Ship-Sister, Star-Sister

  Ship-Sister, Star-Sister

  Robert Silverberg

  Ship-Sister, Star-Sister

  by Robert Silverberg

  Sixteen light-years from Earth today, in the fifth month of the voyage, and the silent throb of acceleration continues to drive the velocity higher. Three games of go are in progress in the ship’s lounge. The year-captain stands at the entrance to the lounge, casually watching the players: Roy and Sylvia, Leon and Chiang, Heinz and Elliot. Go has been a craze aboard ship for weeks. The players—some eighteen or twenty members of the expedition have caught the addiction by now—sit hour after hour, contemplating strategies, devising variations, grasping the smooth black or white stones between forefinger and second finger, putting the stones down against the wooden board with the proper smart sharp clacking sound. The year-captain himself does not play, though the game once interested him to the point of obsession, long ago; he finds his responsibilities so draining that an exercise in simulated territorial conquest does not attract him now. He comes here often to watch, however, remaining five or ten minutes, then going on about his duties.

  The best of the players is Roy, the mathematician, a large, heavy man with a soft sleepy face. He sits with his eyes closed, awaiting in tranquility his turn to play. “I am purging myself of the need to win,” he told the year-captain yesterday when asked what occupies his mind while he waits. Purged or not, Roy wins more than half of his games, even though he gives most of his opponents a handicap of four or five stones.

  He gives Sylvia a handicap of only two. She is a delicate woman, fine-boned and shy, a geneticist, and she plays well although slowly. She makes her move. At the sound of it Roy opens his eyes. He studies the board, points, and says, “Atari” the conventional way of calling to his opponent’s attention the fact that her move will enable him to capture several of her stones. Sylvia laughs lightly and retracts her move. After a moment she moves again. Roy nods and picks up a white stone, which he holds for nearly a minute before he places it.

  The year-captain would like to speak with Sylvia about one of her experiments, but he sees she will be occupied with the game for another hour or more. The conversation can wait. No one hurries aboard this ship. They have plenty of time for everything: a lifetime, maybe, if no habitable planet can be found. The universe is theirs. He scans the board and tries to anticipate Sylvia’s next move. Soft footsteps sound behind him. The year-captain turns. Noelle, the ship’s communicator, is approaching the lounge. She is a slim, sightless girl with long, dark hair, and she customarily walks the corridors unaided: no sensors for her, not even a cane. Occasionally she stumbles, but usually her balance is excellent and her sense of the location of obstacles is superb. It is a kind of arrogance for the blind to shun assistance, perhaps. But also it is a kind of desperate poetry.

  As she comes up to him she says, “Good morning, year-captain.”

  Noelle is infallible in making such identifications. She claims to be able to distinguish members of the expedition by the tiny characteristic sounds they make: their patterns of breathing, their coughs, the rustling of their clothing. Among the others there is some skepticism about this. Many aboard the ship believe that Noelle is reading their minds. She does not deny that she possesses the power of telepathy; but she insists that the only mind to which she has direct access is that of her twin sister Yvonne, far away on Earth.

  He turns to her. His eyes meet hers: an automatic act, a habit. Hers, dark and clear, stare disconcertingly through his forehead. He says, “I’ll have a report for you to transmit in about two hours.”

  “I’m ready whenever.” She smiles faintly. She listens a moment to the clacking of the go stones. “Three games being played?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “How strange that the game hasn’t begun to lose its hold on them by this time.”

  “Its grip is powerful,” the year-captain says.

  “It must be. How good it is to be able to give yourself so completely to a game.”

  “I wonder. Playing go consumes a great deal of valuable time.”

  “Time?” Noelle laughs. “What is there to do with time, except to consume it?” After a moment she says, “Is it a difficult game?”

  “The rules are quite simple. The application of the rules is another matter entirely. It’s a deeper and more subtle game than chess, I think.”

  Her blank eyes wander across his face and suddenly lock into his. “How long would it take for me to learn how to play?”

  “You?”

  “Why not? I also need amusement, year-captain.”

  “The board has hundreds of intersections. Moves may be made at any of them. The patterns formed are complex and constantly changing. Someone who is unable to see—”

  “My memory is excellent,” Noelle says. “I can visualize the board and make the necessary corrections as play proceeds. You need only tell me where you put down your stones. And guide my hand, I suppose, when I make my moves.”

  “I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”

  “Will you teach me anyway?”

  The ship is sleek, tapered, graceful: a silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. No. In fact the ship is no bullet at all, but rather something squat and awkward, as clumsy as any ordinary spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennae and observation booms and other externals. Yet the year-captain persists in thinking of it as sleek and tapered and graceful, because of its incredible speed. It carries him without friction through the vast empty gray cloak of nospace at a velocity greater than that of light. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind.

  Already the expedition is sixteen light-years from Earth. That isn’t an easy thing for him to grasp. He feels the force of it, but not the true meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home, and understand that readily enough. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home, yes, he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much strains comprehension—a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf—but he thinks he is able to understand even so great a distance, after a fashion. Sixteen light-years, though? How can he explain that to himself? Brilliant stars flank the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels, and he knows that his gray-flecked beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far, so swiftly.

  Even so, there is a greater miracle. He will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth an hour after lunch, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems an even greater miracle to him.

  Her cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuettes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some objects evidently chosen for their rich textures—a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea-urchin’s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision; her confidence of motion is unnerving to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down. She is pale, precisely groomed, her dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. Her lips are full, her nose is rounded. She wears a soft flowing robe. Her body is attractive: he has seen her in the baths and knows of her high full breasts, her a
mple curving hips, her creamy perfect skin. Yet so far as he has heard she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship as taking advantage. Well, then, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling; pity too easily becomes patronizing, and kills desire. He rejects that theory: glib, implausible. Could it be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? She has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that Noelle is so self-contained, so serene, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communion with her distant sister that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems unapproachable; her strange perfection of soul sequesters her, keeping others at a distance the way extraordinary physical beauty can sometimes keep people at a distance. She does not arouse desire because she does not seem at all human. She gleams. She is a flawless machine, an integral part of the ship.

  He unfolds the text of today’s report to Earth. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communique all the same.”

  “It would be cruel if we didn’t. We mean so much to them.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Oh, yes. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

  “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace.” His voice sounds harsh to him, his rhythms of speech coarse and blurting. His words surprise him. He had not known he felt this way about Earth. Still, he goes on. “That’s all we represent: novelty, vicarious adventure, a moment of amusement.”

  “Do you mean that? It sounds so awful cynical.”

  He shrugs. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiques. Perhaps sooner than that. A year and they’ll have forgotten us.”

  She says, “I don’t see you as a cynical man. Yet you often say such—” She falters. “Such—”

  “Such blunt things? I’m a realist, I guess. Is that the same as a cynic?”

  “Don’t try to label yourself, year-captain.”

  “I only try to look at things realistically.”

  “You don’t know what real is. You don’t know what you are, year-captain.”

  The conversation is suddenly out of control: much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken like this before. It is as if there is a malign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them unnaturally tense and aggressive. He feels panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle’s consciousness, will she still be able to make contact with far-off Yvonne?

  He is unable to prevent himself from parrying: “Do you know what I am, then?”

  She tells him, “You’re a man in search of himself. That’s why you volunteered to come all the way out here.”

  “And why did you volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle?” he asks helplessly.

  She lets the lids slide slowly down over her unseeing eyes and offers no reply. He tries to salvage things a bit by saying more calmly into her tense silence, “Never mind. I didn’t intend to upset you, Shall we transmit the report?”

  “Wait.”

  “All right.”

  She appears to be collecting herself. After a moment she says, less edgily, “How do you think they see us at home? As ordinary human beings doing an unusual job or as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage?”

  “Right now, as superhuman creatures, epic voyage.”

  “And later we’ll become more ordinary in their eyes?”

  “Later we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us.”

  “How sad.” Her tone tingles with a grace-note of irony. She may be laughing at him. “And you, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”

  “Something in between. Rather more than ordinary, but no demigod.”

  “I regard myself as quite ordinary except in two respects,” she says sweetly.

  “One is your telepathic communion with your sister and the other—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable at naming it. “The other is your blindness.”

  “Of course,” she says. Smiles. Radiantly. “Shall we do the report now?”

  “Have you made contact with Yvonne?”

  “Yes. She’s waiting.”

  “Very well, then.” Glancing at his notes, he begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity… Apparent location…”

  She naps after every transmission. They exhaust her. She was beginning to fade even before he reached the end of today’s message; now, as he steps into the corridor, he knows she will be asleep before he closes the door. He leaves, frowning, troubled by the odd outburst of tension between them and by his mysterious attack of “realism.” By what right does he say Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? All during the years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement never flagged, indeed spurred the voyagers themselves on at times when their interminable training routines threatened them with boredom. Earth’s messages, relayed by Yvonne to Noelle, vibrate with eager queries; the curiosity of the homeworld has been overwhelming since the start. Tell us, tell us, tell us!

  But there is so little to tell, really, except in that one transcendental area where there is so much. And how, really, can any of that be told?

  How can this—

  He pauses by the viewplate in the main transit corridor, a rectangular window a dozen meters long that gives direct access to the external environment. The pearl-gray emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the skin of the ship. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to anticipate nothing in the way of outside inputs as they crossed the galaxy; they would be shuttling through a void of infinite length, a matter-free tube, and there would be no sights to entertain them, no backdrop of remote nebulas, no glittering stars, no stray meteors, not so much as a pair of colliding atoms yielding the tiniest momentary spark, only an eternal sameness, like a blank wall. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, demand no delights from the universe beyond the ship, make the ship itself your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided those warnings had been! Nospace was not a wall but rather a window. It was impossible for those on Earth to understand what revelations lay in that seeming emptiness. The year-captain, head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now revels in his keenest pleasure. A glance at the viewplate reveals that place where the immanent becomes the transcendent: the year-captain sees once again the infinite reverberating waves of energy that sweep through the grayness. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; it is a stunning profusion of interlocking energy fields, linking everything to everything, it is music that also is light, it is light that also is music, and those aboard the ship are sentient particles wholly enmeshed in that vast all-engulfing reverberation, that radiant song of gladness, that is the universe. The voyagers journey joyously toward the center of all things, giving themselves gladly into the care of cosmic forces far surpassing human control and understanding. He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it. What do I see, what do I feel, what am I experiencing? It is instant revelation, every time. It is—almost, almost!—the sought-after oneness. Barriers remain, but yet he is aware of an altered sense of space and time, a knowledge of the awesome something that
lurks in the vacancies between the spokes of the cosmos, something majestic and powerful; he knows that that something is part of himself, and he is part of it. When he stands at the viewplate he yearns to open the ship’s great hatch and tumble into the eternal. But not yet, not yet. Barriers remain. The voyage has only begun. They grow closer every day to that which they seek, but the voyage has only begun.

  How could we convey any of this to those who remain behind? How could we make them understand?

  Not with words. Never with words.

  Let them come out here and see for themselves—

  He smiles. He trembles and does a little shivering wriggle of delight. He turns away from the viewplate, drained, ecstatic.

  Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery, shiny coating of thin hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they have been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It congeals, coagulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice-floes, colliding, grinding, churning; the floes are at war, destroying one another’s edges, but some are making treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it is freezing. The ship can barely make headway. The sails belly out uselessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her cabin, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind’s fist will punch through the stiff, frozen canvas of the sails. Nothing can save them. But now! Yes, yes! A glow overhead! Yvonne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the perfumed tropics.