Variable Star

  The heat of the explosion had briefly been so intense, Rennick’s massive wound had cauterized itself. Most of the red mist had already been dealt with by the Sheffield’s intensive zero-gee airflow, and the rest would be soon.

  “They’ll be here any minute,” Herb said to me.

  “I know,” I said.

  “You understand the problem. You’ve seen her.”

  I wished I didn’t. “Yeah. I’ve seen Alice.”

  We shared a wordless glance that lasted ten seconds or more. He smiled suddenly “I don’t see another way. Do you?”

  I thought as hard as I know how. Finally, reluctantly, I shook my head no. “Not with the tools at hand.”

  He nodded.

  I retrieved Dorothy’s weapon, glanced at it briefly, and tossed it to him.

  “It’s empty,” Dorothy said urgently “It was a single-shot.”

  Herb held it up. “Could you tell it’s empty by looking at it?”

  She made no reply, but her face said she understood now, and that the answer to his question was no.

  A bounce took Rennick’s weapon past me and I picked it out of the air. I looked around at the scene, studying it closely. Just behind me, beside the airlock hatch, was a large display showing data of several kinds.

  I found the right switch and powered it off. Then I stepped back, measured angles, and said, “What do you think?” to Herb.

  “Good as it’s liable to get,” he said. “This is what a long time ago used to be called a Hail Mary play.”

  I nodded. “I really wish it was better,” I said.

  With infinite kindness in his eyes, he said not “Me, too,” but “I know.” Then he moved, to position himself just beside the hatch out to the Sheffield. Dorothy began gathering the p-suits we hadn’t finished donning, and stowing them out of the way.

  “What are you doing?” Jinny asked dangerously “Damn it, what is going on?” Andrew couldn’t decide which of us to gape at. He wore a look I could empathize with—a man rearranging the entire contents of his brain, and heart.

  “Can you handle her?” I asked Evelyn.

  She looked me in the eye and said not “I think so,” but, “Yes.” Everybody was being very helpful to me today. I nodded thanks, and she left my side, jaunting over to dock beside Jinny.

  “Cousin Jinny,” she said clearly and firmly, “zip it.”

  Jinny was too shocked to respond, and before she could regroup, we all heard the sound of the party approaching the antechamber from outside.

  “Joel—” Dorothy began.

  “I think it’ll be all right,” I told her. “But stay alert.”

  She shut up, chose a spot well away from the hatch, near the air outflow, and tugged Rennick’s body there. She held onto the grille with one hand, and held Rennick near it with the other. “Evelyn, over here, dear.”

  Evelyn looked to me, I nodded, and she joined Dorothy.

  Herb and I shared one last long look. Nothing to be said.

  The hatch irised open.

  Alice Dahl entered first, and she was as good as I had presumed she must be. The instant she cleared the hatchway she sensed that something was wrong—body language? Blood scent the airflow hadn’t finished flushing yet?—and went hyperalert well before she could have seen Rennick’s body. She didn’t actually kill anyone, but she was very ready to. And it was me she focused on.

  Failing to notice, Conrad came in behind her, followed by Solomon Short. “All right, everyone,” he was saying, “thanks to Captain Bean’s insights, and Relativist Short’s gift for lateral thinking, I think we’ve come up with a plan that will—”

  It took him that long to see Rennick’s drifting corpse and stop speaking. He must have been very tired. But he was still sharp, and quick. He didn’t bother asking what was wrong.

  “All right,” he went on. “Everyone on board now. We will discuss this later.”

  “Gran’ther, how can you?” Evelyn asked him with infinite sadness.

  He did not seem to understand her question.

  “The race made a small mistake,” Herb said. Alice’s head turned to track him. “We did finally make some progress at stamping out war. But maybe it would have been better to start with greed.”

  “What’s going on?” Solomon asked mildly.

  “Conman of Conman here,” I said, “was just about to depart, leaving behind a boatful of suckers who thought he’d be coming back to start a rescue shuttle.”

  Solomon caught on at once, and turned to glare at Conrad. “Really?”

  “He also forgot to mention to anybody that with a little work, Andy’s Magic Carpet drive will push anything you put it in, just as fast. Irrespective of its mass.”

  Solomon’s face darkened even further. “I see. He had better things to do with it. Sure, he did.”

  “Sol,” I said quickly “It’s covered. Okay? Watch out for green mist.”

  I saw him take my meaning. Stay out of the line of fire and await developments.

  “Oh, for Covenant’s sake!” Conrad snarled. “Jinny, you understand. Evelyn, dear, history is being made. Right now, by us. We need to form and consolidate the Confederation of Human Stars, get it organized. Ferry telepaths around until rational communication can take place, and then get busy and avenge our star. For all we know, a second wave of attacks is just about to happen—there is no way we have time to waste rescuing a bunch of losers from their own incompetence. Please try to be rational. You’re a Conrad, for the—”

  “I am a Johnston,” she told him.

  He rolled his eyes. “Young love. Oh, I love being old! Fine. I don’t care what name you go by, as long as you get into that damned pressure suit and back aboard the ship, now.”

  She looked him in the eye and slowly shook her head. “I will not.”

  Conrad of Conrad sighed, irritated beyond endurance. “Alice.”

  Alice Dahl reached for her right hip, and Time slowed to its lowest possible velocity.

  “Alice!” I shouted.

  She was very good, gave me less than half her attention at first despite my shout.

  That changed fast when she saw my hand holding the weapon I’d been palming all this time, though.

  She was so good that in the fraction of an instant it took me to draw a dead bead on her center of mass, she had her own gun out and pointed directly at my left eye.

  “If you kill me,” she said calmly, “my hand will still kill you afterward.”

  “Probably.” I agreed. Most of my attention was on my features, going for the best poker face of my life.

  “Absolutely.” she corrected.

  Time was going so slowly now, I could actually see her discern some tiny flaw in my poker face. Her finger tightened on the trigger. “Hey, Butch!” Herb bellowed at the top of his lungs.

  She was still good. She turned her head just enough to pick him up in her peripheral vision. She knew he was bluffing, because she knew he was smart enough to know he could not possibly beat her—and still she checked.

  And found Herb aiming Dorothy’s tiny little weapon at her.

  She identified it, must have realized it was much deadlier than the one I held. It didn’t worry her a bit. The right side of her mouth curled up in contempt.

  Faster than the eye could follow, she spun on her axis. Beating Herb was no more difficult than beating me had been for her.

  And as far as Alice Dahl knew, nobody important wanted Herb alive. She shot him in his left eye, perfectly confident that shock and denial would hold a civilian like me frozen for the split second that was all she would need.

  I was not in shock. I was not in denial. She died halfway back around to me, when my shot caught her square in the heart.

  It was a far less gaudy death than either of the others that had happened in that room—but it was definitive. Rennick’s weapon fired not a laser or projectiles, but something that relaxed muscles. All of them, completely. Her face went slack, her eyes became doll’s eyes, her body wen
t limp and derelict, and sphincters let go just before Solomon crashed into her.

  My own nearly did the same. I had been more than half expecting to die myself, doing this. But I barely noticed; I was already in transit to Herb, just in case, knowing it was futile but unable to help myself. Halfway there I knew I was wasting my time, and started to relax and begin mourning.

  An unexpected noise behind me scared the living shit out of me.

  I wrenched my body around and just had time to realize Jinny had launched herself after me, hands curled into claws—when Evelyn slammed into her so hard her vector won the argument. They both drifted away from me, but only Evelyn was still conscious.

  I collided with Alice’s body myself, glanced off, and grabbed a handhold. Now my attention was fully on Andrew.

  He couldn’t take his eyes off Jinny. He was staring at her as if she had just morphed into some loathsome insect, or perhaps a demon with fangs.

  I felt truly bad for him. I knew exactly how he must feel. The same as I had, when I’d first learned she wasn’t who I’d thought she was at all. That she wasn’t who she had told me she was. That she was capable of enormities I could not have imagined, and would not have believed until forced to. Nobody that beautiful should be capable of that much guile: it was too unfair an advantage.

  She was everything her grandfather had hoped for. And little else.

  I decided he would probably live through it, too. He might even be able to deal with it, somehow, for all I knew. He was a supergenius. And a decent man down to his marrow. I would try and have a long talk with him, as soon as I could. A series of them.

  Richard Conrad inevitably found his voice. “All right, now,” he began.

  Andrew Jackson Conrad cut him off. “Grandfather,” he said, “shut the fuck up.”

  Richard stared at him, more confounded by this than anything else that had occurred yet. He groped for words, found none at all.

  “If you say one more word,” his grandson-in-law said to him, “I will come over there and shove it down your throat.”

  “Way too kind,” I heard Dorothy murmur.

  I saw it wash over him, and if it hadn’t been so pathetic I’d have enjoyed it more. For the first time in his entire life, Conrad of Conrad found himself in a room full of people…not one of whom gave a damn what he did or did not want.

  He had always been utterly alone—but had probably never even suspected it until now.

  “Joel,” Andrew continued, “I assume this ship carries proctors?”

  “Good ones,” I agreed.

  “Will you summon one, please. This citizen requires restraint.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “he’ll be here any second. The ship calls him if it decides he’s needed. As soon as he gets here, I suggest we all adjourn back to my quarters, and start making some plans.”

  “Good,” he said. “Will you help me get my wife to your Infirmary first?”

  “Not to worry,” I assured him. “My place is much closer, more comfortable…and our Healer makes house calls. She is very good.”

  He nodded. “Thank you very much.”

  I told him he was welcome.

  And then—finally—my obligations were over for the moment, and at long last I went to rejoin my Evelyn.

  She was waiting for me.

  We had been waiting for each other, for a long, long, long time. No matter what clock you used to measure it.

  Twenty-two

  It’s just beginning. Everything is always just beginning.

  —Jakusho Kwong

  That’s essentially all I have to tell you.

  Governor-General Cott’s more formal account of the events of our voyage is vastly more complete, accurate, and factual. But it was felt that future generations will need more than facts. Too many of them make little or no sense without the subjective context. And it was decided that I was both best able to recount that story, from an insider’s unique perspective—and the one least occupied with other, more pressing duties.

  You have them, too. We all do, now. We need to know for certain, just as soon as possible, whether our civilization has been crippled and nearly killed by stupendous bad fortune—of which there is certainly no shortage in the cosmos—or by enemy action. And either way, we need to figure out what needs to be done about that.

  I do not doubt we will. But you must hurry. You have a limited time now to move yourselves and your entire civilization underground, including all the native and introduced flora and fauna you need to survive…before the wavefront of death arrives, from the very part of the sky you’ve always thought of as home. You will need to be at least several hundred meters underground when it arrives; several thousand would be even better.

  Yours is the fourth world we have brought the news to. At each of them, I have been asked why I don’t simply stay? I’ve done my shift, and more. Why not let someone else take up the torch? Having miraculously managed, against incredible odds, to set my feet on solid ground once more, why would I ever contemplate leaving it again? Evelyn and I have a child to raise now, after all.

  The best I can explain it is, I’ve lost my taste for living on planets. It always was overrated.

  The narrator of an ancient poem by Tennyson “held his purpose firm, to sail beyond the sunset.” My wife and I—all of us—have actually done that.

  It’s going to get interesting now.

  Afterword

  This is an optional bonus: a sort of DVD Special Feature, “The Making of Variable Star,” in which I explain how I ended up being the one to tell you the story.

  Feel free to save it for later, or skip it altogether. Its principal purpose is to save me from having to spend the next few years answering the same questions over and over, and I already suspect it’s probably not going to work.

  I type this in November of 2005, in my office on an island west of British Columbia…but for me, the whole thing began way over at the other end of the continent, in a New York suburb rightly called Plainview, fifty-one years ago in November of 1954, when I turned six years old.

  My mother wanted to raise a literate son. But Mom also had a lot of resting she wanted to get done, so she came up with a diabolically efficient scheme for teaching me to read. She would start reading me a Lone Ranger comic book, and just as it got to the really exciting part, where the masked man was hanging by his fingertips from the cliff… Mom would suddenly remember she had to go wind the cat or fry the dishes. By age six I had taught myself to read out of sheer frustration.

  On my birthday, she graduated me to the hard stuff. She drove me to a building called a “lie bury,” and told me to go inside and ask the nice lady behind the desk for a book. I followed instructions. “Mom says gimme a book, lady” And the nice lady behind the desk sized me up thoughtfully, and handed me the very first book with no pictures in it that I ever read in my life: Rocketship Galileo, by Robert A. Heinlein.

  Her name was Ruth Siegel. She changed my life completely.

  It was the first of Robert’s famous juvenile novels—and it was at least a hundred times better than the Lone Ranger! It was about teenage boys who were so smart they went to the Moon, and fought Nazis there, and there was nothing dopey about it, it all could have been true, practically! I finished it that night, and the next day I walked two miles to that lie bury and demanded to swap it for another one by the same guy. The same nice lady accommodated me, and the first ten books I ever read in my life were by Robert Heinlein, and they were all great.

  When I tried other books, by other writers, it immediately became clear that some were good, and some were rotten. But it was just as clear that the ones in the same stack with the Heinleins—the ones that all had a sticker on their spine depicting a hydrogen atom inexplicably impaled by a V2—were always excellent, nearly as good as Heinlein himself. In 1954, science fiction was such a scorned genre that any sf actually published in hardcover—and then ordered by a public library—had to be terrific. I became a hard-core s
f reader simply because that was where all the best stuff was…and so the whole course of my life was twisted.

  Now the story jumps ahead nearly a year—and yanks us halfway back across the country again.

  On November 14, 1955, ten days before my seventh birthday, Robert Anson Heinlein sat down at his desk in Colorado Springs and wrote an outline for a novel he first called The Stars Are a Clock.

  He later wrote in half a dozen possible alternate titles by hand, including Doctor Einstein’s Clock, but never settled on one he liked. This was not unusual for him. A Martian Named Smith, for instance, was also The Heretic for a while before it was finally published as Stranger in a Strange Land.

  His outline filled at least eight extremely dense pages: single-spaced ten-pica type with absolutely minimal margins on all four sides and very few strikeovers. He also filled fourteen 3X5 index cards with extensive handwritten notes relating to the book. And then, for reasons only he could tell us, he closed the file and put it in a drawer, and never got around to writing that particular book.

  Now the biggest jump of all: less mileage this time, but nearly forty-eight years—to Toronto on September 1, 2003, where the World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon 3, was held that year.

  I was Toastmaster for that Worldcon, the second time I have endured that honor, and it went infinitely better than the first time had, the Saturday night Hugo Awards ceremony this time fiasco-free. So I was pleasantly relaxed on Sunday morning when I showed up for my last obligation of the weekend, an appearance on a panel discussion about rare and obscure works by Robert A. Heinlein. Some remarkable discoveries of previously unknown Heinleiniana had been made in recent years, including an entire first book few had known existed called For Us, the Living, which Scribner’s had just published for the first time. I was on the panel because I had contributed an Introduction to it—but what I wanted to hear about was the exciting new stuff I’d heard rumors about. Teleplays—screenplays, even! I was quite unprepared for what I got.

  The star panelist was Dr. Robert James, one of the researchers busily combing through the country’s libraries for RAH references, standing in for official biographer Bill Patterson who had been unable to attend. Robert is the man personally responsible for rescuing For Us, the Living from oblivion, and Bill had given him some terrific ammunition from the Heinlein Collection at the University of California at Santa Cruz to wow us all with. Those teleplays, for instance: most were based on known short stories…but not all of them. There were Robert Heinlein stories we didn’t know. That room was packed to bursting with some of the world’s most hard-core Heinlein fans, and we were electrified by the news that the Canon was not yet quite complete, after all.