Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

In other words, they conceal themselves perfectly, take no risks at all, and attack without warning or mercy.

I would recall that later in the voyage.

It all started to come together at some point. The meditation improved my disposition and outlook, without which no beneficial change is possible. The physical exercise began to pay off next. When you’re in better shape, you think better. When you’re thinking better, meditation produces more useful insights. As I came to understand Bravo better, my work on the Ag Decks became both more effective and more meaningful to me, and before long I started to acquire something I hadn’t even realized I’d been lacking: a feeling of worth, of making a contribution, having something tangible to offer. I actually did have a knack for it, too, I learned—for sensing just how the new conditions would alter plant requirements and capabilities, and figuring out ways to compensate. The Zog told me once, after I managed to bring a fungal disease under control without quite knowing how myself, that I thought like a Bravonian vegetable. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more flattered.

In time, it became possible to dimly imagine a future life on Brasil Novo, an endurable and maybe even pleasant one in which I might have both purpose and value.

Two moons in the sky. Similar to Callisto, Europa, and Io back home on Ganymede. I liked that. One moon wasn’t enough to keep a sky interesting, in my biased opinion.

There would also be the giant A7 star in the sky, too. Immega 713, as it had been renamed, in preference to some horror like alpha gamma Boo. (Which Solomon of course liked, saying it would make a great name for a fraternity.) According to Matty, since it lay one hundred AU away, it had only four percent of the brightness Sol had from Terra—but that made it a hundred thousand times brighter than Luna. It might only get really dark at night when there was heavy overcast, or when the A7 was on the other side of Peekaboo. I liked that, too.

The music I composed became better, stronger, deeper. The music I played finally started to approach what I’d always heard in my mind’s ear; I had better wind, a clearer head, and a much clearer idea of who it was playing. Not only did my reputation begin to spread throughout the ship, I began to feel more and more as if it was deserved.

As I said, after a certain point it all began to heterodyne. I felt better, so I did better, which made me feel even better, which… So that first year of star travel would probably have been an extremely happy and satisfying one for me, on balance.

If I had not taken all of Dr. Amy’s advice, and resumed dating six months into it.

I don’t suppose it will stun you to learn that Kathy was the first girl I asked for a date. It certainly didn’t surprise anybody I knew in the slightest. I’m given to understand that people I’d never met or heard of on the far side of the Sheffield knew it was going to happen weeks before it did. God knows Kathy was not surprised to be asked, and had the kindness to accept before I’d quite finished getting the words out, which cut my interval of agonized suspense down to just the hundred million years it took me to not quite get the words out.

And why should any of us have been surprised? We were such a perfect couple on paper that even if we’d disliked each other’s body odor, which we didn’t, we’d have had to at least give it a try. Musically we shared a bond, a level of communication, that many married couples never do achieve, and others do at the cost of great struggle. Even tone deaf people in the audience could sense it, and responded to it. She was very good, in the same way that I was, and we brought out each other’s best. We helped each other say important things we could not express alone, and how far can that be from love?

Loving Zog’s Farms was another profound connection, one that went back in time almost as far as music. Plunging hands into soil together is very close to thrusting them into one another. And of course both of us were simultaneously fertile and ripe, a paradox whose metaphorical impossibility accurately reflects the turmoil of that condition. Afterward you look back on it and call it golden. At the time it is hell on rusty wheels.

Part of the problem was precisely that we were so self-evidently perfect for each other—a cliché looking for the spot marked X. Enough so to have made us both self-conscious from the very start, enough to make each of us want to dig in our heels out of sheer stubborn unwillingness to be that predictable. We’d both read and seen enough romantic fiction to know that if the writer seems to insist on throwing two characters together, it’s their job to resist, for as long as they can, anyway. A silly reason not to love, I know… but are there any that aren’t?

But in an utterly closed community that small, you can run but you can’t hide, not forever. Twenty years stretched before us. Eventually you say, why not get it over with and find out? Or maybe I mean, why not find out and get it over with? One of those. And that too was predictable. Like I said, nobody was too surprised when I asked Kathy out, including her, and nobody was too surprised she said yes, even me. I took her to a play, the second production of the Boot and Buskin Society, and afterward we went to the Horn, ordered Irish coffees, and talked.

Five minutes into a discussion of the play we’d just seen—Simon, very well done—I interrupted myself in the middle of explaining why the lead actress’s performance had been so remarkable, and launched into a ten-minute monologue of my own. Kathy listened patiently.

I told her about Jinny—first about Jinny Hamilton, and then about Jinnia Conrad of Conrad—and I worked in my father, and the little I knew of my mother, and my experiences with sudden poverty and solitude, and anything else I could think of that might help justify being a basket case. That was probably pretty predictable, too. At a conservative estimate, I was perhaps the hundred billionth asshole since Adam to try and tell a woman, I find your company enjoyable but I am too damaged for any long-term emotional involvement, so don’t place your hopes on me. They almost always listen patiently, for some reason. But I doubt if anything I said surprised her very much.

Probably the only person in the entire ship who ended up finding anything at all surprising in that entire date was me, after I finally shut up long enough for Kathy to tell me that she’d gotten engaged two weeks earlier, to two very nice people, and had I ever thought much about opting into a group or line marriage myself? Because they were looking to expand. Full bore omnisexual, of course. But no pressure.

I haven’t the slightest idea what response I made. That date lasted another hour and a half—Herb and Balvovatz agreed I got back two hours after the play ended—but I cannot for the life of me recall another word either of us spoke, or anything that occurred.

Things gradually settled, as they always seem to do eventually, into a routine.

At what seemed the approximate speed of mold forming on a corridor wall, life aboard the RSS Charles Sheffield began to take on discernible shape, and then flavor, and finally texture. Five hundred people slowly got to know one another, heard (the first version of) each other’s back stories and dreams, learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, discovered what we needed and what we had to give, slowly began to design and assemble, by trial and error and what few lessons history had made clear enough, a society that would use all of us and feed all of us and give us all something to be part of for twenty uninterrupted years.