Starborne (21 page)

“
Are there any other nominations?”
the year-captain asks. “
If I hear none, nominations are closed.”
He stares at them almost imploringly. Heinz is an impossible candidate, and surely they all know that; the year-captain has put his name in nomination o
nly for the sake of getting the process moving. But what if no one rescues the situation now? Can he blithely allow the captaincy to go to Heinz?

Rescue comes from an unlikely quarter. It is Heinz himself who says, smiling wickedly, “
I nominate Julia.”

The
re are gasps at his audacity. But it is just the sort of thing, the year-captain thinks, that one would expect from Heinz. He looks toward Julia. Heinz has taken her by surprise. Her handsome face is flushed with sudden color.

“
Do you accept?”
he asks her.

Flustered though she is, she hesitates only a moment. “
I accept, yes.”

The year-captain feels a flood of relief, and something much like love for her, for that. “
Thank you,”
he tells her, trying to maintain a purely businesslike tone. “
Are there any furth
er nominations? Or does someone want to make a motion that nominations be closed?”

Paco says, troublesome to the end, “
I nominate Huw.”

“
Declined,”
Huw snaps back. And swiftly says, “
I nominate Paco.”

“
You bastard,”
Paco says amiably, and nearly everyone l
aughs. Not, however, the year-captain, who sees the proceedings degenerating ra
p
idly into farce and does not like that at all. He glances from one to a
n
other of them, trying to silence the laughter that is still rolling nervously around the group. His gaze
comes to rest on Noelle. She is the only calm one in the group. As usual she stands by herself, her expression serene and impassive, as though she is present at this meeting only in body and her mind is actually on some remote planet at this very moment.
Perhaps it is. Very likely she is in contact with Yvonne and is reporting on the election to her as it unfolds.

“
Will you allow your nomination to stand?”
the year-captain asks Paco.

“
Sure. I might even vote for myself, too.”

The year-captain fights back h
is anger. “
We have three nominees, then,”
he declares in his most solemn official tone. Any more than three, he knows, and it will be difficult or perhaps impossible to achieve the prescribed 33% plurality, the seventeen votes required to elect. “
A m
o
tion
to close nominations, please.”

“
So moved,”
Elizabeth says.

“
Seconded,”
says Roy.

They will vote by notifying the ship
’
s intelligence of their choices. The year-captain, watching them line up at the terminals, runs through quick calculations in his mind. Th
e women, he thinks, will mostly vote for Julia, not merely because she too is a woman, but because they mi
s
trust the flip irreverent manner of Heinz and generally dislike Paco
’
s coarse jeering attitude toward most matters of importance. Probably most of th
e men will take the same position. So Julia will be the new year-captain. It is not a bad outcome, he feels. She is a calm and dec
i
sive person, certainly capable of handling the job. Heinz, in a spirit of mockery, has done him a great favor: the year-capta
in can feel only gratitude. And he is grateful to Julia, too, for allowing the nomination to stand, busy as she already is with her responsibilities on the drive deck. She is doing it for him, he knows. She understands, though he has never spoken of it wi
t
h her, how eager he is to lay down his captaincy and go forth to Planet A
’
s surface as part of the exploratory mission.

The voting takes just a few minutes. The year-captain, who is the last to vote, casts his own vote for Julia.

“
Very well,”
he says, look
ing up at the grid through which the voice of the ship
’
s intelligence emerges. “
Let
’
s have the totals, please.”

And the intelligence tells them that Julia has received five votes, Heinz has received two, Paco has received one. The other forty-two votes are
abstentions.

For an instant the year-captain is stunned. He can scarcely find his voice. Then his Lofoten training somehow kicks in, and he manages to say, almost calmly, “
We have failed of a proper plurality, it seems.”

“
What do we do now?”
Zena asks. “
Take another vote?”

“
That would be useless,”
the year-captain says, slowly, heavily. He stares at their faces, once again struggling with the rage that he knows he dares not allow himself to express. “
You
’
ve made your position plain enough. Nobody here wan
ts the job.”

“
We want
you
to have the job!”
Elizabeth cries.

“
Yes. Yes. I do see that. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Some of them look frightened. He must be letting the fury show, he realizes.

“
So be it,”
he says. “
The election has failed. I yield to what you a
p
parently want of me. I will stay in office a second year.”

***

In their secret place belowdecks Julia attempts to offer him consol
a
tion for the bitter outcome of the election. But his Lofoten skills have carri
ed him through the crisis; he has already begun to reconcile himself to the loss of the Planet A trip. There will be other worlds to visit b
e
yond this one, and some day he will no longer be year-captain and will be allowed to go down and explore them; or e
lse this will be the planet where they are going to settle, in which case he will be seeing it soon enough. Either way, there is no real reason for him to grieve. So the year-captain accepts, and gladly, the comfort of her breasts, and her lips, and her t
h
ighs, and of the warm place between them; but Julia
’
s words of sympathy he brushes gently aside. He does tell her, though, how touched he was by her gesture of willingness to take the captaincy from him so that he would be able to join the landing party.
W
hat he does not speak of is that sensation that seemed so much like love for her that passed through him at the moment of her acceptance of the nomination. It was, he has subsequently come to see, not really love at all, only a warm burst of gratitude. Lo
v
e and gratitude are different things; one does not fall in love simply as a response to favors received. He is fond of Julia; he likes and respects her a great deal; he certainly takes great pleasure in all that passes between them in their little private
cubicle. But he does not think he loves her, and he does not want to complicate their relationship with discussions of illusory states.

Noelle, unworldly as she often seems to be, shows surprising awar
e
ness of the meaning and consequences to him of the ele
ction. “
You
’
re terribly disappointed, aren
’
t you, at not being able to be part of the landing mission?”
she says, when they meet the next morning for the daily transmission to Earth.

“
Disappointed, yes. Not necessarily
terribly
disappointed. I very much wa
nted to go. But I
’
ll survive staying behind.”

“
Do you mind very much having to be year-captain for a second term?”

“
Only insofar as it keeps me from leaving the ship,”
he says. “
The work itself isn
’
t anything I object to. I simply accept it as something I
have to do.”

She turns toward him, giving him that forthright straight-in-the-eyes look of hers that so eerily seems to deny the fact of her blindness. “
If one of the others had been elected year-captain,”
she says, “
then you and I wouldn
’
t be meeting like
this any more. I would be getting briefings from Julia or Paco or Heinz about the messages to send to Earth.”

That startles him. He hadn
’
t considered that possibility at all.

“
I
’
m glad that didn
’
t happen. I would miss you,”
she says. “
I like b
e
ing with yo
u very much.”

Her quietly uttered words unsettle him tremendously. The statement is too simple, too childlike, to carry with it any deeper meaning. Of that he is certain, or at least wants to be certain. She has said it as though they are playmates and thi
s is their daily game, the loss of which she would regret. And yet she is not a child, is she? She is a woman, twe
n
ty-six years old, a beautiful and intelligent and mysterious woman.
I like being with you very much.
Yes. Yes. The simple straightforward phr
ase makes something stir in him, something disturbing and turbulent and troublesome, the strength of which is all out of keeping with the inn
o
cence of her words. He stares at her smooth broad forehead, seeking some understanding of what may be going on beh
ind it. But she is u
t
terly opaque to him, as she has always been.

Noelle getting her briefings from Heinz
—
Noelle and Paco
—

There is some sort of leap of connections within the year-captain
’
s whirling mind and he finds himself wondering whether Noelle has h
ad any sort of intimate involvement with anyone aboard ship, other than her daily meetings with him. Sexual, emotional, anything. Mostly she spends her time in her cabin, so far as he knows, except for the hours each day that she is in the gaming lounge p
l
aying
Go
, or the time co
n
sumed in taking meals, bathing, official meetings, and so forth. Certai
n
ly there has been no gossip about her going around. But what does that mean? He doesn
’
t think there
’
s been any gossip about him and Julia, either. The starship
is big
—
the biggest spacegoing vessel ever built, it is, by a couple of orders of magnitude
—
and it is full of nooks, crannies, hideaways. All sorts of undetected things might be going on. Noelle and Paco? Noelle and Huw? Noelle and Hesper, for God
’
s sake,
down in Hesper
’
s little chamber of flashing colored lights that she would never be able to see?

All these wild thoughts astound him. He finds himself suddenly lost in a vortex of crazy nonsense.

Nothing is going on, he tells himself. Not that it should mat
ter to you one way or the other.

Noelle leads a life of complete chastity. There are no probable alte
r
natives. She comes occasionally to the baths, yes
—
everyone does that
—
and sits there unselfconsciously naked in the steamy tub, but what of it? She does no
t flirt. She does not join in the cheerfully bawdy b
y
play, the double-entendres and open solicitations, of the baths. She has never been known to go into one of the little adjacent rooms with an
y
one. On board this ship she lives like a nun. She has always
lived that way. Very likely she is a virgin, even, the year-captain thinks.

A virgin. Strange medieval concept. The word itself seems bizarrely antiquated. No doubt there
are
such creatures somewhere
—
past the age of twelve or thirteen, that is. But one doe
sn
’
t ever give them much thought, any more than one thinks about unicorns.

Whatever else she may be, Noelle is certainly an island unto herself. She and far-away Yvonne dwell joined in an indissoluble union, into which no one else is ever admitted by eithe
r sister. If she is indeed a vi
r
gin, then the virginity, perhaps, may be essential to the manifestation of her telepathic powers. Untouched, untouchable. And so she would not ever
—
she has not ever
—