Ship-Sister, Star-Sister

Otherwise you will lose nothing. Never “see” her again? No. You can “see” her just as well, certainly, from a distance of a million light-years as you can from the next room. There can be no doubt of that.

The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap of more than sixteen light-years. “Wait,” she says. “Yvonne is calling for a repeat. From ‘metabolic’ ” He pauses, goes back, reads again: “Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps, and—” Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. He waits, and she bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples. “Static again,” she says. “It’s worse today.”

“Are you getting through at all?”

“I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, to push. And still Yvonne asks for repeats. I don’t know what’s happening, year-captain.”

“The distance—”

“No!”

“Better than sixteen light-years.”

“No,” she says. “We’ve already demonstrated that distance effects aren’t a factor. If there’s no falling-off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years, no perceptible drop in clarity and accuracy whatever, then there shouldn’t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at sixteen light-years. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”

“Noelle—”

“Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Yvonne and I have had perfect contact from the day we left Earth until just a few days ago. And now—no, year- captain, it can’t be attenuation. It has to be some sort of interference. A local effect.”

“Yes, like sunspots, I know. But—”

“Let’s start again. Yvonne’s calling for signal. Go on from ‘manganese and potassium.’ ”

“—manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps—”

Playing go seems to ease her tension. He has not played in years, and he is rusty at first, but within minutes the old associations return and he finds himself setting up chains of stones with skill. Although he expects her to play poorly, unable to remember the patterns on the board after the first few moves, she proves to have no difficulty keeping the entire array in her mind. Only in one respect has she overestimated herself: for all her precision of coordination, she is unable to place the stones exactly, tending rather to disturb the stones already on the board as she makes her moves. After a little while she admits failure and thenceforth she calls out the plays she desires —M17, Q6, P6, R4, Cll—and he places the stones for her. In the beginning he plays unaggressively, assuming that as a novice she will be haphazard and weak, but soon he discovers that she is adroitly expanding and protecting her territory while pressing a sharp attack against his, and he begins to devise more cunning strategies. They play for two hours and he wins by 16 points, a comfortable margin but nothing to boast about, considering that he is an experienced and adept player and that this is her first game.

The others are skeptical of her instant ability. “Sure she plays well,” Heinz mutters. “She’s reading your mind, isn’t she? She can see the board through your eyes and she knows what you’re planning.”

“The only mind open to her is her sister’s,” the year-captain says vehemently.

“How can you be sure she’s telling the truth?”

The year-captain scowls. “Play a game with her yourself. You’ll see whether it’s skill or mind-reading that’s at work.”

Heinz, looking sullen, agrees. That evening he challenges Noelle; later he comes to the year-captain, abashed. “She plays well. She almost beat me, and she did it fairly.”

The year-captain plays a second game with her. She sits almost motionless, eyes closed, lips compressed, offering the coordinates of her moves in a quiet bland monotone, like some sort of game-playing mechanism. She rarely takes long to decide on a move and she makes no blunders that must be retracted. Her capacity to devise game-patterns has grown astonishingly; she nearly shuts him off from the center, but he recovers the initiative and manages a narrow victory. Afterward she loses once more to Heinz, but again she displays an increase of ability, and in the evening she defeats Chiang, a respected player. Now she becomes invincible. Undertaking two or three matches every day, she triumphs over Heinz, Sylvia, the year-captain, and Leon; go has become something immense to her, something much more than a mere game, a simple test of strength; she focuses her energy on the board so intensely that her playing approaches the level of a religious discipline, a kind of meditation. On the fourth day she defeats Roy, the ship’s champion, with such economy that everyone is dazzled. Roy can speak of nothing else. He demands a rematch and is defeated again.

Noelle wondered, as the ship was lifting from Earth, whether she really would be able to maintain contact with Yvonne across the vast span of interstellar space. She had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance. They had often spoken to each other without difficulty from opposite sides of the planet, yes, but would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart? During the early hours of the voyage she and Yvonne kept up a virtually continuous linking, and the signal remained clear and sharp, with no perceptible falling off of reception, as the ship headed outward. Past the orbit of the moon, past the million-kilometer mark, past the orbit of Mars: clear and sharp, clear and sharp. They had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance. But Noelle remained unsure of what would happen once the ship abandoned conventional power and shunted into nospace in order to attain faster- than-light velocity. She would then be in a space apart from Yvonne; in effect she would be in another universe; would she still be able to reach her sister’s mind? Tension rose in her as the moment of the shunt approached, for she had no idea what life would be like for her in the absence of Yvonne. To face that dreadful silence, to find herself thrust into such terrible isolation—but it did not happen. They entered nospace and her awareness of Yvonne never flickered. Here we are, wherever we are, she said, and moments later came Yvonne’s response, a cheery greeting from the old continuum. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Nor did the signal grow more tenuous in the weeks that followed. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp, until the static began.

The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial waveguide. He sees the joining of those two minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of Yvonne and Noelle, Noelle and Yvonne, and the glowing bond that stretches between the sisters gives off so brilliant a radiance that he stirs and moans and presses his forehead into the pillow.

The interference grows worse. Neither Noelle nor Yvonne can explain what is happening; Noelle clings, without conviction, to her sunspot analogy. They still manage to make contact twice daily, but it is increasingly a strain on the sisters’ resources, for every sentence must be repeated two or three times, and whole blocks of words now do not get through at all. Noelle has become thin and haggard. Go refreshes her, or at least diverts her from this failing of her powers. She has become a master of the game, awarding even Roy a two-stone handicap; although she occasionally loses, her play is always distinguished, extraordinarily original in its sweep and design. When she is not playing she tends to be remote and aloof. She is in all aspects a more elusive person than she was before the onset of this communications crisis.

Noelle dreams that her blindness has been taken from her. Sudden light surrounds her, and she opens her eyes, sits up, looks about in awe and wonder, saying to herself, this is a table, this is a chair, this is how my statuettes look, this is what my sea urchin is like. She is amazed by the beauty of everything in her room. She rises, goes forward, stumbling at first, groping, then magically gaining poise and balance, learning how to walk in this new way, judging the positions of things not by echoes and air currents but rather by using her eyes.