The hatch irised open. Alice the bodyguard made Solomon and Andrew exit first, followed by herself, and then Conrad, with Hattori taking up the rear. She either rated the banker as zero threat or hoped he’d stop bullets.
Lieutenant Bruce began a speech. I can’t recall a word of it. It was flowery, trite, pompous, smarmy, obsequious, and self-aggrandizing, all at once. Jinny endured a sentence or two, and then said, without discernible reference to anything he’d been saying, “Thank you very much, Commander; you are gracious.”
He was so pleased he shut right up. If she understood brevet rank, then she knew what a high-ranking fellow he was—which was all he’d wished to establish to begin with. “Very kind of you, ma’am.”
“Yes. The last thing I would wish, Commander, would be to distract you from your heavy responsibility. I am myself married to a pilot.” I did not catch her moving any of her limbs, but suddenly she was in motion, floating slowly away from him and us. “The other ladies and I can converse with Joel over at this end of the Bridge without disturbing you, I think, if we are quiet. And Mr. Rennick will keep you excellent company; thank you, Alex.”
Both Evelyn and Dorothy had started moving on the third word. I was slower off the mark, so I got to savor the expression on Bruce’s face. Rennick showed no reaction, and I savored that, too. “You’ll forgive me, gentlemen,” I lied, then picked a docking spot and jaunted after the ladies.
It was a short jaunt, but I’d done it slowly, so I had several seconds to think on my way. When I was near I said to all three, but looking at Dorothy Robb, “Time has been extremely kind to all of you.”
One corner of her mouth turned up. “I love a liar,” she said. She studied my face and raised an eyebrow. “You’ve had less of it, but I can see you used your time well.”
I nodded. “I tried,” I agreed. “Jinny, it is nice to see you again. You look wonderful.”
Her eyes lit with pleasure at being addressed next—age before beauty. An instant later she realized second was not the optimal position in a group of three, and the light went out.
I noted it, but was busy with the sudden realization—maybe it was more of a revelation—that what I had just said to her was strictly accurate. It was nice to see her.
And that was all it was. Yes, this woman had chased me out of the System with a crushed heart, and yes, she had haunted my days and stalked me in my dreams. But not for five years or so, now.
“Evelyn, I can’t tell you how good it is to see you again. Your letters have meant a lot to me. I knew you would be beautiful, but apparently I have a very feeble imagination. I hope you will let me play my saxophone for you one day.” It felt awkward saying all that in front of Jinny, but I didn’t have any choice.
“If I can sit in on keyboards,” she said.
I stared with my mouth open.
“I have a new arrangement for ‘Sol Keeps Shining’ I want to show you. And a couple of other tracks from Stars.”
Can an ego have an orgasm? Something made my heart pound.
“Perhaps we could postpone the soundtrack until the film is done,” Jinny said coldly. “We do have important things to talk about, and little time. Grandfather doesn’t have anything like the patience he used to.”
“We do indeed,” I said. “How many passengers will your husband’s vessel carry?”
“Ten,” she said.
“Damn.” I felt sharp disappointment. I’d been hoping against hope for some vastly higher number. Twenty-one c was definitely an impressive velocity, but even at that barely imaginable speed, Peekaboo was nearly four years away. I doubted we’d be able to get four hundred and something of us to Brasil Novo before the stellar shitrain arrived, even with a magic carpet to help.
I wasted a few seconds trying to work out how many of us could be saved, and how many would die of old age aboard the derelict Sheffield before a seat became available for them on the shuttle, and how they would be chosen. The maths were way beyond me, even if I’d known exactly how many of us were still alive. And so were the ethics.
It was not just a terrible letdown—it was also puzzling.
“What is it, Joel?” Evelyn asked.
How to put it? “I’m a little confused,” I admitted finally.
“We’re all confused,” Dorothy said. “Which confusion troubles you now?”
If there was a way to say it pretty, I couldn’t find it. “There really isn’t any way you can be of much help to us with a ten-seater, even if it is twenty times faster than a speeding photon. Is there?”
Dorothy began to say something, but was overridden by Jinny. “There is a plan. As we speak, Grandfather and Andrew are discussing with your Captain Bean and his own advisers the feasibility o—”
“You’re forgetting something,” I said.
“What?”
“Jinny Hamilton,” I said carefully, “you are one of the best. But I know exactly how you look and act and sound when you are lying.”
Her control was excellent, but she could not stop her skin from reddening. She started a bluff but got only two chilly words in before giving it up and doing an instant one-eighty, so that the sentence came out, “How dare all right damn it, I was trying to keep this focused on the positive.”
“That doesn’t leave much to talk about,” I said. “What I’m trying to understand is, since there doesn’t seem to be any practical way to rescue us… why the hell are you here?”
“Joel!”
“There’s damn little you can do for us—and for the life of me, I can’t figure out anything we could possibly do for you.”
“The whole Solar System just died!” she said. “Naturally we headed for the first—”
“If your grandfather just wanted company for comfort, why in Sol’s name would he pick hundreds of doomed souls he can’t help, with only a temporary ecology? It makes a million times more sense for him to make a beeline for someplace like Aradia or Hippolyte—they’ve both been thriving for decades. Or any of the self-sustaining colonies. Any technology we could possibly give you, any asset we could have aboard, you could get much better elsewhere, and without the social awkwardness of having to interact with dead people.”
I stopped and waited for a response, but Jinny made none.
“It’s a simple question. Why are you—”
Dorothy Robb said, “Joel, don’t be dense.”
I stared at her.
Neither of the others had anything to say. They were both just looking at me. As if I had two—
“Covenant’s sake! We’re here because of you, you idiot.”
I lost my handhold and went free.
I wasted seconds uselessly fanning air as if to agree I was an idiot, and then gave it up, surrendered to free fall, and tried to get control of my breath.
Nobody seemed to have a problem letting me take as long as I needed to think it through, so I did, eyes shut tight. It probably took a good thirty seconds to slow my spinning mind down from dynamo speed to something more like the cyclic rate of a prayer wheel.
I opened my eyes in time to see a thick cable within reach and docked on it.
“I don’t believe it,” I said slowly to Jinny. “Are you seriously telling me that you came all this way, played with the hopes of all these people, all my friends… just to give me the finger, one last time?”
“I made them come!” Evelyn cried.
21
In my dreams
I can see, I can
I can see a love
That could be
—David Crosby, “In My Dreams”
“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.
The hatch opened and Andrew entered, as if invoked by
my thinking of him. Herb came in on his heels, must have guided him there.
“Hi, darling,” was the first thing Andrew said, I noticed, and then, “Hello, everybody. I hope I’m not—” He saw me and Evelyn. “But apparently I am. I should have tapped first; crave pardon.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Herb told him. “That’s the way I usually find him.”
“Usually with his girlfriend,” I agreed.
Evelyn turned to me, eyes twinkling, and we gave each other our best deadpan. She was good; I nearly lost it. “So I’m going about this backward, then?” she asked.
“I for one work best in that mode,” I told her. “Come on in, Andrew—I can work with an audience. How goes the confabulation?”
He looked pained. “Well, they’re still discussing what should be done to evacuate the Sheffield as efficiently as possible. Your grandfather’s come up with the seed of a very interesting plan, actually. Several problems still to be solved, of course, but… look, could we talk about it on the way? Richard sent me to tell you he’d be pleased if we all returned to the Mercury right away, and began preparing for an immediate launch. It’s very important to lose as little time as possible, obviously, since every loss will cascade down through the whole sequence, and he’s determined to hit the ground running.”
Evelyn and I exchanged a glance and adjusted our position until we were side by side, each with an arm around the other’s waist. “They’re that close to agreeing on a plan?” Jinny asked.
Her husband shrugged. “Your grandfather wants to be under way two seconds after the airlock shuts behind him. We don’t even know if all the provisions we were offered have been loaded aboard yet, much less stowed properly.”
She nodded. “I guess we can continue the conversation there. Let’s go.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Question.”
Variable Star Page 34
