The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Surprise, Surprise

Jade leaned back in the yielding warmth of the form-shaping chair, suddenly weary and drained. She turned off the computer on her lap. The interview with Professor Goodman was on its way to Selene. The final interview. Her long trek after Sam Gunn’s story was at last finished.

She felt as if she had been struggling all her life to reach the top of a mountain, and now that she had done it, there was nothing to see, nothing more to do. The challenge had been met, and now she was surrounded by emptiness. There was no feeling of triumph, or even accomplishment. She was merely tired and empty and alone on a pinnacle with nowhere else to go.

She leaned her head back into the chair’s comforting warmth. The dormitory room that the university had given her was more luxurious than most of the hotels she had slept in. The chair adjusted itself to her body shape and temperature, enfolding her like a gently pulsating womb. How pleasant it would be, Jade thought, to just close my eyes and sleep—forever.

But the smart screen on the wall of the small room showed a view of Titan’s spaceport out on the murky surface, and the sleek torch ship that had landed there only minutes earlier. The retractable dome was rising silently over it. Soon the ship would be disgorging its payload of passengers and cargo. In another two days it would start back toward the big scientific base in Mars orbit. And Jade would be on it, heading back toward Selene, toward the habitats crowding the Earth-Moon system, toward the world of her birth.

And what then? she asked herself. What then?

She drifted into an exhausted dreamless sleep. When the phone buzzed it startled her; her nerves jumped as if an emergency klaxon were hooting.

Her laptop had slipped to the thickly carpeted floor. Thinking idly that the university life had all sorts of unwritten perquisites, Jade picked up the tiny box and pressed its ON switch.

Spence Johansen’s grinning face filled the little screen.

“Hello there,” he said.

Jade waited for him to go on, knowing that this was either a recorded message or a call from the Earth-Moon area, hours distant even at the lightspeed of video communications.

“Hey, Jade, say something! I’m here. On Titan. Up in the flight lounge. Surprised?”

She nearly dropped the computer again.

“Spence? You’re here? It’s really you?”

“Sure, I just arrived.”

“I’ll be right up!”

Jade tossed the computer onto her bed and dashed for the door, all fatigue forgotten, all the weariness melted away. By the time she tore through the corridors and rode the power stairs up to the flight lounge, Spence already had a pair of tall frosted drinks sitting on the bar, waiting for her.

She threw herself into his arms. Their long passionate kiss drew admiring stares and a few low whistles from the other new arrivals and regulars in the lounge.

“Whatever … how did you … why … ?” Jade had a million questions bubbling within her.

Johansen smiled, almost sheepishly. “Ol’ Jefferson got kind of boring after you went away. I missed you, Jade. Missed you a lot.”

“So much that you came all the way out here?”

He shrugged.

She perched on the bar-stool next to his, ignoring the drink standing before her, all her attention on this man who had traveled across half the solar system. To be with her.

“I missed you, too, Spence.”

“Did you?”

“Enormously.” She suddenly grinned maliciously. “Considering where we are, I might say titanically.”

Spence Johansen threw his head back and laughed a genuine, hearty, full-throated laugh. And Jade knew that she loved him.

She took his big hand in her little one and tugged him off the bar-stool. “Come on,” she said. “There’s so much I’ve got to tell you. Come on to my room where we can be alone together.”

Without another word, Spence allowed the elfin little woman to lead him away.

There is no natural day/night cycle on Titan. Ten times farther from the Sun than Earth is, Saturn’s major moon is always in gloomy twilight, at best. Usually its murky, clouded atmosphere even blots out the pale light from Saturn itself.

The university base kept Greenwich Mean Time. The lights in the windowless base’s corridors and public areas dimmed at 2000 hours and went down to a “night” equivalent at 2200, then came up to “morning” at 0700.

Jade and Spence had no way of knowing the time. He had purposely put his shaving kit in front of the dorm room’s digital clock, so that from the bed they could not see it. The only light in the room was from the video window, which they had set on views of the methane sea up on the surface: shadowy, muted, almost formless.

Jade told Spence about all her discoveries, and the pain that they brought. He seemed utterly surprised when she explained that she was probably Sam Gunn’s daughter.

“Talk about kismet,” he whispered low. “For both of us.”

“If Sam were alive he could give the bride away,” Jade said.

“And then be my best man.” Spence chuckled softly in the shadows. “Just like him to turn the ordinary rules upside down.”

They made love again, languidly, unhurriedly. They slept and then made love once more. And talked. Talked of the past, of the wondrous ways that lives can intertwine, of the surprises and sheer luck—good or bad—that can determine a person’s fate. Talked of the pain one person can inflict on another without even knowing it. Talked of the happiness that can be had when two people click just right, as they had done.

Suddenly a new question popped into Jade’s mind. “How many children do you have?” she asked. “Am I going to be a stepmother?”

In the darkened room she could barely see him shake his head. “Never stayed married long enough to have kids. But now…” His voice drifted into silence.

“I want babies. Lots of them.”

“Me too,” he said. “At least two.”

“A boy and a girl.”

“Right.”

“And then maybe two more.”

He laughed softly. “Maybe we ought to have twins.”

“That would be more efficient, wouldn’t it?”

“Want a big wedding? The main chapel at Selene and all the trimmings?” ]ade shook her head. “I never even thought about it. No, I don’t think I know enough people to invite.”

“My parents are gone, but we could ask your adoptive mother to come up.”

“No!” Jade snapped. “She abandoned me. I haven’t seen her for seventeen years. Let it stay that way.”

“But she’s the only kin you have.”

She peered at the video window, the murky gloom of the methane sea. “I have family. Lots of family. Monica Bianco and Zach Bonner and Felix Sanchez. Frederick Mohammed Malone. Rick Darling. Elverda Apacheta. The owner of the Pelican Bar. They’re my family. They’d come to Selene for my wedding, if I asked them to.”

Spence said, “And here I thought you were an orphan.”

“Not anymore,” Jade answered, surprised at the reality of it. I’m not alone, she told herself. I have friends all across the solar system now. And a man who loves me.

“I’m pretty old for you,” Spence said in the darkness. “Hell, if Sam really is your father, I’m a year or two older than he is.”

“Would you be embarrassed to have a wife young enough to be your daughter?” she asked, half teasing, half fearful of his answer.

“Embarrassed? Hell no! Every guy my age will eat his heart out with envy the minute he meets you.”

Jade laughed, relieved.

“But there’s you to think about,” he said, turning toward her in the bed. “How’re you going to feel, tied to an old fart like me when you’re so young? There’s plenty of stories about old men with young wives….”

“Old stories,” Jade quickly said. “Stories from ancient times. You’re as young and vigorous as Sir Lancelot was, and you’ll stay that way for another thirty or forty years, at least, thanks to modern medicine.”

He propped himself on one elbow and, with his other hand, traced a finger from her lips to her chin, down her throat and the length of her body. Jade felt her skin tingle at his touch.

“Well,” he said, quite seriously, “I’m sure going to keep abreast of all the research going on in the field of aging and rejuvenation.”

Jade burst out laughing and grabbed for him. They made love again and then drifted back to sleep.

It was the phone buzzer that awoke Jade. She blinked once, twice, coming out of the fog, suddenly panicked that she had been dreaming. Then she felt the warmth of Spence’s body next to hers and heard him snoring softly, almost like the purr of a contented cat.

Smiling, she groped in the dark for the oblong box that controlled the wall screen. Without turning on any lights she pecked at the keys until the scene of the methane sea was replaced by bold yellow lettering:

Jade had to turn on her bedside lamp to see the control wand well enough to tap out the command that put Goodman on the video window without activating the wall camera that would let him see her.

Spence stirred groggily. “Whassamatter?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Goodman was apparently in the communications center, hunched over a technician who was sitting at one of the consoles. Display screens covered the wall behind him, no two of them showing the same picture.

The professor was scowling fiercely. Or was his expression one of fear? Or even utter surprise, shock? Jade could not tell.

“Professor Goodman? This is Jade.”

“Oh!” He jumped back slightly, as if pricked by a hot needle. “There’s no video.”

“I know. You have an urgent message for me?”

He bobbed his head up and down so hard that a lock of his curly hair flopped in front of his eyes. Brushing it back, he broke into a strange, toothy smile that just might have been a grimace of pain.

“It just came in … from the automated station at Einstein….”

“Einstein? The black hole?”

“Yes. No video, of course. But—well, listen for yourself.”

A long, low bass note, throbbing slightly, like the last distant echo of faraway thunder or the rumble of a torch ship’s engines.

Spence sat up in the bed beside Jade. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

“What is it?” Jade asked Goodman’s image on the video screen.

The professor looked startled all over again. “Oh! Excuse me. In my haste I activated the raw data chip. Here—here’s the same message, but time-compressed and computer-enhanced.”

“… you wouldn’t believe what these guys can do! It’s fantastic!”

Sam Gunn’s voice!

Jade felt her heart clutch in her chest. “What is that?” she blurted.

“It’s Sam!” Goodman almost yelled. “Sam! He’s on his way back! He’s coming out of the black hole!”

“That’s impossible,” Spence said, his voice hollow.

“I know! But he’s doing it,” Professor Goodman answered, oblivious to the fact that he was now speaking to a man’s voice.

“He’s alive?” Jade asked.

“Yes! Yes!” Goodman seemed ecstatic. “He found aliens on the other side of the black hole. An intelligent extraterrestrial species! They’ve provided him with the means to come back through the space-time warp!”

“Sacre dieu,” Jade breathed.

“He’s alive and coming back to us!” Goodman was almost capering around the comm center now. “He’s discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s a miracle. Two miracles! Miraculous, the whole thing is miraculous!”

“The time distortion,” Jade asked. “How long will it take before Sam is back with us?”

Goodman sobered, but only slightly. “We’re working on that. Trying to get a Doppler fix on the raw data. It’s only a rough estimate, but from what we’ve got now I’d say that Sam will pop out of the event horizon in another twenty to twenty-five years.”

“Years?” Spence gasped.

“He’s been gone for more than fifteen,” Goodman said. Then he fell to musing. “Maybe there’s a symmetry here. Maybe it’ll take him exactly as long to return as it did to go through the other way. Still, it’ll be fifteen years, at least. Unless …”

Jade turned to Spence and clutched him by the shoulders. “He’s alive! Sam’s alive!”

“And on his way back. The little SOB is coming back to us.”

“And he’s met intelligent aliens.”

“Holy cow,” said Spence, fervently.

Two days later Jade and Spence stood at the observation bay of the torch ship as it sped away from Titan, heading back toward civilization and the Earth-Moon system.

Holding one arm protectively around the tiny young woman he loved, Johansen pointed with his free hand: “There’s Jupiter, the big bright one. And Mars, the smaller red star, down to your left.”

Jade nestled into the crook of his arm, rested her head against his chest. “And Earth? Can we see Earth?”

“Yep. Kind of faint at this distance, but it still looks distinctly blue. See it, out there to the left of Jupiter.”

Jade saw the distant blue speck and knew that her mother lay buried there. And there was another woman on Earth, Jade realized, still alive. But for how long? The one thing she had learned in the past year or so was that life surges along, always changing, whether you want it to or not. Nothing remains the same.

“Spence?” she asked, turning to look up into his face. “Would you mind if we went down to Earth? Just for a few days.”

“Earth? I thought you couldn’t….”

“I can wear an exoskeleton for a few days. And attach myself to a heart pump.”

“But why?”

“My adoptive mother lives in Quebec. I want to see her. I want to tell her that I understand why she had to leave me.”

“I thought you hated her.”

“I thought so, too. Maybe I did. But I don’t anymore. I can’t. Not anymore.”

He gazed down into her lovely green eyes, knowing that he could not deny her anything.

“Couldn’t you speak with her on a video link? It’s just as good, almost.”

Jade shook her head gendy. “No. This has to be in person. For real. Flesh to flesh.”

He shrugged. “I might need an exoskeleton myself. Been a long time since I faced a full g.”

The ship was accelerating at just under one-sixth gravity. They had weeks of leisure ahead of them. Solar News was planning an elaborate special series on Sam Gunn, now that the news of his return had broken. Raki had promised Jade that she would narrate the entire series and be the on-camera star. Her career was assured, even though she had carefully withheld the information that she was probably Sam Gunn’s daughter.

“Will you go out to the black hole for the show?” Spence asked.

“No,” said Jade. “We can record that with the remote cameras already on station at Einstein and patch me into the scene. There’s not much to see, really. No point going out there until Sam’s about to emerge, and he won’t be coming out for another fifteen or twenty years.”

“But he’s on his way back.”

“I wonder if he’s aged? Maybe I’ll be his age when he comes out.”

Spence let a little grin show on his face.

“It’s so like Sam,” Jade went on. “He has the whole solar system in a commotion. Intelligent alien life! All these years the astronomers have been searching and Sam’s the one to find them.”

Spence made a sound that might have been a barely suppressed laugh.

Jade took no notice of it. “The scientists, the politicians, the military—they’re all in an uproar. To say nothing of the world’s religious leaders.”

Spence made no reply.

“Well,” Jade said, with a sigh, “at least we have fifteen or twenty years to get ready for it.”

“Maybe,” Spence said at last.

She looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know for sure,” he replied. “But there’s a strange flavor to all this.”

Jade knit her brows.

“I mean,” said Spence, “Sam disappears while a shipload of lawyers are on their way to strip him naked. Then fifteen years later he pops up again claiming he’s met intelligent extraterrestrial creatures.”

“You don’t think….!”

“Before we left Titan I used the university library access system to look up the status of all the lawsuits filed against Sam. The statute of limitations runs out on the last one next year.”

“But the signals from the black hole!”

“He’s Sam Gunn, honey. He’s been hiding out someplace for the past fifteen years. Maybe he really did fall into a black hole.” Spence pulled her tighter and gazed out at the wide starry universe. “I wouldn’t put any money on it, though.”

She smiled up at him. “And you claim to be his friend.”

“I knew Sam pretty well. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“He couldn’t have! It just isn’t possible.”

Spence grinned and looked out at the stars again. “He’s Sam Gunn, honey. Unlimited.