Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“Ah,” I said, lowering my pitch. “To drive you crazy, then.” I was curious to see how he’d respond to an invitation to a jocular, between-us-men discussion of his mistress—whom I personally knew to be a handful and a half.

He sidestepped effortlessly. “That would be redundant, I’m afraid.”

“Have you worked here long?”

“Yes.”

I see. “How many people live here in… the North Keep, you said?”

“The number varies.”

His stinginess with information was beginning to mildly irritate me. “No doubt. But surely as master of the house you know its current value.”

I halfway expected him to say “Yes, I do,” and clam up. But he wasn’t that kind of childish. Instead he used jujitsu. “There are eighty-four persons resident in the North Keep at the moment. By midnight the number will be ninety-two, and shortly before breakfast time tomorrow it is expected to drop back to eighty-nine.”

“Ah.” I hesitated in phrasing my next question. “And how many of those are employees?”

“All but four. Five tomorrow.” Yipes! Yes, Conrads lived here, all right. “Here we are.” He stopped before a door that looked no different from any of several dozen we’d passed along the way, and tapped the button which on Terra is for some reason always called a knob.

The door dilated to reveal a room full of thick pink smoke. At least it looked like smoke, and behaved like it, roiling and billowing—with the single exception that it declined to spill out of the open door into the corridor. I reminded myself I’d promised myself not to boggle, and with only what I hoped was an imperceptible hesitation, I walked right into the pink smoke, came out the other side—

—and boggled. Worse; I actually yelped.

I was on Ganymede.

Look, I admit I’m a hick. But I had experienced Sim walls, by that point in my life, even if I couldn’t afford them yet. Even good ones didn’t really fool you; you could tell they were not-real, just rectangular windows into worlds that you never really forgot were virtual. I’d even experienced six-wall Sim, 360-degree surround, and even then you had to voluntarily cooperate with the illusion for it to work: it never quite got the rounding correction perfect at the corners. But it was pretty good.

This was real . I was back home on Ganymede—so convincingly that for just a startled moment, two-thirds of my weight seemed to leave me. I realized with astonishment that the air even smelled like Ganymede air, tasted like it, different from terrestrial air in ways subtle but unmistakable. I was standing in the middle of a newly made field, the soil only just coming to life. Beneath my feet, earthworms were shaking off the grogginess of cold sleep and beginning to realize they weren’t on Terra anymore. On the edge of the field, fifteen or twenty meters away, was a new-built farmhouse, smoke spiraling from its chimney. Try and build a fire anywhere else on Terra and they’d fine you the equivalent of two months’ tuition—for a first offense. Until today, I hadn’t seen a square meter of naked soil since I’d landed on its namesake. I felt my eyes begin to sting and water, and with no further warning a tidal wave of homesickness broke over me.

I spun around in time to see Rennick come through the doorway. From this side too it looked like it was full of pink smoke. But it was no longer a door in anything: it just stood by itself in the middle of the field, a rectangle of pink smoke without any wall to be a hole in. I turned my back on hole and house master alike.

“Miss Jinny thought you’d find this congenial,” he said from just behind me.

I nodded.

“Follow me please.”

That didn’t require an answer either. We walked to the farmhouse and went inside. “The ’fresher and entertainment center are in the obvious places. You’ll find clothing in that closet, Unlimited Access at that desk. If you want anything—anything whatsoever—state your wishes to the house server. His name is Leo.”

I had the homesickness under control now, enough that I trusted myself to speak at least. “Leo is listening at all times?”

“Leo listens at all times,” he agreed. “But he cannot hear anything unless he is addressed. Your privacy and security as a guest are unconditionally guaranteed.”

“Of course,” I said as if I believed him. I idly opened the closet he’d indicated, and found all my own clothing. Boggle.

On closer inspection it proved to be copies of nearly every piece of clothing I owned—all the ones Jinny had seen. They were not quite identical copies. For one thing, in nearly every case the quality of the copy was slightly better than that of the original.

Suddenly I felt vastly tired. I didn’t feel like boggling anymore, or struggling not to. “Mr. Rennick—Alex—I thank you for your offer of a tour of the North Keep, but I believe I will pass, at least for tonight.”

“Certainly, Joel. If there’s nothing further I can do for you now, I’ll leave you to rest.”

“I’m fine. Thank you.”

“Good night.” He left. I watched through a window as he walked across the field and through the pink smoke of the door-without-a-wall. I looked around the “farmhouse,” then back out the window at a sky with two moons, and thought about bursting into tears, but I decided I was too manly.

“Leo?”

“Yes, Mr. Johnston?”

“Can I get a cup of coffee?”

“On the desk, sir.”

I blinked, looked—a steaming cup of coffee sat on the desk beside me. It hadn’t been there a moment ago, but I hadn’t noticed it arrive. Without a word I picked it up and tried it. The superbness of the coffee was no surprise at all. The perfect drinking temperature was only a mild one. But the cream and two sugars—

“Did Jinny tell you how I like my coffee , Leo?”

“Miss Jinny has told me many things about you, Mr. Johnston.”

“Call me Joel.”

“Yes, Mr. Joel.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. There must be something sillier than arguing with software, but I can’t think offhand what it would be. I sat down on a rocking chair that creaked authentically, put my feet up on a hassock, and began to dismiss Leo from my mind, to prepare for the upcoming conversation with Jinny. Then a thought occurred. Carefully not addressing him by name I asked, “How long do you keep listening after I stop speaking, before you conclude I’m done and stop listening again?”

Answer came there none. Which answered me: somewhere between five and ten seconds. Useful datum.

“Leo?”

“Yes, Mr. Joel?”

“Can you let me know just before Miss Jinny arrives here?”

“No,” she said from the doorway. “He can’t.”

We were both tired, and both emotionally upset. But we both knew there was more to be said before we could sleep. I took my feet down off the hassock, and she came and sat before me on it, and took both my hands in hers.

“No more ducking and weaving. Spell it out for me,” I said. “In words of one sound bit, what’s the deal?”

She was through dodging. “I’m proposing marriage, Joel. Just as we’ve discussed: lifetime, exclusive, old-fashioned matrimony. And I’m offering to support us… uh, at least until you get your degree and start to become established as a composer and start earning. I can afford it. I’m quite sure you’ll get that Kallikanzaros Scholarship—but if you don’t, it won’t matter. And best of all, we can start our first baby right away —tomorrow night, if you want.”

“Huh? Skinny, what about your degree—your career?”

“My second career, you mean. It’ll keep. I’ve always known what my first career has to be.” She tightened her grip on my hands and leaned slightly closer. “Stinky, maybe now you’ll understand why I’ve been so…” She blushed suddenly. “So frimpin’ stingy. So square, even for a Terran girl. Why I don’t park, or pet, or sneak out after curfew, and why our clinches never got out of hand—or even into it, so to speak. I think you know I haven’t wanted to be that way. But I had no choice. It may be all right for some other girls to bend the rules and take risks, but me, I’ve had it beaten into my head since I was three that I have responsibilities.”