Starburst

13

OLD RELIABLE PEED-OFF SHEF HERE. LOOK, WE GOT YOUR message. You know, you're not in very close touch with reality. I don't want to discuss what you said, except to say you've got a humongous nerve. Don't take your bad moods out on us, unless you want us to do the same, all right? If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. We do the best we can. That's not bad. If we don't do exactly what you want us to, maybe it's because you don't deserve it. Not to mention that, really, we all know quite a lot more about the world than you did when you fired us off at that blob of moonshine you call Alpha-Aleph. Well, thanks a lot for nothing!

On the other hand, thanks a little bit for what little you did do for us, which at least worked out to get us where we are, and I don't mean spatially. So I'm not going to yell at you. I just don't want to talk to you at all. I'll let the others speak for themselves.

Dot Letski speaking. This is important. Pass it on. I have three things to tell you that I do not want you to forget. One: Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random, and happening to find out that by accident you've built the Constitution. It gets solved by constructing a model (=equation (^grammar)) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model all you have to do is hang the metal around it, and then it goes like gangbusters.

When you have understood this you will be ready for: Two: There is no such thing as causality. What a waste of time it has been, trying to assign "causes" to "events"! You say things like, "Striking a match causes it to burn." True statement? No. False statement. You find yourself in a whole waffle about whether the "act" of "striking" is "necessary" and/or "sufficient" and you get lost in words. Pragmatically useful grammars are without tenses. In a decent grammar (which this English-language one, of course, is not, but I'll do the best I can) you can make a statement like "There exists a conjunction of forms of matter (specified) which combine with the release of energy at a certain temperature (specified) (which may be the temperature associated with heat of friction)." Where's the causality? "Cause" and "effect" are in the same timeless statement. So, Three: There are no such things as empirical laws. When Ski came to understand that, he was able to contain the plasma in our jet indefinitely, not by pushing particles around in brute- force magnetic squeezes but by encouraging them to stay together. There are other ways of saying what he does (="creates an environment in which centripetal exceed centrifugal forces"), but the way I said it is better because it tells you all something you really need to know about your personalities. Bullies, all of you. Why can't you be nice to things if you want them to be nice to you? Be sure to pass this on to T'in Fa at Tientsin, Professor Morris at All Soul's, and whoever holds the Carnap chair at UCLA.

Flo's turn. My mother would have loved my garden. I have drumsticks and daffodils growing side by side in the sludgy sand. They do so please us, and we them. I will probably transmit a full horticultural handbook at a future date, but meanwhile be aware that it is shameful to eat a radish. Carrots, on the other hand, enjoy it.

A statement of Willis Becklund, deceased. I emerged into the world between feces and urine, learned, grew, ate, worked, moved, and died. Alternatively, I emerged from the hydrogen flare, shrank, disgorged, and reentered the womb one misses so. You may approach it from either end, it makes no difference at all which way you look at it.

Observational datum, Letski. At time t, a Dirac number incommensurable with GMT, the following phenomenon is observed: Bolometric analysis indicates that the bright spot ahead of us, occupying approximately one minute of arc, is in fact the fossil 2.7 K blackbody radiation left over from the Big Bang, blue­shifted up to a perceived temperature of S.7 X 10⁴ K, with a visual magnitude of approximately mv = 24.5. We are aiming at the womb of the universe. Harvard-Smithsonian notification service, please copy.

"Starbow," a preliminary study for a rendering into English of a poem by James Barstow:

Gaggle of goslings but pick of our race

We wander through relativistic space,

Out of the evil unspeakable Night

Into the awful unknowable Bright.

Dilated, discounted, despondent we scan:

But vacant the sign of the Horse and the Man,

Vacant the sign of the Man and the Horse,

And now we conjecture the goal of our course.

Tricked, trapped, and cozened, we ruefully run

After the child of the bachelor sun.

The trick is revealed and the trap is confessed , And we are the butts of the dim-witted jest. O Gander who made us, O Goose who laid us, How lewdly and twistedly you betrayed us! We owe you a debt. We won't forget. With fortune and firmness we'll pay you yet. Give us some luck and we'll timely send Your pot of gold from the starbow's end.

Ann Becklund: I think it was Stanley Weinbaum who said that from three facts a truly superior mind should be able to deduce the whole universe. (Ski thinks the feat is possible with a finite number, but one which is considerably larger than three.) We are so very far from being truly superior minds by those standards, or even by our own. Yet we have a much larger number of facts to work with than three, or even three thousand, and so we have deduced a good deal.

This is not as valuable to you as you might have hoped, dear old bastardly Kneflie and all you bastardly others, because one of the things that we have deduced is that we can't tell you everything, because you wouldn't understand. We would be willing to help you along, some of you, if you were here—and what a tribute to our essential decency that is! And then in time you would be able to do what we do easily enough; but not at remote control.

But all is not lost, folks! Cheer up! You don't deduce like we deduce, but on the other hand there are an awful lot more of you. So try. Get smart. You can do it if you want to. Set your person at rest, compose your mind before you speak, make your relations firm before you ask for something. Don't be like the fellow in the Changes. "He brings increase to no one. Indeed, someone even strikes him."

We've all grown our toes back now, even Will, although it was particularly difficult for him after he was killed, and we've inscribed the bones and used them with very good effect in generating the hexagrams. I hope you see the point of what we did. We could have gone on with tossing coins or throwing the yarrow stalks, or at least with the closest Flo could breed to yarrow stalks. We didn't want to "do that because it's not the optimal way.

The person who doesn't keep his heart constantly steady might say, "Well, what's the difference?" That's a poor sort of question to ask. It implies a deterministic answer. A better question is, "Does it make a difference?" and the answer to that is, "Yes, probably, because in order to do something right you must do it right." That is the law of identity, in any language.

Another question you might ask is, "Well, what source of knowledge are you actually tapping when you consult the hexagrams?" That's a better kind of question in that it doesn't force a wrong answer, but the answer is, again, indeterminate. You might view the I Ching as a sort of Rorschach bundle of squiggles that has no innate meaning but is useful because your own mind interprets it and puts sense into it. Feel free! You might think of it as a sort of memory bank of encoded lore. Why not? You might skip it entirely and come to knowledge in some other tao, any tao you like. ("The superior man understands the transitory in the light of the eternity of the end.") That's fine, too!

But whatever way you do it, you should do it that way. We needed inscribed bones to generate hexagrams, because that was the right way, and so it was no particular sacrifice to lop off a toe each for the purpose. It's working out nicely, except for one thing. The big hangup now is that the translations in the only book we have are so degraded, Chinese to German, German to English, and error seeping in at every step, and you bastards wouldn't transmit us the originals. Never mind. We'll make out.

Perhaps I will tell you more at another time. Not now. Not very soon. Eve will tell you all about that.

Eve Barstow, the Dummy, comes last and, I'm afraid, least.

When I was a little girl I used to play chess, badly, with very good players, and that's the story of my life. I'm a chronic overachiever. I can't stand people who aren't smarter and better than I am, but the result is that I'm the runt of the litter every time. They are all pretty nice to me here most of the time, even Jim, but they know what the score is and so do I.

So I keep busy, and applaud in them what I can't do myself. It isn't a bad life. I have everything I need, not counting pride.

Let me tell you what a typical day is like here between Sol and Centaurus. We wake up (if we have been sleeping, which most of us still do) and eat (if we are still eating, as all but Ski and, of course, Will Becklund do). The food is delicious and Florence has induced it to grow cooked and seasoned where that is desirable, so it's no trouble to go over and pick yourself a nice poached egg or a clutch of French fries. (I really prefer brioche in the mornings, but Flo can't manage them for, I think, some kind of sentimental reasons.) Sometimes we ball a little or sing old campfire songs. Ski comes down for that, but not for long, and then he goes back to looking at the universe. I don't see how he stands it. It almost burns out your eyes. The starburst is magnificent and appalling. One can always look in the other frequencies and see ghost stars before us and behind us, but in the birthright bands the view is just about dead black, and then that beautiful powdery ring of colored stars— and then the starburst. It will of course disappear when we slow down again, but right now it is exactly like plummeting right into the hottest pit of Hell.

Sometimes we write plays or have a little music. Shef deduced four lost Bach harpsichord concerti, very reminiscent of Corelli and Vivaldi, with everything going at once in the tuttis, and we've all adapted them for performance. I did mine on the Moog, but Ann and Shef synthesized whole orchestras. Shef's is particularly cute. You can tell that the flautist has early emphysema and two people in the violin section have been drinking, and he's got Toscanini conducting like a risorgimento metronome. Flo's oldest daughter made up words and now she sings a sort of nursery-rhyme adaptation of some Buxtehude chorales; oh, I didn't tell you about the kids. We have eleven of them now. Ann, Dot, and I have one apiece, and Florence has eight. (But they're going to let me have quadruplets next week.) They let me take care of them pretty much for the first few weeks, while they're little, and they're so darling.

So mostly I spend my time taking care of the kids and working out tensor equations that Ski kindly gives me to do for him and, I must confess it, feeling a little lonely. I would like to watch a TV quiz show over a cup of coffee with a friend! It's not what you'd call cozy around here. Though they do let me do over the interior of our mobile home now and then. The other day I redid it in Pittsburgh suburban just as a joke. Would you believe French windows in interstellar space? We can't open them, of course, but they look real pretty with the chintz curtains and lace tiebacks. And we've added several new rooms for the children and their pets. (Flo grew them the cutest little bunnies in the hydroponics plot; they're warm and they sort of breathe, but of course they don't hop or anything.)

Well, I've enjoyed this chance to gossip, but I'd better get to the point. I don't know why I'm the one who has to give you the bad news, but anyway let's get it over with.

None of the others are going to see what I'm transmitting to you. They simply aren't that interested anymore. There's a lot of other things they simply aren't, anymore, and, dear friends back home, I'm not a bit sure that one of those things isn't "human." I don't want to talk about it. But I don't like it, either, and you all should understand that the Will Becklund and the Sheffield Jackman and even the Eve Barstow you used to know simply do not exist anymore, and any assumptions you may make about what any of them, or us, will do are wholly at your own risk. More than that. You've been quite annoying. There's a lot of free-floating hostility around here that belongs to you.

For some time now the vibrations here have been pretty sour. You know how it is around the Cape when there's a hold, and then a slipback, and you don't know if the mission's scrubbed or not, and if it isn't you don't know if the damn bird's going to blow up on the pad, and the prime crews are missing sleep, and the backups are getting hopeful and grouchy and mostly all raw nerves, and the wives are yelling at the kids and locking themselves in the bedroom for a cry two or three times a day and wondering if a divorce would be, after all, all that much of a bad thing? I don't mean it was like that. I mean it was a million times worse than that. I mean, when something like that comes down at the Cape it's just your average all-American Joes and Sallys that are jumping out of their skins. We're not like that anymore. I mean, not even am I sweet little Eve anymore. And if any of us had any sweetness left, it sure dried up when we found out you were murdering us.

Oh, we're not dead—not counting Will, I mean. But that doesn't make all of you any less a pack of murderers.

So we found it out; and, oh, my dears, what a meeting we had after that! I'm not going to tell you some of the things we talked about doing. You don't want to know. And I don't think we're really going to do them, or anyway the worst of them, at least not right now. Probably.

But there's something we are going to do. Folks, you're all in Coventry. No talking anymore. The others have decided we don't want to get any more messages from you. They don't like the way you try to work on our subconsciouses and all (not that you succeed, of course, but you can see that it's still a little annoying), and so in future the dial will be set at six-six-oh, all right, but the switch will be in the "off" position. It wasn't my idea, but I was glad to go along. I would like some slightly less demanding company from time to time, although not, of course, yours.