Variable Star (37 page)

I must have gaped at him. “Don’t be silly. The sun can’t explode! Gs don’t go nova. They don’t have the materials. It simply isn’t—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “I know that.”

“But—then—I—what are you saying? Did a, did a black hole, or a neutron star, or a, a, some extrasolar—but that’s
silly
! It would have been detected, we’d have known about it
long
before it got to…” I trailed off, confounded.

“I’m telling you Sol exploded. I know it can’t happen. It did anyway.”

“
What
?”

“I’m telling you everyone we left behind us is dead. Clear out to the Oort Cloud by now. All that’s left in the universe of the human race is nineteen colonies. Excuse me, twenty; I was forgetting the
New Frontiers
.”

By now the literal meaning of his words, at least, had reached me. “You’re serious. You
can’t
be serious.
The sun blew up?
”

He could shrug with just his face. “The one we used to use, yeah.”

“Bullshit. How—how can that possibly be? It has to be the most studied star in the universe! How could they conceivably fail to notice an instability so—” I was distracted by a pulsing in my peripheral vision, took my eyes from his, and saw that my panel light was now bright ruby red, and blinking.

Sol said, “I see only two possibilities. First, it could be there is some fundamental and monumental mistake in our understanding of stellar processes. A true scientist
never
says, ‘That cannot have happened.’ The most he can say is, ‘This is the first instance of that I have observed, and I cannot account for it.’” He let go of my hands, and spread his. “Maybe G2s
do
explode sometimes. This one did.”

“Sol, we’ve been looking closely at the stars for half a fucking millennium—”

He nodded. “And it is perfectly possible that G2s explode at a rate of one a millennium or less. That may turn out to be the clue that leads to an explanation one day.”

“What does Matty say?”

He pointed farther down the row of autodoc capsules. “He’s over there. Sedated.”

“Prophet!”

“He said he’s been half expecting it for six years. Something about observations he made as we were leaving the System, that nobody would have believed without backup, and nobody else was in a position to repeat.”

“That’s what’s been chewing his guts?”

“It’d chew mine.”

My mind rejected Matty’s problem. I could tell it was going to take a lot of time to imagine what it must have been like to have known about this, for years, and been unable to do anything about it. I was busy now.

“You said two possibilities. What’s the other one?”

His face became as perfectly expressionless as Dr. Amy’s should have been. Except the eyes, they looked as haunted as hers. “Just before Hal disarmed him and put him out, the last thing Matty was screaming was, ‘The paradox is fucking resolved, Enrico! I told you so!’”

“What?”

His meaning slowly percolated in.

Enrico Fermi asked,
Where is everybody?

If intelligent life can arise once, it must arise more than once. There must be other star-going civilizations, lots of them. Where are they all?

Answer: maybe laying up in the tall bushes. Behind cover, wearing camo gear and face paint. Slowly and methodically quartering the battlefield through sniperscopes. Looking for game big enough to be tasty, but stupid enough to step out on the plain and start yelling, “Yoo hoo! Anybody out there?” Every millennium or so, one gets lucky.

I rejected the question, as I had Matty’s torment. The
emotional
impact was just beginning to arrive, then. To start arriving.

It started to sink in that everyone I knew who wasn’t aboard this ship was dead. Irretrievably, beyond any resuscitation, even if anyone were left to resuscitate them.
Everybody
, from Terra to Pluto. Everyone from the Secretary General of the System down to whoever ranked lowest in Coventry—hell, down to the last
virus
. Dead and already cremated. Tens of billions of human beings. Martians. Venerian dragons. All animals of all planets, cooked. All birds, baked in a pie. All fish, fried. Uncountable lower life-forms gone extinct ahead of schedule.

Lucky humanity. The cockroach did not outlive it after all. We had none aboard.

I started to ask how we even knew what had happened, when death must have arrived out of the sky before any possible warning could be given or received. But before I got the question completed, I knew the answer.

Two of the System halves of the
Sheffield
’s three telepath pairs had, for obvious reasons, been well paid to locate themselves equidistantly around Terra. One of them, Herb’s sister, must have chanced to be on the nightside of Terra. Perhaps with several minutes of useless warning, before the wave of superheated steam arrived at well below lightspeed—

I glanced down. There were three lights on the panel, now, all ruby red, all flashing.

And the third System twin, I recalled, had lived at the north pole of Ganymede, which could easily have been in the blast shadow of Jupiter. I found myself trying to picture what Jupiter must have looked like from behind as she was being destroyed by her bigger sister. The nature of the cataclysm must have been as unmistakable as it was inconceivable.

And the precise relative timing of the two telepathic reports would have nailed it down.

At
that
point it started to sink in that everyone I
cared about
who was not aboard this ship was dead. Friends, relatives, teachers, colleagues, acquaintances, people I’d always intended to look up one day—

The ruby lights were slightly out of synch. The rhythmic interplay was very interesting. It gave me an idea. I wished I had a sax with me. I looked up at Solomon, with the vague intention of asking him to fetch me one, and the moment I saw his face, the final punch arrived. The others had all been solid, bare-knuckled lefts, but this was the big right hand, square in the heart.

Jinny was dead
.

Not “dead to me.” Not hypothetically dead, at some future time. Dead.

The moment I’d stepped aboard a relativistic starship without her, I had known and accepted that I would now probably outlive Jinny by many years. When I arrived at Brasil Novo, still just on the sunny side of forty, ninety years would have elapsed on Terra, and Jinny would be—

Absurdly, my brain actually did the math.

—
ash
,
seventy-nine years cold
.

If she had taken me up on my offer—my plea—and come aboard with me, to homestead in the stars…she’d have lived.

I discovered that Solomon was holding my head against his chest. I hadn’t even noticed him approach. I pulled back, found his eyes, and smiled broadly.

Doing Richie, I said, “I hate to say atojiso, Jinny, but I fuckin’ atojiso.”

But I couldn’t hear a word I was saying. Some asshole was playing a tenor too loud. Probably Philip Glass’s first piece: the same note endlessly repeated.
Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!
I didn’t
give
a fucking fly how many measures he waited before he varied it, and I tried to ask Sol to durn it town. But Sol’s eyes were widening. Kept widening until they covered his whole face and met around the back. Pupils turned yellow, became big yolks, and not very funny ones, either. Felt him laying me back down in the autodoc. Splendid old James Raymond song. “
Lay me down in the river, and wash my self away. Break me down like sand from a stone. Maybe I’ll be whole again one day.
” Lay me down…

The lid of the autocoffin closed over me, and washed my self away.

W
hen I did emerge from the Infirmary, nothing had changed, and everything was different.

I
had
once read a book, a whole book, about what it was like to be in New York City during the week following the 2001 terrorist attack. So none of the things I saw surprised me. I’d just never expected to see them with my own eyes. Not everywhere I looked.

I suppose by definition there had never been a more emotionally traumatized bunch of people in history before. We were the first sons and daughters of Terra, grandchildren of Sol, who had ever
literally
lost everything but what we were carrying. Our ancestral womb was gone.
All
our home planets were gone. Our civilization was gone. Our
star
was gone.

There was no precedent for processing something like that. No appropriate ritual. No traditional therapy.

Not one human religion had ever even contemplated such a turn of events—not even the old, psychotically bloodthirsty ones we’d had to eliminate. It upstaged Ragnarok, dwarfed Armageddon, mocked Apocalypse, overshadowed the Qiyamah, outdid the Kali Yuga, ruined the prophecy of Maitreya Buddha.

The center of the universe appeared to be somewhere
else
. The possibility had occurred to hardly anyone, ever.

By the time my ’doc decanted me for the second time, forty-seven of my fellow colonists had committed suicide, by an assortment of means.

That there were so few as that is a testament to the professional skills of Dr. Amy and her staff…and I think in equal measure a testament to the regard in which she personally was held on board the
Sheffield
. Several people told me later they had wanted badly to leave, but decided in the end that they could not disappoint her that way.

But I think it’s fair to say that better than half of us still warm were basket cases. Walking wounded. On my way back down from the Infirmary to Rup-Tooey, at least four times I passed adults who were just sitting on the deck, weeping. Very few people I encountered acknowledged me, or even seemed to see me. Nobody smiled or spoke. I went by a room whose door was frozen open; its interior showed extensive fire damage. There was a long line outside the Sim chamber, and hardly anyone on it was talking while they waited. There was an equally long line outside the ship’s nondenominational chapel—but as I passed within fifty meters of it, a fistfight apparently broke out inside. I kept going, and a few seconds later had to lunge out of the way of Proctors DeMann and Jim Roberts to avoid being trampled. I did not go in The Better ‘Ole, one of the two free taverns, but passed near enough to it to note that it too was packed, with a silent and morose crowd. The only thing audible was soft music. As I went by, Second Officer Silver lurched out into the corridor and began vomiting. It was not uncommon to see crew in colonists’ country, but they tended to do their drinking among themselves. It was the first time I could ever recall seeing any officer drunk, and I realized that must have been a policy of Captain Bean’s. Which nobody gave a damn about anymore.

I
n Rup-Tooey
I found Herb, Pat, and Solomon, sitting around and bullshitting like students after curfew, though it was midafternoon. The moment I laid eyes on Solomon, it came into my mind that none of us went probably ever going to be able to bear to call him by anything but his full first name, ever again. Or at least for years to come.

He looked up and nodded as I came in. “Hey, Joel. How are you feeling?”

“Swell,” I said. “You okay, Herb?”

“No,” he said, with no more affect than if I’d asked him if he were left-handed.

“You going to be?”

“Yes,” he said the same way.

I believed him both times. We nodded at each other. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, but knew he would hate it. It can be frustrating to care about people who hate to be touched, sometimes.

Solomon said, “I was such a big help the first time you woke up, I thought this time I’d leave you alone.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, and squeezed. He reached up and squeezed my hand back.

“You want coffee?” Pat asked. “Or ethanol?”

“Yes.”

Herb nodded, got up, and made me an Irish coffee. I pulled my desk chair over to join the group and sat. “Somebody bring me up-to-date on what’s happened while I was out. Do we
know
anything, yet?”

“Everyone in the Solar System is dead,” Herb said over his shoulder. “All other information follows at lightspeed. Sorry.”

I wished I had asked anything else. “We’re sure it wasn’t just Ter—”

“Gene’s twin sister Terry was behind Jupiter. She had time to know what she was seeing. Poor woman. The times match. Doom arrived from Solward at lightspeed. QED.”

I’d forgotten I had already worked that out, back in the autodoc. Another ill-considered question, in any event.

Solomon said, “The specks of data we do have indicate that conversion of Sol’s mass to energy was at least ninety percent efficient, and could have been perfect.”

If there is an intelligent response to that statement, none of us found it.

“Is there a consensus guess what went wrong, even?” I tried finally. The smell of fresh coffee filled the room.

Solomon snorted. “First, we have to settle how many angels can dance their way into a pinhead.”

“Solomon—” Pat began.

Herb said, “He’s saying it’s a religious question.”

Pat looked scandalized.

“Exactly,” Solomon agreed. “Everybody is going to end up with a firm opinion, based on intuition, but nobody’s going to be able to defend his. The first scraps of actual hard data aren’t going to catch us for years to come. And I doubt they’ll settle anything. I don’t think the question will be answerable in my lifetime. Except on faith.”

“I just hate to even use the word ‘religion’ in this context,” Pat said. “It makes my skin crawl.”

“Occam’s Razor,” Herb said, bringing me my Irish coffee. He’d made one for himself as well.

“What?” Pat asked.

“We forgot Occam’s Razor,” Herb said.

“I don’t follow.” I could see that Solomon did.