Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein; Spider Robinson

  "Very important," I agreed. "Keep them from going crazy with boredom and despair."

  "Way more important than that, because of their third bit of luck."

  I knew he was toying with me somehow but it didn't feel unpleasant, so I played along. "And what was that, Mr. Interlocker... Mr. Inneroculator ... what was that, Mr. Hattori?"

  "One of the Relativists had conceived and bore twins on the voyage. The children lived."

  "Really? Oh. Oh. I think I get it! When they�"

  "When they grew old enough, they studied everything they could find on their mother's profession. One day when they felt they were ready, they somehow relit the quantum ramjet�and resumed the voyage."

  "That is amazing! What a story. Oh, they must have flipped back at Terra when they started getting radio messages from a ghost ship! How long did . . . wait a minute . . . oh, hell, I can't do math when I'm sober."

  (The gene for my father's kind of mathematical talent is, fairly self-evidently, recessive.)

  "Nonetheless, your intuition izh correct�excuse me, is correct." Nice to know he was feeling it, too. "If the happy news came by radio, we would not be receiving it for several years yet. That's the fourth bit of luck. One of the twins inherited some of her father's talent, as well�and Dad had been a Communicator. She scared the witch�the wits�out of her uncle back in Luna, the first time she made contact. He thought he was being haunted: his late brother had never mentioned any offspring."

  I shook my head, which stayed on. "Incredible! I have to tell my friend Herb that story�he's a writer, and a Communicator, he'll make a meal of it. A dozen movies will be made about it just in the next year, and at least one miniseries. Thanks for telling me, for, thanks for, why the hell did you tell me that, Paul? I mean, it's a great story, but what has it got to do with what we were talking about, swindling money out of time? What's the connection?"

  That omnipresent smile suddenly blossomed into a full-blown grin that lit up his whole face, and his eyes beamed happiness. "The name of the prodigal starship, Joel."

  All the pieces finally fell into place, and I knew exactly what he was going to say next. Unfortunately it cost me the power of speech, so he said it anyway.

  "It's the New Frontiers."

  I suppose a similar effect could have been achieved by turning every other atom in my brain to antimatter.

  "Your father meant for you to be a rich man, Joel," Hattori's voice said from the far side of the cosmos. "Now you are. All shares have been reactivated, and you have a lot of them. Should you choose to, you could become one of the Sheffield's biggest investors . . ."

  I began to laugh. Then I laughed some more, after which I kept on laughing, and finally realized I was not going to be able to stop anytime soon. I was on the floor by then, in fetal position, Hattori fussing futilely over me, and I discovered that I could convert the laughing to crying for minutes at a time, which was a change at least.

  All I kept thinking was that I had abandoned everything there was, left everyone I knew, burned every bridge ever built, and literally fled the Solar System on a one-way trip, to escape the dread danger of becoming rich. . . .

  Some days, you just can't lose a buck.

  I had to do some fast talking to get out of Hattori's office without being reported as emotionally unstable and sent for therapy. I'd freaked him out a little with my outburst of hilarity. And I had to edit what I said on the fly, too: if I had tried to convince him I'd been betrothed to a niece of Conrad of Conrad, he'd have been certain to send for a counselor. Especially once I told him I'd broken the engagement.

  But after hearing a version of my recent history that dialed Jinny back to "a girl from a very wealthy family," he finally agreed that hysterical laughter was an appropriate response to the way things had turned out, and stopped physically recoiling from me. He even had the grace to postpone picking my pocket, urging me to take my time, and come back for further discussion of my participation in the colonial partnership when I'd had a chance to, as he put it, "encompass everything."

  I thanked him and left, with every intention of finding Herb and asking him to be my designated keeper while I got hammered. If he was not interested, Balvovatz or Pat would do. And if none of them were available�well, I had survived a solo bender in Vancouver, a very tough town. I could probably handle the Sheffield.

  But halfway back to my room I remembered that I had already done so. More than once. For most of my first week aboard, actually. Nobody had reported me because�well, a lot of us had spent some portion of that first week drinking or smoking or snorting more heavily than usual. But if I were to start back up again after only a day of sobriety, eyebrows would be raised, and sooner or later someone would mention my name to the Healers. I was damned if I wanted to waste hours explaining myself and my decisions to some well-meaning headcandler, who might take it into his head to start messing with my brain chemistry. Ganymedeans didn't hold much with that sort of thing.

  So I did the sensible thing instead, and didn't get hammered.

  That was a pity, because then I had no excuse at all for the fistfight. Or my miserable performance in it.

  The way I remember it, I plodded back to my room in a fog, like a cow on its way back to the barn, so confused by my own thoughts that I could barely lift my feet. And then I raised a weary arm and palmed my door open, and there were these two guys.

  You know how sometimes you'll meet a stranger, and it's as if a closed caption appears at the bottom of the screen, summing them up in a word or two for those who just tuned in? "Professional victim," or "Could bore the balls off a buffalo," or "Wants money," or the like? My first sight of these two went freeze-frame for a second, and below each of them I clearly saw the subtitle "Perpetrator." Only after the action restarted did I notice their armbands, and realize I was meeting my first transportees.

  They were big guys, too. Bigger than me, anyway. They didn't look sophisticated enough to be political prisoners or incorrigible monoreligionists. The one sitting on Pat's bunk had the arms, shoulders, and thighs of one who lifts weights regularly and faithfully while he's in jail, but has been out for some time now. He had short black hair just beginning to thin and a short sanitary sideless black beard, of the type called a "doorknocker." He had a glass of some dark fluid cupped in his right hand, and took a quick pull from it when he saw me�but he didn't drop his eyes.

  His partner, sprawled on Balvovatz's desk chair, looked more as if he tended to win his fights by knowing more dirty tricks than the other guy. He had the body of a high school sports star . . . who had been expelled before graduation, and had expended as little effort as possible ever since. Instead of pumping iron when in jail, he just hung out near his friend. He wore his dirty blond hair in an arcane style that involved grease, and hinted that it came from a motorcycle or copter engine. There is no name for his beard type, nor is it likely any will be needed. Sweeping scimitar sideburns failed to reach quite as far as his mustachios . . . which did not descend quite far enough to reach the goatlike goatee. The net effect was of a satyr too dumb or drunk to realize his gay barber is making fun of him. He was as unguardedly furtive as his friend was poker-faced. That caused me to notice that Balvovatz's desk monitor was darkened, not switched off.

  "Oh, hi," he said, too heartily "You're back."

  The one on Pat's bunk said, "We're real sorry to barge in like this, okay?"

  "Yeah, but everything's totally cool," Weird Beard said. "Nothing to freak out about."

  "How did you two get in here?" I asked the dark one sitting on the bunk.

  He shrugged, being careful not to spill his drink. "Everybody's got things they're good at," he said reasonably.

  I nodded. "And this is okay with me because . . ."

  The other one said, "Because this is one of those fuckin' situations where, you know, like it says upfront, viewer discretion is the better part of value."

  His friend stared at him, took a deep breath, let it out, and
turned back to me. "We have a proposal for you. A business opportunity. Joint venture. Low risk, high return. But yeah, Richie's right, it's definitely what you'd call a little gray-market."

  Well, I thought to myself, you happen to catch me at a moment when I have a few gigabucks I need to invest somewhere. "How gray?"

  "Just barely beige," Richie said. "And only right at the end. Up until then it's mostly red, and some green. Tell him, Jules."

  "Richie, will you take it easy? Joel�can I call you Joel?�it's real simple. You work down on the Farm Decks, right?"

  I agreed that this was sometimes so.

  "Dirt or High Japonics?" Richie asked.

  I looked at Jules. Jules looked at me and his face said, What am I supposed to do?

  "Both," I said.

  "So you like to make stuff grow," Jules suggested.

  "Like you said, everybody's got something they're good at."

  "And you know your way around down there. Like, where things are, what parts get looked at all the time, what parts don't get looked at so often."

  Light was beginning to dawn. "Why?"

  "We got some stuff we'd like to grow."

  "Without bothering the Zog with a lot of fuckin' paperwork and formalities," Richie put in.

  "And we figure a smart guy like you could work that out."

  I closed my eyes. The world spun as if I were drunk. But the moment I opened them again, it slammed to a halt. "What sort of plant are we talking about?"

  "Just flowers," Jules said.

  "Herbs," Richie amplified, pronouncing it like my roommate's name. "From the country."

  " 'Erbs," Jules corrected, glaring at him.

  "Well, sure, now," Richie said, annoyed. "But originally they grew it in the country"

  Jules and I exchanged another glance, and he took a deep pull on his drink, wiping his mouth with his wrist. YOU wanna try it?

  "Richie," I said gently, "which Herb, exactly?" I pronounced it like my roommate's name, and Jules nodded. That's the way to deal with him. Richie frowned. "Look, if you're gonna get all technical on me�just because I haven't got my grade eleven, you�"

  I turned back to Jules. "Why don't you tell me which flower you mean?"

  He looked me in the eye. "Poppy flower, okay?"

  I took in a deep breath, and then when I was done, I found more room in my chest somewhere and took in a lot more breath. "Get the hell out of my room before I call a proctor," I said, loudly enough to use up a lot of it, and began exhaling the rest.

  Jules didn't move, or even wince. But Richie came up out of Bal's chair like a boxer out of his corner, yelling something of his own�

  and then a whole lot of things happened too fast to grasp�

  and then a proctor with somebody's blood on his tunic blouse was holding me gently but firmly by the upper arm, a really nice guy from the smile on him, and offering me a mood elevator. That sounded like a great idea; it was only after I let him put it under my tongue that I realized the elevator's cables had been cut, by my anemones. It got exciting then for a few years, but fortunately the basement, when we reached it, turned out to be made out of marshmallow, and I decided it was safe to take a nap after all.

  Not really.

  I walked corridors for a million years. The same ones, for all I know. I didn't mind. I wasn't tired. I wasn't even bored. Funny things kept happening as I walked. Silly-funny. A cat danced with a fire extinguisher. Doors grew phallic knobs, then dilated and swallowed them. The floor was furry beneath my bare feet, then grassy, then hard and cold as ice. A section of pale yellow wall started to melt like frozen urine from the heat of my passage�nothing odd there, but it ran up instead of down. Less than zero gee whiz. It started to collect overhead, but I ignored it and walked on. Goats sang harmony�in Rabbit rather than Goat, a ludicrous choice. A bubble began to keep station on me, ahead and to my left, and inside it grew a hobo, a lifesize headshot. It was Jinny�hundreds of years older. She smelled like fields of barley, light as flax. Her face was in ruins, beyond the power of even power to save. Her hair was still widely red, but often misunderstood. Her eyes were hazel, stoned, rolling. Then Ganymede devalued the debit, the economy went bad, and her bubble burst. Well, at least the goats finally got their butts out of their heads and started singing in Goat. I began to encounter members of a race of Easter Island statues, huge mouths gaping like Art Deco urinals, making fluttery sounds like pigeons as I went by.

  Then one short one blocked my path, and turned into my roommate Pat. "Joel?" he asked me. I waited with interest to hear the answer, but it didn't come. He asked if I could hear him, and after considering it, I said, "Sometimes." A pigeon fluttered, and Pat said loudly, "Just a moment, please, Proctor," and then softly, "Take this." A piece of notepad paper, folded three times. He folded my fingers around it, used them to tuck it into my breast pocket. "A time will come for you to speak," he said, very quietly, but with an unmistakable urgency that reached me in my fog. "When that time comes, say exactly what is on that piece of paper, and nothing else. You hear me, Joel? Say it back to me."

  I nodded. "When it's time to talk, say what's on the paper, just that."

  He nodded back. "Okay," he said loudly, and was dissolved by the sudden strong tide that swept me forward. I remembered that I should have told him about his bunk being destroyed. Instead I tried to interest the goats in a strained pun about a farmer who cared for seven or eight goats, even though he never cared for chevon or ate goats. It shut them up, at least. I trudged on in comfortable silence until I came upon my mother. I knew her at once, and was delighted to learn what she looked like, how she moved, how she smelled. It was only when I saw the concern in her troubled eyes that I began to realize how much trouble I must be in. That made me dizzy, and I told her so. She said I could sit down, so I did, and by the time I realized she'd meant I should sit in some chair somewhere nearby it was way too late. My tailbone hit the floor with a crash, angering the floor so much it reared up and smacked me on the back of the head. It burst, like Jinny's bubble had earlier, disintegrating me just as effectively.

  Ten

  No, no, you're not thinking: you're just being logical.

  �Niels Bohr

  I was wide awake and clearheaded. I was in an absolutely anonymous cubic, a generic plasteel box of air, about the size of a small studio. Its only features were doors at opposite ends, generic chairs, and a monitor. I was seated on one of the chairs, facing one of the doors, the monitor on the wall to my right. Seated facing me was Solomon Short. Behind him was another man I did not know, who sat facing the monitor and seemed absorbed in it. My tailbone hurt, quite a bit, and so did the back of my head, but I did not mind much.

  "Do you accept me as your Advocate, Joel?" Sol asked me. I blinked. "Sure."

  "I understand Pat has given you your lines."

  I remembered what he must mean, and patted my pocket; the folded note was still there. "Yes."

  He nodded, and gestured to the monitor. "Stick to the script. Now pay attention to that�"

  The screen showed a room larger than this one. At its far left, three people sat behind a long table on a short shallow stage. On the right three mailer tables faced the stage, with people seated at them, one at either end and two at the center table. They were the only ones I recognized: Richie and Jules. "Is this real-time?"

  "Yes."

  Oh, fine: they got to tell their side first.

  "Closest to us on the left," Sol said, "is Coordinator Merril Grossman, representing the colony. Beyond her is Magistrate Eleanor Will, and after her is Lieutenant Frank Bruce, Third Officer, representing the crew. With me?"

  "So far."

  "Good man. Nearest to us on the right of the screen is Prosecutor Arthur Dooley, representing the Covenant. Look him over carefully. I believe you've met the next two, transportees Butch and Sundance. Beyond them is their own Advocate, Counselor Randy Lahey." He spoke over his shoulder. "Sound please, Tiger?"

  The man addres
sed, a Japanese of great grace and dignity, lifted a remote control he hadn't been holding a second ago, and turned up the volume on the scene we were watching.

  Coordinator Grossman was speaking. ". . . chance to rebut or amend afterward before this recording is formally entered into evidence. Do you both understand?"

  "Sure," Richie said sullenly "If it's bullshit, we can tell you after, I got it. Only I'll tell you right now, it's bullshit."

  His partner Jules threw him a glare. "We understand, Your Honor." I noticed that his right hand, under the table, visible to the camera but not to the panel onstage, held a half-full drink.

  Dr. Will, a striking slender brunette with skeptical eyes, spoke up in the formal tones of one reciting ritual for the record. "The Sheffield's AI began this recording when one of you spoke one of its trigger phrases, `gray market.' Under the terms of the Covenant, the recording was brought to official human attention only upon the observed commission of a breach of peace which occurs several seconds in. It is that breach with which I am primarily concerned today."

  I was delighted. If there was an audiovisual record of what had occurred, I had nothing to worry about�and Jules was going to need whatever he had in that glass he was always holding. I could remember everything that had happened, very clearly. Well, clearly. Clearly enough. The broad outlines at least.

  Let's see now. Richie and Jules had confessed that they were trying to recruit me into a conspiracy to traffic in heroin, or morphine, or possibly opium. Any of the three was an offense not merely detainable but serious enough to get one sent to Coventry . . . in jurisdictions where one existed. On a starship, for all I knew it was a spacing offense. Naturally I had been angry and afraid. I had asked them to leave my cubic, and had been ignored. When I tried to urge Jules toward the door with a hand on his shoulder, Richie had abruptly attacked me. Releasing a lot of my own pent-up frustration, I had admittedly overresponded a bit, knocked him all the way across the room�back onto my own bed, destroying it. Then Jules had sucker-punched me from behind, and we'd all ended up entangled on the deck, where I'd managed to keep them both restrained until the proctors arrived.