And then, too, it is a matter of what he is experiencing on the voyage itself, in relation to the intense throbbing grayness of nospace outside: that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal connectedness. He has not spoken with any of the others about this, but the year-captain is certain that he is not the only one who has felt these things. He and, doubtless, some of his companions are making new discoveries every day, not astronomical but — well, spiritual — and, the year-captain tells himself, what a great pity it will be if none of this can ever be communicated to those who have remained behind on Earth. We must keep the link open.
“Maybe,” he says, “we ought to let you and Yvonne rest for a few days.”
A celebration: the six-month anniversary of the day the Wotan set out for deep space from Earth orbit. The starship’s entire complement is jammed into the gaming lounge, overflowing out into the corridor. Much laughter, drinking, winking, singing, a happy occasion indeed, though no one is quite sure why they should be making such a fuss about the half-year anniversary.
“It’s because we aren’t far enough out yet,” Leon suggests. “We still really have one foot in space and one back on Earth. So we keep time on the Earth calendar still. And we focus on these little milestones. But that’ll change.”
“It already has,” Chang observes. “When was the last time you used anything but the shiptime calendar in your daily work?”
“Which calendar I use isn’t important,” Leon says. He is the ship’s chief medical officer, a short, barrel-chested man with a voice like tumbling gravel. “As it happens, I use the shiptime calendar. But we still think in reference to Earth dates too. Earth dates still matter to us, after a fashion. All of us keep a kind of double calendar in our heads, I suspect. And I think we’ll go on doing that until—”
“Happy six-month!” Paco cries just then. His broad face is flushed, his dark deep-set eyes are aglow. “Six months cooped up together in this goddamned tin can and we’re still all on speaking terms with each other! It’s a miracle! A bloody miracle!” He holds a tumbler of red wine in each hand. For tonight’s party the year-captain has authorized breaking out the last of the wine that they brought with them from Earth. They will be synthesizing their own from now on. It won’t be the same thing, though; everyone knows that.
Paco may not be as drunk as he seems, but he puts on a good show. He caroms through the crowd, bellowing, “Drink! Drink!” and bumps into tall, slender Marcus, the planetographer, nearly knocking him down, and Marcus is the one who apologizes: that is the way Marcus is. A moment later Sieglinde drifts past him and Paco hands his extra wineglass to her. Then he loops his free arm through hers. “Tanz mit mir, liebchen!” he cries. The old languages are still spoken, more or less. “Show me how to waltz, Sieglinde!” She gives him a sour look, but yields. It’s a party, after all. They make a foolish-looking couple — she is a head taller than he is, and utterly ungraceful — but looking foolish is probably what Paco has in mind. He whirls her around through the crowd in a clumsy galumphing not-quite-waltz, holding her tightly at arm’s length with a one-armed grip and joyously waving his wineglass in the other.
The year-captain, who has come late to the party and now stands quietly by himself at the rear of the lounge near the tables where theGo boards are kept, sees Noelle on the opposite side, also alone. He fears for her, slim and frail as she is, and sightless, in this room of increasingly drunken revelers. But she seems to be smiling. Michael and Julia are at her side; Julia is saying something to her, and Noelle nods. Apparently she is asking if Noelle wants something to drink, for a moment later Mike plunges into the melee and fetches a glass of something for her.
There had been a party much like this six months before, on Earth, the eve of their departure. The same people acting foolish, the same ones being shy and withdrawn. They all knew each other so superficially, then, even after the year-long training sessions — names, professional skills, that was about it. No depth, no intimacy. But that was all right. There would be time, plenty of time. Already couples bad begun to form as launch time drew near: Paco and Julia, Huw and Giovanna, Michael and Innelda. None of those relationships was destined to last past the first month of the voyage, but that was all right too. The ship’s crew consisted of twenty-five men, twenty-five women, and the supposition was that they would all pair neatly off and mate and be fruitful and multiply on the new Earth to come, but in all likelihood only about half the group would do that at most, and the others would remain single to the end of their days, or pass through a series of intricate and shifting relationships without reproducing, as most people did on Earth. It would make little difference in the long run. There was a sufficiency of frozen gametes on board with which to people the new world. And one could readily enough contribute one’s own to the pool without actually pairing and mating.
Partying was not a natural state for the year-captain. Aloof and essentially solitary by nature, marked also by his wintry years at the monastery in Lofoten, he made his way through these social events the way he had managed his notable and improbable career as an actor, stepping for the time being into the character of someone who was not at all like himself. He could pretend a certain joviality. And so he drank with the others at the launch party; and so he would drink here tonight.
The launch party, yes. That had called for all his thespian skills. The newly elected year-captain going about the room, grinning, slapping backs, trading quips. Getting through the evening, somehow.
And then the day of the launch. That had needed some getting through too. The grand theatrical event of the century, it was, staged for maximum psychological impact on those who were staying behind. The whole world watching as the chosen fifty, dressed for the occasion in shimmering, absurdly splendiferous ceremonial robes, emerged from their dormitory and solemnly marched toward the shuttle ship like a procession of Homeric heroes boarding the vessel that will take them to Troy.
How he had hated all that pomp, all that pretension! But of course the departure of the first interstellar expedition in the history of the human race was no small event. It needed proper staging. So there they came, ostentatiously strutting toward the waiting hatch, the year-captain leading the way, and Noelle walking unerringly alongside him, and then Huw, Heinz, Giovanna, Julia, Sieglinde, Innelda, Elliot, Chang, Roy, and on and on down to Michael and Marcus and David and Zena to the rear, the fifty voyagers, the whole oddly assorted bunch of them, the short ones and the tall, the burly ones and the slender, the emissaries of the people of Earth to the universe in general.
Aboard the shuttle. Up to the Wotan, waiting for them at its construction site in low orbit. More festivities there. All manner of celebrities, government officials, and such on hand to bid them farewell. Then a change of mood, a new solemnity: the celebrities took their leave. The fifty were alone with their ship. Each to his or her cabin for a private moment of — what? prayer? meditation? contemplation of the unlikeliness of it all? — before the actual moment of departure.
And then all hands to the lounge. The year-captain must make his first formal address:
“I thank you all for the dubious honor you’ve given me. I hope you have no reason to regret your choice. But if you do, keep in mind that a year lasts only twelve months.”
Thin laughter came from the assembled voyagers. He had never been much of a comedian.
A few more words, and then it was time for them to go back to their cabins again. By twos and threes drifting out, pausing by the viewplate in the great corridor to have one last look at the Earth, blue and huge and throbbing with life in the center of the screen. Off to the sides somewhere, the Moon, the Sun. Everything that you take for granted as fixed and permanent.
The sudden awareness coming over them all that the Wotan is their world now, that they are stuck with each other and no one else for all eternity.
Music over the ship’s speakers. Beethoven, was it? Something titanic-sounding, at any rate. Something chosen for its sublime transcendental force too. That added up to Beethoven. “Prepare for launch,” the year-captain announced, over the music. “Shunt minus ten. Nine. Eight.” All the old hokum, the ancient stagy stuff, the stirring drama of takeoff. The whole world was watching, yes. The comfortable, happy people of Earth were sending forth the last of their adventurers, a grand exploit indeed, ridding themselves of fifty lively and troubled people in the fond hope that they would somehow replicate the vigor and drive of the human species on some brave new world safely far away. “Six. Five. Four.”
His counting was meaningless, of course. The actual work of the launch was being done by hidden mechanisms in some other part of the ship. But he knew the role he was supposed to play.
“Shunt,” he said.
Drama in his voice, perhaps, but none in the actuality of the event. There was no special sensation at the moment the stardrive came on, no thrusting, no twisting, nothing that could be felt. But the Earth and Sun disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an eerie pearly blankness, as the Wotan made its giddy leap into a matter-free tube and began its long journey toward an unknown destination.
Someone is standing beside him now, here at the six-month-anniversary celebration. Elizabeth, it is. She puts a glass of wine in his hand.
“The last of the wine, year-captain. Don’t miss out.” She has obviously already had her share, and then some. “’Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where.’” She is quoting something again, he realizes. Her mind is a warehouse of old poems.
“Is that Shakespeare?” he asks.
“TheRubaiyat,” she says. “Do you know it? ‘Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring the winter garment of repentance fling.’” She is very giddy. She rubs up against him, lurching a little, just as he puts the wine to his lips; but he keeps his balance and not a drop is spilled. “’The bird of time,’” she cries, “’has but a little way to fly — and lo! The bird is on the wing.’”
Elizabeth staggers, nearly goes sprawling. Quickly the year-captain slips his arm under hers, pulls her up, steadies her. She presses her thin body eagerly against his; she is murmuring things into his ear, not poetry this time but a flow of explicit obscenities, startling and a little funny coming from this bookish unvoluptuous woman. Her slurred words are not entirely easy to make out against the roaring background of the party, but it is quite clear that she is inviting him to her cabin.
“Come,” he says, as she weaves messily about, trying to get into position for a kiss. He grips her tightly, propelling her forward, and cuts a path across the room to Heinz, who is pouring somebody else’s discarded drink into his glass with the total concentration of an alchemist about to produce gold from lead. “I think she’s had just a little too much,” the year-captain tells him, and smoothly hands Elizabeth over to him.
Just beyond him is Noelle, quiet, alone, an island of serenity in the tumult. The year-captain wonders if she is telling her sister about the party.
Astonishingly, she seems aware that someone is approaching her. She turns to face him as he comes up next to her.
“How are you doing?” he asks her. “Everything all right?”
“Fine. Fine. It’s a wonderful party, isn’t it, year-captain?”
“Marvelous,” he says. He stares shamelessly at her. She seems to have overcome yesterday’s fatigue; she is beautiful again. But her beauty, he decides, is like the beauty of a flawless marble statue in some museum of Greek antiquities. One admires it; one does not necessarily want to embrace it. “It’s hard to believe that six months have gone by so fast, isn’t it?” he asks, wanting to say something and unable to find anything less fatuous to offer.
Noelle makes no reply, simply smiles up at him in that impersonal way of hers, as though she has already gone back to whatever conversation with her distant sister he has in all probability interrupted. She is an eternal mystery to him. He studies her lovely unreadable face a moment more; then he moves away from her without a further word. She will know, somehow, that he is no longer standing by her side.
There is trouble again in the transmission the next day. When Noelle makes the morning report, Yvonne complains that the signal is coming through indistinctly and noisily. But Noelle, telling this to the year-captain, does not seem as distraught as she had been over the first episode of fuzzy transmission. Evidently she has decided that the noise is some sort of local phenomenon, an artifact of this particular sector of nospace — something like a sunspot effect, maybe — and will vanish once they have moved farther from the source of the disturbance.
Perhaps so. The year-captain isn’t as confident of that as she seems to be. But she probably has a better understanding of such things than he has. In any event, he is pleased to see her cheerful and serene again.
What courage it must have taken for her to agree to go along on this voyage!
He sometimes tries to put himself in her place. Consider your situation carefully, he thinks, pretending that he is Noelle. You are twenty-six years old, female, sightless. You have never married or even entered into a basic relationship. Throughout your life your only real human contact has been with your twin sister, who is, like yourself, blind and single. Her mind is fully open to yours. Yours is to hers. You and she are two halves of one soul, inexplicably embedded in separate bodies. With her, only with her, do you feel complete. And now you are asked to take part in a voyage to the stars without her — a voyage that is sure to cut you off from her forever, at least in a physical sense.
You are told that if you leave Earth aboard the starship, there is no chance that you will ever see your sister again. Nor do you have any assurance that your mind and hers will be able to maintain their rapport once you are aloft.
You are also told that your presence is important to the success of the voyage, for without your participation it would take decades or even centuries for news of the starship to reach Earth, but if you are aboard — and if, if, contact with Yvonne can be maintained across interstellar distances, which is not something that you can know in advance — it will be possible for the voyagers to maintain instantaneous communication with Earth, no matter how far into the galaxy they journey.
The others who undertake to sail the sea of stars aboard the Wotan will be making painful sacrifices too, you know. You understand that everyone on board the ship will be leaving loved ones behind: mothers and fathers, perhaps, or brothers and sisters, certainly friends, lovers. There will be no one in the Wotan’s complement who does not have some Earthbound tie that will have to be severed forever. But your case is special, is it not, Noelle? To put it more precisely, your case is unique. Your sister is your other self. You will be leaving part of yourself behind.
What should you do, Noelle?
Consider. Consider.
You consider. And you agree to go, of course. You are needed: how can you refuse? As for your sister, you will naturally lose the opportunity to touch her, to hold her close, to derive direct comfort from the simple fact of her physical presence. You will be giving that up forever. But is that really so significant? They say you must understand that you will never “see” her again, but that’s not true at all. Seeing is not the issue. You can “see” Yvonne just as well, certainly, from a distance of a million light-years as you can from the next room. There can be no doubt of that. If contact can be maintained between them at two or three continents’ distance — and it has — then it can be maintained from one end of the universe to another. You are certain of that. You have a desperate need to be certain of that.
You consult Yvonne. Yvonne tells you what you are hoping to hear.
Go, love. This is something that has to be done. And everything will work out the right way.
Yes. Yes. Everything will work out. They agree on that. And so Noelle, with scarcely a moment’s hesitation, tells them that she is willing to undertake the voyage.