Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

I’m not sure anyone else could have said what he was about to say, and finished saying it, before being hounded out of the room. So it’s good it was him.

People face in any direction they like in the Star Chamber, but now nearly all of us turned our seats around to face Hideo, near the center of the room.

“I wish to tell you all something,” he said, when stillness returned. As always, he spoke slightly slower than another would have, and slightly softer. It made you listen closer, and think more about what you heard. “I need to tell you. You need to hear me. But it will be hard to hear. Shikata-ga-nai . It cannot be helped. For this, too, I apologize to you.”

“You go on and say whatever you got to, Hideo-san honey,” said the woman behind me.

He bowed to her. “Thank you, Mary.”

His next seven words were spoken the slowest yet. Two slow pairs and a slow triplet, with pauses two or three full seconds long between them. Maximum emphasis and earnestness.

“The time… for fear… is past , now.”

Everybody spoke at once. Not all were angry, but everybody spoke at once. Have you been in an enclosed hemisphere when everybody spoke at once—a dome, perhaps? People far away sound louder than the ones beside you. It’s so weird, silence usually resumes quickly, and it did now. Then two or three tried to speak at once, and none would yield, so someone told them to all shut the fuck up, and the noise level started to go right back up again—

“ PLEASE! ” the loudest voice I had ever heard bellowed.

Instant silence.

Even when I was sure, it was hard to believe that much sound had come out of quiet little Hideo. He took his time replacing the air it had cost, in a long slow perfectly controlled inhalation. It was a good example. I began measuring my own breath.

“I promise I will hear what each of you wants to say,” he said. “Until you are done speaking. Please wait until I am done speaking first. It may be that my meaning will require more than a single sentence to fully express.”

He had the floor back.

“Some of you might become angry if I said Sol may have died of natural causes, so I will not say that. We all know that is theoretically possible, if most unlikely. But it is unsatisfying to think about. It leaves us nothing to do but mourn our colossal bad fortune.

“I believe what happened was done . I believe one day we will meet those who did it. We will speak with them. And for all we can know now, perhaps we may choose to prune them from the Galaxy. If we can acquire such power.”

The crowd was solidly with him again now.

Slowly, he shook his head from side to side. “But I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, or that of the youngest infant in the Sheffield . I suspect it will not happen in her grandchildren’s lifetime. Everything we learned and built in ten thousand years of painful evolution was insufficient. It will take us many generations just to restore that, if we can.”

Murmurings of dismay, argument.

Again his voice drew power from some unsuspected source, not as loud as his earlier roar, but enough to override the impolite.

“But of this much I am certain: we… will… have those generations.”

Silence again.

“I have heard many of you express deep fear that our enemy might even now be hunting the Sheffield .”

Pindrop silence.

“This is not rational. If it were true, there would be none to think it.”

“They’re six years behind us,” a deckhand named Hildebrand yelped. “How do we know they’re not hot on our trail?”

“Reason with me, Dan,” Hideo said calmly. “If I build a machine that makes stars explode without warning… is it not certain that I must be able to reach stars other than my own? Had I but the one star, such a machine would have no sane function. Agreed?”

Hildebrand reluctantly grunted agreement.

“If I can travel the stars so easily that I develop reasons to blow some up… can I possibly be constrained by the cosmic speed limit humans must presently obey?”

“What? The speed of light is abso—”

“Name a method of slower-than-light travel by which you could so much as approach our general region of this galactic arm without ever being detected by the Solar System .”

Hideo had him there. Fusion, antimatter, ramjet, all were pretty much impossible to miss.

“To have ambushed us so successfully,” Hideo said, “they must be superluminal. By orders of magnitude, at the least.”

He paused there. After a few seconds of thought, someone said, “Subluminal, superluminal—what’s your point, Tenzin Itokawa?”

Hideo turned his hands palm upward. “ We travel at less than c . They travel at some very high multiple of c . Perhaps an exponential. And we have just agreed that we are clearly visible to anyone looking.”

“What, they didn’t notice us leaving?” said Terri, one of the Healers.

“Perhaps. Perhaps they mistook our nature. Perhaps they don’t care.”

“Beg pardon, Tenzin? Why wouldn’t they?”

“It is hard for us to think this,” Hideo said, “but the annihilation of humanity may not have been their purpose in destroying our star. For all we can know now, it might be merely collateral damage which they deemed either insignificant or acceptable. As we accept the deaths of millions of microorganisms living on our skin and in our hair each time we choose to bathe.”

He had silence again. He let it stretch, while the stars drifted slowly past his head.

“There are wise ones,” he said finally, “who say that man cannot endure insignificance on such a scale. That if confronted by a species as far advanced beyond him as he is beyond dogs, his spirit must inevitably break. For an example they point to the original inhabitants of the North American continent on Terra, who so thoroughly internalized a perception of their own inferiority that they became all but extinct within one or two centuries.

“Somehow they miss the counterexample of the original inhabitants of the South American continent. Or of the Africans chained and sold by other Africans to the Europeans even then conquering both Americas.”

“Where are you going with this?” Hildebrand demanded. “We know we’re not going to fold up and die.”

When Hideo replied, his raising his volume again startled me, but not as much as his words themselves.

“I have great anger in my heart.”

That made everyone sit up a little straighter.

“I do not wish to. It may help my grandchildren one day, but it is useless to me now… here. And I do not have room for it in my heart. I need all the room for grief.

“The only way to deal with anger is to cut it at the root. The root of anger is always fear.

“I do not fear for the dead. It is too late. So I must be afraid for myself, and my friends here.

“There are only two things for us to fear, and I have just showed you that the first is irrational. I share it myself! Even now a tightness in my spine tries to warn me that the Star Killer could be drawing a bead on us right now, that I may not live to finish my sentence. But it is madness, not good sense. I can learn to make it go, and so can you.”

As he spoke I was feeling my own shoulders start to lower, my lungs taking in deeper breaths.

“The second thing to fear is that we will fail the test. That we will not be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, to found a society which can grow to accomplish the things that must be done. Last week, the worst decision we could possibly make would have killed five hundred and twenty people, at most. Such a poor decision today would come very close to literally decimating the remaining human race. An unacceptable loss. Let me say this just right.”