angular beak of a nose, who comes from some island on the far side of India. The sun must be very strong there; the fair-skinned year-captain imagines that he would find himself baked down to the bone in a minute, if ever he were to set foot in that land. Is it a place like that toward which all of Hesper’s zealous scanning is bent, one with a sun of such ferocity?
“Look here, year-captain,” Hesper says immediately. “Four new prospects!”
He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal optimist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.
“How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”
“Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.” Hesper’s voice is light, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “Of course, I’m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”
The year-captain nods. “Of course.”
“But it won’t be long, year-captain! It won’t be long, I promise you that!”
The year-captain offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at — it’s an article of faith for everyone on board that there
Hesper has told him, more than once, what the blazing swirls and squiggles on the screen are supposed to signify. The sequence of criteria for habitable worlds. The raw astronomical data, first. Each sun’s place on the main sequence, the indications of the presence of planetary bodies in constructive positions. Mean orbital distances plotted against luminosity. And then a spectroscopic workup. Evidence for the presence of an atmosphere. The chemical components thereof: suitable or not? And then — biospheric analysis — conditions of thermodynamic disequilibrium, indicating the possible presence of transpiration and respiration — the temperature range, probable mean highs and lows—
The starship has data-gathering tentacles reaching far out into the incomprehensible void. A host of sensory receptors, mysteriously capable of piercing the nospace tube in which the ship travels and extending into the dark reality beyond, collects information tirelessly, information that is not actual realspace data but is somehow a usable equivalent of such data, and processes it into these bright designs. Over which this bubbly little man hovers, evaluating, discarding, reconsidering, unendingly searching for the ultimate new Eden that is the goal of their quest.
Hesper wants to discuss his newest prospects. The year-captain listens with half an ear. He wants nothing more just now than the simple relaxation that watching the screen affords. The abstract patterns, so very bright and cheerful. The wild swirls of color that whirl and clash like crazed comets. Is there any real meaning in them? Only Hesper knows. He devised this information-gathering system; he is the only one, really, who can decipher and interpret the mysterious factoids that the ship’s sensors suck in. When the time comes, the year-captain will pay close attention to the little man’s data. But this is not yet the time.
The year-captain stands and watches for a while, mindlessly, like a small child, taking innocent pleasure in the colors and patterns, admiring them for their own sake. There are few enough pleasures that he allows himself: this one is harmless and comforting. Stars dance on the screen in wild galliards and fandangos. He imagines that he identifies steel-blue Vega and emerald Deneb and golden Arcturus, but he knows that there is no way he can be correct. The patterns he sees here are not those of the constellations he watched so often soaring across the icy sky over Norway in his long vigils of the night. What Hesper views here is not the sky itself, nor even any one-to-one equivalent of it, but simply the nospace correlative of the sky, a map of energy sources in realspace as they have been translated into utterly alien nospace terms. No matter; let these seeming stars be any stars at all, let them be Markab or Procyon or Rigel or Betelgeuse or ones that have no names at all — let them, for all he cares, be nothing more than imaginary points of light. He wants only to see the dance.
He savors the light-show gratefully until his eyes begin to ache a little and the wild spectacle starts to weary his mind. Then he thanks Hesper gravely and goes out.
Noelle’s cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuettes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some objects evidently chosen for their rich textures — a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea urchin’s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision, moving this object a centimeter or two to one side, lifting another and fondling it a moment before returning it to the exact place where it had been. The supreme confidence of her movements is fascinating to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down.
Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver stitching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship between adults as
He unfolds the text he has prepared, the report that is to be transmitted to Earth today. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says to her, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communique all the same.”
“It would be cruel if we didn’t. We mean so very much to them.”
The moment she begins to speak, all of the year-captain’s carefully constructed calmness evaporates, and instantly he finds himself becoming edgy, oddly belligerent, distinctly off balance. He is bewildered by that. Something in the softness and earnestness of her sweet gentle voice has mysteriously annoyed him, it seems. Coils of sudden startling tension are springing up within him. Anger, even. Animosity. He has no idea why. He is unable to account for his reaction entirely.
“I have my doubts about that,” he says, with a roughness that surprises him. “I don’t think we matter at all.”
This is perverse, and he knows it. What he has just said runs counter to all of his own beliefs.
She looks a little surprised too. “Oh, yes, yes, we do, we mean a great deal to them. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel, all over the world and to the Moon as well. Word from us is terribly important to them.”
He will not concede the point. “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace. A nine-day wonder.” His voice sounds harsh and unfamiliar to him, his rhythms of speech coarse, erratic, words coining in awkward rushes. As for his words themselves, so bleak and sardonic, they astonish him. He has never spoken this way about Earth and its attitude toward the starship before. Such thoughts have never so much as crossed his mind before. Still, he finds himself pushing recklessly onward down the same strange track. “That’s the only thing we represent to them, isn’t it?
