Starborne

second year.”

In their secret place belowdecks Julia attempts to offer him consolation for the bitter outcome of the election. But his Lofoten skills have carried him through the crisis; he has already begun to reconcile himself to the loss of the Planet A trip. There will be other worlds to visit beyond this one, and someday he will no longer be year-captain and will be allowed to go down and explore them; or else this will be the planet where they are going to settle, in which case he will be seeing it soon enough. Either way, there is no real reason for him to grieve. So the year- captain accepts, and gladly, the comfort other breasts, and her lips, and her thighs, and of the warm place between them; but Julia’s words of sympathy he brushes gently aside. He does tell her, though, how touched he was by her gesture of willingness to take the captaincy from him so that he would be able to join the landing party. What he does not speak of is that sensation that seemed so much like love for her that passed through him at the moment of her acceptance of the nomination. It was, he has subsequently come to see, not really love at all, only a warm burst of gratitude. Love and gratitude are different things; one does not fall in love simply as a response to favors received. He is fond of Julia; he likes and respects her a great deal; he certainly takes great pleasure in all that passes between them in their little private cubicle. But he does not think he loves her, and he does not want to complicate their relationship with discussions of illusory states.

Noelle, unworldly as she often seems to be, shows surprising awareness of the meaning and consequences to him of the election. “You’re terribly disappointed, aren’t you, at not being able to be part of the landing mission?” she says when they meet the next morning for the daily transmission to Earth.

“Disappointed, yes. Not necessarilyterribly disappointed. I very much wanted to go. But I’ll survive staying behind.”

“Do you mind very much having to be year-captain for a second term?”

“Only insofar as it keeps me from leaving the ship,” he says. “The work itself isn’t anything I object to. I simply accept it as something I have to do.”

She turns toward him, giving him that forthright straight-in-the-eyes look of hers that so eerily seems to deny the fact other blindness. “If one of the others had been elected year-captain,” she says, “then you and I wouldn’t be meeting like this any more. I would be getting briefings from Julia or Paco or Heinz about the messages to send to Earth.”

That startles him. He hadn’t considered that possibility at all.

“I’m glad that didn’t happen. I would miss you,” she says. “I like being with you very much.”

Her quietly uttered words unsettle him tremendously. The statement is too simple, too childlike, to carry with it any deeper meaning. Of that he is certain, or at least wants to be certain. She has said it as though they are playmates and this is their daily game, the loss of which she would regret. And yet she is not a child, is she? She is a woman, twenty-six years old, a beautiful and intelligent and mysterious woman. I like being with you very much. Yes. Yes. The simple straightforward phrase makes something stir in him, something disturbing and turbulent and troublesome, the strength of which is all out of keeping with the innocence of her words. He stares at her smooth, broad forehead, seeking some understanding of what may be going on behind it. But she is utterly opaque to him, as she has always been.

Noelle getting her briefings from Heinz — Noelle and Paco—

There is some sort of leap of connections within the year-captain’s whirling mind and he finds himself wondering whether Noelle has had any sort of intimate involvement with anyone aboard ship, other than her daily meetings with him. Sexual, emotional, anything. Mostly she spends her time in her cabin, so far as he knows, except for the hours each day that she is in the gaming lounge playingGo, or the tune consumed in taking meals, bathing, official meetings, and so forth. Certainly there has been no gossip about her going around. But what does that mean? He doesn’t think there’s been any gossip about him and Julia, either. The starship is big — the biggest spacegoing vessel ever built, it is, by a couple of orders of magnitude — and it is full of nooks, crannies, hideaways. All sorts of undetected things might be going on. Noelle and Paco? Noelle and Huw? Noelle and Hesper, for God’s sake, down in Hesper’s little chamber of Hashing colored lights that she would never be able to see?

All these wild thoughts astound him. He finds himself suddenly lost in a vortex of crazy nonsense.

Nothing is going on, he tells himself. Not that it should matter to you one way or the other.

Noelle leads a life of complete chastity. There are no probable alternatives. She comes occasionally to the baths, yes — everyone does that — and sits there unselfconsciously naked in the steamy tub, but what of it? She does not flirt. She does not join in the cheerfully bawdy byplay, the double entendres and open solicitations, of the baths. She has never been known to go into one of the little adjacent rooms with anyone. On board this ship she lives like a nun. She has always lived that way. Very likely she is a virgin, even, the year-captain thinks.

A virgin. Strange medieval concept. The word itself seems bizarrely antiquated. No doubt thereare such creatures somewhere — past the age of twelve or thirteen, that is. But one doesn’t ever give them much thought, any more than one thinks about unicorns.

Whatever else she may be, Noelle is certainly an island unto herself. She and faraway Yvonne dwell joined in an indissoluble union, into which no one else is ever admitted by either sister. If she is indeed a virgin, then the virginity, perhaps, may be essential to the manifestation of her telepathic powers. Untouched, untouchable. And so she would not ever — she has not ever—

What in God’s name is happening here?

This is all craziness. His head is full, suddenly, of absurd puerile speculations and suspicions and theories. He is behaving exactly like the lovesick adolescent that he never was. Why? Why? He wonders just how much Noelle means to him. Certainly she fascinates him. Is he in love with her, then? At the very least, her strangely impersonal beauty exerts a powerful effect on him. Does he want to go to bed with her? Then go to bed with her, he tells himself. If she’s interested, of course. If she is not in literal truth the nun he was just imagining her to be.

The year-captain is grateful now for Noelle’s blindness, which keeps her from seeing the way his face must look as all this stuff goes coursing through his mind.

As he struggles to regain his equilibrium, she says, “Is there anything wrong?”

She can tell. Of course. She doesn’t need to see his face. She is equipped with a horde of secret built-in receptors that bring her a steady stream of messages about the way he is breathing, the chemical substances that are flowing from his pores, and all the other little physiological betrayals of internal psychological states that a sufficiently keen observer is able to detect even without eyesight. The naturally augmented auxiliary senses of the blind.

“I was just thinking,” he says, not entirely dishonestly, “that I would miss these sessions with you too. Very much, as a matter of fact.”

“But we don’t have to miss them now.”

“No. We don’t.”

He takes her hand between his and presses it there, lightly, for a moment. A small gesture of mild affection, nothing more. Then he suggests they get down to work.

“I’ve been getting mental static again,” she says.

“You have? Since when?” He is glad that the subject is changing, but this is a jarring, unwelcome shift.

“It began during the night. A feeling like a veil coming over my mind. Coming between me and Yvonne.”

“But you can still reach her?”

“I haven’t tried. I suppose so. But I thought everything was better, and now—”

“We’ve been travelling between stars the past few months,” he points out. “Now we’re getting close to one again.”

“When I was on Earth,” Noelle says, “I was only ninety-three million miles from a star, and Yvonne and I had no transmission problems whatever, even when we were far apart.”

“Even when you were as far apart as you could get on Earth,” he says, “you and your sister were standing side by side, compared to the distances between you out here.”

“I still don’t think distance has anything much to do with it. I think it’s something connected with stars, but I don’t know what it can be. Stars that are not the sun, maybe. But I don’t really understand.” Now she is the one who takes his hand, and holds it rather more firmly than he had been holding hers a moment ago. “I hate it when anything gets between me and Yvonne. It scares me. It’s the most terrifying thing I can imagine.”