Variable Star (47 page)

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.

T
hat’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.

T
his 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 sf reader simply because that was where all the best stuff was…and so the whole course of my life was twisted.

N
ow 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.

N
ow 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.

And that wasn’t all…

There was, Robert said, an outline for an entire
novel
that no one knew about, that Heinlein had never gotten around to writing. What it read like, he said, was a classic Heinlein Juvenile, and indeed it had been dreamed up around the time he was writing them, and—

—and from the back of the room, a woman I could not see called, in a loud, clear, melodious voice:

“You should get Spider Robinson to finish that novel.”

And there was applause.

One of the other people on that panel was Eleanor Wood, literary agent for the estate of Robert A. Heinlein—and also, as it happens, for
me
. Another was Art Dula, trustee for the estate and its half-million dollar Heinlein Prize Trust (See
www.heinleinprize.com
for details)…and Robert’s literary executor. Glances were exchanged. Immediately after the panel ended, words were exchanged.

I was, please understand, profoundly terrified that this cup might actually come to me. It was quite literally the most difficult and intimidating challenge that could possibly be handed a science fiction writer, a red flag to critics. It was like a musician being asked to write, score, produce, perform, and record an entire album based on a couple of John Lennon demo cassettes. In boxing it’s called leading with your chin. But I was fifty-five years old, just in the mood for the challenge of my life. Most of all, I wanted to read a new Heinlein novel so badly, I didn’t care if I had to finish it myself, didn’t care what kind of grief it cost me to do so.

Once again, a woman I didn’t know had changed my life.

I’m delighted to report that she did not remain anonymous. I sent this Afterword around to some of those mentioned in it for corrections, and one of them was David M. Silver, President of the Heinlein Society (
www.heinleinsociety.org
), who was also on that panel. He was able to identify my benefactress as a member of his esteemed society. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Kate Gladstone!

S
hortly after
I returned home from Torcon 3, I received Robert’s outline, and permission to write two sample chapters and a proposal for Art Dula; if he liked them, the gig was mine. Wild with exultation, I fell upon that outline and read it three times with extreme care.

And then I began banging my head on my desk. Gently, at first.

You may recall I stated earlier that Robert’s outline ran at least eight pages. It may have run fifty, for all anybody knows. What we
do
know is, seven of them survive.

They establish the ficton—Robert’s term for time and place in which a story is set. They create vivid characters and their back stories, especially Joel, Jinny, and her grandfather. They describe the basic antinomy that impels Joel to emigrate, discuss the economics of interstellar colonization, and sketch in some of his early adventures after he leaves.

And then they chop off in midsentence, and midstory.

My God
, I said to myself, the first time I finished reading the outline,
there’s no furshlugginer
ending!
It could go
anywhere
from here
…

God, this is great!
I said to myself the second time I finished it,
I not only get to write a book with Robert, I get to pick the ending
.