Variable Star (25 page)

I dug in my heels. “Hold on a minute. Is this some kind of religious thing? Buddhism or something?”

She smiled. “Atheist?”

“Agnostic.”

“Fear not. Buddhists are only one of many groups of humans who have found this a useful posture for meditation. So have Hindus, Taoists, TM’ers, and a dozen other groups. And in any case, Buddhism isn’t a religion, strictly speaking.”

“It isn’t?”

“No god, or gods, or goddesses—except in a couple of the more obscure sects. No heaven or hell in the theological sense. No patriarch or matriarch, no Prophet or Pope. They don’t go in for holy wars, or heresy hunts.”

“Really?”

“Buddhists believe the Buddha himself was simply a man, who woke up one day. As far as I understand it, anyway. I know hardly anything at all about Buddhism. If you’re interested, you can talk to Tenzin Itokawa, the Relativist. He is a Zen priest, of the Rinzai school. Right now, forget Buddhism. Forget religion. Just put your legs like this and trust me, okay?”

I tried. “Show me again.”

She unpretzeled, and then pretzeled again slowly. I tried to copy it. This time I came closer.

“Other way round. This one over that one. There—that’s it. Now work your knees around a little until they’re comfortable.”

Suddenly I seemed to just snap into place. “Like that?”

“That’s it. Good. Okay, now. Spine straight. Stack those vertebrae. Hands together, palms up, left hand on top, with the thumb tips touching. Settle your skull on those stacked vertebrae. You’ve got it.”

It did indeed feel like a position I could hold for a while in relative comfort. “Now what?”

“Don’t just do something: sit there.”

I mentally shrugged and did so. Or rather tried to stop doing anything. As before I tried to stop thinking, too—with no better success. But I did become aware that I was starting to relax. My thoughts didn’t exactly slow down…but they became less intense, somehow.

After a few minutes of silence, she said, “Now we do a breathing exercise so childishly simple it can’t possibly have any effect.”

“Sounds good.”

“There really is nothing to it. In your head, count to four, at intervals of about four seconds, or a little longer.” I did as she asked. “Okay. Now, you inhale for a count of four…then hold your breath for a count of four…then exhale for four…then hold for four. In, hold, out, hold. Repeat, and keep repeating. Try it.”

I played along. A full cycle, then another, then another. After half a dozen or so, I found the rhythm, and settled into it. Easy as pie. Considerably easier than pi. Stop that, Joel.

“Good. Now with each cycle, slow it down just a skosh. Not much, and when it seems to be too much, let it come back up again, until you find your slowest natural speed. As soon as you’re sure you’ve found it, stop counting and just breathe.”

It wasn’t hard. It was mindless, was what it was. Silly, and pointless, and…

…and I could feel my shoulders settling. Feel my facial muscles relaxing. Feel my pulse slowing, and deepening, and steadying.
Hear
my pulse, playing bass under the alternating E-A E-A organ chords of my breath. As I became aware of it, I had the idea I could hear it slowly changing from electric bass guitar to acoustic standup bass, quieter but more resonant.

I let myself sink into it. I closed my eyes, and paradoxically as I did I became more aware of the room, of my position in it, of its position in the
Sheffield—
and as I followed the thought to its logical next stopping place, it was as if the ground fell away beneath me without warning. Have you ever been so stoned or drunk that you suddenly fancied you could actually
perceive
the vast slow spinning of whatever planet you live on? Not just as something known intellectually but as something felt in the gut? Ever find yourself clutching the ground, to keep from falling off? Well, something like that happened to me then. For the very first time, I suddenly
got
where I was.

I was in an incredibly, pathetically flimsy bubble of moist air, hurtling through interstellar space at a speed so intrinsically terrifying that its friction with
nothingness
was enough to require powerful and clever shielding, propelled by a force no man really understood, so powerful it could have wrecked my star if invoked too near it. With a would-be village of other misfits and refugees I was plummeting through the universe so fast Time itself couldn’t keep up—living by Dr. Einstein’s Clock, while behind me the rest of the human race continued to age as God or random chance had intended. In these hair-raising conditions I would, if I was very lucky, spend approximately the next fifth of my life racing toward a destination I had not given a second’s serious consideration, a place where, if I was incredibly lucky, it would prove possible to raise turnips and keep hogs, and the monsters wouldn’t be able to kill me.

All this in a microsecond—then in the time it took me to open my eyes the feeling popped like a bubble and I was back in my body again, was just a guy sitting in a room doing nothing at all. It happened and then was over so impossibly fast that I was still relaxed: there hadn’t even been time for my heartbeat or breathing to increase. But when I did get my eyes open the first thing they saw was Dr. Amy’s eyes looking straight into them, and I knew at once that she knew what had happened to me. She’d been expecting it to happen. No, that was wrong. She had known it might happen, and had hoped it would. My whole head vibrated for a few seconds, like a hummingbird in denial. “Whoa!” I croaked.

“See, Joel? You sat still and quieted down…and you noticed where you are. Sit still longer and you’ll start to notice where you’re going. Sit still long enough and you may figure out why you’re going there. You could end up with some clues to just who the hell is doing all that.”

“And that would be a good thing?”

“
Yes
,” she said, raising her voice two notches higher in volume for the single word. “Stop looking dubious. When you peel back enough layers of your own bullshit to finally get a good glimpse of yourself, you are going to find you respect yourself a good deal more than you expected to.”

I said nothing.

“I promise that, Joel. The journey you need to take isn’t going to be easy…but you’re going to like the destination. Certainly a lot better than where you are now. Now lie to me.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Tell me you believe me.”

I tried unsuccessfully to suppress my grin. “I believe you believe it.”

She nodded. “Close enough. That’s enough for one session. Here’s your homework. First, I want you to spend an hour a day sitting zazen—that’s what you just did—and I’d like you to do it in a Sim Room.”

“I was thinking of a spot on the Upper Ag Deck.”

“Later. Starting out, use the Sim. Accept the simulations it offers you for the first two weeks, the ones I’ll program for you. After that you can override if you want, using your judgment. After three or four weeks we’ll slowly bring you back out into the real world again. The Ag Deck might be a great place to start.”

I thought up some objections, and decided to hell with them. If she wasn’t smarter than I was, this was all a terrible mistake. “Okay. That was ‘first.’ What’s next?”

“I want you to get in shape. You’re healthy enough, but you’re quite out of condition for your age. Do what the Gym tells you.”

It was easier to think up objections this time, and they were better objections. The one I wanted to admit to was, “Where do I find the hours?”

“Shave them from either your farmwork or your music. Whichever is less important to you personally.”

It is annoyingly hard to object to a reasonable proposal. She was right. I was out of shape. “Okay. Meditate, work out. What else?”

“Study your destination. Learn everything you can about it. The star, first—where Immega 714 lies in the sky, why it took so long to discover, how it’s different from Sol. Then the planet: What kind of world is Brasil Novo, how is it like and unlike Ganymede, what’s living there already, what kind of place is it going to be for a kid to grow up in?”

To that I had no objections. “Done. Meditate, exercise, look out the windshield—anything else?”

She nodded. “Yes. I want you to start dating. Joel?
Joel!
”

“You go too damned far,” I said on my way to the door. It would not iris open fast enough to suit me, so I tried to hurry it with my hands and it jammed in its tracks, not quite all the way open. I had to stop in my own tracks, my exit spoiled by an absurd social dilemma. I could not walk away and leave her with a broken door like some kind of barbarian, but I had no idea how to repair it. I stood there, unwilling to turn around until I had some idea how to cope with the situation. I’m pretty sure in another second or two I’d have remembered that I was a rich man, now. But before I could think of it, behind me she said drily, “My door is always open.”

It is very hard to remain annoyed at someone who has just made you burst out laughing. I gave up and turned around and she was laughing, too. She had a great whoop of a laugh. We got into one of those things where each time you’re just about to get it under control, the other cracks up again. It always ends eventually with you smiling at each other, breathing like runners after the marathon.

“Okay,” she said finally. “If you can laugh like that, you can take a few weeks before you start dating again. Go do your homework.”

I nodded and gestured at the door. “I’ve got this.”

She nodded and put her attention back down on her screen, as she’d been doing when I’d first seen her.

I
guess
that was really the day I finally joined the colony, became a Brasiliano Novo—or at least, decided to try. I had already been utterly committed, physically, since the
Sheffield
had left orbit, but it was only after I left Dr. Amy Louis’s office that afternoon that I finally started to become
emotionally
committed to anything but numbness. Until then, I had been not only drifting, but paying no attention where I was drifting. Reefs or deeps, rough seas or doldrums, all had been the same to me. But from then on, I was at least back on the Bridge, trying to work out my position and best course, trying the rudder, learning how the sails handled, testing the diesels, scanning the horizon for clues to the weather ahead.

I don’t mean to suggest it happened in an hour. It took weeks to happen, months, years. But that’s the hour when it began happening.

T
he first thing I did about it was not move out.

Everyone seemed to assume that now that I was stinking rich, I would of course move out of the prematurely decaying hovel I had been sharing with three hapless losers, leave Dear Old Rup-Tooey behind me in the dust, and settle into vastly more lavish solo quarters several decks higher, and with all the privacy, comfort, and (most prestigious of all) roominess that could be desired by a healthy young nouveau millionaire whose Healer had advised him to start dating.

But I had lived alone before. I had
always
lived alone before. Until I’d been accepted into the Tenth Circle, I’d had no idea how much that sucked. I remembered it well. I had no particular reason to suppose money would make it all that much better.

Also, I kept remembering that I might very well have been spaced as a danger to the
Sheffield
by now, if it had not been for my bunkies Pat and Herb. And for Solomon Short, who was one of the six wealthiest people aboard, and had chosen to be my friend when all I had to my name was a good sax.

Besides, as Mark Twain says, two moves equals one fire. I’d already moved once recently.

So I stayed where I was. But I reached out to another friend, as wealthy as Sol and considerably more practical, and sought his counsel. And George R smiled, and pointed me toward the best mechanics, engineers, artisans, electricians, cyberpeople,
and
plumbers aboard, and snipped some bureaucratic red tape to get me permission to clear out storage cubics immediately next door on either side and cut through some walls. When all the busy beavers had gone away again and the dust had settled, RUP-0010-E was the most solid, reliable, comfortable, luxuriously appointed, and technologically advanced living space on that deck—and its ’fresher was probably the best in the
Sheffield
, so unreasonably large that all four of us could have used it at once, with a guest apiece. And so advanced in terms of hedonic technology that we all suddenly found ourselves very popular fellows in shipboard society: people wanted to be invited over for long enough to need to use the ’fresher. It didn’t work well because we were usually in there ourselves.

Pat got all the data-chasing and pattern-spotting software his heart desired, and enough processing power to provide practical, real-time access to any historical datum on board. Or behind us in the Solar System, although that was already becoming more and more out-of-date as Einstein effect started to mount up. But historians aren’t in a hurry.

Herb received the power to seal off his quadrant of the room at will with two mirror walls that would not pass light or sound in either direction, within which he could not-write in privacy.

So did Balvovatz, but I doubt he got much writing done, because he never activated his field if he was alone in there, and never stopped smiling when he came out. He told me years later, weeping drunk, that it was the first place he had ever lived that a woman who did not love him desperately would come to. I laughed so hard he stopped weeping and began laughing just about the time I quit laughing and started to cry.

For myself, I settled for two major infrastructure improvements. First, a robot that made French Press style coffee from fresh-ground recently roasted beans on demand and adulterated it to my taste; it claimed to be fully automatic, but actually you had to push a little button. And second, a bunk that was as comfortable as any in the
Sheffield
…and on top of which I, my roommates,
and
Richie and Jules could all have piled at once and done jumping jacks without making it creak, much less rip free of the bulkhead. Nothing in that room was breakable by the time I was done with it.