The Sam Gunn Omnibus (74 page)

Darling seemed to sense her
apprehension the way a snake senses the terror it instills in a small bird. He
thinks it’s because of him, Jade realized. He doesn’t know, doesn’t realize.

“Sheena married Lowell Hubble,
after her Queen of the Asteroids series went into syndication,” Darling ticked
off on his beringed fingers, his eyes watching her intently. “Marjorie finally
retired on Bermuda. Jean Margaux died recently in a traffic accident in Maine,
not far from her summer home, I understand. There was some talk about foul
play, even suicide.”

Jade’s heart nearly stopped.

“I checked that out,” she said
through gritted teeth. “No foul play. Suicide is possible, of course, but all
that can be said for certain is that she lost control of her car and went over
a cliff into the sea.”

“Strange that she’d be driving her
own car, though, don’t you think? I would imagine a woman such as Jean would
have a chauffeur on hand at all times. A young handsome chauffeur, undoubtedly.”
He smiled wickedly.

Jade barely managed to say, “Maybe.”

“That leaves just me.” Darling
heaved a titanic sigh. “Living alone here in the midst of all this splendor.”

Get him talking about himself, Jade
thought desperately. Get away from Jean Margaux’s death.

“Why alone?” she asked, trying to
sound inquisitive. “You’re wealthy. Your columns about art are world-famous.
You could be surrounded by friends, associates, admirers.”

He made a laugh that sounded forced
and self-deprecating. “It would take quite a few of them to surround me, wouldn’t
it?”

“I didn’t m
ean ...”

“Dear lady, I live the way I live
because I choose to. I know my limitations. My columns are frauds; how can
anyone
write valid art criticism without going to see the artwork in its actual
setting? I write about holograms that are sent to me. People read my pieces for
the personal nasties I throw in about the artists and dealers and other critics.
I’m a worse gossip columnist than Grace Harcourt ever was, on her most vicious
day.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Do you know what that
radiation did to me? I can never father children! That’s not bad enough. It
also unbalanced my entire endocrine system so completely that I’ve blown up to
this monstrous size you see!” He spread his arms and the robe billowed out like
a silken cloud.

“I didn’t know that,” Jade said
softly.

“Sam accused me of gluttony and
called me terrible names,” Darling said, his voice shaking, “but the truth is I
was a slim and handsome man when I started out on that voyage of his. You saw
the pictures! Did I look anything like
this
?”

“No,” she admitted. “You certainly
didn’t.”

“Thanks to that unkind bastard Sam
I’ve become a balloon, a blimp, a mountain of fat—and it’s all his fault! I’ve
got to hide myself from the rest of the human race, because of that little
unloving snot of a man!”

Tears were rolling down Darling’s
cheeks. “I loved him. I truly did. And he treated me worse than dirt. He turned
me into
this”

“He may be my father,” Jade
blurted.

Darling coughed and sputtered,
cleared his throat, wiped at his eyes. “What did you say?”

Shocked at her own admission, Jade
sat there in stunned silence. She had not intended to tell Darling what she had
learned, what she now feared was true. She had intended to remain silent, to
keep her secret to herself and share it with no one.

Instead, her voice trembling, Jade
said, “Sam and Jean Margaux had a fling aboard the
Bosporus.
Jean stayed on the Moon for nearly a year. I was born at Moonbase. An orphan.”

“But that doesn’t m
ean ...”

“How could someone be orphaned at
birth in a place like Moonbase?” Jade demanded, painful urgency in her
question. “It was a small town in those days, only a few hundred people, and most
of them were retirees. The medical staff didn’t allow pregnancies to come to
term there; as soon as they found that a woman was pregnant they shipped her
back to her home on Earth.”

“But you were born there,” Darling
whispered, the truth slowly dawning on him.

“You’d have to have a lot of money
to get away with it,” said Jade. “Money to keep the medics quiet. Money to
erase the computer records. Money to pay off the woman
who ...
who adopted the abandoned baby.”

“Jean
Margaux ...
?”
Darling seemed stunned.

Jade nodded bitterly. “Twenty years
later, when she heard there was a reporter looking into the time she’d spent at
Moonbase, when she found out who the reporter was, where she’d been born, how
old she was—she told her chauffeur to take the day off, and then drove her car
off a cliff.”

“My God.”

“I’m really an orphan now,” said
Jade. “Sam died off at the end of the solar system, and I killed my own mother.”

Suddenly she was crying
uncontrollably. Her world dissolved and she was bawling like a baby. She found
herself in Darling’s arms, wrapped and held and protected by this strange man
who was no longer a stranger.

“It’s all right,” Darling was
crooning to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “It’s all right. Cry all
you want to. We’ll both cry. For all the love that we never had. For all the
love that we’ve lost.”

She had no idea how long they cried
together. Finally, though, she disengaged herself gently from his arms. Darling
pointed to a door in the opulent room and suggested she freshen up. She saw
that tears had runneled streaks down the makeup on his face.

By the time she returned to the main
room a small meal sat steaming on the low table in front of her host and
Darling’s makeup had been newly applied. Although she felt anything but hungry,
Jade sat on the cushions set up opposite Darling. He poured her a cup of tea.

“Are you all right now?” he asked
softly.

Jade nodded. I’ll never be all
right, she knew. I made my own mother kill herself. She killed herself rather
than face her own daughter. Killed herself rather than admit she had a
daughter—me.

“There’s the matter of your
promise,” Darling said as he uncovered a bowl of diced meat chunks. She saw
that the bowl next to it was filled with bubbling melted cheese.

“Yes. My promise.” She almost
laughed. Nothing he could do to her could bother her now.

“I had intended,” he said, spearing
a square of meat deftly on a little skewer, “to demand that you never reveal
anything you heard on Sam’s disks.”

She
looked up at him. “That was going to be it?”

“Yes.”
He smiled at her. “What did you think?”

Glancing
at the erotic scenes on the tapestries, she smiled back. “Something more
physical.”

“Dear
me, no! Not at all!”

“I
can understand why you’re sensitive about Sam’s disks.”

“Yes.
Of course you can.”

“But
I’m a
reporter....”

“You
don’t have to convince me. You can have the disks.”

For
a moment she was not sure she had heard him correctly. “I can have them?”

Darling
nodded, and a tide of ripples ran across his cheeks and chins to disappear
beneath the open collar of his robe.

“It’s
strange,” he said wistfully. “You nurse your own pain until there’s virtually
nothing left in your life but the pain.”

“That’s
a terrible way to live,” she said. But a pang of loss and sadness and guilt
pulsed through her.

“When
I realized how much you’ve suffered, it made me see how I’ve been flagellating
myself, blaming Sam for what’s become of me.”

“I’ve
got my work,” Jade said, as much to herself as Darling. “I’ve got a life.”

“And
I don’t. I’ve become a hermit. I’ve withdrawn from the human race.”

“It’s
not too late to come back.”

“Like
this?” He looked down at himself, layer upon layer of bulging fat.

“Endocrine
imbalances can be corrected,” Jade said tenderly.

“Yes,
I know,” he confessed. “It’s nothing but an excuse to keep myself hidden away
from the rest of the world.”

She
smiled at him. “You’d need some discipline. Or a thick hide.”

“You
still owe me a promise. You said you’d do whatever I asked.”

She
felt no fear now. “I remember. What do you want?”

Darling
took in a deep breath. His eyes studied her face, as if searching for the
courage to make his request.

“Will
you be my friend?” he asked at last. “You’re going to be on the
Golden Gate
for months. Will you come and visit me
and ...
and help me to come out and meet other people?”

“I...”
She had other commitments, a career, a longing for love and fulfillment, a
gnawing guilt that burned sullenly within her like a hot coal. But in that
instant of time she realized that love takes many forms, and that saving a man’s
life bears an obligation for a lifetime.

She saw an automobile tumbling off
a cliff into the angry sea below. She saw Sam Gunn’s round, slightly lopsided
face grinning at her. She saw Raki’s darkly handsome scowl and Spence Johansen’s
heart-fluttering smile and the tearful last memory of her adoptive mother as
she left the Moonbase hospital forever. She saw Rick Darling staring at her
with his entire life in his eyes.

“I’d be happy to be your friend,”
she said. “I need a friend, too.”

The two of them—enormous overweight man
and tiny elfin woman—leaned across the low table and embraced each other in
newfound charity.

JADE
CELEBRATED, IF THAT IS THE CORRECT WORD, HER
twenty-first birthday alone.

Rick Darling had thrown an immense
party for her the day before she left the
Golden Gate
at the farthest point in its orbit and took the bulbous shuttle craft to the
surface of Ceres. Nearly half the population of the huge bridge ship had poured
into Darling’s posh villa, eating, laughing, drinking, narcotizing themselves
into either frenzied gaiety or withdrawn moroseness.

Through it all, Darling had
remained close to Jade’s side, his new figure almost trim compared to his
former obesity. At first Jade thought he stayed near her because he was afraid
of the crowd. Slowly, as the party proceeded and Darling played the genial,
witty, gracious host, Jade began to realize that
he
wanted to protect
her.

Jade tried to relax at the party
and have a good time, but she was still haunted by the thoughts of her newly
discovered and newly lost mother. Despite the happy oblivious crowd swirling
around her, she still saw the automobile plunging over the rocky cliff and into
the unforgiving sea.

Now, more than a week after Darling’s
party, it was her birthday. Twenty-one years old. An entire lifetime ahead of
her. An entire lifetime already behind her.

She stood at the window of her room
in the habitat
Chrysalis,
in orbit around Ceres,
and gazed out at the empty sky. There were no moons to be seen, no Earth
hanging huge and tantalizingly close. Here in the Asteroid Belt, beyond the
orbit of Mars, even giant Jupiter was merely another star in the sky, brighter
than the rest but still little more than a distant speck of light against the
engulfing dark.

Slightly wider than a thousand
kilometers, Ceres was the largest of the asteroids. Still, its gravity was so minuscule
that its underground caverns and tunnels were always thick with dust; the
slightest movement stirred the choking black soot, and it hung in the air for
hours before finally settling—only to be stirred up again by the next person’s
movements.