Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

To that I had no objections. “Done. Meditate, exercise, look out the windshield—anything else?”

She nodded. “Yes. I want you to start dating. Joel? Joel! ”

“You go too damned far,” I said on my way to the door. It would not iris open fast enough to suit me, so I tried to hurry it with my hands and it jammed in its tracks, not quite all the way open. I had to stop in my own tracks, my exit spoiled by an absurd social dilemma. I could not walk away and leave her with a broken door like some kind of barbarian, but I had no idea how to repair it. I stood there, unwilling to turn around until I had some idea how to cope with the situation. I’m pretty sure in another second or two I’d have remembered that I was a rich man, now. But before I could think of it, behind me she said drily, “My door is always open.”

It is very hard to remain annoyed at someone who has just made you burst out laughing. I gave up and turned around and she was laughing, too. She had a great whoop of a laugh. We got into one of those things where each time you’re just about to get it under control, the other cracks up again. It always ends eventually with you smiling at each other, breathing like runners after the marathon.

“Okay,” she said finally. “If you can laugh like that, you can take a few weeks before you start dating again. Go do your homework.”

I nodded and gestured at the door. “I’ve got this.”

She nodded and put her attention back down on her screen, as she’d been doing when I’d first seen her.

I guess that was really the day I finally joined the colony, became a Brasiliano Novo—or at least, decided to try. I had already been utterly committed, physically, since the Sheffield had left orbit, but it was only after I left Dr. Amy Louis’s office that afternoon that I finally started to become emotionally committed to anything but numbness. Until then, I had been not only drifting, but paying no attention where I was drifting. Reefs or deeps, rough seas or doldrums, all had been the same to me. But from then on, I was at least back on the Bridge, trying to work out my position and best course, trying the rudder, learning how the sails handled, testing the diesels, scanning the horizon for clues to the weather ahead.

I don’t mean to suggest it happened in an hour. It took weeks to happen, months, years. But that’s the hour when it began happening.

The first thing I did about it was not move out.

Everyone seemed to assume that now that I was stinking rich, I would of course move out of the prematurely decaying hovel I had been sharing with three hapless losers, leave Dear Old Rup-Tooey behind me in the dust, and settle into vastly more lavish solo quarters several decks higher, and with all the privacy, comfort, and (most prestigious of all) roominess that could be desired by a healthy young nouveau millionaire whose Healer had advised him to start dating.

But I had lived alone before. I had always lived alone before. Until I’d been accepted into the Tenth Circle, I’d had no idea how much that sucked. I remembered it well. I had no particular reason to suppose money would make it all that much better.

Also, I kept remembering that I might very well have been spaced as a danger to the Sheffield by now, if it had not been for my bunkies Pat and Herb. And for Solomon Short, who was one of the six wealthiest people aboard, and had chosen to be my friend when all I had to my name was a good sax.

Besides, as Mark Twain says, two moves equals one fire. I’d already moved once recently.

So I stayed where I was. But I reached out to another friend, as wealthy as Sol and considerably more practical, and sought his counsel. And George R smiled, and pointed me toward the best mechanics, engineers, artisans, electricians, cyberpeople, and plumbers aboard, and snipped some bureaucratic red tape to get me permission to clear out storage cubics immediately next door on either side and cut through some walls. When all the busy beavers had gone away again and the dust had settled, RUP-0010-E was the most solid, reliable, comfortable, luxuriously appointed, and technologically advanced living space on that deck—and its ’fresher was probably the best in the Sheffield , so unreasonably large that all four of us could have used it at once, with a guest apiece. And so advanced in terms of hedonic technology that we all suddenly found ourselves very popular fellows in shipboard society: people wanted to be invited over for long enough to need to use the ’fresher. It didn’t work well because we were usually in there ourselves.

Pat got all the data-chasing and pattern-spotting software his heart desired, and enough processing power to provide practical, real-time access to any historical datum on board. Or behind us in the Solar System, although that was already becoming more and more out-of-date as Einstein effect started to mount up. But historians aren’t in a hurry.

Herb received the power to seal off his quadrant of the room at will with two mirror walls that would not pass light or sound in either direction, within which he could not-write in privacy.

So did Balvovatz, but I doubt he got much writing done, because he never activated his field if he was alone in there, and never stopped smiling when he came out. He told me years later, weeping drunk, that it was the first place he had ever lived that a woman who did not love him desperately would come to. I laughed so hard he stopped weeping and began laughing just about the time I quit laughing and started to cry.

For myself, I settled for two major infrastructure improvements. First, a robot that made French Press style coffee from fresh-ground recently roasted beans on demand and adulterated it to my taste; it claimed to be fully automatic, but actually you had to push a little button. And second, a bunk that was as comfortable as any in the Sheffield … and on top of which I, my roommates, and Richie and Jules could all have piled at once and done jumping jacks without making it creak, much less rip free of the bulkhead. Nothing in that room was breakable by the time I was done with it.

So much for change in my physical environment.

On my way to the Sim Room for my first session, I wondered what sort of exotic locale Dr. Amy had programmed for me to meditate in. The Sheffield ’s Sim gear was less perfectly convincing than what I’d experienced at the Conrad enclave back in British Columbia… but not by much. It was one of the few areas Kang/da Costa had splurged on. I guess I expected something grandiose and imposing and sacred—the Eiheiji monastery in Japan, or Jaipur Lake Palace in India, or Vatican City before the Prophet’s Angels got ahold of it. Or possibly some secular but stunning scenic vista: Vancouver Harbor, or Rio de Janeiro in old Brasil, or looking east from Olympus Mons on Mars, or Titan seen from the Rings, or my own favorite, Jupiter from Ganymede, at night, through an aurora. Nor would I have been surprised by a simple flood of sheer kaleidoscopic imagery, like a screensaver display, or the fireworks you can sometimes see behind your closed eyelids.

I got a blank white wall. About half a meter from my nose.

I’ve since learned that several schools of Buddhism do that, too: meditate facing a blank wall. It makes a certain amount of sense. Minimal visual distraction, maximal visual canvas for any visualization imagery you may find useful—and a constant, ongoing, gentle reminder that you are doing something not-ordinary, that you are now removed from the conventional world where sensible people do not sit staring at blank walls.