Starborne Read online

  How he had hated all that pomp, all that pretension! But of course the departure of the first interstellar expedition in the history of the human race was no small event. It needed proper staging. So there they came, ostentatiously strutting toward the waiting hatch, the year-captain leading the way, and Noelle walking unerringly alongside him, and then Huw, Heinz, Giovanna, Julia, Sieglinde, Innelda, Elliot, Chang, Roy, and on and on down to Michael and Marcus and David and Zena to the rear, the fifty voyagers, the whole oddly assorted bunch of them, the short ones and the tall, the burly ones and the slender, the emissaries of the people of Earth to the universe in general.

  Aboard the shuttle. Up to the Wotan, waiting for them at its construction site in low orbit. More festivities there. All manner of celebrities, government officials, and such on hand to bid them farewell. Then a change of mood, a new solemnity: the celebrities took their leave. The fifty were alone with their ship. Each to his or her cabin for a private moment of — what? prayer? meditation? contemplation of the unlikeliness of it all? — before the actual moment of departure.

  And then all hands to the lounge. The year-captain must make his first formal address:

  “I thank you all for the dubious honor you’ve given me. I hope you have no reason to regret your choice. But if you do, keep in mind that a year lasts only twelve months.”

  Thin laughter came from the assembled voyagers. He had never been much of a comedian.

  A few more words, and then it was time for them to go back to their cabins again. By twos and threes drifting out, pausing by the viewplate in the great corridor to have one last look at the Earth, blue and huge and throbbing with life in the center of the screen. Off to the sides somewhere, the Moon, the Sun. Everything that you take for granted as fixed and permanent.

  The sudden awareness coming over them all that the Wotan is their world now, that they are stuck with each other and no one else for all eternity.

  Music over the ship’s speakers. Beethoven, was it? Something titanic-sounding, at any rate. Something chosen for its sublime transcendental force too. That added up to Beethoven. “Prepare for launch,” the year-captain announced, over the music. “Shunt minus ten. Nine. Eight.” All the old hokum, the ancient stagy stuff, the stirring drama of takeoff. The whole world was watching, yes. The comfortable, happy people of Earth were sending forth the last of their adventurers, a grand exploit indeed, ridding themselves of fifty lively and troubled people in the fond hope that they would somehow replicate the vigor and drive of the human species on some brave new world safely far away. “Six. Five. Four.”

  His counting was meaningless, of course. The actual work of the launch was being done by hidden mechanisms in some other part of the ship. But he knew the role he was supposed to play.

  “Shunt,” he said.

  Drama in his voice, perhaps, but none in the actuality of the event. There was no special sensation at the moment the stardrive came on, no thrusting, no twisting, nothing that could be felt. But the Earth and Sun disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an eerie pearly blankness, as the Wotan made its giddy leap into a matter-free tube and began its long journey toward an unknown destination.

  Someone is standing beside him now, here at the six-month-anniversary celebration. Elizabeth, it is. She puts a glass of wine in his hand.

  “The last of the wine, year-captain. Don’t miss out.” She has obviously already had her share, and then some. “’Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.’” She is quoting something again, he realizes. Her mind is a warehouse of old poems.

  “Is that Shakespeare?” he asks.

  “TheRubaiyat,” she says. “Do you know it? ‘Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring the winter garment of repentance fling.’” She is very giddy. She rubs up against him, lurching a little, just as he puts the wine to his lips; but he keeps his balance and not a drop is spilled. “’The bird of time,’” she cries, “’has but a little way to fly — and lo! The bird is on the wing.’”

  Elizabeth staggers, nearly goes sprawling. Quickly the year-captain slips his arm under hers, pulls her up, steadies her. She presses her thin body eagerly against his; she is murmuring things into his ear, not poetry this time but a flow of explicit obscenities, startling and a little funny coming from this bookish unvoluptuous woman. Her slurred words are not entirely easy to make out against the roaring background of the party, but it is quite clear that she is inviting him to her cabin.

  “Come,” he says, as she weaves messily about, trying to get into position for a kiss. He grips her tightly, propelling her forward, and cuts a path across the room to Heinz, who is pouring somebody else’s discarded drink into his glass with the total concentration of an alchemist about to produce gold from lead. “I think she’s had just a little too much,” the year-captain tells him, and smoothly hands Elizabeth over to him.

  Just beyond him is Noelle, quiet, alone, an island of serenity in the tumult. The year-captain wonders if she is telling her sister about the party.

  Astonishingly, she seems aware that someone is approaching her. She turns to face him as he comes up next to her.

  “How are you doing?” he asks her. “Everything all right?”

  “Fine. Fine. It’s a wonderful party, isn’t it, year-captain?”

  “Marvelous,” he says. He stares shamelessly at her. She seems to have overcome yesterday’s fatigue; she is beautiful again. But her beauty, he decides, is like the beauty of a flawless marble statue in some museum of Greek antiquities. One admires it; one does not necessarily want to embrace it. “It’s hard to believe that six months have gone by so fast, isn’t it?” he asks, wanting to say something and unable to find anything less fatuous to offer.

  Noelle makes no reply, simply smiles up at him in that impersonal way of hers, as though she has already gone back to whatever conversation with her distant sister he has in all probability interrupted. She is an eternal mystery to him. He studies her lovely unreadable face a moment more; then he moves away from her without a further word. She will know, somehow, that he is no longer standing by her side.

  There is trouble again in the transmission the next day. When Noelle makes the morning report, Yvonne complains that the signal is coming through indistinctly and noisily. But Noelle, telling this to the year-captain, does not seem as distraught as she had been over the first episode of fuzzy transmission. Evidently she has decided that the noise is some sort of local phenomenon, an artifact of this particular sector of nospace — something like a sunspot effect, maybe — and will vanish once they have moved farther from the source of the disturbance.

  Perhaps so. The year-captain isn’t as confident of that as she seems to be. But she probably has a better understanding of such things than he has. In any event, he is pleased to see her cheerful and serene again.

  What courage it must have taken for her to agree to go along on this voyage!

  He sometimes tries to put himself in her place. Consider your situation carefully, he thinks, pretending that he is Noelle. You are twenty-six years old, female, sightless. You have never married or even entered into a basic relationship. Throughout your life your only real human contact has been with your twin sister, who is, like yourself, blind and single. Her mind is fully open to yours. Yours is to hers. You and she are two halves of one soul, inexplicably embedded in separate bodies. With her, only with her, do you feel complete. And now you are asked to take part in a voyage to the stars without her — a voyage that is sure to cut you off from her forever, at least in a physical sense.

  You are told that if you leave Earth aboard the starship, there is no chance that you will ever see your sister again. Nor do you have any assurance that your mind and hers will be able to maintain their rapport once you are aloft.

  You are also told that your presence is important to the success of the voyage, for without your participation it would take decades or even centuries for news of the starship to re
ach Earth, but if you are aboard — and if, if, contact with Yvonne can be maintained across interstellar distances, which is not something that you can know in advance — it will be possible for the voyagers to maintain instantaneous communication with Earth, no matter how far into the galaxy they journey.

  The others who undertake to sail the sea of stars aboard the Wotan will be making painful sacrifices too, you know. You understand that everyone on board the ship will be leaving loved ones behind: mothers and fathers, perhaps, or brothers and sisters, certainly friends, lovers. There will be no one in the Wotan’s complement who does not have some Earthbound tie that will have to be severed forever. But your case is special, is it not, Noelle? To put it more precisely, your case is unique. Your sister is your other self. You will be leaving part of yourself behind.

  What should you do, Noelle?

  Consider. Consider.

  You consider. And you agree to go, of course. You are needed: how can you refuse? As for your sister, you will naturally lose the opportunity to touch her, to hold her close, to derive direct comfort from the simple fact of her physical presence. You will be giving that up forever. But is that really so significant? They say you must understand that you will never “see” her again, but that’s not true at all. Seeing is not the issue. You can “see” Yvonne just as well, certainly, from a distance of a million light-years as you can from the next room. There can be no doubt of that. If contact can be maintained between them at two or three continents’ distance — and it has — then it can be maintained from one end of the universe to another. You are certain of that. You have a desperate need to be certain of that.

  You consult Yvonne. Yvonne tells you what you are hoping to hear.

  Go, love. This is something that has to be done. And everything will work out the right way.

  Yes. Yes. Everything will work out. They agree on that. And so Noelle, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, tells them that she is willing to undertake the voyage.

  There was no way, really, that she could have known that it would work. The only thing that mattered to her, her relationship with her sister, would be at risk. How could she have taken the terrible gamble?

  But she had. And she had been right, until now. Until now. And what is happening now? the year-captain wonders. Is the link really breaking? What will happen to Noelle, he asks himself, if she loses contact with her sister?

  For a moment, right at the beginning, sitting in her cabin aboard the Wotan as it lay parked in orbit above the Earth with launch only an hour or two away, Noelle had given some thought to such matters too, and in that moment she had nearly let herself be overwhelmed by panic. It seemed inconceivable to her, suddenly, that she would really be able to maintain contact with her sister across the vast span of interstellar space. And she could not imagine what life would be like for her in the absence of Yvonne. A sword suddenly descending, cutting the thread that had bound them since the moment of their birth, and even before. And then that dreadful silence — that awful unthinkable isolation — she was astonished, suddenly, that she had ever exposed herself to the possibility that such a thing might happen.

  What am I doing here? Where am I? Get out of this place, idiot! Run, home, home to Yvonne!

  Wild fear swept her like fire in a parched forest. She trembled, and the trembling turned into an anguished shaking, and she clasped her arms around her shoulders and doubled over, sick, miserably frightened, gasping in terror. But then, somehow, some measure of calmness returned. She closed her eyes — that always helped — took deep breaths, compelled herself to unfold her clasped arms and stand straight, forced the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back to uncoil. It would all work out, she told herself fiercely. It would. It would. Yvonne would be there after the shunt just as before.

  It was time to go back to the lounge. The captain was going to make a speech to the assembled crew just before the launch itself. Coolly Noelle moved through the corridors of the ship, touching this, stroking that, drawing its strange sterile air deep into her lungs so that she would begin to feel native to it, familiarizing herself with textures and smells and highly local patterns of coolness or warmth. She had already been aboard twice before, during the indoctrination sessions. They had built the starship up here in space, for it was a flimsy thing and could not be subjected to the traumas of the acceleration needed to lift it out of a planetary gravitational field. For months, years, hordes of mass-drivers had come chugging up from bases on the Moon, hauling tons of prefabricated matériel as the great job of weaving and spinning went on and on. And gradually the members of the crew had been chosen, brought together here, shown their way around the strange-looking vessel that would contain their lives, perhaps, until the end of their days.

  Yvonne will still be there once we have set out, she told herself. Why should the link fail?

  There was no reason to think that it would; but none to think that it would necessarily hold, either. She and Yvonne were something new under the sun. No body of experimental study existed to cover the case of telepathic twin sisters separated by a span of dozens of light-years. Noelle had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance, but her faith had been secure up till that moment of sudden panic just now. She and Yvonne had often spoken to each other from opposite sides of the planet without difficulty, had they not?

  Yes. Yes. But would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart?

  The last hours before departure time were ticking down. The ship was full of people, not all of them actual members of the crew. Noelle felt their presences all around her: men, a lot of them, deep voices, a special sharpness to their sweat. Some women too. The rustle of different kinds of garments, thin robes, crisp blouses, the clink of jewelry. Everybody tense: she could smell it, a sharpness in the air. She could hear it in the subliminal hesitations of their voices.

  Well, why not be tense? Switches would be thrown and incomprehensible forces would come into play and the starship would vanish with all hands into nowhere.

  There had been test voyages, of course. This project was almost a century old. The unmanned nospace ships, first, going out on short journeys into absolute strangeness and successfully sending radio messages back, which arrived after the obligatory interval that radio transmission imposes. And then two manned journeys into interstellar space, small ships carrying unimaginably courageous volunteers — theColumbus and theUltima Thule, names out of antiquity given new gloss. TheColumbus had traveled eleven light-months, theUltima Thule fourteen; and both had returned safely. The second of those voyages had been carried out seven years ago. Members of its crew had spoken to them, trying to explain what nospace travel would feel like to them. No one had grasped anything of what they were saying, least of all Noelle.

  Now the Wotan — more ancient mythology, a ship named for some shaggy savage indomitable headstrong god of the northern forests — was ready to go. And am I? Noelle wondered. Am I?

  Final speeches. Much orotund noise. Drums and trumpets. The exit of the high governmental officials who bad come aboard to see them off. The year-captain — they had elected him yesterday, the dour Scandinavian man with the wonderfully musical voice — telling them to prepare themselves for departure, by which he meant, apparently, to say any sort of prayers that they might find meaningful, or at least to do whatever it was they did to compose their minds as they prepared to make the irrevocable transition from one life to another.

  — yvonne? Do you hear me?

  — Of course I do.

  — We’re about to get going.

  — I know. I know.

  There was no sensation of acceleration. Why should there be? This was no shuttle ride from Earth to the Moon, or to some satellite world. There was no propulsive engine aboard other than the relatively insignificant braking motor to be used when they reached their destination; no thrust was being applied; none of the conventional patterns of acceleration were being
established. Some sort of drive mechanism was at work in the bowels of the ship, yes; some sort of forces was being generated; some kind of movement was taking place. But not Newtonian, not in any way Einsteinian. The movement was from space to nospace, where relativity did not apply. Mass, inertia, acceleration, velocity — they were irrelevant concepts here. One moment they had been hanging in midspace only a few thousand kilometers above the face of the Earth, and in the next they were floating, silent as a comet, through a tube in a folded and pleated alternative universe that ran adjacent to and interlineated with the experiential universe of stars and planets, of mass and force and gravitation and inertia, of photons and electrons and neutrinos and quarks, of earth, air, fire, and water. Caught up in some unthinkable flux, hurled with unimaginable swiftness through an utter empty darkness a thousand times blacker than the darkness in which she had spent her whole life.

  It had happened, yes. Noelle had no doubt of it. There had been an instant in which she seemed to be at the brink of an infinite abyss. And then she knew she was in nospace. Something had happened; something had changed. But it was unquantifiable and altogether undefinable. Forces beyond her comprehension, powered by mysterious energies that spanned the cosmos from rib to rib, had come abruptly into play, hurling the Wotan smoothly and swiftly from the experiential universe, the universe of space and time and matter, into this other place. She knew it had happened. But she had no idea how she knew that she knew.

  — Yvonne? Can you hear me now, Yvonne?

  The reply came right away, with utter instantaneity. Not even time for a moment of terror. There was Yvonne, immediately, comfortingly: