Starborne Read online

  The year-captain nods. “Of course.”

  “But it won’t be long, year-captain! It won’t be long, I promise you that!”

  The year-captain offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at — it’s an article of faith for everyone on board that there must be such a world somewhere — but he understands that Hesper’s early enthusiasms are just that, enthusiasms. Hesper is a quick man with a hypothesis. No matter: the voyage has just begun, really. The year-captain doesn’t expect to be greeted here with any real discoveries, not yet. He simply wants to stare at the screen.

  Hesper has told him, more than once, what the blazing swirls and squiggles on the screen are supposed to signify. The sequence of criteria for habitable worlds. The raw astronomical data, first. Each sun’s place on the main sequence, the indications of the presence of planetary bodies in constructive positions. Mean orbital distances plotted against luminosity. And then a spectroscopic workup. Evidence for the presence of an atmosphere. The chemical components thereof: suitable or not? And then — biospheric analysis — conditions of thermodynamic disequilibrium, indicating the possible presence of transpiration and respiration — the temperature range, probable mean highs and lows—

  The starship has data-gathering tentacles reaching far out into the incomprehensible void. A host of sensory receptors, mysteriously capable of piercing the nospace tube in which the ship travels and extending into the dark reality beyond, collects information tirelessly, information that is not actual realspace data but is somehow a usable equivalent of such data, and processes it into these bright designs. Over which this bubbly little man hovers, evaluating, discarding, reconsidering, unendingly searching for the ultimate new Eden that is the goal of their quest.

  Hesper wants to discuss his newest prospects. The year-captain listens with half an ear. He wants nothing more just now than the simple relaxation that watching the screen affords. The abstract patterns, so very bright and cheerful. The wild swirls of color that whirl and clash like crazed comets. Is there any real meaning in them? Only Hesper knows. He devised this information-gathering system; he is the only one, really, who can decipher and interpret the mysterious factoids that the ship’s sensors suck in. When the time comes, the year-captain will pay close attention to the little man’s data. But this is not yet the time.

  The year-captain stands and watches for a while, mindlessly, like a small child, taking innocent pleasure in the colors and patterns, admiring them for their own sake. There are few enough pleasures that he allows himself: this one is harmless and comforting. Stars dance on the screen in wild galliards and fandangos. He imagines that he identifies steel-blue Vega and emerald Deneb and golden Arcturus, but he knows that there is no way he can be correct. The patterns he sees here are not those of the constellations he watched so often soaring across the icy sky over Norway in his long vigils of the night. What Hesper views here is not the sky itself, nor even any one-to-one equivalent of it, but simply the nospace correlative of the sky, a map of energy sources in realspace as they have been translated into utterly alien nospace terms. No matter; let these seeming stars be any stars at all, let them be Markab or Procyon or Rigel or Betelgeuse or ones that have no names at all — let them, for all he cares, be nothing more than imaginary points of light. He wants only to see the dance.

  He savors the light-show gratefully until his eyes begin to ache a little and the wild spectacle starts to weary his mind. Then he thanks Hesper gravely and goes out.

  Noelle’s 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, moving this object a centimeter or two to one side, lifting another and fondling it a moment before returning it to the exact place where it had been. The supreme confidence of her movements is fascinating to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down.

  Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver stitching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows 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 by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship between adults as taking advantage. Well, then, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling: pity too easily becomes patronizing, and that kills desire. He rejects that theory also: glib, implausible. Could it simply be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? Noelle 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 calm, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communication 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 he has prepared, the report that is to be transmitted to Earth today. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says to her, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communiqué all the same.”

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

  The moment she begins to speak, all of the year-captain’s carefully constructed calmness evaporates, and instantly he finds himself becoming edgy, oddly belligerent, distinctly off balance. He is bewildered by that. Something in the softness and earnestness of her sweet gentle voice has mysteriously annoyed him, it seems. Coils of sudden startling tension are springing up within him. Anger, even. Animosity. He has no idea why. He is unable to account for his reaction entirely.

  “I have my doubts about that,” he says, with a roughness that surprises him. “I don’t think we matter at all.”

  This is perverse, and he knows it. What he has just said runs counter to all of his own beliefs.

  She looks a little surprised too. “Oh, yes, yes, we do, we mean a great deal to them. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel, all over the world and to the Moon as well. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

  He will not concede the point. “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace. A nine-day wonder.” His voice sounds harsh and unfamiliar to him, his rhythms of speech coarse, erratic, words coining in awkward rushes. As for his words themselves, so bleak and sardonic, they astonish him. He has never spoken this way about Earth and its attitude toward the starship before. Such thoughts have never so much as crossed his mind before. Still, he finds himself pushing rec
klessly onward down the same strange track. “That’s the only thing we represent to them, isn’t it? Novelty, vicarious adventure, a bit of passing amusement?”

  “Do you really mean that? It seems so terribly cynical.”

  He shrugs. Somehow this ugly idea has taken possession of him, repugnant though his argument is, even to him. He sees the effect that he is having on her — puzzlement turning to dismay — but he feels that he has gone in too deep now to turn back. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiqués. Perhaps sooner than that. They’ll stop paying attention. A year’s time and they’ll have forgotten us.”

  She seems taken aback. Her nostrils flicker in apparent alarm. Normally her face is a serene mask. Not now. “What a peculiar mood you’re in today, year-captain!”

  “Am I? Well, then, I suppose I am.”

  “I don’t see you as in any way a cynical man. Everything about you is the opposite of cynical. And yet here, today — saying such— such—” She falters.

  “Such disagreeable things?”

  “Yes.”

  “Perhaps I’m just being realistic. I try to be. A realist, yes. Is a realist the same as a cynic?”

  “Why do you feel you need to put labels on yourself?”

  “That’s an important part of being a realist.”

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

  Her counterattack, if that is what it is, amazes him as much as his own outburst. This is a new Noelle, agitated, vehement. In just a few seconds the conversation has veered entirely out of control: much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken to him like this before. The same is true of him. He is saying things he doesn’t believe; she is saying things that go far beyond the bounds of her normal quiet aloofness. It is as if there is a malign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them both unnaturally tense and aggressive.

  The year-captain feels a touch of panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle’s consciousness, will she still be able to make contact with far-off Yvonne?

  Yet he is unable to prevent himself from parrying once more: “Do you know what I am, then?”

  “A man in search of himself is what you are. That’s why you volunteered to come all the way out here.”

  He shakes his head briskly, futile though he knows such nonverbal language to be with her. “Oh, no, no, no. Too slick, Noelle. Too easy.”

  “They say you were a famous actor, once. Isn’t that so? And after that, a biologist who made a great discovery on some moon of Jupiter, or maybe it was Saturn. Then a monk on a desert island somewhere. And now the captain of the first starship. There’s no continuity in any of that that I can find. Who are you, year-captain? Do you really know?”

  “Of course I do.” But he does not care to amplify that response. Her words make no sense to him. He sees the logic of his jagged zigzagging career with perfect clarity; it is obvious to him how one thing has led inevitably to the next. He could explain all that to her, but something hardens in him. He is not willing to present an apologia for his life just now. That leaves him with nothing of any substance to say; and the best he can do is merely to throw her taunt back at her. “What about you?” he asks, still almost angrily. “Would you be able to answer such a question?”

  “I think I could.”

  “Then tell me. The same things you were asking me. Show me how it’s done, all right? What made you volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle? What are you searching for? Come on. Tell me! Tell me!”

  She lets the lids slide down over her unseeing eyes and offers no reply. She holds herself stiffly, hands tightly knitted, lips compressed, breath coming in ragged bursts. She moves her head from side to side three or four times, doing it very slowly, the way a wounded animal might try to shake off pain.

  The year-captain says nothing: he has run out of sophomoric nonsense at last, and he is afraid that what he has already said has done terrible damage. He knows why Noelle is here, and she knows that he knows. How could he not? She is essential to the mission; her participation in it was less of a choice than the inevitable assumption of an unrefusable mantle, involving a terrible sacrifice of the one precious thing in her life. It was contemptible of him even to ask.

  His throat is dry, his heart is pounding; his entire performance of these past few minutes amazes him. It is as though he has been possessed, yes. Transformed. He makes an effort to get back in touch with the self that he regards as his own, and, after a moment, seems to succeed in reaching some vestige of contact with the man he believes himself to be.

  Can anything be salvaged now? he wonders.

  As calmly as he can, he says into her tense silence, “This has all been very far out of line. I hope that you’ll forgive me for the things I’ve said.”

  She remains silent. He sees a barely perceptible nod.

  “I’m sorry that I upset you, Noelle. It was the last thing I intended when I came in here.”

  “I know.”

  “Shall I go?”

  “There’s a report to transmit, isn’t there?”

  “Do you think you’d be able to transmit it just now?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m willing to try, though. Wait a little, all right?”

  “Whatever you want.”

  She appears to be collecting herself. Her eyes are still closed, but he can see them moving about less rapidly beneath the lids. Unreadable furrows appear and vanish on her broad forehead. The year-captain thinks of the meditation exercises he learned to practice in his island days, under the bright Arctic sky of Lofoten. She must be doing something like that now herself, he thinks. He sits quietly, watching her, waiting.

  Finally she looks at him, at any rate looks toward him, and says, after a moment, in a calm tone more like the one she normally uses, “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?”

  “We don’t really need to continue this discussion, do we, Noelle? It isn’t getting us anywhere useful.”

  “Let’s just finish it with this one last point. Tell me what you think. What do we seem like to them?”

  “Right at this point, I suppose, as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage.”

  “Yes. And later, you think, they’ll regard us as being more ordinary — as being people just like themselves?”

  He searches himself for his truest beliefs. He is surprised at what he finds, but he shares it with her anyway, even though it tends to support the dark, unexpectedly harsh words that had come blurting from him earlier. “Later,” he says, “we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us. What was important to them was the great global effort of getting this expedition launched. Now that it is launched, everything that follows is an anticlimax for them. We’ll go on to live our lives, whatever they’re going to be, and they’ll proceed with theirs, pleasant and shallow and bland as always, and they and we will travel on separate and ever-diverging paths for all the rest of time.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Yes. I’m afraid I do.”

  “How sad that is. What a bleak finish you foresee for our grand adventure.” Her tone tingles with a grace note of irony. She has become very calm; she may be laughing at him now. But at least there is no danger that he will unsettle her again. She has taken command. “One more question. You yourself, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”

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

  “I think you are right.”

  “And you?”

  “I regard myself as quite ordinary,” she says sweetly. “Except in two respects. You know what they are.”

  “One is your—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable for a moment at naming it. Then he pushes ahead. “Your blindness. And the other, of course, is your telepathic co
mmunion with your sister.”

  “Indeed.” She smiles. Radiantly. A long moment’s pause. Then she says, “Enough of this, I think. There’s work to be done. Shall we send the report now?”

  The speed with which she has regained her poise catches him off balance. “You’re ready to go? You’ve been able to make contact with Yvonne?”

  “Yes. She’s waiting.”

  “Well, then.” He is numb, hollow. She has completely routed him in whatever inexplicable duel it is that they have been waging here. His fingers tremble a little as he unfolds his notes. He begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity… Apparent location…”

  Noelle naps after every transmission. They exhaust her terribly. She was beginning to fade even before he reached the end of today’s message; now, as the year-captain steps into the corridor, he knows she will be asleep before he closes the door. He leaves, frowning, troubled by that odd outburst of tension between them and by his mysterious attack of brutal “realism,” from which he seems to be recovering almost at once, now that he is no longer in Noelle’s presence.

  By what right, he wonders, has he said that Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? And that the voyage will have no ultimate consequence for the mother world? He was blurting idiotic foolishness and he knows it. The expedition is Earth’s redemption, the most interesting thing that has happened there in two hundred years, the last best hope of a sleepy stagnant civilization smothering in its own placidity: it matters to them, it matters terribly, he has no reason whatsoever to doubt that. All during the hundred years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement had scarcely ever flagged, indeed had spurred the voyagers themselves on at times, when their interminable training routines threatenedthem with boredom. And the fascination continues. The journey, eventless though it has been so far, mesmerizes all those millions who remained behind. It is like a drug for them, a powerful euphoric, hauling them up from their long lethargy. They have become vicarious travelers; later, when the new Earth is founded, they will be vicarious colonists. The benefits will be felt for thousands of years to come. Why, then, this morning’s burst of gratuitous pessimism? There is no evidence for the position he has so impulsively espoused. Thus far Earth’s messages, relayed by Yvonne to Noelle, have vibrated with eager queries; the curiosity of the home world has been overwhelming since the start. Tell us, tell us, tell us!