Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “No.”

  He relaxed slightly. “Yes, you have. You’re not.”

  “I really hate it when somebody tells me what I’m thinking. Or are you a telepath?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes, but not the way you mean. A real one.”

  I snorted. “Right. Your mind isn’t fast enough.”

  In fiction, a telepath can read minds. A real telepath is just a glorified radio, with a single receiver. But really glorified—way faster than any radio. Our time rate and the System’s were already diverging very slightly, under the constraints of Einsteinian physics, and would get steadily worse for the next twenty years. Every day, radio and laser signals took just a tiny bit longer to cross the widening gulf between us, and by the time we reached our destination it would take them the greater part of a century. But telepathy, for reasons nobody understands, takes place instantaneously, across any distance yet measured. That single perverse exception to the laws of the universe, and the fact that the gene for it is dominant, make a star-traveling civilization just barely possible. Our ship, like all of them, carried several people capable of telepathic rapport with a partner back in the System, usually, but not always, their identical twin. With luck, their children would be able to maintain the link.

  Herb was looking at me strangely.

  At first, the way his jaw was squared off, and his eyes seemed to have receded deeper into their sockets, and his shoulders were slightly raised, all combined to tell me he was angry. That was odd. Then a second later I saw I had misread the signals completely: he was amused, trying his best not to laugh in my face. At something I had done in the last few moments, apparently. Or said…

  He saw me start to catch on, and let the laugh out.

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Did you really think I was accepted into this company because I’m a writer? You figure a fledgling colony, fighting to stay alive and establish a foothold, has a lot of use for fiction?”

  “You never mentio—”

  “You never asked.”

  “Who—?”

  “My sister Li,” he said. “In Oregon. The one on Terra. Two hours a day, we handle message traffic between Kang/da Costa HQ and the colony, and we’re available freelance for private communications.”

  “I never noticed you doing that!”

  “How would you? I stare into space, and then start typing like crazy. It must look exactly like I’m writing a story. Sometimes I am, if what I’m supposed to type annoys me enough.”

  “Holy shit.” I was so busy rearranging my presumptions and misconceptions in my head, I forgot I had not yet expressed an opinion. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Believe it. I’m a telepath. A communicator.”

  His voice cued me. A lot of people are weirded out by telepaths. A few people call them the kind of names that cause a proctor to show up. He was waiting to learn whether or not his new friend and roommate for the next two decades was one of those people.

  Quickly I said, “No, I mean I can’t believe there’s some poor girl back in the System who looks just like you.”

  His shoulders dropped. “Back to our argument—I was winning. How can you stay a bachelor? Have you no appreciation for fine womanhood? No sense of obligation—”

  My mind took a left. Talking about Jinny and the Conrads had reminded me of something, a small burr under my saddle. An unfulfilled obligation behind me. “As a matter of fact, I do. Both. So much so that I’m going to presume on our friendship and ask you for a favor.”

  “What friendship?”

  “I know, but it’s all I’ve got. I want to send a private message back to Terra.”

  He frowned. “Phone still works. So does mail.”

  “No, I mean private. I need to thank a young lady for defying her grandfather to help me out of a tight spot, and I don’t want to risk getting her in trouble.”

  His frown deepened. “Just tell me one thing. Is this young lady rich and beautiful?”

  “That’s two things. And yes to both.”

  “Maybe there’s hope for you yet. Okay, this once, I’ll do it. You want visual, or just voice?”

  “Voice is fine.”

  He shook his head. “Hopeless. Name?”

  “Evelyn Conrad.”

  “How do you want to route it to her?”

  “Through an intermediary I think I can trust. Can your sister put a really serious privacy shield on a message?”

  “Yes,” was all he said.

  “Okay. Ask her to get it to a Dorothy Robb, two b’s.”

  “Address?”

  “Ms. Robb is the Chief Enabler for Conrad of Conrad.”

  Herb came as close as I would ever see him come to betraying surprise. His nostrils flared just perceptibly for a moment, as if he had begun to doubt his deodorant. His eyes did a funny little thing where for just an instant they tried to widen and narrow at the same time. There was maybe a quarter-second hitch in the soundtrack, and then he said, “I take it back. There is no hope for you.”

  I spread my hands. “When did I claim there was?”

  “You know a Conrad. Well enough that she defied… oh. Kindly tell me her granddad is not—”

  I nodded. “Conrad.”

  “Of course. She defied Conrad of Conrad for you. And you’re here.”

  “Herb, she’s seven years old.”

  He smiled broadly. It had taken him about ten seconds to gear up and start enjoying this. “To be thoroughly sure. Say no more. Unless you want to live.”

  So I told him the whole damned story.

  I’d always known I would, some day. It was going to be a long voyage. But not in the first year. I probably couldn’t have told it yet to anyone who didn’t listen as well as he did. He didn’t mind if I needed a couple of minutes of silence to get a sentence completed.

  When I was finished, he took a couple himself. Then he said softly, “Amigo, you’re the first person I’ve talked to in this bucket of rust so far that actually has a sensible reason to be here. All right, you want little Evelyn to know you’re grateful for getting you out of there, but without tipping the Old Man, have I got it?”

  “Something like, ‘I enjoyed the last moments of our relationship even more than the first,’ maybe. Do you really think you can get that to her privately? Now that you know who she is?”

  He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Li says yes. She knows a way. You don’t need to know what it is. It’s covered.”

  “Thanks, Herb.”

  He lit up one of his cigarettes. “Well, at least the cord is cut clean. With Jinny, I mean. Seldom in history have any humans gotten to have a breakup as final as the one you’ve had. By the time we get to 23 Skiddoo in twenty years, she’ll be… 108 years old, if she was honest about her age.”

  We were making a jump of about eighty-five light-years—at such a hair-raising fraction of c that the trip would seem to us to take twenty years, total. But back in the normal universe, clocks run faster, thanks to Dr. Einstein’s Paradox. To an observer at, say, Tombaugh Station around Pluto, our voyage would appear to take roughly ninety and one-half Standard years.

  “Of course, with her money, she’ll probably still look twenty, by then,” Herb added. “But you’ll know better.”

  “I don’t want her old,” I said bleakly. “I don’t want her to suffer. I want her to be here with me.”

  “Happy to be your mate, even if you both starve on alien soil. Was she really that dumb?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “You’ll love again. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”

  I grimaced. “Not soon.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t have to be too soon. You have twenty years to decide what you want in a wife. But don’t put it off too long, either. The supply is limited, and you don’t look like a man who’d be happy as a celibate.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” I muttered darkly.

  “Look, you have decisions to make. Some short-term,
some long-term. If you plan to spend the next twenty years licking your wounds, and letting those decisions make themselves for you, you’re going to be a tough friend to have. I suggest you get started working on them.”

  “Decisions like what?”

  He leaned back in his chair. “What do you want to do?”

  A perfectly simple, sensible question: the logical first step in making any plan.

  He might just as well have whacked me in the forehead with a plank.

  I did not really see a burst of bright white light, and then find myself on the ground beside my horse, godstruck. The earth did not literally tremble and roar at my feet. My heart probably did not actually pause, and I have it on good authority that time did not, at any time, in fact come to a stop. But Herb’s perfectly obvious question hit me with that kind of impact. He and the room went away while I tried to cope with it.

  Surely, I thought, I have an answer for him. But I could not find one. I rewound mental tape and realized with shock that I had not asked myself that question once since the night of my graduation from Fermi.

  Throughout all the terrible days since, I had been focused intently and exclusively on what I did not want to do.

  Well, that had been silly of me, hadn’t it? Now that I was finally and forever safe from the terrible danger of becoming one of the richest humans alive, married to the girl of my dreams, perhaps it was time to give some quantum of thought to what I might find preferable. If anything.

  Great blathering mother of morons, what was I going to do with the next twenty years? Or the twenty after that, if it came to it?

  Herb was saying something. Why did I know that? Oh. He had touched my hand to get my attention. I rewound my ears. “—don’t have to come up with an answer right this minute,” he had said.

  I wasn’t absolutely sure I agreed—but just then I heard my name called. It was Solomon Short, in a larger nearby booth with three companions. He waved emphatically to us to come and join them. I looked to Herb for help, and he shrugged, so we got up and went over to the other booth. Sol’s companions slid over to make room for us, while he made introductions.

  As I’d guessed, his friends were all Relativists like him. I had now met five of the six people on whom our whole voyage depended. Nearest me was Tenzin Hideo Itokawa, a tiny man whom I learned later was a Zen Buddhist monk; then, I got only that he had twinkling eyes and seemed to lack vocal cords. Between him and Sol was a hearty and voluptuous woman named London McBee, who turned out to be married to George R Marsden, the Relativist I’d literally bumped into in my first seconds aboard. She and Sol volleyed with words, vying to outpun each other. But the most striking of the three was clearly the man on the other side of the table, Peter Kindred, and for the life of me I could not decide why.

  There was something electric and sheepish about him, that’s the best I can say it—he gave off the disconcerting sensation that at any moment he was likely to switch from talking to quacking like a duck, or barking like a dog—that at any given time there was utterly no way of telling what he might take it into his head to do—and that at the same time, he was just a little embarrassed by it. It was more than just mad eyes, though he surely had those. His name seemed ironically chosen; he had “Loose Cannon” written all over him. Sol and London both seemed to find him delightful.

  I was overawed. Most of the ship’s power, literally, was seated at that table. I’m used to famous people, even great people. This was different. In a pinch, the Sheffield could have gotten by without her captain—but her Relativists were essential. These men and woman spent their days reaching into the cosmic vacuum with their naked organic brains, and persuaded it to yield up its inconceivable energy in a measured fashion.

  I realize that description has about as much meaning as saying that a nuclear fission plant works because the gods breathe upon its mojo in such a way as to cause it to be far out. One of my hopes, as I sat down, was to perhaps solicit a better explanation from one or more of the Relativists I was privileged to talk to. But I got off to a bad start.

  Things went fine at first. Sol introduced his companions to us. Then he introduced Herb to them, giving them a two-sentence thumbnail bio. Then he introduced me—and that’s where it went sour. His second sentence for me began, inevitably, with, “His father was the—”

  But by the second word, Peter Kindred had gone berserk. He kicked his chair over backward with his butt, leaped backward over it, landed several feet away in combat crouch, making finger gestures to ward off evil.

  At me.

  I opened my mouth—

  “SHUT UP!” he screamed.

  I blinked.

  “Not a word! AIYEEE!” He averted his gaze. “No facial expressions!”

  I looked at Herb, then Sol, then everybody else, without finding anything I could use. I decided I needed to leave, started to rise.

  He screamed, hopped back a pace, and snatched a plate from someone’s table, holding it like a cream pie in an ancient comedy. “Back!” he shrieked. “You lunatic! Are you crazy? What the fuck are you trying to do to me?”

  I shrugged. I had to: it was all he had left me.

  It was the last straw. He shut his eyes, made a strangling sound, turned, and left the room at high speed. Taking the plate with him, despite loud protest from its owner.

  “Don’t mind Peter,” Sol said imperturbably.

  “He’s terrified of Centipede’s Dilemma,” said London.

  “Ahhh,” I said. “Of course.”

  “He’s rude,” Herb said.

  “No, no,” I said. “I think I actually get it.” And after I explained my thinking, they agreed that I did.

  Without its Relativists, no starship can operate its primary drive, open the Ikimono Portal into the dark energy universe. Not without becoming a Gamma Ray Burst in short order, anyway.

  That monstrous engine of mass creation had not been invoked, yet, and could not be until we’d gotten a little farther away from Sol—but without it and its kind, most star travel would have been impossible, and the rest would have awaited the development of suspended animation to accomplish. And thanks to the Prophet’s distaste for fiddling with God’s allegedly clear intentions, safe suspended animation still seems to lie as far in the future as it did centuries ago.

  Thanks to Relativists, though, mankind finally had a drive that could really take it to the stars, within normal human life span. The only problem was that, countless generations of folklore to the contrary, the relativistic engine really was the first engine ever invented that literally required the constant attention of a human operator to function: the Relativist. Somehow, an organic brain was able—some organic brains were able—to ensure that every time Doc Schrödinger opened his box, what came out was a live cat. Even if none had been in there to start with.

  The last I’d heard, the entire Solar System held something less than two hundred humans—out of dozens of billions!—who had the necessary combination of talents, skills, attitudes, and education to perform that task reliably. More than half of them, I had read, wanted to do something else. The rest probably commanded a higher salary than Jinny’s father.

  When the mathematician/poet and Soto Zen Buddhist priest Hoitsu Ikimono Roshi (whose name means “life,” “living creatures,” “farm products,” or “uncooked food”) discovered the first practical star drive in 2237—or perhaps was merely the first such discoverer to survive—he thereby created the profession called “Relativist.” The best definition ever offered to the layman of what a Relativist does is (naturally) the Roshi’s: he said they meditate on and with the engine, in order to make it happy enough to function.

  He held back the part about how they dissuade the star drive from becoming a star… until humankind had invested heavily in star travel, both economically and emotionally. Fortunately that did not take long: the Roshi’s only significant character flaw was reluctance to keep a joke to himself. (A great pity: it finally killed him… a joke he must have lo
ved.)

  Technically one could argue that Relativists should be called relativistic engineers. Without them, no engine; res ipse loquitur. But as it happens, the term “engineer” is already in use—by people who find the very kind of science that relativism requires to be witchcraft, spooky science, mumbo jumbo, perhaps even hocus-pocus. To them, it stops just short of being that most despised of all modes of thinking: a religion. The very first word in its technical description ruins all hope of conversation, sets engineers’ teeth on edge, and makes all the hairs bristle at the backs of their necks.

  Quantum ramjet.

  The quantum ramjet relies on the well-established theory of quantum fluctuations in the energy of the vacuum. These occur throughout the universe on extremely small scales of time and distance. Over times on the order of 10–15 second and lengths of about 10–55 centimeter, masses as high as 10–5 grams and energies as large as 10–6 ergs pop in and out of existence interminably. Conventional physics supports this picture, but it is an entirely different matter to make use of vacuum quantum fluctuations to propel a starship. A quantum ramjet, first proposed by H. David Froning (an engineer!) back before the Collapse, would work by “ingesting” the energy of the quantum fluctuations and converting it to propulsive energy. If the quantum starship could tap only a very tiny fraction of the theoretically available mass/energy of the vacuum, it could accelerate rapidly to relativistic velocities. But until Ikimono Roshi tried visualizing something in his mind, as he sat zazen in his ship in the Belt one day, and found himself half a light-year from home before he could stop doing it, no one had a clue how this might be accomplished. It almost certainly never occurred to anyone before then that human attention might be a necessary condition for the phenomenon. It was fortunate indeed that Hoitsu Ikimono was a Roshi—a Zen master, for whom sustained attention was a given—or he might never have made his way back to Sol to spread the news.

  The philosophical implications of the quantum ramjet alone are startling. If, as the inflationary theory of cosmology mandates, the universe evolved from a quantum fluctuation that somehow grew to its present enormous scale, the same thing might occur as a matter of course in the heart of the quantum ramjet. Does each quantum ramjet create and destroy countless universes as it travels our cosmos, and are their crews as gods to the countless beings in the universes that support their flight?