Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“Oh, hi,” he said, too heartily. “You’re back.”

The one on Pat’s bunk said, “We’re real sorry to barge in like this, okay?”

“Yeah, but everything’s totally cool,” Weird Beard said. “Nothing to freak out about.”

“How did you two get in here?” I asked the dark one sitting on the bunk.

He shrugged, being careful not to spill his drink. “Everybody’s got things they’re good at,” he said reasonably.

I nodded. “And this is okay with me because…”

The other one said, “Because this is one of those fuckin’ situations where, you know, like it says upfront, viewer discretion is the better part of value.”

His friend stared at him, took a deep breath, let it out, and turned back to me. “We have a proposal for you. A business opportunity. Joint venture. Low risk, high return. But yeah, Richie’s right, it’s definitely what you’d call a little gray-market.”

Well, I thought to myself, you happen to catch me at a moment when I have a few gigabucks I need to invest somewhere. “How gray?”

“Just barely beige,” Richie said. “And only right at the end. Up until then it’s mostly red, and some green. Tell him, Jules.”

“Richie, will you take it easy? Joel—can I call you Joel?—it’s real simple. You work down on the Farm Decks, right?”

I agreed that this was sometimes so.

“Dirt or High Japonics?” Richie asked.

I looked at Jules. Jules looked at me and his face said, What am I supposed to do?

“Both,” I said.

“So you like to make stuff grow,” Jules suggested.

“Like you said, everybody’s got something they’re good at.”

“And you know your way around down there. Like, where things are, what parts get looked at all the time, what parts don’t get looked at so often.”

Light was beginning to dawn. “Why?”

“We got some stuff we’d like to grow.”

“Without bothering the Zog with a lot of fuckin’ paperwork and formalities,” Richie put in.

“And we figure a smart guy like you could work that out.”

I closed my eyes. The world spun as if I were drunk. But the moment I opened them again, it slammed to a halt. “What sort of plant are we talking about?”

“Just flowers,” Jules said.

“Herbs,” Richie amplified, pronouncing it like my roommate’s name. “From the country.”

“’Erbs,” Jules corrected, glaring at him.

“Well, sure, now ,” Richie said, annoyed. “But originally they grew it in the country.”

Jules and I exchanged another glance, and he took a deep pull on his drink, wiping his mouth with his wrist. YOU wanna try it?

“Richie,” I said gently, “ which Herb, exactly?” I pronounced it like my roommate’s name, and Jules nodded. That’s the way to deal with him .

Richie frowned. “Look, if you’re gonna get all technical on me—just because I haven’t got my grade eleven, you—”

I turned back to Jules. “Why don’t you tell me which flower you mean?”

He looked me in the eye. “Poppy flower, okay?”

I took in a deep breath, and then when I was done, I found more room in my chest somewhere and took in a lot more breath. “Get the hell out of my room before I call a proctor,” I said, loudly enough to use up a lot of it, and began exhaling the rest.

Jules didn’t move, or even wince. But Richie came up out of Bal’s chair like a boxer out of his corner, yelling something of his own—

—and then a whole lot of things happened too fast to grasp—

—and then a proctor with somebody’s blood on his tunic blouse was holding me gently but firmly by the upper arm, a really nice guy from the smile on him, and offering me a mood elevator. That sounded like a great idea; it was only after I let him put it under my tongue that I realized the elevator’s cables had been cut, by my anemones. It got exciting then for a few years, but fortunately the basement, when we reached it, turned out to be made out of marshmallow, and I decided it was safe to take a nap after all.

Not really.

I walked corridors for a million years. The same ones, for all I know. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t even bored. Funny things kept happening as I walked. Silly-funny. A cat danced with a fire extinguisher. Doors grew phallic knobs, then dilated and swallowed them. The floor was furry beneath my bare feet, then grassy, then hard and cold as ice. A section of pale yellow wall started to melt like frozen urine from the heat of my passage—nothing odd there, but it ran up instead of down. Less than zero gee whiz. It started to collect overhead, but I ignored it and walked on. Goats sang harmony—in Rabbit rather than Goat, a ludicrous choice. A bubble began to keep station on me, ahead and to my left, and inside it grew a holo, a lifesize headshot. It was Jinny—hundreds of years older. She smelled like fields of barley, light as flax. Her face was in ruins, beyond the power of even power to save. Her hair was still widely red, but often misunderstood. Her eyes were hazel, stoned, rolling. Then Ganymede devalued the debit, the economy went bad, and her bubble burst. Well, at least the goats finally got their butts out of their heads and started singing in Goat. I began to encounter members of a race of Easter Island statues, huge mouths gaping like Art Deco urinals, making fluttery sounds like pigeons as I went by.

Then one short one blocked my path, and turned into my roommate Pat. “Joel?” he asked me. I waited with interest to hear the answer, but it didn’t come. He asked if I could hear him, and after considering it, I said, “Sometimes.” A pigeon fluttered, and Pat said loudly, “Just a moment, please, Proctor,” and then softly, “Take this.” A piece of notepad paper, folded three times. He folded my fingers around it, used them to tuck it into my breast pocket. “A time will come for you to speak,” he said, very quietly, but with an unmistakable urgency that reached me in my fog. “When that time comes, say exactly what is on that piece of paper, and nothing else. You hear me, Joel? Say it back to me.”

I nodded. “When it’s time to talk, say what’s on the paper, just that.”

He nodded back. “Okay,” he said loudly, and was dissolved by the sudden strong tide that swept me forward. I remembered that I should have told him about his bunk being destroyed. Instead I tried to interest the goats in a strained pun about a farmer who cared for seven or eight goats, even though he never cared for chevon or ate goats. It shut them up, at least. I trudged on in comfortable silence until I came upon my mother. I knew her at once, and was delighted to learn what she looked like, how she moved, how she smelled. It was only when I saw the concern in her troubled eyes that I began to realize how much trouble I must be in. That made me dizzy, and I told her so. She said I could sit down, so I did, and by the time I realized she’d meant I should sit in some chair somewhere nearby it was way too late. My tailbone hit the floor with a crash, angering the floor so much it reared up and smacked me on the back of the head. It burst, like Jinny’s bubble had earlier, disintegrating me just as effectively.

I was wide awake and clearheaded. I was in an absolutely anonymous cubic, a generic plasteel box of air, about the size of a small studio. Its only features were doors at opposite ends, generic chairs, and a monitor. I was seated on one of the chairs, facing one of the doors, the monitor on the wall to my right. Seated facing me was Solomon Short. Behind him was another man I did not know, who sat facing the monitor and seemed absorbed in it. My tailbone hurt, quite a bit, and so did the back of my head, but I did not mind much.