“Angel?”
“Not really an angel, year-captain. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of alien species. More like the energy-creatures Heinz was discussing. But bigger. Bigger. I don’t know what it was, year-captain.”
“You told me you were talking with a star.”
“—a star!”
“In your delirium. That’s what you said.”
Her eyes blaze with excitement, “A star! Yes! Yes, year-captain! I think I was, yes!”
“But what does that mean: talking to a star?”
She laughs. “It means talking to a star, year-captain. A great ball of fiery gas, year-captain, and it has a mind, it has a consciousness. I think that’s what it was. I’m sure, now. I’m sure!”
“But how can a—”
“The light goes abruptly from her eyes. She is traveling again; she is no longer with him. He waits beside her bed. An hour, two hours, half a day. What bizarre realm has she penetrated? Her breathing is a distant, impersonal drone. So far away from him now, so remote from any place he comprehends. At last her eyelids flicker. She looks up. Her face seems transfigured. To the year-captain she still appears to be partly in that other world beyond the ship. “Yes,” she says. “Not an angel, year-captain. A sun. A living intelligent sun.” Her eyes are radiant. “A sun, a star, a sun,” she murmurs. “I touched the consciousness of a sun. Do you believe that, year- captain? I found a network of stars that live, that think, that have minds, that have souls. That communicate. The whole universe is alive.”
“A star,” he says dully. “The stars have minds.”
“Yes.”
“All of them? Our own sun too?”
“All of them. We came to the place in the galaxy where this star lives, and it was broadcasting on my wavelength, and its output began overriding my link with Yvonne. That was the interference, year-captain. The big star, broadcasting.”
This conversation has taken on for him the texture of a dream. He says quietly, “Why didn’t Earth’s sun override you and Yvonne when you were on Earth?”
She shrugs. “It isn’t old enough. It takes—I don’t know —billions of years until they’re mature, until they can transmit. Our sun isn’t old enough, year-captain. None of the stars close to Earth is old enough. But out here —”
“Are you in contact with it now?”
“Yes. With it and with many others. And with Yvonne.”
“Yvonne too?”
“She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle pauses. “I can bring others into the circuit. I could bring you in, year-captain.”
“Me?”
“You. Would you like to touch a star with your mind?”
“What will happen to me? Will it harm me?”
“Did it harm me, year-captain?”
“Will I still be me afterward?”
“Am I still me, year-captain?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Open to me. Try. See what happens.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Touch a star, year-captain.”
He puts his hand on hers. “Go ahead,” he says, and his soul becomes a solarium.
Afterward, with the solar pulsations still reverberating in the mirrors of his mind, with blue-white sparks leaping in his synapses, he says, “What about the others?”
“I’ll bring them in too.”
He feels a flicker of momentary resentment. He does not want to share the illumination. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment, he abolishes it.
“Take my hand,” Noelle says.
They reach out together. One by one they touch the others. Roy. Sylvia. Heinz. Elliot. He feels Noelle surging in tandem with him, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, eternal. All are joined. Ship-sister, star- sister: all become one. The year-captain realizes that the days of playing
“And now,” Noelle whispers. “Now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength into Yvonne, and Yvonne —”
Yvonne draws Earth’s seven billion into the network.
The ship hurtles through the nospace tube. Soon the year-captain will initiate the search for a habitable planet. If they discover one, they will settle there. If not, they will go on, and it will not matter at all, and the ship and its seven billion passengers will course onward forever, warmed by the light of the friendly stars.
