Variable Star (14 page)

“You haven’t even heard me play, yet.”

He nodded. “And the agony is delicious. I’ll leave you to sett—oh, my word! I don’t see them!”

“What?”

“Tell me you didn’t entrust your instruments to your luggage?”

“I didn’t have any oth—”

“Don’t panic yet!” he cried, sprang for the door so fast it barely had time to iris out of his way, and used both hands to swing himself out into the direction of traffic. “There may still be time,” his voice said as it dopplered away.

A hand closed on my shoulder. The bone held. “Do not worry, friend Joel,” Balvovatz said. “A snitch in time saves mine.” He let go before I would have had to scream, whacked me on that shoulder blade, and drifted away again. Somehow I retained my grip on the overhead light, but it took me a moment to stabilize again.

“He’s right,” Herb assured me. “It takes time to wreck luggage, and they always save the best stuff for last.”

“And they’re all afraid of Sol,” Pat put in.

“They should be,” Herb said. “They’re staying behind—so he doesn’t need them alive.”

“This is your bunk over here, Joel,” Pat told me. “Right above my own. Unless you care to discuss the matter with pistols?”

“Knives better,” Balvovatz said.

“Fine with me,” I said. Once we were under way it would be the upper bunk on the right. “I’ve had a preference for the upper ever since figured out that farts are heavier than air.”

He grinned evilly (I don’t care what my spell-checker says, of course there’s such a word. (“In an evil manner”—okay?) “Not mine.”

I carefully jaunted, in a direction soon to be known as “down,” over to my bed, and docked with it. I’m not sure why, since I had no luggage or other belongings to secure. I guess just to symbolize taking ownership. It didn’t wait to find out. The moment I grabbed it and started using it to brake my arriving mass, one of the two (
two?
) folding angle-braces intended to support it under acceleration tore right out of the plasteel bulkhead. All three bolts—and two of the bolts on the other support. The bed immediately rotated around the remaining bolt, about sixty degrees clockwise, and jammed to a halt against the top of the folded-up lower bunk. This left me dangling from the other end of it like a tyro, trying desperately to clutch bed as well as bedclothes and avoid the indignity of being thrown altogether. I never even noticed banging my face against the wall.

The shriek of frictionally stressed plasteel, and my scrabbling-rat noises, gave way to an omnipresent rather glutinous sound, which was like silence, but different. As I stabilized myself, I realized it was the sound of men not laughing.

I turned to face the room and made, very loudly, the sound of a man not murdering anyone, yet.

Pat Williamson pointed to a spot just “below” me. I glanced down, and in a moment realized that his own bed was
not
folded up against the bulkhead. It was duct-taped to it. His had torn out of the wall, too. I could see the bolt holes. They were
not
empty. Each contained a little shiny-ended bolt stump. All six had snapped off clean. I looked, and all five of my failed bolts were the same. I looked back to Pat, and raised my eyebrows inquisitively.

He spread his hands, palm up. He wanted to explain, but couldn’t do it louder than he was not laughing at me.

Balvovatz took it. “Well come into
Shuffled
, Joel. Do not worry. Is warrantee. Air leaks out, just say so. Kang sends more from Terra.”

Maybe my expression made Herb stop wanting to laugh. “There’s still time,” he said softly “You can still jump ship and go back down to Terra, if you’re one of those fussbudgets who expects everything to
work
. It’s not too late to be sensible.”

I closed my eyes. All I could see was Terra…with Jinny’s face. “Yes it is,” I said. “Where’s the duct tape?”

I
later
learned the bunk-support bolts had been specified by a Kang Cartel engineer, and supplied by a da Costa Associates subsidiary. Both halves of the financial Siamese-twin behemoth that was underwriting this little interstellar venture. The desk that wouldn’t interface properly with my PDC or phone despite nominal system compatibility for the next two days was the other way round: da Costa design, Kang manufacturing. And the blame for the complex cluster of systems failures that combined to keep all my luggage
except
my four saxophones (Sol Short rescued them, somehow) from catching up to me for another two weeks was, I was eventually able to establish, divided up roughly evenly between the two houses.

Fortunately nudity was not taboo aboard the
Sheffield
. It was not commonplace either—but nobody got upset if I sat around the laundry room naked while waiting for my only set of clothing to dry, each day, or went to and from the ’fresher without a robe. (There were ship-issue jumpsuits and robes I could have had. I preferred skin. They were, visibly, the plasteel bolts of the clothing world.)

I did end up with a lot of time to reflect that most of the Conrad empire products I had ever purchased had worked pretty reliably. And I retained just enough sanity to realize this was probably an omen of some kind, perhaps even an unfavorable one.

But I had told Herb the truth. It was way too late to change my mind. The center of my personal Solar System had turned out to be a dangerously variable star. It was imperative to break free of her pull, while I still could, and go somewhere else, far far away.

J
inny phoned two days later, about eight hours before we left.

Theoretically she should not have been able to. I’d contributed my phone to the ship’s recycler on arrival, and gotten a new one—under a false name, using nonexistent credit, and paying a premium for a
super
-unlisted code. That account would vanish like a bubble when the first bill went unpaid, of course. But by then I expected I would no longer need one. I only needed it now to say good-bye to a few friends and acquaintances, and to dispose of my few remaining assets on Ganymede.

I
think
that might just have been good enough to foil, or at least slow, a Federation agent hunting me. Against a Conrad, it was a gesture. As I slipped in my earbead, I reflected that she could probably have called me five minutes after I’d activated the phone. Her first words practically admitted as much.

“Damn it, Joel, I admire your stubbornness. I really do. You’ve held out to the last possible second, I give you that. But we are
out of time now
. Stop this foolishness and come home, this fucking minute!”

I’d known this call would come. It wasn’t surprise, even at the word I had never heard her use, that kept me from answering her for several seconds. It was just her face. There on the inside of my wrist, thumbnail sized, poor quality 2-D image. I had never seen her so clearly or so vividly.

She had never looked more beautiful. I wanted to eat my whole forearm. Her image cut off at her waist, but I could see the rest of her almost as clearly in my mind’s eye. What blurred it a bit was that she was wearing an outfit considerably more expensive than anything I had ever seen her in. That realization restored the power of speech to me.

“I can’t, Jinny. It’s too late. We were out of time yesterday. The last boat has—”

“You idiot, I can be there to get you in two hours! How long do you need to pack your four saxo—”

“Bring me where, did you say?”

“—phones and your one spare—what?”

“Where exactly is this home you speak of? Certainly not your apartment. Some mansion in Nepal accessible only by copter? A secret village at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? A stealthed palace at L-1 or—no, why would you care about saving fuel—somewhere in space, then? Or perhaps a few kilometers below the apparent surface of Jupiter, there floats a—”

She overrode me by yelling, “
I deserve that
!” I was so surprised I stopped talking. “And I ask you to believe that I have already administered it to myself, and to trust that I will continue to do so, okay? You can kick me all you like, I agree I have it coming—but you won’t be able to if I don’t come get you and bring you back home, and even my window is closing!”

I shook my head wearily “I meant what I said. Where is ‘home’ for us? No place we’ve ever been. No place I’ve ever been. I don’t think we even mean the same things by the word—or have any clear idea what the discrepancies are, either one of us.”

“Joel, I didn’t have any choice, why can’t you see that? I
couldn’t
tell you, not until—”

“I know that.”

“You do? Then—”

“Jinny, we’ve never really met.”

“We
can
. We
will
meet, and we’ll love each other—we already know how—and the money won’t make any damn difference, none at all.”

I had to grab something with my left hand just then to keep myself from colliding with a bed: I’d been drifting free since her incoming call had caused me to lose my handhold on my own desk. I guess from her perspective it looked like I was turning away. “Joel, I love you!” she cried.

I started to regain eye contact…and paused. I found myself looking around my room. My cruddy little dump of a room, just a bit worse than what I’d have expected as a freshman at university, possessed of few and feeble amenities, shared with three other smelly hairy creatures. In a place where nearly everyplace smelled faintly like feet, and
all
the water tasted like a school hallway water fountain, and the food aspired to be two-star, and you always saw the same people. The
Sheffield
would in fact be remarkably like another nineteen years of our courtship as we had known it until recently. Freshman year of university, forever. The only thing the big tin can had to recommend it, really, was that it was going to leap the Big Deep—

I yanked the phone back up to my eyes. “Jinny, come with me!”

Shocked silence. On both sides. I recovered first.

“Right now. Without a suitcase. Without a pot. If the money really doesn’t matter, walk away—come homestead with me on the other end of the rainbow. I know you don’t know how, any more than I know about your world—but I’ll teach you. Trust me: it’s a
lot
easier to grow potatoes than empires. It’s more satisfying to get in a good crop than to play with billions of people’s lives and fortunes. It leaves you time to make babies, and to pay attention to them, and to occasionally notice each other past the babies and make more of them. For God’s sake, Jinny, you remember the song. Let’s die on the way to the stars! Together…”

I knew exactly how stupid and romantic and naïve my words were. I had never intended to speak them—aloud. They left my mouth with the force and honesty of vomit, but with the same despair as well. Without a particle of hope.

That was only born when a full second had gone by and she still had not answered yet. At birth, it was tinier than a lepton’s shadow at noon. It took less than another second to grow into something large enough to choke on. I was beginning to worry by the time she broke the silence.

But the problem solved itself, when my heartbeat ceased. “God damn you, Joel, you gave me every reason to believe you were an adult. With a pair of balls, and at least half a brain. You
cannot
be this cowardly and stupid and prideful, I won’t tolerate it. I’ve invested too much time in you! I’m coming up there, and I’m—Joel? Joel!”

My arms had gone limp with cessation of pulse, of course: she was looking at my left hip. Purely from reflex politeness I pulled my wrist back up. So then I had to say something, and thus began breathing again.

“Jinny, listen to me. Please. I honestly don’t know if I have what it takes to be a Conrad, I admit that. But I don’t know if
anybody
does, so I’m not at all afraid to find out. What I do know is, it’s not something I
want
to be. I guess it seems self-evident to you that any rational man would. So you won’t want an irrational husband.” She tried to interrupt, and for once I overrode her. “If you think even your gran’ther has enough proctors and bailiffs to delay the launch of a Kang/da Costa Cartel starship by five minutes so you can arrest a junior apprentice farmer for breach of promise, you’re being irrational yourself. Now, listen to this last part, and don’t interrupt until I’m done, and then you can call me any dirty names you like until they light the candle in eight hours and reception goes to hell for a while. Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

She was deploying her ultimate weapon and we both knew it: her voice was trembling on the edge of tears, and they were absolutely genuine.

My own voice tightened. “Jinny—Jinny Hamilton—you were my first love. You may be the last. You certainly are the last I will have in this Solar System. For what it’s worth, I forgive you for not telling me who—what—you really were. I understand, I really do: you had no choice, no other way to play it. I am sorry, genuinely sorry, that you wasted your investment. Maybe
nobody
is as sorry as I am. I’m pretty certain I’m in the top five, anyway. All I can tell you is that the prospectus you were offered was complete and accurate in every particular. I answered every question I was asked. Honestly.” I took a deep breath. “My own investments haven’t done too well lately, either. Thanks for teaching me to dance, and listening to me play my music. Really. Good luck in your future investments. Maybe I’ll see you in a couple of hundred years, and we can swap notes.” Anything else to say? Yes—but all of it angry. Delete it. It was way too late for anger to serve any purpose worth the indignity “Your turn.”

The pause this time was probably as long as the earlier one, but with no hope in it, it went by faster.

“Good luck, Joel. I really am sorry.” She let go on the last word, cried so hard the screen image became a sideways close-up of her scrunched-up left eye.

Somehow I held on myself. “I know, honey. Me, too. Really.”

“Good-bye.”

The phone was dead.

For some reason I was not. So I went looking for strong drink, and did the best I could. By the time we left the Solar System I was far from feeling no pain—I was probably in maximum emotional pain, and in considerable physical discomfort from being loaded in free fall—but I was momentarily too stupid to mind either. Terra sure looked pretty, shimmering there in the simulated window, and slow shrinking didn’t spoil the effect at all. In fact, the smaller she got, the prettier she looked.