Variable Star

19

Existence had lost all point.

For the first time ever, it was not hyperbole. It really had.

Fine. Tell that to the goats. Their existence had a point: being fed and milked. It seemed enough to them. Tell it to the rabbits. Their existence had all the purpose it would ever need: fucking. The chickens thought the point of existence is hatching eggs; the rooster held a different opinion; but both were convinced. The vegetables did not even dignify the question with an asking.

Being around that kind of naïve certainty was soothing. And I had made a deal with those critters. It did not contain an escape clause letting me off the hook in the event of solar disruption or even disappearance of local gravity. They had kept their end, so far, by living.

Also, I needed to be somewhere that was not Rup-Tooey. I had been sleeping like a baby there, lately. Alone, waking up wailing every few hours, wetting the bed. Not a good thing in free fall.

So I was on the Bravo Ag Deck. I’d thought of going up to the Horn and playing Anna for whoever was there. But I’d decided that if somehow I did succeed in blowing everything that was in my heart out the end of my sax, I might fail to inhale again. And so might my listeners.

By now I found the steamy smells of Bravo—or what we had imagined they might be like—conducive to inhaling. It would have been a terrific planet, if we could have gotten there, I remember thinking.

But of course, the smells were much less intense and local than I was used to. Now that the Sheffield was in free fall again, we were back on free-fall air-conditioning. That translates to constant heavy airflow in any cubic where humans spent time. It has to. In zero gee, unless the air is kept very well stirred at all times, the carbon dioxide you exhale tends to form a sphere around your head and smother you.

The mood I was in, I’d almost have accepted that to have the good Bravo smells back, rich in my nose again. But of course, I never would, now.

I was wearing the Zog’s treasured old Japanese gardening shirts, which he’d picked up on a trip to Terra in his youth. Tiger Kotani owned a similar one. It was a PreCollapse garment, made in prerepublican Japan in respectful imitation of an even older style, cream with turquoise trim, covered with colorful images of samurai, peasants, beautiful maidens, pagodas, mountains, and tall Noble fir trees. Just wearing it made me feel I could talk to plants, and understand their replies. In zero gee it flapped around me like wings.

I had no responsibilities at the moment. Over a dozen of us had chosen to emulate Peter Kindred—so far—but fewer than half of those had left instructions to bury them. I guess if they’d seen any point in contributing to our ecosystem, they would not have opted to leave it. Those few who had chosen the oldest form of eternal rest had long since been tucked beneath soil. Admittedly it had proven more difficult without gravity to help keep the dead moving in the desired direction. I decided to see how the goats were doing in their improvised zero-gee enclosure. I had a pretty good idea I knew what the rabbits were doing.

“Citizen Johnston,” the Sheffield said softly, “Captain Bean requires your presence on the Bridge immediately. Acknowledge, please.”

Requires? Of a free citizen?

I thought about how much the Captain must be in the mood for backtalk, right about now. That he was still functional at all was a miracle. He had expected to carry the heaviest of responsibilities for another fourteen years. Now he had none. No further piloting was ever going to be needed.

“I’m on my way.”

He’s going to announce his retirement, and ask me to take his job, I thought. Joel Johnston, Star Pilot! How old was I the first time I ever thought those words—six?

It was the first even mildly humorous thought I could recall having in… some period of time. That couldn’t be good, could it?

Along the way, I checked both the official news site, Sheffield Steel, and the barely tolerated unofficial one Jules ran despite Richie’s help, The Straight Shit. Neither had word of anything unusual or even interesting. In fact, each had barely been updated since the day before Kindred had wasted us all. Who cared anymore if RUP-0 sector got their plumbing problem under control, or young Sparks Reilly succeeded in adding another thousand digits to pi?

I was surprised to note that one of the few headings showing new material at each source, besides obits, was the wedding announcements. The same news that had triggered fifteen suicides had also apparently inspired nineteen couples, one triad, and one quartet to get off the dime and make a commitment for the future. Since there wasn’t going to be one, it seemed incredibly sad to me. What shall it profit a man if he gaineth his soul, yet he loseth the whole universe? How could you have children now?

Kathy’s group, I noticed, had replaced a suicide husband with a new wife. Until then, I had not consciously realized I’d been toying with the idea of trying to get back together with her, in some way, on some basis. As soon as I did realize it, I knew it had been a bad idea—sheer loneliness, looking to get comfort without the trouble of pretending to get to know someone first. I’d already screwed up Kathy quite enough. I had come aboard this bucket of mildew loudly proclaiming my intention to die a bachelor—it was time to put my vast, useless money where my big dumb mouth was.

I had a momentary image of myself dying all alone. And suddenly I saw that the me in it was the same age I was now. Right then and there in the corridor, I became aware for the first time that if I continued as I was going, if I did not make some kind of drastic change, it might be no more than a week or two before the Zog would be planting me.

I would like to say I froze in my tracks, consumed with horror at this revelation, and resolved to race to Dr. Amy for help as soon as I’d finished whatever the Old Man had in mind. It did disturb me, but I didn’t break stride. And I was pretty sure I’d already seen Amy’s best moves.

Well, when you reach that mental state, about the only thing that can save you is for random chance or intelligent design or the Lord God of the Heavenly Host or whatever you want to call the source of all the irony in this universe to come kick you square in the ass with His almighty reinforced boot.

I got mine around the other side, that’s all.

I had never seen the Bridge. Not with my own eyes, anyway. But it looked much like it did in the Sim, even to apparent size and lighting. The main visual difference I noticed as I came through the hatch was that almost none of the countless screens, dials, or readouts were active, including the main display before the Captain’s Couch. In Sim, everything was active all the time, and there was a constant faint under-current of metallic beeps, chirps, buzzes, and other technosounds. And the Sim had the scent all wrong; instead of electrical ozone, the predominant notes were stale coffee and an odd, hauntingly redolent perfume. I would never have taken Captain Bean for a perfume kind of guy, and while I didn’t know the Second Officer, van Cortlandt, his picture hadn’t made him seem like one either.

One other intangible was different. Here I was somehow acutely conscious of the stupendous thickness and weight and ingenious design of all that shielding above my head, and of the fact that our speed was so horrendous, some dangerous stuff was getting through anyway. The hazard was low, but I would definitely be safer when I got back down as far as the Ag Deck or Rup-Tooey.

Terrific.

All these things registered on the subconscious level in the time it took me to complete a preliminary census. Big as it was, one big open area, the Bridge Deck was considerably more crowded than I had expected it to be.

I counted fourteen people total, began ticking them off. Because of the higher than normal airflow, all were displaying a tendency to drift away from their handholds. A slight majority were facing my way, so I started with them, left to right.

Governor-General Cott and Perry Jarnell, both imposing as hell in full formal attire including ceremonial swords, and drifting tall arm in arm as if they were posing for a sculptor, Jarnell grasping a chair to anchor them in the steady breeze. Solomon Short, wearing only a dirty breechclout and an expression it took me a moment to be sure was a broad grin, since he was upside down with respect to everyone else. Second Officer David van Cortlandt, tall and portly, with a flowing white walrus mustache, a receding mane of white hair, and extremely well-developed smile wrinkles—which he too was exercising. Odd. Captain Bean, wearing the kind of pepper-and-salt Vandyke beard, heavy on the pepper with slight mustache twirls, that has been the most common choice of skippers since the age of sail, was more what I’d been expecting; his expression was the one on my mental picture of Magellan, the day he realized he wasn’t going to make it home. To his left, Third Officer Bruce looked madder than a wet hen, ready to peck somebody and then lay a bad egg. Completing the array on my extreme right was, to my mild surprise, Paul Hattori, in his best business attire. I’d have thought he was now even more useless than the crew—whether we admitted it or not, we were now a de facto social collective, operating on the barter system, with no further use for money as long as the toilet paper held out. Yet his expression was the oddest of all; he looked… exalted, like someone in church, or a groupie backstage. He was gripping the back of a chair with both hands in such a way as to make it seem he was standing on the deck.

Those facing away from me took several seconds longer to identify.

I got no instant-recognition hits from size or body language, nor from clothes—in fact, there was something subtly not right about their clothes I was too busy to analyze. The seven of them broke down into two het couples and three singletons, two female, one male. Something about placement and stance gave me the idea the taller of the single fems might have deliberately interposed herself between the other two, but I couldn’t be sure. Without exception, they all seemed to carry themselves with an air of enormous confidence, as if they were used to being listened to respectfully.

Nobody had noticed me enter. I hadn’t identified any of the ones facing away yet, and some instinct or insecurity made me keep my handhold just inside the door until I had. So I went with my strengths. Four people were talking at once and none would yield; probably anybody else would have called the result noise. I chose to treat it as a quartet—and used my composer’s ear to pick out the individual horns by their timbre and range rather than the mangled notes. Whatever they were saying could be repeated to me later; now I wanted to know who was saying them. The enhanced free-fall airflow worked for me, now, bringing me their voices with unusual clarity.

Three of the instruments I knew at once, would have even if I could not have seen them being played: Captain Bean, Jarnell, and Lieutenant Bruce, working as a trio, alto, trombone, and trumpet. That fourth horn doing the counterpoint, the baritone—

Damn, it was strange. It teased at the edges of memory. Long-term storage. Whoever he was, I’d met him briefly years ago, probably shortly after we’d left, and hadn’t encountered him since. I hadn’t liked him much for some reason. The penny resolutely refused to drop farther.

Another voice entered, causing the others to fall silent. A clarinet, but with the quiet authority of Goodman. This one I was sure I didn’t know; its timbre was so unique I knew if I’d ever heard him speak I’d have tried to get him to sing for me. His couple-partner remained silent, contributing no harmonies.

He stated a brief theme. Captain Bean picked it up and restated it three times, changing it slightly each time. The third time, the clarinet joined in in unison, to tell him he had it right.

Lieutenant Bruce began a counterstatement, but had traded his trumpet for a kazoo; in compensation he blew so hard it broke.

The baritone entered again, but allowed itself to be interrupted by a cello in its lower register. I didn’t know this voice either, I was sure of it. And I didn’t much care for it. It had an undertone of menace, of unstated threat.

My strangeness meter was beginning to max. In a small town of less than five hundred, there can be one or two people you’ve just never chanced to run into. But three of them, that you’re sure you’ve never even passed within earshot of? I had to be mistaken.

Captain Bean’s alto reply started out softly, but built to a small angry crescendo, like the first harbinger of trouble ahead in Wagner.

The next voice, the tall singleton female, I knew at once, and started to relax. Her name would come to me in a second. I hadn’t seen her in years, but had always liked her. This one was no horn, but a singer: smokey voice, like late period Annie Ross. Some sort of joke in her name. Miss Steak? Miss Fortune? Ms. Rhee? Something literary about the joke. Miss Elenius? An adolescent erotic undertone too, somehow. Something dirty… female honorific… last name that made it all a quote or literary reference… I was almost there… famous character? Title? Title. That felt right.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, of course. Les Misérables. “Lay Ms. Robb.” Dorothy Robb, sweet old lady, had been kind to me the last time we met. What was that funny job title of hers? Chief Enabler, that was it….

Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.

Given that context, I recognized the baritone at once. “Smithers.” Alex Rennick, Master of the North Keep.

Well, hell. That was annoying. Clearly my wiring was misfiring. Not that I blamed it, given the events of recent weeks. But I could not even override it—no matter how hard I assured my ears that they were mistaken, they both stubbornly insisted we were all hearing Dorothy Robb together. Slightly older, perhaps, but her.

All right, this did not necessarily mean I was losing it. People can have vocal doubles. I’d have remembered a colonist in her nineties, but it was not impossible this woman was imitating one for some—

Once while colossally drunk, Herb had spoken of himself as “hanging by my fingertips from my own anus, to keep from falling out.” I was in that mindset, clutching for dear life.

Then from the couple with the cello female came the unforgettable, unmistakable, inarguable, utterly impossible voice of Conrad of Conrad, and I lost my grip.

But I was in zero gravity. I didn’t go anywhere.

Naturally I felt instant fear. But not terror.

When the impossible happens—when a planet moves beneath your feet, and won’t stop—when you look up on a gorgeous morning and see something huge fly majestically into the side of a tall building—when a man you buried shows up at your door with a six-pack—you’re supposed to feel a primal terror, a superstitious dread. It’s in all the books. You pass out, or vomit, or your bowels and bladder void, or you howl. If the universe is prepared to cheat, you’re screwed, right? The only alternative is to decide it’s all a bad dream or sustained hallucination and just go with it.

I didn’t do any of those things. I can’t say why not. Maybe I was simply too far gone. I’d been electroshocked so many times, they no longer had a voltage that would put me into convulsions. In a twisted way, it was almost starting to get good to me.

The fabric of the universe itself was coming apart? Fine—bring it. Fucking thing hadn’t turned out that well anyway. The dead were rising, Time itself flowing back up over the dam? Great. Gee, if I unaged slower than normal because I was on a nearly luminal starship, I might finally get to meet my mom. Go on, disintegrating reality, give me your best shot.

It is never a good idea to say that.

It seemed perfectly clear to me that I had fried my operating system. Deep down, I knew I had. I did not believe in ghosts, never had… well, not since I was real little. No more did I actually believe in universes that cheated. Given the insistent evidence of my senses, I knew I was nuts—the kind of nuts hardly anyone ever went anymore. There seemed only one sensible response to that.

I roared with laughter.

In a timeless instant, I saw my life as a whole, saw the shape of it, and the flavor of it, saw that it led inexorably from hope and great promise to gibbering madness in a doomed can full of tragedies ten light-years from the hole where the human race used to be, haunted by the ridiculous shade of the evil old bastard who’d forced me onto this donkey ride to heaven in the first place—all because some nameless unknowable alien vigilante other had concluded that mankind was not a feature but a bug in the Galaxy—and there just wasn’t anything else to do, not to do about it, but just to do, except to laugh my ass off. Part of me was aware the Captain had wanted my participation in an important meeting—but since he wasn’t going to get it anyway, why not disrupt the silly thing? I didn’t even try to hold back; I laughed like a buffalo, like a bull ape, like a brontosaur—they might all be extinct, but by God they were still funny.

Naturally everyone stared at me as if I had lost my mind. I thought I had, too.

Especially when the people facing away from me started turning around.

Yep, that was Dorothy Robb, older but still as vital as I remembered.

Yes, that was Smithers, his hairline strangely receded.

Yes indeedy, absolutely beyond question, the man in the center was Richard Conrad, Conrad of Conrad, and he still didn’t look the part. He still looked like some sort of gruff lovable academic don, now well past retirement age but quite vigorous.

His companion was a short compact woman I had never seen in my life, and I was oddly grateful for that. At last, a hallucination with a trace of creativity! She seemed my age or a little older, remarkably fit, and as focused as a comm laser.

On Conrad’s other side was another total stranger, about ten years older than me. This one was more interesting. His short stature, pale skin, and overdeveloped limbs told me he was a Terran. He had an overall air of sweet hayseed innocence, a gullibility based on intrinsic decency, which usually assumes itself in others. He wore a small dopey mustache like the one Jinny had once tried to get me to grow. But his eyes—his eyes had a contradictory quality I cannot express with words. I would have to show you a similar pair, and say, “Like those.” I had only seen such eyes twice. My father had had them. And so had one of his best friends, who everyone knew should also have won the Nobel, and who I called Uncle Max. They were the kind of eyes that caused other great geniuses to drop their egos and just stare. I wondered what his field was.

I was giving myself creative credit for having finally produced a really intriguing hallucination, when the last two people present finished turning around.

Given the mental state and emotional shape I was in right then—and the seeming theatricality with which they had both turned so slowly—I was actually fully expecting one of them to turn out to be Jinny.

I was not expecting both of them to.

The one farthest from me, standing beside the man with kaleidoscope eyes, did not look like Jinny as I remembered her. What she looked remarkably like, I realized, was the mental picture I had always had of “fellow orphan” Jinny’s imaginary “dead mother, Mrs. Maureen Hamilton.”

This one was—convincingly appeared to be—the real, actual Jinny Conrad. If she were alive, she would have been about thirteen years older than when I’d last seen her. If this was her, she had apparently lied to me about her age. Despite excellent cosmeticizing, she looked thirty-five. That too would fit.

But it was difficult to focus analytical thought on anything at all, let alone a psychotic puzzle like this, because the other Jinny was so much closer to the Jinny I still carried in my heart’s memory that it threatened to stop my heart. Jinny at eighteen or nineteen—an honest eighteen or nineteen—so beautiful it wasn’t even fair, a perfect rose just unfolding. Jinny as I had seen her then—wise and smart and compassionate and strong and certain—transported through time. Looking back at me now exactly the way she had back then, with eyes that were lamps, whose pupils were black holes, calling me to fall in.

“Hello, Joel,” they both said at once.

I had begun to stop laughing when they both turned around, and finished a few seconds after they were done, with a last few “ha’s.”

But a split second after they both greeted me, I finally got it.

I may have been in ragged shape, an emotional basket case with a malfunctioning brain, belabored by too many impossible stimuli at once—but I had started the course with a pretty decent thinking machine. Presented with a series of clues that allowed only one rational explanation, I was bound to get there eventually. I was aware of the ancient dictum that if you’re certain you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left, however unlikely, must be the answer.

Once I got the premise, everything else made sense half a second later. I even had a pretty good idea who the two strangers were, and why they were present.

This time I laughed so hard I went into a tumble, and lost my vertical. I would have literally rolled on the floor laughing if there’d been any gravity to put me there. I had always thought it a hyperbolic expression. There was simply no position that could contain or properly brace my titanic mirth; yearning to laugh even harder, I would curl into fetal position, then explode like a starfish, then punch and kick the air the way I’d learned in Tiger’s dojo, desperate to force all the laughter out before it burst me.

The moment I could spare the air, I managed to squeeze four words into the outgoing message traffic, two at a time.

First: “Hello, Evelyn.”

And then: “Hello, Jin.”

Two things made my father special, and only one of them was that he could think better than practically anybody else.

The other was that he could think faster than practically anybody else.

That means more than just getting to the answer before anyone else can. It means you reach answers no one else will. The faster you can think, the longer a logic chain you can follow out before you get tired and decide to stop. In modern physics, that can be crucial. He told me once, “The universe is so simple, it takes very complicated thought to touch it.”

I inherited a touch of his freak speed. It became clear quite early that I emphatically had not inherited Dad’s gift for exotic mathematics—but it was just as clear that he genuinely did not give the least sub-subatomic particle of a damn about that, and maybe that indicates genius of another, completely different kind on his part. But I had mastered the alto sax at seven, playing with a speed that had literally frightened my first teacher, Francis Layne—who himself was called “Fast Layne.” In my secret heart of hearts, I had always honestly believed I was one of the best composers alive, and one of the best saxophonists, too, although I had expected it to be decades before there was much agreement on that. Now, of course, I had it in the bag.

But I had also noticed quite early that I was usually faster on the uptake than most people. Unless the subject was me, anyway. I spent the better part of most conversations waiting for everyone else to catch up. Patterns form and combine in my mind like crystals reproducing at fast forward, sometimes so fast that even to me it seems like I skip whole steps in my logic process and just thumb to the back of the book for the answer. Telepathy is literally instantaneous; maybe sometimes other kinds of thought are, too.

I saw the people present, I knew who all but two of them were, and it seemed that the instant I got over disbelieving the evidence of my eyes, I knew who the two strangers had to be, and how all of them must have gotten here, and why each of them had come, and what their presence could mean. The actual deduction and induction itself didn’t require genius, really—merely a willingness to think the unthinkable. I’d been doing that for weeks. I had most of it worked out by the time I’d stopped laughing.

Jinnia Conrad, when last seen, had been in the market for a new promising young genius-carrier.

Was there the slightest chance her grandfather would not have said to her, “This time, find one in some serious profession. No more damned artists,” and made it stick? Selecting a sax player had probably been as close as she’d dared come to a gesture of rebellion against her dynastic destiny, tolerated only because of my father’s pedigree.

What was the exact global opposite of a sax player, if not an experimental physicist? Okay, perhaps a financier, but Jinny wasn’t a pervert.

Assume she repeated the pattern, found the male offspring of one or maybe even two of the greatest such tinkerers in recent history, and assume that this lad had inherited the same kind of genius, the urge and ability to take the universe apart and put it back together in different ways with his own hands. He certainly had the eyes of a Tesla. And the naïveté.

Propelled irresistibly by Jinny’s—oh, horrid pun—by her relative-istic drive, and funded by the unlimited resources of the Conrad Family—as if J. P. Morgan had been canny enough to simply find Nikola Tesla a wife who would keep him in harness—was there anything such a genius might not have accomplished?

Suppose he was interested in faster-than-light star drives? His grandfather-in-law would like that.

If he were, he would damn well have a ship equipped with one ready to test within five years, if I knew Jinny.

If he and it survived the initial tests, then the passenger list for its very first official shakedown cruise as a commissioned vessel, long before the rest of the Solar System was told of its existence, was absolutely and beyond question going to include at least two people besides the inventor-pilot: the pilot’s wife, and her grandfather. This voyage would be not merely historic, but conceivably the most historic of all time—no possibility existed that those two names would not be in the first paragraph of the story.

They say luck is the residue of good planning. If the most paranoid man that ever lived ends up being the only one in a position to escape the end of the world with a few playmates for company… can you even call that luck? They must have been on the dark side of Terra, or some other large planet, when it suddenly began to glow around the edges.

If Conrad of Conrad was aboard a small vessel, a minimum of three others were, too.

First and most essential to that paranoid old villain, a very very good and very very very reliable bodyguard. She would be the one I had mistaken for a companion, the cello voice with menace in its undertones. No wonder she looked fit! She could probably fight us all with one hand, while using the other to hold a shield… over her employer. If you’re compelled to try and screw literally everyone you’ll ever meet, you need a strong condom.

Second, Rennick: pan-trained stooge, Speaker To Peasants, flapper, flunky, and designated fall guy should one ever become necessary. Don’t leave the castle without one.

Third, Dorothy Robb: his walking desk, database, secretary, researcher, and necessary impertinent, licensed to sass him occasionally. She had the courage to be willing to pretend every day that she did not fear his terrible power… and the wisdom never to go so far that he began to suspect she really didn’t.

Something about their respective positioning and zero-gee kinesthetics gave me the sudden insight that Jinny’s mocking nickname for Rennick had indeed been aptly chosen. His loyalty to his boss was charged with, if not based on, suppressed eroticism. His body language said his subconscious absurdly considered even ninety-year-old Dorothy Robb a potential rival.

Given the not-terribly-surprising existence of young Gyro Gearloose—if any of them were here, he had to be—I fully understood at once the presence of Jinny, and her grandfather, and all three stooges. The one I had the most trouble explaining to myself was the person I still thought of as “little” Evelyn.

Little she no longer was—but it made little sense that she should be here. If the Conrad superluminal yacht had an extra seat, why hadn’t it gone to some closer relative of Jinny’s than a mere cousin? Why not one of her own parents—or if they were dead or the old man loathed them, Evelyn’s?

All I knew was that her presence was the single most wonderful phenomenon in the Galaxy at that time. I was absolutely certain of that.

I’ve recounted this as if I examined each person there one at a time, and finished with Evelyn, because sentences can’t happen all at the same time. It wasn’t like that. Start to finish, she occupied a huge fraction of my attention and processing time. All the others I saw with peripheral vision—it was my day for clichés come true, and I literally could not take my eyes off her.

The resemblance to Jinny at her age was striking even given their kinship, enough to be eerie. But the differences were just as striking to me, now that I looked. And very dear.

This face was at least as strong as Jinny’s, as determined, as proud. But it was not ruthless. Its eyes were fully as intelligent and alert—but nowhere near as calculating. It was every bit as heartstoppingly beautiful as Jinny’s face had been at nineteen—and more, because it didn’t care. It did not think of its own beauty as a tool, or a weapon.

For the first time I realized the imperfection in Jinny’s beauty that had always escaped my notice somehow, the missing note in the perfect chord: compassion. Evelyn believed other people were real, even non-Conrads. And liked them. Her eyes said in part that she had hurt others in her short life, and that she regretted more about that than the increased difficulty of getting them to accede to her whims.

As I was watching her, she did a little zero-gee move too complex to describe that caused her to look ridiculous for a brief moment, because if she had not, she would have bumped into Jarnell. She did it unconsciously, and I knew in a million years Jinny would never have done such a thing. Jarnell would have ended up apologizing to her.

This was a version of Jinny who could never play me the way the original had, no matter what the reasons.

As quickly as I absorbed all these things and reached all these understandings, I also saw just as clearly a couple of things that only two others present had fully realized yet, two of the most important facts in this whole equation.

Richard Conrad was not only still a very wealthy man, he was vastly wealthier than he had ever been, was now in fact without a doubt the wealthiest human being in the universe.

But his inconceivable fortune consisted of two assets.

And he only had one bodyguard.