Starborne

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Starborne Page 9

by Robert Silverberg

Their eyes meet for a moment. The year-captain searches them. It is always hard to tell whether Heinz is being sincere. His eyes are blue like the year-captain’s, but much more playful, and of an altogether different kind of blueness, a soft sky-blue greatly unlike the fierce ice-blue of the year-captain’s. Both men have fair Nordic hair, but again there is a difference, Heinz’s being thick and flowing and a burnished glowing gold in color, whereas the year-captain’s is stiff and fine and almost silver, not from aging but from simple absence of pigment. They are oddly similar and yet unalike in most other ways too. The year-captain does not regard Heinz as a friend in any real sense of that word; if he were to allow himself friends, which has always been a difficult thing for him, Heinz would probably not be one of them. But there is a certain measure of respect and trust between them.

  The year-captain says, after a little while, “Is there something else you want to tell me?”

  “To ask, rather.”

  “Ask, then.”

  “I’ve been wondering if there’s some difficulty involving Noelle.”

  The year-captain takes great care to show no change of expression. “A difficulty? What sort of difficulty?”

  “She seems to be under unusual stress these days.”

  “She is a complicated person in a complicated situation.”

  “Which is true of us all,” Heinz says easily. “Nevertheless, she’s seemed different somehow in recent days. There was always a serenity about her — a saintliness, even, if you will allow me that word. I don’t see it any more. The change began, I think, about the time she started playingGo with us. Her face is so tightly drawn all the time now. Her movements are extremely tense. She plays the game with some sort of weird scary intensity that makes me very uneasy. And she wins all the time.”

  “You don’t like it that she wins?”

  “I don’t like it that she’s so intense about it. Roy used to win all the time too, but that was simply because he was so good that he couldn’t help winning. Noelle playsGo as if her life depends on it.”

  “Perhaps it does,” the year-captain says.

  Heinz shows just a flicker of vexation now at the year-captain’s constant conversational parrying. It is a standard trait of the year-captain’s, these repetitions — his automatic manner of responding, his default mode — and most people are accustomed to it. It has never seemed to bother Heinz before.

  He says, “What I mean, captain, is that I think she may be approaching a breakdown of some sort, and I felt it was important to call that to your attention.”

  “Thank you.”

  “She is more high-strung than the rest of us. I would not like to see her in any sort of distress.”

  “Neither would I, Heinz. You have my assurance of that.”

  An awkward silence then. At length Heinz says, “If it were possible to find out what’s bothering her, and to offer her whatever comfort would be useful—”

  “I appreciate your concern,” the year-captain says stonily. “Please believe me when I say that I regard Noelle as one of the most important members of the expedition, and I am doing everything in my power to maintain her stability.”

  “Everything?”

  “Everything,” the year-captain says, in a way intended unmistakably to close the conversation.

  Noelle dreams that her blindness has been taken from her. Sudden light surrounds her, phenomenal white cascades of shimmering brilliance, and she opens her eyes, sits up, looks about in awe and wonder, saying to herself. This is a table, this is a chair, this is how my statuettes look, this is what my sea-urchin shell is like. She is amazed by the beauty of everything in her room. She rises, going forward, stumbling at first, groping, then magically gaining poise and balance, learning how to walk in this new way, judging the positions of things not by echoes and air currents any longer, but rather by the simple miracle of using her eyes. Information floods her. She walks around her room, picking things up, stroking them, matching shapes with actual appearances, correlating the familiar feel of her objects with the new data coming to her now through this miraculously restored extra sense. Then she leaves the cabin and moves about the ship, discovering the faces of her shipmates. Intuitively she knows who they all are. You are Roy, you are Sylvia, you are Heinz, you are the year-captain. They look, surprisingly, very much as she had always imagined them: Roy fleshy and red-faced, Sylvia fragile, the year-captain lean and fierce, Heinz handsome and constantly smiling, and so on and so on, Elliot and Marcus and Chang and Julia and Hesper and Giovanna and the rest, everyone matching expectations. Everyone beautiful. She goes to the window of which all the others talk, the one that provides a view of nospace, and looks out into the famous grayness. Yes, yes, the scene through that window is precisely as they say it is: a cosmos of wonders, a miracle of complex pulsating tones, level after level of incandescent reverberation sweeping outward toward the rim of the boundless universe. There is nothing to see, and there is everything. For an hour she stands before that dense burst of rippling energies, giving herself to it and taking it into herself, and then, and then, just as the ultimate moment of illumination toward which she has been moving throughout the entire hour is coming over her, she realizes that something is wrong. Yvonne is not with her. Noelle reaches out with her mind and does not touch Yvonne. Again. No. No contact. Can’t find her. She has somehow traded her special power for the mere gift of sight.

  Yvonne? Yvonne?

  All is still. Where is Yvonne?

  Yvonne is not with her. This is only a dream, Noelle tells herself, and I will soon awaken from it. But she cannot awaken. She cries out in terror. And then she feels Yvonne at last. “It’s all right,” Yvonne whispers, across the immensities of space and time. “I’m here, love, I’m here, I’m here, just as I always am,” comes Yvonne’s soft voice, rising out of the great whirlpool of invisible suns. Yes. All is well. Noelle can feel the familiar closeness again. Yvonne is there, right there, beside her. Trembling, Noelle embraces her sister. Looks at her. Beholds her for the first time.

  I can see, Yvonne! I can see!

  Noelle realizes that in her first rapture of sightedness she had quite forgotten to look at herself, although she had rushed about looking at everything and everyone else. It had not occurred to her. Mirrors have never been part of her world. But now she looks at Yvonne, which is, of course, like looking at herself, and Yvonne is beautiful, her hair dark and silken and lustrous, her face smooth and sleek, her features finely shaped, her eyes — her blind eyes! — alive and sparkling. Noelle tells Yvonne how beautiful she is, and Yvonne smiles and nods, and they laugh and hold one another close, and they begin to weep with pleasure and love, out of the sheer joy of being with each other, and then Noelle awakens, and of course the world is as dark as ever around her.

  Heinz goes out, finally. Finally. There are exercises that the year-captain learned in Lofoten, spiritual disciplines designed to restore and maintain tranquillity. He makes use of them now, breathing slowly and deeply, running through each of the routines. And then he runs through them all over again.

  The conversation with Heinz has seemed interminable — and has been deeply embarrassing, and it has left the year-captain feeling greatly annoyed, as annoyed as his fundamentally controlled and equable nature will allow him to be. Does Heinz think the year-captain has failed to notice Noelle’s disturbed state? Does Heinz think he has failed to care about it? Heinz knows nothing, presumably, of the recent difficulties in communication between the sisters. It is not his business to know about that. But the year-captain knows; the year-captain is aware of the existence of a problem; the year-captain does not need the assistance of Heinz in order to discover that an important member of the expedition is experiencing problems. And in any case, what does Heinz want him todo about it? Does he have some suggestion to make, and, if so, why has he not made it? That damnable sly smile of Heinz’s seemed always to imply that he was holding something back that would be very useful for you to know, if only he cared
to let you in on the secret. It was easy enough to think that there was less behind that smile of his than you might suspect. But was that true?

  The year-captain wonders whether everyone aboard, one by one, is about to undergo some maddening transformation for the worse. Already Noelle is losing the ability to communicate with her sister on Earth; the blunt and straightforward Sieglinde has unsettlingly chosen to challenge the reliability of the theorems that she herself helped to write; and now the easygoing and irreverent Heinz is tiresomely eager to explain the year-captain’s own responsibilities to him. What next? What next, he wonders?

  The year-captain is particularly bothered by Heinz’s sudden little burst of pious helpfulness because it has kept him from a badly needed therapeutic engagement of his own. Julia is waiting for him in their secret place of rendezvous in a dark corner of the cargo deck.

  Julia and the year-captain are lovers. They have been since the third week of the voyage, after she had extricated herself from her brief and unsatisfying fling with Paco. So far as he knows, no one but he and she are aware of their relationship, such as it is, and he prefers to keep it that way. Among the people of the Wotan he has a reputation for asceticism, for a certain monkish ferocity of discipline, and, rightly or wrongly, he has come to feel that this enhances his authority as captain.

  The truth is that the year-captain feels the pull of physical desire at least as often as anyone else on board, and has been doing something about it with great regularity, as any sane person would. But he does it secretly. He finds pleasure and amusement in the knowledge that he has managed to maintain a private life within the goldfish bowl that is the ship. There are times when the year-captain feels that he is committing the sin of pride by allowing others to think that he is more ascetic than he really is; at the very least, there is something hypocritical about it, he realizes. He has chosen, however, to lock himself into this pattern of furtive behavior since the beginning of the voyage, and now it seems to him much too late to do anything about changing it. Nor does he really want to, anyway.

  So he sets out once more down the corridor to the dropchute, descends to the lower levels, moves with his usual feline grace through the tangle of stored gear that clutters those levels, and, pressing his hand against the identification plate that gives access to the deepest storage areas, steps through the opening hatch into the secret world of the ship’s most precious cargo, its bank of genetic material.

  Not many people have Need-to-Enter access to this area coded into the ship’s master brain. Chang does — he is the custodian of the Wotan’s collection of fertilized and unfertilized reproductive cells — and so does Sylvia, the ship’s other genetic specialist. But the expedition is a long way from any point where the birth of children aboard ship would be a desirable thing, and neither of them has reason to come down here very often. Michael, whose primary job is maintenance of all of the ship’s internal mechanical functions, is another one who can enter this part of the vessel without the year-captain’s specific permission. There are two or three others. But most of the time the unborn and indeed mostly still unconceived future colonists of the as yet undiscovered New Earth sleep peacefully in the stasis of their freezer units, unintruded upon by visitors from above.

  Julia is not someone who should be authorized to come to this part of the ship. Her responsibilities center entirely on the functioning of the stardrive, and no element of the stardrive mechanism is located anywhere near here. The year-captain has added her palmprint to the section’s Need-to-Enter list for purely personal reasons. He has given her the ability to pass through that hatch because hardly anyone else has it, which makes this an excellent location for their clandestine meetings. The chances of their being disturbed here are very small. And if ever they should be, why would anyone care that the year-captain has illicitly permitted his lover to join him down here? He suspects that his little crime, such as it is, would be taken merely as a welcome indication that he is human, after all.

  This is a dark place, lit only by little pips of slave-light that jump into energized states along the illuminator strands set overhead as he passes beneath them, and wink out again when he has gone by. To the right and the left are the cabinets in which germ plasm of various sorts is stored. The plan of the voyage calls for no births aboard ship at all during the first year; then, if it seems desirable in the context of what position the ship has attained and what potential colony-worlds, if any, have been located, births will be authorized to shipboard couples interested in rearing children. There is room on board for up to fifty additional passengers to be born en route. After that, no more until a planetary landing. The stored ova and spermatozoa are to be kept in the cooler until that time as well. A mere twenty-five couples, no matter how often their couplings are rearranged, will not be able to provide sufficient genetic diversity for the peopling of a new world. But all those thousands of stored ova and the myriad sperm cells will be available to vary the genetic mix once the colony has been established.

  A single small light illuminates the year-captain’s love nest, which is an egg-shaped security node, just barely big enough for two people of reasonable size to embrace in, that separates one of the sectors of freezer cabinets from its array of monitoring devices. The year-captain peers in and sees Julia stretched out casually with her arms folded behind her head and her ankles crossed. Her clothes are stacked in the passageway outside; there is no room in the little security node to get undressed.

  “Was there a problem?” she asks.

  “Heinz,” says the year-captain, wriggling quickly out of his tunic and trousers. “There was something he felt I ought to be told about, so he stayed after the meeting and told me. And told me and told me.”

  “Something serious?”

  “Nothing I didn’t already know about,” he replies.

  He is naked now. She beckons to him and he crawls in beside her. Julia hisses with pleasure as he curls up around her cool, muscular body. It is an athlete’s body, a racer’s body, taut-bellied, flat-buttocked, not a gram of excess flesh. Her thighs are long and narrow, her arms slender and strong, with lightly corded veins strikingly prominent along them. She swims an hour each day in the lap-pool on the recreation level. Occasionally the year-captain joins her there, and although he is not unlike her in build, an athlete too, his body hardened and tempered by a lifetime of discipline, he invariably finds himself breathing hard after fifty or sixty turns in the pool, whereas Julia goes on and on without a single break in rhythm for her full hour and when she climbs from the water she seems not to have exerted herself at all.

  Their couplings are like athletic events too: dispassionate excursions into passion, measured and controlled expenditures of erotic energy, uncomplicated by emotion. Julia is easy to arouse but slow to reach consummation, and they have evolved a way of embracing and gliding into a steady, easy rocking rhythm that goes on and on, as though they are swimming laps. It is a kind of pleasant, almost conversational kind of copulation that gradually moves through a series of almost unquantifiable upticks in pace, each marking a stage in her approach to the climax, until at last he will detect certain unmistakable terminal signals from her, soft staccato moaning sounds, a sudden burst of sweat-slickness along her shoulders, and he will whip himself onward then to the final frenzied strokes, taking his cues from her at every point and letting go in the ultimate moment, finally, of his own carefully governed self-control.

  The year-captain knows that what he and Julia do with one another has nothing to do with love, and he is aware that even sex for the sake of sex itself can be considerably more gratifying than this. But he is indifferent to all of that. Love is not unimportant to him, but he is not interested in finding it just now, and the physical satisfactions he achieves in Julia’s arms may fall short of some theoretical ideal but they do serve to keep him tuned and balanced and able to perform his administrative duties well, which is all that he presently seeks.

  She is uttering the familiar stac
cato moans now. His fingertips detect the first onrush of preorgasmic sweatiness emerging from the pores of her upper back.

  But a curious thing happens this time. Ordinarily, when he and Julia are making love and they have just reached this point in the event, he invariably topples into a trancelike state in which he no longer feels capable of speech or even thought. His mind goes blank with the sort of shimmering blankness that he learned how to attain in his years at the Lofoten monastery — the same blankness that he sees when he looks through the viewplate at the reverberating nothingness of the nospace tube surrounding the ship. After he has arrived at that point, all his mental processes are suspended except those elementary ones, not much more than tropisms, that are concerned with the mechanics of the carnal act itself.

  But today things are different. Today when he reaches the blank point and begins the hectic ride toward their shared culmination, the image of Noelle suddenly bursts into his mind.

  He sees her face hovering before him as though in midair: her dark, clear sightless eyes, her delicate nose, her small mouth and elegantly tapering jaw. It is as though she is right here in the cubicle with them, floating not far in front of his nose, watching them, watching with a kind of solemn childlike curiosity. The year-captain is jolted entirely out of his trance. He is flooded at this wrongest of moments by a torrent of mysterious conflicting emotions, shame and desire, guilt and joy. He feels his skin flaming with embarrassment at this disconcerting intrusion into the final moments of his embrace of Julia, and he is certain that his sudden confusion must be dismayingly apparent to his partner; but if Julia notices anything unusual, she gives him no hint of that, and merely goes on moving steadily beneath him, eyes closed, lips drawn back in a grimacing smile, hips churning in the steady ever-increasing rhythmic thrusts that carry her closer to her goal.

  All the preparations have been carried out and they are ready now to alter the trajectory of the starship so that it will take them toward Hesper’s Planet A. What this requires is largely a mathematical operation. Conventional line-of-sight navigation is not a concept that applies in any way to the starship, traveling as it does through space that is both non-Einsteinian and non-Euclidean. The ship, however tangible and substantial it may seem to its tangible and substantial occupants, is in fact nothing more than a flux of probabilities at this point, a Heisenbergian entity at best, not “real” at all in the sense of being subject to the Newtonian laws of action and reaction or any of the other classical concepts of celestial mechanics. Its change of course must be executed by means of equivalences and locational surrogates, not by applications of actual thermodynamic thrust along some particular spatial vector. The changing of signs in a cluster of equations rather than the changing of the direction of acceleration through an outlay of physical energy is what is needed.

 

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