Starborne (34 page)

But H
einz is right. With contact apparently lost for good
—
Noelle continues to have no luck in reaching Yvonne
—
Earth has ceased to be a major factor in their calculations: has ceased to be a factor at all, really. Where an Article proves itself to be unworkable,
they themselves must be the only judges of whether it is to be amended. Besides, the Articles call for a change in the captaincy every year, and that rule has been, if not amended, then simply ignored. And so, in consequence of that, they must now dispen
s
e with the one about penning up the year-captain aboard the ship. Once again some new planet is about to swim into their ken, as Huw likes to say, and this time the year-captain does not intend to be left behind when they go down to look at it. That
’
s the
essential thing now. He does not intend to be left behind.

***

So my third term as year-captain now begins. I think I should pe
r
haps get used to the idea of holding this job for the rest of my life.

The election was a grubby thing, of course, a lot of sham
eless polit
i
cal bargaining. But the deal is done: they have their
quid
, I have my
quo
, and that
’
s that. I
’
m used to being captain by now. Ironic, consi
d
ering how elaborately I always used to go out of my way to spare myself from taking on the responsibilit
ies of society; but what I used to do can
’
t be allowed to control my sense of what must be done now.

The ship has to have a captain. I seem to be the right person for the job. What I need is to continue traveling the course I chose for myself long ago, whi
ch means continued exploration of one kind of another. What Earth needs
—

Yes, what Earth needs. I must never forget about that.

Poor old Earth! All the ancient squalor is gone, most of the pain
—
and yet something is wrong. Disease and hunger are conquered.
Life is just about eternal if you want it to be that way. War is something we read about in history texts, something anthropological and remote, an odd obsolete practice of our ancestors, like cannibalism or bloo
d
letting. And yet! Something wrong! I think
back through all that I know of human history, and I know a great deal, really
—
the plagues, the massacres, all the episodes of torture for the sheer fun of it, the great and petty vilenesses, the whole catalog of sins that Sophocles and Shakespeare and St
r
indberg understood so well
—
and I wonder why we aren
’
t more jubilant about what we have attained in our own time. What I have to conclude is that we are a driven race, never satisfied with a
n
ything, even with utter blissful contentedness. There
’
s always som
ething missing, even in perfection. And our awareness of that missing som
e
thing is what drives us on and on and on, forever looking for it.

Which is what caused the massacres and all of that
—
a sense even among our primitive forebears that something needs t
o be fixed, by whatever ham-fisted methods happen to be available at the moment. Our methods have become more humane and also more efficient as we grow more
—
well, civilized
—
but that need, that hunger, still operates on us. And now has pushed us out among
t
he stars to grapple with unknown worlds.

Or am I projecting my own needs and hungers and awareness of i
n
adequacies onto the whole human race? Are most of us quite happy with our lives in this glorious modern age, and do those happy ones feel so
r
ry for the
pitiful maladjusted few who were willing to go off on this wild voyage into the dark?

I don
’
t believe that. I don
’
t
want
to believe that, at any rate. And we will go onward, we fifty, until we find what we are seeking. (We fo
r
ty-nine, I should say now, but
the old phrase is ingrained so deeply!) And when we find it, which I am certain we will, I want to think that for a moment, at least, we will know a little peace.

I wish we were still in touch with Earth.

I worry about Noelle. She seems to be all right, e
ven in the absence of the contact with her sister that has nourished and sustained her all her life. But is she, really? Is she?

***

The breakdown in the communication link with Earth has been the subject of much discussion, naturally.

Whether it is a tota
l and irreversible breakdown is not entirely certain yet. Yes, Noelle had said, at the meeting between the year-captain and the delegation that had come to apprise him of the election results, that there was no way of restoring contact with her sister; bu
t
—
as she a
d
mitted privately to the year-captain the next day
—
she had simply been saying that by way of bolstering Heinz
’
s arguments in favor of amen
d
ing the Articles of the Voyage. In truth Noelle has no idea whether co
n
tact can be restored, and she feels j
ust a little guilty for having given everyone the notion that it can
’
t be. “
I did it because I wanted everyone to go along with the deal that was taking shape,”
she confesses, but only to the year-captain. “
If we can
’
t speak with Earth any more, we don
’
t
n
eed to worry what they
’
ll think about our changing the Articles, isn
’
t that so? But it
’
s always possible that I
’
ll regain Yvonne
’
s signal sooner or later. It
’
s happened before that the signal has weakened and then b
e
come strong again.”

She does, she says,
still feel Yvonne
’
s mental presence somewhere within her. But, as has been true for days now, she is unable to pick up any verbal content in what Yvonne is sending, and she suspects
—
it is only a guess, but she thinks there
’
s real probability to it
—
that no
t
hing she
’
s sending Earthward is reaching Yvonne either. She still makes da
i
ly attempts at reopening the link, but to no avail. For all intents and purposes they are cut off from Earth and very likely will remain cut off forever.

No one believes that the pr
oblem is a function of anything so obvious as distance. Noelle has been quite convincing on that score: a signal that propagates perfectly for the first sixteen light-years of a journey ought not abruptly to deteriorate a couple of light-minutes farther a
l
ong the road. There should at least have been prior sign of attenuation, and there was no attenuation, only noise suddenly cutting in, noise that interfered with and ultimately destroyed the signal.

“
It
’
s some kind of a force,”
Roy suggests, “
that has reached in here and messed up the connection.”

A force? What kind of force?

Noelle
’
s old idea that what is intervening between her and her sister is some physical effect analogous to sunspot static
—
that it is the product of radiation emitted by th
is or that giant star into whose vicinity they have come during the course of their travels
—
is brought up again, and is in the end rejected again. There is, both Roy and Sieglinde point out, no energy interface between realspace and nospace, no opportunit
y
for any kind of electromagnetic intrusion. That much had been amply demo
n
strated long before any manned voyages were undertaken. Hesper
’
s scanning instruments, yes, are able to pick up information of a non-electromagnetic kind out of the realspace continu
um, information that can be translated into comprehensible data about that continuum; but no material thing belonging to realspace can penetrate here. The n
o
space tube is an impermeable wall separating them from the continuum of phenomena. They are effecti
vely outside the universe. They could in theory pass, and perhaps they already have, right through the heart of a star in the course of their journey without causing any disruption either to the star or to themselves. Nothing that has mass or charge can l
e
ap the barrier between the universe of real-world phenomena and the cocoon of nothingness that the ship
’
s drive mechanism has woven about them; nor can a photon get across, nor even a slippery neutrino.

But something, it seems, is getting through, and is d
oing damage. Many speculations excite the voyagers. The one force that
can
cross the barrier, Roy observes, is thought. Thought is intangible, unmeasurable, limitless. The ease with which Noelle and Yvonne maintained c
ontact on an instantaneous basis throughout the first five months of the voyage has demonstrated that.

“
But let us suppose,”
Roy says
—
it is clear from his lofty tone that this is merely some hypothesis he is putting forth, an airy
gedankene
x
periment
—“
that
the interference Noelle is experiencing is caused by beings of powerful telepathic capacity that live in the space between the stars.”

“
Beings that live between the stars,”
Paco repeats in wonderment. Plainly he thinks that Roy has launched into something
crazy, but he has enough respect for the power of Roy
’
s intellect to hold off on his scorn until the mathematician has finished putting forth his idea.

“
Yes, between the stars,”
Roy goes on. “
Or
in
the stars, or surroun
d
ing them. Who can say? Let us suppos
e that each of these beings is c
a
pable of emitting mental transmissions, just as Noelle is, but that their sending capacity is far more powerful than hers. As these transmissions go flooding outward, perhaps each one sweeping out a sphere with a radius of
many light-years, the trajectory of the
Wotan
carries them in and out of these spheres and the telepathic impulses cross the nospace barrier just as readily as the thoughts of Noelle and Yvonne do. And it is these alien mental emanations, let us suppose, t
hat are smothering the signal coming from Earth.”

Paco is ready to jump in now with objections; but Heinz is already speaking, extending Roy
’
s suggestion into a different area of possibility.

“
What if,”
Heinz says, “
these beings that Roy has suggested are
de
n
izens not of the space between the stars but of nospace itself? Living right here in the tube, let us say, and as we travel along we keep running into their domains.”

“
The nospace tube must be matter-free except for the ship that moves through it,”
Sieg
linde observes acidly. “
Otherwise a body moving at speeds faster than light, as we are, would generate destructive resonan
c
es, since in conventional physical terms our mass is equal to infinity, and a body with infinite mass leaves no room in its universe
for an
y
thing else.”

“
Indeed true,”
Heinz replies, unruffled as always. “
But I don
’
t r
e
member speaking of these beings as material objects. What I imagine are gigantic incorporeal beings as big as asteroids, as big as planets, maybe, that have no mass at al
l, no essence, only
existence
—
great co
n
vergences of pure mental force that drift freely through the tube. They are the native life-forms of nospace. They are not made up of anything that we can regard as matter. They are something of a nature absolutely un
known to us, occupying this otherworldly zone that we call nospace, living out there the way angels live in Heaven.”