theory: glib, implausible. Could it be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? She has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, 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 Noelle is so self-contained, so serene, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communion with her distant sister that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems unapproachable; her strange perfection of soul sequesters 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 of today’s report to Earth. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communique all the same.”
“It would be cruel if we didn’t. We mean so much to them.”
“I wonder.”
“Oh, yes. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel. Word from us is terribly important to them.”
“As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace.” His voice sounds harsh to him, his rhythms of speech coarse and blurting. His words surprise him. He had not known he felt this way about Earth. Still, he goes on. “That’s all we represent: novelty, vicarious adventure, a moment of amusement.”
“Do you mean that? It sounds so awful cynical.”
He shrugs. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiques. Perhaps sooner than that. A year and they’ll have forgotten us.”
She says, “I don’t see you as a cynical man. Yet you often say such—” She falters. “Such—”
“Such blunt things? I’m a realist, I guess. Is that the same as a cynic?”
“Don’t try to label yourself, year-captain.”
“I only try to look at things realistically.”
“You don’t know what real
The conversation is suddenly out of control: much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken like this before. It is as if there is a malign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them unnaturally tense and aggressive. He feels panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle’s consciousness, will she still be able to make contact with far-off Yvonne?
He is unable to prevent himself from parrying: “Do
She tells him, “You’re a man in search of himself. That’s why you volunteered to come all the way out here.”
“And why did you volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle?” he asks helplessly.
She lets the lids slide slowly down over her unseeing eyes and offers no reply. He tries to salvage things a bit by saying more calmly into her tense silence, “Never mind. I didn’t intend to upset you, Shall we transmit the report?”
“Wait.”
“All right.”
She appears to be collecting herself. After a moment she says, less edgily, “How do you think they see us at home? As ordinary human beings doing an unusual job or as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage?”
“Right now, as superhuman creatures, epic voyage.”
“And later we’ll become more ordinary in their eyes?”
“Later we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us.”
“How sad.” Her tone tingles with a grace-note of irony. She may be laughing at him. “And you, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”
“Something in between. Rather more than ordinary, but no demigod.”
“I regard myself as quite ordinary except in two respects,” she says sweetly.
“One is your telepathic communion with your sister and the other—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable at naming it. “The other is your blindness.”
“Of course,” she says. Smiles. Radiantly. “Shall we do the report now?”
“Have you made contact with Yvonne?”
“Yes. She’s waiting.”
“Very well, then.” Glancing at his notes, he begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity… Apparent location…”
She naps after every transmission. They exhaust her. She was beginning to fade even before he reached the end of today’s message; now, as he steps into the corridor, he knows she will be asleep before he closes the door. He leaves, frowning, troubled by the odd outburst of tension between them and by his mysterious attack of “realism.” By what right does he say Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? All during the years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement never flagged, indeed spurred the voyagers themselves on at times when their interminable training routines threatened
But there is so little to tell, really, except in that one transcendental area where there is so much. And how, really, can any of that be told?
How can
He pauses by the viewplate in the main transit corridor, a rectangular window a dozen meters long that gives direct access to the external environment. The pearl-gray emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the skin of the ship. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to anticipate nothing in the way of outside inputs as they crossed the galaxy; they would be shuttling through a void of infinite length, a matter-free tube, and there would be no sights to entertain them, no backdrop of remote nebulas, no glittering stars, no stray meteors, not so much as a pair of colliding atoms yielding the tiniest momentary spark, only an eternal sameness, like a blank wall. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, demand no delights from the universe beyond the ship, make the ship itself your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided those warnings had been! Nospace was not a wall but rather a window. It was impossible for those on Earth to understand what revelations lay in that seeming emptiness. The year-captain, head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now revels in his keenest pleasure. A glance at the viewplate reveals that place where the immanent becomes the transcendent: the year-captain sees once again the infinite reverberating waves of energy that sweep through the grayness. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; it is a stunning profusion of interlocking energy fields, linking everything to everything, it is music that also is light, it is light that also is music, and those aboard the ship are sentient particles wholly enmeshed in that vast all-engulfing reverberation, that radiant song of gladness, that is the universe. The voyagers journey joyously toward the center of all things, giving themselves gladly into the care of cosmic forces far surpassing human control and understanding. He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it.
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 delight. He turns away from the viewplate,
