Starborne

her room, picking things up, stroking them, matching shapes with actual appearances, correlating the familiar feel of her objects with the new data coming to her now through this miraculously restored extra sense. Then she leaves the cabin and moves about the ship, discovering the faces of her shipmates. Intuitively she knows who they all are. You are Roy, you are Sylvia, you are Heinz, you are the year-captain. They look, surprisingly, very much as she had always imagined them: Roy fleshy and red-faced, Sylvia fragile, the year-captain lean and fierce, Heinz handsome and constantly smiling, and so on and so on, Elliot and Marcus and Chang and Julia and Hesper and Giovanna and the rest, everyone matching expectations. Everyone beautiful. She goes to the window of which all the others talk, the one that provides a view of nospace, and looks out into the famous grayness. Yes, yes, the scene through that window is precisely as they say it is: a cosmos of wonders, a miracle of complex pulsating tones, level after level of incandescent reverberation sweeping outward toward the rim of the boundless universe. There is nothing to see, and there is everything. For an hour she stands before that dense burst of rippling energies, giving herself to it and taking it into herself, and then, and then, just as the ultimate moment of illumination toward which she has been moving throughout the entire hour is coming over her, she realizes that something is wrong. Yvonne is not with her. Noelle reaches out with her mind and does not touch Yvonne. Again. No. No contact. Can’t find her. She has somehow traded her special power for the mere gift of sight.

Yvonne? Yvonne?

All is still. Where is Yvonne?

Yvonne is not with her. This is only a dream, Noelle tells herself, and I will soon awaken from it. But she cannot awaken. She cries out in terror. And then she feels Yvonne at last. “It’s all right,” Yvonne whispers, across the immensities of space and time. “I’m here, love, I’m here, I’m here, just as I always am,” comes Yvonne’s soft voice, rising out of the great whirlpool of invisible suns. Yes. All is well. Noelle can feel the familiar closeness again. Yvonne is there, right there, beside her. Trembling, Noelle embraces her sister. Looks at her. Beholds her for the first time.

I can see, Yvonne! I can see!

Noelle realizes that in her first rapture of sightedness she had quite forgotten to look at herself, although she had rushed about looking at everything and everyone else. It had not occurred to her. Mirrors have never been part of her world. But now she looks at Yvonne, which is, of course, like looking at herself, and Yvonne is beautiful, her hair dark and silken and lustrous, her face smooth and sleek, her features finely shaped, her eyes — her blind eyes! — alive and sparkling. Noelle tells Yvonne how beautiful she is, and Yvonne smiles and nods, and they laugh and hold one another close, and they begin to weep with pleasure and love, out of the sheer joy of being with each other, and then Noelle awakens, and of course the world is as dark as ever around her.

Heinz goes out, finally. Finally. There are exercises that the year-captain learned in Lofoten, spiritual disciplines designed to restore and maintain tranquillity. He makes use of them now, breathing slowly and deeply, running through each of the routines. And then he runs through them all over again.

The conversation with Heinz has seemed interminable — and has been deeply embarrassing, and it has left the year-captain feeling greatly annoyed, as annoyed as his fundamentally controlled and equable nature will allow him to be. Does Heinz think the year-captain has failed to notice Noelle’s disturbed state? Does Heinz think he has failed to care about it? Heinz knows nothing, presumably, of the recent difficulties in communication between the sisters. It is not his business to know about that. But the year-captain knows; the year-captain is aware of the existence of a problem; the year-captain does not need the assistance of Heinz in order to discover that an important member of the expedition is experiencing problems. And in any case, what does Heinz want him todo about it? Does he have some suggestion to make, and, if so, why has he not made it? That damnable sly smile of Heinz’s seemed always to imply that he was holding something back that would be very useful for you to know, if only he cared to let you in on the secret. It was easy enough to think that there was less behind that smile of his than you might suspect. But was that true?

The year-captain wonders whether everyone aboard, one by one, is about to undergo some maddening transformation for the worse. Already Noelle is losing the ability to communicate with her sister on Earth; the blunt and straightforward Sieglinde has unsettlingly chosen to challenge the reliability of the theorems that she herself helped to write; and now the easygoing and irreverent Heinz is tiresomely eager to explain the year-captain’s own responsibilities to him. What next? What next, he wonders?

The year-captain is particularly bothered by Heinz’s sudden little burst of pious helpfulness because it has kept him from a badly needed therapeutic engagement of his own. Julia is waiting for him in their secret place of rendezvous in a dark corner of the cargo deck.

Julia and the year-captain are lovers. They have been since the third week of the voyage, after she had extricated herself from her brief and unsatisfying fling with Paco. So far as he knows, no one but he and she are aware of their relationship, such as it is, and he prefers to keep it that way. Among the people of the Wotan he has a reputation for asceticism, for a certain monkish ferocity of discipline, and, rightly or wrongly, he has come to feel that this enhances his authority as captain.

The truth is that the year-captain feels the pull of physical desire at least as often as anyone else on board, and has been doing something about it with great regularity, as any sane person would. But he does it secretly. He finds pleasure and amusement in the knowledge that he has managed to maintain a private life within the goldfish bowl that is the ship. There are times when the year-captain feels that he is committing the sin of pride by allowing others to think that he is more ascetic than he really is; at the very least, there is something hypocritical about it, he realizes. He has chosen, however, to lock himself into this pattern of furtive behavior since the beginning of the voyage, and now it seems to him much too late to do anything about changing it. Nor does he really want to, anyway.

So he sets out once more down the corridor to the dropchute, descends to the lower levels, moves with his usual feline grace through the tangle of stored gear that clutters those levels, and, pressing his hand against the identification plate that gives access to the deepest storage areas, steps through the opening hatch into the secret world of the ship’s most precious cargo, its bank of genetic material.

Not many people have Need-to-Enter access to this area coded into the ship’s master brain. Chang does — he is the custodian of the Wotan’s collection of fertilized and unfertilized reproductive cells — and so does Sylvia, the ship’s other genetic specialist. But the expedition is a long way from any point where the birth of children aboard ship would be a desirable thing, and neither of them has reason to come down here very often. Michael, whose primary job is maintenance of all of the ship’s internal mechanical functions, is another one who can enter this part of the vessel without the year-captain’s specific permission. There are two or three others. But most of the time the unborn and indeed mostly still unconceived future colonists of the as yet undiscovered New Earth sleep peacefully in the stasis of their freezer units, unintruded upon by visitors from above.

Julia is not someone who should be authorized to come to this part of the ship. Her responsibilities center entirely on the functioning of the stardrive, and no element of the stardrive mechanism is located anywhere near here. The year-captain has added her palmprint to the section’s Need-to-Enter list for purely personal reasons. He has given her the ability to pass through that hatch because hardly anyone else has it, which makes this an excellent location for their clandestine meetings. The chances of their being disturbed here are very small. And if ever they should be, why would anyone care that the year-captain has illicitly permitted his lover to join him down here? He suspects that his little crime, such as it is, would be taken merely as a welcome indication that he is human, after all.

This is a dark place, lit only by little pips of slave-light that jump into energized states along the illuminator strands set overhead as he passes beneath them, and wink out again when he has gone by. To the right and the left are the cabinets in which germ plasm of various sorts is stored. The plan of the voyage calls for no births aboard ship at all during the first year; then, if it seems desirable in the context of what position the ship has attained and what potential colony-worlds, if any, have been located, births will be authorized to shipboard couples interested in rearing children. There is room on board for up to fifty additional passengers to be born en route. After that, no more until a planetary landing. The stored ova and spermatozoa are to be kept in the cooler until that time as well. A mere twenty-five couples, no matter how often their couplings are rearranged, will not be able to provide sufficient genetic diversity for the peopling of a new world. But all those thousands of stored ova and the myriad sperm cells will be available to vary the genetic mix once the colony has been established.

A single small light illuminates the year-captain’s love nest, which is an egg-shaped security node, just barely big enough for two people of reasonable size to embrace in, that separates one of the sectors of freezer cabinets