Variable Star (24 page)

“Of course, Dr. Louis,” I said, and she put her full attention on her screen for a few moments, keying in an occasional input. To pass the time I examined her office, a fairly large cubic, soothingly furnished, gimmicked so that no matter which way you looked, the light was never directly in your eyes.

Suddenly I burst out laughing. A small outburst, easily suppressed, but audible. She looked up and met my eyes again and smiled faintly “You got it, did you?”

“Just now,” I agreed.

Behind her, a midsize image hung framed on the wall, a rather striking photo of a large lizard, of a breed that had adapted better than anyone had expected to Martian conditions and was now considered a minor pest there. I had noticed it when I’d come in, but it had taken until now for my memory to yield up the odd name of that odd creature. Gila monster. It was a visual pun. She was the Healer monster.

“That’s about how long we’ve been around,” she said.

“Healers?”

“Meddlers. Busybodies. Pains in the ass. Healing is merely one of the few remaining socially acceptable excuses for poking one’s nose into another Citizen’s affairs. Excuse me again for just one moment.”

She went back to her screen, and this time I decided to pass my time by studying her more closely instead of the room.

She was perhaps twice my own age or a bit more, I guessed, of average height and weight, and looked healthy, fit, and content with her life. In another context I’d have called her attractive for her age. She wore her brown hair short, so nothing obscured any part of her face. In its various contours and configurings I found evidences suggesting decency, kindness, patience, considerable humor…and beneath all these a strength, or perhaps simply a determination, so awesome even in repose I had the crazy idea that if she were ever to go out the airlock, get a good grip on the frame, and plant her feet on the vacuum, the
Sheffield
would slowly come to a halt. Her clothing, however, was slightly more casual and comfortable than many would have deemed appropriate for our situation, indicating that the strength was not the kind rooted in iron stupid discipline.

I glanced around again. A pair of flat images on the side of a bookcase caught my attention, precisely because they seemed so pointless. Each photo had been cut out of a magazine or other hard copy and put there with pins. The one on top was of a donkey, or burro. Below it was a medium shot of a golfer lining up a putt. And just below them both was a line cut from some advertisement: “
For those who know the difference!
” If there was a point to the arrangement, it eluded me.

“Thanks for your patience.”

“No problem, Dr. Louis.”

“Call me Amy, please. Joel, I think there are four questions you urgently need to consider.”

“That many?” I said sourly.

“I don’t think you’ve thought through any of them yet.” Perhaps my least favorite criticism; I swallowed a comeback. “And you must. They’re all very important.”

“Somehow, Amy, I have an idea you’re going to tell me what they are soon.”

She shook her head. “Not if you’re going to get cranky right at the jump, just because I said you have some thinking to do. If you like, we can spend this whole session dicking around. But we’re going to get to it eventually. Suit yourself.”

I think if she had looked back down at her screen, I would have gotten up and left, then. But she didn’t. She just kept looking me in the eye, waiting, not offended by my antics, just waiting patiently until I decided to move on instead.

“Hell of a thing to say to a man, that he doesn’t think things through,” I grumbled. But it was clearly a backing-down grumble.

She nodded sympathetically. “It is an embarrassing thing to be caught at. But, Joel, face it: you’re
caught
. Your presence here is not voluntary, remember? Ergo, you have screwed up
big-time
. The embarrassment is one of the smallest things you’re going to have to deal with.”

She paused, visibly giving me a few seconds to see if I was going to jump salty again.

Well, God damn it, Joel, is she right or isn’t she? Can you face facts, or not?

“The majority of clients I deal with have been driven into this room by their own egos. You have not, for once, so I don’t want to waste as much time dealing with yours. Can we simply assume goodwill on both sides, and start with the basic agreement that you need help, and that I may have some?”

The stars themselves knew I needed help. And I knew she had some. I’d known that before I’d gotten from her door to the chair I sat in.

“I guess…” I began.

And a stuck switch somewhere in my brain went
spung
, and I burst out laughing—a hold-your-belly-and-fold-over guffaw.

She was not offended in the least, just surprised. And interested. I wanted to explain but was laughing too hard. But she was in no hurry. Finally I got enough air to hoot, “I do!… I do!… Honest!” which only further confused her until I was able to get one arm free and point to the clip art pictures on the side of her bookcase that had puzzled me earlier. “I do know!” At once she began to laugh, too.

I
do
know the difference. Between my ass, and a hole in the ground. “Sometimes, anyway—”

She had a great braying loon hoot of a laugh, and knew it, and was not at all self-conscious about it. So we had us a good one. By the time was done, I was pretty sure I trusted her. It’s humorless people who frighten me, because I can’t begin to understand them.

At last I said, “I’m sorry, Amy. Please tell me the four questions you think I need to address first.”

She nodded. “Who. What. Where. Why.”

I blinked. “Not ‘when’?”

She shook her head. “The answer to that is always ‘now’”

I took a deep breath. “In that case, let’s do it.”

“First, ‘who.’ That’s almost always a good place to start. Who are you? Not, who did you plan to be, or who are you expected to be, or even, what would you like to be. Who are you? Who the hell is this Joel Johnston, when he’s at home? I don’t think you know. And I’m certain I don’t. It would be a useful thing to know, don’t you think?”

I was past sarcasm or irony. “Yes, Amy, it would.” My voice was hoarse. From the laughing.

“Next, ‘what.’ What led you to this place? To this ship, this twenty-year voyage to the back of beyond? What led you to abandon literally every single thing you’ve ever known except the concept of associating with other humans? Why did you leave the world, leave the rest of the race, leave the Solar System, for good? This is probably the question you think you know the most about, and I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. Or only part right.”

It was a broken heart! Wasn’t it?

Wait. Had I expected heartbreak to be
permanent
? Did I really intend to die a virgin? If my Jinny was not to be with me, nor I with her, how was it any better if she was eighty-five light-years farther away?

“The third question, ‘where,’ might actually be your best place to start. Where are you going? I mean that not rhetorically, but literally”

I didn’t understand. “Literally? That’s easy. To Peekaboo Two. Brasil Novo, if you want to be formal. The second planet of Immega Seven-Something.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me about the planet. When it was discovered. Its physical parameters. Its atmosphere. Its geography, and geology. Climate. Seasons. Flora. Fauna. Most intelligent-seeming organism identified. Most dangerous-looking predator identified. Intended location of our First Landing site.” She paused expectantly.

“Uh…it’s real hot and damp, for…for extended periods, and there’s a whole lot of oxygen,” I said, and realized with dismay that I had shot my bolt.

“You’re going to spend twenty years getting there, and you’ll stay there the rest of your life. I would spend some of the twenty years studying just what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

All at once I felt immortally stupid. She was absolutely, shockingly right. Not thought this through? Hell, I hadn’t
started
thinking. Look before you leap, my father had often said. I hadn’t even looked
after
I’d leapt. After weeks on board a starship, my principal curiosity about my destination so far had consisted of wondering what to wear to work on the Upper Ag Deck. I had just sort of assumed there’d be a planet of some sort at the end of this, and what of it?

Could a broken heart cause brain damage? On this scale?

“Finally, why. Once you know the destination, the question becomes, why are you going there? Why go anywhere, for that matter? For what reason? What will you do there? Above all, why will it
matter
? Here, take these. Basket over there.”

I accepted the box of tissues she offered out of politeness, and was startled to discover that my face was soaking wet and I really did need to blow my nose. The wastebasket had been placed so that it was a hard shot to miss. I hit it six times running before I was done. By then I was seeing little black spots overlaying everything.

“So that’s it?” I said, my voice quavering. “That’s everything? Shit, I thought I had a problem.”

“You do,” she said simply. “And that is a
lot
to chew on. So much that twenty years might not be enough time. And I promise you it will be painful. And you may fail completely. Would you like the
bad
news, now?”

I giggled. “Sure.”

“You have no fucking choice.”

“Tell me there’s good news.” I tried to parody desperation, but did too good a job.

She smiled. “You have the best Healer on the ship. I will give you some good tools, and yell encouragement, and take your crap, and share your breakthroughs, and tell you when your exciting new profound insights are horseshit.”

“Tools?”

“Techniques. Disciplines. Attitudes. Drugs. In addition, I will listen to anything you want to tell me, and give advice if I happen to have any.”

“That sounds good,” I said. “When do I start?”

“Now.”

“Okay.
How
do I start?”

“First, you have to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Everything.”

“Huh? I mean, Crave pardon?”

“To grow, you must learn about yourself. To learn, you must listen to yourself. To listen, you must first learn the hardest trick of all: to shut the hell up.”

I was so startled, I did. And then realized it would have been a not unclever reply, if I’d done it intentionally. So I tried to pretend I had, and made an elaborate show of obligingly cocking my ear to listen to some imaginary sound, and then tried to pantomime hearing some transcendent insight. She just kept looking at me with no expression, and suddenly I had a sense of seeing myself from the outside, watching myself mug and fidget. And
finally
began to get a sense of what she was driving at. I let my face go as blank as hers, took a deep breath, and tried my best to listen. To myself…to her…to whatever. After a few seconds I closed my eyes to help myself concentrate.

I don’t hear a damn thing/wait/is that the air circulator?/it’s gone now/this is silly/really silly/stupid kid’s game/hide and go fuck yourself/wait, now/a hum/a note at the very upper limit of audibility, somewhere right around 20,000 cycles per second/no, two of them/dysharmonic/I never diss harmonic/what’s wrong with dat harmonic?/God, I’m sleepy/hey, why can’t I hear my own pulse?/I wonder if
—

“There’s a certain interior monologue that never stops, isn’t there?”

Her voice startled me, enough that I opened my eyes. “Yes. Yes, there is.”

“Try and make it stop.”

“Stop thinking? Completely? Hell, that’s one of my best tricks.”

“Go ahead.”

About five minutes later, I admitted defeat.

“Whose is the voice you hear?”

“My own.”

“To whom does it speak?”

“To…to me.”

“Why?”

It was a good question. How could it be so important to tell myself things I already knew that I couldn’t seem to stop, even for a second? I had always prided myself on controlling my own mind…but it now seemed I only had limited control of what it thought
about
. But I could not make it stop.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It must be terribly, terribly important, because I can’t make it stop even as long as I can make myself stop breathing. It’s like my heartbeat—if it ever pauses, even for a few seconds, I’ll die. But that can’t be true: I’ve stopped thinking altogether a lot of times. Drunk…stoned…sedated…anesthetized for surgery…” I trailed off, realizing I wasn’t sure whether I’d stopped thinking at those times, or just stopped recording the thoughts. “Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“You don’t need to be afraid of it, I promise.”

“Are you
sure
?”

“Your record says you’re a musician and composer, but is vague about what kinds of music you’re interested in. Do you know the classics? The Beatles?”

“Sure.”

“Turn off your mind. Relax, and float downstream. It is not dying. That advice was ancient back then.”

I shrugged. “Okay. How?”

“People have been trying to make their minds stop for thousands of years. It’s called meditation. There are some useful tricks that have been passed down. Come here and I’ll show you some.”

She got up and moved to an area with no furniture. I could tell she was a Loonie by the way she handled herself in a third of a gee, but it wasn’t so much awkward as unpracticed. She had the necessary strength to handle twice her normal weight, and would get more graceful at it with time, like perfecting an accent. I got up and followed her. She was just placing on the floor two objects like giant black cloth hamburgers. Pillows, it seemed: as I watched, she dropped effortlessly into a cross-legged seat on one of them, seeming to melt slowly like the Wicked Witch of the West despite the double gravity. She gestured at the other. “Sit down, Joel.”

I did so far more clumsily, despite being in my native gravity. Pillow? It was just barely a cushion—made of soft cloth, but filled with something unyielding, as soft-but-firm-underneath as a…

“It’s called a zafu,” she said. “Don’t sit square on it, but a little forward on it, almost falling off the edge, and put your legs like so.” She demonstrated.