Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

Sol Short once told me mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening… and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If it thrills you, you become liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more.

I don’t know. In those days, I would have to say my basic orientation was toward the Threatened school. I had begun life by losing a mother I never knew, except as a source of rhythmic thumping sounds and intermittent gurgling noises and comforting warmth. Then, when I was just old enough to get the full impact, I found out how infinitely much worse it is to lose a parent you know. My world had just begun to shake with the changes of puberty when it exploded in my face; at the moment I most needed adult guidance, my supply of parents dwindled to zero.

Then for a while everything had been change, and almost all of it had been unpleasant. I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.

My father raised no wimps. I’d buckled down and got to work, examined my options, made a plan, made it work, started at last to acquire the confidence that I could get a handle on this life business just like everybody else—

And then I’d met Jinny.

So maybe you can understand that my instinctive tendency, in those early years of the voyage, was to tuck my chin down into my chest, hunch my shoulders, cover up with both forearms, and keep backpedaling. The temporary insanity with Diane was my last flirtation with grand passion and romance. After that I was more in the market for companionship, intellectual stimulation, perhaps a little cautious friendly sex every now and again, perhaps not.

I really did comprehend, intellectually at least, that I was engaged in one of the most profoundly thrilling endeavors in human history. How conservative can you be, if you’ve jumped off the edge of the Solar System? Do conservative people travel at relativistic speeds? By the end of the first year of our voyage, we were already traveling at more than a third of the speed of light—and even though there were no sensory cues at all to confirm that, we were all well aware of it, and believed it, and I think I can safely say we all found it more than a little thrilling. By the time we reached turnover in nine more years, our velocity was going to peak at a hair-frying 0.99794 c . Does a conservative man race photons?

It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the future was going to be thrilling. It wasn’t that I was unwilling or even reluctant to be thrilled. I just had little experience with it.

The mores and customs we had all been raised in, fruits of the Covenant, continued to work their unlikely magic: even in close and closed quarters, we found ways to live together without violence, to a large extent without malice, and with as much kindness as we could find within ourselves.

At the end of that first year, we celebrated with a party that would become so legendary I don’t think I’ll discuss it here. There are several detailed accounts available, and I disagree with every one of them on some of the details. One point on which there is agreement, however, is that there were no quarrels. No relationships broke up, no feuds were born. If anyone had a really bad time, they managed to conceal it from one of the best gossip networks in history.

I’m not saying there were no unhappy people aboard. A predictable percentage of us concluded, much too late, that they’d made a terrible mistake in joining the colony. A predictable few of those became merchants of gloom, prophets of doom, carriers of that most infectious of diseases, fear. And a few just became so profoundly miserable they lowered morale wherever they passed. Dr. Amy and her three colleagues had their work cut out for them.

It made me want to stop being a jerk faster, to free up her time. So I worked at it.

By the end of that first year of the voyage, I had at least a working two-part answer to the question, Who is Joel Johnston?

First, I was a guy who was going to sing to the stars.

I would sing with my horn and with all the other instruments of man, to a star whose very existence had been unsuspected for most of history. I would sing of human beings, since words would not do, to a star system that knew nothing of them or anything like them. I would sing of my fellow colonists, in what I hoped was a universal language, to a planet we hoped would see fit to nurture and sustain us all. And I would sing of myself—and perhaps another—to two strange new moons in the night sky, and slightly distorted constellations.

Second, I was a guy who was going to talk to strange dirt.

On the long voyage I would speak softly to alien soil, in my best approximation of its own language, asking it as politely as I could to accept Terran plants that would feed my colony. I would open negotiations with the ecosystem of Bravo, and listen intently to the responses that came back. Zog and I and all the rest of his crew would spend the years staring until our eyes watered at the probes’ surface recon images of Brasil Novo’s surface, trying to outguess the planet, speculating endlessly over what sorts of new predators, parasites, or other perils were most likely to exist, arguing endlessly over what we might do about them. It’s difficult to plan for the unknown—all right, it’s impossible—but we were going to do our level best.

It was a place to stand. Sing to new stars; speak to new dirt. Two planted legs to help keep me upright for the next couple of decades. First we love music. Then we love food. Many years later, we evolve high enough to love another—if we’re lucky.

The second year of the voyage of the RSS Sheffield was eventful only by ship standards.

People you don’t know fell in and out of love, had and did not have babies, worked and goofed off, succeeded and failed at amusing themselves and each other, did mediocre work and accomplished minor miracles and screwed up completely, were and were not happy.

Al Mulherin, said to be the best physicist aboard, and Linda Jacobs, editor of the ship newspaper Sheffield Steel , were the first couple to birth a child, a boy they named Coyote, and a dozen more babies had joined the colony before the year was out.

A machinist named C. Platt got careless with a torch and became our first death. He was not widely mourned. Not even his roommates knew what the C stood for.

One of the residential decks beat all the rest at soccer, and you’d be shocked to hear which one, if you cared.

Relativist Kindred had a fairly gaudy nervous breakdown and for a couple of weeks his colleagues had to cover for him, but this had been expected and planned for and caused no difficulties. It would become a roughly annual occurrence. I think most of us colonists half expected that Peter Kindred was going to Burn Out eventually, at some point along the way—but none of his fellow Relativists did. His shift was taken by Dugald Beader, the only one of the Relativists I haven’t mentioned yet, because it took me months to meet him. Dugald was sort of the backward of the flamboyantly eccentric Kindred—quiet and sane and empathetic, with a diabolical dry sense of humor. It was said that he’d been involved in the design of the Sheffield somehow, but he didn’t talk about it.