Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “They’re six years behind us,” a deckhand named Hildebrand yelped. “How do we know they’re not hot on our trail?”

  “Reason with me, Dan,” Hideo said calmly. “If I build a machine that makes stars explode without warning… is it not certain that I must be able to reach stars other than my own? Had I but the one star, such a machine would have no sane function. Agreed?”

  Hildebrand reluctantly grunted agreement.

  “If I can travel the stars so easily that I develop reasons to blow some up… can I possibly be constrained by the cosmic speed limit humans must presently obey?”

  “What? The speed of light is abso—”

  “Name a method of slower-than-light travel by which you could so much as approach our general region of this galactic arm without ever being detected by the Solar System.”

  Hideo had him there. Fusion, antimatter, ramjet, all were pretty much impossible to miss.

  “To have ambushed us so successfully,” Hideo said, “they must be superluminal. By orders of magnitude, at the least.”

  He paused there. After a few seconds of thought, someone said, “Subluminal, superluminal—what’s your point, Tenzin Itokawa?”

  Hideo turned his hands palm upward. “We travel at less than c. They travel at some very high multiple of c. Perhaps an exponential. And we have just agreed that we are clearly visible to anyone looking.”

  “What, they didn’t notice us leaving?” said Terri, one of the Healers.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps they mistook our nature. Perhaps they don’t care.”

  “Beg pardon, Tenzin? Why wouldn’t they?”

  “It is hard for us to think this,” Hideo said, “but the annihilation of humanity may not have been their purpose in destroying our star. For all we can know now, it might be merely collateral damage which they deemed either insignificant or acceptable. As we accept the deaths of millions of microorganisms living on our skin and in our hair each time we choose to bathe.”

  He had silence again. He let it stretch, while the stars drifted slowly past his head.

  “There are wise ones,” he said finally, “who say that man cannot endure insignificance on such a scale. That if confronted by a species as far advanced beyond him as he is beyond dogs, his spirit must inevitably break. For an example they point to the original inhabitants of the North American continent on Terra, who so thoroughly internalized a perception of their own inferiority that they became all but extinct within one or two centuries.

  “Somehow they miss the counterexample of the original inhabitants of the South American continent. Or of the Africans chained and sold by other Africans to the Europeans even then conquering both Americas.”

  “Where are you going with this?” Hildebrand demanded. “We know we’re not going to fold up and die.”

  When Hideo replied, his raising his volume again startled me, but not as much as his words themselves.

  “I have great anger in my heart.”

  That made everyone sit up a little straighter.

  “I do not wish to. It may help my grandchildren one day, but it is useless to me now… here. And I do not have room for it in my heart. I need all the room for grief.

  “The only way to deal with anger is to cut it at the root. The root of anger is always fear.

  “I do not fear for the dead. It is too late. So I must be afraid for myself, and my friends here.

  “There are only two things for us to fear, and I have just showed you that the first is irrational. I share it myself! Even now a tightness in my spine tries to warn me that the Star Killer could be drawing a bead on us right now, that I may not live to finish my sentence. But it is madness, not good sense. I can learn to make it go, and so can you.”

  As he spoke I was feeling my own shoulders start to lower, my lungs taking in deeper breaths.

  “The second thing to fear is that we will fail the test. That we will not be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, to found a society which can grow to accomplish the things that must be done. Last week, the worst decision we could possibly make would have killed five hundred and twenty people, at most. Such a poor decision today would come very close to literally decimating the remaining human race. An unacceptable loss. Let me say this just right.”

  He paused and went inside himself. Nobody said a word. Hildebrand started to, and there was a dull thud sound, and he exhaled instead.

  “Both fear and its cover identity, anger, are notorious for producing spectacularly bad decisions.”

  No actual words, but there were widespread grunts, murmurs, snickers, and harumphs, all of firm agreement.

  “I will offer only a single example: the Terror Wars that led inexorably to the Ascension of the Prophet.

  “Shortly after Captain Leslie LeCroix returned home safely from the historic first voyage to Luna, fanatical extremist Muslims from a tiny nation committed a great atrocity against a Christian superpower. Suicide terrorists managed to horribly murder thousands of innocent civilians. The grief and rage of their surviving compatriots must have been at least comparable to what we all feel now.

  “Intelligently applied, that much national will and economic force could easily have eliminated every such fanatic from the globe. At that time there were probably less than a hundred that rabid, and by definition they were so profoundly stupid or deranged as to be barely functional. It was always clear their primitive atrocity had succeeded so spectacularly only by the most evil luck.

  “We all know what the superpower chose to do instead. It crushed two tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual terrorists, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that nation’s leaders had perhaps known about the terror plot and failed to give warning. The second invasion didn’t even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously hostile to terrorists. Both nations were Muslim, as the nineteen killers had been: that was enough. The nation nearly all of them had actually come from remained, inexplicably, almost the only Muslim ally the Christian superpower had in that region.

  “The generation of a large planetary web of enraged Muslim extremists was so inevitable it is difficult for us now to conceive of the minds that did it. They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: What could they have been thinking?

  “Of course they were not. They were feeling.

  “They were a superpower, and monotheist. No one had ever hurt them remotely that badly, and they were utterly certain no one had any right to hurt them at all. They reverted to tribal primate behavior. Beaten and robbed of your banana by a bigger ape or a more clever chimp… you find some smaller, stupider primate, beat him, and steal his banana.

  “So doing, they ignited a global religious war that threatened to literally return the whole world to barbarism. The only thing to do then was crush it under the iron and silicon heel of a slightly smarter barbarism, a marginally less bloodstained religion, the best of all possible tyrannies. Nehemiah Scudder became the Holy Prophet of the Lord, smote the false prophets, and darkness fell.”

  He paused and turned slowly around in place. He seemed to be trying to meet the eyes of each of us in the dark. “If we respond to our own unendurable grief and sadness in that same way they did—by looking away from grief and sadness, and seeking comfort in fixating instead on paranoia and rage—if we react with our own version of their Terror Wars—then we will probably lose this fight, and we will probably deserve to.”

  That produced rumbles, and he let them happen, and waited them out. No one voice chose to try and take the floor, but many small murmured conversations were held at once.

  “Let us continue on our journey,” Hideo said after a while. “Let us build the new world we planned. Only its very longest-term goals have changed. We hoped one day to be part of a great interstellar community with a radius of ninety light-years and a volume of three million. That is still our goal.


  “We hoped that community would live in the peace and harmony we were just beginning to take for normal in our home System. That will not happen now. Defending that community and ending a war are new goals we’ve only just learned we have.

  “We also hoped to communicate efficiently by telepathy through the Terran hub. That will not happen now either. And for that very reason, this war will be so lengthy that we cannot even begin ending it for thirteen more years, and will never live to see any progress whatsoever. We have the luxury of much time in which to make our decisions. Let us make smart ones from the very start.

  “The smartest thing we can do is take hate from our hearts. There is nothing to do with it, no one to use it on but each other. Thus we must banish our fear, lest it grow cancerous tendrils around our hearts.

  “When a child hits his thumb with a hammer, if he is alone, he will say to his hammer, ‘Look what you have done.’ If he is with another, he will say, ‘Look what you made me do.’” A few parents chuckled. “When we become victims, we want to victimize. So badly that if no victim presents himself, we will settle for an inanimate object, rather than have no one to hate. It is nature.

  “We must be wiser than that child. There are no persons here but ourselves. There are no inanimate objects here we do not need.

  “Be sad, citizens. Hurt. Grieve. Go insane with grief if you must. But please… avoid the different insanity of rage. At the very least, until we locate the target that deserves it. Meanwhile, let us teach our children love and compassion for one another, as we have always done, by practicing it in our own lives for them to see. Let not this inhuman enemy have taken our humanity from us.”

  The applause startled him. But after a moment he sort of leaned into it, like a stiff breeze he was sailing through.

  He bowed then, and headed for the door. People made way. Some touched his shoulder or arm or face as he passed, and he acknowledged each.

  When he got to the door he stopped and turned. We waited for his coda.

  “Many of you know I am a student of Zen,” he said. “All my life I have belonged to the Rinzai sect. Long ago it was the Zen of the Samurai. Warrior Zen.” He took a deep breath. “I have changed my affiliation. As of today—as of now—I am a student of Soto Zen, like Hoitsu Ikimono Roshi, who discovered the relativistic engine. Soto is the Zen of the peasants. Farmer Zen.” He looked around at all of us one last time, and made a small wry smile. “As of today, it is the more useful to me. And now you must excuse me, for my shift is soon to begin.” He was gone; the lightlock cycled behind him.

  The silence he left behind him went on for several minutes before anyone tried to say anything, and those who did were politely asked to say it somewhere else, and after that it lasted… well, I don’t know, but at least until I left, a couple of hours later.

  Word of what Hideo had said spread throughout the ship. The Sheffield had recorded every word, and he readily granted permission for its uploading. It was more words than he had spoken in the entire voyage until then. It didn’t produce any miracles. But over the next few days, it gradually started to seem possible to us all that we might heal one day. Not soon enough, surely. But one day.

  We had a shot, anyway.

  It seemed that way right up until four weeks after The Day, when Relativist Peter Kindred was found dead by suicide in his quarters.

  He had taken massive lethal overdoses of a stimulant, a depressant, an analgesic, and a powerful entheogen, using care and a lifetime of extensive experience to time it so that they all peaked at once. I imagine he went out feeling just like the energy being depicted in Alex Grey’s “Theologue,” burning with universal fire. The first witnesses on the scene described his expression as “transcendent” and “blissful,” until Solomon Short arrived and caved in half his face with a looping overhand right that began and ended at the deck, blasting Kindred’s corpse and the chair holding it two meters across the room, and breaking five bones in Solomon’s hand. Despite the pain he must have been in, he stayed enraged long enough to find the suicide note Kindred had left, and delete it unread. By the time the proctors arrived, he was calm, docile, and dry-eyed, ready to be escorted to the Infirmary. Their relief was obvious. If he’d still been crazy enough to assault them, they’d have had to let him beat them up.

  He and Hideo-san and Dugal Beader did their best for us, and managed to hold out for longer than anyone thought they could. The first time the drive went out, a week later, Hideo got it restarted in a matter of minutes. Four days after that it failed again, for the last time, on Solomon’s watch.

  Nothing we could possibly do would ever allow us to drop below ninety-five percent of the speed of light again, now. We were going to reach Brasil Novo at something ironically very close to the time we’d expected to—and sail right on past, too quickly to do much more than wave good-bye to our dreams.

  In theory, we could then persist for another three or four useless, pointless generations. But a century after our departure from the Solar System, when we were 444 light-years from where it had been, the gamma rays from its annihilation were going to catch up and complete the job. Sterilize the Sheffield.

  Mankind was down to eighteen scattered outgrowths. And we weren’t one of them.

  That old song was wrong. We were going to die on the way to the stars… and it was lonelier than I had thought it would be.

  19

  We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space.

  —H. G. Wells The War of the Worlds

  Existence had lost all point.

  For the first time ever, it was not hyperbole. It really had.

  Fine. Tell that to the goats. Their existence had a point: being fed and milked. It seemed enough to them. Tell it to the rabbits. Their existence had all the purpose it would ever need: fucking. The chickens thought the point of existence is hatching eggs; the rooster held a different opinion; but both were convinced. The vegetables did not even dignify the question with an asking.

  Being around that kind of naïve certainty was soothing. And I had made a deal with those critters. It did not contain an escape clause letting me off the hook in the event of solar disruption or even disappearance of local gravity. They had kept their end, so far, by living.

  Also, I needed to be somewhere that was not Rup-Tooey. I had been sleeping like a baby there, lately. Alone, waking up wailing every few hours, wetting the bed. Not a good thing in free fall.

  So I was on the Bravo Ag Deck. I’d thought of going up to the Horn and playing Anna for whoever was there. But I’d decided that if somehow I did succeed in blowing everything that was in my heart out the end of my sax, I might fail to inhale again. And so might my listeners.

  By now I found the steamy smells of Bravo—or what we had imagined they might be like—conducive to inhaling. It would have been a terrific planet, if we could have gotten there, I remember thinking.

  But of course, the smells were much less intense and local than I was used to. Now that the Sheffield was in free fall again, we were back on free-fall air-conditioning. That translates to constant heavy airflow in any cubic where humans spent time. It has to. In zero gee, unless the air is kept very well stirred at all times, the carbon dioxide you exhale tends to form a sphere around your head and smother you.

  The mood I was in, I’d almost have accepted that to have the good Bravo smells back, rich in my nose again. But of course, I never would, now.

  I was wearing the Zog’s treasured old Japanese gardening shirts, which he’d picked up on a trip to Terra in his youth. Tiger Kotani owned a similar one. It was a PreCollapse garment, made in prerepublican Japan in respectful imitation of an even older style, cream with turquoise trim, covered with colorful images of samurai, peasants, beautiful maidens, pagodas, mountains, and tall Noble fir trees. Just wearing it made me feel I could talk to plants, and understand their
replies. In zero gee it flapped around me like wings.

  I had no responsibilities at the moment. Over a dozen of us had chosen to emulate Peter Kindred—so far—but fewer than half of those had left instructions to bury them. I guess if they’d seen any point in contributing to our ecosystem, they would not have opted to leave it. Those few who had chosen the oldest form of eternal rest had long since been tucked beneath soil. Admittedly it had proven more difficult without gravity to help keep the dead moving in the desired direction. I decided to see how the goats were doing in their improvised zero-gee enclosure. I had a pretty good idea I knew what the rabbits were doing.

  “Citizen Johnston,” the Sheffield said softly, “Captain Bean requires your presence on the Bridge immediately. Acknowledge, please.”

  Requires? Of a free citizen?

  I thought about how much the Captain must be in the mood for backtalk, right about now. That he was still functional at all was a miracle. He had expected to carry the heaviest of responsibilities for another fourteen years. Now he had none. No further piloting was ever going to be needed.

  “I’m on my way.”

  He’s going to announce his retirement, and ask me to take his job, I thought. Joel Johnston, Star Pilot! How old was I the first time I ever thought those words—six?

  It was the first even mildly humorous thought I could recall having in… some period of time. That couldn’t be good, could it?

  Along the way, I checked both the official news site, Sheffield Steel, and the barely tolerated unofficial one Jules ran despite Richie’s help, The Straight Shit. Neither had word of anything unusual or even interesting. In fact, each had barely been updated since the day before Kindred had wasted us all. Who cared anymore if RUP-0 sector got their plumbing problem under control, or young Sparks Reilly succeeded in adding another thousand digits to pi?

  I was surprised to note that one of the few headings showing new material at each source, besides obits, was the wedding announcements. The same news that had triggered fifteen suicides had also apparently inspired nineteen couples, one triad, and one quartet to get off the dime and make a commitment for the future. Since there wasn’t going to be one, it seemed incredibly sad to me. What shall it profit a man if he gaineth his soul, yet he loseth the whole universe? How could you have children now?