Starborne (11 page)

It was time to go back to the lounge. The captain was going to make a speech to the assembled crew just before the laun
ch itself. Coolly N
o
elle moved through the corridors of the ship, touching this, stroking that, drawing its strange sterile air deep into her lungs so that she would begin to feel native to it, familiarizing herself with textures and smells and highly loca
l patterns of coolness or warmth. She had already been aboard twice before, during the indoctrination sessions. They had built the starship up here in space, for it was a flimsy thing and could not be subjected to the traumas of the acceleration needed to
lift it out of a planetary gravitational field. For months, years, hordes of mass-drivers had come chugging up from bases on the Moon, hauling tons of prefa
b
ricated materiel as the great job of weaving and spinning went on and on. And gradually the members
of the crew had been chosen, brought together here, shown their way around the strange-looking vessel that would contain their lives, perhaps, until the end of their days.

Yvonne will still be there once we have set out, she told herself. Why should the l
ink fail?

There was no reason to think that it would; but none to think that it would necessarily hold, either. She and Yvonne were something new under the sun. No body of experimental study existed to cover the case of telepathic twin sisters separated by
a span of dozens of light-years. Noelle had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance, but her faith had been secure up till that moment of sudden panic just now. She and Yvonne had o
f
ten spoken to each other from opposite sides of the planet without difficulty, had they not?

Yes. Yes. But would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart?

The last hours before departure time were ticking down. The ship was full of people, not all of them actual members of the crew. Noelle felt their presences all around her: men, a lot of them, deep voices, a special sharpness to their sweat. Some women, t
o
o. The rustle of diffe
r
ent kinds of garments, thin robes, crisp blouses, the clink of jewelry. Everybody tense: she could smell it, a sharpness in the air. She could hear it in the subliminal hesitations of their voices.

Well, why not be tense? Switches wo
uld be thrown and incompr
e
hensible forces would come into play and the starship would vanish with all hands into nowhere.

There had been test voyages, of course. This project was almost a century old. The unmanned nospace ships, first, going out on short j
ourneys into absolute strangeness and successfully sending radio me
s
sages back, which arrived after the obligatory interval that radio tran
s
mission imposes. And then two manned journeys into interstellar space, small ships carrying unimaginably courageous
volunteers
—
the
Colu
m
bus
and the
Ultima Thule
, names out of antiquity given new gloss. The
Columbus
had traveled eleven light-months, the
Ultima Thule
fourteen; and both had returned safely.
The second of those voyages had been carried out seven years ago. Members of its crew had spoken to them, trying to explain what nospace travel would feel like to them. No one had grasped anything of what they were saying, least of all Noelle.

Now the
Wot
an
—
more ancient mythology, a ship named for some shaggy savage indomitable headstrong god of the northern forests
—
was ready to go. And am I? Noelle wondered. Am I?

Final speeches. Much orotund noise. Drums and trumpets. The exit of the high governmental of
ficials who had come aboard to see them off. The year-captain
—
they had elected him yesterday, the dour Scandin
a
vian man with the wonderfully musical voice
—
telling them to prepare themselves for departure, by which he meant, apparently, to say any sort of p
rayers that they might find meaningful, or at least to do whatever it was they did to compose their minds as they prepared to make the i
r
revocable transition from one life to another.

—
Yvonne? Do you hear me?

—
Of course I do.

—
We
’
re about to get going.

—
I
know. I know.

There was no sensation of acceleration. Why should there be? This was no shuttle ride from Earth to the Moon, or to some satellite world. There was no propulsive engine aboard other than the relatively insi
g
nificant braking motor to be used w
hen they reached their destination; no thrust was being applied; none of the conventional patterns of acce
l
eration were being established. Some sort of drive mechanism was at work in the bowels of the ship, yes; some sort of forces were being ge
n
erated; so
me kind of movement was taking place. But not Newtonian, not in any way Einsteinian. The movement was from space to nospace, where relativity did not apply. Mass, inertia, acceleration, veloc
i
ty
—
they were irrelevant concepts here. One moment they had been
hanging in mid-space only a few thousand kilometers above the face of the Earth, and in the next they were floating, silent as a comet, through a tube in a folded and pleated alternative universe that ran adjacent to and interlineated with the experientia
l
universe of stars and planets, of mass and force and gravitation and inertia, of photons and electrons and ne
u
trinos and quarks, of earth, air, fire, and water. Caught up in some u
n
thinkable flux, hurled with unimaginable swiftness through an utter empty
darkness a thousand times blacker than the darkness in which she had spent her whole life.

It had happened, yes. Noelle had no doubt of it. There had been an instant in which she seemed to be at the brink of an infinite abyss. And then she knew she was in
nospace. Something had happened; something had changed. But it was unquantifiable and altogether undefinable. Forces beyond her comprehension, powered by mysterious energies that spanned the cosmos from rib to rib, had come abruptly into play, hurling the
Wotan
smoothly and swiftly from the experiential universe, the un
i
verse of space and time and matter, into this other place. She knew it had happened. But she had no idea how she knew that she knew.

—
Yvonne? Can you hear me now, Yvonne?

The reply came righ
t away, with utter instantaneity. Not even time for a moment of terror. There was Yvonne, immediately, comfortingly:

—
I hear you, yes.

The signal was pure and clear and sharp. And so it remained, day a
f
ter day.

Throughout the strange early hours of the voy
age Noelle and Yvonne were rarely out of contact with each other for more than a moment, and there was no perceptible falling off of reception as the starship headed outward. They might have been no farther from each other than in adj
a
cent rooms. Past the
orbital distance of the Moon, past the mi
l
lion-kilometer mark, past the orbital distance of Mars: everything stayed clear and sharp, clear and sharp. The sisters had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance, appa
rently.

But
—
so it had been explained to them
—
the ship at this point was still traveling at sub-light velocity. It took time, even in nospace, to build up to full speed. The process of nospace acceler
a
tion
—
qualitatively different,
conceptually
different, fr
om anything that anyone understood as acceleration in normal space, but a kind of acce
l
eration all the same
—
was a gradual one. They would not reach the speed of light for several days.

The speed of light! Magical barrier! Noelle had heard so much about it:
the limiting velocity, the borderline between the known and the u
n
known. What would happen to the bond between them, once the
Wotan
was on the far side of it? Noelle had no real idea. Already she was in a space apart from Yvonne, and still could feel her
tangible presence: that much was immensely reassuring. But when the starship had crossed into that realm where even a photon was forbidden to go? What then, what then? No one had discussed these things with her. She scarcely unde
r
stood them. But she had al
ways heard that traveling faster than light i
n
volved paradox, mystery, strangeness. There was an element of the fo
r
bidden about it.
It was against the law
.

That terrible tension rose in her all over again. One more test
—
the final one, she hoped
—
was approac
hing. She had never known such fear. As they entered the superluminal universe it might become impossible for her mind to reach back across that barrier to find Yvonne
’
s. Who could say? She had never traveled faster than light before. Once more she contem
p
lated the possibility of an existence without Yvonne. She had never known a lonely moment in her life. But now
—
now
—

And again her fears were proven needless. Somewhere during the day they reached the sinister barrier, and the starship went on through it wi
thout even the formality of an announcement. They had, after all, been outside Einsteinian space since the first moment of the voyage; why, then, take notice of a violation of the traffic laws of another un
i
verse, when they were here, already safely journe
ying across nospace?

Someone told her, later in the day, that they were moving faster than light now.

Her awareness of Yvonne
’
s presence within her had not flickered at all.

—
It
’
s happened
, she told her sister.
Here we are, wherever that is.

And swiftly as
ever came Yvonne
’
s response, a cheery greeting from the old continuum. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Nor did the signal grow more tenuous in the weeks that followed. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Until the first static set in.

***

Hesper is in his
element. The year-captain has called a general mee
t
ing of the crew, and Hesper will lecture them on his newest findings and conclusions. The year-captain has resolved to make his move. He will declare that Hesper has identified a world that holds potentia
l for se
t
tlement
—
several, as a matter of fact
—
and that they will immediately begin to direct their course toward the most promising of them with the intention of carrying out an exploratory landing.

Large as the
Wotan
is, and it is very large indeed as spa
ceships go, there is no chamber aboard the ship big enough to contain all fifty vo
y
agers at the same time. The general meeting is held in the great central corridor on the uppermost deck, spilling outward from the gaming lounge. People sprawl, lean, cling
to the rungs on the sides of the walls.

Hesper, standing before them with his arms folded cockily, flashes the brightest of grins, first-magnitude stuff, and says, “
The galaxy is full of worlds. This is no secret. However, we ourselves have certain limit
a
t
ions of form that require us to find a world of appropriate mass, appr
o
priate orbital distance from its sun, appropriate atmospheric mix, appr
o
priate
—”

“
Get on with it,”
Sieglinde calls. She is famous for her impat
ience, a brawny, heavy-breasted woman with close-cropped honey-colored hair and a brusque, incisive manner. “
We know all this stuff.”

Hesper
’
s brilliant grin vanishes instantly. The little man glowers at her.

“
For you,”
he says, “
I have found just the righ
t planet. It is something like Jupiter, but really
large
, and it has a mean temperature of six tho
u
sand degrees Kelvin at its surface, beneath fifty thousand kilometers of corrosive gases. Will this be satisfactory? As for the rest of us
—”