Starborne (9 page)

“
That
’
s the best word I can use for it.”

Yvonne
’
s mental tone, Noelle says, is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before. Plainly she is worried by it. Frightened, perhaps.

“
Perhaps you were tired,”
he suggests gently. “
Or maybe she was.”

Noelle sm
iles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a tro
u
bled inner state.

He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle
’
s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her custo
mary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words fr
e
quently, and often can be heard asking Yvonne to repeat something. The message from the mother world, what the year-captain can make out of it, is
the customary chattery blather, no surprises. But this business of static disturbs him. Is this the beginning, he wonders, of the breakdown of their one communication link with Earth, the onset of a steady ine
x
plicable degradation of the signal, leading in
evitably to the isolation of the starship in a realm of total silence?

And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvonne and Noelle are non-relativistic; the
y travel instantaneously across a cosmos in which light itself can go no faster than 300,000 ki
l
ometers per second and even this non-relativistic faster-than-light sta
r
ship crosses the topological folds of nospace at finite, though immense, velocity. Witho
ut the sisters, they would have to fall back on radio transmission to make contact with Earth: from their present distance a message would take two decades to get there.

The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is sel
f-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to aband
o
n. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, ou
t
ward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct r
e
ligions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere a
r
chaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?

But he
does
care. The link matters.

He decides that it has to do with the symbolic functio
n of this voyage to the people of Earth: the fact that the voyagers are the focal point of so much aspiration and anticipation. If contact is lost, their achievements in planting a new Earth on some far star, whatever they may ultimately be, will have no
m
eaning for the people of the mother world.

And then, too, it is a matter of what he is experiencing on the voyage itself, in relation to the intense throbbing grayness of nospace outside: that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal connec
te
d
ness. He has not spoken with any of the others about this, but the year-captain is certain that he is not the only one who has felt these things. He and, doubtless, some of his companions are making new di
s
coveries every day, not astronomical but
—
well,
spiritual
—
and, the year-captain tells himself, what a great pity it will be if none of this can ever be communicated to those who have remained behind on Earth. We must keep the link open.

“
Maybe,”
he says, “
we ought to let you and Yvonne rest for a few da
ys.”

***

A celebration: the six-month anniversary of the day the
Wotan
set out for deep space from Earth orbit. The starship
’
s entire complement is jammed into the gaming lounge, overflowing out into the corridor. Much laughter, drinking, winking, singing,
a happy occasion indeed, though no one is quite sure why they should be making such a fuss about the half-year anniversary.

“
It
’
s because we aren
’
t far enough out, yet,”
Leon suggests. “
We still really have one foot in space and one back on Earth. So we k
eep time on the Earth calendar, still. And we focus on these little milestones. But that
’
ll change.”

“
It already has,”
Chang observes. “
When was the last time you used anything but the shiptime calendar in your daily work?”

“
Which calendar I use isn
’
t impo
rtant,”
Leon says. He is the ship
’
s chief medical officer, a short, barrel-chested man with a voice like tu
m
bling gravel. “
As it happens, I use the shiptime calendar. But we still think in reference to Earth dates, too. Earth dates still matter to us, afte
r a fashion. All of us keep a kind of double calendar in our heads, I su
s
pect. And I think we
’
ll go on doing that until
—”

“
Happy six-month!”
Paco cries, just then. His broad face is flushed, his dark deep-set eyes are aglow. “
Six months cooped up together in this goddamned tin can and we
’
re still all on speaking terms with each other! It
’
s a miracle! A bloody miracle!”
He holds a tumbler of red wine in each hand. For tonight
’
s party the year-captain has authorized breaking out
the last of the wine that they brought with them from Earth. They will be synthesizing their own from now on. It won
’
t be the same thing, though: everyone knows that.

Paco may not be as drunk as he seems, but he puts on a good show. He caroms through the c
rowd, bellowing, “
Drink! Drink!”
and bumps into tall, slender Marcus, the planetographer, nearly knocking him down, and Marcus is the one who apologizes: that is the way Marcus is. A moment later Sieglinde drifts past him and Paco hands his extra wine-gla
s
s to her. Then he loops his free arm through hers. “
Tanz mit mir, liebchen
!”
he cries. The old languages are still spoken, more or less. “
Show me how to waltz, Sieglinde!”
She gives him a sour look, but yields. It
’
s a party, after all. They make a foolish-
looking couple
—
she is a head taller than he is, and utterly ungraceful
—
but looking foolish is probably what Paco has in mind. He whirls her around through the crowd in a clumsy galumphing not-quite-waltz, holding her tightly at arm
’
s length with a one-arm
e
d grip and joyously waving his wine-glass in the other.

The year-captain, who has come late to the party and now stands qu
i
etly by himself at the rear of the lounge near the tables where the
Go
boards are kept, sees Noelle on the opposite side, also alone.
He fears for her, slim and frail as she is, and sightless, in this room of increasin
g
ly drunken revelers. But she seems to be smiling. Michael and Julia are at her side; Julia is saying something to her, and Noelle nods. Apparen
t
ly she is asking if Noelle
wants something to drink, for a moment later Mike plunges into the melee and fetches a glass of something for her.

There had been a party much like this six months before, on Earth, the eve of their departure. The same people acting foolish, the same ones
being shy and withdrawn. They all knew each other so superficially, then, even after the year-long training sessions
—
names, professional skills, that was about it. No depth, no intimacy. But that was all right. There would be time, plenty of time. Alread
y
couples had begun to form as launch time drew near, Paco and Julia, Huw and Giovanna, Michael and Innelda. None of those relationships was destined to last past the first month of the voyage, but that was all right too. The ship
’
s crew consisted of twent
y
-five men, twenty-five women, and the supposition was that they would all pair neatly off and mate and be fruitful and mu
l
tiply on the new Earth to come, but in all likelihood only about half the group would do that at most, and the others would remain sin
gle to the end of their days, or pass through a series of intricate and shifting rel
a
tionships without reproducing, as most people did on Earth. It would make little difference, in the long run. There was a sufficiency of frozen gametes on board with which
to people the new world. And one could readily enough contribute one
’
s own to the pool without actually pairing and mating.

Partying was not a natural state for the year-captain. Aloof and e
s
sentially solitary by nature, marked also by his wintry years at
the mo
n
astery in Lofoten, he made his way through these social events the way he had managed his notable and improbable career as an actor, stepping for the time being into the character of someone who was not at all like himself. He could pretend a certa
in joviality. And so he drank with the others at the launch party; and so he would drink here tonight.

***

The launch party, yes. That had called for all his thespian skills. The newly elected year-captain going about the room, grinning, slapping backs, tr
ading quips. Getting through the evening, somehow.

And then the day of the launch. That had needed some getting through, too. The grand theatrical event of the century, it was, staged for maximum psychological impact on those who were staying behind. The w
hole world watching as the chosen fifty, dressed for the occasion in shimmering, absurdly splendiferous ceremonial robes, emerged from their dormitory and solemnly marched toward the shuttle ship like a procession of Homeric heroes boarding the vessel tha
t
will take them to Troy.

How he had hated all that pomp, all that pretension! But of course the departure of the first interstellar expedition in the history of the human race was no small event. It needed proper staging. So there they came, ostentatiously
strutting toward the waiting hatch, the year-captain lea
d
ing the way, and Noelle walking unerringly alongside him, and then Huw, Heinz, Giovanna, Julia, Sieglinde, Innelda, Elliot, Chang, Roy, and on and on down to Michael and Marcus and David and Zena to
the rear, the fifty voyagers, the whole oddly assorted bunch of them, the short ones and the tall, the burly ones and the slender, the emissaries of the people of Earth to the universe in general.

Aboard the shuttle. Up to the
Wotan
, waiting for them at i
ts constru
c
tion site in low orbit. More festivities there. All manner of celebrities, government officials, and such on hand to bid them farewell. Then a change of mood, a new solemnity: the celebrities took their leave. The fifty were alone with their shi
p. Each to his or her cabin for a private moment of
—
what? Prayer? Meditation? Contemplation of the unlikel
i
ness of it all?
—
before the actual moment of departure.

And then all hands to the lounge. The year-captain must make his first formal address:

“
I than
k you all for the dubious honor you
’
ve given me. I hope you have no reason to regret your choice. But if you do, keep in mind that a year lasts only twelve months.”

Thin laughter came from the assembled voyagers. He had never been much of a comedian.

A few
more words, and then it was time for them to go back to their cabins again. By twos and threes drifting out, pausing by the viewplate in the great corridor to have one last look at the Earth, blue and huge and throbbing with life in the center of the scr
e
en. Off to the sides som
e
where, the Moon, the Sun. Everything that you take for granted as fixed and permanent.