Variable Star Read Online Free Page A

She was staring straight ahead at the windshield, which was still opaque.
    Keeping my mouth shut was easy this time. I not only didn’t know how I felt, I didn’t even know what I felt it about . I couldn’t have been more clueless if I’d had my head in a sack. Anything I said was likely to sound stupid in retrospect, and there are few things I hate more.
    “I rehearsed this a hundred times,” she said finally. “Now I’ve screwed it up completely.”
    I suspected this was true, but kept my mouth shut.
    She swiveled my way and unbuckled her crash harness, though we were still three klicks above hard ice. It gave her enough freedom of movement to lean forward and take one of my hands in both of hers. I noted absently that the skin of her palm was remarkably hot. “Have you ever heard of Harun al-Rashid?” she asked me.
    “Plays defense for the Tachyons?”
    “Close,” she said. “You’re only off by, let me see, a little more than a millennium and a half. Fifteen hundred and some years.”
    “But he does play defense.”
    “Stinky, please shut up! He was a rich kid, from a powerful military family in ancient Persia. His father was a Caliph, roughly equivalent to premier of a province today, a man so tough he invaded the Eastern Roman Empire, which was then ruled by the Empress Irene.”
    “You’re making this up,” I charged.
    Her eyes flashed. “I said ‘please,’ Joel.”
    I drew an invisible zipper across my lips.
    “Harun became Caliph himself in the year 786.” Over a thousand years before man could even travel anywhere . “He was probably as wealthy and powerful as anybody in living memory had ever been. Yet somehow, he was not an ignorant idiot.”
    “Amazing,” I said, trying to be helpful.
    Go try to be helpful to a woman who’s talking. “He had the odd idea it was important to know what his people were really thinking and feeling about things,” she went on as if I had not spoken. “He wanted more than just the sanitized, politically safe version they would give to him or to anyone he could send to talk to them. He understood that his wealth and power distorted just about everything in his relations with others, made it difficult if not impossible for truth to pass between them. You can see how that would be, right?”
    “Sure. Everybody lies to the boss.”
    “Yes!” Finally, I’d gotten one right. “Then one day he overheard one of his generals say that nobody knows a city as well as an enemy spy. It gave him an idea.
    “That night he disguised himself as a beggar, sneaked out of his palace alone, and wandered the streets of Baghdad, a spy in his own capital. Everywhere he went, he listened to conversations, and sometimes he asked innocent questions, and because he was thought a beggar, no one bothered to lie to him. He got drunk on it. He started to do it whenever he could sneak away.”
    Her eyes were locked on mine, now. It was important that I get this.
    “Do you see, Joel? For the first time in his life Harun got an accurate picture of what the common people honestly thought…more than just what they thought, he experienced firsthand what life was really like for them, came to understand the things they didn’t even think about because they simply assumed them…and their perspective informed and improved his own thinking from then on. He became one of the most beloved rulers in history—his name means Aaron the Just, and how many rulers do you suppose have ever been called that? One time fifteen thousand men followed him into battle against one hundred twenty-five thousand—and whipped them, left forty thousand legionaries dead on the ground and the rest running for their lives. He lived to a ripe old age, and when he died the whole Muslim world mourned. Okay?”
    I was nodding. I understood every word she said. I had no idea what she was driving at.
    She took a deep breath. “Okay. Now, imagine you’re a young Persian girl in Baghdad. I see your mouth opening,