Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“It isn’t?”

“No god, or gods, or goddesses—except in a couple of the more obscure sects. No heaven or hell in the theological sense. No patriarch or matriarch, no Prophet or Pope. They don’t go in for holy wars, or heresy hunts.”

“Really?”

“Buddhists believe the Buddha himself was simply a man, who woke up one day. As far as I understand it, anyway. I know hardly anything at all about Buddhism. If you’re interested, you can talk to Tenzin Itokawa, the Relativist. He is a Zen priest, of the Rinzai school. Right now, forget Buddhism. Forget religion. Just put your legs like this and trust me, okay?”

I tried. “Show me again.”

She unpretzeled, and then pretzeled again slowly. I tried to copy it. This time I came closer.

“Other way round. This one over that one. There—that’s it. Now work your knees around a little until they’re comfortable.”

Suddenly I seemed to just snap into place. “Like that?”

“That’s it. Good. Okay, now. Spine straight. Stack those vertebrae. Hands together, palms up, left hand on top, with the thumb tips touching. Settle your skull on those stacked vertebrae. You’ve got it.”

It did indeed feel like a position I could hold for a while in relative comfort. “Now what?”

“Don’t just do something: sit there.”

I mentally shrugged and did so. Or rather tried to stop doing anything. As before I tried to stop thinking, too—with no better success. But I did become aware that I was starting to relax. My thoughts didn’t exactly slow down… but they became less intense, somehow.

After a few minutes of silence, she said, “Now we do a breathing exercise so childishly simple it can’t possibly have any effect.”

“Sounds good.”

“There really is nothing to it. In your head, count to four, at intervals of about four seconds, or a little longer.” I did as she asked. “Okay. Now, you inhale for a count of four… then hold your breath for a count of four… then exhale for four… then hold for four. In, hold, out, hold. Repeat, and keep repeating. Try it.”

I played along. A full cycle, then another, then another. After half a dozen or so, I found the rhythm, and settled into it. Easy as pie. Considerably easier than pi. Stop that, Joel.

“Good. Now with each cycle, slow it down just a skosh. Not much, and when it seems to be too much, let it come back up again, until you find your slowest natural speed. As soon as you’re sure you’ve found it, stop counting and just breathe.”

It wasn’t hard. It was mindless, was what it was. Silly, and pointless, and…

…and I could feel my shoulders settling. Feel my facial muscles relaxing. Feel my pulse slowing, and deepening, and steadying. Hear my pulse, playing bass under the alternating E-A E-A organ chords of my breath. As I became aware of it, I had the idea I could hear it slowly changing from electric bass guitar to acoustic standup bass, quieter but more resonant.

I let myself sink into it. I closed my eyes, and paradoxically as I did I became more aware of the room, of my position in it, of its position in the Sheffield —and as I followed the thought to its logical next stopping place, it was as if the ground fell away beneath me without warning. Have you ever been so stoned or drunk that you suddenly fancied you could actually perceive the vast slow spinning of whatever planet you live on? Not just as something known intellectually but as something felt in the gut? Ever find yourself clutching the ground, to keep from falling off? Well, something like that happened to me then. For the very first time, I suddenly got where I was.

I was in an incredibly, pathetically flimsy bubble of moist air, hurtling through interstellar space at a speed so intrinsically terrifying that its friction with nothingness was enough to require powerful and clever shielding, propelled by a force no man really understood, so powerful it could have wrecked my star if invoked too near it. With a would-be village of other misfits and refugees I was plummeting through the universe so fast Time itself couldn’t keep up—living by Dr. Einstein’s Clock, while behind me the rest of the human race continued to age as God or random chance had intended. In these hair-raising conditions I would, if I was very lucky, spend approximately the next fifth of my life racing toward a destination I had not given a second’s serious consideration, a place where, if I was incredibly lucky, it would prove possible to raise turnips and keep hogs, and the monsters wouldn’t be able to kill me.

All this in a microsecond—then in the time it took me to open my eyes the feeling popped like a bubble and I was back in my body again, was just a guy sitting in a room doing nothing at all. It happened and then was over so impossibly fast that I was still relaxed: there hadn’t even been time for my heartbeat or breathing to increase. But when I did get my eyes open the first thing they saw was Dr. Amy’s eyes looking straight into them, and I knew at once that she knew what had happened to me. She’d been expecting it to happen. No, that was wrong. She had known it might happen, and had hoped it would. My whole head vibrated for a few seconds, like a hummingbird in denial. “Whoa!” I croaked.

“See, Joel? You sat still and quieted down… and you noticed where you are. Sit still longer and you’ll start to notice where you’re going. Sit still long enough and you may figure out why you’re going there. You could end up with some clues to just who the hell is doing all that.”

“And that would be a good thing?”

“Yes,” she said, raising her voice two notches higher in volume for the single word. “Stop looking dubious. When you peel back enough layers of your own bullshit to finally get a good glimpse of yourself, you are going to find you respect yourself a good deal more than you expected to.”

I said nothing.

“I promise that, Joel. The journey you need to take isn’t going to be easy… but you’re going to like the destination. Certainly a lot better than where you are now. Now lie to me.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Tell me you believe me.”

I tried unsuccessfully to suppress my grin. “I believe you believe it.”

She nodded. “Close enough. That’s enough for one session. Here’s your homework. First, I want you to spend an hour a day sitting zazen—that’s what you just did—and I’d like you to do it in a Sim Room.”

“I was thinking of a spot on the Upper Ag Deck.”

“Later. Starting out, use the Sim. Accept the simulations it offers you for the first two weeks, the ones I’ll program for you. After that you can override if you want, using your judgment. After three or four weeks we’ll slowly bring you back out into the real world again. The Ag Deck might be a great place to start.”

I thought up some objections, and decided to hell with them. If she wasn’t smarter than I was, this was all a terrible mistake. “Okay. That was ‘first.’ What’s next?”

“I want you to get in shape. You’re healthy enough, but you’re quite out of condition for your age. Do what the Gym tells you.”

It was easier to think up objections this time, and they were better objections. The one I wanted to admit to was, “Where do I find the hours?”

“Shave them from either your farmwork or your music. Whichever is less important to you personally.”

It is annoyingly hard to object to a reasonable proposal. She was right. I was out of shape. “Okay. Meditate, work out. What else?”

“Study your destination. Learn everything you can about it. The star, first—where Immega 714 lies in the sky, why it took so long to discover, how it’s different from Sol. Then the planet: What kind of world is Brasil Novo, how is it like and unlike Ganymede, what’s living there already, what kind of place is it going to be for a kid to grow up in?”