“All right,” the year-captain says, as calmly as though they are discussing whether it is getting close to time for lunch. “So tell me who you think ought to be the ones to go.”
Huw, flustered and crimson-faced, says, “Why, you and me, of course. Me to drive the buggy, you to examine the biological situation. And Marcus or Innelda to work out the overall planetary analysis. That’s a big enough party to do the job, but not so big that we’d be putting an enormous proportion of the whole expedition at risk in one basket.”
The year-captain nods. But he says nothing. He sits there silently, inscrutable as ever. Perhaps he is considering the best reply to make to what Huw has said; perhaps he is simply sitting there with his mind blanked out in the proper Zen-monk fashion, allowing Huw to fidget. Indeed, Huw fidgets. Huw thinks he knows this man better than anyone else alive, and perhaps that is true. But, even so, he does not know him nearly well enough. He has transgressed on some inviolable boundary here, he realizes, but he is not sure what it is.
After a very long while the year-captain says, “You and me and Marcus. Or Innelda. All right. Certainly those are qualified personnel. And who is to become the next captain? Have you worked that out too?”
“Man, man, I don’t give a bloody damn who is captain! What I care about is the landing party! You and me, old brother, the way it was on Io, on Callisto, on Titan — !”
“Yes. You and me. And Marcus or Innelda. We agree on that. It’s a logical group, yes, Huw. But also we will need a new captain.” He smiles, but to Huw the smile seems no warmer than the landscape of Callisto or Ganymede. “We should hold the election immediately, I think. And then, once my successor is chosen, I’ll name the members of the landing party as my last act in office, and they will be the ones that you’ve proposed. You really want to go, do you, Huw?”
“Stop playing idiotic games with me. Of course I do!”
“Then find me a new year-captain,” the year-captain says.
At Lofoten I was taught how to put all vestiges of ego aside and live as a purely unattached entity, undistracted by irrelevant yearnings and schemes. And thereby to be a more perfect being, who will be more nearly likely to attain the dissolution of self that is the highest goal of the disciplined mind.
I absorbed the teachings fully, yes, I did, I did. Even though the nagging feeling remained in me that by trying to make myself perfectly unattached I was in fact acting out the ultimate in self-aggrandizement, because I was setting out to try to turn myself into a god, and what is that if not self-aggrandizement? I remember how my Preceptor smiled as I told him all that. Obviously he had been down the same path himself. It was, he said, the paradox of striving toward unstrivingness, a circular trap, and there was no way out of it except right through the middle of it. Scheme as hard as you can to free yourself of the need for scheming. Drive yourself ever onward toward liberation from the slavery of goals. Exert merciless self-discipline in the pursuit of freedom from compulsive achievement.
Well, so be it, I told myself. You are an imperfect being seeking to follow a course of perfection, and it’s altogether likely that you’ll hit a few problems along that way. I did my best, given the inherent limitations of the material I was required to work with, and by and large I think that the Lofoten experience got me closer to whatever it is that I’m searching for than anything I had previously done. But look at me now! Oh, just look! Where is all my nonattachment? Where is my freedom from fruitless and distracting striving?
I want to be part of the team that lands on Planet A.
I want it desperately. Desperately.
I feel excitement gathering in me night and day as we get closer to that place. I feel it in my fingertips, in my throat, in my chest, in my balls. A new world! The new world, for all we know! If it is to be the place where we build our settlement, then the first ones of us who set foot on it will become figures of myth in millennia to come, culture-heroes, even gods. Do I want my remote descendants to think of me as a god? Apparently I do. Oh, Lofoten, Lofoten, you seem even farther away than you actually are! All those salutary plunges into icy pools, all that naked sprinting through the snow, all the fasting, all the meditation, the focusing of the mind on that clear white light, and yet here I am hungry for godhood, and how idiotic it is, how contemptible, how absurd. Yet undeniable. I want to go down there.
Which means I must find someone to replace me as captain. But who? Who? No one is stepping forward. No one seems even remotely interested. They are quite content to let me remain in the job. Like sheep, all of them, and none wants to be shepherd in my place. I should have thought of all this when I first let myself in for this year-captain business. Perhaps I did; perhaps I thought that it would be just another valuable spiritual discipline for me, to take on the responsibility of running the ship. Perhaps I had in mind, even, the great increment of virtue that would accrue to me by denying myself the right to be part of an exploring party. Certainly I’m capable of such nonsense. And now I have trapped myself in it.
Noelle reports that the transmission difficulties she has been experiencing in recent weeks have seemingly cleared up during the course of our move to this sector of space. Perhaps her “sunspot” theory really was correct, and some wholly local force was filling her mind with static back there. We’ll see. It’s a positive development, anyway, and those are always welcome. She still seems very tense and strange, though. Sits there in the lounge half the day and half the night, playing Go as though playing Go is the most important thing in the universe, taking on all corners and beating them with the greatest of ease. What a mystery that woman is! In this ship of strange creatures she is surely the strangest by some distance.
Unless Paco has botched his calculations, we are just a few days away now from the vicinity of Planet A. Given the uncertainties of my own situation, I find myself half hoping that the place will be so obviously unsuitable for colonization that we won’t even want to take an exploratory look at it. But that’s contemptible idiocy. Ten to one we’ll be sending a team down to prowl around. Huw, certainly. And Innelda, I think. And — me? That remains to be seen, I guess. The extent of my fear that I won’t be eligible to go is a good measure of the failure of my Lofoten training, and my anxiety level in that area is, well, embarrassingly high.
What I need to do now is call everyone together and hold an election. And get this thing settled before I lose whatever respect for myself I may happen to have.
The Articles of the Voyage specify that a simple majority is sufficient to elect,” the year-captain says. “In the event of there being more than two candidates, a simple plurality will be sufficient, providing it represents more than thirty-three percent of the total population of the ship. I call now for nominations.”
As is the case when all fifty of them are assembled in general meeting, they are gathered in the great central corridor of the top deck, fanned out in several directions from the place where the year-captain stands. His back is against the gray bulkhead that forms the corridor’s aft end. From there he can face them all. His eyes rove this way and that, looking onward from Leon to Elliot to Huw, from Giovanna to Sylvia to Natasha, from David to Marcus to Zena to Heinz.
No one says anything.
Chang and Roy, Noelle and Elizabeth, Paco, Hesper, Marcus, Bruce. Jean-Claude. Edmund. Althea. Leila. Imogen. Charles. The year-captain looks here, he looks there. Expressionless faces look back at him.
“The post of year-captain becomes vacant in five days,” the year-captain says, though that fact hardly comes as news to them. “I call for nominations to the post of year-captain.”
An ocean of uneasy faces. Frowns, sidewise glances. Silence. Silence.
Paco says, finally, “I nominate Leon.”
“Declined,” says Leon, almost before Paco has finished speaking the words that place his name in nomination. “I can’t be ship’s doctor and year-captain as well.”
“Why is that?” the year-captain asks. “Holding the one responsibility doesn’t preclude holding the other.”
“Well,” Leon says, glowering, “in my mind it does. I don’t want the job. Declined.”
“Very well. Do I hear another nomination?”
His eyes begin roving again. Innelda, Sieglinde, Julia, Giovanna. Michael. Celeste. Chang and Elizabeth, Hesper and Marcus, Paco and Heinz. Imogen. Zena.
Someone. Anyone.
Elizabeth says out of another long stark silence, “I nominate you to succeed yourself.”
The year-captain closes his eyes just for a moment. “I don’t choose to retain the office,” he says quietly.
“There’s nobody better qualified.”
“Surely that isn’t so. Surely. I decline the nomination.” He looks around again, a little desperately, now. No one says anything. The wild thought crosses his mind that this is a conspiracy of the whole group, that they are determined by their obstinacy to force him to reassume the captaincy by default. He will not let them do that to him. He will not.
“Well, then,” he says, “I’ll place some names in nomination myself. There’s nothing in the Articles preventing me from doing that, is there?”
This is unexpected. Startled glances are interchanged. Everyone looks troubled. There is no one in front of him, except perhaps Noelle, who does not show visible signs of fearing to be among those who are named.
“Heinz,” the year-captain says. “I nominate Heinz.”
Cool as usual, Heinz says, “Oh, captain, you know that that’s a bad idea.”
“Is that a refusal?”
Heinz shrugs. “No. No, I’ll let the nomination stand. What the hell, why not? But anybody who votes for me is crazy.”
“Are there any other nominations?” the year-captain asks. “If I hear none, nominations are closed.” He stares at them almost imploringly. Heinz is an impossible candidate, and surely they all know that; the year-captain has put his name in nomination only for the sake of getting the process moving. But what if no one rescues the situation now? Can he blithely allow the captaincy to go to Heinz?
Rescue comes from an unlikely quarter. It is Heinz himself who says, smiling wickedly, “I nominate Julia.”
There are gasps at his audacity. But it is just the sort of thing, the year-captain thinks, that one would expect from Heinz. He looks toward Julia. Heinz has taken her by surprise. Her handsome face is flushed with sudden color.
“Do you accept?” he asks her.
Flustered though she is, she hesitates only a moment. “I accept, yes.”
The year-captain feels a flood of relief, and something much like love for her, for that. “Thank you,” he tells her, trying to maintain a purely businesslike tone. “Are there any further nominations? Or does someone want to make a motion that nominations be closed?”
Paco says, troublesome to the end, “I nominate Huw.”
“Declined,” Huw snaps back. And swiftly says, “I nominate Paco.”