Starborne

by Robert Silverberg

I don’t relieve that. I don’t want to believe that, at any rate. And we will go onward, we fifty, until we find what we are seeking. (We forty-nine, I should say now, but the old phrase is ingrained so deeply!) And when we find it, which I am certain we will, I want to think that for a moment, at least, we will know a little peace.

  I wish we were still in touch with Earth.

  I worry about Noelle. She seems to be all right, even in the absence of the contact with her sister that has nourished and sustained her all her life. But is she, really? Is she?

  The breakdown in the communication link with Earth has been the subject of much discussion, naturally.

  Whether it is a total and irreversible breakdown is not entirely certain yet. Yes, Noelle had said, at the meeting between the year-captain and the delegation that had come to apprise him of the election results, that there was no way of restoring contact with her sister; but — as she admitted privately to the year-captain the next day — she had simply been saying that by way of bolstering Heinz’s arguments in favor of amending the Articles of the Voyage. In truth Noelle has no idea whether contact can be restored, and she feels just a little guilty for having given everyone the notion that it can’t be. “I did it because I wanted everyone to go along with the deal that was taking shape,” she confesses, but only to the year-captain. “If we can’t speak with Earth any more, we don’t need to worry what they’ll think about our changing the Articles, isn’t that so? But it’s always possible that I’ll regain Yvonne’s signal sooner or later. It’s happened before that the signal has weakened and then become strong again.”

  She does, she says, still feel Yvonne’s mental presence somewhere within her. But, as has been true for days now, she is unable to pick up any verbal content in what Yvonne is sending, and she suspects — it is only a guess, but she thinks there’s real probability to it — that nothing she’s sending Earthward is reaching Yvonne, either. She still makes daily attempts at reopening the link, but to no avail. For all intents and purposes they are cut off from Earth and very likely will remain cut off forever.

  No one believes that the problem is a function of anything so obvious as distance. Noelle has been quite convincing on that score: a signal that propagates perfectly for the first sixteen light-years of a journey ought not abruptly to deteriorate a couple of light-minutes farther along the road. There should at least have been prior sign of attenuation, and there was no attenuation, only noise suddenly cutting in, noise that interfered with and ultimately destroyed the signal.

  “It’s some kind of a force,” Roy suggests, “that has reached in here and messed up the connection.”

  A force? What kind of force?

  Noelle’s old idea that what is intervening between her and her sister is some physical effect analogous to sunspot static — that it is the product of radiation emitted by this or that giant star into whose vicinity they have come during the course of their travels — is brought up again, and is in the end rejected again. There is, both Roy and Sieglinde point out, no energy interface between realspace and nospace, no opportunity for any kind of electromagnetic intrusion. That much had been amply demonstrated long before any manned voyages were undertaken. Hesper’s scanning instruments, yes, are able to pick up information of a nonelectromagnetic kind out of the realspace continuum, information that can be translated into comprehensible data about that continuum; but no material thing belonging to realspace can penetrate here. The nospace tube is an impermeable wall separating them from the continuum of phenomena. They are effectively outside the universe. They could in theory pass, and perhaps they already have, right through the heart of a star in the course of their journey without causing any disruption either to the star or to themselves. Nothing that has mass or charge can leap the barrier between the universe of real-world phenomena and the cocoon of nothingness that the ship’s drive mechanism has woven about them; nor can a photon get across, nor even a slippery neutrino.

  But something, it seems,is getting through, and is doing damage. Many speculations excite the voyagers. The one force thatcan cross the barrier, Roy observes, is thought. Thought is intangible, immeasurable, limitless. The ease with which Noelle and Yvonne maintained contact on an instantaneous basis throughout the first five months of the voyage has demonstrated that.

  “But let us suppose,” Roy says — it is clear from his lofty tone that this is merely some hypothesis he is putting forth, an airygedankenexperiment — “that the interference Noelle is experiencing is caused by beings of powerful telepathic capacity that live in the space between the stars.”

  “Beings that live between the stars,” Paco repeats in wonderment. Plainly he thinks that Roy has launched into something crazy, but he has enough respect for the power of Roy’s intellect to hold off on his scorn until the mathematician has finished putting forth his idea.

  “Yes, between the stars,” Roy goes on. “Orin the stars, or surrounding them. Who can say? Let us suppose that each of these beings is capable of emitting mental transmissions, just as Noelle is, but that their sending capacity is far more powerful than hers. As these transmissions go flooding outward, perhaps each one sweeping out a sphere with a radius of many light-years, the trajectory of the Wotan carries them in and out of these spheres and the telepathic impulses cross the nospace barrier just as readily as the thoughts of Noelle and Yvonne do. And it is these alien mental emanations, let us suppose, that are smothering the signal coming from Earth.”

  Paco is ready to jump in now with objections; but Heinz is already speaking, extending Roy’s suggestion into a different area of possibility.

  “What if,” Heinz says, “these beings that Roy has suggested are denizens not of the space between the stars but of nospace itself? Living right here in the tube, let us say, and as we travel along we keep running into their domains.”

  “The nospace tube must be matter-free except for the ship that moves through it,” Sieglinde observes acidly. “Otherwise a body moving at speeds faster than light, as we are, would generate destructive resonances, since in conventional physical terms our mass is equal to infinity, and a body with infinite mass leaves no room in its universe for anything else.”

  “Indeed true,” Heinz replies, unruffled as always. “But I don’t remember speaking of these beings as material objects. What I imagine are gigantic incorporeal beings as big as asteroids, as big as planets, maybe, that have no mass at all, no essence, onlyexistence — great convergences of pure mental force that drift freely through the tube. They are the native life-forms of nospace. They are not made up of anything that we can regard as matter. They are something of a nature absolutely unknown to us, occupying this otherworldy zone that we call nospace, living out there the way angels live in Heaven.”

  “Angels,” Paco snorts.

  “Angels, yes!” cries Elizabeth, as though inspired, and claps her hands in a sort of rapture of fantasy.

  “Of course, I don’t mean that literally,” says Heinz, a little sourly. He casts an annoyed look in Elizabeth’s direction. “But let’s postulate that they are there, whatever they are, these alien beings, these strange gigantic things. And as we pass through them, they give off biopsychic transmissions that disrupt the Yvonne-Noelle circuit—”

  “Biopsychic transmissions,” Paco repeats mockingly.

  “Yes, biopsychic transmissions, causing accidental interference — or maybe it’s deliberate, maybe they are actuallyfeeding on the sisters’ mental output, soaking it up, reveling in the energy flow that comes their way—”

  “’So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, angels affect us oft, and worshipped be,’” says Elizabeth.

  “What?” Huw asks, mystified as usual by her.

  “She’s quoting poetry again,” Heinz once more explains to him. “Shakespeare, I think.”

  “John Donne.” says Elizabeth. “Why do you always think it’s Shakespeare?”

  “Shakespeare is the only poet he’s ever heard of,” Paco says.

 
“’Hear, all ye angels, progeny of light,’” says Elizabeth. “’Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers, hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.’”

  “Now,that’s Shakespeare for sure,” Heinz says.

  “Milton,” Elizabeth tells him sweetly. Heinz only shrugs. “Shakespeare is ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us,’” she continues. “Shakespeare is ‘Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’”

  Elizabeth is an inexhaustible reservoir. She is capable of going on indefinitely quoting scraps of verse about angels, and is certainly willing to do so, but Heinz’s improbable little burst of poetic fancy, which Heinz plainly has come to regret almost immediately, has excited everyone in the room and no one cares to listen to her further recitations, because they all have things of their own to say. Paco, unsurprisingly, wants to bury the whole idea beneath a mound of manly contempt, and stolid Huw is having a great deal of trouble grasping the idea of noncorporeal life-forms at all, let alone angels, and Heinz keeps insisting that he was simply reaching for a figure of speech, not making a serious suggestion; but nearly everyone else finds it a striking concept, if a trifle implausible, and those others who have serious reservations about it are too abashed by the general enthusiasm to speak up openly against it. And in any case the term “angels” seems a convenient shorthand for whatever may be out there causing the problem.

  Almost everybody is fascinated by the idea and they all want to provide individual embellishments of the general theme, speculating about whether the “angels” are benign or malevolent, whether they are supremely intelligent or mindless, immortal or evanescent, and so on and so on. Giovanna suggests that they could even be responsible for the sinister effects that she and Huw and Marcus had experienced during their visit to Planet A. Why not? Perhaps these space beings, these “angels,” are troubled by humanity’s incursion into interstellar space and are taking steps to thrust it back. But Huw, practical as ever, suggests that they wait to see if the same things happen to those who make the landing on Planet B before coming to any conclusions of that sort.

  Where the space beings might live is discussed too, but not with any clarity. It is generally agreed that whether the “angels” live within the tube as proposed by Heinz, or in some sector of realspace just outside it as pictured by Roy, is unimportant to decide at the moment; the basic concept is what needs exploration. And a consensus has definitely emerged in the group this afternoon that the interference Noelle is experiencing is in all likelihood the work of some kind of alien intelligence into whose vicinity they keep moving from time to time. That idea arouses wonder in all, even Huw. Even — however much he tries to conceal the fact — in Paco.

  The year-captain, who has not been present for any of this, arrives at the lounge now, and stands perplexed by the entrance for a few moments as the talk of angels and biopsychic transmissions swirls about him.

  “What angels?” he asks after a while. “Where?”

  They try to explain, two or three talking at once. Heinz is silent, arms folded, looking smug. He has overcome his initial annoyance at the excitement his casual choice of words has caused, and now he likes the idea of having stirred everyone up over so ethereal a theory. Sly worldly Heinz, postulating angels in the nospace tube! He isn’t really serious, at least not about the angel part of it, the year-captain sees. But should any part of his wild idea be taken seriously? The year-captain, when he has heard them out and managed to grasp something of what they are babbling at him, seems to think so. “Angels,” he says, looking pensive and grave. “Well, why shouldn’t that be so? As good a metaphor as any other. It’s certainly worth investigating.”

  They turn, all of them, and stare at him. They are all more or less aware of his background in monasticism — in mysticism, even: those years at that odd monkish retreat near the Arctic Circle, that strange interlude in his life between his time as an explorer of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and his enrollment in the crew of the Wotan. He never speaks of that period to anyone on board, nor do any of them really understand why he chose to withdraw from the world at the peak of a great scientific career and enter a monastery, any more than they understand why, much earlier, after training to be a scientist, he chose to go on the stage. He has always been a complete mystery to them, which is one reason they prefer him to remain as their captain. But they are all agreed that he is a serious person, a deep thinker — unlike Paco, say, or Heinz — and if he, the true philosopher of their group, finds something of interest in this “angels” hypothesis, then very likely there must be something in it.

  What to do now, though? If they are indeed in the presence of alien beings of extraordinary nature and power, can some way be found of opening a dialog with them?

  Innelda suggests asking Hesper to put his scanning devices to work in an attempt to determine their location. Roy proposes an all-out campaign to find them by conventional radio means after the voyagers have emerged from the nospace tube to investigate Planet B. Huw, gamely trying to enter into the spirit of a thing that is basically uncongenial to his pragmatic nature, puts forth the idea that they ought to aim radio transmissions at the things while stillwithin the nospace tube, since if the “angels” are in it with them they might well have the capacity to detect electromagnetic energy as well as thought waves.

  Then Heinz says, “There’s one other thing we can try. Regardless of where these creatures actually live, it would seem that their energy-wave, their thought-manifestations, whatever it is, can come inside the tube here with us, since Noelle’s thought-beam is being affected by them. Very well. We should be able to reach them the same way, by mental transmission. Noelle could try to speak directly to them. Ask them who they are, where they live, why they’re suppressing her contact with Earth.”

  “Yes!” someone shouts — it is Elliot — and Maria echoes her, and then Jean-Claude. “Of course! Noelle should try! Noelle! Noelle!”

  All eyes are on Noelle.

  She looks flustered, even a little frightened, but to some degree amenable nonetheless. Softly she says, smiling shyly, “I’ve nevertried to talk with angels before, you know. If that’s what they are. But if you all want me to try—”

  “Yes,” the year-captain breaks in, saying the word in a tone of voice that often is better understood aboard the ship as meaning No. “We should definitely consider the project, a little later on. But this isn’t the moment for it, really. We’re coming within range of the solar system of Planet B. We have that to deal with first; we can worry about speaking with angels afterwards.”

  An end has been made, then, at least for the time being, to the excitement over Heinz’s angel theory.

  Heinz and Roy’s theory, really, though Roy’s crucial role in propounding it has quickly been overshadowed in the general consciousness by Heinz’s quickness with a lively metaphor. Nobody on board is religious in the way that term once had been understood, but the long months of isolation aboard the starship, perhaps, may have conjured a streak of irrationality in some of the voyagers, and of fierce playfulness in others. “Angels” is what everybody now calls the hypothetical alien beings that hypothetically surround the ship. Even hard-core skeptics like Paco and Huw use the term for lack of any better one.

  But there will be no immediate attempt at a telepathic foray by Noelle for the purpose of making contact with supposed incorporeal creatures of extraterrestrial origin that may be lurking in their vicinity of nospace or realspace. As the year-captain has pointed out, the impending arrival of the Wotan at Planet B is a matter of higher priority just now.

  The year-captain wonders what the Abbot would have said about his suppression of the angel discussion. He thinks about the Abbot’s disapproval whenever he does something that is blatantly manipulative or selfish; and that is certainly what he has done just now, something both manipulativeand selfish, though he hopes he is the only one aboard who fully understands that.

  His ostensible reason for dera
iling the conversation — that they need to concentrate instead on the challenge of Planet B — is legitimate enough. But behind it lies something else entirely, a matter of compassion, of concern for the most delicate member of the ship’s community. He could see, even if none of the others could, the look of fear on Noelle’s face, and he could hear the little quaver in her voice. Suppose these angels, or whatever they are,did exist, and suppose shecould in some fashion open her mind to them, how did anyone know what would become of her? His mind had gone at once to all those Greek myths of women who had wanted to be embraced by this or that god in all his might, and had been granted their wish, and had been consumed unto ashes by the full glory of the deity. They needed to consider, very carefully indeed, all the consequences of a mental union between Noelle and one of these supposed creatures of the void, before shoving her into the attempt.

  So the desire to protect Noelle lurks beneath his stated reason for tabling the project. And because — he isn’t sure why — he is reluctant to reveal that underlying desire to the others, he has chosen to hide it behind an acceptable but secondary explanation that would achieve the same goal. That was a manipulative act, he feels.

  The selfishness is hidden one further layer down. What if Noelle tries to speak with these creatures, and succeeds, and actually strikes some détente with them under which the communications channel linking her to her sister could be reopened? What, then, would become of his own hard-won deal giving him the right to participate in the Planet B landing expedition in return for accepting a third year as captain? Many of them, he suspects, had voted for the change in the Articles of the Voyage only because they believed that contact with Earth had been forever lost and they were under no obligation now to obey inconvenient regulations that Earth had imposed upon them. But if that contact were to be restored—

  He has put the “angel” thing aside, therefore, for three good and proper reasons, one that is simply sensible, one that is tenderhearted, and one that is out-and-out selfish.