Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

We had to get to Bravo. We had to survive. It was far more than just our own lives at stake, now. It was our species. We were The Last Of The Solarians.

I remembered a spiritual book Dr. Amy had had me read the year before, by a man named Gaskin. I had been easy to persuade because the farmer in me had resonated to its title, This Season’s People . It turned out to derive from a famous saying of the Jewish mystic Shlomo Carlebach:

I was the guy who had been trying to run away from all responsibility. And found just that.

I often wish I could believe in a deity, so I could compliment Him or Her on His or Her sense of humor. And then go for His or Her throat.

“How long, Sol?” Herb asked.

Solomon winced to hear his own name. “How long what?”

“Blue sky it with me, here. Optimistic assumptions throughout. I just want to get a vague sense of how far away the payoff is.”

“I’m still not understanding you.”

“Assume all goes as well as we can reasonably hope, from here on in. The folks at 44 Boo dig in successfully, and survive with zero fatalities. We make it to Bravo, dig in successfully, and also survive with no further fatalities. Round our numbers off to five hundred for convenience, and assume 44 Boo has twice that population by this point.”

Sol nodded. “All right.”

“The human race now numbers fifteen hundred, total, plus an indeterminate number of frozen ova. It’s in two pieces, forty-odd light-years apart, with no telepathic links. That’s our starting gene pool and situation. We have specs for virtually every piece of proven technology the System had when we left, 44 Boo nearly the same, and we’ll both get better and better at making our own parts, so again let’s simplify, and just say we’ll be able to build new relativistic ships again in a single generation.”

Sol was dubious. “That’s a damn big simplification.”

“On the time scale I’m talking about, it’ll disappear in the noise,” Herb insisted.

“Go on.”

“Here’s what I want to know, and I’ll settle for a very rough approximation: how many centuries will it be, do you suppose, before we have rebuilt and protected our civilization sufficiently so that we can track down those shit-sucking back-shooting baby-burning vermin and blow up THEIR fucking star ?”

His voice rang in the silence that followed. Standing there tall with a fifth of whiskey in his hand and death in his eyes, he had never looked more like a Viking chieftain.

“How many generations?” Herb continued. “A lot, I know—but roughly how many, do you suppose? How far away were we ourselves from having the power to make stars go nova?”

“I repeat,” Sol began, “I really think we should be careful not—”

“You’re right, sorry,” Herb conceded impatiently. “A nova is a natural phenomenon, and we know this probably was not. G2s don’t nova. That is a point worth remembering. So: how far away were we from being able to make stars go boom? How far do you suppose we are now from being bright enough to reverse-engineer it, once we start getting some hard data on exactly what was done?”

“It won’t even start to happen in our lifetimes,” Solomon said.

“I know that. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the human race. It numbers fifteen hundred people, and it has only two tasks. Hide. And hit back. I’d like to try and get a loose sense of how many centuries it’s going to be before there’s likely to be any good news again. My intuitive feeling is, on the order of five hundred years. What’s your guess?”

The idea was breathtaking, heartbreaking. I had vaguely understood that a very long, very hard task lay ahead of me. Until now I had not grasped that it probably lay ahead of my remotest descendants.

Nobody had an answer for him.

I stood up and went to him. “Unhand that bottle.” He passed it over, and I topped up my Irish coffee, which had been down to its last inch. I tried it, and it seemed the right concentration for the moment.

“Damn it,” Pat said. “Damn it to all hells at once. We managed to evolve beyond war. Why couldn’t they ?” He shook his fist angrily in the general direction of the hull, and the stars beyond it.

“We didn’t evolve beyond war,” Herb said. “Just beyond violence—and we’ve only been free of that for a whole whopping century and a half. You still know how to shake your fist. There was a trade war going on back in the System last week, remember? The first. Who knows how far it might have gone?”

“Even if that’s true, we were getting better ,” Pat cried. “Are we really going to have to go back to thinking and acting like the Prophets, and the crazy Terrorist nuts and Cold War nuts before them ? Just when we were finally starting to grow up?”

There was a truly depressing thought.

I remembered Solomon’s dichotomy of the Thrilled and the Threatened. Was the human race really going to have to spend the next half a millennium or more being as conservative, as paranoid, as utterly pragmatic and cynical and ruthless as Genghis Khan, or Conrad of Conrad?

What is thrilling—if entities that can burst a sun want you dead? Anything besides simple survival itself?

Would any human above the age of six ever again look up at the stars in the night sky in simple wonder?

For that alone, I wanted revenge. Never mind billions of unearned deaths by fire.

I went to the Star Chamber, alone. I couldn’t talk any of the others into coming along. Solomon nagged me into taking a sandwich along. Autodocs feed you well but do not fill the stomach, he pointed out. I had to admit that something to soak up all the Irish coffee did seem like a good idea.

The Star Chamber might seem like a pointless waste of cubic, but few aboard the Sheffield ever thought so. Sure, the Sim illusion you get with naked eyeballs in that huge spherical room is nowhere near as convincing as what you can get while wearing the rig. How could it be? And there’s only the single illusion.

But you can share it.

In conventional Sim, in a tiny cubicle, wearing all the gear, you can have people around you, totally convincing ones… but you never really forget they’re not real. And only partly because the smells are never better than close.

But in the Star Chamber, you could look at the stars in the company of other human beings. Just then, I could not have borne to look at them by myself.

As I’d expected, it was just as heavily in use as the rest of the Sim Suite. I had to wait awhile for a space to become available. An argument was going on behind me as I reached the head of the line. “I know G2s can’t go nova, I never said it was a nova,” someone kept repeating. “What I said was, and is, there could be some equally natural process, other than the nova mechanism, by which a star can explode. Obviously it would be an exceedingly rare event, I’m not a fool —”

It was only when a bystander interrupted, “You play one brilliantly, Citizen,” that I realized the speaker was Robin. My oldest living girlfriend. “We all took your point the first three times you made it,” he went on. “And I imagine my great-grandchildren will be both the first to know whether you’re right or not… and the first to give a damn. But right now, and until the day they’re born, could you possibly shut up?”

Some atavistic hindbrain mechanism caused me to consider intervening on her behalf. But I did much prefer the silence the stranger had produced.