Starborne Read online

  And, knowing the importance of the endeavor they have embarked upon, the voyagers have tried to make full reply. 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 provides direct access to the external environment of the ship. None of Hesper’s sophisticated data-gathering analog devices are in operation here: this is the Wotan’s actual visual surround. And what it is, is the void of voids. The pearl-gray utter emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the Wotan’s skin. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to count on 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 in all likelihood 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, the great empty Intermundium, like a blank wall surrounding them on all sides. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, require no delights from the universe that lies beyond the ship, make the ship your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided, those warnings had proved to be! 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, his head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now seeks to restore his shaken equanimity by indulging 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, out there where the continuum is flattened and curved by the nospace field so that the starship can slide with such deceptive ease and swiftness across the great span of light-years. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; the Intermundium 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. When he peers into that field of light it is manifestly clear to the year-captain that he and all his fellow voyagers are journeying 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. The sight of that shimmering void might well be frightening, a stunning forcible reminder that they are outside the universe, separated from all that is familiar and indeed “real,” floating in this vacant place where the rules of space and time are suspended. But the year-captain finds nothing frightening in that knowledge. None of the voyagers do. It is — almost,almost! — the sought-after oneness. Barriers remain, but yet he is aware of an altered sense of space and time, an enhanced sense of possibility, an encounter with 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 often yearns to open the ship’s great hatch and let himself tumble into the eternal. But not yet, not yet. He is far from ready to swim the galactic Intermundium. Barriers remain. The voyage has only begun. They grow closer every day to whatever it is that they are seeking, 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 then come out here and see for themselves!

  He smiles. He trembles and does a little shivering wriggle of delight. His sudden new doubts all have fallen away, as swiftly as they came. The starship plunges onward through the great strange night. Confidence rises in him like the surging of a tide. The outcome of the voyage can only be a success, come what may.

  He turns away from the viewplate, drained, ecstatic.

  Noelle was the first member of the crew to be chosen, if indeed she could be said to have been chosen at all. Choice had not really been a part of it for her, nor for her sister. The entire project had been built about their initial willingness; had they not been who and what they were, the expedition would probably have gone forth anyway, but it would have been something quite different. Perhaps it would not have happened at all. The mere existence of Noelle and Yvonne was the prerequisite for the whole enterprise. They were central to everything; their consent was mainly a formality; and once it had been determined that Noelle and not Yvonne would be the one actually to travel on board the ship, her examination for eligibility was a mere charade.

  Of those who had truly volunteered, Heinz was the first to win the formal approval of the Board, Paco was the second, Sylvia the third, then Bruce, Huw, Chang, Julia. The year-captain was one of the last to pass through the qualification process. The last one of all, technically, was Noelle, but of course, she was already a part of the project, as much so as the ship itself, and for many of the same reasons.

  For each of them, but for Noelle, the process of qualifying was the same: simple, cruel, humiliating, insincere. Generally speaking, the crew members had been picked even before it had occurred to some of them that they might be interested in going. The world had become very small. Everyone’s capacities were known. No one was particularly famous any more, but no one was obscure, either.

  Certain formalities were observed, though. It was always possible that the coverta priori selection process had been mistaken in one or two instances, and no one wanted mistakes. Eleven hundred candidates were summoned to fill the fifty slots aboard the starship. They came from every part of the world, a carefully impartial and studiedly representative geographic sampling. Many of the old nations that had once been so distinct and noisily self-important still had some sort of tenuous existences, more as sentimental concepts than as sovereign entities now, but they had not completely evolved out of existence yet and it was a good idea to pay lip service, at least, to the continued quasi-fact of their quasi-status. Each of the formerly sovereign nations or historically significant fragment thereof contributed a few of its former citizens to the long list. And then, too, the candidates represented most or perhaps all — who could say, really? The old distinctions had often been so minute and dubious — of the planet’s racial and ethnic and religious groups, insofar as such groups still existed and looked upon themselves as mattering in the small and cozy society that had evolved out of the turbulent, messy societies of the Industrial and immediately Post-Industrial epochs. In the cosmic scheme of things it no longer counted for very much that one person might like to think of himself as a Finn and another as a Turk, or a German or a Brit or a Thai or a Swede, nor was it really easy any more to fit most people into the old racial classifications that had once had such troublesome significance, nor had the world’s innumerable theological distinctions survived very coherently into modern times. But there were those for whom — perhaps for philosophical reasons, or sentimental ones, or reasons of esthetics, or out of a lingering sense of historical connection, or a fondness for anachronisms, or just out of simple cantankerousness — there was still some value in valiantly claiming, “I am a Welshman” or “I am a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church” or “I carry the blood of the Norman aristocracy.” Such people were considered quaint and eccentric; but there were plenty of them, even now. The world had come a long way, yes, yet ancient vestiges of the grand institutions and solemn distinctions of former civilizations still cropped out everywhere like fossil bones whitening and weathering in the sun. They had ceased to beproblems, yes, but they had n
ot fully ceased to be. Possibly they never would. And so the long list of candidates for the Wotan expedition was an elaborately representative one. The final group would be too, insofar as that was feasible. Formalities were observed, indeed.

  There were five Examiners, distinguished and formidable citizens all, and they sat around a table on the top floor of a tall building in Zurich whose enormous wraparound windows offered a clear, crisp view that stretched halfway to Portugal. You stood before them and they asked you things that they already knew about you, things about your technical skills and your physical health and your mental stability and your willingness to say goodbye to the world forever, and to spend anywhere from one to five years, or perhaps even more, in intimate confinement with forty-nine other people, and you could tell from the way they were listening that they weren’t really listening at all. After that they wanted you to speak only about your flaws. If you were in any way hesitant, they would list some for you, sometimes quite an extensive list indeed, and ask you to offer comment on your most flagrant failings, your choice of five. The whole interrogation lasted, in most cases, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they told you you were rejected. Every single candidate who came before the Board of Examiners was told that, calmly, straightforwardly, without show of regret or apology: “Sorry, you’re off the list.” They wanted to see what you would say then. That was the real examination; everything that had gone before had been mere maneuvering and feinting.

  The ones who passed were the ones who had rejected the rejection. Some did it one way, some another. Points were given for arrogance, so long as it was sane and sensible arrogance. The man who eventually would become the expedition’s first year-captain had simply said, “You can’t be serious. Obviously I’m qualified. And I don’t like it that you’re playing games with me.” Heinz, who was Swiss himself and indeed was the son of one of the Examiners, had taken a similar stance, telling them that it would be the whole world’s loss if they stuck to their position, but that he had a high enough opinion of the human race to think that they would reconsider. Heinz had helped to design the still-unconstructed Wotan; he knew more of its workings than anyone. Did they really think that he was going to build it for them and then be left behind? Huw, who did indeed proudly call himself a Welshman, was another who reacted with the cool and confident attitude that the Examiners were making a big mistake. He had designed the planetgoing equipment with which the people of the Wotan would explore the new worlds: was he to be denied the right to deploy his own devices, and if so, who was going to handle the job of modifying them on-site to meet unanticipated challenges? And so on.

  Most of the female candidates tended to temper their annoyance with a touch of sorrow or regret, partly for themselves but primarily — constructive arrogance again, only imperfectly concealed! — for the enterprise itself. Sylvia explained that she knew more about tectogenetic microsurgery than anyone else alive: how would the coming generations of starborn colonists be able to adapt to some not-quite-suitable planetary environment without her special skills? Giovanna, too, observed that it would be a great pity for the expedition to be deprived of her unique abilities — her primary specialty was metabolic chemistry, and there was something magical about her insight into the relationship between molecular structure and nutritional value. From Sieglinde, who had helped to work out some fundamental theorems of the mathematics of nospace travel, came the simple comment that shebelonged aboard the ship and would not accept disqualification. Et cetera.

  What the Examiners looked for — and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun — was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by philosophical realism. Anyone who raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the predesignated fifty.

  At the end of the entire process it was Noelle’s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little charade with her too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual verdict, “Sorry, you’re off the list,” and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and then at last she said in her soft way, “Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.” It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point inher examination.

  “Then neither of us will go?” Noelle asked, mystified.

  “It was only a test of your reaction,” they told her.

  “Ah,” she said. “I see.” And she laughed — giggled, really — as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed along with her anyway.

  Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.

  We flipped a coin, they told her.

  She never found out whether that was really true.

  Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually sees. 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 entering into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel 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, toward the lands of spices and pearls.

  Some say the world will end in fire,’” Elizabeth offers. In the lounge, the talk among those who are not playingGo has turned to apocalyptic matters. “’Some say in ice.’”

  “Are you quoting something?” Huw wants to know.

  “Of course she is,” says Heinz. “You know that Elizabeth’s always quoting something.” Long-limbed, straw-haired Elizabeth is the Wotan’s official bard and chronicler, among other things. Everyone on board has to be Something-Among-Other-Things; multiple skills are the rule. But the center of Elizabeth’s being is poetry. “I think it’s Shakespeare,” Heinz says.

  “Not that old,” says Giovanna, looking up from her game. “Only four or five hundred years, at most. An American.”

  “Frost,” Elizabeth says. “Robert Frost.”

  “Is that a kind of ice?” someone asks.

  “It’s a name,” says someone else.

  “’From what I’ve tasted of desire,’” Elizabeth says, and her tone makes it clear that she is reciting again, “’I hold with those who favor fire.’”

  The year-captain enters the room just then, and Paco glances toward him and says in his booming unfettered way, “And what about you, year-captain? How do you think the world’s going to end? We’ve done the sun going nova, we’ve done the entropic heat-death, we’ve done t
he rising of the seas until everything has drowned. We’ve done plague and drought and volcanoes. Give us your take, now.”

  “Fimbulwinter,” the year-captain says. “Ragnarok.” The barbaric half-forgotten words leap instantly to his tongue almost of their own accord. The northern winds of his childhood sweep through his memory. He sees the frost-locked boreal landscape gleaming as though ablaze, even in the parsimonious winter light.

  “The Twilight of the Gods, yes,” Elizabeth says, and gives him a melting smile of unconcealed love, which the year-captain, lost in polar memories, does not see.

  Faces turn toward him. They want to hear more. The year-captain says, reaching deep for the ancestral lore, “A time comes when the sun turns black. It gives no light, it gives no warmth, winter comes three times in succession with no summer between. This is the Fimbulwinter, the great winter that heralds the world’s end. There is battle everywhere in the darkness, and brother slays brother for the sake of greed, and father lies with daughter, sister with brother, many a whoredom.”

  Elizabeth is nodding. She knows these ancient skaldic poems too. Half to herself she murmurs, rocking back and forth rhythmically, “’An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shall be cloven. A wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters.’”

  “Yes,” says the year-captain, shivering now, his mind swirling with the powerful ancient images. “A great wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf the moon. The stars vanish from the heavens. Trees are torn up, and mountains fall, and all fetters and bonds are broken and rent. The sea bursts its bounds, and the Midgard Serpent stirs and comes up on the land and sprinkles all the air and water with his venom, and the Fenris-Wolf breaks free and advances with his mouth agape, his lower jaw against the Earth and the upper against heaven. Nothing is without fear anywhere in the world. For this is the day on which the gods will meet their doom.”