Variable Star

14

Things gradually settled, as they always seem to do eventually, into a routine.

At what seemed the approximate speed of mold forming on a corridor wall, life aboard the RSS Charles Sheffield began to take on discernible shape, and then flavor, and finally texture. Five hundred people slowly got to know one another, heard (the first version of) each other’s back stories and dreams, learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, discovered what we needed and what we had to give, slowly began to design and assemble, by trial and error and what few lessons history had made clear enough, a society that would use all of us and feed all of us and give us all something to be part of for twenty uninterrupted years.

Complicating the task, of course, the society was intended to become something utterly different at the end of that twenty years, and needed to be kept aimed in that direction at all times. For most humans, anything farther ahead than this time next year is the “far future.” It can be all too easy to lose sight of a goal that far off, and we had to be ready when we got there. The good news was that Merril Grossman was our Coordinator. She had a keen mind, a great understanding of her job, and a way of bullying people that was so transparently an act of love everyone let her get away with it.

Six months into the voyage, she organized and chaired the Sheffield’s first town meeting. It had to be electronic, naturally. Any cubic large enough to have held all of us at once, even in free fall, would have been a preposterous waste of space, in a ship that never seemed to have enough. Even the Pool could barely have accommodated half of us, and only on the friendliest of terms. But a well-run ETM works better than a live rally in the park, and Coordinator Grossman knew how.

I mean, speeches were made, inevitably: we are talking about humans here. But they were kept short, and they assayed out remarkably low in bullshit content. Captain James Bean, a man who looked exactly like you want the captain of your starship to look, and had the reputation to back it up, got five minutes, and used three. The whole ship rocked with applause when he was done; he was well liked. Five-minute gab-slots also were awarded to Colony Governor Jaime Roberts, and to George R representing the Relativists. Another would have gone to Governor-General Lawrence Cott, representative of Kang/da Costa, but he was ill so his slot was given by his lifemate Perry Jarnell, who took six minutes. At that point his audio and video both cut out.

After that, even the most pompous speakers quickly figured out that if they hadn’t gotten it said within five minutes, Merril wasn’t going to let them keep trying. By the time everyone’s screens went dark that night we had accomplished what I considered an astonishing amount.

Names, for one thing.

People had been arguing them for months, occasionally at a volume that drew proctors, but somehow our Coordinator cut through the confusion in a way that didn’t seem to leave anyone feeling disenfranchised, and before too long we had all finally reached consensus on names for most of the places and things that would really matter to all of us when we got to Bravo.

I for one found most of the choices cheering, too—our colony seemed to be a jolly crew.

The three major continents, for example, were christened Samba, Cerveja, and Carnaval. What lay ahead we knew not, but we intended to have a good time there if we could. At the same time, once he’d explained it to everyone, Matty Jaymes’s suggested name for our first settlement, Saudade, passed by a landslide, with fewer than two dozen opposed, the closest to unanimity we came that night. We all understood that our good times would always, always be seasoned with a sharp regret, a longing for all the lost loved ones and planets and habitats we had left so far behind us forever. To pretend otherwise would be foolish.

Nearly as popular a choice were the new names given to our two moons. Nobody had liked the unimaginative names Immega had given them, New Deimos and New Phobos. For one thing, they didn’t look like their namesakes, and would not behave like them in the sky. For another, a lot of us were from Mars, and did not want our good times tinged with nostalgic regret every single damn time we looked at or discussed the night sky. (That was one reason the two closest alternatives to Saudade—Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi—had found so few supporters, I think.)

So I’d been expecting the grassroots effort to rename the moons. But the names chosen were a pleasant surprise, from the music of the twentieth century: Tom and Joao. The great composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, and his great disciple Joao Gilberto between them created samba, the lush basis of all subsequent Brazilian music… which became a major influence on the work of my favorite saxophonist of that period, Stan Getz. I took that as a good omen, and made a mental note to find out if Kathy knew his work with Tom and Joao. (She did—and knew a guitarist who could play Gilberto style. We killed ’em at the Horn of Plenty all that week.)

Governor-General Cott’s partner had by that point leaned on somebody hard enough to get hooked back online, and expressed his co-husband’s strong distaste, on behalf of our noble patrons at Kang/da Costa, for the growing tendency of some colonists to shorten the name of our new home-to-be from Brasil Novo to Bravo. His partner found it disrespectful and Jarnell found it vulgar, if I’ve sorted them out correctly. He stopped short of demanding prohibition of the name Bravo, but asked for a resolution agreeing that the proper name was Brasil Novo. The Brazilians aboard registered strong support.

Merril sighed and asked if anyone else wanted to address the question. A colonist named Robin Feeney spoke up, pointing out that “bravo” was a word used to applaud a feat of great difficulty, and a jump of eighty-five light-years certainly qualified: our successful arrival would itself be a Bravo to Captain Bean and his excellent crew. That went over well. The word was also, she added, one we commonly applied to artistic effort that moved us, and as an actress and painter, she hoped hearing it often might help to remind us that the arts would have an important place even in a frontier society. Someone promptly said, “Bravo!” and was widely echoed around the ship. Merril squelched further debate, put it to a vote, and that was the end of the Cott resolution. Many of us would continue to say Brasil Novo, most of the time, because let’s face it, it was more elegant. But when we did it was our choice.

More time was nearly wasted on the contentious question of just where on exactly which continent Saudade should be founded. It was a big planet. Almost none of us had an opinion, but the few who did were married to them. Fortunately before it got out of hand, Merril pointed out to us that the reason most of us had no opinion was that none of us was entitled to one. It was not yet possible to state with certainty where the best site for a colony might be: we simply didn’t know enough yet. Robot probes were good, but they weren’t that good. We would simply have to wait until we approached the Peekaboo System and could take a closer look for ourselves.

We did more than just pick names that night. Some sensible suggestions were made. Survivor Gerald Knave, for example, proposed we establish a prize of some kind for Most Constructive Complaint of the Month. Sol Short broke in to suggest we establish some sort of penalty for the least constructive, but Merril ruled him out of order and made it stick.

The most popular speaker of the evening was clearly the Zog. He spoke on what it was now believed our new home would be like, the local conditions we expected to find, some of the flora and fauna we knew about—not in any great detail, really: just enough to give a sense of the place. More than a few of us were still as ill-informed as I had once been, and all were spellbound by his descriptions. He made it sound exciting, enticing, mysterious. A steamy jungle planet, shrouded in mists, teeming with life as exotic as if it had been made up to entertain a child at bedtime. His description of the hoop snakes, which bit their own tails, curled up into the shape of a wheel, and then by deforming their belly muscles were able to roll along the trails carved through the jungle by the snipper beasts, had everyone chuckling. Then his straight-faced explication of the propulsive method used by the rocket slugs caused such a shipwide convulsion of laughter Merril had a hard time restoring order. For months thereafter, the words “green mist” had the power to make us crack up. I remember thinking at the time that it was the first time the entire colony had laughed together about something, and that I hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

Zog even managed—don’t ask me how—to make the ever-present mortal danger of fire we would face and even the threat of Hungry Ghosts seem like only bedtime-story monsters, thrilling but not truly terrifying. I think if you took a poll, most people would agree with me that Bravo Colony’s history as a real rather than merely potential entity begins with the moment Kamal Zogby began to speak that night. Before that we were a big can full of smelly strangers. When he was done we knew that we were a family, and one that was going to create an entire world from scratch together one day, in an environment strikingly like the one in which humans had first evolved back on Terra, and that it was going to be an adventure. Everything we did would be legend for ten thousand years: the first legends of our planet.

There were a couple of obligatory anticlimax speeches and announcements, and then Merril closed the meeting precisely when she had said she was going to, at 2300 Sheffield time.

Ship’s time, that is. By that point in our voyage, six months out, we were already beginning to use Dr. Einstein’s Clock instead of Sol. Lorentz contraction had set in, and we were aging just measurably slower than the people we had left behind.

How much slower? Not a lot—yet. At the instant when those of us in the Sheffield passed the six-month mark of the trip, residents of the Solar System were only about seventeen and a half hours older than we were.

But it would get steadily worse as our velocity mounted up. And constant boost mounts up fast.

At the one-year mark, the differential would be about seven days and seven hours.

At two years, it would be more than fifty-eight days.

By the five-year mark, the divergence of our clocks and mankind’s would surge up to almost three years. We would be traveling at more than 0.938c.

And when I had been traveling for ten years, and was twenty-eight years old, more than forty-five years would have elapsed on Terra. Behind me Jinny would be closing in on sixty-four.

And receding at 99.794 percent of the speed of light.

Then we would flip over and do the whole thing in reverse. And assuming we got it right, and made orbit around Brasil Novo as planned, we Peekaboobs would be twenty years older, and Solarians would be something like eighty-five years older. Jinny would be one hundred and eight, and probably wouldn’t look a day over eighty.

Time has always struck me as one of the Allegedly Intelligent Designer’s ideas that was never properly beta-tested before its implementation.

I know: they say it serves to keep everything from happening at once. But what would be so bad about that? You’d get to see both the Big Bang, if there really was one, and the Heat Death, if there’s going to be one. Either way at either end, you’d know. That and everything else knowable. You’d have what Adam and Eve got cheated out of, what they thought they were bargaining for. Gnosis.

So would everybody. No more bullshit.

Okay, so it would lack suspense. But it wouldn’t lack surprise. Everything would be a total surprise, always.

I have a great career ahead as a consultant in the thriving field of universe design, Sol once told me. I told him he should hire me: some experts said he and his fellow Relativists generated mini-universes like soap bubbles every working day. He said the moment he got a complaint from one of them, I was the guy he would hire to do the renovation.

I don’t care what Dr. Einstein says: my own clock seemed to speed up as the days went by. Those first few hours after leaving orbit took forever to pass. The first few days went by at a glacial pace. Then for weeks, every minute of every day brought new information, new people, new situations, new problems, new mistakes, new things to learn and unlearn. After a few months, of course, it began to slack off. At six months, I had a fair idea of where to find most of the good stuff and how to avoid most of the bad stuff, and the days started to slide by while I wasn’t paying close attention, and events began to sort of lurch forward in quanta rather than unfold in a smooth flow.

Things did move forward, though. By the end of the first year, I was on my sixth girlfriend of the voyage.

I’ve already mentioned the first one, twice, but you probably didn’t notice her go by. Robin Feeney was the female lead in the Doc Simon play I took Kathy to see, on our first and last date—the actress whose performance I was championing just before everything went to hell. When Robin spoke up at that first Town Meeting, in support of the shorthand name Bravo, I was just out of frame beside her, holding her hand and smiling encouragingly. I’m the one who said “Bravo!” first when she was done. It got me soundly kissed about two minutes after the meeting ended.

And that, I’m sorry to admit, is very damn nearly all there is to say about that relationship. That kiss may have been the high point.

If my life were a play Robin would have had to be a pivotal character, vivid and vibrant, the source of several life-changing insights, and utterer of at least one or two lines that would come back to haunt me in the third act. It was a role she was perfectly cast for, too, one she could play the hell out of. Unfortunately she had no one to write it for her—and no skill at improv. Onstage, she was vivid and vibrant. Offstage, she was usually thinking about how to be thought vivid and vibrant the next time she was onstage.

I sound like I’m implying that she was more self-centered than I, which is both unfair and untrue. In all honesty, Robin’s principal attraction for me was that she was a female mammal with a body temperature of thirty-seven degrees who was willing to share my company in a social context. I certainly didn’t think of it in those terms then, of course, but looking back on it I can see the most powerful emotion I felt throughout was probably relief at finally being able to get Dr. Amy off my case.

We couldn’t even manage a meet-cute. She came up to me after a set at the Horn, to ask the name of the piece Kathy and I had just played. “Shaping the Curve,” it was: a soprano-piano duet by a twenty-first-century composer named Colin MacDonald. I said if she gave me her address I would mail her MacDonald’s own recording, and I did, and after a couple of days of increasingly chatty mail we finally made a date. That was all there was to it.

Herb says a relationship that begins without a good anecdote has no future. He may be right. Jinny and I met online at the campus bookstore, the first week of class. She asked if I had a battery wafer she could borrow, and I did. Yawn. And look how that turned out.

For our first date Robin and I picked a common choice: we shared Sim. And once there, the simulation we agreed on was again one of the most common options: background sharing. I showed her typical scenes of life on Ganymede, some of the places and activities that had once mattered to me. She walked me through comparable scenes of life in The Wheel, one of the smaller O’Neills, where she had been born. In my opinion it’s also one of the goofier ones, an odd combination of mystical and uptight. They believe in the anthropic principle, and live communally and take entheogens, but nobody ever leaves a surface unpolished or an item out of place. I didn’t express this opinion, and in return Robin was far too polite to tell me that Ganymede struck her as materialistic and sloppy. Our truth level never did improve much.

I did notice that she was a different person when we were in The (simulated) Wheel, one I think I maybe would have liked better. But she didn’t.

If I want to, or need to, I can reach back into my mental file storage and pull out long stretches of footage representing just about all the major periods and significant people of my life—usually in ultradefinition video with supersaturated color, and full spectrum audio with enhanced treble and bass. In the drawers marked “Dad” and “Jinny” there are extended sequences in true 3-D, complete with textured smells, and sometimes even tastes. Sadly such mental files are like analog recordings rather than digital, in that they decay slightly with each playback. At the same time, paradoxically, some of the earliest memories are the most detailed and evocative.

But when I try and retrieve memorable scenes from my relationship with Robin, what I get is a series of disjointed dim still images, like old photographs, that occasionally animate for a few seconds, with snippets of soundtrack that often fail to match the action.

There don’t seem to be any inconsequential relationships in drama. I guess they don’t have the time. We had plenty of time. If we’d been a play ourselves, and unsubsidized, we’d have closed in a week. As it was we managed to keep the house lit for months by giving away comp tickets to each other and pretending not to notice the canned applause. But the reviews were never worth clipping.

The upside, of course, is that in the end we were able to disengage without doing any important damage to one another. We carried on as though we had, of course, for the drama that was in it. But we gave it up soon, and with secret relief on both sides. On mine, anyway.

About a week later, as I was wandering around in a daze thinking, Well, that wasn’t as horrible as it could have been, I had a meet-cute with Diane Levy. She did not notice me sit down next to her at dinner, tried to turn around and grab the sugar from the table behind us, and coldcocked me with her elbow. Or was it? I thought, and woke to find her large liquid eyes as close as one might expect to find those of a lover. Four hours later, she was one. To my complete astonishment, I had made her a thankfully unnoticed gift of my virginity.

I lay beside her gasping for air, and grateful for the excuse. What would I say to her, now? My brain settled on something or other just as my lungs returned to active duty; I opened my eyes and opened my mouth… and discovered Diane was not at all interested in any of those organs.

A while later, floating on a rich postcoital sea of relief and pride and satisfaction and regret, I found the perfect words with which to let her down easy. I would simply explain, tell my story truthfully, help her see that I was damaged goods, too scarred by a tragic love to ever love again. If she then chose to take up the chal… to pursue a relationship, my conscience would be clear. (Somebody said the gray component of semen is draining brain cells. It may well be so.)

No sense dragging it out; I opened my eyes to begin her disappointment as gently as I could. And found myself alone.

For the next three days my calls reached only voicemail; my text messages went unanswered. The Sheffield resolutely refused to supply me with any useful data, not location of quarters, usual whereabouts, names of friends, or biographical information. The third time I tried to wheedle it, the ship threatened to rat me out to Dr. Amy if I asked again.

By that point I knew the truth. This was love.

The real thing—not the pathetic charade Jinny and I had mugged our way through, but the love of the ages, the true mystical union of two souls. I knew things about Diane that she didn’t know herself, and she was going to explain me to myself, and I was absolutely certain that if she would only give me thirteen words I could make her see it all as clearly as I did. I had it down to thirteen words, so good I felt they’d have done the job even as flatscreen text—and I couldn’t get a single one of them before her eyes.

The first night I just moaned a lot. The second, I raged and wept and made myself a stinking nuisance to my roommates. Balvovatz finally took it on himself to drink me under the table, and laid me out on my bunk. The third night, I went to the Horn, and laid a drunken monologue on Kathy that would damage our friendship for months to come. At the time, she limited her remarks to a polite hope that things would work out well for me, and a slap with so much wrist to it that a proctor was halfway to the table before I could wave him off.

Tossing in my comfortable bunk that night, I got it down to six words. I’d need eye contact, but if I could just get six lousy words in—

The next morning while I was in the ’fresher, paying in ugly coin for two nights’ debauchery, Diane phoned.

“Diane! Uh… let me call you back—”

“Joel, dear, I appreciate your interest. I had a wonderful time with you. Perhaps I will again, one day. But it can’t be soon. It’s just simple math, dear.”

“I don’t understand. Look, can’t I—”

“I have to make a big decision sometime in the next twenty years. It’s going to affect my whole life. Obviously my information has to be as complete as possible. Even after I rule out seniors, mono-gays, and other permanent ineligibles, there are something over two hundred possible mates in the world. I like to keep my weekends for reading. So that means I’ll work my way back around to you again in a little over forty weeks. Not even a year.”

I stared at my wrist, and reminded myself that my guts had been churning before the phone had rung. “Are you telling me you’ve already—”

“Yes, dear, but I assure you I remember you with particular fondness.”

Spasm. “One day isn’t long enough to—”

“I find that by the second or third day one forms attachments, don’t you? At that rate I could easily take the whole voyage identifying the right husband. I’d still be breaking him in when we hit dirt at Bravo. You understand, I’m sure. Or rather, I hope. If so, I’ll see you in forty weeks, give or take. Unless I get lucky and lightning strikes, of course.” She hung up before I could wail her name. It didn’t stop me.

Let’s just say the next five or ten minutes stressed that ’fresher to its design limits and beyond, and leave it at that.

So I sought a mojo.

That’s a term from PreCollapse times. It means a love charm. A magic spell or fetish of some kind that I could use to make Diane see her search was over.

Naturally I sought the advice of an expert. Matty Jaymes listened sympathetically to my tale of woe, nodding in all the right places. Until I named my beloved; then his face went blank, and he sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Son, I’m afraid I am powerless to help you.”

“Huh? What do you mean? Why?”

“Diane made love to me, once.” He sighed. “I spent two hours down on the Ag Deck eating dirt, before I resumed my human shape.” His left foot was tapping uncontrollably on the deck. “My advice is to be thankful you weren’t two hundredth on her list, and quit trying to hog a natural resource.”

From there, my love life went downhill. Eventually I gave it up as a failed experiment and put my mind on my work.

Let’s see. There was Barbara Manning, a student of Dr. Amy’s—her suggestion—and then an engineer named Mariko Stupple—Tiger’s suggestion—followed by a physics student named Darren Maeder who had the superstitious notion that perhaps something of my father’s innate genius might be exuded in my sweat, or something, followed closely by his former girlfriend when I proved a dry hole—both of those his idea—and then, if I have the sequence correct, there were…

Can I stop now? This emotional striptease not only embarrasses me, it’s boring. Everyone’s early love life is boring, sometimes even to the protagonists at the time. Let it stand that eventually the awkwardness started to wear off, and when the dust settled, I found myself a normal healthy het-bi bachelor with somewhat less than average interest in casual sex and even less interest in emotional commitment.

That described a lot of us in the Sheffield. There was no rush in forming a partnership that had nothing much to do for another couple of decades. Unless of course you decided you wanted to arrive on Bravo with children tall enough to be useful, which an unsurprising number of colonists did. But a nearly equal number concluded, as I did, that a ball of mud, even alien mud, had to be a better place to raise children than a metal can. And the last five or six years of the voyage, when things were just starting to gear up to their busiest, would be a poor time to be ass-deep in bored, surly, invincibly ignorant teenagers. Such as I was now.

Sol Short once told me mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening… and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If it thrills you, you become liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more.

I don’t know. In those days, I would have to say my basic orientation was toward the Threatened school. I had begun life by losing a mother I never knew, except as a source of rhythmic thumping sounds and intermittent gurgling noises and comforting warmth. Then, when I was just old enough to get the full impact, I found out how infinitely much worse it is to lose a parent you know. My world had just begun to shake with the changes of puberty when it exploded in my face; at the moment I most needed adult guidance, my supply of parents dwindled to zero.

Then for a while everything had been change, and almost all of it had been unpleasant. I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.

My father raised no wimps. I’d buckled down and got to work, examined my options, made a plan, made it work, started at last to acquire the confidence that I could get a handle on this life business just like everybody else—

And then I’d met Jinny.

So maybe you can understand that my instinctive tendency, in those early years of the voyage, was to tuck my chin down into my chest, hunch my shoulders, cover up with both forearms, and keep backpedaling. The temporary insanity with Diane was my last flirtation with grand passion and romance. After that I was more in the market for companionship, intellectual stimulation, perhaps a little cautious friendly sex every now and again, perhaps not.

I really did comprehend, intellectually at least, that I was engaged in one of the most profoundly thrilling endeavors in human history. How conservative can you be, if you’ve jumped off the edge of the Solar System? Do conservative people travel at relativistic speeds? By the end of the first year of our voyage, we were already traveling at more than a third of the speed of light—and even though there were no sensory cues at all to confirm that, we were all well aware of it, and believed it, and I think I can safely say we all found it more than a little thrilling. By the time we reached turnover in nine more years, our velocity was going to peak at a hair-frying 0.99794c. Does a conservative man race photons?

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the future was going to be thrilling. It wasn’t that I was unwilling or even reluctant to be thrilled. I just had little experience with it.

The mores and customs we had all been raised in, fruits of the Covenant, continued to work their unlikely magic: even in close and closed quarters, we found ways to live together without violence, to a large extent without malice, and with as much kindness as we could find within ourselves.

At the end of that first year, we celebrated with a party that would become so legendary I don’t think I’ll discuss it here. There are several detailed accounts available, and I disagree with every one of them on some of the details. One point on which there is agreement, however, is that there were no quarrels. No relationships broke up, no feuds were born. If anyone had a really bad time, they managed to conceal it from one of the best gossip networks in history.

I’m not saying there were no unhappy people aboard. A predictable percentage of us concluded, much too late, that they’d made a terrible mistake in joining the colony. A predictable few of those became merchants of gloom, prophets of doom, carriers of that most infectious of diseases, fear. And a few just became so profoundly miserable they lowered morale wherever they passed. Dr. Amy and her three colleagues had their work cut out for them.

It made me want to stop being a jerk faster, to free up her time. So I worked at it.

By the end of that first year of the voyage, I had at least a working two-part answer to the question, Who is Joel Johnston?

First, I was a guy who was going to sing to the stars.

I would sing with my horn and with all the other instruments of man, to a star whose very existence had been unsuspected for most of history. I would sing of human beings, since words would not do, to a star system that knew nothing of them or anything like them. I would sing of my fellow colonists, in what I hoped was a universal language, to a planet we hoped would see fit to nurture and sustain us all. And I would sing of myself—and perhaps another—to two strange new moons in the night sky, and slightly distorted constellations.

Second, I was a guy who was going to talk to strange dirt.

On the long voyage I would speak softly to alien soil, in my best approximation of its own language, asking it as politely as I could to accept Terran plants that would feed my colony. I would open negotiations with the ecosystem of Bravo, and listen intently to the responses that came back. Zog and I and all the rest of his crew would spend the years staring until our eyes watered at the probes’ surface recon images of Brasil Novo’s surface, trying to outguess the planet, speculating endlessly over what sorts of new predators, parasites, or other perils were most likely to exist, arguing endlessly over what we might do about them. It’s difficult to plan for the unknown—all right, it’s impossible—but we were going to do our level best.

It was a place to stand. Sing to new stars; speak to new dirt. Two planted legs to help keep me upright for the next couple of decades. First we love music. Then we love food. Many years later, we evolve high enough to love another—if we’re lucky.