Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “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.

  Very rich, she’d said. Yeah, and the Milky Way is rather roomy!

  The Conrad industrial/informational empire was larger than the Rothschild family, the Hanseatic League, Kinetic Sciences Interplanetary, and Rolls-Daiwoo combined, and only slightly smaller than the Solar System. Nothing like it could have existed before the advent of space travel—and perhaps it became inevitable in the first minute of Year One, as Leslie LeCroix was still shutting down the Pioneer’s engine on the virgin surface of Luna. The Conrads were a 150-year dynasty, every member of whom wielded wealth, power, and influence comparable to that of the Hudson’s Bay Company or Harriman Enterprises in their day. Their combined interests ranged from the scientific outpost on Mercury, to Oort Cloud harvest—to interstellar exploration as far as sixty-five light-years away. At that time there were well over a dozen starships either outgoing or incoming, and eight had already returned safely (out of a hoped-for eighteen), five of them bearing the riches of Croesus in one form or another. Three of those big winners had been Conrad ships.

  She gave me a minute—well, some indeterminate period. Finally she said, “Look, I have to land, now. Smithers wasn’t completely out of line to remind me. We… don’t like to hover, here. It’s just a bit conspicuous.”

  “Okay,” I said, to be saying something. “Where’s here?”

  “In a minute. Silver: I relieve you.”

  “Yes, Jinny.” She took the stick and we dropped three thousand meters rapidly enough to give me heart palpitations.

  Which nearly became cardiac arrest when the ground came rushing up, and she failed to decelerate hard enough to stop in time! We were going to crash—

  —right through the imaginary glacier—

  —and into a deep valley, its floor lush and green and inviting and, best of all, still hundreds of meters below us. She landed us, without a bump, in a small clearing that from the air had looked indistinguishable from dozens of others, to me at least. But the moment she shut down, hoses and cables sprouted from the forest floor and began nurturing Silver. Ahead of us was a huge boulder, the size of a truck; as I watched, a large doorway appeared in it, facing us.

  “We’re here,” she said.

  “I ask again: Where is here?”

  She shook her head. “It isn’t.”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “Isn’t anywhere.”

  I turned my head just enough to be looking at her out of the corner of my eye. “Here isn’t anywhere.”

  “Right.”

  I closed my eyes. If I had just stayed back home on the farm, by now I might have been making enough of a crop to afford a hired man. That would have freed me up to do some courting—in a frontier society with considerably looser rules about premarital experimentation than contemporary Terra.

  But I knew for a fact there was no one remotely like Jinny anywhere on Ganymede. Had known it for a fact, that is, even before learning that she was more well off than the Secretary General….

  No, I couldn’t take that in just yet. “I really really wish I could think of something more intelligent to say than, ‘What do you mean, “here isn’t anywhere”?’”

  She shrugged. “You tell me. If a place does not appear on any map, anywhere… if it doesn’t show in even the finest-grain satellite photos… if no wires or roads or paths run to it, no government takes mail to it or taxes from it, and nobody is from there… in what sense does it exist? There is no here. Just us.”

  “Here.”

  “Exactly.”

  I nodded and dismissed the matter. “And this is your home?”

  “One of them.”

  I nodded. “And your apartment on Lasqueti, of course. It must be weird having two homes.”

  She didn’t say a word or move a muscle.

  I turned to look at her. “More than two?”

  Silence. Stillness.

  “How many homes do you have, Jinny?”

  In a very small voice, she said, “Eight. Not counting the Lasqueti place.”

  “So?”

  “But three of them are off-planet!”

  “Naturally,” I agreed. “One winters in space.”

  “Oh, Joel, don’t be that way.”

  “Okay. Let’s go in.”

  She looked distressed. “Uh… if you are going to be that way, maybe it might be better to do it out here, before we go in.”

  I nodded again. Mr. Agreeable. “Sure. That makes sense. Okay.” Then, big: “How could you do this to me, Jinny?”

  She didn’t flinch or cringe or duck. “Think it through, Joel. Sleep on it. Tomorrow morning, you tell me: How could I have not done it?”

  I began an angry retort, and swallowed it. I had to admit I had not begun to think this thing through yet, and Dad always drilled into me that the time to open your mouth came after that. Besides, I already had a glimmering of what she meant. I filled my lungs, emptied them slowly and fully, and said, “You’re right. Okay, I’m prepared to be polite, now. Let’s go inside.”

  “You won’t have to be,” she said. “I promise you won’t see any family at all until tomorrow morning. I made them guarantee that. This is our Prom Night.”

  I frowned. “I wish I had an overnight bag. Change of socks, fresh shirt, my razor—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, and unlocked the doors.

  I let it go. Probably the contents of the slop chest here were finer than anything I owned. “All right. Invite me up to your place.”

  “Down, actually.”

  We opened our doors and got out. The roof of imaginary glacier did not exist from its underside; the moon and stars shone unimpeded overhead, a neat trick. But this was definitely not a natural ecology. The air was skin temperature, with an occasional breeze just slightly warmer. It smelled of dirt and green growing things, with just a little ozone tingle as if it had rained recently, though it had not. The loamy earth beneath my feet was rich, almost quivering with life; any farmer I knew back on Ganymede would have desperately envied it. Acres of it, at least a meter deep: wild, uncultivated, supporting nothing but trees, scrub, and inedible berries. Just lying there. Conspicuous nonconsumption. Start getting used to it, old son. I thought of saying something, but I knew Jinny would never understand. It’s funny: the very word “Terra” means “dirt”—and not one hungry terrestrial in a thousand has a clue how important, how precious it is. I shook my head.

  The door in that huge rock ahead of the car was indeed an elevator. Back when I was four I’d been in an elevator that nice. In Stockholm, when Dad came Earthside to pick up the Nobel. Like that one, this elevator had a live human operator, of advanced age and singular ugliness, who made it a point of pride to remain unaware of our existence: he happened to be leaving as we stepped in, and took us down a good fifty meters with him. The car descended with unhurried elegance. It gave me time to think about the kind of people who would live deep underground, in a place that did not exist… and still feel the need to pull the sky over them like a blanket. “Paranoid” didn’t seem to cover it.

  By happy chance the operator decided to pause and check the operation of the doors just as he was passing the floor we wanted; so intent was his inspection, we were able to escape unnoticed. This left us in a kind of reception room, so lavish as to remind me of the lobby of that hotel back in Stockholm. The carpet was grass. But
I didn’t get time to study the room; nearly at once I felt a tugging and turned to see a man older and uglier than the elevator operator trying to take my cloak. With some misgivings I let him have it, and that seemed to have been a mistake, for he simply handed it off to a small boy who suddenly appeared in my peripheral vision, and then literally threw himself at my feet and began loosening my shoes. I… reacted. If we’d been under normal gravity, on Ganymede or Mars, I think I’d have kicked his teeth in; as it was he went sprawling. But he took a shoe with him as he went, a trick I admired as much as I resented it. Jinny giggled. I recovered, removed the other shoe myself with as much dignity as I could muster, and handed it to him as he approached again. He reunited it with its twin, bowed deeply, and backed away.

  I turned to Jinny and forgot whatever I’d been about to say. Her own cloak and shoes had been magicked away by tall elves, and she looked… how do girls do that, anyway? One minute just be there, and the next, be there. They can do it without moving a muscle, somehow.

  “Good evening, Miss Jinny,” said a baritone voice from across the room. “Welcome home.”

  Standing just inside a door I had failed to notice was a man nearly as tall as me with a shaved head, wearing a suit that cost more than my tuition at Fermi Junior. Like us, and the various elves I’d seen, he wore no shoes. Presumably they would cobble us all new ones in the night.

  “Thank you, Smithers. This is—damn. Excuse me.” She lifted her phone-finger to her ear, listened for a few moments, frowned, said “Yes,” and broke the connection. “I’ve got to go, for just a few minutes. Get Joel situated, would you please, Smithers? I’m sorry, Joel—I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  “Okay.”

  She was gone.

  Somehow he was at my side, without having covered the intervening distance. “Good evening, Mr. Johnston. I’m Alex Rennick, master of the house at present. Welcome to the North Keep. Let me show you to your room, first, and then perhaps I can give you the ten-credit tour.”

  His eyes were gray, almost mauve. His head wasn’t shaved, it was depilated. Despite his height, a dozen subconscious cues told me he was earthborn. He was fit, and had an air of great competence and great confidence. I’m pretty good at guessing ages, given that everybody looks alike now, and I couldn’t pin him down any closer than the thirty-to-sixty zone. I found it interesting that he knew my last name without having been given it.

  “Thank you, Mr. Rennick. You are most kind. Please call me Joel.”

  “And I am Alex. Will you come this way, Joel?”

  I thought of an ancient joke, put it out of my mind, and followed him from the room. As I did I promised myself, solemnly, that no matter what wonders I was shown here, I would not boggle. No matter how staggeringly opulent the place proved to be, I would not let it make me feel inferior. My father had been a Nobel laureate, and my mother a great composer—how many of these people could say as much?

  “Do you have any questions to start?” he asked as we went.

  “Yes, Alex,” I said, memorizing the route we were taking. “Why does Jinny call you Smithers?”

  “I have no idea.” His tone was absolutely neutral, but somehow I knew I’d touched a sore spot. Either it bothered him not to know—or the answer was humiliating.

  “Ah,” I said, lowering my pitch. “To drive you crazy, then.” I was curious to see how he’d respond to an invitation to a jocular, between-us-men discussion of his mistress—whom I personally knew to be a handful and a half.

  He sidestepped effortlessly. “That would be redundant, I’m afraid.”

  “Have you worked here long?”

  “Yes.”

  I see. “How many people live here in… the North Keep, you said?”

  “The number varies.”

  His stinginess with information was beginning to mildly irritate me. “No doubt. But surely as master of the house you know its current value.”

  I halfway expected him to say “Yes, I do,” and clam up. But he wasn’t that kind of childish. Instead he used jujitsu. “There are eighty-four persons resident in the North Keep at the moment. By midnight the number will be ninety-two, and shortly before breakfast time tomorrow it is expected to drop back to eighty-nine.”

  “Ah.” I hesitated in phrasing my next question. “And how many of those are employees?”

  “All but four. Five tomorrow.” Yipes! Yes, Conrads lived here, all right. “Here we are.” He stopped before a door that looked no different from any of several dozen we’d passed along the way, and tapped the button which on Terra is for some reason always called a knob.

  The door dilated to reveal a room full of thick pink smoke. At least it looked like smoke, and behaved like it, roiling and billowing—with the single exception that it declined to spill out of the open door into the corridor. I reminded myself I’d promised myself not to boggle, and with only what I hoped was an imperceptible hesitation, I walked right into the pink smoke, came out the other side—

  —and boggled. Worse; I actually yelped.

  I was on Ganymede.

  Look, I admit I’m a hick. But I had experienced Sim walls, by that point in my life, even if I couldn’t afford them yet. Even good ones didn’t really fool you; you could tell they were not-real, just rectangular windows into worlds that you never really forgot were virtual. I’d even experienced six-wall Sim, 360-degree surround, and even then you had to voluntarily cooperate with the illusion for it to work: it never quite got the rounding correction perfect at the corners. But it was pretty good.

  This was real. I was back home on Ganymede—so convincingly that for just a startled moment, two-thirds of my weight seemed to leave me. I realized with astonishment that the air even smelled like Ganymede air, tasted like it, different from terrestrial air in ways subtle but unmistakable. I was standing in the middle of a newly made field, the soil only just coming to life. Beneath my feet, earthworms were shaking off the grogginess of cold sleep and beginning to realize they weren’t on Terra anymore. On the edge of the field, fifteen or twenty meters away, was a new-built farmhouse, smoke spiraling from its chimney. Try and build a fire anywhere else on Terra and they’d fine you the equivalent of two months’ tuition—for a first offense. Until today, I hadn’t seen a square meter of naked soil since I’d landed on its namesake. I felt my eyes begin to sting and water, and with no further warning a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me.

  I spun around in time to see Rennick come through the doorway. From this side too it looked like it was full of pink smoke. But it was no longer a door in anything: it just stood by itself in the middle of the field, a rectangle of pink smoke without any wall to be a hole in. I turned my back on hole and house master alike.

  “Miss Jinny thought you’d find this congenial,” he said from just behind me.

  I nodded.

  “Follow me please.”

  That didn’t require an answer either. We walked to the farmhouse and went inside. “The ’fresher and entertainment center are in the obvious places. You’ll find clothing in that closet, Unlimited Access at that desk. If you want anything—anything whatsoever—state your wishes to the house server. His name is Leo.”

  I had the homesickness under control now, enough that I trusted myself to speak at least. “Leo is listening at all times?”

  “Leo listens at all times,” he agreed. “But he cannot hear anything unless he is addressed. Your privacy and security as a guest are unconditionally guaranteed.”

  “Of course,” I said as if I believed him. I idly opened the closet he’d indicated, and found all my own clothing. Boggle.

  On closer inspection it proved to be copies of nearly every piece of clothing I owned—all the ones Jinny had seen. They were not quite identical copies. For one thing, in nearly every case the quality of the copy was slightly better than that of the original.

  Suddenly I felt vastly tired. I didn’t feel like boggling anymore, or struggling not to. “Mr. Rennick—Alex—I thank you for your
offer of a tour of the North Keep, but I believe I will pass, at least for tonight.”

  “Certainly, Joel. If there’s nothing further I can do for you now, I’ll leave you to rest.”

  “I’m fine. Thank you.”

  “Good night.” He left. I watched through a window as he walked across the field and through the pink smoke of the door-without-a-wall. I looked around the “farmhouse,” then back out the window at a sky with two moons, and thought about bursting into tears, but I decided I was too manly.

  “Leo?”

  “Yes, Mr. Johnston?”

  “Can I get a cup of coffee?”

  “On the desk, sir.”

  I blinked, looked—a steaming cup of coffee sat on the desk beside me. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, but I hadn’t noticed it arrive. Without a word I picked it up and tried it. The superbness of the coffee was no surprise at all. The perfect drinking temperature was only a mild one. But the cream and two sugars—

  “Did Jinny tell you how I like my coffee, Leo?”

  “Miss Jinny has told me many things about you, Mr. Johnston.”

  “Call me Joel.”

  “Yes, Mr. Joel.”

  I opened my mouth, then closed it. There must be something sillier than arguing with software, but I can’t think offhand what it would be. I sat down on a rocking chair that creaked authentically, put my feet up on a hassock, and began to dismiss Leo from my mind, to prepare for the upcoming conversation with Jinny. Then a thought occurred. Carefully not addressing him by name I asked, “How long do you keep listening after I stop speaking, before you conclude I’m done and stop listening again?”

  Answer came there none. Which answered me: somewhere between five and ten seconds. Useful datum.

  “Leo?”

  “Yes, Mr. Joel?”

  “Can you let me know just before Miss Jinny arrives here?”

  “No,” she said from the doorway. “He can’t.”

  We were both tired, and both emotionally upset. But we both knew there was more to be said before we could sleep. I took my feet down off the hassock, and she came and sat before me on it, and took both my hands in hers.