Variable Star (45 page)

She gently collided with me, for the second time in six of my years and thirteen of hers. She was taller, now. Her eyes were only decimeters from mine, this time. So was her mouth. Both her arms were around me. I had both of mine around her. I must have let go of my handhold again. The room
literally
spun around us. She twined her calves around mine, completing the free-fall embrace. Our bellies touched, and we both discovered my waxing erection.

“I
bullied
them into coming for you,” she said. “I said I would space myself if they did not. They knew I meant it. Right now, Gran’ther would rather cut off his own feet than lose fifty percent of the universe’s remaining supply of egg-laying Conrads.” Her voice dropped so low then that even I needed to follow her exaggerated lip movements to know she was adding, “
But…he…is
…
going to
.”

It wasn’t so much any of the words as looking at her mouth that forced me to kiss her.

Very little coherent thought took place during that kiss. So it must have gone on for a long time, because I had time to think that no woman in my life had ever given me her attention for so many years in a row for any reason, let alone without reasonable hope of any possible return. That she had done this for years before she’d ever heard me play a note. That she had learned to play because of me. That she was far and away the best kisser I had ever met or even fantasized. And that it would be very convenient if our first two children happened to take to the bass and drums. Drums first, no doubt.

Then our faces were whole decimeters apart again, and there was a ship around us.

“You
are
coming with us, right?” she asked solemnly.

“I’m coming with
you
,” I said just as solemnly.

We both grinned at the same instant. “This
is
insane, right?” I asked her.

“Believe it,” she agreed.

“Oh, thank heavens. For a second there I was afraid I was going sane.”

“Little danger of that,” Jinny said from across the room.

I glanced over at her, found her expressionless. I realized that not once during that timeless kiss had it even momentarily occurred to me that Jinny was watching us. It made me want to grin even wider, but it seemed politer not to. The disease had come close to killing me—but the cure was now complete. Andrew, poor bastard, was welcome to her. I wished him well, hoped he was genius
enough
to hold his own with her. He had licked lightspeed; maybe he could.

My heart suddenly sprang a leak, and joy started to leak out into reality. It began to sink in that I had no clear idea what was going to happen next, what I was going to do now. Or how I was going to live with myself afterward. I wanted with my whole heart to go with Evelyn, wherever she might go. But how could I leave so many of my friends—any of my friends—behind to die in the
Sheffield
? If I stayed, I could save at most one other life—if it hadn’t been for me,
nobody
would have lived—those and a dozen other rationalizations raced through my mind, but were of no help whatsoever.

Evelyn saw the change in my face. From her distance she could scarcely have helped it. “Joel, what’s wrong?”

I sighed. “I really hate with my whole heart the idea of leaving anyone at all to die of old age in this bucket. I don’t know if I can… I don’t know how to…” I did not even know how to express my dilemma, even to myself.

Dorothy Robb spoke up. “Am I the only one here comfortable with arithmetic?”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

She was frowning mightily “Admittedly, the math does become hairy. But surely
someone
must know how to operate a calculator.”

“What do you mean, Dorothy?” Evelyn called.

She replied, “Joel, how many passengers does the
Sheffield
now carry?”

I wasn’t at all sure. Too many deaths lately, no time to keep the figures current. “Can we call it four hundred and fifty for now?”

She nodded and closed her eyes, saying, “So: nine passengers at a time yields a total of forty-five trips, with a series of geometrically decreasing trip lengths beginning with seventy-five light-years—we assume zero turnaround time for convenience—” She stopped speaking, but her lips kept moving. We all gave her time. After a while she said, “Call it very roughly a hundred and fifty-one years.”

My heart sank in my chest, but I nodded and kept going, needing to know just how bad it was. “How many could we transport in the first seventy or eighty years? You know, before we all die of old age.”

Dorothy gave me the look a grandmother gives a child who has just picked his nose in company “Joel, Joel—those are a hundred and fifty-one
real
years.”

“Pardon—oh!” My heart leaped.

“Since this ship is doing nearly ninety-eight percent of the speed of light, that works out to…hall a tick, now…a bit under thirty-three local, shipboard years.”

Blood roared in my ears.
We could all live!
Her figures assumed zero turnaround, zero downtime for maintenance, and a lot of other things—but it didn’t matter: the thing was
doable
. Andrew had saved us all.

This changed
everything
. For the first time since the quantum ramjet had gone out, I started to feel real hope. With it came a phantom memory of an ancient film about a man struggling with Time, who said to a companion near the end, “It’s not the despair—I can live with the despair. It’s the
hope
that’s killing me!”

Well, being killed beats being dead. I’d been dying for two dozen years now, since the moment of my birth. Another seventy-five years of it sounded very good.

If I could spend them with Evelyn.

T
he hatch
opened and Andrew entered, as if invoked by my thinking of him. Herb came in on his heels, must have guided him there.

“Hi, darling,” was the first thing Andrew said, I noticed, and then, “Hello, everybody. I hope I’m not—” He saw me and Evelyn. “But apparently I am. I should have tapped first; crave pardon.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Herb told him. “That’s the way I usually find him.”

“Usually with his girlfriend,” I agreed.

Evelyn turned to me, eyes twinkling, and we gave each other our best deadpan. She was good; I nearly lost it. “So I’m going about this backward, then?” she asked.

“I for one work best in that mode,” I told her. “Come on in, Andrew—I can work with an audience. How goes the confabulation?”

He looked pained. “Well, they’re still discussing what should be done to evacuate the
Sheffield
as efficiently as possible. Your grandfather’s come up with the seed of a very interesting plan, actually. Several problems still to be solved, of course, but…look, could we talk about it on the way? Richard sent me to tell you he’d be pleased if we all returned to the
Mercury
right away, and began preparing for an immediate launch. It’s very important to lose as little time as possible, obviously, since every loss will cascade down through the whole sequence, and he’s determined to hit the ground running.”

Evelyn and I exchanged a glance and adjusted our position until we were side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist. “They’re that close to agreeing on a plan?” Jinny asked.

Her husband shrugged. “Your grandfather wants to be under way two seconds after the airlock shuts behind him. We don’t even know if all the provisions we were offered have been loaded aboard yet, much less stowed properly.”

She nodded. “I guess we can continue the conversation there. Let’s go.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Question.”

“He just told you we don’t have any minutes to spare,” Jinny said sharply.

“I agree with Andrew. But that begs my question: who’s ‘we,’ exactly?” Everybody did a lot of blinking.

“Ten seats. Seven of you. If Evelyn has her way, I take seat number eight. Who gets the other two?”

Very
loud
blinking. Herb looked less sleepy than usual.

Andrew cleared his throat. “As I was leaving, Mr. Hattori had just agreed to join us.”

“Really?” Jinny said. “Why?”

Andrew frowned. “To be honest, I’m not sure. It made sense when Richard explained it.”

“Hattori!” Lieutenant Bruce squawked, ruining his efforts to avoid being caught eavesdropping. “Why in space should
he
get one of the first berths? He’s a
bean counter
!”

Jinny’s stare blasted him with superheated contempt, and he withered. “I’m sure you would prefer to share your Bridge with people
interested
in your opinions, Lieutenant, so we will take our leave now. Your hospitality has been exceeded only by your courtesy. Shall we go, all?”

Evelyn turned her head to look at me. “Is there anything you want to pack, Joel?” One eyebrow rose slightly, copied accurately by the same side of her mouth. “Anyone you want to say good-bye to?”

I had absolutely no idea where we were going to go, or what we intended to do when we got there, or what if any contribution I could make.

I raised my voice a little. “Herb? Say good-bye to everybody for me, will you? You know how to say it pretty.”

“If I don’t get the tenth seat, sure,” he called back. “Don’t bother leaving me your porn folder; I hacked into it years ago.”

“Captain Conrad?” I said at the same volume. “Would my baggage allotment aboard your ship accommodate a baritone saxophone?”

“Anna?” Evelyn asked.

I smiled. “You read liner notes carefully. Yes, my Yanigasawa.”

Andrew called, “If it didn’t, I’d tear out a couple of instrument panels or something.”

He and I exchanged a look. “I’ll meet you all at the airlock with my saxophone, then,” I said.

Andrew pretended to clear his throat. “Joel, I hope you will forgive my presumption. I took the liberty of asking that your silver baritone be loaded aboard the
Mercury
shortly after our arrival. Evelyn said that was the one you’d want.” His eyes went back and forth between Jinny and Evelyn twice. “It seemed the prudent course.”

I knew what he meant. Jinny and Evelyn were twin forces of nature. If one of them said a man was coming aboard, the smart money said to save time and start loading his luggage. “I’m sure it was,” I agreed, and a silent understanding passed between us. “Let’s go, then. I’m eager to see your ship, Captain. I presume you docked down by the main passenger airlock?”

“That’s right.” He turned to Herb. “Mr. Johnson, will you accompany us? I can show you that thing I was talking about on our way up here.” Herb nodded.

Bruce looked like he wanted to cry. Rennick looked like he could happily boil me. Dorothy looked like she wanted to suddenly extrude a judge’s robes and marry Evelyn and me on the spot. Andrew looked as proud as a puppy who’s learned some really amazing new tricks and is dying to show everyone.

And Evelyn looked like the rest of my life, smiling at me.

T
he trip
was nearly the whole length of the ship, and took longer than I had expected. We did not pass a lot of people I knew well…we passed few people at all; it seemed a lot of us were waiting in our rooms to be told what the hell was going on. But of the few friends we did encounter, there were none that either Herb or I could bring ourselves to simply float past without a word of personal leave-taking. We also wanted to make sure the news spread as quickly as possible throughout the ship that everyone was going to get out of this alive, sooner or later. I never did find a really satisfactory way to say it in a few sentences. Herb did much better, of course. All but one of the reactions I got were positive, supportive. The one—Richie—just gaped at me, then turned and jaunted away without a word.

We had gotten all the way to the airlock antechamber before things started to shift around in my head.

I found myself thinking over everything that had been said since I’d gotten to the Bridge, and who had been saying it. Everything made sense, everything added up, except for a single term in the equation. It nagged at me. Gave me a faint sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that I could not seem to either justify or explain away.

I was so preoccupied I was barely paying attention to Andrew’s eager babbling about his discovery, even though I did want very much to hear it. It was the genuine Secret of the Ages he was telling me. But I was distracted, and it didn’t help that hardly anything he said conveyed much meaning to me.

Then all at once, three words leaped out of the noise, burrowed into my consciousness, and there exploded with great force. I lost my grip on my p-suit, and didn’t bother jaunting after it.

“Andy” I interrupted rudely. “Did you just say, ‘…irrespective of…’ a moment ago?”

He was struggling with his own p-suit, trying to get his feet in. He had the klutziness of the true supergenius. “Excuse me? Yes, Joel. Quite irrespective. As I was saying, the basis of the DIS principle—”

I stepped on him again. “Evelyn? Do you understand Andrew’s drive? Has he explained it to you?”

She paused in her own suit-up checklist procedure. “He tried to,” she said, puzzled but game. “It didn’t take. I’m afraid I don’t have anything like your background in physics.”

I nodded. “Dorothy?”

She shook her head. “I was
handicapped
by my background in physics. It kept turning out that everything I thought I knew was wrong. I gave up listening at about the fourth sentence, when I seemed to hear him telling me that all mass is infinite in the first place.”

“It is, in a sense,” Andrew tried to explain. “You see—”

“Andrew, my new friend,” I told him, “we don’t. Very likely we can’t. But I want to be as certain as I can be of at least one datum, so I’m going to ask you one more time. Have I just understood you to tell me that the DIS effect functions under any circumstances,
irrespective of mass
? Do those three words mean to you what they mean to us? Or is this some sort of semantic confusion?”

“No, you’re correct,” he said, puzzled. “Mass really is imaginary, you know. Like inertia. What you need to understand—”

I turned to Evelyn. “Do
you
get it?”