Variable Star (32 page)

Devising a solution wasn’t all that hard. Implementing it was. Kathy and I dug as deep a hole as we could, about a meter, and laid Platt in it. Then we stood on either side and covered the corpse over completely, me with broken glass and busted springs, she with curry powder and a spray bottle of lion urine. (Chemically simulated, of course. Zog had fetched a
lot
of odd things along from Sol.) Then we replaced
all
the dirt we’d dug up, leaving a mound of loose earth, but one that was unlikely to be disturbed.

The first problem I had with implementation of this simple solution should be obvious. Nowadays it takes something close to total destruction of the brain to beat the autodocs. I’ve told you the damage was done by a torch, and you know where the brain is generally kept: work it out. The smell alone was memorable.

My second problem was less gruesome, but bothered me for a longer time. When we were done with our shoveling, Kathy and I stood there for a few moments, catching our breath and thinking deep thoughts. And then as I was about to turn and walk away, she said, “Shouldn’t we say something?” Phrased that way, it meant, “Shouldn’t
you
say something?”

And of course I was in charge. And of course I should say something; it didn’t seem right to just plant the man and go. But of course I had absolutely no idea what kind of words the deceased would have wanted, did not even know if he subscribed to one of the religions humane enough to be permitted under the Covenant or not. If nobody knew what his first initial stood for, there was no point posting a query about his metaphysics on the ship bulletin board. I had no all-purpose nondenominational homilies on tap; I had experienced only one death, and hadn’t heard a word anyone had said at the funeral.

I stood there for a long time feeling inadequate, stymied by the question, hating Kathy for raising it. She waited. And finally I heard myself say, “Let the universe take note of this man’s passing. Somebody should. He was one of the bravest adventurers our species ever produced: he died on the way to the stars.” That night instead of sleeping I thought of better things I might have said, and said them in my head to a man I had never known.

The Zog told me I’d done well when he returned. He’d had a different spot in mind for the ship’s cemetery, but was fine with the one I’d picked. I warmed to his praise. But it took me a while to stop resenting Kathy for asking that question.

T
hird year
, third year…let me scan my diary.

The social bombshell of that year, beyond question, was the surprise wedding of Sol Short and Hideo Itokawa.

If the nuptials of the Zog and Merril the year before had startled everyone, this one stunned us all speechless. The Zogby-Grossman match had paired two strong people, both administrators, one quiet and the other loud. Sol and Hideo were two
extremely
powerful minds, both mavericks, one loud enough to dominate any cubic he entered and kind and hilarious enough to get away with it, and the other so impossibly quiet and still that the eye tended to subtract him. I hadn’t even realized Buddhist priests were allowed to marry.

I don’t believe anyone aboard opposed the match, once we thought about it. But to do that you had to first imagine it, and that took us a while.

I found out when Tenzin Itokawa asked me to play at the wedding. I don’t remember what I said.

The wedding feast was a memorable blast, and there is nothing in the world duller than hearing the details of someone else’s blast memories, unless you were at the same blast, so I won’t recount any.

That was the kind of year it was. The most exciting event in it was not really worth recounting, to anyone who was not conceived that night.

Y
ear Four
would probably have been downright dull if it hadn’t been for the Happy Disaster.

Three months into the year, the Sim Deck went down.

And stayed down, for weeks. The
Sheffield
’s diagnostic systems furnished an explanation, and the six people aboard capable of understanding it all agreed that it sounded reasonable to them, but I never comprehended a word of it, and will not reproduce it here.

By that point, most of us were making fairly heavy use of Sim, for recreation and for emotional therapy and for a way to fight the growing monotony and claustrophobia of life in a great big can. If Dr. Amy or one of the other three Healers decided you were using it too much, they could limit your access, and by that third year they were starting to do so often enough that it became a subject of jokes, unhappy ones.

When the Sim hardware first failed, I worried for colony morale. It doesn’t matter how huge it is: any space becomes confining if you absolutely can’t escape it. Without the escape valve of assisted fantasy, I was afraid the ship would start to shrink on us. A few folks did panic, at first, and the general tension spiked.

It didn’t help when Matty Jaymes had a public flameout. He had no regular partner, and Sim use was not monitored by the Healers like drug intake, so no one had really noticed as, over the years, Matty had quietly turned into a
hardcore
Sim addict. But when he was forced into withdrawal, he switched instantly to a hardcore drunk, and that became very ugly very fast. Dr. Amy did all she could, but even sober he was unmanageable, and finally she was forced to put him in his quarters: his door stopped opening for him. It was only the second time in her career that she’d ever suspended anyone’s Covenant rights, and it devastated her. And upset the rest of us. Until then he had been much liked and highly respected; his collapse left everybody on edge.

But then word went around there would be an unscheduled ETM, and when we all logged in, it was Dr. Amy leading the Town Meeting. That was surprising in itself, but what she proceeded to do was probably the last thing any of us would ever have expected.

She yelled at us.

She didn’t say a whole lot. She never used profanity, obscenity, or blasphemy. But what she did say was as memorable as an unexpected enema.

“If you cannot function without sucking on a holographic fantasy teat that does all your imagining for you every day of your life, what good will you be to Colônia Brasil Novo?

“It usually takes a
life-and-death
crisis to show you what you’re made of, and what your neighbors are made of. Thank whatever powers you believe in that all it will cost
you
is a few weeks without your favorite soap operas.

“The overwhelming majority of your primitive ignorant ancestors managed to get through their lives without 3D-5S Simulation somehow. It must be possible, don’t you think? Children in an empty playroom can amuse themselves, for Covenant’s sake.

“Some say anyone who goes to the stars is a loser, running away from reality. I have never believed that of anyone aboard this ship. I’d rather not start.”

Those were some of the highlights.

I guess she summed it up in her literal last word, and in the force of the exasperation with which she delivered it:

“
Cope
.”

And do you know, later on when the dust settled, it turned out the Sim systems failure had been a
good
thing, after all—maybe even one of the luckiest things that had happened to us so far. Forced to amuse and inspire ourselves, we rose to the challenge. Social groupings of all kinds sprang up throughout the colony. Get enough people talking long enough and sooner or later someone will say something interesting or useful. Happy meetings occurred. Good conversations got held. With more time to read, we spent more thought on what might be good to read, and began to learn things. Creativity that begins with off-hours amusement soon accidentally spills over into work, and into social interaction. Weddings and less formal partnerships of all kinds spiked to record levels. The theater group acquired competition, and rose to the challenge. The ship’s daycare program finally got serious—none too soon. Shipwide drug intake went
down
.

And when the system finally came back up, Sim use never did reach its previous level again, let alone exceed it.

Indeed, toward the end of the year I developed a funny suspicion about how well it had all turned out, and queried the
Sheffield
as to whether any previous starships might ever have suffered Sim failure, and discovered an overall benefit. I was absolutely certain it was physically and emotionally impossible for an untrue word to pass the lips of Dr. Amy, but for all I knew any or all of her three colleagues could have conspired to hoodwink us all for our own good. But if that was the case the ship’s AI was in on the gag: it told me only nine previous ships had even carried 5S Sim gear, and none had ever experienced more than momentary failures, save for the one that had blown up.

Clever con or sheer luck—either way it was damned good luck. The colony was emotionally healthier than it had ever been as it entered its fifth year of star travel, gaining confidence in its own ability to cope. That proved useful when disaster struck.

W
hat goes
on in the Power Room of a relativistic starship like the
Sheffield
?

Maybe God knows, if She exists. The Relativists themselves aren’t at all sure.

I remember I was sitting at a table at the Horn once with Herb and all five off-duty Relativists, everyone but Kindred—I can’t recall what led them all to be awake at once—and Herb asked what it was like.

I’d never have had the hairs to ask, myself, and there was a silence that lasted nearly ten seconds. Then Dugald Beader shifted his pipe in his mouth and said, “It’s like staring at a random-visuals screensaver until you can predict what it’s going to do in the next second.”

George R said, “It’s like playing jai alai with fifty different opponents at once, in zero gravity, blindfolded.”

London, her head on his shoulder, said, “It’s like being inside a spherical mirror, in free fall, and remembering at all times where the door is.”

Sol grinned. “It’s like running full tilt across a tightrope in spike heels with your eyes closed while cooking an omelette with a blowtorch,” he said, and turned to his husband. “Your turn, Spice. ‘It’s like…’”

“…not being…” Hideo said.

“Aw, come on,” Sol said. “I declare that answer void.”

Hideo blinked at him, and then nodded. “Very well. It is for me like an archery exercise, in which you must first hit the bull’s-eye, then hit that arrow, then hit
that
arrow, and the next, continuing until you can retrieve all your arrows with a single tug, without taking a step forward.” He turned to the rest of us. “The secret,” he confided, eyes twinkling, “is to aim.”

Sol hooted with laughter and hugged him. “Much better.”

Dugald took another crack at it. “Sometimes I think of it as looking for a hayseed in a giant needle stack.”

“Oh, Duggie, that’s
good
,” George R said, wincing as he mimed rummaging through needles.

His wife said, “To me it’s always seemed very much like hearing a very complex unfamiliar four-part harmony in the distance, and trying to instantly, intuitively improvise fifth, sixth, and seventh harmonies.”

That one boggled my own mind. Most people have trouble intuiting the
third
harmony.

Nobody else came up with anything better that night. But I later learned someone had asked Peter Kindred, and he’d offered two of his own, “It’s like looking at a Rorschach blot until it means
everything
,” and, “It’s like repairing nothingness.”

None of which tells me anything.

Despite years of friendship with five Relativists, and close friendship with Sol, George R, and London, I don’t know what it looks like inside the Power Room, or even the antechamber; nobody does who hasn’t been inside one. The convention that has become established in film and other forms of fiction is to portray Relativists sitting before banks of instruments with lots of blinking lights, intently studying gauges and readouts, constantly making fine adjustments with levers, dials, wheels, or mice that invariably cause beeping sounds. But no such layout has ever been certified authentic, and as far as I or anyone really knows, it is equally likely that what they do in there is simply sit in meditation in a bare white cubic…a meter off the floor, held aloft by sheer spiritual purity. I have no idea what takes place in a Power Room, and I particularly have never been able to conceptualize what it is like in there at the moment of transition, when one’s shift ends and another’s begins—how that handoff is accomplished.

I am not one of those fools who believe Relativists guard their guild secrets to protect their monopoly. None of the ones I knew had an avaricious bone in their bodies. Avarice would appear incompatible with the mindset that produces a Relativist, or that a Relativist produces—a rare case of fortune bringing immense wealth to people fundamentally indifferent to it. But I have no idea why it is that they
do
discourage specific questions about their daily activities. I simply know it is their right if they choose, and they do. It is purely my own intuition that they do so to
protect
the rest of us from the knowledge, for some reason.

It may equally well be that they simply literally
can’t
explain what they do—that you and I have no referents for the information, nothing in our experience that any words we know could evoke. Maybe I’m like a cat trying to understand exactly how the fish get into those little cans, or a man trying to understand women: unequipped.

For all I know, something happened in that room, every day, all day, that was simply beyond ordinary human understanding. That’s the way I lean, anyway.

The one thing I’m absolutely certain of is that my last chance to ask any of the Relativists I know about such matters is gone for good. I waited too long.

A
nybody who
was aboard can tell you where they were and what they were doing when it happened.

Any society has such events, benchmarks in its shared history. Usually they involve great tragedy. It may be the untimely death of some universally beloved public figure, or a natural disaster of uncommon magnitude; in the old days it was most often a war, and sometimes a plague.