Variable Star

  Her eyes were locked on mine, now. It was important that I get this.

  “Do you see, Joel? For the first time in his life Harun got an accurate picture of what the common people honestly thought…more than just what they thought, he experienced firsthand what life was really like for them, came to understand the things they didn’t even think about because they simply assumed them…and their perspective informed and improved his own thinking from then on. He became one of the most beloved rulers in history—his name means Aaron the Just, and how many rulers do you suppose have ever been called that? One time fifteen thousand men followed him into battle against one hundred twenty-five thousand—and whipped them, left forty thousand legionaries dead on the ground and the rest running for their lives. He lived to a ripe old age, and when he died the whole Muslim world mourned. Okay?”

  I was nodding. I understood every word she said. I had no idea what she was driving at.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. Now, imagine you’re a young Persian girl in Baghdad. I see your mouth opening, and so help me God, if a wisecrack should come out of it…that’s better. You’re a poor-but-decent young Persian girl, working hard at some menial trade, struggling to better yourself, and so is—”

  A strange alto voice suddenly spoke, seemingly from the empty space between Jinny and me, just a little too loudly. I was so startled I nearly jumped out of my seat. “Your vehicle’s hull temperature has dropped sufficiently to permit safe debarking now, Miss Jinny.”

  If I was startled, Jinny was furious. I could tell because her face became utterly smooth, and her voice became softer in pitch and tone and slower in speed as she said, “There are only four letters in the word ‘wait,’ Smithers. There seems little room for ambiguity.”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Jinny,” Smithers said at once, and although there was no noticeable cessation of any background hiss or power hum, somehow he was gone.

  “And so,” she went on before I could ask who Smithers was, “is your boyfriend…call him Jelal. The two of you are very much in love, and want to get married, but you just don’t have the means. And then one day—”

  “Wait,” I said, “I think I see where this is going…sort of. One day the beggar who lives next door comes over, right, and it turns out he’s incredibly rich and he says he’s been eavesdropping and he understands our problem and he offers Jelal a—”

  I stopped talking. The penny had just dropped. All of sudden, I actually did see where this was going, at least in general terms. “Oh…my…God…” I breathed. “I’ve got it just backward, don’t I?”

  Her eyes told me I was right. “There wasn’t any other way, do you see? Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton, I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, the whole point was to—”

  “You’re Harun al-Rashid!”

  “Well, his granddaughter,” she said miserably.

  I was stunned. “You’re rich.”

  She nodded sadly. “Very.”

  Tumblers began to click into place. I tried to think it through. “You’re not even an orphan, are you?”

  Headshake. “I couldn’t let anyone at Fermi meet my parents. They’re…pretty well known. Hiring a pair of Potemkin parents for social purposes seemed grotesque.”

  “And you came to Fermi, instead of Lawrence Campbell or one of the other top prep schools, so you could—what? See how the other half lives?”

  “Well…in part.”

  I was ranging back through my memories, adding things up with the benefit of hindsight, understanding little things that had puzzled me. Silver’s previously unsuspected power. Jinny’s extraordinary confidence and poise, so unexpected in an orphan. How, whenever someone brought up one of the really fabulous vacation destinations—Tuva, or the Ice Caves of Queen Maud Land in the Antarctic, or Harriman City on Luna—Jinny always seemed to have seen a good documentary about it recently. The way, when we ate pistachios, she always threw away the ones that were any trouble at all to open—

  I became aware that Jinny was absolutely still and silent, studying my face intently for clues to what 1 was thinking. It seemed like a good idea; maybe I should get a mirror and try it. I thought about banging my head against the dashboard to reboot my brain.

  Instead I looked at her and spread my hands. “I’m going to need some time to process this,” I admitted.

  “Of course,” she said at once. “Sleep on it. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my real father. And meantime I’ll answer any questions you have—no more evasions, no more white lies.”

  I didn’t feel as though I knew enough to formulate a coherent question yet. No, wait, I did have one—purely for form’s sake; I didn’t see how the answer could help me. Still—

  “What is it really?”

  She blinked. “Crave pardon?”

  “You said, ‘Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton…’ So that’s not your real name. Okay, I’ll bite. What is?”

  “Oh, dear,” she said.

  “‘Jinny Oh.’ Chinese, dear?”

  Not amused. “Joel—”

  “Come on, how bad could it be? Look, let’s meet for the first time all over again. Hi there, I’m Joel Johnston, of Ganymede. And you are—?”

  She stared at me, blank-faced, for so long I actually began to wonder whether she was going to tell me. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her hesitate about anything before, much less this long. One of the many things I liked about her was that she always knew what she wanted to be doing next. Finally she closed her eyes, took in a long breath, released it…squared her shoulders and opened her eyes and looked me right in the eye.

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Johnston. I’m Jinny Conrad.”

  For a second or two nothing happened. Then my eyebrows and my pulse both rose sharply. It couldn’t be. “Not—”

  “Of Conrad,” she confirmed.

  It couldn’t be.

  “It’s true,” she said. “My father is Albert Conrad. Richard Conrad’s third son.”

  “You’re Jinnia Conrad of Conrad,” I said.

  She nodded once.

  I didn’t quite faint—but it was good that I was sitting down, and strapped in. My head drained like a sink; all the blood and most of the brain matter dropped at once to my feet.

  Very rich, she’d said. Yeah, and the Milky Way is rather roomy!

  The Conrad industrial/informational empire was larger than the Rothschild family, the Hanseatic League, Kinetic Sciences Interplanetary, and Rolls-Daiwoo combined, and only slightly smaller than the Solar System. Nothing like it could have existed before the advent of space travel—and perhaps it became inevitable in the first minute of Year One, as Leslie LeCroix was still shutting down the Pioneer’s engine on the virgin surface of Luna. The Conrads were a 150-year dynasty, every member of whom wielded wealth, power, and influence comparable to that of the Hudson’s Bay Company or Harriman Enterprises in their day. Their combined interests ranged from the scientific outpost on Mercury, to Oort Cloud harvest—to interstellar exploration as far as sixty-five light-years away. At that time there were well over a dozen starships either outgoing or incoming, and eight had already returned safely (out of a hoped-for eighteen), five of them bearing the riches of Croesus in one form or another. Three of those big winners had been Conrad ships.

  She gave me a minute—well, some indeterminate period. Finally she said, “Look, I have to land, now. Smithers wasn’t completely out of line to remind me. We…don’t like to hover, here. It’s just a bit conspicuous.”

  “Okay,” I said, to be saying something. “Where’s here?”

  “In a minute. Silver: I relieve you.”

  “Yes, Jinny.” She took the stick and we dropped three thousand meters rapidly enough to give me heart palpitations.

  Which nearly became cardiac arrest when the ground came rushing up, and she failed to decelerate hard enough to stop in time! We were going to crash—

  —right through the imaginary glacier—

  —and into a
deep valley, its floor lush and green and inviting and, best of all, still hundreds of meters below us. She landed us, without a bump, in a small clearing that from the air had looked indistinguishable from dozens of others, to me at least. But the moment she shut down, hoses and cables sprouted from the forest floor and began nurturing Silver. Ahead of us was a huge boulder, the size of a truck; as I watched, a large doorway appeared in it, facing us.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  “I ask again: Where is here?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Isn’t anywhere.”

  I turned my head just enough to be looking at her out of the corner of my eye. “Here isn’t anywhere.”

  “Right.”

  I closed my eyes. If I had just stayed back home on the farm, by now I might have been making enough of a crop to afford a hired man. That would have freed me up to do some courting—in a frontier society with considerably looser rules about premarital experimentation than contemporary Terra.

  But I knew for a fact there was no one remotely like Jinny anywhere on Ganymede. Had known it for a fact, that is, even before learning that she was more well off than the Secretary General…

  No, I couldn’t take that in just yet. “I really really wish I could think of something more intelligent to say than, ‘What do you mean, “here isn’t anywhere”?’”

  She shrugged. “You tell me. If a place does not appear on any map, anywhere…if it doesn’t show in even the finest-grain satellite photos…if no wires or roads or paths run to it, no government takes mail to it or taxes from it, and nobody is from there…in what sense does it exist? There is no here. Just us.”

  “Here.”

  “Exactly.”

  I nodded and dismissed the matter. “And this is your home?”

  “One of them.”

  I nodded. “And your apartment on Lasqueti, of course. It must be weird having two homes.”

  She didn’t say a word or move a muscle.

  I turned to look at her. “More than two?”

  Silence. Stillness.

  “How many homes do you have, Jinny?”

  In a very small voice, she said, “Eight. Not counting the Lasqueti place.”

  “So?”

  “But three of them are off-planet!”

  “Naturally,” I agreed. “One winters in space.”

  “Oh, Joel, don’t be that way.”

  “Okay. Let’s go in.”

  She looked distressed. “Uh…if you are going to be that way, maybe it might he better to do it out here, before we go in.”

  I nodded again. Mr. Agreeable. “Sure. That makes sense. Okay.” Then, big: “How could you do this to me, Jinny?”

  She didn’t flinch or cringe or duck. “Think it through, Joel. Sleep on it. Tomorrow morning, you tell me: How could I have not done it?”

  I began an angry retort, and swallowed it. I had to admit I had not begun to think this thing through yet, and Dad always drilled into me that the time to open your mouth came after that. Besides, I already had a glimmering of what she meant. I filled my lungs, emptied them slowly and fully, and said, “You’re right. Okay I’m prepared to be polite, now. Let’s go inside.”

  “You won’t have to be,” she said. “I promise you won’t see any family at all until tomorrow morning. I made them guarantee that. This is our Prom Night.”

  I frowned. “I wish I had an overnight bag. Change of socks, fresh shirt, my razor—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and unlocked the doors.

  I let it go. Probably the contents of the slop chest here were finer than anything I owned. “All right. Invite me up to your place.”

  “Down, actually.”

  We opened our doors and got out. The roof of imaginary glacier did not exist from its underside; the moon and stars shone unimpeded overhead, a neat trick. But this was definitely not a natural ecology. The air was skin temperature, with an occasional breeze just slightly warmer. It smelled of dirt and green growing things, with just a little ozone tingle as if it had rained recently, though it had not. The loamy earth beneath my feet was rich, almost quivering with life; any farmer I knew back on Ganymede would have desperately envied it. Acres of it, at least a meter deep: wild, uncultivated, supporting nothing but trees, scrub, and inedible berries. Just lying there. Conspicuous nonconsumption. Start getting used to it, old son. I thought of saying something, but I knew Jinny would never understand. It’s funny: the very word “Terra” means “dirt”—and not one hungry terrestrial in a thousand has a clue how important, how precious it is. I shook my head.

  The door in that huge rock ahead of the car was indeed an elevator. Back when I was four I’d been in an elevator that nice. In Stockholm, when Dad came Earthside to pick up the Nobel. Like that one, this elevator had a live human operator, of advanced age and singular ugliness, who made it a point of pride to remain unaware of our existence: he happened to be leaving as we stepped in, and took us down a good fifty meters with him. The car descended with unhurried elegance. It gave me time to think about the kind of people who would live deep underground, in a place that did not exist…and still feel the need to pull the sky over them like a blanket. “Paranoid” didn’t seem to cover it.

  By happy chance the operator decided to pause and check the operation of the doors just as he was passing the floor we wanted; so intent was his inspection, we were able to escape unnoticed. This left us in a kind of reception room, so lavish as to remind me of the lobby of that hotel back in Stockholm. The carpet was grass. But I didn’t get time to study the room; nearly at once I felt a tugging and turned to see a man older and uglier than the elevator operator trying to take my cloak. With some misgivings I let him have it, and that seemed to have been a mistake, for he simply handed it off to a small boy who suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision, and then literally threw himself at my feet and began loosening my shoes. I…reacted. If we’d been under normal gravity, on Ganymede or Mars, I think I’d have kicked his teeth in; as it was he went sprawling. But he took a shoe with him as he went, a trick I admired as much as I resented it. Jinny giggled. I recovered, removed the other shoe myself with as much dignity as I could muster, and handed it to him as he approached again. He reunited it with its twin, bowed deeply, and backed away.

  I turned to Jinny and forgot whatever I’d been about to say. Her own cloak and shoes had been magicked away by tall elves, and she looked…how do girls do that, anyway? One minute just be there, and the next, be there. They can do it without moving a muscle, somehow.

  “Good evening, Miss Jinny,” said a baritone voice from across the room. “Welcome home.”

  Standing just inside a door I had failed to notice was a man nearly as tall as me with a shaved head, wearing a suit that cost more than my tuition at Fermi Junior. Like us, and the various elves I’d seen, he wore no shoes. Presumably they would cobble us all new ones in the night.

  “Thank you, Smithers. This is—damn. Excuse me.” She lifted her phone-finger to her ear, listened for a few moments, frowned, said “Yes,” and broke the connection. “I’ve got to go, for just a few minutes. Get Joel situated, would you please, Smithers? I’m sorry, Joel—I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  She was gone.

  Somehow he was at my side, without having covered the intervening distance. “Good evening, Mr. Johnston. I’m Alex Rennick, master of the house at present. Welcome to the North Keep. Let me show you to your room, first, and then perhaps I can give you the ten-credit tour.”

  His eyes were gray, almost mauve. His head wasn’t shaved, it was depilated. Despite his height, a dozen subconscious cues told me he was earthborn. He was fit, and had an air of great competence and great confidence. I’m pretty good at guessing ages, given that everybody looks alike now, and I couldn’t pin him down any closer than the thirty-to-sixty zone. I found it interesting that he knew my last name without having bee
n given it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rennick. You are most kind. Please call me Joel.”

  “And I am Alex. Will you come this way, Joel?”

  I thought of an ancient joke, put it out of my mind, and followed him from the room. As I did I promised myself, solemnly, that no matter what wonders I was shown here, I would not boggle. No matter how staggeringly opulent the place proved to be, I would not let it make me feel inferior. My father had been a Nobel laureate, and my mother a great composer—how many of these people could say as much?

  “Do you have any questions to start?” he asked as we went.

  “Yes, Alex,” I said, memorizing the route we were taking. “Why does Jinny call you Smithers?”

  “I have no idea.” His tone was absolutely neutral, but somehow I knew I’d touched a sore spot. Either it bothered him not to know—or the answer was humiliating.

  “Ah,” I said, lowering my pitch. “To drive you crazy, then.” I was curious to see how he’d respond to an invitation to a jocular, between-us-men discussion of his mistress—whom I personally knew to be a handful and a half.

  He sidestepped effortlessly. “That would be redundant, I’m afraid.”

  “Have you worked here long?”

  “Yes.”

  I see. “How many people live here in…the North Keep, you said?”

  “The number varies.”

  His stinginess with information was beginning to mildly irritate me. “No doubt. But surely as master of the house you know its current value.”

  I halfway expected him to say “Yes, I do,” and clam up. But he wasn’t that kind of childish. Instead he used jujitsu. “There are eighty-four persons resident in the North Keep at the moment. By midnight the number will be ninety-two, and shortly before breakfast time tomorrow it is expected to drop back to eighty-nine.”

  “Ah.” I hesitated in phrasing my next question. “And how many of those are employees?”

  “All but four. Five tomorrow.” Yipes! Yes, Conrads lived here, all right. “Here we are.” He stopped before a door that looked no different from any of several dozen we’d passed along the way, and tapped the button which on Terra is for some reason always called a knob.