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  And in any case there’s no longer any possibility that he can hold back, not now, nor is Noelle willing to allow it. Her legs part and he enters her quickly, almost roughly, and in that moment Noelle throws back her head and lets out a cry that is surely one of ecstasy and not of pain, and in almost the same moment he comes. He is completely unable to prevent that from happening. It erupts from him with a force that he has not felt since he was eighteen. And he hears her ecstatic hissing gasp, feels her bucking almost convulsively beneath him.

  He wonders, in the first bewildered and almost distraught moment afterward, whether Yvonne has experienced their pleasure too, somewhere far away. Whether Yvonne has come with them, even, perhaps.

  They lie still for a little while. Neither of them speaks. He is faintly stunned by what has happened; and also relieved, enormously relieved, that the long half-conscious courtship is over, that they have at last put an end to all the games of attraction and repulsion that they have been playing with each other almost since the beginning of the voyage, and finally have allowed themselves to come crashing together in the union — a union of opposites, is it? — that had been ordained for them all along. He is pleased, pleased and happy, and a little amazed, and just a bit frightened, also.

  Then very shortly he feels his strength returning, coming back to him with unexpected and almost improbable quickness, and they begin to move once again, less hastily this time, less wildly. It is as though they have traveled in just these first few moments beyond the initial stage of breathless heedless frenzy and are already beginning to become experienced lovers.

  This time when it is over she grins up at him and says, “I waited and waited. I thought you never would.”

  “I was afraid.”

  “Of me?”

  “Of damaging your powers, somehow.”

  “What?”

  “As though the magic would go away if you — if I — if you and I—”

  “Silly. You’ve read too many old fables.”

  “Maybe I have.”

  “Yes. I definitely think you have.”

  But now, even now, even after all that, another week goes by and still nothing is done about reaching out to the angels. This time the excuse is that Noelle and the year-captain want to explore their newfound bliss; the effort of the angel experiment will certainly be an immense drain on her energies, and so it is better to postpone it a little while longer, they tell themselves, while the two of them devote their energies to endeavors of a more familiar kind.

  The truth is that they are both still afraid to make the attempt. He continues to have Semele’s fate on his mind, troubling him all the more now that a new dimension has been added to their relationship; and she has hesitations of her own, a complex mixture of things — the natural fear of the unknown, and that curious feeling that she would somehow be unfaithful to Yvonne if she were to speak with the angels, and also a certain sense that she was simply inadequate to the task, incapable of fulfilling the high hopes that her shipmates are investing in her.

  But it has to be attempted. Of that much the year-captain is certain. Whatever the risks, it has to be attempted. They all placed themselves permanently at risk the moment they first affiliated themselves with this project. If there is a possibility that Noelle can extricate them from their predicament, then that possibility must be explored. He sees no choice. He can’t allow himself so great an evasion.

  They have had no contact with Earth for many ship-weeks, for months, even, and the psychological effects are beginning to manifest themselves in a host of troublesome ways. It has started to seem almost as though Earth has been destroyed in some great cataclysm, that they are the sole surviving representatives of humanity, an ark, unfettered by any ties to the past whatsoever and permitted to reshape the rules of their lives whichever way they please. The year-captain’s conservative nature rebels at such anarchy. Earth still is there. The voyagers are beholden to Earth for their presence here. This mission is being executed at the behest of Earth, to fulfill certain needs of Earth.

  But with Earth lost to them forever in the vast whirlpool of the skies—

  He bides his time. He waits for his moment.

  He and Noelle are recognized now aboard ship as lovers. Hiding it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, anyway: he has no desire to impose on her the sort of hole-and-corner relationship that he had carried on for so long with Julia. Let them see. Let them know. They were all expecting it to happen anyway; he understands that now. Some, like Heinz, evidently had seen the whole thing coming a couple of years before he did. Julia too: she smiles knowingly at him, as if to acknowledge that the long-awaited inevitable has at last occurred. Julia doesn’t seem to be hurt by it. Quite the contrary.

  So he and Noelle are seen together in the baths, in theGo lounge, in the corridors. He spends nights in her cabin, or she in his — the first time since the beginning of the voyage that he has known anything but solitary sleep. She is a marvelous mixture of passion and innocence, or at least the semblance of innocence; there is unexpected skill and fire in her lovemaking, but also an eagerness to be led into unfamiliar paths, to be taught previously unknown ways. It reminds him, after a fashion, of the way Noelle had approached learningGo once upon a time: the attentiveness, the seriousness, the concern with understanding the fundamentals of the game — and, ultimately, the revelation of enormous mastery.

  TheGo obsession has never diminished aboard ship, and the year-captain, who has been only an occasional player since his reawakening of interest in the game, now goes to the lounge whenever his official duties permit. His superior skills make it difficult for most of the others to enjoy playing with him, and he plays almost exclusively with Roy and Leon and Noelle, most often with Noelle.

  She is a merciless player. He wins against her no more often than once out of every four or five games.

  Today, playing black, the year-captain has been able to remain on the offensive through the 89th move. But Noelle then breaks through his north stones, which are weakly deployed, and closes a major center territory. The year-captain finds himself unable to mount a satisfactory reply. Before he can get very much going, Noelle has run a chain of stones across the 19th line, boxing him in, in an embarrassing way. He manages to fend off further calamity for a while, but he knows that all he is doing is playing for time as he heads toward inevitable defeat. At Move 141 he launches what he suspects is a hopeless attack, and his forces are easily crushed by Noelle within her own territory. A little while later he finds himself confronted with the classic cat-in-a-basket trap, by which he will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone, and at Move 196 he concedes that he has been beaten. She has taken 81 stones to his 62.

  As they clear the board for a rematch he says, trying to be casual about it, “Have you been giving any thought to the business of the angels, Noelle?”

  “Of course. I think about them a great deal.”

  “And?”

  “And what?” she asks.

  “Do you have any idea how you’d go about it? Making the contact, I mean.”

  “I have some theories, yes. But naturally they’re only theories. I won’t really know anything until I make the actual attempt.”

  The year-captain waits just a beat. “And when do you think that will be?”

  She gives him one of those special looks of hers, those baffling sightless focusings of her eyes that somehow manage to convey an expression. The expression that she conveys this time is one of disingenuousness.

  “Whenever you’d like it to be,” she says.

  “What about today, then?”

  What about today? Yes. What about today. There is no way that it can be postponed any longer. He knows that; she knows that; they are in agreement. This is the moment. Today. Now.

  In her cabin. Alone, among her familiar things. She has insisted on that. She grants herself a few moments of delay first, a little self-indulgence, moving about the room, picking up things and handling
them, the sea-urchin shell, the polished piece of jade, the small bronze statuettes, the furry stuffed animal. In her former life these things had been hers and Yvonne’s jointly; neither of them had ever had any sense of “mine” or “yours,” not while they were together, but Yvonne had insisted, as the time for the launch of the Wotan drew near, that Noelle take all these with her, these beloved objects, the talismans of their shared life. “After all,” she had said, “I’ll be able to feel them through your hands.” Yes. But not any longer.

  Perhaps what Noelle is about to do will restore Yvonne’s access to these little things, the things that once had been theirs and now were merely hers. Perhaps. Perhaps.

  She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to enhance the force of her power, she often thinks.

  Extends a tenuous tendril of thought now that probes warily outward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—

  Angels?

  Who knows what they are? But she has been conscious of their presence all along, ever since the interference first began, cloudy presences, huge, heavy masses of mentation hovering around her, somewhere out there in — what does he call it? The Intermundium? Yes, the Intermundium, the great gray space between the worlds. She has felt them out there, not as individual entities but only as presences, or perhapsone presence having many parts.

  Now she seeks them.

  Angels! Angels! Angels!

  She is well beyond the ship and keeps moving outward and outward into the undifferentiated void of the nospace tube, extending herself to what she thinks is the limit of her reach and then reaching even farther yet. She envisions herself now as a line of bright light stretched out across the cosmos, a line that has neither beginning nor end but has no substance, either — an infinitely extended point of radiant energy, a dazzling immaterial streak, a mere beam.

  Reaching. Reaching.

  Angels!

  Oh. She feels the presence now. So they are real, yes. Whatever they are, they are really there. They may not be actual angels, but they are there, not far away. They exist. Brightness. Strength. Magnetism. Yes. Awareness now of a fierce roiling mass of concentrated energy close by her. A gigantic mass in motion, laying a terrible stress on the fabric of the cosmos.

  How strange! The angel has angular momentum! It tumbles ponderously on its colossal axis. Who could have thought that angels would be so huge? But they are angels; they can be whatever they please to be.

  Noelle is oppressed by the shifting weight of the angel as it makes its slow, heavy axial swing. She moves closer.

  Oh.

  She is dazzled by it.

  Oh. Oh.

  She hears it roaring, the way a furnace might roar. But what a deafening furnace-roar this is! Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. She hears a crackling too, a hissing, a sizzling: the sounds of inexorable power unremittingly unleashed.

  Too much light! Too much power!

  She is fascinated as much as she is frightened. But she must be cautious. This is a great monster lurking here. Noelle draws back a little, and then a little more, overwhelmed by the intensity of the other being’s output. Such a mighty mind: she feels dwarfed. If she touches it even glancingly with her own mind she is certain that she will be destroyed. She must step down the aperture and establish some kind of transformer in the circuit that will shield her against the full bellowing blast of power that comes from the thing.

  So she withdraws, pulling herself back and back and back until she is once again inside the ship, and rests, and studies the problem. It will require time and discipline to do what has to be done. She must make adjustments, master new techniques, discover capacities she had not known she possessed. All that requires time and discipline. Minutes, hours, days? She doesn’t know. She will do what is necessary. And does it, patiently, cautiously.

  And now. She’s ready once more.

  Yes.

  Try again, now. Slowly, slowly, slowly, with utmost care. Outward goes the questing tendril.

  Yes.

  Approaching the angel.

  See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me—

  Just a touch—

  Touch—

  Oh. Oh.

  I see you. The light — eye of crystal — fountains of lava — oh, the light — your light — I see — I see—

  Oh, like a god—

  She had looked up the story in the ship’s archives of literature just after the time the year-captain had told it to her, the story of Semele, the myth. And it was just as he had said that day, the day that they first became lovers.

  — and Semele wished to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus, who loved her, could not refuse her; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her remained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh, bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him—

  — oh God I am Semele—

  Now she is terrified. This is too much to face. She will be consumed; she will be obliterated. Noelle withdraws again, hastily. Back within the sanctuary of the ship. Rests, regroups. Tries to regenerate herpowers, but they are badly depleted. Exhausted, at least for the time being. Rest, then. Rest. This is very difficult, very dangerous. She knows it’s unwise to continue right now. She will not attempt to go out into the Intermundium a third time that day.

  They’re really and truly there,” she says. She is pale, weary, still badly off balance. It is two hours since her return from her adventure. The entire excursion had taken no more than a few minutes, apparently. It seemed like years to her. And to those waiting for her to emerge from her trance.

  They are with her in the control cabin for the debriefing: Heinz, Huw, Leon, Elizabeth, Imogen, Julia. The year-captain is there too, of course. “I could feel them hovering somewhere outside the ship. Angels.”

  “Angels?” Heinz asks, sounding startled. He seems uncharacteristically subdued. “Actually, literally?”

  “You mean, divine beings with human form, only with wings, like in the old paintings?” Noelle says.

  “And names and identities,” says Elizabeth. “Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael. God’s lieutenants.”

  “I don’t know that they’re really angels,” Noelle says. “That was just the word we all started to use for them.”

  “And surely you must know that I was just using the word lightly,” Heinz says. “It was only a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, when I talked about angels. I never seriously believed there was any kind of intelligence out there, let alone angels. You say you sawsomething, though.”

  There are frowns. It is strange to speak of Noelle as “seeing” anything. But who knows what sort of sense-equivalents she experiences through her mind-powers?

  “Felt,” says Noelle. “Didn’t see.”

  “And were they really angels or weren’t they?” Heinz asks.

  Noelle smiles faintly, shakes her head. “How would I know? But I don’t think they were, not literal angels. I told you, I didn’t see anything. But I felt them. Forces. Immense nodes of power, each one revolving on its own axis. If that’s what angels are, then the presence of angels is what I felt.”

  “Forces,” Elizabeth says. “I wonder, is that one of the categories of angels?” She counts on her fingers. “Choirs, Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers — Powers, that would be just about the same as Forces—”

  The year-captain leans forward and says quietly to Noelle, “Are you able to give us any kind of description in words of what you experienced?”

  “No.”

  “How far from the ship were you when you began to perceive them?”

  “I can’t tell you that, either. Nothing makes sense out
there. Certainly not distance. It’s all just one infinite featureless gray blur, just like what you say you see through the viewplate, but going on and on and on.”

  “Did they seem relatively close, at least?” he asks.

  Noelle turns the palms of her hands upward and outward, a gesture signifying helplessness. “I can’t say. There’s nothing like ‘close’ or ‘far’ out there. Everything is the same distance from everything else. I don’t know whether I was in the tube or out of it when I saw them.”

  “And yet you could distinguish relative sizes, at least. These things were big.”

  “Bigger than me, yes. Much bigger. Immense. That was easy enough to tell. I felt enormous power. It was like standing at the edge of a gigantic furnace. I could hear it roaring.”

  “One furnace, or many?” Huw asks.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes it felt like just one, sometimes I thought there were thousands of them all around me.” Noelle gives them a faint, ashen-faced smile. “You’re all trying to get me to put what I felt into concrete, understandable terms, but that just isn’t possible. All I can tell you is that I went out there and after a little while I felt something,something, very large, very powerful, a huge radiant source of energy. If that’s what angels are like, then I encountered an angel. I don’t know what meeting an angel is supposed to be like. Or how important it is to call what I met by any sort of name. I only know? that there wassomething out there and I think that it’s the something that’s interfering with the transmissions.”

  “Will you want to try contacting it again?” the year-captain asks gently.

  “Not right now.”

  “I understand. Later on, though?”

  “Of course. I’m not going to stop here. I can’t. But not now — not — now—”

  Leon says, “We should let her rest.”

  The year-captain nods. “Yes. Absolutely.” He signals to the others, and they begin to leave. “Come,” he says to Noelle. “I’ll take you back to your cabin.”

  Ordinarily she bridles at being offered help in getting around the ship. Not today, though. She gets slowly to her feet and he slips his arm around her shoulders, and they walk together down the corridor, slowly, very slowly.