Variable Star

7

Jinny phoned two days later, about eight hours before we left.

Theoretically she should not have been able to. I’d contributed my phone to the ship’s recycler on arrival, and gotten a new one—under a false name, using nonexistent credit, and paying a premium for a super-unlisted code. That account would vanish like a bubble when the first bill went unpaid, of course. But by then I expected I would no longer need one. I only needed it now to say good-bye to a few friends and acquaintances, and to dispose of my few remaining assets on Ganymede.

I think that might just have been good enough to foil, or at least slow, a Federation agent hunting me. Against a Conrad, it was a gesture. As I slipped in my earbead, I reflected that she could probably have called me five minutes after I’d activated the phone. Her first words practically admitted as much.

“Damn it, Joel, I admire your stubbornness. I really do. You’ve held out to the last possible second, I give you that. But we are out of time now. Stop this foolishness and come home, this fucking minute!”

I’d known this call would come. It wasn’t surprise, even at the word I had never heard her use, that kept me from answering her for several seconds. It was just her face. There on the inside of my wrist, thumbnail-sized, poor quality 2-D image. I had never seen her so clearly or so vividly.

She had never looked more beautiful. I wanted to eat my whole forearm. Her image cut off at her waist, but I could see the rest of her almost as clearly in my mind’s eye. What blurred it a bit was that she was wearing an outfit considerably more expensive than anything I had ever seen her in. That realization restored the power of speech to me.

“I can’t, Jinny. It’s too late. We were out of time yesterday. The last boat has—”

“You idiot, I can be there to get you in two hours! How long do you need to pack your four saxo—”

“Bring me where, did you say?”

“—phones and your one spare—what?”

“Where exactly is this home you speak of? Certainly not your apartment. Some mansion in Nepal accessible only by copter? A secret village at the bottom of the Marianas Trench? A stealthed palace at L-1 or—no, why would you care about saving fuel—somewhere in space, then? Or perhaps a few kilometers below the apparent surface of Jupiter, there floats a—”

She overrode me by yelling, “I deserve that!” I was so surprised I stopped talking. “And I ask you to believe that I have already administered it to myself, and to trust that I will continue to do so, okay? You can kick me all you like, I agree I have it coming—but you won’t be able to if I don’t come get you and bring you back home, and even my window is closing!”

I shook my head wearily. “I meant what I said. Where is ‘home’ for us? No place we’ve ever been. No place I’ve ever been. I don’t think we even mean the same things by the word—or have any clear idea what the discrepancies are, either one of us.”

“Joel, I didn’t have any choice, why can’t you see that? I couldn’t tell you, not until—”

“I know that.”

“You do? Then—”

“Jinny, we’ve never really met.”

“We can. We will meet, and we’ll love each other—we already know how—and the money won’t make any damn difference, none at all.”

I had to grab something with my left hand just then to keep myself from colliding with a bed; I’d been drifting free since her incoming call had caused me to lose my handhold on my own desk. I guess from her perspective it looked like I was turning away. “Joel, I love you!” she cried.

I started to regain eye contact… and paused. I found myself looking around my room. My cruddy little dump of a room, just a bit worse than what I’d have expected as a freshman at university, possessed of few and feeble amenities, shared with three other smelly hairy creatures. In a place where nearly everyplace smelled faintly like feet, and all the water tasted like a school hallway water fountain, and the food aspired to be two-star, and you always saw the same people. The Sheffield would in fact be remarkably like another nineteen years of our courtship as we had known it until recently. Freshman year of university, forever. The only thing the big tin can had to recommend it, really, was that it was going to leap the Big Deep—

I yanked the phone back up to my eyes. “Jinny, come with me!”

Shocked silence. On both sides. I recovered first.

“Right now. Without a suitcase. Without a pot. If the money really doesn’t matter, walk away—come homestead with me on the other end of the rainbow. I know you don’t know how, any more than I know about your world—but I’ll teach you. Trust me: it’s a lot easier to grow potatoes than empires. It’s more satisfying to get in a good crop than to play with billions of people’s lives and fortunes. It leaves you time to make babies, and to pay attention to them, and to occasionally notice each other past the babies and make more of them. For God’s sake, Jinny, you remember the song. Let’s die on the way to the stars! Together…”

I knew exactly how stupid and romantic and naïve my words were. I had never intended to speak them—aloud. They left my mouth with the force and honesty of vomit, but with the same despair as well. Without a particle of hope.

That was only born when a full second had gone by and she still had not answered yet. At birth, it was tinier than a lepton’s shadow at noon. It took less than another second to grow into something large enough to choke on. I was beginning to worry by the time she broke the silence.

But the problem solved itself, when my heartbeat ceased. “God damn you, Joel, you gave me every reason to believe you were an adult. With a pair of balls, and at least half a brain. You cannot be this cowardly and stupid and prideful, I won’t tolerate it. I’ve invested too much time in you! I’m coming up there, and I’m—Joel? Joel!”

My arms had gone limp with cessation of pulse, of course: she was looking at my left hip. Purely from reflex politeness I pulled my wrist back up. So then I had to say something, and thus began breathing again.

“Jinny, listen to me. Please. I honestly don’t know if I have what it takes to be a Conrad, I admit that. But I don’t know if anybody does, so I’m not at all afraid to find out. What I do know is, it’s not something I want to be. I guess it seems self-evident to you that any rational man would. So you won’t want an irrational husband.” She tried to interrupt, and for once I overrode her. “If you think even your gran’ther has enough proctors and bailiffs to delay the launch of a Kang/da Costa Cartel starship by five minutes so you can arrest a junior apprentice farmer for breach of promise, you’re being irrational yourself. Now, listen to this last part, and don’t interrupt until I’m done, and then you can call me any dirty names you like until they light the candle in eight hours and reception goes to hell for a while. Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

She was deploying her ultimate weapon and we both knew it: her voice was trembling on the edge of tears, and they were absolutely genuine.

My own voice tightened. “Jinny—Jinny Hamilton—you were my first love. You may be the last. You certainly are the last I will have in this Solar System. For what it’s worth, I forgive you for not telling me who—what—you really were. I understand, I really do: you had no choice, no other way to play it. I am sorry, genuinely sorry, that you wasted your investment. Maybe nobody is as sorry as I am. I’m pretty certain I’m in the top five, anyway. All I can tell you is that the prospectus you were offered was complete and accurate in every particular. I answered every question I was asked. Honestly.” I took a deep breath. “My own investments haven’t done too well lately, either. Thanks for teaching me to dance, and listening to me play my music. Really. Good luck in your future investments. Maybe I’ll see you in a couple of hundred years, and we can swap notes.” Anything else to say? Yes—but all of it angry. Delete it. It was way too late for anger to serve any purpose worth the indignity. “Your turn.”

The pause this time was probably as long as the earlier one, but with no hope in it, it went by faster.

“Good luck, Joel. I really am sorry.” She let go on the last word, cried so hard the screen image became a sideways close-up of her scrunched-up left eye.

Somehow I held on myself. “I know, honey. Me, too. Really.”

“Good-bye.”

The phone was dead.

For some reason I was not. So I went looking for strong drink, and did the best I could. By the time we left the Solar System I was far from feeling no pain—I was probably in maximum emotional pain, and in considerable physical discomfort from being loaded in free fall—but I was momentarily too stupid to mind either. Terra sure looked pretty, shimmering there in the simulated window, and slow shrinking didn’t spoil the effect at all. In fact, the smaller she got, the prettier she looked.

The same seemed to hold true for Mama Sol. She was prettiest just before I passed out, as a single pixel of pure white in a sea of ink.

We did not really achieve enough initial velocity for the sun to show detectable shrinkage, that first day: that last view was an effect of my vision graying out. A matter/antimatter torch is not something you want to start up quickly and max the throttle—certainly not in the vicinity of an inhabited planet! We left High Orbit under conventional fusion drive, albeit a hellacious big one. Even in my stupor, it seemed noisy.

Unsurprisingly, the menu of recreational drugs obtainable on board was considerably shorter and tamer than what I’d had available to me back in Vancouver. A man who wished to stupefy himself pretty much had to rely on alcohol and/or marijuana. They did the job, in combination.

But once you used your month’s ration of either one it was gone, so the binge burned itself out faster than it might have if I’d had more powerful tools. By the time I had binged, crashed, died, revived, and been restored to feeble continued interest in events outside my own skull and thorax and indigestive system, the Captain had just throttled the fusion plant back from a space drive to a mere power plant, and things got much quieter again for a while. The sun looked just perceptibly smaller in disk size, there in my simulated window… and considerably dimmer than normal, even though all the other stars now seemed brighter than usual. I thought of trying to locate Ganymede by eye, to bid farewell to my birth planet, but it was already way too late; she was in opposition.

Within an hour, the Old Man had gotten the antimatter torch lit, and some noise and other vibration did resume, but by no means as much, or as loud. Or as unpleasant. Less like an ongoing earthquake, more like a waterfall, or rapids in a stream.

Then the sun’s dwindling could be detected, if you had the patience to watch long enough.

I did. For far longer than made any sense I can explain. There could be no Key West sunset, no final Last of the Light. I knew that even by the end of my journey I would not have traveled so far that Sol’s light could not still reach me. It would be old light, that was all.

And still I watched, until Herb came and dragged me off for dinner. I felt so weary, it was a noticeable strain to be back in normal gravity again, for the first time in so many months. Free fall is as addictively comfortable as the womb.

Three kinds of gentleman adventurers participated in the Sheffield’s voyage. The real gents, senior partners, invested very large amounts of money, and remained behind at Sol System to see how it all worked out. Just below them were the limited partners, who put in considerably less money, but tossed their personal bodies and futures into the pot as well. At the bottom rung were the provisional partners, whose entire stake was their head, hands, and health.

Chumps like me.

My father died thinking he had provided well for me, because he had. But such provisions don’t always last. By the time my orphan’s allowance had run out at eighteeen, market shifts (as always, unexpected) had all but wiped out the value of the stock Dad had left me; I’d had to sell nearly everything to finance that last semester at Fermi. After that, I’d been pinning all my hopes on the scholarship that Conrad had blocked.

Now my only remaining assets were nominal: some shares in one of the very earliest starships—which had vanished in the Big Deep years ago. They were worth so little I’d instructed my guardian not to bother selling them; the income would scarcely have covered the assorted charges and taxes. They weren’t worthless, quite: there was always the infinitesimal chance that the New Frontiers might be found and rescued one day. But no missing starship had ever been heard from again. Only once had they even been able to establish just what had gone wrong.

So I took my meals with most of the others, in Stark Hall, one of the ship’s three mess halls, designed to accommodate up to a third of us at any one time with good solid unspectacular food, drink, and ancillaries, without charge. But for those who had the money and inclination, there were also alternatives. Such as the Horn of Plenty, the Sheffield’s equivalent of an upscale nightclub, with four-star food and more expensive amusement options, open all three shifts.

I had not expected to ever set foot in the place, unless a live waiter’s job should open up, but it was there that Herb insisted on dragging me for my last dinner in the Solar System.

I did try to resist. I had known several novelists, but none with even as much money as I had. “Herb, I don’t know about you, but I can’t afford this. There’s an old PreCollapse blues song that goes, ‘If money did my talkin’/I couldn’t breathe a sigh—’ and that’s…”

And my voice trailed off, because the next lines of the song suddenly loomed up out of memory and clotheslined me: “But my baby’s love is one thing/even money can’t buy/Ain’t that fine?”

Herb said, “This meal is on me. You have almost nothing in your system but poisons and toxins. The food you take on to absorb it all should be of the highest quality.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to pay you back.”

“I know: you probably won’t, and I’ll get to hold it over you forever. Cheap dominance. Come on, it’s right up ahead.”

I stopped us at the door and tried to thank him, but he brushed it away. “Sheer self-interest. I have to live with you.”

They seemed to know him inside. As we were conducted to our booth, I had that weird feeling you get entering a place that’s a little out of your reach, the irrational sensation that everyone is looking at you and can tell you’re out of place, which is caused by everyone looking at you and knowing you’re out of place. Herb had a way of walking as though they were out of place, but he was a broad-minded man. Jinny had had it, too….

A dance performance was in progress on a cleared area of the floor, something classic-modern, I think, though I have trouble keeping the distinctions straight. I don’t think ballet is ever done in silence. Serious dance, at any rate, not mating dance, and apparently very well done, by three energetic people a little older than me. They finished to thunderous applause as we crossed the room, and sprinted backstage.

I did notice a bandstand, an interesting one, just beyond the dancers’ Marley floor. It was powered down at the moment, unoccupied, but it looked nicely equipped. The keyboard system was built into a very good replica of a PreCollapse grand piano; it looked as though the player could produce “real,” mechanically produced acoustic sound with the thing if he chose. The drum kit too could have produced reasonable accompaniment for most purposes even powered down. The stringed instrument cases I saw were all obviously for either acoustic or hybrids. I mentioned that to Herb as we were seated.

“You watch,” he said, “pre-electric music is going to become very popular in this ship over the next twenty years. We all know deep down we’re going to a place where we may not have power to spare for luxuries for some time to come. Subconsciously we’re preparing. Brunch menus, coffee and orange juice for two, please.”

I hadn’t noticed the waitress approach until he spoke, and she was gone by the time I turned around. Yet I later learned she was human. “Brunch?” I asked, checking the time.

“In a restaurant that never closes, in a ship with three shifts, it’s always brunchtime. Or dinnertime. Or midnight snacktime, or tea. You need serious food that doesn’t challenge digestion; ergo, brunch.”

The food was indeed wonderful. It penetrated my depression, forced me to concede to myself that I did have some interest in continued life, even if I had no idea why. I was continually conscious of a sensation of having gnawed off one of my feet to escape a trap, a pit-of-the-stomach feeling that wouldn’t go away. But for some reason it didn’t interfere with my appetite much, or even my mood.

Herb, I was very gratified to learn, was the kind of man who did not chatter over his food. Save for a handful of conversational politenesses, he used his mouth for intake only. It gave me permission to do the same. We already knew we were going to be friends. And there was going to be plenty of time to use up our conversation stores.

When he did speak, it was with a friend’s directness. “So,” he said, setting down his fork, “have you decided whether you’re going to cut your throat or not? Inquiring minds want to know.”

“No.”

He relaxed slightly. “Yes, you have. You’re not.”

“I really hate it when somebody tells me what I’m thinking. Or are you a telepath?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, but not the way you mean. A real one.”

I snorted. “Right. Your mind isn’t fast enough.”

In fiction, a telepath can read minds. A real telepath is just a glorified radio, with a single receiver. But really glorified—way faster than any radio. Our time rate and the System’s were already diverging very slightly, under the constraints of Einsteinian physics, and would get steadily worse for the next twenty years. Every day, radio and laser signals took just a tiny bit longer to cross the widening gulf between us, and by the time we reached our destination it would take them the greater part of a century. But telepathy, for reasons nobody understands, takes place instantaneously, across any distance yet measured. That single perverse exception to the laws of the universe, and the fact that the gene for it is dominant, make a star-traveling civilization just barely possible. Our ship, like all of them, carried several people capable of telepathic rapport with a partner back in the System, usually, but not always, their identical twin. With luck, their children would be able to maintain the link.

Herb was looking at me strangely.

At first, the way his jaw was squared off, and his eyes seemed to have receded deeper into their sockets, and his shoulders were slightly raised, all combined to tell me he was angry. That was odd. Then a second later I saw I had misread the signals completely: he was amused, trying his best not to laugh in my face. At something I had done in the last few moments, apparently. Or said…

He saw me start to catch on, and let the laugh out.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Did you really think I was accepted into this company because I’m a writer? You figure a fledgling colony, fighting to stay alive and establish a foothold, has a lot of use for fiction?”

“You never mentio—”

“You never asked.”

“Who—?”

“My sister Li,” he said. “In Oregon. The one on Terra. Two hours a day, we handle message traffic between Kang/da Costa HQ and the colony, and we’re available freelance for private communications.”

“I never noticed you doing that!”

“How would you? I stare into space, and then start typing like crazy. It must look exactly like I’m writing a story. Sometimes I am, if what I’m supposed to type annoys me enough.”

“Holy shit.” I was so busy rearranging my presumptions and misconceptions in my head, I forgot I had not yet expressed an opinion. “I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it. I’m a telepath. A communicator.”

His voice cued me. A lot of people are weirded out by telepaths. A few people call them the kind of names that cause a proctor to show up. He was waiting to learn whether or not his new friend and roommate for the next two decades was one of those people.

Quickly I said, “No, I mean I can’t believe there’s some poor girl back in the System who looks just like you.”

His shoulders dropped. “Back to our argument—I was winning. How can you stay a bachelor? Have you no appreciation for fine womanhood? No sense of obligation—”

My mind took a left. Talking about Jinny and the Conrads had reminded me of something, a small burr under my saddle. An unfulfilled obligation behind me. “As a matter of fact, I do. Both. So much so that I’m going to presume on our friendship and ask you for a favor.”

“What friendship?”

“I know, but it’s all I’ve got. I want to send a private message back to Terra.”

He frowned. “Phone still works. So does mail.”

“No, I mean private. I need to thank a young lady for defying her grandfather to help me out of a tight spot, and I don’t want to risk getting her in trouble.”

His frown deepened. “Just tell me one thing. Is this young lady rich and beautiful?”

“That’s two things. And yes to both.”

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Okay, this once, I’ll do it. You want visual, or just voice?”

“Voice is fine.”

He shook his head. “Hopeless. Name?”

“Evelyn Conrad.”

“How do you want to route it to her?”

“Through an intermediary I think I can trust. Can your sister put a really serious privacy shield on a message?”

“Yes,” was all he said.

“Okay. Ask her to get it to a Dorothy Robb, two b’s.”

“Address?”

“Ms. Robb is the Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.”

Herb came as close as I would ever see him come to betraying surprise. His nostrils flared just perceptibly for a moment, as if he had begun to doubt his deodorant. His eyes did a funny little thing where for just an instant they tried to widen and narrow at the same time. There was maybe a quarter-second hitch in the soundtrack, and then he said, “I take it back. There is no hope for you.”

I spread my hands. “When did I claim there was?”

“You know a Conrad. Well enough that she defied… oh. Kindly tell me her granddad is not—”

I nodded. “Conrad.”

“Of course. She defied Conrad of Conrad for you. And you’re here.”

“Herb, she’s seven years old.”

He smiled broadly. It had taken him about ten seconds to gear up and start enjoying this. “To be thoroughly sure. Say no more. Unless you want to live.”

So I told him the whole damned story.

I’d always known I would, some day. It was going to be a long voyage. But not in the first year. I probably couldn’t have told it yet to anyone who didn’t listen as well as he did. He didn’t mind if I needed a couple of minutes of silence to get a sentence completed.

When I was finished, he took a couple himself. Then he said softly, “Amigo, you’re the first person I’ve talked to in this bucket of rust so far that actually has a sensible reason to be here. All right, you want little Evelyn to know you’re grateful for getting you out of there, but without tipping the Old Man, have I got it?”

“Something like, ‘I enjoyed the last moments of our relationship even more than the first,’ maybe. Do you really think you can get that to her privately? Now that you know who she is?”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Li says yes. She knows a way. You don’t need to know what it is. It’s covered.”

“Thanks, Herb.”

He lit up one of his cigarettes. “Well, at least the cord is cut clean. With Jinny, I mean. Seldom in history have any humans gotten to have a breakup as final as the one you’ve had. By the time we get to 23 Skiddoo in twenty years, she’ll be… 108 years old, if she was honest about her age.”

We were making a jump of about eighty-five light-years—at such a hair-raising fraction of c that the trip would seem to us to take twenty years, total. But back in the normal universe, clocks run faster, thanks to Dr. Einstein’s Paradox. To an observer at, say, Tombaugh Station around Pluto, our voyage would appear to take roughly ninety and one-half Standard years.

“Of course, with her money, she’ll probably still look twenty, by then,” Herb added. “But you’ll know better.”

“I don’t want her old,” I said bleakly. “I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be here with me.”

“Happy to be your mate, even if you both starve on alien soil. Was she really that dumb?”

“Obviously not.”

“You’ll love again. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

I grimaced. “Not soon.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be too soon. You have twenty years to decide what you want in a wife. But don’t put it off too long, either. The supply is limited, and you don’t look like a man who’d be happy as a celibate.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I muttered darkly.

“Look, you have decisions to make. Some short-term, some long-term. If you plan to spend the next twenty years licking your wounds, and letting those decisions make themselves for you, you’re going to be a tough friend to have. I suggest you get started working on them.”

“Decisions like what?”

He leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to do?”

A perfectly simple, sensible question: the logical first step in making any plan.

He might just as well have whacked me in the forehead with a plank.

I did not really see a burst of bright white light, and then find myself on the ground beside my horse, godstruck. The earth did not literally tremble and roar at my feet. My heart probably did not actually pause, and I have it on good authority that time did not, at any time, in fact come to a stop. But Herb’s perfectly obvious question hit me with that kind of impact. He and the room went away while I tried to cope with it.

Surely, I thought, I have an answer for him. But I could not find one. I rewound mental tape and realized with shock that I had not asked myself that question once since the night of my graduation from Fermi.

Throughout all the terrible days since, I had been focused intently and exclusively on what I did not want to do.

Well, that had been silly of me, hadn’t it? Now that I was finally and forever safe from the terrible danger of becoming one of the richest humans alive, married to the girl of my dreams, perhaps it was time to give some quantum of thought to what I might find preferable. If anything.

Great blathering mother of morons, what was I going to do with the next twenty years? Or the twenty after that, if it came to it?

Herb was saying something. Why did I know that? Oh. He had touched my hand to get my attention. I rewound my ears. “—don’t have to come up with an answer right this minute,” he had said.

I wasn’t absolutely sure I agreed—but just then I heard my name called. It was Solomon Short, in a larger nearby booth with three companions. He waved emphatically to us to come and join them. I looked to Herb for help, and he shrugged, so we got up and went over to the other booth. Sol’s companions slid over to make room for us, while he made introductions.

As I’d guessed, his friends were all Relativists like him. I had now met five of the six people on whom our whole voyage depended. Nearest me was Tenzin Hideo Itokawa, a tiny man whom I learned later was a Zen Buddhist monk; then, I got only that he had twinkling eyes and seemed to lack vocal cords. Between him and Sol was a hearty and voluptuous woman named London McBee, who turned out to be married to George R Marsden, the Relativist I’d literally bumped into in my first seconds aboard. She and Sol volleyed with words, vying to outpun each other. But the most striking of the three was clearly the man on the other side of the table, Peter Kindred, and for the life of me I could not decide why.

There was something electric and sheepish about him, that’s the best I can say it—he gave off the disconcerting sensation that at any moment he was likely to switch from talking to quacking like a duck, or barking like a dog—that at any given time there was utterly no way of telling what he might take it into his head to do—and that at the same time, he was just a little embarrassed by it. It was more than just mad eyes, though he surely had those. His name seemed ironically chosen; he had “Loose Cannon” written all over him. Sol and London both seemed to find him delightful.

I was overawed. Most of the ship’s power, literally, was seated at that table. I’m used to famous people, even great people. This was different. In a pinch, the Sheffield could have gotten by without her captain—but her Relativists were essential. These men and woman spent their days reaching into the cosmic vacuum with their naked organic brains, and persuaded it to yield up its inconceivable energy in a measured fashion.

I realize that description has about as much meaning as saying that a nuclear fission plant works because the gods breathe upon its mojo in such a way as to cause it to be far out. One of my hopes, as I sat down, was to perhaps solicit a better explanation from one or more of the Relativists I was privileged to talk to. But I got off to a bad start.

Things went fine at first. Sol introduced his companions to us. Then he introduced Herb to them, giving them a two-sentence thumbnail bio. Then he introduced me—and that’s where it went sour. His second sentence for me began, inevitably, with, “His father was the—”

But by the second word, Peter Kindred had gone berserk. He kicked his chair over backward with his butt, leaped backward over it, landed several feet away in combat crouch, making finger gestures to ward off evil.

At me.

I opened my mouth—

“SHUT UP!” he screamed.

I blinked.

“Not a word! AIYEEE!” He averted his gaze. “No facial expressions!”

I looked at Herb, then Sol, then everybody else, without finding anything I could use. I decided I needed to leave, started to rise.

He screamed, hopped back a pace, and snatched a plate from someone’s table, holding it like a cream pie in an ancient comedy. “Back!” he shrieked. “You lunatic! Are you crazy? What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”

I shrugged. I had to: it was all he had left me.

It was the last straw. He shut his eyes, made a strangling sound, turned, and left the room at high speed. Taking the plate with him, despite loud protest from its owner.

“Don’t mind Peter,” Sol said imperturbably.

“He’s terrified of Centipede’s Dilemma,” said London.

“Ahhh,” I said. “Of course.”

“He’s rude,” Herb said.

“No, no,” I said. “I think I actually get it.” And after I explained my thinking, they agreed that I did.

Without its Relativists, no starship can operate its primary drive, open the Ikimono Portal into the dark energy universe. Not without becoming a Gamma Ray Burst in short order, anyway.

That monstrous engine of mass creation had not been invoked, yet, and could not be until we’d gotten a little farther away from Sol—but without it and its kind, most star travel would have been impossible, and the rest would have awaited the development of suspended animation to accomplish. And thanks to the Prophet’s distaste for fiddling with God’s allegedly clear intentions, safe suspended animation still seems to lie as far in the future as it did centuries ago.

Thanks to Relativists, though, mankind finally had a drive that could really take it to the stars, within normal human life span. The only problem was that, countless generations of folklore to the contrary, the relativistic engine really was the first engine ever invented that literally required the constant attention of a human operator to function: the Relativist. Somehow, an organic brain was able—some organic brains were able—to ensure that every time Doc Schrödinger opened his box, what came out was a live cat. Even if none had been in there to start with.

The last I’d heard, the entire Solar System held something less than two hundred humans—out of dozens of billions!—who had the necessary combination of talents, skills, attitudes, and education to perform that task reliably. More than half of them, I had read, wanted to do something else. The rest probably commanded a higher salary than Jinny’s father.

When the mathematician/poet and Soto Zen Buddhist priest Hoitsu Ikimono Roshi (whose name means “life,” “living creatures,” “farm products,” or “uncooked food”) discovered the first practical star drive in 2237—or perhaps was merely the first such discoverer to survive—he thereby created the profession called “Relativist.” The best definition ever offered to the layman of what a Relativist does is (naturally) the Roshi’s: he said they meditate on and with the engine, in order to make it happy enough to function.

He held back the part about how they dissuade the star drive from becoming a star… until humankind had invested heavily in star travel, both economically and emotionally. Fortunately that did not take long: the Roshi’s only significant character flaw was reluctance to keep a joke to himself. (A great pity: it finally killed him… a joke he must have loved.)

Technically one could argue that Relativists should be called relativistic engineers. Without them, no engine; res ipse loquitur. But as it happens, the term “engineer” is already in use—by people who find the very kind of science that relativism requires to be witchcraft, spooky science, mumbo jumbo, perhaps even hocus-pocus. To them, it stops just short of being that most despised of all modes of thinking: a religion. The very first word in its technical description ruins all hope of conversation, sets engineers’ teeth on edge, and makes all the hairs bristle at the backs of their necks.

Quantum ramjet.

The quantum ramjet relies on the well-established theory of quantum fluctuations in the energy of the vacuum. These occur throughout the universe on extremely small scales of time and distance. Over times on the order of 10^–15 second and lengths of about 10^–55 centimeter, masses as high as 10^–5 grams and energies as large as 10^–6 ergs pop in and out of existence interminably. Conventional physics supports this picture, but it is an entirely different matter to make use of vacuum quantum fluctuations to propel a starship. A quantum ramjet, first proposed by H. David Froning (an engineer!) back before the Collapse, would work by “ingesting” the energy of the quantum fluctuations and converting it to propulsive energy. If the quantum starship could tap only a very tiny fraction of the theoretically available mass/energy of the vacuum, it could accelerate rapidly to relativistic velocities. But until Ikimono Roshi tried visualizing something in his mind, as he sat zazen in his ship in the Belt one day, and found himself half a light-year from home before he could stop doing it, no one had a clue how this might be accomplished. It almost certainly never occurred to anyone before then that human attention might be a necessary condition for the phenomenon. It was fortunate indeed that Hoitsu Ikimono was a Roshi—a Zen master, for whom sustained attention was a given—or he might never have made his way back to Sol to spread the news.

The philosophical implications of the quantum ramjet alone are startling. If, as the inflationary theory of cosmology mandates, the universe evolved from a quantum fluctuation that somehow grew to its present enormous scale, the same thing might occur as a matter of course in the heart of the quantum ramjet. Does each quantum ramjet create and destroy countless universes as it travels our cosmos, and are their crews as gods to the countless beings in the universes that support their flight?

The engineers have already left the room to vomit. And I can’t really say I blame them. But who knows? You, maybe?

To an engineer, it’s simple. If you can explain what you’re doing in numbers, and prove them, it’s science. If you can’t, it isn’t. End of story. There is much to recommend this view: it is essentially what keeps the black heart of the Prophet rotting in his stained coffin where it belongs. And any Relativist will happily admit she does not know how she does what she does. Nobody does. It’s not at all certain, in fact, that anybody ever will.

One thing is generally agreed, however: the man who had so far come closest to providing an explanation—who had at least provided some useful mathematical tools for approaching the problem, and pointed out a promising theoretical path through what had been an impenetrable thicket—was a Nobel prize-winning physicist from Ganymede named Ben Johnston.

My late father.

No wonder Kindred was terrified of me. Kindred did not want even the slightest morsel of understanding of the process by which he made himself one of the wealthiest individuals alive to creep into his mind. The thing that most Relativists fear the most is burnout: utter annihilation of personality. Not Kindred. He might even have yearned for it a little. As London had said, he was terrified of the Centipede’s Dilemma. Once the centipede got to pondering just how he managed all those legs, he couldn’t do it anymore. Kindred feared that if he understood what he did, he might stop being able to pull it off. For all he knew, my father might have told me some significant datum before he died, shared some crucial insight that I might be stupid enough to blurt out, whether I understood it myself or not. The risk was tiny, but to him the stakes were everything. So he averted his eyes and fled.

An engineer would call that raw superstition, primitive bullshit, childish magical thinking. But nobody cares what an engineer thinks about this topic, until he can make a big can full of people move at close to lightspeed without carrying any fuel for its primary drive. So of course they’re working on it, and good luck to them.

But I can’t think of any engineers I’d have been as excited to talk with over postprandial coffee as the three Relativists who remained at the table.

Nearly at once, and without warning, I found myself skateboarding right off a conversational precipice.

One minute I was enjoying the ride; the next, I looked down and saw, kilometers below, the rock-strewn base of the cliff I had just left behind me.

Why it took me by surprise, I cannot tell you. I admit it: in retrospect, I look dumb. How smart would I have had to be to guess that one of the very first polite questions to be directed at me would be:

“And what do you do, Joel?”

Now, where did I put that parachute?

It happened to be London who asked. The correct honest answer was: it sheets the bit out of me. I hadn’t even had time—during my walk here from my room—to draw up a master list of my options, arranged by category, much less zero in on anything. What I did these days was mostly get loaded, and mourn my lost love. It seemed to be all I had been doing, for quite a while now.

I kind of did not want to tell three of the most interesting people on the ship that I was that big a fool. But I had no other answer to give them.

Technically I could have said, “I’m a farmer,” without perjuring myself. I had contracted, as part of the price of my ticket, to spend twenty-one hours a week working down on the Sheffield’s Agricultural Decks, sharing my putatively valuable experience and expertise in hydroponic farming. Somehow I didn’t feel like going with that answer, either.

I am no longer sure, but I think I had decided on an enigmatic smile as my best response, when Sol answered for me. “You’re going to love it. Joel plays the sax.”

“And composes,” Herb amended for me.

I opened my mouth—

“How wonderful,” said Hideo the little monk.

I closed my mouth—

“Saxophone? Oh, I do love it,” London said. “Are you any good, Joel?”

That one, at least, I had numerous stock answers for on tap. I tossed out the first one that came up. “I think so. Being tone deaf, I’ve never been sure.”

“Sol?”

Sol shrugged. “I haven’t heard him play yet.”

“Herb?”

Herb shrugged, too. “Hasn’t played a note in my hearing yet either. Stingy bastard.”

“Nonetheless I am prepared to bet cash he’s very good,” Sol said.

“On what basis?” Hideo asked.

“I’ve examined his instrument closely. It is the saxophone of a man who loves it dearly, and is loved in return.”

I stared at him. “You can tell that?”

He just nodded.

“Well, we simply have to hear you, then,” London said. “Solomon, do you think the management would have any objection if we were to send for Joel’s instrument and ask him to play for us, here? Failing that, we could adjourn to my cabin.”

I took advantage of the discussion that ensued to think, hard and fast. I was on the edge of being committed, to something I had not chosen. Lately.

Playing sax and composing music had been what I did, once. They had been just about all I did, aside from thinking about Jinny. They and she had together constituted what I was, what I wanted, what I was for. Together. It had been a long time since I had thought of a future as a composer without Jinny as part of the picture.

Maybe when all the dust settled, and all the fallout faded to endurable levels again, I would still—or again—want to be a composer/musician. I had to admit, in fact, that it was highly likely. What the hell else was I qualified for? What else did I love nearly so much? (Don’t answer that one.)

But I had not made that decision yet. That had been the old plan, for a universe that had Jinny in it.

And more than just that, I suddenly realized with dizzy shock—it had been a plan for a universe that had the entire existing musical establishment of the Solar System as part of the given. All the other musicians, critics, and composers, all the vast potential audience, all the sources of funding, all the supporting institutions. In a society of many billions, composer is an honorable and even sometimes honored occupation. With a target audience that huge, one need not reach all that many of them to earn a living, and respect. Now that I was going to be living, forever, in a society of five hundred people and their offspring, everything needed to be rethought.

Another not inconsiderable point: I had hired on this tub as a farmer’s helper. The Colonial Council might decide to hold me to it, feeling that the colony needed shit shoveled more than it needed sax played, and until I could afford to put up enough credits for at least one Basic Share, they had as much say over my time as I did. The prudent man would divide his time between the hydroponic farm, and whatever would bring in the highest possible return in the shortest time—which did not describe sax playing in any known universe. Not even the currently most popular kinds of sax music… which were decidedly not what I wanted to compose.

If I did not speak up right now, these folks were going to accept me as a composer/musician. That would be awkward down the line if I ended up concluding that my life was best spent as something else altogether.

What else? I hadn’t admitted it to myself until now, but what I had always been second most interested in, after music, was history, particularly PreCollapse history. Terrific. If anything, history was even less use than serious music, to a frontier society. If, after a long day in the fields, my hypothetical descendants had any curiosity at all about the planet the Old Farts were always nattering about, they would be more than satisfied with the copious data we already had aboard, and any new historical fact I could ever learn would already be over ninety years old back on Earth, already chewed to death. The Libra colony would one day be interested in its own history—presuming it survived—but not until at least two generations after we landed, which itself was decades away.

Okay, Joel, don’t think about what else, now. But start backtracking, right now… right up to the point where you’d have to commit to some other track. Otherwise you may spend the next twenty years being thought of as the composer who couldn’t cut it.

“Sol and Herb spoke a little hastily without realizing it,” I heard myself saying. “Music is what I have done. I’m not certain it’s what I will do now, aboard the Sheffield. Or when we hit dirt at Brasil Novo either, for that matter. I’m still giving that thought.”

“What other areas interest you?” Itokawa asked.

“Well, I’ve always wanted to try space piracy,” I said.

“A step up from musician,” Sol agreed drily.

“Or perhaps dowsing.”

London whooped with laughter, a bracing sound. “Yes, I imagine aboard a ship would be a good place to learn how to locate water. You could check your answers without having to dig all those pesky holes.”

I smiled back at her. I wanted to banter with her, but also wanted this part of the conversation over as soon as possible. I had given just enough comic answers to hint that a serious one would not be forthcoming.

“You will find your path,” Itokawa said. He sounded a lot more certain than I felt.

“With luck,” I agreed. “Speaking of things we weren’t speaking of—”

But I didn’t have to manufacture a subject change, because one presented itself just then: my axe. The decision to send for it had apparently been made while I was deep in thought. Nothing for it but to play now.

But first they all had to ooh and ah, of course.

I had brought four saxophones with me, actually: soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone. (Musical instruments did not count against personal weight allowance.) But someone, almost surely Sol, had sent for my personal favorite, the one I considered my primary axe: Anna, a genuine Silver Sonic—a PreCollapse Yanigasawa B-9930 baritone, solid silver with a gold-plated hand-engraved bell and keys. The Selmer is more famous—but how often is the most famous really the best? Anna is a thing of beauty even to a layman, so elegant and precise you’d think she’d been finished by a jeweler… and a special joy to play for those who can handle her. Featherlight keys, lightning-fast response, tone-boosted resonator pads… never mind, I see you yawning. Let it stand that three people who spent their working days contemplating the infinite beauty that underlies the universe thought her special enough to admire extravagantly.

Even before they’d heard a note.

The baritone sax has never been a terribly popular instrument with musicians, because it is, physically, such a screaming bitch to play. It’s huge and ungainly and requires you to move an immense volume of air. But some of the greats—Gerry Mulligan, James Carter—understood that it is worth the effort. Baritone sax is probably the most powerful resonant wind instrument there is, the Paul Robeson of horns, and no other is so immediately impressive to the layman.

(A purist would note there are actually two deeper saxes, the bass and contrabass, just as there are two higher than soprano, the sopranino and soprillo, and some even recognize one lower than contrabass called the tubax—but you’re unlikely ever to hear any of them.)

While I wetted up my reed, I tried to decide what to play for them. Naturally, I wanted to play them one of my own compositions. And I was reasonably sure all three were sophisticated enough to appreciate it, if only mathematically—very sure, in Sol’s case. But what if they were sophisticated enough to hate it? Also, I was far less sure of everyone else in the place, and perfectly well aware that some of my work can strike a civilian as dry and complex. To pick the most polite words Jinny had used.

Okay, wrong time and place for an original Johnston. Something immediately accessible, but not crap. I reached into the air, and pulled down a tune Charlie Haden wrote to his wife Ruth called “First Song.” It was the opening number of the last set Stan Getz ever played, and it always tears me up. You’d think a tenor piece wouldn’t sound right on a baritone, but that one does. It snuck up on me; before long I had forgotten anyone else was listening, and played my heart out.

I hadn’t played a note in weeks, hadn’t even thought of it. My fingers were stiff, my embouchure weak, my wind less than optimal. I killed them, that’s all. You can tell when it’s working. I was playing smarter than I actually am, and could tell.

For the first three or four minutes, I was imagining accompaniment. Kenny Barron, who backed Getz by himself on that long-ago night in Copenhagen. Piano as crisp as snapping sticks.

And then suddenly the piano was really there.

I nearly clammed the phrase I was playing, and spun toward the bandstand. It was empty.

Wherever the keyboard player was, he was really good. Really good. I quartered the room without finding him, then eighthed it with no better luck. There were several side rooms and alcoves in which he might be lurking—or he could have been anywhere on the ship, listening in and tapping into the house sound system to play along. I decided to worry about it later, and put my attention back on Anna.

That piano was just the floor I’d needed to set my feet properly. We talked, briefly, and then he set me loose to wander. Before I knew it I had disappeared down the mouthpiece. When Getz played the song that night, he was saying good-bye to his life. I used it now to say good-bye to mine. God knew what new life I would build for myself, but the old one was over for good and for all, as unreachable as a moment ago, or the second before the Big Bang. Out of the bell of my Anna I blew my scholarship, and the mentor who would appear someday to nurture and teach me, and my master’s, and my debut at the legendary Milkweg II in Amsterdam, and my discovery by the contemporary serious music establishment, and System-wide recognition, and the respect of an entire generation of my peers… I blew away my courtship with Jinny, and our marriage, and our wedding night, and our first nest, and our first child, and all our children, and their childhoods and adolescences and adulthoods, and their children, and all the golden years she and I would have spent loving and cherishing them all…I blew away both my dead parents, whose widely separated graves I would never see again… I blew away Ganymede my home, lost to me for so long and now lost for good, and all those who still lived on her… and not incidentally I blew away a quantum of wealth and power that perhaps could have been expressed as a fraction of all there was using only a single digit in the denominator.

I didn’t get it all out—didn’t come close—but I made a start.

I actually didn’t hear the applause; Herb told me about it later.

I left the Horn of Plenty that night minus about a million kilos I’d been carrying on my shoulders… and with a steady gig, two nights a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, for a scandalous sum, tips, and all I could eat. Plus the private phone codes of three Relativists. Four, since London and George R lived together.

On the down side, I also left without finding out who had been playing that piano. Nobody seemed to know. The sound source had apparently been the house MIDI system—but the originating keyboard might have been in a sealed booth somewhere in the Horn, or up in the Control Room, for all anyone could tell me. All I could positively rule out was a player back in the Solar System… because our communication had unquestionably been conducted in real-time, without any lag at all. So I didn’t worry about it. I had twenty years to find him. He could hide, but he couldn’t run.

On our way back to our room, I tried to thank Herb, to explain just how much he’d unwittingly done for me, but he brushed it away. “I think everybody made out on that deal,” he said. When I pushed it, though, he allowed me to promise to bring home a doggy bag on Tuesday and Friday nights. And perhaps a doggy bulb of good Scotch.

After half an hour at his desk, Herb gave me a data cube and suggested I play it privately. I did so at once, so I could stop thinking about it.

It was little Evelyn Conrad, back in the Solar System. Audio and video, stereo both ways. She told me gravely that I was very welcome. She said she was very cross with her gran’ther for making me go away. She said she was going to marry me one day, just the same. She told me not to marry anyone else without checking with her, first. She gave me a “private” mail address, but warned me it was not totally secure. And she closed with a solemn Bon Voyage and a blown kiss. By that point I was grinning and crying at the same time. I popped out the cube, stretched out on my bunk, and slept like a stone for thirteen hours. And when I woke, rude things and implausible suggestions had been written all over my face and hands with a laundry marker. I guess I snore.