Variable Star

3

“Joel. It’s time to wake up, dear.”

Yes, that was definitely her hair I smelled.

I had heard Jinny say just those words, in much that low throaty tone of voice, at the start of more than one pleasant dream. It was a novel experience to hear them at the end of one. Now if only everything else would continue to unfold as it usually did in the dream….

I opened my eyes and she was not there. The scent was either vestigial or imagined. Drat.

“You really need to wake up now, Joel,” she murmured insistently from somewhere nearby.

“Okay,” I said.

“Wake up, Joel. It’s time t—”

I sat up, and she chopped off in midword. She wasn’t there. Anywhere.

I wake up hard. I had to sit there, blinking, for a few seconds before I had it worked out. The speaker was not Jinny but Leo the AI server, perfectly imitating her voice while acting as an alarm clock. Doing the job well, too: I could fool my own alarm at the dorm by simply telling it I was getting up. Leo was programmed to accept nothing less than verticality as proof of compliance.

Why did I need to get up now? I could tell I had not had eight hours’ sleep. I had graduated, for Pete’s sake—what was so urgent?

It all came back to me at once. Oh, yes. That’s right. Today I was going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. Had I supposed it would be scheduled for my convenience? A man like Conrad of Conrad would doubtless want to dispose of matters as trivial as meeting his grandchild’s fiancé as early as possible in the business day.

“How soon am I expected?” I asked.

“In half an hour, Mr. Joel,” Leo said in his own voice.

“How do I get breakfast?”

“I can take your order, sir.”

I started to say scrambled on toast, bucket of black coffee, liter of OJ. Then I thought to myself, this morning you are going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. “Eggs Benedict, home fries, Tanzanian coffee—French Press, please, two sugars and eighteen percent cream, keep it coming—and squeeze a dozen oranges.”

Leo returned the serve. “Very good, Mr. Joel. Do you prefer peaberry or the normal bean?”

“The peaberry, I think,” I managed.

There was a scratching sound at the door. It opened, and a servant entered, pushing a tray ahead of him at shoulder height with two fingers. He was easily as old and as ugly as the servants I’d seen the night before, but nowhere near as surly. Maybe day shift was better.

“What’s that?” I asked.

He steered the tray to a table near the bed, and somehow persuaded it to sit down. “Eggs Benedict, potatoes, coffee, fresh orange juice, and this morning’s news, sir,” he said, pointing to each item as he named it. Nothing in his manner suggested that only an idiot would need these things named.

I promised myself that just as soon as I had the time, I would wonder, very hard, about how any of those items could have been produced instantly, much less all of them at once. But meanwhile, there was no sense pretending they had not caught me by surprise. “If I’d known how fast the service is here, I’d have asked them to wait ten minutes, while I used the ’fresher,” I said with a rueful grin.

He turned to the tray, made some sort of mystic gesture. The food became obscured by a hemisphere of… well, it looked like shimmery air. “Take as long as you like, sir. Everything will be the same temperature and consistency when you get back out.”

Oh. Of course. I wondered how the hell I would get the air to stop shimmering, but I was determined not to ask. I’d figure it out somehow.

“Just reach right through it, whenever you’re ready, sir,” he volunteered. “That collapses the field.”

I opened my mouth to ask what kind of field, how was it generated, what were its properties—and stifled myself. There would be time for that later. “What is your name?”

“Nakamura, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Nakamura. You’re very kind.”

“You’re welcome, sir. And thank you.” Somehow he was gone instantly, without hurrying.

I started to get out of bed… and the damned thing helped me. The part right under my knees dropped away, and the part under my butt rose, and I was on my feet. I reacted pretty much as if I’d been goosed—the physical sensations were not dissimilar. I said the word “Whoa!” louder and an octave higher than I might have wished, leaped forward a meter or so, and spun around to glare accusingly at the bed.

“Is something wrong, Mr. Joel?” Leo asked.

I took a deep breath. And then another. “Not yet,” I stated cautiously.

On the way to the ’fresher, I passed close to the tray of food. I could see a cup of coffee in there, and wanted it so badly it brought tears to my eyes. But I knew if I “collapsed the field” now, I probably wouldn’t be able to re-create it again. And besides, there was the question of making room for the coffee.

So okay, I would hurry and be out of the ’fresher in five minutes instead of ten. I stepped in….

On Ganymede we’re more reticent about such matters than Terrans—for complex sociocultural reasons I’d be perfectly happy to explain any time you have an hour to kill listening to a guy who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. So I’ll just say that this ’fresher was about ten times better equipped and programmed than I had ever imagined possible, and let it go at that. It was more like fifteen minutes before I was able to make myself end the sybaritic cycle.

When I came out, my clothes were gone.

I remarked on this, as casually as I could manage. Leo explained that they had been taken away for laundering. He invited me to wear any of the fakes in the closet that pleased me, and assured me, unnecessarily, that they would all fit me perfectly.

I was not at all happy about this, but I could see my wallet, phone, and keys on the bedside table, so I postponed the matter until after coffee.

By the end of the first cup, I had no strong objection to anything short of disembowelment or denial of a second cup. If you are ever given the choice, insist on the peaberry. Trust me.

When I was ready to dress, I automatically reached for the copy of my best suit, comforting myself as best I could with the guess that this version of it, at least, would be freshly cleaned, and would not be worn nearly through in spots. But as I took it from the closet, I noticed an item hanging just behind it that certainly was not a copy of any garment I owned. It was a J. L. Fong suit. Top of the line, of the latest cut and style. In a color, I noticed, that would complement Jinny’s hair. It was worth more than my entire wardrobe—more than my passage to Earth had cost. The tights were just a bit daring, but I decided I had the calves to carry them off. I was unsurprised to find suitable underwear and other necessary accessories in drawers, tucked in among my own trash.

The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend—and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew things about me I wouldn’t learn for years yet, and approved of them all. Wearing a suit like that, you could break up a knife fight with an admonishment, secure a million-dollar loan without being troubled for a signature, walk away from a crime scene, or obtain illicit drugs on credit. I examined the effect in the ’fresher room mirror, and decided that on me, it looked good. Perhaps, I felt, I could even survive an interview with Conrad of Conrad without soiling it. If it was a brief interview.

“Will Jinny be present at this meeting, do you know?” I asked Leo.

“No, Mr. Joel. Only Mr. Conrad, Mr. Albert, and yourself.”

I blinked. “Wait a second. Which Mr. Conrad—Jinny’s father, or her grandfather? And who’s this Albert bloke?”

“Ah. Pardon me, Mr. Joel. There are over a dozen adult males in the immediate family whose last name is or incorporates Conrad—but by long-standing family and corporate tradition, there is only one ‘Mr. Conrad’ at any one time. At present that is Jenny’s grandfather, Mr. Richard Conrad—Conrad of Conrad. The others are Mr. Joseph, Mr. Chang, Mr. Akwai-N’boko, and so on. Mr. Albert is Jinny’s father.”

“I see,” I said. “Thank you.” I began to understand Leo’s insistence on putting Mr. before my name. I started to ask where Jinny was now, and realized the answer would probably mean nothing to me.

I paid attention to my breathing, trying to make it slower and deeper, for another twenty seconds. Then I said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Very good, Mr. Joel.”

I left the faux farmhouse, and walked through faux fields. It smelled convincingly like morning on Ganymede, and don’t ask me to explain that. It felt inexpressibly weird to be walking through a colonial homestead, in the wrong gravity, dressed like an aristocrat, heading for a doorway of pink smoke. It was a bit of a relief to walk through the smoke and find myself in an ordinary corridor that smelled like Terra instead of Wonderland.

“I’ll guide you from here, sir,” Leo said. “Do you see the light at your feet?”

I glanced down, and there was a soft green light at the baseboard of the left-hand wall, pulsing on and off. It was about the size and intensity of a firefly: discreet, but impossible to miss. “Lead on,” I said. It moved away.

“If you’ll forgive a personal observation, sir,” Leo said as I followed his blinking firefly down the corridor, “you have an excellent time sense for a human.”

“Excuse me?’”

“You said, ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ twenty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds after I advised you that you had thirty minutes to prepare.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “A couple of people have told me I have a pretty accurate internal clock.”

“Extremely so, sir, if this example is representative.”

I shrugged. “I never burn the toast. Look, I have some thinking to do, all right?”

“Yes, sir. I’d just like to—”

“Later, Leo.”

“But, sir—”

I was raised to be polite to gadgets—Dad always said it was good practice—but I was trying to get some fretting done and Leo was distracting me. “Quiet!”

He shut up, and I put my full attention on the predicament I was in. First I scanned my memory for everything I had ever heard or read about high-level etiquette, manners, or protocol. Unfortunately that only took me about two steps. Then I examined my own autobiography, looking first for things that might impress a multi-octillionaire—and when that failed, making a short list of spots that might alienate one, and going over my excuses. A step and a half, tops. As I followed the blinking green firefly around a corner, I was trying to decide whether the next priority was to imagine all the possible ways this upcoming meeting could go wrong, or to try and work out exactly how I had gotten myself into this, where I had taken my first misstep—

—when I rounded the corner, and encountered eighteen kilograms of mass coming in the other direction.

I weighed four times that much. But it caught me well above my center of gravity—square in the face—and was moving much faster, packing more kinetic energy. I believe the Terran expression is, who knows why, “ass over teakettle.”

I’ve taken self-defense courses. I know how to fall properly, and do so as a matter of reflex in normal conditions. But not in a one-gee field. I went down hard on my back, and all my air left me in a single explosive syllable, and only the extreme thickness of the carpet kept me from cracking my skull. I remember feeling quite unhappy for a moment, there. Then the eighteen-kilo mass landed on my groin, and I felt much worse.

Sometime later I forced my eyes open. Closed them quickly. Reopened them cautiously. Half a meter from my nose, a little girl—

“Why don’t you look where you’re going?” she asked.

Make a mental note, Joel: next time you tell an AI you want quiet and it keeps talking—listen. “Because I’m a dolt.”

“Oh.” She thought about that. “I’m a Conrad.”

I looked her over. She appeared to be somewhere around seven Terran years old. And adorable. “Are you all right?”

She frowned, and stuck her chin out slightly. “Yes, I am. Daddy says I don’t have bones.” She moved her gaze away. “But I think my skyboard’s broke.”

The object named lay beside us. It looked like a conventional skateboard—minus the usual wheels, motor housing, onboard computer, and data port. Like a miniature surfboard, in other words. I had no doubt that it could fly—when it wasn’t broken—because it had been at head height when I’d first encountered it. But I could not guess how.

“I’m sorry.” I’d have to replace it. There went my scholarship, probably. “Uh, what’s your name?”

“I’m Evelyn.”

“Hello, Evelyn. That was my mother’s name, too. I’m—”

“You’re Joel, of course. I’m not a baby.”

“Certainly not! Not by a good ten kilos.”

She giggled—then frowned. “Am I hurting you?”

“Only when I breathe.”

She was off me and up on her feet at once. “Jinny is my favorite cousin. I think she’s rickety all through. Don’t you?”

“Yes. I think I do, anyway.” I sat up. When that didn’t kill me, I got to my feet and examined my costume for damage.

“Are you going to marry her?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, twice. “We’re still discussing that,” I managed finally.

“Do you love her?”

“Evelyn, I’m afraid we’ll have to finish this conversation another time. I’m late for an appointment with your—” What would the relationship be? “For a very important appointment. Please excuse me.”

She grinned. “Never mind. I saw you blush.”

I did it some more. This was Jinny’s cousin, all right. “I really mustn’t be late.”

She waved a hand majestically. “Don’t matter about it. Just tell Grandfather Rich I made you late.”

I realized my flashing-firefly guide was beginning to move off down the corridor: hinting. “It was wonderful to meet you,” I said hastily. “Sorry I broke your board. I’ll get a new one to you as soon as I can.”

She giggled. “You’re silly.”

I followed her pointing finger. A new skyboard was just arriving, gliding along the corridor at knee height. It was as featureless as the other, not so much as an antenna showing. Suddenly I saw that the firefly had nearly reached a corner. In another few seconds it would be around the bend. “Great. I’ll see you around.”

“It’s okay, Joel. Gran’ther Rich will think you’re rickety-tickety. You’ll see.”

I know a compliment when I hear one. I bowed—and did not quite sprint away. I found the firefly around the corner, waiting for me, but pulsing faster to indicate impatience. I breezed right past it at double time, made it scramble to catch up and pass me again, and felt the tiny satisfaction that comes to an idiot who has successfully insulted a piece of software. I slowed to walking pace—and it kept on going at double time. I ended up reaching my destination slightly out of breath, and not quite dripping sweat.

I planned to pause outside the door for at least two or three deep breaths. But the infernal thing opened as soon as I reached it. I allowed myself one breath, mostly because I had to, and entered.

But it was only Rennick’s office.

He did not say, “You’re late,” even by facial expression. But in the time it took me to walk three steps into the room, he had risen from his workstation, come all the way round it, and reached my side, without seeming to hurry. “Good morning, Joel,” he said pleasantly. He took my elbow, turned me, and we were back out in the corridor and walking again—not as fast as I had arrived, but not slowly either. “I trust you slept well.”

“Yes, thank you, Alex. And yourself?”

“There are things I must tell you, and we no longer have time for the standard set speech. As you know, there is only one Mr. Conrad in this house, and that is what he is called in his presence or out of it. But when one directly addresses him, he prefers, strongly, to be called simply Conrad. Thus, you might hear someone say, for instance, ‘Mr. Conrad approves of this—isn’t that so, Conrad?’ Am I clear?”

“No honorific to his face. Not even ‘sir’?”

“Not even ‘sir.’ ‘Yes, Conrad.’ ‘No, Conrad.’”

I nodded. “Got it. Thanks. Do I call Mr. Albert ‘Albert’ to his face, too?”

“Not unless he invites you to. Which is unlikely. Until then he is Mr. Albert.”

We came to a checkpoint. Five large men, four of them heavily armed and the deadliest one sitting at a workstation. Rennick didn’t even slow down, and nobody killed him, so I didn’t slow down either.

“Mr. Conrad does not shake hands. Mr. Conrad does not care for humor. Mr. Conrad is not interrupted.”

Right turn. Another checkpoint. Another five armed men, but not large this time. Gurkhas. Their knives were sheathed. Rennick came to a halt and stood still, but ignored them. I did likewise. I could almost feel myself being scanned and sniffed and candled by invisible machinery.

“When Mr. Conrad says ‘Thank you,’ he means ‘good-bye.’ The correct response is not ‘You’re welcome,’ but ‘Yes, Conrad.’ You say it on your way to the door.”

“Got it.” A Gurkha produced something I’d only seen in cop or spy stories, and gave it to Rennick: an identifier. He held it up to his eyes like binoculars for a moment, then poked his right index finger into a socket on the side, and removed it. Almost at once there was a soft chiming sound, and a blue light on top of the device flashed three times. Rennick passed the device to me.

Fighting an impulse to grin like an imbecile, I lifted it to my own eyes and looked into the lenses. Nothing but a white field. I lowered it, hesitated a second, and stuck my finger in the slot. I expected to be poked for a blood sample, but what I got was even more disconcerting, a sensation as if someone were sucking gently on that fingertip. Whether it was taking skin scrapings or sampling my fingernail I couldn’t say. In any event it decided it approved of my DNA and my retinas, and awarded me the same chime and flash Rennick had received.

The Gurkha’s forearms and hands relaxed slightly, and his cousins relaxed too, slightly. He accepted the identifier back from me, saluted to both me and Rennick, held it, and stepped smartly backward out of our way. Rennick was off again at once, with me at his heels.

I wondered if anyone else in the Inner System was as paranoid as these people. Or, now that I came to think of it, had better reason to be.

The pause had been almost enough to let me get my breath back. “Anything else?”

“Yes. A piece of personal advice. There’s only one way to say this. Don’t bullshit. If Mr. Conrad asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, there is only one acceptable response—‘I don’t know, Conrad.’ Try and bluff, and he’ll smell it.”

We came to a large door that looked like a polished slab of real wood. It lacked the customary ID scanner, but at about the same location it had an antique fitting I guessed at once must be the fabled doorknob: a flattened toroid like a brass onion, sticking out from the door on a short horizontal stalk. I wasn’t quite quick enough to catch the procedure Rennick used to operate it. It was hard to follow: some sort of small probe, a quick torquing motion, and a small clack sound. Cued by the sound, I was not too surprised when the door swung inward away from us instead of dilating: it actually was a polished slab of real wood, a good fifteen centimeters thick. I followed him through the doorway, and had to step out of the way so he could swing it shut behind us. I was sure we had reached the Holy of Holies, at last.

Wrong again.

It certainly looked very like what I had been expecting to see: the serious working office of a major CEO or senior politician, tastefully decorated and lavishly equipped. It had every imaginable sort of monitor screen, display, input device, peripheral or other gadget, but the utilitarian effect was softened by a carefully chaotic profusion of exotic and lovely plant life. Dominating the room was a huge piece of furniture as obsolete as the doorknob, for some reason called a desk even though it had no graphic interface or surface icons—not even a trash can. It was basically an elaborate table intended to provide a stable flat work surface plus storage drawers. In films, such a desk is usually covered with items: a primitive telephone, a keypad and monitor, family flat photos, styli, and so on. This one was as austerely, majestically bare as I would have expected from a man of great power.

Two things immediately spoiled the picture, though. First, the absence of any men in the room. And then, the presence of a woman behind the desk. Her apparent age was five years higher than my own, and the fake was very impressive, but there were at least seventy years of skepticism in those eyes and the set of her mouth.

“Morning, Dorothy,” Rennick said. “This is Joel Johnston. Joel, Dorothy Robb.”

“Good morning, Alex,” she greeted him. “Relax: you’re early. And good morning to you, too, Mr. Johnston.” She offered me her hand. Her voice was wonderfully husky, like a great jazz singer near the end of her career; I wondered if she sang.

In my social circle, my move would now have been to shake her hand firmly and release. I had no idea what was done at this altitude—even if I’d had a clue what our relative status was. Deep breath. What would Dad do? “Good morning, Ms. Robb,” I said, did my second-best bow, and kissed her hand.

She removed it quickly and said, “Dorothy!” sharply, but I knew she was not offended because almost at once she softened it by adding, “‘Ms. Robb’ sounds too much like—”

I nodded. “A Victor Hugo novel. In that case, I’m Joel.”

Those cynical eyes opened a bit wider. “You read!”

“My parents infected me before I knew any better. There was no bedtime, as long as I was reading a book.”

“What splendid parents.”

Suddenly I felt myself blush. My multitrack mind was still playing with our pun, and it had suddenly realized that the full title of the book we were discussing would have been Lay Ms. Robb. Her sharp eyes caught me blushing, and twinkled. I realized I’d made no response to her compliment, and was too flustered to formulate one.

She saved me. “Do you know the story of the American farm wife who wrote a letter to Victor Hugo, Joel?”

“No, I don’t,” I said gratefully.

“She wrote, ‘Dear Vic—’” I couldn’t help smiling; her accent and deadpan delivery were good. “‘We shore liked that book you wrote there, Less Miserables’”—I began to grin broadly, and Rennick did, too—“‘but we wanted to ask you one thing we cain’t figger out: which one o’ them characters was Les?’” I broke up, turned to Rennick, and saw that he was chuckling, too—and had absolutely no idea why. Oops. Oh, well—no reason his education should include period French literature. No reason anyone’s should, really.

“What a glorious story,” I said to Dorothy. “Is it apocryphal?”

“Oh, I hope so. Imagine the poor man trying to compose a response.”

I decided to take the bull by the horns. “May I ask your job title, Dorothy?”

She snorted. “Professional bureaucratic-gibberish composers have wept with frustration over that one. There doesn’t seem to be an adequate descriptive that any of them liked. For accounting purposes we finally settled on Enabler, which they simply hate.”

“Like a personal secretary, sort of?”

She did not smile. “Mr. Conrad has seven personal secretaries. One executive secretary, two research secretaries, a social secretary, a scheduling secretary, a record-keeping secretary, and a personal private secretary. Plus assorted personal executive assistants and chiefs of staff and first facilitators and chief counselors and senior advisors and legal counsels and a personal physiotherapist and several personal physicians and psychiatrists—a clinic, really—plus an incredibly complex impossibly sprawling extended personal family. And then of course there is the empire itself, with its hundreds of CEOs, comptrollers, and so on. And finally there are the various executives, and executive, legislative, and judicial branches, of a great many governments. I am one of two people through whom he accesses all those people. And vice versa. I have the 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. shift—or 1:00 P.M. to 1:00 A.M. Greenwich.”

I blinked. “And you have time to tell me Victor Hugo jokes?”

“No. That’s why I enjoyed it so much. You looked like you needed relaxing.”

“I still do! How much time do I have?”

“None,” she said. A previously unsuspected door occurred behind her. “Good luck, Joel.”

Rennick stepped forward and entered. I didn’t. The powers of motion and speech had deserted me.

“You’ll be fine,” she murmured. “The suit looks terrific on you.”

When you’re too scared to move, there’s a simple fix. I’m not saying easy—but simple. Just lean forward. That’s all you need to do. Keep it up long enough and you’ll fall on your face—but your body won’t let you. It will automatically put a foot out… and now you’re moving forward. Repeat as needed. Remember to alternate feet.

Before I knew it I was passing through the doorway, lurching only slightly.