The Diamond Moon by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online Page A

think I’d like to change the subject.”
    Besides being the ship’s youngest passenger, Marianne was its most easily excited and most easily bored. Most of the others were new graduates of universities and profes-sional schools, taking the year off to acquire a thin coat of cosmopolitan varnish before settling down to a life of in-terplanetary banking or stock brokerage or art dealing or fulltime leisure. Marianne had not yet found her calling. None of the undergraduate majors she’d undertaken had proved capable of holding her interest; pre-law, pre-medicine, history of art, languages ancient or modern—nothing had lasted beyond a romantic first encounter. Not even a real romance—she would tell this part delicately, hinting at a brief affair with a professor of classics—had carried her past the midterm in the subject. Semester after semester she’d started with A’s and ended with incompletes.
    Her mother, possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible fortune but beginning to balk at financing Marianne’s ongoing education without some glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel, had finally urged Marianne to take time off to see something of the rest of Earth and the other inhabited worlds. Perhaps somewhere in Europe or Indonesia or South America or out there among the planets and satellites and space stations, something would capture her daughter’s imagination for longer than a month.
    Marianne had spent the year after her twenty-first birthday wandering Earth, acquiring clothes and souvenirs and intellectually stylish acquaintances. If she lacked discipline, she was nevertheless gifted with a restless intelligence and was quick to pick up the latest in modes pensées —among which the ideas of Sir Randolph Mays figured prominently, at least in North Continental circles.
“You’re actually working for Professor Forster? You didn’t tell me that before.” Her customary boredom was overcome. “You don’t look much like a conspirator type to me.”
     
“Conspirator? Oh . . . don’t tell me.”
     
“What?”
     
“You’re not one of those who take Randolph Mays se-riously.”
     
“Several million people do.” Her eyes widened. “Includ-ing some very intelligent ones.”
     
“ ‘The ultimate spiritual presence that is the dweller in the innermost, besides being the creator and sustainer of the universe’—do I quote him correctly?”
     
“Well . . .” Marianne hesitated. “Why is Forster going to Amalthea, if he doesn’t know something he’s not telling?” she demanded.
    “He may suspect he knows something, but he’s going for pure research. What else?” Hawkins, a postdoc in xeno--archaeology at the University of London, was a blind loy-alist where his thesis advisor was concerned. “Remember, Forster applied for his grants and permits long before Amal-thea got into the news; that anomalous radiation signature has been known for over a century. As for this warmed-over conspiracy business—really, that too belongs back in the 20th century,” Hawkins said a bit huffily.
    Marianne was uncertain whether to be miffed; having formed few opinions of her own, she found herself at the mercy of people who claimed authority. She struggled bravely on. “So you think there’s no such thing as the Free Spirit? That aliens never visited the solar system?”
    “I’d be a right fool to say that, wouldn’t I? Seeing as how I’m one of less than half a dozen people who can read Culture X script. So is Forster, which is how I know him. Which has nothing to do with Mays and his theories.”
Marianne gave it up then, and drained the last of her champagne. She studied the empty flute and said, “There’s a lot I don’t know about you.” She was stating a fact, not starting a flirtation. Panic creased his brows. “I’ve done it again, launched into a lecture. I always . . .”
     
“I like to learn things,” she said plainly. “Besides, you shouldn’t try to be somebody you