and he turned to her just the way he had turned to me the week before, and that was that for Marcus and me. It was over, as simply as that. But I always thought that Marcus and I would have a chance to get to know each other eventually, later on, maybe much later on. And now we never will.”
“Such a waste,” Sieglinde says, from the other tub.
“A fine young man,” says Huw. “It ripped me apart, watching him crack up down there. It ripped me apart.”
The year-captain nods abstractedly. This conversation is a necessary one, he supposes, part of the healing process for them, but it is making him uncomfortable. And the pressure of Noelle’s bare thigh against his in the tub is having an unsettling effect on him.
“They are very sad for us, the people on Earth,” Noelle says. “You know, they love us very much, they follow everything that we are doing with the greatest interest. The expedition to Planet A — it was the only thing they talked about on Earth all week, my sister says. And then — to learn that Marcus had died—” She shakes her head. “They are having memorial services for him today everywhere on Earth, do you know?”
“How wonderful,” Imogen says. “How good that will be for them. And for us as well.”
The year-captain looks at Noelle in surprise. That little detail, the thing about the memorial services, comes as news to him. Noelle had said nothing about that during the transmission meeting. Is she still in contact with Yvonne at this moment, receiving a steady flow of reports of Earth’s reactions to the death of Marcus? Or — he hates the idea, but it will not stay buried — is she simply inventing things as she goes along?
“You didn’t tell me that,” he says, a little reproachfully. “About the services.”
“Oh. Yes. Everywhere on Earth.”
“We are the big news,” Sieglinde says, with her usual coarse guffaw. “We fly around the universe, we live, we die, we find nasty planets, it is the great event for them. The only event. We astonish them, and they are unaccustomed to astonishment. Sheep, is what they are! Lazy as sheep! We should make up deaths every now and then, even if there aren’t any more, just to keep them excited. To keep them interested in us. Also to remind them that there is such a thing as death.”
Everyone turns to look at her. Sieglinde’s face is red with anger, fiery. She has a capacity for stirring herself up mightily. But then she grins — smirks, really — and the high color fades as swiftly as it had come.
More gently she says, “It was very bad, the thing about Marcus. I am greatly troubled by it, still. Such a quiet boy. Such a good mind he had. We must have no more losses of that kind, year-captain, do you hear me?”
“I wish we hadn’t had even that one,” he replies.
There is a dark moment of silence in the room.
“Well,” Huw says finally. He heaves his bulky body out of the water. He is reddened from the heat, looking at least half boiled. “We should be moving along, I think.” Reaching down with one hand, he lifts little Imogen out of the tub as easily as though she were a child, pulling her up over the tiled rim and letting her feet dangle in the air a moment before setting her down. They go off to the cold showers, and then dress and leave.
“I will be going also,” Sieglinde announces. “There is work I should be doing in the control cabin.”
Noelle and the year-captain are left alone in the baths. They sit facing the same way, thighs still touching. It is suddenly a highly awkward situation, with the other three gone. The tension of the moment in her cabin when Noelle had removed her clothes now returns to the year-captain, if indeed it has ever left. The nearest of the three lovemaking chambers next to the baths is just a few meters away. They could very easily stroll over to it right now. But the year-captain has no idea what Noelle wants him to do. He has no very clear idea what he himself wants to do. Again he waits, resolved to take his cue from her.
And again Noelle offers him nothing more than the usual simple innocence, the usual sweet indifference to the possibilities of the situation.
“Shall we go to the gaming lounge now, year-captain?”
“Of course. Whatever you say, Noelle.”
They return to her cabin first. He remains outside while she dresses; then they go up to the gaming lounge, where they find Paco and Roy playing, and also Sylvia and Heinz. The year-captain sets up the third board for himself and Noelle.
It is several weeks since he has played. The expedition to the surface of Planet A has kept him sufficiently distracted lately. He sinks quickly into the game now, but for all his skill, he doesn’t stand a chance. Noelle, playing black, greets him with an aggressive strategy that he has never seen before, and her swarming warriors devour his white stones with appalling swiftness, hollowing out his forces and setting up elliptical rings of conquered territory all over the board. It’s a complete rout. The game is over so quickly that Roy and Heinz, glancing over simultaneously from their own boards in the moment of Noelle’s triumph, both grunt in amazement as they realize that it has ended.
Everything had been calculated, and checked and rechecked, and today is the day of our departure for the world that at this point we call, with such drab unpoetic simplicity, Planet B. Let us hope that we have reason to give it some more colorful and memorable name later on: let us hope that it is to be our new home. Hope costs us nothing. It does no harm and perhaps accomplishes some good.
I found myself, as the hour of the new shunt approached, standing in front of the viewplate, looking out at the solar system we were about to leave. Down over there, the broad brown breast of Planet A itself, turning indifferently on its axis, giving us not an iota of its attention. We are like gnats to it. Less than gnats: we art nothing. In the most offhand of ways it has claimed one of our lives, and now it swings onward around its golden sun as it always has, ignoring the unwanted and unwelcomed visitors who briefly disturbed its solitude and now soon will be gone. What folly, to think that this heartless place could ever have been our home! But Marcus’s life was the price we had to pay for learning that.
It isn’t an evil world, of course. There isn’t any such thing as an evil world. Worlds are indifferent things. This one simply is not a world we can use.
And now — Planet B — Planet C, perhaps — Planet Z—
I stood by the viewplate, watching this alien sky, this strange repellent planet that we had come here to explore, its yellow sun, its neighbor worlds wandering the dark sky all about us, and the hint of other stars in the sky behind them, mere bright specks, betokening the vastness of the universe in which we are soon once more to be wandering; and then, in a twinkling, the whole scene was gone, wiped from my sight in a single abolishing stroke, and I was looking once again at the rippling, eddying, shimmering blankness that is nospace. We had successfully made our shunt. How I had missed that dazzling gray emptiness! How I rejoiced now at seeing it once more!
So again we are outside space and time, crossing through unfathomable nowhere on our route from somewhere to somewhere, and I realize that I have in some fashion begun to become a denizen of nospace: I am happiest, it seems, when we have ripped ourselves loose of the fabric of normal space and time and are floating in this quiet featureless other reality, this void within the void, this inexplicable strangeness, this mathematical construct, that we call nospace. Nospace travel is only a means to an end; why, then, do I take such pleasure in returning to it? Can it be that my secret preference, unknown even to me, is that we never find any suitable world at all, that we roam the galaxy forever like the crew of the accursed Flying Dutchman? Surely not. Surely I want us to discover that Planet B is a warm and friendly land, where we will settle and thrive and live happily ever after.
Surely.
The journey, Paco tells me, will take five or six months, or perhaps as many as eight — he can’t be entirely certain, the mathematics of nospace travel being the paradoxical business that is. No less than five, no more than eight, anyway. And then we do the whole survey-mission thing all over again, with better luck, let us hope, than this time.
The chances are, of course, that B won’t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of atmosphere, a place with actual H2O water, one that isn’t too hot or too cold, that doesn’t already belong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and we are, after all, still essentially in Earth’s own backyard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its entirety has — how many stars? two hundred billion? four hundred
