Starborne

uncomplimentary-sounding in German; Zena nudges her and tells her to hush; the others remain silent.

“Very well,” Hesper says. “Let me show you now what I have found.”

He touches switches and conjures up virtual images at the far end of the corridor, where the beams of a communicator node intersect.

Hesper tells them that what they see is a star and a solar system. Hesper’s star seems not to have a name, only an eight-digit catalog number. So evidently it hadn’t ever registered on the consciousnesses of those old Arab astronomers who had given Rigel and Mizar and Aldebaran and all those other stars such lovely poetic designations, somewhere back a thousand or two years ago. All it has is a number. But it has planets. Six of them.

“This is Planet A,” he announces. The assembled voyagers behold a small bright dot of light with six lesser dots arrayed in orbits around it. He explains that this is merely the decoding of a reality-analog, not in any way an actual telescopic image. But it is a reliable decoding, he assures everyone. The instruments with which he pierces the veil of the nospace tube are as accurate as any telescope. “Main sequence sun, type G2. Type G and perhaps Type K are the only acceptable stars for us, of course. This is a yellow-orange sun, G2, not uncomfortably different in luminosity from our own. I call your attention to the fourth planet.” A small gesture of a finger: one of the six small dots expands until it fills the visual field. Now it is a globe, green faintly banded with blue and red and brown, dabs of white above and below. It has a cheerily familiar look. “Here we see it, not a direct image, of course, but an enhanced transformation of the data. Its diameter, by all indications, is Earthlike. Its distance from its primary is such that small ice caps are present at the poles. The spectral reading indicates a strong dip in brightness at 0.76 micron, which is a wavelength at which molecular oxygen absorbs radiation. Nitrogen is also present — somewhat overabundantly, in truth, but not seriously so. The temperature range seems to be within human tolerability. Also we have indications of the presence of water, and the distance of this world from its primary is such that water would be capable of existing on its surface. Now, notice also the sharp absorption band at the far red end of the visible spectrum — 0.7 micron, approximately. Green light is reflected, red and blue are absorbed. This is a characteristic of chlorophyll.”

“So what time do we land?” Paco calls out.

Unperturbed, Hesper continues blandly: “We note also the minute presence of methane, one part in 1.5 million. That is not much methane, but why is there any? Methane rapidly oxidizes into water and carbon dioxide. If this atmosphere were in equilibrium, all the methane would have been gone long ago. Therefore we must not have an equilibrium here, do you see? Something is generating new methane to replace that which is oxidized. Ongoing metabolic processes, perhaps? The presence of bacteria, or larger organisms? Life, anyway, of one sort or another. Every indication thus far points toward viability.”

“And if the place is already inhabited?” asks Heinz. “What if they don’t want to sell us any real estate?”

“We would not, of course, intrude on a planet that has intelligent life of its own. But that can readily be determined while we are still at a distance. The emission of modulated radio waves, or even the visual signs of occupation—”

“How far is this place from our present location?” Sylvia wants to know.

Hesper looks puzzled. He spreads the fingers of his precise little hands and glances uncomfortably toward the year-captain.

The year-captain says, “There’s no easy way of answering that. While we’re in nospace we don’t have spatial coordinates relating to anything but Earth.”

“In relation to Earth, then,” Sylvia says.

“About ninety-five light-years,” Hesper tells her.

There is murmuring in the corridor. “Ninety-five light-years” is a phrase that carries the weight of serious distance.

“We should be able to reach it,” says the year-captain, making a quick and probably slightly hazy estimate, “in about seven months.”

Hesper says, “The other prime prospect, Planet B, which is eighty-six light-years from Earth, has similar characteristics, although with perhaps keener indications of the presence of organic molecules.” A new virtual pattern springs into the air in the hallways, eleven pips of light clustered about their bright little star. He begins to speak once more of spectral lines, insolation levels, temperature gradients, probable size and gravitational pull, electromagnetic emissions, and all the other criteria they must consider.

Somebody cautiously asks if they have enough information to make a decision about a landing.

The year-captain says they do. Enough to allow him to recommend a reconnaissance mission, at any rate. And what they don’t know now, they will be able to learn by sending down drone surveillance vehicles before deciding whether to undertake an actual manned exploration. But first they must agree to take the steps that will bring them out of nospace and carry them to the vicinity of the designated world. There are certain risks in that; there will be risks every time they move from nospace to normal space or back again. But those are risks that must be taken.

He calls for the motion. He proposes a survey of Hesper’s Planet A; and if A proves unsuitable, a look at Planet B.

No one is opposed. They have come out here, after all, to find a place to live.

PlayingGo seems to ease the tensions of Noelle’s situation. She has been playing daily for weeks now, as addicted to the game as any of them, and by now she has become astonishingly expert at it.

The year-captain was her first opponent. Because he had not played in years he was rusty at first, but within minutes the old associations returned and he found himself setting up chains of stones with skill. Although he had expected her to play poorly, unable to remember the patterns on the board after the first few moves, she proved to have no difficulty keeping the entire array on her mind. Only in one respect had she overestimated herself: for all her precision of coordination, she was unable to place the stones exactly, tending rather to disturb the stones already on the board as she made her moves. After a while she admitted failure and henceforth she would call out the plays she desired — M17, Q6, P6, R4, C11 — and he would place the stones for her. In the beginning he played unaggressively, assuming that as a novice she would be haphazard and weak, but soon he discovered that she was adroitly expanding and protecting her territory while pressing a sharp attack against his, and he began to devise more cunning strategies. They played for two hours and he won by sixteen points, a comfortable margin but nothing to boast about, considering that the year-captain was an experienced and adept player and that this was her first game.

The others were skeptical of her instant ability. “Sure she plays well,” Paco muttered. “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 said vehemently.

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

The year-captain scowled. “Play a game with her yourself. That ought to tell you whether it’s skill or mind reading that’s at work.”

Paco, looking sullen, agreed. That evening he challenged Noelle to a game; and later he came to the year- captain looking abashed. “She plays very well. She almost beat me, and she did it fairly.”

The year-captain played a second game with her. She sat almost motionless, eyes closed, lips compressed, calling out the coordinates of her moves in a quiet steady monotone, like some sort of clever automaton, a mechanical game-playing device. She rarely needed much time to decide on her moves and she made no blunders that had to be retracted. Her capacity to devise game patterns had grown with incredible swiftness just in those first few days: no more than thirty minutes into the game he found that she had him nearly shut off from the center, but he recovered the initiative and managed a narrow victory. Afterward she lost once more to Paco and then to Heinz, but again she displayed an increase of ability, and in the evening she defeated Chang, a respected player. Now she became invincible. Undertaking two or three matches every day, she triumphed over Leon, Elliot, the year-captain, and Sylvia. Go had become something immense to her, something more than a mere game or a simple test of mental agility. She focused her energy on the board so intensely that her playing approached the level of a religious discipline, a kind of meditation. On her fourth day of play she defeated Roy, the ship’s reigning champion, with such economy that everyone was dazzled. Roy could speak of nothing else that evening. He demanded a rematch and was defeated again.

And now she plays almost all the time. She sits within a luminous sphere of Noelleness, a strange