Variable Star (39 page)

We are this season’s people
.

We are all the people there are
, this
season
.

If we blow it, it’s blown
.

I was the guy who had been trying to run away from all responsibility. And found just that.

I often wish I could believe in a deity, so I could compliment Him or Her on His or Her sense of humor. And then go for His or Her throat.

“H
ow long
, Sol?” Herb asked.

Solomon winced to hear his own name. “How long what?”

“Blue sky it with me, here. Optimistic assumptions throughout. I just want to get a vague sense of how far away the payoff is.”

“I’m still not understanding you.”

“Assume all goes as well as we can reasonably hope, from here on in. The folks at 44 Boo dig in successfully, and survive with zero fatalities. We make it to Bravo, dig in successfully, and also survive with no further fatalities. Round our numbers off to five hundred for convenience, and assume 44 Boo has twice that population by this point.”

Sol nodded. “All right.”

“The human race now numbers fifteen hundred, total, plus an indeterminate number of frozen ova. It’s in two pieces, forty-odd light-years apart, with no telepathic links. That’s our starting gene pool and situation. We have specs for virtually every piece of proven technology the System had when we left, 44 Boo nearly the same, and we’ll both get better and better at making our own parts, so again let’s simplify, and just say we’ll be able to build new relativistic ships again in a single generation.”

Sol was dubious. “That’s a damn big simplification.”

“On the time scale I’m talking about, it’ll disappear in the noise,” Herb insisted.

“Go on.”

“Here’s what I want to know, and I’ll settle for a very rough approximation: how many centuries will it be, do you suppose, before we have rebuilt and protected our civilization sufficiently so that we can
track down those shit-sucking back-shooting baby-burning vermin and blow up THEIR fucking star
?”

His voice rang in the silence that followed. Standing there tall with a fifth of whiskey in his hand and death in his eyes, he had never looked more like a Viking chieftain.

“How many generations?” Herb continued. “A lot, I know—but roughly how many, do you suppose? How far away were we ourselves from having the power to make stars go nova?”

“I repeat,” Sol began, “I really think we should be careful not—”

“You’re right, sorry,” Herb conceded impatiently “A nova is a natural phenomenon, and we know this probably was not. G2s don’t nova. That is a point worth remembering. So: how far away were we from being able to make stars go boom? How far do you suppose we are
now
from being bright enough to reverse-engineer it, once we start getting some hard data on exactly what was done?”

“It won’t even start to happen in our lifetimes,” Solomon said.

“I
know
that. I’m not talking about me. I’m talking about the human race. It numbers fifteen hundred people, and it has only two tasks. Hide. And hit back. I’d like to try and get a loose sense of how many centuries it’s going to be before there’s likely to be any good news again. My intuitive feeling is, on the order of five hundred years. What’s your guess?”

The idea was breathtaking, heartbreaking. I had vaguely understood that a very long, very hard task lay ahead of me. Until now I had not grasped that it probably lay ahead of my remotest descendants.

Nobody had an answer for him.

I stood up and went to him. “Unhand that bottle.” He passed it over, and I topped up my Irish coffee, which had been down to its last inch, tried it, and it seemed the right concentration for the moment.

“Damn it,” Pat said. “Damn it to all hells at once.
We
managed to evolve beyond war. Why couldn’t
they
?” He shook his fist angrily in the general direction of the hull, and the stars beyond it.

“We didn’t evolve beyond war,” Herb said. “Just beyond violence—and we’ve only been free of that for a whole whopping century and a half. You still know how to shake your fist. There was a trade war going on back in the System last week, remember? The first. Who knows how far it might have gone?”

“Even if that’s true, we were getting
better
,” Pat cried. “Are we really going to have to go back to thinking and acting like the Prophets, and the crazy Terrorist nuts and Cold War nuts before
them
? Just when we were finally starting to grow up?”

There was a truly depressing thought.

I remembered Solomon’s dichotomy of the Thrilled and the Threatened. Was the human race really going to have to spend the next half a millennium or more being as conservative, as paranoid, as utterly pragmatic and cynical and ruthless as Genghis Khan, or Conrad of Conrad?

What is thrilling—if entities that can burst a sun want you dead? Anything besides simple survival itself?

Would any human above the age of six ever again look up at the stars in the night sky in simple wonder?

For that alone, I wanted revenge. Never mind billions of unearned deaths by fire.

I
went
to the Star Chamber, alone. I couldn’t talk any of the others into coming along. Solomon nagged me into taking a sandwich along. Autodocs feed you well but do not fill the stomach, he pointed out. I had to admit that something to soak up all the Irish coffee did seem like a good idea.

The Star Chamber might seem like a pointless waste of cubic, but few aboard the
Sheffield
ever thought so. Sure, the Sim illusion you get with naked eyeballs in that huge spherical room is nowhere near as convincing as what you can get while wearing the rig. How could it be? And there’s only the single illusion.

But you can
share
it.

In conventional Sim, in a tiny cubicle, wearing all the gear, you can have people around you, totally convincing ones…but you never really forget they’re not real. And only partly because the smells are never better than close.

But in the Star Chamber, you could look at the stars in the company of other human beings. Just then, I could not have borne to look at them by myself.

As I’d expected, it was just as heavily in use as the rest of the Sim Suite. I had to wait awhile for a space to become available. An argument was going on behind me as I reached the head of the line. “I
know
G2s can’t go nova, I never
said
it was a nova,” someone kept repeating. “What I
said
was, and is, there could be some equally natural process,
other
than the nova mechanism, by which a star can explode.
Obviously
it would be an exceedingly rare event, I’m not a
fool—
”

It was only when a bystander interrupted, “You play one brilliantly, Citizen,” that I realized the speaker was Robin. My oldest living girlfriend. “We all took your point the first three times you made it,” he went on. “And I imagine my great-grandchildren will be both the first to know whether you’re right or not…and the first to
give
a damn. But right now, and until the day they’re born, could you possibly shut up?”

Some atavistic hindbrain mechanism caused me to consider intervening on her behalf. But I did much prefer the silence the stranger had produced.

Five minutes later it was broken—from inside the Chamber.

At first, all I could tell was that someone was yelling in there, very loud. But as they got him closer to the outer door, his tone and then his words became audible. I don’t think it took any of us on line more than half a second to understand. He was screaming at the top of his lungs, with berserker rage. At the stars.

“—shit-eating piss-drinking pig-fucking goat-sucking maggot-licking baby-raping
well-poisoning
illegitimate spawn of degenerate diseased vermin-vomit”—he was shrieking as they forced him out into the corridor—“I’ll pop your mutant eyeballs with your own—” and at that point Proctor DeMann came trotting past me, touched him gently near the base of the neck, and caught him as he fell. He stood there with the man in his arms, his breathing as slow and measured as if he’d been standing in line with me, and gestured with his chin.

“Next!” he said.

I nodded to him, stepped into the lightlock, waited for the outer door to iris shut, then opened the inner one and entered the Chamber, almost on the heels of the two people who’d ejected the screamer. I stopped and waited for my eyes to adjust, and for the self-appointed bouncers to resume their seats so I could tell which was the empty one. The experience of the room came on like a powerful drug rush.

There was nothing to the Star Chamber, in one sense. A spherical room that was cut into upper and lower hemispheres by a floor filled with sling couches—but seemed not to be because the floor and couch frames were transparent. That was basically it. Until it was powered up.

But then one of the
Sheffield
’s countless servers caused the walls to display the universe.

Not perfectly, as I said. But well enough to fool the subconscious. And the heart.

Not the unrecognizable mess we would have seen out of portholes, if there had been such silly things—but a corrected image, which removed the eye-wrenching distortions and displacements of relativistic Doppler effect. The universe as it actually was out there right now, for anybody who was not racing photons. As we would see it if somehow it were magically possible to instantly shed all our hideous inertia and decelerate to sublight velocity for a few moments. Well, obviously not as it was
right
now; there had to be some lag, and some assumptions made. But close.

It was quiet and still in there, now that the sufferer had been removed. By the time my pupils had finished adjusting, I saw that the room had been reprogrammed as I had expected it would be. Known it would be.

When humans sit together to look at the stars, they look up. It’s way older than rational thought, possibly older than thought. So the Star Chamber was customarily programmed to place whatever part of the universe the Chamber’s inhabitants found most interesting directly overhead. Most of the time, though by no means always, that had meant Immega 714 could be found at galactic high noon.

Today, Peekaboo was directly under our feet, and we were all looking at where Sol had been.

As I had expected, someone had explained to the computer that it could delete Sol from its permanents, now. To have seen it there still blazing in the sky would have been unendurable. I had vaguely wondered if they would attempt some graphic representation of the explosion, but of course they had had better sense. To watch that happening forever in slow motion would have been equally unendurable.

What was there was endurable—but only just. Only just barely. It was shocking, and…neither “pitiful” nor “humbling” even come
close
to touching it, but those are the two closest words I can find. It didn’t matter in the
slightest
that I had fully expected it, that I understood it intellectually and had for all my adult life, that it was old news.

It was simply heartbreaking, mind-numbing, soul-chilling, to see, with my own eyes, what an incredibly tiny, insignificant hole the removal of Sol left in the fabric of the Galaxy.

If I had not known exactly where to look, and been thoroughly familiar with that particular degree of the sky I’d have missed it. Anyone would have.

A
s I
stared, mesmerized, it came to me for no reason at all that the very first cinematic work to take starflight seriously had been titled
Star Wars
. The irony was mind-melting.

I thought I felt a great disturbance in The Force—as if millions of voices had cried out as one, and then were silent
.

Millions, you say? Hell, son, suck it up and walk it off! For a second there, I thought you had a
problem
.

Try forty-seven billion.

T
hat was
why I had come here, I realized. I’d had to see it with my own eyes. Among other things, I needed to put my brain more in synch with my mind.

My mind understood all about the universe and its correct scale and mankind’s terrible insignificance in it—intellectually. It always had. But my brain had always seen things differently. To it, the Solar System was practically everything there was, and tiny hypothetical little Brasil Novo was the rest, and in between the two lay nothing but a gap in the map—one
wildly
out of scale. Like a Mercator projection of a globe, it was a false representation of reality that was much more useful than the truth.

Until now.

For humanity, the whole universe right at this moment consisted of nineteen tiny colonies, at least two of them believed to be slowly dying, many of the rest doomed. All of them many many light-years distant from one another, communicating by laser or radio. Even if any of them should survive this, it would take us many decades, maybe centuries, merely to finish hearing what each of them would have to say about this shared catastrophe, when they found out, and as long again after that before we could possibly hope to hear a word of response from anyone to anything we might say.

To my personal brain, the whole universe now consisted of the
Sheffield
, and emptiness. Bravo was a fantasy.

To my mind, the whole universe consisted of Bravo. The
Sheffield
was now just an antechamber, with a timelock on the door.

But my eyes kept reminding me that neither was true. It was good to be reminded.

Because sitting in a chair spoils the illusion somewhat, the Star Chamber restores it and reinforces it by always
drifting
slightly, while keeping the focal star overhead. It works quite well. The universe as it actually is blazed all around me, and I floated in it, so convincingly I felt the first faint symptoms of psychosomatic dropsickness.

But it no longer held the beauty, the majesty, the grandeur, the glory that it had always held for me before.

For no reason I could name, my mind leaped back more than six years to the night of my prom. Jinny and I orbiting each other like halves of a binary star. Someone singing, “
It would not be so lonely to die if I knew/I had died on the way to the stars—
”