Variable Star

ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-1988) was the dominant science fiction writer of the modern era, a writer whose influence on the field was immense. He won science fiction's Hugo award for best novel four times.

SPIDER ROBINSON, since he began writing professionally in 1972, has won many major awards, including three Hugos, one Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. Robinson currently resides near Vancouver, B.C., Canada.

 Chapter One
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Harun Alrashid . . .
 
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
 
Recollections of the Arabian Nights
 
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.
 
It’s the reason we came from the mud, don’t you know
’cause we wanted to climb to the stars,
 
In our flesh and our bone and our blood we all know
we were meant to return to the stars,
 
Ask anyone which way is God, and you know
he will probably point to the stars . . .
 
None of that explained the way Jinny danced that night. I knew her as a good dancer, but that night it was almost as if she were possessed by the ghost of Gillis. It wasn’t even just her own dancing, though that was inspired. She did some moves that startled me, phrases so impressive she started to draw attention even on a crowded dance floor. Couples around us kept dancing, but began watching her. Her long red hair swirled through the room like the cape of an inspired toreador, and for a while I could only follow like a mesmerized bull. But then her eyes met mine, and flashed, and the next thing I knew I was attempting a combination I had never even thought of before; one that I knew as I began, was way beyond my abilities—and I nailed it. She sent me a grin that felt like it started a sunburn, and offered me an intriguing move, and I thought of something to do with it, and she lobbed it back with a twist, and we got through five fairly complex phrases without a train wreck and out the other side as smoothly as if we’d been rehearsing for weeks. Some people had stopped dancing to watch, now.
 
On the way to the stars—
every molecule in you was born in the heart of a star.
On the way to the stars—
in the dead of the night they’re the light that’ll show
where you are
yes they are
from so far . . .
 
In the back of my head were a few half-formed, half-baked layman’s ideas for dance steps that I wasn’t even sure were physically possible in a one-gee field. I’d never had the nerve to actually try any of them with a partner, in any gravity; I really hate looking ridiculous. But Jinny lifted an eyebrow—what have you got?—and before I knew it I was trying one, even though there was no way she could know what her response was supposed to be. Only she did, somehow, and made it—or rather, an improved variation of what I’d thought of—and not only was the result successful enough to draw applause, by luck it happened to offer a perfect lead-in to another of my ideas, which also turned out to work, and suggested something to her—
 
We flew.
 
We’ll be through if the day ever comes when we no
longer yearn to return to the stars.
 
I can’t prove it’s so, but I’m certain: I know
that our ancestors came from the stars.
 
It would not be so lonely to die if I knew
I had died on the way to the stars.
 
Talking about dance is as silly as dancing about architecture. I don’t know how to convey exactly how we danced that night, or what was so remarkable about it. I can barely manage to believe we did it. Just let it stand that we deserved the applause we received when the music finally ended and we went into our closing clinch. It was probably the first time since I’d come to Terra that I didn’t feel heavy and weak and fragile. I felt strong . . . graceful . . . manly. . . .
 
“After dancing like that, Stinky, a couple really ought to get married,” Jinny said about two hundred millimeters below my ear.
 
I felt fourteen. “Damn it, Jinny—” I said, and pulled away from her. I reached down for her hands, trying to make it into a dance move, but she eluded me. Instead she curtsied, blew me a kiss, turned on her heel, and left at high speed, to spirited applause.
 
It increased when I ran after her.
 
Jinny was 178 centimeters tall, not especially tall for a Terran, and I was a Ganymedean beanpole two full meters high, so her legs were considerably shorter than mine. But they were also adapted from birth to a one-gee field—to sports in a one-gee field. I didn’t catch up with her until we’d reached the parking lot, and then only because she decided to let me.
 
So we’d each had time to work on our lines.
 
Ginny went with, “Joel Johnston, if you don’t want to marry me—”
 
“Jinny, you know perfectly well I’m going to marry you—”
 
“In five more frimpin’ years! My God, Stinky, I’ll be an old, old woman by then—”
 
“Skinny, you’ll never be an old woman,” I said, and that shut her up for a second. Every so often a good one comes to me like that. Not often enough. “Look, don’t be like this. I can’t marry you right now. You know I can’t.”
 
“I don’t know anything of the sort. I know you won’t. But I see nothing preventing you. You don’t even have to worry about parental consent.”
 
“What does that have to do with it? Neither do you. And we wouldn’t let parental disapproval stand in our way if we did want to get married.”
 
“You see? I was right—you don’t want to!”
 
I was becoming alarmed. I had always thought of Jinny as unusually rational, for a girl. Could this be one of those hormonal storms I had read about? I hoped not—all authorities seemed to agree the only thing a man could do in such weather was lash himself to the mast and pray. I made a last stubborn attempt to pour logic on the troubled waters. “Jinny, please—be reasonable! I am not going to let you marry a dole bludger. Not even if he’s me.”
 
“But—”
 
“I intend to be a composer. You know that. That means it’s going to take me at least a few years to even start to get established. You knew that when we started dating. If, I say ‘if,’ all those bullocks I sacrificed to Zeus pay off and I actually win a Kallikanzaros Scholarship, it will be my great privilege to spend the next four years living on dishrag soup and scraped fridge, too poor to support a cat. If, and I say ‘if,’ I am as smart as I think I am, and luckier than I usually am, I’ll come out the other end with credentials that might, in only another year or two, leave me in a position to offer you something more than half of a motel cubicle. Meanwhile, you have your own scholarships and your law degree to worry about, so that once my music starts making serious money, nobody will weasel it away from us.”
 
“Stinky, do you think I care about money?” She said that last word as if it were a synonym for stale excrement.
 
I sighed. Definitely a hormonal storm. “Reboot and start over. What is the purpose of getting married?”
 
“What a romantic question!” She turned away and quested for her car. I didn’t move.
 
“Quit dodging, I’m serious. Why don’t we just live together if we want to be romantic? What is marriage for?”
 
The car told her she was heading the wrong way; she reversed direction and came back past me toward its voice and pulsing beacon. “Babies, obviously.”
 
I followed her. “Bingo. Marriage is for making jolly babies, raising them up into successful predators, and then admiring them until they’re old enough to reward you with grandchildren to spoil.”
 
She’d acquired the car by now; she safed and unlocked it. “My baby-making equipment ...