Variable Star Read Online Free

talk to me! Whatever it is, we’ll fix it, I know we will. Just tell me.”
    “Oh, God, I-hi-hi’m sorry… I screwed it all up-hup-hup-hup…” She clutched me back fiercely.
    I was alarmed. I’d seen Jinny cry. This was hooting with sorrow, rocking with grief. Something was seriously wrong. “Whatever it is, it’s okay, you hear me? Whatever it is.”
    She writhed in my arms. “Joel, I lie-hi-hi-hi-hied… I’m so stu-hoo- hupid …”
    Ice formed on the floor of my heart. I did not break our embrace, but I felt an impulse to, and I’m sure she felt it kinesthetically. She cried twice as hard. Well, much harder.
    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.

Two
    Howe’er it be, it seems to me
’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
    —Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
Lady Clara Vere de Vere
    T he 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.