Starborne

For Dave and Nancy Deroche

Sixteen light-years from Earth today, in the fifth month of the voyage, and the silken force of nospace acceleration continues to drive the starship’s velocity ever higher. Three games of Go are in progress in the Wotan’s lounge. The year-captain stands at the entrance to the brightly lit room, casually watching the players: Roy and Sylvia, Leon and Chang, Heinz and Elliot.

Go has been a craze aboard ship for weeks. The players — some eighteen or twenty members of the expedition have caught the addiction by this time, more than a third of the entire complement — sit hour after hour, contemplating strategies, devising variations, grasping the smooth black or white stones between forefinger and second finger, putting the stones down against the wooden board with the proper smart sharp clacking sound. The year-captain himself does not play, though the game once interested him to the point of obsession, long ago, in what was almost another life; his shipboard responsibilities require so intense an exercise of his energies that he can find little amusement in simulated territorial conquest. But he comes here sometimes to watch, remaining five or ten minutes, then going on about his duties.

The best of the players is Roy, the mathematician, a large, heavy man with a soft, sleepy face. He sits with his eyes closed, awaiting in tranquillity his turn to play. “I am purging myself of the need to win,” he told the year-captain yesterday when asked what occupied his mind while he waited to put down his next piece. Purged or not, Roy continues to win more than half of his games, even though he gives most of his opponents a handicap of four or five stones.

He gives Sylvia a handicap of only two. She is a delicate woman, fine-boned and shy. Genetic surgery is her specialty. Sylvia plays the game well, although slowly. She makes her move. At the sound of it Roy opens his eyes. He studies the board the merest fraction of a second, points, and says, “Atari,” the conventional way of calling to his opponent’s attention the fact that her move will enable him to capture several of her stones. Sylvia laughs lightly and retracts her move. After a moment she moves again. Roy nods and picks up a white stone, which he holds for nearly a minute, hefting it between the two playing fingers as though testing its weight, before he places it. Which is not at all typical of him: ordinarily he makes his moves with intimidating speed. Perhaps he is tired this morning. Or perhaps he is simply being kind.

The year-captain would like to speak to Sylvia about the anaerobic gene-cluster experiment, but evidently the game is barely under way; he supposes that she and Roy will be occupied with it for another hour or more. His questions can wait. No one hurries aboard the Wotan. They have plenty of time for everything: a lifetime, maybe, if no habitable planet can be found. All the universe is theirs to search, yes. But it may well be the case that nothing useful will be found, and this ship’s walls will mark the full boundary of their universe, forever and a day. No one knows, yet. They are the first to venture out this far. At this point there are only questions, no answers. The only thing that is reasonably certain is that they are bound on a voyage from which there is no expectation of returning.

All is quiet for a time in the lounge. Then Heinz, at the far side of the room, loudly places a stone. Elliot acknowledges it with a little chuckle. Chang, at the board next to them, glances over to look; Sylvia and Roy pay no attention. The year-captain scans the board of Roy and Sylvia’s game, trying to anticipate Sylvia’s next move. His eyesight is sharp: even at this distance he can clearly make out the patterns on the board. Indeed, everything about the year-captain is sharp. He is a man of crisp boundaries, of taut edges carefully drawn together.

Soft footsteps sound behind him.

The year-captain turns. Noelle, the mission communicator, is approaching the lounge. She is a slim sightless woman with long gleaming blue-black hair and elegantly chiseled features. Her tapering face is a perfect counterpart of the year-captain’s own lean, austere one, though she is dusky, and he is fair-haired and so pale of skin that he seems to have been bleached. She customarily walks the corridors unaided. No sensors for Noelle, not even a cane. Occasionally she will stumble, but usually her balance is excellent and her sense of the location of obstacles is eerily accurate. It is a kind of arrogance for the blind to shun assistance, perhaps. But also it is a kind of desperate poetry.

He watches in silence as she comes up to him. “Good morning, year-captain,” she says.

Noelle is infallible in making such identifications. She claims to be able to distinguish each of the members of the expedition by the tiny characteristic sounds they make: their patterns of breathing, the timbre of their coughs, the rustling of their clothing. Among the others there is a certain skepticism about this. Many aboard the starship believe that Noelle is simply reading their minds. She does not deny that she possesses the power of telepathy; but she insists that the only mind to which she has direct access is that of her sister Yvonne, her identical twin, far away on Earth.

He turns to her. His eyes meet hers: an automatic act, a habit. Her eyes, dark and clear and almost always open, stare disconcertingly through his forehead. Plainly they are the eyes of a blind person but they seem weirdly penetrating all the same. The year-captain says, “I’ll have a report for you to transmit in about two hours.”

“I’m ready whenever you need me.” Noelle smiles faintly. She listens a moment, head turned slightly to the left, to the clacking of the Go stones. “Three games being played?” she asks. Her voice is soft but musical and clear, and perfectly focused, every syllable always audible.

“Yes.”

What extraordinary hearing she must have, if she can perceive the sounds of stones being placed so acutely that she knows the number of game-boards that are in use.

“It seems strange that the game hasn’t begun to lose its hold on them by now?”

“Go can have an extremely powerful grip,” the year-captain says.

“It must. How good it is to be able to surrender yourself so completely to a game.”

“I wonder. Playing Go consumes an enormous amount of valuable time.”

“Time?” Noelle laughs. The silvery sound is like a cascade of little chimes. “What is there to do with time, except to consume it?” Then after a moment she says, “Is it a difficult game?”

“The rules are actually quite simple. The application of the rules is another matter entirely. It’s a deeper and more subtle game than chess, I think.”

Her glossy blank gaze wanders across his face and suddenly her eyes lock into his. How is she able to do that? “Do you think it would take very long for me to learn how to play?” she asks.

“You?”

“Why not? I also need amusement, year-captain.”

“The board is a grid with hundreds of intersections. Moves may be made at any of them. The patterns that are formed as the players place their stones are complex and constantly changing. Someone who — isn’t — able — to see—”

“My memory is excellent,” Noelle says. “I can visualize the board and make the necessary corrections as play proceeds. You would only have to tell me where you are putting down your stones. And guide my hand, I suppose, when I make my moves.”

“I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”

“Will you teach me anyway?”

I have not yet ceased to wonder at the fact that we are here, aboard this ship, carrying out this voyage, acting out this destiny that the universe has chosen for us. How many times have I made this entry in my journal, after all? Five? Ten? I keep returning to this one slender point, worrying it, prodding at it, marveling that this is happening and that it is happening to us. Not to me, particularly — what good would all my training on the island have been if I were still the center of my own world, like a child? — but to us, this larger entity, this group of individual and disparate and oddly assorted people who have come together willingly, even joyously, in this curious endeavor.

How odd it all is, still! Traveling through endless night to some unknown destination, some virgin world that awaits our finding. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. But this is the proper time, evidently, for it to be happening. It is our fate that we fifty people live at just this moment of time, this present epoch, when it has been made possible to journey between the stars, and so here we are, making that journey, seeking a new Earth for mankind. Someone had to do it; and we are the ones who have stepped forward to be selected, Leon and Paco and Huw and Sylvia and Noelle and I, and all the rest of us aboard this vessel.

In the minds of all those myriad people who have come and gone upon the Earth before our time, when they look forward toward us and try to envision what our era must be like, we are the godlike glittering denizens of the barely imaginable future, leading lives of endless miracle. Everything is possible to us, or so it seems to them. But to those who are not yet born, and will not be for ages, we are the merest mud-crawling primitives, scarcely distinguishable from our hairy ancestors. That we have achieved as much as we have, given our pitiful limitations, is fascinating and perplexing to them.

To ourselves, though, we are only ourselves, people with some skills and some limitations: neither gods nor brutes. It would not be right for us to see ourselves who sit at the summit of Creation, for we know how far from true that is; and yet no one ever sees himself as a pitiful primitive being, a hapless clumsy precursor of the greater things to come. For us there is always only the present. We are simply the people of the moment, living our only live, doing our best or at least trying to, traveling from somewhere to somewhere aboard this unlikely ship at many multiples of the speed of light, and hoping, whenever we let ourselves indulge in anything as risky as hope, that this voyage of ours will new shaft of light into the pool of darkness and mystery that is the reality of human existence.

The year-captain leaves the lounge and walks a few meters down the main transit corridor to the dropchute that will take him to the lower levels, where Zed Hesper’s planetary-scan operation has its headquarters. He stops off there at least once a day, if only to watch the shifting patterns of simulated stars and planets come and go on Hesper’s great galactic screen. The patterns are abstract and mean very little in astronomical terms to the year-captain — there is no way to achieve a direct view of the normal universe from within the nospace tube, and Hesper must work entirely by means of analogs and equivalents — but even so it reassures him in some obscure way to be reminded that those whose lives are totally confined by the unyielding boundaries of this small vessel sixteen light-years from the world of their birth are nevertheless not completely alone in the cosmos.

Sixteen light-years from home.

Not an easy thing to grasp, even for one trained in the mental disciplines that the year-captain has mastered. He can feel the force of the concept but not the real meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home, and find that concept easy enough to understand. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home — a little harder, yes, but he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much begins to strain comprehension — a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf of enormous size — but he thinks he is able to wrap his mind about even so great a distance, after a fashion.

Sixteen light-years, though?

How can he explain that to himself?

Somewhere just beyond the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels lies a blazing host of brilliant stars, a wilderness of suns all around them, and he knows that his gray-flecked blond beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of distant Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.

Even so, there is a greater miracle. An hour after lunch he will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth, summarizing the day’s findings, such as they are, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems a greater miracle to him by far.

He emerges from the dropchute and is confronted by the carefully ordered chaos that is the lower deck.

Cluttered passageways snake off in many directions before him. He chooses the third from the left and proceeds aft, crouching a little to keep from banging his forehead on the multitudinous ducts that pass crisscrossingly just above him.

In the year-captain’s mind the starship sometimes appears sleek, narrow, graceful: a gleaming silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. But he knows that the actuality is nothing like that. In fact the ship is not remotely like a bullet at all. No Newtonian forces of action and reaction are driving it, nor does it have the slightest refinement of form. Its outlines are boxy and squat and awkwardly asymmetrical, a huge clunky container even more lopsided and outlandish in shape than the usual sort of spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and other excrescent externals that have the appearance of having been tacked on in a purely random way.

Yet because of the Wotan’s incredible speed and the serenity of its movements — the ship is carrying him without friction through the vast empty cloak of nospace at a pace already four times greater than that of light and increasing with every passing moment — the year-captain persists in thinking of it as he does, an imaginary projectile, sleek, narrow, graceful. There is a rightness to that which transcends mere literal sense. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind, even though he is familiar with the true shape of the vessel inside and out. If nothing else, his routine movements through the labyrinthine interior of the starship each day provide constant and unending contradiction of his fanciful mental picture of it.

The tangled lower levels of the ship are particularly challenging to traverse. The congested corridors, cluttered with a host of storage domes and recycling coils and all manner of other utility ducts, twist and turn every few meters with the abrupt lunatic intricacy of a topological puzzle. But the year-captain is accustomed to moving through them, and in any case he is a man of extraordinary grace of movement, precise and fastidious of step. His outward physical poise reflects the deep strain of asceticism that is an innate part of his character. He is untroubled by the obstacles of these corridors — to him they have no serious existence, they are barely obstacles at all.

Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are the cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement kits, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other planetary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replicators, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-building storehouse. Below all that, on the deepest level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spansules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain significant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.

He reaches a Y-shaped fork, where the passageway abruptly widens and takes the abrupt left turn into Hesper’s little room. A blare of colored light confronts him, blue and green and dazzling incandescent red. Things blink and flash in comic excess. Hesper’s screen is the center of the universe, toward which everything flows: from every corner of the firmament data comes streaming in torrents, and somehow it all is captured and reconstituted into visual form here. But only Hesper can understand it. Possibly not even he, the year-captain sometimes thinks.

The air in Hesper’s room is warm and close, dense, moist jungle air. Hesper likes heat and always keeps humidity turned to the max. He is a small black-skinned man, with thin, perpetually compressed lips and a startling angular beak of a nose, who comes from some island on the far side of India. The sun must be very strong there; the fair-skinned year-captain imagines that he would find himself baked down to the bone in a minute, if ever he were to set foot in that land. Is it a place like that toward which all of Hesper’s zealous scanning is bent, one with a sun of such ferocity?

“Look here, year-captain,” Hesper says immediately. “Four new prospects!”

He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal optimist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.

“How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”

“Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.” Hesper’s voice is light, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “Of course, I’m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”

The year-captain nods. “Of course.”

“But it won’t be long, year-captain! It won’t be long, I promise you that!”

The year-captain offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at — it’s an article of faith for everyone on board that there must be such a world somewhere — but he understands that Hesper’s early enthusiasms are just that, enthusiasms. Hesper is a quick man with a hypothesis. No matter: the voyage has just begun, really. The year-captain doesn’t expect to be greeted here with any real discoveries, not yet. He simply wants to stare at the screen.

Hesper has told him, more than once, what the blazing swirls and squiggles on the screen are supposed to signify. The sequence of criteria for habitable worlds. The raw astronomical data, first. Each sun’s place on the main sequence, the indications of the presence of planetary bodies in constructive positions. Mean orbital distances plotted against luminosity. And then a spectroscopic workup. Evidence for the presence of an atmosphere. The chemical components thereof: suitable or not? And then — biospheric analysis — conditions of thermodynamic disequilibrium, indicating the possible presence of transpiration and respiration — the temperature range, probable mean highs and lows—

The starship has data-gathering tentacles reaching far out into the incomprehensible void. A host of sensory receptors, mysteriously capable of piercing the nospace tube in which the ship travels and extending into the dark reality beyond, collects information tirelessly, information that is not actual realspace data but is somehow a usable equivalent of such data, and processes it into these bright designs. Over which this bubbly little man hovers, evaluating, discarding, reconsidering, unendingly searching for the ultimate new Eden that is the goal of their quest.

Hesper wants to discuss his newest prospects. The year-captain listens with half an ear. He wants nothing more just now than the simple relaxation that watching the screen affords. The abstract patterns, so very bright and cheerful. The wild swirls of color that whirl and clash like crazed comets. Is there any real meaning in them? Only Hesper knows. He devised this information-gathering system; he is the only one, really, who can decipher and interpret the mysterious factoids that the ship’s sensors suck in. When the time comes, the year-captain will pay close attention to the little man’s data. But this is not yet the time.

The year-captain stands and watches for a while, mindlessly, like a small child, taking innocent pleasure in the colors and patterns, admiring them for their own sake. There are few enough pleasures that he allows himself: this one is harmless and comforting. Stars dance on the screen in wild galliards and fandangos. He imagines that he identifies steel-blue Vega and emerald Deneb and golden Arcturus, but he knows that there is no way he can be correct. The patterns he sees here are not those of the constellations he watched so often soaring across the icy sky over Norway in his long vigils of the night. What Hesper views here is not the sky itself, nor even any one-to-one equivalent of it, but simply the nospace correlative of the sky, a map of energy sources in realspace as they have been translated into utterly alien nospace terms. No matter; let these seeming stars be any stars at all, let them be Markab or Procyon or Rigel or Betelgeuse or ones that have no names at all — let them, for all he cares, be nothing more than imaginary points of light. He wants only to see the dance.

He savors the light-show gratefully until his eyes begin to ache a little and the wild spectacle starts to weary his mind. Then he thanks Hesper gravely and goes out.

Noelle’s cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuettes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some objects evidently chosen for their rich textures — a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea urchin’s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision, moving this object a centimeter or two to one side, lifting another and fondling it a moment before returning it to the exact place where it had been. The supreme confidence of her movements is fascinating to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down.

Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver stitching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship between adults as taking advantage. Well, then, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling: pity too easily becomes patronizing, and that kills desire. He rejects that theory also: glib, implausible. Could it simply be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? Noelle has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that Noelle is so self-contained, so calm, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communication with her distant sister, that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems unapproachable: her strange perfection of soul sequesters her, keeping others at a distance the way extraordinary physical beauty can sometimes keep people at a distance. She does not arouse desire because she does not seem at all human. She gleams. She is a flawless machine, an integral part of the ship.

He unfolds the text he has prepared, the report that is to be transmitted to Earth today. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says to her, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communiqué all the same.”

“It would be cruel if we didn’t. We mean so very much to them.”

The moment she begins to speak, all of the year-captain’s carefully constructed calmness evaporates, and instantly he finds himself becoming edgy, oddly belligerent, distinctly off balance. He is bewildered by that. Something in the softness and earnestness of her sweet gentle voice has mysteriously annoyed him, it seems. Coils of sudden startling tension are springing up within him. Anger, even. Animosity. He has no idea why. He is unable to account for his reaction entirely.

“I have my doubts about that,” he says, with a roughness that surprises him. “I don’t think we matter at all.”

This is perverse, and he knows it. What he has just said runs counter to all of his own beliefs.

She looks a little surprised too. “Oh, yes, yes, we do, we mean a great deal to them. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel, all over the world and to the Moon as well. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

He will not concede the point. “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace. A nine-day wonder.” His voice sounds harsh and unfamiliar to him, his rhythms of speech coarse, erratic, words coining in awkward rushes. As for his words themselves, so bleak and sardonic, they astonish him. He has never spoken this way about Earth and its attitude toward the starship before. Such thoughts have never so much as crossed his mind before. Still, he finds himself pushing recklessly onward down the same strange track. “That’s the only thing we represent to them, isn’t it? Novelty, vicarious adventure, a bit of passing amusement?”

“Do you really mean that? It seems so terribly cynical.”

He shrugs. Somehow this ugly idea has taken possession of him, repugnant though his argument is, even to him. He sees the effect that he is having on her — puzzlement turning to dismay — but he feels that he has gone in too deep now to turn back. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiqués. Perhaps sooner than that. They’ll stop paying attention. A year’s time and they’ll have forgotten us.”

She seems taken aback. Her nostrils flicker in apparent alarm. Normally her face is a serene mask. Not now. “What a peculiar mood you’re in today, year-captain!”

“Am I? Well, then, I suppose I am.”

“I don’t see you as in any way a cynical man. Everything about you is the opposite of cynical. And yet here, today — saying such— such—” She falters.

“Such disagreeable things?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps I’m just being realistic. I try to be. A realist, yes. Is a realist the same as a cynic?”

“Why do you feel you need to put labels on yourself?”

“That’s an important part of being a realist.”

“You don’t know what real is. You don’t know what you are, year-captain.”

Her counterattack, if that is what it is, amazes him as much as his own outburst. This is a new Noelle, agitated, vehement. In just a few seconds the conversation has veered entirely out of control: much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken to him like this before. The same is true of him. He is saying things he doesn’t believe; she is saying things that go far beyond the bounds of her normal quiet aloofness. It is as if there is a malign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them both unnaturally tense and aggressive.

The year-captain feels a touch of panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle’s consciousness, will she still be able to make contact with far-off Yvonne?

Yet he is unable to prevent himself from parrying once more: “Do you know what I am, then?”

“A man in search of himself is what you are. That’s why you volunteered to come all the way out here.”

He shakes his head briskly, futile though he knows such nonverbal language to be with her. “Oh, no, no, no. Too slick, Noelle. Too easy.”

“They say you were a famous actor, once. Isn’t that so? And after that, a biologist who made a great discovery on some moon of Jupiter, or maybe it was Saturn. Then a monk on a desert island somewhere. And now the captain of the first starship. There’s no continuity in any of that that I can find. Who are you, year-captain? Do you really know?”

“Of course I do.” But he does not care to amplify that response. Her words make no sense to him. He sees the logic of his jagged zigzagging career with perfect clarity; it is obvious to him how one thing has led inevitably to the next. He could explain all that to her, but something hardens in him. He is not willing to present an apologia for his life just now. That leaves him with nothing of any substance to say; and the best he can do is merely to throw her taunt back at her. “What about you?” he asks, still almost angrily. “Would you be able to answer such a question?”

“I think I could.”

“Then tell me. The same things you were asking me. Show me how it’s done, all right? What made you volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle? What are you searching for? Come on. Tell me! Tell me!”

She lets the lids slide down over her unseeing eyes and offers no reply. She holds herself stiffly, hands tightly knitted, lips compressed, breath coming in ragged bursts. She moves her head from side to side three or four times, doing it very slowly, the way a wounded animal might try to shake off pain.

The year-captain says nothing: he has run out of sophomoric nonsense at last, and he is afraid that what he has already said has done terrible damage. He knows why Noelle is here, and she knows that he knows. How could he not? She is essential to the mission; her participation in it was less of a choice than the inevitable assumption of an unrefusable mantle, involving a terrible sacrifice of the one precious thing in her life. It was contemptible of him even to ask.

His throat is dry, his heart is pounding; his entire performance of these past few minutes amazes him. It is as though he has been possessed, yes. Transformed. He makes an effort to get back in touch with the self that he regards as his own, and, after a moment, seems to succeed in reaching some vestige of contact with the man he believes himself to be.

Can anything be salvaged now? he wonders.

As calmly as he can, he says into her tense silence, “This has all been very far out of line. I hope that you’ll forgive me for the things I’ve said.”

She remains silent. He sees a barely perceptible nod.

“I’m sorry that I upset you, Noelle. It was the last thing I intended when I came in here.”

“I know.”

“Shall I go?”

“There’s a report to transmit, isn’t there?”

“Do you think you’d be able to transmit it just now?”

“I’m not sure. I’m willing to try, though. Wait a little, all right?”

“Whatever you want.”

She appears to be collecting herself. Her eyes are still closed, but he can see them moving about less rapidly beneath the lids. Unreadable furrows appear and vanish on her broad forehead. The year-captain thinks of the meditation exercises he learned to practice in his island days, under the bright Arctic sky of Lofoten. She must be doing something like that now herself, he thinks. He sits quietly, watching her, waiting.

Finally she looks at him, at any rate looks toward him, and says, after a moment, in a calm tone more like the one she normally uses, “How do you think they see us at home? As ordinary human beings doing an unusual job, or as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage?”

“We don’t really need to continue this discussion, do we, Noelle? It isn’t getting us anywhere useful.”

“Let’s just finish it with this one last point. Tell me what you think. What do we seem like to them?”

“Right at this point, I suppose, as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage.”

“Yes. And later, you think, they’ll regard us as being more ordinary — as being people just like themselves?”

He searches himself for his truest beliefs. He is surprised at what he finds, but he shares it with her anyway, even though it tends to support the dark, unexpectedly harsh words that had come blurting from him earlier. “Later,” he says, “we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us. What was important to them was the great global effort of getting this expedition launched. Now that it is launched, everything that follows is an anticlimax for them. We’ll go on to live our lives, whatever they’re going to be, and they’ll proceed with theirs, pleasant and shallow and bland as always, and they and we will travel on separate and ever-diverging paths for all the rest of time.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I do.”

“How sad that is. What a bleak finish you foresee for our grand adventure.” Her tone tingles with a grace note of irony. She has become very calm; she may be laughing at him now. But at least there is no danger that he will unsettle her again. She has taken command. “One more question. You yourself, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”

“Something in between. Rather more than ordinary, but certainly no demigod.”

“I think you are right.”

“And you?”

“I regard myself as quite ordinary,” she says sweetly. “Except in two respects. You know what they are.”

“One is your—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable for a moment at naming it. Then he pushes ahead. “Your blindness. And the other, of course, is your telepathic communion with your sister.”

“Indeed.” She smiles. Radiantly. A long moment’s pause. Then she says, “Enough of this, I think. There’s work to be done. Shall we send the report now?”

The speed with which she has regained her poise catches him off balance. “You’re ready to go? You’ve been able to make contact with Yvonne?”

“Yes. She’s waiting.”

“Well, then.” He is numb, hollow. She has completely routed him in whatever inexplicable duel it is that they have been waging here. His fingers tremble a little as he unfolds his notes. He begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity… Apparent location…”

Noelle naps after every transmission. They exhaust her terribly. She was beginning to fade even before he reached the end of today’s message; now, as the year-captain steps into the corridor, he knows she will be asleep before he closes the door. He leaves, frowning, troubled by that odd outburst of tension between them and by his mysterious attack of brutal “realism,” from which he seems to be recovering almost at once, now that he is no longer in Noelle’s presence.

By what right, he wonders, has he said that Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? And that the voyage will have no ultimate consequence for the mother world? He was blurting idiotic foolishness and he knows it. The expedition is Earth’s redemption, the most interesting thing that has happened there in two hundred years, the last best hope of a sleepy stagnant civilization smothering in its own placidity: it matters to them, it matters terribly, he has no reason whatsoever to doubt that. All during the hundred years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement had scarcely ever flagged, indeed had spurred the voyagers themselves on at times, when their interminable training routines threatenedthem with boredom. And the fascination continues. The journey, eventless though it has been so far, mesmerizes all those millions who remained behind. It is like a drug for them, a powerful euphoric, hauling them up from their long lethargy. They have become vicarious travelers; later, when the new Earth is founded, they will be vicarious colonists. The benefits will be felt for thousands of years to come. Why, then, this morning’s burst of gratuitous pessimism? There is no evidence for the position he has so impulsively espoused. Thus far Earth’s messages, relayed by Yvonne to Noelle, have vibrated with eager queries; the curiosity of the home world has been overwhelming since the start. Tell us, tell us, tell us!

And, knowing the importance of the endeavor they have embarked upon, the voyagers have tried to make full reply. But there is so little to tell, really, except in that one transcendental area where there is so much. And how, really, can any of that be told?

How can this—

He pauses by the viewplate in the main transit corridor, a rectangular window a dozen meters long that provides direct access to the external environment of the ship. None of Hesper’s sophisticated data-gathering analog devices are in operation here: this is the Wotan’s actual visual surround. And what it is, is the void of voids. The pearl-gray utter emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the Wotan’s skin. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to count on nothing in the way of outside inputs as they crossed the galaxy; they would be shuttling through a void of infinite length, a matter-free tube, and in all likelihood there would be no sights to entertain them, no backdrop of remote nebulas, no glittering stars, no stray meteors, not so much as a pair of colliding atoms yielding the tiniest momentary spark, only an eternal sameness, the great empty Intermundium, like a blank wall surrounding them on all sides. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, require no delights from the universe that lies beyond the ship, make the ship your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided, those warnings had proved to be! Nospace was not a wall but rather a window. It was impossible for those on Earth to understand what revelations lay in that seeming emptiness.

The year-captain, his head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now seeks to restore his shaken equanimity by indulging in his keenest pleasure. A glance at the viewplate reveals that place where the immanent becomes the transcendent: the year-captain sees once again the infinite reverberating waves of energy that sweep through the grayness, out there where the continuum is flattened and curved by the nospace field so that the starship can slide with such deceptive ease and swiftness across the great span of light-years. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; the Intermundium is a stunning profusion of interlocking energy fields, linking everything to everything; it is music that also is light, it is light that also is music, and those aboard the ship are sentient particles wholly enmeshed in that vast all-engulfing reverberation, that radiant song of gladness, that is the universe. When he peers into that field of light it is manifestly clear to the year-captain that he and all his fellow voyagers are journeying joyously toward the center of all things, giving themselves gladly into the care of cosmic forces far surpassing human control and understanding.

He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it.

What do I see, what do I feel, what am I experiencing?

It is instant revelation, every time. The sight of that shimmering void might well be frightening, a stunning forcible reminder that they are outside the universe, separated from all that is familiar and indeed “real,” floating in this vacant place where the rules of space and time are suspended. But the year-captain finds nothing frightening in that knowledge. None of the voyagers do. It is — almost,almost! — the sought-after oneness. Barriers remain, but yet he is aware of an altered sense of space and time, an enhanced sense of possibility, an encounter with the awesome something that lurks in the vacancies between the spokes of the cosmos, something majestic and powerful; he knows that that something is part of himself, and he is part of it. When he stands at the viewplate he often yearns to open the ship’s great hatch and let himself tumble into the eternal. But not yet, not yet. He is far from ready to swim the galactic Intermundium. Barriers remain. The voyage has only begun. They grow closer every day to whatever it is that they are seeking, but the voyage has only begun.

How could we convey any of this to those who remain behind? How could we make them understand?

Not with words. Never with words.

Let then come out here and see for themselves!

He smiles. He trembles and does a little shivering wriggle of delight. His sudden new doubts all have fallen away, as swiftly as they came. The starship plunges onward through the great strange night. Confidence rises in him like the surging of a tide. The outcome of the voyage can only be a success, come what may.

He turns away from the viewplate, drained, ecstatic.

Noelle was the first member of the crew to be chosen, if indeed she could be said to have been chosen at all. Choice had not really been a part of it for her, nor for her sister. The entire project had been built about their initial willingness; had they not been who and what they were, the expedition would probably have gone forth anyway, but it would have been something quite different. Perhaps it would not have happened at all. The mere existence of Noelle and Yvonne was the prerequisite for the whole enterprise. They were central to everything; their consent was mainly a formality; and once it had been determined that Noelle and not Yvonne would be the one actually to travel on board the ship, her examination for eligibility was a mere charade.

Of those who had truly volunteered, Heinz was the first to win the formal approval of the Board, Paco was the second, Sylvia the third, then Bruce, Huw, Chang, Julia. The year-captain was one of the last to pass through the qualification process. The last one of all, technically, was Noelle, but of course, she was already a part of the project, as much so as the ship itself, and for many of the same reasons.

For each of them, but for Noelle, the process of qualifying was the same: simple, cruel, humiliating, insincere. Generally speaking, the crew members had been picked even before it had occurred to some of them that they might be interested in going. The world had become very small. Everyone’s capacities were known. No one was particularly famous any more, but no one was obscure, either.

Certain formalities were observed, though. It was always possible that the coverta priori selection process had been mistaken in one or two instances, and no one wanted mistakes. Eleven hundred candidates were summoned to fill the fifty slots aboard the starship. They came from every part of the world, a carefully impartial and studiedly representative geographic sampling. Many of the old nations that had once been so distinct and noisily self-important still had some sort of tenuous existences, more as sentimental concepts than as sovereign entities now, but they had not completely evolved out of existence yet and it was a good idea to pay lip service, at least, to the continued quasi-fact of their quasi-status. Each of the formerly sovereign nations or historically significant fragment thereof contributed a few of its former citizens to the long list. And then, too, the candidates represented most or perhaps all — who could say, really? The old distinctions had often been so minute and dubious — of the planet’s racial and ethnic and religious groups, insofar as such groups still existed and looked upon themselves as mattering in the small and cozy society that had evolved out of the turbulent, messy societies of the Industrial and immediately Post-Industrial epochs. In the cosmic scheme of things it no longer counted for very much that one person might like to think of himself as a Finn and another as a Turk, or a German or a Brit or a Thai or a Swede, nor was it really easy any more to fit most people into the old racial classifications that had once had such troublesome significance, nor had the world’s innumerable theological distinctions survived very coherently into modern times. But there were those for whom — perhaps for philosophical reasons, or sentimental ones, or reasons of esthetics, or out of a lingering sense of historical connection, or a fondness for anachronisms, or just out of simple cantankerousness — there was still some value in valiantly claiming, “I am a Welshman” or “I am a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church” or “I carry the blood of the Norman aristocracy.” Such people were considered quaint and eccentric; but there were plenty of them, even now. The world had come a long way, yes, yet ancient vestiges of the grand institutions and solemn distinctions of former civilizations still cropped out everywhere like fossil bones whitening and weathering in the sun. They had ceased to beproblems, yes, but they had not fully ceased to be. Possibly they never would. And so the long list of candidates for the Wotan expedition was an elaborately representative one. The final group would be too, insofar as that was feasible. Formalities were observed, indeed.

There were five Examiners, distinguished and formidable citizens all, and they sat around a table on the top floor of a tall building in Zurich whose enormous wraparound windows offered a clear, crisp view that stretched halfway to Portugal. You stood before them and they asked you things that they already knew about you, things about your technical skills and your physical health and your mental stability and your willingness to say goodbye to the world forever, and to spend anywhere from one to five years, or perhaps even more, in intimate confinement with forty-nine other people, and you could tell from the way they were listening that they weren’t really listening at all. After that they wanted you to speak only about your flaws. If you were in any way hesitant, they would list some for you, sometimes quite an extensive list indeed, and ask you to offer comment on your most flagrant failings, your choice of five. The whole interrogation lasted, in most cases, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they told you you were rejected. Every single candidate who came before the Board of Examiners was told that, calmly, straightforwardly, without show of regret or apology: “Sorry, you’re off the list.” They wanted to see what you would say then. That was the real examination; everything that had gone before had been mere maneuvering and feinting.

The ones who passed were the ones who had rejected the rejection. Some did it one way, some another. Points were given for arrogance, so long as it was sane and sensible arrogance. The man who eventually would become the expedition’s first year-captain had simply said, “You can’t be serious. Obviously I’m qualified. And I don’t like it that you’re playing games with me.” Heinz, who was Swiss himself and indeed was the son of one of the Examiners, had taken a similar stance, telling them that it would be the whole world’s loss if they stuck to their position, but that he had a high enough opinion of the human race to think that they would reconsider. Heinz had helped to design the still-unconstructed Wotan; he knew more of its workings than anyone. Did they really think that he was going to build it for them and then be left behind? Huw, who did indeed proudly call himself a Welshman, was another who reacted with the cool and confident attitude that the Examiners were making a big mistake. He had designed the planetgoing equipment with which the people of the Wotan would explore the new worlds: was he to be denied the right to deploy his own devices, and if so, who was going to handle the job of modifying them on-site to meet unanticipated challenges? And so on.

Most of the female candidates tended to temper their annoyance with a touch of sorrow or regret, partly for themselves but primarily — constructive arrogance again, only imperfectly concealed! — for the enterprise itself. Sylvia explained that she knew more about tectogenetic microsurgery than anyone else alive: how would the coming generations of starborn colonists be able to adapt to some not-quite-suitable planetary environment without her special skills? Giovanna, too, observed that it would be a great pity for the expedition to be deprived of her unique abilities — her primary specialty was metabolic chemistry, and there was something magical about her insight into the relationship between molecular structure and nutritional value. From Sieglinde, who had helped to work out some fundamental theorems of the mathematics of nospace travel, came the simple comment that shebelonged aboard the ship and would not accept disqualification. Et cetera.

What the Examiners looked for — and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun — was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by philosophical realism. Anyone who raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the predesignated fifty.

At the end of the entire process it was Noelle’s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little charade with her too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual verdict, “Sorry, you’re off the list,” and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and then at last she said in her soft way, “Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.” It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point inher examination.

“Then neither of us will go?” Noelle asked, mystified.

“It was only a test of your reaction,” they told her.

“Ah,” she said. “I see.” And she laughed — giggled, really — as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed along with her anyway.

Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.

We flipped a coin, they told her.

She never found out whether that was really true.

Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually sees. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery shiny coating of thin, hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they have been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It congeals, coagulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice floes, colliding, grinding, churning: the floes are at war, destroying one another’s edges, but some are entering into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel can barely make headway. The sails belly out uselessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her cabin, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind’s fist will punch through the stiff frozen canvas of the sails. Nothing can save them. But now! Yes! Yes! A glow overhead! Yvonne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the perfumed tropics, toward the lands of spices and pearls.

Some say the world will end in fire,’” Elizabeth offers. In the lounge, the talk among those who are not playingGo has turned to apocalyptic matters. “’Some say in ice.’”

“Are you quoting something?” Huw wants to know.

“Of course she is,” says Heinz. “You know that Elizabeth’s always quoting something.” Long-limbed, straw-haired Elizabeth is the Wotan’s official bard and chronicler, among other things. Everyone on board has to be Something-Among-Other-Things; multiple skills are the rule. But the center of Elizabeth’s being is poetry. “I think it’s Shakespeare,” Heinz says.

“Not that old,” says Giovanna, looking up from her game. “Only four or five hundred years, at most. An American.”

“Frost,” Elizabeth says. “Robert Frost.”

“Is that a kind of ice?” someone asks.

“It’s a name,” says someone else.

“’From what I’ve tasted of desire,’” Elizabeth says, and her tone makes it clear that she is reciting again, “’I hold with those who favor fire.’”

The year-captain enters the room just then, and Paco glances toward him and says in his booming unfettered way, “And what about you, year-captain? How do you think the world’s going to end? We’ve done the sun going nova, we’ve done the entropic heat-death, we’ve done the rising of the seas until everything has drowned. We’ve done plague and drought and volcanoes. Give us your take, now.”

“Fimbulwinter,” the year-captain says. “Ragnarok.” The barbaric half-forgotten words leap instantly to his tongue almost of their own accord. The northern winds of his childhood sweep through his memory. He sees the frost-locked boreal landscape gleaming as though ablaze, even in the parsimonious winter light.

“The Twilight of the Gods, yes,” Elizabeth says, and gives him a melting smile of unconcealed love, which the year-captain, lost in polar memories, does not see.

Faces turn toward him. They want to hear more. The year-captain says, reaching deep for the ancestral lore, “A time comes when the sun turns black. It gives no light, it gives no warmth, winter comes three times in succession with no summer between. This is the Fimbulwinter, the great winter that heralds the world’s end. There is battle everywhere in the darkness, and brother slays brother for the sake of greed, and father lies with daughter, sister with brother, many a whoredom.”

Elizabeth is nodding. She knows these ancient skaldic poems too. Half to herself she murmurs, rocking back and forth rhythmically, “’An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shall be cloven. A wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters.’”

“Yes,” says the year-captain, shivering now, his mind swirling with the powerful ancient images. “A great wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf the moon. The stars vanish from the heavens. Trees are torn up, and mountains fall, and all fetters and bonds are broken and rent. The sea bursts its bounds, and the Midgard Serpent stirs and comes up on the land and sprinkles all the air and water with his venom, and the Fenris-Wolf breaks free and advances with his mouth agape, his lower jaw against the Earth and the upper against heaven. Nothing is without fear anywhere in the world. For this is the day on which the gods will meet their doom.”

He falls silent, playing out the final titanic battle in his mind, Thor putting the Serpent to death but dying himself of its venom, and the Wolf devouring Father Odin, only to have his gullet torn asunder by Vidar, and the demonic Surtr riding out of Muspelheim and casting fire over the Earth that burns all the world. But of these things the year-captain says nothing aloud. He feels he has had the center of the stage long enough just now. And an Arctic gloom has begun to seize his spirit. The ice, the darkness, the ravening wolves rising above the blazing world. And the Earth of his Viking forefathers is so far away, floating through the emptiness of the night, spinning eternally on its axis somewhere back behind him — a dot, a grain of sand. Nothing. Everything.

After a moment Elizabeth’s voice continues the tale:

“’Smoke-reek rages, and reddening fire. The high heat licks against heaven itself.’” Her mind is a crowded storehouse of poetry. But even she is unable to remember the next line.

“And then?” Paco asks. He throws his hands upward and outward, palms raised. Paco is a small, compact-bodied man of great strength and personal force, and any gesture he makes is always more emphatic than it needs to be, just as his shoulders seem twice as wide as those of a man his height should be. “That’s it? The End? Everybody’s dead and there’s nothing more? The curtain comes down and there’s not going to be any next act, and we look around and see that the theater is empty?”

“Redemption, then,” says the year-captain distantly. “Rebirth. The new world rising on the ashes of the old.”

He isn’t sure. Some details of his grandmother’s stories have faded in his mind, after all these many years. But it must be so, the rebirth. It is that way in every myth, no matter what land it may come from: the world is destroyed so that it may be brought forth new and fresh. There would be no point to these tales, otherwise. Not if the Twilight of the Gods is followed simply by unending empty night. That way all of life would be reduced to the experience of any one mortal individual: we are each of us born into flesh and we live, well or not well as the case may be, and then we die, goodbye, and that’s that for us, everything over. But that is only the individual case. New lives are being engendered even as ours is passing from us: an eternal cycle of rebirth and return. We end, yes, but the world of mortals goes on, death succeeded always by more life. So it must be with whole planets too. Sooner or later they may die, but new worlds are born from the dead husk of the old, and thus it all continues, world without end, always a new dawn beyond the darkness in which yesterday perished. There must never be a total and final end: never. Never.

“You know,” Heinz says cheerfully — Heinz is always cheerful — “for us the world has already come to an end, really. Because we will never see it again. It is already becoming mythical for us. It was a dying world even before we left it, wasn’t it? And now, so far as we’re concerned, it’s dead, and we are its rebirth. We, and all the ova and sperm sitting in cold storage down there in our tanks.”

“If,” says Paco. “Don’t forget the Big If.”

Heinz laughs. “There is no If. The sky is full of worlds, and we will find some. One good one is all we need.”

In fact Heinz is right, they all agree: the world they had left behind them was essentially already dead — the human world, that is — even though some hundreds of millions of people were still moving about upon the face of it. It had passed successfully through all the convulsions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the myriad acute crises of demography and nationalistic fervor and environmental decay, and had moved on into an era so stable and happy that its condition seemed indistinguishable from death, for what has ceased to grow and change has ceased to carry out the most important functions of life. Earth now was the home of a steadily dwindling population of healthy, wealthy, cautious, utterly civilized people, living the easy life in an easy society supported by automated devices of every sort. All their problems had been solved except the biggest one of all, which was that the solutions had become the problems and the trend-lines of everything were curving downward toward inevitable extinction. No one had expected that, really: that the end of striving and strife would in effect mean the end of life. But that was how it was working out. The last sputtering spark of Earth’s vitality was here, carried aboard the Wotan, sailing farther out and out and out into the galactic gulfs with each tick of the clock.

An enormous irony, yes. A cosmic giggle. The world, free now of war and lesser conflicts, of inequalities, of disease, of shortages, was drifting downward on an apparently irreversible spiraling course. There was a lot of bland unexcited cocktail-party talk of the end of the human race within five or six hundred years, a notion with which hardly anybody seemed to care to disagree, and such talk was enough to make most people pause and contemplate matters of ultimate destiny for — oh, a good ten or fifteen minutes at a time.

The explosive population growth of the early industrial era had been curbed so successfully that virtually no children were being born at all. Even though the human life span now routinely exceeded a century, there was no region of the world where population was not steadily declining, because childbirth had become so uncommon that the replacement level was not being maintained. The world had become one vast pleasant suburb of well-to-do elderly childless folks.

Everyone was aware of the problem, of course; but everyone was eager for someone else to do something about it. The calm, mature, comfortable, emotionally stable people of the era had, as a general rule, very little interest in bearing or rearing children themselves, and such experiments in having children artificially generated and communally raised as had been carried out had not met with manifest success.

What the human race appeared to be doing, though no one said anything about it out loud, was to be politely allowing itself to die out. Most people thought that that was very sad. But what, if anything, was anybody supposed to do about it?

The Wotan was one answer to that question. A movement arose — it was the most interesting thing that had happened on Earth in two hundred years — aimed at founding a second Earth on some distant planet. Several dozen of the best and brightest of Earth’s younger generation — men and women in their thirties and forties, mainly — would be sent out aboard an interstellar starship to locate and settle a world of some other star. The hope was that amid the challenges of life on an untamed primitive world the colonists and their starborn progeny would recapture the drive and energy that once had been defining characteristics of the human race, and thus bring about a rebirth of the human spirit — which, perhaps, could be recycled back to the mother world five hundred or a thousand years hence.

Perhaps.

Translating the hypothesis into reality required some work, but there were still enough people willing to tackle the job. The starship had to be designed and built and tested. Done and done and done. A crew of suitably fearless and adventuresome people had to be assembled. It was. The voyage had to be undertaken. And so it came to pass. A habitable world needed to be located. Scanning instruments were even now at work.

And then, if some reasonably appropriate world did indeed turn up, a successful colony must be founded there, and somehow made to sustain itself, however difficult and hostile an environment the colonists might find themselves in—

Yes. The Big If.

You promised to teach me how to play,” Noelle says, pouting a little. They are once again in the ship’s lounge, one of the two centers of daily social life aboard the Wotan, the other being the baths. Four games are under way, the usual players: Elliot and Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Michael and Bruce.

The year-captain is fascinated by that sudden pout of Noelle’s: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. In the past few days she and he have passed through the small bit of tension that had so unexpectedly sprung up between them, and are working well together again. He gives the messages to her to transmit, she sends them to Earth, and back from her sister at the far end of the mental transmission line swiftly come the potted replies, the usual cheery stuff, predigested news, politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of doings in the arts and sciences, special greetings for this member of the expedition or that one, expressions of general good wishes — everything light, shallow, amiable, more or less what you would expect the benign stodgy people of Earth to be sending their absconding sons and daughters. And so it will go, the year-captain assumes, as long as the contact between Noelle and Yvonne holds. Of course, someday the sisters will no longer be available for these transmissions, and real-time contact between Earth and its colony in the stars will be severed when that happens, but that is not a problem he needs to deal with today, or, indeed, at all.

“Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “I really do want to know how to play the game. And I know I can learn it. Have faith in me.”

“All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a timely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquillity through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances all the time.

He leads her toward the gaming tables. Noelle bridles only an instant as his hand touches her elbow, and then she relaxes with an obvious effort, allowing him to guide her across the room.

“This is aGo board,” the year-captain says. He takes her hand and gently presses it flat against the board, drawing it from side to side and then up and down, so she can get some idea of the area of the board and also of its feel. “It has nineteen horizontal lines, nineteen vertical lines. The stones are played on the intersections of these lines, not on the squares that the lines form.” He shows her the pattern of intersecting lines by moving the tips other fingers along them. They have been printed with a thick ink, and evidently she is able to discern their slight elevation above the flatness of the board, for when he releases her hand she slowly draws her fingertips along the lines herself, seemingly without difficulty.

“These nine dots are called stars,” he tells her. “They serve as orientation points.” He touches her fingertips to each of the nine stars in turn. They, too, are raised above the board by nothing more than a faint thickness of green ink, but it seems quite clear that she is able to feel them as easily as though they stood out in high relief. All of her senses must be extraordinarily sharp, by way of compensation for the one that is missing. “We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines going in the other direction letters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we have coordinates that allow us to identify positions on the board. This is B10, this is D18, this is J4, do you follow?” He puts the tip of one of her fingers on each of the locations he names. She responds with a smile and a nod. Even so, the year-captain feels despair. How can she ever commit the board to memory? It’s an impossible job. But Noelle looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “A, B, C,…”

The other games have halted. Everyone in the lounge is watching them. He guides her hand toward the two trays of stones, the black ones of polished slate and the white ones fashioned of clamshell, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and clapping it down against the board. The skin of her hand is cool and very smooth. The hand itself is slender and narrow, almost fragile-looking, but utterly unwavering. “The stronger player uses the white stones,” he says. “Black always moves first. The players take turns placing stones, one at a time, on any unoccupied intersection. Once a stone is placed it is never moved unless it is captured, in which case it is removed at once from the board.”

“And the purpose of the game?” she asks.

“To control the largest possible area with the smallest possible number of stones. You build walls. You try to surround your opponent’s pieces even while he’s trying to surround yours. The score is reckoned by counting the number of vacant intersections within your walls, plus the number of prisoners you have taken.” She is staring steadily in his direction, fixedly, an intense and almost exaggerated show of attention, all the more poignant for its pointlessness. Methodically the year-captain explains the actual technique of play to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by setting up simulated situations on the board, calling out the location of each stone as he places it. “Black holds P12, Q12, R12, S12, T12 — got it?” A nod. “And also P11, P10, P9, Q8, R8, S8, T8. All right?” Another nod. “White holds—” Somehow she is able to visualize the positions; she repeats the patterns after him, and asks questions that show she sees the board clearly in her mind.

He wonders why he is so surprised. He has heard of blind chess players, good ones: they must be able to memorize the board and update their inner view of it with every move. Noelle must have the same kind of hypertrophied memory. But playingGo is not like playing chess. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing fewer than two dozen possible moves. InGo, there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game ofGo to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The chessboard has just sixty-four squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, reducing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original thirty-two pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number ofGo pieces also diminishes gradually as the game proceeds, but their absence makes the patterns on the board more complicated rather than simpler during the unfolding battle for territory.

Even so, Noelle seems to be grasping the essentials. Within twenty minutes she appears to understand the basic ploys. And there is no question that she is able to hold the board firmly fixed on the internal screen of her mind. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, the year-captain gives her an incorrect coordinate — the first time by accident, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and letters, and since it is a long time since he last has played, he misgauges the coordinates occasionally — and then twice more deliberately, to test her. Each time she corrects him, gently saying, “N13? Don’t you mean N12?”

At length she says, “I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”

In the baths later that day Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth discuss the year-captain’s putative sex life. It is one of their favorite speculative subjects. Most of the sex that goes on aboard the ship, and there is quite a good deal of it, takes place in complete openness, figuratively and often literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps overcivilized, epoch. Very little is taboo to them. But the year-captain, unlike virtually everyone else on board, is scrupulous about his privacy.

“He doesn’t have any sex and he doesn’t want any,” Paco insists. “He was a monk just before he joined us, you know. That weird colony of meditating mystics up by the North Pole somewhere off the coast of Scandinavia. And a monk is still what he is, at heart. A man of ice through and through. It shows in his face, that lean and grim thin-lipped face with that little beard that he keeps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Lake the blue ice of a glacier, they are. They show you the interior of the man himself.”

“Wrong,” Elizabeth says. “Ice outside, fire within.”

“And you hold with those who favor fire,” Paco says jeeringly. “Don’t think I don’t listen when you start quoting poetry.”

Elizabeth, reddening down to her bony breast, sticks her tongue out at him.

“You’re in love with him,” Paco says. “Aren’t you, Lizzy?”

Instead of answering, she turns the tank nozzle toward him and douses him with a foaming spray of hot water. Paco, more amused than annoyed, snorts and bellows like a breaching walrus and rises with a powerful thrust of his elbows, launching himself toward her, catching her around the middle, pulling her down into the tank and pushing her head under water. Elizabeth thrashes about in his grasp, wildly wigwagging her lean delicate arms, then frantically kicking her long frail legs in the air as Paco, roaring with laughter, upends her. Heinz, who is elongated and lean, with a sly ever-smiling face and a slippery, practically hairless body, glides forward and jams Paco under the surface with her, and for a couple of moments all three of them are splashing chaotically, forming an incoherent tangle of writhing limbs, the pale, thin Nordic Elizabeth and the stocky, swarthy Latin Paco and the gleaming, beautiful Teutonic Heinz. Then they bob to the top all at once, laughing, gasping merrily for breath.

Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth have been an inseparable triad for the past month and a half. The lines of attraction run among them in every direction, though not with uniform force: Elizabeth for both of the men in equal strong measure, Heinz being pleasantly fond of Elizabeth but fiercely passionate about Paco, Paco drawn strongly to Elizabeth by some sort of attraction of physical opposites but — somewhat to his own surprise — captivated by Heinz’s easy self-confidence and omnivorous sexuality. So far the relationship has demonstrated remarkable three-sided stability, but, of course, no one expects it to last indefinitely. The voyage has really only just begun. Couples and triples will form and break apart and reform in new configurations, on and on and on, just as is the fashion on Earth but probably with greater rapidity, considering the limitation of choice in a population that at the moment numbers just fifty in a completely enclosed and utterly inescapable environment. Up until now none of the relationships that have formed aboard the Wotan has lasted more than about seven weeks. This one is approaching the ship record.

In the aftermath of the wrestling match they sit facing one another along the edge of the tank, unable to stop laughing: one will start and set off the other two, and around and around it goes. Elizabeth’s pallid meager body is rosy now from the underwater frolic; her flesh glows, her small breasts heave. Paco studies her with a proprietary air, and Heinz amiably contemplates them both as if planning to spread his long arms about them and pull them in again.

The air in the small, brightly lit room is warm and steamy. A voluptuous abundant torrent of warm water splashes down from the fountainhead set in the tiled wall. No one worries about water shortages aboard the Wotan: every drop, urine and sweat and the vapor of everybody’s breath included, is rigorously recaptured and purified and aerated and chilled and recycled, and not a molecule of it ever goes to waste. The baths are Roman in sensuousness if not in scale: the room is compact but elegantly appointed, and there is a hot tank, a tepid one, and a frigid one, something for all tastes. Up to nine or ten people can use the baths at the same time, though in practice a certain amount of exclusiveness is afforded those who are in any sort of bonded relationship. Three small rooms adjacent to the tank chamber have beds in them. Much of the ship’s erotic activity goes on in those rooms.

Elizabeth says in a serious tone, when the three of them are calm again, “I don’t deny that I’m attracted to him. And not just for his body, though he’s certainly a handsome man. But his mind — that mysterious, complicated, opaque mind of his—”

“The mind of a mystic,” Paco says with unconcealed contempt. “The mind of a monk, yes.”

“He’s been a monk,” Elizabeth retorts, “but he’s been a lot of other things too. You can’t pin him down in any one category. And I don’t think he’s as ascetic as you seem to believe. The Lofoten monastery isn’t famous for vows of chastity.”

“Oh, he’s no ascetic,” Heinz says. “I can testify to that.”

Elizabeth and Paco whirl to gape at him. “You?” they say at the same time.

Heinz chuckles lazily. “Oh, no, not what you’re thinking. He’s not really my type. Too inward, too elusive. But I can see the passion in him. You don’t have to go to bed with him to know that. It’s there. Plenty of it. It streams from him like sunlight.”

“There,” Elizabeth says to Paco. “Ice outside, maybe, but fire within.”

“And,” Heinz continues, “I’m quite certain that he’s been sleeping with somebody on board.”

“Who?” Elizabeth asks, very quickly.

Another lazy chuckle. “Your guess is as good as mine, and mine is no good at all. I haven’t been spying on him. I’m only saying that he moves around this ship like a cat, and knows every hidden corner of it better even than the man who designed it, and I’m certain that a man of his force, of his virility, is getting a little action somewhere, in some part of the ship that we don’t even suspect can be used for some stuff, and with some partner who’s keeping very quiet about what’s going on. That’s all.”

“I hope you’re right,” says Elizabeth, forcing a broad lascivious grin not at all in keeping with the austere scholarly angularity of her face. “And when he’s done with her, whoever she is, I’d gladly volunteer to be his next secret playmate.”

“He doesn’t want you,” Paco says.

Elizabeth meets this casual dismissal of her fantasies with a disdainful wave other hand. “Oh, I don’t think you can be so sure of that.”

“Oh, but I am, I am,” Paco replies. “It’s only too obvious. You keep sending him signals — everyone can see that, you stare at him like a lovesick child — and what does he send you in response? Nothing. Nothing. I don’t mean to cast any personal aspersions, Liz. You know there are plenty of men who find you attractive. He doesn’t happen to be one of them.” Elizabeth is staring wide-eyed at him, and pain is visible in her rigid unblinking gaze. But Paco will not stop. “There’s no — what is the term? — no chemistry between you and our year-captain. Or else he’s a master at masking his emotions, but if he’s that good at playing a part he should have had a more successful career as an actor than he did. No, he just isn’t interested in you, my love. You must not be his type, whatever that is. Just as he isn’t Heinz’s. There’s no accounting for these things, you know.”

Sadly Heinz says, “I think Paco’s right. But not for the same reasons, exactly.”

“Oh?”

“You may or may not be the captain’s type. Who can say? I’ve already said I think he’s got someone for casual sex, and if we knew who he or she is, we’d have more of an idea about his type. But you’re up against another problem that goes beyond his choice of casual bedmates. He sleeps with someone, yes, very likely, but even so his emotions are focused somewhere else, and that’s too complicated a something for you to deal with. The year-captain is in love, don’t you realize that? I’m not talking about sex now, but love. And it’s a love that’s impossible to consummate.”

“Yes, it’s obvious. He’s in love with himself,” says Paco.

“You’re such a filthy boor,” Elizabeth says. She glances toward Heinz. “What are you talking about? Who do you imagine he’s in love with?”

“The one untouchable person aboard this ship. The one who floats through our lives like some kind of being from another sphere of existence. I can see it written all over his face, whenever he’s within twenty meters of her. The blind girl, that’s who he wants. Noelle. And he’s afraid to do anything about it, and it’s agony for him. For God’s sake, can’t you tell?”

Captain?” Noelle says. “It’s me, Noelle.”

The year-captain looks up, startled. He is not expecting her. It is late afternoon, the last day of the voyage’s fifth month. He is working alone in the control cabin, poring over a thick batch of documents that Zed Hesper has brought him: a new set of formal analyses of three or four of his best prospects for a planetary landing, set forth in much greater detail than Hesper has been able to supply previously.

For the first time, the year-captain has begun to pay serious attention to such things. Half his term of office is over, and he is thinking beyond his captaincy, to the time when he will have reverted to his primary specialty of xenobiology. He can’t practice that aboard the Wotan. He needs an actual alien planet as his scene of operations. He has walked alien worlds before, not only Earth’s neighbor planets but also the bleak strange moons of the gas-giant worlds beyond the orbit of Mars: Titan, Iapetus, Callisto, Ganymede, Io. The exultation of finding splotches of life on those cold forbidding worldlets, extraterrestrial microorganisms rugged beyond belief — supreme moments of his life, those were, the astounding discovery in the sulfurous landscape of Io, and then again on Titan, when he knelt and pointed into methane-ammonia snowdrifts at the tiny astonishing spots of burnt orange against the glaring white! And so he will certainly want to be a member of the first landing team, where his intuitive skills will be valuable on a world full of strange and perhaps challenging life-forms of unpredictably strange biochemical characteristics; but as year-captain he would be obliged to remain aboard the vessel while others take the risks outside. That is the rule of the ship.

It is time, therefore, for him to pick the site of the first landing and head for it in these closing months of the first year, while he is still in command. The die will be cast, that way. That way the timing will be right for him to hand his executive responsibilities on to his successor just as they arrive at their destination, and thus to be able to take part in the initial planetary expedition.

But here is Noelle, drifting silently, wraithlike, into the room where he is working. She looks older and less beautiful today than she usually seems to him: weary and drawn, so much so that she is almost translucent. She appears unusually vulnerable, as though a single harsh sound would shatter her.

“I have the return transmission from Yvonne,” she tells him. There is an oddly timid, tentative inflection in her voice that is not at all like her. He wonders if something terrible has taken place on Earth. But what could possibly go awry on that torpid, tranquil world?

She hands him the small, clear data-cube on which she has archived her latest conversation with her sister on Earth. As Yvonne speaks in her mind, Noelle repeats each message aloud into a sensor disk, and it is captured on the cube.

He rests the cube on the palm of his hand and says to her, “Are you all right, Noelle? You look wiped out.”

A faint shrug. “There was a little problem.”

He waits. She seems to be having trouble articulating her thoughts.

“What kind of problem, Noelle?” he says finally.

“With the transmission. I had some difficulty receiving it. Or rather — what I mean to say is, it wasn’t quite clear. It was — fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy,” the year-captain says. His voice is flat.

“Distorted. Not much, but some. A kind of static around the edges of the signal.”

“Static,” he says, flatly again, playing for time, trying to understand, though he does not really see how merely echoing her words will help him to do that. Yet what else can he do? “Mental static,” he says, looking straight into her sightless eyes.

“That’s the best word I can use for it.”

Yvonne’s mental tone, Noelle says, is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before. Plainly she is worried by it. Frightened, perhaps.

“Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests gently. “Or maybe she was.”

Noelle smiles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a troubled inner state.

He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her customary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently, and often can be heard asking Yvonne to repeat something. The message from the mother world, what the year-captain can make out of it, is the customary chattery blather, no surprises. But this business of static disturbs him. Is this the beginning, he wonders, of the breakdown of their one communication link with Earth, the onset of a steady inexplicable degradation of the signal, leading inevitably to the isolation of the starship in a realm of total silence?

And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvonne and Noelle are nonrelativistic; they travel instantaneously across a cosmos in which light itself can go no faster than 300,000 kilometers per second and even this nonrelativistic faster-than-light starship crosses the topological folds of nospace at finite, though immense, velocity. Without the sisters, they would have to fall back on radio transmission to make contact with Earth: from their present distance a message would take two decades to get there.

The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to abandon. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, outward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct religions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere archaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?

But hedoes care. The link matters.

He decides that it has to do with the symbolic function of this voyage to the people of Earth: the fact that the voyagers are the focal point of so much aspiration and anticipation. If contact is lost, their achievements in planting a new Earth on some far star, whatever they may ultimately be, will have no meaning for the people of the mother world.

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.

There was no way, really, that she could have known that it would work. The only thing that mattered to her, her relationship with her sister, would be at risk. How could she have taken the terrible gamble?

But she had. And she had been right, until now. Until now. And what is happening now? the year-captain wonders. Is the link really breaking? What will happen to Noelle, he asks himself, if she loses contact with her sister?

For a moment, right at the beginning, sitting in her cabin aboard the Wotan as it lay parked in orbit above the Earth with launch only an hour or two away, Noelle had given some thought to such matters too, and in that moment she had nearly let herself be overwhelmed by panic. It seemed inconceivable to her, suddenly, that she would really be able to maintain contact with her sister across the vast span of interstellar space. And she could not imagine what life would be like for her in the absence of Yvonne. A sword suddenly descending, cutting the thread that had bound them since the moment of their birth, and even before. And then that dreadful silence — that awful unthinkable isolation — she was astonished, suddenly, that she had ever exposed herself to the possibility that such a thing might happen.

What am I doing here? Where am I? Get out of this place, idiot! Run, home, home to Yvonne!

Wild fear swept her like fire in a parched forest. She trembled, and the trembling turned into an anguished shaking, and she clasped her arms around her shoulders and doubled over, sick, miserably frightened, gasping in terror. But then, somehow, some measure of calmness returned. She closed her eyes — that always helped — took deep breaths, compelled herself to unfold her clasped arms and stand straight, forced the knotted muscles of her shoulders and back to uncoil. It would all work out, she told herself fiercely. It would. It would. Yvonne would be there after the shunt just as before.

It was time to go back to the lounge. The captain was going to make a speech to the assembled crew just before the launch itself. Coolly Noelle moved through the corridors of the ship, touching this, stroking that, drawing its strange sterile air deep into her lungs so that she would begin to feel native to it, familiarizing herself with textures and smells and highly local patterns of coolness or warmth. She had already been aboard twice before, during the indoctrination sessions. They had built the starship up here in space, for it was a flimsy thing and could not be subjected to the traumas of the acceleration needed to lift it out of a planetary gravitational field. For months, years, hordes of mass-drivers had come chugging up from bases on the Moon, hauling tons of prefabricated matériel as the great job of weaving and spinning went on and on. And gradually the members of the crew had been chosen, brought together here, shown their way around the strange-looking vessel that would contain their lives, perhaps, until the end of their days.

Yvonne will still be there once we have set out, she told herself. Why should the link fail?

There was no reason to think that it would; but none to think that it would necessarily hold, either. She and Yvonne were something new under the sun. No body of experimental study existed to cover the case of telepathic twin sisters separated by a span of dozens of light-years. Noelle had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance, but her faith had been secure up till that moment of sudden panic just now. She and Yvonne had often spoken to each other from opposite sides of the planet without difficulty, had they not?

Yes. Yes. But would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart?

The last hours before departure time were ticking down. The ship was full of people, not all of them actual members of the crew. Noelle felt their presences all around her: men, a lot of them, deep voices, a special sharpness to their sweat. Some women too. The rustle of different kinds of garments, thin robes, crisp blouses, the clink of jewelry. Everybody tense: she could smell it, a sharpness in the air. She could hear it in the subliminal hesitations of their voices.

Well, why not be tense? Switches would be thrown and incomprehensible forces would come into play and the starship would vanish with all hands into nowhere.

There had been test voyages, of course. This project was almost a century old. The unmanned nospace ships, first, going out on short journeys into absolute strangeness and successfully sending radio messages back, which arrived after the obligatory interval that radio transmission imposes. And then two manned journeys into interstellar space, small ships carrying unimaginably courageous volunteers — theColumbus and theUltima Thule, names out of antiquity given new gloss. TheColumbus had traveled eleven light-months, theUltima Thule fourteen; and both had returned safely. The second of those voyages had been carried out seven years ago. Members of its crew had spoken to them, trying to explain what nospace travel would feel like to them. No one had grasped anything of what they were saying, least of all Noelle.

Now the Wotan — more ancient mythology, a ship named for some shaggy savage indomitable headstrong god of the northern forests — was ready to go. And am I? Noelle wondered. Am I?

Final speeches. Much orotund noise. Drums and trumpets. The exit of the high governmental officials who bad come aboard to see them off. The year-captain — they had elected him yesterday, the dour Scandinavian man with the wonderfully musical voice — telling them to prepare themselves for departure, by which he meant, apparently, to say any sort of prayers that they might find meaningful, or at least to do whatever it was they did to compose their minds as they prepared to make the irrevocable transition from one life to another.

— yvonne? Do you hear me?

— Of course I do.

— We’re about to get going.

— I know. I know.

There was no sensation of acceleration. Why should there be? This was no shuttle ride from Earth to the Moon, or to some satellite world. There was no propulsive engine aboard other than the relatively insignificant braking motor to be used when they reached their destination; no thrust was being applied; none of the conventional patterns of acceleration were being established. Some sort of drive mechanism was at work in the bowels of the ship, yes; some sort of forces was being generated; some kind of movement was taking place. But not Newtonian, not in any way Einsteinian. The movement was from space to nospace, where relativity did not apply. Mass, inertia, acceleration, velocity — they were irrelevant concepts here. One moment they had been hanging in midspace only a few thousand kilometers above the face of the Earth, and in the next they were floating, silent as a comet, through a tube in a folded and pleated alternative universe that ran adjacent to and interlineated with the experiential universe of stars and planets, of mass and force and gravitation and inertia, of photons and electrons and neutrinos and quarks, of earth, air, fire, and water. Caught up in some unthinkable flux, hurled with unimaginable swiftness through an utter empty darkness a thousand times blacker than the darkness in which she had spent her whole life.

It had happened, yes. Noelle had no doubt of it. There had been an instant in which she seemed to be at the brink of an infinite abyss. And then she knew she was in nospace. Something had happened; something had changed. But it was unquantifiable and altogether undefinable. Forces beyond her comprehension, powered by mysterious energies that spanned the cosmos from rib to rib, had come abruptly into play, hurling the Wotan smoothly and swiftly from the experiential universe, the universe of space and time and matter, into this other place. She knew it had happened. But she had no idea how she knew that she knew.

— Yvonne? Can you hear me now, Yvonne?

The reply came right away, with utter instantaneity. Not even time for a moment of terror. There was Yvonne, immediately, comfortingly:

— I hear you, yes.

The signal was pure and clear and sharp. And so it remained, day after day.

Throughout the strange early hours of the voyage Noelle and Yvonne were rarely out of contact with each other for more than a moment, and there was no perceptible falling off of reception as the starship headed outward. They might have been no farther from each other than in adjacent rooms. Past the orbital distance of the Moon, past the million-kilometer mark, past the orbital distance of Mars: everything stayed clear and sharp, clear and sharp. The sisters had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance, apparently.

But — so it had been explained to them — the ship at this point was still traveling at sublight velocity. It took time, even in nospace, to build up to full speed. The process of nospace acceleration — qualitatively different,conceptually different, from anything that anyone understood as acceleration in normal space, but a kind of acceleration all the same — was a gradual one. They would not reach the speed of light for several days.

The speed of light! Magical barrier! Noelle had heard so much about it: the limiting velocity, the borderline between the known and the unknown. What would happen to the bond between them, once the Wotan was on the far side of it? Noelle had no real idea. Already she was in a space apart from Yvonne, and still could feel her tangible presence: that much was immensely reassuring. But when the starship had crossed into that realm where even a photon was forbidden to go? What then, what then? No one had discussed these things with her. She scarcely understood them. But she had always heard that traveling faster than light involved paradox, mystery, strangeness. There was an element of the forbidden about it. It was against the law.

That terrible tension rose in her all over again. One more test — the final one, she hoped — was approaching. She had never known such fear. As they entered the superluminal universe it might become impossible for her mind to reach back across that barrier to find Yvonne’s. Who could say? She had never traveled faster than light before. Once more she contemplated the possibility of an existence without Yvonne.

She had never known a lonely moment in her life. But now — now—

And again her fears were proven needless. Somewhere during the day they reached the sinister barrier, and the starship went on through it without even the formality of an announcement. They had, after all, been outside Einsteinian space since the first moment of the voyage; why, then, take notice of a violation of the traffic laws of another universe, when they were here, already safely journeying across nospace?

Someone told her, later in the day, that they were moving faster than light now.

Her awareness of Yvonne’s presence within her had not flickered at all.

— It’s happened, she told her sister. Here we are, wherever that is.

And swiftly as ever came Yvonne’s response, a cheery greeting from the old continuum. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Nor did the signal grow more tenuous in the weeks that followed. Clear and sharp, clear and sharp. Until the first static set in.

Hesper is in his element. The year-captain has called a general meeting of the crew, and Hesper will lecture them on his newest findings and conclusions. The year-captain has resolved to make his move. He will declare that Hesper has identified a world that holds potential for settlement — several, as a matter of fact — and that they will immediately begin to direct their course toward the most promising of them with the intention of carrying out an exploratory landing.

Large as the Wotan is, and it is very large indeed as spaceships go, there is no chamber aboard the ship big enough to contain all fifty voyagers at the same time. The general meeting is held in the great central corridor on the uppermost deck, spilling outward from the gaming lounge. People sprawl, lean, cling to the rungs on the sides of the walls.

Hesper, standing before them with his arms folded cockily, flashes the brightest of grins, first-magnitude stuff, and says, “The galaxy is full of worlds. This is no secret. However, we ourselves have certain limitations of form that require us to find a world of appropriate mass, appropriate orbital distance from its sun, appropriate atmospheric mix, appropriate—”

“Get on with it,” Sieglinde calls. She is famous for her impatience, a brawny, heavy-breasted woman with close-cropped honey-colored hair and a brusque, incisive manner. “We know all this stuff.”

Hesper’s brilliant grin vanishes instantly. The little man glowers at her.

“For you,” he says, “I have found just the right planet. It is something like Jupiter, but reallylarge, and it has a mean temperature of six thousand degrees Kelvin at its surface, beneath fifty thousand kilometers of corrosive gases. Will this be satisfactory? As for the rest of us—”

Sieglinde continues to mutter, but Hesper will not be turned from his path. Relentlessly he reminds everyone once again that the sort of world they need to find is the sort of world that they would be capable of living on. Hesper spells this tautological platitude out in terms of temperature, gravitational pull, atmospheric composition, solar luminosity, and all the obvious rest, and then he asks if there are any questions. Sieglinde says something uncomplimentary-sounding in German; Zena nudges her and tells her to hush; the others remain silent.

“Very well,” Hesper says. “Let me show you now what I have found.”

He touches switches and conjures up virtual images at the far end of the corridor, where the beams of a communicator node intersect.

Hesper tells them that what they see is a star and a solar system. Hesper’s star seems not to have a name, only an eight-digit catalog number. So evidently it hadn’t ever registered on the consciousnesses of those old Arab astronomers who had given Rigel and Mizar and Aldebaran and all those other stars such lovely poetic designations, somewhere back a thousand or two years ago. All it has is a number. But it has planets. Six of them.

“This is Planet A,” he announces. The assembled voyagers behold a small bright dot of light with six lesser dots arrayed in orbits around it. He explains that this is merely the decoding of a reality-analog, not in any way an actual telescopic image. But it is a reliable decoding, he assures everyone. The instruments with which he pierces the veil of the nospace tube are as accurate as any telescope. “Main sequence sun, type G2. Type G and perhaps Type K are the only acceptable stars for us, of course. This is a yellow-orange sun, G2, not uncomfortably different in luminosity from our own. I call your attention to the fourth planet.” A small gesture of a finger: one of the six small dots expands until it fills the visual field. Now it is a globe, green faintly banded with blue and red and brown, dabs of white above and below. It has a cheerily familiar look. “Here we see it, not a direct image, of course, but an enhanced transformation of the data. Its diameter, by all indications, is Earthlike. Its distance from its primary is such that small ice caps are present at the poles. The spectral reading indicates a strong dip in brightness at 0.76 micron, which is a wavelength at which molecular oxygen absorbs radiation. Nitrogen is also present — somewhat overabundantly, in truth, but not seriously so. The temperature range seems to be within human tolerability. Also we have indications of the presence of water, and the distance of this world from its primary is such that water would be capable of existing on its surface. Now, notice also the sharp absorption band at the far red end of the visible spectrum — 0.7 micron, approximately. Green light is reflected, red and blue are absorbed. This is a characteristic of chlorophyll.”

“So what time do we land?” Paco calls out.

Unperturbed, Hesper continues blandly: “We note also the minute presence of methane, one part in 1.5 million. That is not much methane, but why is there any? Methane rapidly oxidizes into water and carbon dioxide. If this atmosphere were in equilibrium, all the methane would have been gone long ago. Therefore we must not have an equilibrium here, do you see? Something is generating new methane to replace that which is oxidized. Ongoing metabolic processes, perhaps? The presence of bacteria, or larger organisms? Life, anyway, of one sort or another. Every indication thus far points toward viability.”

“And if the place is already inhabited?” asks Heinz. “What if they don’t want to sell us any real estate?”

“We would not, of course, intrude on a planet that has intelligent life of its own. But that can readily be determined while we are still at a distance. The emission of modulated radio waves, or even the visual signs of occupation—”

“How far is this place from our present location?” Sylvia wants to know.

Hesper looks puzzled. He spreads the fingers of his precise little hands and glances uncomfortably toward the year-captain.

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.

I have a funny idea,” Sieglinde says, and everyone looks up, for Sieglinde is not noted for fanny ideas. Nor is there anything at all comic in the unusually thin, high, strained tone in which she is speaking now. But something has been building up in her for the past half hour, and now it comes erupting forth. “What if we throw the switch and the ship doesn’t want to come out of nospace?” she asks. “What if we find that we simply can’t reach this Planet A, or any other realspace destination? What do we do then? Do we have a fallback plan?”

This is the first brainstorming session for the group that is planning the change of course. They are meeting in the control cabin. Intelligence readouts embedded in the curved wall glow all around them, soft emanations of pulsing light, amethyst and amber and jade. Sieglinde and Roy and Heinz and Paco and Julia and the year-captain have been talking for two hours straight and they are all getting tired and a little silly now.

“If that happens, then we find a nice nospace planet somewhere and we settle down there instead,” Paco answers. “That’s our fallback plan.”

Roy gives him a glowering stare. “What you say is absurd and irrelevant. There aren’t any nospace planets. Such a thing is a logical impossibil—”

Heinz, smiling as always but displaying an edge of controlled annoyance, says to Sieglinde, “Why do you even ask these things? This is a meeting to discuss a survey mission into realspace. You’re conjuring up imaginary demons for us. The stardrive wasn’t designed to fail. It will not fail.”

“And if it does?” Sieglinde asks.

“Heinz is right,” says the year-captain wearily. “It won’t fail. It simply won’t. You can count on that.”

“I count on nothing,” Sieglinde says, speaking in a throaty mock-dramatic way. Maybe sheis trying to be funny. But her eyes are strangely bright. She seems possessed by some powerful contrary energy that will not relent. “Anything may happen. We are dealing with tremendous physical forces and we still have relatively little experience with this equipment. And we work with stochastic processes here. Do you understand what I am saying? Each jump we make is in effect a gamble. The odds are in our favor each time, of course. But with each jump there is always the possibility of the random event, whenever the stardrive is changed from one state to another. It is here in the equations: the random factor, the fatal probability. The more often we jump, the more often we expose ourselves to that small but real probability. And on one of our jumps we may leap from one nospace to another instead of returning to realspace, or experience something even worse. It is possible.”

“Not highly probable, though,” says Heinz. “The odds favor us, you say.”

“Not highly probable, no, but possible, distinctly possible, and what is possible is worth a little thought when that possibility can be fatal to our endeavor. You are an engineer, Heinz; you deal in tangible things, in absolute concepts of what works and what does not I am a mathematician. We are more poetic than you, do you understand me? I deal in axioms and certainties; but I also know that beneath the axioms lie only assumptions, and beneath the assumptions lies — chaos!”

“Rely on faith, then, if you can’t trust your own equations,” says the year-captain. “We all took a leap into the dark when we signed on. If you didn’t think the drive would work property, you should have stayed home.”

“I say only that there is a finite chance that it will not.”

“And therefore — ?”

“And therefore, as I have just said, the more jumps we make, the greater the likelihood that one of them will be a bad one. And so I argue that we ought not to make any shunt that is not absolutely necessary. By which I mean that we should not attempt a realspace reentry without complete assurance that the world we have picked is likely to be a place where we’ll want to settle, because the risk of moving from one reality state to another is so great that we will want to attempt it only when there is a high order of probability that the risk is worth taking.”

Paco says, in what is for him an uncharacteristically subdued and thoughtful tone, “You know, there’s something to that. The odds that any given Earth-size planet has anything like Earthlike living conditions are — what? A hundred to one against? So we may find ourselves having to make a hundred jumps, five hundred, a thousand, if we don’t get lucky right away. Which multiplies the shunt risks enormously, if I follow Sieglinde correctly. If there’s any real likelihood that the drive might fail, we ought to be damned sure ahead of time that whatever place we’re jumping to is—”

Julia, who has the actual responsibility for operating the nospace drive, says irritably, “This is a stupid conversation, and we’re not supposed to be stupid people. Why are we even discussing this? There’s been a vote and we’re going to take a look at Planet A, because we have good reason to believe that it’s the sort of place that we came out here to find, as far as we can tell without actually getting up close to it and taking a good look, and that’s all there is to it. Heinz is right. Sieglinde is pulling demons out of nowhere. When we make our next shunt, the stardrive will behave exactly as we want it to behave, and you all know it. And even if there’s some slight mathematical risk hanging on each jump, we’ve already reached agreement that Planet A is a place worth taking risks to find. Our job is to find the way to Planet A, not to debate hypothetical nightmare scenarios.”

“Yes, we are not stupid,” says Heinz. “But we are restless. We live in a confined place and we think too much. And if we think long enough, eventually we begin to think stupidly. Enough of this, Sieglinde. We will never find any place to live at all, if we are too terrified of these probability problems to undertake even a single survey mission. You knew all this when we set out. Why did you wait until now to say anything? If somebody else had raised this string of last-minute objections while you were trying to get on with the work at hand, you’d be trying to cut off his head by now.” He turns to the year-captain. “Rule her out of order, will you? And then let’s adjourn.”

“What do you say, Sieglinde?” the year-captain asks. “Can we drop this, please?”

The big woman shrugs. The manic force has gone out of her as suddenly as it came. She has made her little bit of trouble and is ready to relent. She looks tired and defeated, and to the year-captain’s relief she seems as ready to be done with this as the rest of them. The point she has raised is a troublesome one, but, as Heinz has observed, this is not the moment to be discussing it. And in an almost toneless voice Sieglinde says, “Whatever you want, captain. Whatever you want.”

Until now the starship, in the absence of any specific destination, has been following an essentially undirected path through the nospace tube, simply traveling away from Earth rather than toward some particular star. Its course, such as it is, has been chosen to carry it into one of the more densely populated areas of the immediate sector of the celestial sphere in which Earth’s sun is located; but the intent of the planners of the voyage was that the voyagers would at some point redirect the ship toward a star they would choose themselves on the basis of planetary data collected in the course of the journey.

Now that time has arrived. The Wotan must swing its course through nospace toward the star that is the primary of Zed Hesper’s Planet A; and when it has reached the vicinity of that star, it must break itself out of the nospace tube in which it has been traveling and return to the Einsteinian continuum, so that surveillance of Planet A may be carried out by ordinary spacefaring methods, an orbital circuit in a probe ship, direct visual inspection, and then perhaps an actual landing if the survey of surface conditions from nearby is in any way encouraging.

Nospace travel is a fundamentally nonlinear phenomenon. If you propose to make a surface journey between two cities on Earth that are three thousand kilometers apart — Los Angeles and Montreal, let us say — you will expect to cover a distance of three thousand kilometers during the course of the trip, no more, no less, and the elapsed time of the journey will be a function of the average time it takes to coverone kilometer, multiplied by three thousand. There are no shortcuts; there are no exceptions to the rule that one must travel a distance of three thousand kilometers in order to make a journey of three thousand kilometers. Not so in nospace. Linear measurements applicable in the classical continuum have no meaning there. Spatial relationships between points in the universe that have been determined by conventional means are irrelevant in nospace. Nospace is all shortcuts, nothingbut shortcuts. In that special space, flattened and curved and doubled and redoubled upon itself as it is, the logic of linear travel is useless and paradoxes abound. Dimensions are collapsed and transformed; the infinite universe is infinitely adjacent to itself; all normal understanding of such concepts as “near” and “far,” “here” and “there,” “toward” and “away from” must be discarded. In nospace it may be quicker to travel between two stars five hundred light-years apart than between two that are close neighbors. There may — there is at least theoretical basis for the notion — be no clear and consistently calculable relationship between realworld distance between two points and nospace transit time between those points at all.

There are, however, proxies and equivalents. With the aid of appropriate computational power one can plot a set of transformations that will carry one through nospace along quasi-geodetic lines corresponding to actual realspace vectors and allow one actually to reach a preselected destination. At least, so the governing equations of nospace travel demonstrate, and in the brief experimental flights of theColumbus and then theUltima Thule those equations were found to hold true.

TheColumbus, after making a journey of not quite one light-year from Earth in a period of eleven Earth-days, was able successfully to reenter Einsteinian space, accurately measure its distance from its starting point, and, returning to nospace without difficulty, carry out its homeward voyage in the same span of time. TheUltima Thule, going in a different direction, found itself a little more than a light-year from home after just nine days: it, too, was able to move out of nospace and back into it and to aim itself satisfactorily toward Earth. Despite Sieglinde’s sudden willful skepticism, the year-captain prefers to think that there is every reason to believe that the Wotan would have just as little difficulty redirecting itself in nospace in order to head itself toward the Einsteinian location of the star it meant to visit, and then in leaving nospace to execute a survey of the habitability of that star’s planet. He understands her point that there is some risk with every shunt and that the more shunts they make, the greater is the number of times they place themselves in jeopardy. But they must find a world where they can live; and for that, the taking of certain risks is unavoidable. She is simply overwrought. He has no regrets about quashing her objection to the survey shunt.

The year-captain,ex officio, is the head of the team that will calculate and achieve this maneuver. But he is no expert on such things; the real work of the group will be done by five other crew members. Roy and Sieglinde will handle the mathematical aspects. Paco is the master navigator. Julia programs and operates the star drive. Heinz, the ship’s designer, is the prime generalist who comprehends all of the specialties of the other members of the team; he will be the interface, the grand communicator, the true captain of the enterprise.

This first meeting of the group has been only a preliminary one. Hesper was there for the beginning of it. He has shown the others where, in normal-space reckoning, the star of Planet A is located, according to the set of correlatives that he has worked out. After Hesper goes, there is much consulting of star-maps and the ship’s navigation circuitry. There will be need for much more, before the actual jump is attempted. Ultimately the drive intelligence itself is going to do the real work of getting them there; but the intelligence, clever though it is, is as finite as the minds of its makers. It has only limited ability to compensate for bungled instructions. They must figure out precisely what it is they want to do before they authorize the drive intelligence to do it. Or as precisely as they are able to manage. And then pray. But to whom? And with what hope that their prayers will be heard?

Sieglinde’s outburst convinces the year-captain that the meeting has gone on long enough. He keeps them together only a few minutes more, so that he can summarize this day’s work and get a consensus vote for the log. Then he adjourns.

Sieglinde is the first to leave, a fraction of a second later, striding from the room without a word, the implacable stride of a Valkyrie. She was poorly named, the year-captain thinks: Brünnhilde should have been her name, not Sieglinde. Paco and Roy go out together, arm in arm, bound for the lounge and their millionth game of Go. Julia trails after them.

Heinz alone remains with the year-captain. He stands before him, rocking lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet. “Are you worried?” he asks, after a moment.

The year-captain looks up. “About what?”

“Sieglinde’s hypothesis. Drive malfunction.”

“No. Not in the slightest. Should I be?”

Heinz smiles oddly, as though he is smiling within his smile. “That drive will take us from one end of the galaxy to another, a thousand times in and out of nospace and no problem. I promise you that.”

Their eyes meet for a moment. The year-captain searches them. It is always hard to tell whether Heinz is being sincere. His eyes are blue like the year-captain’s, but much more playful, and of an altogether different kind of blueness, a soft sky-blue greatly unlike the fierce ice-blue of the year-captain’s. Both men have fair Nordic hair, but again there is a difference, Heinz’s being thick and flowing and a burnished glowing gold in color, whereas the year-captain’s is stiff and fine and almost silver, not from aging but from simple absence of pigment. They are oddly similar and yet unalike in most other ways too. The year-captain does not regard Heinz as a friend in any real sense of that word; if he were to allow himself friends, which has always been a difficult thing for him, Heinz would probably not be one of them. But there is a certain measure of respect and trust between them.

The year-captain says, after a little while, “Is there something else you want to tell me?”

“To ask, rather.”

“Ask, then.”

“I’ve been wondering if there’s some difficulty involving Noelle.”

The year-captain takes great care to show no change of expression. “A difficulty? What sort of difficulty?”

“She seems to be under unusual stress these days.”

“She is a complicated person in a complicated situation.”

“Which is true of us all,” Heinz says easily. “Nevertheless, she’s seemed different somehow in recent days. There was always a serenity about her — a saintliness, even, if you will allow me that word. I don’t see it any more. The change began, I think, about the time she started playingGo with us. Her face is so tightly drawn all the time now. Her movements are extremely tense. She plays the game with some sort of weird scary intensity that makes me very uneasy. And she wins all the time.”

“You don’t like it that she wins?”

“I don’t like it that she’s so intense about it. Roy used to win all the time too, but that was simply because he was so good that he couldn’t help winning. Noelle playsGo as if her life depends on it.”

“Perhaps it does,” the year-captain says.

Heinz shows just a flicker of vexation now at the year-captain’s constant conversational parrying. It is a standard trait of the year-captain’s, these repetitions — his automatic manner of responding, his default mode — and most people are accustomed to it. It has never seemed to bother Heinz before.

He says, “What I mean, captain, is that I think she may be approaching a breakdown of some sort, and I felt it was important to call that to your attention.”

“Thank you.”

“She is more high-strung than the rest of us. I would not like to see her in any sort of distress.”

“Neither would I, Heinz. You have my assurance of that.”

An awkward silence then. At length Heinz says, “If it were possible to find out what’s bothering her, and to offer her whatever comfort would be useful—”

“I appreciate your concern,” the year-captain says stonily. “Please believe me when I say that I regard Noelle as one of the most important members of the expedition, and I am doing everything in my power to maintain her stability.”

“Everything?”

“Everything,” the year-captain says, in a way intended unmistakably to close the conversation.

Noelle dreams that her blindness has been taken from her. Sudden light surrounds her, phenomenal white cascades of shimmering brilliance, and she opens her eyes, sits up, looks about in awe and wonder, saying to herself. This is a table, this is a chair, this is how my statuettes look, this is what my sea-urchin shell is like. She is amazed by the beauty of everything in her room. She rises, going forward, stumbling at first, groping, then magically gaining poise and balance, learning how to walk in this new way, judging the positions of things not by echoes and air currents any longer, but rather by the simple miracle of using her eyes. Information floods her. She walks around her room, picking things up, stroking them, matching shapes with actual appearances, correlating the familiar feel of her objects with the new data coming to her now through this miraculously restored extra sense. Then she leaves the cabin and moves about the ship, discovering the faces of her shipmates. Intuitively she knows who they all are. You are Roy, you are Sylvia, you are Heinz, you are the year-captain. They look, surprisingly, very much as she had always imagined them: Roy fleshy and red-faced, Sylvia fragile, the year-captain lean and fierce, Heinz handsome and constantly smiling, and so on and so on, Elliot and Marcus and Chang and Julia and Hesper and Giovanna and the rest, everyone matching expectations. Everyone beautiful. She goes to the window of which all the others talk, the one that provides a view of nospace, and looks out into the famous grayness. Yes, yes, the scene through that window is precisely as they say it is: a cosmos of wonders, a miracle of complex pulsating tones, level after level of incandescent reverberation sweeping outward toward the rim of the boundless universe. There is nothing to see, and there is everything. For an hour she stands before that dense burst of rippling energies, giving herself to it and taking it into herself, and then, and then, just as the ultimate moment of illumination toward which she has been moving throughout the entire hour is coming over her, she realizes that something is wrong. Yvonne is not with her. Noelle reaches out with her mind and does not touch Yvonne. Again. No. No contact. Can’t find her. She has somehow traded her special power for the mere gift of sight.

Yvonne? Yvonne?

All is still. Where is Yvonne?

Yvonne is not with her. This is only a dream, Noelle tells herself, and I will soon awaken from it. But she cannot awaken. She cries out in terror. And then she feels Yvonne at last. “It’s all right,” Yvonne whispers, across the immensities of space and time. “I’m here, love, I’m here, I’m here, just as I always am,” comes Yvonne’s soft voice, rising out of the great whirlpool of invisible suns. Yes. All is well. Noelle can feel the familiar closeness again. Yvonne is there, right there, beside her. Trembling, Noelle embraces her sister. Looks at her. Beholds her for the first time.

I can see, Yvonne! I can see!

Noelle realizes that in her first rapture of sightedness she had quite forgotten to look at herself, although she had rushed about looking at everything and everyone else. It had not occurred to her. Mirrors have never been part of her world. But now she looks at Yvonne, which is, of course, like looking at herself, and Yvonne is beautiful, her hair dark and silken and lustrous, her face smooth and sleek, her features finely shaped, her eyes — her blind eyes! — alive and sparkling. Noelle tells Yvonne how beautiful she is, and Yvonne smiles and nods, and they laugh and hold one another close, and they begin to weep with pleasure and love, out of the sheer joy of being with each other, and then Noelle awakens, and of course the world is as dark as ever around her.

Heinz goes out, finally. Finally. There are exercises that the year-captain learned in Lofoten, spiritual disciplines designed to restore and maintain tranquillity. He makes use of them now, breathing slowly and deeply, running through each of the routines. And then he runs through them all over again.

The conversation with Heinz has seemed interminable — and has been deeply embarrassing, and it has left the year-captain feeling greatly annoyed, as annoyed as his fundamentally controlled and equable nature will allow him to be. Does Heinz think the year-captain has failed to notice Noelle’s disturbed state? Does Heinz think he has failed to care about it? Heinz knows nothing, presumably, of the recent difficulties in communication between the sisters. It is not his business to know about that. But the year-captain knows; the year-captain is aware of the existence of a problem; the year-captain does not need the assistance of Heinz in order to discover that an important member of the expedition is experiencing problems. And in any case, what does Heinz want him todo about it? Does he have some suggestion to make, and, if so, why has he not made it? That damnable sly smile of Heinz’s seemed always to imply that he was holding something back that would be very useful for you to know, if only he cared to let you in on the secret. It was easy enough to think that there was less behind that smile of his than you might suspect. But was that true?

The year-captain wonders whether everyone aboard, one by one, is about to undergo some maddening transformation for the worse. Already Noelle is losing the ability to communicate with her sister on Earth; the blunt and straightforward Sieglinde has unsettlingly chosen to challenge the reliability of the theorems that she herself helped to write; and now the easygoing and irreverent Heinz is tiresomely eager to explain the year-captain’s own responsibilities to him. What next? What next, he wonders?

The year-captain is particularly bothered by Heinz’s sudden little burst of pious helpfulness because it has kept him from a badly needed therapeutic engagement of his own. Julia is waiting for him in their secret place of rendezvous in a dark corner of the cargo deck.

Julia and the year-captain are lovers. They have been since the third week of the voyage, after she had extricated herself from her brief and unsatisfying fling with Paco. So far as he knows, no one but he and she are aware of their relationship, such as it is, and he prefers to keep it that way. Among the people of the Wotan he has a reputation for asceticism, for a certain monkish ferocity of discipline, and, rightly or wrongly, he has come to feel that this enhances his authority as captain.

The truth is that the year-captain feels the pull of physical desire at least as often as anyone else on board, and has been doing something about it with great regularity, as any sane person would. But he does it secretly. He finds pleasure and amusement in the knowledge that he has managed to maintain a private life within the goldfish bowl that is the ship. There are times when the year-captain feels that he is committing the sin of pride by allowing others to think that he is more ascetic than he really is; at the very least, there is something hypocritical about it, he realizes. He has chosen, however, to lock himself into this pattern of furtive behavior since the beginning of the voyage, and now it seems to him much too late to do anything about changing it. Nor does he really want to, anyway.

So he sets out once more down the corridor to the dropchute, descends to the lower levels, moves with his usual feline grace through the tangle of stored gear that clutters those levels, and, pressing his hand against the identification plate that gives access to the deepest storage areas, steps through the opening hatch into the secret world of the ship’s most precious cargo, its bank of genetic material.

Not many people have Need-to-Enter access to this area coded into the ship’s master brain. Chang does — he is the custodian of the Wotan’s collection of fertilized and unfertilized reproductive cells — and so does Sylvia, the ship’s other genetic specialist. But the expedition is a long way from any point where the birth of children aboard ship would be a desirable thing, and neither of them has reason to come down here very often. Michael, whose primary job is maintenance of all of the ship’s internal mechanical functions, is another one who can enter this part of the vessel without the year-captain’s specific permission. There are two or three others. But most of the time the unborn and indeed mostly still unconceived future colonists of the as yet undiscovered New Earth sleep peacefully in the stasis of their freezer units, unintruded upon by visitors from above.

Julia is not someone who should be authorized to come to this part of the ship. Her responsibilities center entirely on the functioning of the stardrive, and no element of the stardrive mechanism is located anywhere near here. The year-captain has added her palmprint to the section’s Need-to-Enter list for purely personal reasons. He has given her the ability to pass through that hatch because hardly anyone else has it, which makes this an excellent location for their clandestine meetings. The chances of their being disturbed here are very small. And if ever they should be, why would anyone care that the year-captain has illicitly permitted his lover to join him down here? He suspects that his little crime, such as it is, would be taken merely as a welcome indication that he is human, after all.

This is a dark place, lit only by little pips of slave-light that jump into energized states along the illuminator strands set overhead as he passes beneath them, and wink out again when he has gone by. To the right and the left are the cabinets in which germ plasm of various sorts is stored. The plan of the voyage calls for no births aboard ship at all during the first year; then, if it seems desirable in the context of what position the ship has attained and what potential colony-worlds, if any, have been located, births will be authorized to shipboard couples interested in rearing children. There is room on board for up to fifty additional passengers to be born en route. After that, no more until a planetary landing. The stored ova and spermatozoa are to be kept in the cooler until that time as well. A mere twenty-five couples, no matter how often their couplings are rearranged, will not be able to provide sufficient genetic diversity for the peopling of a new world. But all those thousands of stored ova and the myriad sperm cells will be available to vary the genetic mix once the colony has been established.

A single small light illuminates the year-captain’s love nest, which is an egg-shaped security node, just barely big enough for two people of reasonable size to embrace in, that separates one of the sectors of freezer cabinets from its array of monitoring devices. The year-captain peers in and sees Julia stretched out casually with her arms folded behind her head and her ankles crossed. Her clothes are stacked in the passageway outside; there is no room in the little security node to get undressed.

“Was there a problem?” she asks.

“Heinz,” says the year-captain, wriggling quickly out of his tunic and trousers. “There was something he felt I ought to be told about, so he stayed after the meeting and told me. And told me and told me.”

“Something serious?”

“Nothing I didn’t already know about,” he replies.

He is naked now. She beckons to him and he crawls in beside her. Julia hisses with pleasure as he curls up around her cool, muscular body. It is an athlete’s body, a racer’s body, taut-bellied, flat-buttocked, not a gram of excess flesh. Her thighs are long and narrow, her arms slender and strong, with lightly corded veins strikingly prominent along them. She swims an hour each day in the lap-pool on the recreation level. Occasionally the year-captain joins her there, and although he is not unlike her in build, an athlete too, his body hardened and tempered by a lifetime of discipline, he invariably finds himself breathing hard after fifty or sixty turns in the pool, whereas Julia goes on and on without a single break in rhythm for her full hour and when she climbs from the water she seems not to have exerted herself at all.

Their couplings are like athletic events too: dispassionate excursions into passion, measured and controlled expenditures of erotic energy, uncomplicated by emotion. Julia is easy to arouse but slow to reach consummation, and they have evolved a way of embracing and gliding into a steady, easy rocking rhythm that goes on and on, as though they are swimming laps. It is a kind of pleasant, almost conversational kind of copulation that gradually moves through a series of almost unquantifiable upticks in pace, each marking a stage in her approach to the climax, until at last he will detect certain unmistakable terminal signals from her, soft staccato moaning sounds, a sudden burst of sweat-slickness along her shoulders, and he will whip himself onward then to the final frenzied strokes, taking his cues from her at every point and letting go in the ultimate moment, finally, of his own carefully governed self-control.

The year-captain knows that what he and Julia do with one another has nothing to do with love, and he is aware that even sex for the sake of sex itself can be considerably more gratifying than this. But he is indifferent to all of that. Love is not unimportant to him, but he is not interested in finding it just now, and the physical satisfactions he achieves in Julia’s arms may fall short of some theoretical ideal but they do serve to keep him tuned and balanced and able to perform his administrative duties well, which is all that he presently seeks.

She is uttering the familiar staccato moans now. His fingertips detect the first onrush of preorgasmic sweatiness emerging from the pores of her upper back.

But a curious thing happens this time. Ordinarily, when he and Julia are making love and they have just reached this point in the event, he invariably topples into a trancelike state in which he no longer feels capable of speech or even thought. His mind goes blank with the sort of shimmering blankness that he learned how to attain in his years at the Lofoten monastery — the same blankness that he sees when he looks through the viewplate at the reverberating nothingness of the nospace tube surrounding the ship. After he has arrived at that point, all his mental processes are suspended except those elementary ones, not much more than tropisms, that are concerned with the mechanics of the carnal act itself.

But today things are different. Today when he reaches the blank point and begins the hectic ride toward their shared culmination, the image of Noelle suddenly bursts into his mind.

He sees her face hovering before him as though in midair: her dark, clear sightless eyes, her delicate nose, her small mouth and elegantly tapering jaw. It is as though she is right here in the cubicle with them, floating not far in front of his nose, watching them, watching with a kind of solemn childlike curiosity. The year-captain is jolted entirely out of his trance. He is flooded at this wrongest of moments by a torrent of mysterious conflicting emotions, shame and desire, guilt and joy. He feels his skin flaming with embarrassment at this disconcerting intrusion into the final moments of his embrace of Julia, and he is certain that his sudden confusion must be dismayingly apparent to his partner; but if Julia notices anything unusual, she gives him no hint of that, and merely goes on moving steadily beneath him, eyes closed, lips drawn back in a grimacing smile, hips churning in the steady ever-increasing rhythmic thrusts that carry her closer to her goal.

All the preparations have been carried out and they are ready now to alter the trajectory of the starship so that it will take them toward Hesper’s Planet A. What this requires is largely a mathematical operation. Conventional line-of-sight navigation is not a concept that applies in any way to the starship, traveling as it does through space that is both non-Einsteinian and non-Euclidean. The ship, however tangible and substantial it may seem to its tangible and substantial occupants, is in fact nothing more than a flux of probabilities at this point, a Heisenbergian entity at best, not “real” at all in the sense of being subject to the Newtonian laws of action and reaction or any of the other classical concepts of celestial mechanics. Its change of course must be executed by means of equivalences and locational surrogates, not by applications of actual thermodynamic thrust along some particular spatial vector. The changing of signs in a cluster of equations rather than the changing of the direction of acceleration through an outlay of physical energy is what is needed.

So Roy and Sieglinde do the primary work, plotting Hesper’s star data against Paco’s computations of the Wotan’s presumed location in Einsteinian space and calculating the appropriate nospace equivalents. Paco then converts their figures into navigational coordinates intended to get the ship fromhere tothere and presents his results to Julia, who — working in consultation with Heinz — enters the necessary transformations in the stardrive intelligence. Whereupon the intelligence produces a simulation of the flight plan, indicating the course to be taken and the probable consequences of attempting it. The final step is for the year-captain, who bears ultimate responsibility for the success of these maneuvers, to examine the simulation and give his approval, whereupon the drive intelligence will put it into operation.

All this, except for the last, has been accomplished.

The year-captain does not pretend to any sort of expertise in nospace travel. His considerable skills lie in other fields. So it is largely by means of a leap of faith rather than any intellectual process that he allows himself to announce, after Julia and Heinz have shown him the simulation diagrams, “Well, I’m willing to go with it if you are.”

What else can he say? His assent, he knows, is nothing but a formality. The jump must be made — that has already been decided. And he has to assume that Julia and Heinz have done their work properly. That all of them have. These calculations are matters that he does not really understand, and he knows he has no real right to an opinion. This far along in the operation he can only say yes. If he is thereby giving assent to catastrophe, well, so be it: Julia and Heinz and Paco and Roy and Sieglinde will partake of the catastrophe along with all the others, and so will he. He is in no position to recalculate and emend their proposal.

“When we make the course change,” he says, “are we going to be aware that anything special is happening, and if so, what?”

“Nothing will be apparent,” Julia tells him. “Nothing that we can feel, anyway. You mustn’t think of what well be doing in terms of acceleration effects. You mustn’t think in terms of any sort of phenomenological event that makes sense to you.”

“But will it make sense to you?” he asks.

“It’ll make sense,” Julia replies. “Not to me, not to you, maybe not even to Sieglinde and Roy. We don’t need to have it make sense. We only need to have it work.”

“And it will.”

“It will. It will.”

Well, then, it will. The year-captain sends for Noelle.

“It’s time to let Earth know about the course change,” he tells her. “We’re going to be redirecting the ship toward the star of Planet A a little later this day. Our first planetary surveillance mission is getting started.”

Noelle nods gravely. “The people at home will find that news very exciting, I’m sure.” She says that in the most unexcited way possible, as if she is reading it from a script she has never seen before, and not reading it very well.

The year-captain’s last few encounters with Noelle have been uncomfortable ones. That odd business of having her face pop so vividly into his mind like that, just as he was settling into the home stretch with Julia, was still bothering him the next time he saw the actual Noelle, and evidently she was able to pick up traces of his discomfort — from his body odor, maybe? from some edge on his voice? — for she had said, at once, “Is something wrong, year-captain?” Which he had taken pains to deny. But she knew. She knew. She never missed a nuance. It was hard, sometimes, to banish the suspicion that she could read anybody’s mind, and not just her sister’s. Most likely not; most likely she simply had greatly heightened senses of smell and hearing to compensate for the one sense that was missing, as was so often the case among the blind. The suspicion lingered all the same. He disliked holding on to it, but it was difficult for him to discard it. And he hated the thought that his mind might be wide open to hers, all his carefully repressed and buried cowardices and selfishnesses and hypocrisies and, yes, shameful lusts on display, waving like banners in the breeze.

The uneasiness between them had not diminished in the ensuing days. He found it disturbing in some way to be alone with her, and she was disturbed by his disturbance, and that was upsetting to him, and so if went shuttling back and forth between them in infinite regress, like a reflection trapped between two mirrors. But neither of them ever said a word about it.

“Is this a good time for you to try to send the message?” the year-captain asks.

“I can try, yes,” she says, a little hesitantly.

The interference has been growing worse, day by day. Neither Noelle nor Yvonne has any explanation for what is happening; Noelle clings without much conviction to her sunspot analogy for lack of any better answer. The sisters still manage to make contact twice daily, but the effort is increasingly a strain on their resources, for nearly every sentence must be repeated two or three times, and whole blocks of words now do not get through at all. Noelle has begun to look drawn, even haggard. The only thing that seems to refresh her, or at least divert her from this failing of her powers, is her playing of Go. She has become a master of the game, awarding even the masterly Roy a two-stone handicap; although she occasionally loses, her play is always distinguished, extraordinarily original in its sweep and design. When she is not playing she tends to be remote and withdrawn, as she is right now as she stands before die year-captain in his working quarters: head downcast, shoulders slumped, arms dangling, blind eyes no longer even attempting contact with his. She has become in all aspects a more elusive person than she had been before the onset of this communications crisis.

Her deepening solitude must be frightful. The year-captain often yearns to extend some sort of comfort to her that would take the place of the ever more tenuous contact with her sister: to sweep her into his arms, to hold her close, to permit her to feel the simple proximity of another human being. But he does not dare. He is afraid of giving offense, or perhaps of frightening her. And he is afraid, also, of certain upwelling inchoate emotions of his own. He has no idea how far things might go once he lets them begin, and he fears letting them begin.

Noelle’s classic beauty no longer seems quite so marmoreal to him. He has started, since the time that that apparition of her intruded on his lovemaking with Julia, to admit to himself the existence of a feeling of something as uncomplicated as desire for her. Why else had she entered his mind at that moment in the cubicle, if not that hidden feelings, feelings to which even he himself had had no access up till now, were beginning to break through to the surface?

But he keeps his distance. He does not dare to touch her. He does not dare.

“Tell them,” he says, “that the transverse journey across nospace will take approximately four and a half ship-months, after which—”

“Wait. Too fast.”

“Sorry.”

She seems to be shivering. Some part of her mind, he knows, is linked to a woman essentially identical to herself who happens to be some twenty-odd light-years away, even as she seems to be focusing her attention on him. Who is more real to her, the identical twin far away on Earth, or the odd, edgy, troubled man just a hundred fifty centimeters distant from her in this cabin aboard this starship?

“The transverse journey across nospace,” he says again, and waits.

“Yes.”

“Will take approximately four and a half ship-months—”

“Yes. All right.”

“After which the Wotan will have reached the vicinity of—”

“Wait. Please.”

A ripple of something not much unlike pain crosses her face. This is hurting her, this unclarity, the effort of maintaining the weakening link to Yvonne. The year-captain clenches his fists and presses his knuckles together until they pop. Waits. Waits.

“Go ahead,” Noelle says. “Now.”

“Will have reached the vicinity of the G-type star which—”

“Wait. I’m sorry. It’s bad today.”

He waits.

They finish sending the message eventually. Noelle seems to be at the verge of tears by the time they are done. Her breath is coining in ragged bursts. Her dusky, lustrous skin has taken on a ghostly subcutaneous pallor. But after a moment she manages a sort of a smile.

“Yvonne says she’ll tell everyone the news right away. She says it sounds wonderful. She wishes us all the luck in the world. No. In the universe.”

Indeed, at the next transmission Noelle learns from Yvonne that the news of the Planet A surveillance mission has generated tremendous excitement everywhere on Earth. The reaction to the bulletin has been extreme, a kind of worldwide intoxication, a frenzied communal agitation such as has not been experienced by the staid people of Earth in centuries. It is as though the voyagers have announced not merely a surveillance mission but the actual discovery of a habitable New Earth. Yvonne says that they demand further reports at once: descriptions of the new planet’s climate and topography and other geographical details, conjectures about its possible flora and fauna.

The year-captain is pleased that the news from the Wotan is having the appropriate beneficial psychological effect on the citizens of the home world. But he knows he must clarify the actual situation, and quickly, before their unrealistic expectations become embedded so deeply that it will be difficult for them to deal with the possible, even probable, disappointment that awaits.

“Tell them,” he instructs Noelle, “that it’s too soon to start setting off fireworks — that this is probably only the first of many worlds that we’re going to have to explore before we find one that we can settle.”

It takes her more than an hour to send that one brief message. The communications difficulties seem to be growing worse all the time.

Huw holds his smooth blackGo stone lightly in the center of one broad fleshy fingertip, waggles the finger two or three times with great seriousness, as though trying to estimate the weight of the tiny polished disk, and says, apropos of nothing that anybody has been discussing this morning in the lounge, “Has he decided, I wonder, which of us are actually going to make the landing on Planet A?”

“Well, he’ll be one of them, for sure,” Leon replies. He is Huw’s opponent, doing poorly, and waiting with ill-concealed impatience for Huw to make his move. “That’s his big specialty, isn’t it, planetary exploration?”

Huw grunts and puts his stone down with a great flourish, clapping it against the board in a way that makes an emphatic, almost belligerent click. He has only recently surrendered to theGo -playing addiction, which by now is almost universal on board. Practically everyone except Hesper, Sieglinde, and a couple of the others has taken to spending three or four hours a day in the gaming lounge.

It is only a couple of ship-weeks now until the Wotan is due to reach the nospace vicinity of the solar system in which Planet A is the feature of greatest interest, and then must shunt back into realspace for the direct-vision survey work. A great many unanswered questions wall begin to receive their answers at that point, not the least of which is whether the starship has traveled in the right direction through nospace and whether it will be able successfully to return to realspace at all; and shipboard tensions have begun to run a little higher than usual as the moment of truth approaches.

“During his term of office the year-captain isn’t allowed to leave the ship for any reason whatsoever, unless we’ve come to our final destination,” Chang says from across the room. “It’s in the Articles of the Voyage.”

“His year is almost up,” Leon says. “Once he’s out of office he’ll be free to take part in the exploration mission. My bet is that he’ll name himself to the landing party as one of his last official acts.”

“Why do you think he’ll leave office when his year is up?” Paco asks. “What if he puts himself forward for reelection? I think he’d win. Who else would want that bloody job, anyway? And there’s nothing in the rules preventing a year-captain from succeeding himself when his year is up.”

“Is he so power-hungry that he would want a second term, do you think?” Julia says.

“Nobody in his right mind would want a second term,” Paco tells her. “Or even a first one. But is he necessarily in his right mind? Are any of us? Would anyone in his right mind have agreed to go on this voyage in the first place?”

Calmly, Heinz, who is playing a game with Sylvia at the far side of the lounge, says, “My opinion is that a second term is the last thing he wants. I think he would very much prefer to be part of the landing party, and, as Chang says, having a second term would disqualify him from joining that. So he intends to step down. But if he does, who are we going to elect in his place?”

The question lands with sudden force among them, like a fist slamming down on everyone’s gaming board. There is a long moment of surprised silence in the lounge. Has this abruptly become an impromptu nominating convention? In that case, why is no one speaking out?

“What about you, Heinz?” Chang says at last.

“Don’t speak foolishness. I’m not a reliable person. Not in the way a captain needs to be.”

“Well, then, who would you suggest?”

“I’m not suggesting anyone. I simply raised the question.” Heinz looks around at each of the others. “What about you, Sylvia? A year as captain — why not? You don’t have any other urgent responsibilities at this stage in the voyage. Or you, Paco? You say you wouldn’t want the job, but you’d be a nice contrast with him, all sound and fury in place of chilly Nordic restraint. And what about Sieglinde, maybe? She’d nominate herself, I suspect, if we gave her half a chance.” They all laugh at that. Sieglinde is not a popular member of the expedition. “Or you, Huw,” Heinz says, grinning and pointing at the heavyset red-faced Welshman. “You’d make a damned good captain.”

“No. Not on your life. If I took the job, I would then face the same problem that he does, of the year-captain’s not being permitted to take part in a planetary exploration mission,” Huw reminds him. “And this entire conversation began with my question about the possible makeup of the planetary landing mission, if there is indeed to be one. Of course, I’m intending to be part of it. So obviously there’s no chance I’d let myself be put forth for captain.”

“Who would we pick, then?” someone asks.

Again, silence. There is no clearly apparent consensus candidate and they all know it. They have all become accustomed to the captaincy of the incumbent in these eleven months; he seems well fitted to the role, and it seems a useful employment of his strange restless intensity. Many have voiced the hope that he will simply remain in office, which would spare the rest of them the bother of having to do the job and also keep him safely busy. Which is why discussions of the upcoming expiration of the year-captain’s term have been few and far between, and why this one has rapidly petered out.

Huw says, “If we may return to the question of the makeup of the landing party now—”

“Play your stone, Huw,” Leon grunts.

Huw flamboyantly sweeps a black stone out of the pile of loose ones and slaps it almost without looking against the board, capturing a little group of Leon’s that evidently had been left undefended for some time now. Leon gasps in surprise. Huw says, addressing the others, “The exploration team ought to consist, I would think, of three people, no more, no less. Obviously we can’t send one person down alone, and two is probably too few to deal with the risks that might arise. On the other hand, we mustn’t risk any big percentage of our total complement in any landing. Three is probably the right number.”

“You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?” Leon says sourly.

Huw ignores him. “The ideal exploration party, it seems to me, would include one biologist, one planetographer, and, of course, one man to operate and do necessary maintenance work on the vehicle the party uses. The year-captain is the expert on alien biologies: he’s an obvious choice, though we could send Giovanna or even Elizabeth if for some reason the year-captain can’t or won’t go. As for the planetographer—”

“I don’t think we should let any women be part of the group,” Paco says firmly.

The unexpected remark cuts across Huw’s line of discourse so completely that Huw falls silent and his mouth gapes open two or three times, fishlike. Everyone turns to stare at Paco. He is beaming in a very self-satisfied way, as though he has just demonstrated the existence of a fourth law of thermodynamics.

There are four women in the lounge: Julia, Innelda, Giovanna, Sylvia. Julia and Innelda and Giovanna seem too astonished to reply. It is Sylvia, finally, who speaks up. “Bravo, Paco! What a marvelously medieval idea! The bold, brave knights go forth to check out the country of the dragons, and the ladies stay home in the castle. Is that it?”

Paco’s self-congratulatory glow dims. He gives her a surly look.

“That’s not what I mean at all,” he says.

“No?”

“No. It’s purely a matter of genetic diversity, don’t you see?” The room has become very quiet. Paco hunches forward and begins to count off points on his fingers. “Look. We have twenty-five live wombs on board, to put matters in the most basic possible way. Twenty-five walking ovum banks, twenty-five potential carriers of fetuses. That is to say, we’ve got only you twenty-five women available among ourselves with which to get the population of New Earth started. There’s plenty of sperm available around here, you know. One man could fertilize a whole army of women, if necessary. It’s potential mothers who are scarce, and we don’t want to make them any scarcer. Each woman on board represents an irreplaceable four percent of all the women well be bringing to the new world. Each of you is an irreplaceable pool of genetic information, in other words. And an instrument of embryo nurture. The chance of losing even one of you on a risky exploration mission is too big a gamble to take. Q.E.D.”

Innelda and Julia and Giovanna begin to speak all at once. But it is Sylvia’s light, clear voice that carries through the hubbub:

“You’re an idiot, Paco. One live womb more or less, as you so prettily put it, one instrument of embryo nurture, won’t make any statistical difference in the long run. The handful of fertile men and women aboard this ship aren’t going to be a significant factor in populating New Earth, and you know it. What really matters is the gene bank downstairs and theex utero genetic machinery. We’ve got barrels of fertile ova stored safely away down there. And plenty of sperm too, thank you. That’s where the genetic diversity of New Earth is going to come from, not from us. Naturally we don’t want to lose any members of the expedition, but to claim that the women of the voyage are such sacred and special carriers of life that it’s folly to risk them in a planetside mission is nonsense, Paco, downright stupid nonsense!”

“So you’ll volunteer for the first landing, then?” Paco asks her.

“Has anybody called for volunteers? I would go if I were asked. Of course I would. But you who worry so much about our precious genetic heritage and our irreplaceable instruments of embryo nurture might stop and think a little about the logic of risking one of the two people on board who have a thorough understanding of how to operate our gene bank.”

“I take it that what you’re saying is that you aren’t willing to go,” Paco says cheerfully. It is apparent to everyone now, by the light in his eyes and the lopsided smile on his face, that he is simply goading her for the sake of a little fun.

Sylvia is a small and fairly timid woman, and this is an unusual situation for her. The stress of it is already beginning to show. “Isaid I would go if I were asked! But it would be idiotic to ask me. You go, Paco. All you’re good for is navigating and producing sperm. You said yourself that we have plenty of sperm available, so we can get along without yours in case you get killed down there. And if it’s a planet good enough to settle on, we won’t need a navigator any more anyway.”

Julia and Giovanna applaud. So do Heinz and David, after a moment. Even Paco grins.

Huw, who can be an extremely patient man, has been waiting with extreme patience while all this takes place. Now he says doggedly, as though the entire Paco-Sylvia interchange had never taken place, “If I may continue, then: three of us make up the landing party. The year-captain is the biologist. Marcus or Innelda will do the planetographic analysis, I suppose. And, naturally, I will drive the surface vehicle in which we will travel, and look after it in case of a breakdown. What do you think?”