Free Cold as Ice by Charles Sheffield Page A

than she was willing to admit.
    Magnus raised a bushy eyebrow. "That's a dumb question. Because you fascinate him, that's why. But you have him intimidated. He knows that you're seven years younger, and yet no matter what he does, he'll always be your musical inferior. He'll never have your critical ability, or your memory, or a thousandth of your creativity."
    "Oh, nonsense. I couldn't intimidate anyone. He's just shy ."
    She didn't understand Magnus's skeptical shrug. Wilsa's talent had been recognized early by the Belt's foundling education system. Before she was three years old, she had been assigned to live in a music creche, where everyone was a musical prodigy in outsider terms—and the word "prodigy" was never mentioned. Perfect pitch was taken for granted—it was as natural as having two ears—and the teachers expected you to read music before you could read words.
    Surrounded by her peers, Wilsa thought herself perfectly ordinary. At twelve years old, her unusual talent for composition was discovered and encouraged; but by that time, Bach and Mozart and Beethoven and Stravinsky had become her constant companions. Comparing herself with the immortals, she knew she was nothing.
    It had taken another ten years, plus concert exposure to the "real" world, for her to learn that although she might be nothing, one day she could be something. And two more years to appreciate that musical talents were not the only important ones, perhaps not the most important ones.
    In the days after her conversation with Magnus, Wilsa had watched and listened. She decided that, as usual when it came to people and motivation, he was right. Tristan Morgan was confident and relaxed and talkative with everyone and about everything—except when he was face-to-face with Wilsa. Then it was hard to force more than a few words out of him.
    She hated that. It offended her self-image. With time to spare while Magnus Klein haggled contracts, Wilsa had reversed the roles for the past week. She had pursued Tristan, tracking him to his meetings on Ganymede, eating at the same times and places he did, and at last having the inspiration to sit down in front of him and ask about Project Starseed.
    And then the words had poured out. He told her of the grand design, more than a century old, to send an unmanned, fusion-powered ship to the stars. "We changed the name, and the old-timers would have boggled at our technology, but they'd have been right at home with the physics. We fuse a helium-3/deuterium mixture—"
    But when he wanted to give her details, she had outmaneuvered him. She had, she said, at least a week free. Why not let her see things, rather than just hearing about them?
    He seemed hesitant again. She had to coax him along. First she persuaded him to take her to a small deuterium-separation facility right there on Ganymede, and then to the main one on a big ice fragment beyond Callisto. From that point it seemed natural for them to travel inward, together with a load of deuterium, to the construction program on the orbiting Starseed base and watch the Von Neumanns soar up to dock, discharge their helium-3 cargo and drop back to repeat the cycle. The final step had been the visit she had wangled to Hebe Station.
    The vicarious cruise in the Leda through Jupiter's depths, to watch the Von Neumanns mining for fusion fuels within Jupiter's cloud layers, had been part of the same strategy. The music that flooded into her head while she did it had been a long shot, a bonus benefit. New stimulation usually led to new composition, but there were no guarantees.
    Her plan had worked. Tristan would at last speak freely to her. He would even offer comments on music, on other people's music. The only thing he would not do was to discuss her works. Wilsa realized that she wanted that more than anything, but she had not yet understood why it was important . . . although she had noticed that it pleased her rather than distressed her when Tristan Morgan