Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

And I had a ton of it. Not theoretical experience, either. Not classroom knowledge, but the kind where bilging the course means you starve. Like most Ganymedeans, and many colonials in or on other worlds, I had spent a portion of my childhood turning earth, hauling manure, outguessing weather, making crops—performing some of the most ancient labor there is, using tools so primitive by Terrestrial standards that most of my fellow colonists probably could not have identified them without help. That’s what we were all so busy at, up there, if you’ve been wondering: turning rock into rutabagas, because they tasted better, and were also more nutritious.

Go ahead, laugh—I did. The one aspect of my background that had always been guaranteed to elicit gales of laughter from those Terrans I admitted it to ended up being the deciding factor in sending me to the stars. Pretty good joke, even for fate.

Even those three factors might not have been enough to get me aboard one of the very earliest colony ships—the Gaia , say—not at the last minute. For the first dozen voyages or so, crew and colonists alike were minutely scrutinized, rigorously tested, and meticulously matched according to carefully worked out social, psychological, and ergonomic principles (it says here), with hopeful alternates ready to fill a last-minute opening in any niche, long before the ship was ready to boost.

But by now, almost two dozen ships had left the Solar System—and the supply of applicants was beginning to thin out just a little.

Correction: the cream was beginning to thin out a little. There was still a copious supply of applicants… 99.99 percent of whom were eliminated by gross tests. Half the remainder then changed their minds halfway through.

Part of the problem was, hardly anybody still left wanted to pioneer, wanted to leave everything and everybody behind forever, and go plant beans by the sweat of their back under the miscolored light of an alien sun. It wasn’t really a question of pioneer spirit being just about gone, as jeremiahs were always complaining on the wire. Even way back in history, so-called pioneer spirit was usually the result of intolerable conditions back home more than anything else.

That applied back at the very dawn of star travel. Volunteers to leave the Prophet’s Paradise were not hard to come by. But the Solar System was a fairly tolerable habitat for most people about now, particularly Terrans and O’Neillers. There was still plenty of frontier to go around, too, for those who hated crowds and regulations. The Asteroid Belt seemed unlikely to fill up anytime soon. To want to leave Sol altogether, forever, you almost had to be a born misfit, or a perpetual tourist, or as brave and curious as a bodhisattva. Most of the last category had signed up already and left in the first or second wave.

I’ve omitted two other historically significant categories of pioneer. Fortunately, things had not yet reached the point where colony planners willingly accepted members of the first category: perpetual fuckups. But this would be the third ship so far to carry transportees—prisoners, guaranteed by their various sentencing jurisdictions to be “nonviolent,” “suitably skilled,” “highly motivated” “volunteers.” But there would be just over two dozen of them, five percent of the colony’s total population, and the majority would be political prisoners rather than predators. Neither of the previous transportee experiments had sent back reports of any problems so far.

One other thing I’ve speculated about. I said that the Immega 714 colony’s underwriters were not allied with the Conrads. In fact, they were instead associated with the Kangs and the da Costas, both houses that were hereditary enemies of the Conrads. The RSS Sheffield ’s designers, the prestigious firm of Ray, Guy and Douglas, belonged to neither house—but were all notorious defectors from the giant Conrad subsidiary Starship Enterprises MDA.

I knew nothing of the history between the three houses, and still don’t—but sometimes I wonder whether a deep enough background check on me mightn’t have turned up the information that the Conrad family had put the Black Spot on me… and why. Are relationships between financial empires really petty enough that some Chinese or Brazilian exec way beyond his Peter Principle point might have up-checked my application purely to spite Richard Conrad?

I don’t know. Do you?

I expected something like a vocational/educational boot camp on the ground—several rigorous weeks at least of cramming, training, testing, observation, evaluation, and ultimately final placement in my proper place on the great ship’s table of organization.

I didn’t even get orientation indoctrination. They called me at a little after 7:00 A.M. Pacific Standard Time in White Rock—near the end of business hours in Brussels, where the decision had been made—to tell me I’d been selected to take passage on the Sheffield . By nine that night, Pacific time, I was aboard her.

Where it was 6:00 A.M. local ship’s time, since the Sheffield was using the same Central European Time that Brussels did, for reasons left as an exercise for the reader who likes easy lifting.

I emerged from the airlock braced, I thought, for a barrage of new sensory data and impressions, expecting the unexpected insofar as that phrase has any meaning. Which is not much: I was definitely sideswiped by the smell.

It’s possible to cut your nose out of your breathing circuit completely, and I did at once. But that aroma was just pungent enough to taste with the tongue, and there’s no bypass for that , short of tracheotomy. I’d have stopped in my tracks… if I had not been so busy bracing my brain for new impressions that I’d neglected to have the more useful portion of my body maintain a hold on the airlock door. Having thus committed myself, I kept on sailing forward, with the stately inevitable grace of a runaway hospital bed on ice, until I crashed into a naked bald man.

I’m a colonial. We maintain some conservative (public) attitudes about sexuality, by contemporary System standards, but at the same time, being on the frontier we tend to be somewhat more practical and matter-of-fact than most Earthlings are about nudity. It was the bald part that startled me.

Thanks to the unnamed ladies who did us all the favor of tearing the Prophet into little bloody gobbets and bits of bone, it is finally once again permissible to do biological research, so happily all baldness is voluntary today, and is not a popular choice. And extremes of body weight are becoming so rare, one body looks much like another from a distance nowadays—so why would a man who spent time nude choose to shave off his only visual identifier? Was he antisocial? Or just self-effacing?

Neither. “I know exactly what you’re thinking,” he said, and managed to brake us to a halt without sending either of us drifting. His speaking voice was just audible, despite our proximity.

I became aware that I was holding him in something very like a lover’s four-limbed embrace, and forced myself not to flinch. I was the stranger here, he was my host. But I hoped our sexual orientations matched. “So?”

He let go of me, again without setting me adrift. His expression was no clue at all. “You’re thinking, if it smells like this after only a few months of occupancy, what is it going to smell like in twenty years?”

I had to admit I had been on the way to formulating that very thought when I’d crashed. “Right in one.”

“And the answer is, in far less than twenty years you will be prepared to swear, truthfully, that this ship has no smell at all, other than local cooking and your wife’s perfume.” Once again, his voice was just barely as loud as it needed to be.