The year-captain says, “There’s no easy way of answering that. While we’re in nospace we don’t have spatial coordinates relating to anything but Earth.”
“In relation to Earth, then,” Sylvia says.
“About ninety-five light-years,” Hesper tells her.
There is murmuring in the corridor. “Ninety-five light-years” is a phrase that carries the weight of serious distance.
“We should be able to reach it,” says the year-captain, making a quick and probably slightly hazy estimate, “in about seven months.”
Hesper says, “The other prime prospect, Planet B, which is eighty-six light-years from Earth, has similar characteristics, although with perhaps keener indications of the presence of organic molecules.” A new virtual pattern springs into the air in the hallways, eleven pips of light clustered about their bright little star. He begins to speak once more of spectral lines, insolation levels, temperature gradients, probable size and gravitational pull, electromagnetic emissions, and all the other criteria they must consider.
Somebody cautiously asks if they have enough information to make a decision about a landing.
The year-captain says they do. Enough to allow him to recommend a reconnaissance mission, at any rate. And what they don’t know now, they will be able to learn by sending down drone surveillance vehicles before deciding whether to undertake an actual manned exploration. But first they must agree to take the steps that will bring them out of nospace and carry them to the vicinity of the designated world. There are certain risks in that; there will be risks every time they move from nospace to normal space or back again. But those are risks that must be taken.
He calls for the motion. He proposes a survey of Hesper’s Planet A; and if A proves unsuitable, a look at Planet B.
No one is opposed. They have come out here, after all, to find a place to live.
PlayingGo seems to ease the tensions of Noelle’s situation. She has been playing daily for weeks now, as addicted to the game as any of them, and by now she has become astonishingly expert at it.
The year-captain was her first opponent. Because he had not played in years he was rusty at first, but within minutes the old associations returned and he found himself setting up chains of stones with skill. Although he had expected her to play poorly, unable to remember the patterns on the board after the first few moves, she proved to have no difficulty keeping the entire array on her mind. Only in one respect had she overestimated herself: for all her precision of coordination, she was unable to place the stones exactly, tending rather to disturb the stones already on the board as she made her moves. After a while she admitted failure and henceforth she would call out the plays she desired — M17, Q6, P6, R4, C11 — and he would place the stones for her. In the beginning he played unaggressively, assuming that as a novice she would be haphazard and weak, but soon he discovered that she was adroitly expanding and protecting her territory while pressing a sharp attack against his, and he began to devise more cunning strategies. They played for two hours and he won by sixteen points, a comfortable margin but nothing to boast about, considering that the year-captain was an experienced and adept player and that this was her first game.
The others were skeptical of her instant ability. “Sure she plays well,” Paco muttered. “She’s reading your mind, isn’t she? She can see the board through your eyes and she knows what you’re planning.”
“The only mind open to her is her sister’s,” the year-captain said vehemently.
“How can you be sure she’s telling the truth about that?”
The year-captain scowled. “Play a game with her yourself. That ought to tell you whether it’s skill or mind reading that’s at work.”
Paco, looking sullen, agreed. That evening he challenged Noelle to a game; and later he came to the year-captain looking abashed. “She plays very well. She almost beat me, and she did it fairly.”
The year-captain played a second game with her. She sat almost motionless, eyes closed, lips compressed, calling out the coordinates of her moves in a quiet steady monotone, like some sort of clever automaton, a mechanical game-playing device. She rarely needed much time to decide on her moves and she made no blunders that had to be retracted. Her capacity to devise game patterns had grown with incredible swiftness just in those first few days: no more than thirty minutes into the game he found that she had him nearly shut off from the center, but he recovered the initiative and managed a narrow victory. Afterward she lost once more to Paco and then to Heinz, but again she displayed an increase of ability, and in the evening she defeated Chang, a respected player. Now she became invincible. Undertaking two or three matches every day, she triumphed over Leon, Elliot, the year-captain, and Sylvia. Go had become something immense to her, something more than a mere game or a simple test of mental agility. She focused her energy on the board so intensely that her playing approached the level of a religious discipline, a kind of meditation. On her fourth day of play she defeated Roy, the ship’s reigning champion, with such economy that everyone was dazzled. Roy could speak of nothing else that evening. He demanded a rematch and was defeated again.
And now she plays almost all the time. She sits within a luminous sphere of Noelleness, a strange otherworldly creature lit by that eerie inner glow of hers, and finds some kind of deep and abiding peace in a universe of black and white stones.
So it is decided. We are to make our first planetary visit.
The first of how many, I wonder, before we discover our new home? Will we find a world on this first attempt that’s almost good enough but perhaps has one or two more or less serious drawbacks, and will that cause us to get embroiled in a long, dreary battle over whether to stay or leave? We don’t want to pick a place that doesn’t really work, of course. But what’s our definition of a place that works? A planet that’s 99.77 percent identical to Earth? Blue skies, fleecy clouds, green forests, easy gravitation, a pleasant climate, ripe and nicely edible fruit on every vine, lots of easily domesticated useful animals close at hand? We aren’t going to find a place like that. If we hold out for a perfect simulacrum of Earth, we’re going to be roaming the galaxy for the next fifty thousand years.
What we’re going to have to settle for is some place that’s 93 percent Earthlike, or 87 percent, or maybe only 74 percent. Obviously we need an oxygen-based atmosphere and plenty of available water, and we aren’t going to be able to manage if the biochemistry of the place if pure poison to our systems, or if the gravitation is so strong that we can’t take a step without falling on our noses. But we will need to understand that wherever we settle, we’re going to have to make changes in the environmental conditions to the limit of our ability to effect them, and probably we’re also going to have to make significant genetic changes in ourselves to the point where there’s likely to be some serious debate over whether our children can really be considered human.
Will people be willing to settle for a planet like that on the first or second or even tenth try? Or will they vote again and again to reject what we find and look elsewhere for something a little better? We can waste our entire lives looking for the perfect world, or even the almost perfect one.
An autocratic year-captain could force them to settle for the first plausible-looking planet we find, simply by decree. But the year-captain isn’t supposed to be that kind of an autocrat. And in any case I’m not going to be year-captain, am I, by the time we reach Planet A. My year will be up. They could reelect me, I suppose, if I agreed, and then I could do whatever was within my powers to influence our decision about where we found our colony. But if I want to be part of the landing team, somebody else has to be elected captain. And I do want to be part of the landing team. I can’t have it both ways.
Who will succeed me? Heinz? Roy? Sieglinde? I don’t immediately see an ideal candidate. That makes me uncomfortable. And anything at all can happen once this collection of prima donnas starts to vote, which makes me feel even more troubled about the whole idea of handing the job over to someone else.
One other thing to consider. Are we really going to be able to jump in and out of nospace with the greatest of ease? This is experimental equipment we’re flying here. We aren’t entirely sure about its stress tolerance. It may have plenty of surprises waiting for us. Apparently there’s a mathematical angle too, which had only now begun to surface in something I heard Sieglinde and Roy discussing. The star-drive, it seems, is governed by probabilistic phenomena that aren’t fully understood, that in fact are scarcely understood at all. Whenever we make a jump in or out of nospace there’s a small but distinct possibility that the ship will do something completely unexpected. It might just happen on any given shunt that something critical will have gone awry that is beyond our capacity to correct, and we won’t be able to make the equipment work any more, so that we wind up stuck wherever we happen to be, whether that’s in nospace or out of it. Come to think of it, we might find that the first time we try to get back into normal space we simply can’t do it.
That’s quite a spread of worries, for one little journal entry. But it’s of some therapeutic value, I suppose, to set all this stuff down. In actuality I’ll deal with all of those problems the way I deal with everything, tackling them one at a time in the appropriate order. No need to worry about our rejecting a nearly suitable world until we’ve found one. No need to worry about whether the shunt mechanism will fail until it does. As for choosing the next year-captain, I ought to trust to the common sense and good judgment of my companions, instead of fretting about my own supposed indispensability and the likelihood that they will replace me with some clown.
What matters right now is simply to locate Planet A in some kind of Einsteinian-universe coordinates, get ourselves as close as we can to it before we leave nospace, and shunt back into the real continuum within easy exploring range of Planet A’s star’s solar system.
We’re supposed to know how to do that. If we can’t manage it, none of the other problems are going to be very important.
And so we get started on the grand quest. I don’t seriously believe we’re going to find our New Earth on the very first try. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And there’d a chance — small, but real — that we’ll find what we need right away. Both of these two planets look as though they just may be the real thing, insofar as we can tell very much about that at these distances and with the scanning equipment at our disposal. What we have to do now is go out and take a close look.
The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap that now spans more than twenty light-years. “Wait,” she says. “Yvonne is calling for a repeat. From ‘metabolic.’”
He pauses, goes back, reads again:
“Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are, of course, taking appropriate corrective steps, and—”
Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. The year-captain waits. She bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples.
“Static again,” she says. “It’s worse than ever today.”
“Are you getting through at all?”
“I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, push. And still Yvonne asks me for repeats.” She lifts her head and stares at him, her eyes locking on his in that weird intuitive way of hers. Her face is taut with tension. Her forehead is furrowed, and it glistens with a bright film of sweat. The year-captain wants to reach out to her, to hold her, to comfort her. She says huskily, “I don’t know what’s happening, year-captain.”
“The distance—”
“No!”
“Better than twenty light-years.”
“No,” she says again, a little less explosively this time. “We’ve already demonstrated that distance effects aren’t a factor. If there’s no falling off of signal after a million kilometers, after one light-year, after ten light-years — no measurable drop in clarity and accuracy whatever — then there shouldn’t be any qualitative diminution suddenly at any greater distance. Don’t you think I’ve thought about this?”
“Of course you have, Noelle.”
“It’s not as if we’re getting out of earshot of each other. We were in perfect contact at ten light-years, perfect at fifteen. Those are already immense distances. If we could manage that, we ought to be able to manage at any distance at all.”
“But still, Noelle—”
“Attenuation of signal is one thing, and interference is another. An attenuation curve is a gradual slope. Remember, Yvonne and I have had complete and undistorted mental access from the moment we left Earth until just a short while ago. And now — no, year-captain, it can’t be attenuation. This has to be some sort of interference. A purely local effect that we’re encountering in this region of the galaxy.”
“Yes, like sunspots, I know. Perhaps when we head out for Planet A, things will clear up.”
“Perhaps,” Noelle says crisply. “Let’s start again, shall we, year-captain? Yvonne’s calling for signal. Go on from’manganese and potassium.’ ”
” — manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps—”
The year-captain visualizes the contact between the two sisters as an arrow whistling from star to star, as fire speeding through a shining tube, as a river of pure force coursing down a celestial wave guide. He sees the joining of those two minds as a stream of pure light binding the moving ship to the far-off mother world. Sometimes he dreams of them both, Yvonne and Noelle, Noelle and Yvonne, standing facing each other across the cosmos with their hands upraised and light streaming from their fingertips, and the glowing bond that stretches across the galaxy between the two sisters gives off so brilliant a radiance that he stirs and moans and presses his forehead into the pillow.