The Sam Gunn Omnibus (84 page)

She
peered at the video window, the murky gloom of the methane sea. “I have family.
Lots of family. Monica Bianco and Zach Bonner and Felix Sanchez. Frederick
Mohammed Malone. Rick Darling. Elverda Apacheta. The owner of the Pelican Bar.
They’re my family. They’d come to Selene for my wedding, if I asked them to.”

Spence
said, “And here I thought you were an orphan.”

“Not
anymore,” Jade answered, surprised at the reality of it. I’m not alone, she told
herself. I have friends all across the solar system now. And a man who loves me.

“I’m
pretty old for you,” Spence said in the darkness. “Hell, if Sam really is your
father, I’m a year or two older than he is.”

“Would
you be embarrassed to have a wife young enough to be your daughter?” she asked,
half teasing, half fearful of his answer.

“Embarrassed?
Hell no! Every guy my age will eat his heart out with envy the minute he meets
you.”

Jade
laughed, relieved.

“But
there’s you to think about,” he said, turning toward her in the bed. “How’re
you going to feel, tied to an old fart like me when you’re so young? There’s
plenty of stories about old men with young wives....”

“Old
stories,” Jade quickly said. “Stories from ancient times. You’re as young and vigorous
as Sir Lancelot was, and you’ll stay that way for another thirty or forty
years, at least, thanks to modern medicine.”

He
propped himself on one elbow and, with his other hand, traced a finger from her
lips to her chin, down her throat and the length of her body. Jade felt her
skin tingle at his touch.

“Well,”
he said, quite seriously, “I’m sure going to keep abreast of all the research
going on in the field of aging and rejuvenation.”

Jade
burst out laughing and grabbed for him. They made love again and then drifted
back to sleep.

It
was the phone buzzer that awoke Jade. She blinked once, twice, coming out of
the fog, suddenly panicked that she had been dreaming. Then she felt the warmth
of Spence’s body next to hers and heard him snoring softly, almost like the
purr of a contented cat.

Smiling,
she groped in the dark for the oblong box that controlled the wall screen.
Without turning on any lights she pecked at the keys until the scene of the methane
sea was replaced by bold yellow lettering:

urgent call from prof.
goodman.

Jade
had to turn on her bedside lamp to see the control wand well enough to tap out
the command that put Goodman on the video window without activating the wall
camera that would let him see her.

Spence
stirred groggily. “Whassamatter?”

“I
don’t know,” she said.

Goodman
was apparently in the communications center, hunched over a technician who was
sitting at one of the consoles. Display screens covered the wall behind him, no
two of them showing the same picture.

The
professor was scowling fiercely. Or was his expression one of fear? Or even
utter surprise, shock? Jade could not tell.

“Professor
Goodman? This is Jade.”

“Oh!”
He jumped back slightly, as if pricked by a hot needle. “There’s no video.”

“I
know. You have an urgent message for me?”

He
bobbed his head up and down so hard that a lock of his curly hair flopped in
front of his eyes. Brushing it back, he broke into a strange, toothy smile that
just might have been a grimace of pain.

“It
just came in ... from the automated station at Einstein....”

“Einstein?
The black hole?”

“Yes.
No video, of course. But—well, listen for yourself.”

A
long, low bass note, throbbing slightly, like the last distant echo of faraway
thunder or the rumble of a torch ship’s engines.

Spence
sat up in the bed beside Jade. “What the hell is that?” he whispered.

“What
is it?” Jade asked Goodman’s image on the video screen.

The
professor looked startled all over again. “Oh! Excuse me. In my haste I activated
the raw data chip. Here—here’s the same message, but time-compressed and
computer-enhanced.”

“...
you wouldn’t believe what these guys can do! It’s fantastic!”

Sam
Gunn’s voice!

Jade
felt her heart clutch in her chest. “What is that?” she blurted.

“It’s
Sam!” Goodman almost yelled. “Sam! He’s on his way back! He’s coming out of the
black hole!”

“That’s impossible,” Spence said,
his voice hollow.

“I know! But he’s doing it,”
Professor Goodman answered, oblivious to the fact that he was now speaking to a
man’s voice.

“He’s alive?” Jade asked.

“Yes! Yes!” Goodman seemed
ecstatic. “He found aliens on the other side of the black hole. An intelligent
extraterrestrial species! They’ve provided him with the means to come back
through the space-time warp!”

“Sacre dieu,
” Jade breathed.

“He’s alive and coming back to us!”
Goodman was almost capering around the comm center now. “He’s discovered
intelligent extraterrestrial life. It’s a miracle. Two miracles! Miraculous,
the whole thing is miraculous!”

“The time distortion,” Jade asked. “How
long will it take before Sam is back with us?”

Goodman sobered, but only slightly.
“We’re working on that. Trying to get a Doppler fix on the raw data. It’s only
a rough estimate, but from what we’ve got now I’d say that Sam will pop out of
the event horizon in another twenty to twenty-five years.”

“Years?” Spence gasped.

“He’s been gone for more than
fifteen,” Goodman said. Then he fell to musing. “Maybe there’s a symmetry here.
Maybe it’ll take him exactly as long to return as it did to go through the
other way. Still, it’ll be fifteen years, at least. Unless ...”

Jade turned to Spence and clutched
him by the shoulders. “He’s alive! Sam’s alive!”

“And on his way back. The little
SOB is coming back to us.”

“And he’s met intelligent aliens.”

“Holy cow,” said Spence, fervently.

TWO DAYS LATER
Jade and Spence stood at the
observation bay of the torch ship as it sped away from Titan, heading back
toward civilization and the Earth-Moon system.

Holding one arm protectively around
the tiny young woman he loved, Johansen pointed with his free hand: “There’s
Jupiter, the big bright one. And Mars, the smaller red star, down to your left.”

Jade nestled into the crook of his
arm, rested her head against his chest. “And Earth? Can we see Earth?”

“Yep. Kind of faint at this
distance, but it still looks distinctly blue. See it, out there to the left of
Jupiter.”

Jade saw the distant blue speck and
knew that her mother lay buried there. And there was another woman on Earth,
J
ade realized, still alive. But for how long?
The one thing she had learned in the past year or so was that life surges
along, always changing, whether you want it to or not. Nothing remains the
same.

“Spence?” she asked, turning to
look up into his face. “Would you mind if we went down to Earth? Just for a few
days.”

“Earth? I thought you couldn’t....”

“I can wear an exoskeleton for a
few days. And attach myself to a heart pump.”

“But why?”

“My adoptive mother lives in
Quebec. I want to see her. I want to tell her that I understand why she had to
leave me.”

“I thought you hated her.”

“I thought so, too. Maybe I did.
But I don’t anymore. I can’t. Not anymore.”

He gazed down into her lovely green
eyes, knowing that he could not deny her anything.

“Couldn’t you speak with her on a
video link? It’s just as good, almost.”

Jade shook her head gendy. “No.
This has to be in person. For real. Flesh to flesh.”

He shrugged. “I might need an
exoskeleton myself. Been a long time since I faced a full g.”

The ship was accelerating at just
under one-sixth gravity. They had weeks of leisure ahead of them. Solar News
was planning an elaborate special series on Sam Gunn, now that the news of his
return had broken. Raki had promised Jade that she would narrate the entire
series and be the on-camera star. Her career was assured, even though she had
carefully withheld the information that she was probably Sam Gunn’s daughter.

“Will you go out to the black hole
for the show?” Spence asked.

“No,” said Jade. “We can record
that with the remote cameras already on station at Einstein and patch me into
the scene. There’s not much to see, really. No point going out there until Sam’s
about to emerge, and he won’t be coming out for another fifteen or twenty
years.”

“But he’s on his way back.”

“I wonder if he’s aged? Maybe I’ll
be his age when he comes out.”

Spence let a little grin show on
his face.

“It’s so like Sam,” Jade went on. “He
has the whole solar system in a commotion. Intelligent alien life! All these
years the astronomers have been searching and Sam’s the one to find them.”

Spence
made a sound that might have been a barely suppressed laugh.

Jade
took no notice of it. “The scientists, the politicians, the
military—
they’re
all in an uproar. To say nothing of the world’s religious leaders.”

Spence
made no reply.

“Well,”
Jade said, with a sigh, “at least we have fifteen or twenty years to get ready
for it.”

“Maybe,”
Spence said at last.

She
looked sharply at him. “What do you mean?”

“I
don’t know for sure,” he replied. “But there’s a strange flavor to all this.”

Jade
knit her brows.

“I
mean,” said Spence, “Sam disappears while a shipload of lawyers are on their
way to strip him naked. Then fifteen years later he pops up again claiming he’s
met intelligent extraterrestrial creatures.”

“You
don’t think....!”

“Before
we left Titan I used the university library access system to look up the status
of all the lawsuits filed against Sam. The statute of limitations runs out on
the last one next year.”

“But
the signals from the black hole!”

“He’s
Sam Gunn, honey. He’s been hiding out
someplace
for the past fifteen years. Maybe he really did fall into a black hole.” Spence
pulled her tighter and gazed out at the wide starry universe. “I wouldn’t put
any money on it, though.”

She
smiled up at him. “And you claim to be his friend.”

“I
knew Sam pretty well. I wouldn’t put
anything
past him.”

“He
couldn’t have! It just isn’t possible.”

Spence grinned and looked out at the stars
again. “He’s Sam Gunn, honey. Unlimited.

SAM GUNN BIO IS SMASH HIT

Amid
rumors that he’s not dead after all, Solar News’s biographical series about Sam
Gunn has swept the ratings across the solar system.

Produced by neophyte Jane Inconnu,
of Selene, the biography is told through the voices of men and women who knew
Sam Gunn over the many years of his exploits on Earth and in space.

Widely regarded as an adventurer
who operated on the ragged edge of the law, Sam Gunn ...

-HOLLYWOOD INTERPLANETARY

THE LITTLE GIANT: THE
SAM GUNN
SAGA

The
public loves success stories, and none more than the saga of an ordinary person
who struggles against giant corporations and government bureaucracies—and wins.
This accounts, no doubt, for the wild success of Solar News’s biographical
series on space entrepreneur Sam Gunn.