Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I got mine around the other side, that’s all.

I had never seen the Bridge. Not with my own eyes, anyway. But it looked much like it did in the Sim, even to apparent size and lighting. The main visual difference I noticed as I came through the hatch was that almost none of the countless screens, dials, or readouts were active, including the main display before the Captain’s Couch. In Sim, everything was active all the time, and there was a constant faint under-current of metallic beeps, chirps, buzzes, and other technosounds. And the Sim had the scent all wrong; instead of electrical ozone, the predominant notes were stale coffee and an odd, hauntingly redolent perfume. I would never have taken Captain Bean for a perfume kind of guy, and while I didn’t know the Second Officer, van Cortlandt, his picture hadn’t made him seem like one either.

One other intangible was different. Here I was somehow acutely conscious of the stupendous thickness and weight and ingenious design of all that shielding above my head, and of the fact that our speed was so horrendous, some dangerous stuff was getting through anyway. The hazard was low, but I would definitely be safer when I got back down as far as the Ag Deck or Rup-Tooey.

Terrific.

All these things registered on the subconscious level in the time it took me to complete a preliminary census. Big as it was, one big open area, the Bridge Deck was considerably more crowded than I had expected it to be.

I counted fourteen people total, began ticking them off. Because of the higher than normal airflow, all were displaying a tendency to drift away from their handholds. A slight majority were facing my way, so I started with them, left to right.

Governor-General Cott and Perry Jarnell, both imposing as hell in full formal attire including ceremonial swords, and drifting tall arm in arm as if they were posing for a sculptor, Jarnell grasping a chair to anchor them in the steady breeze. Solomon Short, wearing only a dirty breechclout and an expression it took me a moment to be sure was a broad grin, since he was upside down with respect to everyone else. Second Officer David van Cortlandt, tall and portly, with a flowing white walrus mustache, a receding mane of white hair, and extremely well-developed smile wrinkles—which he too was exercising. Odd. Captain Bean, wearing the kind of pepper-and-salt Vandyke beard, heavy on the pepper with slight mustache twirls, that has been the most common choice of skippers since the age of sail, was more what I’d been expecting; his expression was the one on my mental picture of Magellan, the day he realized he wasn’t going to make it home. To his left, Third Officer Bruce looked madder than a wet hen, ready to peck somebody and then lay a bad egg. Completing the array on my extreme right was, to my mild surprise, Paul Hattori, in his best business attire. I’d have thought he was now even more useless than the crew—whether we admitted it or not, we were now a de facto social collective, operating on the barter system, with no further use for money as long as the toilet paper held out. Yet his expression was the oddest of all; he looked… exalted, like someone in church, or a groupie backstage. He was gripping the back of a chair with both hands in such a way as to make it seem he was standing on the deck.

Those facing away from me took several seconds longer to identify.

I got no instant-recognition hits from size or body language, nor from clothes—in fact, there was something subtly not right about their clothes I was too busy to analyze. The seven of them broke down into two het couples and three singletons, two female, one male. Something about placement and stance gave me the idea the taller of the single fems might have deliberately interposed herself between the other two, but I couldn’t be sure. Without exception, they all seemed to carry themselves with an air of enormous confidence, as if they were used to being listened to respectfully.

Nobody had noticed me enter. I hadn’t identified any of the ones facing away yet, and some instinct or insecurity made me keep my handhold just inside the door until I had. So I went with my strengths. Four people were talking at once and none would yield; probably anybody else would have called the result noise. I chose to treat it as a quartet—and used my composer’s ear to pick out the individual horns by their timbre and range rather than the mangled notes. Whatever they were saying could be repeated to me later; now I wanted to know who was saying them. The enhanced free-fall airflow worked for me, now, bringing me their voices with unusual clarity.

Three of the instruments I knew at once, would have even if I could not have seen them being played: Captain Bean, Jarnell, and Lieutenant Bruce, working as a trio, alto, trombone, and trumpet. That fourth horn doing the counterpoint, the baritone—

Damn, it was strange. It teased at the edges of memory. Long-term storage. Whoever he was, I’d met him briefly years ago, probably shortly after we’d left, and hadn’t encountered him since. I hadn’t liked him much for some reason. The penny resolutely refused to drop farther.

Another voice entered, causing the others to fall silent. A clarinet, but with the quiet authority of Goodman. This one I was sure I didn’t know; its timbre was so unique I knew if I’d ever heard him speak I’d have tried to get him to sing for me. His couple-partner remained silent, contributing no harmonies.

He stated a brief theme. Captain Bean picked it up and restated it three times, changing it slightly each time. The third time, the clarinet joined in in unison, to tell him he had it right.

Lieutenant Bruce began a counterstatement, but had traded his trumpet for a kazoo; in compensation he blew so hard it broke.

The baritone entered again, but allowed itself to be interrupted by a cello in its lower register. I didn’t know this voice either, I was sure of it. And I didn’t much care for it. It had an undertone of menace, of unstated threat.

My strangeness meter was beginning to max. In a small town of less than five hundred, there can be one or two people you’ve just never chanced to run into. But three of them, that you’re sure you’ve never even passed within earshot of? I had to be mistaken.

Captain Bean’s alto reply started out softly, but built to a small angry crescendo, like the first harbinger of trouble ahead in Wagner.

The next voice, the tall singleton female, I knew at once, and started to relax. Her name would come to me in a second. I hadn’t seen her in years, but had always liked her. This one was no horn, but a singer: smokey voice, like late period Annie Ross. Some sort of joke in her name. Miss Steak? Miss Fortune? Ms. Rhee? Something literary about the joke. Miss Elenius? An adolescent erotic undertone too, somehow. Something dirty… female honorific… last name that made it all a quote or literary reference… I was almost there… famous character? Title? Title . That felt right.

Oh, for Pete’s sake, of course. Les Misérables . “Lay Ms. Robb.” Dorothy Robb, sweet old lady, had been kind to me the last time we met. What was that funny job title of hers? Chief Enabler, that was it….

Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.

Given that context, I recognized the baritone at once. “Smithers.” Alex Rennick, Master of the North Keep.

Well, hell . That was annoying. Clearly my wiring was misfiring. Not that I blamed it, given the events of recent weeks. But I could not even override it—no matter how hard I assured my ears that they were mistaken, they both stubbornly insisted we were all hearing Dorothy Robb together. Slightly older, perhaps, but her.

All right, this did not necessarily mean I was losing it. People can have vocal doubles. I’d have remembered a colonist in her nineties, but it was not impossible this woman was imitating one for some—