Нэнси Кресс - Tomorrow's Kin

Sissy decided to be honest. Not that she wasn’t usually honest with Marianne. “Probably not that much, but—”

“Tell them I’m sick and reschedule.”

“But Tim says it’s important you show up so nobody thinks you’re scared off because of that attack at Notre Dame.”

“I am scared.”

“I said ‘scared off.’ Anyway, it’s too late to reschedule.”

“You’re a hard taskmaster, Sissy Tate.”

“Tim is going to pick you up in an hour at your place so you better go home and get ready. You aren’t going to wear that, are you?”

“No. I’m going to wear sackcloth and ashes and mourn my reading time.”

“Little lady, you’d look good even in that rig-out and that’s just the God honest truth,” said a voice behind them. Sissy whirled. How had anybody gotten in here and was he armed and— But Tim stood beside the intruder, and Tim was grinning.

Sissy felt her insides draw up and back, like a rat getting ready to fight. She knew who this was. She’d seen him just yesterday on the news.

Jonah Stubbins was even taller than Tim, and about 150 pounds heavier. He was dressed in what Marianne had once called Full Sunbelt: yellow shirt, khakis, white belt and shoes, bolo tie. He seized Marianne’s hand. “Dr. Jenner, I’m real glad to meet y’all!”

Sissy saw that Marianne was holding her breath. Stubbins saw it, too. He laughed. “Aw, I ain’t wearing none of my product, Doc. Y’all are perfectly safe from… whatever. Unless a’course you don’t wanna be!”

Marianne freed her hand and said icily, “I don’t understand why you are here, Mr. Stubbins. Tim—”

“Sure you understand. You and me, little lady—may I call you Marianne?”

“No.”

“All right. But we got interests in common. You already knew that, din’t you?”

“I—”

“Don’t say nothing till you hear me out. You Eastern types allus too quick to get to jawin’. I’m here to make y’all a donation. A real big one, that you don’t expect. That’s why your bodyguard showed me up here.”

A donation. From Jonah Stubbins. Sissy looked at Marianne, who said, “I don’t think so.”

“Then think again. Just hear me out, little lady, that’s all I ask. Right now, anyways!”

“I am not a ‘little lady.’ And you are not a viable donor to the foundation, however much you might think our interests align. Lastly, I’m not fooled, not amused, and not charmed by your folksy presentation. You have an MBA from Harvard, for God’s sake, which you have misused to criminal levels.”

Sissy caught her breath. She’d never heard Marianne be rude like that.

Stubbins did not leave. Instead he altered his body, somehow becoming less mountainous, less looming, less gaudy. He said, “That’s a great relief. I do get tired of my business persona, you know. But it’s even more of a relief to realize I wasn’t wrong about you. You have the backbone to perhaps succeed at your foundation’s mission, to sway public opinion by inches, until it reaches the tipping point. Because our interests do align, Dr. Jenner. We both want a starship built. However, I know the government can’t, or won’t, get the job done. No surprise there—I’m a Libertarian and we Libertarians know that government can seldom get anything right because responsibility is diffused and unaccountable. So I’m getting it done, even if it takes my entire fortune.”

He waved his hand like the fortune was right there in front of him, and somehow Sissy could see it: piles of gold and diamonds and rubies like in a storybook.

Stubbins continued, “Now, you don’t want to accept my donation because first, you don’t like my products. That’s irrelevant. Second, you’re afraid that I’ll want something from you, that there are strings attached to my donation. There aren’t. I only want you to go on doing what you’re doing. And third, you think that if you’re associated with me, your cause will suffer. Well, it won’t, because my donation will be completely anonymous. Not even the IRS can trace what I don’t want them to.

“You know and I know—the whole word knows—that if environmental conditions on Earth trend the way they are now, with ocean pollution and superstorms and desertification, in three or four generations this planet will be almost uninhabitable. Escape from Earth is humanity’s strongest hope for survival. I know you agree with me on that—your speeches quote Stephen Hawking and Freeman Dyson and Paul Davies on the subject. People like me are the only ones getting the job done. So take my anonymous donation and add your bit to a private lifeboat for humanity.”

Sissy felt dazed. Some of those words were straight from Marianne’s speeches. Marianne looked dazed, too. Was this devil using one of his products on them? Sissy wanted to move closer and sniff, but then the perfume might get her, too.

Marianne said, “How can I be sure your donation will really be anonymous?”

“Because I’ve made them before, to other groups working in my interests. You know some of the recipients.” He pulled a piece of paper from a pocket. “Ask them, privately and in a place you’re sure isn’t bugged. Here, take the list, it’s going to erase itself in a few minutes.”

Marianne took the paper. “I can’t give you an answer now, Mr. Stubbins. I need to consider.”

“Of course. My personal phone number is at the bottom of the list. It won’t erase. Only ten people in the world have that number. You’re the eleventh. Also, here is the figure I’m prepared to donate anonymously to your foundation. Call me. Good-bye, Dr. Jenner. A pleasure.”

He lumbered out and Tim locked the door. When he turned back to face Sissy and Marianne, his blue eyes shone like lighthouses. “It’s a lot of money. You gotta take it, Marianne.”

“ No, ” Sissy said, and it came out almost a shout. Not that she didn’t feel that strongly about it. But she lowered her voice. “I don’t trust him.”

Marianne gazed down at the list. Sissy, not good at reading upside down, saw only that it held six or seven names and some numbers before the names abruptly vanished and Marianne crumpled the paper in her fist.

Tim said, “Fuck me! How did it do that? Marianne, we gotta take his money.”

“No,” Sissy said. And again, “No.”

Jonah Stubbins was an unlikely multibillionaire in a high-tech electronic age, more like P. T. Barnum than Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, although Stubbins’s fortune now rivaled Gates’s. Stubbins had been born country-shucks poor, in the hills of Appalachia, which he’d hated enough to hike out of on the day he turned sixteen, bringing with him nothing but clothes, a rifle, and an untutored brain. Still, the meth labs of his violent kin had imbued him with three things: a hatred of poverty, a respect for chemistry, and a light regard for the law.

The next few years of his biography were murky, defying even journalists to discover where, how, and with what he had survived. But at twenty-two he enrolled in a third-rate college, tested out of most subjects, and emerged a year later with a degree in chemistry. By that time his good-ol’-boy façade was firmly in place, and he kept it through Harvard, which he attended on scholarship. He had already founded his fledgling company, and the applications committee was impressed. Nobody at Harvard liked Stubbins, not the legacy babies nor the brilliant nobodies nor the faculty. Nobody understood why he kept up his pose of illiteracy, despite stellar grades. In fact, nobody understood anything about him. But by the time he had his MBA, everybody knew who he was.

His company, like many start-ups, began in a garage. The garage belonged to the first of his many wives, who’d received it in the divorce from the first of her many husbands. The product was perfume.