Starborne (42 page)

The
Go
obsession has never diminished aboard ship, and the year-captain, who has be
en only an occasional player since his reawa
k
ening of interest in the game, now goes to the lounge whenever his off
i
cial duties permit. His superior skills make it difficult for most of the others to enjoy playing with him, and he plays almost exclusively
with Roy and Leon and Noelle, most often with Noelle.

She is a merciless player. He wins against her no more often than once out of every four or five games.

Today, playing black, the year-captain has been able to remain on the offensive through the 89th m
ove. But Noelle then breaks through his north stones, which are weakly deployed, and closes a major center te
r
ritory. The year-captain finds himself unable to mount a satisfactory r
e
ply. Before he can get very much going, Noelle has run a chain of stones a
cross the 19th line, boxing him in in an embarrassing way. He manages to fend off further calamity for a while, but he knows that all he is doing is playing for time as he heads toward inevitable defeat. At Move 141 he launches what he suspects is a hopel
e
ss attack, and his forces are easily crushed by Noelle within her own territory. A little while later he finds himself confronted with the classic cat-in-a-basket trap, by which he will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone, and at Move
196 he concedes that he has been beaten. She has taken 81 stones to his 62.

As they clear the board for a rematch he says, trying to be casual about it, “
Have you been giving any thought to the business of the a
n
gels, Noelle?”

“
Of course. I think about the
m a great deal.”

“
And?”

“
And what?”
she asks.

“
Do you have any idea how you
’
d go about it? Making the contact, I mean.”

“
I have some theories, yes. But naturally they
’
re only theories. I won
’
t really know anything until I make the actual attempt.”

The year
-captain waits just a beat. “
And when do you think that will be?”

She gives him one of those special looks of hers, those baffling sightless focusings of her eyes that somehow manage to convey an e
x
pression. The expression that she conveys this time is one
of disingen
u
ousness.

“
Whenever you
’
d like it to be,”
she says.

“
What about today, then?”

***

What about today? Yes. What about today. There is no way that it can be postponed any longer. He knows that; she knows that; they are agreed. This is the moment.
Today. Now.

In her cabin. Alone, among her familiar things. She has insisted on that. She grants herself a few moments of delay, first, a little self-indulgence, moving about the room, picking up things and handling them, the sea-urchin shell, the polished
piece of jade, the small bronze statuettes, the furry stuffed animal. In her former life these things had been hers and Yvonne
’
s jointly; neither of them had ever had any sense of “
mine”
or “
yours,”
not while they were together, but Yvonne had i
n
sisted, a
s the time for the launch of the
Wotan
drew near, that Noelle take all these with her, these beloved objects, the talismans of their shared life. “
After all,”
she had said, “
I
’
ll be able to feel them through your hands.”
Yes. But not any longer.

Perhaps wh
at Noelle is about to do will restore Yvonne
’
s access to these little things, the things that once had been
theirs
and now were merely
hers
. Perhaps. Perhaps.

She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to e
nhance the force of her power, she often thinks.

Extends a tenuous tendril of thought, now, that probes warily ou
t
ward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward
—

Angels
?

Who knows what they are? But she has been conscious of their pre
s
ence all along, ever since the interference first began, cloudy presences, huge heavy masses of mentation hovering around her, somewhere out there in
—
what does he call it? The Intermundium?
Yes, the Intermu
n
dium, the great gray space between the worlds. She has felt them out there, not as individual entities, but only as presences, or perhaps
one
presence having many parts.

Now she seeks them.

Angels! Angels! Angels!

She is well beyond the ship and keeps moving outward and outward into the undifferentiated void of the nospace tube, extending herself to what she thinks is the limit of her reach and then reaching even farther yet. She envisions herself now as a line of
b
right light stretched out across the cosmos, a line that has neither beginning nor end but has no substance, either
—
an infinitely extended point of radiant energy, a da
z
zling immaterial streak, a mere beam.

Reaching. Reaching.

Angels!

Oh. She feels the pre
sence now. So they are real, yes. Whatever they are, they are really there. They may not be actual angels but they are there, not far away. They
exist
. Brightness. Strength. Magnetism. Yes. Awareness now of a fierce roiling mass of concentrated energy clos
e by her. A gigantic mass in motion, laying a terrible stress on the fabric of the cosmos.

How strange! The angel has angular momentum! It tumbles ponde
r
ously on its colossal axis. Who could have thought that angels would be so huge? But they are angels; t
hey can be whatever they please to be.

Noelle is oppressed by the shifting weight of the angel as it makes its slow heavy axial swing. She moves closer.

Oh.

She is dazzled by it.

Oh. Oh.

She hears it roaring, the way a furnace might roar. But what a dea
f
en
ing furnace-roar this is!
Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh.
She hears a crackling, too, a hissing, a sizzling: the sounds of inexorable power unremittingly u
n
leashed.

Too much light! Too much power!

She is fascinated as much as she is frightened. But she must be ca
u
tious. T
his is a great monster lurking here. Noelle draws back a little, and then a little more, overwhelmed by the intensity of the other being
’
s output. Such a mighty mind: she feels dwarfed. If she touches it even glancingly with her own mind she is certain th
a
t she will be destroyed. She must step down the aperture and establish some kind of transformer in the circuit that will shield her against the full bellowing blast of po
w
er that comes from the thing.

So she withdraws, pulling herself back and back and bac
k until she is once again inside the ship, and rests, and studies the problem. It will r
e
quire time and discipline to do what has to be done. She must make a
d
justments, master new techniques, discover capacities she had not known she possessed. All that requires time and discipline. Minutes, hours, days? She doesn
’
t know. She will do what is necessary. And does it, patiently, cautiously.

And now. She
’
s ready on
ce more.

Yes.

Try again, now. Slowly, slowly, slowly, with utmost care. Outward goes the questing tendril.

Yes.

Approaching the angel.

See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me
—

Just a touch
—

To
uch
—

Oh. Oh.

I see you. The light
—
eye of crystal
—
fountains of lava
—
oh, the light
—
your light
—
I see
—
I see
—

Oh, like a god
—

She had looked up the story in the ship
’
s archives of literature just after the time the year-captain had told it to her, the story of
Semele, the myth. And it was just as he had said, that day, the day that they first b
e
came lovers.

—
and Semele wished to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus who loved her could not refuse her
; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her r
e
mained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh,
bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him
—

—
oh God I am Semele
—

Now she is terrified. This is too much to face. She will be consumed; she will be obliterated. Noelle withdraws again, hastily. Back within the sanctuary of the ship. Rests,
regroups. Tries to regenerate her powers, but they are badly depleted. Exhausted, at least for the time being. Rest, then. Rest. This is very difficult, very dangerous. She knows it
’
s unwise to continue right now. She will not attempt to go out into the
I
ntermu
n
dium a third time that day.

***

“
They
’
re really and truly there,”
she says. She is pale, weary, still badly off balance. It is two hours since her return from her adventure. The entire excursion had taken no more
than a few minutes, apparently. It seemed like years to her. And to those waiting for her to emerge from her trance.

They are with her in the control cabin for the debriefing: Heinz, Huw, Leon, Elizabeth, Imogen, Julia. The year-captain is there too, of co
urse. “
I could feel them hovering somewhere outside the ship. A
n
gels.”

“
Angels?”
Heinz asks, sounding startled. He seems uncharacterist
i
cally subdued. “
Actually, literally?”

“
You mean, divine beings with human form, only with wings, like in the old paintin
gs?”
Noelle says.

“
And names and identities,”
says Elizabeth. “
Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael. God
’
s lieutenants.”

“
I don
’
t know that they
’
re really angels,”
Noelle says. “
That was just the word we all started to use for them.”

“
And surely you must know
that I was just using the word lightly,”
Heinz says. “
It was only a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, when I talked about angels. I never seriously believed there was any kind of intelligence out there, let alone angels. You say you saw
something
, though.
”

There are frowns. It is strange to speak of Noelle as “
seeing”
an
y
thing. But who knows what sort of sense-equivalents she experiences through her mind-powers?

“
Felt,”
says Noelle. “
Didn
’
t see.”

“
And were they really angels or weren
’
t they?”
Heinz asks.

N
oelle smiles faintly, shakes her head. “
How would I know? But I don
’
t think they were, not literal angels. I told you, I didn
’
t see anything. But I felt them.
Forces
. Immense nodes of power, each one revolving on its own axis. If that
’
s what angels are, th
en the presence of angels is what I felt.”