Variable Star

18

When I did emerge from the Infirmary, nothing had changed, and everything was different.

I had once read a book, a whole book, about what it was like to be in New York City during the week following the 2001 terrorist attack. So none of the things I saw surprised me. I’d just never expected to see them with my own eyes. Not everywhere I looked.

I suppose by definition there had never been a more emotionally traumatized bunch of people in history before. We were the first sons and daughters of Terra, grandchildren of Sol, who had ever literally lost everything but what we were carrying. Our ancestral womb was gone. All our home planets were gone. Our civilization was gone. Our star was gone.

There was no precedent for processing something like that. No appropriate ritual. No traditional therapy.

Not one human religion had ever even contemplated such a turn of events—not even the old, psychotically blood-thirsty ones we’d had to eliminate. It upstaged Ragnarok, dwarfed Armageddon, mocked Apocalypse, overshadowed the Qiyamah, outdid the Kali Yuga, ruined the prophecy of Maitreya Buddha.

The center of the universe appeared to be somewhere else. The possibility had occurred to hardly anyone, ever.

By the time my ’doc decanted me for the second time, forty-seven of my fellow colonists had committed suicide, by an assortment of means.

That there were so few as that is a testament to the professional skills of Dr. Amy and her staff… and I think in equal measure a testament to the regard in which she personally was held on board the Sheffield. Several people told me later they had wanted badly to leave, but decided in the end that they could not disappoint her that way.

But I think it’s fair to say that better than half of us still warm were basket cases. Walking wounded. On my way back down from the Infirmary to Rup-Tooey, at least four times I passed adults who were just sitting on the deck, weeping. Very few people I encountered acknowledged me, or even seemed to see me. Nobody smiled or spoke. I went by a room whose door was frozen open; its interior showed extensive fire damage. There was a long line outside the Sim chamber, and hardly anyone on it was talking while they waited. There was an equally long line outside the ship’s nondenominational chapel—but as I passed within fifty meters of it, a fistfight apparently broke out inside. I kept going, and a few seconds later had to lunge out of the way of Proctors De-Mann and Jim Roberts to avoid being trampled. I did not go in The Better ’Ole, one of the two free taverns, but passed near enough to it to note that it too was packed, with a silent and morose crowd. The only thing audible was soft music. As I went by, Second Officer Silver lurched out into the corridor and began vomiting. It was not uncommon to see crew in colonists’ country, but they tended to do their drinking among themselves. It was the first time I could ever recall seeing any officer drunk, and I realized that must have been a policy of Captain Bean’s. Which nobody gave a damn about anymore.

In Rup-Tooey I found Herb, Pat, and Solomon, sitting around and bullshitting like students after curfew, though it was midafternoon. The moment I laid eyes on Solomon, it came into my mind that none of us were probably ever going to be able to bear to call him by anything but his full first name, ever again. Or at least for years to come.

He looked up and nodded as I came in. “Hey, Joel. How are you feeling?”

“Swell,” I said. “You okay, Herb?”

“No,” he said, with no more affect than if I’d asked him if he were left-handed.

“You going to be?”

“Yes,” he said the same way.

I believed him both times. We nodded at each other. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but knew he would hate it. It can be frustrating to care about people who hate to be touched, sometimes.

Solomon said, “I was such a big help the first time you woke up, I thought this time I’d leave you alone.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, and squeezed. He reached up and squeezed my hand back.

“You want coffee?” Pat asked. “Or ethanol?”

“Yes.”

Herb nodded, got up, and made me an Irish coffee. I pulled my desk chair over to join the group and sat. “Somebody bring me up-to-date on what’s happened while I was out. Do we know anything, yet?”

“Everyone in the Solar System is dead,” Herb said over his shoulder. “All other information follows at lightspeed. Sorry.”

I wished I had asked anything else. “We’re sure it wasn’t just Ter—”

“Gene’s twin sister Terry was behind Jupiter. She had time to know what she was seeing. Poor woman. The times match. Doom arrived from Solward at lightspeed. QED.”

I’d forgotten I had already worked that out, back in the autodoc. Another ill-considered question, in any event.

Solomon said, “The specks of data we do have indicate that conversion of Sol’s mass to energy was at least ninety percent efficient, and could have been perfect.”

If there is an intelligent response to that statement, none of us found it.

“Is there a consensus guess what went wrong, even?” I tried finally. The smell of fresh coffee filled the room.

Solomon snorted. “First, we have to settle how many angels can dance their way into a pinhead.”

“Solomon—” Pat began.

Herb said, “He’s saying it’s a religious question.”

Pat looked scandalized.

“Exactly,” Solomon agreed. “Everybody is going to end up with a firm opinion, based on intuition, but nobody’s going to be able to defend his. The first scraps of actual hard data aren’t going to catch us for years to come. And I doubt they’ll settle anything. I don’t think the question will be answerable in my lifetime. Except on faith.”

“I just hate to even use the word ‘religion’ in this context,” Pat said. “It makes my skin crawl.”

“Occam’s Razor,” Herb said, bringing me my Irish coffee. He’d made one for himself as well.

“What?” Pat asked.

“We forgot Occam’s Razor,” Herb said.

“I don’t follow.” I could see that Solomon did.

Herb sat and drank some of his coffee. “The sky has always been full of things we can’t explain,” he said. “It still is. Anomalies always abound. Gamma ray bursts. Missing matter. Quasars. Dozens of things. Generations of astrophysicists have made careers creating different, complicated explanations for each of them—often brilliantly. But one explanation for all of them, a quite likely one, they have never once considered. Or at least, anyone who did propose it instantly lost all credibility.”

“Oh, Herb, no!”

He nodded. “Intelligent design.”

Pat tried to speak, but could only sputter.

“That’s exactly why, too,” Herb said. “For some reason, we let the god-botherers appropriate that term as a euphemism for their stupid deities, and let our revulsion for the latter cloud our understanding of the former.”

Solomon spoke up. “He’s right, Pat. Once you get over the baseless idea that an intelligent designer must necessarily be God, it gets easier to deal with. Nothing whatsoever except a lot of dead fools says an intelligent designer has to be omnipotent—just more powerful than us. He need not necessarily be omniscient—just smarter than us.”

Herb said, “And God Himself knows there is no reason why an intelligent designer must—or even can—be omnibenevolent. He need not even be as nice as us. And we’re swine with starships.”

Pat’s mouth hung open. Perhaps mine did, too.

“And finally,” Solomon said, “nothing says there has to be only one—or even some low prime number.”

“We found sentient life on Mars and Venus,” Herb said. “But nothing at all outside the System. And the Martians and Venerian dragons were just so… irrelevant to us, it was easy to stop thinking about them. Even after we got bright enough to go out and look for ourselves, more than a dozen times in a row we found whole star systems containing nothing more complicated than a cat. For some reason, we concluded our star system must be unique. We got the notion we were the only sentients in the Galaxy. We should have seen how preposterous that was, and looked for more reasonable explanations.”

“I really really really hate this,” Pat told him.

“Exactly our problem. Hate does not add clarity.”

I felt a powerful inexplicable impulse to put some music on. It would make us all feel better. I summoned up my library on my desk display and was going to choose one of my favorite old jazz records, a Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba collaboration that had never failed to soothe me when I needed it. But before I could start it, the album title sunk in. It was called La Tierra del Sol.

And every song on it had been written by a dead man, to whom it was a posthumous tribute.

I cleared the screen. So much for the power of music. I had thousands of other albums available, but suddenly I didn’t want to hear any music by dead men. I wondered if the next time I picked up my horn, any sound would come out.

“Why can’t it have been a natural occurrence?” Pat was saying. “It seems to me that would be Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor says don’t multiply entities unnecessarily. Which is less likely? One single cosmic event we can’t explain yet? Or a galaxy full of lethal monsters, hiding perfectly, explaining dozens of astrophysical mysteries at once?”

“What does Matty say?” I asked.

The silence told me I was still asking bad questions.

“Aw, shit—”

“Don’t be mad at him, Joel,” Solomon said. “He spent every minute of the last six and a half years praying to a God I happen to know he didn’t even believe in that he was wrong, that nothing was wrong with the sun. But he knew he wasn’t; that’s why he came apart. The measurements he lucked onto as we were leaving told him something unprecedented and scary was going on. He was too good at what he did to be wrong. Having it confirmed was just too much.”

He was right: Matty had hinted about this to me, more than once. Something about a perfect solar eclipse by Terra occurring as we’d left the System, and something wrong about the predicted displacement of some stars behind Sol. Whatever had happened—or been done—to our star had taken six or more years to finish happening. The few subtle signs had been visible only to someone outside the System. One day, our descendants might find that a useful clue. If we had any.

Oh, no wonder Matty had gone to pieces.

Not that he could conceivably have done anything to prevent the tragedy. With no one else in a position to replicate his data—until whenever the next starship containing a good astronomer was built and launched to a point where it happened to see a perfect solar eclipse from the right distance—he could not possibly have gotten anyone to listen to him in time to do the slightest good. At most, he might have created a disastrous System-wide panic.

“He probably had more people he cared strongly about back in the System than anybody else aboard,” Pat said. “Except maybe Dr. Amy. No, no, she’s all right,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “But she’s hurting.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. Might as well get it over with. “Who else that I know is gone?”

Another awkward pause. I should probably never ask another question again.

Solomon answered. “Balvovatz, for one.”

“What?” I was stunned. One of the last people I’d have guessed would ever suicide was Balvovatz, that cynical, fun-loving old Loonie.

But then as I heard that last word in my mind, I started to understand. His tragedy was, impossibly, even greater than that of most of the rest of us. Everyone he cared about back in the System lived—had lived—in Luna. It was the preposition killing him.

All the other planets mankind had used, it had lived on the surface of. Even the Marsmen had been aboveground for over a century now. Only Luna was too small to terranize. Loonies had still lived almost exclusively underground. Some of them quite deep.

By now, if there were any solids at all among the particles expanding from the place where the System had been, they would probably be only a pair of smelted lumps formerly known as Jupiter and Saturn. Even they might not still exist, if the destruction had been as complete as Solomon believed.

But some Loonies might conceivably have lasted whole seconds, broiling in lava, before it became too hot for even lava to exist.

“Everyone you or I knew back home is surely dead,” Herb said. “So is everyone Balvovatz knew. But his were among those who suffered worst.”

I rejected the image, and the thought. I knew I was going to miss Balvovatz badly. I had liked him a lot. Loved him. “Okay. You said ‘for one…’ Who else is gone?”

“Diane,” Herb said. “And Mariko.”

Mariko Stupple was the girl I’d used for consolation for a few weeks after Diane Levy had taken my virginity, glanced at it, and returned it. I wondered how close Diane had come to achieving her goal of sampling every male aboard. I found that I hoped she had. “Anyone else?”

“Nobody else you know well, I think,” Pat said.

“None of your lot, Solomon? Not even Kindred?”

“None of us has the luxury of that option,” Solomon said dully.

“I don’t follow.”

“We have no way of knowing exactly what happened to Sol—so we must assume worst case: total destruction.”

It took a second or two to hit me. If all or nearly all the mass of the sun had been converted to energy, a wave of lethal gamma rays was even now racing after us. Faster than we were going, or could go…

I said, “Sorry, Sollie. I am not doing at all well on thinking things through, today.”

He nodded. “Happens to me, too, every time I’ve been dead.”

If even one Relativist became incapacitated, sooner or later the ramjet was going to go out and stay out. The Sheffield would never make port. She could remain self-sustaining for a maximum of three or four generations—but that didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have anywhere near that long to live. We were only traveling at 0.976 c… and death was chasing us at c.

“Will we be able to outrun it, do you think? By the time the wavefront catches up, will it still be—are we dead?”

Herb gave me a baleful look. “How long is a piece of rope?”

“He’s right,” Solomon said. “Tell me exactly what happened to the sun, what percentage of its mass was converted to what forms of energy in what proportion by the explosion, and perhaps a horseback guess could be made, by somebody as smart as Matty was. But we know hardly anything beyond the bare fact of humanity’s annihilation. It could easily have been a violent enough event to fry us even as far away as Bravo. Indications are it was. We may be as dead as those poor bastards in Luna—just on a longer string.”

“Jesus Christ!” Pat said, at the same time I said, “Covenant!” in the same tone of voice. I’d never heard him say that before, and took it as a clue to why discussion of religion upset him. Diehard closet Old Christians in the family might even help explain what a man like him was doing on a voyage to nowhere in the first place.

“If the explosion was that powerful,” Herb said, “we’ll never reach Immega, will we? At no time will we exceed the speed of light, and the wavefront is only six years and change behind us—”

“Ten years and change,” Solomon corrected. “We’ve been traveling for 6.41 years. But we passed half the speed of light in the first year, and by now we’re making more than ninety-seven percent of it. Lorentz time contraction. It adds up.”

“So will it catch us along the way, or not? I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of the question.” I’d always prided myself on being quick on the uptake… but I decided to give myself a pass, this time.

Solomon shrugged. “I can’t believe I don’t have the exact answer ready for you. Al Mulherin’s been crunching away at it, but I haven’t checked since yesterday. We’ve all been thinking of other things than survival, that’s all. Give me a second.” He began tapping on a keyboard.

I tried to work it out roughly in my head. The Sheffield and waves of evil start out just under ten and a half light-years apart, then race. Us at a very high fraction of c which will get even higher, but will never reach one. Them at c. At what point will the second train catch the first? It seemed like a classic grade school math puzzle. But relativistic factor kept royally screwing up my calculations. And then I realized I’d forgotten to factor in deceleration… I gave up and waited for Solomon. I knew my father would have closed his eyes for a moment and just known the answer.

“I think we’re all right,” Solomon said finally. “As long as the ramjet keeps ramming. We expect to reach Bravo after twenty years, our time, 90.4 years in Sol time.” He winced slightly as the phrase left his lips, but kept going. “Assuming a lethal concentration of gamma rays is in fact after us, it will arrive at our neighborhood about seven and a half years later. With luck, we can get dug in deep enough to weather it out in time.”

Herb stood up to his full height and clapped his hands together, loud enough to make all of us flinch. “Well, that is just the best fucking news in the fucking Galaxy,” he said loudly. “That makes my fucking day.”

He spun on his heel and went to get the Irish whiskey. Solomon and I exchanged a nervous glance. If Herb were to go berserk in this enclosed space we would have a serious problem. He turned around and caught us at it, and his booming laughter was as loud and almost as startling as his handclap had been.

“You dopes, I’m serious! The distance between one and infinity is nothing compared to the distance between zero and one.”

I decided to assume he was not cracking up. “What do you mean, Herb?”

“Think it through. There’s one and only one reason we know, for sure, what’s happened behind us. Chance dictated that two of our three telepaths in the System were in blast shadow. For my sister, Hell didn’t arrive at lightspeed, but at something closer to the speed of Terra’s rotation. She had time—barely—to hear and comprehend what was coming at her.”

Get him off this subject. “Okay. I don’t take your point.”

“How many other colonies do you think were that lucky?”

Oof.

“Prophet’s prick!” Pat said. “I never even thought—”

“Telepath pairs were even scarcer on the ground in the early days,” Herb said. “Most of the earlier colonies made do with two. And most of those that shipped three are down to two, now. Li kept up on such things.”

“We’ve got to send a laser!” Pat cried, and started to get up.

Solomon caught his shoulder and pulled him back down. “Calm down, son. Captain Bean has already long-since notified the only colony we can help.”

“But there are—” He frowned. “Oh. Oh. Shit.”

Any laser or radio message we sent would travel at lightspeed. Only one human colony happened to even lie in the constellation of Boötes: 44 Boo, from which our destination had been discovered. Taking into account the offset (it was not dead ahead), it was something like thirty-five years ahead of us by laser… and doom would arrive there in forty-one years. That was the one and only colony we could possibly hope to warn, and we could give them an absolute maximum of six years in which to prepare. That had already been done.

Any other colony lacking a telepath whose partner had chanced to be in apposition at the moment of explosion, and thus needing us to warn it, was screwed. Hellfire was coming for them at the speed of light, and we were powerless to alert them in time.

Between us, the Sheffield and 44 Boötes probably now held the very last surviving fragments of the human race. All the rest would probably be gone within sixty-five years.

We had to get to Bravo. We had to survive. It was far more than just our own lives at stake, now. It was our species. We were The Last Of The Solarians.

I remembered a spiritual book Dr. Amy had had me read the year before, by a man named Gaskin. I had been easy to persuade because the farmer in me had resonated to its title, This Season’s People. It turned out to derive from a famous saying of the Jewish mystic Shlomo Carlebach:

I was the guy who had been trying to run away from all responsibility. And found just that.

I often wish I could believe in a deity, so I could compliment Him or Her on His or Her sense of humor. And then go for His or Her throat.

“How long, Sol?” Herb asked.

Solomon winced to hear his own name. “How long what?”

“Blue sky it with me, here. Optimistic assumptions throughout. I just want to get a vague sense of how far away the payoff is.”

“I’m still not understanding you.”

“Assume all goes as well as we can reasonably hope, from here on in. The folks at 44 Boo dig in successfully, and survive with zero fatalities. We make it to Bravo, dig in successfully, and also survive with no further fatalities. Round our numbers off to five hundred for convenience, and assume 44 Boo has twice that population by this point.”

Sol nodded. “All right.”

“The human race now numbers fifteen hundred, total, plus an indeterminate number of frozen ova. It’s in two pieces, forty-odd light-years apart, with no telepathic links. That’s our starting gene pool and situation. We have specs for virtually every piece of proven technology the System had when we left, 44 Boo nearly the same, and we’ll both get better and better at making our own parts, so again let’s simplify, and just say we’ll be able to build new relativistic ships again in a single generation.”

Sol was dubious. “That’s a damn big simplification.”

“On the time scale I’m talking about, it’ll disappear in the noise,” Herb insisted.

“Go on.”

“Here’s what I want to know, and I’ll settle for a very rough approximation: how many centuries will it be, do you suppose, before we have rebuilt and protected our civilization sufficiently so that we can track down those shit-sucking back-shooting baby-burning vermin and blow up THEIR fucking star?”

His voice rang in the silence that followed. Standing there tall with a fifth of whiskey in his hand and death in his eyes, he had never looked more like a Viking chieftain.

“How many generations?” Herb continued. “A lot, I know—but roughly how many, do you suppose? How far away were we ourselves from having the power to make stars go nova?”

“I repeat,” Sol began, “I really think we should be careful not—”

“You’re right, sorry,” Herb conceded impatiently. “A nova is a natural phenomenon, and we know this probably was not. G2s don’t nova. That is a point worth remembering. So: how far away were we from being able to make stars go boom? How far do you suppose we are now from being bright enough to reverse-engineer it, once we start getting some hard data on exactly what was done?”

“It won’t even start to happen in our lifetimes,” Solomon said.

“I know that. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the human race. It numbers fifteen hundred people, and it has only two tasks. Hide. And hit back. I’d like to try and get a loose sense of how many centuries it’s going to be before there’s likely to be any good news again. My intuitive feeling is, on the order of five hundred years. What’s your guess?”

The idea was breathtaking, heartbreaking. I had vaguely understood that a very long, very hard task lay ahead of me. Until now I had not grasped that it probably lay ahead of my remotest descendants.

Nobody had an answer for him.

I stood up and went to him. “Unhand that bottle.” He passed it over, and I topped up my Irish coffee, which had been down to its last inch. I tried it, and it seemed the right concentration for the moment.

“Damn it,” Pat said. “Damn it to all hells at once. We managed to evolve beyond war. Why couldn’t they?” He shook his fist angrily in the general direction of the hull, and the stars beyond it.

“We didn’t evolve beyond war,” Herb said. “Just beyond violence—and we’ve only been free of that for a whole whopping century and a half. You still know how to shake your fist. There was a trade war going on back in the System last week, remember? The first. Who knows how far it might have gone?”

“Even if that’s true, we were getting better,” Pat cried. “Are we really going to have to go back to thinking and acting like the Prophets, and the crazy Terrorist nuts and Cold War nuts before them? Just when we were finally starting to grow up?”

There was a truly depressing thought.

I remembered Solomon’s dichotomy of the Thrilled and the Threatened. Was the human race really going to have to spend the next half a millennium or more being as conservative, as paranoid, as utterly pragmatic and cynical and ruthless as Genghis Khan, or Conrad of Conrad?

What is thrilling—if entities that can burst a sun want you dead? Anything besides simple survival itself?

Would any human above the age of six ever again look up at the stars in the night sky in simple wonder?

For that alone, I wanted revenge. Never mind billions of unearned deaths by fire.

I went to the Star Chamber, alone. I couldn’t talk any of the others into coming along. Solomon nagged me into taking a sandwich along. Autodocs feed you well but do not fill the stomach, he pointed out. I had to admit that something to soak up all the Irish coffee did seem like a good idea.

The Star Chamber might seem like a pointless waste of cubic, but few aboard the Sheffield ever thought so. Sure, the Sim illusion you get with naked eyeballs in that huge spherical room is nowhere near as convincing as what you can get while wearing the rig. How could it be? And there’s only the single illusion.

But you can share it.

In conventional Sim, in a tiny cubicle, wearing all the gear, you can have people around you, totally convincing ones… but you never really forget they’re not real. And only partly because the smells are never better than close.

But in the Star Chamber, you could look at the stars in the company of other human beings. Just then, I could not have borne to look at them by myself.

As I’d expected, it was just as heavily in use as the rest of the Sim Suite. I had to wait awhile for a space to become available. An argument was going on behind me as I reached the head of the line. “I know G2s can’t go nova, I never said it was a nova,” someone kept repeating. “What I said was, and is, there could be some equally natural process, other than the nova mechanism, by which a star can explode. Obviously it would be an exceedingly rare event, I’m not a fool—”

It was only when a bystander interrupted, “You play one brilliantly, Citizen,” that I realized the speaker was Robin. My oldest living girlfriend. “We all took your point the first three times you made it,” he went on. “And I imagine my great-grandchildren will be both the first to know whether you’re right or not… and the first to give a damn. But right now, and until the day they’re born, could you possibly shut up?”

Some atavistic hindbrain mechanism caused me to consider intervening on her behalf. But I did much prefer the silence the stranger had produced.

Five minutes later it was broken—from inside the Chamber.

At first, all I could tell was that someone was yelling in there, very loud. But as they got him closer to the outer door, his tone and then his words became audible. I don’t think it took any of us on line more than half a second to understand. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, with berserker rage. At the stars.

“—shit-eating piss-drinking pig-fucking goat-sucking maggot-licking baby-raping well-poisoning illegitimate spawn of degenerate diseased vermin-vomit”—he was shrieking as they forced him out into the corridor—“I’ll pop your mutant eyeballs with your own—” and at that point Proctor DeMann came trotting past me, touched him gently near the base of the neck, and caught him as he fell. He stood there with the man in his arms, his breathing as slow and measured as if he’d been standing in line with me, and gestured with his chin.

“Next!” he said.

I nodded to him, stepped into the lightlock, waited for the outer door to iris shut, then opened the inner one and entered the Chamber, almost on the heels of the two people who’d ejected the screamer. I stopped and waited for my eyes to adjust, and for the self-appointed bouncers to resume their seats so I could tell which was the empty one. The experience of the room came on like a powerful drug rush.

There was nothing to the Star Chamber, in one sense. A spherical room that was cut into upper and lower hemispheres by a floor filled with sling couches—but seemed not to be because the floor and couch frames were transparent. That was basically it. Until it was powered up.

But then one of the Sheffield’s countless servers caused the walls to display the universe.

Not perfectly, as I said. But well enough to fool the subconscious. And the heart.

Not the unrecognizable mess we would have seen out of portholes, if there had been such silly things—but a corrected image, which removed the eye-wrenching distortions and displacements of relativistic Doppler effect. The universe as it actually was out there right now, for anybody who was not racing photons. As we would see it if somehow it were magically possible to instantly shed all our hideous inertia and decelerate to sublight velocity for a few moments. Well, obviously not as it was right now; there had to be some lag, and some assumptions made. But close.

It was quiet and still in there, now that the sufferer had been removed. By the time my pupils had finished adjusting, I saw that the room had been reprogrammed as I had expected it would be. Known it would be.

When humans sit together to look at the stars, they look up. It’s way older than rational thought, possibly older than thought. So the Star Chamber was customarily programmed to place whatever part of the universe the Chamber’s inhabitants found most interesting directly overhead. Most of the time, though by no means always, that had meant Immega 714 could be found at galactic high noon.

Today, Peekaboo was directly under our feet, and we were all looking at where Sol had been.

As I had expected, someone had explained to the computer that it could delete Sol from its permanents, now. To have seen it there still blazing in the sky would have been unendurable. I had vaguely wondered if they would attempt some graphic representation of the explosion, but of course they had had better sense. To watch that happening forever in slow motion would have been equally unendurable.

What was there was endurable—but only just. Only just barely. It was shocking, and… neither “pitiful” nor “humbling” even come close to touching it, but those are the two closest words I can find. It didn’t matter in the slightest that I had fully expected it, that I understood it intellectually and had for all my adult life, that it was old news.

It was simply heartbreaking, mind-numbing, soul-chilling, to see, with my own eyes, what an incredibly tiny, insignificant hole the removal of Sol left in the fabric of the Galaxy.

If I had not known exactly where to look, and been thoroughly familiar with that particular degree of the sky, I’d have missed it. Anyone would have.

As I stared, mesmerized, it came to me for no reason at all that the very first cinematic work to take starflight seriously had been titled Star Wars. The irony was mind-melting.

I thought I felt a great disturbance in The Force—as if millions of voices had cried out as one, and then were silent.

Millions, you say? Hell, son, suck it up and walk it off! For a second there, I thought you had a problem.

Try forty-seven billion.

That was why I had come here, I realized. I’d had to see it with my own eyes. Among other things, I needed to put my brain more in synch with my mind.

My mind understood all about the universe and its correct scale and mankind’s terrible insignificance in it—intellectually. It always had. But my brain had always seen things differently. To it, the Solar System was practically everything there was, and tiny hypothetical little Brasil Novo was the rest, and in between the two lay nothing but a gap in the map—one wildly out of scale. Like a Mercator projection of a globe, it was a false representation of reality that was much more useful than the truth.

Until now.

For humanity, the whole universe right at this moment consisted of nineteen tiny colonies, at least two of them believed to be slowly dying, many of the rest doomed. All of them many many light-years distant from one another, communicating by laser or radio. Even if any of them should survive this, it would take us many decades, maybe centuries, merely to finish hearing what each of them would have to say about this shared catastrophe, when they found out, and as long again after that before we could possibly hope to hear a word of response from anyone to anything we might say.

To my personal brain, the whole universe now consisted of the Sheffield, and emptiness. Bravo was a fantasy.

To my mind, the whole universe consisted of Bravo. The Sheffield was now just an antechamber, with a timelock on the door.

But my eyes kept reminding me that neither was true. It was good to be reminded.

Because sitting in a chair spoils the illusion somewhat, the Star Chamber restores it and reinforces it by always drifting slightly, while keeping the focal star overhead. It works quite well. The universe as it actually is blazed all around me, and I floated in it, so convincingly I felt the first faint symptoms of psychosomatic dropsickness.

But it no longer held the beauty, the majesty, the grandeur, the glory that it had always held for me before.

For no reason I could name, my mind leaped back more than six years to the night of my prom. Jinny and I orbiting each other like halves of a binary star. Someone singing, “It would not be so lonely to die if I knew/I had died on the way to the stars—”

In my brain, I was no longer on my way to the stars. I was on my way from them, to refuge.

With more than twice the distance I had already covered still to go.

I felt and heard my own left foot start tapping spastically on the deck. I needed my hand to make it stop. For some reason that made me want to cry.

Someone ahead of me and to my left stood up and cleared his throat.

There was a rumble of annoyance, and a woman behind me muttered, “Whatever it is, keep it to yourself.”

But then he said, “I apologize for disturbing your wa,” and there was general relaxation as his voice was recognized. Tenzin Hideo Itokawa was well liked, even by those few who had problems with Buddhism—possibly in part because in over six years I had not heard him use the word once. He was also one of the gentlest and kindest souls aboard, and what he did best of all was listen. You make remarkably few enemies that way. And finally, of course, everybody knew that he kept the most popular man aboard, his partner Solomon Short, extremely happy. And not just because Sol kept mentioning it.

I’m not sure anyone else could have said what he was about to say, and finished saying it, before being hounded out of the room. So it’s good it was him.

People face in any direction they like in the Star Chamber, but now nearly all of us turned our seats around to face Hideo, near the center of the room.

“I wish to tell you all something,” he said, when stillness returned. As always, he spoke slightly slower than another would have, and slightly softer. It made you listen closer, and think more about what you heard. “I need to tell you. You need to hear me. But it will be hard to hear. Shikata-ga-nai. It cannot be helped. For this, too, I apologize to you.”

“You go on and say whatever you got to, Hideo-san honey,” said the woman behind me.

He bowed to her. “Thank you, Mary.”

His next seven words were spoken the slowest yet. Two slow pairs and a slow triplet, with pauses two or three full seconds long between them. Maximum emphasis and earnestness.

“The time… for fear… is past, now.”

Everybody spoke at once. Not all were angry, but everybody spoke at once. Have you been in an enclosed hemisphere when everybody spoke at once—a dome, perhaps? People far away sound louder than the ones beside you. It’s so weird, silence usually resumes quickly, and it did now. Then two or three tried to speak at once, and none would yield, so someone told them to all shut the fuck up, and the noise level started to go right back up again—

“PLEASE!” the loudest voice I had ever heard bellowed.

Instant silence.

Even when I was sure, it was hard to believe that much sound had come out of quiet little Hideo. He took his time replacing the air it had cost, in a long slow perfectly controlled inhalation. It was a good example. I began measuring my own breath.

“I promise I will hear what each of you wants to say,” he said. “Until you are done speaking. Please wait until I am done speaking first. It may be that my meaning will require more than a single sentence to fully express.”

He had the floor back.

“Some of you might become angry if I said Sol may have died of natural causes, so I will not say that. We all know that is theoretically possible, if most unlikely. But it is unsatisfying to think about. It leaves us nothing to do but mourn our colossal bad fortune.

“I believe what happened was done. I believe one day we will meet those who did it. We will speak with them. And for all we can know now, perhaps we may choose to prune them from the Galaxy. If we can acquire such power.”

The crowd was solidly with him again now.

Slowly, he shook his head from side to side. “But I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, or that of the youngest infant in the Sheffield. I suspect it will not happen in her grandchildren’s lifetime. Everything we learned and built in ten thousand years of painful evolution was insufficient. It will take us many generations just to restore that, if we can.”

Murmurings of dismay, argument.

Again his voice drew power from some unsuspected source, not as loud as his earlier roar, but enough to override the impolite.

“But of this much I am certain: we… will… have those generations.”

Silence again.

“I have heard many of you express deep fear that our enemy might even now be hunting the Sheffield.”

Pindrop silence.

“This is not rational. If it were true, there would be none to think it.”

“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.