Starborne Read online

  So Roy and Sieglinde do the primary work, plotting Hesper’s star data against Paco’s computations of the Wotan’s presumed location in Einsteinian space and calculating the appropriate nospace equivalents. Paco then converts their figures into navigational coordinates intended to get the ship fromhere tothere and presents his results to Julia, who — working in consultation with Heinz — enters the necessary transformations in the stardrive intelligence. Whereupon the intelligence produces a simulation of the flight plan, indicating the course to be taken and the probable consequences of attempting it. The final step is for the year-captain, who bears ultimate responsibility for the success of these maneuvers, to examine the simulation and give his approval, whereupon the drive intelligence will put it into operation.

  All this, except for the last, has been accomplished.

  The year-captain does not pretend to any sort of expertise in nospace travel. His considerable skills lie in other fields. So it is largely by means of a leap of faith rather than any intellectual process that he allows himself to announce, after Julia and Heinz have shown him the simulation diagrams, “Well, I’m willing to go with it if you are.”

  What else can he say? His assent, he knows, is nothing but a formality. The jump must be made — that has already been decided. And he has to assume that Julia and Heinz have done their work properly. That all of them have. These calculations are matters that he does not really understand, and he knows he has no real right to an opinion. This far along in the operation he can only say yes. If he is thereby giving assent to catastrophe, well, so be it: Julia and Heinz and Paco and Roy and Sieglinde will partake of the catastrophe along with all the others, and so will he. He is in no position to recalculate and emend their proposal.

  “When we make the course change,” he says, “are we going to be aware that anything special is happening, and if so, what?”

  “Nothing will be apparent,” Julia tells him. “Nothing that we can feel, anyway. You mustn’t think of what well be doing in terms of acceleration effects. You mustn’t think in terms of any sort of phenomenological event that makes sense to you.”

  “But will it make sense to you?” he asks.

  “It’ll make sense,” Julia replies. “Not to me, not to you, maybe not even to Sieglinde and Roy. We don’t need to have it make sense. We only need to have it work.”

  “And it will.”

  “It will. It will.”

  Well, then, it will. The year-captain sends for Noelle.

  “It’s time to let Earth know about the course change,” he tells her. “We’re going to be redirecting the ship toward the star of Planet A a little later this day. Our first planetary surveillance mission is getting started.”

  Noelle nods gravely. “The people at home will find that news very exciting, I’m sure.” She says that in the most unexcited way possible, as if she is reading it from a script she has never seen before, and not reading it very well.

  The year-captain’s last few encounters with Noelle have been uncomfortable ones. That odd business of having her face pop so vividly into his mind like that, just as he was settling into the home stretch with Julia, was still bothering him the next time he saw the actual Noelle, and evidently she was able to pick up traces of his discomfort — from his body odor, maybe? from some edge on his voice? — for she had said, at once, “Is something wrong, year-captain?” Which he had taken pains to deny. But she knew. She knew. She never missed a nuance. It was hard, sometimes, to banish the suspicion that she could read anybody’s mind, and not just her sister’s. Most likely not; most likely she simply had greatly heightened senses of smell and hearing to compensate for the one sense that was missing, as was so often the case among the blind. The suspicion lingered all the same. He disliked holding on to it, but it was difficult for him to discard it. And he hated the thought that his mind might be wide open to hers, all his carefully repressed and buried cowardices and selfishnesses and hypocrisies and, yes, shameful lusts on display, waving like banners in the breeze.

  The uneasiness between them had not diminished in the ensuing days. He found it disturbing in some way to be alone with her, and she was disturbed by his disturbance, and that was upsetting to him, and so if went shuttling back and forth between them in infinite regress, like a reflection trapped between two mirrors. But neither of them ever said a word about it.

  “Is this a good time for you to try to send the message?” the year-captain asks.

  “I can try, yes,” she says, a little hesitantly.

  The interference has been growing worse, day by day. Neither Noelle nor Yvonne has any explanation for what is happening; Noelle clings without much conviction to her sunspot analogy for lack of any better answer. The sisters still manage to make contact twice daily, but the effort is increasingly a strain on their resources, for nearly every sentence must be repeated two or three times, and whole blocks of words now do not get through at all. Noelle has begun to look drawn, even haggard. The only thing that seems to refresh her, or at least divert her from this failing of her powers, is her playing of Go. She has become a master of the game, awarding even the masterly Roy a two-stone handicap; although she occasionally loses, her play is always distinguished, extraordinarily original in its sweep and design. When she is not playing she tends to be remote and withdrawn, as she is right now as she stands before die year-captain in his working quarters: head downcast, shoulders slumped, arms dangling, blind eyes no longer even attempting contact with his. She has become in all aspects a more elusive person than she had been before the onset of this communications crisis.

  Her deepening solitude must be frightful. The year-captain often yearns to extend some sort of comfort to her that would take the place of the ever more tenuous contact with her sister: to sweep her into his arms, to hold her close, to permit her to feel the simple proximity of another human being. But he does not dare. He is afraid of giving offense, or perhaps of frightening her. And he is afraid, also, of certain upwelling inchoate emotions of his own. He has no idea how far things might go once he lets them begin, and he fears letting them begin.

  Noelle’s classic beauty no longer seems quite so marmoreal to him. He has started, since the time that that apparition of her intruded on his lovemaking with Julia, to admit to himself the existence of a feeling of something as uncomplicated as desire for her. Why else had she entered his mind at that moment in the cubicle, if not that hidden feelings, feelings to which even he himself had had no access up till now, were beginning to break through to the surface?

  But he keeps his distance. He does not dare to touch her. He does not dare.

  “Tell them,” he says, “that the transverse journey across nospace will take approximately four and a half ship-months, after which—”

  “Wait. Too fast.”

  “Sorry.”

  She seems to be shivering. Some part of her mind, he knows, is linked to a woman essentially identical to herself who happens to be some twenty-odd light-years away, even as she seems to be focusing her attention on him. Who is more real to her, the identical twin far away on Earth, or the odd, edgy, troubled man just a hundred fifty centimeters distant from her in this cabin aboard this starship?

  “The transverse journey across nospace,” he says again, and waits.

  “Yes.”

  “Will take approximately four and a half ship-months—”

  “Yes. All right.”

  “After which the Wotan will have reached the vicinity of—”

  “Wait. Please.”

  A ripple of something not much unlike pain crosses her face. This is hurting her, this unclarity, the effort of maintaining the weakening link to Yvonne. The year-captain clenches his fists and presses his knuckles together until they pop. Waits. Waits.

  “Go ahead,” Noelle says. “Now.”

  “Will have reached the vicinity of the G-type star which—”

  “Wait. I’m sorry. It’s bad today.”

  He waits.

&nbs
p; They finish sending the message eventually. Noelle seems to be at the verge of tears by the time they are done. Her breath is coining in ragged bursts. Her dusky, lustrous skin has taken on a ghostly subcutaneous pallor. But after a moment she manages a sort of a smile.

  “Yvonne says she’ll tell everyone the news right away. She says it sounds wonderful. She wishes us all the luck in the world. No. In the universe.”

  Indeed, at the next transmission Noelle learns from Yvonne that the news of the Planet A surveillance mission has generated tremendous excitement everywhere on Earth. The reaction to the bulletin has been extreme, a kind of worldwide intoxication, a frenzied communal agitation such as has not been experienced by the staid people of Earth in centuries. It is as though the voyagers have announced not merely a surveillance mission but the actual discovery of a habitable New Earth. Yvonne says that they demand further reports at once: descriptions of the new planet’s climate and topography and other geographical details, conjectures about its possible flora and fauna.

  The year-captain is pleased that the news from the Wotan is having the appropriate beneficial psychological effect on the citizens of the home world. But he knows he must clarify the actual situation, and quickly, before their unrealistic expectations become embedded so deeply that it will be difficult for them to deal with the possible, even probable, disappointment that awaits.

  “Tell them,” he instructs Noelle, “that it’s too soon to start setting off fireworks — that this is probably only the first of many worlds that we’re going to have to explore before we find one that we can settle.”

  It takes her more than an hour to send that one brief message. The communications difficulties seem to be growing worse all the time.

  Huw holds his smooth blackGo stone lightly in the center of one broad fleshy fingertip, waggles the finger two or three times with great seriousness, as though trying to estimate the weight of the tiny polished disk, and says, apropos of nothing that anybody has been discussing this morning in the lounge, “Has he decided, I wonder, which of us are actually going to make the landing on Planet A?”

  “Well, he’ll be one of them, for sure,” Leon replies. He is Huw’s opponent, doing poorly, and waiting with ill-concealed impatience for Huw to make his move. “That’s his big specialty, isn’t it, planetary exploration?”

  Huw grunts and puts his stone down with a great flourish, clapping it against the board in a way that makes an emphatic, almost belligerent click. He has only recently surrendered to theGo -playing addiction, which by now is almost universal on board. Practically everyone except Hesper, Sieglinde, and a couple of the others has taken to spending three or four hours a day in the gaming lounge.

  It is only a couple of ship-weeks now until the Wotan is due to reach the nospace vicinity of the solar system in which Planet A is the feature of greatest interest, and then must shunt back into realspace for the direct-vision survey work. A great many unanswered questions wall begin to receive their answers at that point, not the least of which is whether the starship has traveled in the right direction through nospace and whether it will be able successfully to return to realspace at all; and shipboard tensions have begun to run a little higher than usual as the moment of truth approaches.

  “During his term of office the year-captain isn’t allowed to leave the ship for any reason whatsoever, unless we’ve come to our final destination,” Chang says from across the room. “It’s in the Articles of the Voyage.”

  “His year is almost up,” Leon says. “Once he’s out of office he’ll be free to take part in the exploration mission. My bet is that he’ll name himself to the landing party as one of his last official acts.”

  “Why do you think he’ll leave office when his year is up?” Paco asks. “What if he puts himself forward for reelection? I think he’d win. Who else would want that bloody job, anyway? And there’s nothing in the rules preventing a year-captain from succeeding himself when his year is up.”

  “Is he so power-hungry that he would want a second term, do you think?” Julia says.

  “Nobody in his right mind would want a second term,” Paco tells her. “Or even a first one. But is he necessarily in his right mind? Are any of us? Would anyone in his right mind have agreed to go on this voyage in the first place?”

  Calmly, Heinz, who is playing a game with Sylvia at the far side of the lounge, says, “My opinion is that a second term is the last thing he wants. I think he would very much prefer to be part of the landing party, and, as Chang says, having a second term would disqualify him from joining that. So he intends to step down. But if he does, who are we going to elect in his place?”

  The question lands with sudden force among them, like a fist slamming down on everyone’s gaming board. There is a long moment of surprised silence in the lounge. Has this abruptly become an impromptu nominating convention? In that case, why is no one speaking out?

  “What about you, Heinz?” Chang says at last.

  “Don’t speak foolishness. I’m not a reliable person. Not in the way a captain needs to be.”

  “Well, then, who would you suggest?”

  “I’m not suggesting anyone. I simply raised the question.” Heinz looks around at each of the others. “What about you, Sylvia? A year as captain — why not? You don’t have any other urgent responsibilities at this stage in the voyage. Or you, Paco? You say you wouldn’t want the job, but you’d be a nice contrast with him, all sound and fury in place of chilly Nordic restraint. And what about Sieglinde, maybe? She’d nominate herself, I suspect, if we gave her half a chance.” They all laugh at that. Sieglinde is not a popular member of the expedition. “Or you, Huw,” Heinz says, grinning and pointing at the heavyset red-faced Welshman. “You’d make a damned good captain.”

  “No. Not on your life. If I took the job, I would then face the same problem that he does, of the year-captain’s not being permitted to take part in a planetary exploration mission,” Huw reminds him. “And this entire conversation began with my question about the possible makeup of the planetary landing mission, if there is indeed to be one. Of course, I’m intending to be part of it. So obviously there’s no chance I’d let myself be put forth for captain.”

  “Who would we pick, then?” someone asks.

  Again, silence. There is no clearly apparent consensus candidate and they all know it. They have all become accustomed to the captaincy of the incumbent in these eleven months; he seems well fitted to the role, and it seems a useful employment of his strange restless intensity. Many have voiced the hope that he will simply remain in office, which would spare the rest of them the bother of having to do the job and also keep him safely busy. Which is why discussions of the upcoming expiration of the year-captain’s term have been few and far between, and why this one has rapidly petered out.

  Huw says, “If we may return to the question of the makeup of the landing party now—”

  “Play your stone, Huw,” Leon grunts.

  Huw flamboyantly sweeps a black stone out of the pile of loose ones and slaps it almost without looking against the board, capturing a little group of Leon’s that evidently had been left undefended for some time now. Leon gasps in surprise. Huw says, addressing the others, “The exploration team ought to consist, I would think, of three people, no more, no less. Obviously we can’t send one person down alone, and two is probably too few to deal with the risks that might arise. On the other hand, we mustn’t risk any big percentage of our total complement in any landing. Three is probably the right number.”

  “You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?” Leon says sourly.

  Huw ignores him. “The ideal exploration party, it seems to me, would include one biologist, one planetographer, and, of course, one man to operate and do necessary maintenance work on the vehicle the party uses. The year-captain is the expert on alien biologies: he’s an obvious choice, though we could send Giovanna or even Elizabeth if for some reason the year-captain can’t or won’t go. As for t
he planetographer—”

  “I don’t think we should let any women be part of the group,” Paco says firmly.

  The unexpected remark cuts across Huw’s line of discourse so completely that Huw falls silent and his mouth gapes open two or three times, fishlike. Everyone turns to stare at Paco. He is beaming in a very self-satisfied way, as though he has just demonstrated the existence of a fourth law of thermodynamics.

  There are four women in the lounge: Julia, Innelda, Giovanna, Sylvia. Julia and Innelda and Giovanna seem too astonished to reply. It is Sylvia, finally, who speaks up. “Bravo, Paco! What a marvelously medieval idea! The bold, brave knights go forth to check out the country of the dragons, and the ladies stay home in the castle. Is that it?”

  Paco’s self-congratulatory glow dims. He gives her a surly look.

  “That’s not what I mean at all,” he says.

  “No?”

  “No. It’s purely a matter of genetic diversity, don’t you see?” The room has become very quiet. Paco hunches forward and begins to count off points on his fingers. “Look. We have twenty-five live wombs on board, to put matters in the most basic possible way. Twenty-five walking ovum banks, twenty-five potential carriers of fetuses. That is to say, we’ve got only you twenty-five women available among ourselves with which to get the population of New Earth started. There’s plenty of sperm available around here, you know. One man could fertilize a whole army of women, if necessary. It’s potential mothers who are scarce, and we don’t want to make them any scarcer. Each woman on board represents an irreplaceable four percent of all the women well be bringing to the new world. Each of you is an irreplaceable pool of genetic information, in other words. And an instrument of embryo nurture. The chance of losing even one of you on a risky exploration mission is too big a gamble to take. Q.E.D.”