Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I’m quite prepared to believe, for instance, that at one point I raced up the Granville Street Slidewalk, scattering pedestrians like duckpins, while screaming, “I am Prorad of Prorad! Absolutely nothing that happens to you is my fault!” But can it be remotely possible that I really was, as memory insists, holding hands with a monkey at the time? Where did the monkey come from? Where did he go?

Similarly, it’s not impossible that I challenged half a dozen White Hat boys to personal combat for laughing at me in Chinatown. The Granville Slidewalk leads in that direction, and I was in a suicidal mood. But how I could have survived… whatever ensued… unscathed, I can neither recall nor imagine. I had no weapon, no combat skills, and Ganymedean muscles. (I never understood, by the way, why Chinatown was still called that, considering that it had been well over a century since the population of Greater Vancouver was less than sixty percent Chinese by ethnicity. I don’t know; maybe ghettoization becomes funny after it stops happening. Or perhaps it was more of a “Never forget!” thing.)

And if I was in Chinatown, on foot—I had no money for cabs or other public transport—how could I have found myself, an eyeblink later, all the way across town at Spanish Banks beach, watching the vast boat city moored there, Little Kong, gleam in the sunlight, and boil and bustle with the indomitable industry of the doomed? As far as I could see, they were selling seawater to each other out there—but they did it with all their might, each dreaming of cornering the market one day. When a few Vietnamese came ashore, I reeled over and tried to apologize to them, for not having the guts to become a Conrad, and thus solve the politico-economic conditions that trapped them there. But the language barrier intervened—they spoke no Basic, I spoke no Vietnamese—and somehow I ended up buying an unlabeled sprayer of something even more diabolical than Metaxa from them, instead. Maybe they did understand what I was trying to say, after all.

I remember the first rush of it, whatever it was—it was memorable, even to a man in my condition—and after that I have only one other brief scrap of memory that seems even remotely likely to be real.

I became aware that I was chilly. This rekindled enough awareness for me to notice that I was on the west side of Stanley Park—halfway up a tall tree. (How did I get to the Park from Spanish Banks on foot? Persuade someone to drive me? Stow away on a bus? Teleport? No idea.)

It seems clear in retrospect that my intention must have been to commit suicide. Ganymedeans do not climb tall trees in Terran gravity for any other reason I can think of. Amazing I got as far as halfway up; I had never climbed a tree in my life. Apparently I had become distracted by the magnificent view, staring across the Georgia Strait at distant Vancouver Island, just visible low on the horizon, and beyond that the Juan de Fuca Strait and the Pacific Ocean and ultimately Vladivostok, I suppose.

I should not have been chilly—I don’t wear stupid clothes—but I’d obviously forgotten to recharge them. It made sense that my face would be the chilliest part of me… but why was the coolness there moving , running down toward my neck? I had just worked out that it was tears, sheets of them, when my phone went off. I knew who it was, but checked the display anyway, just on the off chance that it was a major university offering me a full scholarship and bursaries.

It was Jinny, of course.

I turned up the volume to hear the message she was recording. “—been trying to give you room, give you time to get ov—uh, to adjust to the situation. I know I’ve given you a lot to deal with. I understand why you ran away. But I can’t wait anymore, I’m going out of my mind. Pick up, Joel, we have to talk. Please pick up. I probably won’t be able to call you again, and if you try and call me back, it won’t… oh, God damn it, I love you, Joel. I really do. You know that. Just give me—”

I plucked the earbeads out of my ears, held them at arm’s length. Jinny’s voice became a faint cricket sound. That seemed a distinct improvement. If a little was good, then—I threw the earbeads so hard, they cleared the sea wall below and plunked into the Georgia Strait. Yes, that was the ticket: no more cricket.

“‘Ran away’?” I muttered. “ I’ll show you run away, lady. Watch me.”

How did I get back down from that tree without breaking anything? I reject memory, which says I was assisted by a team of swans, but have no better explanation to offer.

There are, as I said, a few more shards of memory after that, but I don’t think any of them represent real experiences. I don’t think, for instance, that it’s possible to do that with even an extremely cooperative goat. Certainly not without paying in advance.

And then, with the shocking suddenness of running full tilt into an unseen wall, I was instantly a hundred percent cold sober, and an ugly man with lemon breath was staring into my eyes from no more than ten or twenty centimeters away, so fixedly and intently that I sensed he was grading them, by some unknown criteria.

I couldn’t stop him, so I decided to grade his eyes. At first they seemed the eyes of a man so tired he was on the verge of a temper tantrum. But on second look I could see that he was always that angry, and the fatigue merely blew his cover. On the third look, I learned something new. Until then I had believed that anger is always fear in disguise. My father had told me so once, in memorable circumstances, and I’d never seen a counterexample. But now I could see that at least some of this man’s anger derived not from fear, but from shame. In some way he had failed himself irredeemably—so irredeemably that there was no longer anything left to fear. His face tried to say that was my fault, especially his mouth—but his eyes knew damn well it wasn’t.

“Am I finally addressing a sentient being?” he asked.

Early sixties. Ruddy face. Strong lemon breath. Sour lemon. “I doubt it,” I said. “But I’m probably close enough to run for Parliament, at least.”

He grunted and moved away. As his face receded I tried to follow it and fell off my chair, thereby learning that I had been sitting in a chair. Where this chair, mein Herr ? There, mon cher. Well, I swear.

He let me make my own way back up into the chair, leaning into the force of his contempt as if it were a strong wind. It took me a while. Before I had time to congratulate myself, he said, “I’m Dr. Rivera. Do you know where you are?”

I rubbed a sore spot on my face. “On Terra, obviously. Barbaric gravity.”

He didn’t have the energy to be impatient. “Where on Terra, specifically?”

“In these pants,” I said, and giggled.

“After what I gave you, you should be straight by now,” he said. “I conclude you must be a natural horse’s ass.”

“Nonsense! I’ve had to work hard at it.”

Humor was wasted on him. Or being wasted was not humorous to him. One of those. “You are in Tampa, Florida.”

I giggled again. “Home of the tampon. Is this your pad?”

“You are at the Tampa Spaceport.”

“You don’t want to Tampa with a spaceport. Your complexion could end up even Florider.” I cracked myself up with that one. But as I laughed, rusty wheels finally began to turn slowly in my head.

Tampa? Why the hell would I go to Tampa? Even if I had found some sort of pressing reason to visit a spaceport, Albuquerque was a hell of a lot closer to Vancouver than Tampa was—

“Do you know why you are—”

What did Tampa have that Albuquerque didn’t? Nothing. In fact, these days Tampa was almost completely closed to normal commercial traffic, due to—something. I forgot.