Variable Star (10 page)

Again, rebuttal wrote itself. Joel, don’t be a nincompoop.
How could she
not
have done this to you
? How would you have handled her problem differently, in her place? Placed an ad on the Web? “Princess seeks hybrid vigor. Salary effectively infinite. Auditions daily at noon; bring resume, genotype, and headshot.”

Me: Well, no, but—

Myself: But what? Once you did catch her eye, once she did somehow, for some glorious reason, cut you out of the herd and let you sniff each other, what was she supposed to do? Tell you who she really was on the first date? Come, now.

Me: But she could have! It wouldn’t have—

Myself: Oh, please. In the first place you’re full of shit, and in the second place even if you’re not, even if you really happen to be the kind of unique and special human being who isn’t remotely fazed by small things like unimaginable wealth and power…
how the hell was she supposed to know that on a first date?
Or a twentieth?

Me: She kept the damn masquerade up a lot longer than twenty dates! She strung me along for—

Myself: She maintained her cover until about thirty seconds after you stated for the first time, unequivocally and with sincerity in your voice, that you wanted to marry her as soon as you were able.

Me:…

Myself: You tell me: can you think of any other way at all that a girl in her position could
know
, for certain, whether she’s loved for her self or for her pelf? A girl needs to know these things, pal.

I: He’s right, you know.

Me: Yes, but—

Myself: Wait, I’m not done. Can you think of any other way at all that a guy in
your
position could know, for certain, that he genuinely loves a girl who’s worth gigacredits? Isn’t that a good thing for the guy to know before he marries her?

I: You’ll never have any doubts about your own motives, now.

Myself: And neither will she.

Imaginary friend, kibitzing: And neither will anybody else. Everyone will know the story: face it, it’s too good not to tell.

Me: Spiffing. Everyone I ever meet will be thinking, how smart can he be, to have been so profoundly fooled for so long.

Myself: If they know the story,
they’ll know Jinny
. They’ll understand.

Me: Okay, good point. Only…only…it’s just…it’s…

D
amn it
out to the Oort Cloud and back, I understood why she had to do what she did—but
how could she do that to me
?

D
istraction. Distraction.

I found that I was on my feet, dressed, and pacing around my tiny apartment, with no memory of having willed any of these things. This suggested to me that the distraction should take the form of a depressant rather than a stimulant.

The bar in my home was a pathetic joke compared to even the field model in Conrad’s guest taxi—I was a starving student, who couldn’t afford to indulge, and usually didn’t mind—but its sole useful content happened to be a large, unopened bottle of an ancient Greek alcoholic beverage called Metaxa, a species of brandy, given to me by a friend with family on Ikaros. I pulled the cork, decided to dispense with a glass, took a big incautious gulp. It smelled and tasted the way I have always imagined gasoline must have smelled and tasted—especially if the gasoline were on fire at the time. By the time I realized my error and tried to scream, my vocal cords were crisped. My tongue cooked through as if microwaved. Tears spilled like lava from my boiling eyes.

When I could see again, I located my arm, followed it to my hand. The bottle was still in it. I transferred my consciousness, became the bottle, managed to locate my former mouth, and made my way back there. But in attempting to make the jump back to my own brain again, in order to appreciate the full benefit of that second swallow I got lost somehow I thrashed around the noosphere for a while, looking for me, but eventually I decided the hell with it and just embraced the darkness. Darkness was a very good thing to embrace. You could count on it staying what it was.

A
fter that
comes a series of disconnected fragmentary memories, of events so unlikely and actions so unlike me I’m honestly not sure whether they were real, hallucinations, or some combination thereof.

I’m quite prepared to believe, for instance, that at one point I raced up the Granville Street Slidewalk, scattering pedestrians like duckpins, while screaming, “I am Prorad of Prorad! Absolutely nothing that happens to you is my fault!” But can it be remotely possible that I really was, as memory insists, holding hands with a monkey at the time? Where did the monkey come from? Where did he go?

Similarly, it’s not impossible that I challenged half a dozen White Hat boys to personal combat for laughing at me in Chinatown. The Granville Slidewalk leads in that direction, and I was in a suicidal mood. But how I could have survived…whatever ensued…unscathed, I can neither recall nor imagine. I had no weapon, no combat skills, and Ganymedean muscles. (I never understood, by the way, why Chinatown was still called that, considering that it had been well over a century since the population of Greater Vancouver was less than sixty percent Chinese by ethnicity. I don’t know; maybe ghettoization becomes funny after it stops happening. Or perhaps it was more of a “Never forget!” thing.)

And if I
was
in Chinatown, on foot—I had no money for cabs or other public transport—how could I have found myself, an eyeblink later, all the way across town at Spanish Banks beach, watching the vast boat city moored there, Little Kong, gleam in the sunlight, and boil and bustle with the indomitable industry of the doomed? As far as I could see, they were selling seawater to each other out there—but they did it with all their might, each dreaming of cornering the market one day. When a few Vietnamese came ashore, I reeled over and tried to apologize to them, for not having the guts to become a Conrad, and thus solve the politico-economic conditions that trapped them there. But the language barrier intervened—they spoke no Basic, I spoke no Vietnamese—and somehow I ended up buying an unlabeled sprayer of something even more diabolical than Metaxa from them, instead. Maybe they did understand what I was trying to say, after all.

I remember the first rush of it, whatever it was—it was memorable, even to a man in my condition—and after that I have only one other brief scrap of memory that seems even remotely likely to be real.

I became aware that I was chilly. This rekindled enough awareness for me to notice that I was on the west side of Stanley Park—halfway up a
tall
tree. (How did I get to the Park from Spanish Banks on foot? Persuade someone to drive me? Stow away on a bus? Teleport? No idea.)

It seems clear in retrospect that my intention must have been to commit suicide. Ganymedeans do not climb tall trees in Terran gravity for any other reason I can think of. Amazing I got as far as halfway up; I had never climbed a tree in my life. Apparently I had become distracted by the magnificent view, staring across the Georgia Strait at distant Vancouver Island, just visible low on the horizon, and beyond that the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Pacific Ocean and ultimately Vladivostok, I suppose.

I should not have been chilly—I don’t wear stupid clothes—but I’d obviously forgotten to recharge them. It made sense that my face would he the chilliest part of me…but why was the coolness there
moving
, running down toward my neck? I had just worked out that it was tears, sheets of them, when my phone went off. I knew who it was, but checked the display anyway, just on the off chance that it was a major university offering me a full scholarship and bursaries.

It was Jinny, of course.

I turned up the volume to hear the message she was recording. “—been trying to give you room, give you time to get ov—uh, to adjust to the situation. I know I’ve given you a lot to deal with. I understand why you ran away. But I can’t wait anymore, I’m going out of my mind. Pick up, Joel, we have to talk.
Please
pick up. I probably won’t be able to call you again, and if you try and call me back, it won’t…oh, God damn it, I love you, Joel. I really do. You know that. Just give me—”

I plucked the earbeads out of my ears, held them at arm’s length. Jinny’s voice became a faint cricket sound. That seemed a distinct improvement. If a little was good, then—I threw the earbeads so hard, they cleared the sea wall below and plunked into the Georgia Strait. Yes, that was the ticket: no more cricket.

“‘Ran away’?” I muttered. “
I’ll
show you run away, lady. Watch me.”

How did I get back down from that tree without breaking anything? I reject memory, which says I was assisted by a team of swans, but have no better explanation to offer.

There are, as I said, a few more shards of memory after that, but I don’t think any of them represent real experiences. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s possible to
do
that with even an
extremely
cooperative goat. Certainly not without paying in advance.

A
nd then
, with the shocking suddenness of running full tilt into an unseen wall, I was instantly a hundred percent cold sober, and an ugly man with lemon breath was staring into my eyes from no more than ten or twenty centimeters away, so fixedly and intently that I sensed he was grading them, by some unknown criteria.

I couldn’t stop him, so I decided to grade
his
eyes. At first they seemed the eyes of a man so tired he was on the verge of a temper tantrum. But on second look I could see that he was always that angry, and the fatigue merely blew his cover. On the third look, I learned something new. Until then I had believed that anger is
always
fear in disguise. My father had told me so once, in memorable circumstances, and I’d never seen a counterexample. But now I could see that at least some of this man’s anger derived not from fear, but from shame. In some way he had failed himself irredeemably—so irredeemably that there was no longer anything left to fear. His face tried to say that was
my
fault, especially his mouth—but his eyes knew damn well it wasn’t.

“Am I finally addressing a sentient being?” he asked.

Early sixties. Ruddy face. Strong lemon breath. Sour lemon. “I doubt it,” I said. “But I’m probably close enough to run for Parliament, at least.”

He grunted and moved away. As his face receded I tried to follow it and fell off my chair, thereby learning that I had been sitting in a chair. Where this chair,
mein herr
? There,
mon cher
. Well, I swear.

He let me make my own way back up into the chair, leaning into the force of his contempt as if it were a strong wind. It took me a while. Before I had time to congratulate myself, he said, “I’m Dr. Rivera. Do you know where you are?”

I rubbed a sore spot on my face. “On Terra, obviously. Barbaric gravity.”

He didn’t have the energy to be impatient. “Where on Terra, specifically?”

“In these pants,” I said, and giggled.

“After what I gave you, you should be straight by now,” he said. “I conclude you must be a natural horse’s ass.”

“Nonsense! I’ve had to work hard at it.”

Humor was wasted on him. Or being wasted was not humorous to him. One of those. “You are in Tampa, Florida.”

I giggled again. “Home of the tampon. Is this your pad?”

“You are at the Tampa Spaceport.”

“You don’t want to Tampa with a spaceport. Your complexion could end up even Florider.” I cracked myself up with that one. But as I laughed, rusty wheels finally began to turn slowly in my head.

Tampa? Why the hell would I go to Tampa? Even if I had found some sort of pressing reason to visit a spaceport, Albuquerque was a hell of a lot closer to Vancouver than Tampa was—

“Do you know why you are—”

What did Tampa have that Albuquerque didn’t? Nothing. In fact, these days Tampa was almost completely closed to normal commercial traffic, due to—something. I forgot.

“I said, do you even remember what you—”

What made Tampa different from any other spaceport in this hemisphere?

“Forget it,” he said suddenly. “You’re not up to this.”

“The hell I’m not,” I said automatically. Whatever he was talking about, who the hell was he to be talking about it?

His contempt reached a crescendo. “Young man, I doubt you’d be up to it even if your bloodstream were completely clean. It’s a big decision. Too big for you. Try again another time. You probably won’t be any smarter, but you will at least be older.”

Wait a minute, now—there
was
one thing you could do at Tampa that you couldn’t do at any other spaceport in this hemisphere, right at this time—

“I’m old enough to make up my own mind, Dr. Rivera,” I snapped.

—wait a minute—

He blinked. “See here, son—you are indeed, as you point out, legally old enough to make up your mind as neat and tight and tidy as your bed used to be made up when you lived with your mother. But
you have not done so yet
. Half your blankets are on the floor, the sheets are a tangled wreck. Go sleep it off, come back in a day or two, and we’ll talk. In my professional judgment, you’re not ready to go to Immega 714.”

My jaw fell. On my first attempt, I had very nearly gotten stoned enough to fall right out of the Solar System.

W
hen the
shock wore off, I found I was more than half tempted to go through with it. Sign onto the
Sheffield
, become a Gentleman Adventurer, and head for the stars. Partly just to spite that sourpuss with the sour lemon breath, for telling me I couldn’t. But mostly because it suited my mood. Star travel would certainly be a way out of the trap I’d put myself in, the trap Jinny had led me into—

—one that involved gnawing off both my own legs. No thanks. I told Lemon-Breath Rivera I
would
be back in a day or two, but we both knew I was fronting. I found myself on the street, blinking against the Tampa sunshine, sweating in the Tampa heat.

I considered various options for getting home again, balancing speed against expense with the miserliness of a student on a short budget. Then I thought to consult my credit balance, and my options shrank to one. If that. In choosing my route to Tampa, I had apparently assumed it was okay to burn bridges, and had chosen a semiballistic. Fast, comfortable—and
very
expensive, what with the price of hydrogen. I was just short of totally tapped out.