Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

Herb was looking at me strangely.

At first, the way his jaw was squared off, and his eyes seemed to have receded deeper into their sockets, and his shoulders were slightly raised, all combined to tell me he was angry . That was odd. Then a second later I saw I had misread the signals completely: he was amused, trying his best not to laugh in my face. At something I had done in the last few moments, apparently. Or said…

He saw me start to catch on, and let the laugh out.

“Are you kidding me?”

“Did you really think I was accepted into this company because I’m a writer ? You figure a fledgling colony, fighting to stay alive and establish a foothold, has a lot of use for fiction?”

“You never mentio—”

“You never asked.”

“Who—?”

“My sister Li,” he said. “In Oregon. The one on Terra. Two hours a day, we handle message traffic between Kang/da Costa HQ and the colony, and we’re available freelance for private communications.”

“I never noticed you doing that!”

“How would you? I stare into space, and then start typing like crazy. It must look exactly like I’m writing a story. Sometimes I am, if what I’m supposed to type annoys me enough.”

“Holy shit.” I was so busy rearranging my presumptions and misconceptions in my head, I forgot I had not yet expressed an opinion. “I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it. I’m a telepath. A communicator.”

His voice cued me. A lot of people are weirded out by telepaths. A few people call them the kind of names that cause a proctor to show up. He was waiting to learn whether or not his new friend and roommate for the next two decades was one of those people.

Quickly I said, “No, I mean I can’t believe there’s some poor girl back in the System who looks just like you.”

His shoulders dropped. “Back to our argument—I was winning. How can you stay a bachelor? Have you no appreciation for fine womanhood? No sense of obligation—”

My mind took a left. Talking about Jinny and the Conrads had reminded me of something, a small burr under my saddle. An unfulfilled obligation behind me. “As a matter of fact, I do. Both. So much so that I’m going to presume on our friendship and ask you for a favor.”

“What friendship?”

“I know, but it’s all I’ve got. I want to send a private message back to Terra.”

He frowned. “Phone still works. So does mail.”

“No, I mean private . I need to thank a young lady for defying her grandfather to help me out of a tight spot, and I don’t want to risk getting her in trouble.”

His frown deepened. “Just tell me one thing. Is this young lady rich and beautiful?”

“That’s two things. And yes to both.”

“Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Okay, this once, I’ll do it. You want visual, or just voice?”

“Voice is fine.”

He shook his head. “Hopeless. Name?”

“Evelyn Conrad.”

“How do you want to route it to her?”

“Through an intermediary I think I can trust. Can your sister put a really serious privacy shield on a message?”

“Yes,” was all he said.

“Okay. Ask her to get it to a Dorothy Robb, two b’s.”

“Address?”

“Ms. Robb is the Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.”

Herb came as close as I would ever see him come to betraying surprise. His nostrils flared just perceptibly for a moment, as if he had begun to doubt his deodorant. His eyes did a funny little thing where for just an instant they tried to widen and narrow at the same time. There was maybe a quarter-second hitch in the soundtrack, and then he said, “I take it back. There is no hope for you.”

I spread my hands. “When did I claim there was?”

“You know a Conrad. Well enough that she defied… oh. Kindly tell me her granddad is not—”

I nodded. “Conrad.”

“Of course. She defied Conrad of Conrad for you. And you’re here .”

“Herb, she’s seven years old.”

He smiled broadly. It had taken him about ten seconds to gear up and start enjoying this. “To be thoroughly sure. Say no more. Unless you want to live.”

So I told him the whole damned story.

I’d always known I would, some day. It was going to be a long voyage. But not in the first year. I probably couldn’t have told it yet to anyone who didn’t listen as well as he did. He didn’t mind if I needed a couple of minutes of silence to get a sentence completed.

When I was finished, he took a couple himself. Then he said softly, “Amigo, you’re the first person I’ve talked to in this bucket of rust so far that actually has a sensible reason to be here. All right, you want little Evelyn to know you’re grateful for getting you out of there, but without tipping the Old Man, have I got it?”

“Something like, ‘I enjoyed the last moments of our relationship even more than the first,’ maybe. Do you really think you can get that to her privately? Now that you know who she is?”

He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Li says yes. She knows a way. You don’t need to know what it is. It’s covered.”

“Thanks, Herb.”

He lit up one of his cigarettes. “Well, at least the cord is cut clean. With Jinny, I mean. Seldom in history have any humans gotten to have a breakup as final as the one you’ve had. By the time we get to 23 Skiddoo in twenty years, she’ll be… 108 years old, if she was honest about her age.”

We were making a jump of about eighty-five light-years—at such a hair-raising fraction of c that the trip would seem to us to take twenty years, total. But back in the normal universe, clocks run faster, thanks to Dr. Einstein’s Paradox. To an observer at, say, Tombaugh Station around Pluto, our voyage would appear to take roughly ninety and one-half Standard years.

“Of course, with her money, she’ll probably still look twenty, by then,” Herb added. “But you’ll know better.”

“I don’t want her old,” I said bleakly. “I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be here with me.”

“Happy to be your mate, even if you both starve on alien soil. Was she really that dumb?”

“Obviously not.”

“You’ll love again. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

I grimaced. “Not soon.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be too soon. You have twenty years to decide what you want in a wife. But don’t put it off too long, either. The supply is limited, and you don’t look like a man who’d be happy as a celibate.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I muttered darkly.

“Look, you have decisions to make. Some short-term, some long-term. If you plan to spend the next twenty years licking your wounds, and letting those decisions make themselves for you, you’re going to be a tough friend to have. I suggest you get started working on them.”

“Decisions like what?”

He leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to do ?”

A perfectly simple, sensible question: the logical first step in making any plan.

He might just as well have whacked me in the forehead with a plank.

I did not really see a burst of bright white light, and then find myself on the ground beside my horse, godstruck. The earth did not literally tremble and roar at my feet. My heart probably did not actually pause, and I have it on good authority that time did not, at any time, in fact come to a stop. But Herb’s perfectly obvious question hit me with that kind of impact. He and the room went away while I tried to cope with it.

Surely, I thought, I have an answer for him. But I could not find one. I rewound mental tape and realized with shock that I had not asked myself that question once since the night of my graduation from Fermi.