Variable Star

5

Like the fabulous Conrad compound, my apartment was mostly underground, and did not appear on any map. But there the similarities ended.

For one thing, it was not located in the middle of a glacier somewhere, but smack in the midst of some of the most densely populated land in the U.S.N.A., the White Rock district of Greater Vancouver. For another, it was the polar opposite of opulent or luxurious, as comfortable as a coffin. Vancouver itself has a tradition of quasilegal “basement suites” dating back centuries to some World’s Fair, or perhaps Olympics, but outlying suburbs like White Rock acquired theirs so recently that they’re still illegal, hence unrecorded, hence unregulated, hence mostly shitholes. In sharp contrast to Conradville, it had only a single virtue to recommend it.

But right then, that virtue rated high in my scale of values: it was mine.

I take it back: it had one other thing going for it. The thing that had recommended it to me in the first place, back when I’d first grounded on Terra: like most caves, it was a terrific place to hole up. It had been my first refuge from the unbelievable crowding Terrans considered normal, from the appalling crime rate they considered acceptable, from my own sudden shocking physical weakness, from unexpectedly crushing homesickness and loneliness, and from my own unaccustomed social ineptitude. A womb with a view.

What I needed when I woke up, that horrible morning after, was refuge from my own thoughts and feelings. The apartment did its best, but I suspect a riot would have been insufficient distraction.

The emotion foremost in me when consciousness first reconstructed itself again was sadness, grief insupportable, but it took me a while to recall exactly what I was so sad about. Then it all came back in a rush, and I sat bolt upright in bed. My skull promptly exploded with the force of an antimatter collision—I’d obviously forgotten to take anti-hangover measures the night before—but the blinding white light and total agony seemed merely appropriate. I’d have howled like a dog if I’d had the strength. Instead I whimpered like a puppy.

For the last—I couldn’t remember how many mornings, I had woken up thinking of Jinny. Yearning for Jinny. Aching for Jinny. Had woken every time from dreaming of Jinny—of us—of us together—of the distant but attainable day when she would be there in the morning, there all night, the day when I would finally possess her fully.

Possess her? Ha! My lifetime net worth would probably not suffice to lease an hour of her time.

And yet she wanted me.

And God help me, I still wanted her—as fiercely as ever. I could still have her, if I chose. So why was I so sad I wanted to fall out of bed and bang my face against the floor?

The sadness was because my dream was gone. Whatever the future might hold for me and Jinny, it would not, could not, remotely resemble anything I had ever envisioned. Conceivably it could be a better future, perhaps much better—but right now, at this remove, mostly what it was, was unimaginable.

Unless it was nothing at all. I could imagine that easily enough. I just didn’t want to. Like life before I met Jinny—minus hope.

Let’s not be hasty, Joel. I couldn’t rent an hour of her time… but I could have all of her hours, if I wanted, without paying a single credit. What would it cost me, though? Let’s see. All my plans for my, our, future, for a start. The identity and goals and place in the world I had picked for myself. The rustic notion that the husband should be the one who supported the family, which I had already admitted to myself months ago was archaic nonsense anywhere but a frontier society like Ganymede. It hadn’t been customary for the majority of the human race for well over a century now.

And let’s not forget one other little cost that Conrad had been quite upfront about: most of my waking hours for the rest of my days, which would be spent working very long and hard on things for which I had little interest, training, or talent. With the very best of medical care assuring that I’d be in harness as long as possible. I would have to assume and bear a yoke of almost inconceivable responsibility—responsibility to literally billions of people, all with their own loves and dreams and plans for their futures.

And even if I washed out personally, my children would be groomed and fitted and trained for that same responsibility from birth. All of them. In my vague eighteen-year-old imaginings of the children I might have one day, I had always pictured myself advising them to pursue whatever really interested them, to follow their hearts, the way my father had with me. That would no longer be an option if they were Conrads.

I’m making my hungover maunderings seem far more coherent and organized and cogent than they really were. At the very same time that all the thoughts I’ve just described were going through my head, for instance, I was also simultaneously asking myself over and over again just what, exactly, was so horrible about becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in human history, if that was what it took to win the most beautiful woman in the Solar System?

Well, for a start, myself kept answering, you haven’t earned it. What good is a prize, any prize, if you don’t deserve it, if you haven’t done the work? Face it, Joel: you don’t even have the vaguest idea what the work is.

To which my ongoing rebuttal was: Oh, give me a break, self. Do you think even Conrad of Conrad truly earned that much power and money? Do you think anyone could? Do you honestly believe any conceivable human being, however talented and however hardworking, could possibly deserve that much compensation, merit that much authority? The most anyone can do is have it. Old man Conrad happened to have been born from the right womb at the right time, and must have behaved thereafter more intelligently than any of his rivals, that was all. That was as close as he came to deserving what he had: it had been handed to him, and he had not fumbled it. Now it—or at least a piece of it—was being handed to me—or at least to my—

—children. Mine and Jinny’s—

How could she do this to me?

Distraction. Distraction. Change the ch—ah, that was it. I found the remote—thank you, Mr. Tesla—turned on the tube, and selected passive entertainment, genre search.

First, drama: on some unimaginably distant colony planet—because there were two moons in the sky, one of them ringed—a beautiful woman with red hair was crying as if her heart were broken. No, thank you; change channel—

Comedy, next: a young man my age—we did make great natural comedic victims, didn’t we?—had done something incredibly stupid, and a roomful of people and Martians were laughing openly at his humiliation. Next, please—

Erotica. I was utterly disinterested, and noticed that my right arm was extremely weary. Apparently that car’s drug supply had included libido enhancers. Next—

Sports. Free-fall soccer semifinals, O’Neill versus the Belt, winner to face Circum-Terra in the fall. As it came on, the mob outside the globe roared: a forward as long and lean as a Ganymedean had just frozen, fumbled his chance, blown an easy shot by hesitating. Zoom in for extreme close-up of his anguished features, his obvious shame. Next—

News, Systemwide: Luna Free State was saying very rude things about Ganymede’s trade policy, and Terra was making no comment; while nobody had actually used the words “trade war” yet, everyone was thinking them, louder than they had last week. And here I was, trapped at the bottom of the gravity well. Next—

News, Global: The outfitting and provisioning of the latest colony ship, RSS Charles Sheffield, was nearly complete. It was expected to leave orbit in a few days, and a few days after that, assuming its drive lit without incident, its complement of some five hundred souls should go bye-bye in a big hurry. Hopeably to a star called Immega 714—known also, for reasons I could not imagine, as “Peekaboo.” Only the day before yesterday, I had considered most of them to be idiots, a company of misfits, malcontents, romantics, failures, crackpot visionaries, runaways, transportees, and other defective personalities. Now I found myself fiercely envying them. Just a couple more days, and nothing the Conrad dynasty or any individual Conrad could possibly do would ever again affect them in the slightest. What dominated my future and my children’s future was shortly to become as irrelevant to them as the Roman Empire. Sigh. Next—

Local news. Housing riots again. This time the demonstrators had somehow overwhelmed or outsmarted both proctors and private security, and penetrated to the very heart of Vancouver’s most upscale neighborhood, the tony intersection of Main and Hastings. Standard anticrowd measures could not be taken for fear of excessive damage to private property.

I switched to the fiction channel, scanned my favorites index for a story I wanted to reread, something really good and solid and dependable—and long, at least a trilogy. As I did, random sentences from old favorite books kept running through my head. You don’t turn down a promotion… if someone puts money in your hand, close your fingers and keep your mouth shut… let this cup pass from me… he played the hand he was dealt… opporknockity tunes but once, and you’d better be in tune with it….

Forget fiction. I was way too scattered to read. Even focusing on titles was beyond me. I didn’t bother with any of the music channels: I just knew that whatever I got would be heartbreaking. I shut the screen altogether and flung the remote across the room.

God damn it, how could she do this to me?

How could she lie to me that way, hide the truth from me for so long, tell so many lies to me, play me for a fool? My innocent, loving maiden turned out to be a slumming aristocrat, Harun al-Rashid’s granddaughter in clever disguise, casing the marketplace for a strapping young peasant lad with acceptable features and good teeth, to serve as stud back at the palace… smiling fondly inside at his earnest naïveté and childish dreams….

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 résumé, 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…

Damn 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?

Distraction. 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.

After 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 be 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.

And 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.

When 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.

I consulted an atlas, and calculated that with a little luck, the high-speed 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.

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, but that’s because you’re not eighteen anymore. I didn’t burst into tears—quite. But it was a near thing.

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 if 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.