Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“I’m sorry if I squashed you,” I said, getting to my own feet.

She shook her head. “No problem. You know how to use your elbows.”

I found myself blushing.

And her blushing back. “Besides,” she went on quickly, “if I’d only listened to what you were trying to tell me—”

“No harm done,” Zog said. “Except to the shed.” He glanced around at the damage and sighed. “It was guaranteed goat-proof.”

“I’ll bring it back to the store,” she said.

He shook his head. “Traveling at relativistic speeds voids the warrantee.”

“Figures.”

“I’ll go round them up,” I said.

“We all will,” Zog said.

“That’s okay,” I said. “I’m the new guy. And I really should have taken the time to explain to Kathy why—”

“We all will,” Zog insisted. “Once we patch this shed together well enough to hold them again.”

And of course he was right. Catching a goat is just barely possible for three people working together; I doubt any two of us could have caught even one. The hairy little bastards led us a merry chase. A goat can leap pretty well even in terrestrial gravity; in one-third gee they begin to seem more like large birds than mammals. Large smart birds, with offensive armament.

By the time we were done, I was thoroughly exhausted, and quite understood why many cultures have used goats to represent Satan. I left the shed and flopped down not far from the entrance, with my back against an intact section of wall. Zog took a seat beside me—with noticeably less effort, even though he had nearly twenty years on me—and Kathy dropped into a tailor’s seat facing us. The three of us sat in silence for a while, Kathy and I because we were getting our breath back, and Zog because he had nothing to say.

Finally Kathy frowned, shifted position slightly, reached beneath her, and removed something. She held it out on her palm to examine it. A slightly squashed goat berry. I managed to choke off the giggle and to slap on my poker face, but it took me a few seconds, and I was sure she’d heard me at it. She looked up, our eyes met, I waited to see if she would flare up at me—

It so happens that the average goat turd is just the size, shape, and color of the data beads used to hold video or audio programming. When she took it between thumb and forefinger, and pretended to be trying to insert it into the docking slot on her wrist CPU, it wasn’t what you could call a hilarious jest. But it was excuse enough for a tension-releasing blurt of laughter from both of us.

“That music sounds like shit,” Zog said, and we laughed harder.

After a while we went back inside, and Zog had Kathy and me finish hooving that goat together, and pass out treats to all of them, to calm them down and by way of apology for our carelessness. Then we left, and Zog said, “Joel, I believe you were about to correct a small misunderstanding on my part about your background.”

Ah yes. “Well…” His eyes met mine, and I heard myself say, “Not a misunderstanding. I lied, Zog. Not about dirt farming—but pretty much everything I put down about my experience in hydroponics is pure goat berries. I’ll come in real handy in twenty years, when we all start doing this kind of farming on a large scale, at our new home. But right now, you’re going to need short words and long patience.”

He just nodded. “Why did you lie?”

“It was the only way I had to get a berth aboard the Sheffield . And I really wanted one.”

I’d been sweating this moment for days now. He nodded again, and that was the end of it. “We’ll begin your education in hydroponics tomorrow. For now follow me,” he said, and took us on a grand tour of that deck.

It really was a wonder, a Garden of Eden such as no planet had ever seen, designed and constructed so that the local light intensity of any given square meter of that vast area could be varied from zero to noon in Baghdad, with equivalent control of humidity, airflow, O 2and CO 2content, and some other factors I forget. Those crops that were able to thrive on a twenty-four-hour light cycle (or other variant) could do so, without disturbing the slumber of the ones nearby who liked things the old-fashioned way. Those that were reasonably happy in the different conditions that obtained on our destination planet were already enjoying them, and all the rest would, hopeably, be successfully reconditioned to enjoy them over the course of the next two decades.

The goats notwithstanding, the staple meat aboard the Sheffield besides chickens was not chevon but rabbit—low fat, a milder taste than chevon, and easier to cook. (You couldn’t subsist on rabbit alone—not enough vitamins A or C—but we weren’t trying to.) They’re less fussy eaters themselves, too, happy to live on alfalfa with a pinch of salt, which both upper and lower farms produced in plenty. Each doe and her litter took up about a square meter of living space—but a stackable square meter—and about twelve times that in alfalfa; the yield works out to about 150 kilos of boneless meat per hectare per day.

What was left of the rabbits was fed, along with each day’s dining-hall waste, to chickens. They too insist on a dark stinky home, like goats. But it’s safe to enter it even with a head cold, and the reward is four or more eggs per colonist per week, plus fried chicken.

And finally there was fish—the last stop on the tour. Marsbred fish, as productive as the rabbits in terms of protein, and less trouble to care for. As we were strolling there from the chicken run, Zog told us that one of the very few stabs at genetic manipulation the Prophets had ever approved was an attempt to breed a chicken that would reliably lay an egg a day—the Holy Ones liked eggs. “The Church’s breeders were successful, technically,” Zog said, “but unfortunately the resulting chicken was literally too dumb to eat. If you want to take that as a metaphor for the True Church’s whole approach to science, you’re pretty astute in my opinion.”

“God,” Kathy said, “what a shitstain in history.”

“Middle Ages were worse,” Zog said.

“Maybe—but we could have had immortality by now! We could have beaten cancer by now. We might have had telepathy by now.” She sounded angry.

“We have telepathy,” Zog said mildly.

“Sure, terrific. But only in identical twins, and fewer than four percent of them— and we don’t have the faintest idea how they do it, or why they can and the rest of us can’t.”

“True. There remain mysteries to be solved.”

“It’s infuriating.”

She really seemed upset. I decided to distract her with a diversionary anecdote. “Let me tell you both my very favorite mystery,” I said. “You reminded me of it just a second ago, Zog, and it’s related to what you’re talking about, Kathy. Kind of, anyway.”

She didn’t answer. “Go ahead, Joel,” the Zog said.

“I ran across this in a book. Just before the Hiatus, natal medicine got so good that they were sometimes able to save babies born so prematurely that they had not yet even developed the sucking reflex. And now that the Prophets are all finally holding services in Hell, we can do that again: rescue babies that are, in the Zog’s colorful phrase, too dumb to eat.”

“How?” Kathy asked. “Force-feed the poor things?”

The Zog shook his head. “They’d never learn, then.”

“No, they train them to suck,” I said.

Kathy frowned. “ How? If something is too dumb to figure out that eating is pleasant, what the hell do you reward it with?”

I smiled. “Music.”

Her face smoothed over. “Oh, I love it.”

“Rhythm?” Zog asked.