Variable Star (20 page)

“God,” Kathy said, “what a shitstain in history.”

“Middle Ages were worse,” Zog said.

“Maybe—but
we could have had immortality by
now! We could have beaten cancer by now. We might have had telepathy by now.” She sounded angry.

“We have telepathy,” Zog said mildly.

“Sure, terrific. But only in identical twins, and fewer than four percent of them—
and
we don’t have the faintest idea how they do it, or why they can and the rest of us can’t.”

“True. There remain mysteries to be solved.”

“It’s infuriating.”

She really seemed upset. I decided to distract her with a diversionary anecdote. “Let me tell you both my very favorite mystery,” I said. “You reminded me of it just a second ago, Zog, and it’s related to what you’re talking about, Kathy. Kind of, anyway.”

She didn’t answer. “Go ahead, Joel,” the Zog said.

“I ran across this in a book. Just before the Hiatus, natal medicine got so good that they were sometimes able to save babies born
so
prematurely that they had not yet even developed the sucking reflex. And now that the Prophets are all finally holding services in Hell, we can do that again: rescue babies that are, in the Zog’s colorful phrase, too dumb to eat.”

“How?” Kathy asked. “Force-feed the poor things?”

The Zog shook his head. “They’d
never
learn, then.”

“No, they train them to suck,” I said.

Kathy frowned. “
How
? If something is too dumb to figure out that eating is pleasant, what the hell do you
reward
it with?”

I smiled. “Music.”

Her face smoothed over. “Oh, I love it.”

“Rhythm?” Zog asked.

“You’d think so, but no,” I said. “Melody. The little buggers will work hardest to bring about repetition of a favorite scrap of melody.
That
’s how hardwired love of music is, in the human brain. It
predates survival instinct
.”

“It doesn’t seem reasonable,” Zog said. “How would a brain evolve so?”

I spread my hands. “Ask God. I just work here. All I know is, it’s my very favorite mystery.”

“You like music, too?” she asked. “I like it a lot.”

“What kinds?”

The question seemed to puzzle her, but she gave it a try “Audible.”

She liked everything? It seemed to me, in my sophistication, that people who liked everything must understand hardly anything. I was eighteen, all right?

“For the past hour I’ve been thinking this place could use a banjo player,” I said.

“There are two listed,” she said, “and one other who isn’t. They’re all pretty good.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I did a data search for musicians, way back on Terra, and listened to all their audition recordings. I also asked the ship to alert me anytime someone makes live music, and let me listen in if they haven’t put privacy seal on it. I discovered at least half a dozen unregistered musicians that way. In fact, the best musician I’ve heard aboard so far was unlisted. He came aboard at the last possible minute, so they waived his audition.”

I opened my mouth, closed it again.

“What’s his instrument?” the Zog asked her.

“Saxophone. I sat in with him, remote, for a few numbers. I wanted to introduce myself afterward, but by the time I got the system to give up his phone code, somebody he was sitting with put a heavy privacy shield on the whole table.”

“Have you tried him since?”

My kindly wristband produced the chip-chirp indicating a watch alarm. Today’s shift was over. Saved by the chip. “Zog,” I said, “I really hate to act like a clock-watcher on the first day I’ve bothered to show up, but I really do need to—”

“There are things we need to talk about,” he interrupted.

“I know. Uh… I could meet you somewhere in a couple of hours. Your office?” I shifted my weight from foot to foot as if I badly needed to pee.

“Go. Our AIs will work something out.”

“Thanks Zog nice to meet you Kathy see you both tomorrow.”

I fled.

I
don’t get it,” Herb said, squinting at images on his wristband’s monitor. “This girl is clearly much better-looking than you are, even with the baldness, string warts, and that glass eye. You raved about her piano playing—and you say she appears able to endure your own instrumental atrocities, so it’s certain she has a forgiving nature. Did she google up bad?”

“I haven’t tried yet. I mean, I haven’t tried. I’m not interested, I keep telling you.”

“Age, height, mass, marital status, economic status, state of health, attractiveness, talent, all apparently compatible within reason. And you can forget
all
those factors, and remember just the three important things.”

I rolled my eyes. “Go ahead.”

“She is a female mammal, she has a pulse, and she thinks you’re the best musician in the colony.”

I grimaced in exasperation. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m…not…interested. I told you: I
took
that class. I’m done with women.”

He put his own exasperation into a sigh instead of a grimace. “Joel, twenty years is a long, long time. And it’s going to seem even longer, with an attitude like that.”

“She and I have nothing in common. Didn’t I tell you what her greatest dream for mankind is? Telepathy, for Murphy’s sake!”

“Something wrong with telepathy?” he asked mildly.

I blushed. “Aw, you know what I mean. She’s talking about the kind where nobody has any secrets and yet we all love each other. Fantasy.”

Herb had successfully passed two other Secret Messages back to little Evelyn Conrad for me so far. Her replies always cheered me up. But they always came back via conventional electronic mail rather than telepathic courier; for some reason she was willing to accept information from a telepath but not give information to one. I was a little afraid she might be overestimating the security of whatever mail route she used. So I kept my own messages to her to a minimum, for fear of getting her in trouble with her elders.

Thinking about telepathy gave me an idea. “Hell’s bells, Herb, why don’t
you
take a run at Kathy?”

He looked at me strangely “Really?”

“Well, you’re obviously interested in her. And she doesn’t find telepathy weird.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

I closed my eyes, counted to five, opened them again. “Why would I mind? Haven’t you been listening? I’m through with romance, I’m through with love, I’m through with counting the stars above.”

“You’re really serious about that, then.”

I rolled my eyes upward and asked the ceiling to bear witness to the tribulations I had to endure here below. “Yes, for the love of—is that you or me?”

He brought his wrist to his ear. “You. Go ahead.”

I tapped my own wrist. “Yes?”

The face on the screen was unfamiliar to me, as his first words confirmed. “Mr. Johnston, we haven’t met yet. My name is Paul Hattori. I am the colony’s banker. Forgive me for disturbing your privacy, but there is a matter we should discuss at your earliest convenience. A matter of some importance.”

I thought for a second. The day was young—hell, it was still before noon. But my morning had been overfull of stimulating inputs. I was tired, and confused, and wanted only to put my feet up and try to get some thinking done about everything that had happened that morning. “How about tomorrow?” I temporized.

He hesitated. “I will of course follow your wishes. But I have information you really should have as soon as possible.”

What could he possibly be on about? Was this some sort of pitch for investment advice or banking services? He had access to my financial records—record—surely he must know I was a dry hole. “Can you give me some idea what it’s about?”

He was smiling, but there was something odd about the smile, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t phony, exactly. Just odd. “I can, but if you will forgive me, I would greatly prefer to tell you in person.”

I met Herb’s eyes, raised an eyebrow. He shrugged. “Are you sure you don’t want Communicator Johnson? Same address, he’s my roommate.”

“No, it’s you I need to speak with, Mr. Johnston.” He gave an address only one deck below the officers and crew. He was a VIP.

“All right, I’ll be there in half an hour. But I still think you have the wrong bloke.”

“Who was that?” Herb asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “It can’t be important.”

I started to change to better clothes—and changed my mind. Why should I dress up for this joker? I wasn’t the one who’d asked for this meeting. Showing up was courtesy enough; putting on formal tights and collar would be obsequious. I had no reason to impress the man…because I had absolutely nothing to impress him
with
. He had nothing I wanted. Pausing only to empty my bladder and comb my hair, I left dressed just as I was: like a man who had recently been in a goat shed when somebody sneezed.

I took my time on the way, too. So I had time to develop a dark suspicion as to what he might want to talk to me for, which quickly built itself into an ugly and plausible theory.

Hattori was a banker. Bankers know all about very large sums of money. Did I know anyone who was connected in some way with very large sums of money? Had 1 not, indeed, recently roundly pissed off some people of that description? If they took a notion to have some sort of heavy weight dropped on my scrotum in retaliation, might not a banker be their chosen instrument?

It was hard to sustain alarm. As far as I knew, I really was bulletproof, from a financial point of view: I had nothing to steal, no credit to ruin. If the Conrads wanted vengeance, they would just have to have me beaten or killed like civilized people.

Nonetheless by the time I reached Hattori’s cabin I was paranoid enough to be feeling just a bit belligerent. I was going to stop just outside his door and take a few deep breaths to calm down, but the door recognized me and opened before I had the chance.

I had expected his quarters to be impressive. They exceeded my expectations. They were tasteful, supremely comfortable despite a Zen simplicity, luxurious without ostentation. A Hawaiian slack-key guitar played at background level—Cyril Pahinui, I think. I was given an understanding chair, and offered a beverage impressive enough to denote respect, which I accepted.

Banker Hattori was a pleasant-looking cobber. I’d have guessed his ancestry at a combination of something like Hawaiian or Japanese and Scottish or German. He was short by Ganymedean standards, a little short even by Terran reckoning, but well proportioned and clearly in excellent physical shape. Back on Terra, he might have sailed, climbed mountains, run marathons, flown an ultralight. Now that those joys were lost to him for the next twenty years, he probably played a competitive but noncontact sport, and worked out. But he was not hard to take the way some jocks can be, did not challenge.

In person, his smile was as subtly
off
as it had been over the phone. The surprisingly few seconds he wasted on polite ritual and pleasantry gave me just enough time to figure out what was odd about it. He was clearly a man who smiled a lot, in his off hours—the placement and depth of the smile wrinkles at his mouth and eyes told you that—but he was unaccustomed to smiling like that
at work
.

In retrospect, it’s actually pretty impressive that he didn’t drag it out longer than he did, surround it with even more of a big drumroll buildup. I couldn’t have blamed him if he had. He must indeed not have gotten to impart news of that particular sort very often.

But he was a professional, and also I think a reasonably kindly man, so he merely teased me with it until I wanted to throttle him.

“You have made no financial investment in this colony so far, Joel,” he began. We were Joel and Paul by then. “Looking over your records, I see that your motives in joining us were personal and emotional rather than economic. I would like to explain, briefly, why I think that was a mistake, and then—”

“Paul, excuse me for interrupting, but your pump is sucking air. I have no capital at all.”

He held up his hands. “Please—indulge me for just a moment. Think of it as a hypothetical. I did say ‘briefly’.”

He really did have a nice smile. Odd or not. “You have the floor.”

“I say I am the ship’s banker, and that is one of the things I do. I am also our colony’s chief financial adviser, and act as its representative.”

I nodded, impressed. “Quite a job. It can’t be easy, arranging to borrow such stupendous sums, let alone handling them wisely.”

“Let me give you an imaginary hypothetical conversation between me and a Terran banker, shortly before we left the Solar System.”

He proceeded to act it out, using different hokey but clever cartoon voices:

“Banker: Greetings, gentleman merchant adventurer, hereafter known as GMA. I assume you’re here to ask about a loan, and I’m sorry to say money is very tight just now—

“GMA: I have some lubricant with me.

“Banker: Excuse me?

“GMA: I can help solve tight money. I am here to discuss a loan, as you suggest. But I don’t want to borrow. I want to lend
you
money.”

“Banker: Really? Well, now. That would certainly be agreeable, in principle. What sort of terms and conditions did you have in mind?”

“GMA: Here is a check, representing gold dollars in Zurich.

“Banker: How m—oh my, a great many.

“GMA: A very great many.

“Banker: I…see. And you want to give it to us.

“GMA: I want you to invest it for me at compound interest. A rate of eleven percent a year would be acceptable.

“Banker: That is a very high rate of interest!

“GMA: Not if I undertake not to touch the money for twenty years…

“Banker: Ah. I begin to see. But what’s in it for me—besides the usual fees? How does this loosen tight money?

“GMA: You have the full use of that money for twenty years, and keep all the profits. All you have to do is invest soundly enough so the capital sum remains intact…a trick venture capitalists like yourself are rather good at.