Starborne (7 page)

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 sui
t
ably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A hab
itable 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 a
n environment the colonists might find themselves in
—

Yes. The Big If.

***

“
You promised to teach me how to play,”
Noelle says, pouting a li
t
tle. They are once again in the ship
’
s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the
Wotan
, the ot
her 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 mental 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 tha
t
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 th
e
contact between Noelle and Yvonne holds. Of course someday the sisters will no longer be available for these tran
s
missions, 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 nee
ds 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 ti
mely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquility through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances a
l
l 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 e
f
fort, allowing him to guide her across the room.

“
This is a
Go
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
v
ertical 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 of her fingers along them. They have been printed with a thick ink, and ev
i
dently 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 wit
h
out difficulty.

“
These nine dots are called stars,”
he tells her. “
Th
ey serve as orie
n
tation 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 thic
k
ness of green ink, but it seems quite clear that she is able to feel them as easily as thoug
h they stood out in high relief. All of her senses must be extraordinarily sharp, by way of compensation for the one that is mis
s
ing. “
We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines going in the other direction let
ters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we have coordinates that allow us to identify pos
i
tions 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 impo
s
sible job. But Noelle looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “
A, B, C, D.…”

The other games have hal
ted. 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 clam shell, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and c
l
apping it down against the board. The skin of her hand is cool and very smooth. The hand itself is slender and narrow, almost fra
g
ile-looking, but utterly unwavering. “
The stronger player uses the white stones,”
he says. “
Black always moves first. The play
ers 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 larg
est possible area with the smallest possible nu
m
ber 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, plu
s 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
p
lay to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by se
t
ting 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 wh
y 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 playing
Go
is not like playing ches
s. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing less than two dozen possible moves. In
Go
, there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game of
Go
to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The ch
ess board has just 64 squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, redu
c
ing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original 32 pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number of
Go
pieces also diminish
es 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 u
nderstand the basic ploys. And there is no que
s
tion 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 acc
i
dent, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and le
t
ters, 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 o
f
ten literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps over-civilized, 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 c
olony 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 k
e
eps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Like 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 f
ire,”
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 towar
d
her, catching her around the middle, pulling her down into the tank and pushing her head under water. Elizabeth thrashes about in his grasp, wildly wigwa
g
ging her lean delicate arms, then frantically kicking her long frail legs in the air as Paco, roaring
with laughter, up-ends her. Heinz, who is elo
n
gated 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 chao
tically, 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 Eli
z
abeth 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 d
e
monstrated 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 re-form in new configurations, on and on and on, just as is the fas
h
ion 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 form
e
d aboard the
Wotan
has lasted more than about seven weeks. This one is approaching the ship record.