Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

It took her several minutes to get back under control. During those minutes, I didn’t breathe or think or move or digest food or do anything at all except wait to learn what my Jinny had lied about. Then, when she took in a deep breath and pulled away from my arms, suddenly I didn’t want to know. So I thought of a different question she could answer instead. “Where are we going?”

Her eyes began to slide away from mine, then came back and locked. “To my home.”

This time I caught the subtle change. Usually the instruction she gave Silver was “my place .”

“So? And it’s north?”

She nodded.

“How far?”

“Silver: step on it,” she said. The car acknowledged. Then to me, as Silver faced our chairs forward and pressed us back into them with acceleration, she said, “About twenty minutes, now.”

I consulted a mental map and glanced out the window—with difficulty, as we were now pulling serious gees. Jinny’s car was exceedingly well loved, but nonetheless it was just short of an antique. There was simply no way it could go anywhere near this fast. I made myself breathe slowly. This just kept getting better and better.

Twenty minutes north of Lasqueti at this speed would, it seemed to me, put us smack in the middle of a glacier somewhere, just below the border with Yukon Province. I was dressed for a ballroom, didn’t have so much as a toothbrush. Not that it mattered, because we were doing at least four times the provincial exurban speed limit; long before we reached that glacier the Mounties (local cops) were going to cut our power and set us down to await the Proctors… probably in raw forest. Unless, of course, Silver tore himself apart first, traveling at four times the best speed he’d been capable of the day he left the factory.

Less than half an hour before, I’d been as perfectly happy as I’d ever been in my life, dancing with my Jinny. I opaqued my window, surrendered to the gee forces, and stared straight ahead at nothing. To my intense annoyance, she let me.

Life is going to continue to suck until somebody finds the Undo key.

The engine did not explode. It didn’t even sound any louder than usual. The Mounties somehow failed to notice us blazing across their radar, or to log any complaints about shattered windows; we crossed the province unmolested. For most of the trip we were above atmosphere, so high that the horizon showed a distinct curve—we pretty much had to be at that speed, I think—but if the Peace Forces satellites noticed us, they kept it to themselves. Nineteen minutes later, the car finished decelerating, came to a dead stop, and went into hover mode, glowing softly from the heat of our passage and reentry into atmosphere.

“Wait,” Jinny said—whether to Silver or to me, I was unsure.

I glanced at her, then turned to my side window once again and looked down. Sure enough, what lay some three thousand meters below us was a nearly featureless glacier. There was a big rill to the east, and a shadowy crevasse almost directly below that was much smaller, but still large enough to conceal several dozen cars the size of Silver. I looked back to Jinny. She was staring straight ahead at the windshield, which was still opaque.

Keeping my mouth shut was easy this time. I not only didn’t know how I felt, I didn’t even know what I felt it about . I couldn’t have been more clueless if I’d had my head in a sack. Anything I said was likely to sound stupid in retrospect, and there are few things I hate more.

“I rehearsed this a hundred times,” she said finally. “Now I’ve screwed it up completely.”

I suspected this was true, but kept my mouth shut.

She swiveled my way and unbuckled her crash harness, though we were still three klicks above hard ice. It gave her enough freedom of movement to lean forward and take one of my hands in both of hers. I noted absently that the skin of her palm was remarkably hot. “Have you ever heard of Harun al-Rashid?” she asked me.

“Plays defense for the Tachyons?”

“Close,” she said. “You’re only off by, let me see, a little more than a millennium and a half. Fifteen hundred and some years.”

“But he does play defense.”

“Stinky, please shut up! He was a rich kid, from a powerful military family in ancient Persia. His father was a Caliph, roughly equivalent to premier of a province today, a man so tough he invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, which was then ruled by the Empress Irene.”

“You’re making this up,” I charged.

Her eyes flashed. “I said ‘please,’ Joel.”

I drew an invisible zipper across my lips.

“Harun became Caliph himself in the year 786.” Over a thousand years before man could even travel anywhere . “He was probably as wealthy and powerful as anybody in living memory had ever been. Yet somehow, he was not an ignorant idiot.”

“Amazing,” I said, trying to be helpful.

Go try to be helpful to a woman who’s talking. “He had the odd idea it was important to know what his people were really thinking and feeling about things,” she went on as if I had not spoken. “He wanted more than just the sanitized, politically safe version they would give to him or to anyone he could send to talk to them. He understood that his wealth and power distorted just about everything in his relations with others, made it difficult if not impossible for truth to pass between them. You can see how that would be, right?”

“Sure. Everybody lies to the boss.”

“Yes!” Finally, I’d gotten one right. “Then one day he overheard one of his generals say that nobody knows a city as well as an enemy spy. It gave him an idea.

“That night he disguised himself as a beggar, sneaked out of his palace alone, and wandered the streets of Baghdad, a spy in his own capital. Everywhere he went, he listened to conversations, and sometimes he asked innocent questions, and because he was thought a beggar, no one bothered to lie to him. He got drunk on it. He started to do it whenever he could sneak away.”

Her eyes were locked on mine, now. It was important that I get this.

“Do you see, Joel? For the first time in his life Harun got an accurate picture of what the common people honestly thought… more than just what they thought, he experienced firsthand what life was really like for them, came to understand the things they didn’t even think about because they simply assumed them… and their perspective informed and improved his own thinking from then on. He became one of the most beloved rulers in history—his name means Aaron the Just, and how many rulers do you suppose have ever been called that? One time fifteen thousand men followed him into battle against one hundred twenty-five thousand—and whipped them, left forty thousand legionaries dead on the ground and the rest running for their lives. He lived to a ripe old age, and when he died the whole Muslim world mourned. Okay?”

I was nodding. I understood every word she said. I had no idea what she was driving at.

She took a deep breath. “Okay. Now, imagine you’re a young Persian girl in Baghdad. I see your mouth opening, and so help me God, if a wisecrack should come out of it… that’s better. You’re a poor-but-decent young Persian girl, working hard at some menial trade, struggling to better yourself, and so is—”

A strange alto voice suddenly spoke, seemingly from the empty space between Jinny and me, just a little too loudly. I was so startled I nearly jumped out of my seat. “Your vehicle’s hull temperature has dropped sufficiently to permit safe debarking now, Miss Jinny.”