Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

She yelled at us.

She didn’t say a whole lot. She never used profanity, obscenity, or blasphemy. But what she did say was as memorable as an unexpected enema.

“If you cannot function without sucking on a holographic fantasy teat that does all your imagining for you every day of your life, what good will you be to Colônia Brasil Novo?

“It usually takes a life-and-death crisis to show you what you’re made of, and what your neighbors are made of. Thank whatever powers you believe in that all it will cost you is a few weeks without your favorite soap operas.

“The overwhelming majority of your primitive ignorant ancestors managed to get through their lives without 3D-5S Simulation somehow. It must be possible, don’t you think? Children in an empty playroom can amuse themselves, for Covenant’s sake.

“Some say anyone who goes to the stars is a loser, running away from reality. I have never believed that of anyone aboard this ship. I’d rather not start.”

Those were some of the highlights.

I guess she summed it up in her literal last word, and in the force of the exasperation with which she delivered it:

“Cope.”

And do you know, later on when the dust settled, it turned out the Sim systems failure had been a good thing, after all—maybe even one of the luckiest things that had happened to us so far. Forced to amuse and inspire ourselves, we rose to the challenge. Social groupings of all kinds sprang up throughout the colony. Get enough people talking long enough and sooner or later someone will say something interesting or useful. Happy meetings occurred. Good conversations got held. With more time to read, we spent more thought on what might be good to read, and began to learn things. Creativity that begins with off-hours amusement soon accidentally spills over into work, and into social interaction. Weddings and less formal partnerships of all kinds spiked to record levels. The theater group acquired competition, and rose to the challenge. The ship’s daycare program finally got serious—none too soon. Shipwide drug intake went down .

And when the system finally came back up, Sim use never did reach its previous level again, let alone exceed it.

Indeed, toward the end of the year I developed a funny suspicion about how well it had all turned out, and queried the Sheffield as to whether any previous starships might ever have suffered Sim failure, and discovered an overall benefit. I was absolutely certain it was physically and emotionally impossible for an untrue word to pass the lips of Dr. Amy, but for all I knew any or all of her three colleagues could have conspired to hoodwink us all for our own good. But if that was the case the ship’s AI was in on the gag: it told me only nine previous ships had even carried 5S Sim gear, and none had ever experienced more than momentary failures, save for the one that had blown up.

Clever con or sheer luck—either way it was damned good luck. The colony was emotionally healthier than it had ever been as it entered its fifth year of star travel, gaining confidence in its own ability to cope. That proved useful when disaster struck.

What goes on in the Power Room of a relativistic starship like the Sheffield ?

Maybe God knows, if She exists. The Relativists themselves aren’t at all sure.

I remember I was sitting at a table at the Horn once with Herb and all five off-duty Relativists, everyone but Kindred—I can’t recall what led them all to be awake at once—and Herb asked what it was like.

I’d never have had the hairs to ask, myself, and there was a silence that lasted nearly ten seconds. Then Dugald Beader shifted his pipe in his mouth and said, “It’s like staring at a random-visuals screensaver until you can predict what it’s going to do in the next second.”

George R said, “It’s like playing jai alai with fifty different opponents at once, in zero gravity, blindfolded.”

London, her head on his shoulder, said, “It’s like being inside a spherical mirror, in free fall, and remembering at all times where the door is.”

Sol grinned. “It’s like running full tilt across a tightrope in spike heels with your eyes closed while cooking an omelette with a blowtorch,” he said, and turned to his husband. “Your turn, Spice. ‘It’s like…’”

“…not being…” Hideo said.

“Aw, come on,” Sol said. “I declare that answer void.”

Hideo blinked at him, and then nodded. “Very well. It is for me like an archery exercise, in which you must first hit the bull’s-eye, then hit that arrow, then hit that arrow, and the next, continuing until you can retrieve all your arrows with a single tug, without taking a step forward.” He turned to the rest of us. “The secret,” he confided, eyes twinkling, “is to aim.”

Sol hooted with laughter and hugged him. “Much better.”

Dugald took another crack at it. “Sometimes I think of it as looking for a hayseed in a giant needle stack.”

“Oh, Duggie, that’s good ,” George R said, wincing as he mimed rummaging through needles.

His wife said, “To me it’s always seemed very much like hearing a very complex unfamiliar four-part harmony in the distance, and trying to instantly, intuitively improvise fifth, sixth, and seventh harmonies.”

That one boggled my own mind. Most people have trouble intuiting the third harmony.

Nobody else came up with anything better that night. But I later learned someone had asked Peter Kindred, and he’d offered two of his own, “It’s like looking at a Rorschach blot until it means everything ,” and, “It’s like repairing nothingness.”

None of which tells me anything.

Despite years of friendship with five Relativists, and close friendship with Sol, George R, and London, I don’t know what it looks like inside the Power Room, or even the antechamber; nobody does who hasn’t been inside one. The convention that has become established in film and other forms of fiction is to portray Relativists sitting before banks of instruments with lots of blinking lights, intently studying gauges and readouts, constantly making fine adjustments with levers, dials, wheels, or mice that invariably cause beeping sounds. But no such layout has ever been certified authentic, and as far as I or anyone really knows, it is equally likely that what they do in there is simply sit in meditation in a bare white cubic… a meter off the floor, held aloft by sheer spiritual purity. I have no idea what takes place in a Power Room, and I particularly have never been able to conceptualize what it is like in there at the moment of transition, when one’s shift ends and another’s begins—how that hand-off is accomplished.

I am not one of those fools who believe Relativists guard their guild secrets to protect their monopoly. None of the ones I knew had an avaricious bone in their bodies. Avarice would appear incompatible with the mindset that produces a Relativist, or that a Relativist produces—a rare case of fortune bringing immense wealth to people fundamentally indifferent to it. But I have no idea why it is that they do discourage specific questions about their daily activities. I simply know it is their right if they choose, and they do. It is purely my own intuition that they do so to protect the rest of us from the knowledge, for some reason.

It may equally well be that they simply literally can’t explain what they do—that you and I have no referents for the information, nothing in our experience that any words we know could evoke. Maybe I’m like a cat trying to understand exactly how the fish get into those little cans, or a man trying to understand women: unequipped.