Starborne (5 page)

How could we convey any of this to those who remain behind? How could we make them understand?

Not with words. Never with words.

Let them come out here and see for themselves!

He smiles. He trembles and does a little shivering wriggle of deligh
t. His sudden new doubts all have fallen away, as swiftly as they came. The starship plunges onward through the great strange night. Confidence rises in him like the surging of a tide. The outcome of the voyage can only be a success, come what may.

He turn
s away from the viewplate, drained, ecstatic.

***

Noelle was the first member of the crew to be chosen, if indeed she could be said to have been chosen at all. Choice had not really been a part of it for her, nor for her sister. The entire project had been
built about their initial willingness; had they not been who and what they were, the expedition would probably have gone forth anyway, but it would have been something quite different. Perhaps it would not have happened at all. The mere existence of Noel
l
e and Yvonne was the pr
e
requisite for the whole enterprise. They were central to everything; their consent was mainly a formality; and, once it had been determined that Noelle and not Yvonne would be the one actually to travel on board the ship, her examin
ation for eligibility was a mere charade.

Of those who had truly volunteered, Heinz was the first to win the formal approval of the Board, Paco was the second, Sylvia the third, then Bruce, Huw, Chang, Julia. The year-captain was one of the last to pass th
rough the qualification process. The last one of all, technically, was Noelle, but of course she was already a part of the project, as much so as the ship itself, and for many of the same reasons.

For each of them, but for Noelle, the process of qualifying
was the same: simple, cruel, humiliating, insincere. Generally speaking, the crew members had been picked even before it had occurred to some of them that they might be interested in going. The world had become very small. Everyone
’
s capacities were know
n
. No one was particularly f
a
mous, any more, but no one was obscure, either.

Certain formalities were observed, though. It was always possible that the covert
a priori
selection process had been mistaken in one or two instances, and no one wanted mistakes.
Eleven hundred candidates were summoned to fill the fifty slots aboard the starship. They came from every part of the world, a carefully impartial and studiedly repr
e
sentative geographic sampling. Many of the old nations that had once been so distinct and
noisily self-important still had some sort of tenuous existences, more as sentimental concepts than as sovereign entities now, but they had not completely evolved out of existence yet and it was a good idea to pay lip service, at least, to the continued q
u
asi-fact of their quasi-status. Each of the formerly sovereign nations or historically si
g
nificant fragment thereof contributed a few of its former citizens to the long list. And then, too, the candidates represented most or perhaps all
—
who could say, real
ly? The old distinctions had often been so m
i
nute and dubious
—
of the planet
’
s racial and ethnic and religious groups, insofar as such groups still existed and looked upon themselves as ma
t
tering in the small and cozy society that had evolved out of the tur
b
u
lent, messy societies of the Industrial and immediately Post-Industrial epochs. In the cosmic scheme of things it no longer counted for very much that one person might like to think of himself as a Finn and anot
h
er as a Turk, or a German or a Brit or a T
hai or a Swede, nor was it r
e
ally easy any more to fit most people into the old racial classifications that had once had such troublesome significance, nor had the world
’
s innumerable theological distinctions survived very coherently into mo
d
ern times. But
there were those for whom
—
perhaps for philosophical reasons, or sentimental ones, or reasons of esthetics, or out of a lingering sense of historical connection, or a fondness for anachronisms, or just out of simple cantankerousness
—
there was still some v
a
lue in valiantly claiming, “
I am a Welshman”
or “
I am a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church”
or “
I carry the blood of the Norman aristocracy.”
Such people were considered quaint and eccentric; but there were plenty of them, even now. The world had co
m
e a long way, yes, yet ancient ve
s
tiges of the grand institutions and solemn distinctions of former civiliz
a
tions still cropped out everywhere like fossil bones whitening and weathering in the sun. They had ceased to be
problems
, yes, but they had not full
y ceased to be. Possibly they never would. And so the long list of candidates for the
Wotan
expedition was an elaborately repr
e
sentative one. The final group would be, too, insofar as that was feas
i
ble. Formalities were observed, indeed.

There were five Ex
aminers, distinguished and formidable citizens all, and they sat around a table on the top floor of a tall building in Zurich whose enormous wraparound windows offered a clear crisp view that stretched halfway to Portugal. You stood before them and they a
s
ked you things that they already knew about you, things about your technical skills and your physical health and your mental stability and your wil
l
ingness to say goodbye to the world forever, and to spend anywhere from one to five years, or perhaps even m
ore, in intimate confinement with forty-nine other people, and you could tell from the way they were listening that they weren
’
t really listening at all. After that they wanted you to speak only about your flaws. If you were in any way hesitant, they woul
d
list some for you, sometimes quite an extensive list indeed, and ask you to offer comment on your most flagrant failings, your choice of five. The whole interrogation lasted, in most cases, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they told you you w
e
re rejected. Every single candidate who came before the Board of Examiners was told that, calmly, straightforwardly, without show of regret or apology: “
Sorry, you
’
re off the list.”
They wanted to see what you would say then. That was the real examination
;
everything that had gone before had been mere maneuvering and feinting.

The ones who passed were the ones who had rejected the rejection. Some did it one way, some another. Points were given for arrogance, so long as it was sane and sensible arrogance. Th
e man who eventually would become the expedition
’
s first year-captain had simply said, “
You can
’
t be serious. Obviously I
’
m qualified. And I don
’
t like it that you
’
re playing games with me.”
Heinz, who was Swiss himself and indeed was the son of one of th
e
Examiners, had taken a similar stance, telling them that it would be the whole world
’
s loss if they stuck to their position, but that he had a high enough opinion of the human race to think that they would reconsider. Heinz had helped to design the still
unconstructed
Wotan
; he knew more of its workings than anyone. Did they really think that he was going to build it for them and then be left behind? Huw, who did indeed proudly call himself a Welshman, was another who reacted with the cool and confident at
titude that the Examiners were making a big mistake. He had designed the planetgoing equipment with which the people of the
Wotan
would explore the new worlds: was he to be denied the right to deploy his own devices, and if so, who was going to handle the
job of modifying them on-site to meet unanticipated challenges? And so on.

Most of the female candidates tended to temper their annoyance with a touch of sorrow or regret, partly for themselves but primar
i
ly
—
constructive arroganc
e again, only imperfectly concealed!
—
for the enterprise itself. Sylvia explained that she knew more about tectogenetic microsurgery than anyone else alive: how would the coming generations of starborn colonists be able to adapt to some not-quite-suitable
p
lan
e
tary environment without her special skills? Giovanna too observed that it would be a great pity for the expedition to be deprived of her unique abilities
—
her primary specialty was metabolic chemistry, and there was something magical about her insight
into the relationship between m
o
lecular structure and nutritional value. From Sieglinde, who had helped to work out some fundamental theorems of the mathematics of nospace travel, came the simple comment that she
belonged
aboard the ship and would not acce
pt disqualification. Et cetera.

What the Examiners looked for
—
and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun
—
was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by phil
o
sophical realism. Anyone w
ho raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the pre-designated fifty.

At the end of the entire process it was Noelle
’
s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little chara
de with her, too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual ve
r
dict, “
Sorry, you
’
re off the list,”
and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and the
n at last she said in her soft way, “
Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.”
It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point in
her
examination.

“
Then neither of us will go?
”
Noelle asked, mystified.

“
It was only a test of your reaction,”
they told her.

“
Ah,”
she said. “
I see.”
And laughed
—
giggled, really
—
as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed al
ong with her anyway.

Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.

We flipped a coin, they told her.

She never found out whether that was really true.

***

Noelle lies in une
asy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually
sees
. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the
deck. The deck wears a slippery shiny coating of thin hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they hav
e
been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It conceals, coa
g
ulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice floes, colliding, grinding, churning: the flo
es are at war, destroying one another
’
s edges, but some are ente
r
ing into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel can barely make headway. Th
e sails belly out us
e
lessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all
perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her ca
b
in, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind
’
s fist will punch through the stiff frozen canvas of the sails. Not
h
ing can save them. But now! Yes! Yes! A glow overhead! Yvon
ne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the p
e
rfumed tropics, toward the lands of spices and pearls.