Starburst

11

THIS IS SHEF AGAIN AND IT'S OH, LET ME SEE, MAYBE ABOUT day two hundred and fifty? Three hundred? No, I don't think it can be that much. Look, I'm sorry about the ship date, but I honestly don't think much in those terms anymore. I've been thinking about other things. Also I'm still a little upset. We've all calmed down a lot (you can tell that by the fact that you're getting this!), but when I tossed the ruble the hexagram was K'an, which is danger, over Li, the Sun. That's a crappy modality to be communicating in—with you, I mean. "Danger" is too close to true to be funny. We aren't vengeful types, but the fact is that some of us were pretty sore when we found out what you'd done. For God's sake, why did you do it? Didn't you know it would piss us off transcendentally? I don't think you need to worry about what's going to happen, because we've de­cided to take no action for the present; but I wish I'd got a better hexagram.

I don't really know how to talk to you now, either. You're so rotten it's embarrassing. It's like if the bride farts at the altar. There isn't any social provision for dealing with that sort of thing, so the best you can do is everybody proceed with the wedding as if nothing had happened. So I'll try that, but you know what I'm thinking! (Ha-ha.)

Let me tell you the good parts first. Our velocity is pushing point four oh c now. The scenery is beginning to get interesting, but not exactly as advertised. (Like anything else you can think of about this cruise?) For several weeks now the stars have been drifting around, as the ones up front get up into the ultraviolet and the ones behind sink into the infrared. When we first noticed this starcreep Letski sent back for the original papers, Einstein and Sanger and all those other people, and he got with them an old one by two fellows named McKinley and Doherty that said we'd never get a starbow because as the spectrum shifts the other parts of the EMF bands would come into the visible range. Well, I guess they do, but stars peak in certain frequencies, and most of them seem to do it in the visible frequencies, so the effect is that they disappear. Of course, we know they're there. We can detect them fairly well with phase-shift equipment, just as we can transmit and receive with you folks by shifting the frequencies.

But what we see with the naked eye (not counting what Jim Barstow sees, or says he sees, because he's practicing his farsight on the stars) is—well—scary. We do get a kind of a starbow, or at least we get a band of stars that run from a sort of dull purplish color through bright blue and a sort of leafy green and yellow to the bands nearest the black patch behind us, which are orange shading to a nasty dark red.

But in front of us, my God, you wouldn't believe how bright it's getting! Not as bright as the Sun used to be, maybe. But a hell of a lot brighter than anything else I've ever seen in the sky, and getting brighter. It's actually kind of scary. It looks as though we're heading right into a supernova or a quasar, and, dear friends (not counting Knefhausen), that is a scary thought. But it's beautiful. It's worth the trip. (Though not worth the way it's going to turn out!) Flo was learning oil painting so she could make a picture of it to send you for your wall, if we could figure out a way of sending it, but when she found out what you'd been up to she thought of booby-trapping it with a fusion bomb. But she's over that now. (I think.)

So we're not really so mad at you anymore, although there was a time when, if I'd been communicating with you at exactly that moment, I would have said some bad things. I don't know how long this placidity will last, though.

. . . I just played this back, and it sounds pretty jumbled and confused. I'm sorry about that. It's hard for me to do this. I don't mean hard like intellectually difficult (the way chess problems and tensor analysis used to be), but hard like shoveling sand with a coke spoon. I'm just not used to constricting my thoughts in this straitjacket any more. I tried to get one of the others to communicate this time instead of me but, no surprise, there were no takers. I did get a lot of free advice. Dot says (I'll leave out the hostility; you can figure that out for yourself) that I shouldn't waste my time remembering how we used to talk. She wanted to write an eidetic account in simplified notation, mostly for the fun of it, but she would have let me transmit it, which she estimated a crash program could translate for you in reasonable time, a decade or two, and would give you an absolutely full account of everything. I objected because of the practical difficulties. Not in preparing the account, I don't mean. Shucks, any of us could do that now. I don't forget anything, except irrelevant things like the standard-reckoning date that I don't want to remember in the first place. Neither does anybody else. But the length of transmission would be excessive. We don't have power to waste on all those groups, especially since the incident with the plasma chamber. Dot said we could Godelize it. Will Becklund said (I think he said; it's a little hard to tell with Will these days) that you were too dumb to de-Godelize it. Dot said it would be good practice for you.

Well, she's right about that, and it's time you all learned how to communicate in a sensible way, so if the power holds out I'll include Flo's eidetic account in Dot's Godel-ized form at the end. Lots of luck. I won't honestly be surprised if you miss a digit or something and it all turns into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or some missing books of apocrypha. Or, more likely of course, just gibberish. Ski says it won't do you any good in any case, because Henle was right. I pass that on without comment.

Sex. You always want to hear about sex.

Well, it's great. Now that we don't have to fool with the pills anymore we've been having some marvelous times. Flo and Jim Barstow began making it as part of a multiplexed communications system that you have to see to believe. Sometimes when they're going to do it we all knock off and just sit around and watch them, cracking jokes and singing and helping with the auxiliary computations. When we had that little bit of minor surgery the other day (we've got the bones seasoning now), Ann and Ski decided to ball instead of using anesthesia. They said it was better than acupuncture. It didn't block the sensation. They were aware of their little toes being lopped off, but they didn't perceive it as pain. So then when it was Jim's turn he had an idea and he tried going through the amputation without any anesthesia at all, in the expectation that he and Flo would go to bed together a little later, and that worked well too. He was all het up about it: claimed that it showed a reverse causality that his theories predicted but that had not been demonstrated before. Said he was at last over the cause-preceding- the-effect hangup. It's like the Red Queen and the White Queen, quite puzzling until you get the hang of it. I'm not sure I've gotten the hang of it yet. Suppose he hadn't balled Flo after the operation? Would his toe have hurt retroactively? I'm a little mixed up on this, Dot says because I simply don't understand phenomenology in general, and I think I'll have to take Ann's advice and work my way through Carnap, although the linguistics are so poor that it's hard to stay with it. Come to think of it, I don't have to. It's all in the Godelized eidetic statement, after all. So I'll transmit the statement to you, and while I'm doing that it will be a sort of review for me and maybe I'll get my head right on causality.

Listen, let me give you a tip. The statement will also contain Ski's trick of containing plasma for up to 500K milliseconds, so when you figure it out you'll know how to build those fusion power reactors you've been bullshitting about all these years. That's the carrot before your nose. So get busy on de-Godelizing. The plasma dodge works fine, although of course we were sorry about what happened when we converted the drive. The explosion killed Will Becklund outright, and it looked hairy for all of us. But Will doesn't hold a grudge.

Well, anyway, I have to cut this short because power's running a little low and I don't want to chance messing up the statement. It follows herewith:

(3.875 x 1228)1 + 1973854 + 331852 + 172008 + 39606 + 288 take away 78. Lots of luck, fellows!