Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I didn’t understand. “Literally? That’s easy. To Peekaboo Two. Brasil Novo, if you want to be formal. The second planet of Immega Seven-Something.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me about the planet. When it was discovered. Its physical parameters. Its atmosphere. Its geography, and geology. Climate. Seasons. Flora. Fauna. Most intelligent-seeming organism identified. Most dangerous-looking predator identified. Intended location of our First Landing site.” She paused expectantly.

“Uh… it’s real hot and damp, for… for extended periods, and there’s a whole lot of oxygen,” I said, and realized with dismay that I had shot my bolt.

“You’re going to spend twenty years getting there, and you’ll stay there the rest of your life. I would spend some of the twenty years studying just what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

All at once I felt immortally stupid. She was absolutely, shockingly right. Not thought this through? Hell, I hadn’t started thinking. Look before you leap, my father had often said. I hadn’t even looked after I’d leapt. After weeks on board a starship, my principal curiosity about my destination so far had consisted of wondering what to wear to work on the Upper Ag Deck. I had just sort of assumed there’d be a planet of some sort at the end of this, and what of it?

Could a broken heart cause brain damage? On this scale?

“Finally, why. Once you know the destination, the question becomes, why are you going there? Why go anywhere, for that matter? For what reason? What will you do there? Above all, why will it matter ? Here, take these. Basket over there.”

I accepted the box of tissues she offered out of politeness, and was startled to discover that my face was soaking wet and I really did need to blow my nose. The wastebasket had been placed so that it was a hard shot to miss. I hit it six times running before I was done. By then I was seeing little black spots overlaying everything.

“So that’s it?” I said, my voice quavering. “That’s everything? Shit, I thought I had a problem.”

“You do,” she said simply. “And that is a lot to chew on. So much that twenty years might not be enough time. And I promise you it will be painful. And you may fail completely. Would you like the bad news, now?”

I giggled. “Sure.”

“You have no fucking choice.”

“Tell me there’s good news.” I tried to parody desperation, but did too good a job.

She smiled. “You have the best Healer on the ship. I will give you some good tools, and yell encouragement, and take your crap, and share your breakthroughs, and tell you when your exciting new profound insights are horseshit.”

“Tools?”

“Techniques. Disciplines. Attitudes. Drugs. In addition, I will listen to anything you want to tell me, and give advice if I happen to have any.”

“That sounds good,” I said. “When do I start?”

“Now.”

“Okay. How do I start?”

“First, you have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Everything.”

“Huh? I mean, ‘Crave pardon?’”

“To grow, you must learn about yourself. To learn, you must listen to yourself. To listen, you must first learn the hardest trick of all: to shut the hell up.”

I was so startled, I did. And then realized it would have been a not-unclever reply, if I’d done it intentionally. So I tried to pretend I had, and made an elaborate show of obligingly cocking my ear to listen to some imaginary sound, and then tried to pantomime hearing some transcendent insight. She just kept looking at me with no expression, and suddenly I had a sense of seeing myself from the outside, watching myself mug and fidget. And finally began to get a sense of what she was driving at. I let my face go as blank as hers, took a deep breath, and tried my best to listen. To myself… to her… to whatever. After a few seconds I closed my eyes to help myself concentrate.

I don’t hear a damn thing/wait/is that the air circulator?/it’s gone now/this is silly/really silly/stupid kid’s game/hide and go fuck yourself/wait, now/a hum/a note at the very upper limit of audibility, somewhere right around 20,000 cycles per second/no, two of them/dysharmonic/I never diss harmonic/what’s wrong with dat harmonic?/God, I’m sleepy/hey, why can’t I hear my own pulse?/I wonder if—

“There’s a certain interior monologue that never stops, isn’t there?”

Her voice startled me, enough that I opened my eyes. “Yes. Yes, there is.”

“Try and make it stop.”

“Stop thinking? Completely? Hell, that’s one of my best tricks.”

“Go ahead.”

About five minutes later, I admitted defeat.

“Whose is the voice you hear?”

“My own.”

“To whom does it speak?”

“To… to me.”

“Why?”

It was a good question. How could it be so important to tell myself things I already knew that I couldn’t seem to stop, even for a second? I had always prided myself on controlling my own mind… but it now seemed I only had limited control of what it thought about . But I could not make it stop.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It must be terribly, terribly important, because I can’t make it stop even as long as I can make myself stop breathing. It’s like my heartbeat—if it ever pauses, even for a few seconds, I’ll die. But that can’t be true: I’ve stopped thinking altogether a lot of times. Drunk… stoned… sedated… anesthetized for surgery…” I trailed off, realizing I wasn’t sure whether I’d stopped thinking at those times, or just stopped recording the thoughts. “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“You don’t need to be afraid of it, I promise.”

“Are you sure ?”

“Your record says you’re a musician and composer, but is vague about what kinds of music you’re interested in. Do you know the classics? The Beatles?”

“Sure.”

“Turn off your mind. Relax, and float downstream. It is not dying. That advice was ancient back then.”

I shrugged. “Okay. How?”

“People have been trying to make their minds stop for thousands of years. It’s called meditation. There are some useful tricks that have been passed down. Come here and I’ll show you some.”

She got up and moved to an area with no furniture. I could tell she was a Loonie by the way she handled herself in a third of a gee, but it wasn’t so much awkward as unpracticed. She had the necessary strength to handle twice her normal weight, and would get more graceful at it with time, like perfecting an accent. I got up and followed her. She was just placing on the floor two objects like giant black cloth hamburgers. Pillows, it seemed: as I watched, she dropped effortlessly into a cross-legged seat on one of them, seeming to melt slowly like the Wicked Witch of the West despite the double gravity. She gestured at the other. “Sit down, Joel.”

I did so far more clumsily, despite being in my native gravity. Pillow? It was just barely a cushion—made of soft cloth, but filled with something unyielding, as soft-but-firm-underneath as a…

“It’s called a zafu,” she said. “Don’t sit square on it, but a little forward on it, almost falling off the edge, and put your legs like so.” She demonstrated.

I dug in my heels. “Hold on a minute. Is this some kind of religious thing? Buddhism or something?”

She smiled. “Atheist?”

“Agnostic.”

“Fear not. Buddhists are only one of many groups of humans who have found this a useful posture for meditation. So have Hindus, Taoists, TM’ers, and a dozen other groups. And in any case, Buddhism isn’t a religion, strictly speaking.”