Starborne (15 page)

Heinz alone remains wi
th the year-captain. He stands before him, rocking lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “
Are you wo
r
ried?”
he asks, after a moment.

The year-captain looks up. “
About what?”

“
Sieglinde
’
s hypothesis. Drive malfunction.”

“
No. Not in the slightest.
Should I be?”

Heinz smiles oddly, as though he is smiling within his smile. “
That drive will take us from one end of the galaxy to another, a thousand times in and out of nospace and no problem. I promise you that.”

Their eyes meet for a moment. The year-
captain searches them. It is always hard to tell whether Heinz is being sincere. His eyes are blue like the year-captain
’
s, but much more playful, and of an altogether different kind of blueness, a soft sky-blue greatly unlike the fierce ice-blue of the y
e
ar-captain
’
s. Both men have fair Nordic hair, but again there is a di
f
ference, Heinz
’
s being thick and flowing and a burnished glowing gold in color, whereas the year-captain
’
s is stiff and fine and almost silver, not from aging but from simple absence of
pigment. They are oddly similar and yet unalike in most other ways, too. The year-captain does not regard Heinz as a friend in any real sense of that word; if he were to allow himself friends, which has always been a difficult thing for him, Heinz would p
r
obably not be one of them. But there is a certain measure of respect and trust between them.

The year-captain says, after a little while, “
Is there something else you want to tell me?”

“
To ask, rather.”

“
Ask, then.”

“
I
’
ve been wondering if there
’
s some dif
ficulty involving Noelle.”

The year-captain takes great care to show no change of expression. “
A difficulty? What sort of difficulty?”

“
She seems to be under unusual stress these days.”

“
She is a complicated person in a complicated situation.”

“
Which is tr
ue of us all,”
Heinz says easily. “
Nevertheless, she
’
s seemed different somehow in recent days. There was always a serenity about her
—
a saintliness, even, if you will allow me that word. I don
’
t see it any more. The change began, I think, about the time s
h
e started playing
Go
with us. Her face is so tightly drawn all the time, now. Her movements are extremely tense. She plays the game with some sort of weird scary intensity that makes me very uneasy. And she wins all the time.”

“
You don
’
t like it that she wins?”

“
I don
’
t like it that she
’
s so intense about it. Roy used to win all the time, too, but that was simply because he was so good that he couldn
’
t help winning. Noelle plays
Go
as if her life depends on it.”

“
Perhaps it does,”
the ye
ar-captain says.

Heinz shows just a flicker of vexation, now, at the year-captain
’
s constant conversational parrying. It is a standard trait of the year-captain
’
s, these repetitions
—
his automatic manner of responding, his default mode
—
and most people are a
ccustomed to it. It has never seemed to bother Heinz before.

He says, “
What I mean, captain, is that I think she may be approac
h
ing a breakdown of some sort, and I felt it was important to call that to your attention.”

“
Thank you.”

“
She is more high-strung
than the rest of us. I would not like to see her in any sort of distress.”

“
Neither would I, Heinz. You have my assurance of that.”

An awkward silence, then. At length Heinz says, “
If it were possible to find out what
’
s bothering her, and to offer her wha
tever comfort would be useful
—”

“
I appreciate your concern,”
the year-captain says stonily. “
Please believe me when I say that I regard Noelle as one of the most important members of the expedition, and I am doing everything in my power to maintain her sta
bility.”

“
Everything?”

“
Everything,”
the year-captain says, in a way intended unmistakably to close the conversation.

***

Noelle dreams that her blindness has been taken from her. Sudden light surrounds her, phenomenal white cascades of shimmering bri
l
lian
ce, and she opens her eyes, sits up, looks about in awe and wonder, saying to herself, This is a table, this is a chair, this is how my statuettes look, this is what my sea-urchin shell is like. She is amazed by the beauty of everything in her room. She r
i
ses, going forward, stumbling at first, groping, then magically gaining poise and balance, learning how to walk in this new way, judging the positions of things not by echoes and air currents any longer, but rather by the simple miracle of using her eyes.
Information floods her. She walks around her room, picking things up, stroking them, matching shapes with actual appearances, correlating the familiar feel of her objects with the new data coming to her now through this miraculously restored extra sense.
T
hen she leaves the ca
b
in and moves about the ship, discovering the faces of her shipmates. I
n
tuitively she knows who they all are. You are Roy, you are Sylvia, you are Heinz, you are the year-captain. They look, surprisingly, very much as she had always im
agined them: Roy fleshy and red-faced, Sylvia fragile, the year-captain lean and fierce, Heinz handsome and constantly smiling, and so on and so on, Elliot and Marcus and Chang and Julia and Hesper and Giovanna and the rest, everyone matching expectations.
Everyone beautiful. She goes to the window of which all the others talk, the one that provides a view of nospace, and looks out into the famous grayness. Yes, yes, the scene through that window is precisely as they say it is: a cosmos of wonders, a mirac
l
e of complex pulsating tones, level after level of incandescent reverberation sweeping outward toward the rim of the boundless universe. There is nothing to see, and there is everything. For an hour she stands before that dense burst of rippling energies,
giving herself to it and taking it into herself, and then, and then, just as the ultimate moment of illumination toward which she has been moving throughout the entire hour is coming over her, she realizes that something is wrong. Yvonne is not with her.
N
oelle reaches out with her mind and does not touch Yvonne. Again. No. No contact. Can
’
t find her. She has somehow traded her special power for the mere gift of sight.

Yvonne? Yvonne?

All is still. Where is Yvonne?

Yvonne is not with her. This is only a dre
am, Noelle tells herself, and I will soon awaken from it. But she cannot awaken. She cries out in te
r
ror. And then she feels Yvonne at last. “
It
’
s all right,”
Yvonne whispers, across the immensities of space and time. “
I
’
m here, love, I
’
m here, I
’
m here, j
ust as I always am,”
comes Yvonne
’
s soft voice, rising out of the great whirlpool of invisible suns. Yes. All is well. Noelle can feel the familiar closeness again. Yvonne is there, right there, beside her. Tre
m
bling, Noelle embraces her sister. Looks at h
er. Beholds her for the first time.

I can see, Yvonne! I can see!

Noelle realizes that in her first rapture of sightedness she had quite forgotten to look at herself, although she had rushed about looking at everything and everyone else. It had not occurre
d to her. Mirrors have never been part of her world. But now she looks at Yvonne, which is, of course, like looking at herself, and Yvonne is beautiful, her hair dark and silken and lustrous, her face smooth and sleek, her features finely shaped, her eyes
—
her blind eyes!
—
alive and sparkling. Noelle tells Yvonne how beautiful she is, and Yvonne smiles and nods, and they laugh and hold one another close, and they begin to weep with pleasure and love, out of the sheer joy of being with each other, and then No
e
lle awakens, and of course the world is as dark as ever around her.

***

Heinz goes out, finally.
Finally
.

There are exercises that the year-captain learned in Lofoten, spiritual disciplines designed to restore and maintain tranquility. He makes use of them
now, breathing slowly and deeply, running through each of the routines. And then he runs through them all over again.

The conversation with Heinz has seemed interminable and has been deeply embarrassing, and it has left the year-captain feeling greatly a
n
noyed, as annoyed as his fundamentally controlled and equable nature will allow him to be. Does Heinz think the year-captain has failed to n
o
tice Noelle
’
s disturbed state? Does Heinz think he has failed to care about it? Heinz knows nothing, presumably, of
the recent difficulties in communication between the sisters. It is not his business to know about that. But the year-captain knows; the year-captain is aware of the exis
t
ence of a problem; the year-captain does not need the assistance of Heinz in order to discover that an important member of the expedition is experiencing problems. And in any case, what does Heinz want him to do about it? Does he have some suggestion to m
a
ke, and, if so, why has he not made it? That damnable sly smile of Heinz
’
s seemed always to imply that he was holding something back that would be very useful for you to know, if only he cared to let you in on the secret. It was easy enough to think that
t
here was less behind that smile of his than you might suspect. But was that true?

The year-captain wonders whether everyone aboard, one by one, is about to undergo some maddening transformation for the worse. A
l
ready Noelle is losing the ability to communi
cate with her sister on Earth; the blunt and straightforward Sieglinde has unsettlingly chosen to challenge the reliability of the theorems which she herself helped to write; and now the easy-going and irreverent Heinz is tiresomely eager to explain the y
e
ar-captain
’
s own responsibilities to him. What next? What next, he wonders?

The year-captain is particularly bothered by Heinz
’
s sudden little burst of pious helpfulness because it has kept him from a badly needed therapeutic engagement of his own. Julia i
s waiting for him in their s
e
cret place of rendezvous in a dark corner of the cargo deck.

Julia and the year-captain are lovers. They have been since the third week of the voyage, after she had extricated herself from her brief and unsatisfying fling with
Paco. So far as he knows, no one but he and she are aware of their relationship, such as it is, and he prefers to keep it that way. Among the people of the
Wotan
he has a reputation for asceticism, for a certain monkish ferocity of discipline, and, rightly
or wrongly, he has come to feel that this enhances his authority as captain.

The truth is that the year-captain feels the pull of physical desire at least as often as anyone else on board, and has been doing something about it with great regularity, as an
y sane person would. But he does it secretly. He finds pleasure and amusement in the knowledge that he has managed to maintain a private life within the goldfish bowl that is the ship. There are times when the year-captain feels that he is committing the
s
in of pride by allowing others to think that he is more ascetic than he really is; at the very least, there is something hypocritical about it, he realizes. He has chosen, however, to lock himself into this pattern of furtive behavior since the beginning
o
f the voyage and now it seems to him much too late to do anything about changing it. Nor does he really want to, anyway.