Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

The story of the year was probably the totally unexpected marriage of the Zog and Coordinator Grossman. Nobody had a problem with the match; they were both widely admired, and when you thought about it, they were perfect for each other. It had simply never occurred to anyone aboard that either party might have time for a social life, let alone an active one.

He moved into her quarters, and they honeymooned by sealing the door for a week. Zog left me in charge in his absence, high praise.

So I got to be the only one in the ship to whom Machinist Platt’s death mattered much.

A proctor named Hal DeMann showed up at the Bravo farm one day, pushing a body bag on a gurney. He looked like an old-time pirate or gunfighter, but had a warm, soothing voice, a good combination in his line of work. He explained that Colonist Platt—maybe that was what the C stood for—had left instructions that he wished his body to be recycled, so that he might always be a part of the colony’s ecosystem. But old C had given no specifics as to just how this should be done, leaving the question up to the relevant authorities.

Who turned out to be me.

The problem itself was admittedly trivial. Solving it was not. There was certainly plenty of dirt to plant him in, and there were several places where he might even prove useful as fertilizer, and as a check on how Bravonian conditions would alter the usual processes of decomposition and fertilization.

But there was not enough dirt to plant him two meters deep. And we had long since learned that no fence is always foolproof. Having his corpse dug up and eaten by pigs or goats or dogs would technically have met the requirements of Platt’s will, and I was tempted to, as the poet Buckley said, just “scoop some sand over his wig, and swoop the scene.” I was fairly sure he wouldn’t have complained, or even minded.

But I was absolutely sure I knew what the Zog would say if he came home from his honeymoon to find some of the leftovers being dragged across his Ag Deck by one of his pigs.

Devising a solution wasn’t all that hard. Implementing it was. Kathy and I dug as deep a hole as we could, about a meter, and laid Platt in it. Then we stood on either side and covered the corpse over completely, me with broken glass and busted springs, she with curry powder and a spray bottle of lion urine. (Chemically simulated, of course. Zog had fetched a lot of odd things along from Sol.) Then we replaced all the dirt we’d dug up, leaving a mound of loose earth, but one that was unlikely to be disturbed.

The first problem I had with implementation of this simple solution should be obvious. Nowadays it takes something close to total destruction of the brain to beat the autodocs. I’ve told you the damage was done by a torch, and you know where the brain is generally kept: work it out. The smell alone was memorable.

My second problem was less gruesome, but bothered me for a longer time. When we were done with our shoveling, Kathy and I stood there for a few moments, catching our breath and thinking deep thoughts. And then as I was about to turn and walk away, she said, “Shouldn’t we say something?” Phrased that way, it meant, “Shouldn’t you say something?”

And of course I was in charge. And of course I should say something; it didn’t seem right to just plant the man and go. But of course I had absolutely no idea what kind of words the deceased would have wanted, did not even know if he subscribed to one of the religions humane enough to be permitted under the Covenant or not. If nobody knew what his first initial stood for, there was no point posting a query about his metaphysics on the ship bulletin board. I had no all-purpose nondenominational homilies on tap; I had experienced only one death, and hadn’t heard a word anyone had said at the funeral.

I stood there for a long time feeling inadequate, stymied by the question, hating Kathy for raising it. She waited. And finally I heard myself say, “Let the universe take note of this man’s passing. Somebody should. He was one of the bravest adventurers our species ever produced: he died on the way to the stars.” That night instead of sleeping I thought of better things I might have said, and said them in my head to a man I had never known.

The Zog told me I’d done well when he returned. He’d had a different spot in mind for the ship’s cemetery, but was fine with the one I’d picked. I warmed to his praise. But it took me a while to stop resenting Kathy for asking that question.

Third year, third year… let me scan my diary.

The social bombshell of that year, beyond question, was the surprise wedding of Sol Short and Hideo Itokawa.

If the nuptials of the Zog and Merril the year before had startled everyone, this one stunned us all speechless. The Zogby-Grossman match had paired two strong people, both administrators, one quiet and the other loud. Sol and Hideo were two extremely powerful minds, both mavericks, one loud enough to dominate any cubic he entered and kind and hilarious enough to get away with it, and the other so impossibly quiet and still that the eye tended to subtract him. I hadn’t even realized Buddhist priests were allowed to marry.

I don’t believe anyone aboard opposed the match, once we thought about it. But to do that you had to first imagine it, and that took us a while.

I found out when Tenzin Itokawa asked me to play at the wedding. I don’t remember what I said.

The wedding feast was a memorable blast, and there is nothing in the world duller than hearing the details of someone else’s blast memories, unless you were at the same blast, so I won’t recount any.

That was the kind of year it was. The most exciting event in it was not really worth recounting, to anyone who was not conceived that night.

Year Four would probably have been downright dull if it hadn’t been for the Happy Disaster.

Three months into the year, the Sim Deck went down.

And stayed down, for weeks. The Sheffield ’s diagnostic systems furnished an explanation, and the six people aboard capable of understanding it all agreed that it sounded reasonable to them, but I never comprehended a word of it, and will not reproduce it here.

By that point, most of us were making fairly heavy use of Sim, for recreation and for emotional therapy and for a way to fight the growing monotony and claustrophobia of life in a great big can. If Dr. Amy or one of the other three Healers decided you were using it too much, they could limit your access, and by that third year they were starting to do so often enough that it became a subject of jokes, unhappy ones.

When the Sim hardware first failed, I worried for colony morale. It doesn’t matter how huge it is: any space becomes confining if you absolutely can’t escape it. Without the escape valve of assisted fantasy, I was afraid the ship would start to shrink on us. A few folks did panic, at first, and the general tension spiked.

It didn’t help when Matty Jaymes had a public flameout. He had no regular partner, and Sim use was not monitored by the Healers like drug intake, so no one had really noticed as, over the years, Matty had quietly turned into a hardcore Sim addict. But when he was forced into withdrawal, he switched instantly to a hardcore drunk, and that became very ugly very fast. Dr. Amy did all she could, but even sober he was unmanageable, and finally she was forced to put him in his quarters: his door stopped opening for him. It was only the second time in her career that she’d ever suspended anyone’s Covenant rights, and it devastated her. And upset the rest of us. Until then he had been much liked and highly respected; his collapse left everybody on edge.

But then word went around there would be an unscheduled ETM, and when we all logged in, it was Dr. Amy leading the Town Meeting. That was surprising in itself, but what she proceeded to do was probably the last thing any of us would ever have expected.