Variable Star

17

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—”

“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.

It took a total of maybe ten seconds. Maybe less. I will never forget a picosecond of it.

Paul and I knew something was terribly wrong. The color had drained from his face, veins writhed on his forehead like cooking pasta, cords of muscle stood out on his neck. My only wild hypothesis was that he was having a stroke. By now his gaping mouth had sucked a huge volume of air into his lungs. I was afraid it might never leave.

And then was horrified when it did. It may have been the worst sound that ever left a human throat. And he had very big lungs.

The devil himself would take pity on a man who screamed like that. Perhaps he did: the room’s microphones all blew out after only a second or two, and that scrambled the video feed as well. You’ve seen and heard the surviving footage, and you know how indelibly soul-searing those couple of seconds are. It went on for a good fifteen seconds. I heard the whole thing, live, four meters away in an enclosed cubic, and it did not deafen me near as much as I wished it would.

It started out as a scream of pain, very quickly escalated to mindless agony, stayed there for what seemed like a million years, mutated into despair, and then in its final seconds added in powerful undertones of unimaginable heartbreak, unendurable regret, insupportable grief.

I had absolutely no idea what had happened. I just knew it was the worst thing ever.

And it was.

We weren’t the only ones to hear a scream like that, either. Not even the only ones aboard.

By the time it dawned on me that Paul could help me carry Herb, I’d left him way too far behind. “Call Dr. Amy,” I brayed, and lurched on.

From Rup-Tooey to the elevator—nearly the ship’s radius. Black spots. Upward five decks, at the speed of capillary action. Ears pounding. From the elevator to the Infirmary, only about half a radius, but with a complicated route. Bad design. Red spots, now. Got lost and had to backtrack. Made mental note: sob the moment you can spare the air. Spotted big red “ER” and red cross ahead, just as vision began to dither out. Kept going, confident door would get out of my way.

I presume it did, but something hard just beyond it did not. I felt the impact, realized I had lost my horizon somewhere, let go of Herb, bawled, “Take him!” and waited with mild interest to learn whether I would injure my face or the back of my head.

The answer was both, but I did not find out for some time. It was the back of my head that hit first, and it hit hard enough to bounce. That was unfortunate, because just then Herb landed on my face. They say my skull made a much louder sound the second time.

I want to be clear: the problem was not shortage of autodocs—the Sheffield stocked two hundred, which someone had calculated should last five hundred people until they could build their own. It wasn’t even a shortage of autodocs warmed up and ready to use. Four casualties at one time didn’t even begin to strain the resources Dr. Amy had in place. And while many parts of the Sheffield’s infrastructure were underspecified or even shoddy, she had made damned sure medicine was not one of them: those were ’docs fit for the Prophet’s generals.

It was nobody’s fault. It was confusion, that’s all. Everyone in that room was probably as saturated with excess adrenalin as I was or more, and most of them had more than a single emergency to deal with at once. Only one of them knew me well enough to even be in a position to infer how far I had probably just run as fast as I could, carrying a man who outweighed me by more than thirty-five kilos. And not only was she the busiest person in the room, she already knew, as almost no one else did, what had happened to cause all this. It is remarkable that she was able to function at all, and she dealt more than competently with the three acute patients she knew about.

Nobody noticed for a while that I had died, that’s all.

Obviously, somebody did catch on before I passed the critical threshold. And those really were top of the line ’docs. I was never in any real danger. But Herb and his colleagues had already been discharged by the time mine decided to decant me.

I woke as the lid unsealed, opened my eyes to see Solomon Short seated a few meters from my ’doc, looking at me. His face was distant, unreadable. As he saw that I was awake, his eyes hardened. He got up and came to my bedside. He looked so solemn I was about to tease him, when I suddenly noticed his lower lip trembling.

He leaned close, looked me in the eye, and said, without a trace of humor, “If you die one more time, I will be very angry with you. Do you understand?”

“How’s Herb? I died?”

He straightened and nodded. “A little bit, yeah.”

“Wow. How’s—”

“He’s all right physically.”

An LCD lit yellow next to me, on a panel inside the ’doc. “And otherwise?”

“Dr. Louis is the best there is.”

As I thought about what that statement said, and what it didn’t say, the yellow light turned amber. I knew that wasn’t good, and started doing my quartered-breathing trick. By the first exhalation, the light had dropped back to yellow. “Li died, didn’t she? His twin? While they were in rapport.” The light went out.

“Everybody did,” Sol said. “Almost.” He turned away and began pacing slowly around the room.

I assumed he spoke metaphorically: all of us aboard shared Herb’s pain. His voice was as odd as his words.

“Covenant, how horrible for him!” Involuntarily imagining what it must have been like for him, to share his twin sister’s death, turned my panel light yellow again. I focused on my breathing, tried to force the image from my mind, but the light stayed on. “What did she die of?”

He hesitated a moment, his back to me. “Let’s talk about it later.”

“That bad?”

“Worse.” He resumed his pacing.

It was beginning to dawn on me that Solomon Short had spoken seven sentences in a row to me without saying a single funny thing. “Sol, what’s wrong? Is Herb brain dead? Did somebody else aboard die?”

“No one on this ship has died, physically or mentally,” he said.

“Okay, what is it then? Why are you acting so weird?”

“Let’s talk about it later,” he said dully.

“Why? Look at me.”

“You’re not ready.”

I sat up on that one, yellow light or no yellow light. “I’d like a second opinion on that,” I said. “Come to think of it, where the hell is Dr. Amy, anyway? Why isn’t she here?”

“She is,” he said, and pointed.

I followed his finger. Dr. Amy was in the autodoc next to mine.

I had never before seen anyone in a ’doc with any sort of facial expression whatsoever. Hers looked as if it weren’t working, as if she were in serious pain in there. That was silly, and a glance at the monitors confirmed it, but still—

“Prophet’s dick, Solomon, what’s wrong? What is going on? I want to know now.” Yellow became amber.

For the first time he smiled—and I was very sorry. It was a ghastly parody. “Of course you do,” he said softly.

He came back to my bedside, and to my astonishment and alarm, reached into the ’doc and took both my hands in his, captured both my eyes with his. “This will sound crazy. Because it is. I swear to you it’s true.”

“Okay.”

“Sol is gone.”

Was he telling me that he had gone insane? Or that he was an alien who had taken over my friend’s body? Did it make a difference? Had he put Dr. Amy in that autodoc?

All that went through my mind in the second that it took him to see my incomprehension in my eyes, and to realize that for the first time in his life he had failed to notice an obvious pun.

“Not me,” he said. “My namesake. The star.”

He wasn’t helping. “What the fuck are you—”

“Joel, Sol has exploded. It’s gone. The whole System is gone. What isn’t annihilated is sterilized.”

I must have gaped at him. “Don’t be silly. The sun can’t explode! Gs don’t go nova. They don’t have the materials. It simply isn’t—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I know that.”

“But—then—I—what are you saying? Did a, did a black hole, or a neutron star, or a, a, some extrasolar—but that’s silly! It would have been detected, we’d have known about it long before it got to…” I trailed off, confounded.

“I’m telling you Sol exploded. I know it can’t happen. It did anyway.”

“What?”

“I’m telling you everyone we left behind us is dead. Clear out to the Oort Cloud by now. All that’s left in the universe of the human race is nineteen colonies. Excuse me, twenty; I was forgetting the New Frontiers.”

By now the literal meaning of his words, at least, had reached me. “You’re serious. You can’t be serious. The sun blew up?”

He could shrug with just his face. “The one we used to use, yeah.”

“Bullshit. How—how can that possibly be? It has to be the most studied star in the universe! How could they conceivably fail to notice an instability so—” I was distracted by a pulsing in my peripheral vision, took my eyes from his, and saw that my panel light was now bright ruby red, and blinking.

Sol said, “I see only two possibilities. First, it could be there is some fundamental and monumental mistake in our understanding of stellar processes. A true scientist never says, ‘That cannot have happened.’ The most he can say is, ‘This is the first instance of that I have observed, and I cannot account for it.’” He let go of my hands, and spread his. “Maybe G2s do explode sometimes. This one did.”

“Sol, we’ve been looking closely at the stars for half a fucking millennium—”

He nodded. “And it is perfectly possible that G2s explode at a rate of one a millennium or less. That may turn out to be the clue that leads to an explanation one day.”

“What does Matty say?”

He pointed farther down the row of autodoc capsules. “He’s over there. Sedated.”

“Prophet!”

“He said he’s been half expecting it for six years. Something about observations he made as we were leaving the System, that nobody would have believed without backup, and nobody else was in a position to repeat.”

“That’s what’s been chewing his guts?”

“It’d chew mine.”

My mind rejected Matty’s problem. I could tell it was going to take a lot of time to imagine what it must have been like to have known about this, for years, and been unable to do anything about it. I was busy now. “You said two possibilities. What’s the other one?”

His face became as perfectly expressionless as Dr. Amy’s should have been. Except the eyes, they looked as haunted as hers. “Just before Hal disarmed him and put him out, the last thing Matty was screaming was, ‘The paradox is fucking resolved, Enrico! I told you so!’”

“What?”

His meaning slowly percolated in.

Enrico Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

If intelligent life can arise once, it must arise more than once. There must be other star-going civilizations, lots of them. Where are they all?

Answer: maybe laying up in the tall bushes. Behind cover, wearing camo gear and face paint. Slowly and methodically quartering the battlefield through sniperscopes. Looking for game big enough to be tasty, but stupid enough to step out on the plain and start yelling, “Yoo hoo! Anybody out there?” Every millennium or so, one gets lucky.

I rejected the question, as I had Matty’s torment. The emotional impact was just beginning to arrive, then. To start arriving.

It started to sink in that everyone I knew who wasn’t aboard this ship was dead. Irretrievably, beyond any resuscitation, even if anyone were left to resuscitate them. Everybody, from Terra to Pluto. Everyone from the Secretary General of the System down to whoever ranked lowest in Coventry—hell, down to the last virus. Dead and already cremated. Tens of billions of human beings. Martians. Venerian dragons. All animals of all planets, cooked. All birds, baked in a pie. All fish, fried. Uncountable lower life-forms gone extinct ahead of schedule.

Lucky humanity. The cockroach did not outlive it after all. We had none aboard.

I started to ask how we even knew what had happened, when death must have arrived out of the sky before any possible warning could be given or received. But before I got the question completed, I knew the answer.

Two of the System halves of the Sheffield’s three telepath pairs had, for obvious reasons, been well paid to locate themselves equidistantly around Terra. One of them, Herb’s sister, must have chanced to be on the nightside of Terra. Perhaps with several minutes of useless warning, before the wave of superheated steam arrived at well below lightspeed—

I glanced down. There were three lights on the panel, now, all ruby red, all flashing.

And the third System twin, I recalled, had lived at the north pole of Ganymede, which could easily have been in the blast shadow of Jupiter. I found myself trying to picture what Jupiter must have looked like from behind as she was being destroyed by her bigger sister. The nature of the cataclysm must have been as unmistakable as it was inconceivable.

And the precise relative timing of the two telepathic reports would have nailed it down.

At that point it started to sink in that everyone I cared about who was not aboard this ship was dead. Friends, relatives, teachers, colleagues, acquaintances, people I’d always intended to look up one day—

The ruby lights were slightly out of synch. The rhythmic interplay was very interesting. It gave me an idea. I wished I had a sax with me. I looked up at Solomon, with the vague intention of asking him to fetch me one, and the moment I saw his face, the final punch arrived. The others had all been solid, bare-knuckled lefts, but this was the big right hand, square in the heart.

Jinny was dead.

Not “dead to me.” Not hypothetically dead, at some future time. Dead.

The moment I’d stepped aboard a relativistic starship without her, I had known and accepted that I would now probably outlive Jinny by many years. When I arrived at Brasil Novo, still just on the sunny side of forty, ninety years would have elapsed on Terra, and Jinny would be—

Absurdly, my brain actually did the math.

—ash, seventy-nine years cold—

If she had taken me up on my offer—my plea—and come aboard with me, to homestead in the stars… she’d have lived.

I discovered that Solomon was holding my head against his chest. I hadn’t even noticed him approach. I pulled back, found his eyes, and smiled broadly.

Doing Richie, I said, “I hate to say atojiso, Jinny, but I fuckin’ atojiso.”

But I couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Some asshole was playing a tenor too loud. Probably Philip Glass’s first piece: the same note endlessly repeated. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! I didn’t give a fucking fly how many measures he waited before he varied it, and I tried to ask Sol to durn it town. But Sol’s eyes were widening. Kept widening until they covered his whole face and met around the back. Pupils turned yellow, became big yolks, and not very funny ones, either. Felt him laying me back down in the autodoc. Splendid old James Raymond song. “Lay me down in the river, and wash my self away. Break me down like sand from a stone. Maybe I’ll be whole again one day.” Lay me down…

The lid of the autocoffin closed over me, and washed my self away.