Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

Comedy, next: a young man my age—we did make great natural comedic victims, didn’t we?—had done something incredibly stupid, and a roomful of people and Martians were laughing openly at his humiliation. Next, please—

Erotica. I was utterly disinterested, and noticed that my right arm was extremely weary. Apparently that car’s drug supply had included libido enhancers. Next—

Sports. Free-fall soccer semifinals, O’Neill versus the Belt, winner to face Circum-Terra in the fall. As it came on, the mob outside the globe roared: a forward as long and lean as a Ganymedean had just frozen, fumbled his chance, blown an easy shot by hesitating. Zoom in for extreme close-up of his anguished features, his obvious shame. Next—

News, Systemwide: Luna Free State was saying very rude things about Ganymede’s trade policy, and Terra was making no comment; while nobody had actually used the words “trade war” yet, everyone was thinking them, louder than they had last week. And here I was, trapped at the bottom of the gravity well. Next—

News, Global: The outfitting and provisioning of the latest colony ship, RSS Charles Sheffield , was nearly complete. It was expected to leave orbit in a few days, and a few days after that, assuming its drive lit without incident, its complement of some five hundred souls should go bye-bye in a big hurry. Hopeably to a star called Immega 714—known also, for reasons I could not imagine, as “Peekaboo.” Only the day before yesterday, I had considered most of them to be idiots, a company of misfits, malcontents, romantics, failures, crackpot visionaries, runaways, transportees, and other defective personalities. Now I found myself fiercely envying them. Just a couple more days, and nothing the Conrad dynasty or any individual Conrad could possibly do would ever again affect them in the slightest. What dominated my future and my children’s future was shortly to become as irrelevant to them as the Roman Empire. Sigh. Next—

Local news. Housing riots again. This time the demonstrators had somehow overwhelmed or outsmarted both proctors and private security, and penetrated to the very heart of Vancouver’s most upscale neighborhood, the tony intersection of Main and Hastings. Standard anticrowd measures could not be taken for fear of excessive damage to private property.

I switched to the fiction channel, scanned my favorites index for a story I wanted to reread, something really good and solid and dependable—and long, at least a trilogy. As I did, random sentences from old favorite books kept running through my head. You don’t turn down a promotion… if someone puts money in your hand, close your fingers and keep your mouth shut… let this cup pass from me… he played the hand he was dealt… opporknockity tunes but once, and you’d better be in tune with it….

Forget fiction. I was way too scattered to read. Even focusing on titles was beyond me. I didn’t bother with any of the music channels: I just knew that whatever I got would be heartbreaking. I shut the screen altogether and flung the remote across the room.

God damn it, how could she do this to me?

How could she lie to me that way, hide the truth from me for so long, tell so many lies to me, play me for a fool? My innocent, loving maiden turned out to be a slumming aristocrat, Harun al-Rashid’s granddaughter in clever disguise, casing the marketplace for a strapping young peasant lad with acceptable features and good teeth, to serve as stud back at the palace… smiling fondly inside at his earnest naïveté and childish dreams….

Again, rebuttal wrote itself. Joel, don’t be a nincompoop. How could she not have done this to you? How would you have handled her problem differently, in her place? Placed an ad on the Web? “Princess seeks hybrid vigor. Salary effectively infinite. Auditions daily at noon; bring résumé, genotype, and headshot.”

Me: Well, no, but—

Myself: But what? Once you did catch her eye, once she did somehow, for some glorious reason, cut you out of the herd and let you sniff each other, what was she supposed to do? Tell you who she really was on the first date? Come, now.

Me: But she could have! It wouldn’t have—

Myself: Oh, please. In the first place you’re full of shit, and in the second place even if you’re not, even if you really happen to be the kind of unique and special human being who isn’t remotely fazed by small things like unimaginable wealth and power… how the hell was she supposed to know that on a first date? Or a twentieth?

Me: She kept the damn masquerade up a lot longer than twenty dates! She strung me along for—

Myself: She maintained her cover until about thirty seconds after you stated for the first time, unequivocally and with sincerity in your voice, that you wanted to marry her as soon as you were able.

Me: …

Myself: You tell me: can you think of any other way at all that a girl in her position could know , for certain, whether she’s loved for her self or for her pelf? A girl needs to know these things, pal.

I: He’s right, you know.

Me: Yes, but—

Myself: Wait, I’m not done. Can you think of any other way at all that a guy in your position could know, for certain, that he genuinely loves a girl who’s worth gigacredits? Isn’t that a good thing for the guy to know before he marries her?

I: You’ll never have any doubts about your own motives, now.

Myself: And neither will she.

Imaginary friend, kibitzing: And neither will anybody else. Everyone will know the story: face it, it’s too good not to tell.

Me: Spiffing. Everyone I ever meet will be thinking, how smart can he be, to have been so profoundly fooled for so long.

Myself: If they know the story, they’ll know Jinny. They’ll understand.

Me: Okay, good point. Only… only… it’s just… it’s…

Damn it out to the Oort Cloud and back, I understood why she had to do what she did—but how could she do that to me?

Distraction. Distraction.

I found that I was on my feet, dressed, and pacing around my tiny apartment, with no memory of having willed any of these things. This suggested to me that the distraction should take the form of a depressant rather than a stimulant.

The bar in my home was a pathetic joke compared to even the field model in Conrad’s guest taxi—I was a starving student, who couldn’t afford to indulge, and usually didn’t mind—but its sole useful content happened to be a large, unopened bottle of an ancient Greek alcoholic beverage called Metaxa, a species of brandy, given to me by a friend with family on Ikaros. I pulled the cork, decided to dispense with a glass, took a big incautious gulp. It smelled and tasted the way I have always imagined gasoline must have smelled and tasted—especially if the gasoline were on fire at the time. By the time I realized my error and tried to scream, my vocal cords were crisped. My tongue cooked through as if microwaved. Tears spilled like lava from my boiling eyes.

When I could see again, I located my arm, followed it to my hand. The bottle was still in it. I transferred my consciousness, became the bottle, managed to locate my former mouth, and made my way back there. But in attempting to make the jump back to my own brain again, in order to appreciate the full benefit of that second swallow, I got lost somehow. I thrashed around the noosphere for a while, looking for me, but eventually I decided the hell with it and just embraced the darkness. Darkness was a very good thing to embrace. You could count on it staying what it was.

After that comes a series of disconnected fragmentary memories, of events so unlikely and actions so unlike me I’m honestly not sure whether they were real, hallucinations, or some combination thereof.