I told her about Jinny—first about Jinny Hamilton, and then about Jinnia Conrad of Conrad—and I worked in my father, and the little I knew of my mother, and my experiences with sudden poverty and solitude, and anything else I could think of that might help justify being a basket case. That was probably pretty predictable, too. At a conservative estimate, I was perhaps the hundred billionth asshole since Adam to try and tell a woman, I find your company enjoyable but I am too damaged for any long-term emotional involvement, so don’t place your hopes on me. They almost always listen patiently, for some reason. But I doubt if anything I said surprised her very much.
Probably the only person in the entire ship who ended up finding anything at all surprising in that entire date was me, after I finally shut up long enough for Kathy to tell me that she’d gotten engaged two weeks earlier, to two very nice people, and had I ever thought much about opting into a group or line marriage myself? Because they were looking to expand. Full bore omnisexual, of course. But no pressure.
I haven’t the slightest idea what response I made. That date lasted another hour and a half—Herb and Balvovatz agreed I got back two hours after the play ended—but I cannot for the life of me recall another word either of us spoke, or anything that occurred.
Fourteen
If you don’t live it, it won’t come out your horn.
—Bird
Things gradually settled, as they always seem to do eventually, into a routine.
At what seemed the approximate speed of mold forming on a corridor wall, life aboard the RSS Charles Sheffield began to take on discernible shape, and then flavor, and finally texture. Five hundred people slowly got to know one another, heard (the first version of) each other’s back stories and dreams, learned each other’s strengths and weaknesses, discovered what we needed and what we had to give, slowly began to design and assemble, by trial and error and what few lessons history had made clear enough, a society that would use all of us and feed all of us and give us all something to be part of for twenty uninterrupted years.
Complicating the task, of course, the society was intended to become something utterly different at the end of that twenty years, and needed to be kept aimed in that direction at all times. For most humans, anything farther ahead than this time next year is the “far future.” It can be all too easy to lose sight of a goal that far off, and we had to be ready when we got there. The good news was that Merril Grossman was our Coordinator. She had a keen mind, a great understanding of her job, and a way of bullying people that was so transparently an act of love everyone let her get away with it.
Six months into the voyage, she organized and chaired the Sheffield’s first town meeting. It had to be electronic, naturally. Any cubic large enough to have held all of us at once, even in free fall, would have been a preposterous waste of space, in a ship that never seemed to have enough. Even the Pool could barely have accommodated half of us, and only on the friendliest of terms. But a well-run ETM works better than a live rally in the park, and Coordinator Grossman knew how.
I mean, speeches were made, inevitably: we are talking about humans here. But they were kept short, and they assayed out remarkably low in bullshit content. Captain James Bean, a man who looked exactly like you want the captain of your starship to look, and had the reputation to back it up, got five minutes, and used three. The whole ship rocked with applause when he was done; he was well liked. Five-minute gab-slots also were awarded to Colony Governor Jaime Roberts, and to George R representing the Relativists. Another would have gone to Governor-General Lawrence Cott, representative of Kang/da Costa, but he was ill so his slot was given by his lifemate Perry Jarnell, who took six minutes. At that point his audio and video both cut out.
After that, even the most pompous speakers quickly figured out that if they hadn’t gotten it said within five minutes, Merril wasn’t going to let them keep trying. By the time everyone’s screens went dark that night we had accomplished what I considered an astonishing amount.
Names, for one thing.
People had been arguing them for months, occasionally at a volume that drew proctors, but somehow our Coordinator cut through the confusion in a way that didn’t seem to leave anyone feeling disenfranchised, and before too long we had all finally reached consensus on names for most of the places and things that would really matter to all of us when we got to Bravo.
I for one found most of the choices cheering, too—our colony seemed to be a jolly crew.
The three major continents, for example, were christened Samba, Cerveja, and Carnaval. What lay ahead we knew not, but we intended to have a good time there if we could. At the same time, once he’d explained it to everyone, Matty Jaymes’s suggested name for our first settlement, Saudade, passed by a landslide, with fewer than two dozen opposed, the closest to unanimity we came that night. We all understood that our good times would always, always be seasoned with a sharp regret, a longing for all the lost loved ones and planets and habitats we had left so far behind us forever. To pretend otherwise would be foolish.
Nearly as popular a choice were the new names given to our two moons. Nobody had liked the unimaginative names Immega had given them, New Deimos and New Phobos. For one thing, they didn’t look like their namesakes, and would not behave like them in the sky. For another, a lot of us were from Mars, and did not want our good times tinged with nostalgic regret every single damn time we looked at or discussed the night sky (That was one reason the two closest alternatives to Saudade—Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi—had found so few supporters, I think.)
So I’d been expecting the grassroots effort to rename the moons. But the names chosen were a pleasant surprise, from the music of the twentieth century: Tom and Joao. The great composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, known as Tom, and his great disciple Joao Gilberto between them created samba, the lush basis of all subsequent Brazilian music…which became a major influence on the work of my favorite saxophonist of that period, Stan Getz. I took that as a good omen, and made a mental note to find out if Kathy knew his work with Tom and Joao. (She did—and knew a guitarist who could play Gilberto style. We killed ’em at the Horn of Plenty all that week.)
Governor-General Cott’s partner had by that point leaned on somebody hard enough to get hooked back online, and expressed his co-husband’s strong distaste, on behalf of our noble patrons at Kang/da Costa, for the growing tendency of some colonists to shorten the name of our new home-to-be from Brasil Novo to Bravo. His partner found it disrespectful and Jarnell found it vulgar, if I’ve sorted them out correctly. He stopped short of demanding prohibition of the name Bravo, but asked for a resolution agreeing that the proper name was Brasil Novo. The Brazilians aboard registered strong support.
Merril sighed and asked if anyone else wanted to address the question. A colonist named Robin Feeney spoke up, pointing out that “bravo” was a word used to applaud a feat of great difficulty, and a jump of eighty-five light-years certainly qualified: our successful arrival would itself be a Bravo to Captain Bean and his excellent crew. That went over well. The word was also, she added, one we commonly applied to artistic effort that moved us, and as an actress and painter, she hoped hearing it often might help to remind us that the arts would have an important place even in a frontier society. Someone promptly said, “Bravo!” and was widely echoed around the ship. Merril squelched further debate, put it to a vote, and that was the end of the Cott resolution. Many of us would continue to say Brasil Novo, most of the time, because let’s face it, it was more elegant. But when we did it was our choice.
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.
Ship’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.