Starborne (3 page)

Hesper wants
to discuss his newest prospects. The year-captain li
s
tens with half an ear. He wants nothing more just now than the simple relaxation that watching the screen affords. The abstract patterns, so very bright and cheerful. The wild swirls of color that whirl
and flash like crazed comets. Is there any real meaning in them? Only Hesper knows. He devised this information-gathering system; he is the only one, really, who can decipher and interpret the mysterious factoids that the ship
’
s sensors suck in. When the
time comes, the year-captain will pay close attention to the little man
’
s data. But this is not yet the time.

The year-captain stands and watches for a while, mindlessly, like a small child, taking innocent pleasure in the colors and patterns, admiring the
m for their own sake. There are few enough pleasures that he allows himself: this one is harmless and comforting. Stars dance on the screen in wild galliards and fandangos. He imagines that he identifies steel-blue Vega and emerald Deneb and golden Arctur
u
s, but he knows that there is no way he can be correct. The patterns he sees here are not those of the constellations he watched so often soaring across the icy sky over Norway in his long vigils of the night. What Hesper views here is not the sky itself,
nor even any one-to-one equivalent of it, but simply the nospace correlative of the sky, a map of energy sources in realspace as they have been translated into utterly alien nospace terms. No matter; let these seeming stars be any stars at all, let them b
e
Markab or Procyon or Rigel or Betelgeuse or ones that have no names at all
—
let them, for all he cares, be nothing more than imaginary points of light. He wants only to see the dance.

He savors the light-show gratefully until his eyes begin to ache a li
t
tl
e and the wild spectacle starts to weary his mind. Then he thanks He
s
per gravely and goes out.

***

Noelle
’
s cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuet
tes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some o
b
jects evidently chosen for their rich textures
—
a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea urchin
’
s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does
someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision, moving this object a ce
n
timeter or two to one side, lifting another and fondling it a moment b
e
fore returning it to the exact
place where it had been. The supreme co
n
fidence of her movements is fascinating to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down.

Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from
her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver s
t
itching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows she has had no shipboard liaisons.
Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take a
d
vantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and imm
e
diately catches him
self up, startled by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relatio
n
ship between adults as
taking advantage
. Well, then, possibly compa
s
sion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling: pity too easil
y becomes patronizing, and that kills desire. He rejects that theory also: glib, implausible. Could it simply be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? Noelle has r
e
peatedly denied any ability
to enter minds other than her sister
’
s. B
e
sides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that N
o
elle is so self-contained, so calm, so much wrapped up in her blindn
ess and her mind-power and her unfathomable communication with her di
s
tant sister, that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems una
p
proachable: her strange perfection of soul seques
ters her, keeping others at a distance the way extraordinary physical beauty can sometimes keep people at a distance. She does not arouse desire because she does not seem at all human. She gleams. She is a flawless machine, an integral part of the ship.

He
unfolds the text he has prepared, the report that is to be transmi
t
ted to Earth today. “
Not that there
’
s anything new to tell them,”
he says to her, “
but I suppose we have to file the daily communique all the same.”

“
It would be cruel if we didn
’
t. We mea
n so very much to them.”

The moment she begins to speak, all of the year-captain
’
s carefully constructed calmness evaporates, and instantly he finds himself beco
m
ing edgy, oddly belligerent, distinctly off balance. He is bewildered by that. Something in th
e softness and earnestness of her sweet gentle voice has mysteriously annoyed him, it seems. Coils of sudden startling te
n
sion are springing up within him. Anger, even. Animosity. He has no idea why. He is unable to account for his reaction at all.

“
I have
my doubts about that,”
he says, with a roughness that su
r
prises him. “
I don
’
t think we matter at all.”

This is perverse, and he knows it. What he has just said runs counter to all of his own beliefs.

She looks a little surprised too. “
Oh, yes, yes, we do,
we mean a great deal to them. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel, all over the world and to the Moon as well. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

He will not concede the point.
“
As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace. A nine-day wonder.”
His voice sounds harsh and unfamiliar to him, his rhythms of speech coarse, erratic, words coming in
awkward rushes. As for his words themselves, so bleak and sardonic, they astonish him. He has never spoken this way about Earth and its a
t
titude toward the starship before. Such thoughts have never so much as crossed his mind before. Still, he finds himsel
f pushing recklessly o
n
ward down the same strange track. “
That
’
s the only thing we represent to them, isn
’
t it? Novelty, vicarious adventure, a bit of passing amus
e
ment?”

“
Do you really mean that? It seems so terribly cynical.”

He shrugs. Somehow this ugly idea has taken possession of him, r
e
pugnant though his argument is, even to him. He sees the effect that he is having on her
—
puzzlement turning to dismay
—
but he feels that he has gone in too deep now to turn back. “
Another six
months and they
’
ll be completely bored with us and our communiques. Perhaps sooner than that. They
’
ll stop paying attention. A year
’
s time and they
’
ll have fo
r
gotten us.”

She seems taken aback. Her nostrils flicker in apparent alarm. No
r
mally her face is a
serene mask. Not now. “
What a peculiar mood you
’
re in today, year-captain!”

“
Am I? Well, then, I suppose I am.”

“
I don
’
t see you as in any way a cynical man. Everything about you is the opposite of cynical. And yet here, today
—
saying such
—
such
—”
She falte
rs.

“
Such disagreeable things?”

“
Yes.”

“
Perhaps I
’
m just being realistic. I try to be. A realist, yes. Is a realist the same as a cynic?”

“
Why do you feel you need to put labels on yourself?”

“
That
’
s an important part of being a realist.”

“
You don
’
t know w
hat real is. You don
’
t know what you are, year-captain.”

Her counterattack, if that is what it is, amazes him as much as his own outburst. This is a new Noelle, agitated, vehement. In just a few seconds the conversation has veered entirely out of control:
much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken to him like this b
e
fore. The same is true of him. He is saying things he doesn
’
t believe; she is saying things that go far beyond the bounds of her normal quiet aloofness. It is as if there is a mal
ign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them both unnaturally tense and aggressive.

The year-captain feels a touch of panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle
’
s consciousness, will she still be able
to make contact with far-off Yvonne?

Yet he is unable to prevent himself from parrying once more: “
Do
you
know what I am, then?”

“
A man in search of himself is what you are. That
’
s why you volu
n
teered to come all the way out here.”

He shakes his head bris
kly, futile though he knows such non-verbal language to be with her. “
Oh, no, no, no. Too slick, Noelle. Too easy.”

“
They say you were a famous actor, once. Isn
’
t that so? And after that, a biologist who made a great discovery on some moon of Jupiter, or m
aybe it was Saturn. Then a monk on a desert island somewhere. And now the captain of the first starship. There
’
s no continuity in any of that that I can find. Who
are
you, year-captain? Do you really know?”

“
Of course I do.”
But he does not care to amplify
that response. Her words make no sense to him. He sees the logic of his jagged zigzagging career with perfect clarity; it is obvious to him how one thing has led inevitably to the next. He could explain all that to her, but something hardens in him. He i
s
not willing to present an apologia for his life just now. That leaves him with nothing of any substance to say; and the best he can do is merely to throw her taunt back at her. “
What about you?”
he asks, still almost angrily. “
Would you be able to answer
such a que
s
tion?”

“
I think I could.”

“
Then tell me. The same things you were asking me. Show me how it
’
s done, all right? What made
you
volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle? What are
you
searching for? Come on. Tell me! Tell me!”

She lets the lid
s slide down over her unseeing eyes and offers no r
e
ply. She holds herself stiffly, hands tightly knitted, lips compressed, breath coming in ragged bursts. She moves her head from side to side three or four times, doing it very slowly, the way a wounded an
imal might try to shake off pain.