“I don’t,” she says. “Not really. How could I? But I just don’t think — I’m quite confident that I — that they — that when I—” She is really shaking now. They are at the edge of the hot tank. The usual procedure is to step quickly into the cold tub, then go on to the hot one, and finish by returning to the tepid tank or even the cold one. But instead of going into any of them now Noelle stands trembling at the brink of the hot tub for a long moment; and then she turns, suddenly, and presses herself into his arms.
He enfolds her and holds her tightly and gently strokes her back, trying to soothe her, trying to comfort her and ease whatever terror it is that has taken possession of her. All of it very manly and paternal, and then a moment later not paternal in the least, for the year-captain is trembling too, and they stand there for a long while in a close embrace.
Then she breaks free of him and steps a few paces back. She is smiling, and her eyes, those mysterious sightless eyes that are nevertheless often so expressive, have taken on a strange mischievous light. She reaches out a hand toward him.
The year-captain is amazed at how her body, which he has seen on so many other occasions here in the baths and in the pool, now suddenly seems unfamiliar — different, transformed. The same full round breasts, yes, the same flat belly, the same deeply indented navel. But it is all different. There is an inner light emanating from her. She is gleaming, radiant. He is powerfully drawn to her. He wonders how he had ever managed to fail to find her attractive — why she had never seemed to him, really, like a sexual being at all. Certainly she seems like one now.
“Come,” she whispers, and tugs at his hand, and leads him deftly and unhesitatingly over the tiled floor into one of the little lovemaking rooms that adjoin the baths.
They sink down together onto the hard narrow bed. It is entirely obvious to him now that he has wanted this since the beginning of the voyage, that he has always been drawn to her, that he has hedged himself around with a host of caveats and uncertainties and self-imposed prohibitions precisely because he has desired her all along with such frightening intensity.
He covers her lips, her throat, her closed eyelids with kisses. She clings to him, murmuring, thrusting herself against him. At the last moment before he could possibly turn back he remembers that odd thought he once had had, more than a year before, that she might actually be a virgin, and even that her telepathic powers might somehow depend on the preservation of that virginity and would be forever lost at the first touch of a man’s insistent body.
No. No. That’s idiocy. She isn’t a creature out of some fantastic myth. Her telepathy is not a magical power that can be lost through the violation of an oath of chastity.
And in any case there’s no longer any possibility that he can hold back, not now, nor is Noelle willing to allow it. Her legs part and he enters her quickly, almost roughly, and in that moment Noelle throws back her head and lets out a cry that is surely one of ecstasy and not of pain, and in almost the same moment he comes. He is completely unable to prevent that from happening. It erupts from him with a force that he has not felt since he was eighteen. And he hears her ecstatic hissing gasp, feels her bucking almost convulsively beneath him.
He wonders, in the first bewildered and almost distraught moment afterward, whether Yvonne has experienced their pleasure too, somewhere far away. Whether Yvonne has come with them, even, perhaps.
They lie still for a little while. Neither of them speaks. He is faintly stunned by what has happened; and also relieved, enormously relieved, that the long half-conscious courtship is over, that they have at last put an end to all the games of attraction and repulsion that they have been playing with each other almost since the beginning of the voyage, and finally have allowed themselves to come crashing together in the union — a union of opposites, is it? — that had been ordained for them all along. He is pleased, pleased and happy, and a little amazed, and just a bit frightened, also.
Then very shortly he feels his strength returning, coming back to him with unexpected and almost improbable quickness, and they begin to move once again, less hastily this time, less wildly. It is as though they have traveled in just these first few moments beyond the initial stage of breathless heedless frenzy and are already beginning to become experienced lovers.
This time when it is over she grins up at him and says, “I waited and waited. I thought you never would.”
“I was afraid.”
“Of me?”
“Of damaging your powers, somehow.”
“What?”
“As though the magic would go away if you — if I — if you and I—”
“Silly. You’ve read too many old fables.”
“Maybe I have.”
“Yes. I definitely think you have.”
But now, even now, even after all that, another week goes by and still nothing is done about reaching out to the angels. This time the excuse is that Noelle and the year-captain want to explore their newfound bliss; the effort of the angel experiment will certainly be an immense drain on her energies, and so it is better to postpone it a little while longer, they tell themselves, while the two of them devote their energies to endeavors of a more familiar kind.
The truth is that they are both still afraid to make the attempt. He continues to have Semele’s fate on his mind, troubling him all the more now that a new dimension has been added to their relationship; and she has hesitations of her own, a complex mixture of things — the natural fear of the unknown, and that curious feeling that she would somehow be unfaithful to Yvonne if she were to speak with the angels, and also a certain sense that she was simply inadequate to the task, incapable of fulfilling the high hopes that her shipmates are investing in her.
But it has to be attempted. Of that much the year-captain is certain. Whatever the risks, it has to be attempted. They all placed themselves permanently at risk the moment they first affiliated themselves with this project. If there is a possibility that Noelle can extricate them from their predicament, then that possibility must be explored. He sees no choice. He can’t allow himself so great an evasion.
They have had no contact with Earth for many ship-weeks, for months, even, and the psychological effects are beginning to manifest themselves in a host of troublesome ways. It has started to seem almost as though Earth has been destroyed in some great cataclysm, that they are the sole surviving representatives of humanity, an ark, unfettered by any ties to the past whatsoever and permitted to reshape the rules of their lives whichever way they please. The year-captain’s conservative nature rebels at such anarchy. Earth still is there. The voyagers are beholden to Earth for their presence here. This mission is being executed at the behest of Earth, to fulfill certain needs of Earth.
But with Earth lost to them forever in the vast whirlpool of the skies—
He bides his time. He waits for his moment.
He and Noelle are recognized now aboard ship as lovers. Hiding it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, anyway: he has no desire to impose on her the sort of hole-and-corner relationship that he had carried on for so long with Julia. Let them see. Let them know. They were all expecting it to happen anyway; he understands that now. Some, like Heinz, evidently had seen the whole thing coming a couple of years before he did. Julia too: she smiles knowingly at him, as if to acknowledge that the long-awaited inevitable has at last occurred. Julia doesn’t seem to be hurt by it. Quite the contrary.
So he and Noelle are seen together in the baths, in theGo lounge, in the corridors. He spends nights in her cabin, or she in his — the first time since the beginning of the voyage that he has known anything but solitary sleep. She is a marvelous mixture of passion and innocence, or at least the semblance of innocence; there is unexpected skill and fire in her lovemaking, but also an eagerness to be led into unfamiliar paths, to be taught previously unknown ways. It reminds him, after a fashion, of the way Noelle had approached learningGo once upon a time: the attentiveness, the seriousness, the concern with understanding the fundamentals of the game — and, ultimately, the revelation of enormous mastery.
TheGo obsession has never diminished aboard ship, and the year-captain, who has been only an occasional player since his reawakening of interest in the game, now goes to the lounge whenever his official duties permit. His superior skills make it difficult for most of the others to enjoy playing with him, and he plays almost exclusively with Roy and Leon and Noelle, most often with Noelle.
She is a merciless player. He wins against her no more often than once out of every four or five games.
Today, playing black, the year-captain has been able to remain on the offensive through the 89th move. But Noelle then breaks through his north stones, which are weakly deployed, and closes a major center territory. The year-captain finds himself unable to mount a satisfactory reply. Before he can get very much going, Noelle has run a chain of stones across the 19th line, boxing him in, in an embarrassing way. He manages to fend off further calamity for a while, but he knows that all he is doing is playing for time as he heads toward inevitable defeat. At Move 141 he launches what he suspects is a hopeless attack, and his forces are easily crushed by Noelle within her own territory. A little while later he finds himself confronted with the classic cat-in-a-basket trap, by which he will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone, and at Move 196 he concedes that he has been beaten. She has taken 81 stones to his 62.
As they clear the board for a rematch he says, trying to be casual about it, “Have you been giving any thought to the business of the angels, Noelle?”
“Of course. I think about them a great deal.”
“And?”
“And what?” she asks.
“Do you have any idea how you’d go about it? Making the contact, I mean.”
“I have some theories, yes. But naturally they’re only theories. I won’t really know anything until I make the actual attempt.”
The year-captain waits just a beat. “And when do you think that will be?”
She gives him one of those special looks of hers, those baffling sightless focusings of her eyes that somehow manage to convey an expression. The expression that she conveys this time is one of disingenuousness.
“Whenever you’d like it to be,” she says.
“What about today, then?”
What about today? Yes. What about today. There is no way that it can be postponed any longer. He knows that; she knows that; they are in agreement. This is the moment. Today. Now.
In her cabin. Alone, among her familiar things. She has insisted on that. She grants herself a few moments of delay first, a little self-indulgence, moving about the room, picking up things and handling them, the sea-urchin shell, the polished piece of jade, the small bronze statuettes, the furry stuffed animal. In her former life these things had been hers and Yvonne’s jointly; neither of them had ever had any sense of “mine” or “yours,” not while they were together, but Yvonne had insisted, as the time for the launch of the Wotan drew near, that Noelle take all these with her, these beloved objects, the talismans of their shared life. “After all,” she had said, “I’ll be able to feel them through your hands.” Yes. But not any longer.
Perhaps what Noelle is about to do will restore Yvonne’s access to these little things, the things that once had been theirs and now were merely hers. Perhaps. Perhaps.
She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to enhance the force of her power, she often thinks.
Extends a tenuous tendril of thought now that probes warily outward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—
Angels?
Who knows what they are? But she has been conscious of their presence all along, ever since the interference first began, cloudy presences, huge, heavy masses of mentation hovering around her, somewhere out there in — what does he call it? The Intermundium? Yes, the Intermundium, the great gray space between the worlds. She has felt them out there, not as individual entities but only as presences, or perhapsone presence having many parts.