Variable Star

  His gaze shifted up and to his left slightly, and he began a conversation with someone in a corner of his screen. The audio cut off, and the image of his mouth fuzzed so that his lips could not be read. Very slick.

  I used the pause to get hold of myself, control my breath, and figure out what to say to cure his misconceptions. I even had a second or two to appreciate the surreality of having a phone conversation on a public slidewalk with one of the wealthiest living humans. Then I waited to seize control of the conversation the moment his eyes returned to mine.

  Waste of time; once again he simply ignored the fact that I was speaking. “If you do measure up, you will become a Conrad, with all that implies. If you don’t—well, you and your children will be Johnstons, but considerably better off than you would otherwise be. One of the pleasant things about this dynasty is that we can be liberal in pensioning off those who don’t quite make it.” I’d have tried to interrupt if there’d been any point. “If you turned out to have no real head for business but were tops in research, say, you might end up as Dr. Johnston, Chief of Kindelberger Research Laboratories. Or you might choose to simply lie in the sun in Cairns, and that can be arranged, too—we can afford to be generous. One moment.”

  Once again he spoke briefly and inaudibly with someone else, this time in his lower right-hand corner. This time when his gaze returned to me I was ready with a very loud, “Mr. Conrad, sir!”

  I think he literally didn’t know how to process insolence. Insufficient experience. It shut him up long enough for me to wedge four more words in edgewise. It took a surprising amount of courage to say them.

  “The answer is no.”

  He tried to frown and raise his eyebrows in surprise at the same time. Even Conrad of Conrad must have heard those words before—or he’d own everything, instead of only about a quarter of it. But he clearly hadn’t expected to hear them now, from me. “You mean you don’t want to marry my granddaughter?”

  Surprising him cheered me up. I reminded myself that I had once bitten this man. Hard, as I recalled. “Don’t misunderstand me. If Jinny wants to get married right away, we’ll get married. I’ll swing it somehow. But I do not intend to let someone else lay out my life according to some kind of time table and tell me when to wipe my nose—no matter how well the job pays. It’s not a question of measuring up. I’ll do my own measuring. And I’ll pay my own way. Thanks anyway, I appreciate it, I do appreciate it—but keep your free lunch, it’s not for me.”

  He glanced up and to the right, and this time forgot to mute his audio. “Tell the Secretary of State I will be a few minutes late.” I think he really did forget, because when he said those words his voice was flat and cold, and when he turned back to me it had become warm and fatherly “I admire spirit in a young man, I really do. We can’t hold this thing together with yes-men and flunkies at the top. Your answer convinces me more than anything else that little Jinnia Anne has made a wise choice. Nevertheless, I must convince you that we need you—and that you need training. We’ve got to crowd thirty years of training into the next ten—it’s been proved over and over again that, despite the wonders of modern geriatrics, young men must be allowed to make top decisions before age, experience, and caution grow on them like rust or mold. We must strive for a young man’s drive and an old man’s knowledge. Not easy.” He sighed. “And the young have all the time in the world. I wish I did. You want to sleep on it, I can see that. Looks like you could use the sleep, too.” Without taking his eyes from mine, he told someone, “Joel will call me at this code tomorrow at 0900 PST.”

  I started to ask him what code to use to reach Jinny—but he had already broken the connection.

  I tried redialing the number—and was told it was a null. I could guess it would remain one, at least for me, until tomorrow morning at nine.

  I went to Jinny’s apartment that night. She had moved out. No forwarding address. I caught one of her neighbors looking at me with pity. I agreed with her.

  I did not call Conrad at 0900 the next morning. For the next half hour, I was braced for him to call me, or have some flunky summon me, but he did not. For the rest of the morning, I was halfway prepared for two large men to bust in my door and drag me out to a black limo, but nothing of the sort occurred.

  A little after noon, there was incoming mail, a text-only message. It was a letter from Stony Brook, informing me without even a polite pretense of regret that my scholarship had been turned down. It didn’t say why, but it didn’t need to.

  Every single plan I had made for my life lay in ruins. No degree, no career, no future, no Jinny, no family—unless I consented to serve at stud while training to run a multiplanet dynasty. My only two lifestyle choices were to be a dole bludger, or one of the wealthiest gigolos alive.

  I wanted, very badly, to get so wasted that my previous bender would seem a mere preamble.

  Instead, I did not so much as drink a beer or take an acetaminophen. I spent the day taking care of a number of tedious details and formalities. I ate a healthy dinner, retired early, got a good night’s sleep. In the morning, I filled a backpack with the belongings and food I hadn’t disposed of the day before, locked the apartment behind me for the last time, and headed for a crosstown slidewalk.

  A little over seventeen hours later I persuaded Dr. Rivera (whose breath smelled like strawberries that day) that I was sober enough to apply for a slot on the waiting list for a berth on the RSS Sheffield. The expedition’s backers had no connection whatsoever with the Conrad dynasty; my application was accepted. That very afternoon, one of the colonists who’d already been accepted managed to kill himself on one last rock-climbing trip. The next day I was informed that I had been chosen to replace him.

  I was on my way to Immega 714, aka Peekaboo. Where I would live out my life on the planet called Brasil Novo.

  Six

  There is no wealth but life.

  —John Ruskin

  There were other candidates, of course, some of whom had been waiting years longer than I had, and a great many of them had more impressive skill sets or resources than I did, as well. But such decisions are rarely made fairly. What got me the berth—late starter, dead broke, and all—was a combination of three specific unfair advantages I had over my competitors.

  First, of course, was what would have been a disadvantage in just about any other enterprise, with the possible exception of prostitution: my extreme youth. I had only just become a legal adult. You want young people on a voyage expected to last nearly twenty years, ship time, and over ninety years Earth time—but not a lot of them volunteer for such a trip. If they do, and are turned down, they tend to go away and make another plan. It’s not really the sort of trip young people sit around and pine for, at least not now that the first waves have gone. Not happy healthy ones, anyway.

  The next important factor was sheer coincidence: the Sheffield’s boost rate. She would blast at a constant acceleration of exactly one-third gee—and I was from Ganymede. I’d be one of the few around who felt normal, for a change. For once, I’d be markedly better adapted, more effective, than those I was with. Even fewer Ganymedeans or Marsmen tended to sign up for star travel than did teenagers; they were just too busy.

  But what cinched the deal was, I was from Ganymede. That is, I was one of no more than a handful of star colonists who had any practical, hands-on experience whatsoever with…pause for ironic drumroll…dirt farming!

  You can’t blame Earthlings for not knowing much about that: despite what they named their planet, really good dirt is getting hard to come by, there. (God knows the Prophet wasted enough of it for them, may his concept of Hell actually appear, for just long enough to accept him.) But most Terrans haven’t even done any hydroponic farming, and the few who have are generally too rich to make good candidates for interstellar refugees. There is something to be said for scarcity. The total food-growing experience of most Sheffield passengers was almost indistinguishable from zero.

  And I had a to
n of it. Not theoretical experience, either. Not classroom knowledge, but the kind where bilging the course means you starve. Like most Ganymedeans, and many colonials in or on other worlds, I had spent a portion of my childhood turning earth, hauling manure, outguessing weather, making crops—performing some of the most ancient labor there is, using tools so primitive by Terrestrial standards that most of my fellow colonists probably could not have identified them without help. That’s what we were all so busy at, up there, if you’ve been wondering: turning rock into rutabagas, because they tasted better, and were also more nutritious.

  Go ahead, laugh—I did. The one aspect of my background that had always been guaranteed to elicit gales of laughter from those Terrans I admitted it to ended up being the deciding factor in sending me to the stars. Pretty good joke, even for fate.

  Even those three factors might not have been enough to get me aboard one of the very earliest colony ships—the Gaia, say—not at the last minute. For the first dozen voyages or so, crew and colonists alike were minutely scrutinized, rigorously tested, and meticulously matched according to carefully worked out social, psychological, and ergonomic principles (it says here), with hopeful alternates ready to fill a last-minute opening in any niche, long before the ship was ready to boost.

  But by now, almost two dozen ships had left the Solar System—and the supply of applicants was beginning to thin out just a little.

  Correction: the cream was beginning to thin out a little. There was still a copious supply of applicants…99.99 percent of whom were eliminated by gross tests. Half the remainder then changed their minds halfway through.

  Part of the problem was, hardly anybody still left wanted to pioneer, wanted to leave everything and everybody behind forever, and go plant beans by the sweat of their back under the miscolored light of an alien sun. It wasn’t really a question of pioneer spirit being just about gone, as jeremiahs were always complaining on the wire. Even way back in history, so-called pioneer spirit was usually the result of intolerable conditions back home more than anything else.

  That applied back at the very dawn of star travel. Volunteers to leave the Prophet’s Paradise were not hard to come by. But the Solar System was a fairly tolerable habitat for most people about now, particularly Terrans and O’Neillers. There was still plenty of frontier to go around, too, for those who hated crowds and regulations. The Asteroid Belt seemed unlikely to fill up anytime soon. To want to leave Sol altogether, forever, you almost had to be a born misfit, or a perpetual tourist, or as brave and curious as a bodhisattva. Most of the last category had signed up already and left in the first or second wave.

  I’ve omitted two other historically significant categories of pioneer. Fortunately, things had not yet reached the point where colony planners willingly accepted members of the first category: perpetual fuckups. But this would be the third ship so far to carry transportees—prisoners, guaranteed by their various sentencing jurisdictions to be “nonviolent,” “suitably skilled,” “highly motivated” “volunteers.” But there would be just over two dozen of them, five percent of the colony’s total population, and the majority would be political prisoners rather than predators. Neither of the previous transportee experiments had sent back reports of any problems so far.

  One other thing I’ve speculated about. I said that the Immega 714 colony’s underwriters were not allied with the Conrads. In fact, they were instead associated with the Kangs and the da Costas, both houses that were hereditary enemies of the Conrads. The RSS Sheffield’s designers, the prestigious firm of Ray, Guy and Douglas, belonged to neither house—but were all notorious defectors from the giant Conrad subsidiary Starship Enterprises MDA.

  I knew nothing of the history between the three houses, and still don’t—but sometimes I wonder whether a deep enough background check on me mightn’t have turned up the information that the Conrad family had put the Black Spot on me…and why. Are relationships between financial empires really petty enough that some Chinese or Brazilian exec way beyond his Peter Principle point might have upchecked my application purely to spite Richard Conrad?

  I don’t know. Do you?

  I expected something like a vocational/educational boot camp on the ground—several rigorous weeks at least of cramming, training, testing, observation, evaluation, and ultimately final placement in my proper place on the great ship’s table of organization.

  I didn’t even get orientation indoctrination. They called me at a little after 7:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time in White Rock—near the end of business hours in Brussels, where the decision had been made—to tell me I’d been selected to take passage on the Sheffield. By nine that night, Pacific time, I was aboard her.

  Where it was 6:00 A.M. local ship’s time, since the Sheffield was using the same Central European Time that Brussels did, for reasons left as an exercise for the reader who likes easy lifting.

  I emerged from the airlock braced, I thought, for a barrage of new sensory data and impressions, expecting the unexpected insofar as that phrase has any meaning. Which is not much: I was definitely sideswiped by the smell.

  It’s possible to cut your nose out of your breathing circuit completely, and I did at once. But that aroma was just pungent enough to taste with the tongue, and there’s no bypass for that, short of tracheotomy. I’d have stopped in my tracks…if I had not been so busy bracing my brain for new impressions that I’d neglected to have the more useful portion of my body maintain a hold on the airlock door. Having thus committed myself, I kept on sailing forward, with the stately inevitable grace of a runaway hospital bed on ice, until I crashed into a naked bald man.

  I’m a colonial. We maintain some conservative (public) attitudes about sexuality, by contemporary System standards, but at the same time, being on the frontier we tend to be somewhat more practical and matter-of-fact than most Earthlings are about nudity. It was the bald part that startled me.

  Thanks to the unnamed ladies who did us all the favor of tearing the Prophet into little bloody gobbets and bits of bone, it is finally once again permissible to do biological research, so happily all baldness is voluntary today, and is not a popular choice. And extremes of body weight are becoming so rare, one body looks much like another from a distance nowadays—so why would a man who spent time nude choose to shave off his only visual identifier? Was he antisocial? Or just self-effacing?

  Neither. “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, and managed to brake us to a halt without sending either of us drifting. His speaking voice was just audible, despite our proximity.

  I became aware that I was holding him in something very like a lover’s four-limbed embrace, and forced myself not to flinch. I was the stranger here, he was my host. But I hoped our sexual orientations matched. “So?”

  He let go of me, again without setting me adrift. His expression was no clue at all. “You’re thinking, if it smells like this after only a few months of occupancy, what is it going to smell like in twenty years?”

  I had to admit I had been on the way to formulating that very thought when I’d crashed. “Right in one.”

  “And the answer is, in far less than twenty years you will be prepared to swear, truthfully, that this ship has no smell at all, other than local cooking and your wife’s perfume.” Once again, his voice was just barely as loud as it needed to be.

  I wasn’t convinced. But I didn’t need to be. “What is it I’m smelling, exactly?”

  “Us,” he said simply.

  I tentatively half opened a nostril, and frowned. “I know what people smell like, what a ship smells like, and there’s more than that here.”

  “You know what Ganymedeans smell like, and Terrans in a limited portion of a third of its northern hemisphere. This isn’t just everybody, it’s everybody all together. And more of ’em than you’ve ever been shut in with before. Terrans from all over that varied planet, Loonies, O’Neillers, Martians, Ganymedeans, Belters—all at the same time, in combination. Fewer than two dozen time
s in history have all those smells been mingled, in large amounts—and the other ones have left the Solar System already.”

  “Oh.”

  “No one group’s smell is intrinsically better or worse than any others’, and you might very well find the personal body odor of an individual from just about any racial, political, or social group aboard perfectly agreeable to you. But put them all together, in one place, and ancient instinct makes you uneasy. Think of it as one of the last remaining traces of our physical predisposition to xenophobia and racism. Like the appendix.”

  I had never seen anybody real talk for so long without even momentarily developing a facial expression. “I hope you’re right,” I said politely.

  “Also, the two decks immediately above this one are both agricultural decks. We’re sort of in the bilge of Noah’s Ark here.”

  “I apologize for crashing into you.”

  He shook his head—slowly, the way one does in free fall. “All you did was fail to realize you would need someone to catch you, and that was so close to inevitable that I was waiting there specifically to catch you. Shuttles are always overpressured: everyone comes sailing in the door. Apology respectfully returned unopened.”

  I shook my own head even slower, to underline the point I was about to make. “You don’t understand. I was born in free fall. I could at least have docked more gracefully.”

  He nodded, even more slowly. Was that a twinkle in his eye? Or a tic? “Ah,” he said. “In that case, you are a dimwit. And an oaf. But you can’t help being either one; so apology is still unnecessary. Come with me, please.”

  And as I gaped, he turned over, grabbed a rung on the wall with one hand, and jaunted off down the corridor, at a pace suitable for dimwits and oafs.

  In my embarrassment, I nearly mortified myself completely by bleating out “Wait!” like some fool groundhog. To say “wait” to someone who has just jaunted away from you in zero gee is basically as sensible as saying it to someone who just stepped off a roof: barring unreasonable effort, they’re gone. Barely in time, I managed to end the “W—” with “—hat about my luggage?”