Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The next few weeks were dark.

  Disaster on that scale can demoralize a community—or draw it together. The crucial factor seems to be, how fast does the fear ease?

  It was touch and go. Dr. Amy and her three other Healers had their work cut out for them. Coordinator Grossman and the Zog, Governor Roberts, Governor-General Cott and his partner, Chief Engineer Cunningham, even Captain Bean himself, all made a point of wandering around the ship with cheerful optimistic expressions fixed on their faces. It did help, a little. But only a little.

  How do you tell someone falling through the universe at nearly the speed of a photon there’s nothing to worry about? When the most valued, pampered members of the ship’s company can die and worse than die, who is safe? I don’t think any of us had really expected any dying to begin until we got to Bravo. Now all our lives and plans and hopes depended on four particular people remaining not only alive but healthy enough to work for every day of the next fifteen years.

  And that was the heart of our darkness: theirs.

  Thanks for coming in ahead of schedule, Joel,” said Dr. Amy.

  “No problem,” I said, settling into my chair. “To tell you the truth, though, things haven’t been too bad lately.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said.

  “I mean, I know you must have your hands full—”

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about, this time.”

  “Crave pardon?”

  “I’m going to be more blunt and candid with you than I have been with the rest of the colony, Joel.”

  Yikes. “Okay.”

  “This ship is in trouble.”

  I nodded. “I know.”

  “The morale crisis is not responding to anything we can do. I think you know why.”

  I nodded again. “The Relativists. The rest of us… colonists, administrators like you, crew… none of us can begin to heal until they do.” All four stalked the corridors like golems, now, and were given as wide a berth by all they passed. All four had politely declined to speak to a Healer, as was their right. They didn’t even seem to crave each other’s company. They spoke as little as possible at shift change, and less at any other time.

  Her turn to nod. “They do their duty. They keep the engine running. But that’s the absolute limit of their strength right now. They’re the heart of the ship. And they’re heartsick.”

  “I have to say I can’t blame them a bit,” I said. “One of the best of them died, another wasn’t as lucky—and it could happen to any one of the rest at any time. It can’t be easy healing if every day you have to spend six straight hours utterly devoid of all emotions… in the presence of the force you most fear and hate. I’m amazed they can function at all.”

  “Nobody blames them, Joel.”

  “No—but nobody has the hairs to tell them to suck it up, and let you Healers help them.”

  Her shoulders relaxed. “Exactly. You do understand.”

  “Well, that much. What you can do about it, I have no idea. A year ago, I’d have said, have Matty Jaymes talk to all of them.”

  She nodded. “They all used to respect him a lot.”

  “He used to deserve it.”

  Matty had long since been restored to the Covenant. But the man who’d emerged from his room was not the Matty Jaymes anyone remembered. He was pale, dwindled, and taciturn, and he did not want to talk to anybody. Something had changed him, and no one had any idea what.

  She grimaced ruefully. “Suppose you were in my chair. Where would you start?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “With Sol. He’s the linchpin, now that George R is gone. Until you turn him around, you’ll never…” I trailed off as I realized where this had to be going.

  “I agree,” she said.

  I held up both hands, shook my head, and shut my eyes briefly, refusing delivery with all the body language at my disposal. “No way. Don’t look at me.”

  “Joel—”

  “I tried already. Twice, okay? Both conversations together totaled a single word, and I didn’t say it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The first time I saw him after… afterward, I walked up to him, and we stood about a meter apart for a few moments, and after a while I opened my mouth, and he shook his head no, and I closed my mouth, and he went away.”

  “And the second time?”

  “Two days ago. I waited outside his room, where his door couldn’t see me. I had a zinger prepared. A brutal, stinging line that would shock him into paying attention to me. Use anger to invoke his fighting spirit. Healing 101. The door opened, he came out and saw me, and this time I didn’t even get to open my mouth. ‘Don’t,’ he said. Just that.”

  “How did he say it?” She was leaning forward slightly.

  “Way back at the dawn of video, there was a short time when animation was so expensive, they made cartoons in which little ever moved but the characters’ mouths, which were real human lips superimposed on 2-D drawings. He looked just like that.”

  She winced.

  “So I just nodded, like, ‘Okay, I won’t.’ And he gave one little gesture of a nod, like somewhere between ‘Thank you,’ and ‘Fuck off, now.’ So I fucked off.”

  She was wearing her most empathic expression. “And now if you try a third time, without some kind of direct invitation from him, you’ll lose him as a friend. I see that.”

  “You’re good.”

  “How horrible for you. Okay, never mind. Thanks, Joel. I should have known you would already have tried your best. I apologize.”

  She stood up. We were done. I got up, too, and we gave each other the Japanese style bow that was our half-ironic custom. But I did not turn and head for the door.

  “What was it you were going to suggest?”

  She waved it away. “No, never mind. Thanks. Probably wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

  “If this is reverse psychology—”

  She smiled. “No. It was just an idea.”

  “So just tell it.”

  “I read a line somewhere in an old book once, to the effect that when you’re really depressed, the only person you’d be glad to see coming is somebody who wants to pay an old debt.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “You’ve never paid Sol for his services as your advocate, four years ago. You promised him an original composition of at least fifteen minutes, on the baritone sax, with his name in the title.”

  She was right. I had certainly meant to do it. I’d even made a start on it, once. But what with one damn thing after another, it had fallen between the cracks, and eventually been silted over. I told myself I would have recalled my promise eventually.

  “I was thinking maybe you could offer to do it now, ask him for direction, use that to get him talking. But you’re right: if you raised the subject now, he’d tell you where to put your saxophone. Don’t worry. I’ve got a few other approaches I can try. Thanks for sharing your insights with me.”

  I left. But when I got back to Rup-Tooey, I stayed only long enough to grab my Yanigasawa B-9930, and then headed for my studio. Now that I was a rich man, I was renting a soundproofed cubic on the lower of the two VIP decks, so I wouldn’t have to inflict my saxes on my roommates. When I got there, I had enough forethought to phone both the Zog, and Jill and Walter at the Horn of Plenty, and beg off my upcoming shifts at both jobs. Then I sealed the door and shut off phone and mail.

  Three days later I switched the phone back on, called Dr. Amy, and outlined what I had. It was she who figured out how to try and put it to use.

  Coming off shift, Solomon Short craved only oblivion. If he could manage to sleep twelve hours—and he could, easily—that left only six to fill. Same amount of time spent in and out of the Hole, each day. When he entered his quarters and found the sitting room full of people, he simply backed out again before the door could shut behind him.

  At least he tried to. It didn’t work. He encountered someone coming in the other dire
ction, found himself back in the sitting room, heard the door dilate behind both of them.

  He didn’t bother to turn and find out who it was, didn’t even bother to take note of exactly which assholes were cluttering up his parlor with this moronic Intervention attempt. Like a soldier removing the muzzle cap from his assault weapon and jacking one into the chamber, he slowly opened his mouth and took in air—

  A face was suddenly decimeters from his own. An angry, brutal, stupid face. Its mouth was already open, and had already taken in lots of air.

  “Shut the fuck up,” Richie bellowed at him.

  His own mouth slammed shut.

  “Sit down there.”

  Sol sat.

  Richie sat down to his right. The man behind him—Jules—took a seat at his left, and shifted his drink to his left hand. Proctor DeMann stepped across the doorway and dropped into parade rest, then softened it by taking one hand from behind him and stroking his gunfighter mustache, in the manner of one who wishes he still smoked a pipe.

  And before Solomon could get himself planted, let alone prepare his first withering wisecrack, I began to play.

  At first, he was so pissed off he didn’t hear a thing I was playing.

  That was okay. I’d expected that. I kept on playing.

  He tried to stop me by talking over me.

  That was okay. Nobody can talk over a baritone saxophone. Not my silver Anna. Not even Solomon Short. I kept on playing.

  With elaborately insulting body language, he stuck a finger in each ear, screwed his eyes shut, and stuck out his tongue.

  That was okay. The sound struck him with renewed force again at the same instant muscle-bound arms were flung across him from each side, pinning him in place—so he opened his eyes just in time to watch his own fingers jammed up his nose. They released him at once. Richie leaned into his field of vision, shook his head no very slowly, and sat back. I kept on playing.

  He tried making faces at people, clearly hoping to escalate to mime. He tried everyone in the room.

  That was okay. Nobody would play along. I kept playing.

  Finally he fell back on his last line of defense, and met my eyes, wearing an expression that said, I don’t care if you are the reincarnation of the Yardbird himself playing me a previously unknown Beiderbecke masterpiece, you aren’t getting in as deep as the layer of moisture on the surface of my eyeballs, motherfucker. Most musicians have seen that look, and it is indeed demoralizing, and Sol did it better than most.

  But that was okay, too, because by the time he had it fully in place and the mortar had set, it was already starting to show tiny cracks. Because I kept on playing. And kept on playing.

  It took longer to penetrate than it would have in his normal mindset. But eventually, even in his depression he couldn’t help but notice that I had been playing for something like a minute and a half by now.

  Without stopping to breathe.

  Even once.

  A fellow amateur historian of music, he caught on to what I was doing faster than most would have. And in spite of himself, he started to grow interested….

  The technique known as “circular breathing” is in fact nothing of the sort. But it looks like it to a civilian.

  If you’re doing it right. This is vastly easier said than done.

  I hold with the school of thought that says modern music (as they were now calling it, again) copied it from the Aborigines of the continent Australia, on Terra. So it could be as much as 47,000 years old—a little under a thousand generations. The Australian didgeridoo is an immensely powerful but intrinsically limited instrument; like haiku, it finds enormous beauty within severe constraints. Denied the endless variety offered by pitch, however, it finally began to lack the bandwidth to carry concepts as sophisticated as those that some didgeridoo players wished to express. There were only so many things, and combinations of things, you could do before you ran out of air and had to start a new phrase.

  So they abolished breathing.

  Obviously they did nothing of the sort. What they did was improve it. All the necessary parts were right there: all they had to do was train and exercise them. Not to say that was easy.

  What I actually do when I “circularly breathe” is to use my cheeks as a storage bellows. It’s a four-step process, that begins during exhalation:

  1. As I start to run low on air, I puff my cheeks as far as possible, a configuration called a Dizzy for more than one reason.

  2. I slowly contract my cheek muscles, using the air trapped in my cheeks to keep the sound coming out the other end of the pipe—while simultaneously inhaling through my nose. Very like learning to wear a Mars-mask, and no harder.

  3. If I’ve timed it right, my cheek-bellows empty out at the same time my lungs fill up. My soft palate closes, and once again it’s my lungs pushing air out the horn.

  4. My cheeks return to normal embouchure, until my air starts to run low again. Repeat from 1. above.

  During all this time, of course, my fingers are busy doing even more difficult things to turn all that air into pleasant sounds. They say that anybody can learn to do it… with enough beatings.

  Anyone who’s studied the saxophone has heard about circular breathing, and most of us have attempted it, and a few have persisted long enough to get it—six months of daily practice, minimum—and then played around with it a little. Hardly anyone keeps it up, once they’ve proved to themselves that they can do it. There’s little point: the number of compositions in the database that call for it can pretty much be counted on the fingers of one foot. The last composer of merit to mess with it much was probably MacDonald, just before the Prophet took everyone’s breath away for a century and a half; his “Thaumaturgy” is definitive.

  I’d developed an interest in it about a year before the Disaster—for much the same reason the Aborigines had. After many long slow years in one place, I was beginning to find my own limitations unbearably confining. First I’d fooled around with playing more than one horn at once. But like everyone who tries that, I’d found that everything you can do along those lines that isn’t just a gimmick was done a long time ago, by Rahsaan Roland Kirk and Sun Ra.

  So I’d switched to circular breathing. It took me about three weeks just to be able to do it with nothing in my mouth, then three weeks more with a straw making bubbles in a cup of water. After six months, I could produce recognizable melodies on sax, and six months after that, I was just beginning to get to the point where I might have been willing to let another human hear me do it… when Hell broke loose in the Hole, and the roof fell in on us all. I hadn’t played much music of any kind for a while after that. Nobody much wanted to hear any.

  But after my conversation with Dr. Amy, I had worked continuously for seventy-two hours, getting by on catnaps and helmet rations. I had to. I already knew I was going to be half cheating Sol as it was: I did not have time to actually compose a fifteen-minute-long work, and was going to have to improvise something that had his name in the title. But by the Covenant, the man had asked for whatever it was to be played on Anna, and that was what he was going to get! He was the first person aboard to touch her, had brought her to me with his own hands, that first week.

  Up until those last three days, all my circular breathing had been done on my alto sax—on which I could barely get through the nine-and-a-half-minute “Thaumaturgy.”

  It is much harder to do on a baritone—even a cherry like my silver Anna. Simple physics. A bigger volume of air has to be moved farther. There’s a finite limit to how big you can make your cheeks. The lower notes in particular require breathing very fast, and that’s hard to hide.

  (Counterintuitively, it is also harder to do circular breathing on a tenor, and perhaps hardest on a soprano, because of the increased lip pressure required. This is not a paradox: the universe just hates musicians. Envy, I think.)

  I’d finally found a way to fake it, but I don’t think I can describe it. What it feels like I do is to use my sinus c
avities as auxiliary bellows, somehow isolating them from the nasal-inhalation pipeline, but Dr. Amy assured me that’s just not possible. I asked how I was doing it, then, and she said she’d need to saw my head in half while I was doing it to tell me; would I care to book an appointment?

  So I had his attention, finally.

  Sol was knowledgeable enough to recognize circular breathing, and he was sophisticated enough about the physics of wind instruments to realize how insanely hard it must be to do it on a baritone, and he loved Anna’s voice as much as I did, and its sheer power in such a small enclosed cubic was enormous, and I was playing my heart out. I simply overwhelmed his indifference shields, denied him the power of denial, forced him to listen to what I was playing.

  I was playing phrases that did not end.

  We call them phrases because there’s only so long they can be. Some go so far as to say that the pauses between the notes are the most important parts of the music. Sooner or later even the most complex phrase dies—to be phoenix-reborn a moment later, in the next phrase. This happens even with instruments not constrained by breath or any other limitation. Most music unconsciously echoes the generational nature of human creation, death at either end of every life, an instant of silence before and after each new melody.

  I played melodies and themes and motifs that did not end, but flowed endlessly, one into the next without pause, without rest, without hesitation.

  At first I underlined that, by playing what first seemed to be conventional sequences, building naturally toward inevitable ending places—that always took an unexpected left turn just before they got there, and turned out to have actually been lead-ins to some different familiar series.

  Once I saw in his eyes that he got it, I abandoned all convention and just played.

  I forgot everything I knew about composition, reattained what Zen people call beginner’s mind, acquired once again the mighty power of ignorance. I shut down most of my brain, except for the part way back by the stem that knows how to make a saxophone work, and gave control of it over directly to my heart. I learned what I was going to play at the same instant Sol and the others did: as it emerged.