Variable Star

by Robert A. Heinlein

  It took a total of maybe ten seconds. Maybe less. I will never forget a picosecond of it.

  Paul and I knew something was terribly wrong. The color had drained from his face, veins writhed on his forehead like cooking pasta, cords of muscle stood out on his neck. My only wild hypothesis was that he was having a stroke. By now his gaping mouth had sucked a huge volume of air into his lungs. I was afraid it might never leave.

  And then was horrified when it did. It may have been the worst sound that ever left a human throat. And he had very big lungs.

  The devil himself would take pity on a man who screamed like that. Perhaps he did: the room’s microphones all blew out after only a second or two, and that scrambled the video feed as well. You’ve seen and heard the surviving footage, and you know how indelibly soul-searing those couple of seconds are. It went on for a good fifteen seconds. I heard the whole thing, live, four meters away in an enclosed cubic, and it did not deafen me near as much as I wished it would.

  It started out as a scream of pain, very quickly escalated to mindless agony, stayed there for what seemed like a million years, mutated into despair, and then in its final seconds added in powerful undertones of unimaginable heartbreak, unendurable regret, insupportable grief.

  I had absolutely no idea what had happened. I just knew it was the worst thing ever.

  And it was.

  We weren’t the only ones to hear a scream like that, either. Not even the only ones aboard.

  By the time it dawned on me that Paul could help me carry Herb, I’d left him way too far behind. “Call Dr. Amy,” I brayed, and lurched on.

  From Rup-Tooey to the elevator—nearly the ship’s radius. Black spots. Upward five decks, at the speed of capillary action. Ears pounding. From the elevator to the Infirmary, only about half a radius, but with a complicated route. Bad design. Red spots, now. Got lost and had to backtrack. Made mental note: sob the moment you can spare the air. Spotted big red “ER” and red cross ahead, just as vision began to dither out. Kept going, confident door would get out of my way.

  I presume it did, but something hard just beyond it did not. I felt the impact, realized I had lost my horizon somewhere, let go of Herb, bawled, “Take him!” and waited with mild interest to learn whether I would injure my face or the back of my head.

  The answer was both, but I did not find out for some time. It was the back of my head that hit first, and it hit hard enough to bounce. That was unfortunate, because just then Herb landed on my face. They say my skull made a much louder sound the second time.

  I want to be clear: the problem was not shortage of autodocs—the Sheffield stocked two hundred, which someone had calculated should last five hundred people until they could build their own. It wasn’t even a shortage of autodocs warmed up and ready to use. Four casualties at one time didn’t even begin to strain the resources Dr. Amy had in place. And while many parts of the Sheffield’s infrastructure were underspecified or even shoddy, she had made damned sure medicine was not one of them: those were ’docs fit for the Prophet’s generals.

  It was nobody’s fault. It was confusion, that’s all. Everyone in that room was probably as saturated with excess adrenalin as I was or more, and most of them had more than a single emergency to deal with at once. Only one of them knew me well enough to even be in a position to infer how far I had probably just run as fast as I could, carrying a man who outweighed me by more than thirty-five kilos. And not only was she the busiest person in the room, she already knew, as almost no one else did, what had happened to cause all this. It is remarkable that she was able to function at all, and she dealt more than competently with the three acute patients she knew about.

  Nobody noticed for a while that I had died, that’s all.

  Obviously, somebody did catch on before I passed the critical threshold. And those really were top of the line ’docs. I was never in any real danger. But Herb and his colleagues had already been discharged by the time mine decided to decant me.

  I woke as the lid unsealed, opened my eyes to see Solomon Short seated a few meters from my ’doc, looking at me. His face was distant, unreadable. As he saw that I was awake, his eyes hardened. He got up and came to my bedside. He looked so solemn I was about to tease him, when I suddenly noticed his lower lip trembling.

  He leaned close, looked me in the eye, and said, without a trace of humor, “If you die one more time, I will be very angry with you. Do you understand?”

  “How’s Herb? I died?”

  He straightened and nodded. “A little bit, yeah.”

  “Wow. How’s—”

  “He’s all right physically.”

  An LCD lit yellow next to me, on a panel inside the ’doc. “And otherwise?”

  “Dr. Louis is the best there is.”

  As I thought about what that statement said, and what it didn’t say, the yellow light turned amber. I knew that wasn’t good, and started doing my quartered-breathing trick. By the first exhalation, the light had dropped back to yellow. “Li died, didn’t she? His twin? While they were in rapport.” The light went out.

  “Everybody did,” Sol said. “Almost.” He turned away and began pacing slowly around the room.

  I assumed he spoke metaphorically: all of us aboard shared Herb’s pain. His voice was as odd as his words.

  “Covenant, how horrible for him!” Involuntarily imagining what it must have been like for him, to share his twin sister’s death, turned my panel light yellow again. I focused on my breathing, tried to force the image from my mind, but the light stayed on. “What did she die of?”

  He hesitated a moment, his back to me. “Let’s talk about it later.”

  “That bad?”

  “Worse.” He resumed his pacing.

  It was beginning to dawn on me that Solomon Short had spoken seven sentences in a row to me without saying a single funny thing. “Sol, what’s wrong? Is Herb brain dead? Did somebody else aboard die?”

  “No one on this ship has died, physically or mentally,” he said.

  “Okay, what is it then? Why are you acting so weird?”

  “Let’s talk about it later,” he said dully.

  “Why? Look at me.”

  “You’re not ready.”

  I sat up on that one, yellow light or no yellow light. “I’d like a second opinion on that,” I said. “Come to think of it, where the hell is Dr. Amy, anyway? Why isn’t she here?”

  “She is,” he said, and pointed.

  I followed his finger. Dr. Amy was in the autodoc next to mine.

  I had never before seen anyone in a ’doc with any sort of facial expression whatsoever. Hers looked as if it weren’t working, as if she were in serious pain in there. That was silly, and a glance at the monitors confirmed it, but still—

  “Prophet’s dick, Solomon, what’s wrong? What is going on? I want to know now.” Yellow became amber.

  For the first time he smiled—and I was very sorry. It was a ghastly parody. “Of course you do,” he said softly.

  He came back to my bedside, and to my astonishment and alarm, reached into the ’doc and took both my hands in his, captured both my eyes with his. “This will sound crazy. Because it is. I swear to you it’s true.”

  “Okay.”

  “Sol is gone.”

  Was he telling me that he had gone insane? Or that he was an alien who had taken over my friend’s body? Did it make a difference? Had he put Dr. Amy in that autodoc?

  All that went through my mind in the second that it took him to see my incomprehension in my eyes, and to realize that for the first time in his life he had failed to notice an obvious pun.

  “Not me,” he said. “My namesake. The star.”

  He wasn’t helping. “What the fuck are you—”

  “Joel, Sol has exploded. It’s gone. The whole System is gone. What isn’t annihilated is sterilized.”

  I must have gaped at him. “Don’t be silly. The sun can’t explode! Gs don’t go nova. They don’t have the materials
. It simply isn’t—”

  “I know,” he interrupted. “I know that.”

  “But—then—I—what are you saying? Did a, did a black hole, or a neutron star, or a, a, some extrasolar—but that’s silly! It would have been detected, we’d have known about it long before it got to…” I trailed off, confounded.

  “I’m telling you Sol exploded. I know it can’t happen. It did anyway.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you everyone we left behind us is dead. Clear out to the Oort Cloud by now. All that’s left in the universe of the human race is nineteen colonies. Excuse me, twenty; I was forgetting the New Frontiers.”

  By now the literal meaning of his words, at least, had reached me. “You’re serious. You can’t be serious. The sun blew up?”

  He could shrug with just his face. “The one we used to use, yeah.”

  “Bullshit. How—how can that possibly be? It has to be the most studied star in the universe! How could they conceivably fail to notice an instability so—” I was distracted by a pulsing in my peripheral vision, took my eyes from his, and saw that my panel light was now bright ruby red, and blinking.

  Sol said, “I see only two possibilities. First, it could be there is some fundamental and monumental mistake in our understanding of stellar processes. A true scientist never says, ‘That cannot have happened.’ The most he can say is, ‘This is the first instance of that I have observed, and I cannot account for it.’” He let go of my hands, and spread his. “Maybe G2s do explode sometimes. This one did.”

  “Sol, we’ve been looking closely at the stars for half a fucking millennium—”

  He nodded. “And it is perfectly possible that G2s explode at a rate of one a millennium or less. That may turn out to be the clue that leads to an explanation one day.”

  “What does Matty say?”

  He pointed farther down the row of autodoc capsules. “He’s over there. Sedated.”

  “Prophet!”

  “He said he’s been half expecting it for six years. Something about observations he made as we were leaving the System, that nobody would have believed without backup, and nobody else was in a position to repeat.”

  “That’s what’s been chewing his guts?”

  “It’d chew mine.”

  My mind rejected Matty’s problem. I could tell it was going to take a lot of time to imagine what it must have been like to have known about this, for years, and been unable to do anything about it. I was busy now. “You said two possibilities. What’s the other one?”

  His face became as perfectly expressionless as Dr. Amy’s should have been. Except the eyes, they looked as haunted as hers. “Just before Hal disarmed him and put him out, the last thing Matty was screaming was, ‘The paradox is fucking resolved, Enrico! I told you so!’”

  “What?”

  His meaning slowly percolated in.

  Enrico Fermi asked, Where is everybody?

  If intelligent life can arise once, it must arise more than once. There must be other star-going civilizations, lots of them. Where are they all?

  Answer: maybe laying up in the tall bushes. Behind cover, wearing camo gear and face paint. Slowly and methodically quartering the battlefield through sniperscopes. Looking for game big enough to be tasty, but stupid enough to step out on the plain and start yelling, “Yoo hoo! Anybody out there?” Every millennium or so, one gets lucky.

  I rejected the question, as I had Matty’s torment. The emotional impact was just beginning to arrive, then. To start arriving.

  It started to sink in that everyone I knew who wasn’t aboard this ship was dead. Irretrievably, beyond any resuscitation, even if anyone were left to resuscitate them. Everybody, from Terra to Pluto. Everyone from the Secretary General of the System down to whoever ranked lowest in Coventry—hell, down to the last virus. Dead and already cremated. Tens of billions of human beings. Martians. Venerian dragons. All animals of all planets, cooked. All birds, baked in a pie. All fish, fried. Uncountable lower life-forms gone extinct ahead of schedule.

  Lucky humanity. The cockroach did not outlive it after all. We had none aboard.

  I started to ask how we even knew what had happened, when death must have arrived out of the sky before any possible warning could be given or received. But before I got the question completed, I knew the answer.

  Two of the System halves of the Sheffield’s three telepath pairs had, for obvious reasons, been well paid to locate themselves equidistantly around Terra. One of them, Herb’s sister, must have chanced to be on the nightside of Terra. Perhaps with several minutes of useless warning, before the wave of superheated steam arrived at well below lightspeed—

  I glanced down. There were three lights on the panel, now, all ruby red, all flashing.

  And the third System twin, I recalled, had lived at the north pole of Ganymede, which could easily have been in the blast shadow of Jupiter. I found myself trying to picture what Jupiter must have looked like from behind as she was being destroyed by her bigger sister. The nature of the cataclysm must have been as unmistakable as it was inconceivable.

  And the precise relative timing of the two telepathic reports would have nailed it down.

  At that point it started to sink in that everyone I cared about who was not aboard this ship was dead. Friends, relatives, teachers, colleagues, acquaintances, people I’d always intended to look up one day—

  The ruby lights were slightly out of synch. The rhythmic interplay was very interesting. It gave me an idea. I wished I had a sax with me. I looked up at Solomon, with the vague intention of asking him to fetch me one, and the moment I saw his face, the final punch arrived. The others had all been solid, bare-knuckled lefts, but this was the big right hand, square in the heart.

  Jinny was dead.

  Not “dead to me.” Not hypothetically dead, at some future time. Dead.

  The moment I’d stepped aboard a relativistic starship without her, I had known and accepted that I would now probably outlive Jinny by many years. When I arrived at Brasil Novo, still just on the sunny side of forty, ninety years would have elapsed on Terra, and Jinny would be—

  Absurdly, my brain actually did the math.

  —ash, seventy-nine years cold—

  If she had taken me up on my offer—my plea—and come aboard with me, to homestead in the stars… she’d have lived.

  I discovered that Solomon was holding my head against his chest. I hadn’t even noticed him approach. I pulled back, found his eyes, and smiled broadly.

  Doing Richie, I said, “I hate to say atojiso, Jinny, but I fuckin’ atojiso.”

  But I couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Some asshole was playing a tenor too loud. Probably Philip Glass’s first piece: the same note endlessly repeated. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! I didn’t give a fucking fly how many measures he waited before he varied it, and I tried to ask Sol to durn it town. But Sol’s eyes were widening. Kept widening until they covered his whole face and met around the back. Pupils turned yellow, became big yolks, and not very funny ones, either. Felt him laying me back down in the autodoc. Splendid old James Raymond song. “Lay me down in the river, and wash my self away. Break me down like sand from a stone. Maybe I’ll be whole again one day.” Lay me down…

  The lid of the autocoffin closed over me, and washed my self away.

  18

  We need to have as many baskets for our eggs as possible. Even if we don’t manage to ruin this planet ourselves, natural disasters or changes—or even changes in our star—could make it impossible to live on this planet.

  —Philosopher Anson MacDonald, radio interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra, July 7, 1987 (“Anson MacDonald Day”)

  When I did emerge from the Infirmary, nothing had changed, and everything was different.

  I had once read a book, a whole book, about what it was like to be in New York City during the week following the 2001 terrorist attack. So none of the things I saw surprised me. I’d just never expected to see them wit
h my own eyes. Not everywhere I looked.

  I suppose by definition there had never been a more emotionally traumatized bunch of people in history before. We were the first sons and daughters of Terra, grandchildren of Sol, who had ever literally lost everything but what we were carrying. Our ancestral womb was gone. All our home planets were gone. Our civilization was gone. Our star was gone.

  There was no precedent for processing something like that. No appropriate ritual. No traditional therapy.

  Not one human religion had ever even contemplated such a turn of events—not even the old, psychotically blood-thirsty ones we’d had to eliminate. It upstaged Ragnarok, dwarfed Armageddon, mocked Apocalypse, overshadowed the Qiyamah, outdid the Kali Yuga, ruined the prophecy of Maitreya Buddha.

  The center of the universe appeared to be somewhere else. The possibility had occurred to hardly anyone, ever.

  By the time my ’doc decanted me for the second time, forty-seven of my fellow colonists had committed suicide, by an assortment of means.

  That there were so few as that is a testament to the professional skills of Dr. Amy and her staff… and I think in equal measure a testament to the regard in which she personally was held on board the Sheffield. Several people told me later they had wanted badly to leave, but decided in the end that they could not disappoint her that way.

  But I think it’s fair to say that better than half of us still warm were basket cases. Walking wounded. On my way back down from the Infirmary to Rup-Tooey, at least four times I passed adults who were just sitting on the deck, weeping. Very few people I encountered acknowledged me, or even seemed to see me. Nobody smiled or spoke. I went by a room whose door was frozen open; its interior showed extensive fire damage. There was a long line outside the Sim chamber, and hardly anyone on it was talking while they waited. There was an equally long line outside the ship’s nondenominational chapel—but as I passed within fifty meters of it, a fistfight apparently broke out inside. I kept going, and a few seconds later had to lunge out of the way of Proctors De-Mann and Jim Roberts to avoid being trampled. I did not go in The Better ’Ole, one of the two free taverns, but passed near enough to it to note that it too was packed, with a silent and morose crowd. The only thing audible was soft music. As I went by, Second Officer Silver lurched out into the corridor and began vomiting. It was not uncommon to see crew in colonists’ country, but they tended to do their drinking among themselves. It was the first time I could ever recall seeing any officer drunk, and I realized that must have been a policy of Captain Bean’s. Which nobody gave a damn about anymore.