“Such a waste,” Sieglinde says, from the other tub.
“A fine young man,” says Huw. “It ripped me apart, watching him crack up down there. It ripped me apart.”
The year-captain nods abstractedly. This conversation is a necessary one, he supposes, part of the healing process for them, but it is making him uncomfortable. And the pressure of Noelle’s bare thigh against his in the tub is having an unsettling effect on him.
“They are very sad for us, the people on Earth,” Noelle says. “You know, they love us very much, they follow everything that we are doing with the greatest interest. The expedition to Planet A — it was the only thing they talked about on Earth all week, my sister says. And then — to learn that Marcus had died—” She shakes her head. “They are having memorial services for him today everywhere on Earth, do you know?”
“How wonderful,” Imogen says. “How good that will be for them. And for us as well.”
The year-captain looks at Noelle in surprise. That little detail, the thing about the memorial services, comes as news to him. Noelle had said nothing about that during the transmission meeting. Is she still in contact with Yvonne at this moment, receiving a steady flow of reports of Earth’s reactions to the death of Marcus? Or — he hates the idea, but it will not stay buried — is she simply inventing things as she goes along?
“You didn’t tell me that,” he says, a little reproachfully. “About the services.”
“Oh. Yes. Everywhere on Earth.”
“We are the big news,” Sieglinde says, with her usual coarse guffaw. “We fly around the universe, we live, we die, we find nasty planets, it is the great event for them. The only event. We astonish them, and they are unaccustomed to astonishment. Sheep, is what they are! Lazy as sheep! We should make up deaths every now and then, even if there aren’t any more, just to keep them excited. To keep them interested in us. Also to remind them that there is such a thing as death.”
Everyone turns to look at her. Sieglinde’s face is red with anger, fiery. She has a capacity for stirring herself up mightily. But then she grins — smirks, really — and the high color fades as swiftly as it had come.
More gently she says, “It was very bad, the thing about Marcus. I am greatly troubled by it, still. Such a quiet boy. Such a good mind he had. We must have no more losses of that kind, year-captain, do you hear me?”
“I wish we hadn’t had even that one,” he replies.
There is a dark moment of silence in the room.
“Well,” Huw says finally. He heaves his bulky body out of the water. He is reddened from the heat, looking at least half boiled. “We should be moving along, I think.” Reaching down with one hand, he lifts little Imogen out of the tub as easily as though she were a child, pulling her up over the tiled rim and letting her feet dangle in the air a moment before setting her down. They go off to the cold showers, and then dress and leave.
“I will be going also,” Sieglinde announces. “There is work I should be doing in the control cabin.”
Noelle and the year-captain are left alone in the baths. They sit facing the same way, thighs still touching. It is suddenly a highly awkward situation, with the other three gone. The tension of the moment in her cabin when Noelle had removed her clothes now returns to the year-captain, if indeed it has ever left. The nearest of the three lovemaking chambers next to the baths is just a few meters away. They could very easily stroll over to it right now. But the year-captain has no idea what Noelle wants him to do. He has no very clear idea what he himself wants to do. Again he waits, resolved to take his cue from her.
And again Noelle offers him nothing more than the usual simple innocence, the usual sweet indifference to the possibilities of the situation.
“Shall we go to the gaming lounge now, year-captain?”
“Of course. Whatever you say, Noelle.”
They return to her cabin first. He remains outside while she dresses; then they go up to the gaming lounge, where they find Paco and Roy playing, and also Sylvia and Heinz. The year-captain sets up the third board for himself and Noelle.
It is several weeks since he has played. The expedition to the surface of Planet A has kept him sufficiently distracted lately. He sinks quickly into the game now, but for all his skill, he doesn’t stand a chance. Noelle, playing black, greets him with an aggressive strategy that he has never seen before, and her swarming warriors devour his white stones with appalling swiftness, hollowing out his forces and setting up elliptical rings of conquered territory all over the board. It’s a complete rout. The game is over so quickly that Roy and Heinz, glancing over simultaneously from their own boards in the moment of Noelle’s triumph, both grunt in amazement as they realize that it has ended.
Everything had been calculated, and checked and rechecked, and today is the day of our departure for the world that at this point we call, with such drab unpoetic simplicity, Planet B. Let us hope that we have reason to give it some more colorful and memorable name later on: let us hope that it is to be our new home. Hope costs us nothing. It does no harm and perhaps accomplishes some good.
I found myself, as the hour of the new shunt approached, standing in front of the viewplate, looking out at the solar system we were about to leave. Down over there, the broad brown breast of Planet A itself, turning indifferently on its axis, giving us not an iota of its attention. We are like gnats to it. Less than gnats: we art nothing. In the most offhand of ways it has claimed one of our lives, and now it swings onward around its golden sun as it always has, ignoring the unwanted and unwelcomed visitors who briefly disturbed its solitude and now soon will be gone. What folly, to think that this heartless place could ever have been our home! But Marcus’s life was the price we had to pay for learning that.
It isn’t an evil world, of course. There isn’t any such thing as an evil world. Worlds are indifferent things. This one simply is not a world we can use.
And now — Planet B — Planet C, perhaps — Planet Z—
I stood by the viewplate, watching this alien sky, this strange repellent planet that we had come here to explore, its yellow sun, its neighbor worlds wandering the dark sky all about us, and the hint of other stars in the sky behind them, mere bright specks, betokening the vastness of the universe in which we are soon once more to be wandering; and then, in a twinkling, the whole scene was gone, wiped from my sight in a single abolishing stroke, and I was looking once again at the rippling, eddying, shimmering blankness that is nospace. We had successfully made our shunt. How I had missed that dazzling gray emptiness! How I rejoiced now at seeing it once more!
So again we are outside space and time, crossing through unfathomable nowhere on our route from somewhere to somewhere, and I realize that I have in some fashion begun to become a denizen of nospace: I am happiest, it seems, when we have ripped ourselves loose of the fabric of normal space and time and are floating in this quiet featureless other reality, this void within the void, this inexplicable strangeness, this mathematical construct, that we call nospace. Nospace travel is only a means to an end; why, then, do I take such pleasure in returning to it? Can it be that my secret preference, unknown even to me, is that we never find any suitable world at all, that we roam the galaxy forever like the crew of the accursed Flying Dutchman? Surely not. Surely I want us to discover that Planet B is a warm and friendly land, where we will settle and thrive and live happily ever after.
Surely.
The journey, Paco tells me, will take five or six months, or perhaps as many as eight — he can’t be entirely certain, the mathematics of nospace travel being the paradoxical business that is. No less than five, no more than eight, anyway. And then we do the whole survey-mission thing all over again, with better luck, let us hope, than this time.
The chances are, of course, that B won’t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of atmosphere, a place with actual H2O water, one that isn’t too hot or too cold, that doesn’t already bel
ong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and we are, after all, still essentially in Earth’s own backyard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its entirety has — how many stars? two hundred billion? four hundred billion? — and if only one out of a thousand of those has planets, and one planet out of a thousand falls within the criteria for habitability that we must impose, then there are more potential worlds for us out there than we could ever reach in our lifetimes, or in those of the children that may be born aboard this starship as our voyage proceeds. Surely one of those will work out for us.
Surely.
They are well along now in this leg of their journey, and interference problems have developed again for Noelle. The static, the fuzziness of transmission quality, that first had begun to set in in the fifth month of the voyage, and that had at some points become severe and at others had almost vanished, has returned again in much greater force than before. There are some days when Noelle can barely make contact with her sister at all.
Though the voyage is uneventful now, one serene day following another, the year-captain insists on making the daily transmissions to Earth. He continues to believe that that is an important, even essential, activity for them: that the people of Earth are vicariously living the greatest adventure of their languid lives through the men and women of the Wotan, and derive immense psychological value from their daily dose of news from those intrepid travelers who fearlessly roam the distant stars. It does his crew some good, too, to get word from Earth regularly of the things that are taking place there, such as they are.
But now, day by day, the transmission problems are becoming more extreme, and Noelle must struggle with ever-greater outlay of effort to maintain her weakening connection with far-off Yvonne. She is working at it so hard that the year-captain has begun to fear for her. He is feeling the strain himself.
“I have the new communiqué ready to send,” he tells her edgily. “Do you feel up to it?”
“Of course I do.” She gives him a ferocious smile. “Don’t even hint at giving up, year-captain. There absolutelyhas to be some way around this interference.”
“Absolutely,” he says. He rustles his papers restlessly. “Okay, then, Noelle. Let’s go. This is shipday number—”
“Wait,” she says. “Give me just another moment to get ready, all right?”
He pauses. She closes her eyes and begins to enter the transmitting state. She is conscious, as ever, of Yvonne’s presence. Even when no specific information is flowing between them, there is perpetual low-level contact, there is the sense that the other is near, that warm proprioceptive awareness such as one has of one’s own arm or leg or hip. But between that impalpable subliminal contact and the actual transmission of specific content lie several key steps. Yvonne and Noelle are human biopsychic resonators constituting a long-range communications network; there is a tuning procedure for them as for any other transmitters and receivers. Noelle opens herself to the radiant energy spectrum, vibratory, pulsating, that will carry her message to her Earthbound sister. As the transmitting circuit in this interchange she must be the one to attain maximum energy flow. Quickly, intuitively, she activates her own energy centers, the one in the spine, the one in the solar plexus, the one at the top of the skull; a stream of energy pours from her and instantaneously spans the galaxy.
But today there is an odd and troublesome splashback effect: Noelle, monitoring the circuit, is immediately aware that the signal has failed to reach Yvonne. Yvonne is there, Yvonne is tuned and expectant, yet something is jamming the channel and nothing gets through, not a single syllable.
“The interference is worse than ever,” she tells the year-captain. “I feel as if I could put my hand out andtouch Yvonne. But she’s not reading me and nothing’s coming back from her.”
With a little shake of her shoulders Noelle alters the sending frequency; she feels a corresponding adjustment at Yvonne’s end of the connection; but again they are thwarted, again there is total blockage. Her signal is going forth and is being soaked up by — what? How can such a thing happen?
Now she makes a determined effort to boost the output of the system. She addresses herself to the neural center in her spine, exciting its energies, using them to drive the next center to a more intense vibrational tone, harnessing that to push the highest center of all to its greatest harmonic capacity. Up and down the energy bands she roves. Nothing. Nothing. She shivers; she huddles; she is visibly depleted by the strain, pale, struggling for breath. “I can’t get through,” she murmurs. “Yvonne’s there, I can feel her there, I know she’s working to read me. But I can’t transmit any sort of intelligible coherent message.”
A hundred, two hundred, however many light-years from Earth it is that they are, and the only communication channel is blocked. The year-captain finds himself unexpectedly beleaguered by frosty terrors. They can report nothing to the mother world; they can receive nothing. It should not matter, really, but it does. It matters terribly, somehow. The ship, the self-sufficient autonomous ship, has become a mere gnat blowing in a hurricane. There is darkness on all sides of them. The voyagers now hurtle blindly onward into the depths of an unknown universe, alone, alone, alone.
He sits by himself in the control cabin, brooding. He has failed Noelle, he knows, fleeing helplessly from her in the moment of her need, overwhelmed by the immensity of her loss, for it is her loss even more than it is theirs. All about him meaningless readout lights flash and wink. He is dumbfounded by the depth of the sudden despair that has engulfed him.
He had been so smug about not needing any link to Earth, but now that the link is gone he shivers and cowers. He barely can recognize himself in this new unraveled man that he has become. Everything has been made new. There are no rules. Human beings have never been this far from home, and the tenuous, invisible bond between the sisters had been their lifeline, he realizes now, and now the sisters are sundered and that lifeline is gone. It is gone. The water is wide and their ship is very small. He walks out into the corridor and presses himself against the viewplate; and the famous grayness of the Intermundium just beyond, swirling and eddying, the grayness that had been so beautiful to him and so full of revelations, mocks him now with its unbearable immensity. Mocks and seduces all at once. Leap into me, it calls. Leap, leap, lose yourself in me, drown in me.
Behind him, the sound of soft footsteps. Noelle. She touches his hunched, knotted shoulders. “It’s all right,” she whispers. “You’re overreacting. Don’t make such a tragedy out of it.” But it is. Her tragedy in particular, hers and Yvonne’s. He is amazed that she can even think of giving comfort to him in this moment, when it is he who should be comforting her. Noelle and Yvonne have spent their lives in the deepest of unions, a union fundamentally incomprehensible to everyone but them, and that is lost to them now. How brave she is, he thinks. How strong in the face of this, her great disaster.
But also, he knows, it is his disaster, his tragedy, theirs, everybody’s. They are all cut off. Lost forever in a foggy silence. Whatever triumphs they may achieve out here, if ever any triumphs there are to be, they will never be able to share them with the mother world. Or at least will not be able to share them for a century or more, until the news of their accomplishments creeps finally back to Earth on whatever conventional carrier wave they use to send it. None of the fifty who sailed the stars aboard the Wotan can hope still to be alive by then.
From the gaming lounge, far down the corridor, comes the sound of singing. Boisterous voices, Elliot, Chang, Leon. They know nothing, yet, of what has happened.
Well, Travelin’ Dan was a spacefarin’ man
Who jumped in the nospace tube —
The year-captain still has not t
urned. Something that might have been a sigh or might perhaps have been a sob escapes from Noelle, behind him. He whirls, seizes her, pulls her against him. Feels her trembling. Comforts her, where a moment before she had been comforting him. “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he murmurs. With his arm around her shoulders he swings around, pivoting so that they both are facing the viewplate. As if she could see. Nospace dances and churns a couple of centimeters from his nose, just beyond that transparent shield. That shimmering grayness, that deep infinite well of nothingness, his great Intermundium. It frightens him now. He feels a fierce wind blowing out of the viewplate and through the ship, the khamsin, the sirocco, the simoom, the leveche, a sultry wind, a killing wind coming out of the gray strangeness, all the grim, dry deadly winds that rove the Earth bringing fire and madness, hot winds and cold ones, the mistral, the tramontana. No, he thinks. No. He forces himself not to fear that wind. He tells himself that it is a wind of joy, a cool sweet wind, a wind of life. Why should he think there is anything to fear in the realm beyond the viewplate? Until today he has always loved to stand here and stare into it: how beautiful it is out there, how ecstatically beautiful, that is what he has always thought! And it is. It is. Noelle is quivering against him as if she sees what he sees, and he begins to grow calm, begins to find beauty in the sight of the nospace realm again. How sad, the year-captain thinks, that we can never tell anyone about it now, except one another.
Starborne Page 18