Variable Star (30 page)

More time was nearly wasted on the contentious question of just where on exactly which continent Saudade should be founded. It was a big planet. Almost none of us had an opinion, but the few who did were married to them. Fortunately before it got out of hand, Merril pointed out to us that the reason most of us had no opinion was that none of us was entitled to one. It was not yet possible to state with certainty where the best site for a colony might be: we simply didn’t know enough yet. Robot probes were good, but they weren’t
that
good. We would simply have to wait until we approached the Peekaboo System and could take a closer look for ourselves.

We did more than just pick names that night. Some sensible suggestions were made. Survivor Gerald Knave, for example, proposed we establish a prize of some kind for Most Constructive Complaint of the Month. Sol Short broke in to suggest we establish some sort of penalty for the
least
constructive, but Merril ruled him out of order and made it stick.

The most popular speaker of the evening was clearly the Zog. He spoke on what it was now believed our new home would be
like
, the local conditions we expected to find, some of the flora and fauna we knew about—not in any great detail, really: just enough to give a
sense
of the place. More than a few of us were still as ill-informed as I had once been, and all were spellbound by his descriptions. He made it sound exciting, enticing, mysterious. A steamy jungle planet, shrouded in mists, teeming with life as exotic as if it had been made up to entertain a child at bedtime. His description of the hoop snakes, which bit their own tails, curled up into the shape of a wheel, and then by deforming their belly muscles were able to roll along the trails carved through the jungle by the snipper beasts, had everyone chuckling. Then his straight-faced explication of the propulsive method used by the rocket slugs caused such a shipwide convulsion of laughter Merril had a hard time restoring order. For months thereafter, the words “green mist” had the power to make us crack up. I remember thinking at the time that it was the first time the entire colony had laughed together about something, and that I hoped it wouldn’t be the last.

Zog even managed—don’t ask me how—to make the ever-present mortal danger of fire we would face and even the threat of Hungry Ghosts seem like only bedtime-story monsters, thrilling but not truly terrifying. I think if you took a poll, most people would agree with me that Bravo Colony’s history as a real rather than merely potential entity begins with the moment Kamal Zogby began to speak that night. Before that we were a big can full of smelly strangers. When he was done we knew that we were a family, and one that was going to create an entire world from scratch together one day, in an environment strikingly like the one in which humans had first evolved back on Terra, and that it was going to be an adventure. Everything we did would be legend for ten thousand years: the first legends of our planet.

There were a couple of obligatory anticlimax speeches and announcements, and then Merril closed the meeting precisely when she had said she was going to, at 2300
Sheffield
time.

S
hip’s time
, that is. By that point in our voyage, six months out, we were already beginning to use Dr. Einstein’s Clock instead of Sol. Lorentz contraction had set in, and we were aging just measurably slower than the people we had left behind.

How much slower? Not a lot—yet. At the instant when those of us in the
Sheffield
passed the six-month mark of the trip, residents of the Solar System were only about seventeen and a half hours older than we were.

But it would get steadily worse as our velocity mounted up. And constant boost mounts up
fast
.

At the one-year mark, the differential would be about seven days and seven hours.

At two years, it would be more than fifty-eight days.

By the five-year mark, the divergence of our clocks and mankind’s would surge up to almost three years. We would be traveling at more than 0.938c.

And when I had been traveling for ten years, and was twenty-eight years old, more than
forty-five years
would have elapsed on Terra. Behind me Jinny would be closing in on sixty-four.

And receding at 99.794 percent of the speed of light.

Then we would flip over and do the whole thing in reverse. And assuming we got it right, and made orbit around Brasil Novo as planned, we Peekaboobs would be twenty years older, and Solarians would be something like eighty-five years older. Jinny would be one hundred and three, and probably wouldn’t look a day over eighty.

Time has always struck me as one of the Allegedly Intelligent Designer’s ideas that was never properly beta-tested before its implementation.

I know: they say it serves to keep everything from happening at once. But what would be so bad about that? You’d get to see both the Big Bang, if there really was one, and the Heat Death, if there’s going to be one. Either way at either end, you’d
know
. That and everything else knowable. You’d have what Adam and Eve got cheated out of, what they
thought
they were bargaining for. Gnosis.

So would everybody. No more bullshit.

Okay, so it would lack suspense. But it wouldn’t lack surprise.
Everything
would be a total surprise, always.

I have a great career ahead as a consultant in the thriving field of universe design, Sol once told me. I told him he should hire me: some experts said he and his fellow Relativists generated mini-universes like soap bubbles every working day. He said the moment he got a complaint from one of them, I was the guy he would hire to do the renovation.

I
don’t
care what Dr. Einstein says: my own clock seemed to
speed up
as the days went by. Those first few hours after leaving orbit took forever to pass. The first few days went by at a glacial pace. Then for weeks, every minute of every day brought new information, new people, new situations, new problems, new mistakes, new things to learn and unlearn. After a few months, of course, it began to slack off. At six months, I had a fair idea of where to find most of the good stuff and how to avoid most of the bad stuff, and the days started to slide by while I wasn’t paying close attention, and events began to sort of lurch forward in quanta rather than unfold in a smooth flow.

Things did move forward, though. By the end of the first year, I was on my sixth girlfriend of the voyage.

I
’ve already
mentioned the first one, twice, but you probably didn’t notice her go by. Robin Feeney was the female lead in the Doc Simon play I took Kathy to see, on our first and last date—the actress whose performance I was championing just before everything went to hell. When Robin spoke up at that first Town Meeting, in support of the shorthand name Bravo, I was just out of frame beside her, holding her hand and smiling encouragingly. I’m the one who said “Bravo!” first when she was done. It got me soundly kissed about two minutes after the meeting ended.

And that, I’m sorry to admit, is very damn nearly all there is to say about that relationship. That kiss may have been the high point.

If my life were a play Robin would have had to be a pivotal character, vivid and vibrant, the source of several life-changing insights, and utterer of at least one or two lines that would come back to haunt me in the third act. It was a role she was perfectly cast for, too, one she could play the hell out of. Unfortunately she had no one to write it for her—and no skill at improv. Onstage, she was vivid and vibrant. Offstage, she was usually thinking about how to be thought vivid and vibrant the next time she was onstage.

I sound like I’m implying that she was more self-centered than I, which is both unfair and untrue. In all honesty, Robin’s principal attraction for me was that she was a female mammal with a body temperature of thirty-seven degrees who was willing to share my company in a social context. I certainly didn’t think of it in those terms then, of course, but looking back on it I can see the most powerful emotion I felt throughout was probably relief at finally being able to get Dr. Amy off my case.

We couldn’t even manage a meet-cute. She came up to me after a set at the Horn, to ask the name of the piece Kathy and I had just played. “Shaping the Curve,” it was: a soprano-piano duet by a twenty-first-century composer named Colin MacDonald. I said if she gave me her address I would mail her MacDonald’s own recording, and I did, and after a couple of days of increasingly chatty mail we finally made a date. That was all there was to it.

Herb says a relationship that begins without a good anecdote has no future. He may be right. Jinny and I met online at the campus bookstore, the first week of class. She asked if I had a battery wafer she could borrow, and I did. Yawn. And look how
that
turned out.

For our first date Robin and I picked a common choice: we shared Sim. And once there, the simulation we agreed on was again one of the most common options: background sharing. I showed her typical scenes of life on Ganymede, some of the places and activities that had once mattered to me. She walked me through comparable scenes of life in The Wheel, one of the smaller O’Neills, where she had been born. In my opinion it’s also one of the goofier ones, an odd combination of mystical and uptight. They believe in the anthropic principle, and live communally and take entheogens, but nobody ever leaves a surface unpolished or an item out of place. I didn’t express this opinion, and in return Robin was far too polite to tell me that Ganymede struck her as materialistic and sloppy. Our truth level never did improve much.

I did notice that she was a different person when we were in The (simulated) Wheel, one I think I maybe would have liked better. But she didn’t.

If I want to, or need to, I can reach back into my mental file storage and pull out long stretches of footage representing just about all the major periods and significant people of my life—usually in ultradefinition video with supersaturated color, and full spectrum audio with enhanced treble and bass. In the drawers marked “Dad” and “Jinny” there are extended sequences in true 3-D, complete with textured smells, and sometimes even tastes. Sadly such mental files are like analog recordings rather than digital, in that they decay slightly with each playback. At the same time, paradoxically, some of the earliest memories are the most detailed and evocative.

But when I try and retrieve memorable scenes from my relationship with Robin, what I get is a series of disjointed dim still images, like old photographs, that occasionally animate for a few seconds, with snippets of soundtrack that often fail to match the action.

There don’t seem to be any inconsequential relationships in drama. I guess they don’t have the time. We had
plenty
of time. If we’d been a play ourselves, and unsubsidized, we’d have closed in a week. As it was we managed to keep the house lit for months by giving away comp tickets to each other and pretending not to notice the canned applause. But the reviews were never worth clipping.

The upside, of course, is that in the end
we
were able to disengage without doing any important damage to one another. We carried on as though we had, of course, for the drama that was in it. But we gave it up soon, and with secret relief on both sides. On mine, anyway.

About a week later, as I was wandering around in a daze thinking,
Well, that wasn’t as horrible as it could have been
, I had a meet-cute with Diane Levy. She did not notice me sit down next to her at dinner, tried to turn around and grab the sugar from the table behind us, and coldcocked me with her elbow.
Or was it?
I thought, and woke to find her large liquid eyes as close as one might expect to find those of a lover. Four hours later, she was one. To my complete astonishment, I had made her a thankfully unnoticed gift of my virginity.

I lay beside her gasping for air, and grateful for the excuse. What would I say to her, now? My brain settled on something or other just as my lungs returned to active duty; I opened my eyes and opened my mouth…and discovered Diane was not at all interested in any of
those
organs.

A while later, floating on a rich postcoital sea of relief and pride and satisfaction and regret, I found the perfect words with which to let her down easy. I would simply explain, tell my story truthfully, help her see that I was damaged goods, too scarred by a tragic love to ever love again. If she then chose to take up the challenge to pursue a relationship, my conscience would be clear. (Somebody said the gray component of semen is draining brain cells. It may well be so.)

No sense dragging it out; I opened my eyes to begin her disappointment as gently as I could. And found myself alone.

F
or the
next three days my calls reached only voicemail; my text messages went unanswered. The
Sheffield
resolutely refused to supply me with any useful data, not location of quarters, usual whereabouts, names of friends, or biographical information. The third time I tried to wheedle it, the ship threatened to rat me out to Dr. Amy if I asked again.

By that point I knew the truth. This was love.

The real thing—not the pathetic charade Jinny and I had mugged our way through, but the love of the ages, the true mystical union of two souls. I knew things about Diane that she didn’t know herself, and she was going to explain me to myself, and I was absolutely certain that if she would only give me thirteen words I could make her see it all as clearly as I did. I had it down to thirteen words, so good I felt they’d have done the job even as flatscreen text—and I couldn’t get a single one of them before her eyes.

The first night I just moaned a lot. The second, I raged and wept and made myself a stinking nuisance to my roommates. Balvovatz finally took it on himself to drink me under the table, and laid me out on my bunk. The third night, I went to the Horn, and laid a drunken monologue on Kathy that would damage our friendship for months to come. At the time, she limited her remarks to a polite hope that things would work out well for me, and a slap with so much wrist to it that a proctor was halfway to the table before I could wave him off.