Variable Star

  I rolled my eyes. “Go ahead.”

  “She is a female mammal, she has a pulse, and she thinks you’re the best musician in the colony.”

  I grimaced in exasperation. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m…not…interested. I told you: I took that class. I’m done with women.”

  He put his own exasperation into a sigh instead of a grimace. “Joel, twenty years is a long, long time. And it’s going to seem even longer, with an attitude like that.”

  “She and I have nothing in common. Didn’t I tell you what her greatest dream for mankind is? Telepathy, for Murphy’s sake!”

  “Something wrong with telepathy?” he asked mildly.

  I blushed. “Aw, you know what I mean. She’s talking about the kind where nobody has any secrets and yet we all love each other. Fantasy.”

  Herb had successfully passed two other Secret Messages back to little Evelyn Conrad for me so far. Her replies always cheered me up. But they always came back via conventional electronic mail rather than telepathic courier; for some reason she was willing to accept information from a telepath but not give information to one. I was a little afraid she might be overestimating the security of whatever mail route she used. So I kept my own messages to her to a minimum, for fear of getting her in trouble with her elders.

  Thinking about telepathy gave me an idea. “Hell’s bells, Herb, why don’t you take a run at Kathy?”

  He looked at me strangely “Really?”

  “Well, you’re obviously interested in her. And she doesn’t find telepathy weird.”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  I closed my eyes, counted to five, opened them again. “Why would I mind? Haven’t you been listening? I’m through with romance, I’m through with love, I’m through with counting the stars above.”

  “You’re really serious about that, then.”

  I rolled my eyes upward and asked the ceiling to bear witness to the tribulations I had to endure here below. “Yes, for the love of—is that you or me?”

  He brought his wrist to his ear. “You. Go ahead.”

  I tapped my own wrist. “Yes?”

  The face on the screen was unfamiliar to me, as his first words confirmed. “Mr. Johnston, we haven’t met yet. My name is Paul Hattori. I am the colony’s banker. Forgive me for disturbing your privacy, but there is a matter we should discuss at your earliest convenience. A matter of some importance.”

  I thought for a second. The day was young—hell, it was still before noon. But my morning had been overfull of stimulating inputs. I was tired, and confused, and wanted only to put my feet up and try to get some thinking done about everything that had happened that morning. “How about tomorrow?” I temporized.

  He hesitated. “I will of course follow your wishes. But I have information you really should have as soon as possible.”

  What could he possibly be on about? Was this some sort of pitch for investment advice or banking services? He had access to my financial records—record—surely he must know I was a dry hole. “Can you give me some idea what it’s about?”

  He was smiling, but there was something odd about the smile, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t phony, exactly. Just odd. “I can, but if you will forgive me, I would greatly prefer to tell you in person.”

  I met Herb’s eyes, raised an eyebrow. He shrugged. “Are you sure you don’t want Communicator Johnson? Same address, he’s my roommate.”

  “No, it’s you I need to speak with, Mr. Johnston.” He gave an address only one deck below the officers and crew. He was a VIP.

  “All right, I’ll be there in half an hour. But I still think you have the wrong bloke.”

  “Who was that?” Herb asked.

  “Never mind,” I said. “It can’t be important.”

  I started to change to better clothes—and changed my mind. Why should I dress up for this joker? I wasn’t the one who’d asked for this meeting. Showing up was courtesy enough; putting on formal tights and collar would be obsequious. I had no reason to impress the man…because I had absolutely nothing to impress him with. He had nothing I wanted. Pausing only to empty my bladder and comb my hair, I left dressed just as I was: like a man who had recently been in a goat shed when somebody sneezed.

  I took my time on the way, too. So I had time to develop a dark suspicion as to what he might want to talk to me for, which quickly built itself into an ugly and plausible theory.

  Hattori was a banker. Bankers know all about very large sums of money. Did I know anyone who was connected in some way with very large sums of money? Had 1 not, indeed, recently roundly pissed off some people of that description? If they took a notion to have some sort of heavy weight dropped on my scrotum in retaliation, might not a banker be their chosen instrument?

  It was hard to sustain alarm. As far as I knew, I really was bulletproof, from a financial point of view: I had nothing to steal, no credit to ruin. If the Conrads wanted vengeance, they would just have to have me beaten or killed like civilized people.

  Nonetheless by the time I reached Hattori’s cabin I was paranoid enough to be feeling just a bit belligerent. I was going to stop just outside his door and take a few deep breaths to calm down, but the door recognized me and opened before I had the chance.

  I had expected his quarters to be impressive. They exceeded my expectations. They were tasteful, supremely comfortable despite a Zen simplicity, luxurious without ostentation. A Hawaiian slack-key guitar played at background level—Cyril Pahinui, I think. I was given an understanding chair, and offered a beverage impressive enough to denote respect, which I accepted.

  Banker Hattori was a pleasant-looking cobber. I’d have guessed his ancestry at a combination of something like Hawaiian or Japanese and Scottish or German. He was short by Ganymedean standards, a little short even by Terran reckoning, but well proportioned and clearly in excellent physical shape. Back on Terra, he might have sailed, climbed mountains, run marathons, flown an ultralight. Now that those joys were lost to him for the next twenty years, he probably played a competitive but noncontact sport, and worked out. But he was not hard to take the way some jocks can be, did not challenge.

  In person, his smile was as subtly off as it had been over the phone. The surprisingly few seconds he wasted on polite ritual and pleasantry gave me just enough time to figure out what was odd about it. He was clearly a man who smiled a lot, in his off hours—the placement and depth of the smile wrinkles at his mouth and eyes told you that—but he was unaccustomed to smiling like that at work.

  In retrospect, it’s actually pretty impressive that he didn’t drag it out longer than he did, surround it with even more of a big drumroll buildup. I couldn’t have blamed him if he had. He must indeed not have gotten to impart news of that particular sort very often.

  But he was a professional, and also I think a reasonably kindly man, so he merely teased me with it until I wanted to throttle him.

  “You have made no financial investment in this colony so far, Joel,” he began. We were Joel and Paul by then. “Looking over your records, I see that your motives in joining us were personal and emotional rather than economic. I would like to explain, briefly, why I think that was a mistake, and then—”

  “Paul, excuse me for interrupting, but your pump is sucking air. I have no capital at all.”

  He held up his hands. “Please—indulge me for just a moment. Think of it as a hypothetical. I did say ‘briefly’.”

  He really did have a nice smile. Odd or not. “You have the floor.”

  “I say I am the ship’s banker, and that is one of the things I do. I am also our colony’s chief financial adviser, and act as its representative.”

  I nodded, impressed. “Quite a job. It can’t be easy, arranging to borrow such stupendous sums, let alone handling them wisely.”

  “Let me give you an imaginary hypothetical conversation between me and a Terran banker, shortly before we left the Solar System.”

  He proceeded to act it
out, using different hokey but clever cartoon voices:

  “Banker: Greetings, gentleman merchant adventurer, hereafter known as GMA. I assume you’re here to ask about a loan, and I’m sorry to say money is very tight just now—

  “GMA: I have some lubricant with me.

  “Banker: Excuse me?

  “GMA: I can help solve tight money. I am here to discuss a loan, as you suggest. But I don’t want to borrow. I want to lend you money.”

  “Banker: Really? Well, now. That would certainly be agreeable, in principle. What sort of terms and conditions did you have in mind?”

  “GMA: Here is a check, representing gold dollars in Zurich.

  “Banker: How m—oh my, a great many.

  “GMA: A very great many.

  “Banker: I…see. And you want to give it to us.

  “GMA: I want you to invest it for me at compound interest. A rate of eleven percent a year would be acceptable.

  “Banker: That is a very high rate of interest!

  “GMA: Not if I undertake not to touch the money for twenty years…

  “Banker: Ah. I begin to see. But what’s in it for me—besides the usual fees? How does this loosen tight money?

  “GMA: You have the full use of that money for twenty years, and keep all the profits. All you have to do is invest soundly enough so the capital sum remains intact…a trick venture capitalists like yourself are rather good at.

  “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.