Variable Star (11 page)

I consulted an atlas, and calculated that with a little luck, the highspeed public slidewalks ought to get me back to Vancouver in no more than seventeen hours or so. If I could just avoid getting hungry or thirsty or bored for that long, I’d end up back in my tiny basement apartment, free to gorge on whatever I had left in the pantry and all the water I wanted, while enjoying any book or film I already owned. Then I would have to start praying that my scholarship came through before the next rent payment was due. This was a bad time to go into debt; interest rates were approaching body temperature.

I made a mental note:
never
go on a bender without taping a fifty-credit bill to the sole of your foot.

I found slidewalk access without too much trouble, transferred my way up to the 320 kph strip in due course, found a seat without difficulty, and hunkered down for the trip. It took me all of half an hour to go from terminal nausea to ravening hunger. Did you know that you smell at least partially with your mouth? Holding my nose didn’t help
nearly
enough in suppressing food smells. I had to keep resisting a temptation to suck on my own hand. I was already drawing enough unwanted attention as it was: it turned out that I
looked
like someone on a bender. Why wouldn’t I?

After a lonely half hour I spent watching countryside whip past too fast to really see, someone sat down near me. That cheered me up until I realized the reason for his tolerance: he was well into a bender of his own, and might not have noticed if I’d been on fire. Ignoring public privacy laws, he was listening to music on speaker rather than his earbeads. I started to object—and got sucker-punched by the song that was emanating from his wrist.

It’s the reason we came from the mud, don’t you know

’
cause we wanted to climb to the stars

Instantly, I was back in the ballroom of the Hotel Vancouver, in Jinny’s arms, dancing with her at our prom. The last happy moment I could recall. Maybe the last one I was ever going to have. I know that sounds melodramatic, hut that’s because you’re not eighteen anymore. I didn’t burst into tears—quite. But it was a near thing.

Ask anyone which way is God, and you know

he will probably point to the stars
…

Not everyone, I thought. Some of us would point to a glacier somewhere in northern British Columbia.

All at once I understood the real reason I had chosen not to hop a starship after all. I wasn’t
done
yet. I couldn’t even think about
thinking about
leaving for Immega 714 as long as my situation was still unresolved. Not until I’d done everything I could to try and fix it. I was still alive. Jinny was still alive.

Well, there was no time like the present. Automatically, I started to look round for a ’fresher, to fix my appearance—then decided it could wait. Let Jinny see the state she’d reduced me to, first. All I wanted from her right now was a phone code, anyway.
Then
I’d get cleaned up. She and I would have our own conversation, after this upcoming one was done. I punched her code from memory—my own, I mean, not pod storage—and then the call went through, and—

I flipped my wrist over to make the screen go away and shouted “
Coventry
!” loud enough to startle my zoned neighbour into muting his music.

Why was I so surprised?
Ask me which way is God
, I thought,
and I’ll point to my phone
.

I turned my wrist back over, and Conrad of Conrad frowned up at me.

I
had
wanted
to talk to him, planned to talk to him, with great firmness and determination. In a few minutes, once I’d gotten his code from Jinny and prepared my lines. Now I was off balance. Great start.

He began speaking nearly at once. I could see his lips move. But I was now forcibly reminded that I had thrown my earbeads into the Georgia Strait, last night. I could only point at my ears and shake my head, feeling like an idiot, even further off balance.

He glanced way offscreen at someone to his right, lifted an eyebrow, and my phone put itself on speaker. I’d have thought of it myself in a second. I could feel my cheeks burning.

“I said, I understand your problem, Joel.”

I hoped to call myself a man one day. It simply did not matter it I was unprepared, or my hair was uncombed, or my pants were on. Showtime! “I’m very glad to hear that, Conrad.” There now—I’d remembered in time not to call him “sir.”

“You have grave doubts that you’ll measure up.” I tried to respond, and he kept talking right over me until I stopped. “Any sane man in your position would. You have no life experience to reassure you yet. Or to reassure me, for that matter. Women’s intuition has historically been a chancy method of selecting winners—else Troy would still stand. But your genes and grades are excellent, for what that’s worth. And you have off-planet experience, which broadens a man. Maybe you are what we need. I think you are. In any case you are going to be given a chance. One moment, Joel.”

His gaze shifted up and to his left slightly, and he began a conversation with someone in a corner of his screen. The audio cut off, and the image of his mouth fuzzed so that his lips could not be read. Very slick.

I used the pause to get hold of myself, control my breath, and figure out what to say to cure his misconceptions. I even had a second or two to appreciate the surreality of having a phone conversation on a public slidewalk with one of the wealthiest living humans. Then I waited to seize control of the conversation the moment his eyes returned to mine.

Waste of time; once again he simply ignored the fact that I was speaking. “If you do measure up, you will become a Conrad, with all that implies. If you don’t—well, you and your children will be Johnstons, but considerably better off than you would otherwise be. One of the pleasant things about this dynasty is that we can be liberal in pensioning off those who don’t quite make it.” I’d have tried to interrupt if there’d been any point. “If you turned out to have no real head for business but were tops in research, say, you might end up as Dr. Johnston, Chief of Kindelberger Research Laboratories. Or you might choose to simply lie in the sun in Cairns, and that can be arranged, too—we can afford to be generous. One moment.”

Once again he spoke briefly and inaudibly with someone else, this time in his lower right-hand corner. This time when his gaze returned to me I was ready with a very loud, “Mr. Conrad, sir!”

I think he literally didn’t know how to process insolence. Insufficient experience. It shut him up long enough for me to wedge four more words in edgewise. It took a surprising amount of courage to say them.

“The answer is no.”

He tried to frown and raise his eyebrows in surprise at the same time. Even Conrad of Conrad must have heard those words before—or he’d own
everything
, instead of only about a quarter of it. But he clearly hadn’t expected to hear them now, from me. “You mean you
don’t want
to marry my granddaughter?”

Surprising him cheered me up. I reminded myself that I had once bitten this man. Hard, as I recalled. “Don’t misunderstand me. If Jinny wants to get married right away, we’ll get married. I’ll swing it somehow. But I do not intend to let someone else lay out my life according to some kind of time table and tell me when to wipe my nose—no matter how well the job pays. It’s not a question of measuring up. I’ll do my own measuring. And I’ll pay my own way. Thanks anyway, I appreciate it, I do appreciate it—but keep your free lunch, it’s not for me.”

He glanced up and to the right, and this time forgot to mute his audio. “Tell the Secretary of State I will be a few minutes late.” I think he really did forget, because when he said those words his voice was flat and cold, and when he turned back to me it had become warm and fatherly “I admire spirit in a young man, I really do. We can’t hold this thing together with yes-men and flunkies at the top. Your answer convinces me more than anything else that little Jinnia Anne has made a wise choice. Nevertheless, I must convince
you
that we need you—and that you need training. We’ve got to crowd thirty years of training into the next ten—it’s been proved over and over again that, despite the wonders of modern geriatrics, young men must be allowed to make top decisions before age, experience, and caution grow on them like rust or mold. We must strive for a young man’s drive and an old man’s knowledge. Not easy.” He sighed. “And the young have all the time in the world. I wish I did. You want to sleep on it, I can see that. Looks like you could use the sleep, too.” Without taking his eyes from mine, he told someone, “Joel will call me at this code tomorrow at 0900 PST.”

I started to ask him what code to use to reach Jinny—but he had already broken the connection.

I
tried
redialing the number—and was told it was a null. I could guess it would remain one, at least for me, until tomorrow morning at nine.

I went to Jinny’s apartment that night. She had moved out. No forwarding address. I caught one of her neighbors looking at me with pity. I agreed with her.

I did not call Conrad at 0900 the next morning. For the next half hour, I was braced for him to call me, or have some flunky summon me, but he did not. For the rest of the morning, I was halfway prepared for two large men to bust in my door and drag me out to a black limo, but nothing of the sort occurred.

A little after noon, there was incoming mail, a text-only message. It was a letter from Stony Brook, informing me without even a polite pretense of regret that my scholarship had been turned down. It didn’t say why, but it didn’t need to.

Every single plan I had made for my life lay in ruins. No degree, no career, no future, no Jinny, no family—unless I consented to serve at stud while training to run a multiplanet dynasty. My only two lifestyle choices were to be a dole bludger, or one of the wealthiest gigolos alive.

I wanted, very badly, to get so wasted that my previous bender would seem a mere preamble.

Instead, I did not so much as drink a beer or take an acetaminophen. I spent the day taking care of a number of tedious details and formalities. I ate a healthy dinner, retired early, got a good night’s sleep. In the morning, I filled a backpack with the belongings and food I hadn’t disposed of the day before, locked the apartment behind me for the last time, and headed for a crosstown slidewalk.

A little over seventeen hours later I persuaded Dr. Rivera (whose breath smelled like strawberries that day) that I was sober enough to apply for a slot on the waiting list for a berth on the RSS
Sheffield
. The expedition’s backers had no connection whatsoever with the Conrad dynasty; my application was accepted. That very afternoon, one of the colonists who’d already been accepted managed to kill himself on one last rock-climbing trip. The next day I was informed that I had been chosen to replace him.

I was on my way to Immega 714, aka Peekaboo. Where I would live out my life on the planet called Brasil Novo.

T
here were other candidates, of course, some of whom had been waiting
years
longer than I had, and a great many of them had more impressive skill sets or resources than I did, as well. But such decisions are rarely made fairly. What got me the berth—late starter, dead broke, and all—was a combination of three specific unfair advantages I had over my competitors.

First, of course, was what would have been a disadvantage in just about any other enterprise, with the possible exception of prostitution: my extreme youth. I had only just become a legal adult. You want young people on a voyage expected to last nearly twenty years, ship time, and over ninety years Earth time—but not a lot of them volunteer for such a trip. If they do, and are turned down, they tend to go away and make another plan. It’s not really the sort of trip young people sit around and pine for, at least not now that the first waves have gone. Not happy healthy ones, anyway.

The next important factor was sheer coincidence: the
Sheffield
’s boost rate. She would blast at a constant acceleration of exactly one-third gee—and I was from Ganymede. I’d be one of the few around who felt normal, for a change. For once, I’d be markedly better adapted,
more
effective, than those I was with. Even fewer Ganymedeans or Marsmen tended to sign up for star travel than did teenagers; they were just too busy.

But what cinched the deal was, I was from Ganymede. That is, I was one of no more than a handful of star colonists who had any practical, hands-on experience whatsoever with…pause for ironic drumroll…dirt farming!

You can’t blame Earthlings for not knowing much about that: despite what they named their planet, really good dirt is getting hard to come by, there. (God knows the Prophet wasted enough of it for them, may his concept of Hell actually appear, for just long enough to accept him.) But most Terrans haven’t even done any
hydroponic
farming, and the few who have are generally too rich to make good candidates for interstellar refugees. There is something to be said for scarcity. The total food-growing experience of most
Sheffield
passengers was almost indistinguishable from zero.

And I had a
ton
of it. Not theoretical experience, either. Not classroom knowledge, but the kind where bilging the course means you starve. Like most Ganymedeans, and many colonials in or on other worlds, I had spent a portion of my childhood turning earth, hauling manure, outguessing weather, making crops—performing some of the most ancient labor there is, using tools so primitive by Terrestrial standards that most of my fellow colonists probably could not have identified them without help. That’s what we were all so
busy
at, up there, if you’ve been wondering: turning rock into rutabagas, because they tasted better, and were also more nutritious.

Go ahead, laugh—I did. The one aspect of my background that had always been guaranteed to elicit gales of laughter from those Terrans I admitted it to ended up being the deciding factor in sending me to the stars. Pretty good joke, even for fate.