Starborne (44 page)

She pulls back, afraid. Still afrai
d. It is too much for her; she will be destroyed. She turns. Flees.

Finds a safe place, somewhere. Halts. Draws deep breaths.

Opens her eyes.

All about her is darkness, as usual. There are no flames anywhere near her. Everything is perfectly still. The ang
el is gone. She is in her own cabin, aboard the
Wotan
. Alone. Trembling. She has failed again.

***

“
I
’
m going to give it one more shot,”
she tells the year-captain.

“
But if the risk is so great
—”

“
I don
’
t know that it really is.”

“
You said
—”

“
I said, y
es. But maybe I was wrong. I
’
ll try one more time, and we
’
ll see.”

He is silent for a long while.

“
You don
’
t want me to do it,”
Noelle says, eventually, in a co
m
pletely neutral tone, nothing reproachful about it.

“
I do and I don
’
t,”
the year-captain says.
“
I
’
ve been the one pushing you toward this all along. And pulling you back with the other hand. I
’
m afraid of losing you, Noelle. We need to see what these things are, yes. But I
’
m afraid of losing you.”
And he says, after another almost inte
r
minable pause
, “
You know that I love you, Noelle.”

“
Yes.”

“
And if something should happen to you
—”

“
Nothing will happen to me,”
she says. “
Nothing bad.”

***

This time as she enters the gray Intermundium she pauses before even beginning to search for the angel, and send
s a shaft of thought across the light-years to Earth, to Yvonne.

She has had no contact of the kind that she once had enjoyed with Yvonne for months, nothing on the level of message-interchange. But she knows Yvonne is still there and trying to reach her,
and in some i
n
definable way the link between them is still open, however clouded it is by the interference caused by the proximity of the angels. It is that link that Noelle attempts to widen and strengthen now.

Yvonne? Can you hear me? Can you feel me?

Th
ere is the hint of a hint of an affirmative reply. Only the hint of a hint, is all, but that is better than nothing.

Ride with me, Yvonne. When I want you to let me lean on you, be there beside me. Let me draw strength from you. I
’
m going to need you soon.

Does Yvonne hear? Does she know?

I love you, Yvonne. You are me. I am you. We are in this together.

Noelle thinks she feels Yvonne
’
s silent affirmative presence. Hopes she does.

And now. Now. Noelle moves deeper into the void beyond the ship. She can feel
the force of the angel now, the vast godlike thing that waits for her out there.

Angel? Listen to me, angel! This is Noelle!

The angel is listening. The angel is waiting.

I am Noelle. I come to you in love, angel. I give myself to you, angel.

This time sh
e holds nothing back. She yields herself completely, permitting herself no fear. Yvonne is with her. Yvonne stands beside her, lending her her strength.

I am yours
, Noelle tells the angel.

Contact.

The universe splits open. The whole cosmos is burning. Bur
sts of wild silver light streak across the shining metal dome of the sky. Walls smolder and burst into flames. Worlds turn to ash. There is contact, yes. A sensory explosion
—
a dancing solar flare
—
a stream of liquid fire
—
a flood tide of brilliant radiance,
irresistible, unendurable, running into her, sweeping over her, penetrating her, devouring her. Light ever
y
where. Fire. A great blaze in the firmament.

Semele
.

The angel smiles and she quakes.
Open to me, Noelle
, cries the vast tolling voice, and she opens
and the force enters fully, taking possession of every nook and cranny of her brain, sweeping resistlessly through her

And she and the angel are one. She lies within its bosom, resting
, r
e
gaining her strength steadily, moment by moment, as its great warmth fills her and revives her.

After a while she is strong enough to rise and move about within the angel. She discovers that she can travel freely and at will, going as she pleases into
any sector of the great being. She drops down beyond the zone of outer turbulence, past the huge fiery cells of angel-stuff that come constantly floating up from the interior, and disappears into the tranquility of the angel
’
s core, the cool hidden place
w
here no firestorms rage and the deepest of wisdom resides. There she remains for a consi
d
erable while, feeling a peace that she has never known before, until at last it comes to seem to her that if she does not move along she will stay there forever; and s
o she moves upward again, toward the surface, e
n
tering the realm of fiery turmoil that is the angel
’
s outer semblance. But the fire does not harm her. She is of the angel now; the angel is of N
o
elle.

Come. Let me show you things.

They drift across the face
of the cosmos together. There are angels everywhere, a vast choir of them wherever she looks
—
great ones, small ones, bright ones, faint ones, some massed in clusters, some burning in solitary splendor. The sound of their voices fills the heavens.

She and her guide halt in a place of deep darkness, and there Noelle sees what she understands to be a new angel coming into being, barely glimmering as it is born. It coalesces swiftly, as she watches, out of a cool, dark cloud of dust that is collapsing
inward on itself to become a compact ball. As it shrinks and takes on spherical form it begins to turn, slowly and then faster and then much faster yet, and to give off heat, faintly at first, and then with increasing force, until it is glowing red-hot, w
h
ite-hot. It has begun to spit matter into the void, too, feverishly hur
l
ing segments of itself in every direction in what seems like a tantrum: a prodigious and prodigal outpouring of energy, ferocious and yet som
e
how comical.

A playful baby. An infant ang
el savoring the first throes of life. They watch for a while; and then they leave it in the midst of its sport.

Come along, now. Onward.

Onward, yes. The sky is very bright, here, full of angels, and all of them are singing as angels should sing, a wonderf
ul celestial choir whose harmonies fill the void. There is brightness everywhere, a sea of light.

Here Noelle sees a giant angel that burns with so steady and fierce a radiance that she does not understand why it has not already exhausted its own substance
. It blazes in the firmament like an angry blue eye, unwearyingly hurling its fires outward to an immense distance. It is more like a god than an angel, this giant, an angry god, pouring itself forth in inexplicable wrath upon the fabric of the universe.

A
nd then here, farther away, in one of the deepest places, are angels all in a cluster, old angels, ancient ones, thousands of them, millions, each pressed up close against its neighbor so that they seem to form one huge shining wall, a single brilliant ma
s
s. But Noelle
’
s angel shows her that they are many, not one, and lets her reach toward them so that she can experience their great age, their inordinate wisdom. How old are they? Millions of years? Billions?

We were old before the sky was young
, one of the
m tells her.

And another says
—
or perhaps it is the same one
—
We came out of the All-Engulfing and one day we will return to the All-Engulfing, but we have been here since before the before, and we will remain until a
f
ter the after.

And a third tells her,
We
precede and we follow, and we exist when there is no existence, and we are love when love no longer is. And we are you and you are us.

Noelle understands perfectly, or at least thinks she does; and when they give her their blessing, she gives them hers. A
nd moves along, for her guide has other things for her to see in other parts of the cosmos.

And here is a very old angel, an angel that is dying.

That surprises her. She says that she would not have believed that it was possible for angels to die, and her
angel tells her calmly that it is, it is not only possible but necessary. If angels can be born, angels must also die. Everything dies, even angels; and everything is born again. The only thing that has neither a beginning nor an end, it says, is the univ
e
rse itself, which was there at the beginning and before, and will be there at the end and afterward.

Look. Here.

They have reached the dying angel, in a region apart from the others. Its light is very dim, though there still is warmth coming from it, the m
idday warmth of a winter day, perhaps. There is no brilliance to this angel. Its face is dull and dark, as though it is covered by an ocean of heavy mud, or thick lava, perhaps, sultry in color, a deep purple streaked with occasional widely separated regi
o
ns of crimson and scarlet. Across the cooling surface of the dying angel there still is some sparse sign of sluggish activity, the slow difficult movement of lumpy masses of ma
t
ter sliding forward in the mud, some of them black or gray, some glo
w
ing dull r
ed like metal ingots that have fallen from the forge but are not yet cold.

There is no roaring here, no hissing, no crackling, no sizzling. There is only the deep muffled sound of titanic forces grinding to a halt, of c
o
lossal energies winding down. Even a
s Noelle watches, the painful movements of the traveling masses grow even more slow and the bright streaks of crimson and scarlet give up much of the richness of their hue. Everything here will stop, soon. There will be nothing left but cinders and ash. B
u
t when she looks up, beyond the place where the dying angel hangs in the firmament, she sees dust already coalescing in the distance, the first glimmers of brightness taking form. This angel is going; a new one will soon be arriving. And so it has been, N
o
elle understands, since the beginning of time. And before the beginning.

And now see this one
, Noelle
’
s angel tells her.

They travel onward, and come to a golden angel, a small one in a r
e
gion of the void that has very few other angels around it. It pays no heed to them, but goes on turning steadily on its axis like a child amusing i
t
self in a playground. Noelle understands that this is a young angel, not a newborn one by any means, but not
yet mature
—
an adolescent one, perhaps. They remain in its vicinity for a time, watching its self-absorbed antics. There is something extremely pleasant about being near this charming young angel, Noelle thinks. Watching it, she feels almost as though she
has returned to her own childhood. Yvonne seems very near, closer than she has been in a long while. They are girls again together, giggling, running, colliding, giggling again as they tumble down in a heap.