Variable Star

6

There 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.

Even those three factors might not have been enough to get me aboard one of the very earliest colony ships—the Gaia, say—not at the last minute. For the first dozen voyages or so, crew and colonists alike were minutely scrutinized, rigorously tested, and meticulously matched according to carefully worked out social, psychological, and ergonomic principles (it says here), with hopeful alternates ready to fill a last-minute opening in any niche, long before the ship was ready to boost.

But by now, almost two dozen ships had left the Solar System—and the supply of applicants was beginning to thin out just a little.

Correction: the cream was beginning to thin out a little. There was still a copious supply of applicants… 99.99 percent of whom were eliminated by gross tests. Half the remainder then changed their minds halfway through.

Part of the problem was, hardly anybody still left wanted to pioneer, wanted to leave everything and everybody behind forever, and go plant beans by the sweat of their back under the miscolored light of an alien sun. It wasn’t really a question of pioneer spirit being just about gone, as jeremiahs were always complaining on the wire. Even way back in history, so-called pioneer spirit was usually the result of intolerable conditions back home more than anything else.

That applied back at the very dawn of star travel. Volunteers to leave the Prophet’s Paradise were not hard to come by. But the Solar System was a fairly tolerable habitat for most people about now, particularly Terrans and O’Neillers. There was still plenty of frontier to go around, too, for those who hated crowds and regulations. The Asteroid Belt seemed unlikely to fill up anytime soon. To want to leave Sol altogether, forever, you almost had to be a born misfit, or a perpetual tourist, or as brave and curious as a bodhisattva. Most of the last category had signed up already and left in the first or second wave.

I’ve omitted two other historically significant categories of pioneer. Fortunately, things had not yet reached the point where colony planners willingly accepted members of the first category: perpetual fuckups. But this would be the third ship so far to carry transportees—prisoners, guaranteed by their various sentencing jurisdictions to be “nonviolent,” “suitably skilled,” “highly motivated” “volunteers.” But there would be just over two dozen of them, five percent of the colony’s total population, and the majority would be political prisoners rather than predators. Neither of the previous transportee experiments had sent back reports of any problems so far.

One other thing I’ve speculated about. I said that the Immega 714 colony’s underwriters were not allied with the Conrads. In fact, they were instead associated with the Kangs and the da Costas, both houses that were hereditary enemies of the Conrads. The RSS Sheffield’s designers, the prestigious firm of Ray, Guy and Douglas, belonged to neither house—but were all notorious defectors from the giant Conrad subsidiary Starship Enterprises MDA.

I knew nothing of the history between the three houses, and still don’t—but sometimes I wonder whether a deep enough background check on me mightn’t have turned up the information that the Conrad family had put the Black Spot on me… and why. Are relationships between financial empires really petty enough that some Chinese or Brazilian exec way beyond his Peter Principle point might have up-checked my application purely to spite Richard Conrad?

I don’t know. Do you?

I expected something like a vocational/educational boot camp on the ground—several rigorous weeks at least of cramming, training, testing, observation, evaluation, and ultimately final placement in my proper place on the great ship’s table of organization.

I didn’t even get orientation indoctrination. They called me at a little after 7:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time in White Rock—near the end of business hours in Brussels, where the decision had been made—to tell me I’d been selected to take passage on the Sheffield. By nine that night, Pacific time, I was aboard her.

Where it was 6:00 A.M. local ship’s time, since the Sheffield was using the same Central European Time that Brussels did, for reasons left as an exercise for the reader who likes easy lifting.

I emerged from the airlock braced, I thought, for a barrage of new sensory data and impressions, expecting the unexpected insofar as that phrase has any meaning. Which is not much: I was definitely sideswiped by the smell.

It’s possible to cut your nose out of your breathing circuit completely, and I did at once. But that aroma was just pungent enough to taste with the tongue, and there’s no bypass for that, short of tracheotomy. I’d have stopped in my tracks… if I had not been so busy bracing my brain for new impressions that I’d neglected to have the more useful portion of my body maintain a hold on the airlock door. Having thus committed myself, I kept on sailing forward, with the stately inevitable grace of a runaway hospital bed on ice, until I crashed into a naked bald man.

I’m a colonial. We maintain some conservative (public) attitudes about sexuality, by contemporary System standards, but at the same time, being on the frontier we tend to be somewhat more practical and matter-of-fact than most Earthlings are about nudity. It was the bald part that startled me.

Thanks to the unnamed ladies who did us all the favor of tearing the Prophet into little bloody gobbets and bits of bone, it is finally once again permissible to do biological research, so happily all baldness is voluntary today, and is not a popular choice. And extremes of body weight are becoming so rare, one body looks much like another from a distance nowadays—so why would a man who spent time nude choose to shave off his only visual identifier? Was he antisocial? Or just self-effacing?

Neither. “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, and managed to brake us to a halt without sending either of us drifting. His speaking voice was just audible, despite our proximity.

I became aware that I was holding him in something very like a lover’s four-limbed embrace, and forced myself not to flinch. I was the stranger here, he was my host. But I hoped our sexual orientations matched. “So?”

He let go of me, again without setting me adrift. His expression was no clue at all. “You’re thinking, if it smells like this after only a few months of occupancy, what is it going to smell like in twenty years?”

I had to admit I had been on the way to formulating that very thought when I’d crashed. “Right in one.”

“And the answer is, in far less than twenty years you will be prepared to swear, truthfully, that this ship has no smell at all, other than local cooking and your wife’s perfume.” Once again, his voice was just barely as loud as it needed to be.

I wasn’t convinced. But I didn’t need to be. “What is it I’m smelling, exactly?”

“Us,” he said simply.

I tentatively half opened a nostril, and frowned. “I know what people smell like, what a ship smells like, and there’s more than that here.”

“You know what Ganymedeans smell like, and Terrans in a limited portion of a third of its northern hemisphere. This isn’t just everybody, it’s everybody all together. And more of ’em than you’ve ever been shut in with before. Terrans from all over that varied planet, Loonies, O’Neillers, Martians, Ganymedeans, Belters—all at the same time, in combination. Fewer than two dozen times in history have all those smells been mingled, in large amounts—and the other ones have left the Solar System already.”

“Oh.”

“No one group’s smell is intrinsically better or worse than any others’, and you might very well find the personal body odor of an individual from just about any racial, political, or social group aboard perfectly agreeable to you. But put them all together, in one place, and ancient instinct makes you uneasy. Think of it as one of the last remaining traces of our physical predisposition to xenophobia and racism. Like the appendix.”

I had never seen anybody real talk for so long without even momentarily developing a facial expression. “I hope you’re right,” I said politely.

“Also, the two decks immediately above this one are both agricultural decks. We’re sort of in the bilge of Noah’s Ark here.”

“I apologize for crashing into you.”

He shook his head—slowly, the way one does in free fall. “All you did was fail to realize you would need someone to catch you, and that was so close to inevitable that I was waiting there specifically to catch you. Shuttles are always over-pressured: everyone comes sailing in the door. Apology respectfully returned unopened.”

I shook my own head even slower, to underline the point I was about to make. “You don’t understand. I was born in free fall. I could at least have docked more gracefully.”

He nodded, even more slowly. Was that a twinkle in his eye? Or a tic? “Ah,” he said. “In that case, you are a dimwit. And an oaf. But you can’t help being either one; so apology is still unnecessary. Come with me, please.”

And as I gaped, he turned over, grabbed a rung on the wall with one hand, and jaunted off down the corridor, at a pace suitable for dimwits and oafs.

In my embarrassment, I nearly mortified myself completely by bleating out “Wait!” like some fool groundhog. To say “wait” to someone who has just jaunted away from you in zero gee is basically as sensible as saying it to someone who just stepped off a roof: barring unreasonable effort, they’re gone. Barely in time, I managed to end the “W—” with “—hat about my luggage?”

“You’ll never see it again,” he called back without turning around, just loud enough to be understood, and continued to drift away.

I realized to my dismay he had left me stationary. That’s not supposed to be possible in free fall, and I suppose technically I must have had some sort of vector, but I could see it wasn’t going to close the half-meter gap between me and the corridor wall anytime soon. I had no thrusters, or even wings.

It turns out you can swim in air, if it’s thick enough. But not well at all, and definitely not without looking like a dimwit and an oaf. By the time I got one hand on a rung, he had receded so far there was great temptation to complete my disgraceful display by flinging myself after him too hard, the classic newbie mistake. Instead I carefully set a measured pace, just faster than his own, and settled back to—

He stuck out his arm as if signaling a turn, grabbed a rung—zip—made an abrupt turn in the direction I was falling right at the moment, and disappeared.

When there’s nothing else you can do, breathe slower. There’s no way it can hurt, and it might help. Long before I reached that rung which I had failed to spot as larger than the rest and therefore a corner rung, I had calmed down enough to find at least a few small items to place in the This-Might-Not-Be-So-Bad column.

If it was possible to swim in air at all, then the air pressure in this dump was considerably better than that in the low-budget liners and the one military vessel I’d previously traveled aboard. Which explained why smells were more pungent than I’d expected… but also promised that the food was going to taste as good as it did on Terra. Presuming, that is, that it started out that tasty.

If you’ve never experienced anything other than Terran normal pressure, I may need to explain that. Most Terrans don’t seem to realize more than half of what they think of as their sense of taste is actually their sense of smell. This confusion becomes clear the first time you eat something you like in lower pressure. Federation military standard pressure is just barely good enough to appreciate superb coffee. Aboard an economy liner everything pretty much tastes like varying consistencies of warm cardboard or tinted water, and you can chew Red Savina habañeros. (Half a million Scoville units.) Economy passage on a luxury liner, I’m told, gets you warm spiced cardboard and flavored water. I had tolerated both ends of that spectrum, without too much difficulty.

—for the length of an Outer to Inner System hop, most conveniently measured in weeks! Twenty years was going to be a decidedly different matter. It was nice to know I would not spend my first weeks on Brasil Novo weeping with joy at the rediscovery of garlic—of any spice subtler than Scotch bonnet peppers. (A mere third of a million Scovilles, tops.)

Very nice, really. I conceded to myself as I jaunted along that I was in rocky emotional shape, and in need of consolation. And my father had once told me nothing consoles humans like gratifying our appetites. And a good half of my own total appetites were of no further use to me—I was done with women, for good and for all time. Food, music, and good books had damn well better be enough to fill in the hours, because there were going to be roughly 175,000 of them to fill.

There, that was another good one for the Not-So-Bad side of the ledger: thicker air means better sound. And more wind! The music here would be good. Well, as good as the musicians, anyway.

The corner rung was approaching—on my left, now, since I had rolled over while in trajectory. I put some care and effort into my pivot turn, did a lovely job, and immediately crashed into the naked man again, this time from behind, and upside down. If you can’t work out where that placed my nose, good. And never mind.

Of course he had stopped and waited for me to catch up. Far enough away for me to stop in time, too—if I had happened to round that corner at a more prudent speed, while paying attention to where I was going.

“Excuse me,” I said. It came out somewhat muffled, and nasal, with a small echo.

“I do,” he said, and jaunted away again, leaving me drifting ever so slightly after him in his wake this time.

Fortunately I was near a wall this time. I blinked, wrinkled my nose, and jaunted after him. Again I matched speeds, and this time we were still within conversation distance, sort of. “I’m Joel Johnston,” I called.

He precessed to face me without disturbing his trajectory. “I’m surprised to hear that,” he replied softly.

“Huh?”

“I’m surprised to hear that,” he repeated, perhaps a decibel and a half louder.

I’m surprised I hear it, pal. “I meant, why is that?”

“The First Officer told me to meet a Joel Johnston at the aft airlock.”

And you did. “And you did meet Joel Johnston.”

“And at the aft airlock, too,” he agreed. “That’s why I’m surprised.”

Should I ask why? No clue on his bland face. “What did you expect?”

“This is the Sheffield,” he said. “Naturally I expected to meet a Joan Johnson at the midships lock. I only came here first so I wouldn’t confuse you by being on time. Naturally I ended up confusing us both—so symmetry is restored.” I was pretty sure that was a twinkle in his eyes. But it could have been a detaching retina. Or lunacy. “I’m pleased to meet you, Joel. I’m George R Marsden.”

We were starting to pass other people in the corridor, a few at least. All of them had clothes on. All of them ignored us, busy with their own affairs, or possibly their own business. “Glad to know you, George.”

He didn’t wince or frown, exactly, but the twinkle in his eyes guttered. “I prefer George R.”

File for later. “Of course, George R. May I ask what you do?”

Again, poker-face delivery. “I am one of the ship’s six Relativists.”

I’d reached boggle point. I couldn’t stop myself from blurting, “Pisam ti u krvotok!” Well, it should have been safe enough. And his expression still did not… well, come to exist. But somehow I knew I’d poo’ed the screwch. “Let me guess, George R: you’re part Croatian.”

He nodded. “I have the honor to be descended from the family of Nikola Tesla’s mother.”

I was weary of apologizing, and even wearier of needing to. “No offense. My mother was part Croat, too. It’s usually a safe language to swear in. There can’t be enough of us left to keep a newsgroup alive.”

“I understand, and realize you did not mean the expression literally, but merely as an ejaculation of surprise.” His eyes twinkled up again. It wasn’t quite a facial expression, but it did hint which one he might have worn if he’d gone in for them. “Ironically, it is in fact literally correct. By the end of this journey, we will all end up pissing in one another’s bloodstreams: the system depends on it.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

And at last his face came alive: he laughed. It was a pretty good laugh, too, clearly the with-you rather than at-you kind. “Oh, good,” he said. “For a minute I was afraid you’d left your sense of humor in your luggage.”

“Just my dignity.”

“You’ll fit right in,” he assured me. “Don’t worry: both dignity and luggage will catch up with you again, from time to time.”

I wish to record that this time when he made a turn, I was paying attention, and turned with him as crisply and elegantly as if we’d drilled in this.

(I did not realize we had been traveling until then in a direction that would later come to be called “up,” and were now moving horizontally again, on a deck much closer to the ship’s nose than the one we’d started from.)

What I wanted to ask, of course, was, “Why is one of the six most important people aboard this tub herding newbies from the airlock to their cubic?” But it didn’t seem polite. And I couldn’t think of anything lesser I wanted to ask, just now. I mean, this guy was one of the six most impor—

“I know just what you’re thinking,” he said.

I didn’t actually hear the last word, because a door chuffed open in the corridor behind us just then and drowned him out. But I knew what it was. I was destined to spend the next nineteen years being his straight man. “Okay, why are you, then?”

“Because this is the Sheffield.”

“Of course.” No, what is the name of the man on second base.

“What would have constituted weirdness would’ve been if they’d sent, for instance, one of your cubicmates, who actually knew where the damn place—wait, now, this looks right, something must be wrong—no, this is it. Let me catch you.” He grabbed a rung just this side of a door (hatch, Joel, think hatch) with one hand and braked himself to a halt, while letting me use his other hand to brake myself. Somehow I ended up stationary in front of the hatch, with him beside it to my right.

The hatch bore the stenciled label “RUP-0010-E.” Below that was a sign hand-painted in some ancient font, with rather good calligraphy. It read:

George R released my hand. He was smiling again. “Doubtless this will be a disaster for you, since you came to it quickly. Just try to remember at all times the Prime Law of the Sheffield.”

I don’t know plays third base. “I am keen to know it, George R.”

“No refunds.”

“Ah.”

He was drifting away before I knew he had eyes to go. “Satisfaction guaranteed, or you’re screwed. Good”—and I’m pretty sure the last four syllables as he was passing out of earshot were—“bye, Joel Johnston.”

But he might have said, “bye, Joan Johnson.”

I found myself grinning after him. His sense of humor was drier than fossil bone in vacuum. And it’s hard not to like a man whose only facial expression is a gentle smile.

Ah, that wonderful moment just before you meet new bunkmates. Like the moment just after you step off a roof, and just before you open your eyes and look down to see how many floors away the ground is.

Deep breath. Best smile. I palmed the door. After George R’s buildup, I half expected it to shock me unconscious and call for the Proctors. But it accepted me as a resident rather than merely someone unknown seeking to annoy one, and opened to me.

As it slid open, a faint cloud of pale smoke emerged and intersected with my face. Tobacco. I smiled, mildly pleased. I’m not a nicotinic myself, but I’ve always enjoyed having a smoker cubicmate. It’s hard not to like that scent, especially in thick air.

It’s going to be a while before the biological sciences really get back on their feet, but safe tobacco was one of their very first new fruits after more than a century of enforced barrenness. The Prophet repressed the weed so savagely that it became a mark of defiance, then a symbol of rebellion, and finally a way to identify other members of the Cabal. Now he’s ashes, and cigarettes no longer produce them. As my father once said, the weed outlasted the Creed.

I could see the nicotinic was the only one present in the cubic at the moment, drifting near the center. It seemed an awfully small space for four people. Then contradictory clues resolved, and my perspective shifted. The room was fine. It was just that he was awfully large for a four-person cubic. Much better. I could always kill him.

I’d have to sneak up behind him with a pretty big chainsaw, though, and take him down a limb at a time. He was enormous. Between his mass and the copious white beard he looked like a Viking chieftain, or perhaps Santa Claus’s big brother. The latter impression was strengthened by the eyeglasses I could see he wore. People who do that are usually writers or visual artists of some kind: most normal people with astigmatism are willing to risk surgery with a failure rate of about one percent. At worst you need eye transplants—what’s the big deal? He wore classic jeans and a baggy blouse with elbow-length sleeves.

As he rotated lazily the front of him came into better view and I saw that he was typing on air, and a hologram glow unreadable at this angle was keeping station with his face. A writer then, I surmised. He kept rotating until he should have seen me, but didn’t, and kept typing furiously. Definitely a writer. I hoped he was a poet. If you threaten one with death, and mean it, they always stop. Then he rotated to where I could see his hologram from the back, and my heart sank. It was way too far away to read, even if it had not been backward—but even from here I could see it was properly formatted text, with consistent margins, nothing centered, and words arranged in paragraphs that began with indents. It was about as bad as it could be: he was a novelist.

I think I made a small moaning sound. His eyes refocused past the holo and locked on to me, and the holo vanished. His hands drifted at waist level, but somehow less like they were poised over an invisible keypad, and more like they were poised over the controls of an invisible weapon.

“Johnson,” he called.

I shook my head. “Johnston,” I corrected.

He shook his head. “No,” he insisted. “Johnson.”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said.

“I’m positive,” he said.

I closed my eyes and opened them again. “One last time: who’s on first, what’s on second,” I said.

He frowned thunderously. “I don’t understand you.”

“My point exactly. Let’s start this routine over from the top, and see if we can identify just where gangrene set in. Ready? Straight man: Say, who’s that handsome bastard floating outside the doorway? Talent: Joel Johnston, junior agronomist. Honest, I really am.”

His brow and hands relaxed. “You got a corrupted copy. My script reads differently. Dipshit: Say, whose work am I interrupting? Talent: Herb Johnson, the writer. Dishonest, but I really am.”

Light dawned. We had been talking at cross-purposes. “Glad to know you. Which one am I, again?”

“The other one. You coming in? I’m losing smoke.”

I was starting to enter when the choice was taken from me. Three men arrived behind me, all talking loud and fast, and I found myself swept into the room before them. I grabbed the nearest handhold, which turned out to be what would be an overhead light once we were under acceleration.

The loudest voice was holding forth on English history, I’m pretty sure, though I don’t know which period. “—that not many people realize is that the dukes of hazzard used up nearly three hundred dodge chargers.”

“So it wasn’t a total loss, then,” one of his companions replied.

“Right. And who is this before me?”

“Johnston,” I said.

He shook his head. “Close. Johnson. And who are you?”

Herb and I exchanged a glance. “My name is Joel Johnston.”

“He’s the new guy we heard about,” Herb said.

“Ah,” said the third arrival. “John’s ton. You are him, plus T.”

“Actually,” Herb said, “he’s me, minus coffee.” He turned to me. “It’s going to be a long twenty years, isn’t it? They’ve got me doing it.”

“Welcome to Rup-Tooey, Joel,” the second newcomer to speak said to me. “Home of the Lost Boys. I’m Pat Williamson, one of your new roommates.”

We did the free-fall equivalent of shaking hands: approach, squeeze both hands briefly, release. “Hi, Pat. Why do you call it Rup-Tooey?”

The history expert snorted. “Because he’s a phlegm-ing idiot.”

“You saw it on the hatch,” Pat said. “Residential, Unclassified Personnel, cubic 0010-E. RUP-0010-E… Rup-Tooey.”

“Ah.” I could think of nothing to add.

“That’s your bunk over there. You’ll have to tell me all about yourself.”

“I’m sure there’ll be plenty of time to talk,” I said politely.

“No, I mean you’ll really have to tell me all about yourself.”

“Professor Pat is ship’s historian,” the third arrival explained. “Thinks this makes him biographer. I tell him is dangerous: he should let sleeping bags lie. But he is encouragable. Glad to please you, Joel. Well come on the board of Sheffield.” He pronounced it like “shuffled.” “Am Balvovatz, of Luna. Am miner.”

“He looks like an adult,” the loud expert on ducal matters said. “They age fast in Luna.”

“Give to me a fracture.” Balvovatz glared at him, and turned back to me. “Balvovatz mines. In mine. You got rock, give you ore. You understand?” I managed a nod. “So when Shuffled reach Immega 714, am big shoot. Till then, like teats on male person: no more use than historian or writer. That is why slum here in UP dump with you bowl budgers.”

“Dole bludgers,” Williamson corrected gently.

I had to admire his restraint. And his optimism in even trying.

“I think I see,” I said. “A pattern begins to emerge. How about you?” I asked the loud expert. “What’s your line? Horse whispering? Weatherman?”

It is difficult to smirk without being offensive, but he managed it somehow. “I’m a Relativist,” he said. “My name’s Solomon Short.”

My mouth slammed shut. I had just met my second wizard, in my first half hour aboard. And this one I had actually heard of. Maybe you have, too. That arrest record.

He was smirking at himself, that was why. “Yeah. You remember the headline they all used. Short grounded. They loved that one. I keep meaning to bisect a baby; they’d all die of biblical ecstasy. Solomon subdivides tot. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to locate a donor. Was your father—?”

“Yes.”

He nodded and stopped smirking. “Well chosen, sir. May I ask your own line of interest?”

It was diplomatically asked. Most people said, “Are you a physicist like your father?” and thought themselves tactful because they hadn’t said “great physicist.” So instead of giving my standard deflective response (“I’m involved in pneumatic generation of sequences of higher order vibratory harmonics designed to induce auditory maximization of local endorphin production”), I just told him, “I’m a composer and musician.”

He smiled—no smirk component at all, this time. “This voyage has just become distinctly less intolerable. And what is your axe?”

“Saxophone.”

Now he beamed. It made him look like a cherub who you do not yet know has just lifted your wallet. “Which one?”

“Well, since they didn’t count against my mass allowance, I brought the standard four. Soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone.”

He shivered with joy. “I often wish I could manage to make myself believe in a god, but hardly ever so that I can thank him for something. Welcome aboard, Maestro.”

“You haven’t even heard me play, yet.”

He nodded. “And the agony is delicious. I’ll leave you to sett—oh, my word! I don’t see them!”

“What?”

“Tell me you didn’t entrust your instruments to your luggage?”

“I didn’t have any oth—”

“Don’t panic yet!” he cried, sprang for the door so fast it barely had time to iris out of his way, and used both hands to swing himself out into the direction of traffic. “There may still be time,” his voice said as it dopplered away.

A hand closed on my shoulder. The bone held. “Do not worry, friend Joel,” Balvovatz said. “A snitch in time saves mine.” He let go before I would have had to scream, whacked me on that shoulder blade, and drifted away again. Somehow I retained my grip on the overhead light, but it took me a moment to stabilize again.

“He’s right,” Herb assured me. “It takes time to wreck luggage, and they always save the best stuff for last.”

“And they’re all afraid of Sol,” Pat put in.

“They should be,” Herb said. “They’re staying behind—so he doesn’t need them alive.”

“This is your bunk over here, Joel,” Pat told me. “Right above my own. Unless you care to discuss the matter with pistols?”

“Knives better,” Balvovatz said.

“Fine with me,” I said. Once we were under way it would be the upper bunk on the right. “I’ve had a preference for the upper ever since I figured out that farts are heavier than air.”

He grinned evilly. (I don’t care what my spell-checker says, of course there’s such a word. “In an evil manner”—okay?) “Not mine.”

I carefully jaunted, in a direction soon to be known as “down,” over to my bed, and docked with it. I’m not sure why, since I had no luggage or other belongings to secure. I guess just to symbolize taking ownership. It didn’t wait to find out. The moment I grabbed it and started using it to brake my arriving mass, one of the two (two?) folding angle-braces intended to support it under acceleration tore right out of the plasteel bulkhead. All three bolts—and two of the bolts on the other support. The bed immediately rotated around the remaining bolt, about sixty degrees clockwise, and jammed to a halt against the top of the folded-up lower bunk. This left me dangling from the other end of it like a tyro, trying desperately to clutch bed as well as bedclothes and avoid the indignity of being thrown altogether. I never even noticed banging my face against the wall.

The shriek of frictionally stressed plasteel, and my scrabbling-rat noises, gave way to an omnipresent rather glutinous sound, which was like silence, but different. As I stabilized myself, I realized it was the sound of men not laughing.

I turned to face the room and made, very loudly, the sound of a man not murdering anyone, yet.

Pat Williamson pointed to a spot just “below” me. I glanced down, and in a moment realized that his own bed was not folded up against the bulkhead. It was duct-taped to it. His had torn out of the wall, too. I could see the bolt holes. They were not empty. Each contained a little shiny-ended bolt stump. All six had snapped off clean. I looked, and all five of my failed bolts were the same. I looked back to Pat, and raised my eyebrows inquisitively.

He spread his hands, palm up. He wanted to explain, but couldn’t do it louder than he was not laughing at me.

Balvovatz took it. “Well come into Shuffled, Joel. Do not worry. Is warrantee. Air leaks out, just say so. Kang sends more from Terra.”

Maybe my expression made Herb stop wanting to laugh. “There’s still time,” he said softly. “You can still jump ship and go back down to Terra, if you’re one of those fussbudgets who expects everything to work. It’s not too late to be sensible.”

I closed my eyes. All I could see was Terra… with Jinny’s face. “Yes it is,” I said. “Where’s the duct tape?”

I later learned the bunk-support bolts had been specified by a Kang Cartel engineer, and supplied by a da Costa Associates subsidiary. Both halves of the financial Siamese-twin behemoth that was underwriting this little interstellar venture. The desk that wouldn’t interface properly with my PDC or phone despite nominal system compatibility for the next two days was the other way round: da Costa design, Kang manufacturing. And the blame for the complex cluster of systems failures that combined to keep all my luggage except my four saxophones (Sol Short rescued them, somehow) from catching up to me for another two weeks was, I was eventually able to establish, divided up roughly evenly between the two houses.

Fortunately nudity was not taboo aboard the Sheffield. It was not commonplace either—but nobody got upset if I sat around the laundry room naked while waiting for my only set of clothing to dry, each day, or went to and from the ’fresher without a robe. (There were ship-issue jumpsuits and robes I could have had. I preferred skin. They were, visibly, the plasteel bolts of the clothing world.)

I did end up with a lot of time to reflect that most of the Conrad empire products I had ever purchased had worked pretty reliably. And I retained just enough sanity to realize this was probably an omen of some kind, perhaps even an unfavorable one.

But I had told Herb the truth. It was way too late to change my mind. The center of my personal Solar System had turned out to be a dangerously variable star. It was imperative to break free of her pull, while I still could, and go somewhere else, far far away.