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.
Eighteen
We need to have as many baskets for our eggs as possible. Even if we don’t manage to ruin this planet ourselves, natural disasters or changes—or even changes in our star—could make it impossible to live on this planet.
—Philosopher Anson MacDonald,
radio interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra,
July 7, 1987 (“Anson MacDonald Day”)
When 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.
In 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 th
is 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.
Herb sat and drank some of his coffee. “The sky has always been full of things we can’t explain,” he said. “It still is. Anomalies always abound. Gamma ray bursts. Missing matter. Quasars. Dozens of things. Generations of astrophysicists have made careers creating different, complicated explanations for each of them—often brilliantly. But one explanation for all of them, a quite likely one, they have never once considered. Or at least, anyone who did propose it instantly lost all credibility.”
“Oh, Herb, no!”
He nodded. “Intelligent design.”
Pat tried to speak, but could only sputter.
“That’s exactly why, too,” Herb said. “For some reason, we let the god-botherers appropriate that term as a euphemism for their stupid deities, and let our revulsion for the latter cloud our understanding of the former.”
Solomon spoke up. “He’s right, Pat. Once you get over the baseless idea that an intelligent designer must necessarily be God, it gets easier to deal with. Nothing whatsoever except a lot of dead fools says an intelligent designer has to be omnipotent—just more powerful than us. He need not necessarily be omniscient—just smarter than us.”
Herb said, “And God Himself knows there is no reason why an intelligent designer must—or even can—be omnibenevolent. He need not even be as nice as us. And we’re swine with starships.”
Pat’s mouth hung open. Perhaps mine did, too.
“And finally,” Solomon said, “nothing says there has to be only one—or even some low prime number.”
“We found sentient life on Mars and Venus,” Herb said. “But nothing at all outside the System. And the Martians and Venerian dragons were just so…irrelevant to us, it was easy to stop thinking about them. Even after we got bright enough to go out and look for ourselves, more than a dozen times in a row we found whole star systems containing nothing more complicated than a cat. For some reason, we concluded our star system must be unique. We got the notion we were the only sentients in the Galaxy. We should have seen how preposterous that was, and looked for more reasonable explanations.”
“I really really really hate this,” Pat told him.
“Exactly our problem. Hate does not add clarity.”
I felt a powerful inexplicable impulse to put some music on. It would make us all feel better. I summoned up my library on my desk display and was going to choose one of my favorite old jazz records, a Charlie Haden/Gonzalo Rubalcaba collaboration that had never failed to soothe me when I needed it. But before I could start it, the album title sunk in. It was called La Tierra del Sol.
And every song on it had been written by a dead man, to whom it was a posthumous tribute.
I cleared the screen. So much for the power of music. I had thousands of other albums available, but suddenly I didn’t want to hear any music by dead men. I wondered if the next time I picked up my horn, any sound would come out.
“Why can’t it have been a natural occurrence?” Pat was saying. “It seems to me that would be Occam’s Razor. Occam’s Razor says don’t multiply entities unnecessarily. Which is less likely? One single cosmic event we can’t explain yet? Or a galaxy full of lethal monsters, hiding perfectly, explaining dozens of astrophysical mysteries at once?”
“What does Matty say?” I asked.
The silence told me I was still asking bad questions.
“Aw, shit—”
“Don’t be mad at him, Joel,” Solomon said. “He spent every minute of the last six and a half years praying to a God I happen to know he didn’t even believe in that he was wrong, that nothing was wrong with the sun. But he knew he wasn’t; that’s why he came apart. The measurements he lucked onto as we were leaving told him something unprecedented and scary was going on. He was too good at what he did to be wrong. Having it confirmed was just too much.”
He was right: Matty had hinted about this to me, more than once. Something about a perfect solar eclipse by Terra occurring as we’d left the System, and something wrong about the predicted displacement of some stars behind Sol. Whatever had happened—or been done—to our star had taken six or more years to finish happening. The few subtle signs had been visible only to someone outside the System. One day, our descendants might find that a useful clue. If we had any.
Oh, no wonder Matty had gone to pieces.
Not that he could conceivably have done anything to prevent the tragedy. With no one else in a position to replicate his data—until whenever the next starship containing a good astronomer was built and launched to a point where it happened to see a perfect solar eclipse from the right distance—he could not possibly have gotten anyone to listen to him in time to do the slightest good. At most, he might have created a disastrous System-wide panic.
“He probably had more people he cared strongly about back in the System than anybody else aboard,” Pat said. “Except maybe Dr. Amy. No, no, she’s all right,” he added hastily, seeing my expression. “But she’s hurting.”
I closed my eyes for a moment. Might as well get it over with. “Who else that I know is gone?”
Another awkward pause. I should probably never ask another question again.
Solomon answered. “Balvovatz, for one.”
“What?” I was stunned. One of the last people I’d have guessed would ever suicide was Balvovatz, that cynical, fun-loving old Loonie.
But then as I heard that last word in my mind, I started to understand. His tragedy was, impossibly, even greater than that of most of the rest of us. Everyone he cared about back in the System lived—had lived—in Luna. It was the preposition killing him.
All the other planets mankind had used, it had lived on the surface of. Even the Marsmen had been aboveground for over a century now. Only Luna was too smal
l to terranize. Loonies had still lived almost exclusively underground. Some of them quite deep.
By now, if there were any solids at all among the particles expanding from the place where the System had been, they would probably be on a pair of smelted lumps formerly known as Jupiter and Saturn. Even they might not still exist, if the destruction had been as complete as Solomon believed.
But some Loonies might conceivably have lasted whole seconds broiling in lava, before it became too hot for even lava to exist.
“Everyone you or I knew back home is surely dead,” Herb said. “So is everyone Balvovatz knew. But his were among those who suffered worst.”
I rejected the image, and the thought. I knew I was going to miss Balvovatz badly. I had liked him a lot. Loved him. “Okay. You said ‘for one…’ Who else is gone?”
“Diane,” Herb said. “And Mariko.”
Mariko Stupple was the girl I’d used for consolation for a few weeks after Diane Levy had taken my virginity, glanced at it, and returned it. I wondered how close Diane had come to achieving her goal of sampling every male aboard. I found that I hoped she had. “Anyone else?”
“Nobody else you know well, I think,” Pat said.
“None of your lot, Solomon? Not even Kindred?”
“None of us has the luxury of that option,” Solomon said dully.
“I don’t follow.”
“We have no way of knowing exactly what happened to Sol—so we must assume worst case: total destruction.”
It took a second or two to hit me. If all or nearly all the mass of the sun had been converted to energy, a wave of lethal gamma rays was even now racing after us. Faster than we were going, or could go…
I said, “Sorry, Sollie. I am not doing at all well on thinking things through, today.”
He nodded. “Happens to me, too, every time I’ve been dead.”
If even one Relativist became incapacitated, sooner or later the ramjet was going to go out and stay out. The Sheffield would never make port. She could remain self-sustaining for a maximum of three or four generations—but that didn’t matter, because we wouldn’t have anywhere near that long to live. We were only traveling at 0.976 c…and death was chasing us at c.