Variable Star (28 page)

“Okay, got it. The farther from the seashore, the more fire danger…but there’s a
lot
of seashore.”

He nodded. “The planet’s axial tilt is only fifteen degrees, as compared to Terra’s twenty-three point four five degrees. So there will be distinct seasons…but less pronounced than on Earth. No freezing winters. No polar ice caps.”

That was good. I hate wearing stanfields—as long underwear is called in Canada, for reasons probably lost to history and certainly unknown to me. A world without snowdrifts was just fine with Joel. And no polar ice meant more of the total surface available to live on; more places to put usable seashore.

“And the day/night cycle—”

That one I could address. “—is nearly identical to Mars. Twenty-four hours, thirty-something minutes. Uh, thirty-seven.”

“Of course, that must be what the Zog has you using on the Upper Deck. Well, the farming is probably going to be even better on Bravo than it is in Zogland.”

“Really?”

He caused images to slideshow on his wall, some still, some moving—and all striking. “As you can see, the place is tectonically quite active. Volcanic mountain ranges. Good thing; it keeps the atmosphere replenished. So volcanic ash fertilizes the land—and the mountains present useful minerals and metals which we reach by blasting a little bit sideways instead of digging way down and hauling it back up. But from a peasant’s point of view, the best part is going to be the weather: probably the most stable climate humans have yet encountered.”

Well, I hadn’t said it in several minutes now “Why is that, Matty?”

“Consider the geography” He smiled. “Or bravography, if you will.”

“
I
won’t, but you go ahead.”

“Thank you. Look at those three major continents. All more or less equatorial. Roughly evenly spaced. Each of them will have a bravographically anchored transportation zone, where jungle trees pump a regular fountain of water into the atmosphere. Ergo, climate patterns will be anchored, too, with weather infinitely more stable and reliable than anyplace in the Solar System.”

I understood what he meant when I saw the planet in 3-D projection. Terra is continually plagued by nerve-racking El Nino events because the committee that designed it (it had to be a committee) inexplicably omitted to place a large jungle in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, to anchor that evaporation zone. Bravo lacked this defect. “And that stable weather forecast will be…gray skies, lots of clouds? Rain in the morning giving way to rain in the afternoon, followed by a high probability of rain all night?”

“In general, yes, around the equator. With more temperate zones to north and south. But the three big continents themselves will be fairly temperate, and covered with boreal forest.”

“A lot of our oldest myths will still work.”

He nodded happily “And some others will become for us historical curiosities, requiring footnotes. On Terra, there tend to be large deserts to the north and south of all the jungle areas, including the Sahara, Kalahari, Gobi, Patagonian, and Sonoran deserts. But Bravo does not seem to have real deserts, probably thanks to its more favorable climate distribution.”

“Okay by me,” I said. “I never met a desert I liked much.”

“Oh, I have!” he said emphatically “I’ll miss them. Splendid places to do astronomy. But by surrendering them, I’ll get to see something unique in their place. I’ve
seen
a desert. I’ve lived in a few. But so far, as far as I know,
nobody
has yet seen a Hungry Ghost with his own personal eyeballs, much less spent time in one.” He sounded gleeful at the prospect.

“A Hungry Ghost?”

“A firestorm the size of a state or province.”

The name sort of explained itself to an extent. One-third gee, and a teeming stable biosphere—the land would be lush with life. The trees must grow to fantastic heights, and sprawl across the sky in the competition for sunlight. But the air they spread through was nearly a third oxygen, fifty percent more than a sensible planet needed…which they themselves were replenishing! Let things get dried out in the stable weather, let the ground cover vegetation and tree droppings crisp up nicely into tinder and kindling, let one of the inevitable sparks occur in a very bad place…

“Tesla’s eyebrows, Matty! It must be all the circles of Hell.”

“Worse, I think.” The bastard was still gleeful. “I’m not saying those were fun, but they all
stayed
put. Once you reported to your Circle and took your assigned spot in the lake of burning pitch, you pretty much knew your address and postal code for the next quadrillion eternities. But Bravo has more sunlight and higher temperatures than Earth, so—”

“—so it’s going to have
serious
winds.”

“Sometimes. And sometimes hurricanes. Primarily in tropical ocean regions. But also in high elevation land plateaus…where forests tend to dry out.”

“Oh, that’s not good!” Now I fully understood the aptness of the name he’d picked. I had all too vivid a mental picture of a firestorm, the size of Central British Columbia, say…that lurched and lunged randomly across the landscape at hurricane speeds, gulping biomass like a drunken sailor on a spree, spewing flames to altitudes previously reached in human experience only by mushroom clouds and weather balloons. Hungry Ghost indeed! Like the Hungry Ghosts I had encountered in my quick surface reading of Tibetan Buddhist mythology: spirits consumed with lust for things that never satisfied, hunger that could not be eased, thirst that nothing could quench. Damned souls condemned to yearn forever, and destroy all they touched, knowing it was pointless. I wondered if a Hungry Ghost typically had an eye, like a hurricane, and how long you’d have to live if you ever found yourself in one. Would it be even theoretically possible to move quickly and correctly enough to
stay
in such an eye, until the Ghost’s terrible Hunger burned itself out?

“But that’s only going to worry certifiably insane explorer types like me, who go looking for danger,” he said with a chuckle. “Farmers who pick their homestead site intelligently, on the other hand, are probably going to be very happy people in Saudade.”

Incongruous image of pigs on the Ag Deck. “Sow what?”

“That will be the name chosen for the first town we’ll settle. You heard it here first.”

“How can you be so sure, this far in advance?”

“Because that’s what I strongly feel it should be, and nobody aboard with a contrary opinion is a bigger bully than me.”

“It would be impolite to argue with my host. Say the name again, and tell me what it means.”

“
Saudade
. ‘Sow,’ like a female hog. ‘Da,’ like the Russian for ‘probably not.’ ‘Day,’ light come an’ me wan’ go home.”

“You can’t possibly know that song.”

“Neither can you, son. And if you do, you ought to know the word ‘
saudade
.’ It’s a Portuguese word, and the heart of the Portuguese music called
fado
. You could say it is as important a word to fado as ‘soul’ is to blues, or ‘cool’ is to jazz. And as difficult to define.”

It came back. “I know that word. I’ve seen it written, anyway, I just had no idea it was pronounced like that. It means…well, sort of…”

“The best I’ve heard it rendered into Basic so far,” Matty said, “is ‘the presence of absence.’”

“The thing you know because it isn’t there.”

He nodded. “Which, when you think about it, is a pretty fair description of what powers this ship.”

“Do you understand the relativistic engine, Matt?”

He smiled. “You flatter me. That’s my point: there is some reason to believe there’s literally nothing there.”

I shrugged. “Big deal. Is nothing sacred?”

He winced politely “I asked George R once, what do you guys actually
do
down there in the Hole? He looked around, leaned close, lowered his voice, and told me the secret. They strap toast onto a cat’s back and toss it in the air.”

And he waited. I
knew
there had to be a gag, and if I didn’t guess what it was, he would win the exchange I had begun by essaying a pun. Well, it served me right. “But how do dat make de ship go, Mr. Interlocutor,” I asked ritually, conceding defeat.

“They butter the toast, you see.”

Light belatedly dawned. “Ah. Of course. The toast
must
fall butter side down—”

“—but the cat
must
land on its feet.” He spread his hands: QED. “Hence the array spins forever, generating power.”

It was a good gag; I grinned in surrender. “It’s so simple once someone explains it.”

He accepted my sword by saying, “To answer your question seriously, I confess the word that best describes my understanding of relativism is probably saudade.”

“The mystery of the ages,” I said, thinking to agree.

“No,” he said with a sudden seriousness that took me by surprise. “
That
it is not. Not even the mystery of
this
age.”

“Uh… I’ll bite. What
is
the mystery of the ages, this one included?” I said, trying for lightness.

He kept frowning, and had stopped meeting my eyes. “Fermi’s Paradox.”

It took a second. “Oh. ‘Where is everybody?’ you mean.”

He made a single nod. “Nobody even talks about it anymore. We know that life can come to exist in the universe, because it did, once that we know of. We know life can evolve sufficient intelligence to leave its star, because we’ve done it. It is, granted, conceivable that this might occur only once every twelve billion years or more.” He made a face as if he’d bitten into a lemon. “But as for me, I find the creation myth in Genesis considerably more plausible.”

“Didn’t someone settle this back before the Dark Age?” I asked. “Webb? Wrote a book listing forty-nine possible solutions to Fermi’s Paradox—and demolished them one by one, leaving only the fiftieth solution, namely: we’re alone?”

He looked as if he’d chased his lemon with milk. “Webb was an idiot. His analysis presumed that if other life did exist, it could not be more intelligent than him. It was the characteristic flaw of the entire PreCollapse millennium: the assumption of vastly more knowledge than they actually possessed.” He closed his eyes and rubbed them. “Over and over like a recurring flu they developed the imbecile idea that they understood nearly everything, in all but the finest details. They had no slightest idea what lightning was, how it worked. They had absolutely no clue how moisture got farther than about ten meters up a tree—the highest that capillary action can push it. Fifty years after the splitting of the atom, they accidentally noticed for the first time that hurricanes emit gamma rays. There were quite a few large, significant phenomena they could ‘explain,’ often elegantly…over and over again…and had to, because the explanations kept falling apart at the first hard-data-push. Things like the Tunguska Event, gamma ray bursts, why an airplane wing generated lift, what ninety percent of our DNA was doing there…yet they were solemnly convinced they basically understood the universe, except for some details out in the tenth decimal place.

“They somehow managed to persuade themselves that computer models constitute
data
. That very complicated guesses become facts. They made themselves believe they had the power to accurately model, not merely something as inconceivably complex as, say, a single zygote…but a national economy, a weather system, a planetary ecosphere, a multiplanet society—even a universe. They made solemn pronouncements about conditions a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, on the basis of computer models, which they had produced with computers not even bright enough to talk, let alone understand speech. They were unlike all the generations before theirs in several ways, but chiefly in that they had no faintest
clue
how ignorant they were. Previous ages had usually had a pretty good handle on that.”

“Things got worse in that direction soon.”

“Sure. Scientists were claiming godlike knowledge, and couldn’t deliver. It got to where even the average citizen could sense they were bluffing. They could go on for literally days on what happened in the first five minutes of creation, without ever saying a single thing that
meant
anything, did anybody any good. They wouldn’t even
discuss
what happened when you died, let alone how random chance produced life. No wonder the citizens decided to go back to a different kind of omniscience, that came with omnipotence
and
omnibenevolence thrown in at no extra charge. Twentieth-century science
handed
the world over to Nehemia Scudder, on a plate. No wonder some people preferred ‘intelligent design’ to evolution. At least it put intelligence somewhere in the mix. Unfortunately, not much.”

I was getting a little dizzy “I think I lost you around that last curve, Matty. What’s your answer to the mystery? If intelligent life has arisen more than once, in this corner of the cosmos, where
is
everybody?”

He drew in a long slow breath, and held it for long enough to make me think of the breathing routine I still used at the start of meditation. I kept on thinking of it as he exhaled, and his frown melted away and his face smoothed over and his body language relaxed. He fiddled with his remote, and said, “Authorities differ, but for my money, probably the closest thing to intelligent life we’ll find on Bravo is the spit-tooth sloth,” and the wall showed what I hoped was an enlarged image of the ugliest creature I had ever seen. “Admittedly it is difficult to assess intelligence based on observations made from orbit. Once a probe is fairly sure a given life-form is not a serious threat to man, it moves on to other things that might be. But the sloth’s competition is not impressive.”

It seemed clear he was changing the subject, and he had been so helpful and generous with his time, that was fine with me; his reasons were none of my business. We moved on to an interesting discussion of exotic fauna like hoop snakes, snippers, blimps, and the truly disgusting rocket slugs, which dodge predators by expelling feces so violently they shoot into the air and glide great distances. A whole pod of such frightened slugs, Matty said, can apparently fill the air with a ghastly green mist…