Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

But when I try and retrieve memorable scenes from my relationship with Robin, what I get is a series of disjointed dim still images, like old photographs, that occasionally animate for a few seconds, with snippets of soundtrack that often fail to match the action.

There don’t seem to be any inconsequential relationships in drama. I guess they don’t have the time. We had plenty of time. If we’d been a play ourselves, and unsubsidized, we’d have closed in a week. As it was we managed to keep the house lit for months by giving away comp tickets to each other and pretending not to notice the canned applause. But the reviews were never worth clipping.

The upside, of course, is that in the end we were able to disengage without doing any important damage to one another. We carried on as though we had, of course, for the drama that was in it. But we gave it up soon, and with secret relief on both sides. On mine, anyway.

About a week later, as I was wandering around in a daze thinking, Well, that wasn’t as horrible as it could have been , I had a meet-cute with Diane Levy. She did not notice me sit down next to her at dinner, tried to turn around and grab the sugar from the table behind us, and coldcocked me with her elbow. Or was it? I thought, and woke to find her large liquid eyes as close as one might expect to find those of a lover. Four hours later, she was one. To my complete astonishment, I had made her a thankfully unnoticed gift of my virginity.

I lay beside her gasping for air, and grateful for the excuse. What would I say to her, now? My brain settled on something or other just as my lungs returned to active duty; I opened my eyes and opened my mouth… and discovered Diane was not at all interested in any of those organs.

A while later, floating on a rich postcoital sea of relief and pride and satisfaction and regret, I found the perfect words with which to let her down easy. I would simply explain, tell my story truthfully, help her see that I was damaged goods, too scarred by a tragic love to ever love again. If she then chose to take up the chal… to pursue a relationship, my conscience would be clear. (Somebody said the gray component of semen is draining brain cells. It may well be so.)

No sense dragging it out; I opened my eyes to begin her disappointment as gently as I could. And found myself alone.

For the next three days my calls reached only voicemail; my text messages went unanswered. The Sheffield resolutely refused to supply me with any useful data, not location of quarters, usual whereabouts, names of friends, or biographical information. The third time I tried to wheedle it, the ship threatened to rat me out to Dr. Amy if I asked again.

By that point I knew the truth. This was love.

The real thing—not the pathetic charade Jinny and I had mugged our way through, but the love of the ages, the true mystical union of two souls. I knew things about Diane that she didn’t know herself, and she was going to explain me to myself, and I was absolutely certain that if she would only give me thirteen words I could make her see it all as clearly as I did. I had it down to thirteen words, so good I felt they’d have done the job even as flatscreen text—and I couldn’t get a single one of them before her eyes.

The first night I just moaned a lot. The second, I raged and wept and made myself a stinking nuisance to my roommates. Balvovatz finally took it on himself to drink me under the table, and laid me out on my bunk. The third night, I went to the Horn, and laid a drunken monologue on Kathy that would damage our friendship for months to come. At the time, she limited her remarks to a polite hope that things would work out well for me, and a slap with so much wrist to it that a proctor was halfway to the table before I could wave him off.

Tossing in my comfortable bunk that night, I got it down to six words. I’d need eye contact, but if I could just get six lousy words in—

The next morning while I was in the ’fresher, paying in ugly coin for two nights’ debauchery, Diane phoned.

“Diane! Uh… let me call you back—”

“Joel, dear, I appreciate your interest. I had a wonderful time with you. Perhaps I will again, one day. But it can’t be soon. It’s just simple math, dear.”

“I don’t understand. Look, can’t I—”

“I have to make a big decision sometime in the next twenty years. It’s going to affect my whole life. Obviously my information has to be as complete as possible. Even after I rule out seniors, mono-gays, and other permanent ineligibles, there are something over two hundred possible mates in the world. I like to keep my weekends for reading. So that means I’ll work my way back around to you again in a little over forty weeks. Not even a year.”

I stared at my wrist, and reminded myself that my guts had been churning before the phone had rung. “Are you telling me you’ve already—”

“Yes, dear, but I assure you I remember you with particular fondness.”

Spasm. “One day isn’t long enough to—”

“I find that by the second or third day one forms attachments, don’t you? At that rate I could easily take the whole voyage identifying the right husband. I’d still be breaking him in when we hit dirt at Bravo. You understand, I’m sure. Or rather, I hope. If so, I’ll see you in forty weeks, give or take. Unless I get lucky and lightning strikes, of course.” She hung up before I could wail her name. It didn’t stop me.

Let’s just say the next five or ten minutes stressed that ’fresher to its design limits and beyond, and leave it at that.

So I sought a mojo.

That’s a term from PreCollapse times. It means a love charm. A magic spell or fetish of some kind that I could use to make Diane see her search was over.

Naturally I sought the advice of an expert. Matty Jaymes listened sympathetically to my tale of woe, nodding in all the right places. Until I named my beloved; then his face went blank, and he sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Son, I’m afraid I am powerless to help you.”

“Huh? What do you mean? Why?”

“Diane made love to me , once.” He sighed. “I spent two hours down on the Ag Deck eating dirt, before I resumed my human shape.” His left foot was tapping uncontrollably on the deck. “My advice is to be thankful you weren’t two hundredth on her list, and quit trying to hog a natural resource.”

From there, my love life went downhill. Eventually I gave it up as a failed experiment and put my mind on my work.

Let’s see. There was Barbara Manning, a student of Dr. Amy’s—her suggestion—and then an engineer named Mariko Stupple—Tiger’s suggestion—followed by a physics student named Darren Maeder who had the superstitious notion that perhaps something of my father’s innate genius might be exuded in my sweat, or something, followed closely by his former girlfriend when I proved a dry hole—both of those his idea—and then, if I have the sequence correct, there were…

Can I stop now? This emotional striptease not only embarrasses me, it’s boring. Everyone ’s early love life is boring, sometimes even to the protagonists at the time. Let it stand that eventually the awkwardness started to wear off, and when the dust settled, I found myself a normal healthy het-bi bachelor with somewhat less than average interest in casual sex and even less interest in emotional commitment.

That described a lot of us in the Sheffield . There was no rush in forming a partnership that had nothing much to do for another couple of decades. Unless of course you decided you wanted to arrive on Bravo with children tall enough to be useful, which an unsurprising number of colonists did. But a nearly equal number concluded, as I did, that a ball of mud, even alien mud, had to be a better place to raise children than a metal can. And the last five or six years of the voyage, when things were just starting to gear up to their busiest, would be a poor time to be ass-deep in bored, surly, invincibly ignorant teenagers. Such as I was now.