Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I started to regain eye contact… and paused. I found myself looking around my room. My cruddy little dump of a room, just a bit worse than what I’d have expected as a freshman at university, possessed of few and feeble amenities, shared with three other smelly hairy creatures. In a place where nearly everyplace smelled faintly like feet, and all the water tasted like a school hallway water fountain, and the food aspired to be two-star, and you always saw the same people. The Sheffield would in fact be remarkably like another nineteen years of our courtship as we had known it until recently. Freshman year of university, forever. The only thing the big tin can had to recommend it, really, was that it was going to leap the Big Deep—

I yanked the phone back up to my eyes. “Jinny, come with me!”

Shocked silence. On both sides. I recovered first.

“Right now. Without a suitcase. Without a pot. If the money really doesn’t matter, walk away—come homestead with me on the other end of the rainbow. I know you don’t know how, any more than I know about your world—but I’ll teach you. Trust me: it’s a lot easier to grow potatoes than empires. It’s more satisfying to get in a good crop than to play with billions of people’s lives and fortunes. It leaves you time to make babies, and to pay attention to them, and to occasionally notice each other past the babies and make more of them. For God’s sake, Jinny, you remember the song. Let’s die on the way to the stars! Together…”

I knew exactly how stupid and romantic and naïve my words were. I had never intended to speak them—aloud. They left my mouth with the force and honesty of vomit, but with the same despair as well. Without a particle of hope.

That was only born when a full second had gone by and she still had not answered yet. At birth, it was tinier than a lepton’s shadow at noon. It took less than another second to grow into something large enough to choke on. I was beginning to worry by the time she broke the silence.

But the problem solved itself, when my heartbeat ceased. “God damn you, Joel, you gave me every reason to believe you were an adult. With a pair of balls, and at least half a brain. You cannot be this cowardly and stupid and prideful, I won’t tolerate it. I’ve invested too much time in you! I’m coming up there, and I’m—Joel? Joel!”

My arms had gone limp with cessation of pulse, of course: she was looking at my left hip. Purely from reflex politeness I pulled my wrist back up. So then I had to say something, and thus began breathing again.

“Jinny, listen to me. Please. I honestly don’t know if I have what it takes to be a Conrad, I admit that. But I don’t know if anybody does, so I’m not at all afraid to find out. What I do know is, it’s not something I want to be. I guess it seems self-evident to you that any rational man would. So you won’t want an irrational husband.” She tried to interrupt, and for once I overrode her. “If you think even your gran’ther has enough proctors and bailiffs to delay the launch of a Kang/da Costa Cartel starship by five minutes so you can arrest a junior apprentice farmer for breach of promise, you’re being irrational yourself. Now, listen to this last part, and don’t interrupt until I’m done, and then you can call me any dirty names you like until they light the candle in eight hours and reception goes to hell for a while. Okay?”

“Go ahead.”

She was deploying her ultimate weapon and we both knew it: her voice was trembling on the edge of tears, and they were absolutely genuine.

My own voice tightened. “Jinny—Jinny Hamilton—you were my first love. You may be the last. You certainly are the last I will have in this Solar System. For what it’s worth, I forgive you for not telling me who—what—you really were. I understand, I really do: you had no choice, no other way to play it. I am sorry, genuinely sorry, that you wasted your investment. Maybe nobody is as sorry as I am. I’m pretty certain I’m in the top five, anyway. All I can tell you is that the prospectus you were offered was complete and accurate in every particular. I answered every question I was asked. Honestly.” I took a deep breath. “My own investments haven’t done too well lately, either. Thanks for teaching me to dance, and listening to me play my music. Really. Good luck in your future investments. Maybe I’ll see you in a couple of hundred years, and we can swap notes.” Anything else to say? Yes—but all of it angry. Delete it. It was way too late for anger to serve any purpose worth the indignity. “Your turn.”

The pause this time was probably as long as the earlier one, but with no hope in it, it went by faster.

“Good luck, Joel. I really am sorry.” She let go on the last word, cried so hard the screen image became a sideways close-up of her scrunched-up left eye.

Somehow I held on myself. “I know, honey. Me, too. Really.”

“Good-bye.”

The phone was dead.

For some reason I was not. So I went looking for strong drink, and did the best I could. By the time we left the Solar System I was far from feeling no pain—I was probably in maximum emotional pain, and in considerable physical discomfort from being loaded in free fall—but I was momentarily too stupid to mind either. Terra sure looked pretty, shimmering there in the simulated window, and slow shrinking didn’t spoil the effect at all. In fact, the smaller she got, the prettier she looked.

The same seemed to hold true for Mama Sol. She was prettiest just before I passed out, as a single pixel of pure white in a sea of ink.

We did not really achieve enough initial velocity for the sun to show detectable shrinkage, that first day: that last view was an effect of my vision graying out. A matter/antimatter torch is not something you want to start up quickly and max the throttle—certainly not in the vicinity of an inhabited planet! We left High Orbit under conventional fusion drive, albeit a hellacious big one. Even in my stupor, it seemed noisy.

Unsurprisingly, the menu of recreational drugs obtainable on board was considerably shorter and tamer than what I’d had available to me back in Vancouver. A man who wished to stupefy himself pretty much had to rely on alcohol and/or marijuana. They did the job, in combination.

But once you used your month’s ration of either one it was gone , so the binge burned itself out faster than it might have if I’d had more powerful tools. By the time I had binged, crashed, died, revived, and been restored to feeble continued interest in events outside my own skull and thorax and indigestive system, the Captain had just throttled the fusion plant back from a space drive to a mere power plant, and things got much quieter again for a while. The sun looked just perceptibly smaller in disk size, there in my simulated window… and considerably dimmer than normal, even though all the other stars now seemed brighter than usual. I thought of trying to locate Ganymede by eye, to bid farewell to my birth planet, but it was already way too late; she was in opposition.

Within an hour, the Old Man had gotten the antimatter torch lit, and some noise and other vibration did resume, but by no means as much, or as loud. Or as unpleasant. Less like an ongoing earthquake, more like a waterfall, or rapids in a stream.

Then the sun’s dwindling could be detected, if you had the patience to watch long enough.

I did. For far longer than made any sense I can explain. There could be no Key West sunset, no final Last of the Light. I knew that even by the end of my journey I would not have traveled so far that Sol’s light could not still reach me. It would be old light, that was all.