I want to be part of the team that lands on Planet A.
I want it desperately. Desperately.
I feel excitement gathering in me night and day as we get closer to that place. I feel it in my fingertips, in my throat, in my chest, in my balls. A new world! The new world, for all we know! If it is to be the place where we build our settlement, then the first ones of us who set foot on it will become figures of myth in millennia to come, culture-heroes, even gods. Do I want my remote descendants to think of me as a god? Apparently I do. Oh, Lofoten, Lofoten, you seem even farther away than you actually are! All those salutary plunges into icy pools, all that naked sprinting through the snow, all the fasting, all the meditation, the focusing of the mind on that clear white light, and yet here I am hungry for godhood, and how idiotic it is, how contemptible, how absurd. Yet undeniable. I want to go down there.
Which means I must find someone to replace me as captain. But who? Who? No one is stepping forward. No one seems even remotely interested. They are quite content to let me remain in the job. Like sheep, all of them, and none wants to be shepherd in my place. I should have thought of all this when I first let myself in for this year-captain business. Perhaps I did; perhaps I thought that it would be just another valuable spiritual discipline for me, to take on the responsibility of running the ship. Perhaps I had in mind, even, the great increment of virtue that would accrue to me by denying myself the right to be part of an exploring party. Certainly I’m capable of such nonsense. And now I have trapped myself in it.
Noelle reports that the transmission difficulties she has been experiencing in recent weeks have seemingly cleared up during the course of our move to this sector of space. Perhaps her “sunspot” theory really was correct, and some wholly local force was filling her mind with static back there. We’ll see. It’s a positive development, anyway, and those are always welcome. She still seems very tense and strange, though. Sits there in the lounge half the day and half the night, playing Go as though playing Go is the most important thing in the universe, taking on all corners and beating them with the greatest of ease. What a mystery that woman is! In this ship of strange creatures she is surely the strangest by some distance.
Unless Paco has botched his calculations, we are just a few days away now from the vicinity of Planet A. Given the uncertainties of my own situation, I find myself half hoping that the place will be so obviously unsuitable for colonization that we won’t even want to take an exploratory look at it. But that’s contemptible idiocy. Ten to one we’ll be sending a team down to prowl around. Huw, certainly. And Innelda, I think. And — me? That remains to be seen, I guess. The extent of my fear that I won’t be eligible to go is a good measure of the failure of my Lofoten training, and my anxiety level in that area is, well, embarrassingly high.
What I need to do now is call everyone together and hold an election. And get this thing settled before I lose whatever respect for myself I may happen to have.
The Articles of the Voyage specify that a simple majority is sufficient to elect,” the year-captain says. “In the event of there being more than two candidates, a simple plurality will be sufficient, providing it represents more than thirty-three percent of the total population of the ship. I call now for nominations.”
As is the case when all fifty of them are assembled in general meeting, they are gathered in the great central corridor of the top deck, fanned out in several directions from the place where the year-captain stands. His back is against the gray bulkhead that forms the corridor’s aft end. From there he can face them all. His eyes rove this way and that, looking onward from Leon to Elliot to Huw, from Giovanna to Sylvia to Natasha, from David to Marcus to Zena to Heinz.
No one says anything.
Chang and Roy, Noelle and Elizabeth, Paco, Hesper, Marcus, Bruce. Jean-Claude. Edmund. Althea. Leila. Imogen. Charles. The year-captain looks here, he looks there. Expressionless faces look back at him.
“The post of year-captain becomes vacant in five days,” the year-captain says, though that fact hardly comes as news to them. “I call for nominations to the post of year-captain.”
An ocean of uneasy faces. Frowns, sidewise glances. Silence. Silence.
Paco says, finally, “I nominate Leon.”
“Declined,” says Leon, almost before Paco has finished speaking the words that place his name in nomination. “I can’t be ship’s doctor and year-captain as well.”
“Why is that?” the year-captain asks. “Holding the one responsibility doesn’t preclude holding the other.”
“Well,” Leon says, glowering, “in my mind it does. I don’t want the job. Declined.”
“Very well. Do I hear another nomination?”
His eyes begin roving again. Innelda, Sieglinde, Julia, Giovanna. Michael. Celeste. Chang and Elizabeth, Hesper and Marcus, Paco and Heinz. Imogen. Zena.
Someone. Anyone.
Elizabeth says out of another long stark silence, “I nominate you to succeed yourself.”
The year-captain closes his eyes just for a moment. “I don’t choose to retain the office,” he says quietly.
“There’s nobody better qualified.”
“Surely that isn’t so. Surely. I decline the nomination.” He looks around again, a little desperately, now. No one says anything. The wild thought crosses his mind that this is a conspiracy of the whole group, that they are determined by their obstinacy to force him to reassume the captaincy by default. He will not let them do that to him. He will not.
“Well, then,” he says, “I’ll place some names in nomination myself. There’s nothing in the Articles preventing me from doing that, is there?”
This is unexpected. Startled glances are interchanged. Everyone looks troubled. There is no one in front of him, except perhaps Noelle, who does not show visible signs of fearing to be among those who are named.
“Heinz,” the year-captain says. “I nominate Heinz.”
Cool as usual, Heinz says, “Oh, captain, you know that that’s a bad idea.”
“Is that a refusal?”
Heinz shrugs. “No. No, I’ll let the nomination stand. What the hell, why not? But anybody who votes for me is crazy.”
“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 only 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.”
There 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 further 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 laughs. Not, however, the year-captain, who sees the proceedings degenerating rapidly into farce and does not like that at all. He glances from one to another 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 his 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 percent plurality, the seventeen votes required to elect. “A motion 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. The women, he thinks, will mostly vote for Julia, not merely because she, too, is a woman, but because they mistrust the flip, irreverent manner of Heinz and generally dislike Paco’s coarse jeering attitude toward most matters of importance. Probably most of the 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 decisive person, certainly capable of handling the job. Heinz, in a spirit of mockery, has done him a great favor: the year-captain 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 with 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, looking 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 wants the job.”
“We wantyou 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 apparently want of me. I will stay in office a second year.”
In their secret place belowdecks Julia attempts to offer him consolation for the bitter outcome of the election. But his Lofoten skills have carried 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 beyond this one, and someday he will no longer be year-captain and will be allowed to go down and explore them; or else 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 other breasts, and her lips, and her thighs, 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. What 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. Love 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 awareness of the meaning and consequences to him of the election. “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 necessarilyterribly disappointed. I very much wanted 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 other 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 being with you 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 this is their daily game, the loss of which she would regret. And yet she is not a child, is she? She is a woman, twenty-six years old, a beautiful and intelligent and mysterious woman. I like being with you very much. Yes. Yes. The simple straightforward phrase makes something stir in him, something disturbing and turbulent and troublesome, the strength of which is all out of keeping with the innocence of her words. He stares at her smooth, broad forehead, seeking some understanding of what may be going on behind it. But she is utterly 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 had 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 playingGo, or the tune consumed in taking meals, bathing, official meetings, and so forth. Certainly 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 Hashing 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 matter to you one way or the other.
Noelle leads a life of complete chastity. There are no probable alternatives. 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 not flirt. She does not join in the cheerfully bawdy byplay, the double entendres and open solicitations, of the baths. She has never been known to go into one of the little adjacent rooms with anyone. 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 itsel
f seems bizarrely antiquated. No doubt thereare such creatures somewhere — past the age of twelve or thirteen, that is. But one doesn’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 faraway Yvonne dwell joined in an indissoluble union, into which no one else is ever admitted by either sister. If she is indeed a virgin, 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—
What in God’s name is happening here?
This is all craziness. His head is full, suddenly, of absurd puerile speculations and suspicions and theories. He is behaving exactly like the lovesick adolescent that he never was. Why? Why? He wonders just how much Noelle means to him. Certainly she fascinates him. Is he in love with her, then? At the very least, her strangely impersonal beauty exerts a powerful effect on him. Does he want to go to bed with her? Then go to bed with her, he tells himself. If she’s interested, of course. If she is not in literal truth the nun he was just imagining her to be.
The year-captain is grateful now for Noelle’s blindness, which keeps her from seeing the way his face must look as all this stuff goes coursing through his mind.
As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, she says, “Is there anything wrong?”
She can tell. Of course. She doesn’t need to see his face. She is equipped with a horde of secret built-in receptors that bring her a steady stream of messages about the way he is breathing, the chemical substances that are flowing from his pores, and all the other little physiological betrayals of internal psychological states that a sufficiently keen observer is able to detect even without eyesight. The naturally augmented auxiliary senses of the blind.
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