He begins to dictate the message that he has drafted a little while before. Glancing at his text now, he sees that it amounts to a litany of unbroken gloom. Abortive mission … severe and inexplicable zones of psychic disturbance everywhere … violent irrational reactions by landing personnel … deplorable fatal accident … immediate withdrawal from planetary surface … abandonment of exploration effort … It’s all true, but it sounds terrible. He tries to soften it a little, improvising as he reads, inserting little phrases like “hopeful first attempt” and “encouraging to have found so Earthlike a planet, whatever its drawbacks, so quickly.” He speaks of their coming departure for Planet B and his optimistic sense that the galaxy is so replete with worlds of the appropriate size, temperature range, and atmosphere that there can be hardly any doubt at all of the forthcoming discovery of an adequate planet for settlement.
There. Let them chew on that for a while.
Noelle tires quickly as she pumps his words across the universe to Yvonne. The strain on her is all too obvious. Her shoulders sag, her head slumps forward, there is a tense flickering of the musculature of her face. There is more interference with the transmission today, apparently, than Noelle has indicated to him. And yet she goes gamely onward, until at last she looks up at him with a seraphic smile of relief, sighs wearily, and announces, “That’s it. I think she’s got it all.”
“What does she say?”
“That she’s very sorry about Marcus. That she wishes us all better luck on Planet B.”
Is Noelle telling him the truth? For one wild moment the year-captain finds himself thinking that this whole business of instantaneous mental contact between two sisters scores of light-years apart is nothing more than a fantasy and a fraud, that Noelle has merely been pretending to be sending his communiqués to Earth and is inventing all of Yvonne’s responses.
No. No. No. No.
An idiotic thought. He banishes it angrily from his mind. Noelle is incapable of such duplicity. And even if she were, she simply could not have managed to invent — to improvise, yet — all of Yvonne’s bulletins from Earth, the little details of ongoing daily life there, the occasional messages from relatives of the members of the expedition. For example, the year-captain’s father, who is a painter. He works in archaic modes — angels, demons, saints, all rendered with meticulous realism. He lives near the southern tip of Africa, on a dry rocky promontory eternally bathed in hot sunlight and planted with grotesque succulent things native to the region. In the past thirty years the two of them have met only twice. They have never had much fondness for each other. And yet the year-captain’s father, who is 130 years old, has quite surprisingly sent birthday greetings recently via the Yvonne-Noelle loop to his son, who is less than half his age. He has spoken of his recent paintings, his garden, the inroads time is beginning to make on his stamina. How could Noelle have known any of that? The year-captain wonders what upwelling of stress within himself has led him to these absurd and unworthy suspicions of the blameless Noelle. The failure of the planetary landing, he supposes. The death of Marcus. No doubt that’s it. He’s been under great pressure. They all have. He resolves to get some extra rest once they have returned to nospace travel.
Assuming Noelle will want her usual nap after this demanding transmission, he starts to leave her cabin. “Wait,” she says. “Where are you going?”
“The baths, I think.” Spur of the moment: he hadn’t been planning on it.
“I’ll go with you, all right? And then afterward, perhaps, we could go to the gaming lounge.”
He is puzzled by this. “You don’t want to get some sleep now?”
“Not this time, no.” Indeed, despite her show of fatigue a few minutes before, she seems strangely full of energy now, not at all depleted as she normally is when she has finished transmitting to Yvonne. This despite the problem of the static — or because of it, maybe? He will never understand her.
But a good soak in the baths right now strikes him as a welcome notion, and if Noelle doesn’t feel like napping today, that’s entirely her own affair. She drops her clothing quite casually, with seeming innocence. As though she is completely unaware how provocative that might seem to be, with just the two of them here in her cabin like this. But in her eternal darkness she probably gives no thought to the effect that the sight of her nakedness might have on others. Or perhaps she does.
He waits just a moment, an oddly tense one, to see what she will do next. Take him by the hand, lead him to the bed? No. Nothing at all like that. She reallyis an innocent. Calmly she opens the cabin door and gestures for him to precede her into the hall.
They go down the corridor to the baths together.
Sieglinde, Huw, and Imogen are there when they arrive. The brawny Sieglinde is in the tepid tub by herself; beefy Huw and petite, golden-haired Imogen are sharing the hot tank. Huw and Imogen are a couple these days, apparently, at least some of the time, and this seems to be one of the times. She is stretched full length in the tub, all but submerged, her head against Huw’s shoulder, her shining hair outspread in the water, the pink tips of her small breasts rising above the surface. He is so much more massive than she is that she seems like a doll beside him.
Huw lifts an eyebrow as Noelle and the year-captain enter, one naked, one not. Public nudity is not an extraordinary thing aboard the starship, and people sometimes come to the baths already undressed, but it is not a widespread custom. The year-captain wonders whether Huw is assuming an intimacy between him and Noelle that does not at all exist. The thought annoys him. He is aware that there is much ignorant conjecture aboard ship about his sexual habits, and he finds the furtive gossip more amusing than bothersome; but he isn’t eager to enmesh Noelle, who might be disturbed at finding herself the subject of such rumors, in these lascivious whisperings.
“May we join you?” the year-captain asks, sliding out of his clothes. The question is routine politeness. Huw gestures grandly, and the year-captain and Noelle slip into the tub on the side opposite from Imogen and Huw. There’s no need for helping Noelle; she makes her way over the side of the tub as easily as if she were sighted. As they settle into the warm water the side of Noelle’s thigh presses up against the year-captain’s, though, which he assumes is accidental, the tub being as small and as crowded as it is, and Noelle’s sense of spatial perception not as accurate in water as it is where sound waves travel unimpeded. The year-captain automatically moves a couple of centimeters to his left; but a few moments later, as further positional adjustments are made by the occupants of the tub, he feels Noelle coming in contact with him again. It is hard now not to believe that this is deliberate, that all of this is, the suggestion that they go to the baths together, the casual stripping in her cabin, the nude promenade through the corridor. But why? Noelle is a beautiful woman, yes; highly attractive, even, and fascinating in her enigmatic cool dignity; but after all this time she still has played no role that he knows of in the pattern of sexual entanglements aboard the starship, and though she certainly seems to be offering herself to him now, the year-captain finds it difficult to accept the belief that she actually is. He prefers to look upon her as guileless and her present behavior as innocent. He continues to think of her as an asexual being, given over wholly to the bond with her distant sister and needing no other. Possibly she’s just in a playful mood just now, without any genuine erotic subtext; or perhaps she is experimenting with a new way of unwinding from the tensions of her message-sending. In any case he has no intention of responding to the invitation she seems to be extending, whether or not it’s real. As always, a sexual involvement with Noelle strikes him as a potentially explosive thing. He doesn’t think it could ever be the kind of coolly recreational coupling that his affair with Julia is. There were bound to be immense messy complications, somehow. Noelle is of vital importance to the voyage; so is he; he will not risk involving them in something that carries with it such a high probability of diverting their energies into troublesome areas.
Nevertheless, this time the year-captain allows his thigh to remain in contact with hers. It would be rude to pull away a second time.
“You spoke very well,” Imogen says to him, “about Marcus the other day. I was extremely moved. I think we all were.”
“Thank you.” It seems like a mindless kind of reply to make, but he can’t think of any other response.
“He was so difficult to get to know,” Imogen says. She and Marcus had been lovers for a brief time early in the voyage. Imogen is one of the ship’s metallurgists; she is also assistant medical officer. Everyone has odd combinations of specialties. “Even in bed, you know?” she says. “Right here in the baths is where it happened, the first time. We were just sitting side by side, the way I am with Huw now, neither of us saying very much, and then Marcus turned to me and smiled and touched my wrist and gestured with his head toward one of the side rooms. Didn’t say a word. And we got right up and went in there. Not a word out of him the whole time.”
Huw is smiling benignly, as though Imogen is merely speaking of having gone off with Marcus to play a few games ofGo. But quite possibly he doesn’t see much difference between the one recreation and the other, except thatGo requires heavier thinking.
Imogen says, “It was like that every rime, the whole week that we were together. He was good, very good, in fact, but he never said a personal thing about himself, never asked anything about me. Friendly but distant: a mystery man. I liked him, though, I admired him, I respected his intelligence, his seriousness. I believed that sooner or later he’d open up a little. And then one afternoon we were sitting in here together and Natasha was here too, 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.