Starborne

by Robert Silverberg

  In the aftermath of the wrestling match they sit facing one another along the edge of the tank, unable to stop laughing: one will start and set off the other two, and around and around it goes. Elizabeth’s pallid meager body is rosy now from the underwater frolic; her flesh glows, her small breasts heave. Paco studies her with a proprietary air, and Heinz amiably contemplates them both as if planning to spread his long arms about them and pull them in again.

  The air in the small, brightly lit room is warm and steamy. A voluptuous abundant torrent of warm water splashes down from the fountainhead set in the tiled wall. No one worries about water shortages aboard the Wotan: every drop, urine and sweat and the vapor of everybody’s breath included, is rigorously recaptured and purified and aerated and chilled and recycled, and not a molecule of it ever goes to waste. The baths are Roman in sensuousness if not in scale: the room is compact but elegantly appointed, and there is a hot tank, a tepid one, and a frigid one, something for all tastes. Up to nine or ten people can use the baths at the same time, though in practice a certain amount of exclusiveness is afforded those who are in any sort of bonded relationship. Three small rooms adjacent to the tank chamber have beds in them. Much of the ship’s erotic activity goes on in those rooms.

  Elizabeth says in a serious tone, when the three of them are calm again, “I don’t deny that I’m attracted to him. And not just for his body, though he’s certainly a handsome man. But his mind — that mysterious, complicated, opaque mind of his—”

  “The mind of a mystic,” Paco says with unconcealed contempt. “The mind of a monk, yes.”

  “He’s been a monk,” Elizabeth retorts, “but he’s been a lot of other things too. You can’t pin him down in any one category. And I don’t think he’s as ascetic as you seem to believe. The Lofoten monastery isn’t famous for vows of chastity.”

  “Oh, he’s no ascetic,” Heinz says. “I can testify to that.”

  Elizabeth and Paco whirl to gape at him. “You?” they say at the same time.

  Heinz chuckles lazily. “Oh, no, not what you’re thinking. He’s not really my type. Too inward, too elusive. But I can see the passion in him. You don’t have to go to bed with him to know that. It’s there. Plenty of it. It streams from him like sunlight.”

  “There,” Elizabeth says to Paco. “Ice outside, maybe, but fire within.”

  “And,” Heinz continues, “I’m quite certain that he’s been sleeping with somebody on board.”

  “Who?” Elizabeth asks, very quickly.

  Another lazy chuckle. “Your guess is as good as mine, and mine is no good at all. I haven’t been spying on him. I’m only saying that he moves around this ship like a cat, and knows every hidden corner of it better even than the man who designed it, and I’m certain that a man of his force, of his virility, is getting a little action somewhere, in some part of the ship that we don’t even suspect can be used for some stuff, and with some partner who’s keeping very quiet about what’s going on. That’s all.”

  “I hope you’re right,” says Elizabeth, forcing a broad lascivious grin not at all in keeping with the austere scholarly angularity of her face. “And when he’s done with her, whoever she is, I’d gladly volunteer to be his next secret playmate.”

  “He doesn’t want you,” Paco says.

  Elizabeth meets this casual dismissal of her fantasies with a disdainful wave other hand. “Oh, I don’t think you can be so sure of that.”

  “Oh, but I am, I am,” Paco replies. “It’s only too obvious. You keep sending him signals — everyone can see that, you stare at him like a lovesick child — and what does he send you in response? Nothing. Nothing. I don’t mean to cast any personal aspersions, Liz. You know there are plenty of men who find you attractive. He doesn’t happen to be one of them.” Elizabeth is staring wide-eyed at him, and pain is visible in her rigid unblinking gaze. But Paco will not stop. “There’s no — what is the term? — no chemistry between you and our year-captain. Or else he’s a master at masking his emotions, but if he’s that good at playing a part he should have had a more successful career as an actor than he did. No, he just isn’t interested in you, my love. You must not be his type, whatever that is. Just as he isn’t Heinz’s. There’s no accounting for these things, you know.”

  Sadly Heinz says, “I think Paco’s right. But not for the same reasons, exactly.”

  “Oh?”

  “You may or may not be the captain’s type. Who can say? I’ve already said I think he’s got someone for casual sex, and if we knew who he or she is, we’d have more of an idea about his type. But you’re up against another problem that goes beyond his choice of casual bedmates. He sleeps with someone, yes, very likely, but even so his emotions are focused somewhere else, and that’s too complicated a something for you to deal with. The year-captain is in love, don’t you realize that? I’m not talking about sex now, but love. And it’s a love that’s impossible to consummate.”

  “Yes, it’s obvious. He’s in love with himself,” says Paco.

  “You’re such a filthy boor,” Elizabeth says. She glances toward Heinz. “What are you talking about? Who do you imagine he’s in love with?”

  “The one untouchable person aboard this ship. The one who floats through our lives like some kind of being from another sphere of existence. I can see it written all over his face, whenever he’s within twenty meters of her. The blind girl, that’s who he wants. Noelle. And he’s afraid to do anything about it, and it’s agony for him. For God’s sake, can’t you tell?”

  Captain?” Noelle says. “It’s me, Noelle.”

  The year-captain looks up, startled. He is not expecting her. It is late afternoon, the last day of the voyage’s fifth month. He is working alone in the control cabin, poring over a thick batch of documents that Zed Hesper has brought him: a new set of formal analyses of three or four of his best prospects for a planetary landing, set forth in much greater detail than Hesper has been able to supply previously.

  For the first time, the year-captain has begun to pay serious attention to such things. Half his term of office is over, and he is thinking beyond his captaincy, to the time when he will have reverted to his primary specialty of xenobiology. He can’t practice that aboard the Wotan. He needs an actual alien planet as his scene of operations. He has walked alien worlds before, not only Earth’s neighbor planets but also the bleak strange moons of the gas-giant worlds beyond the orbit of Mars: Titan, Iapetus, Callisto, Ganymede, Io. The exultation of finding splotches of life on those cold forbidding worldlets, extraterrestrial microorganisms rugged beyond belief — supreme moments of his life, those were, the astounding discovery in the sulfurous landscape of Io, and then again on Titan, when he knelt and pointed into methane-ammonia snowdrifts at the tiny astonishing spots of burnt orange against the glaring white! And so he will certainly want to be a member of the first landing team, where his intuitive skills will be valuable on a world full of strange and perhaps challenging life-forms of unpredictably strange biochemical characteristics; but as year-captain he would be obliged to remain aboard the vessel while others take the risks outside. That is the rule of the ship.

  It is time, therefore, for him to pick the site of the first landing and head for it in these closing months of the first year, while he is still in command. The die will be cast, that way. That way the timing will be right for him to hand his executive responsibilities on to his successor just as they arrive at their destination, and thus to be able to take part in the initial planetary expedition.

  But here is Noelle, drifting silently, wraithlike, into the room where he is working. She looks older and less beautiful today than she usually seems to him: weary and drawn, so much so that she is almost translucent. She appears unusually vulnerable, as though a single harsh sound would shatter her.

  “I have the return transmission from Yvonne,” she tells him. There is an oddly timid, tentative inflection in her voice that is not at all like her. He wonders if something terrible has taken
place on Earth. But what could possibly go awry on that torpid, tranquil world?

  She hands him the small, clear data-cube on which she has archived her latest conversation with her sister on Earth. As Yvonne speaks in her mind, Noelle repeats each message aloud into a sensor disk, and it is captured on the cube.

  He rests the cube on the palm of his hand and says to her, “Are you all right, Noelle? You look wiped out.”

  A faint shrug. “There was a little problem.”

  He waits. She seems to be having trouble articulating her thoughts.

  “What kind of problem, Noelle?” he says finally.

  “With the transmission. I had some difficulty receiving it. Or rather — what I mean to say is, it wasn’t quite clear. It was — fuzzy.”

  “Fuzzy,” the year-captain says. His voice is flat.

  “Distorted. Not much, but some. A kind of static around the edges of the signal.”

  “Static,” he says, flatly again, playing for time, trying to understand, though he does not really see how merely echoing her words will help him to do that. Yet what else can he do? “Mental static,” he says, looking straight into her sightless eyes.

  “That’s the best word I can use for it.”

  Yvonne’s mental tone, Noelle says, is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before. Plainly she is worried by it. Frightened, perhaps.

  “Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests gently. “Or maybe she was.”

  Noelle smiles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a troubled inner state.

  He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her customary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently, and often can be heard asking Yvonne to repeat something. The message from the mother world, what the year-captain can make out of it, is the customary chattery blather, no surprises. But this business of static disturbs him. Is this the beginning, he wonders, of the breakdown of their one communication link with Earth, the onset of a steady inexplicable degradation of the signal, leading inevitably to the isolation of the starship in a realm of total silence?

  And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvonne and Noelle are nonrelativistic; they travel instantaneously across a cosmos in which light itself can go no faster than 300,000 kilometers per second and even this nonrelativistic faster-than-light starship crosses the topological folds of nospace at finite, though immense, velocity. Without the sisters, they would have to fall back on radio transmission to make contact with Earth: from their present distance a message would take two decades to get there.

  The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to abandon. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, outward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct religions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere archaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?

  But hedoes care. The link matters.

  He decides that it has to do with the symbolic function of this voyage to the people of Earth: the fact that the voyagers are the focal point of so much aspiration and anticipation. If contact is lost, their achievements in planting a new Earth on some far star, whatever they may ultimately be, will have no meaning for the people of the mother world.

  And then, too, it is a matter of what he is experiencing on the voyage itself, in relation to the intense throbbing grayness of nospace outside: that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal connectedness. He has not spoken with any of the others about this, but the year-captain is certain that he is not the only one who has felt these things. He and, doubtless, some of his companions are making new discoveries every day, not astronomical but — well, spiritual — and, the year-captain tells himself, what a great pity it will be if none of this can ever be communicated to those who have remained behind on Earth. We must keep the link open.

  “Maybe,” he says, “we ought to let you and Yvonne rest for a few days.”

  A celebration: the six-month anniversary of the day the Wotan set out for deep space from Earth orbit. The starship’s entire complement is jammed into the gaming lounge, overflowing out into the corridor. Much laughter, drinking, winking, singing, a happy occasion indeed, though no one is quite sure why they should be making such a fuss about the half-year anniversary.

  “It’s because we aren’t far enough out yet,” Leon suggests. “We still really have one foot in space and one back on Earth. So we keep time on the Earth calendar still. And we focus on these little milestones. But that’ll change.”

  “It already has,” Chang observes. “When was the last time you used anything but the shiptime calendar in your daily work?”

  “Which calendar I use isn’t important,” Leon says. He is the ship’s chief medical officer, a short, barrel-chested man with a voice like tumbling gravel. “As it happens, I use the shiptime calendar. But we still think in reference to Earth dates too. Earth dates still matter to us, after a fashion. All of us keep a kind of double calendar in our heads, I suspect. And I think we’ll go on doing that until—”

  “Happy six-month!” Paco cries just then. His broad face is flushed, his dark deep-set eyes are aglow. “Six months cooped up together in this goddamned tin can and we’re still all on speaking terms with each other! It’s a miracle! A bloody miracle!” He holds a tumbler of red wine in each hand. For tonight’s party the year-captain has authorized breaking out the last of the wine that they brought with them from Earth. They will be synthesizing their own from now on. It won’t be the same thing, though; everyone knows that.

  Paco may not be as drunk as he seems, but he puts on a good show. He caroms through the crowd, bellowing, “Drink! Drink!” and bumps into tall, slender Marcus, the planetographer, nearly knocking him down, and Marcus is the one who apologizes: that is the way Marcus is. A moment later Sieglinde drifts past him and Paco hands his extra wineglass to her. Then he loops his free arm through hers. “Tanz mit mir, liebchen!” he cries. The old languages are still spoken, more or less. “Show me how to waltz, Sieglinde!” She gives him a sour look, but yields. It’s a party, after all. They make a foolish-looking couple — she is a head taller than he is, and utterly ungraceful — but looking foolish is probably what Paco has in mind. He whirls her around through the crowd in a clumsy galumphing not-quite-waltz, holding her tightly at arm’s length with a one-armed grip and joyously waving his wineglass in the other.

  The year-captain, who has come late to the party and now stands quietly by himself at the rear of the lounge near the tables where theGo boards are kept, sees Noelle on the opposite side, also alone. He fears for her, slim and frail as she is, and sightless, in this room of increasingly drunken revelers. But she seems to be smiling. Michael and Julia are at her side; Julia is saying something to her, and Noelle nods. Apparently she is asking if Noelle wants something to drink, for a moment later Mike plunges into the melee and fetches a glass of something for her.

  There had been a party much like this six months before, on Earth, the eve of their departure. The same people acting foolish, the same ones being shy and withdrawn. They all knew e
ach other so superficially, then, even after the year-long training sessions — names, professional skills, that was about it. No depth, no intimacy. But that was all right. There would be time, plenty of time. Already couples bad begun to form as launch time drew near: Paco and Julia, Huw and Giovanna, Michael and Innelda. None of those relationships was destined to last past the first month of the voyage, but that was all right too. The ship’s crew consisted of twenty-five men, twenty-five women, and the supposition was that they would all pair neatly off and mate and be fruitful and multiply on the new Earth to come, but in all likelihood only about half the group would do that at most, and the others would remain single to the end of their days, or pass through a series of intricate and shifting relationships without reproducing, as most people did on Earth. It would make little difference in the long run. There was a sufficiency of frozen gametes on board with which to people the new world. And one could readily enough contribute one’s own to the pool without actually pairing and mating.

  Partying was not a natural state for the year-captain. Aloof and essentially solitary by nature, marked also by his wintry years at the monastery in Lofoten, he made his way through these social events the way he had managed his notable and improbable career as an actor, stepping for the time being into the character of someone who was not at all like himself. He could pretend a certain joviality. And so he drank with the others at the launch party; and so he would drink here tonight.

  The launch party, yes. That had called for all his thespian skills. The newly elected year-captain going about the room, grinning, slapping backs, trading quips. Getting through the evening, somehow.

  And then the day of the launch. That had needed some getting through too. The grand theatrical event of the century, it was, staged for maximum psychological impact on those who were staying behind. The whole world watching as the chosen fifty, dressed for the occasion in shimmering, absurdly splendiferous ceremonial robes, emerged from their dormitory and solemnly marched toward the shuttle ship like a procession of Homeric heroes boarding the vessel that will take them to Troy.