Starborne

by Robert Silverberg

  The horror that Planet B has turned out to be, after the great expectations that they had all allowed themselves to foster for it, has indeed taken a terrible toll, and not just on the two men who experienced that horror at close range.

  It is suddenly occurring to those on the Wotan — many of them, at any rate — that after having left the predictability and comfort of Earth behind for the sake of undertaking a great exploit, they are faced now with the possibility of touring the galaxy forever without finding a world that can become a tolerable home for them. And the wildness of the thing they have volunteered to do, the utter fantastic gamble that it is, has begun to oppress their souls. They are afraid now, many of them, that they have simply thrown away their lives.

  The year-captain struggles to transcend this bleak mood in himself, so that he will be better able to purge it from the others. But the sights and sounds of Planet B haunt him day and night, and they engulf him in a dire morass of melancholy. An entire world so hopelessly dismal: it is enough to make one deny the existence of the Creator, assuming one believed in Him in the first place. What divine purpose could have been served by the creation of a planet of endless rain, of titanic vines that constrict and strangle every hectare of the place, colossal brainless worms that feed on the vines, diabolic parasitic bugs that feed on the worms? No doubt it is the best of all possible worlds for the vines and the worms and the jewel-eyed bugs. But such objectivity is beyond him just now. He feels as though he has made a little excursion into some hitherto unrecorded subsidiary circle of Dante’s own Hell.

  He yearns to speak with the Abbot about Planet B, if only he could. He hungers for the few quick acerbic sentences that would demolish all the darkness that clings to him now.

  But the Abbot is beyond his reach. And so, very gradually, over a period of days, the year-captain manages to pull himself up out of the slough of despond without the aid of the Abbot’s direct intervention. There is no other course that he can allow himself to take.

  Some of the others, primarily Hesper and Paco and Julia and Huw and even Sieglinde, have been able to retain their optimistic outlook toward the expedition despite the sobering outcome of the Planet B event. “The remarkable thing isn’t that the first two landings failed,” Julia says. “The remarkable thing is that we found two worlds that were worth checking out within the first couple of years of the voyage.”

  “Hear, hear,” Huw bellows, as Huw likes to do. Huw knows that much depends now on his show of hearty high spirits and indomitable will, and he makes sure that he is never seen to be anything but his usual stalwart self, even after all that he has observed and felt on Planet A and the very different but equally oppressive Planet B. There is a price for this. He is willing to pay it.

  But there are some aboard who have become deeply bemired in funk. These are the ones who had chosen, for whatever reason, to put a great many emotional chips down on the success of the Planet B mission, and were devastated by the spectacular failure of their wagers. Elizabeth is part of this group, and Imogen, and Sylvia, and several of the men: Roy, Elliot, Chang, Jean-Claude. Among these, who now spend most of their time atGo in the gaming lounge, there has begun to be some talk of giving up the voyage entirely, of swinging around and heading back to Earth.

  “Don’t be idiots,” Paco says. “I can’t even imagine creeping back there.”

  “You can’t imagine it,” says Elliot. “But I can.”

  Elliot’s specialty is urban planning; it is Elliot who will design the future extraterrestrial settlements that the Wotan people hope to found. Since the Planet B fiasco he has convinced himself that he will never get a chance to practice his profession among these alien worlds, that the enterprise on which they all are bound is quixotic and foolish. Marcus’s death has affected Elliot deeply; so has the loss of contact with Earth.

  Paco says to him, “If you want to go back, Elliot, why don’t you go? Maybe Huw will let you have one of the drone probes, and you can ride back to Earth in that. You and whoever else wants to go home. It’ll take you about three hundred years, give or take five or six, but if you’re as homesick as all that you won’t mind waiting a—”

  “Stop it, Paco,” Elizabeth says.

  Paco turns to her. “You’d like to go with him, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s fine with me. I’ll even calculate the course for you, if you like.” The Paco-Heinz-Elizabeth triad has just about collapsed in recent weeks; Heinz has been sleeping in a random, intermittent way with Jean-Claude and sometimes with Leila; and Paco, though he still spends some of his nights with Elizabeth and the occasional one with Heinz, has drifted off into a collateral entanglement with Giovanna. “Here,” Paco says, grabbing Elizabeth roughly and shoving her against Elliot. “She’s all yours. My blessings.”

  Elliot is so annoyed that he pushes her back. Heinz gathers Elizabeth up as she rebounds from Elliot and tucks her against the side of his chest. To Paco he says quietly, “Can you try to calm down a little?”

  “I hate all this talk of giving up and going back to Earth. It’s completely insane.”

  “Is it, now?” Roy asks, looking up from the game ofGo he is playing with Noelle. He is another who has let it be known that he may have already had a sufficiency of nospace travel.

  “Of course it is. We’re here to do a job, and we’re going to do it. Julia’s right — one or two bad planets, that doesn’t mean a thing. We’ve only begun to search. Besides, do you think anyone could ever talk the captain into turning back? Has that man ever turned back from anything in his life?”

  “He doesn’t necessarily have to go on being captain forever,” Elliot says, a little sullenly. “The job was supposed to be for one year. We gave him three. We could replace him.”

  “With someone who wants to bring the voyage to an end?” Paco asks. “Somebody willing to turn back, you mean?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Huw says, from the corner where he is playing a languorous game ofGo with Chang, “He would never step down in favor of anyone who would take that position. He may not have wanted to keep the job this long, but he’ll keep it forever rather than hand it over to someone who—”

  “I’m not talking of asking him voluntarily to step down,” says Elliot. “I’m talking of replacing him.”

  “Mutiny?” Huw asks. “Is that the word you’re looking for?”

  “A new captain,” says Elliot doggedly. “That’s what I’m looking for. And a new direction for the voyage.”

  “You’re talking mutiny,” Huw says, lost in wonderment. “You’re talking a coup d’état aboard the ship, overthrowing the captain by force, abandoning the Articles of the Voyage completely—”

  “He’s talking idiocy,” Paco says. “He’s talking like a lunatic. He ought to be sedated. Where’s Leon?” Leon is playingGo with Sylvia. He looks up, scowling. “Leon, we’ve got a crazy man here for you to take care of! Give him an injection of something, will you?”

  “Please,” Noelle says, very softly.

  She has been silent up until now, concentrating entirely on her game, bending over herGo board as though it were the entire universe. As it so often does, the very softness of her tone succeeds in drawing the attention of everyone in the room, and they all look in her direction.

  “Please,” she says again. “We mustn’t fight like this. The voyage is going to continue. You know it will, Elliot. Ithas to. So why even talk about these things?”

  “We have to talk about them, Noelle,” says Elliot, sounding a little abashed at persisting. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a discussion with Noelle, because she is widely believed to possess a kind of innate incontrovertible wisdom. And also they all have a horror of involving her in any kind of confrontation, so fragile does she seem to them. “Ever since we lost contact with Earth,” Elliot goes on, “can it really be said that the expedition still has a purpose?”

  “Its purpose is to find another world where people can live,” says Noelle. “And we haven’t lost contact w
ith Earth.”

  There is a general gasp of amazement in the room.

  “We haven’t?” several of them ask at once.

  Noelle smiles. “Not forever. I’m sure of that. It’s just a temporary thing, this interference, these ‘angels’ that Heinz was talking about—” Every one of them is staring intently in her direction now. “I’m going to try to speak with them,” she says. “You know that I promised to do that. To speak with them, to ask them to let me make contact with my sister again. If I can do that — and if they agree—”

  So the project of making contact with the angels is alive once again, at Noelle’s own instigation, after having been in suspension the whole time of the Planet B event. The hope of regaining contact with Earth inspires them all; the mood of despair that has enshrouded so many of them since the return of Huw and the year-captain from Planet B begins to lift.

  The project is alive, yes, but nothing actually is attempted just yet. The days go by — they are heading now toward Planet C, a hundred fifteen light-years from Earth in some entirely different part of the galaxy from the one they have just visited — and it is assumed by everyone that Noelle is preparing herself to reach out in some telepathic fashion toward the extraterrestrial beings that supposedly have interrupted the contact between her and her sister. But the two people who are most closely concerned with the project — the year-captain, who must give Noelle the order to make the attempt, and Noelle herself — are both in their separate ways uneasy about the enterprise to which Noelle has so publicly committed herself. And so both of them in their separate ways have hesitated to move forward with it.

  Noelle has never so much as experimented with opening her mind to anyone but her sister, and the idea is a little troublesome to her. It seems almost like an act of infidelity. But, on the other hand, doing it might very well restore the contact with Yvonne that has been the most precious thing in her life. Therefore Noelle remains willing to try it, if uncertain about how the task is actually going to be accomplished, when and if. But she is waiting for the year-captain to tell her to initiate the maneuver.

  The year-captain is holding back, though, as he has from the moment any of this first surfaced, because he is afraid that Noelle will somehow be damaged in the attempt.

  He has had a classical education. The myth of Semele is very much on his mind.

  “Who was she?” Noelle asks him when he allows some of his concern to slip into view.

  “Semele was the daughter of an ancient Greek king,” he tells her. They are in the ship’s recreation area, where they have just been swimming in the long, narrow lap-pool, and now they are sitting along the edge of the pool with their legs dangling in the water. “Zeus had taken her as one of his lovers.” Noelle has turned toward him, and she seems to be listening carefully, but her face is completely expressionless. “You know who Zeus was? The chief of the Greek gods, the ruler of the universe.”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  “And quite a ladies’ man. Zeus was completely infatuated with beautiful young Semele, and had a child with her, who was destined to grow up to be the god Dionysus; and Hera, Zeus’s wife, who had had to put up with much too much of this stuff during the course of her marriage and didn’t care for it, decides to take action. She dons human disguise and goes to visit Semele and asks her if she knows who it is that she’s been sleeping with. Yes, says Semele proudly, he is Zeus, the father of the gods. And have you ever seen him in all his glory? Hera asks. No, says Semele, never, he always comes to me in the form of a man. Well, then, says sly Hera, you should ask him to reveal himself to you in his full majesty. Now,that would be something to see!”

  “I think I know this story,” Noelle says.

  Nevertheless the year-captain does not halt in his telling of the tale. “The next time Zeus comes to her, Semele says to him, ‘You never show yourself to me as you really are.’ And Zeus says, ‘No, no, that would be too much for you, the sight would be overwhelming.’ But Semele insists. She reminds Zeus that he had promised her, long ago, to grant any wish that she might make. To refuse her nothing. Zeus is trapped. He can’t go back on his promise, though he knows what’s going to happen. So, reluctantly, he gives Semele what she’s asking for. There is a tremendous clap of thunder and Zeus appears before her in his chariot in a great aurora of light. No human being can look upon the true form of Zeus and survive. Semele is destroyed by the heat that emanates from the god. She is burned utterly to ashes by it; and so Hera has had her revenge.”

  Noelle has drawn back into herself during this part of the story. She has wrapped her arms tightly around her body, and it seems to the year-captain that she is trembling a little.

  “But something good came forth out of that, didn’t it?” she asks. “There was Dionysus the god. Semele’s son. He survived the flames, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. He survived. Zeus spared him, and scooped him up in the moment of Semele’s destruction, carrying him off and hiding him from Hera’s wrath until he was grown.”

  “So, then. That’s the point of the story. The miraculous birth of the god Dionysus.”

  She is definitely trembling, he sees. Shivering, even. They are still naked after their swim, but it is, as always, quite warm here in the recreation area.

  “The point of the story is that Semele overreached herself and died,” the year-captain says. “Dionysus is just an incidental part of the myth. The point is that ordinary mortals can’t hope to have unrestricted contact with gods.”

  “The birth of a new god can’t just be an incidental part of anything,” Noelle says. The year-captain thinks he hears her teeth chattering.

  “Are you feeling all right, Noelle?”

  “Just a little chilly.”

  “It isn’t chilly in here, though.”

  “But I feel that way. Maybe we should go on across into the baths.”

  “Yes. Yes. A little time in the hot tub will get you feeling better in no time.”

  The baths are just on the other side of the corridor from the lap pool. They collect their towels and discarded clothing and go across. The room is empty when they get there.

  “Why did you tell me that story?” Noelle asks him.

  “You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “I can’t help feeling worried about what will happen when you try to—”

  “It isn’t the same in any way. I’m not Semele. The angels aren’t Zeus.”

  “How do you know what they are?”

  “I don’t,” she says. “Not really. How could I? But I just don’t think — I’m quite confident that I — that they — that when I—” She is really shaking now. They are at the edge of the hot tank. The usual procedure is to step quickly into the cold tub, then go on to the hot one, and finish by returning to the tepid tank or even the cold one. But instead of going into any of them now Noelle stands trembling at the brink of the hot tub for a long moment; and then she turns, suddenly, and presses herself into his arms.

  He enfolds her and holds her tightly and gently strokes her back, trying to soothe her, trying to comfort her and ease whatever terror it is that has taken possession of her. All of it very manly and paternal, and then a moment later not paternal in the least, for the year-captain is trembling too, and they stand there for a long while in a close embrace.

  Then she breaks free of him and steps a few paces back. She is smiling, and her eyes, those mysterious sightless eyes that are nevertheless often so expressive, have taken on a strange mischievous light. She reaches out a hand toward him.

  The year-captain is amazed at how her body, which he has seen on so many other occasions here in the baths and in the pool, now suddenly seems unfamiliar — different, transformed. The same full round breasts, yes, the same flat belly, the same deeply indented navel. But it is all different. There is an inner light emanating from her. She is gleaming, radiant. He is powerfully drawn to her. He wonders how he had ever managed to fail to find her att
ractive — why she had never seemed to him, really, like a sexual being at all. Certainly she seems like one now.

  “Come,” she whispers, and tugs at his hand, and leads him deftly and unhesitatingly over the tiled floor into one of the little lovemaking rooms that adjoin the baths.

  They sink down together onto the hard narrow bed. It is entirely obvious to him now that he has wanted this since the beginning of the voyage, that he has always been drawn to her, that he has hedged himself around with a host of caveats and uncertainties and self-imposed prohibitions precisely because he has desired her all along with such frightening intensity.

  He covers her lips, her throat, her closed eyelids with kisses. She clings to him, murmuring, thrusting herself against him. At the last moment before he could possibly turn back he remembers that odd thought he once had had, more than a year before, that she might actually be a virgin, and even that her telepathic powers might somehow depend on the preservation of that virginity and would be forever lost at the first touch of a man’s insistent body.

  No. No. That’s idiocy. She isn’t a creature out of some fantastic myth. Her telepathy is not a magical power that can be lost through the violation of an oath of chastity.