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.

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.

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 other side as smoothly as if we’d been rehearsing for weeks. Some people had stopped dancing to watch, now.

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.

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 groundquakes 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 banked 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 us 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 Boötes, 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-hoo-hupid…”

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.

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 I knew 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, Mr. 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.

“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, blinking, for 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 fiancé as early as possible in the business day.

“How soon am I expected?” I asked.

“In half an hour, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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. If it was a brief interview.

“Will Jinny be present at this meeting, do you know?” I asked Leo.

“No, Mr. Joel. Only Mr. Conrad, Mr. Albert, and yourself.”

I blinked. “Wait a second. Which Mr. Conrad—Jinny’s father, or her grandfather? And who’s this Albert bloke?”

“Ah. Pardon me, Mr. Joel. There are over a dozen adult males in the immediate family whose last name is or incorporates Conrad—but by long-standing family and corporate tradition, there is only one ‘Mr. Conrad’ at any one time. At present that is Jenny’s grandfather, Mr. Richard Conrad—Conrad of Conrad. The others are Mr. Joseph, Mr. Chang, Mr. Akwai-N’boko, and so on. Mr. Albert is Jinny’s father.”

“I see,” I said. “Thank you.” I began to understand Leo’s insistence on putting Mr. before my name. I started to ask where Jinny was now, and realized the answer would probably mean nothing to me.

I paid attention to my breathing, trying to make it slower and deeper, for another twenty seconds. Then I said, “Okay, I’m ready.”

“Very good, Mr. Joel.”

I left the faux farmhouse, and walked through faux fields. It smelled convincingly like morning on Ganymede, and don’t ask me to explain that. It felt inexpressibly weird to be walking through a colonial homestead, in the wrong gravity, dressed like an aristocrat, heading for a doorway of pink smoke. It was a bit of a relief to walk through the smoke and find myself in an ordinary corridor that smelled like Terra instead of Wonderland.

“I’ll guide you from here, sir,” Leo said. “Do you see the light at your feet?”

I glanced down, and there was a soft green light at the baseboard of the left-hand wall, pulsing on and off. It was about the size and intensity of a firefly: discreet, but impossible to miss. “Lead on,” I said. It moved away.

“If you’ll forgive a personal observation, sir,” Leo said as I followed his blinking firefly down the corridor, “you have an excellent time sense for a human.”

“Excuse me?’”

“You said, ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ twenty-nine minutes and forty-one seconds after I advised you that you had thirty minutes to prepare.”

“Ah.” I nodded. “A couple of people have told me I have a pretty accurate internal clock.”

“Extremely so, sir, if this example is representative.”

I shrugged. “I never burn the toast. Look, I have some thinking to do, all right?”

“Yes, sir. I’d just like to—”

“Later, Leo.”

“But, sir—”

I was raised to be polite to gadgets—Dad always said it was good practice—but I was trying to get some fretting done and Leo was distracting me. “Quiet!”

He shut up, and I put my full attention on the predicament I was in. First I scanned my memory for everything I had ever heard or read about high-level etiquette, manners, or protocol. Unfortunately that only took me about two steps. Then I examined my own autobiography, looking first for things that might impress a multi-octillionaire—and when that failed, making a short list of spots that might alienate one, and going over my excuses. A step and a half, tops. As I followed the blinking green firefly around a corner, I was trying to decide whether the next priority was to imagine all the possible ways this upcoming meeting could go wrong, or to try and work out exactly how I had gotten myself into this, where I had taken my first misstep—

—when I rounded the corner, and encountered eighteen kilograms of mass coming in the other direction.

I weighed four times that much. But it caught me well above my center of gravity—square in the face—and was moving much faster, packing more kinetic energy. I believe the Terran expression is, who knows why, “ass over teakettle.”

I’ve taken self-defense courses. I know how to fall properly, and do so as a matter of reflex in normal conditions. But not in a one-gee field. I went down hard on my back, and all my air left me in a single explosive syllable, and only the extreme thickness of the carpet kept me from cracking my skull. I remember feeling quite unhappy for a moment, there. Then the eighteen-kilo mass landed on my groin, and I felt much worse.

Sometime later I forced my eyes open. Closed them quickly. Reopened them cautiously. Half a meter from my nose, a little girl—

“Why don’t you look where you’re going?” she asked.

Make a mental note, Joel: next time you tell an AI you want quiet and it keeps talking—listen. “Because I’m a dolt.”

“Oh.” She thought about that. “I’m a Conrad.”

I looked her over. She appeared to be somewhere around seven Terran years old. And adorable. “Are you all right?”

She frowned, and stuck her chin out slightly. “Yes, I am. Daddy says I don’t have bones.” She moved her gaze away. “But I think my skyboard’s broke.”

The object named lay beside us. It looked like a conventional skateboard—minus the usual wheels, motor housing, onboard computer, and data port. Like a miniature surfboard, in other words. I had no doubt that it could fly—when it wasn’t broken—because it had been at head height when I’d first encountered it. But I could not guess how.

“I’m sorry.” I’d have to replace it. There went my scholarship, probably. “Uh, what’s your name?”

“I’m Evelyn.”

“Hello, Evelyn. That was my mother’s name, too. I’m—”

“You’re Joel, of course. I’m not a baby.”

“Certainly not! Not by a good ten kilos.”

She giggled—then frowned. “Am I hurting you?”

“Only when I breathe.”

She was off me and up on her feet at once. “Jinny is my favorite cousin. I think she’s rickety all through. Don’t you?”

“Yes. I think I do, anyway.” I sat up. When that didn’t kill me, I got to my feet and examined my costume for damage.

“Are you going to marry her?”

I opened my mouth and closed it again, twice. “We’re still discussing that,” I managed finally.

“Do you love her?”

“Evelyn, I’m afraid we’ll have to finish this conversation another time. I’m late for an appointment with your—” What would the relationship be? “For a very important appointment. Please excuse me.”

She grinned. “Never mind. I saw you blush.”

I did it some more. This was Jinny’s cousin, all right. “I really mustn’t be late.”

She waved a hand majestically. “Don’t matter about it. Just tell Grandfather Rich I made you late.”

I realized my flashing-firefly guide was beginning to move off down the corridor: hinting. “It was wonderful to meet you,” I said hastily. “Sorry I broke your board. I’ll get a new one to you as soon as I can.”

She giggled. “You’re silly.”

I followed her pointing finger. A new skyboard was just arriving, gliding along the corridor at knee height. It was as featureless as the other, not so much as an antenna showing. Suddenly I saw that the firefly had nearly reached a corner. In another few seconds it would be around the bend. “Great. I’ll see you around.”

“It’s okay, Joel. Gran’ther Rich will think you’re rickety-tickety. You’ll see.”

I know a compliment when I hear one. I bowed—and did not quite sprint away. I found the firefly around the corner, waiting for me, but pulsing faster to indicate impatience. I breezed right past it at double time, made it scramble to catch up and pass me again, and felt the tiny satisfaction that comes to an idiot who has successfully insulted a piece of software. I slowed to walking pace—and it kept on going at double time. I ended up reaching my destination slightly out of breath, and not quite dripping sweat.

I planned to pause outside the door for at least two or three deep breaths. But the infernal thing opened as soon as I reached it. I allowed myself one breath, mostly because I had to, and entered.

The room was not small, but smaller than I had expected, and further surprised me by being furnished more like a den or a study than an office. At the far end of the room was a conversational grouping of four chairs. Rennick was just reaching the leftmost of the two that faced away from me. The two facing toward me were already occupied. In each sat a man who appeared to be approximately Rennick’s age. The fourth chair, its back to me, was obviously the hot seat.

My feet wanted to stop in their tracks again. But I managed to keep leaning forward. As I headed for the death chair, I invoked my very sharpest self-criticism. You have not thought this through.

Myself replied with some asperity, And how the hell was I supposed to do that, chum? Using what data?

Social customs on Ganymede are considerably simpler and more direct than those on Earth: a frontier society is just too busy for indirection, innuendo, and ceremony. Nevertheless, I had, under Jinny’s tutelage, gradually managed to soak up enough Terran manners to get by, in the sorts of social situations in which I found myself. It had been some time since I’d heard anyone mutter, “Hayseed!” under their breath after a conversation with me.

But college life had not prepared me for this. I was in a milieu where I knew I had no faintest idea what constituted correct behavior—and I was already saddled with some complex and difficult social problems that I had about a dozen steps to solve, for the toughest audience on the planet.

When in doubt, I decided, fall back on analogy. Okay… royalty always takes precedence, that gets you started. Which one next? And how…?

I’d expected those twelve steps would seem to take forever. They turned out to be just long enough.

Part of what threw me was the apparent ages. Both men I was here to meet seemed to be middle-aged, somewhere between thirty and sixty. Neither visibly deferred to the other by body language or chair placement. Both were dressed equally well, which was very well. Both carried themselves with authority and confidence, and had “the look of eagles”—a constant hyperalertness I had seen before only in certain very good bodyguards like the Gurkhas out in the hallway, and in a Zen priest I met once.

So which one was Jinny’s dad… and which one merely owned half the inner Solar System?

When I reached the decision point, I put down my money, made my bet, and quit worrying. The rest of the necessary choices seemed to have been made while I was busy.

I stopped in front of the man to my right, bowed almost as deeply as I would have for the Secretary General or for Jinny, and said, “Good morning, Conrad. I am Joel Johnston. Thank you for taking me into your cubic. Your home is most gracious. Pardon me a moment, please.”

Without waiting for a response I turned on my heel and gave Rennick my warmest smile. “It was very kind of you to escort me here, Alex. I’m sure with Leo’s help I’ll find my way back to my quarters.”

His own smile congealed slightly at the edges, and he opened his mouth as if to reply.

“Thank you,” I said pointedly.

After an instant’s hesitation, spent in reappraisal of me, he did a little indescribable thing with his mouth that was a rueful salute, and nodded. He said, “You’re welcome,” on his way to the door.

Again without pausing, I turned to the second man, bowed almost as deeply as I had to the first, and said, “Mr. Albert, I am Joel Johnston of Lermer City, Ganymede. My parents were Ben and Evelyn Johnston of that city. I am a recent graduate of Fermi Junior College. I love your daughter Jinnia—more than I can say!—and she loves me. I’m declaring now my intention to ask you for her hand as soon as I can. I will supply Dorothy Robb with what is necessary to allow you to inspect my background and records.”

I was done. I had shot my bolt—nothing to do now but wait and see just how badly I’d screwed things up. The door whispered shut behind Rennick, and sealed me in here in the lions’ den.

The man last addressed stared up at me, absolutely expressionless, yet with an attention that was almost a physical force, as if any slightest muscle twitch on my face might tell him something crucial. He stared for so long I began to suspect that I had botched the whole thing, guessed wrong—that he was not Mr. Albert, but the Lord God Conrad himself. I wished I could sneak a glance at the other man for a clue, but did not dare take my gaze away from his.

“Well and boldly spoken,” he said at last. “My daughter has made an interesting choice, Mr. Johnston. Good luck to you.”

It wasn’t until I exhaled that I realized I’d been holding my breath. Those were the last words he said to me.

“How did you know which of us was which?” the other man asked. “You can’t have seen a picture of me. There are none.”

For a split second I thought about claiming to have had the foresight to google up a picture of my fiancée’s father, last night. Rennick’s advice came back to me. Don’t bullshit. “I did not know, Conrad. I was forced to guess.”

He nodded. “On what basis?”

I didn’t have a clue. But my mouth did. It opened, and out came, “Jinny’s cheeks.”

“What did you say?”

Why, yes. I could see what my mouth meant, now that I looked. “Jinny’s cheekbones, s—Conrad. Cheekbones and ears. They’re distinctive. Mr. Albert has them, too.”

He mimed the word “ah,” without actually emitting sound. Mr. Albert was poker-faced.

I was beginning to understand why there were no pictures of Conrad of Conrad. There’s an expression actors use: “He can’t wear the clothes.” Meaning that actor, however talented he may be, just isn’t right for that part. No one would have cast this man as Conrad.

Not that he was in any way unimpressive, quite the contrary. He just didn’t look nearly heartless or soulless or ruthless enough to fit my preconceptions of the head of a multiplanet empire. He looked… learned, and wise, and kind. He would have been excellent casting for, say, a brilliant college professor. In some warm, fuzzy subject, like ecology, or sociobiology, or poetry, or even theology. His students would all love him, and write him letters years later to tell him he’d changed their lives. But he would never make department chairman because he wasn’t willing to kill for it.

I knew this impression had to be utterly false. This was Conrad of Conrad. But he did not bear the kind of face that would inspire the countless armies of remorseless sharks in suits who constituted the Conrad empire. He had the kind of face that would reassure their mothers. He was more effective as a Man of Mystery, never seen.

“Have a seat, Joel,” Conrad said.

It was a superbly comfortable chair, and became more so the longer I sat in it. This wasn’t going so badly…

“I am informed that my granddaughter Jinnia Anne has revealed her true identity to you, and you have accepted her proposal of matrimony—”

I opened my mouth but no sound came out.

He went on quickly, as one who is determined to get through his little speech however banal it may be. “I commend you heartily on your good fortune, Jinny on her good sense, and both of you on your good taste; I wish you both every happiness; I am confident you will prove a welcome and valuable addition to our great family; we will now define the terms and conditions under which that may occur—”

I opened my mouth even farther. Even less sound came out.

His eyes narrowed very slightly. The department chairman reluctantly suspected me of plagiarizing my thesis. “—unless you would feel more comfortable represented by counsel?”

I had to reject the slander. “No!” I managed to say, and got nearly halfway through my follow-up monosyllable, “I—,” before he steamrollered ahead.

“No, of course not. Excellent. I’m sure Jinny has made her family situation clear to you, explained all the ramifications, brought you up to speed.” She damn well had not! “Preliminary genetic analysis is satisfactory, as expected given your heritage.” Apparently my consent had been assumed. “I might add that I consider such analysis a mere pro forma check on my granddaughter’s intuition and judgment: you were in the moment she said you are. But I am pleased with her choice. I met your father, you know. Many years ago, when he came Earthside to receive his prize.”

“Then you met me,” I blurted out.

“Eh?”

“I never left his side, that trip.”

“Ah.” He did the math, worked out how old I would have been. “Oh!” He started slightly at a memory. “Uh…”

The only vowel he had not tried in front of an “h” yet was “i”—and perhaps “y.” What was his problem?

Then all of a sudden I remembered, too.

“Ih!” I gasped. “I bit you.”

I’d never seen anyone try to unfrown, before. “Yes.” He gave up and surrendered to the frown. “You did.” Then without warning he smiled, so broadly it was as if another man had burst out laughing. “Good for you!” It made him look much younger, and it took me an instant to work out the sad reason why: his smile wrinkles were almost entirely nonexistent. I tried to remember why I had felt he needed biting, back then, but failed. All I could recall was the fuss after I had done it. Everyone had been upset… except Dad. He had apologized for me—once—and then stopped hearing conversation about the matter.

“And good for Jinny, too,” he went on. “I’m more convinced than ever that she’s found just the man we need. And just when we need him, too.”

“‘We’?”

We frowned at each other for a few seconds.

“I don’t understand your question,” he said. “Unless you are speaking French.”

“I guess,” I said slowly, “I had the idea marriage involved the needs of just two people, and the interests of the rest of their families. So far, I’ve been thinking exclusively of Jinny’s needs and mine. If you need me for something, it has not yet been explained to me, and I have not yet agreed.”

His jaw did not drop. But his lower lip went slack, and his eyes unfocused slightly for a moment. Then he shook his head. “I know you are not stupid; I’ve seen your genes. I know you are not ignorant; I’ve seen your transcripts. It has to be… a rather staggering naïveté.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Joel, do you honestly believe your marriage is going to be a normal, mundane union? Do you think its purpose is simply to provide the two of you with agreeable companionship and licensed sexual relief? Can you really imagine that your life together will be anything like what you were picturing as recently as yesterday morning?”

Well, no. But neither could I imagine what it would be like. The furthest I had gotten in my thinking so far was trying to encompass the preposterous notion that I could stop balancing my checkbook, now: that I would never again be short of money, no matter how much I developed a wish for. “What will it be like?”

“You kids will marry and continue in school under the name Johnston, but your legal name will be Conrad. Your training has been planned for you by experts familiar with your background and capabilities—at least ten years, and as a minimum you’ll take degrees in engineering, law, business administration, one of the practical sciences, and a language. I suggest Portuguese, but of course that’s up to you. It won’t all be academic fun and games, of course: you’ll need field experience in the company, as many areas of it as you can handle. Plus additional special coaching in social skills, and in politics, both governmental and corporate, and—”

“But you’re sure you won’t mind if I go for Swahili instead of Portuguese?”

“Anything but French.”

I gave up on sarcasm. He honestly didn’t know what it was. “You’re talking about grooming me for a top executive position in the Conrad empire. What makes you think—” I stopped because he was shaking his head.

“Not a top position,” he said.

I felt the blood start to drain from my head. “Are you trying to tell me—”

“Listen to me, Joel.” He leaned forward slightly, and his chair adjusted at once. “It is conceivable that one day you might sit in this chair and give the orders. It is even likely, on the basis of what can be extrapolated from your ancestry, present abilities, and accomplishments to date. It is certain that one or more of your children will sit in this chair one day. I’ve had you most fully investigated, else Jinny would never have received permission to propose to you.”

I felt two extremely strong and inappropriate impulses, fortunately so contradictory they canceled each other out: the urge to faint, and the urge to giggle.

“Oh, I understand,” he said. “Really I do, son. Your interest in music is commendable in one of your age, a sign of a mathematical mind, and Jinny assures me your work is agreeable, not at all like this… well. But surely you see the time for childish things is now behind you. The real world is now open to you: you’ve been given the opportunity to become one of those men music is written about.”

Like the fabulous Conrad compound, my apartment was mostly underground, and did not appear on any map. But there the similarities ended.

For one thing, it was not located in the middle of a glacier somewhere, but smack in the midst of some of the most densely populated land in the U.S.N.A., the White Rock district of Greater Vancouver. For another, it was the polar opposite of opulent or luxurious, as comfortable as a coffin. Vancouver itself has a tradition of quasilegal “basement suites” dating back centuries to some World’s Fair, or perhaps Olympics, but outlying suburbs like White Rock acquired theirs so recently that they’re still illegal, hence unrecorded, hence unregulated, hence mostly shitholes. In sharp contrast to Conradville, it had only a single virtue to recommend it.

But right then, that virtue rated high in my scale of values: it was mine.

I take it back: it had one other thing going for it. The thing that had recommended it to me in the first place, back when I’d first grounded on Terra: like most caves, it was a terrific place to hole up. It had been my first refuge from the unbelievable crowding Terrans considered normal, from the appalling crime rate they considered acceptable, from my own sudden shocking physical weakness, from unexpectedly crushing homesickness and loneliness, and from my own unaccustomed social ineptitude. A womb with a view.

What I needed when I woke up, that horrible morning after, was refuge from my own thoughts and feelings. The apartment did its best, but I suspect a riot would have been insufficient distraction.

The emotion foremost in me when consciousness first reconstructed itself again was sadness, grief insupportable, but it took me a while to recall exactly what I was so sad about. Then it all came back in a rush, and I sat bolt upright in bed. My skull promptly exploded with the force of an antimatter collision—I’d obviously forgotten to take anti-hangover measures the night before—but the blinding white light and total agony seemed merely appropriate. I’d have howled like a dog if I’d had the strength. Instead I whimpered like a puppy.

For the last—I couldn’t remember how many mornings, I had woken up thinking of Jinny. Yearning for Jinny. Aching for Jinny. Had woken every time from dreaming of Jinny—of us—of us together—of the distant but attainable day when she would be there in the morning, there all night, the day when I would finally possess her fully.

Possess her? Ha! My lifetime net worth would probably not suffice to lease an hour of her time.

And yet she wanted me.

And God help me, I still wanted her—as fiercely as ever. I could still have her, if I chose. So why was I so sad I wanted to fall out of bed and bang my face against the floor?

The sadness was because my dream was gone. Whatever the future might hold for me and Jinny, it would not, could not, remotely resemble anything I had ever envisioned. Conceivably it could be a better future, perhaps much better—but right now, at this remove, mostly what it was, was unimaginable.

Unless it was nothing at all. I could imagine that easily enough. I just didn’t want to. Like life before I met Jinny—minus hope.

Let’s not be hasty, Joel. I couldn’t rent an hour of her time… but I could have all of her hours, if I wanted, without paying a single credit. What would it cost me, though? Let’s see. All my plans for my, our, future, for a start. The identity and goals and place in the world I had picked for myself. The rustic notion that the husband should be the one who supported the family, which I had already admitted to myself months ago was archaic nonsense anywhere but a frontier society like Ganymede. It hadn’t been customary for the majority of the human race for well over a century now.

And let’s not forget one other little cost that Conrad had been quite upfront about: most of my waking hours for the rest of my days, which would be spent working very long and hard on things for which I had little interest, training, or talent. With the very best of medical care assuring that I’d be in harness as long as possible. I would have to assume and bear a yoke of almost inconceivable responsibility—responsibility to literally billions of people, all with their own loves and dreams and plans for their futures.

And even if I washed out personally, my children would be groomed and fitted and trained for that same responsibility from birth. All of them. In my vague eighteen-year-old imaginings of the children I might have one day, I had always pictured myself advising them to pursue whatever really interested them, to follow their hearts, the way my father had with me. That would no longer be an option if they were Conrads.

I’m making my hungover maunderings seem far more coherent and organized and cogent than they really were. At the very same time that all the thoughts I’ve just described were going through my head, for instance, I was also simultaneously asking myself over and over again just what, exactly, was so horrible about becoming one of the wealthiest and most powerful people in human history, if that was what it took to win the most beautiful woman in the Solar System?

Well, for a start, myself kept answering, you haven’t earned it. What good is a prize, any prize, if you don’t deserve it, if you haven’t done the work? Face it, Joel: you don’t even have the vaguest idea what the work is.

To which my ongoing rebuttal was: Oh, give me a break, self. Do you think even Conrad of Conrad truly earned that much power and money? Do you think anyone could? Do you honestly believe any conceivable human being, however talented and however hardworking, could possibly deserve that much compensation, merit that much authority? The most anyone can do is have it. Old man Conrad happened to have been born from the right womb at the right time, and must have behaved thereafter more intelligently than any of his rivals, that was all. That was as close as he came to deserving what he had: it had been handed to him, and he had not fumbled it. Now it—or at least a piece of it—was being handed to me—or at least to my—

—children. Mine and Jinny’s—

How could she do this to me?

There were other candidates, of course, some of whom had been waiting years longer than I had, and a great many of them had more impressive skill sets or resources than I did, as well. But such decisions are rarely made fairly. What got me the berth—late starter, dead broke, and all—was a combination of three specific unfair advantages I had over my competitors.

First, of course, was what would have been a disadvantage in just about any other enterprise, with the possible exception of prostitution: my extreme youth. I had only just become a legal adult. You want young people on a voyage expected to last nearly twenty years, ship time, and over ninety years Earth time—but not a lot of them volunteer for such a trip. If they do, and are turned down, they tend to go away and make another plan. It’s not really the sort of trip young people sit around and pine for, at least not now that the first waves have gone. Not happy healthy ones, anyway.

The next important factor was sheer coincidence: the Sheffield’s boost rate. She would blast at a constant acceleration of exactly one-third gee—and I was from Ganymede. I’d be one of the few around who felt normal, for a change. For once, I’d be markedly better adapted, more effective, than those I was with. Even fewer Ganymedeans or Marsmen tended to sign up for star travel than did teenagers; they were just too busy.

But what cinched the deal was, I was from Ganymede. That is, I was one of no more than a handful of star colonists who had any practical, hands-on experience whatsoever with… pause for ironic drumroll… dirt farming!

You can’t blame Earthlings for not knowing much about that: despite what they named their planet, really good dirt is getting hard to come by, there. (God knows the Prophet wasted enough of it for them, may his concept of Hell actually appear, for just long enough to accept him.) But most Terrans haven’t even done any hydroponic farming, and the few who have are generally too rich to make good candidates for interstellar refugees. There is something to be said for scarcity. The total food-growing experience of most Sheffield passengers was almost indistinguishable from zero.

And I had a ton of it. Not theoretical experience, either. Not classroom knowledge, but the kind where bilging the course means you starve. Like most Ganymedeans, and many colonials in or on other worlds, I had spent a portion of my childhood turning earth, hauling manure, outguessing weather, making crops—performing some of the most ancient labor there is, using tools so primitive by Terrestrial standards that most of my fellow colonists probably could not have identified them without help. That’s what we were all so busy at, up there, if you’ve been wondering: turning rock into rutabagas, because they tasted better, and were also more nutritious.

Go ahead, laugh—I did. The one aspect of my background that had always been guaranteed to elicit gales of laughter from those Terrans I admitted it to ended up being the deciding factor in sending me to the stars. Pretty good joke, even for fate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t know. Do you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bring me where, did you say?”

“—phones and your one spare—what?”

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

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

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

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

“I know that.”

“You do? Then—”

“Jinny, we’ve never really met.”

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

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

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

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

Shocked silence. On both sides. I recovered first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go ahead.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Good-bye.”

The phone was dead.

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

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

The first thing I did when I woke next morning was to sit down at my desk and summon a list of Positions Available.

There were a lot more than I expected. It had apparently occurred to the expedition’s planners that not only could nearly all the actual useful work of preparing to start this colony be safely put off until the last few years of the voyage… it probably would be anyway, humans being human. Therefore, it would be good to keep them all occupied doing some damn thing or other for the first eighteen or so years. Lots of helpful suggestions had been provided. The full list of jobs the Colonial Authority was willing to pay someone to do took well over three hours just to scroll down through at normal reading speed.

But basically most of them broke down into categories you could skim in less than half an hour, if you were a fast reader. Here’s a typical screen’s worth, which was sent in response to my query by an astronomer named Matty Jaymes:

• Refining knowledge of the location and plasma properties of the heliopause between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, on the way out of town—and then the same for the heliopause of Immega 714 when we got there.

• Again as we were leaving, helping refine our comet map of the Oort Cloud, detecting comet nuclei with radar.

• Once we were good and gone, measuring, in situ, the density, charge, mass, species, velocity, and temperature characteristics of interstellar plasma and gas.

• Continuous measurement of the orthagonal components of the galactic magnetic field.

• Continuous monitoring of the interstellar medium for molecular species. Determination of mass, composition, size distribution, and frequency of interstellar grains. Performance of interstellar erosion experiments with various models of shield configurations.

• Using the long baseline formed by the starship and Solar System to carry out high-resolution astronomical measurements with optical and radio interferometry. Performing astrometric measurements of nearby stars, extrasolar planet detection, extrasolar planet imaging, and atmospheric spectroscopy. Using the same long-baseline techniques for astrophysical measurements, for example, to image radio galaxies, quasars, and neutron stars.

(It had long been hoped that with multiple starships under way at the same time, the capability of this long baseline interferometry could be vastly enhanced by combining their observations of distant sources. It didn’t seem to be working out well: the problem in this kind of interstellar interferometry was how to agree on common time-tagging of data from probes moving in different directions at significant fractions of the speed of light.)

• Observation of low energy cosmic rays, normally excluded from the Solar System.

• Attempting detection of gravity waves from astrophysical processes such as supernovae or neutron stars, by tracking anomalies in the Doppler effect of our signals.

• Refinement of the dark matter map of the Galaxy…

…and so on. Mind you, all these are from the list of jobs Dr. Jaymes figured he could train just about any chimp aboard to do satisfactorily. But before he sent me those, he sent another, shorter list of jobs for especially smart people, with specific qualifications, which I won’t even bother to excerpt, because I didn’t understand it.

He appeared to be saying that he wanted to make an extremely intensive examination of the sun—our sun—okay, our former sun—of Sol, all right?—even as we were leaving it behind us forever at high speed. Why, I couldn’t imagine. You’d think if there was an adequately studied star in the universe, it would be Sol. Studied even from vessels receding at fractions of c, if that made some sort of difference. And information about that particular star was going to be of purely academic interest to anyone we would ever meet again. But Dr. Jaymes certainly sounded terribly concerned about it. When I told him I lacked the qualifications for his first list of jobs, he allowed his disappointment to show even through mail; whereas when I politely declined his second list, too, he didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Now, I don’t know about you, but if I had been forced to pick one of those I just listed as my shipboard occupation, I think the option I’d have selected instead would have been euthanasia. Like any literate citizen, I love to read what astronomers have to say after years of patient data collection and astute analysis… but the actual gathering of the data was not my idea of a way to spend the next twenty years.

When I came right down to it, not much was.

It was that growing realization, about five or ten scrollings down the list, which caused me to stop and approach it from the other direction. Instead of wading through the Big List of Jobs, the sensible way to do this was to make a Small List of Jobs I would be willing to endure for twenty years, if I had to, and then see if by chance any of them were on the Big List.

By dinnertime I had settled on the following:

• Teach the saxophone. Or composition. Or music history. Or history.

But did I in fact have any pedagogic skills? Forget the skills: did I have the talent? The indefinable intangible something that would make strangers find learning from me preferable to learning by themselves? How the hell did I know?

• Conduct. Assuming an orchestra of some kind could be assembled out of five hundred people, and made good enough to be listened to by the rest.

Again: Did I possess whatever variant offshoot of charisma it was that would make musicians find watching me more helpful than listening to their own internal metronome?

• Act. An orchestra might prove to be beyond the resources at hand, but surely a theater company or trideo studio would form sooner or later.

Let’s just keep assuming the unanswerable question, “But did I have a particle of talent for that endeavor?” from here on.

• Direct, for either live or canned drama.

• Write, either live, canned, or prose fiction. Or nonfiction if necessary; I’d been given to understand that it did not pay a writer to be too fussy. Just possibly journalism, if it turned out that a town of five hundred souls produced enough gossip to need writing down. Herb could give me pointers.

And finally, of course:

• Play the furshlugginer saxophone. There were other venues aboard offering dining or entertainment or dancing. If I could line up enough different sorts of gigs, in different musical genres, then between that and private parties it might just be possible to make a whole entire livelihood out of my single favorite activity, pushing air out the end of a pipe.

That, God damn it, was finally something I did know I had the talent for. The crucial question however was: Did anybody care? Or rather, did enough people care that I would be able to live on my tips?

I looked back over my list gloomily, and detected a pattern. All the occupations that interested me shared two characteristics: they all might just manage to sustain me during the two decades of the voyage… and they would all become nearly worthless when we reached Immega 714. Pioneers don’t have a lot of time or energy for art, either making it or consuming it. It was unlikely that anybody would be willing to feed me just because I made a pretty noise, or made up stories, or pretended to be someone more interesting.

But what did it matter? Doubtless I would end up scratching so hard to feed myself and get warm and dry that most of those things would lose their appeal for me, too.

I brooded about it for the rest of the evening without useful result. I was about to collapse my keypad for the night when I noticed that I had incoming mail. That was odd. Practically everyone I knew lived in my room. Surely my Relativist acquaintances were all too busy for chat. Then I saw the header title, “Where are you?” and felt my pulse begin to rise as I leaped to the conclusion that it was from Jinny.

But no. Instead, it was from the Zog. My job search was over, at least for a while. Reality had caught up to me.

I wrote back that I would report at the start of shift next morning, at 0900. Then I went directly to bed and immediately to sleep, determined to be at his office no later than 0800.

“I don’t get it,” Herb said, squinting at images on his wristband’s monitor. “This girl is clearly much better-looking than you are, even with the baldness, string warts, and that glass eye. You raved about her piano playing—and you say she appears able to endure your own instrumental atrocities, so it’s certain she has a forgiving nature. Did she google up bad?”

“I haven’t tried yet. I mean, I haven’t tried. I’m not interested, I keep telling you.”

“Age, height, mass, marital status, economic status, state of health, attractiveness, talent, all apparently compatible within reason. And you can forget all those factors, and remember just the three important things.”

I rolled my eyes. “Go ahead.”

“She is a female mammal, she has a pulse, and she thinks you’re the best musician in the colony.”

I grimaced in exasperation. “Didn’t you hear me? I’m… not… interested. I told you: I took that class. I’m done with women.”

He put his own exasperation into a sigh instead of a grimace. “Joel, twenty years is a long, long time. And it’s going to seem even longer, with an attitude like that.”

“She and I have nothing in common. Didn’t I tell you what her greatest dream for mankind is? Telepathy, for Murphy’s sake!”

“Something wrong with telepathy?” he asked mildly.

I blushed. “Aw, you know what I mean. She’s talking about the kind where nobody has any secrets and yet we all love each other. Fantasy.”

Herb had successfully passed two other Secret Messages back to little Evelyn Conrad for me so far. Her replies always cheered me up. But they always came back via conventional electronic mail rather than telepathic courier; for some reason she was willing to accept information from a telepath but not give information to one. I was a little afraid she might be overestimating the security of whatever mail route she used. So I kept my own messages to her to a minimum, for fear of getting her in trouble with her elders.

Thinking about telepathy gave me an idea. “Hell’s bells, Herb, why don’t you take a run at Kathy?”

He looked at me strangely. “Really?”

“Well, you’re obviously interested in her. And she doesn’t find telepathy weird.”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

I closed my eyes, counted to five, opened them again. “Why would I mind? Haven’t you been listening? I’m through with romance, I’m through with love, I’m through with counting the stars above.”

“You’re really serious about that, then.”

I rolled my eyes upward and asked the ceiling to bear witness to the tribulations I had to endure here below. “Yes, for the love of—is that you or me?”

He brought his wrist to his ear. “You. Go ahead.”

I tapped my own wrist. “Yes?”

The face on the screen was unfamiliar to me, as his first words confirmed. “Mr. Johnston, we haven’t met yet. My name is Paul Hattori. I am the colony’s banker. Forgive me for disturbing your privacy, but there is a matter we should discuss at your earliest convenience. A matter of some importance.”

I thought for a second. The day was young—hell, it was still before noon. But my morning had been overfull of stimulating inputs. I was tired, and confused, and wanted only to put my feet up and try to get some thinking done about everything that had happened that morning. “How about tomorrow?” I temporized.

He hesitated. “I will of course follow your wishes. But I have information you really should have as soon as possible.”

What could he possibly be on about? Was this some sort of pitch for investment advice or banking services? He had access to my financial records—record—surely he must know I was a dry hole. “Can you give me some idea what it’s about?”

He was smiling, but there was something odd about the smile, something I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t phony, exactly. Just odd. “I can, but if you will forgive me, I would greatly prefer to tell you in person.”

I met Herb’s eyes, raised an eyebrow. He shrugged. “Are you sure you don’t want Communicator Johnson? Same address, he’s my roommate.”

“No, it’s you I need to speak with, Mr. Johnston.” He gave an address only one deck below the officers and crew. He was a VIP.

“All right, I’ll be there in half an hour. But I still think you have the wrong bloke.”

“Who was that?” Herb asked.

“Never mind,” I said. “It can’t be important.”

I started to change to better clothes—and changed my mind. Why should I dress up for this joker? I wasn’t the one who’d asked for this meeting. Showing up was courtesy enough; putting on formal tights and collar would be obsequious. I had no reason to impress the man… because I had absolutely nothing to impress him with. He had nothing I wanted. Pausing only to empty my bladder and comb my hair, I left dressed just as I was: like a man who had recently been in a goat shed when somebody sneezed.

I took my time on the way, too. So I had time to develop a dark suspicion as to what he might want to talk to me for, which quickly built itself into an ugly and plausible theory.

Hattori was a banker. Bankers know all about very large sums of money. Did I know anyone who was connected in some way with very large sums of money? Had I not, indeed, recently roundly pissed off some people of that description? If they took a notion to have some sort of heavy weight dropped on my scrotum in retaliation, might not a banker be their chosen instrument?

It was hard to sustain alarm. As far as I knew, I really was bulletproof, from a financial point of view: I had nothing to steal, no credit to ruin. If the Conrads wanted vengeance, they would just have to have me beaten or killed like civilized people.

Nonetheless by the time I reached Hattori’s cabin I was paranoid enough to be feeling just a bit belligerent. I was going to stop just outside his door and take a few deep breaths to calm down, but the door recognized me and opened before I had the chance.

I had expected his quarters to be impressive. They exceeded my expectations. They were tasteful, supremely comfortable despite a Zen simplicity, luxurious without ostentation. A Hawaiian slack-key guitar played at background level—Cyril Pahinui, I think. I was given an understanding chair, and offered a beverage impressive enough to denote respect, which I accepted.

Banker Hattori was a pleasant-looking cobber. I’d have guessed his ancestry at a combination of something like Hawaiian or Japanese and Scottish or German. He was short by Ganymedean standards, a little short even by Terran reckoning, but well proportioned and clearly in excellent physical shape. Back on Terra, he might have sailed, climbed mountains, run marathons, flown an ultralight. Now that those joys were lost to him for the next twenty years, he probably played a competitive but noncontact sport, and worked out. But he was not hard to take the way some jocks can be, did not challenge.

In person, his smile was as subtly off as it had been over the phone. The surprisingly few seconds he wasted on polite ritual and pleasantry gave me just enough time to figure out what was odd about it. He was clearly a man who smiled a lot, in his off hours—the placement and depth of the smile wrinkles at his mouth and eyes told you that—but he was unaccustomed to smiling like that at work.

In retrospect, it’s actually pretty impressive that he didn’t drag it out longer than he did, surround it with even more of a big drumroll buildup. I couldn’t have blamed him if he had. He must indeed not have gotten to impart news of that particular sort very often.

But he was a professional, and also I think a reasonably kindly man, so he merely teased me with it until I wanted to throttle him.

“You have made no financial investment in this colony so far, Joel,” he began. We were Joel and Paul by then. “Looking over your records, I see that your motives in joining us were personal and emotional rather than economic. I would like to explain, briefly, why I think that was a mistake, and then—”

“Paul, excuse me for interrupting, but your pump is sucking air. I have no capital at all.”

He held up his hands. “Please—indulge me for just a moment. Think of it as a hypothetical. I did say ‘briefly.’”

He really did have a nice smile. Odd or not. “You have the floor.”

“I say I am the ship’s banker, and that is one of the things I do. I am also our colony’s chief financial adviser, and act as its representative.”

I nodded, impressed. “Quite a job. It can’t be easy, arranging to borrow such stupendous sums, let alone handling them wisely.”

“Let me give you an imaginary hypothetical conversation between me and a Terran banker, shortly before we left the Solar System.”

He proceeded to act it out, using different hokey but clever cartoon voices:

“Banker: Greetings, gentleman merchant adventurer, hereafter known as GMA. I assume you’re here to ask about a loan, and I’m sorry to say money is very tight just now—

“GMA: I have some lubricant with me.

“Banker: Excuse me?

“GMA: I can help solve tight money. I am here to discuss a loan, as you suggest. But I don’t want to borrow. I want to lend you money.

“Banker: Really? Well, now. That would certainly be agreeable, in principle. What sort of terms and conditions did you have in mind?

“GMA: Here is a check, representing gold dollars in Zurich.

“Banker: How m—oh my, a great many.

“GMA: A very great many.

“Banker: I… see. And you want to give it to us.

“GMA: I want you to invest it for me at compound interest. A rate of eleven percent a year would be acceptable.

“Banker: That is a very high rate of interest!

“GMA: Not if I undertake not to touch the money for twenty years…

“Banker: Ah. I begin to see. But what’s in it for me—besides the usual fees? How does this loosen tight money?

“GMA: You have the full use of that money for twenty years, and keep all the profits. All you have to do is invest soundly enough so the capital sum remains intact… a trick venture capitalists like yourself are rather good at.

“Banker: Well, thank you. But I don’t see what’s in it for you. For the same twenty years, you’re depriving yourself of that same money, receiving no payments.

“GMA (smiling broadly): Yes, but you see, I intend to age more slowly than you….”

He smiled.

“I get it—I think,” I told Paul. “It really is a clever swindle.”

“It’s not a swindle,” he said.

“It has to be. People are earning large sums of money for either sitting and waiting, or else for traveling expensively. Somebody has to be getting swindled for it. TANSTAAFL.”

“That principle doesn’t apply here. In this one case, there is such a thing as a free lunch. Wealth is being created by time. Nobody’s being swindled because nobody’s losing anything.”

I must have looked stubborn.

“The key phrase was, ‘You will have the use of that money for twenty years.’ Suppose the moment we get to Immega 714 we do an instant one-eighty, slingshot around it and hotfoot it right back to Sol at the same speed. It took us twenty years to get there, twenty years to come back; we arrive at Terra forty years older than we started. But what we find when we debark—”

I started to see it. “Finagle on fire!”

“—is a Terra more than one hundred and sixty years older than when we left it.”

“With a hundred and twenty years of free interest!” The beauty of it washed over me.

“Not free,” he said. “We had to get our butts up to a large fraction of c, and keep them there for forty years. But real cheap. Are you ready for more of the special blend?”

“Oh, that really is lovely, Paul,” I said as he poured generous refills for both of us. “You’re absolutely right: for the first time, I genuinely regret not having been able to kick any money into the pot myself.”

“Well, theoretically, of course, a person could choose to buy in even now—or for that matter, at any point in the trip, although the degree of participation would naturally go down some as the voyage gets longer.”

I grinned, and a faint tingling of the lips told me the special blend was beginning to hit me. “With what I make turning shit and piss back into food, plus what I hope in my wildest dreams to earn in tips playing at the Horn of Plenty, by the time we reach Peekaboo I can confidently expect to see profits in the low five figures.”

That mysterious smile had never quite left him, even when he was playing Banker and GMA. It was still there, and now his eyes were twinkling, too. “Joel, let me tell you about another starship, a long time ago. One of the unlucky ones. There was bad sickness aboard, one you didn’t get over. Both their telepaths died in the first wave, so the only reports were by radio and laser. Some of their Relativists died, and then it was reported that all the others were infected, and the quantum ramjet was being shut down. That cut the power for the radio and lasers, and the ship passed from human history.”

This was sounding oddly familiar. Hard to pin down the memory, though: when I closed my eyes to try, the room began to rotate around me. Counterclockwise. “Heard about a ship like that, once.” No, clockwise. “Lost in the stars, forever.”

“Only, not,” Paul said. “They were very lucky. Their first bit of luck was that their plague, whatever it was, burned itself out completely with seventy-five percent of them still alive. They were able to keep the antimatter engine alive, stroke of luck number two, which gave them enough power to survive, and run all the machinery. Including the data-banks they’d brought along with them, the total accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the human race at that time.”

“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 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 smaller 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 addressed, 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.

Yep—that was everything. I realized it was a bit unusual for someone of my size, mass, and background to make such easy work of huge bruisers like those two, so I was glad to know a visual record existed to back up my account.

“Sheffield, please begin playback.”

“Yes, Magistrate,” the ship said.

I settled back to watch myself in action. …“gray-market,” Jules’s recorded voice said.

“How gray?” I heard myself ask after a pause that now seemed to me incriminatingly long.

“Just barely beige,” Richie answered. “It only gets black for a day or so right at the end. Up until then it’s mostly gray, and some green. Tell him, Jules—”

That’s odd, I thought. Poppies aren’t black at any part of their life cycle. Or gray, or beige. I’d grown them for the Lermer City Hospital, back on Ganymede. They’re extremely colorful flowers, which ultimately yield a white or pale yellow seed pod that oozes a white sap. How could a drug dealer know less about his product than I did? Or was Richie simply talking through his ass?

I glanced at Sol when Richie’s “High Japonics” line came, expecting to share at least a grin if not a chuckle. I was sure it would delight him. He didn’t crack a smile.

Solomon Short failing to find humor in a situation was so out of character, I was still puzzling over it when I suddenly realized the crux of the whole matter was approaching, and resumed paying close attention. Here came the sentence that would exculpate me. My heroic battle scene would not be far behind.

Richie’s voice blathered something about his grade ten. My own voice asked Jules, “Why don’t you tell me which flower you mean?”

Here it came—

“Happy hour,” Jules said.

My jaw fell. I was so shocked, I stopped paying attention to the events unfolding onscreen. Someone had to have altered the recording!

“Sol—” I cried.

“Shush,” he said loudly and firmly. “Reserve your questions and observations.”

“But damn it, he said—”

“Pipe down, I said!”

Damn it to hell, he’d said poppy flower, not happy hour.

Developed in one of the L-5s—all of them publicly disavowed blame and all of them privately claimed credit—Happy hour was a flower whose leaves contained a mildly entheogenic alkaloid just slightly stronger than marijuana in effect, and no more habituating. It was about the opposite end of the spectrum from opium poppies. It just barely qualified as a restricted drug on Terra, and there were jurisdictions—among them Ganymede—where its use was legal. I had no idea what the Sheffield’s policy on it might be. There were shouts and other loud noises from onscreen, but I was oblivious, aghast at this unexpected turn of events, trying to reconcile the impossible. The only rational explanation was that someone, somewhere, somehow, had been able to corrupt the Sheffield’s AI. If so, I was about as screwed as screwed could be. I began to panic. “Sol, you have to listen to me!”

“I know,” he agreed, eyes on the screen. “Isn’t it terrible?”

“But I—”

“Don’t call me Butt-Eye,” he said, and used the remote to raise the volume enough to drown me out.

It wasn’t easy. The fistfight playback had finished while I was distracted, and the sole audio output now was the soft voice of the magistrate. But Sol mashed down on that volume-up button, and only backed it off when I resumed paying attention to the screen.

And found Dr. Will in mid-lecture, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-contempt tone in her voice. “—even mention your ridiculous attempts to claim your names were actually Corey Trevor and Jay Rock.”

“I told you, it was a fuckin’ reflex—” Richie said off-camera.

“However,” she went on determinedly, “this court does take notice of your special request regarding language, and reluctantly agrees with your argument that for you to defend yourself adequately you must be allowed to use your own natural idiom. To require you to use my vocabulary would be a distraction roughly equivalent to you asking me to speak to you freely and eloquently… without ever using any words that contain the letter ‘t.’ I rule that you—only you—may use profanity in my court.”

“Wow. Thanks, Your Magistrate, that’s really fuckin’ awesome.”

“Richie,” Jules began.

“Well, it is,” Richie said. “Okay, so you saw it. That dick got all pissy for no reason, and started talking about proctors and shit. Well, I’m already on probation, like you pointed out before, and who’s a proctor gonna listen to, me or some citizen? So I got mad and told him he was being an asshole, ’cause he was. And what does he do? He punches me in the face!”

No. That wasn’t possible. Surely I hadn’t—

Dr. Will said, “At that point, a proctor would have seen your face and his knuckles and believed you. Why didn’t you call one?”

“Well, I would’ve got around to it,” he said defensively. “I was kind of fuckin’ busy just then.”

“Busy whacking him,” Jules muttered.

“I was trying to, like, knock his punches aside,” Richie insisted. “So I kept missing. Big fuckin’ deal. What am I, a boxer? Anyway, Your Wordship, my point is, after that the whole thing kind of got out of hand and nothing that happened was really anybody’s fault, and the stuff that was somebody’s fault wasn’t really, so much, because all of us were full of shit, so what I say is, why don’t we let water under the bridge lay where Jesus flang it, and just forget the whole thing? That’s fair.”

Jules said, “I hate to admit it, but he’s right, Your Honor. It’s a wash. No harm, no foul.”

Dr. Will sat breathing through her nose for a while, looking at the pair of them. Finally she said, “Here is my judgment. You will both apologize to Mr. Johnston for invading his privacy, disturbing his harmony, and ruining his furniture. You will repair the damage yourselves. For the next month you will each be confined to your quarters whenever you are not either working or eating.” She closed a folder that lay before her.

Richie couldn’t believe his luck. “That’s it?”

She cleared her throat meaningfully, and his grin vanished. “I would be considerably harsher,” she assured him. “But the Sheffield’s Senior Healer, Dr. Lewis, has advised me that she considers moderate recreational use of happy hour acceptable on this voyage, and the Captain concurs. Neither of you knew that when you approached Mr. Johnston—but it was a fact all the same. You have narrowly escaped serious sanctions. Consider yourselves lucky that camera’s microphone did not malfunction.”

“We do. Thank you, Your Honor,” Jules said at once. “Let’s go, Rich.”

They both got up and left the frame, and a few seconds later, the door I was facing dilated, and they both came out together, accompanied by Lahey, their potbellied Advocate. They were striving hugely, and without much success, to suppress grins big enough to frighten a hired killer or even a real estate agent. When they saw me, their grins did not falter, just became more wolflike somehow. “Hey, Farmer Brown,” Richie called. “Knock knock.”

I was so confused and demoralized I played along. “Who’s there?”

“A fucked-in-the-head dipshit with manure on his shoes who goes around punching people ’cause he doesn’t know his ass from his elmo,” he said triumphantly.

I opened my mouth… but if there is a comeback to that remark, I still don’t know what it is.

“Good luck in there, arsehole,” Jules said, and took a sip of his ever-present drink. “Come on, Rich, let’s go.” They both walked boldly through us, making us step out of their way, and left through the door behind us.

“You have your lines?” Solomon asked again.

I started, and patted my breast pocket. “Damn. I should have studied them—”

“Too late now,” he said. “Let’s go.”

My Healer said, “Will you excuse me for just one moment, Joel?

“Of course, Dr. Louis,” I said, and she put her full attention on her screen for a few moments, keying in an occasional input. To pass the time I examined her office, a fairly large cubic, soothingly furnished, gimmicked so that no matter which way you looked, the light was never directly in your eyes.

Suddenly I burst out laughing. A small outburst, easily suppressed, but audible. She looked up and met my eyes again and smiled faintly. “You got it, did you?”

“Just now,” I agreed.

Behind her, a midsize image hung framed on the wall, a rather striking photo of a large lizard, of a breed that had adapted better than anyone had expected to Martian conditions and was now considered a minor pest there. I had noticed it when I’d come in, but it had taken until now for my memory to yield up the odd name of that odd creature: Gila monster. It was a visual pun. She was the Healer monster.

“That’s about how long we’ve been around,” she said.

“Healers?”

“Meddlers. Busybodies. Pains in the ass. Healing is merely one of the few remaining socially acceptable excuses for poking one’s nose into another Citizen’s affairs. Excuse me again for just one moment.”

She went back to her screen, and this time I decided to pass my time by studying her more closely instead of the room.

She was perhaps twice my own age or a bit more, I guessed, of average height and weight, and looked healthy, fit, and content with her life. In another context I’d have called her attractive for her age. She wore her brown hair short, so nothing obscured any part of her face. In its various contours and configurings I found evidences suggesting decency, kindness, patience, considerable humor… and beneath all these a strength, or perhaps simply a determination, so awesome even in repose I had the crazy idea that if she were ever to go out the airlock, get a good grip on the frame, and plant her feet on the vacuum, the Sheffield would slowly come to a halt. Her clothing, however, was slightly more casual and comfortable than many would have deemed appropriate for our situation, indicating that the strength was not the kind rooted in iron stupid discipline.

I glanced around again. A pair of flat images on the side of a bookcase caught my attention, precisely because they seemed so pointless. Each photo had been cut out of a magazine or other hard copy and put there with pins. The one on top was of a donkey, or burro. Below it was a medium shot of a golfer lining up a putt. And just below them both was a line cut from some advertisement: “For those who know the difference!” If there was a point to the arrangement, it eluded me.

“Thanks for your patience.”

“No problem, Dr. Louis.”

“Call me Amy, please. Joel, I think there are four questions you urgently need to consider.”

“That many?” I said sourly.

“I don’t think you’ve thought through any of them yet.” Perhaps my least favorite criticism; I swallowed a comeback. “And you must. They’re all very important.”

“Somehow, Amy, I have an idea you’re going to tell me what they are soon.”

She shook her head. “Not if you’re going to get cranky right at the jump, just because I said you have some thinking to do. If you like, we can spend this whole session dicking around. But we’re going to get to it eventually. Suit yourself.”

I think if she had looked back down at her screen, I would have gotten up and left, then. But she didn’t. She just kept looking me in the eye, waiting, not offended by my antics, just waiting patiently until I decided to move on instead.

“Hell of a thing to say to a man, that he doesn’t think things through,” I grumbled. But it was clearly a backing-down grumble.

She nodded sympathetically. “It is an embarrassing thing to be caught at. But, Joel, face it: you’re caught. Your presence here is not voluntary, remember? Ergo, you have screwed up big-time. The embarrassment is one of the smallest things you’re going to have to deal with.”

She paused, visibly giving me a few seconds to see if I was going to jump salty again.

Well, God damn it, Joel, is she right or isn’t she? Can you face facts, or not?

“The majority of clients I deal with have been driven into this room by their own egos. You have not, for once, so I don’t want to waste as much time dealing with yours. Can we simply assume goodwill on both sides, and start with the basic agreement that you need help, and that I may have some?”

The stars themselves knew I needed help. And I knew she had some. I’d known that before I’d gotten from her door to the chair I sat in.

“I guess…” I began.

And a stuck switch somewhere in my brain went spung, and I burst out laughing—a hold-your-belly-and-fold-over guffaw.

She was not offended in the least, just surprised. And interested. I wanted to explain but was laughing too hard. But she was in no hurry. Finally I got enough air to hoot, “I do!… I do!… Honest!” which only further confused her until I was able to get one arm free and point to the clip art pictures on the side of her bookcase that had puzzled me earlier. “I do know!” At once she began to laugh, too.

I do know the difference. Between my ass, and a hole in the ground. “Sometimes, anyway—”

She had a great braying loon hoot of a laugh, and knew it, and was not at all self-conscious about it. So we had us a good one. By the time it was done, I was pretty sure I trusted her. It’s humorless people who frighten me, because I can’t begin to understand them.

At last I said, “I’m sorry, Amy. Please tell me the four questions you think I need to address first.”

She nodded. “Who. What. Where. Why.”

I blinked. “Not ‘when’?”

She shook her head. “The answer to that is always ‘now.’”

I took a deep breath. “In that case, let’s do it.”

“First, ‘who.’ That’s almost always a good place to start. Who are you? Not, who did you plan to be, or who are you expected to be, or even, what would you like to be. Who are you? Who the hell is this Joel Johnston, when he’s at home? I don’t think you know. And I’m certain I don’t. It would be a useful thing to know, don’t you think?”

I was past sarcasm or irony. “Yes, Amy, it would.” My voice was hoarse. From the laughing.

“Next, ‘what.’ What led you to this place? To this ship, this twenty-year voyage to the back of beyond? What led you to abandon literally every single thing you’ve ever known except the concept of associating with other humans? Why did you leave the world, leave the rest of the race, leave the Solar System, for good? This is probably the question you think you know the most about, and I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Or only part right.”

It was a broken heart! Wasn’t it?

Wait. Had I expected heartbreak to be permanent? Did I really intend to die a virgin? If my Jinny was not to be with me, nor I with her, how was it any better if she was eighty-five light-years farther away?

“The third question, ‘where,’ might actually be your best place to start. Where are you going? I mean that not rhetorically, but literally.”

I didn’t understand. “Literally? That’s easy. To Peekaboo Two. Brasil Novo, if you want to be formal. The second planet of Immega Seven-Something.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me about the planet. When it was discovered. Its physical parameters. Its atmosphere. Its geography, and geology. Climate. Seasons. Flora. Fauna. Most intelligent-seeming organism identified. Most dangerous-looking predator identified. Intended location of our First Landing site.” She paused expectantly.

“Uh… it’s real hot and damp, for… for extended periods, and there’s a whole lot of oxygen,” I said, and realized with dismay that I had shot my bolt.

“You’re going to spend twenty years getting there, and you’ll stay there the rest of your life. I would spend some of the twenty years studying just what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

All at once I felt immortally stupid. She was absolutely, shockingly right. Not thought this through? Hell, I hadn’t started thinking. Look before you leap, my father had often said. I hadn’t even looked after I’d leapt. After weeks on board a starship, my principal curiosity about my destination so far had consisted of wondering what to wear to work on the Upper Ag Deck. I had just sort of assumed there’d be a planet of some sort at the end of this, and what of it?

Could a broken heart cause brain damage? On this scale?

“Finally, why. Once you know the destination, the question becomes, why are you going there? Why go anywhere, for that matter? For what reason? What will you do there? Above all, why will it matter? Here, take these. Basket over there.”

I accepted the box of tissues she offered out of politeness, and was startled to discover that my face was soaking wet and I really did need to blow my nose. The wastebasket had been placed so that it was a hard shot to miss. I hit it six times running before I was done. By then I was seeing little black spots overlaying everything.

“So that’s it?” I said, my voice quavering. “That’s everything? Shit, I thought I had a problem.”

“You do,” she said simply. “And that is a lot to chew on. So much that twenty years might not be enough time. And I promise you it will be painful. And you may fail completely. Would you like the bad news, now?”

I giggled. “Sure.”

“You have no fucking choice.”

“Tell me there’s good news.” I tried to parody desperation, but did too good a job.

She smiled. “You have the best Healer on the ship. I will give you some good tools, and yell encouragement, and take your crap, and share your breakthroughs, and tell you when your exciting new profound insights are horseshit.”

“Tools?”

“Techniques. Disciplines. Attitudes. Drugs. In addition, I will listen to anything you want to tell me, and give advice if I happen to have any.”

“That sounds good,” I said. “When do I start?”

“Now.”

“Okay. How do I start?”

“First, you have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Everything.”

“Huh? I mean, ‘Crave pardon?’”

“To grow, you must learn about yourself. To learn, you must listen to yourself. To listen, you must first learn the hardest trick of all: to shut the hell up.”

I was so startled, I did. And then realized it would have been a not-unclever reply, if I’d done it intentionally. So I tried to pretend I had, and made an elaborate show of obligingly cocking my ear to listen to some imaginary sound, and then tried to pantomime hearing some transcendent insight. She just kept looking at me with no expression, and suddenly I had a sense of seeing myself from the outside, watching myself mug and fidget. And finally began to get a sense of what she was driving at. I let my face go as blank as hers, took a deep breath, and tried my best to listen. To myself… to her… to whatever. After a few seconds I closed my eyes to help myself concentrate.

I don’t hear a damn thing/wait/is that the air circulator?/it’s gone now/this is silly/really silly/stupid kid’s game/hide and go fuck yourself/wait, now/a hum/a note at the very upper limit of audibility, somewhere right around 20,000 cycles per second/no, two of them/dysharmonic/I never diss harmonic/what’s wrong with dat harmonic?/God, I’m sleepy/hey, why can’t I hear my own pulse?/I wonder if—

“There’s a certain interior monologue that never stops, isn’t there?”

Her voice startled me, enough that I opened my eyes. “Yes. Yes, there is.”

“Try and make it stop.”

“Stop thinking? Completely? Hell, that’s one of my best tricks.”

“Go ahead.”

About five minutes later, I admitted defeat.

“Whose is the voice you hear?”

“My own.”

“To whom does it speak?”

“To… to me.”

“Why?”

It was a good question. How could it be so important to tell myself things I already knew that I couldn’t seem to stop, even for a second? I had always prided myself on controlling my own mind… but it now seemed I only had limited control of what it thought about. But I could not make it stop.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It must be terribly, terribly important, because I can’t make it stop even as long as I can make myself stop breathing. It’s like my heartbeat—if it ever pauses, even for a few seconds, I’ll die. But that can’t be true: I’ve stopped thinking altogether a lot of times. Drunk… stoned… sedated… anesthetized for surgery…” I trailed off, realizing I wasn’t sure whether I’d stopped thinking at those times, or just stopped recording the thoughts. “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“You don’t need to be afraid of it, I promise.”

“Are you sure?”

“Your record says you’re a musician and composer, but is vague about what kinds of music you’re interested in. Do you know the classics? The Beatles?”

“Sure.”

“Turn off your mind. Relax, and float downstream. It is not dying. That advice was ancient back then.”

I shrugged. “Okay. How?”

“People have been trying to make their minds stop for thousands of years. It’s called meditation. There are some useful tricks that have been passed down. Come here and I’ll show you some.”

She got up and moved to an area with no furniture. I could tell she was a Loonie by the way she handled herself in a third of a gee, but it wasn’t so much awkward as unpracticed. She had the necessary strength to handle twice her normal weight, and would get more graceful at it with time, like perfecting an accent. I got up and followed her. She was just placing on the floor two objects like giant black cloth hamburgers. Pillows, it seemed: as I watched, she dropped effortlessly into a cross-legged seat on one of them, seeming to melt slowly like the Wicked Witch of the West despite the double gravity. She gestured at the other. “Sit down, Joel.”

I did so far more clumsily, despite being in my native gravity. Pillow? It was just barely a cushion—made of soft cloth, but filled with something unyielding, as soft-but-firm-underneath as a…

“It’s called a zafu,” she said. “Don’t sit square on it, but a little forward on it, almost falling off the edge, and put your legs like so.” She demonstrated.

I dug in my heels. “Hold on a minute. Is this some kind of religious thing? Buddhism or something?”

She smiled. “Atheist?”

“Agnostic.”

“Fear not. Buddhists are only one of many groups of humans who have found this a useful posture for meditation. So have Hindus, Taoists, TM’ers, and a dozen other groups. And in any case, Buddhism isn’t a religion, strictly speaking.”

“It isn’t?”

“No god, or gods, or goddesses—except in a couple of the more obscure sects. No heaven or hell in the theological sense. No patriarch or matriarch, no Prophet or Pope. They don’t go in for holy wars, or heresy hunts.”

“Really?”

“Buddhists believe the Buddha himself was simply a man, who woke up one day. As far as I understand it, anyway. I know hardly anything at all about Buddhism. If you’re interested, you can talk to Tenzin Itokawa, the Relativist. He is a Zen priest, of the Rinzai school. Right now, forget Buddhism. Forget religion. Just put your legs like this and trust me, okay?”

I tried. “Show me again.”

She unpretzeled, and then pretzeled again slowly. I tried to copy it. This time I came closer.

“Other way round. This one over that one. There—that’s it. Now work your knees around a little until they’re comfortable.”

Suddenly I seemed to just snap into place. “Like that?”

“That’s it. Good. Okay, now. Spine straight. Stack those vertebrae. Hands together, palms up, left hand on top, with the thumb tips touching. Settle your skull on those stacked vertebrae. You’ve got it.”

It did indeed feel like a position I could hold for a while in relative comfort. “Now what?”

“Don’t just do something: sit there.”

I mentally shrugged and did so. Or rather tried to stop doing anything. As before I tried to stop thinking, too—with no better success. But I did become aware that I was starting to relax. My thoughts didn’t exactly slow down… but they became less intense, somehow.

After a few minutes of silence, she said, “Now we do a breathing exercise so childishly simple it can’t possibly have any effect.”

“Sounds good.”

“There really is nothing to it. In your head, count to four, at intervals of about four seconds, or a little longer.” I did as she asked. “Okay. Now, you inhale for a count of four… then hold your breath for a count of four… then exhale for four… then hold for four. In, hold, out, hold. Repeat, and keep repeating. Try it.”

I played along. A full cycle, then another, then another. After half a dozen or so, I found the rhythm, and settled into it. Easy as pie. Considerably easier than pi. Stop that, Joel.

“Good. Now with each cycle, slow it down just a skosh. Not much, and when it seems to be too much, let it come back up again, until you find your slowest natural speed. As soon as you’re sure you’ve found it, stop counting and just breathe.”

It wasn’t hard. It was mindless, was what it was. Silly, and pointless, and…

…and I could feel my shoulders settling. Feel my facial muscles relaxing. Feel my pulse slowing, and deepening, and steadying. Hear my pulse, playing bass under the alternating E-A E-A organ chords of my breath. As I became aware of it, I had the idea I could hear it slowly changing from electric bass guitar to acoustic standup bass, quieter but more resonant.

I let myself sink into it. I closed my eyes, and paradoxically as I did I became more aware of the room, of my position in it, of its position in the Sheffield—and as I followed the thought to its logical next stopping place, it was as if the ground fell away beneath me without warning. Have you ever been so stoned or drunk that you suddenly fancied you could actually perceive the vast slow spinning of whatever planet you live on? Not just as something known intellectually but as something felt in the gut? Ever find yourself clutching the ground, to keep from falling off? Well, something like that happened to me then. For the very first time, I suddenly got where I was.

I was in an incredibly, pathetically flimsy bubble of moist air, hurtling through interstellar space at a speed so intrinsically terrifying that its friction with nothingness was enough to require powerful and clever shielding, propelled by a force no man really understood, so powerful it could have wrecked my star if invoked too near it. With a would-be village of other misfits and refugees I was plummeting through the universe so fast Time itself couldn’t keep up—living by Dr. Einstein’s Clock, while behind me the rest of the human race continued to age as God or random chance had intended. In these hair-raising conditions I would, if I was very lucky, spend approximately the next fifth of my life racing toward a destination I had not given a second’s serious consideration, a place where, if I was incredibly lucky, it would prove possible to raise turnips and keep hogs, and the monsters wouldn’t be able to kill me.

All this in a microsecond—then in the time it took me to open my eyes the feeling popped like a bubble and I was back in my body again, was just a guy sitting in a room doing nothing at all. It happened and then was over so impossibly fast that I was still relaxed: there hadn’t even been time for my heartbeat or breathing to increase. But when I did get my eyes open the first thing they saw was Dr. Amy’s eyes looking straight into them, and I knew at once that she knew what had happened to me. She’d been expecting it to happen. No, that was wrong. She had known it might happen, and had hoped it would. My whole head vibrated for a few seconds, like a hummingbird in denial. “Whoa!” I croaked.

“See, Joel? You sat still and quieted down… and you noticed where you are. Sit still longer and you’ll start to notice where you’re going. Sit still long enough and you may figure out why you’re going there. You could end up with some clues to just who the hell is doing all that.”

“And that would be a good thing?”

“Yes,” she said, raising her voice two notches higher in volume for the single word. “Stop looking dubious. When you peel back enough layers of your own bullshit to finally get a good glimpse of yourself, you are going to find you respect yourself a good deal more than you expected to.”

I said nothing.

“I promise that, Joel. The journey you need to take isn’t going to be easy… but you’re going to like the destination. Certainly a lot better than where you are now. Now lie to me.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Tell me you believe me.”

I tried unsuccessfully to suppress my grin. “I believe you believe it.”

She nodded. “Close enough. That’s enough for one session. Here’s your homework. First, I want you to spend an hour a day sitting zazen—that’s what you just did—and I’d like you to do it in a Sim Room.”

“I was thinking of a spot on the Upper Ag Deck.”

“Later. Starting out, use the Sim. Accept the simulations it offers you for the first two weeks, the ones I’ll program for you. After that you can override if you want, using your judgment. After three or four weeks we’ll slowly bring you back out into the real world again. The Ag Deck might be a great place to start.”

I thought up some objections, and decided to hell with them. If she wasn’t smarter than I was, this was all a terrible mistake. “Okay. That was ‘first.’ What’s next?”

“I want you to get in shape. You’re healthy enough, but you’re quite out of condition for your age. Do what the Gym tells you.”

It was easier to think up objections this time, and they were better objections. The one I wanted to admit to was, “Where do I find the hours?”

“Shave them from either your farmwork or your music. Whichever is less important to you personally.”

It is annoyingly hard to object to a reasonable proposal. She was right. I was out of shape. “Okay. Meditate, work out. What else?”

“Study your destination. Learn everything you can about it. The star, first—where Immega 714 lies in the sky, why it took so long to discover, how it’s different from Sol. Then the planet: What kind of world is Brasil Novo, how is it like and unlike Ganymede, what’s living there already, what kind of place is it going to be for a kid to grow up in?”

To that I had no objections. “Done. Meditate, exercise, look out the windshield—anything else?”

She nodded. “Yes. I want you to start dating. Joel? Joel!”

“You go too damned far,” I said on my way to the door. It would not iris open fast enough to suit me, so I tried to hurry it with my hands and it jammed in its tracks, not quite all the way open. I had to stop in my own tracks, my exit spoiled by an absurd social dilemma. I could not walk away and leave her with a broken door like some kind of barbarian, but I had no idea how to repair it. I stood there, unwilling to turn around until I had some idea how to cope with the situation. I’m pretty sure in another second or two I’d have remembered that I was a rich man, now. But before I could think of it, behind me she said drily, “My door is always open.”

It is very hard to remain annoyed at someone who has just made you burst out laughing. I gave up and turned around and she was laughing, too. She had a great whoop of a laugh. We got into one of those things where each time you’re just about to get it under control, the other cracks up again. It always ends eventually with you smiling at each other, breathing like runners after the marathon.

“Okay,” she said finally. “If you can laugh like that, you can take a few weeks before you start dating again. Go do your homework.”

I nodded and gestured at the door. “I’ve got this.”

She nodded and put her attention back down on her screen, as she’d been doing when I’d first seen her.

The first thing I did about it was not move out.

Everyone seemed to assume that now that I was stinking rich, I would of course move out of the prematurely decaying hovel I had been sharing with three hapless losers, leave Dear Old Rup-Tooey behind me in the dust, and settle into vastly more lavish solo quarters several decks higher, and with all the privacy, comfort, and (most prestigious of all) roominess that could be desired by a healthy young nouveau millionaire whose Healer had advised him to start dating.

But I had lived alone before. I had always lived alone before. Until I’d been accepted into the Tenth Circle, I’d had no idea how much that sucked. I remembered it well. I had no particular reason to suppose money would make it all that much better.

Also, I kept remembering that I might very well have been spaced as a danger to the Sheffield by now, if it had not been for my bunkies Pat and Herb. And for Solomon Short, who was one of the six wealthiest people aboard, and had chosen to be my friend when all I had to my name was a good sax.

Besides, as Mark Twain says, two moves equals one fire. I’d already moved once recently.

So I stayed where I was. But I reached out to another friend, as wealthy as Sol and considerably more practical, and sought his counsel. And George R smiled, and pointed me toward the best mechanics, engineers, artisans, electricians, cyberpeople, and plumbers aboard, and snipped some bureaucratic red tape to get me permission to clear out storage cubics immediately next door on either side and cut through some walls. When all the busy beavers had gone away again and the dust had settled, RUP-0010-E was the most solid, reliable, comfortable, luxuriously appointed, and technologically advanced living space on that deck—and its ’fresher was probably the best in the Sheffield, so unreasonably large that all four of us could have used it at once, with a guest apiece. And so advanced in terms of hedonic technology that we all suddenly found ourselves very popular fellows in shipboard society: people wanted to be invited over for long enough to need to use the ’fresher. It didn’t work well because we were usually in there ourselves.

Pat got all the data-chasing and pattern-spotting software his heart desired, and enough processing power to provide practical, real-time access to any historical datum on board. Or behind us in the Solar System, although that was already becoming more and more out-of-date as Einstein effect started to mount up. But historians aren’t in a hurry.

Herb received the power to seal off his quadrant of the room at will with two mirror walls that would not pass light or sound in either direction, within which he could not-write in privacy.

So did Balvovatz, but I doubt he got much writing done, because he never activated his field if he was alone in there, and never stopped smiling when he came out. He told me years later, weeping drunk, that it was the first place he had ever lived that a woman who did not love him desperately would come to. I laughed so hard he stopped weeping and began laughing just about the time I quit laughing and started to cry.

For myself, I settled for two major infrastructure improvements. First, a robot that made French Press style coffee from fresh-ground recently roasted beans on demand and adulterated it to my taste; it claimed to be fully automatic, but actually you had to push a little button. And second, a bunk that was as comfortable as any in the Sheffield… and on top of which I, my roommates, and Richie and Jules could all have piled at once and done jumping jacks without making it creak, much less rip free of the bulkhead. Nothing in that room was breakable by the time I was done with it.

As soon as we got back to his luxury digs, he started bringing up Brasil Novo stats for me. Normally I’d rather read figures in printout than onscreen… but what he used for a monitor was an entire wall, bigger than any two walls in my place. So I sank back into an armchair so comfortable I kept murmuring thanks to it, sipped Matty’s excellent Scotch, and learned.

Brasil Novo is roughly the same size as Mars, but thanks to a smaller iron core, it is twelve percent less dense, giving it a surface gravity of .33 gee rather than Mars’s .38 gee. It lies more than 1.1 AU from its star—but Immega 714 is slightly brighter than Sol, so it seems normally bright in the sky for a sun, despite being ten percent farther away.

Here is how the planet stacks up beside Terra:

And here, for perspective, is a set of similar comparisons between Terra and another reasonably well-known planet of comparable gravity:

Brasil Novo comes complete with two moons, quite similar to those of Mars. For that reason, and for emotional/political reasons less susceptible to analysis, it had been rather illogically decided to name them, too, Phobos and Deimos.

“What difference does it make?” Matty asked when I raised the issue. “Nobody’s likely to confuse them in conversation with the ones we left eighty-five light-years behind. And very soon after arrival, everyone is going to become sharply aware that those two moons will have radically different effects than their namesakes, at least.”

Always happy to play straightman to a speaker who truly enjoys his subject. “Why’s that?”

“Because of something Mars lacks that Bravo has in great plenty.”

It took me a second to recognize “Bravo” as an Anglicized contraction of Brasil Novo. It was the first time I’d heard the shorthand, but it would by no means be the last. Within a year, even the two dozen or so real Brazilianos aboard would be using it. “What’s that?” I repeated.

He blinked at me. “Water. Teratons of water. The original Phobos and Deimos have tidal effects, but there’s not enough surface water on Mars to make them visible. Bravo is going to have very complicated tides, and I suspect its version of a king tide will be an emperor tide.”

I thought about it. “So, moist air, then.”

“It better be.”

The only reason it didn’t get tedious saying “Why is that?” to this man was that he always answered, and the answer was usually interesting. So I said it again.

“We expect, or at least hope, to live there. So we’ll probably want to breathe a lot. You have probably noticed that we are not carrying along with us in this bucket five hundred and fifty Mars-type low-pressure masks, plus several thousands more for replacements and the next several generations of offspring, nor are we spending any time drilling in them or trying to become acclimatized to them. If not, you’ve surely noticed that you don’t wear one when you’re working on the Upper Ag Deck.”

He paused, and did not say, “Think it through.”

Let’s see. Atmosphere breathable without assistance. But even less gravity than Mars or home. So to get Terra-standard pressure, there are only two possibilities: the atmosphere must be thicker, or it must be much higher in oxygen.

Okay, take Terra. Its surface gets that much pressure from lying under a troposphere about twelve kilometers high. Brasil Novo’s lower atmosphere would need to stand an unreasonable thirty-six klicks tall to yield that much pressure. So…

“The place is a tinderbox!” I exclaimed.

He shrugged carelessly. “The drier parts of it, yes. The air is a little over thirty percent oxygen. Here, take a look at this.” He gestured shamanically with his hand, working some virtual remote control only he could see, and the wall display changed to:

“Clearly it’s going to be a warm, moist planet, by human standards. A jungle world, very much like the Amazon Basin of Old Brasil back on Terra, I imagine. Its fauna seem to be fantastically better at photosynthesis than ours. But your guess is correct: that thirty percent oxygen is going to make for severe fire danger. I suspect that if an expedition to one of the drier regions were to be struck by lightning, the lucky ones would be those killed outright on the spot. I doubt the rest could outrun the flames.”

There are times when I’m happier to have a vivid imagination than I am other times.

“But there will be no shortage of damp places. Bravo has almost as much salt water cover as Terra—a bit more than half its total surface, compared to Terra’s seventy percent. What you get basically is three major continents, more or less evenly spaced around the globe, each supporting a large dense jungle, with a major river flowing out of each, as in the Terran Amazon or Congo. There are also several large continental islands analogous to Australia, and if you’ll pardon the technical terminology, umpty gazillion smaller islands, ranging in size from humungous to teeny-weeny.”

“Okay, got it. The farther from the seashore, the more fire danger… but there’s a lot of seashore.”

He nodded. “The planet’s axial tilt is only fifteen degrees, as compared to Terra’s twenty-three point four five degrees. So there will be distinct seasons… but less pronounced than on Earth. No freezing winters. No polar ice caps.”

That was good. I hate wearing stanfields—as long underwear is called in Canada, for reasons probably lost to history and certainly unknown to me. A world without snowdrifts was just fine with Joel. And no polar ice meant more of the total surface available to live on; more places to put usable seashore.

“And the day/night cycle—”

That one I could address. “—is nearly identical to Mars. Twenty-four hours, thirty-something minutes. Uh, thirty-seven.”

“Of course, that must be what the Zog has you using on the Upper Deck. Well, the farming is probably going to be even better on Bravo than it is in Zogland.”

“Really?”

He caused images to slideshow on his wall, some still, some moving—and all striking. “As you can see, the place is tectonically quite active. Volcanic mountain ranges. Good thing; it keeps the atmosphere replenished. So volcanic ash fertilizes the land—and the mountains present useful minerals and metals which we reach by blasting a little bit sideways instead of digging way down and hauling it back up. But from a peasant’s point of view, the best part is going to be the weather: probably the most stable climate humans have yet encountered.”

Well, I hadn’t said it in several minutes now. “Why is that, Matty?”

“Consider the geography.” He smiled. “Or bravography, if you will.”

“I won’t, but you go ahead.”

“Thank you. Look at those three major continents. All more or less equatorial. Roughly evenly spaced. Each of them will have a bravographically anchored transportation zone, where jungle trees pump a regular fountain of water into the atmosphere. Ergo, climate patterns will be anchored, too, with weather infinitely more stable and reliable than anyplace in the Solar System.”

I understood what he meant when I saw the planet in 3-D projection. Terra is continually plagued by nerve-racking El Niño events because the committee that designed it (it had to be a committee) inexplicably omitted to place a large jungle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to anchor that evaporation zone. Bravo lacked this defect. “And that stable weather forecast will be… gray skies, lots of clouds? Rain in the morning giving way to rain in the afternoon, followed by a high probability of rain all night?”

“In general, yes, around the equator. With more temperate zones to north and south. But the three big continents themselves will be fairly temperate, and covered with boreal forest.”

“A lot of our oldest myths will still work.”

He nodded happily. “And some others will become for us historical curiosities, requiring footnotes. On Terra, there tend to be large deserts to the north and south of all the jungle areas, including the Sahara, Kalahari, Gobi, Patagonian, and Sonoran deserts. But Bravo does not seem to have real deserts, probably thanks to its more favorable climate distribution.”

“Okay by me,” I said. “I never met a desert I liked much.”

“Oh, I have!” he said emphatically. “I’ll miss them. Splendid places to do astronomy. But by surrendering them, I’ll get to see something unique in their place. I’ve seen a desert. I’ve lived in a few. But so far, as far as I know, nobody has yet seen a Hungry Ghost with his own personal eyeballs, much less spent time in one.” He sounded gleeful at the prospect.

“A Hungry Ghost?”

“A firestorm the size of a state or province.”

The name sort of explained itself to an extent. One-third gee, and a teeming stable biosphere—the land would be lush with life. The trees must grow to fantastic heights, and sprawl across the sky in the competition for sunlight. But the air they spread through was nearly a third oxygen, fifty percent more than a sensible planet needed… which they themselves were replenishing! Let things get dried out in the stable weather, let the ground cover vegetation and tree droppings crisp up nicely into tinder and kindling, let one of the inevitable sparks occur in a very bad place…

“Tesla’s eyebrows, Matty! It must be all the circles of Hell.”

“Worse, I think.” The bastard was still gleeful. “I’m not saying those were fun, but they all stayed put. Once you reported to your Circle and took your assigned spot in the lake of burning pitch, you pretty much knew your address and postal code for the next quadrillion eternities. But Bravo has more sunlight and higher temperatures than Earth, so—”

“—so it’s going to have serious winds.”

“Sometimes. And sometimes hurricanes. Primarily in tropical ocean regions. But also in high elevation land plateaus… where forests tend to dry out.”

“Oh, that’s not good!” Now I fully understood the aptness of the name he’d picked. I had all too vivid a mental picture of a firestorm, the size of Central British Columbia, say… that lurched and lunged randomly across the landscape at hurricane speeds, gulping biomass like a drunken sailor on a spree, spewing flames to altitudes previously reached in human experience only by mushroom clouds and weather balloons. Hungry Ghost indeed! Like the Hungry Ghosts I had encountered in my quick surface reading of Tibetan Buddhist mythology: spirits consumed with lust for things that never satisfied, hunger that could not be eased, thirst that nothing could quench. Damned souls condemned to yearn forever, and destroy all they touched, knowing it was pointless. I wondered if a Hungry Ghost typically had an eye, like a hurricane, and how long you’d have to live if you ever found yourself in one. Would it be even theoretically possible to move quickly and correctly enough to stay in such an eye, until the Ghost’s terrible Hunger burned itself out?

“But that’s only going to worry certifiably insane explorer types like me, who go looking for danger,” he said with a chuckle. “Farmers who pick their homestead site intelligently, on the other hand, are probably going to be very happy people in Saudade.”

Incongruous image of pigs on the Ag Deck. “Sow what?”

“That will be the name chosen for the first town we’ll settle. You heard it here first.”

“How can you be so sure, this far in advance?”

“Because that’s what I strongly feel it should be, and nobody aboard with a contrary opinion is a bigger bully than me.”

“It would be impolite to argue with my host. Say the name again, and tell me what it means.”

“Saudade. ‘Sow,’ like a female hog. ‘Da,’ like the Russian for ‘probably not.’ ‘Day,’ light come an’ me wan’ go home.”

“You can’t possibly know that song.”

“Neither can you, son. And if you do, you ought to know the word ‘saudade.’ It’s a Portuguese word, and the heart of the Portuguese music called fado. You could say it is as important a word to fado as ‘soul’ is to blues, or ‘cool’ is to jazz. And as difficult to define.”

It came back. “I know that word. I’ve seen it written, anyway, I just had no idea it was pronounced like that. It means… well, sort of…”

“The best I’ve heard it rendered into Basic so far,” Matty said, “is ‘the presence of absence.’”

“The thing you know because it isn’t there.”

He nodded. “Which, when you think about it, is a pretty fair description of what powers this ship.”

“Do you understand the relativistic engine, Matt?”

He smiled. “You flatter me. That’s my point: there is some reason to believe there’s literally nothing there.”

I shrugged. “Big deal. Is nothing sacred?”

He winced politely. “I asked George R once, what do you guys actually do down there in the Hole? He looked around, leaned close, lowered his voice, and told me the secret. They strap toast onto a cat’s back and toss it in the air.”

And he waited. I knew there had to be a gag, and if I didn’t guess what it was, he would win the exchange I had begun by essaying a pun. Well, it served me right. “But how do dat make de ship go, Mr. Interlocutor,” I asked ritually, conceding defeat.

“They butter the toast, you see.”

Light belatedly dawned. “Ah. Of course. The toast must fall butter side down—”

“—but the cat must land on its feet.” He spread his hands: QED. “Hence the array spins forever, generating power.”

It was a good gag; I grinned in surrender. “It’s so simple once someone explains it.”

He accepted my sword by saying, “To answer your question seriously, I confess the word that best describes my understanding of relativism is probably saudade.”

“The mystery of the ages,” I said, thinking to agree.

“No,” he said with a sudden seriousness that took me by surprise. “That it is not. Not even the mystery of this age.”

“Uh… I’ll bite. What is the mystery of the ages, this one included?” I said, trying for lightness.

He kept frowning, and had stopped meeting my eyes. “Fermi’s Paradox.”

It took a second. “Oh. ‘Where is everybody?’ you mean.”

He made a single nod. “Nobody even talks about it anymore. We know that life can come to exist in the universe, because it did, once that we know of. We know life can evolve sufficient intelligence to leave its star, because we’ve done it. It is, granted, conceivable that this might occur only once every twelve billion years or more.” He made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “But as for me, I find the creation myth in Genesis considerably more plausible.”

“Didn’t someone settle this back before the Dark Age?” I asked. “Webb? Wrote a book listing forty-nine possible solutions to Fermi’s Paradox—and demolished them one by one, leaving only the fiftieth solution, namely: we’re alone?”

He looked as if he’d chased his lemon with milk. “Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree—the highest that capillary action can push it. Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could ‘explain,’ often elegantly… over and over again… and had to, because the explanations kept falling apart at the first hard-data-push. Things like the Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there… yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.

“They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote… but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society—even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models, which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that.”

“Things got worse in that direction soon.”

“Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn’t deliver. It got to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that meant anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn’t even discuss what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence and omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science handed the world over to Nehemiah Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred ‘intelligent design’ to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix. Unfortunately, not much.”

I was getting a little dizzy. “I think I lost you around that last curve, Matty. What’s your answer to the mystery? If intelligent life has arisen more than once, in this corner of the cosmos, where is everybody?”

He drew in a long slow breath, and held it for long enough to make me think of the breathing routine I still used at the start of meditation. I kept on thinking of it as he exhaled, and his frown melted away and his face smoothed over and his body language relaxed. He fiddled with his remote, and said, “Authorities differ, but for my money, probably the closest thing to intelligent life we’ll find on Bravo is the spit-tooth sloth,” and the wall showed what I hoped was an enlarged image of the ugliest creature I had ever seen. “Admittedly it is difficult to assess intelligence based on observations made from orbit. Once a probe is fairly sure a given life-form is not a serious threat to man, it moves on to other things that might be. But the sloth’s competition is not impressive.”

It seemed clear he was changing the subject, and he had been so helpful and generous with his time, that was fine with me; his reasons were none of my business. We moved on to an interesting discussion of exotic fauna like hoop snakes, snippers, blimps, and the truly disgusting rocket slugs, which dodge predators by expelling feces so violently they shoot into the air and glide great distances. A whole pod of such frightened slugs, Matty said, can apparently fill the air with a ghastly green mist….

Later on, though, after I’d read up on spit-tooth sloths, I became less certain he’d been changing the subject. A sloth sits high in one of those preposterously tall trees, waiting with infinite patience until something preyish-looking happens to wander by below. Then she (once the males are done with their fertilizing, their only remaining function is as hibernation food) spits out a poison tooth, with high velocity and great accuracy. It drops the prey for so long she has time to slowly descend, retrieve it, and bring it back up the tree to consume at her leisure.

In other words, they conceal themselves perfectly, take no risks at all, and attack without warning or mercy.

I would recall that later in the voyage.

Things gradually settled, as they always seem to do eventually, into a routine.

The second year of the voyage of the RSS Sheffield was eventful only by ship standards.

People you don’t know fell in and out of love, had and did not have babies, worked and goofed off, succeeded and failed at amusing themselves and each other, did mediocre work and accomplished minor miracles and screwed up completely, were and were not happy.

Al Mulherin, said to be the best physicist aboard, and Linda Jacobs, editor of the ship newspaper Sheffield Steel, were the first couple to birth a child, a boy they named Coyote, and a dozen more babies had joined the colony before the year was out.

A machinist named C. Platt got careless with a torch and became our first death. He was not widely mourned. Not even his roommates knew what the C stood for.

One of the residential decks beat all the rest at soccer, and you’d be shocked to hear which one, if you cared.

Relativist Kindred had a fairly gaudy nervous breakdown and for a couple of weeks his colleagues had to cover for him, but this had been expected and planned for and caused no difficulties. It would become a roughly annual occurrence. I think most of us colonists half expected that Peter Kindred was going to Burn Out eventually, at some point along the way—but none of his fellow Relativists did. His shift was taken by Dugald Beader, the only one of the Relativists I haven’t mentioned yet, because it took me months to meet him. Dugald was sort of the backward of the flamboyantly eccentric Kindred—quiet and sane and empathetic, with a diabolical dry sense of humor. It was said that he’d been involved in the design of the Sheffield somehow, but he didn’t talk about it.

The story of the year was probably the totally unexpected marriage of the Zog and Coordinator Grossman. Nobody had a problem with the match; they were both widely admired, and when you thought about it, they were perfect for each other. It had simply never occurred to anyone aboard that either party might have time for a social life, let alone an active one.

He moved into her quarters, and they honeymooned by sealing the door for a week. Zog left me in charge in his absence, high praise.

So I got to be the only one in the ship to whom Machinist Platt’s death mattered much.

A proctor named Hal DeMann showed up at the Bravo farm one day, pushing a body bag on a gurney. He looked like an old-time pirate or gunfighter, but had a warm, soothing voice, a good combination in his line of work. He explained that Colonist Platt—maybe that was what the C stood for—had left instructions that he wished his body to be recycled, so that he might always be a part of the colony’s ecosystem. But old C had given no specifics as to just how this should be done, leaving the question up to the relevant authorities.

Who turned out to be me.

The problem itself was admittedly trivial. Solving it was not. There was certainly plenty of dirt to plant him in, and there were several places where he might even prove useful as fertilizer, and as a check on how Bravonian conditions would alter the usual processes of decomposition and fertilization.

But there was not enough dirt to plant him two meters deep. And we had long since learned that no fence is always foolproof. Having his corpse dug up and eaten by pigs or goats or dogs would technically have met the requirements of Platt’s will, and I was tempted to, as the poet Buckley said, just “scoop some sand over his wig, and swoop the scene.” I was fairly sure he wouldn’t have complained, or even minded.

But I was absolutely sure I knew what the Zog would say if he came home from his honeymoon to find some of the leftovers being dragged across his Ag Deck by one of his pigs.

Devising a solution wasn’t all that hard. Implementing it was. Kathy and I dug as deep a hole as we could, about a meter, and laid Platt in it. Then we stood on either side and covered the corpse over completely, me with broken glass and busted springs, she with curry powder and a spray bottle of lion urine. (Chemically simulated, of course. Zog had fetched a lot of odd things along from Sol.) Then we replaced all the dirt we’d dug up, leaving a mound of loose earth, but one that was unlikely to be disturbed.

The first problem I had with implementation of this simple solution should be obvious. Nowadays it takes something close to total destruction of the brain to beat the autodocs. I’ve told you the damage was done by a torch, and you know where the brain is generally kept: work it out. The smell alone was memorable.

My second problem was less gruesome, but bothered me for a longer time. When we were done with our shoveling, Kathy and I stood there for a few moments, catching our breath and thinking deep thoughts. And then as I was about to turn and walk away, she said, “Shouldn’t we say something?” Phrased that way, it meant, “Shouldn’t you say something?”

And of course I was in charge. And of course I should say something; it didn’t seem right to just plant the man and go. But of course I had absolutely no idea what kind of words the deceased would have wanted, did not even know if he subscribed to one of the religions humane enough to be permitted under the Covenant or not. If nobody knew what his first initial stood for, there was no point posting a query about his metaphysics on the ship bulletin board. I had no all-purpose nondenominational homilies on tap; I had experienced only one death, and hadn’t heard a word anyone had said at the funeral.

I stood there for a long time feeling inadequate, stymied by the question, hating Kathy for raising it. She waited. And finally I heard myself say, “Let the universe take note of this man’s passing. Somebody should. He was one of the bravest adventurers our species ever produced: he died on the way to the stars.” That night instead of sleeping I thought of better things I might have said, and said them in my head to a man I had never known.

The Zog told me I’d done well when he returned. He’d had a different spot in mind for the ship’s cemetery, but was fine with the one I’d picked. I warmed to his praise. But it took me a while to stop resenting Kathy for asking that question.

The next few weeks were dark.

Disaster on that scale can demoralize a community—or draw it together. The crucial factor seems to be, how fast does the fear ease?

It was touch and go. Dr. Amy and her three other Healers had their work cut out for them. Coordinator Grossman and the Zog, Governor Roberts, Governor-General Cott and his partner, Chief Engineer Cunningham, even Captain Bean himself, all made a point of wandering around the ship with cheerful optimistic expressions fixed on their faces. It did help, a little. But only a little.

How do you tell someone falling through the universe at nearly the speed of a photon there’s nothing to worry about? When the most valued, pampered members of the ship’s company can die and worse than die, who is safe? I don’t think any of us had really expected any dying to begin until we got to Bravo. Now all our lives and plans and hopes depended on four particular people remaining not only alive but healthy enough to work for every day of the next fifteen years.

And that was the heart of our darkness: theirs.

You know the date. Everyone does. Everyone always will.

If we’re lucky.

Everyone everywhere has their own story. For me, this is the way the world ended. Not with a whim, but with a banker.

When I did emerge from the Infirmary, nothing had changed, and everything was different.

Existence had lost all point.

For the first time ever, it was not hyperbole. It really had.

Fine. Tell that to the goats. Their existence had a point: being fed and milked. It seemed enough to them. Tell it to the rabbits. Their existence had all the purpose it would ever need: fucking. The chickens thought the point of existence is hatching eggs; the rooster held a different opinion; but both were convinced. The vegetables did not even dignify the question with an asking.

Being around that kind of naïve certainty was soothing. And I had made a deal with those critters. It did not contain an escape clause letting me off the hook in the event of solar disruption or even disappearance of local gravity. They had kept their end, so far, by living.

Also, I needed to be somewhere that was not Rup-Tooey. I had been sleeping like a baby there, lately. Alone, waking up wailing every few hours, wetting the bed. Not a good thing in free fall.

So I was on the Bravo Ag Deck. I’d thought of going up to the Horn and playing Anna for whoever was there. But I’d decided that if somehow I did succeed in blowing everything that was in my heart out the end of my sax, I might fail to inhale again. And so might my listeners.

By now I found the steamy smells of Bravo—or what we had imagined they might be like—conducive to inhaling. It would have been a terrific planet, if we could have gotten there, I remember thinking.

But of course, the smells were much less intense and local than I was used to. Now that the Sheffield was in free fall again, we were back on free-fall air-conditioning. That translates to constant heavy airflow in any cubic where humans spent time. It has to. In zero gee, unless the air is kept very well stirred at all times, the carbon dioxide you exhale tends to form a sphere around your head and smother you.

The mood I was in, I’d almost have accepted that to have the good Bravo smells back, rich in my nose again. But of course, I never would, now.

I was wearing the Zog’s treasured old Japanese gardening shirts, which he’d picked up on a trip to Terra in his youth. Tiger Kotani owned a similar one. It was a PreCollapse garment, made in prerepublican Japan in respectful imitation of an even older style, cream with turquoise trim, covered with colorful images of samurai, peasants, beautiful maidens, pagodas, mountains, and tall Noble fir trees. Just wearing it made me feel I could talk to plants, and understand their replies. In zero gee it flapped around me like wings.

I had no responsibilities at the moment. Over a dozen of us had chosen to emulate Peter Kindred—so far—but fewer than half of those had left instructions to bury them. I guess if they’d seen any point in contributing to our ecosystem, they would not have opted to leave it. Those few who had chosen the oldest form of eternal rest had long since been tucked beneath soil. Admittedly it had proven more difficult without gravity to help keep the dead moving in the desired direction. I decided to see how the goats were doing in their improvised zero-gee enclosure. I had a pretty good idea I knew what the rabbits were doing.

“Citizen Johnston,” the Sheffield said softly, “Captain Bean requires your presence on the Bridge immediately. Acknowledge, please.”

Requires? Of a free citizen?

I thought about how much the Captain must be in the mood for backtalk, right about now. That he was still functional at all was a miracle. He had expected to carry the heaviest of responsibilities for another fourteen years. Now he had none. No further piloting was ever going to be needed.

“I’m on my way.”

He’s going to announce his retirement, and ask me to take his job, I thought. Joel Johnston, Star Pilot! How old was I the first time I ever thought those words—six?

It was the first even mildly humorous thought I could recall having in… some period of time. That couldn’t be good, could it?

Along the way, I checked both the official news site, Sheffield Steel, and the barely tolerated unofficial one Jules ran despite Richie’s help, The Straight Shit. Neither had word of anything unusual or even interesting. In fact, each had barely been updated since the day before Kindred had wasted us all. Who cared anymore if RUP-0 sector got their plumbing problem under control, or young Sparks Reilly succeeded in adding another thousand digits to pi?

I was surprised to note that one of the few headings showing new material at each source, besides obits, was the wedding announcements. The same news that had triggered fifteen suicides had also apparently inspired nineteen couples, one triad, and one quartet to get off the dime and make a commitment for the future. Since there wasn’t going to be one, it seemed incredibly sad to me. What shall it profit a man if he gaineth his soul, yet he loseth the whole universe? How could you have children now?

Kathy’s group, I noticed, had replaced a suicide husband with a new wife. Until then, I had not consciously realized I’d been toying with the idea of trying to get back together with her, in some way, on some basis. As soon as I did realize it, I knew it had been a bad idea—sheer loneliness, looking to get comfort without the trouble of pretending to get to know someone first. I’d already screwed up Kathy quite enough. I had come aboard this bucket of mildew loudly proclaiming my intention to die a bachelor—it was time to put my vast, useless money where my big dumb mouth was.

I had a momentary image of myself dying all alone. And suddenly I saw that the me in it was the same age I was now. Right then and there in the corridor, I became aware for the first time that if I continued as I was going, if I did not make some kind of drastic change, it might be no more than a week or two before the Zog would be planting me.

I would like to say I froze in my tracks, consumed with horror at this revelation, and resolved to race to Dr. Amy for help as soon as I’d finished whatever the Old Man had in mind. It did disturb me, but I didn’t break stride. And I was pretty sure I’d already seen Amy’s best moves.

Well, when you reach that mental state, about the only thing that can save you is for random chance or intelligent design or the Lord God of the Heavenly Host or whatever you want to call the source of all the irony in this universe to come kick you square in the ass with His almighty reinforced boot.

I got mine around the other side, that’s all.

By the time I’d finally gotten the last of my laughter out, airflow had nudged me back within reach of the bulkhead I’d come through to enter the Bridge, and I used it to launch myself toward the meeting.

I tried to talk myself out of it all the way there. I guess I’m just not that big a man. When I reached the group, I used a deck chair to brake myself, and looked Conrad of Conrad in the eyes. For half a second.

“Hey, Connie,” I said.

And turned away. “Dorothy, good to see you again. Alex, I see you again. Crave pardon, ma’am, we haven’t been introduced, my name is Joel Johnston.” I bowed as graciously as I had free-fall skills for.

“Alice Dahl,” she said crisply. That was a scary cello she was playing, all right. She did not acknowledge my bow with even a nod, or offer to shake, even with her non-gunhand. Maybe she didn’t have one. She was a golem.

Jinny said, “Joel, I’d like you to meet my husband, Andrew J. Conrad. Andrew, this is Joel.”

He and I exchanged about a hundred thousand words by eye traffic in three seconds, and each put out a hand at the same instant. I liked the man. The mustache looked silly, but I knew it had not been his idea.

“It is an honor to meet you, Captain Conrad,” I said. “Congratulations on your historic achievements. And I speak for the moment only of the latest ones. First man to exceed c. First master of a transluminal passenger vessel. First and only man ever to match orbits with a relativistic starship in transit.” I thought of another one. “And one of only seven creatures we know of who’ve ever been in the close vicinity of an exploding star and lived to tell about it. Welcome to our covered wagon. We hope you’ll find our technology quaint.”

He didn’t preen, or look smug, or sneer arrogantly, or try to pretend he didn’t enjoy the praise. He nodded and said, “Please call me Andrew. Thank you, Joel. I’m glad to be here.”

“You’re welcome, Andrew.”

“Jinny told me you’re a quick study. I can see she was right; you seem up to speed. We’re all lucky to be here.” His face clouded. “And I can’t hope to tell you how much I wish I’d built the Mercury years sooner. Centuries ago. Even last year….”

“We all do, son,” Captain Bean said softly. “Play the cards in front of you.”

Andrew nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s good advice.”

Van Cortlandt spoke up, his voice a pleasant tenor. “How did you ever figure out what was happening in time to run?”

“We were fortunate enough to be in Terra’s shadow when she lit up.”

“And you’re sure destruction was complete?”

“We reached Ganymede with a thirty-three-minute lead over the wavefront, and spent five minutes talking to telepaths on the ground there. They were just receiving information consistent with the annihilation of Terra. We jumped again, and thirty minutes later telepaths on Saturn confirmed the destruction of Ganymede, with timing consistent with a solar explosion. At that point, I gave her the gun.”

“Andrew’s quick reactions saved us all,” Jinny said proudly, and his shoulders widened.

“What can you tell us about her drive?” I asked.

Solomon spoke up. “The subject came up, as you may imagine. Captain Conrad discussed the nature of the Mercury’s novel propulsion system frankly and forthrightly at some length, using short simple words, and continuing until the last of us lost the struggle to pretend we had the faintest clue what he was talking about. I myself gleaned only that its basic principle is—sometimes—called Drastic Irrelevancy. Have I got that right, Captain?”

“Drastic Irrelevancy Synergism, yes,” Andrew agreed. “You see, it’s… but then you don’t. I’m sorry.”

“Is there even a Sunday supplement shorthand version, albeit grossly oversimplified or crudely approximate, that you could give us?” Lieutenant van Cortlandt asked.

Andrew pursed his mouth in thought a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said. “In a week, I could probably provide Relativist Short with enough tools to begin thinking about the first part of the answer you want. Uh, there are a lot of parts. Yourself, and a few others here, a month would probably do it. For sure,” he amended, seeing van Cortlandt’s expression.

Richard Conrad had put up with the unnatural state of being ignored for as long as he was prepared to. Ten percent louder than anyone had spoken so far, he said, “We’ve failed to cover this already. Can we for the love of privacy just accept for now that the Mercury is towed by a fleet of hyperphotonic swans under an enchantment, and move on?”

He was now merely a man like any other, without a multiplanet empire behind him anymore, and everyone in the room probably knew it. But he was also Conrad of Conrad, and had been all his life. We all flinched at his whip-crack interruption and fell silent, and the first one of us who felt capable of obeying him did so.

Captain Bean said to Andrew, “Captain, I have a confession to make. While I’m no mathematician, I’ve always thought myself capable of simple kitchen arithmetic, at least.” Both his lieutenants made brief nasal sounds. “And ever since I received your hail… amend that: ever since I convinced myself your hail was not a hallucination, I’ve been using part of my mind to try and calculate what speed you were making. But there are a few more variables than I can handle, and I keep losing my decimal point. Curiosity trumps pride: Will you tell us your top speed?”

Conrad of Conrad—there were just too many Conrads present; I was going to have to start thinking of him as Richard somehow—started speaking at the same instant Andrew did, obviously trying to cut him off. I was surprised when Andrew didn’t yield, then again when the old man did.

“…not possible to answer your question, in the strictest sense,” Andrew was saying, “but I’ll do my best. You’ve traveled roughly 10.4 lights in a little over 6.41 years—your years, I mean. Thirteen years for us back home. We caught up in a little over six and a half weeks, by your clock.” He sensed that he was taking too long. “But in the terms you’re using, our equivalent of a maximum real-world velocity works out to be on the order of 19.6 c.”

Several of us either sucked in air or expelled it noisily. You could almost hear a whining sound as many mental calculators began operating at full capacity.

How far away was Brasil Novo, at twenty c? I could make a stab at it in terms of objective years, what Andrew had called “real-world” time, but when it came to how much time it would seem to take for a passenger, I lacked a basis from which to even guess.

Screw that: the answer was, a hell of a lot closer than it had been, whether you were speaking subjectively or objectively.

And real-world years, out there in the subliminal universe, had more than academic importance, too. They were the measure of how long we had to warn the rest of the colonies, before all their skies turned to fire.

“Evelyn, what—?”

That was as far as I could go. I could not even form a rational question.

No, wait. Yes I could.

“Evelyn, why?”

She had just let me think over an answer for a good half a minute. I gave her the same. So did the others. Jinny watched her intently, with no expression.

When she was ready, Evelyn said, “Joel, you were the first person I ever saw defy my grandfather. You are the only one I know who ever got away with it. You gave me the inspiration to become a musician—the only one in four entire generations of my family—in case perhaps that was the source of your courage. And it was! You’re the only man I’ve ever known who thought it was a great thing to go to the stars—and went.”

“But—”

“Shut up. That’s part of it. You were the very first adult I ever met who took me seriously. Who did not talk down to me, because I was small. You treated me as an equal with an unfortunate height problem you were too polite to notice.”

“That was—”

“I asked you to shut up. Because of that, you were the first adult I ever allowed to have any faintest idea how smart I was. Previous experiments had worked out badly. But it didn’t bother you a bit to need my help, or to get it. It didn’t even surprise you much.”

“That’s how my father always treated me at that age. I didn’t know any other way to react.”

“You were the first grown-up to remember my name the second time he saw me. And before you let me help you, you asked if it would get me in trouble.”

I tried to remember. Was all this true? It had been a long time ago.

But then, it had been longer for her than for me: thirteen years to my six since we’d cannoned into each other in the corridors of the North Keep—how could she remember so much better than I?

“You didn’t laugh at me.” She hesitated, then went on more softly, “Even when I told you I was going to marry you.” Then far more softly, “And you were engaged then.”

Jinny snorted, but did not speak.

Evelyn made a small measured movement, and began to drift toward me. Snow used to fall at about that speed in the low gravity of Ganymede, once. She came with infinite grace, and her eyes seemed to get larger faster than the rest of her.

“Joel Johnston, you were the first man ever to write to me. You’re the longest pen pal I ever had. You are the only man who ever kept writing to me after it was clear that I was not going to have sex with him. No one else of either sex, ever, has given me their attention without expecting anything in return. My letters ended up having to be a tenth the size of yours, and carefully edited, thanks to Gran’ther Dick… and yours kept on coming anyway. And you are the only man I have ever known in my life or expected to who did not care one single solitary molecule of a damn how much money I had!”

She gently collided with me, for the second time in six of my years and thirteen of hers. She was taller, now. Her eyes were only decimeters from mine, this time. So was her mouth. Both her arms were around me. I had both of mine around her. I must have let go of my handhold again. The room literally spun around us. She twined her calves around mine, completing the free-fall embrace. Our bellies touched, and we both discovered my waxing erection.

“I bullied them into coming for you,” she said. “I said I would space myself if they did not. They knew I meant it. Right now, Gran’ther would rather cut off his own feet than lose fifty percent of the universe’s remaining supply of egg-laying Conrads.” Her voice dropped so low then that even I needed to follow her exaggerated lip movements to know she was adding, “But… he… is… going to.”

It wasn’t so much any of the words as looking at her mouth that forced me to kiss her.

Very little coherent thought took place during that kiss. So it must have gone on for a long time, because I had time to think that no woman in my life had ever given me her attention for so many years in a row for any reason, let alone without reasonable hope of any possible return. That she had done this for years before she’d ever heard me play a note. That she had learned to play because of me. That she was far and away the best kisser I had ever met or even fantasized. And that it would be very convenient if our first two children happened to take to the bass and drums. Drums first, no doubt.

Then our faces were whole decimeters apart again, and there was a ship around us.

“You are coming with us, right?” she asked solemnly.

“I’m coming with you,” I said just as solemnly.

We both grinned at the same instant. “This is insane, right?” I asked her.

“Believe it,” she agreed.

“Oh, thank heavens. For a second there I was afraid I was going sane.”

“Little danger of that,” Jinny said from across the room.

I glanced over at her, found her expressionless. I realized that not once during that timeless kiss had it even momentarily occurred to me that Jinny was watching us. It made me want to grin even wider, but it seemed politer not to. The disease had come close to killing me—but the cure was now complete. Andrew, poor bastard, was welcome to her. I wished him well, hoped he was genius enough to hold his own with her. He had licked lightspeed; maybe he could.

My heart suddenly sprang a leak, and joy started to leak out into reality. It began to sink in that I had no clear idea what was going to happen next, what I was going to do now. Or how I was going to live with myself afterward. I wanted with my whole heart to go with Evelyn, wherever she might go. But how could I leave so many of my friends—any of my friends—behind to die in the Sheffield? If I stayed, I could save at most one other life—if it hadn’t been for me, nobody would have lived—those and a dozen other rationalizations raced through my mind, but were of no help whatsoever.

Evelyn saw the change in my face. From her distance she could scarcely have helped it. “Joel, what’s wrong?”

I sighed. “I really hate with my whole heart the idea of leaving anyone at all to die of old age in this bucket. I don’t know if I can… I don’t know how to…” I did not even know how to express my dilemma, even to myself.

Dorothy Robb spoke up. “Am I the only one here comfortable with arithmetic?”

Everyone turned to stare at her.

She was frowning mightily. “Admittedly, the math does become hairy. But surely someone must know how to operate a calculator.”

“What do you mean, Dorothy?” Evelyn called.

She replied, “Joel, how many passengers does the Sheffield now carry?”

I wasn’t at all sure. Too many deaths lately, no time to keep the figures current. “Can we call it four hundred and fifty for now?”

She nodded and closed her eyes, saying, “So: nine passengers at a time yields a total of forty-five trips, with a series of geometrically decreasing trip lengths beginning with seventy-five light-years—we assume zero turnaround time for convenience—” She stopped speaking, but her lips kept moving. We all gave her time. After a while she said, “Call it very roughly a hundred and fifty-one years.”

My heart sank in my chest, but I nodded and kept going, needing to know just how bad it was. “How many could we transport in the first seventy or eighty years? You know, before we all die of old age.”

Dorothy gave me the look a grandmother gives a child who has just picked his nose in company. “Joel, Joel—those are a hundred and fifty-one real years.”

“Pardon—oh!” My heart leaped.

“Since this ship is doing nearly ninety-eight percent of the speed of light, that works out to… half a tick, now… a bit under thirty-three local, shipboard years.”

Blood roared in my ears. We could all live! Her figures assumed zero turnaround, zero downtime for maintenance, and a lot of other things—but it didn’t matter: the thing was doable. Andrew had saved us all.

This changed everything. For the first time since the quantum ramjet had gone out, I started to feel real hope. With it came a phantom memory of an ancient film about a man struggling with Time, who said to a companion near the end, “It’s not the despair—I can live with the despair. It’s the hope that’s killing me!”

Well, being killed beats being dead. I’d been dying for two dozen years now, since the moment of my birth. Another seventy-five years of it sounded very good.

If I could spend them with Evelyn.

That’s essentially all I have to tell you.

Governor-General Cott’s more formal account of the events of our voyage is vastly more complete, accurate, and factual. But it was felt that future generations will need more than facts. Too many of them make little or no sense without the subjective context. And it was decided that I was both best able to recount that story, from an insider’s unique perspective—and the one least occupied with other, more pressing duties.

You have them, too. We all do, now. We need to know for certain, just as soon as possible, whether our civilization has been crippled and nearly killed by stupendous bad fortune—of which there is certainly no shortage in the cosmos—or by enemy action. And either way, we need to figure out what needs to be done about that.

I do not doubt we will. But you must hurry. You have a limited time now to move yourselves and your entire civilization underground, including all the native and introduced flora and fauna you need to survive… before the wavefront of death arrives, from the very part of the sky you’ve always thought of as home. You will need to be at least several hundred meters underground when it arrives; several thousand would be even better.

Yours is the fourth world we have brought the news to. At each of them, I have been asked why I don’t simply stay? I’ve done my shift, and more. Why not let someone else take up the torch? Having miraculously managed, against incredible odds, to set my feet on solid ground once more, why would I ever contemplate leaving it again? Evelyn and I have a child to raise now, after all.

The best I can explain it is, I’ve lost my taste for living on planets. It always was overrated.

The narrator of an ancient poem by Tennyson “held his purpose firm, to sail beyond the sunset.” My wife and I—all of us—have actually done that.

It’s going to get interesting now.

This is an optional bonus: a sort of DVD Special Feature, “The Making of Variable Star,” in which I explain how I ended up being the one to tell you the story.

Feel free to save it for later, or skip it altogether. Its principal purpose is to save me from having to spend the next few years answering the same questions over and over, and I already suspect it’s probably not going to work.

Assignment in Eternity

The Best of Robert A. Heinlein

Between Planets

The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Citizen of the Galaxy

Destination Moon

The Door into Summer

Double Star

Expanded Universe: More Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein

Farmer in the Sky

Farnham’s Freehold

For Us, the Living

Friday

Glory Road

The Green Hills of Earth

Grumbles from the Grave

Have Space Suit—Will Travel

I Will Fear No Evil

Job: A Comedy of Justice

The Man Who Sold the Moon

The Menace from Earth

Methuselah’s Children

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

The Number of the Beast—

Orphans of the Sky

The Past Through Tomorrow

Podkayne of Mars

The Puppet Masters

Red Planet

Revolt in 2100

Rocket Ship Galileo

The Rolling Stones

Sixth Column

Space Cadet

The Star Beast

Starman Jones

Starship Troopers

Stranger in a Strange Land

Take Back Your Government

Three by Heinlein

Time Enough for Love

Time for the Stars

Tomorrow the Stars [ed.]

To Sail Beyond the Sunset

Tramp Royale

Tunnel in the Sky

The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag

Waldo & Magic, Inc.

The Worlds of Robert A. Heinlein

Variable Star (with Spider Robinson)

Antinomy

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Callahan and Company (omnibus)

The Callahan Chronicals (omnibus)

The Callahan Touch

Callahan’s Con

Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon

Callahan’s Key

Callahan’s Lady

Callahan’s Legacy

Callahan’s Secret

Copyright Violation

Deathkiller (omnibus)

The Free Lunch

God Is an Iron and Other Stories

Kill the Editor

Lady Slings the Booze

Lifehouse

Melancholy Elephants

Mindkiller

Night of Power

Off the Wall at Callahan’s

The Star Dancers (with Jeanne Robinson)

Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)

Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)

Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)

Telempath

Time Pressure

Time Travelers Strictly Cash

True Minds

User Friendly

Very Bad Deaths

Variable Star (with Robert A. Heinlein)

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

VARIABLE STAR

Copyright © 2006 by The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust and Spider Robinson

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ISBN: 978-0-7653-5168-5