Variable Star (40 page)

In my brain, I was no longer on my way to the stars. I was on my way
from
them, to refuge.

With more than twice the distance I had already covered still to go.

I felt and heard my own left foot start tapping spastically on the deck. I needed my hand to make it stop. For some reason that made me want to cry.

Someone ahead of me and to my left stood up and cleared his throat.

There was a rumble of annoyance, and a woman behind me muttered, “Whatever it is, keep it to yourself.”

But then he said, “I apologize for disturbing your
wa
,” and there was general relaxation as his voice was recognized. Tenzin Hideo Itokawa was well liked, even by those few who had problems with Buddhism—possibly in part because in over six years I had not heard him use the word once. He was also one of the gentlest and kindest souls aboard, and what he did best of all was listen. You make remarkably few enemies that way. And finally, of course, everybody knew that he kept the most popular man aboard, his partner Solomon Short, extremely happy. And not just because Sol kept mentioning it.

I’m not sure anyone else could have said what he was about to say, and finished saying it, before being hounded out of the room. So it’s good it was him.

People face in any direction they like in the Star Chamber, but now nearly all of us turned our seats around to face Hideo, near the center of the room.

“I wish to tell you all something,” he said, when stillness returned. As always, he spoke slightly slower than another would have, and slightly softer. It made you listen closer, and think more about what you heard. “I need to tell you. You need to hear me. But it will be hard to hear.
Shikataga-nai
. It cannot be helped. For this, too, I apologize to you.”

“You go on and say whatever you got to, Hideo-san honey,” said the woman behind me.

He bowed to her. “Thank you, Mary.”

His next seven words were spoken the slowest yet. Two slow pairs and a slow triplet, with pauses two or three full seconds long between them. Maximum emphasis and earnestness.

“The time…for fear…is
past
, now.”

Everybody spoke at once. Not all were angry, but everybody spoke at once. Have you been in an enclosed hemisphere when everybody spoke at once—a dome, perhaps? People far away sound louder than the ones beside you. It’s so weird, silence usually resumes quickly, and it did now. Then two or three tried to speak at once, and none would yield, so someone told them to all shut the fuck up, and the noise level started to go right back up again—

“
PLEASE!
” the loudest voice I had ever heard bellowed.

Instant silence.

Even when I was sure, it was hard to believe that much sound had come out of quiet little Hideo. He took his time replacing the air it had cost, in a long slow perfectly controlled inhalation. It was a good example. I began measuring my own breath.

“I promise I will hear what each of you wants to say,” he said. “Until you are done speaking. Please wait until
I
am done speaking first. It may be that my meaning will require more than a single sentence to fully express.”

He had the floor back.

“Some of you might become angry if I said Sol may have died of natural causes, so I will not say that. We all know that is theoretically possible, if most unlikely. But it is unsatisfying to think about. It leaves us nothing to do but mourn our colossal bad fortune.

“I believe what happened was
done
. I believe one day we will meet those who did it. We will speak with them. And for all we can know now, perhaps we may choose to prune them from the Galaxy. If we can acquire such power.”

The crowd was solidly with him again now.

Slowly, he shook his head from side to side. “But I do not believe this will happen in my lifetime, or that of the youngest infant in the
Sheffield
. I suspect it will not happen in her grandchildren’s lifetime. Everything we learned and built in ten thousand years of painful evolution was insufficient. It will take us many generations just to restore that, if we can.”

Murmurings of dismay, argument.

Again his voice drew power from some unsuspected source, not as loud as his earlier roar, but enough to override the impolite.

“But of this much I am certain: we…will…
have
those generations.”

Silence again.

“I have heard many of you express deep fear that our enemy might even now be hunting the
Sheffield
.”

Pindrop silence.

“This is not rational. If it were true, there would be none to think it.”

“They’re six years behind us,” a deckhand named Hildebrand yelped. “How do we know they’re not hot on our trail?”

“Reason with me, Dan,” Hideo said calmly. “If I build a machine that makes stars explode without warning…is it not certain that I must be able to reach stars other than my own? Had I but the one star, such a machine would have no sane function. Agreed?”

Hildebrand reluctantly grunted agreement.

“If I can travel the stars so easily that I develop reasons to blow some up…can I possibly be constrained by the cosmic speed limit humans must presently obey?”

“What? The speed of light is abso—”

“Name a method of slower-than-light travel by which you could so much as approach our general region of this galactic arm
without ever being detected by the Solar System
.”

Hideo had him there. Fusion, antimatter, ramjet, all were pretty much impossible to miss.

“To have ambushed us so successfully,” Hideo said, “they
must
be superluminal. By orders of magnitude, at the least.”

He paused there. After a few seconds of thought, someone said, “Subluminal, superluminal—what’s your point, Tenzin Itokawa?”

Hideo turned his hands palm upward. “
We
travel at less than
c
. They travel at some very high multiple of
c
. Perhaps an exponential. And we have just agreed that we are clearly visible to anyone looking.”

“What, they didn’t notice us leaving?” said Terri, one of the Healers.

“Perhaps. Perhaps they mistook our nature. Perhaps they don’t care.”

“Beg pardon, Tenzin? Why
wouldn’t
they?”

“It is hard for us to think this,” Hideo said, “but the annihilation of humanity may not have been their purpose in destroying our star. For all we can know now, it might be merely collateral damage which they deemed either insignificant or acceptable. As we accept the deaths of millions of microorganisms living on our skin and in our hair each time we choose to bathe.”

He had silence again. He let it stretch, while the stars drifted slowly past his head.

“There are wise ones,” he said finally, “who say that man cannot endure insignificance on such a scale. That if confronted by a species as far advanced beyond him as he is beyond dogs, his spirit must inevitably break. For an example they point to the original inhabitants of the North American continent on Terra, who so thoroughly internalized a perception of their own inferiority that they became all but extinct within one or two centuries.

“Somehow they miss the counterexample of the original inhabitants of the
South
American continent. Or of the Africans chained and sold by other Africans to the Europeans even then conquering both Americas.”

“Where are you going with this?” Hildebrand demanded. “We know we’re not going to fold up and die.”

When Hideo replied, his raising his volume again startled me, but not as much as his words themselves.

“I have great anger in my heart.”

That made everyone sit up a little straighter.

“I do not wish to. It may help my grandchildren one day, but it is useless to me now…here. And I do not have room for it in my heart. I need all the room for grief.

“The only way to deal with anger is to cut it at the root. The root of anger is
always
fear.

“I do not fear for the dead. It is too late. So I must be afraid for myself, and my friends here.

“There are only two things for us to fear, and I have just showed you that the first is irrational. I share it myself! Even now a tightness in my spine tries to warn me that the Star Killer could be drawing a bead on us right now, that I may not live to finish my sentence. But it is madness, not good sense. I can learn to make it go, and so can you.”

As he spoke I was feeling my own shoulders start to lower, my lungs taking in deeper breaths.

“The second thing to fear is that we will fail the test. That we will not be good enough, strong enough, smart enough, to found a society which can grow to accomplish the things that must be done. Last week, the worst decision we could possibly make would have killed five hundred and twenty people, at most. Such a poor decision today would come very close to literally decimating the remaining human race. An unacceptable loss. Let me say this just right.”

He paused and went inside himself. Nobody said a word. Hildebrand started to, and there was a dull thud sound, and he exhaled instead.

“Both fear and its cover identity, anger, are notorious for producing spectacularly bad decisions.”

No actual words, but there were widespread grunts, murmurs, snickers, and harumphs, all of firm agreement.

“I will offer only a single example: the Terror Wars that led inexorably to the Ascension of the Prophet.

“Shortly after Captain Leslie LeCroix returned home safely from the historic first voyage to Luna, fanatical extremist Muslims from a tiny nation committed a great atrocity against a Christian superpower. Suicide terrorists managed to horribly murder thousands of innocent civilians. The grief and rage of their surviving compatriots must have been at least comparable to what we all feel now.”

“Intelligently applied, that much national will and economic force could easily have eliminated every such fanatic from the globe. At that time there were probably less than a hundred that rabid, and by definition they were so profoundly stupid or deranged as to be barely functional. It was always clear their primitive atrocity had succeeded so spectacularly only by the most evil luck.

“We all know what the superpower chose to do instead. It crushed two tiny bystander nations, killing some dozens of actual terrorists, and hundreds of thousands of civilians as innocent as their own dead loved ones had been. The first time it was suggested that nation’s leaders had perhaps known about the terror plot and failed to give warning. The second invasion didn’t even bother with an excuse, even though that nation had been famously
hostile
to terrorists. Both nations were Muslim, as the nineteen killers had been: that was enough. The nation nearly all of them had actually
come from
remained, inexplicably, almost the only Muslim ally the Christian superpower had in that region.

“The generation of a large planetary web of enraged Muslim extremists was so inevitable it is difficult for us now to conceive of the minds that did it. They were some of the most intelligent and humane people in the history of the planet: What
could
they have been thinking?

“Of course they were not. They were feeling.

“They were a superpower, and monotheist. No one had ever hurt them remotely that badly, and they were utterly certain no one had any right to hurt them at
all
. They reverted to tribal primate behavior. Beaten and robbed of your banana by a bigger ape or a more clever chimp…you find some smaller, stupider primate, beat
him
, and steal
his
banana.

“So doing, they ignited a global religious war that threatened to literally return the whole world to barbarism. The only thing to do
then
was crush it under the iron and silicon heel of a slightly smarter barbarism, a marginally less bloodstained religion, the best of all possible tyrannies. Nehemiah Scudder became the Holy Prophet of the Lord, smote the false prophets, and darkness fell.”

He paused and turned slowly around in place. He seemed to be trying to meet the eyes of each of us in the dark. “If we respond to our own unendurable grief and sadness in that same way they did—by looking away from grief and sadness, and seeking comfort in fixating instead on paranoia and rage—if we react with our own version of their Terror Wars—then we will probably lose this fight, and we will probably deserve to.”

That produced rumbles, and he let them happen, and waited them out. No one voice chose to try and take the floor, but many small murmured conversations were held at once.

“Let us continue on our journey,” Hideo said after a while. “Let us build the new world we planned. Only its very
longest-term
goals have changed. We hoped one day to be part of a great interstellar community with a radius of ninety light-years and a volume of three million.
That is still our goal
.

“We hoped that community would live in the peace and harmony we were just beginning to take for normal in our home System. That will not happen now. Defending that community and ending a war are new goals we’ve only just learned we have.

“We also hoped to communicate efficiently by telepathy through the Terran hub. That will not happen now either. And for that very reason, this war will be so lengthy that we cannot even begin ending it for thirteen more years, and will never live to see any progress whatsoever. We have the luxury of much time in which to make our decisions. Let us make smart ones from the very start.

“The smartest thing we can do is take hate from our hearts. There is nothing to
do
with it, no one to use it on but each other. Thus we must banish our fear, lest it grow cancerous tendrils around our hearts.

“When a child hits his thumb with a hammer, if he is alone, he will say to his hammer, ‘Look what you have done.’ If he is with another, he will say, ‘Look what you made me do.’” A few parents chuckled. “When we become victims, we want to victimize. So badly that if no victim presents himself, we will settle for an inanimate object, rather than have
no one
to hate. It is nature.

“We
must
be wiser than that child. There are no persons here but ourselves. There are no inanimate objects here we do not need.