Variable Star. By Robert A. Heinlein. A Puke (TM) Audiobook

Editor’s Preface.

In Robert “A.” Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land there is a story about a Martian artist so focused on his work that he fails to notice his own death, and completes the piece anyway. To Martians, who don’t go anywhere when they die but simply become Old Ones, the burning question was: should this work be judged by the standards used for art by the living, or for art by the dead?
A similar situation occurs here for one of the first times on this planet. This book is a posthumous collaboration, begun when one of its collaborators was seven, and completed when the other was seventeen-years-dead. Spider Robinson discusses this at length in his Afterword, but a brief explanation at the start may help readers to better appreciate what they’re reading, and to decide by what standards they should evaluate it. After the passing of Robert Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, in 2003, his archivist, biographer discovered a detailed outline and notes for a novel the Grand Master had plotted in 1955, but had never gotten around to writing, tentatively titled The Stars Are a Clock. Heinlein’s estate executor and literary agent decided the book deserved to be written and read, and agreed that Spider Robinson was the only logical choice to complete it.
First called “the new Robert Heinlein” by the New York Times Book Review in 1982, Robinson has been linked with him in the reviews of most of his own thirty-two award-winning books. The two were close friends. Spider penned a famous essay demolishing his mentor’s detractors called “Rah, Rah, R.A.H.!” and contributed the introduction to Heinlein’s recently-discovered 1939 first book, For Us, the Living. It was a pairing as fortuitous as McCartney and Lennon. You are about to read something genuinely unique and quite special: a classic novel fifty years in the making, conceived in the Golden Age of SF by its first Grand Master, and completed in the Age of Cyberspace by one of his greatest students. Variable Star is Robert “A.” Heinlein’s only collaborative novel, and we believe he would be as proud of it as Spider Robinson is, and as we at Tor are to publish it.

Cordwainer Lo Brutto, Senior Editor.

One.
For it was in the golden prime.
Of good Harun Alrashid.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Recollections of the Arabian Nights.

I thought I wanted to get married in the worst way. Then that’s pretty much what I was offered, so I ended up going trillions of kilometers out of my way instead. A great many trillions of kilometers, and quite a few years, which turns out to be much the greater distance.
It began this way:
Jinny Hamilton and I were dancing.
This was something of an accomplishment for me, in and of itself, I was born on Ganymede, and I had only been Earthside a few years, then. If you’ve never experienced three times the gravity you consider normal, imagine doing your favorite dance, with somebody your own weight sitting on each of your shoulders, on a pedestal a few meters above concrete.
Broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions are hazards you simply learn to accept.
But some people play water polo, voluntarily. Jinny and I had been going out together for most of a year, and dancing was one of her favorite recreations, so by now I had not only made myself learn how to dance, I’d actually become halfway decent at it. Enough to dimly understand how someone with muscles of steel and infinite wind might consider it fun, anyway.
But that night was something else.
Part of it was the setting, I guess. Your prom is supposed to be a magical time. It was still quite early in the evening, but the Hotel Vancouver ballroom was appropriately decorated and lit, and the band was excellent, especially the singer. Jinny was both the most beautiful and the most interesting person I had ever met. She and I were both finally done with Fermi Junior College, in Surrey, British Columbia. Class of 2286 (Restored Gregorian), huzzah, go, Leptons!
In the fall we’d be going off to university together at Stony Brook, on the opposite coast of North America, if my scholarship came through, anyway, and in the meantime we were young, healthy, and hetero. The song being played was one I liked a lot, an ancient old ballad called “On the Road to the Stars,” that always brought a lump to my throat because it was one of my father’s favorites.
It’s the reason we came from the mud, don’t you know cause we wanted to climb to the stars,
In our flesh and our bone and our blood we all know we were meant to return to the stars,
Ask anyone which way is God, and you know he will probably point to the stars.
None of that explained the way Jinny danced that night. I knew her as a good dancer, but that night it was almost as if she were possessed by the ghost of Gillis. It wasn’t even just her own dancing, though that was inspired. She did some moves that startled me, phrases so impressive she started to draw attention even on a crowded dance floor. Couples around us kept dancing, but began watching her. Her long red hair swirled through the room like the cape of an inspired toreador, and for a while I could only follow like a mesmerized bull. But then her eyes met mine, and flashed, and the next thing I knew I was attempting a combination I had never even thought of before; one that I knew as I began, was way beyond my abilities, and I nailed it. She sent me a grin that felt like it started a sunburn and offered me an intriguing move, and I thought of something to do with it, and she lobbed it back with a twist, and we got through five fairly complex phrases without a train wreck and out the of her side as smoothly as if we’d been rehearsing for weeks. Some people had stopped dancing to watch, now.
On the way to the stars every molecule in you was born in the heart of a star.
On the way to the stars, in the dead of the night they’re the light that’ll show where you are yes they are from so far
In the back of my head were a few half-formed, half-baked layman’s ideas for dance steps that I wasn’t even sure were physically possible in a one gee field. I’d never had the nerve to actually try any of them with a partner, in any gravity; I really hate looking ridiculous. But Jinny lifted an eyebrow,
what have you got?, and before I knew it I was trying one, even though there was no way she could know what her response was supposed to be.
Only she did, somehow, and made it, or rather, an improved variation of what I’d thought of, and not only was the result successful enough to draw applause, by luck it happened to offer a perfect lead-in to another of my ideas, which also turned out to work, and suggested something to her,
We flew.
We’ll be through if the day ever comes when we no longer yearn to return to the stars.
I can’t prove it’s so, but I’m certain: I know that our ancestors came from the stars.
It would not be so lonely to die if I knew I had died on the way to the stars.
Talking about dance is as silly as dancing about architecture. I don’t know how to convey exactly how we danced that night, or what was so remarkable about it. I can barely manage to believe we did it. Just let it stand that we deserved the applause we received when the music finally ended and we went into our closing clinch. It was probably the first time since I’d come to Terra that I didn’t feel heavy and weak and fragile. I felt strong, graceful, manly.
“After dancing like that, Stinky, a couple really ought to get married,” Jinny said about two hundred millimeters below my ear.
I felt fourteen. “Damn it, Jinny.” I said, and pulled away from her. I reached down for her hands, trying to make it into a dance move, but she eluded me. Instead she curtsied, blew me a kiss, turned on her heel, and left at high speed, to spirited applause.
It increased when I ran after her.
Jinny was 178 centimeters tall, not especially tall for a Terran, and I was a Ganymedean beanpole two full meters high, so her legs were considerably shorter than mine. But they were also adapted from birth to a one-gee field, to sports in a one-gee field. I didn’t catch up with her until we’d reached the parking lot, and then only because she decided to let me.
So we’d each had time to work on our lines.
Ginny went with, “Joel Johnston, if you don’t want to marry me.”
“Jinny, you know perfectly well I’m going to marry you,”
“In five more frimpin’ years! My God, Stinky, I’ll be an old, old woman by then.”
“Skinny, you’ll never be an old woman,” I said, and that shut her up for a second. Every so often a good one comes to me like that. Not often enough. “Look, don’t be like this. I can’t marry you right now. You know I can’t.”
“I don’t know anything of the sort. I know you won’t. But I see nothing preventing you.
You don’t even have to worry about parental consent.”
“What does that have to do with it? Neither do you. And we wouldn’t let parental disapproval stand in our way if we did want to get married.”
“You see? I was right, you don’t want to!”
I was becoming alarmed. I had always thought of Jinny as unusually rational, for a girl.
Could this be one of those hormonal storms I had read about? I hoped not, all authorities seemed to agree the only thing a man could do in such weather was lash himself to the mast and pray. I made a last stubborn attempt to pour logic on the troubled waters. “Jinny, please, be reasonable! I am not going to let you marry a dole bludger. Not even if he’s me.”
“But.”
“I intend to be a composer. You know that. That means it’s going to take me at least a few years to even start to get established. You knew that when we started dating. If, I say ‘if,’ all those bullocks I sacrificed to Zeus pay off and I actually win a Kallikanzaros Scholarship, it will be my great privilege to spend the next four years living on dishrag soup and scraped fridge, too poor to support a cat. If, and I say ‘if,’ I am as smart as I think I am, and luckier than I usually am, I’ll come out the other end with credentials that might, in only another year or two, leave me in a position to offer you something more than half of a motel cubicle. Meanwhile, you have your own scholarships and your law degree to worry about, so that once my music starts making serious money, nobody will weasel it away from us.”
“Stinky, do you think I care about money?” She said that last word as if it were a synonym for stale excrement.
I sighed. Definitely a hormonal storm. “Reboot and start over. What is the purpose of getting married?”
“What a romantic question!” She turned away and quested for her car. I didn’t move.
“Quit dodging, I’m serious. Why don’t we just live together if we want to be romantic?
What is marriage for?”
The car told her she was heading the wrong way; she reversed direction and came back past me toward its voice and pulsing beacon. “Babies, obviously.”
I followed her. “Bingo. Marriage is for making jolly babies, raising them up into successful predators, and then admiring them until they’re old enough to reward you with grandchildren to spoil.”
She’d acquired the car by now. She safed and unlocked it. “My baby-making equipment is at its peak right now,” she said, and got in the car. “It’s going to start declining any minute.”
She closed, but did not slam, the door.
I got in my side and strapped in. “And the decline will take decades to become significant,”
I pointed out logically “Your baby-making gear may be at its hypothetical optimum efficiency today, but my baby- raising equipment isn’t even operational yet.”
“So what?”
“Jinny, are you seriously proposing that we raise a child as extraordinary and gifted as ours on credit?” We both shared a most uncommon aversion to being in debt. Orphans spend too much of their childhood in debt to others, debt that cannot be repaid.
“Nobody seems to be seriously proposing around here,” she said bitterly.
Hormonal hurricane, maybe. A long time ago they used to name all hurricanes after women. On Ganymede, we still named all ground-quakes after them. “Look.”
She interrupted, “Silver: my home, no hurry.” The car said, “Yes, Jinny,” and came alive, preparing for takeoff.
I wondered as always why she’d named her car that, if you were going to pick an element, I thought, why not hydrogen? I failed to notice the slight change in address protocol. Despite our low priority, we didn’t have to wait long, since nobody else had left the prom yet and the system was between rush hours; Silver rose nearly at once and entered the system with minimal huhu. That early in the evening, most of the traffic was still in the other direction, into Greater Vancouver. Once our speed steadied, Jinny opaqued the windows, swiveled her seat to face me, and folded her arms.
I’m sure it was quite coincidental that this drew my attention to the area immediately above them. I believe in the Tooth Fairy, too. “Pardon me for interrupting you,” she said.
She looked awfully good. Her prom dress was more of a spell than a garment. The soft warm interior lighting was very good to her. Of course, it was her car.
That was the hell of it. I wanted to marry her at least as much as she wanted to marry me.
Just looking at her made my breath catch in my throat. I wished with all my heart, and not for the first time, that we lived back when unmarried people could live together openly. They said a stable society was impossible, back then. But even if they were right, what’s so great about a stable society?
My pop used to say, “Joel, never pass up a chance to shut up.” Well, some men learn by listening, some read, some observe and analyze, and some of us just have to pee on the electric fence. “Jinny, you know I’m a backward colonial when it comes to debt.”
“And you know I feel the same way about it that you do!”
I blinked. “That’s true. We’ve talked about it. I don’t care what anybody says; becoming the indentured servant of something as compassionate and merciful as a bank or credit union simply isn’t rational.”
“Absolutely.”
I spread my hands. “What am I missing? Raising a child takes money, packets and crates of the stuff. I haven’t got it. I can’t earn it. I won’t borrow it. And I’m too chicken to steal it.”
She broke eye contact. “Those aren’t the only ways to get it,” she muttered. Silver gave its vector-change warning peep, slowed slightly, and kinked left to follow the Second Narrows Bridge across Burrard Inlet.
“So? I suppose I could go to Vegas and turn a two-credit bit into a megasolar at the roulette wheel.”
“Blackjack,” she said. “The other games are for suckers.”
“My tenants back home on the Rock might strike ice. In the next ten minutes I could get an idea for a faster-than-light star drive that can be demonstrated without capital. I can always stand at stud, but that would kick me up a couple of tax brackets. Nothing else comes to mind.”
She said nothing, very loudly. Silver peeped, turned left again, and increased speed, heading for the coast.
“Look, Spice,” I said, “you know I don’t share contemporary Terran prejudices any more than you do, I don’t insist that I be the one to support us.
But somebody has to. If you can find a part-time job for either of us that pays well enough to support a family, we’ll get married tomorrow.”
No response. We both knew the suggestion was rhetorical. Two full-time jobs would barely support a growing family in the present economy.
“Come on,” I said, “we already had this conversation once. Remember? That night on Luckout Hill?” The official name is Lookout Hill, because it looks out over the ocean, but it’s such a romantic spot, many a young man has indeed lucked out there. Not me, unfortunately “We said.”
“I remember what we said!”
Well, then, maybe I didn’t. To settle it, I summoned that conversation up in my mind, or at least fast-forwarded through the storyboard version in the master index. And partway through, I began to grow excited. There was indeed one contingency we had discussed that night on Luckout Hill, one that I hadn’t really thought of again, since I couldn’t really picture Jinny opting for it. I wasn’t sure she was suggesting it now, but if she wasn’t, I would.
“See here, Skinny, you really want to change your name from Hamilton to Johnston right away? Then let’s do it tomorrow morning, and ship out on the Sheffield!” Her jaw dropped; I pressed on. “If we’re going to start our marriage broke, then let’s do it somewhere where being broke isn’t a handicap, or even a stigma, out there around a new star, on some new world eighty light-years away, not here on Terra. What do you say? You say you’re an old-fashioned girl, will you homestead with me?”
A look passed across her face I’d seen only once before, on Aunt Tula’s face, when they told me my father was gone. Sadness unspeakable. “I can’t, Joel.”
How had I screwed up so badly? “Sure you could.”
“No, I can’t.” She swiveled away from me.
The sorrow on her face upset me so much, I shut up and began replaying everything since our dance, trying to locate the point at which my orbit had begun to decay. Outside the car, kilometers flicked by unseen. On the third pass, I finally remembered a technique that had worked for me more than once with women in the past: quit analyzing every word I’d said and instead, consider words I had not said. Light began to dawn, or at least a milder darkness. I swiveled her seat back to face me, and sought her eyes. They were huge.
I dove right in. “Jinny, listen to me. I want to marry you. I ache to marry you. You’re the one. Not since that first moment when I caught you looking at me have I ever doubted for an instant that you are my other half, the person I want to spend the rest of my life with. Okay?”
“Oh.” Her voice was barely audible.
“You give me what I need, and you need what I can give. I want the whole deal, just like you’ve told me you want it, old-fashioned death do us part, better or worse monogamy, like my parents. None of this term marriage business, no prenup nonsense, fifty-fifty, mine is thine, down the line, and I don’t care if we live to be a hundred. I want to marry you so bad, my teeth hurt. So bad my hair hurts. If you would come with me, I would be happy to walk to Bootes, carrying you on my back, towing a suitcase. My eyeballs keep drying out every time I look at you. Then when you’re out of their field of vision, they start to tear up.”
Her eyes started to tear up. “Oh, Joel, you do want to marry me.” Her smile was glorious.
“Of course I do, Skinny you ninny. How could you not know that?”
“So it’s just.”
“Just a matter of financing. Nothing else. We’ll get married the day we can afford to.” I loosened my seat belt, so I’d be ready for the embrace I was sure was coming.
Her smile got even wider. Then it fell apart, and she turned away, but not before I could see she was crying.
What the hell had I said now?
Of course, that’s the one question you mustn’t ask. Bad enough to make a woman cry; to not even know how you managed it is despicable, but no matter how carefully I reviewed the last few sentences I’d spoken, in my opinion they neither said anything nor failed to say anything that constituted a reason to cry.
Silver slowed slightly, signaling that we were crossing the Georgia Strait. We’d be at Jinny’s little apartment on Lasqueti Island, soon. I didn’t know what to apologize for. But then, did I need to? “Jinny, I’m sorry. I really.”
She spoke up at once, cutting me off. “Joel, suppose you knew for sure you had your scholarship in the bag? The whole ride?” She swiveled her seat halfway back around, not quite enough to be facing me, but enough so that I was clearly in her peripheral vision.
I frowned, puzzled by the non sequitur. “What, have you heard something?” As far as I knew, the decisions wouldn’t even be made for another few weeks.
“Damn it, Stinky, I’m just saying: Suppose you knew for a fact that you’re among this year’s Kallikanzaros winners.”
“Well, that’d be great. Right?”
She turned the rest of the way back around, so that she could glare at me more effectively “I’m asking you: If that happened, how would it affect your marriage plans?”
“Oh.” I still didn’t see where she was going with this. “Uh, it’d take a lot of the pressure off.
We’d know for sure that we’re going to be able to get married in as little as four years. Well, nothing’s for sure, but we’d be a whole lot more.”
I trailed off because I could see what I was saying wasn’t what she wanted to hear. I had to shift my weight slightly as Silver went into a wide right turn. I didn’t have a clue what she did want to hear, and her face wasn’t giving me enough clues. Maybe I ought to-
Wide right turn?
I cleared my side window. Sure enough, we were heading north; almost due north, it looked like. But that was wrong: we couldn’t be that far south of Lasqueti. “Jinny, I.”
She was sobbing outright, now.
Oh, God. As calmly as I could, I said, “Honey, you’re going to have to take manual control: Silver has gone insane.”
She waved no-no and kept sobbing.
For a second I nearly panicked, thinking, I don’t know what I was thinking. “Jinny, what’s wrong?”
Her weeping intensified “Oh, Jo-ho-ho-ho.”
I unbuckled, leaned in, and held her. “Damn it, talk to me! Whatever it is, we’ll fix it, I know we will. Just tell me.”
“Oh, God, I-hi-hi’m sorry, I screwed it all up-hup-hup-hup.” She clutched me back fiercely.
I was alarmed. I’d seen Jinny cry. This was hooting with sorrow, rocking with grief.
Something was seriously wrong. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, you hear me? Whatever it is.”
She writhed in my arms. “Joel, I lie-hi-hi-hi-hied, I’m so stu-hoohupid.”
Ice formed on the floor of my heart. I did not break our embrace, but I felt an impulse to, and I’m sure she felt it kinesthetically. She cried twice as hard. Well, much harder.
It took her several minutes to get back under control. During those minutes, I didn’t breathe or think or move or digest food or do anything at all except wait to learn what my Jinny had lied about. Then, when she took in a deep breath and pulled away from my arms, suddenly I didn’t want to know. So I thought of a different question she could answer instead.
“Where are we going?”
Her eyes began to slide away from mine, then came back and locked. “To my home.”
This time I caught the subtle change. Usually the instruction she gave Silver was “my place .”
“So? And it’s north?”
She nodded.
“How far?”
“Silver: step on it,” she said. The car acknowledged. Then to me, as Silver faced our chairs forward and pressed us back into them with acceleration, she said, “About twenty minutes, now.”
I consulted a mental map and glanced out the window, with difficulty, as we were now pulling serious gees. Jinny’s car was exceedingly well loved, but nonetheless it was just short of an antique. There was simply no way it could go anywhere near this fast. I made myself breathe slowly. This just kept getting better and better.
Twenty minutes north of Lasqueti at this speed would, it seemed to me, put us smack in the middle of a glacier somewhere, just below the border with Yukon Province. I was dressed for a ballroom, didn’t have so much as a toothbrush. Not that it mattered, because we were doing at least four times the provincial exurban speed limit; long before we reached that glacier the Mounties (local cops) were going to cut our power and set us down to await the Proctors, probably in raw forest. Unless, of course, Silver tore himself apart first, traveling at four times the best speed he’d been capable of the day he left the factory.
Less than half an hour before, I’d been as perfectly happy as I’d ever been in my life, dancing with my Jinny. I opaqued my window, surrendered to the gee forces, and stared straight ahead at nothing. To my intense annoyance, she let me.
Life is going to continue to suck until somebody finds the Undo key.

Two.
Howe’er it be, it seems to me ‘Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Lady Clara Vere de Vere.
The engine did not explode. It didn’t even sound any louder than usual. The Mounties somehow failed to notice us blazing across their radar, or to log any complaints about shattered windows; we crossed the province unmolested. For most of the trip we were above atmosphere, so high that the horizon showed a distinct curve, we pretty much had to be at that speed, I think, but if the Peace Forces satellites noticed us, they kept it to themselves.
Nineteen minutes later, the car finished decelerating, came to a dead stop, and went into hover mode, glowing softly from the heat of our passage and reentry into atmosphere.
“Wait,” Jinny said, whether to Silver or to me, I was unsure.
I glanced at her, then turned to my side window once again and looked down. Sure enough, what lay some three thousand meters below us was a nearly featureless glacier. There was a big rill to the east, and a shadowy crevasse almost directly below that was much smaller, but still large enough to conceal several dozen cars the size of Silver. I looked back to Jinny.
She was staring straight ahead at the windshield, which was still opaque.
Keeping my mouth shut was easy this time. I not only didn’t know how I felt, I didn’t even know what I felt it about. I couldn’t have been more clueless if I’d had my head in a sack.
Anything I said was likely to sound stupid in retrospect, and there are few things I hate more.
“I rehearsed this a hundred times,” she said finally. “Now I’ve screwed it up completely.”
I suspected this was true, but kept my mouth shut.
She swiveled my way and unbuckled her crash harness, though we were still three klicks above hard ice. It gave her enough freedom of movement to lean forward and take one of my hands in both of hers. I noted absently that the skin of her palm was remarkably hot. “Have you ever heard of Harun al-Rashid?” she asked me.
“Plays defense for the Tachyons?”
“Close,” she said. “You’re only off by, let me see, a little more than a millennium and a half.
Fifteen hundred and some years.”
“But he does play defense.”
“Stinky, please shut up! He was a rich kid, from a powerful military family in ancient Persia. His father was a Caliph, roughly equivalent to premier of a province today, a man so tough he invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, which was then ruled by the Empress Irene.”
“You’re making this up,” I charged.
Her eyes flashed. “I said ‘please,’ Joel.”
I drew an invisible zipper across my lips.
“Harun became Caliph himself in the year 786.” Over a thousand years before man could even travel anywhere. “He was probably as wealthy and powerful as anybody in living memory had ever been. Yet somehow, he was not an ignorant idiot.”
“Amazing,” I said, trying to be helpful.
Go try to be helpful to a woman who’s talking. “He had the odd idea it was important to know what his people were really thinking and feeling about things,” she went on as if I had not spoken. “He wanted more than just the sanitized, politically safe version they would give to him or to anyone he could send to talk to them. He understood that his wealth and power distorted just about everything in his relations with others, made it difficult if not impossible for truth to pass between them. You can see how that would be, right?”
“Sure. Everybody lies to the boss.”
“Yes!” Finally, I’d gotten one right. “Then one day he overheard one of his generals say that nobody knows a city as well as an enemy spy. It gave him an idea.
“That night he disguised himself as a beggar, sneaked out of his palace alone, and wandered the streets of Baghdad, a spy in his own capital.
Everywhere he went, he listened to conversations, and sometimes he asked innocent questions, and because he was thought a beggar, no one bothered to lie to him. He got drunk on it. He started to do it whenever he could sneak away.”
Her eyes were locked on mine, now. It was important that I get this.
“Do you see, Joel? For the first time in his life Harun got an accurate picture of what the common people honestly thought, more than just what they thought, he experienced firsthand what life was really like for them, came to understand the things they didn’t even think about because they simply assumed them, and their perspective informed and improved his own thinking from then on. He became one of the most beloved rulers in history, his name means Aaron the Just, and how many rulers do you suppose have ever been called that? One time fifteen thousand men followed him into battle against one hundred twenty-five thousand, and whipped them, left forty thousand legionaries dead on the ground and the rest running for their lives. He lived to a ripe old age, and when he died the whole Muslim world mourned. Okay?”
I was nodding. I understood every word she said. I had no idea what she was driving at.
She took a deep breath. “Okay. Now, imagine you’re a young Persian girl in Baghdad. I see your mouth opening, and so help me God, if a wisecrack should come out of it, that’s better.
You’re a poor-but-decent young Persian girl, working hard at some menial trade, struggling to better yourself, and so is.”
A strange alto voice suddenly spoke, seemingly from the empty space between Jinny and me, just a little too loudly. I was so startled I nearly jumped out of my seat. “Your vehicle’s hull temperature has dropped sufficiently to permit safe debarking now, Miss Jinny.”
If I was startled, Jinny was furious. I could tell because her face became utterly smooth, and her voice became softer in pitch and tone and slower in speed as she said, “There are only four letters in the word wait, Smithers. There seems little room for ambiguity.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Jinny,” Smithers said at once, and although there was no noticeable cessation of any background hiss or power hum, somehow he was gone.
“And so,” she went on before I could ask who Smithers was, “is your boyfriend, call him Jelal. The two of you are very much in love, and want to get married, but you just don’t have the means. And then one day.”
“Wait,” I said, “I think I see where this is going, sort of. One day the beggar who lives next door comes over, right, and it turns out he’s incredibly rich and he says he’s been eavesdropping and he understands our problem and he offers Jelal a.”
I stopped talking. The penny had just dropped. All of sudden, I actually did see where this was going, at least in general terms. “Oh, my, God.”
I breathed. “I’ve got it just backward, don’t I?”
Her eyes told me I was right. “There wasn’t any other way, do you see? Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton, I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, the whole point was to.”
“You’re Harun al-Rashid!”
“Well, his granddaughter,” she said miserably.
I was stunned. “You’re rich.”
She nodded sadly. “Very.”
Tumblers began to click into place. I tried to think it through. “You’re not even an orphan, are you?”
Headshake. “I couldn’t let anyone at Fermi meet my parents. They’re, pretty well known.
Hiring a pair of Potemkin parents for social purposes seemed grotesque.”
“And you came to Fermi, instead of Lawrence Campbell or one of the other top prep schools, so you could, what? See how the other half lives?”
“Well, in part.”
I was ranging back through my memories, adding things up with the benefit of hindsight, understanding little things that had puzzled me. Silver’s previously unsuspected power. Jinny’s extraordinary confidence and poise, so unexpected in an orphan. How, whenever someone brought up one of the really fabulous vacation destinations, Tuva, or the Ice Caves of Queen Maud Land in the Antarctic, or Harriman City on Luna, Jinny always seemed to have seen a good documentary about it recently. The way, when we ate pistachios, she always threw away the ones that were any trouble at all to open,
I became aware that Jinny was absolutely still and silent, studying my face intently for clues to what I was thinking. It seemed like a good idea; maybe I should get a mirror and try it. I thought about banging my head against the dashboard to reboot my brain.
Instead I looked at her and spread my hands. “I’m going to need some time to process this,” I admitted.
“Of course,” she said at once. “Sleep on it. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my real father. And meantime I’ll answer any questions you have, no more evasions, no more white lies.”
I didn’t feel as though I knew enough to formulate a coherent question yet. No, wait, I did have one, purely for form’s sake; I didn’t see how the answer could help me. Still,
“What is it really?”
She blinked. “Crave pardon?”
“You said, ‘Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton.’ So that’s not your real name. Okay, I’ll bite. What is?”
“Oh, dear,” she said.
” ‘Jinny Oh.’ Chinese, dear?”
Not amused. “Joel.”
“Come on, how bad could it be? Look, let’s meet for the first time all over again. Hi there, I’m Joel Johnston, of Ganymede. And you are?”
She stared at me, blank-faced, for so long I actually began to wonder whether she was going to tell me. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her hesitate about anything before, much less this long. One of the many things I liked about her was that she always knew what she wanted to be doing next.
Finally she closed her eyes, took in a long breath, released it, squared her shoulders and opened her eyes and looked me right in the eye.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mister Johnston. I’m Jinny Conrad.”
For a second or two nothing happened. Then my eyebrows and my pulse both rose sharply. It couldn’t be. “Not.”
“Of Conrad,” she confirmed.
It couldn’t be.
“It’s true,” she said. “My father is Albert Conrad. Richard Conrad’s third son.”
“You’re Jinnia Conrad of Conrad,” I said.
She nodded once.
I didn’t quite faint, but it was good that I was sitting down, and strapped in. My head drained like a sink; all the blood and most of the brain matter dropped at once to my feet.
Very rich, she’d said. Yeah, and the Milky Way is rather roomy!
The Conrad industrial, informational empire was larger than the Rothschild family, the Hanseatic League, Kinetic Sciences Interplanetary, and Rolls-
Daiwoo combined, and only slightly smaller than the Solar System. Nothing like it could have existed before the advent of space travel, and perhaps it became inevitable in the first minute of Year One, as Leslie LeCroix was still shutting down the Pioneer‘s engine on the virgin surface of Luna. The Conrads were a 150-year dynasty, every member of whom wielded wealth, power, and influence comparable to that of the Hudson’s Bay Company or Harriman Enterprises in their day. Their combined interests ranged from the scientific outpost on Mercury, to Oort Cloud harvest, to interstellar exploration as far as sixty-five light-years away. At that time there were well over a dozen starships either outgoing or incoming, and eight had already returned safely (out of a hoped-for eighteen), five of them bearing the riches of Croesus in one form or another. Three of those big winners had been Conrad ships.
She gave me a minute, well, some indeterminate period. Finally she said, “Look, I have to land, now. Smithers wasn’t completely out of line to remind me. We, don’t like to hover, here. It’s just a bit conspicuous.”
“Okay,” I said, to be saying something. “Where’s here?”
“In a minute. Silver: I relieve you.”
“Yes, Jinny.” She took the stick and we dropped three thousand meters rapidly enough to give me heart palpitations.
Which nearly became cardiac arrest when the ground came rushing up, and she failed to decelerate hard enough to stop in time! We were going to crash,
, right through the imaginary glacier,
, and into a deep valley, its floor lush and green and inviting and, best of all, still hundreds of meters below us. She landed us, without a bump, in a small clearing that from the air had looked indistinguishable from dozens of others, to me at least. But the moment she shut down, hoses and cables sprouted from the forest floor and began nurturing Silver. Ahead of us was a huge boulder, the size of a truck; as I watched, a large doorway appeared in it, facing us.
“We’re here,” she said.
“I ask again: Where is here?”
She shook her head. “It isn’t.”
“Isn’t what?”
“Isn’t anywhere.”
I turned my head just enough to be looking at her out of the corner of my eye. “Here isn’t anywhere.”
“Right.”
I closed my eyes. If I had just stayed back home on the farm, by now I might have been making enough of a crop to afford a hired man. That would have freed me up to do some courting, in a frontier society with considerably looser rules about premarital experimentation than contemporary Terra.
But I knew for a fact there was no one remotely like Jinny anywhere on Ganymede. Had known it for a fact, that is, even before learning that she was more well off than the Secretary General.
No, I couldn’t take that in just yet. “I really, really wish I could think of something more intelligent to say than, ‘What do you mean, “here isn’t anywhere”?’ ”
She shrugged. “You tell me. If a place does not appear on any map, anywhere, if it doesn’t show in even the finest-grain satellite photos, if no wires or roads or paths run to it, no government takes mail to it or taxes from it, and nobody is from there, in what sense does it exist? There is no here. Just us.”
“Here.”
“Exactly.”
I nodded and dismissed the matter. “And this is your home?”
“One of them.”
I nodded. “And your apartment on Lasqueti, of course. It must be weird having two homes.”
She didn’t say a word or move a muscle.
I turned to look at her. “More than two?”
Silence. Stillness.
“How many homes do you have, Jinny?”
In a very small voice, she said, “Eight. Not counting the Lasqueti place.”
“So?”
“But three of them are off-planet!”
“Naturally,” I agreed. “One winters in space.”
“Oh, Joel, don’t be that way.”
“Okay. Let’s go in.”
She looked distressed. “Uh, if you are going to be that way, maybe it might he better to do it out here, before we go in.”
I nodded again. Mister Agreeable. “Sure. That makes sense. Okay.” Then, big: “How could you do this to me, Jinny?”
She didn’t flinch or cringe or duck. “Think it through, Joel. Sleep on it. Tomorrow morning, you tell me: How could I have not done it?”
I began an angry retort, and swallowed it. I had to admit I had not begun to think this thing through yet, and Dad always drilled into me that the time to open your mouth came after that.
Besides, I already had a glimmering of what she meant. I filled my lungs, emptied them slowly and fully, and said, “You’re right. Okay I’m prepared to be polite, now. Let’s go inside.”
“You won’t have to be,” she said. “I promise you won’t see any family at all until tomorrow morning. I made them guarantee that. This is our Prom Night.”
I frowned. “I wish I had an overnight bag. Change of socks, fresh shirt, my razor.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and unlocked the doors.
I let it go. Probably the contents of the slop chest here were finer than anything I owned.
“All right. Invite me up to your place.”
“Down, actually.”
We opened our doors and got out. The roof of imaginary glacier did not exist from its underside; the moon and stars shone unimpeded overhead, a neat trick. But this was definitely not a natural ecology. The air was skin temperature, with an occasional breeze just slightly warmer. It smelled of dirt and green growing things, with just a little ozone tingle as if it had rained recently, though it had not. The loamy earth beneath my feet was rich, almost quivering with life; any farmer I knew back on Ganymede would have desperately envied it. Acres of it, at least a meter deep: wild, uncultivated, supporting nothing but trees, scrub, and inedible berries. Just lying there. Conspicuous non consumption. Start getting used to it, old son. I thought of saying something, but I knew Jinny would never understand. It’s funny: the very word “Terra” means “dirt”, and not one hungry terrestrial in a thousand has a clue how important, how precious it is. I shook my head.
The door in that huge rock ahead of the car was indeed an elevator. Back when I was four I’d been in an elevator that nice. In Stockholm, when Dad came Earthside to pick up the Nobel. Like that one, this elevator had a live human operator, of advanced age and singular ugliness, who made it a point of pride to remain unaware of our existence: he happened to be leaving as we stepped in, and took us down a good fifty meters with him. The car descended with unhurried elegance. It gave me time to think about the kind of people who would live deep underground, in a place that did not exist, and still feel the need to pull the sky over them like a blanket. “Paranoid” didn’t seem to cover it.
By happy chance the operator decided to pause and check the operation of the doors just as he was passing the floor we wanted; so intent was his inspection, we were able to escape unnoticed. This left us in a kind of reception room, so lavish as to remind me of the lobby of that hotel back in Stockholm. The carpet was grass. But I didn’t get time to study the room; nearly at once I felt a tugging and turned to see a man older and uglier than the elevator operator trying to take my cloak. With some misgivings I let him have it, and that seemed to have been a mistake, for he simply handed it off to a small boy who suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision, and then literally threw himself at my feet and began loosening my shoes. I, reacted. If we’d been under normal gravity, on Ganymede or Mars, I think I’d have kicked his teeth in; as it was he went sprawling. But he took a shoe with him as he went, a trick I admired as much as I resented it. Jinny giggled. I recovered, removed the other shoe myself with as much dignity as I could muster, and handed it to him as he approached again. He reunited it with its twin, bowed deeply, and backed away.
I turned to Jinny and forgot whatever I’d been about to say. Her own cloak and shoes had been magicked away by tall elves, and she looked, how do girls do that, anyway? One minute just be there, and the next, be there. They can do it without moving a muscle, somehow.
“Good evening, Miss Jinny,” said a baritone voice from across the room. “Welcome home.”
Standing just inside a door I had failed to notice was a man nearly as tall as me with a shaved head, wearing a suit that cost more than my tuition at Fermi Junior. Like us, and the various elves I’d seen, he wore no shoes. Presumably they would cobble us all new ones in the night.
“Thank you, Smithers. This is, damn. Excuse me.” She lifted her phone-finger to her ear, listened for a few moments, frowned, said “Yes,” and broke the connection. “I’ve got to go, for just a few minutes. Get Joel situated, would you please, Smithers? I’m sorry, Joel, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Okay.”
She was gone.
Somehow he was at my side, without having covered the intervening distance. “Good evening, Mister Johnston. I’m Alex Rennick, master of the house at present. Welcome to the North Keep. Let me show you to your room, first, and then perhaps I can give you the ten-credit tour.”
His eyes were gray, almost mauve. His head wasn’t shaved, it was depilated. Despite his height, a dozen subconscious cues told me he was earthborn. He was fit, and had an air of great competence and great confidence. I’m pretty good at guessing ages, given that everybody looks alike now, and I couldn’t pin him down any closer than the thirty-to-sixty zone. I found it interesting that he knew my last name without having been given it.
“Thank you, Mister Rennick. You are most kind. Please call me Joel.”
“And I am Alex. Will you come this way, Joel?”
I thought of an ancient joke, put it out of my mind, and followed him from the room. As I did I promised myself, solemnly, that no matter what wonders I was shown here, I would not boggle. No matter how staggeringly opulent the place proved to be, I would not let it make me feel inferior. My father had been a Nobel laureate, and my mother a great composer, how many of these people could say as much?
“Do you have any questions to start?” he asked as we went.
“Yes, Alex,” I said, memorizing the route we were taking. “Why does Jinny call you Smithers?”
“I have no idea.” His tone was absolutely neutral, but somehow I knew I’d touched a sore spot. Either it bothered him not to know, or the answer was humiliating.
“Ah,” I said, lowering my pitch. “To drive you crazy, then.” I was curious to see how he’d respond to an invitation to a jocular, between-us-men discussion of his mistress, whom I personally knew to be a handful and a half.
He sidestepped effortlessly. “That would be redundant, I’m afraid.”
“Have you worked here long?”
“Yes.”
I see. “How many people live here in, the North Keep, you said?”
“The number varies.”
His stinginess with information was beginning to mildly irritate me. “No doubt. But surely as master of the house you know its current value.” I halfway expected him to say “Yes, I do,” and clam up. But he wasn’t that kind of childish. Instead he used jujitsu. “There are eighty-four persons resident in the North Keep at the moment. By midnight the number will be ninety-two, and shortly before breakfast time tomorrow it is expected to drop back to eighty-nine.”
“Ah.” I hesitated in phrasing my next question. “And how many of those are employees?”
“All but four. Five tomorrow.” Yipes! Yes, Conrads lived here, all right. “Here we are.” He stopped before a door that looked no different from any of several dozen we’d passed along the way, and tapped the button which on Terra is for some reason always called a knob.
The door dilated to reveal a room full of thick pink smoke. At least it looked like smoke, and behaved like it, roiling and billowing, with the single exception that it declined to spill out of the open door into the corridor. I reminded myself I’d promised myself not to boggle, and with only what I hoped was an imperceptible hesitation, I walked right into the pink smoke, came out the other side, and boggled. Worse; I actually yelped.
I was on Ganymede.
Look, I admit I’m a hick. But I had experienced Sim walls by that point in my life, even if I couldn’t afford them yet. Even good ones didn’t really fool you; you could tell they were not real, just rectangular windows into worlds that you never really forgot were virtual. I’d even experienced six-wall Sim,
360-degree surround, and even then you had to voluntarily cooperate with the illusion for it to work: it never quite got the rounding correction perfect at the corners. But it was pretty good.
This was real. I was back home on Ganymede, so convincingly that for just a startled moment, two-thirds of my weight seemed to leave me. I realized with astonishment that the air even smelled like Ganymede air, tasted like it, different from terrestrial air in ways subtle but unmistakable. I was standing in the middle of a newly made field, the soil only just coming to life. Beneath my feet, earthworms were shaking off the grogginess of cold sleep and beginning to realize they weren’t on Terra anymore. On the edge of the field, fifteen or twenty meters away, was a new-built farmhouse, smoke spiraling from its chimney. Try and build a fire anywhere else on Terra and they’d fine you the equivalent of two months’ tuition, for a first offense. Until today, I hadn’t seen a square meter of naked soil since I’d landed on its namesake. I felt my eyes begin to sting and water, and with no further warning a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me.
I spun around in time to see Rennick come through the doorway. From this side too it looked like it was full of pink smoke. But it was no longer a door in anything: it just stood by itself in the middle of the field, a rectangle of pink smoke without any wall to be a hole in. I turned my back on hole and house master alike.
“Miss Jinny thought you’d find this congenial,” he said from just behind me.
I nodded.
“Follow me please.”
That didn’t require an answer either. We walked to the farmhouse and went inside. “The ‘fresher and entertainment center are in the obvious places. You’ll find clothing in that closet, Unlimited Access at that desk. If you want anything, anything whatsoever, state your wishes to the house server. His name is Leo.”
I had the homesickness under control now, enough that I trusted myself to speak at least.
“Leo is listening at all times?”
“Leo listens at all times,” he agreed. “But he cannot hear anything unless he is addressed.
Your privacy and security as a guest are unconditionally guaranteed.”
“Of course,” I said as if I believed him. I idly opened the closet he’d indicated, and found all my own clothing. Boggle.
On closer inspection it proved to be copies of nearly every piece of clothing I owned, all the ones Jinny had seen. They were not quite identical copies. For one thing, in nearly every case the quality of the copy was slightly better than that of the original.
Suddenly I felt vastly tired. I didn’t feel like boggling anymore, or struggling not to.
“Mister Rennick, Alex, I thank you for your offer of a tour of the North Keep, but I believe I will pass, at least for tonight.”
“Certainly, Joel. If there’s nothing further I can do for you now, I’ll leave you to rest.”
“I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Good night.” He left. I watched through a window as he walked across the field and through the pink smoke of the door-without-a-wall. I looked around the “farmhouse,” then back out the window at a sky with two moons, and thought about bursting into tears, but I decided I was too manly “Leo?”
“Yes, Mister Johnston?”
“Can I get a cup of coffee?”
“On the desk, sir.”
I blinked, looked, a steaming cup of coffee sat on the desk beside me. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, but I hadn’t noticed it arrive. Without a word I picked it up and tried it. The superbness of the coffee was no surprise at all. The perfect drinking temperature was only a mild one. But the cream and two sugars.
“Did Jinny tell you how I like my coffee, Leo?”
“Miss Jinny has told me many things about you, Mister Johnston.”
“Call me Joel.”
“Yes, Mister Joel.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. There must be something sillier than arguing with software, but I can’t think offhand what it would be. I sat down on a rocking chair that creaked authentically, put my feet up on a hassock, and began to dismiss Leo from my mind, to prepare for the upcoming conversation with Jinny. Then a thought occurred. Carefully not addressing him by name I asked, “How long do you keep listening after I stop speaking, before you conclude I’m done and stop listening again?”
Answer came there none. Which answered me: somewhere between five and ten seconds.
Useful datum.
“Leo?”
“Yes, Mister Joel?”
“Can you let me know just before Miss Jinny arrives here?”
“No,” she said from the doorway. “He can’t.”
We were both tired, and both emotionally upset. But we both knew there was more to be said before we could sleep. I took my feet down off the hassock, and she came and sat before me on it, and took both my hands in hers.
“No more ducking and weaving. Spell it out for me,” I said. “In words of one sound bit, what’s the deal?”
She was through dodging. “I’m proposing marriage, Joel. Just as we’ve discussed: lifetime, exclusive, old-fashioned matrimony. And I’m offering to support us, uh, at least until you get your degree and start to become established as a composer and start earning. I can afford it.
I’m quite sure you’ll get that Kallikanzaros Scholarship, but if you don’t, it won’t matter. And best of all, we can start our first baby right away, tomorrow night, if you want.”
“Huh? Skinny, what about your degree, your career?”
“My second career, you mean. It’ll keep. I’ve always known what my first career has to be.”
She tightened her grip on my hands and leaned slightly closer. “Stinky, maybe now you’ll understand why I’ve been so.” She blushed suddenly. “So frimpin’ stingy. So square, even for a Terran girl. Why I don’t park, or pet, or sneak out after curfew, and why our clinches never got out of hand, or even into it, so to speak. I think you know I haven’t wanted to be that way. But I had no choice. It may be all right for some other girls to bend the rules and take risks, but me, I’ve had it beaten into my head since I was three that I have responsibilities.”
“The family name.”
“The family name my left foot! The family genes. Stinky, I’m a female human animal; my number one job is to get married and make babies. And because I’m who I am, a member of a powerful dynasty, it makes all the difference in the world what baby I have, and who its father is.” She let go of my hands and sat up straight. “You’re it. This is not a snap decision.”
It began to dawn on me that I was not merely being offered acceptance into the fringes of the Conrad family. I was being asked to father its heirs.
On Ganymede I’d grown up seeing stud bulls brought in and put to work. They were always treated with great care and respect, very well fed, and certainly got all the healthy exercise a male animal could possibly want. Their DNA was vastly more successful than that of most other bulls, and their own lives vastly longer. Nobody made jokes about them in their hearing.
But I couldn’t recall one who had looked very happy about the business.
“Don’t look so worried, Stinky. It’s going to work out fine. You do want to marry me, we settled that, right?”
I opened my mouth, realized I was harpooned, and closed it again. I had stated that only money prevented me from proposing; I didn’t have a leg to stand on.
Nevertheless I found myself on my feet and being embraced. I had to admit it was a very nice embrace, warm and close and fragrant. “Then it’s all really very simple. All you need is a nice long chat with Gran’ther Richard. You’ll love him, really. And I know he’ll love you.”
I stiffened in her arms, and fought with the impulse to faint. Good old Grandpa Richard.
Known to the rest of the Solar System as Conrad of Conrad. The patriarch. The Chairman. I’d heard he had broken premiers. But perhaps the most awesome thing about his wealth was that, when I thought about it, I didn’t actually know a single fact about him, save his name and exalted position.
I’d never read an article about him, or viewed a bio, or even seen a picture of his face. For all I knew he had taken my cloak when I arrived. Harun el-Hatchek.
She released me and stepped back. “You’ll see him first thing tomorrow. He’ll explain things. And then afterward you and I will have breakfast together and start to make some plans. Good night, Stinky.”
We parted without a kiss. She didn’t offer, and I didn’t try. I was starting to feel resentment at having been played for so long, and also I flatly did not believe there were no cameras on us.
After she was gone, I thought about firing up that Universal Access Rennick-Smithers had mentioned, and researching the size and scope of the Conrad empire. But I knew if I did so here, now, on this computer system, Gran’ther Richard would know about it. It just smelled ripe to me. Milady brings home a handsome hick, and the first thing he does is start pricing the furniture. The thought made my cheeks burn.
Instead I used that UA to google around until I had figured out the “Smithers” gag. It turned out to be just as well Rennick didn’t know the reference, if in fact he really didn’t.
Jinny was comparing him to an ancient cartoon character who was a cringing bootlicker, a toady, a completely repressed monosexual, and an unrequited lover. I wondered how much of that was accurate and how much libel. And just how far the analogy was meant to go: Smithers’s employer in the cartoon, a Mister Burns, was vastly rich, impossibly old, and in every imaginable way a monster. Did he represent Jinny’s grandfather?
Or father?
Well, I would find out in the morning. Or maybe I would get lucky and be struck by a meteorite first.
The bed turned out to be just like mine back at the dorm, except the mattress was better, the sheets were infinitely softer and lighter, and the pillow was gooshier. Was I hallucinating, or did the pillowcase really smell faintly of Jinny’s shampoo? It certainly did put a different perspective on things.
It might be nice to smell that on my pillow every night from now on.
And every morning. If in fact I was really smelling it now. While I was wondering, I fell asleep.

Three.

Joel. It’s time to wake up, dear.”
Yes, that was definitely her hair I smelled.
I had heard Jinny say just those words, in much that low throaty tone of voice, at the start of more than one pleasant dream. It was a novel experience to hear them at the end of one.
Now if only everything else would continue to unfold as it usually did in the dream.
I opened my eyes and she was not there. The scent was either vestigial or imagined. Drat.
“You really need to wake up now, Joel,” she murmured insistently from somewhere nearby “Okay,” I said.
“Wake up, Joel. It’s time t.”
I sat up, and she chopped off in midword. She wasn’t there. Anywhere.
I wake up hard. I had to sit there, lot a few seconds before I had it worked out. The speaker was not Jinny but Leo the AI server, perfectly imitating her voice while acting as an alarm clock. Doing the job well, too: I could fool my own alarm at the dorm by simply telling it I was getting up. Leo was programmed to accept nothing less than verticality as proof of compliance.
Why did I need to get up now? I could tell I had not had eight hours’ sleep. I had graduated, for Pete’s sake, what was so urgent?
It all came back to me at once. Oh, yes. That’s right. Today I was going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. Had I supposed it would be scheduled for my convenience? A man like Conrad of Conrad would doubtless want to dispose of matters as trivial as meeting his grandchild’s fiance as early as possible in the business day “How soon am I expected?” I asked.
“In half an hour, Mister Joel,” Leo said in his own voice.
“How do I get breakfast?”
“I can take your order, sir.”
I started to say scrambled on toast, bucket of black coffee, liter of OJ. Then I thought to myself, this morning you are going to have a personal interview with one of the most powerful men in the Solar System. “Eggs Benedict, home fries, Tanzanian coffee, French Press, please, two sugars and eighteen percent cream, keep it coming, and squeeze a dozen oranges.”
Leo returned the serve. “Very good, Mister Joel. Do you prefer peaberry or the normal bean?”
“The peaberry, I think,” I managed.
There was a scratching sound at the door. It opened, and a servant entered, pushing a tray ahead of him at shoulder height with two fingers. He was easily as old and as ugly as the servants I’d seen the night before, but nowhere near as surly. Maybe day shift was better.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He steered the tray to a table near the bed, and somehow persuaded it to sit down. “Eggs Benedict, potatoes, coffee, fresh orange juice, and this morning’s news, sir,” he said, pointing to each item as he named it. Nothing in his manner suggested that only an idiot would need these things named.
I promised myself that just as soon as I had the time, I would wonder, very hard, about how any of those items could have been produced instantly, much less all of them at once. But meanwhile, there was no sense pretending they had not caught me by surprise. “If I’d known how fast the service is here, I’d have asked them to wait ten minutes, while I used the ‘fresher,”
I said with a rueful grin.
He turned to the tray, made some sort of mystic gesture. The food became obscured by a hemisphere of, well, it looked like shimmery air. “Take as long as you like, sir. Everything will be the same temperature and consistency when you get back out.”
Oh. Of course. I wondered how the hell I would get the air to stop shimmering, but I was determined not to ask. I’d figure it out somehow “Just reach right through it, whenever you’re ready, sir,” he volunteered. “That collapses the field.”
I opened my mouth to ask what kind of field, how was it generated, what were its properties, and stifled myself. There would be time for that later.
“What is your name?”
“Nakamura, sir.”
“Thank you, Mister Nakamura. You’re very kind.”
“You’re welcome, sir. And thank you.” Somehow he was gone instantly, without hurrying.
I started to get out of bed, and the damned thing helped me. The part right under my knees dropped away, and the part under my butt rose, and I was on my feet. I reacted pretty much as if I’d been goosed, the physical sensations were not dissimilar. I said the word “Whoa!” louder and an octave higher than I might have wished, leaped forward a meter or so, and spun around to glare accusingly at the bed.
“Is something wrong, Mister Joel?” Leo asked.
I took a deep breath. And then another. “Not yet,” I stated cautiously.
On the way to the ‘fresher, I passed close to the tray of food. I could see a cup of coffee in there, and wanted it so badly it brought tears to my eyes.
But I knew if I “collapsed the field” now, I probably wouldn’t be able to re-create it again. And besides, there was the question of making room for the coffee.
So okay, I would hurry and be out of the ‘fresher in five minutes instead of ten. I stepped in.
On Ganymede we’re more reticent about such matters than Terrans, for complex sociocultural reasons I’d be perfectly happy to explain any time you have an hour to kill listening to a guy who doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about. So I’ll just say that this ‘fresher was about ten times better equipped and programmed than I had ever imagined possible, and let it go at that. It was more like fifteen minutes before I was able to make myself end the sybaritic cycle.
When I came out, my clothes were gone.
I remarked on this, as casually as I could manage. Leo explained that they had been taken away for laundering. He invited me to wear any of the fakes in the closet that pleased me, and assured me, unnecessarily, that they would all fit me perfectly.
I was not at all happy about this, but I could see my wallet, phone, and keys on the bedside table, so I postponed the matter until after coffee.
By the end of the first cup, I had no strong objection to anything short of disembowelment or denial of a second cup. If you are ever given the choice, insist on the peaberry. Trust me.
When I was ready to dress, I automatically reached for the copy of my best suit, comforting myself as best I could with the guess that this version of it, at least, would be freshly cleaned, and would not be worn nearly through in spots. But as I took it from the closet, I noticed an item hanging just behind it that certainly was not a copy of any garment I owned. It was a J. L.
Fong suit. Top of the line, of the latest cut and style. In a color, I noticed, that would complement Jinny’s hair. It was worth more than my entire wardrobe, more than my passage to Earth had cost. The tights were just a bit daring, but I decided I had the calves to carry them off. I was unsurprised to find suitable underwear and other necessary accessories in drawers, tucked in among my own trash.
The moment I put it on, that suit became an old, familiar, and valued friend, and I became taller and wider across the shoulders. It could not have fit better if it had been made on my body. It knew things about me I wouldn’t learn for years yet, and approved of them all.
Wearing a suit like that, you could break up a knife fight with an admonishment, secure a million-dollar loan without being troubled for a signature, walk away from a crime scene, or obtain illicit drugs on credit. I examined the effect in the ‘fresher room mirror, and decided that on me, it looked good. Perhaps, I felt, I could even survive an interview with Conrad of Conrad without soiling it