Starborne

gone by so fast, isn’t it?” he asks, wanting to say something and unable to find anything less fatuous to offer.

Noelle makes no reply, simply smiles up at him in that impersonal way of hers, as though she has already gone back to whatever conversation with her distant sister he has in all probability interrupted. She is an eternal mystery to him. He studies her lovely unreadable face a moment more; then he moves away from her without a further word. She will know, somehow, that he is no longer standing by her side.

There is trouble again in the transmission the next day. When Noelle makes the morning report, Yvonne complains that the signal is coming through indistinctly and noisily. But Noelle, telling this to the year-captain, does not seem as distraught as she had been over the first episode of fuzzy transmission. Evidently she has decided that the noise is some sort of local phenomenon, an artifact of this particular sector of nospace — something like a sunspot effect, maybe — and will vanish once they have moved farther from the source of the disturbance.

Perhaps so. The year-captain isn’t as confident of that as she seems to be. But she probably has a better understanding of such things than he has. In any event, he is pleased to see her cheerful and serene again.

What courage it must have taken for her to agree to go along on this voyage!

He sometimes tries to put himself in her place. Consider your situation carefully, he thinks, pretending that he is Noelle. You are twenty-six years old, female, sightless. You have never married or even entered into a basic relationship. Throughout your life your only real human contact has been with your twin sister, who is, like yourself, blind and single. Her mind is fully open to yours. Yours is to hers. You and she are two halves of one soul, inexplicably embedded in separate bodies. With her, only with her, do you feel complete. And now you are asked to take part in a voyage to the stars without her — a voyage that is sure to cut you off from her forever, at least in a physical sense.

You are told that if you leave Earth aboard the starship, there is no chance that you will ever see your sister again. Nor do you have any assurance that your mind and hers will be able to maintain their rapport once you are aloft.

You are also told that your presence is important to the success of the voyage, for without your participation it would take decades or even centuries for news of the starship to reach Earth, but if you are aboard — and if, if, contact with Yvonne can be maintained across interstellar distances, which is not something that you can know in advance — it will be possible for the voyagers to maintain instantaneous communication with Earth, no matter how far into the galaxy they journey.

The others who undertake to sail the sea of stars aboard the Wotan will be making painful sacrifices too, you know. You understand that everyone on board the ship will be leaving loved ones behind: mothers and fathers, perhaps, or brothers and sisters, certainly friends, lovers. There will be no one in the Wotan’s complement who does not have some Earthbound tie that will have to be severed forever. But your case is special, is it not, Noelle? To put it more precisely, your case is unique. Your sister is your other self. You will be leaving part of yourself behind.

What should you do, Noelle?

Consider. Consider.

You consider. And you agree to go, of course. You are needed: how can you refuse? As for your sister, you will naturally lose the opportunity to touch her, to hold her close, to derive direct comfort from the simple fact of her physical presence. You will be giving that up forever. But is that really so significant? They say you must understand that you will never “see” her again, but that’s not true at all. Seeing is not the issue. You can “see” Yvonne 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. If contact can be maintained between them at two or three continents’ distance — and it has — then it can be maintained from one end of the universe to another. You are certain of that. You have a desperate need to be certain of that.

You consult Yvonne. Yvonne tells you what you are hoping to hear.

Go, love. This is something that has to be done. And everything will work out the right way.

Yes. Yes. Everything will work out. They agree on that. And so Noelle, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, tells them that she is willing to undertake the voyage.

There was no way, really, that she could have known that it would work. The only thing that mattered to her, her relationship with her sister, would be at risk. How could she have taken the terrible gamble?

But she had. And she had been right, until now. Until now. And what is happening now? the year-captain wonders. Is the link really breaking? What will happen to Noelle, he asks himself, if she loses contact with her sister?

For a moment, right at the beginning, sitting in her cabin aboard the Wotan as it lay parked in orbit above the Earth with launch only an hour or two away, Noelle had given some thought to such matters too, and in that moment she had nearly let herself be overwhelmed by panic. It seemed inconceivable to her, suddenly, that she would really be able to maintain contact with her sister across the vast span of interstellar space. And she could not imagine what life would be like for her in the absence of Yvonne. A sword suddenly descending, cutting the thread that had bound them since the moment of their birth, and even before. And then that dreadful silence — that awful unthinkable isolation — she was astonished, suddenly, that she had ever exposed herself to the possibility that such a thing might happen.

What am I doing here? Where am I? Get out of this place, idiot! Run, home, home to Yvonne!

Wild fear swept her like fire in a parched forest. She trembled, and the trembling turned into an anguished shaking, and she clasped her arms around her shoulders and doubled over, sick, miserably frightened, gasping in terror. But then, somehow, some measure of calmness returned. She closed her eyes — that always helped — took deep breaths, compelled herself to unfold her clasped arms and stand straight, forced the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back to uncoil. It would all work out, she told herself fiercely. It would. It would. Yvonne would be there after the shunt just as before.

It was time to go back to the lounge. The captain was going to make a speech to the assembled crew just before the launch itself. Coolly Noelle moved through the corridors of the ship, touching this, stroking that, drawing its strange sterile air deep into her lungs so that she would begin to feel native to it, familiarizing herself with textures and smells and highly local patterns of coolness or warmth. She had already been aboard twice before, during the indoctrination sessions. They had built the starship up here in space, for it was a flimsy thing and could not be subjected to the traumas of the acceleration needed to lift it out of a planetary gravitational field. For months, years, hordes of mass-drivers had come chugging up from bases on the Moon, hauling tons of prefabricated materiel as the great job of weaving and spinning went on and on. And gradually the members of the crew had been chosen, brought together here, shown their way around the strange-looking vessel that would contain their lives, perhaps, until the end of their days.

Yvonne will still be there once we have set out, she told herself. Why should the link fail?

There was no reason to think that it would; but none to think that it would necessarily hold, either. She and Yvonne were something new under the sun. No body of experimental study existed to cover the case of telepathic twin sisters separated by a span of dozens of light-years. Noelle had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance, but her faith had been secure up till that moment of sudden panic just now. She and Yvonne had often spoken to each other from opposite sides of the planet without difficulty, had they not?

Yes. Yes. But would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart?

The last hours before departure time were ticking down. The ship was full of people, not all of them actual members of the crew. Noelle felt their presences all around her: men, a lot of them, deep voices, a special sharpness to their sweat. Some women too. The rustle of different kinds of garments, thin robes, crisp blouses, the clink of jewelry. Everybody tense: she could smell it, a sharpness in the air. She could hear it in the subliminal hesitations of their voices.

Well, why not be tense? Switches would be thrown and incomprehensible forces would come into play and the starship would vanish with all hands into nowhere.

There had been test voyages, of course. This project was almost a century old. The unmanned nospace ships, first, going out on short journeys into absolute strangeness and successfully sending radio messages back, which arrived after the obligatory interval that radio transmission imposes. And then two manned journeys into interstellar space, small ships carrying unimaginably courageous volunteers —