Starborne

by Robert Silverberg

  Everyone gathers at the usual place for a general assembly, and the year-captain puts his back against the usual bulkhead, facing them all.

  He finds it difficult, at first, to locate the proper words. It is not a matter of stage fright — he of all people wouldn’t worry about that — but rather of a sense of inadequacy, of fundamental awkwardness. The year-captain’s dispassionate nature is perhaps not the one best suited, aboard this ship, for the task at hand. But he is the captain, chosen overwhelmingly by their vote at the time of departure, and ratified again a year after that. He is the one who must speak to this issue.

  “Friends—” he begins, as his hesitation begins to pass from him. Every face is turned toward him. “Friends, we are all greatly wounded by the loss of Marcus, and now we must all pray for healing. But where do we turn when we go to pray? To whom do we address our prayers? We are a race that has outlived its gods. We are proud, I think, that we are beyond all superstition, that we live in a realm of the altogether tangible, the accurately measurable. But yet — yet — at a time like this—”

  They are staring at him intently. Wondering where he’s heading, perhaps.

  “Marcus is dead, and no words will bring him back. Prayer itself, even if there were gods and the gods were listening to us, would not be capable of doing that. If there are gods, then it was the will of the gods that Marcus be gathered to them, and we would have no choice but to bend to that will. And if, as we are all so confident, there are no gods—”

  He pauses. He looks from one to another to another, from Heinz to Huw to Paco, from Elizabeth to Noelle to Celeste, looks at Leila, looks at Roy, Zena, seeking for signs of restlessness, puzzlement, irritation. But no. No. He has their attention completely.

  “In ancient times,” he goes on, “this might have been easier for us. We would have said it was the will of the gods, or the will of some particular god, perhaps, that Marcus should die young in a strange and hostile place, and then we would have gone on about our work, secure in the knowledge that the workings of the gods are so mysterious that we need not seek explanations for them beyond the circular one that says that what has happened was fated to be. That was in a simpler era. We modern folk have dispensed with gods; we are left with the problem of finding our own explanations, or of living without explanations entirely. I urge the latter choice on you.

  “Marcus’s death was an accident. It needs no explanation. There have always been risks in any venture of exploration, and even though most of the human race has forgotten that, we of all people should keep it constantly in mind. Courageously Marcus came out here to the stars with us to help in the task of finding a new home for the human race. Courageously he went down with Giovanna and Huw to the surface of the world we see out there; and there he encountered a force too strong for him to understand or handle, and it destroyed him. So be it. The simplest explanation is the best one here. Humanity is no longer, in general, a risk-taking race. But we are the exceptions. We fifty human beings have chosen to revive the willingness to take risks that most of us have lost. Marcus is only the first victim of that willingness. He is gone, and we mourn his loss. We mourn that loss because he was young, someone who had great contributions to make in the world we will someday build and who will not now make those contributions; and because he has been deprived of knowing the joy that the fulfillment of our mission ultimately will bring us; and because he was one of us. Mainly, I think, we mourn him because he was one of us.

  “But is that a reason to mourn, really? Hestill is one of us. He always will be. As we go onward among the stars, to Planet B and Planet C and, if necessary, Planets X and Y and Z and beyond, we will carry Marcus with us — the memory of Marcus — the first of our martyrs, the first to give his life in this great quest on which we all are bound. It wasnecessary for some of us to go down to the surface of that planet. Marcus went. Marcus died. He was performing his function as one of us, and he died because of it. Others of us, I very much suspect, will meet with similar fates as this voyage goes along. So be it. We willingly embraced all risks when we left home and friends and family and world behind to undertake this voyage across the universe. We gave up the assurance of a long and safe and comfortable life on Earth in return for the rewards — and perils — of a venture such as no human beings have ever undertaken before. And as our work unfolds, we are not likely, any of us, to find it altogether comfortable, and certainly not very safe.

  “So Marcus is dead, much too soon. So be it. So be it. He is beyond all pain now, beyond all uncertainties and insufficiencies, all knowledge of failure and defeat now. In that we should find comfort. But also we must see to it, friends — for our own sakes, not his — that Marcus’s death was not without purpose. We must go on, and on and on and on if need be, from one end of the cosmos to the other, if we must, to find the world that we are to settle. And when we get there — and wewill get there — we must see to it that our children and our children’s children remember always the name of Marcus, the first of the martyrs of our enterprise, who gave his life so that their world could be. When we write the histories of our voyage, the name of Marcus will be written in letters of fire. We will make Marcus immortal that way. As all of us will be immortal — glorious figures of myth, demigods, even gods, perhaps — in the minds of the people of that new world. We who are without gods to pray to ourselves will become gods, I think, to the settlers of the new Earth of the years to come. Immortal gods, all of us. And Marcus has simply entered his immortality earlier than the rest of us, that’s all.”

  Again he pauses. Looks from face to face. Too grand? he wonders. Too high-flown?

  But everyone is utterly silent and still; everyone’s eyes are on him, even the blind eyes of Noelle. He has captured them. As in the old days, the Hamlet days, the Oedipus days. Yes. A successful performance, one of his best. Perhaps even accomplishing something useful.

  Good. Quit while you’re ahead, he thinks.

  He says in a different tone of voice, a sudden downward shift of rhetorical intensity, “One thing more, and then we’ll break this up. This afternoon we’ll begin calculating the course for our next shunt, which will take us — what is it, Hesper, eighty light-years? ninety? — to another possible colony-world. Actual departure time will be announced later. Naturally, I have no idea whether this second destination is going to work out any better than the first one did. We’re simply going to go out there and have a look, just as we did here. At this point we have no particular expectations, one way or the other. Of course, I hope that it’s the world we’re seeking, and I know you all feel the same way. But there are others waiting to be explored beyond that one, if need be, and, if need be, we will go onward until we find what we want. I thank you all for listening. Meeting dismissed.”

  Paco, Hesper, Julia, Sieglinde, Roy, and Heinz begin the process of working out the course that will take the Wotan to Planet B. The year-captain goes off with Noelle to send the communiqué to Earth that will report on the failure of the mission to Planet A and the death of Marcus.

  He is worried about the effect that such news will have on the people of Earth. The people of Earth are accustomed to success. For them, he thinks, this voyage is a sort of fairy-tale adventure, and fairy tales are supposed to have benign outcomes, even though the occasional wicked witch may be met with along the way. The fact that one of the adventurers has actuallydied from his encounter with some dark magical force may not fit the pattern that they expect to be enacted out here. They may insulate themselves from further jolts, he fears, by retreating from their Interest in the Wotan’s voyage, by decoupling themselves entirely from their involvement in the enterprise.

  Still, they have to be told. It would be wrong to withhold the truth from them. They know that a planetary landing has been made; they must be allowed to know the outcome of it.

  “How is transmission quality today?” he asks Noelle.

  “Some interference. Not too serious.”

  “All right, then. Are
you ready to go?”

  “Whenever you are.”

  He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing personnel … deplorable fatal accident … immediate withdrawal from planetary surface … abandonment of exploration effort … It’s all true, but it sounds terrible. He tries to soften it a little, improvising as he reads, inserting little phrases like “hopeful first attempt” and “encouraging to have found so Earthlike a planet, whatever its drawbacks, so quickly.” He speaks of their coming departure for Planet B and his optimistic sense that the galaxy is so replete with worlds of the appropriate size, temperature range, and atmosphere that there can be hardly any doubt at all of the forthcoming discovery of an adequate planet for settlement.

  There. Let them chew on that for a while.

  Noelle tires quickly as she pumps his words across the universe to Yvonne. The strain on her is all too obvious. Her shoulders sag, her head slumps forward, there is a tense flickering of the musculature of her face. There is more interference with the transmission today, apparently, than Noelle has indicated to him. And yet she goes gamely onward, until at last she looks up at him with a seraphic smile of relief, sighs wearily, and announces, “That’s it. I think she’s got it all.”

  “What does she say?”

  “That she’s very sorry about Marcus. That she wishes us all better luck on Planet B.”

  Is Noelle telling him the truth? For one wild moment the year-captain finds himself thinking that this whole business of instantaneous mental contact between two sisters scores of light-years apart is nothing more than a fantasy and a fraud, that Noelle has merely been pretending to be sending his communiqués to Earth and is inventing all of Yvonne’s responses.

  No. No. No. No.

  An idiotic thought. He banishes it angrily from his mind. Noelle is incapable of such duplicity. And even if she were, she simply could not have managed to invent — to improvise, yet — all of Yvonne’s bulletins from Earth, the little details of ongoing daily life there, the occasional messages from relatives of the members of the expedition. For example, the year-captain’s father, who is a painter. He works in archaic modes — angels, demons, saints, all rendered with meticulous realism. He lives near the southern tip of Africa, on a dry rocky promontory eternally bathed in hot sunlight and planted with grotesque succulent things native to the region. In the past thirty years the two of them have met only twice. They have never had much fondness for each other. And yet the year-captain’s father, who is 130 years old, has quite surprisingly sent birthday greetings recently via the Yvonne-Noelle loop to his son, who is less than half his age. He has spoken of his recent paintings, his garden, the inroads time is beginning to make on his stamina. How could Noelle have known any of that? The year-captain wonders what upwelling of stress within himself has led him to these absurd and unworthy suspicions of the blameless Noelle. The failure of the planetary landing, he supposes. The death of Marcus. No doubt that’s it. He’s been under great pressure. They all have. He resolves to get some extra rest once they have returned to nospace travel.

  Assuming Noelle will want her usual nap after this demanding transmission, he starts to leave her cabin. “Wait,” she says. “Where are you going?”

  “The baths, I think.” Spur of the moment: he hadn’t been planning on it.

  “I’ll go with you, all right? And then afterward, perhaps, we could go to the gaming lounge.”

  He is puzzled by this. “You don’t want to get some sleep now?”

  “Not this time, no.” Indeed, despite her show of fatigue a few minutes before, she seems strangely full of energy now, not at all depleted as she normally is when she has finished transmitting to Yvonne. This despite the problem of the static — or because of it, maybe? He will never understand her.

  But a good soak in the baths right now strikes him as a welcome notion, and if Noelle doesn’t feel like napping today, that’s entirely her own affair. She drops her clothing quite casually, with seeming innocence. As though she is completely unaware how provocative that might seem to be, with just the two of them here in her cabin like this. But in her eternal darkness she probably gives no thought to the effect that the sight of her nakedness might have on others. Or perhaps she does.

  He waits just a moment, an oddly tense one, to see what she will do next. Take him by the hand, lead him to the bed? No. Nothing at all like that. She reallyis an innocent. Calmly she opens the cabin door and gestures for him to precede her into the hall.

  They go down the corridor to the baths together.

  Sieglinde, Huw, and Imogen are there when they arrive. The brawny Sieglinde is in the tepid tub by herself; beefy Huw and petite, golden-haired Imogen are sharing the hot tank. Huw and Imogen are a couple these days, apparently, at least some of the time, and this seems to be one of the times. She is stretched full length in the tub, all but submerged, her head against Huw’s shoulder, her shining hair outspread in the water, the pink tips of her small breasts rising above the surface. He is so much more massive than she is that she seems like a doll beside him.

  Huw lifts an eyebrow as Noelle and the year-captain enter, one naked, one not. Public nudity is not an extraordinary thing aboard the starship, and people sometimes come to the baths already undressed, but it is not a widespread custom. The year-captain wonders whether Huw is assuming an intimacy between him and Noelle that does not at all exist. The thought annoys him. He is aware that there is much ignorant conjecture aboard ship about his sexual habits, and he finds the furtive gossip more amusing than bothersome; but he isn’t eager to enmesh Noelle, who might be disturbed at finding herself the subject of such rumors, in these lascivious whisperings.

  “May we join you?” the year-captain asks, sliding out of his clothes. The question is routine politeness. Huw gestures grandly, and the year-captain and Noelle slip into the tub on the side opposite from Imogen and Huw. There’s no need for helping Noelle; she makes her way over the side of the tub as easily as if she were sighted. As they settle into the warm water the side of Noelle’s thigh presses up against the year-captain’s, though, which he assumes is accidental, the tub being as small and as crowded as it is, and Noelle’s sense of spatial perception not as accurate in water as it is where sound waves travel unimpeded. The year-captain automatically moves a couple of centimeters to his left; but a few moments later, as further positional adjustments are made by the occupants of the tub, he feels Noelle coming in contact with him again. It is hard now not to believe that this is deliberate, that all of this is, the suggestion that they go to the baths together, the casual stripping in her cabin, the nude promenade through the corridor. But why? Noelle is a beautiful woman, yes; highly attractive, even, and fascinating in her enigmatic cool dignity; but after all this time she still has played no role that he knows of in the pattern of sexual entanglements aboard the starship, and though she certainly seems to be offering herself to him now, the year-captain finds it difficult to accept the belief that she actually is. He prefers to look upon her as guileless and her present behavior as innocent. He continues to think of her as an asexual being, given over wholly to the bond with her distant sister and needing no other. Possibly she’s just in a playful mood just now, without any genuine erotic subtext; or perhaps she is experimenting with a new way of unwinding from the tensions of her message-sending. In any case he has no intention of responding to the invitation she seems to be extending, whether or not it’s real. As always, a sexual involvement with Noelle strikes him as a potentially explosive thing. He doesn’t think it could ever be the kind of coolly recreational coupling that his affair with Julia is. There were bound to be immense messy complications, somehow. Noelle is of vital importance to the voyage; so is he; he will not risk involving them in something that carries with it such a high probab
ility of diverting their energies into troublesome areas.

  Nevertheless, this time the year-captain allows his thigh to remain in contact with hers. It would be rude to pull away a second time.

  “You spoke very well,” Imogen says to him, “about Marcus the other day. I was extremely moved. I think we all were.”

  “Thank you.” It seems like a mindless kind of reply to make, but he can’t think of any other response.

  “He was so difficult to get to know,” Imogen says. She and Marcus had been lovers for a brief time early in the voyage. Imogen is one of the ship’s metallurgists; she is also assistant medical officer. Everyone has odd combinations of specialties. “Even in bed, you know?” she says. “Right here in the baths is where it happened, the first time. We were just sitting side by side, the way I am with Huw now, neither of us saying very much, and then Marcus turned to me and smiled and touched my wrist and gestured with his head toward one of the side rooms. Didn’t say a word. And we got right up and went in there. Not a word out of him the whole time.”

  Huw is smiling benignly, as though Imogen is merely speaking of having gone off with Marcus to play a few games ofGo. But quite possibly he doesn’t see much difference between the one recreation and the other, except thatGo requires heavier thinking.

  Imogen says, “It was like that every rime, the whole week that we were together. He was good, very good, in fact, but he never said a personal thing about himself, never asked anything about me. Friendly but distant: a mystery man. I liked him, though, I admired him, I respected his intelligence, his seriousness. I believed that sooner or later he’d open up a little. And then one afternoon we were sitting in here together and Natasha was here too, and he turned to her just the way he had turned to me the week before, and that was that for Marcus and me. It was over, as simply as that. But I always thought that Marcus and I would have a chance to get to know each other eventually, later on, maybe much later on. And now we never will.”