Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

Maybe I’ve conveyed nothing at all to you. If so, just take it from me that a few weeks’ exposure to those paintings helped me heal—physically, mentally, psychically, spiritually. Grey himself said one of the specific purposes of his work was to make people healthier. He had seen a study which showed that people who had just seen a frightening, disturbing 2-D movie called The Exorcist left the theater with their immune systems weakened, more vulnerable to disease. He decided if art could do that, it could damn well do the opposite, too, and should—so he devoted his life to learning how to create images that left the viewer healthier. I could not begin to describe how he does it, even if I understood it. Just take it from me that if you are ever mindblown or heartsick, what you want to do is look up the works of Alex Grey, in the best reproduction you can find, and let them work on you.

Then for two weeks, I reset the Sim to place me on an imaginary satellite orbiting low over Brasil Novo’s equator, at a speed that kept the primary, Peekaboo, always behind me. I forgave the simulated satellite for impossibly having local gravity, since sitting zazen in orbit would have been impossible without it. And finally, I moved out of the Sim Room altogether, and set up my personal traveling zendo in the second of the two good spots I had mentally marked on the Upper Ag Deck.

As Dr. Amy had decreed, in addition to sitting, every day also had sweating.

For the first several weeks I chose swimming as my primary exercise, because it develops every one of the useful muscles and none of the others. That meant long trips to the upper decks, just below the Bridge Deck. The Sheffield kept its swimming water as far forward as possible, to act as some additional protection against the constant shower of deadliness from dead ahead—the bitter complaints of the very tiny, very nearly nonexistent bits of the universe we were enraging to white heat by hitting them at a large fraction of c. (Our drinking water was stored at the opposite end of the ship, against the day when we would flip over and begin decelerating for the last half of the voyage.)

The Pool area turned out to be a lively, buzzing social center, one of the primary places where the people aboard Sheffield , colonists, crew and transportees alike, went to meet each other for sociosexual reasons—practical when you think about it, since everyone there would be naked sooner or later. While I still was not ready to follow Dr. Amy’s advice, I did notice that I worked harder at my swimming than I would have exercised if I had been alone.

While swimming there I got talking with Tiger Kotani, the kindly man I’d met briefly in the antechamber before my examination by Magistrate Will. He turned out to be a soft-voiced dignified astrophysicist from Terra. He persuaded me that simple fitness was not enough, and talked me into signing up for a self-defense class he taught.

Nowadays, of course, most citizens reliably expect to live out their lives without ever being involved in a violent altercation. People looked at me a little funny because I had been. I agreed that it had been a shameful event I should have been prudent enough to avoid. But I also found myself thinking that I was on my way to a frontier world, where people often acted in primitive ways, and where native fauna often acted in murderous and unpredictable ones. If, Heaven forbid, violence should ever come my way again, it seemed to me that it might be very nice to win the fight this time.

By the time Tiger-Shihan was through with me, I had reason to be confident that I might at least survive. He did not teach me to be a killing machine. But he did teach me to be pretty damn unkillable, and to sharply discourage attempts. I believe he himself could have massacred the entire ship’s complement, proctors and all… if we’d attacked him first. All his technique was defensive.

He was also kind enough to teach me a few utterly nonviolent evasive techniques, which became necessary when I learned that some girls who take self-defense classes are the kind of girls who find a man who has been in a violent confrontation with other men interesting. Thanks to Tiger’s footwork advice, I was able to keep them all at arm’s length… but sometimes I worked harder in the corridor outside the locker rooms than I did in the dojo.

The one female I was always happy to see was little Evelyn, so many trillions of kilometers behind me, whenever one of her rare brief letters came in. She always found some way to make me smile. I tried my best to return the favor.

One day another student of Tiger’s named Matty Jaymes, a pleasant-faced man in his forties who showed a lot of quick in class, happened to come past as I was explaining to a persistent brunette that I couldn’t join her for coffee because I had to study: my Healer had told me to learn everything I could about our destination. This was the truth; I simply omitted to mention that I had already been ducking the task for over a month, and fully intended to keep ducking it that night. Matty stopped short, managed to accept the date I had just evaded without awkwardness for any of us, then placed a tractor beam on me somehow and took me in tow. He wanted to discuss music history, about which it soon developed he knew about as much as I did myself.

But he was no musician. By the time we got back to his quarters I knew he was an astronomer, like Tiger, and when I saw that he shared the space with no one, I twigged that he must be the ship’s astronomer. The same one who had originally tried to interest me in his intensive study of Sol, back when I’d made my abortive stab at a job hunt.

If I’d met Matty—he flatly forbade me to call him Dr. Jaymes—in person back then, instead of by e-mail, he would definitely have met my definition of interesting. I haven’t met a lot of men with genius-level minds whom women found irresistible—but at least a dozen of them called warm greetings to him during the few minutes we were in transit.

He certainly saved me a lot of time, once I got him off music history and onto his own field. Except for Claire Immega herself, there may not have been a better expert on Peekaboo and Brasil Novo anywhere in the Galaxy—because it had been to Matty that the report of Immega’s successor Anabel had been addressed, a fact he mentioned as if it were of no significance. If you don’t count the telepathic communicator who passed on the message, and probably had no idea of its importance, Matty had been literally the first person in the Solar System to know that Immega had discovered gamma Boötes was not , as thought, an A7 III star—a giant—but a binary star, whose companion was a G2 very like Sol. Her robot probes had found a very promising planet orbiting the new G2 star—news that had rocked four different planetary stock exchanges when it became public, and had ended up causing the construction and commissioning of the RSS Sheffield .

It didn’t seem to impress him much. Matty spent the entire trip to his room explaining to me the problem with his Sol study, and I think he believed I understood what he was saying, even though I did not try to fake it. He simply was so focused and so excited, he failed to notice my incomprehension, which would have been incomprehensible to him. All I gleaned was that his research was really frustrating to him, because for some reason he absolutely hated the data he was getting.

He had happened to catch a perfect solar eclipse by Terra as we were leaving the Solar System, a major stroke of luck—I understood that much. And something about the displacement of a few stars behind the sun was very very slightly wrong, and somehow that was very very bad. It indicated something about the “J2 component of angular momentum” was bollixed.