Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

He accepted my sword by saying, “To answer your question seriously, I confess the word that best describes my understanding of relativism is probably saudade.”

  “The mystery of the ages,” I said, thinking to agree.

  “No,” he said with a sudden seriousness that took me by surprise. “That it is not. Not even the mystery of this age.”

  “Uh… I’ll bite. What is the mystery of the ages, this one included?” I said, trying for lightness.

  He kept frowning, and had stopped meeting my eyes. “Fermi’s Paradox.”

  It took a second. “Oh. ‘Where is everybody?’ you mean.”

  He made a single nod. “Nobody even talks about it anymore. We know that life can come to exist in the universe, because it did, once that we know of. We know life can evolve sufficient intelligence to leave its star, because we’ve done it. It is, granted, conceivable that this might occur only once every twelve billion years or more.” He made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “But as for me, I find the creation myth in Genesis considerably more plausible.”

  “Didn’t someone settle this back before the Dark Age?” I asked. “Webb? Wrote a book listing forty-nine possible solutions to Fermi’s Paradox—and demolished them one by one, leaving only the fiftieth solution, namely: we’re alone?”

  He looked as if he’d chased his lemon with milk. “Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree—the highest that capillary action can push it. Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could ‘explain,’ often elegantly… over and over again… and had to, because the explanations kept falling apart at the first hard-data-push. Things like the Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there… yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.

  “They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute data. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote… but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society—even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models, which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest clue how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that.”

  “Things got worse in that direction soon.”

  “Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn’t deliver. It got to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that meant anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn’t even discuss what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence and omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science handed the world over to Nehemiah Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred ‘intelligent design’ to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix. Unfortunately, not much.”

  I was getting a little dizzy. “I think I lost you around that last curve, Matty. What’s your answer to the mystery? If intelligent life has arisen more than once, in this corner of the cosmos, where is everybody?”

  He drew in a long slow breath, and held it for long enough to make me think of the breathing routine I still used at the start of meditation. I kept on thinking of it as he exhaled, and his frown melted away and his face smoothed over and his body language relaxed. He fiddled with his remote, and said, “Authorities differ, but for my money, probably the closest thing to intelligent life we’ll find on Bravo is the spit-tooth sloth,” and the wall showed what I hoped was an enlarged image of the ugliest creature I had ever seen. “Admittedly it is difficult to assess intelligence based on observations made from orbit. Once a probe is fairly sure a given life-form is not a serious threat to man, it moves on to other things that might be. But the sloth’s competition is not impressive.”

  It seemed clear he was changing the subject, and he had been so helpful and generous with his time, that was fine with me; his reasons were none of my business. We moved on to an interesting discussion of exotic fauna like hoop snakes, snippers, blimps, and the truly disgusting rocket slugs, which dodge predators by expelling feces so violently they shoot into the air and glide great distances. A whole pod of such frightened slugs, Matty said, can apparently fill the air with a ghastly green mist….

  Later on, though, after I’d read up on spit-tooth sloths, I became less certain he’d been changing the subject. A sloth sits high in one of those preposterously tall trees, waiting with infinite patience until something preyish-looking happens to wander by below. Then she (once the males are done with their fertilizing, their only remaining function is as hibernation food) spits out a poison tooth, with high velocity and great accuracy. It drops the prey for so long she has time to slowly descend, retrieve it, and bring it back up the tree to consume at her leisure.

  In other words, they conceal themselves perfectly, take no risks at all, and attack without warning or mercy.

  I would recall that later in the voyage.

  It all started to come together at some point. The meditation improved my disposition and outlook, without which no beneficial change is possible. The physical exercise began to pay off next. When you’re in better shape, you think better. When you’re thinking better, meditation produces more useful insights. As I came to understand Bravo better, my work on the Ag Decks became both more effective and more meaningful to me, and before long I started to acquire something I hadn’t even realized I’d been lacking: a feeling of worth, of making a contribution, having something tangible to offer. I actually did have a knack for it, too, I learned—for sensing just how the new conditions would alter plant requirements and capabilities, and figuring out ways to compensate. The Zog told me once, after I managed to bring a fungal disease under control without quite knowing how myself, that I thought like a Bravonian vegetable. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flattered.

  In time, it became possible to dimly imagine a future life on Brasil Novo, an endurable and maybe even pleasant one in which I might have both purpose and value.

  Two moons in the sky. Similar to Callisto, Europa, and Io back home on Ganymede. I liked that. One moon wasn’t enough to keep a sky interesting, in my biased opinion.

  There would also be the giant A7 star in the sky, too. Immega 713, as it had been renamed, in preference to some horror like alpha gamma Boo. (Which Solomon of course liked, saying it would make a great name for a fraternity.) According to Matty, since it lay one hundred AU away, it had only four percent of the brightness Sol had from Terra—but that made it a hundred thousand times brighter than Luna. It might only get really dark at night when there was heavy overcast, or when the A7 was on the other side of Peekaboo. I liked that, too.

  The music I composed became better, stronger, deeper. The music I played finally started to approach what I’d always heard in my mind’s ear; I had better wind, a clearer head, and a much clearer id
ea of who it was playing. Not only did my reputation begin to spread throughout the ship, I began to feel more and more as if it was deserved.

  As I said, after a certain point it all began to heterodyne. I felt better, so I did better, which made me feel even better, which… So that first year of star travel would probably have been an extremely happy and satisfying one for me, on balance.

  If I had not taken all of Dr. Amy’s advice, and resumed dating six months into it.

  I don’t suppose it will stun you to learn that Kathy was the first girl I asked for a date. It certainly didn’t surprise anybody I knew in the slightest. I’m given to understand that people I’d never met or heard of on the far side of the Sheffield knew it was going to happen weeks before it did. God knows Kathy was not surprised to be asked, and had the kindness to accept before I’d quite finished getting the words out, which cut my interval of agonized suspense down to just the hundred million years it took me to not quite get the words out.

  And why should any of us have been surprised? We were such a perfect couple on paper that even if we’d disliked each other’s body odor, which we didn’t, we’d have had to at least give it a try. Musically we shared a bond, a level of communication, that many married couples never do achieve, and others do at the cost of great struggle. Even tone deaf people in the audience could sense it, and responded to it. She was very good, in the same way that I was, and we brought out each other’s best. We helped each other say important things we could not express alone, and how far can that be from love?

  Loving Zog’s Farms was another profound connection, one that went back in time almost as far as music. Plunging hands into soil together is very close to thrusting them into one another. And of course both of us were simultaneously fertile and ripe, a paradox whose metaphorical impossibility accurately reflects the turmoil of that condition. Afterward you look back on it and call it golden. At the time it is hell on rusty wheels.

  Part of the problem was precisely that we were so self-evidently perfect for each other—a cliché looking for the spot marked X. Enough so to have made us both self-conscious from the very start, enough to make each of us want to dig in our heels out of sheer stubborn unwillingness to be that predictable. We’d both read and seen enough romantic fiction to know that if the writer seems to insist on throwing two characters together, it’s their job to resist, for as long as they can, anyway. A silly reason not to love, I know… but are there any that aren’t?

  But in an utterly closed community that small, you can run but you can’t hide, not forever. Twenty years stretched before us. Eventually you say, why not get it over with and find out? Or maybe I mean, why not find out and get it over with? One of those. And that too was predictable. Like I said, nobody was too surprised when I asked Kathy out, including her, and nobody was too surprised she said yes, even me. I took her to a play, the second production of the Boot and Buskin Society, and afterward we went to the Horn, ordered Irish coffees, and talked.

  Five minutes into a discussion of the play we’d just seen—Simon, very well done—I interrupted myself in the middle of explaining why the lead actress’s performance had been so remarkable, and launched into a ten-minute monologue of my own. Kathy listened patiently.

  I told her about Jinny—first about Jinny Hamilton, and then about Jinnia Conrad of Conrad—and I worked in my father, and the little I knew of my mother, and my experiences with sudden poverty and solitude, and anything else I could think of that might help justify being a basket case. That was probably pretty predictable, too. At a conservative estimate, I was perhaps the hundred billionth asshole since Adam to try and tell a woman, I find your company enjoyable but I am too damaged for any long-term emotional involvement, so don’t place your hopes on me. They almost always listen patiently, for some reason. But I doubt if anything I said surprised her very much.

  Probably the only person in the entire ship who ended up finding anything at all surprising in that entire date was me, after I finally shut up long enough for Kathy to tell me that she’d gotten engaged two weeks earlier, to two very nice people, and had I ever thought much about opting into a group or line marriage myself? Because they were looking to expand. Full bore omnisexual, of course. But no pressure.

  I haven’t the slightest idea what response I made. That date lasted another hour and a half—Herb and Balvovatz agreed I got back two hours after the play ended—but I cannot for the life of me recall another word either of us spoke, or anything that occurred.

  14

  If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.

  —Bird

  Things gradually settled, as they always seem to do eventually, into a routine.

  At what seemed the approximate speed of mold forming on a corridor wall, life aboard the RSS Charles Sheffield began to take on discernible shape, and then flavor, and finally texture. Five hundred people slowly got to know one another, heard (the first version of) each other’s back stories and dreams, learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, discovered what we needed and what we had to give, slowly began to design and assemble, by trial and error and what few lessons history had made clear enough, a society that would use all of us and feed all of us and give us all something to be part of for twenty uninterrupted years.

  Complicating the task, of course, the society was intended to become something utterly different at the end of that twenty years, and needed to be kept aimed in that direction at all times. For most humans, anything farther ahead than this time next year is the “far future.” It can be all too easy to lose sight of a goal that far off, and we had to be ready when we got there. The good news was that Merril Grossman was our Coordinator. She had a keen mind, a great understanding of her job, and a way of bullying people that was so transparently an act of love everyone let her get away with it.

  Six months into the voyage, she organized and chaired the Sheffield’s first town meeting. It had to be electronic, naturally. Any cubic large enough to have held all of us at once, even in free fall, would have been a preposterous waste of space, in a ship that never seemed to have enough. Even the Pool could barely have accommodated half of us, and only on the friendliest of terms. But a well-run ETM works better than a live rally in the park, and Coordinator Grossman knew how.

  I mean, speeches were made, inevitably: we are talking about humans here. But they were kept short, and they assayed out remarkably low in bullshit content. Captain James Bean, a man who looked exactly like you want the captain of your starship to look, and had the reputation to back it up, got five minutes, and used three. The whole ship rocked with applause when he was done; he was well liked. Five-minute gab-slots also were awarded to Colony Governor Jaime Roberts, and to George R representing the Relativists. Another would have gone to Governor-General Lawrence Cott, representative of Kang/da Costa, but he was ill so his slot was given by his lifemate Perry Jarnell, who took six minutes. At that point his audio and video both cut out.

  After that, even the most pompous speakers quickly figured out that if they hadn’t gotten it said within five minutes, Merril wasn’t going to let them keep trying. By the time everyone’s screens went dark that night we had accomplished what I considered an astonishing amount.

  Names, for one thing.

  People had been arguing them for months, occasionally at a volume that drew proctors, but somehow our Coordinator cut through the confusion in a way that didn’t seem to leave anyone feeling disenfranchised, and before too long we had all finally reached consensus on names for most of the places and things that would really matter to all of us when we got to Bravo.

  I for one found most of the choices cheering, too—our colony seemed to be a jolly crew.

  The three major continents, for example, were christened Samba, Cerveja, and Carnaval. What lay ahead we knew not, but we intended to have a good time there if we could. At the same time, once he’d explained it to everyone, Matty Jaymes’s suggested name for our first settlement, Saudade, passed by a
landslide, with fewer than two dozen opposed, the closest to unanimity we came that night. We all understood that our good times would always, always be seasoned with a sharp regret, a longing for all the lost loved ones and planets and habitats we had left so far behind us forever. To pretend otherwise would be foolish.

  Nearly as popular a choice were the new names given to our two moons. Nobody had liked the unimaginative names Immega had given them, New Deimos and New Phobos. For one thing, they didn’t look like their namesakes, and would not behave like them in the sky. For another, a lot of us were from Mars, and did not want our good times tinged with nostalgic regret every single damn time we looked at or discussed the night sky. (That was one reason the two closest alternatives to Saudade—Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi—had found so few supporters, I think.)

  So I’d been expecting the grassroots effort to rename the moons. But the names chosen were a pleasant surprise, from the music of the twentieth century: Tom and Joao. The great composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, and his great disciple Joao Gilberto between them created samba, the lush basis of all subsequent Brazilian music… which became a major influence on the work of my favorite saxophonist of that period, Stan Getz. I took that as a good omen, and made a mental note to find out if Kathy knew his work with Tom and Joao. (She did—and knew a guitarist who could play Gilberto style. We killed ’em at the Horn of Plenty all that week.)

  Governor-General Cott’s partner had by that point leaned on somebody hard enough to get hooked back online, and expressed his co-husband’s strong distaste, on behalf of our noble patrons at Kang/da Costa, for the growing tendency of some colonists to shorten the name of our new home-to-be from Brasil Novo to Bravo. His partner found it disrespectful and Jarnell found it vulgar, if I’ve sorted them out correctly. He stopped short of demanding prohibition of the name Bravo, but asked for a resolution agreeing that the proper name was Brasil Novo. The Brazilians aboard registered strong support.