Variable Star

W
HEN
J
OEL
J
OHNSTON FIRST MET
J
INNY
H
AMILTON
, it seemed like a dream come true. And when she finally agreed to marry him, he felt like the luckiest man in the universe.

There was just one small problem. He was broke. His only goal in life was to become a composer, and he knew it would take years before he was earning enough to support a family.

But Jinny wasn’t willing to wait. And when Joel asked her what they were going to do for money, she gave him a most unexpected answer. She told him that her name wasn’t really Jinny Hamilton—it was Jinny Conrad, and she was the granddaughter of Richard Conrad, the wealthiest man in the solar system.

And now that she was sure that Joel loved her for herself, not for her wealth, she revealed her family’s plans for him—he would be groomed for a place in the vast Conrad empire and sire a dynasty to carry on the family business.

Most men would have jumped at the opportunity. But Joel Johnston wasn’t most men. To Jinny’s surprise, and even his own, he turned down her generous offer and then set off on the mother of all benders. And woke up on a colony ship heading out into space, torn between regret over his rash decision and his determination to forget Jinny and make a life for himself among the stars.

He was on his way to succeeding when his plans—and the plans of billions of others—were shattered by a cosmic cataclysm so devastating it would take all of humanity’s strength and ingenuity just to survive.

R
OBERT
A. H
EINLEIN
is universally acknowledged as modern science fiction’s greatest author. At his death, in 1988, he left a legacy of books and stories that has profoundly influenced the course of the field for generations.

But one of Heinlein’s most ambitious works was never finished. In 1955, he began work on a novel to be titled
Variable Star
, completing a detailed outline and making extensive notes for the book, only to set it aside to focus on other novels, including
Tunnel in the Sky
and the Hugo Award-winning
Double Star
. For more than half a century, the work lay forgotten among Heinlein’s papers. Then, on its rediscovery a few years ago, the Robert A. Heinlein Trust selected an author to finish the work.

The author chosen for the project was, appropriately enough, a writer
The New York Times
has hailed as “the New Robert Heinlein”—S
PIDER
R
OBINSON
, the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of such modern SF classics as
Stardance
and “Melancholy Elephants.” Faithful to the spirit of Heinlein’s original vision, and laced with contemporary touches that will appeal to modern readers,
Variable Star
is a rare treat for the Grand Master’s many fans.

Profits from the book will help fund the $500,000 Heinlein Prize for innovation in commercial manned spaceflight, a goal Mr. Heinlein considered crucial to humanity’s long-term survival.

Books by Robert A. Heinlein

Books by Spider Robinson

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously

VARIABLE STAR

Copyright © 2006 by The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust and Spider Robinson

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Book Design by Mary A. Wirth

A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Heinlein, Robert A. (Robert Anson), 1907—
  Variable star / Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson.—1st ed.
    p. cm.
  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
  ISBN-13: 978-0-765-31312-6
  ISBN-10: 0-765-31312-X (acid-free paper)
  I. Robinson, Spider. II. Title.
  PS3515.E288V37 2006
  813‘.54—dc22         2006006865

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Editor’s Preface

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Afterword

I
n Robert A. Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
there is a story about a Martian artist so focused on his work that he fails to notice his own death, and completes the piece anyway. To Martians, who don’t go anywhere when they die but simply become Old Ones, the burning question was: should this work be judged by the standards used for art by the living, or for art by the dead?

A similar situation occurs here for one of the first times on this planet. This book is a posthumous collaboration, begun when one of its collaborators was seven, and completed when the other was seventeen-years-dead. Spider Robinson discusses this at length in his Afterword, but a brief explanation at the start may help readers to better appreciate what they’re reading, and to decide by what standards they should evaluate it.

After the passing of Robert Heinlein’s widow, Virginia, in 2003, his archivist/biographer discovered a detailed outline and notes for a novel the Grand Master had plotted in 1955, but had never gotten around to writing, tentatively titled
The Stars Are a Clock
. Heinlein’s estate executor and literary agent decided the book deserved to be written and read, and agreed that Spider Robinson was the only logical choice to complete it.

First called “the new Robert Heinlein” by the
New York Times Book Review
in 1982, Robinson has been linked with him in the reviews of most of his own thirty-two award-winning books. The two were close friends. Spider penned a famous essay demolishing his mentor’s detractors called “Rah, Rah, R.A.H.!,” and contributed the introduction to Heinlein’s recently-discovered 1939 first book,
For Us, the Living
.

It was a pairing as fortuitous as McCartney and Lennon. You are about to read something genuinely unique and quite special: a classic novel fifty years in the making, conceived in the Golden Age of SF by its first Grand Master, and completed in the Age of Cyberspace by one of his greatest students.
Variable Star
is Robert A. Heinlein’s only collaborative novel—and we believe he would be as proud of it as Spider Robinson is, and as we at Tor are to publish it.

—Cordwainer LoBrutto
,
Senior Editor

I
thought I wanted to get married in the worst way. Then that’s pretty much what I was offered, so I ended up going trillions of kilometers out of my way instead. A great many trillions of kilometers, and quite a few years—which turns out to be much the greater distance.

It began this way:

Jinny Hamilton and I were dancing.

This was something of an accomplishment for me, in and of itself—I was born on Ganymede, and I had only been Earthside a few years, then. If you’ve never experienced three times the gravity you consider normal, imagine doing your favorite dance…with somebody your own weight sitting on each of your shoulders, on a pedestal a few meters above concrete. Broken bones, torn ligaments, and concussions are hazards you simply learn to accept.

But some people play water polo, voluntarily. Jinny and I had been going out together for most of a year, and dancing was one of her favorite recreations, so by now I had not only made myself learn how to dance, I’d actually become halfway decent at it. Enough to dimly understand how someone with muscles of steel and infinite wind might consider it fun, anyway.

But that night was something else.

Part of it was the setting, I guess. Your prom is
supposed
to be a magical time. It was still quite early in the evening, but the Hotel Vancouver ballroom was appropriately decorated and lit, and the band was excellent, especially the singer. Jinny was both the most beautiful and the most interesting person I had ever met. She and I were both finally done with Fermi Junior College, in Surrey, British Columbia. Class of 2286 (Restored Gregorian), huzzah—go, Leptons! In the fall we’d be going off to university together at Stony Brook, on the opposite coast of North America—
if
my scholarship came through, anyway—and in the meantime we were young, healthy, and hetero. The song being played was one I liked a lot, an ancient old ballad called “On the Road to the Stars,” that always brought a lump to my throat because it was one of my father’s favorites.