Starborne (16 page)

So he sets out once more down the corridor to the dropchute, d
e
scends to the lower levels, moves with his usual feline grace through th
e tangle of stored gear that clutters those levels, and, pressing his hand against the identification plate that gives access to the deepest storage areas, steps through the opening hatch into the secret world of the ship
’
s most precious cargo, its bank o
f
genetic material.

Not many people have Need-to-Enter access to this area coded into the ship
’
s master brain. Chang does
—
he is the custodian of the
Wotan
’
s collection of fertilized and unfertilized reproductive cells
—
and so does Sylvia, the ship
’
s
other genetic specialist. But the expedition is a long way from any point where the birth of children aboard ship would be a desirable thing and neither of them has reason to come down here very often. Michael, whose primary job is maintenance of all of
t
he ship
’
s internal mechanical functions, is another one who can enter this part of the vessel without the year-captain
’
s specific permission. There are two or three others. But most of the time the unborn and indeed mostly still unconceived future colonis
t
s of the as yet undiscovered New Earth sleep peacefully in the stasis of their freezer units, unintruded upon by visitors from above.

Julia is not someone who should be authorized to come to this part of the ship. Her responsibilities center entirely on th
e functioning of the stardrive, and no element of the stardrive mechanism is located an
y
where near here. The year-captain has added her palm-print to the se
c
tion
’
s Need-to-Enter list for purely personal reasons. He has given her the ability to pass through
that hatch because hardly anyone else has it, which makes this an excellent location for their clandestine meetings. The chances of their being disturbed here are very small. And if ever they should be, why would anyone care that the year-captain has ill
i
citly permitted his lover to join him down here? He suspects that his little crime, such as it is, would be taken merely as a welcome indication that he is human, after all.

This is a dark place, lit only by little pips of slave-light that jump into energi
zed states along the illuminator strands set overhead as he passes beneath them, and wink out again when he has gone by. To the right and the left are the cabinets in which germ plasm of various sorts is stored. The plan of the voyage calls for no births
a
board ship at all during the first year; then, if it seems desirable in the context of what position the ship has attained and what potential colony-worlds, if any, have been located, births will be authorized to shipboard couples interested in rearing ch
i
ldren. There is room on board for up to fifty additional pa
s
sengers to be born en route. After that, no more until a planetary lan
d
ing. The stored ova and spermatozoa are to be kept in the cooler until that time as well. A mere twenty-five couples, no matt
er how often their couplings are rearranged, will not be able to provide sufficient genetic diversity for the peopling of a new world. But all those thousands of stored ova and the myriad sperm cells will be available to vary the g
e
netic mix once the colon
y has been established.

A single small light illuminates the year-captain
’
s love-nest, which is an egg-shaped security node, just barely big enough for two people of reasonable size to embrace in, that separates one of the sectors of freezer cabinets from
its array of monitoring devices. The year-captain peers in and sees Julia stretched out casually with her arms folded behind her head and her ankles crossed. Her clothes are stacked in the passageway outside; there is no room in the little security node t
o
get undressed.

“
Was there a problem?”
she asks.

“
Heinz,”
says the year-captain, wriggling quickly out of his tunic and trousers. “
There was something he felt I ought to be told about, so he stayed after the meeting and told me. And told me and told me.”

“
Something serious?”

“
Nothing I didn
’
t already know about,”
he replies.

He is naked now. She beckons to him and he crawls in beside her. Julia hisses with pleasure as he curls up around her cool, muscular body. It is an athlete
’
s body, a racer
’
s body, taut-
bellied, flat-buttocked, not a gram of excess flesh. Her thighs are long and narrow, her arms slender and strong, with lightly corded veins strikingly prominent along them. She swims an hour each day in the lap-pool on the recreation level. O
c
casionally th
e year-captain joins her there, and although he is not unlike her in build, an athlete too, his body hardened and tempered by a lif
e
time of discipline, he invariably finds himself breathing hard after fifty or sixty turns in the pool, whereas Julia goes on
and on without a single break in rhythm for her full hour and when she climbs from the water she seems not to have exerted herself at all.

Their couplings are like athletic events too: dispassionate excursions into passion, measured and controlled expendi
tures of erotic energy, uncomplicated by emotion. Julia is easy to arouse but slow to reach consummation, and they have evolved a way of embracing and gliding into a steady, easy rocking rhythm that goes on and on, as though they are swimming laps. It is
a
kind of pleasant, almost conversational kind of copulation that gradually moves through a series of almost unquant
i
fiable upticks in pace, each marking a stage in her approach to the cl
i
max, until at last he will detect certain unmistakable terminal signa
ls from her, soft staccato moaning sounds, a sudden burst of sweat-slickness along her shoulders, and he will whip himself onward then to the final frenzied strokes, taking his cues from her at every point and letting go in the ultimate moment, finally, o
f
his own carefully go
v
erned self-control.

The year-captain knows that what he and Julia do with one another has nothing to do with love, and he is aware that even sex for the sake of sex itself can be considerably more gratifying than this. But he is indi
f
ferent to all of that. Love is not unimportant to him but he is not inte
r
ested in finding it just now, and the physical satisfactions he achieves in Julia
’
s arms may fall short of some theoretical ideal but they do serve to keep him tuned and balanced and
able to perform his administrative d
u
ties well, which is all that he presently seeks.

She is uttering the familiar staccato moans, now. His fingertips detect the first onrush of preorgasmic sweatiness emerging from the pores of her upper back.

But a curiou
s thing happens this time. Ordinarily, when he and Julia are making love and they have just reached this point in the event, he invariably topples into a trance-like state in which he no longer feels capable of speech or even thought. His mind goes blank
w
ith the sort of shimmering blankness that he learned how to attain in his years at the Lofoten monastery: the same blankness that he sees when he looks through the viewplate at the reverberating nothingness of the nospace tube surrounding the ship. After
h
e has arrived at that point, all his me
n
tal processes are suspended except those elementary ones, not much more than tropisms, that are concerned with the mechanics of the carnal act itself.

But today things are different. Today when he reaches the blank p
oint and begins the hectic ride toward their shared culmination the i
m
age of Noelle suddenly bursts into his mind.

He sees her face hovering before him as though in mid-air: her dark clear sightless eyes, her delicate nose, her small mouth and elegantly ta
pering jaw. It is as though she is right here in the cubicle with them, floating not far in front of his nose, watching them, watching with a kind of solemn childlike curiosity. The year-captain is jolted entirely out of his trance. He is flooded at this
w
rongest of moments by a torrent of mysterious conflicting emotions, shame and desire, guilt and joy. He feels his skin flaming with embarrassment at this disconcerting intrusion into the final moments of his embrace of Julia and he is certain that his sud
d
en confusion must be dismayingly apparent to his partner; but if Julia notices anything unusual, she gives him no hint of that, and merely goes on moving steadily beneath him, eyes closed, lips drawn back in a grimacing smile, hips churning in the steady
e
ver-increasing rhythmic thrusts that carry her closer to her goal.

***

All the preparations have been carried out and they are ready now to alter the trajectory of the starship so that it will take them toward He
s
per
’
s Planet A.

What this requires is large
ly a mathematical operation. Conventional line-of-sight navigation is not a concept that applies in any way to the starship, traveling as it does through space that is both non-Einsteinian and non-Euclidean. The ship, however tangible and substantial it m
a
y seem to its tangible and substantial occupants, is in fact nothing more than a flux of probabilities, at this point, a Heisenbergian entity at best, not “
real”
at all in the sense of being subject to the Newtonian laws of action and reaction or any of t
h
e other classical concepts of celestial mechanics. Its change of course must be executed by means of equiv
a
lences and locational surrogates, not by applications of actual therm
o
dynamic thrust along some particular spatial vector. The changing of signs in a
cluster of equations rather than the changing of the direction of acceleration through an outlay of physical energy is what is needed.

So Roy and Sieglinde do the primary work, plotting Hesper
’
s star data against Paco
’
s computations of the
Wotan
’
s presume
d location in Einsteinian space and calculating the appropriate nospace equivalents. Paco then converts their figures into navigational coordinates intended to get the ship from
here
to
there
and presents his results to Julia, who
—
working in consultation w
ith Heinz
—
enters the necessary tran
s
formations in the stardrive intelligence. Whereupon the intelligence produces a simulation of the flight plan, indicating the course to be ta
k
en and the probable consequences of attempting it. The final step is for the y
ear-captain, who bears ultimate responsibility for the success of these maneuvers, to examine the simulation and give his approval, whereupon the drive intelligence will put it into operation.

All this, except for the last, has been accomplished.

The year-
captain does not pretend to any sort of expertise in nospace travel. His considerable skills lie in other fields. So it is largely by means of a leap of faith rather than any intellectual process that he a
l
lows himself to announce, after Julia and Heinz ha
ve shown him the simulation diagrams, “
Well, I
’
m willing to go with it if you are.”

What else can he say? His assent, he knows, is nothing but a forma
l
ity. The jump must be made: that has already been decided. And he has to assume that Julia and Heinz have
done their work properly. That all of them have. These calculations are matters that he does not really u
n
derstand, and he knows he has no real right to an opinion. This far along in the operation he can only say yes. If he is thereby giving assent to c
a
t
astrophe, well, so be it: Julia and Heinz and Paco and Roy and Sie
g
linde will partake of the catastrophe along with all the others, and so will he. He is in no position to recalculate and emend their proposal.

“
When we make the course change,”
he says, “
ar
e we going to be aware that anything special is happening, and if so, what?”