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.
For 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.
Tossing in my comfortable bunk that night, I got it down to six words. I’d need eye contact, but if I could just get six lousy words in—
The next morning while I was in the ’fresher, paying in ugly coin for two nights’ debauchery, Diane phoned.
“Diane! Uh…let me call you back—”
“Joel, dear, I appreciate your interest. I had a wonderful time with you. Perhaps I will again, one day. But it can’t be soon. It’s just simple math, dear.”
“I don’t understand. Look, can’t I—”
“I have to make a big decision sometime in the next twenty years. It’s going to affect my whole life. Obviously my information has to be as complete as possible. Even after I rule out seniors, mono-gays, and other permanent ineligibles, there are something over two hundred possible mates in the world. I like to keep my weekends for reading. So that means I’ll work my way back around to you again in a little over forty weeks. Not even a year.”
I stared at my wrist, and reminded myself that my guts had been churning before the phone had rung. “Are you telling me you’ve already—”
“Yes, dear, but I assure you I remember you with particular fondness.”
Spasm. “One day isn’t long enough to—”
“I find that by the second or third day one forms attachments, don’t you? At that rate I could easily take the whole voyage identifying the right husband. I’d still be breaking him in when we hit dirt at Bravo. You understand, I’m sure. Or rather, I hope. If so, I’ll see you in forty weeks, give or take. Unless I get lucky and lightning strikes, of course.” She hung up before I could wail her name. It didn’t stop me.
Let’s just say the next five or ten minutes stressed that ’fresher to its design limits and beyond, and leave it at that.
So I sought a mojo.
That’s a term from PreCollapse times. It means a love charm. A magic spell or fetish of some kind that I could use to make Diane see her search was over.
Naturally I sought the advice of an expert. Matty Jaymes listened sympathetically to my tale of woe, nodding in all the right places. Until I named my beloved; then his face went blank, and he sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Son, I’m afraid I am powerless to help you.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Why?”
“Diane made love to me, once.” He sighed. “I spent two hours down on the Ag Deck eating dirt, before I resumed my human shape.” His left foot was tapping uncontrollably on the deck. “My advice is to be thankful you weren’t two hundredth on her list, and quit trying to hog a natural resource.”
From there, my love life went downhill. Eventually I gave it up as a failed experiment and put my mind on my work.
Let’s see. There was Barbara Manning, a student of Dr. Amy’s—her suggestion—and then an engineer named Mariko Stupple—Tiger’s suggestion—followed by a physics student named Darren Maeder who had the superstitious notion that perhaps something of my father’s innate genius might be exuded in my sweat, or something, followed closely by his former girlfriend when I proved a dry hole—both of those his idea—and then, if I have the sequence correct, there were…
Can I stop now? This emotional striptease not only embarrasses me, it’s boring. Everyone’s early love life is boring, sometimes even to the protagonists at the time. Let it stand that eventually the awkwardness started to wear off, and when the dust settled, I found myself a normal healthy het-bi bachelor with somewhat less than average interest in casual sex and even less interest in emotional commitment.
That described a lot of us in the Sheffield. There was no rush in forming a partnership that had nothing much to do for another couple of decades. Unless of course you decided you wanted to arrive on Bravo with children tall enough to be useful, which an unsurprising number of colonists did. But a nearly equal number concluded, as I did, that a ball of mud, even alien mud, had to be a better place to raise children than a metal can. And the last five or six years of the voyage, when things were just starting to gear up to their busiest, would be a poor time to be ass-deep in bored, surly, invincibly ignorant teenagers. Such as I was now.
Sol Short once told me mankind is divided into two basic sorts: those who find the unknown future threatening…and those who find it thrilling. He says the rupture between those two sides has been responsible for most of the bloodshed in history. If change threatens you, you become conservative in self-defense. If it thrills you, you become liberal in self-liberation. He says the Threateneds are frequently more successful in the short run, because they always fight dirty. But in the long run, they always lose, because Thrilled people learn and thus accomplish more.
I don’t know. In those days, I would have to say my basic orientation was toward the Threatened school. I had begun life by losing a mother I never knew, except as a source of rhythmic thumping sounds and intermittent gurgling noises and comforting warmth. Then, when I was just old enough to get the full impact, I found out how infinitely much worse it is to lose a parent you know. My world had just begun to sh
ake with the changes of puberty when it exploded in my face; at the moment I most needed adult guidance, my supply of parents dwindled to zero.
Then for a while everything had been change, and almost all of it had been unpleasant. I had not until then fully realized that I was odd, that there was anything strange about growing up with a single-parent genius. I thought all homes had equations scrawled with disc-marker across all the cabinets and walls, and clean laundry in the freezer, and defrosting chicken in the tool drawer. I thought everyone read a book a day and listened to hours of ancient music.
My father raised no wimps. I’d buckled down and got to work, examined my options, made a plan, made it work, started at last to acquire the confidence that I could get a handle on this life business just like everybody else—
And then I’d met Jinny.
So maybe you can understand that my instinctive tendency, in those early years of the voyage, was to tuck my chin down into my chest, hunch my shoulders, cover up with both forearms, and keep backpedaling. The temporary insanity with Diane was my last flirtation with grand passion and romance. After that I was more in the market for companionship, intellectual stimulation, perhaps a little cautious friendly sex every now and again, perhaps not.
I really did comprehend, intellectually at least, that I was engaged in one of the most profoundly thrilling endeavors in human history. How conservative can you be, if you’ve jumped off the edge of the Solar System? Do conservative people travel at relativistic speeds? By the end of the first year of our voyage, we were already traveling at more than a third of the speed of light—and even though there were no sensory cues at all to confirm that, we were all well aware of it, and believed it, and I think I can safely say we all found it more than a little thrilling. By the time we reached turnover in nine more years, our velocity was going to peak at a hair-frying 0.99794c. Does a conservative man race photons?
It wasn’t that I couldn’t see the future was going to be thrilling. It wasn’t that I was unwilling or even reluctant to be thrilled. I just had little experience with it.
The mores and customs we had all been raised in, fruits of the Covenant, continued to work their unlikely magic: even in close and closed quarters, we found ways to live together without violence, to a large extent without malice, and with as much kindness as we could find within ourselves.
At the end of that first year, we celebrated with a party that would become so legendary I don’t think I’ll discuss it here. There are several detailed accounts available, and I disagree with every one of them on some of the details. One point on which there is agreement, however, is that there were no quarrels. No relationships broke up, no feuds were born. If anyone had a really bad time, they managed to conceal it from one of the best gossip networks in history.
I’m not saying there were no unhappy people aboard. A predictable percentage of us concluded, much too late, that they’d made a terrible mistake in joining the colony. A predictable few of those became merchants of gloom, prophets of doom, carriers of that most infectious of diseases, fear. And a few just became so profoundly miserable they lowered morale wherever they passed. Dr. Amy and her three colleagues had their work cut out for them.
It made me want to stop being a jerk faster, to free up her time. So I worked at it.
By the end of that first year of the voyage, I had at least a working two-part answer to the question, Who is Joel Johnston?
First, I was a guy who was going to sing to the stars.
I would sing with my horn and with all the other instruments of man, to a star whose very existence had been unsuspected for most of history. I would sing of human beings, since words would not do, to a star system that knew nothing of them or anything like them. I would sing of my fellow colonists, in what I hoped was a universal language, to a planet we hoped would see fit to nurture and sustain us all. And I would sing of myself—and perhaps another—to two strange new moons in the night sky, and slightly distorted constellations.
Second, I was a guy who was going to talk to strange dirt.
On the long voyage I would speak softly to alien soil, in my best approximation of its own language, asking it as politely as I could to accept Terran plants that would feed my colony. I would open negotiations with the ecosystem of Bravo, and listen intently to the responses that came back. Zog and I and all the rest of his crew would spend the years staring until our eyes watered at the probes’ surface recon images of Brasil Novo’s surface, trying to outguess the planet, speculating endlessly over what sorts of new predators, parasites, or other perils were most likely to exist, arguing endlessly over what we might do about them. It’s difficult to plan for the unknown—all right, it’s impossible—but we were going to do our level best.
It was a place to stand. Sing to new stars; speak to new dirt. Two planted legs to help keep me upright for the next couple of decades. First we love music. Then we love food. Many years later, we evolve high enough to love another—if we’re lucky.
Fifteen
The real miracle is not to walk on water, or on thin air, but to walk on the earth!
—Thich Nhat Hanh
The second year of the voyage of the RSS Sheffield was eventful only by ship standards.
People you don’t know fell in and out of love, had and did not have babies, worked and goofed off, succeeded and failed at amusing themselves and each other, did mediocre work and accomplished minor miracles and screwed up completely, were and were not happy.
Al Mulherin, said to be the best physicist aboard, and Linda Jacobs, editor of the ship newspaper Sheffield Steel, were the first couple to birth a child, a boy they named Coyote, and a dozen more babies had joined the colony before the year was out.
A machinist named C. Platt got careless with a torch and became our first death. He was not widely mourned. Not even his roommates knew what the C stood for.
One of the residential decks beat all the rest at soccer, and you’d be shocked to hear which one, if you cared.
Relativist Kindred had a fairly gaudy nervous breakdown and for a couple of weeks his colleagues had to cover for him, but this had been expected and planned for and caused no difficulties. It would become a roughly annual occurrence. I think most of us colonists half expected that Peter Kindred was going to Burn Out eventually, at some point along the way—but none of his fellow Relativists did. His shift was taken by Dugald Beader, the only one of the Relativists I haven’t mentioned yet, because it took me months to meet him. Dugald was sort of the backward of the flamboyantly eccentric Kindred—quiet and sane and empathetic, with a diabolical dry sense of humor. It was said that he’d been involved in the design of the Sheffield somehow, but he didn’t talk about it.
The story of the year was probably the totally unexpected marriage of the Zog and Coordinator Grossman. Nobody had a problem with the match; they were both widely admired, and when you thought about it, they were perfect for each other. It had simply never occurred to anyone aboard that either party might have time for a social life, let alone an active one.
He moved into her quarters, and they honeymooned by sealing the door for a week. Zog left me in charge in his absence, high praise.
So I got to be the only one in the ship to whom Machinist Platt’s death mattered much.
A proctor named Hal DeMann showed up at the Bravo farm one day, pushing a body bag on a gurney. He looked like an old-time pirate or gunfighter, but had a warm, soothing voice, a good combination in his line of work. He explained that Colonist Platt—maybe that was what the C stood for—had left instructions that he wished his body to be recycled, so that he might always be a part of the colony’s ecosystem. But old C had given no specifics as to just how this should be done, leaving the question up to the relevant authorities.
Who turned out to be me.
The problem itself was admittedly trivial. Solving it was not. There was certainly plenty of dirt to plant him in, and there were several places where he might even prove useful as fertili
zer, and as a check on how Bravonian conditions would alter the usual processes of decomposition and fertilization.
But there was not enough dirt to plant him two meters deep. And we had long since learned that no fence is always foolproof. Having his corpse dug up and eaten by pigs or goats or dogs would technically have met the requirements of Plan’s will, and I was tempted to, as the poet Buckley said, just “scoop some sand over his wig, and swoop the scene.” I was fairly sure he wouldn’t have complained, or even minded.
But I was absolutely sure I knew what the Zog would say if he came home from his honeymoon to find some of the leftovers being dragged across his Ag Deck by one of his pigs.
Devising a solution wasn’t all that hard. Implementing it was. Kathy and I dug as deep a hole as we could, about a meter, and laid Platt in it. Then we stood on either side and covered the corpse over completely, me with broken glass and busted springs, she with curry powder and a spray bottle of lion urine. (Chemically simulated, of course. Zog had fetched a lot of odd things along from Sol.) Then we replaced all the dirt we’d dug up, leaving a mound of loose earth, but one that was unlikely to be disturbed.
The first problem I had with implementation of this simple solution should be obvious. Nowadays it takes something close to total destruction of the brain to beat the autodocs. I’ve told you the damage was done by a torch, and you know where the brain is generally kept: work it out. The smell alone was memorable.
My second problem was less gruesome, but bothered me for a longer time. When we were done with our shoveling, Kathy and I stood there for a few moments, catching our breath and thinking deep thoughts. And then as I was about to turn and walk away, she said, “Shouldn’t we say something?” Phrased that way, it meant, “Shouldn’t you say something?”