Starborne (31 page)

Or
—
he hates the idea, but it will not stay buried
—
is she simply i
n
venting things as she goes along?

“
You didn
’
t tell me that,”
he says, a little reproachfully. “
About the services.”

“
Oh. Yes. Everywhere on Earth.”

“
We are the big news,”
Sieglinde says, with her usual coarse guffaw. “
We fly around the universe, we live, we die, we find nasty planets, it is the great event for them
. The only event. We astonish them, and they are unaccustomed to astonishment. Sheep, is what they are! Lazy as sheep! We should make up deaths every now and then, even if there aren
’
t any more, just to keep them excited. To keep them interested in us. Al
s
o to remind them that there is such a thing as death.”

Everyone turns to look at her. Sieglinde
’
s face is red with anger, fiery. She has a capacity for stirring herself up mightily. But then she grins
—
smirks, really
—
and the high color fades as swiftly as i
t had come.

More gently she says, “
It was very bad, the thing about Marcus. I am greatly troubled by it, still. Such a quiet boy. Such a good mind he had. We must have no more losses of that kind, year-captain, do you hear me?”

“
I wish we hadn
’
t had even t
hat one,”
he replies.

There is a dark moment of silence in the room.

“
Well,”
Huw says, finally. He heaves his bulky body out of the w
a
ter. He is reddened from the heat, looking at least half boiled. “
We should be moving along, I think.”
Reaching down with
one hand, he lifts little Imogen out of the tub as easily as though she were a child, pulling her up over the tiled rim and letting her feet dangle in the air a moment before setting her down. They go off to the cold showers, and then dress and leave.

“
I w
ill be going also,”
Sieglinde announces. “
There is work I should be doing in the control cabin.”

Noelle and the year-captain are left alone in the baths. They sit facing the same way, thighs still touching. It is suddenly a highly awkward si
t
uation, with the other three gone. The tension of the moment in her ca
b
in when Noelle had removed her clothes now returns to the year-captain, if indeed it has ever left. The nearest of the three lovemaking chambers next to the baths is just a few meters a
way. They could very easily stroll over to it right now. But the year-captain has no idea what Noelle wants him to do. He has no very clear idea what he himself wants to do. Again he waits, resolved to take his cue from her.

And again Noelle offers him not
hing more than the usual simple i
n
nocence, the usual sweet indifference to the possibilities of the situation.

“
Shall we go to the gaming lounge now, year-captain?”

“
Of course. Whatever you say, Noelle.”

They return to her cabin, first. He remains outside
while she dresses; then they go up to the gaming lounge, where they find Paco and Roy playing, and also Sylvia and Heinz. The year-captain sets up the third board for himself and Noelle.

It is several weeks since he has played. The expedition to the surfac
e of Planet A has kept him sufficiently distracted lately. He sinks quickly into the game now, but, for all his skill, he doesn
’
t stand a chance. N
o
elle, playing black, greets him with an aggressive strategy that he has never seen before and her swarming w
arriors devour his white stones with appalling swiftness, hollowing out his forces and setting up ellipt
i
cal rings of conquered territory all over the board. It
’
s a complete rout. The game is over so quickly that Roy and Heinz, glancing over simult
a
neously
from their own boards in the moment of Noelle
’
s triumph, both grunt in amazement as they realize that it has ended.

***

Everything has been calculated, and checked and rechecked, and t
o
day is the day of our departure for the world that at this point we ca
ll, with such drab unpoetic simplicity, Planet B. Let us hope that we have reason to give it some more colorful and memorable name later on: let us hope that it is to be our new home. Hope costs us nothing. It does no harm and perhaps accomplishes some go
o
d.

I found myself, as the hour of the new shunt approached, standing in front of the viewplate, looking out at the solar system we were about to leave. Down over there, the broad brown breast of Planet A itself, tur
n
ing indifferently on its axis, giving us
not an iota of its attention. We are like gnats to it. Less than gnats: we are nothing. In the most offhand of ways it has claimed one of our lives, and now it swings onward around its golden sun as it always has, ignoring the unwanted and unwelcomed vis
i
tors who briefly disturbed its solitude and now soon will be gone. What folly, to think that this heartless place could ever have been our home! But Marcus
’
s life was the price we had to pay for learning that.

It isn
’
t an evil world, of course. There isn
’
t
any such thing as an evil world. Worlds are indifferent things. This one simply is not a world we can use.

And now
—
Planet B
—
Planet C, perhaps
—
Planet Z
—

I stood by the viewplate, watching this alien sky, this strange repe
l
lent planet that we had come here
to explore, its yellow sun, its neighbor worlds wandering the dark sky all about us, and the hint of other stars in the sky behind them, mere bright specks, betokening the vastness of the universe in which we are soon once more to be wandering; and then,
i
n a twinkling, the whole scene was gone, wiped from my sight in a si
n
gle abolishing stroke, and I was looking once again at the rippling, e
d
dying, shimmering blankness that is nospace. We had successfully made our shunt. How I had missed that dazzling gray
emptiness! How I r
e
joiced now at seeing it once more!

So again we are outside space and time, crossing through unfat
h
omable nowhere on our route from somewhere to somewhere, and I r
e
alize that I have in some fashion begun to become a denizen of nospace: I
am happiest, it seems, when we have ripped ourselves loose of the fa
b
ric of normal space and time and are floating in this quiet featureless other reality, this void within the void, this inexplicable strangeness, this mathematical construct, that
we call nospace. Nospace travel is only a means to an end; why then do I take such pleasure in returning to it? Can it be that my secret preference, unknown even to me, is that we never find any suitable world at all, that we roam the galaxy forever like
the crew of the accursed
Flying Dutchman
? Surely not. Surely I want us to discover that Planet B is a warm and friendly land, where we will se
t
tle and thrive and live happily ever after.

Surely.

The journey, Paco tells me, will take five or six months, or
perhaps as many as eight
—
he can
’
t be entirely certain, the mathematics of n
o
space travel being the paradoxical business that it is. No less than five, no more than eight, anyway. And then we do the whole survey-mission thing all over again, with better luc
k, let us hope, than this time.

The chances are, of course, that B won
’
t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of a
t
mosphere, a place with actual H
2
O water, one that isn
’
t too hot or too cold, that doesn
’
t already belong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and w
e
are, after all, still essentially in Earth
’
s own back yard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its e
n
tirety has
—
how many stars
? Two hundred billion? Four hundred bi
l
lion?
—
and if only one out of a thousand of those has planets, and one planet out of a thousand falls within the criteria for habitability that we must impose, then there are more potential worlds for us out there than
we could ever reach in our lifetimes, or in those of the children that may be born aboard this starship as our voyage proceeds. Surely one of those will work out for us.

Surely.

***

They are well along, now, in this leg of their journey, and interfe
r
ence
problems have developed again for Noelle. The static, the fuzziness of transmission quality, that first had begun to set in in the fifth month of the voyage, and which had at some points become severe and at ot
h
ers had almost vanished, has returned again i
n much greater force than before. There are some days when Noelle can barely make contact with her sister at all.

Though the voyage is uneventful now, one serene day following a
n
other, the year-captain insists on making the daily transmissions to Earth. He
continues to believe that that is an important, even essential, activity for them: that the people of Earth are vicariously living the greatest adventure of their languid lives through the men and women of the
Wotan
, and derive immense psychological value
from their daily dose of news from those intrepid travelers who fearlessly roam the di
s
tant stars. It does his crew some good, too, to get word from Earth reg
u
larly of the things that are taking place there, such as they are.

But now, day by day, the tran
smission problems are becoming more extreme, and Noelle must struggle with ever greater outlay of effort to maintain her weakening connection with far-off Yvonne. She is working at it so hard that the year-captain has begun to fear for her. He is feeling
t
he strain himself.

“
I have the new communique ready to send,”
he tells her edgily. “
Do you feel up to it?”

“
Of course I do.”
She gives him a ferocious smile. “
Don
’
t even hint at giving up, year-captain. There absolutely
has
to be some way around this inter
ference.”

“
Absolutely,”
he says. He rustles his papers restlessly. “
Okay, then, Noelle. Let
’
s go. This is shipday number
—”

“
Wait,”
she says. “
Give me just another moment to get ready, all right?”

He pauses. She closes her eyes and begins to enter the trans
mitting state. She is conscious, as ever, of Yvonne
’
s presence. Even when no specific information is flowing between them, there is perpetual low-level contact, there is the sense that the other is near, that warm proprioceptive awareness such as one has
o
f one
’
s own arm or leg or hip. But between that impalpable subliminal contact and the actual transmission of specific content lie several key steps. Yvonne and N
o
elle are human biopsychic resonators constituting a long-range comm
u
nications network; there i
s a tuning procedure for them as for any other transmitters and receivers. Noelle opens herself to the radiant energy spectrum, vibratory, pulsating, that will carry her message to her eart
h
bound sister. As the transmitting circuit in this interchange she
must be the one to attain maximum energy flow. Quickly, intuitively, she act
i
vates her own energy centers, the one in the spine, the one in the solar plexus, the one at the top of the skull; a stream of energy pours from her and instantaneously spans the g
alaxy.