Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

He paused and went inside himself. Nobody said a word. Hildebrand started to, and there was a dull thud sound, and he exhaled instead.

“Both fear and its cover identity, anger, are notorious for producing spectacularly bad decisions.”

No actual words, but there were widespread grunts, murmurs, snickers, and harumphs, all of firm agreement.

“I will offer only a single example: the Terror Wars that led inexorably to the Ascension of the Prophet.

“Shortly after Captain Leslie LeCroix returned home safely from the historic first voyage to Luna, fanatical extremist Muslims from a tiny nation committed a great atrocity against a Christian superpower. Suicide terrorists managed to horribly murder thousands of innocent civilians. The grief and rage of their surviving compatriots must have been at least comparable to what we all feel now.

“Intelligently applied, that much national will and economic force could easily have eliminated every such fanatic from the globe. At that time there were probably less than a hundred that rabid, and by definition they were so profoundly stupid or deranged as to be barely functional. It was always clear their primitive atrocity had succeeded so spectacularly only by the most evil luck.

“We all know what the superpower chose to do instead. It crushed two tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual terrorists, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that nation’s leaders had perhaps known about the terror plot and failed to give warning. The second invasion didn’t even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously hostile to terrorists. Both nations were Muslim, as the nineteen killers had been: that was enough. The nation nearly all of them had actually come from remained, inexplicably, almost the only Muslim ally the Christian superpower had in that region.

“The generation of a large planetary web of enraged Muslim extremists was so inevitable it is difficult for us now to conceive of the minds that did it. They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: What could they have been thinking?

“Of course they were not. They were feeling.

“They were a superpower, and monotheist. No one had ever hurt them remotely that badly, and they were utterly certain no one had any right to hurt them at all . They reverted to tribal primate behavior. Beaten and robbed of your banana by a bigger ape or a more clever chimp… you find some smaller, stupider primate, beat him , and steal his banana.

“So doing, they ignited a global religious war that threatened to literally return the whole world to barbarism. The only thing to do then was crush it under the iron and silicon heel of a slightly smarter barbarism, a marginally less bloodstained religion, the best of all possible tyrannies. Nehemiah Scudder became the Holy Prophet of the Lord, smote the false prophets, and darkness fell.”

He paused and turned slowly around in place. He seemed to be trying to meet the eyes of each of us in the dark. “If we respond to our own unendurable grief and sadness in that same way they did—by looking away from grief and sadness, and seeking comfort in fixating instead on paranoia and rage—if we react with our own version of their Terror Wars—then we will probably lose this fight, and we will probably deserve to.”

That produced rumbles, and he let them happen, and waited them out. No one voice chose to try and take the floor, but many small murmured conversations were held at once.

“Let us continue on our journey,” Hideo said after a while. “Let us build the new world we planned. Only its very longest-term goals have changed. We hoped one day to be part of a great interstellar community with a radius of ninety light-years and a volume of three million. That is still our goal .

“We hoped that community would live in the peace and harmony we were just beginning to take for normal in our home System. That will not happen now. Defending that community and ending a war are new goals we’ve only just learned we have.

“We also hoped to communicate efficiently by telepathy through the Terran hub. That will not happen now either. And for that very reason, this war will be so lengthy that we cannot even begin ending it for thirteen more years, and will never live to see any progress whatsoever. We have the luxury of much time in which to make our decisions. Let us make smart ones from the very start.

“The smartest thing we can do is take hate from our hearts. There is nothing to do with it, no one to use it on but each other. Thus we must banish our fear, lest it grow cancerous tendrils around our hearts.

“When a child hits his thumb with a hammer, if he is alone, he will say to his hammer, ‘Look what you have done.’ If he is with another, he will say, ‘Look what you made me do.’” A few parents chuckled. “When we become victims, we want to victimize. So badly that if no victim presents himself, we will settle for an inanimate object, rather than have no one to hate. It is nature.

“We must be wiser than that child. There are no persons here but ourselves. There are no inanimate objects here we do not need.

“Be sad, citizens. Hurt . Grieve. Go insane with grief if you must. But please… avoid the different insanity of rage. At the very least, until we locate the target that deserves it. Meanwhile, let us teach our children love and compassion for one another, as we have always done, by practicing it in our own lives for them to see. Let not this inhuman enemy have taken our humanity from us.”

The applause startled him. But after a moment he sort of leaned into it, like a stiff breeze he was sailing through.

He bowed then, and headed for the door. People made way. Some touched his shoulder or arm or face as he passed, and he acknowledged each.

When he got to the door he stopped and turned. We waited for his coda.

“Many of you know I am a student of Zen,” he said. “All my life I have belonged to the Rinzai sect. Long ago it was the Zen of the Samurai. Warrior Zen.” He took a deep breath. “I have changed my affiliation. As of today—as of now—I am a student of Soto Zen, like Hoitsu Ikimono Roshi, who discovered the relativistic engine. Soto is the Zen of the peasants. Farmer Zen.” He looked around at all of us one last time, and made a small wry smile. “As of today, it is the more useful to me. And now you must excuse me, for my shift is soon to begin.” He was gone; the lightlock cycled behind him.

The silence he left behind him went on for several minutes before anyone tried to say anything, and those who did were politely asked to say it somewhere else, and after that it lasted… well, I don’t know, but at least until I left, a couple of hours later.

Word of what Hideo had said spread throughout the ship. The Sheffield had recorded every word, and he readily granted permission for its uploading. It was more words than he had spoken in the entire voyage until then. It didn’t produce any miracles. But over the next few days, it gradually started to seem possible to us all that we might heal one day. Not soon enough, surely. But one day.

We had a shot, anyway.

It seemed that way right up until four weeks after The Day, when Relativist Peter Kindred was found dead by suicide in his quarters.

He had taken massive lethal overdoses of a stimulant, a depressant, an analgesic, and a powerful entheogen, using care and a lifetime of extensive experience to time it so that they all peaked at once. I imagine he went out feeling just like the energy being depicted in Alex Grey’s “Theologue,” burning with universal fire. The first witnesses on the scene described his expression as “transcendent” and “blissful,” until Solomon Short arrived and caved in half his face with a looping overhand right that began and ended at the deck, blasting Kindred’s corpse and the chair holding it two meters across the room, and breaking five bones in Solomon’s hand. Despite the pain he must have been in, he stayed enraged long enough to find the suicide note Kindred had left, and delete it unread. By the time the proctors arrived, he was calm, docile, and dry-eyed, ready to be escorted to the Infirmary. Their relief was obvious. If he’d still been crazy enough to assault them, they’d have had to let him beat them up.