely.
At first, the way his jaw was squared off, and his eyes seemed to have receded deeper into their sockets, and his shoulders were slightly raised, all combined to tell me he was angry. That was odd. Then a second later I saw I had misread the signals completely: he was amused, trying his best not to laugh in my face. At something I had done in the last few moments, apparently. Or said…
He saw me start to catch on, and let the laugh out.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Did you really think I was accepted into this company because I’m a writer? You figure a fledgling colony, fighting to stay alive and establish a foothold, has a lot of use for fiction?”
“You never mentio—”
“You never asked.”
“Who—?”
“My sister Li,” he said. “In Oregon. The one on Terra. Two hours a day, we handle message traffic between Kang/da Costa HQ and the colony, and we’re available freelance for private communications.”
“I never noticed you doing that!”
“How would you? I stare into space, and then start typing like crazy. It must look exactly like I’m writing a story. Sometimes I am, if what I’m supposed to type annoys me enough.”
“Holy shit.” I was so busy rearranging my presumptions and misconceptions in my head, I forgot I had not yet expressed an opinion. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it. I’m a telepath. A communicator.”
His voice cued me. A lot of people are weirded out by telepaths. A few people call them the kind of names that cause a proctor to show up. I le was waiting to learn whether or not his new friend and roommate for the next two decades was one of those
people.
Quickly I said, “No, I mean I can’t believe there’s some poor girl back in the System who looks just like you.”
His shoulders dropped. “Back to our argument—I was winning. How can you stay a bachelor? Have you no appreciation for fine womanhood? No sense of obligation—”
My mind took a left. Talking about Jinny and the Conrads had reminded me of something, a small burr under my saddle. An unfulfilled obligation behind me. “As a matter of fact, I do. Both. So much so that I’m going to presume on our friendship and ask you for a favor.”
“What friendship?”
“I know, but it’s all I’ve got. I want to send a private message back to Terra.”
He frowned. “Phone still works. So does mail.”
“No, I mean private. I need to thank a young lady for defying her grandfather to help me out of a tight spot, and I don’t want to risk getting her in trouble.”
His frown deepened. “Just tell me one thing. Is this young lady rich and beautiful?”
“That’s two things. And yes to both.”
“Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Okay, this once, I’ll do it. You want visual, or just voice?”
“Voice is fine.”
He shook his head. “Hopeless. Name?”
“Evelyn Conrad.”
“How do you want to route it to her?”
“Through an intermediary I think I can trust. Can your sister put a really serious privacy shield on a message?”
“Yes,” was all he said.
“Okay. Ask her to get it to a Dorothy Robb, two b’s.”
“Address?”
“Ms. Robb is the Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.”
Herb came as close as I would ever see him come to betraying surprise. His nostrils flared just perceptibly for a moment, as if he had begun to doubt his deodorant. His eyes did a funny little thing where for just an instant they tried to widen and narrow at the same time. There was maybe a quarter-second hitch in the soundtrack, and then he said, “I take it back. There is no hope for you.”
I spread my hands. “When did I claim there was?”
“You know a Conrad. Well enough that she defied…oh. Kindly tell me her granddad is not—”
I nodded. “Conrad.”
“Of course. She defied Conrad of Conrad for you. And you’re here.”
“Herb, she’s seven years old.”
He smiled broadly. It had taken him about ten seconds to gear up and start enjoying this. “To be thoroughly sure. Say no more. Unless you want to live.”
So I told him the whole damned story.
I’d always known I would, some day. It was going to be a long voyage. But not in the first year. I probably couldn’t have told it yet to anyone who didn’t listen as well as he did. He didn’t mind if I needed a couple of minutes of silence to get a sentence completed.
When I was finished, he took a couple himself. Then he said softly, “Amigo, you’re the first person I’ve talked to in this bucket of rust so far that actually has a sensible reason to be here. All right, you want little Evelyn to know you’re grateful for getting you out of there, but without tipping the Old Man, have I got it?”
“Something like, ‘I enjoyed the last moments of our relationship even more than the first,’ maybe. Do you really think you can get that to her privately? Now that you know who she is?”
He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Li says yes. She knows a way. You don’t need to know what it is. It’s covered.”
“Thanks, Herb.”
He lit up one of his cigarettes. “Well, at least the cord is cut clean. With Jinny, I mean. Seldom in history have any humans gotten to have a breakup as final as the one you’ve had. By the time we get to 23 Skiddoo in twenty years, she’ll be…108 years old, if she was honest about her age.”
We were making a jump of about eighty-five light-years—at such a hair-raising fraction of c that the trip would seem to us to take twenty years, total. But back in the normal universe, clocks run faster, thanks to Dr. Einstein’s Paradox. To an observer at, say, Tombaugh Station around Pluto, our voyage would appear to take roughly ninety and one-half standard years.
“Of course, with her money, she’ll probably still look twenty, by then,” Herb added. “But you’ll know better.”
“I don’t want her old,” I said bleakly. “I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be here with me.”
“Happy to be your mate, even if you both starve on alien soil. Was she really that dumb?”
“Obviously not.”
“You’ll love again. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
I grimaced. “Not soon.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be too soon. You have twenty years to decide what you want in a wife. But don’t put it off too long, either. The supply is limited, and you don’t look like a man who’d be happy as a celibate.”
“Don’t be so sure,” I muttered darkly.
“Look, you have decisions to make. Some short-term, some long-term. If you plan to spend the next twenty years licking your wounds, and letting those decisions make themselves for you, you’re going to be a tough friend to have. I suggest you get started working on them.”
“Decisions like what?”
He leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to do?”
A perfectly simple, sensible question: the logical first step in making any plan.
He might just as well have whacked me in the forehead with a plank.
I did not really see a burst of bright white light, and then find myself on the ground beside my horse, godstruck. The earth did not literally tremble and roar at my feet. My heart probably did not actually pause, and I have it on good authority that time did not, at any time, in fact come to a stop. But Herb’s perfectly obvious question hit me with that kind of impact. He and the room went away while I tried to cope with it.
Surely, I thought, I have an answer for him. But I could not find one. I rewound mental tape and realized with shock that I had not asked myself that question once since the night of my graduation from Fermi.
Throughout all the terrible days since, I had been focused intently and exclusively on what I did not want to do.
Well, that had been silly of me, hadn’t it? Now that I was finally and forever safe from the terrible danger of becoming one of the richest humans alive, married to the girl of my dreams, perhaps it was time to give some quantum of thought to what I might find preferable. If anything.
Great blathering mother of morons, what was I going to do with the next twenty years? Or the twenty after that, if it came to it?
Herb was saying something. Why did I know that? Oh. He had touched my hand to get my attention. I rewound my ears. “—don’t have to come up with an answer right this minute,” he had said.
I wasn’t absolutely sure I agreed—but just then I heard my name called. It was Solomon Short, in a larger nearby booth with three companions. He waved emphatically to us to come and join them. I looked to Herb for help, and he shrugged, so we got up and went over to the other booth. Sol’s companions slid over to make room for us, while he made introductions.
As I’d guessed, his friends were all Relativists like him. I had now met five of the six people on whom our whole voyage depended. Nearest me was Tenzin Hideo Itokawa, a tiny man whom I learned later was a Zen Buddhist monk; then, I got only that he had twinkling eyes and seemed to lack vocal chords. Between him and Sol was a hearty and voluptuous woman named London McBee, who turned out to be married to George R Marsden, the Relativist I’d literally bumped into in my first seconds aboard. She and Sol volleyed with words, vying to outpun each other. But the most striking of the three was clearly the man on the other side of the table, Peter Kindred, and for the life of me I could not decide why.
There was something electric and sheepish about him, that’s the best I can say it—he gave off the disconcerting sensation that at any moment he was likely to switch from talking to quacki
ng like a duck, or barking like a dog—that at any given time there was utterly no way of telling what he might take it into his head to do—and that at the same time, he was just a little embarrassed by it. It was more than just mad eyes, though he surely had those. His name seemed ironically chosen; he had “Loose Cannon” written all over him. Sol and London both seemed to find him delightful.
I was overawed. Most of the ship’s power, literally, was seated at that table. I’m used to famous people, even great people. This was different. In a pinch, the Sheffield could have gotten by without her captain—but her Relativists were essential. These men and woman spent their days reaching into the cosmic vacuum with their naked organic brains, and persuaded it to yield up its inconceivable energy in a measured fashion.
I realize that description has about as much meaning as saying that a nuclear fission plant works because the gods breathe upon its mojo in such a way as to cause it to be far out. One of my hopes, as I sat down, was to perhaps solicit a better explanation from one or more of the Relativists I was privileged to talk to. But I got off to a bad start.
Things went fine at first. Sol introduced his companions to us. Then he introduced Herb to them, giving them a two-sentence thumbnail bio. Then he introduced me—and that’s where it went sour. His second sentence for me began, inevitably, with, “His father was the—”
But by the second word, Peter Kindred had gone berserk. He kicked his chair over backward with his butt, leaped backward over it, landed several feet away in combat crouch, making finger gestures to ward off evil.
At me.
I opened my mouth—
“SHUT UP!” he screamed.
I blinked.
“Not a word! AIYEEE!” He averted his gaze. “No facial expressions!”
I looked at Herb, then Sol, then everybody else, without finding anything I could use. I decided I needed to leave, started to rise.
He screamed, hopped back a pace, and snatched a plate from someone’s table, holding it like a cream pie in an ancient comedy “Back!” he shrieked. “You lunatic! Are you crazy? What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”