Starborne

sovereign nations or historically significant fragment thereof contributed a few of its former citizens to the long list. And then, too, the candidates represented most or perhaps all — who could say, really? The old distinctions had often been so minute and dubious — of the planet’s racial and ethnic and religious groups, insofar as such groups still existed and looked upon themselves as mattering in the small and cozy society that had evolved out of the turbulent, messy societies of the Industrial and immediately Post-Industrial epochs. In the cosmic scheme of things it no longer counted for very much that one person might like to think of himself as a Finn and another as a Turk, or a German or a Brit or a Thai or a Swede, nor was it really easy any more to fit most people into the old racial classifications that had once had such troublesome significance, nor had the world’s innumerable theological distinctions survived very coherently into modern times. But there were those for whom — perhaps for philosophical reasons, or sentimental ones, or reasons of esthetics, or out of a lingering sense of historical connection, or a fondness for anachronisms, or just out of simple cantankerousness — there was still some value in valiantly claiming, “I am a Welshman” or “I am a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church” or “I carry the blood of the Norman aristocracy.” Such people were considered quaint and eccentric; but there were plenty of them, even now. The world had come a long way, yes, yet ancient vestiges of the grand institutions and solemn distinctions of former civilizations still cropped out everywhere like fossil bones whitening and weathering in the sun. They had ceased to beproblems, yes, but they had not fully ceased to be. Possibly they never would. And so the long list of candidates for the Wotan expedition was an elaborately representative one. The final group would be too, insofar as that was feasible. Formalities were observed, indeed.

There were five Examiners, distinguished and formidable citizens all, and they sat around a table on the top floor of a tall building in Zurich whose enormous wraparound windows offered a clear, crisp view that stretched halfway to Portugal. You stood before them and they asked you things that they already knew about you, things about your technical skills and your physical health and your mental stability and your willingness to say goodbye to the world forever, and to spend anywhere from one to five years, or perhaps even more, in intimate confinement with forty-nine other people, and you could tell from the way they were listening that they weren’t really listening at all. After that they wanted you to speak only about your flaws. If you were in any way hesitant, they would list some for you, sometimes quite an extensive list indeed, and ask you to offer comment on your most flagrant failings, your choice of five. The whole interrogation lasted, in most cases, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they told you you were rejected. Every single candidate who came before the Board of Examiners was told that, calmly, straightforwardly, without show of regret or apology: “Sorry, you’re off the list.” They wanted to see what you would say then. That was the real examination; everything that had gone before had been mere maneuvering and feinting.

The ones who passed were the ones who had rejected the rejection. Some did it one way, some another. Points were given for arrogance, so long as it was sane and sensible arrogance. The man who eventually would become the expedition’s first year-captain had simply said, “You can’t be serious. Obviously I’m qualified. And I don’t like it that you’re playing games with me.” Heinz, who was Swiss himself and indeed was the son of one of the Examiners, had taken a similar stance, telling them that it would be the whole world’s loss if they stuck to their position, but that he had a high enough opinion of the human race to think that they would reconsider. Heinz had helped to design the still-unconstructed Wotan; he knew more of its workings than anyone. Did they really think that he was going to build it for them and then be left behind? Huw, who did indeed proudly call himself a Welshman, was another who reacted with the cool and confident attitude that the Examiners were making a big mistake. He had designed the planetgoing equipment with which the people of the Wotan would explore the new worlds: was he to be denied the right to deploy his own devices, and if so, who was going to handle the job of modifying them on-site to meet unanticipated challenges? And so on.

Most of the female candidates tended to temper their annoyance with a touch of sorrow or regret, partly for themselves but primarily — constructive arrogance again, only imperfectly concealed! — for the enterprise itself. Sylvia explained that she knew more about tectogenetic microsurgery than anyone else alive: how would the coming generations of starborn colonists be able to adapt to some not-quite-suitable planetary environment without her special skills? Giovanna, too, observed that it would be a great pity for the expedition to be deprived of her unique abilities — her primary specialty was metabolic chemistry, and there was something magical about her insight into the relationship between molecular structure and nutritional value. From Sieglinde, who had helped to work out some fundamental theorems of the mathematics of nospace travel, came the simple comment that shebelonged aboard the ship and would not accept disqualification. Et cetera.

What the Examiners looked for — and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun — was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by philosophical realism. Anyone who raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the predesignated fifty.

At the end of the entire process it was Noelle’s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little charade with her too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual verdict, “Sorry, you’re off the list,” and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and then at last she said in her soft way, “Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.” It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point inher examination.

“Then neither of us will go?” Noelle asked, mystified.

“It was only a test of your reaction,” they told her.

“Ah,” she said. “I see.” And she laughed — giggled, really — as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed along with her anyway.

Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.

We flipped a coin, they told her.

She never found out whether that was really true.

Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually sees. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery shiny coating of thin, hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they have been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It congeals, coagulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice floes, colliding, grinding, churning: the floes are at war, destroying one another’s edges, but some are entering into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel can barely make headway. The sails belly out uselessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her cabin, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind’s fist will punch through the stiff frozen canvas of the sails. Nothing can save them. But now! Yes! Yes! A glow overhead! Yvonne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the perfumed tropics, toward the lands of spices and pearls.

Some say the world will end in fire,’” Elizabeth offers. In the lounge, the talk among those who are not playingGo has turned to apocalyptic matters. “’Some say in ice.’”

“Are you quoting something?” Huw wants to know.

“Of course she is,” says Heinz. “You know that Elizabeth’s always quoting something.” Long-limbed, straw- haired Elizabeth is the Wotan’s official bard and chronicler, among other things. Everyone on board has to be Something-Among-Other-Things; multiple skills are the rule. But the center of Elizabeth’s being is poetry. “I think it’s Shakespeare,” Heinz says.

“Not that old,” says Giovanna, looking up from her game. “Only four or five hundred years, at most. An