Starborne Read online

  He falls silent, playing out the final titanic battle in his mind, Thor putting the Serpent to death but dying himself of its venom, and the Wolf devouring Father Odin, only to have his gullet torn asunder by Vidar, and the demonic Surtr riding out of Muspelheim and casting fire over the Earth that burns all the world. But of these things the year-captain says nothing aloud. He feels he has had the center of the stage long enough just now. And an Arctic gloom has begun to seize his spirit. The ice, the darkness, the ravening wolves rising above the blazing world. And the Earth of his Viking forefathers is so far away, floating through the emptiness of the night, spinning eternally on its axis somewhere back behind him — a dot, a grain of sand. Nothing. Everything.

  After a moment Elizabeth’s voice continues the tale:

  “’Smoke-reek rages, and reddening fire. The high heat licks against heaven itself.’” Her mind is a crowded storehouse of poetry. But even she is unable to remember the next line.

  “And then?” Paco asks. He throws his hands upward and outward, palms raised. Paco is a small, compact-bodied man of great strength and personal force, and any gesture he makes is always more emphatic than it needs to be, just as his shoulders seem twice as wide as those of a man his height should be. “That’s it? The End? Everybody’s dead and there’s nothing more? The curtain comes down and there’s not going to be any next act, and we look around and see that the theater is empty?”

  “Redemption, then,” says the year-captain distantly. “Rebirth. The new world rising on the ashes of the old.”

  He isn’t sure. Some details of his grandmother’s stories have faded in his mind, after all these many years. But it must be so, the rebirth. It is that way in every myth, no matter what land it may come from: the world is destroyed so that it may be brought forth new and fresh. There would be no point to these tales, otherwise. Not if the Twilight of the Gods is followed simply by unending empty night. That way all of life would be reduced to the experience of any one mortal individual: we are each of us born into flesh and we live, well or not well as the case may be, and then we die, goodbye, and that’s that for us, everything over. But that is only the individual case. New lives are being engendered even as ours is passing from us: an eternal cycle of rebirth and return. We end, yes, but the world of mortals goes on, death succeeded always by more life. So it must be with whole planets too. Sooner or later they may die, but new worlds are born from the dead husk of the old, and thus it all continues, world without end, always a new dawn beyond the darkness in which yesterday perished. There must never be a total and final end: never. Never.

  “You know,” Heinz says cheerfully — Heinz is always cheerful — “for us the world has already come to an end, really. Because we will never see it again. It is already becoming mythical for us. It was a dying world even before we left it, wasn’t it? And now, so far as we’re concerned, it’s dead, and we are its rebirth. We, and all the ova and sperm sitting in cold storage down there in our tanks.”

  “If,” says Paco. “Don’t forget the Big If.”

  Heinz laughs. “There is no If. The sky is full of worlds, and we will find some. One good one is all we need.”

  In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convulsions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased to carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All their problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, really: that the end of striving and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth’s vitality was here, carried aboard the Wotan, sailing farther out and out and out into the galactic gulfs with each tick of the clock.

  An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly anybody seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

  The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human life span now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the world where population was not steadily declining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replacement level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.

  Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried out had not met with manifest success.

  What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said anything about it out loud, was to be politely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was anybody supposed to do about it?

  The Wotan was one answer to that question. A movement arose — it was the most interesting thing that had happened on Earth in two hundred years — aimed at founding a second Earth on some distant planet. Several dozen of the best and brightest of Earth’s younger generation — men and women in their thirties and forties, mainly — would be sent out aboard an interstellar starship to locate and settle a world of some other star. The hope was that amid the challenges of life on an untamed primitive world the colonists and their starborn progeny would recapture the drive and energy that once had been defining characteristics of the human race, and thus bring about a rebirth of the human spirit — which, perhaps, could be recycled back to the mother world five hundred or a thousand years hence.

  Perhaps.

  Translating the hypothesis into reality required some work, but there were still enough people willing to tackle the job. The starship had to be designed and built and tested. Done and done and done. A crew of suitably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A habitable world needed to be located. Scanning instruments were even now at work.

  And then, if some reasonably appropriate world did indeed turn up, a successful colony must be founded there, and somehow made to sustain itself, however difficult and hostile an environment the colonists might find themselves in—

  Yes. The Big If.

  You promised to teach me how to play,” Noelle says, pouting a little. They are once again in the ship’s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the Wotan, the other being the baths. Four games are under way, the usual players: Elliot and Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Michael and Bruce.

  The year-captain is fascinated by that sudden pout of Noelle’s: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. In the past few days she and he have passed through the small bit of tension that had so unexpectedly sprung up between them, and are working well together again. He gives the messages to her to transmit, she sends them to Earth, and back from her sister at the far end of the me
ntal transmission line swiftly come the potted replies, the usual cheery stuff, predigested news, politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of doings in the arts and sciences, special greetings for this member of the expedition or that one, expressions of general good wishes — everything light, shallow, amiable, more or less what you would expect the benign stodgy people of Earth to be sending their absconding sons and daughters. And so it will go, the year-captain assumes, as long as the contact between Noelle and Yvonne holds. Of course, someday the sisters will no longer be available for these transmissions, and real-time contact between Earth and its colony in the stars will be severed when that happens, but that is not a problem he needs to deal with today, or, indeed, at all.

  “Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “I really do want to know how to play the game. And I know I can learn it. Have faith in me.”

  “All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a timely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquillity through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances all the time.

  He leads her toward the gaming tables. Noelle bridles only an instant as his hand touches her elbow, and then she relaxes with an obvious effort, allowing him to guide her across the room.

  “This is aGo board,” the year-captain says. He takes her hand and gently presses it flat against the board, drawing it from side to side and then up and down, so she can get some idea of the area of the board and also of its feel. “It has nineteen horizontal lines, nineteen vertical lines. The stones are played on the intersections of these lines, not on the squares that the lines form.” He shows her the pattern of intersecting lines by moving the tips other fingers along them. They have been printed with a thick ink, and evidently she is able to discern their slight elevation above the flatness of the board, for when he releases her hand she slowly draws her fingertips along the lines herself, seemingly without difficulty.

  “These nine dots are called stars,” he tells her. “They serve as orientation points.” He touches her fingertips to each of the nine stars in turn. They, too, are raised above the board by nothing more than a faint thickness of green ink, but it seems quite clear that she is able to feel them as easily as though they stood out in high relief. All of her senses must be extraordinarily sharp, by way of compensation for the one that is missing. “We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines going in the other direction letters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we have coordinates that allow us to identify positions on the board. This is B10, this is D18, this is J4, do you follow?” He puts the tip of one of her fingers on each of the locations he names. She responds with a smile and a nod. Even so, the year-captain feels despair. How can she ever commit the board to memory? It’s an impossible job. But Noelle looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “A, B, C,…”

  The other games have halted. Everyone in the lounge is watching them. He guides her hand toward the two trays of stones, the black ones of polished slate and the white ones fashioned of clamshell, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and clapping it down against the board. The skin of her hand is cool and very smooth. The hand itself is slender and narrow, almost fragile-looking, but utterly unwavering. “The stronger player uses the white stones,” he says. “Black always moves first. The players take turns placing stones, one at a time, on any unoccupied intersection. Once a stone is placed it is never moved unless it is captured, in which case it is removed at once from the board.”

  “And the purpose of the game?” she asks.

  “To control the largest possible area with the smallest possible number of stones. You build walls. You try to surround your opponent’s pieces even while he’s trying to surround yours. The score is reckoned by counting the number of vacant intersections within your walls, plus the number of prisoners you have taken.” She is staring steadily in his direction, fixedly, an intense and almost exaggerated show of attention, all the more poignant for its pointlessness. Methodically the year-captain explains the actual technique of play to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by setting up simulated situations on the board, calling out the location of each stone as he places it. “Black holds P12, Q12, R12, S12, T12 — got it?” A nod. “And also P11, P10, P9, Q8, R8, S8, T8. All right?” Another nod. “White holds—” Somehow she is able to visualize the positions; she repeats the patterns after him, and asks questions that show she sees the board clearly in her mind.

  He wonders why he is so surprised. He has heard of blind chess players, good ones: they must be able to memorize the board and update their inner view of it with every move. Noelle must have the same kind of hypertrophied memory. But playingGo is not like playing chess. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing fewer than two dozen possible moves. InGo, there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game ofGo to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The chessboard has just sixty-four squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, reducing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original thirty-two pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number ofGo pieces also diminishes gradually as the game proceeds, but their absence makes the patterns on the board more complicated rather than simpler during the unfolding battle for territory.

  Even so, Noelle seems to be grasping the essentials. Within twenty minutes she appears to understand the basic ploys. And there is no question that she is able to hold the board firmly fixed on the internal screen of her mind. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, the year-captain gives her an incorrect coordinate — the first time by accident, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and letters, and since it is a long time since he last has played, he misgauges the coordinates occasionally — and then twice more deliberately, to test her. Each time she corrects him, gently saying, “N13? Don’t you mean N12?”

  At length she says, “I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”

  In the baths later that day Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth discuss the year-captain’s putative sex life. It is one of their favorite speculative subjects. Most of the sex that goes on aboard the ship, and there is quite a good deal of it, takes place in complete openness, figuratively and often literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps overcivilized, epoch. Very little is taboo to them. But the year-captain, unlike virtually everyone else on board, is scrupulous about his privacy.

  “He doesn’t have any sex and he doesn’t want any,” Paco insists. “He was a monk just before he joined us, you know. That weird colony of meditating mystics up by the North Pole somewhere off the coast of Scandinavia. And a monk is still what he is, at heart. A man of ice through and through. It shows in his face, that lean and grim thin-lipped face with that little beard that he keeps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Lake the blue ice of a glacier, they are. They show you the interior of the man himself.”

  “Wrong,” Elizabeth says. “Ice outside, fire within.”

  “And you hold with those who favor fire,” Paco says jeeringly. “Don’t think I don’t listen when you start quoting poetry.”

  Elizabeth, reddening down to her bony breast, sticks her tongue out at him.

  “You’re in love with him,” Paco says. “Aren’t you, Lizzy?”

  Instead of answering, she turns the tank nozzle toward him and douses him with a foaming spray of hot water. Paco, more amused than annoyed, snorts and bellows like a breaching walrus and rises with a powerful thrust of his elbows, launching himself toward her, catching her around the middle, pulling her down into the tank and pushing her head under water. Elizabeth thrashes about in his grasp, wild
ly wigwagging her lean delicate arms, then frantically kicking her long frail legs in the air as Paco, roaring with laughter, upends her. Heinz, who is elongated and lean, with a sly ever-smiling face and a slippery, practically hairless body, glides forward and jams Paco under the surface with her, and for a couple of moments all three of them are splashing chaotically, forming an incoherent tangle of writhing limbs, the pale, thin Nordic Elizabeth and the stocky, swarthy Latin Paco and the gleaming, beautiful Teutonic Heinz. Then they bob to the top all at once, laughing, gasping merrily for breath.

  Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth have been an inseparable triad for the past month and a half. The lines of attraction run among them in every direction, though not with uniform force: Elizabeth for both of the men in equal strong measure, Heinz being pleasantly fond of Elizabeth but fiercely passionate about Paco, Paco drawn strongly to Elizabeth by some sort of attraction of physical opposites but — somewhat to his own surprise — captivated by Heinz’s easy self-confidence and omnivorous sexuality. So far the relationship has demonstrated remarkable three-sided stability, but, of course, no one expects it to last indefinitely. The voyage has really only just begun. Couples and triples will form and break apart and reform in new configurations, on and on and on, just as is the fashion on Earth but probably with greater rapidity, considering the limitation of choice in a population that at the moment numbers just fifty in a completely enclosed and utterly inescapable environment. Up until now none of the relationships that have formed aboard the Wotan has lasted more than about seven weeks. This one is approaching the ship record.