Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

If I was startled, Jinny was furious. I could tell because her face became utterly smooth, and her voice became softer in pitch and tone and slower in speed as she said, “There are only four letters in the word ‘wait,’ Smithers. There seems little room for ambiguity.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Jinny,” Smithers said at once, and although there was no noticeable cessation of any background hiss or power hum, somehow I knew he was gone .

“And so,” she went on before I could ask who Smithers was, “is your boyfriend… call him Jelal. The two of you are very much in love, and want to get married, but you just don’t have the means. And then one day—”

“Wait,” I said, “I think I see where this is going… sort of. One day the beggar who lives next door comes over, right, and it turns out he’s incredibly rich and he says he’s been eavesdropping and he understands our problem and he offers Jelal a—”

I stopped talking. The penny had just dropped. All of sudden, I actually did see where this was going, at least in general terms. “Oh… my… God …” I breathed. “I’ve got it just backward, don’t I?”

Her eyes told me I was right. “There wasn’t any other way, do you see? Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton, I couldn’t tell you. And anyway, the whole point was to—”

“ You’re Harun al-Rashid!”

“Well, his granddaughter,” she said miserably.

I was stunned. “You’re rich.”

She nodded sadly. “Very.”

Tumblers began to click into place. I tried to think it through. “You’re not even an orphan, are you?”

Headshake. “I couldn’t let anyone at Fermi meet my parents. They’re… pretty well known. Hiring a pair of Potemkin parents for social purposes seemed grotesque.”

“And you came to Fermi, instead of Lawrence Campbell or one of the other top prep schools, so you could—what? See how the other half lives?”

“Well… in part.”

I was ranging back through my memories, adding things up with the benefit of hindsight, understanding little things that had puzzled me. Silver’s previously unsuspected power. Jinny’s extraordinary confidence and poise, so unexpected in an orphan. How, whenever someone brought up one of the really fabulous vacation destinations—Tuva, or the Ice Caves of Queen Maud Land in the Antarctic, or Harriman City on Luna—Jinny always seemed to have seen a good documentary about it recently. The way, when we ate pistachios, she always threw away the ones that were any trouble at all to open—

I became aware that Jinny was absolutely still and silent, studying my face intently for clues to what I was thinking. It seemed like a good idea; maybe I should get a mirror and try it. I thought about banging my head against the dashboard to reboot my brain.

Instead I looked at her and spread my hands. “I’m going to need some time to process this,” I admitted.

“Of course,” she said at once. “Sleep on it. There’s no hurry. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my real father. And meantime I’ll answer any questions you have—no more evasions, no more white lies.”

I didn’t feel as though I knew enough to formulate a coherent question yet. No, wait, I did have one—purely for form’s sake; I didn’t see how the answer could help me. Still—

“What is it really ?”

She blinked. “Crave pardon?”

“You said, ‘Once I met you as Jinny Hamilton…’ So that’s not your real name. Okay, I’ll bite. What is?”

“Oh, dear,” she said.

“‘Jinny Oh.’ Chinese, dear?”

Not amused. “Joel—”

“Come on, how bad could it be? Look, let’s meet for the first time all over again. Hi there, I’m Joel Johnston, of Ganymede. And you are—?”

She stared at me, blank-faced, for so long I actually began to wonder whether she was going to tell me. I couldn’t recall ever seeing her hesitate about anything before, much less this long. One of the many things I liked about her was that she always knew what she wanted to be doing next. Finally she closed her eyes, took in a long breath, released it… squared her shoulders and opened her eyes and looked me right in the eye.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Johnston. I’m Jinny Conrad.”

For a second or two nothing happened. Then my eyebrows and my pulse both rose sharply. It couldn’t be. “Not—”

“Of Conrad,” she confirmed.

It couldn’t be.

“It’s true,” she said. “My father is Albert Conrad. Richard Conrad’s third son.”

“You’re Jinnia Conrad of Conrad,” I said.

She nodded once.

I didn’t quite faint—but it was good that I was sitting down, and strapped in. My head drained like a sink; all the blood and most of the brain matter dropped at once to my feet.

V ery rich , she’d said. Yeah, and the Milky Way is rather roomy!

The Conrad industrial/informational empire was larger than the Rothschild family, the Hanseatic League, Kinetic Sciences Interplanetary, and Rolls-Daiwoo combined, and only slightly smaller than the Solar System. Nothing like it could have existed before the advent of space travel—and perhaps it became inevitable in the first minute of Year One, as Leslie LeCroix was still shutting down the Pioneer ’s engine on the virgin surface of Luna. The Conrads were a 150-year dynasty, every member of whom wielded wealth, power, and influence comparable to that of the Hudson’s Bay Company or Harriman Enterprises in their day. Their combined interests ranged from the scientific outpost on Mercury, to Oort Cloud harvest—to interstellar exploration as far as sixty-five light-years away. At that time there were well over a dozen starships either outgoing or incoming, and eight had already returned safely (out of a hoped-for eighteen), five of them bearing the riches of Croesus in one form or another. Three of those big winners had been Conrad ships.

She gave me a minute—well, some indeterminate period. Finally she said, “Look, I have to land, now. Smithers wasn’t completely out of line to remind me. We… don’t like to hover, here. It’s just a bit conspicuous.”

“Okay,” I said, to be saying something. “Where’s here?”

“In a minute. Silver: I relieve you.”

“Yes, Jinny.” She took the stick and we dropped three thousand meters rapidly enough to give me heart palpitations.

Which nearly became cardiac arrest when the ground came rushing up, and she failed to decelerate hard enough to stop in time! We were going to crash—

—right through the imaginary glacier—

—and into a deep valley, its floor lush and green and inviting and, best of all, still hundreds of meters below us. She landed us, without a bump, in a small clearing that from the air had looked indistinguishable from dozens of others, to me at least. But the moment she shut down, hoses and cables sprouted from the forest floor and began nurturing Silver. Ahead of us was a huge boulder, the size of a truck; as I watched, a large doorway appeared in it, facing us.

“We’re here,” she said.

“I ask again: Where is here?”

She shook her head. “It isn’t.”

“Isn’t what?”

“Isn’t anywhere.”

I turned my head just enough to be looking at her out of the corner of my eye. “Here isn’t anywhere.”

“Right.”

I closed my eyes. If I had just stayed back home on the farm, by now I might have been making enough of a crop to afford a hired man. That would have freed me up to do some courting—in a frontier society with considerably looser rules about premarital experimentation than contemporary Terra.

But I knew for a fact there was no one remotely like Jinny anywhere on Ganymede. Had known it for a fact, that is, even before learning that she was more well off than the Secretary General….