Her first impression of the ship told little about Jack, but it blew her away with the evidence of Beston wealth. The drive was of a type she had never seen before, permitting smooth changes of acceleration when and how you pleased. She would feel none of the jolts, jerks, and nauseating turns of a commercial vessel. The navigation system was totally automated. Jack Beston would not need to put a hand on it during the flight to Odin Station (which made Milly wary as to where he might try to put his hands). As for the interior, each fitting that she saw as she wandered from cabin to cabin was more than Milly could afford. The paintings looked like originals and the free-fall rails were of rare woods, all imported from Earth.
Jack Beston’s private suite, at which Milly took a swift and quite unauthorized peek, had a sitting-room, a kitchen containing the most advanced equipment that Milly had ever seen, and a large bedroom. The last contained a circular bed almost three meters across. Who was supposed to sleep there? Jack himself was skinny enough to become lost in its downy vastness.
Perhaps sudden, huge, and unexpected wealth would do that to anyone — especially if the ways that you could spend your money were strongly constrained.
The story as told to Milly by Hannah was sad, wonderful, or ludicrous, depending on your point of view.
Philip and Jack Beston had grown up together on Ganymede in moderate circumstances, neither poor enough to suffer hardship nor rich enough to be part of the jeunesse doree who felt that Ganymede and the whole System were theirs to play in and with. Philip and Jack knew that they came from a family that had once been loaded. That, however, was more than a century ago. Now they were just smart, ambitious, and competitive.
And until Philip’s sixteenth birthday that was enough. Three weeks after that day, the boys received a call while they were in school. They were asked to come, at their convenience but without telling anyone — anyone, which made it really interesting — to the offices of Branksome and Reid. Philip and Jack had never heard of Branksome or Reid, but the caller assured them they had been legal advisers to the Beston family for many generations.
The original Branksomes and Reids were all long-dead, explained Martha Sappho Reid, a woman in her late seventies. She sat Philip and Jack down in the poky little office on deliberately old-fashioned wing chairs. She gave them green tea in ancient porcelain cups, and began.
“I have rather a strange story to tell you. You have heard, perhaps, of Marcus Tullius Beston?”
Jack looked to his older brother for assistance. Philip said, tentatively, “Like, the great-great-grand-uncle?”
Martha Reid nodded. “Add one great, and you have it right. Marcus Tullius Beston trained the first generation of cetacean managers, and he made a gigantic fortune from the Terran sea-farms. However, he formed no permanent liaisons, and he died sine prole.”
She caught the exchange of glances, and added, “That means he died without children. Rather than handing his wealth on to siblings or nephews and nieces, which would commonly be a preferred solution, he followed a quite different path. He set up a trust, the original assets of which were his entire fortune. Furthermore, upon his death the assets of the trust were to be invested and managed, but otherwise remain untouched for a period of three-quarters of a century.
At that time, the heirs would inherit. Marcus Tullius Beston, however, was a man whom many would consider a little eccentric.”
She ignored Philip and Jack, who were looking at each other in a way that suggested they thought Marcus Beston was a total loon.
“Beston’s will decreed that the inheritance would be encumbered,” Martha continued. “Which is to say, it would go only to family members who satisfied certain criteria, and it could be spent only in certain ways. Those ways were rather tightly defined. Inherited wealth was not to be spent on pleasure. It was, rather, to be applied only to such enterprises as might significantly affect the future of the human race, and affect it in beneficial ways.
“In due course, Marcus Tullius Beston died. The first result of his death was perhaps entirely predictable. His will was contested by every living family member, all of whom had been in effect disinherited in favor of the far future. The will survived those challenges, and the trust was established. Perhaps you are beginning to guess the rest of the story.”
Jack looked to Philip for guidance. Philip said, “Er, the whole thing got wiped out in the Great War?”
“Indeed, no, though that is an intelligent surmise. The trust continued and its assets grew, through good times and bad, until the present day. And well before the Great War, the trust managers had the foresight to transfer a substantial fraction of the assets into investment in Outer System development. Now, however, we must come to the present day. It has been seventy-five years since Marcus Tullius Beston died. Today is, in fact, the exact anniversary of his death. The rules for the line of descent for his inheritors were complex, but well-defined. You, Philip Beston and Jack Beston, are his sole inheritors. You were bequeathed and will receive, in equal shares, the value of his estate.”
“You mean we’re going to get money?” The explanation had finally reached a point that Philip and Jack could understand.
“Eventually, but not for some years. The elder brother — that is you, Philip — will have to reach age twenty-three. Moreover, the assets may be used by each of you only in the manner originally described; namely, for such enterprises as will significantly and beneficially affect the future of the human race.”
“Do our parents know all this?”
“Not yet. Marcus Tullius Beston envisaged, and wished to avoid, any situation in which individuals might seek ways to leverage in advance a future bequest.”
Jack asked, “Do our parents have to know — ever?”
“I see that as inevitable. I do not see it as a problem.”
Jack said, “That’s because you don’t know what our stepmother is like.”
Philip said, “Oh shit. We’re not getting money. We’re getting trouble.”
“The way I’ve heard it,” Hannah went on, “Philip and Jack’s parents took their own shot at cracking the terms of the will, trying to get their hands on the kids’ money. They didn’t have any more success than the people seventy-five years earlier. They just made it so that Philip and Jack never wanted to speak to their stepmother ever again.
“Then Philip and Jack became old enough to inherit. They had a big problem. All that loot, more than they had ever dreamed of having, but they didn’t know how to get their hands on it. They suggested all sorts of things based on their own interests, but the trustees bounced every one. Martha Reid didn’t seem to see the value to humanity of Philip’s proposed hundred kilometer ice rink on Callisto, or Jack’s System-wide space race.
“Freedom to use the trust fund, but also to do something you’d like: that was the problem, and it was Jack who cracked it. He’d always been interested in the idea that there might be aliens, somewhere out there in space. If you could find some, there was no end to what humans might learn. So why not take the old ideas of listening for signals, and do it right? Propose a big, elaborate facility with the best possible equipment and people. And stick it far away from Ganymede, where Old Mother Reid couldn’t keep too close an eye on how you were spending the money.
“It was a great idea, and Martha Reid loved it. She agreed to approve it in a hot minute. Jack set to work, planning an L-5 Argus Station. And he was coming along fine, until he applied for permission to build.
“That’s when he found that there was already an application for a SETI station at Jovian L-5. Philip, without telling his brother, had decided that he would do the same thing, and do it first. Jack went nuts when he found out but there wasn’t much he could do — except win the race. They had always been competitive, now they would be super-competitive. He made his own application for a station at L-4, the other stable Lagrange point. He would do an all-sky survey, whereas Philip Beston was going to concentrate on selected target stars, but otherwise they’d be using the same sort of equipment and analysis methods.