Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  If what I played had had lyrics, they would have had to be “Fuck Death,” repeated in every human tongue ever spoken.

  I blew phrases that refused to end. A structure that climbed as stubbornly and relentlessly and defiantly as the one at Babel rose up from the bell of my horn. I stated a theme that had no resolution and sought none, and proved that it needed none. George R was woven in and out of it—a face whose only expression was a smile. So was London—the London we had known, whose laugh required a baritone sax to do it justice. So were both my parents. Machinist C. Platt made an appearance.

  Einstein said, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

  I dispelled it.

  I did not take my eyes away from those of Solomon Short once. Until I saw, in his eyes, that I had won. That I had penetrated deep enough. I had forced him to see that he could feel, and not die of it. It was like watching a man in agony as the morphine hits.

  Have you ever had a serious fever? The misery seems not only to last forever, but to have lasted forever—and then it goes on like that for days. But there comes a point when some kind of knot inside suddenly lets go—at the base of the throat, it feels like—and something starts to ease, or melt, or release. It’s a little like drifting off to sleep, only it leaves you more conscious. At first you can’t believe it, and then for a time you’re tearful with gratitude, and about ten minutes later you’re demanding food and the remote control.

  I held on until the tearful-with-gratitude stage. I’ve mentioned my unusually accurate time sense. I knew when I’d been playing for fifteen minutes. At sixteen, I yanked the mouthpiece from my lips, chopping off short in the midst of an ascending arpeggio. It took me a ridiculous number of seconds to remember how to take in air by mouth.

  Sol didn’t notice. His eyes stayed closed. At the unexpected cessation of sound he first froze, then slumped slightly.

  When I had enough control back, I said formally, “The name of that piece is ‘Sol Keeps Shining.’”

  Nobody said a word or moved a muscle. Except me, getting my breath all the way back and unkinking my neck.

  For maybe thirty seconds he moved nothing but his nostrils and chest, so long that I was beginning to wonder if he had entered meditation.

  He sat up straight then, and opened his eyes, and looked into mine, and said, “Okay.”

  Anna and I bowed.

  He turned to meet Dr. Amy’s gaze. “All right,” he told her. “I will.”

  She nodded. “I know, Solomon.”

  He addressed the room. “Thank you. You are all good people.” He turned back to me. “Except you. You haven’t even left us the option of saying ‘I’m breathless,’ you hammy bastard.”

  “I could throttle you,” I offered.

  “Well, you’re probably not the only one who’s had that idea lately,” he admitted.

  “I’ve never been the only one with that idea,” I assured him, and noticed I was leaking tears. It didn’t seem to be a problem.

  The old Solomon Short lopsided grin lit the room. “Look—”

  “Yes,” I said. “We will excuse you. Love to Hideo.”

  He nodded, and stood up. He bent slightly, looked up to me for permission, and kissed Anna on her upper lip. Then he straightened, and without asking my opinion kissed me firmly and wickedly on the mouth. Hal opened the door for him, and he left at once.

  I started feeling better immediately. It took him four days to finish bringing the other three Relativists around—Peter Kindred took the longest—but the outcome was never in doubt from the moment when he told Dr. Amy, “Okay.”

  Word got around.

  The next morning, at the Horn, I looked up from my breakfast to find a complete stranger a meter away, seeking to be noticed but looking sheepish. He wanted to know if he could have a copy of “Sol Keeps Shining.” I hadn’t thought about it, but found I didn’t need to. “You’ve come to the wrong window, cousin,” I told him. “That piece and that recording both belong to Solomon Short. It was a work-for-hire, performed in his private cubic, and I’ve waived moral rights. I don’t even have a copy myself.”

  He thanked me and went away, and later that day, my mailbox began to overflow with copies of “Sol Keeps Shining,” at least half sent by people I’d never met. Over the next few days, I started hearing it played all over the ship.

  Later that day, Dr. Amy came down to Rup-Tooey to hug me. She pretended not to see my tears.

  Strangers stopped to bow to me in the corridors. The sets I played at the Horn became full houses, of people who had come to listen. In a musician’s ultimate wet dream, I was literally commanded by my community to formally release an album of my work, so that I could sign copies of it for them.

  One of Kathy’s husbands, Paul Barr, recorded and mixed it. My backup was her, a bass player named Carol Gregg, Garret Amis on guitar, and a utility infielder named Doc Kuggs filling in on this and that. Richie and Jules handled the mechanics of burning, packaging, and marketing, robbing me no more than an honest ten percent. I called it On the Road to the Stars, and included a reinterpretation of that tune.

  Shortly after that Herb came up to me, grinning like a Viking after the plunder but before the rape, to inform me that a VIP of the Apple empire back on Terra wanted to know who represented me. Badly enough to pay a fortune for telepathy rather than wait 2.85 years for an answer by laser. I got Paul Hattori to represent me, and three months later my album reached number seven in the Inner System chart, and number three in the Outer. It would have time to win one major critics’ award, as well.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what Jinny thought of it. But not hard, or for long. I was busy. Come to find out, a saxophone hero in a small town has absolutely no trouble getting all the dates he wants, on whatever terms suit him. Who knew?

  After a few brief holy-shit experiments, I think I did pretty well resisting the temptation to be a jerk and abuse it. I kept remembering that I was always going to live in a small glass-walled town with all these people. Leaving town or planet and reinventing myself was no longer an option.

  But I did have me some fun, I did. Herb actually stopped clucking over me.

  Immense wealth, creative validation, System-wide fame without any downside, personal popularity, emotional support, great sex—if I’d had any idea how much fun it would turn out to be, I’d have leaped off a cliff years earlier.

  It only underlined things when word reached us that the long-threatened trade war had finally broken out between Ganymede and Luna, and I discovered that I did not give the least particle of a damn.

  Some of the more panicky newsnitwits back there were shrilly predicting that the conflict would not only metastasize and become Systemic, but would finally trigger the “inevitable” return of armed violence to human affairs, and destroy the Covenant. Of course they’d been saying similar things as long as I could remember, and for every one of the nearly two hundred years since the last recorded shooting war. But even when I ran it through as a hypothetical—no behavior is beyond human beings—I was mildly surprised to find how little it worried me.

  Was I really that self-centered and callous? Screw you, Jack, I’m all right? I knew people back there. Nice people, who would feel great pain if someone shot them, and feel worse pain if they shot someone. Didn’t I care about them?

  Sure. Theoretically. But I think we can only really worry about things that, deep down, we believe we could do something about, if we tried. I could no more affect the Solar System than I could events in Sparta, or the Land of Oz. My friends on Ganymede were going to have to look out for themselves. So were my friends on Terra, and in Luna.

  I did arrange for a few musicians I knew to get their demos listened to at Apple. But I knew as I did it that it was a message in a bottle, and would probably be my last contact with the Solar System. And unless any of them could afford to spring for telepathy, it was going to
be something like five years at a minimum before I could possibly hear any results. They would crawl after us at the speed of light, and we were moving at well over ninety-five percent of that ourselves by now.

  Psychologically, I was already becoming a Brasil Novan.

  And I wasn’t the only one. As we entered our sixth year, most of us had experienced similar changes. Hits at the ship’s System News website registered a steady decline, without reference to the juiciness of the headlines or sexual attractiveness of those depicted. Mail traffic to sternward showed a similar trend curve.

  Terra, Luna, the O’Neills, Mars, Ganymede, the Belt—all of them had become The Old Country. To our children, some of them now three years old, they weren’t even going to be that. When they grew up they’d have trouble keeping them all straight. “I forget, Dad—was surfing invented on Mars, or Luna? I can never remember which one of you had to live inside of.” All but a handful of their own children would possess such information for only one week of their lives, right before final exam week, and then discard it forever with no ill effect.

  We not only started to realize that, we started to be okay with it.

  We began in subtle ways to function less like a collection of random refugees in a temporary shelter, and more like a community.

  There was a fairly long period in its history when Canada was a collection of isolated outposts, its citizens separated by vast gulfs of uninhabitable space and incompatible regional interests, even different languages. Yet they found it possible to maintain a solid, workable sense of national identity based on little more than unusual pleasantness and a shared loathing of their national airline’s coffee.

  In the Sheffield, it was green mist jokes and shared loathing of rabbit meat in all forms. And, eventually, all things rabbity. Any joke that ended with a bunny covered in green mist was a surefire laugh.

  Nations have been founded on worse.

  I don’t suppose many of us really despised rabbit as much as we affected to. But it is a virtually fatless meat, pretty boring no matter how you cook it, even in a ship with good air pressure. And rabbits lend themselves to jokes. Few of us like a coward.

  And there were ancillary benefits at which one did not have to turn up one’s nose, for a change: if you rejected rabbit meat, you either ate syntho—unsatisfying—or you were a vegetarian until the livestock got decanted at Bravo. And while vegetarians fart twice as much as carnivores, the farts smell ten percent as bad, or less. There was a noticeable net improvement in… ambience, shipwide.

  Things were actually starting to look pretty good, just before everything blew up.

  Well, very damn near everything.

  17

  My opinions as to the future of Mankind are hedged in by this statement: I think it is necessary for the human race to establish colonies off this planet.

  —Admiral Caleb Saunders, interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra July 7, 1987 (“Anson MacDonald Day”)

  You know the date. Everyone does. Everyone always will.

  If we’re lucky.

  Everyone everywhere has their own story. For me, this is the way the world ended. Not with a whim, but with a banker.

  Paul Hattori was a closet soap fiend. We had dozens of them aboard, I had been surprised to discover. But I guess Paul felt an addiction that silly was beneath his dignity as colony banker. I only knew about it because I spent more time than anyone else in Herb’s company.

  The phenomenon was perfectly predictable, when you thought about it; I simply never had until I encountered it.

  Imagine you are a devoted fan—a much politer term than “addict”—of a daily soap opera. One of the real classics, let’s say. Corry, or The Sands of Mars. And you happen to be on a starship, boosting at a steady one-third gee.

  After an arbitrary time… let’s pick 6.41 years. After six years and 150 days of such acceleration, you are traveling at 0.976 c. Naturally you are impressed.

  But you’re also frustrated. Because while it’s been six years and change for you, thirteen years have elapsed back in the System. A full six years and 215 days of Corry episodes—representing more than the total time you’ve been traveling—exist, are in the can, and have been seen by billions of people. But you are going to have to wait forever to find out what has happened to all your favorite imaginary friends. You’re outracing the news.

  Unless you know a telepath you can go lean on. He’s your one and only source of series cheat sheets.

  Paul arrived at Rup-Tooey that afternoon just as Herb was saying good-bye to navigator Mort Alexander and roboticist Guy Atari, who were collaborating on a book and had sought his professional counsel. It had boiled down to “don’t,” but they left undiscouraged. Paul got there in time to hear Herb’s final words of advice: “If you really don’t mind doing twice the work for half the money, we should all get together for poker sometime.”

  “Weren’t you a bit hard on them?” Paul asked as the door dilated behind them. He took a seat near Herb’s desk and facing my bed, where I sprawled in lazy comfort reading a biography of Johnny Hodges. We nodded to each other, and I collapsed the display and sat up; I had come to like Paul.

  Herb said, “Anyone who can possibly be discouraged from writing should be.” He shuddered slightly. “Besides, the idea of sharing a keypad freaks me out. I’d rather share a toothbrush.”

  “I feel the same about my saxophones,” I said.

  “I feel the same way about money,” Paul said, deadpan.

  “Philistine,” I said.

  Herb frowned. “Please—let’s not corrupt the language. It’s pronounced, ‘Fill a stein,’ and I agree, it’s the least he can do.”

  Paul sighed theatrically, got up, and went to the fridge, one of several improvements I’d had made to the room. “You, Joel?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I presume you’re here for your fix.”

  “Can you squeeze me in today, Herb? It’s been a month.”

  Herb’s telepathic time had always been pretty heavily booked, and got more so as the voyage went on, and the amount of information that only he and his colleagues Stephanie Gaskin and Gene Rubbicco could supply increased. By now it was a distinct nuisance for Herb to fit things as frivolous as soap opera synopses into his traffic load. But as a nicotinic he did empathize with addiction. And Paul was the recipient of something like a quarter of his usual, official daily traffic. “Yes—but only because I’ve just thought of a pun so hideous I’ve basically lost the will to live.”

  Paul brought each of us an opened container of beer, and sat down with one of his own. (There were real glass steins aboard—packed deep in the hold, so we’d still have them when we reached Bravo.) “Okay, I’m seated, and I have beer. Go ahead.” He flinched anticipatorily.

  “You spend half your working day staring at the stock situation, concerned about corn futures. Then you come here and pester me so you can get caught up on stock situations and corny futures.”

  I groaned. Paul’s nostrils flared. “If you’re calling Corry corny, ya dozey pillock, I’m glad I pissed in that beer.”

  “I was referring to the ethanol served at the Rover’s Return, wanker.”

  Paul relaxed. “Ah well, ethanol sterilizes anything.”

  I said, “If that were true, the human race would have died out a long time ago.”

  “And there’d never have been a second generation of Irishmen,” Herb agreed.

  Weird, now, remembering that was the last thing I said that morning. Reality can get away with things you’d never buy in fiction.

  “I really appreciate it, Herb,” Paul said. “How late should I come by, tonight?”

  Herb checked the time. “Stick around; you can take it with you. I was just about to log on. I always put private stuff first, so if anyone runs out of time, it ain’t me.”

  “Are you sure?” Paul said. “I wouldn’t want to… intrude.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Well, ‘distract,’ then. Extra work—”
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  “Got your keypad on you?”

  “Sure.” He took it from his belt and opened it.

  “Give it here,” Herb said. “I’ll type the data into it, then just toss it to you and keep going on my own. No extra mousing required.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” He opened the display, accessed his mail account, collapsed the display again, and tossed the keypad to Herb.

  Herb set it on his desk without bothering to reopen the display. He reconfigured his chair for maximum long-term comfort, and placed his beer where he could reach it with his weaker typing hand.

  “You’re sure my being here won’t… I don’t know, disturb your concentration?”

  I snickered.

  “Not if you set yourself on fire,” Herb assured him. “Be alert: this keypad is just going to suddenly come flying in your general direction, and I can’t predict vector.”

  “This is really nice of you.”

  “Remember that when I’m on my knees, begging you for a loan,” Herb said. “See you later, gentlemen.”

  He found home row on Paul’s keypad, closed his eyes, and went away. An indescribable series of expressions passed across his face in only a few seconds, ending in a wry grin. He began typing so rapidly, it was as if the inefficient QWERTY layout were the only thing keeping him from typing too fast for the electrons to keep up, and jamming the machine.

  We watched him together for maybe half a minute.

  “God, look at his face,” Paul whispered then. “Transcendence. I’d give anything for his gift.” That was the last thing he said. I swear.

  I was going to tell him that he didn’t need to whisper, that he could sing it at the top of his lungs while I accompanied him on tenor. But just then we both saw Herb’s face change. Saw the transcendence start to drain out of it.

  First he frowned. Then he stopped typing, became still. He started to inhale. His jaw dropped, slowly and steadily. His eyebrows lurched upward, in stages. Surprise. Amazement. Astonishment. The rising brows dragged open his eyes, and they widened in more rapid stages. Alarm. Dismay. Fear. Panic. Terror. Horror. Disbelief. Awe.