The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Sheena’s a star again. She’s already shooting footage for a docudrama about the flight. Grace is negotiating a book contract. Marj has seventeen design salons from around the world begging for her talents.

  Hubble—well, he’s an academic, really. He’ll go back to his university and try to live down the notoriety. Rick Darling. I just don’t know what he’s going to do. He’s independently wealthy now; or he will be, once we sort out the legalities and split the profits. He hasn’t made another pass at me. In fact, he’s been staying as far away from me as he can.

  Which suits me okay. I took Jean to dinner in the Bosporus s one and only wardroom last night, fed her a bottle of their best wine, and relocated that vulnerable spot of hers. We spent the night making the stars dance.

  They’re treating us for radiation disease, of course. When the Bosporus’s medical officer found out how much radiation I had absorbed, he put on a long face and tried to break it to me gently that I would never be able to father any children. I grinned at that, which I guess puzzled him. Until he asked me to strip and he saw the neat lead-lined jockstrap I wear.

  THIS IS JUST to put a finish on these recordings. I’m going to lock them away with orders that they’re not to be touched by anybody until ten years after my death.

  Erik was sentenced to life imprisonment, which means he’ll be frozen in a vat of liquid nitrogen and kept like a corpsicle until social scientists prove they can rehabilitate murderers. Maybe they’ll thaw him out in a century or two. I hope not. I would’ve preferred it if they’d stuck him on an asteroid and sent him sailing out beyond the orbit of Mars. See how he’d like it.

  I feel bad about Lonz and Will. They were both sentenced to twenty years at the penal colony on Farside. I had to testify at the trial, and even though I put all the blame on Erik, I had to admit that Will and Lonz went along with him in the whole nasty deal.

  The one thing that frosts me is that Erik absolutely refused to implicate Rockledge. Took all the blame himself. They must have threatened his family or something, those fat-cat bastards.

  Okay. That’s it. Funny sitting here listening to my own voice for hours on end. There’s a lot more I could put onto these disks, more details and stuff, but what the hell, enough’s enough.

  They’ll be sore as hell at me if any of this leaks out. Every one of my erstwhile partners is telling his or her version of the story. Selling, I should say, not just telling. Sheena’s got a video series going, “Queen of the Asteroids.” She’s fun to watch, but the stories are yecchh.

  Oh, yeah. One thing that I shouldn’t forget. The IAA scientists propositioned each of the women partners. I guess “propositioned” isn’t the right word.

  Once we were landed at the Moonbase medical facility for further antiradiation therapy and the inevitable psychological counseling, a group of scientists asked each of the women if they would consider having a baby. In the interests of science. To see what effect the radiation exposure would have. Maybe they’d be sterile. Maybe they’d have two-headed triplets.

  It would all be clinically clean and scientifically pure. Artificial insemination and all that. Two with sperm from the males who were also on the asteroid, two with donor sperm from strangers. Maybe they even wanted to throw in a placebo, I don’t know.

  Each of the women turned them down flat. I think. Jean is staying at Moonbase for the time being, which is not like her at all. Marj set herself up in Bermuda, where she’s franchising various Dupray space-inspired fashion lines to the highest bidders. Good old Grace gave me a kiss goodbye and high-tailed it to California as soon as the medics would let her go. Her book’s going to be a best-seller, I guess, even though what I’ve managed to see of it looks more like fiction to me than fact. But what the hell!

  They’ve all gone their separate ways. Rick Darling’s bought himself a villa in the big new bridge ship, Golden Gate.

  Me, I’m heading back for Pittsburgh. The asteroid’s swung around the Sun and she’s heading back toward the Belt. She’s still got billions and billions of dollars worth of valuable metals, and I intend to get them, now that the courts have given me clear title.

  But this time I’m going alone, except for some really top-notch robots.

  It’ll be lonely, out there all by myself.

  Thank God!

  Bridge Ship Golden Gate

  JADE SAT IN DEEP SILENCE FOR A LONG WHILE BEFORE SHE noticed that the robot had returned, bearing her clothing in its spindly metal arms.

  She dressed absently, her thoughts literally millions of kilometers away. The robot gathered up the scattered recording disks and left her alone in the big luxurious room.

  It can’t be, she told herself over and over. It just can’t be. If it’s true it means...

  “Now you’ve heard Sam’s disks.”

  Turning from her pale reflection in the blank screen above the disk player, she asked Darling, “How did you get them?”

  He shrugged, a seismic movement of flesh beneath his robes. He had changed into a pure white costume decorated with gold and silver star bursts.

  “I stole them,” Darling said. “How else?”

  “From Sam?”

  Laboriously, Darling lowered himself onto the same pile of pillows he had been sitting on when she had first entered his chamber. He took a deep breath, like an exhausted athlete, as he sank into the cushions.

  “Oh no, not from Sam. He was far too clever to allow anyone to steal them from him. But once Sam’s will was probated, we discovered that he had left the disks to Grace Harcourt. Ever since she won the Pulitzer for her expose of Rockledge’s industrial hanky-panky, she’s been living—”

  “On Pitcairn Island, I know. I tried to interview her but she wouldn’t see me.” Jade sat on the other set of cushions, facing Darling, her mind seething in growing turmoil.

  “Yes, of course. I had the disks purloined from the plane that was taking them out to her.”

  “Why?”

  Darling’s fleshy face set almost into hardness. “You heard what he said about me. Do you think I want Grace—or anyone else in the world—to hear all that?”

  “You fell in love with Sam?”

  The hardness melted immediately. “I thought I did. It must have been the radiation. Or the excitement. He certainly did nothing to deserve love. Mine, or anyone else’s.”

  “No one else has heard these disks?”

  “No one.”

  There were more questions Jade knew she would have to ask. But she dreaded them, put them off, while the enormity of what she had just learned from the disks boiled over her like a tidal wave, smothering her, drowning her. She fought to maintain her composure, her life. She did not want Darling to see what was tearing away at her innards.

  Darling seemed to sense her apprehension the way a snake senses the terror it instills in a small bird. He thinks it’s because of him, Jade realized. He doesn’t know, doesn’t realize.

  “Sheena married Lowell Hubble, after her Queen of the Asteroids series went into syndication,” Darling ticked off on his beringed fingers, his eyes watching her intently. “Marjorie finally retired on Bermuda. Jean Margaux died recently in a traffic accident in Maine, not far from her summer home, I understand. There was some talk about foul play, even suicide.”

  Jade’s heart nearly stopped.

  “I checked that out,” she said through gritted teeth. “No foul play. Suicide is possible, of course, but all that can be said for certain is that she lost control of her car and went over a cliff into the sea.”

  “Strange that she’d be driving her own car, though, don’t you think? I would imagine a woman such as Jean would have a chauffeur on hand at all times. A young handsome chauffeur, undoubtedly.” He smiled wickedly.

  Jade barely managed to say, “Maybe.”

  “That leaves just me.” Darling heaved a titanic sigh. “Living alone here in the midst of all this splendor.”

  Get him talking about himself, Jade thought desperately. Get away
from Jean Margaux’s death.

  “Why alone?” she asked, trying to sound inquisitive. “You’re wealthy. Your columns about art are world-famous. You could be surrounded by friends, associates, admirers.”

  He made a laugh that sounded forced and self-deprecating. “It would take quite a few of them to surround me, wouldn’t it?”

  “I didn’t mean ...”

  “Dear lady, I live the way I live because I choose to. I know my limitations. My columns are frauds; how can anyone write valid art criticism without going to see the artwork in its actual setting? I write about holograms that are sent to me. People read my pieces for the personal nasties I throw in about the artists and dealers and other critics. I’m a worse gossip columnist than Grace Harcourt ever was, on her most vicious day.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you? Do you know what that radiation did to me? I can never father children! That’s not bad enough. It also unbalanced my entire endocrine system so completely that I’ve blown up to this monstrous size you see!” He spread his arms and the robe billowed out like a silken cloud.

  “I didn’t know that,” Jade said softly.

  “Sam accused me of gluttony and called me terrible names,” Darling said, his voice shaking, “but the truth is I was a slim and handsome man when I started out on that voyage of his. You saw the pictures! Did I look anything like this?”

  “No,” she admitted. “You certainly didn’t.”

  “Thanks to that unkind bastard Sam I’ve become a balloon, a blimp, a mountain of fat—and it’s all his fault! I’ve got to hide myself from the rest of the human race, because of that little unloving snot of a man!”

  Tears were rolling down Darling’s cheeks. “I loved him. I truly did. And he treated me worse than dirt. He turned me into this”

  “He may be my father,” Jade blurted.

  Darling coughed and sputtered, cleared his throat, wiped at his eyes. “What did you say?”

  Shocked at her own admission, Jade sat there in stunned silence. She had not intended to tell Darling what she had learned, what she now feared was true. She had intended to remain silent, to keep her secret to herself and share it with no one.

  Instead, her voice trembling, Jade said, “Sam and Jean Margaux had a fling aboard the Bosporus. Jean stayed on the Moon for nearly a year. I was born at Moonbase. An orphan.”

  “But that doesn’t mean ...”

  “How could someone be orphaned at birth in a place like Moonbase?” Jade demanded, painful urgency in her question. “It was a small town in those days, only a few hundred people, and most of them were retirees. The medical staff didn’t allow pregnancies to come to term there; as soon as they found that a woman was pregnant they shipped her back to her home on Earth.”

  “But you were born there,” Darling whispered, the truth slowly dawning on him.

  “You’d have to have a lot of money to get away with it,” said Jade. “Money to keep the medics quiet. Money to erase the computer records. Money to pay off the woman who ... who adopted the abandoned baby.”

  “Jean Margaux ... ?” Darling seemed stunned.

  Jade nodded bitterly. “Twenty years later, when she heard there was a reporter looking into the time she’d spent at Moonbase, when she found out who the reporter was, where she’d been born, how old she was—she told her chauffeur to take the day off, and then drove her car off a cliff.”

  “My God.”

  “I’m really an orphan now,” said Jade. “Sam died off at the end of the solar system, and I killed my own mother.”

  Suddenly she was crying uncontrollably. Her world dissolved and she was bawling like a baby. She found herself in Darling’s arms, wrapped and held and protected by this strange man who was no longer a stranger.

  “It’s all right,” Darling was crooning to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “It’s all right. Cry all you want to. We’ll both cry. For all the love that we never had. For all the love that we’ve lost.”

  She had no idea how long they cried together. Finally, though, she disengaged herself gently from his arms. Darling pointed to a door in the opulent room and suggested she freshen up. She saw that tears had runneled streaks down the makeup on his face.

  By the time she returned to the main room a small meal sat steaming on the low table in front of her host and Darling’s makeup had been newly applied. Although she felt anything but hungry, Jade sat on the cushions set up opposite Darling. He poured her a cup of tea.

  “Are you all right now?” he asked softly.

  Jade nodded. I’ll never be all right, she knew. I made my own mother kill herself. She killed herself rather than face her own daughter. Killed herself rather than admit she had a daughter—me.

  “There’s the matter of your promise,” Darling said as he uncovered a bowl of diced meat chunks. She saw that the bowl next to it was filled with bubbling melted cheese.

  “Yes. My promise.” She almost laughed. Nothing he could do to her could bother her now.

  “I had intended,” he said, spearing a square of meat deftly on a little skewer, “to demand that you never reveal anything you heard on Sam’s disks.”

  She looked up at him. “That was going to be it?”

  “Yes.” He smiled at her. “What did you think?”

  Glancing at the erotic scenes on the tapestries, she smiled back. “Something more physical.”

  “Dear me, no! Not at all!”

  “I can understand why you’re sensitive about Sam’s disks.”

  “Yes. Of course you can.”

  “But I’m a reporter....”

  “You don’t have to convince me. You can have the disks.”

  For a moment she was not sure she had heard him correctly. “I can have them?”

  Darling nodded, and a tide of ripples ran across his cheeks and chins to disappear beneath the open collar of his robe.

  “It’s strange,” he said wistfully. “You nurse your own pain until there’s virtually nothing left in your life but the pain.”

  “That’s a terrible way to live,” she said. But a pang of loss and sadness and guilt pulsed through her.

  “When I realized how much you’ve suffered, it made me see how I’ve been flagellating myself, blaming Sam for what’s become of me.”

  “I’ve got my work,” Jade said, as much to herself as Darling. “I’ve got a life.”

  “And I don’t. I’ve become a hermit. I’ve withdrawn from the human race.”

  “It’s not too late to come back.”

  “Like this?” He looked down at himself, layer upon layer of bulging fat.

  “Endocrine imbalances can be corrected,” Jade said tenderly.

  “Yes, I know,” he confessed. “It’s nothing but an excuse to keep myself hidden away from the rest of the world.”

  She smiled at him. “You’d need some discipline. Or a thick hide.”

  “You still owe me a promise. You said you’d do whatever I asked.”

  She felt no fear now. “I remember. What do you want?”

  Darling took in a deep breath. His eyes studied her face, as if searching for the courage to make his request.

  “Will you be my friend?” he asked at last. “You’re going to be on the Golden Gate for months. Will you come and visit me and ... and help me to come out and meet other people?”

  “I...” She had other commitments, a career, a longing for love and fulfillment, a gnawing guilt that burned sullenly within her like a hot coal. But in that instant of time she realized that love takes many forms, and that saving a man’s life bears an obligation for a lifetime.

  She saw an automobile tumbling off a cliff into the angry sea below. She saw Sam Gunn’s round, slightly lopsided face grinning at her. She saw Raki’s darkly handsome scowl and Spence Johansen’s heart-fluttering smile and the tearful last memory of her adoptive mother as she left the Moonbase hospital forever. She saw Rick Darling staring at her with his entire life in his eyes.

  “I’d be h
appy to be your friend,” she said. “I need a friend, too.”

  The two of them—enormous overweight man and tiny elfin woman—leaned across the low table and embraced each other in newfound charity.

  Asteroid Ceres

  JADE CELEBRATED, IF THAT IS THE CORRECT WORD, HER twenty-first birthday alone.

  Rick Darling had thrown an immense party for her the day before she left the Golden Gate at the farthest point in its orbit and took the bulbous shuttle craft to the surface of Ceres. Nearly half the population of the huge bridge ship had poured into Darling’s posh villa, eating, laughing, drinking, narcotizing themselves into either frenzied gaiety or withdrawn moroseness.

  Through it all, Darling had remained close to Jade’s side, his new figure almost trim compared to his former obesity. At first Jade thought he stayed near her because he was afraid of the crowd. Slowly, as the party proceeded and Darling played the genial, witty, gracious host, Jade began to realize that he wanted to protect her.

  Jade tried to relax at the party and have a good time, but she was still haunted by the thoughts of her newly discovered and newly lost mother. Despite the happy oblivious crowd swirling around her, she still saw the automobile plunging over the rocky cliff and into the unforgiving sea.

  Now, more than a week after Darling’s party, it was her birthday. Twenty-one years old. An entire lifetime ahead of her. An entire lifetime already behind her.

  She stood at the window of her room in the habitat Chrysalis, in orbit around Ceres, and gazed out at the empty sky. There were no moons to be seen, no Earth hanging huge and tantalizingly close. Here in the Asteroid Belt, beyond the orbit of Mars, even giant Jupiter was merely another star in the sky, brighter than the rest but still little more than a distant speck of light against the engulfing dark.