Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  The engineers have already left the room to vomit. And I can’t really say I blame them. But who knows? You, maybe?

  To an engineer, it’s simple. If you can explain what you’re doing in numbers, and prove them, it’s science. If you can’t, it isn’t. End of story. There is much to recommend this view: it is essentially what keeps the black heart of the Prophet rotting in his stained coffin where it belongs. And any Relativist will happily admit she does not know how she does what she does. Nobody does. It’s not at all certain, in fact, that anybody ever will.

  One thing is generally agreed, however: the man who had so far come closest to providing an explanation—who had at least provided some useful mathematical tools for approaching the problem, and pointed out a promising theoretical path through what had been an impenetrable thicket—was a Nobel prize-winning physicist from Ganymede named Ben Johnston.

  My late father.

  No wonder Kindred was terrified of me. Kindred did not want even the slightest morsel of understanding of the process by which he made himself one of the wealthiest individuals alive to creep into his mind. The thing that most Relativists fear the most is burnout: utter annihilation of personality. Not Kindred. He might even have yearned for it a little. As London had said, he was terrified of the Centipede’s Dilemma. Once the centipede got to pondering just how he managed all those legs, he couldn’t do it anymore. Kindred feared that if he understood what he did, he might stop being able to pull it off. For all he knew, my father might have told me some significant datum before he died, shared some crucial insight that I might be stupid enough to blurt out, whether I understood it myself or not. The risk was tiny, but to him the stakes were everything. So he averted his eyes and fled.

  An engineer would call that raw superstition, primitive bullshit, childish magical thinking. But nobody cares what an engineer thinks about this topic, until he can make a big can full of people move at close to lightspeed without carrying any fuel for its primary drive. So of course they’re working on it, and good luck to them.

  But I can’t think of any engineers I’d have been as excited to talk with over postprandial coffee as the three Relativists who remained at the table.

  Nearly at once, and without warning, I found myself skateboarding right off a conversational precipice.

  One minute I was enjoying the ride; the next, I looked down and saw, kilometers below, the rock-strewn base of the cliff I had just left behind me.

  Why it took me by surprise, I cannot tell you. I admit it: in retrospect, I look dumb. How smart would I have had to be to guess that one of the very first polite questions to be directed at me would be:

  “And what do you do, Joel?”

  Now, where did I put that parachute?

  It happened to be London who asked. The correct honest answer was: it sheets the bit out of me. I hadn’t even had time—during my walk here from my room—to draw up a master list of my options, arranged by category, much less zero in on anything. What I did these days was mostly get loaded, and mourn my lost love. It seemed to be all I had been doing, for quite a while now.

  I kind of did not want to tell three of the most interesting people on the ship that I was that big a fool. But I had no other answer to give them.

  Technically I could have said, “I’m a farmer,” without perjuring myself. I had contracted, as part of the price of my ticket, to spend twenty-one hours a week working down on the Sheffield’s Agricultural Decks, sharing my putatively valuable experience and expertise in hydroponic farming. Somehow I didn’t feel like going with that answer, either.

  I am no longer sure, but I think I had decided on an enigmatic smile as my best response, when Sol answered for me. “You’re going to love it. Joel plays the sax.”

  “And composes,” Herb amended for me.

  I opened my mouth—

  “How wonderful,” said Hideo the little monk.

  I closed my mouth—

  “Saxophone? Oh, I do love it,” London said. “Are you any good, Joel?”

  That one, at least, I had numerous stock answers for on tap. I tossed out the first one that came up. “I think so. Being tone deaf, I’ve never been sure.”

  “Sol?”

  Sol shrugged. “I haven’t heard him play yet.”

  “Herb?”

  Herb shrugged, too. “Hasn’t played a note in my hearing yet either. Stingy bastard.”

  “Nonetheless I am prepared to bet cash he’s very good,” Sol said.

  “On what basis?” Hideo asked.

  “I’ve examined his instrument closely. It is the saxophone of a man who loves it dearly, and is loved in return.”

  I stared at him. “You can tell that?”

  He just nodded.

  “Well, we simply have to hear you, then,” London said. “Solomon, do you think the management would have any objection if we were to send for Joel’s instrument and ask him to play for us, here? Failing that, we could adjourn to my cabin.”

  I took advantage of the discussion that ensued to think, hard and fast. I was on the edge of being committed, to something I had not chosen. Lately.

  Playing sax and composing music had been what I did, once. They had been just about all I did, aside from thinking about Jinny. They and she had together constituted what I was, what I wanted, what I was for. Together. It had been a long time since I had thought of a future as a composer without Jinny as part of the picture.

  Maybe when all the dust settled, and all the fallout faded to endurable levels again, I would still—or again—want to be a composer/musician. I had to admit, in fact, that it was highly likely. What the hell else was I qualified for? What else did I love nearly so much? (Don’t answer that one.)

  But I had not made that decision yet. That had been the old plan, for a universe that had Jinny in it.

  And more than just that, I suddenly realized with dizzy shock—it had been a plan for a universe that had the entire existing musical establishment of the Solar System as part of the given. All the other musicians, critics, and composers, all the vast potential audience, all the sources of funding, all the supporting institutions. In a society of many billions, composer is an honorable and even sometimes honored occupation. With a target audience that huge, one need not reach all that many of them to earn a living, and respect. Now that I was going to be living, forever, in a society of five hundred people and their offspring, everything needed to be rethought.

  Another not inconsiderable point: I had hired on this tub as a farmer’s helper. The Colonial Council might decide to hold me to it, feeling that the colony needed shit shoveled more than it needed sax played, and until I could afford to put up enough credits for at least one Basic Share, they had as much say over my time as I did. The prudent man would divide his time between the hydroponic farm, and whatever would bring in the highest possible return in the shortest time—which did not describe sax playing in any known universe. Not even the currently most popular kinds of sax music… which were decidedly not what I wanted to compose.

  If I did not speak up right now, these folks were going to accept me as a composer/musician. That would be awkward down the line if I ended up concluding that my life was best spent as something else altogether.

  What else? I hadn’t admitted it to myself until now, but what I had always been second most interested in, after music, was history, particularly PreCollapse history. Terrific. If anything, history was even less use than serious music, to a frontier society. If, after a long day in the fields, my hypothetical descendants had any curiosity at all about the planet the Old Farts were always nattering about, they would be more than satisfied with the copious data we already had aboard, and any new historical fact I could ever learn would already be over ninety years old back on Earth, already chewed to death. The Libra colony would one day be interested in its own history—presuming it survived—but not until at least two generations after we landed, which itself was decades away.

  Okay, Joel, don’t think abo
ut what else, now. But start backtracking, right now… right up to the point where you’d have to commit to some other track. Otherwise you may spend the next twenty years being thought of as the composer who couldn’t cut it.

  “Sol and Herb spoke a little hastily without realizing it,” I heard myself saying. “Music is what I have done. I’m not certain it’s what I will do now, aboard the Sheffield. Or when we hit dirt at Brasil Novo either, for that matter. I’m still giving that thought.”

  “What other areas interest you?” Itokawa asked.

  “Well, I’ve always wanted to try space piracy,” I said.

  “A step up from musician,” Sol agreed drily.

  “Or perhaps dowsing.”

  London whooped with laughter, a bracing sound. “Yes, I imagine aboard a ship would be a good place to learn how to locate water. You could check your answers without having to dig all those pesky holes.”

  I smiled back at her. I wanted to banter with her, but also wanted this part of the conversation over as soon as possible. I had given just enough comic answers to hint that a serious one would not be forthcoming.

  “You will find your path,” Itokawa said. He sounded a lot more certain than I felt.

  “With luck,” I agreed. “Speaking of things we weren’t speaking of—”

  But I didn’t have to manufacture a subject change, because one presented itself just then: my axe. The decision to send for it had apparently been made while I was deep in thought. Nothing for it but to play now.

  But first they all had to ooh and ah, of course.

  I had brought four saxophones with me, actually: soprano, tenor, alto, and baritone. (Musical instruments did not count against personal weight allowance.) But someone, almost surely Sol, had sent for my personal favorite, the one I considered my primary axe: Anna, a genuine Silver Sonic—a PreCollapse Yanigasawa B-9930 baritone, solid silver with a gold-plated hand-engraved bell and keys. The Selmer is more famous—but how often is the most famous really the best? Anna is a thing of beauty even to a layman, so elegant and precise you’d think she’d been finished by a jeweler… and a special joy to play for those who can handle her. Featherlight keys, lightning-fast response, tone-boosted resonator pads… never mind, I see you yawning. Let it stand that three people who spent their working days contemplating the infinite beauty that underlies the universe thought her special enough to admire extravagantly.

  Even before they’d heard a note.

  The baritone sax has never been a terribly popular instrument with musicians, because it is, physically, such a screaming bitch to play. It’s huge and ungainly and requires you to move an immense volume of air. But some of the greats—Gerry Mulligan, James Carter—understood that it is worth the effort. Baritone sax is probably the most powerful resonant wind instrument there is, the Paul Robeson of horns, and no other is so immediately impressive to the layman.

  (A purist would note there are actually two deeper saxes, the bass and contrabass, just as there are two higher than soprano, the sopranino and soprillo, and some even recognize one lower than contrabass called the tubax—but you’re unlikely ever to hear any of them.)

  While I wetted up my reed, I tried to decide what to play for them. Naturally, I wanted to play them one of my own compositions. And I was reasonably sure all three were sophisticated enough to appreciate it, if only mathematically—very sure, in Sol’s case. But what if they were sophisticated enough to hate it? Also, I was far less sure of everyone else in the place, and perfectly well aware that some of my work can strike a civilian as dry and complex. To pick the most polite words Jinny had used.

  Okay, wrong time and place for an original Johnston. Something immediately accessible, but not crap. I reached into the air, and pulled down a tune Charlie Haden wrote to his wife Ruth called “First Song.” It was the opening number of the last set Stan Getz ever played, and it always tears me up. You’d think a tenor piece wouldn’t sound right on a baritone, but that one does. It snuck up on me; before long I had forgotten anyone else was listening, and played my heart out.

  I hadn’t played a note in weeks, hadn’t even thought of it. My fingers were stiff, my embouchure weak, my wind less than optimal. I killed them, that’s all. You can tell when it’s working. I was playing smarter than I actually am, and could tell.

  For the first three or four minutes, I was imagining accompaniment. Kenny Barron, who backed Getz by himself on that long-ago night in Copenhagen. Piano as crisp as snapping sticks.

  And then suddenly the piano was really there.

  I nearly clammed the phrase I was playing, and spun toward the bandstand. It was empty.

  Wherever the keyboard player was, he was really good. Really good. I quartered the room without finding him, then eighthed it with no better luck. There were several side rooms and alcoves in which he might be lurking—or he could have been anywhere on the ship, listening in and tapping into the house sound system to play along. I decided to worry about it later, and put my attention back on Anna.

  That piano was just the floor I’d needed to set my feet properly. We talked, briefly, and then he set me loose to wander. Before I knew it I had disappeared down the mouthpiece. When Getz played the song that night, he was saying good-bye to his life. I used it now to say good-bye to mine. God knew what new life I would build for myself, but the old one was over for good and for all, as unreachable as a moment ago, or the second before the Big Bang. Out of the bell of my Anna I blew my scholarship, and the mentor who would appear someday to nurture and teach me, and my master’s, and my debut at the legendary Milkweg II in Amsterdam, and my discovery by the contemporary serious music establishment, and System-wide recognition, and the respect of an entire generation of my peers… I blew away my courtship with Jinny, and our marriage, and our wedding night, and our first nest, and our first child, and all our children, and their childhoods and adolescences and adulthoods, and their children, and all the golden years she and I would have spent loving and cherishing them all…I blew away both my dead parents, whose widely separated graves I would never see again… I blew away Ganymede my home, lost to me for so long and now lost for good, and all those who still lived on her… and not incidentally I blew away a quantum of wealth and power that perhaps could have been expressed as a fraction of all there was using only a single digit in the denominator.

  I didn’t get it all out—didn’t come close—but I made a start.

  I actually didn’t hear the applause; Herb told me about it later.

  I left the Horn of Plenty that night minus about a million kilos I’d been carrying on my shoulders… and with a steady gig, two nights a week, Tuesdays and Fridays, for a scandalous sum, tips, and all I could eat. Plus the private phone codes of three Relativists. Four, since London and George R lived together.

  On the down side, I also left without finding out who had been playing that piano. Nobody seemed to know. The sound source had apparently been the house MIDI system—but the originating keyboard might have been in a sealed booth somewhere in the Horn, or up in the Control Room, for all anyone could tell me. All I could positively rule out was a player back in the Solar System… because our communication had unquestionably been conducted in real-time, without any lag at all. So I didn’t worry about it. I had twenty years to find him. He could hide, but he couldn’t run.

  On our way back to our room, I tried to thank Herb, to explain just how much he’d unwittingly done for me, but he brushed it away. “I think everybody made out on that deal,” he said. When I pushed it, though, he allowed me to promise to bring home a doggy bag on Tuesday and Friday nights. And perhaps a doggy bulb of good Scotch.

  After half an hour at his desk, Herb gave me a data cube and suggested I play it privately. I did so at once, so I could stop thinking about it.

  It was little Evelyn Conrad, back in the Solar System. Audio and video, stereo both ways. She told me gravely that I was very welcome. She said she was very cross with her gran’ther for making me go away.
She said she was going to marry me one day, just the same. She told me not to marry anyone else without checking with her, first. She gave me a “private” mail address, but warned me it was not totally secure. And she closed with a solemn Bon Voyage and a blown kiss. By that point I was grinning and crying at the same time. I popped out the cube, stretched out on my bunk, and slept like a stone for thirteen hours. And when I woke, rude things and implausible suggestions had been written all over my face and hands with a laundry marker. I guess I snore.

  8

  The squeaking of the pump sounds as necessary as the music of the spheres.

  —Henry David Thoreau

  The first thing I did when I woke next morning was to sit down at my desk and summon a list of Positions Available.

  There were a lot more than I expected. It had apparently occurred to the expedition’s planners that not only could nearly all the actual useful work of preparing to start this colony be safely put off until the last few years of the voyage… it probably would be anyway, humans being human. Therefore, it would be good to keep them all occupied doing some damn thing or other for the first eighteen or so years. Lots of helpful suggestions had been provided. The full list of jobs the Colonial Authority was willing to pay someone to do took well over three hours just to scroll down through at normal reading speed.

  But basically most of them broke down into categories you could skim in less than half an hour, if you were a fast reader. Here’s a typical screen’s worth, which was sent in response to my query by an astronomer named Matty Jaymes:

  • Refining knowledge of the location and plasma properties of the heliopause between the solar wind and the interstellar medium, on the way out of town—and then the same for the heliopause of Immega 714 when we got there.