Starborne

Once again Hesper’s long-range calculations have been miraculously confirmed by direct instrument scan. It has turned out to be the case that Planet B is somewhat larger in diameter than Earth but has very similar gravitation, and that its atmospheric composition is 22 percent oxygen and 70.5 percent nitrogen and 4.5 percent water vapor, which is a lot, along with a hefty, though not unmanageable, 1.75 percent CO₂and assorted minor quantities of methane and various inert gases. That suggests a steamy tropical climate, and indeed the instrument scan has revealed that the mean temperature of this Planet B varies scarcely a degree from pole to pole: it is uniformly hot, a sweaty 45 degrees Celsius everywhere. A jungle world. Plenty of vegetation, photosynthesizing that lofty tonnage of CO₂like crazy. The good old Mesozoic, waiting for them down there.

No visual evidence of cities or towns. No electromagnetic output anywhere along the spectrum from gammas up to the longest radio waves and beyond. Nobody home, apparently.

No oceans, no lakes, no rivers, either. A solid landmass from pole to pole. That’s odd, in view of the startlingly high proportion of water vapor in the atmosphere. All that H₂O must condense and precipitate out occasionally, right? There should, in fact, be almost constant rainfall on such a world. Where does that enormous quantity of rain go? Does it all evaporate right back into the cloud layer? Doesn’t it collect anywhere on the surface in the form of large bodies of water?

The sonar probe shows something even odder. The planet is a big ball of rock, extremely skimpy on heavy metals, maybe on metals of any sort. Most of it is just basalt. But the sonar indicates that this world is swaddled in a huge layer of something relatively soft that covers the entire surface, theentire surface, not a break in it anywhere. Vegetable matter, evidently. A planetary jungle. Well, that’s congruent with the climatic and atmospheric figures. But this worldwide layer of vegetable stuff seems to be two or three hundred kilometers thick. That’s quite a thickness. The tallest mountain on Earth is only about nine kilometers high. The idea that this planet is covered by a wrapping of jungle that has roots going down twenty times as deep as Mount Everest is tall is pretty hard to accept.

The people of the Wotan, in the main, are still basking in the warmth of their own expectations about Planet B, which they have been nourishing all during the journey across nospace from the other solar system. For many months now they have been convinced that Planet B is the pot of gold at the end of their rainbow, and until they learn otherwise that is the attitude they are determined to maintain. But those few who have actually been looking at the direct data from Planet B have already understood that those expectations are doomed to be dashed, and they are starting to wonder how their fellow voyagers are going to react to the extreme disappointment that they have set up for themselves.

The year-captain says to Huw, finally, “Do you think the damned place can possibly be of any use to us?”

“Who can tell, unless we go down for a look?”

“I can tell from here. So can you. You know you can.”

Huw acknowledges the point with the most minute of nods. “It seems definitely unusual, I admit.”

“Too hot for us. No useful metals. No free water. Some kind of probably impenetrable jungle covering the whole thing.”

“We’ve come a long way to find it. Are we just going to move along without even sending out a drone probe?” Huw asks.

Once again the year-captain falls into unresponsiveness.

Huw says, “And, truth to tell, a drone probe isn’t what I have in mind. We need to get someone down there and check out Giovanna’s theory about the angels.”

“What theory is that?”

“You don’t remember? That the angels want us to get out of their territory altogether, and so they’ve not only fouled up Noelle’s transmissions but also did that job on Marcus and Giovanna and me when we landed on Planet B.”

The year-captain has locked himself behind some sort of wall and will not come out. “The very existence of these so-called angels is an unproven concept at this point,” he says.

“So it is, old brother. But by landing a couple of people on this planet in front of us, we can at least begin to get some determination of whether it’s going to be possible for us to occupy any planet at all without somehow first obtaining the blessing of these troublesome beings. If they exist, that is. What I’m saying is that if some of us go down there and wedon’t happen to hit the same problems that were encountered on—”

“I know what you’re saying, Huw.”

“We need to go and find out, wouldn’t you agree?”

The year-captain shuts his eyes for a moment. “Who do you propose for such a mission, then?”

“You, of course. Now that you have the legal right to go. And yet you don’t seem to want to, which I confess I can’t understand at all, old brother. You ought to be climbing all over yourself in your hurry to get down there.”

“I want to go, yes. If anyone goes. But the planet is probably useless for our purposes. Is it not a waste of time and perhaps lives to bother looking at it at close range? — Who else would you want to suggest for the mission?”

“Myself.”

“Yes. That goes without saying, Huw. Who else?”

“Nobody else.”

“Just you and me?”

“That’s right, old brother.”

“You argued for the necessity of a three-person expedition to Planet A’s surface,” the year-captain says.

“So I did. But just the two of us was enough for Titan and Ganymede and Callisto,” Huw replies. “We should be able to manage things pretty well by ourselves here too. We don’t need to put anyone else at risk. Look here, old brother, let’s send a probe down today and take some samples. And then you and I will descend and expose ourselves to whatever spooks may be in charge of things down there, unless there are no spooks, in which case we can begin to assume that even though Planet A flamed out for us, there is no reason to expect the same effects everyplace we happen to wander. What do you say, captain-sir, old brother?”

“Let me think about it,” the year-captain says.

In fact the year-captain most passionately wants to visit the surface of Planet B, and has been in the grip of that passion since long before the Wotan ’s latest emergence from nospace. He has been fighting against the idea, though, because he knows that his desire is a purely selfish one, and he feels that he’s had his quota of selfishness for the time being.

Obviously the planet is useless for the purposes of colonization. The year-captain knows that already, even if most of his fellow voyagers don’t. It has some bare possibility of being suitable for human habitation, yes, but the year-captain is certain even without first-hand on-site data that life down there would be endlessly difficult, uncomfortable, and challenging for them. A certain degree of challenge is a valuable stimulus to the growth of civilization, he realizes, but there is a point beyond that at which the human spirit is simply crushed by overwhelming struggle. That is what probably would happen here, the year-captain thinks. Better to write the place off without bothering with it further, and go in search of some other, less difficult, world.

And yet — and yet—

A planet, a unique unknown planet right out there within his grasp, a planet that beyond much doubt has given rise tosome sort of life-form completely beyond human experience—

He wants it. He can’t deny it to himself, not after the battle to win the right to take part in reconnaissance missions outside the ship. And, in the end, he allows Huw’s use of Giovanna’s variant on the angel theory to sway his decision. They do need to find out whether some omnipotent external force has decided to block their access to the worlds of space, and a landing on Planet B would shed a little light on that. Might shed some, anyway. A positive finding in that area might help to compensate for the letdown that people are going to feel when Planet B fizzles out, as the year-captain is sure it will, as a potential settlement site. So he authorizes the sending of one of the drone probes to collect a little more direct information about conditions down there, and lets it be known that a follow-up manned expedition will be the next step, if warranted by the drone’s findings.

Huw, operating the drone by remote control, puts it in an orbit a thousand kilometers outside Planet B’s murky atmosphere and does some infrared eyeballing to get a clue to what’s underneath the cloud layer. His cameras are capable of peeling away thicker fog than that, and they pierce right through, providing him with new mystifications.

“Look there,” he tells the year-captain. “Those hot lines everywhere. It’s like a big ball of twine down there. Or a lot of rubber bands wound round and round the whole place.”

“Vines, I think,” the year-captain says.

“A planet entirely tied up in a wrapping of vines? Vines two hundred kilometers thick?”

“We’ll need to take a closer look at it,” the year-captain says.

“I already have.” Huw kicks the imaging magnification up a couple of levels and cuts in an ultraviolet filter. “Now we’re looking just below the surface. You see the dark lines between the hot ones?”

“Tunnels?” the year-captain suggests.

“Tunnels, yes, I’d say.” Huw indicates the infrared readings. “And things moving in the tunnels, no?”

The year-captain peers closely at the screen’s blue-green surface. Dots of hot purple light, the purple indicating a temperature different from the temperature of the tightly wound lines, are slowly traversing the long darknesses that they have identified as tunnels.

“How big, would you guess?” he asks.

Huw shrugs. “Twenty meters long? Fifty? Big things, anyway. Very big. I don’t think we have a civilization down there, old brother, but I think we do have something.”

“Which requires investigation.”

“Absolutely.”

Huw grins. The year-captain does not. They understand each other, though. They will be shameless. Irresponsible, even. This is a useless world. But they want to see what’s down there; and so they will. They have earned the right. Curiosities must be satisfied. And — who knows? — they may even be able to answer some questions that very much need to be answered before the expedition can proceed to its next destination.

So the word goes forth to the ship’s community that it has been determined that a landing is desirable — no details aboutwhy that might be felt to be a good idea — and therefore a landing will be made, and that Huw and the year-captain will be the landing party, and Huw sets about once more readying one of the probes for a manned voyage. And if anyone aboard the Wotan thinks that the year-captain is needlessly exposing two of the most valuable members of the expedition to great risk, that person does not share those thoughts with anyone else.

Huw winks broadly and does a thumbs-up as he and the year-captain secure themselves in their acceleration chairs. It’s a long time since these two have undertaken a mission of exploration together.

“Well, old brother, shall we shove off?” Huw asks.

“Whenever you’re ready, Huw. You’re the captain aboard this ship, you know. You make the decisions.”

“Right. Right.” Huw puts the little vessel under the control of the Wotan’s drive intelligence and the mother ship’s main computer takes charge, easing the drone out of the bay. When they are a safe distance from the Wotan the drone goes into powered flight and begins its descent from orbit.

The spider-armed lopsided awkwardness of the Wotan quickly gets smaller behind them. The cloud-swaddled face of Planet B expands with breathtaking swiftness.

Then they are inside the cloud layer, which the probe has previously determined to be nothing at all like the ghastly sulfuric-acid wrapper that covers Venus, but just a lot of plain H₂O and some CO₂, your basic veil of ordinary clouds, very, very dense but chemically harmless. They drop down through it and find themselves in the mother of all rainstorms, a planetary deluge of extraordinary intensity. It falls in green loops all around them, thick, viscous-looking rain. Now they understand where this world’s oceans are. They are in constant transit through the atmosphere, going up in the form of evaporation and coming down in the form of rain, and never once pausing to accumulate on the ground.

“It is a bitch of a place for certain, old brother,” Huw declares, as he takes over from the drive intelligence and begins to seek a decent landing place.

They are close enough to the ground now to see, even through the driving rain, that their guesses from on high were correct, that this planet is completely engulfed by an enormous webwork of gigantic woody vines, seemingly endless vines whose trunks have a diameter of at least ten meters and probably more, vines like horizontal trees that crisscross and overlap and entangle, leaving no free spaces between them anywhere.

Sonar shows the underground tunnels they had noticed from above, weaving through the vines beginning at a depth of perhaps forty meters and running both laterally and downward, in some places descending for a kilometer or more. Below the tunnel zone lies something that appears to be one great solid spongy mass, hundreds of kilometers thick, out of which all the vines seem to be sprouting. It is the mother substance, apparently, the living substructure of the entire giant organism — for it is rapidly becoming clear to them now that Planet B is occupied by one immense vegetable entity, which is this spongy subterranean mass, from which all else springs. And beneath that is the stone understructure of the planet, the hidden basalt core.

Where to land? There are no open places, no meadows, no plains.

Huw expends a little reaction mass to create one, tipping the probe up on end and flaming the upper edges of a few vines until there is a satisfactorily flat landing zone below them. There is no reaction from the vines adjacent. They do not writhe, nor do they even stir; they give no indication of any sort that Huw’s assault on this very small sector of the planetary flora has caused the slightest resentment, let alone set in motion some kind of retaliatory action.

He sets the probe down nicely. Waits a moment for it to finish rocking. The landing zone he has improvised is a little on the uneven side.

“Tests, now,” Huw tells the year-captain, unnecessarily.

They run through all the prescribed extravehicular testing routines, checking this thing and that, the acid content of the rain and the possibility of atmospheric toxins and such. Not that they have any intention of exposing themselves to direct unshielded intake of the atmosphere out there, not on an alien world that they are already almost certain will be of no avail as a place where human beings might settle happily. But they are aware that extraterrestrial chemistries might provide nasty surprises even for explorers protected by spacesuits. So they take the proper precautions.

The rain is unrelenting. It works the skin of the little spaceship over like a trillion tiny hammers.

“At this point on the last planet,” Huw says, “I was already beginning to feel strange. The queasies had started to strike before I was even out of the probe.”

“And now?”

“Nothing. You?”

“Nothing at all.”

“But let’s see how it goes for us when we’re outside, shall we?”

A little comedy surrounds their going outside the ship. The year-captain, having previously made it clear that he looks upon Huw as the leader of the party, indicates with a nod that he will defer to Huw in the matter of being the first to set foot on this planet. But Huw, who has been the first to set foot on one extrasolar planet already, is quite willing to let the year-captain have the honor on this one, and defers right back to him. Of course, there is the possibility that the first one outside the ship will be the recipient of some sort of disagreeable jolt, but each man, in his deference to the other, goes to some length to make it clear that such fear is definitely not an item in his considerations, not at all. Courtesy is the only issue.

“Goon,” the year-captain says irritably in the end.

“Well, then. Yes, if so you say.”

Huw shimmies through the hatch and cautiously steps down onto the charred, still faintly sizzling surface of the landing area that he has fashioned. There is a slight resilience, a little give, beneath his weight. He can detect no untoward psychological effects.

“Everything all right so far,” he announces.

The year-captain joins him. Together they walk toward the edge of the clearing; and then, after just a moment of hesitation, they step out together onto the upper surface of one of the unburned vines.

It is an unappealing surface. Big scrofulous leaves, blue-black and stemless, pocked with ugly blister-shaped air bladders, sprout directly from the wood at sparse intervals. Dull red streamers hang from their edges like bursts of entrails. In the bare places between the leaves the trunks of the vine have a disagreeably gluey texture.

“Well?” Huw asks.

“A little sticky, isn’t it?”

“I mean your mind.”

“Still functioning, thank you. And yours?”

“I was ready to scream by this point on Planet A. Alreadywas screaming a little, as a matter of fact. Things are different here, it seems. So much for Giovanna’s theory, let’s hope.”

“Vile place even so, isn’t it?” the year-captain says.

“Utterly repugnant. Absolute trumps, as repugnant goes. Shall we move a little farther onward, old brother?”

It is almost like being under water. By their calculations it’s the midday hour, with a medium-size sun hovering right above them just a few dozens of millions of kilometers away, and yet they are shrouded in a deep twilight gloom. There is one place in the sky where a somewhat lighter blurry patch stands out against the thick gray mantle of clouds: that’s the sun lurking back there, no doubt. The rain, falling as it does in dense sheets, is dispiriting in the extreme. It must not have stopped raining here in millions of years. The water hits the corrugated woody surfaces of the huge vines and goes slithering off into the narrow crevices between them. Perhaps some of it trickles downward from the planetary surface for hundreds of kilometers until it comes to rest in pockets of unimaginable darkness along the flat face of the rocky core; but most of the deluge simply bounces right back up in instant evaporation. All about them they can see heavy clouds of vapor climbing stubbornly through the furious vertical scything of the downpour.

The vines themselves form a virtually impenetrable covering. They lie side by side like the threads in some colossal tapestry, occasionally overlapping, each one stretching on and on for what may well be kilometers; there is not so much as a fingersbreadth of room between each one and its neighbor. Their greenish-purplish bark is sturdy and yet rubbery, yielding a little beneath the feet of the two explorers. It bears not just leaves but pulpy fungoid masses that sprout in random patches all over it, and also scabrous gray coatings of the local equivalent of lichen. These are soft as cheese, these parasites or saprophytes or symbiotes, whatever the case may be, creating a treacherously slippery surface, but it is difficult to avoid walking on them. Between these various excrescent outgrowths it is possible to see numerous large oval bodies, greenish in color and smooth in texture, set in the bark of the vines four or five meters apart from one another like a host of unblinking eyes: they appear to have a significant function for the vines, perhaps supplementary instruments that aid the strange leaves in conducting some kind of photosynthetic process in this dismal subaqueous light.

Everything here seems to be rotting, decaying, decomposing, and reconstituting itself all in the same process. This world would have made a good penal colony, maybe, in the fine old days when cruel and unusual punishment was a popular human pastime. But it doesn’t seem good for very much else.

“Have we seen enough, do you think?” Huw says.

The year-captain points straight ahead. There is a round dark place up there, like the mouth of a cave, set between two vine trunks. The entrance, it seems, to one of those long underground tunnels that had shown up on the sonar images. “Shall we take a look inside?” he asks.

“Ah. You want to go in there.”

“I want to go in there, yes,” says the year-captain in a quiet tone.

“Well, then, why not?” says Huw, not very enthusiastically. “Why not, indeed?”

The year-captain leads the way, without discussion of issues of precedence. The tunnel is wide and low-roofed, ten or twelve meters broad but scarcely higher than the tops of their heads in some places. It runs at a gently sloping downward angle right through the corpus of the vines, slicing casually from one to the next; its walls, which are the substance of the vines, are moist and pink, like intestines, and a kind of sickly phosphorescent illumination comes from them, a feeble glow that breaks the dense darkness but is of little help to vision. Huw and the year-captain activate their helmet lamps and step a little farther within, and then a little farther yet.

Huw says, “I wonder what could have constructed these—”

“Hush,” says the year-captain, pointing ahead once again. “Look.”

He walks forward another dozen meters or so and steps up the intensity of his beam. The tunnel appears to be blocked up ahead by a plug of some sort; but as they get closer to the blockage they can see that the “plug” is slowly retreating from them — that it is, in fact, some enormous sluggish, elongated flat-topped creature that not only is moving in wormlike fashion along the floor of the tunnel but is evidentlycreating the tunnel, or at least expanding it, by devouring the fabric of the vine through which the tunnel runs.

“Fabulous,” Huw murmurs. “What do you know, we’ve found extraterrestrial animal life at last, old brother! And what a beauty it is!”

There is no way for them to tell how long the tunnel worm is. Its front end is lost in the darkness far down the way. But they are able to see that its body is three times the width of a man’s, and rises nearly to their height. Its flesh is translucent and pink in color, a deeper pink than that of the tunnel itself, more in the direction of scarlet, and has a soft, buttery look about it. Black hairy fist-size pores are set low along the creature’s sides, every fifty centimeters or thereabouts, going forward on it as far as they can see. From these orifices comes a steady trickle of thin whitish slime that runs down the curving sides of the thing and lies puddled in rivulets and pools along the tunnel floor around it. An excretion product, no doubt. The worm seems to be nothing more than an eating machine, mindless, implacable. It is steadily munching its way through the vine and turning what it eats into a stream of slime.

Indeed they can hear the sounds of feeding coming from the other end of the creature: a snuffling noise and a harsh chomping noise, both above a constant sixty-cycle drone. All these sounds, which seem to be related, go on without letup. An eating machine, yes.

The two men creep a little nearer, taking care not to let their boots come in contact with the deposits of slime that the great worm has left in their path. When they are as close to the creature as they dare to get, it becomes possible for them to perceive curious glowing cystlike structures, dark and round and solid and about the size of a man’s head, distributed with seeming randomness within the flesh of the thing, scattered here and there at depths of a third of a meter or more. These cysts make their presence known by a bright gleam like yellow fire that emanates from them and rises up through the flesh of the worm to its pink puckered skin.

“Internal organs?” Huw asks. “Elements of its nervous system, could they be?”

“I don’t think so,” the year-captain says. “I think they may belong to this.”

Once more he points, jabbing his finger urgently forward two or three times into the pinkish gloom, and turns the beam of his helmet lamp up to its highest level.

Another creature has appeared from somewhere, a creature far smaller than the worm, and has taken up a perch atop the worm’s back just about at the farthest distance where they are able to see anything. It is a thing about the size of a large dog, vaguely insectoidal in form, with jointed pipe-stem legs, eight or maybe ten of them, and a narrow body made up of several segments. It has a savage-looking beak and a pair of huge glittering golden-green eyes like great jewels, which it turns on them for a moment in a long, baleful stare as the light of the year-captain’s lamp comes to rest on it. Then it returns to its work.

Its work consists of digging a hole deep down in the worm’s flesh and laying an egg in it.

The egg is waiting, glued to the creature’s underbelly: a many-faceted bluish-purple sphere of goodly size. The hole, it seems, is nearly finished. The insectoid-thing, standing upright and bracing itself by spreading its lowest pair of limbs, bends forward at a sharp angle until its head and the upper half of its thorax disappear within the worm. Rapid drilling movements are apparent, the visible half of the creature rocking in quick rhythms, the hidden head no doubt bobbing furiously below to send that terrible beak deeper and deeper into the soft vulnerable material that makes up the worm. The process goes on for an unpleasantly long time.

Then the creature straightens up. It appears to be satisfied with its labors. Once again it glowers warningly at the two watching humans; then it does an odd little strutting dance atop the worm, which, after a moment, can be seen not to be a dance at all, but simply a procedure by which the thing is pulling its huge egg free of its underbelly and laboriously shoving it downward, moving it from one pair of limbs to another, until the next-to-last pair is holding it. At that point the creature flops forward over its excavation, spearing the point of its beak into the skin of the worm as though to anchor itself, and the legs that grasp the egg plunge fiercely downward, jamming the egg deep into the hole that awaits it.

That is all. The creature extricates itself, throws one more huge-eyed glare at Huw and the year-captain, and goes scuttling off into the darkness beyond.

The worm has not reacted in any visible way to the entire event. The snuffling and chomping sounds, and the accompanying sixty-cycle drone, have continued unabated.

“The worm’s flesh will heal around the egg, I suppose,” the year-captain says. “A cyst will form, and there the egg will stay until it hatches, giving off that lovely yellow light. Then, I would imagine, a cheery little thing much like its mother will come forth and will find all the food it needs close at hand. And the worm will never notice a thing.”

“Lovely. Very lovely,” says Huw.

The year-captain moves forward another couple of paces to have a closer look at the opening in which the insectoid-thing has inserted its egg. Huw does not accompany him. It is necessary, the year-captain finds, to clamber up onto the worm’s back for a proper view of what he wants to see. The year-captain’s heavy boots sink a few millimeters into the worm’s yielding flesh as he mounts, but the worm does not react to the year-captain’s presence. The year-captain stares into the aperture, carefully pulling its edges apart so that he can peer into its interior.

“Watch it!” Huw yells. “Mommy is coming back!”

The year-captain looks up. Indeed the insectoid-thing has reappeared, as though its egg has sounded some sort of alarm that has summoned it back from the darker depths of the tunnel. By the light of his helmet lamp the year-captain can see the creature advancing at a startling pace, mandibles clacking, front claws waving ferociously, eyes bright with rage, clouds of what looks like venom emerging from vents along its thorax.

Hastily the year-captain jumps down from the worm and backs away. But the insectoid-thing keeps coming, and swiftly. It seems quite clear to the year-captain that the infuriated creature intends to hurl itself on him and bite him in half, and it appears quite capable of doing just that.

Both men are armed with energy guns, purely as a precautionary thing. The year-captain draws his now, raises it almost without aiming, and fires one quick bolt.

The insectoid-thing explodes in a burst of yellow flame.

“A damned close thing,” Huw says softly as he comes up beside him. “Hell hath no fury like a giant alien bug whose egg is in danger.”

“It wasn’t in any danger,” the year-captain murmurs.

“The bug didn’t know that.”

“No. No. The bug didn’t know.” The year-captain, shaken, nudges the fragments of the thing with the boot of one toe. “I’ve never killed anything before,” he says. “A mosquito, maybe. A spider. But not something like this.”

“You had no choice,” Huw says. “Two seconds more and it would have been going for your throat.”

The year-captain acknowledges that.

“Anyway, it was very damned ugly, old brother.”

“It may have been an intelligent life-form,” says the year-captain. “At the very least, a highly developed one. In any case, it belongs here and we don’t.” His voice is thick with anger and disgust.

He pauses beside the dead creature a little while longer. Then he turns and walks slowly from the tunnel.

Huw follows him out. For a little while they stand together outside the entrance, saying nothing, watching the viscous rain come down in thick looping sheets.

“Would you like to collect a couple of those eggs to take back to the ship for study?” Huw asks finally, goading just a little, but in what he wants to think is a pleasant way, trying to ease the tension of the moment.

The year-captain does not answer immediately.

“No,” he says at last. “I think not.”

“But the eternal quest of science, old brother, does it not require us to—”

“Let the eternal quest of science be damned just this once,” the year-captain tells him sharply. There is a sudden explosive note of anger just barely under control in his voice. “I don’t want to talk about this. Let’s just get ourselves back to the ship.”

This heat, this tone of fury being held in check with great difficulty, is altogether out of character for him. Huw gives him a quick look of surprise verging on alarm. Then, by way of defusing the situation, he lets out a long comic exhalation of relief. “And are we truly going from here, then? Oh, praises be to all the gods! I thought you would keep us poking about in this filthy place forever, my friend.”

Zed Hesper, of course, has the tempting Planet C to propose to them, and plenty of others beyond that.

The sky is full of worlds, Hesper’s instruments indicate, and he is as eager as ever for them to go zooming off in quest of them.

But the first two adventures in planetary exploration have been less than rewarding, in fact have been a bit on the crushing side — one world sending out a broadcast in the psychotic part of the spectrum and the next one populated entirely by loathsome monsters — and in the aftermath of the most recent landing a strange dark mood of negativity is emerging for the first time aboard the Wotan. The loss of contact with Earth — those chatty little bulletins from home, those trifling reminders that they once hadhad a home other than this wandering starship — has had something to do with that. And the voyagers have seen Huw and Giovanna come back pale and shaken from one planet, and Huw and the year-captain equally shaken from another. The effect on the year-captain in particular of the visit to the appalling Planet B is only too apparent even several days after his return, and it disturbs everyone to see that normally impassive man looking so rattled.

The horror that Planet B has turned out to be, after the great expectations that they had all allowed themselves to foster for it, has indeed taken a terrible toll, and not just on the two men who experienced that horror at close range.

It is suddenly occurring to those on the Wotan — many of them, at any rate — that after having left the predictability and comfort of Earth behind for the sake of undertaking a great exploit, they are faced now with the possibility of touring the galaxy forever without finding a world that can become a tolerable home for them. And the wildness of the thing they have volunteered to do, the utter fantastic gamble that it is, has begun to oppress their souls. They are afraid now, many of them, that they have simply thrown away their lives.

The year-captain struggles to transcend this bleak mood in himself, so that he will be better able to purge it from the others. But the sights and sounds of Planet B haunt him day and night, and they engulf him in a dire morass of melancholy. An entire world so hopelessly dismal: it is enough to make one deny the existence of the Creator, assuming one believed in Him in the first place. What divine purpose could have been served by the creation of a planet of endless rain, of titanic vines that constrict and strangle every hectare of the place, colossal brainless worms that feed on the vines, diabolic parasitic bugs that feed on the worms? No doubt it is the best of all possible worlds for the vines and the worms and the jewel-eyed bugs. But such objectivity is beyond him just now. He feels as though he has made a little excursion into some hitherto unrecorded subsidiary circle of Dante’s own Hell.

He yearns to speak with the Abbot about Planet B, if only he could. He hungers for the few quick acerbic sentences that would demolish all the darkness that clings to him now.

But the Abbot is beyond his reach. And so, very gradually, over a period of days, the year-captain manages to pull himself up out of the slough of despond without the aid of the Abbot’s direct intervention. There is no other course that he can allow himself to take.

Some of the others, primarily Hesper and Paco and Julia and Huw and even Sieglinde, have been able to retain their optimistic outlook toward the expedition despite the sobering outcome of the Planet B event. “The remarkable thing isn’t that the first two landings failed,” Julia says. “The remarkable thing is that we found two worlds that were worth checking out within the first couple of years of the voyage.”

“Hear, hear,” Huw bellows, as Huw likes to do. Huw knows that much depends now on his show of hearty high spirits and indomitable will, and he makes sure that he is never seen to be anything but his usual stalwart self, even after all that he has observed and felt on Planet A and the very different but equally oppressive Planet B. There is a price for this. He is willing to pay it.

But there are some aboard who have become deeply bemired in funk. These are the ones who had chosen, for whatever reason, to put a great many emotional chips down on the success of the Planet B mission, and were devastated by the spectacular failure of their wagers. Elizabeth is part of this group, and Imogen, and Sylvia, and several of the men: Roy, Elliot, Chang, Jean-Claude. Among these, who now spend most of their time atGo in the gaming lounge, there has begun to be some talk of giving up the voyage entirely, of swinging around and heading back to Earth.

“Don’t be idiots,” Paco says. “I can’t even imagine creeping back there.”

“You can’t imagine it,” says Elliot. “But I can.”

Elliot’s specialty is urban planning; it is Elliot who will design the future extraterrestrial settlements that the Wotan people hope to found. Since the Planet B fiasco he has convinced himself that he will never get a chance to practice his profession among these alien worlds, that the enterprise on which they all are bound is quixotic and foolish. Marcus’s death has affected Elliot deeply; so has the loss of contact with Earth.

Paco says to him, “If you want to go back, Elliot, why don’t you go? Maybe Huw will let you have one of the drone probes, and you can ride back to Earth in that. You and whoever else wants to go home. It’ll take you about three hundred years, give or take five or six, but if you’re as homesick as all that you won’t mind waiting a—”

“Stop it, Paco,” Elizabeth says.

Paco turns to her. “You’d like to go with him, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s fine with me. I’ll even calculate the course for you, if you like.” The Paco-Heinz-Elizabeth triad has just about collapsed in recent weeks; Heinz has been sleeping in a random, intermittent way with Jean-Claude and sometimes with Leila; and Paco, though he still spends some of his nights with Elizabeth and the occasional one with Heinz, has drifted off into a collateral entanglement with Giovanna. “Here,” Paco says, grabbing Elizabeth roughly and shoving her against Elliot. “She’s all yours. My blessings.”

Elliot is so annoyed that he pushes her back. Heinz gathers Elizabeth up as she rebounds from Elliot and tucks her against the side of his chest. To Paco he says quietly, “Can you try to calm down a little?”

“I hate all this talk of giving up and going back to Earth. It’s completely insane.”

“Is it, now?” Roy asks, looking up from the game ofGo he is playing with Noelle. He is another who has let it be known that he may have already had a sufficiency of nospace travel.

“Of course it is. We’re here to do a job, and we’re going to do it. Julia’s right — one or two bad planets, that doesn’t mean a thing. We’ve only begun to search. Besides, do you think anyone could ever talk the captain into turning back? Has that man ever turned back from anything in his life?”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to go on being captain forever,” Elliot says, a little sullenly. “The job was supposed to be for one year. We gave him three. We could replace him.”

“With someone who wants to bring the voyage to an end?” Paco asks. “Somebody willing to turn back, you mean?”

“Absolutely.”

Huw says, from the corner where he is playing a languorous game ofGo with Chang, “He would never step down in favor of anyone who would take that position. He may not have wanted to keep the job this long, but he’ll keep it forever rather than hand it over to someone who—”

“I’m not talking of asking him voluntarily to step down,” says Elliot. “I’m talking of replacing him.”

“Mutiny?” Huw asks. “Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“A new captain,” says Elliot doggedly. “That’s what I’m looking for. And a new direction for the voyage.”

“You’re talking mutiny,” Huw says, lost in wonderment. “You’re talking a coup d’état aboard the ship, overthrowing the captain by force, abandoning the Articles of the Voyage completely—”

“He’s talking idiocy,” Paco says. “He’s talking like a lunatic. He ought to be sedated. Where’s Leon?” Leon is playingGo with Sylvia. He looks up, scowling. “Leon, we’ve got a crazy man here for you to take care of! Give him an injection of something, will you?”

“Please,” Noelle says, very softly.

She has been silent up until now, concentrating entirely on her game, bending over herGo board as though it were the entire universe. As it so often does, the very softness of her tone succeeds in drawing the attention of everyone in the room, and they all look in her direction.

“Please,” she says again. “We mustn’t fight like this. The voyage is going to continue. You know it will, Elliot. Ithas to. So why even talk about these things?”

“We have to talk about them, Noelle,” says Elliot, sounding a little abashed at persisting. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a discussion with Noelle, because she is widely believed to possess a kind of innate incontrovertible wisdom. And also they all have a horror of involving her in any kind of confrontation, so fragile does she seem to them. “Ever since we lost contact with Earth,” Elliot goes on, “can it really be said that the expedition still has a purpose?”

“Its purpose is to find another world where people can live,” says Noelle. “And we haven’t lost contact with Earth.”

There is a general gasp of amazement in the room.

“We haven’t?” several of them ask at once.

Noelle smiles. “Not forever. I’m sure of that. It’s just a temporary thing, this interference, these ‘angels’ that Heinz was talking about—” Every one of them is staring intently in her direction now. “I’m going to try to speak with them,” she says. “You know that I promised to do that. To speak with them, to ask them to let me make contact with my sister again. If I can do that — and if they agree—”

So the project of making contact with the angels is alive once again, at Noelle’s own instigation, after having been in suspension the whole time of the Planet B event. The hope of regaining contact with Earth inspires them all; the mood of despair that has enshrouded so many of them since the return of Huw and the year-captain from Planet B begins to lift.

The project is alive, yes, but nothing actually is attempted just yet. The days go by — they are heading now toward Planet C, a hundred fifteen light-years from Earth in some entirely different part of the galaxy from the one they have just visited — and it is assumed by everyone that Noelle is preparing herself to reach out in some telepathic fashion toward the extraterrestrial beings that supposedly have interrupted the contact between her and her sister. But the two people who are most closely concerned with the project — the year-captain, who must give Noelle the order to make the attempt, and Noelle herself — are both in their separate ways uneasy about the enterprise to which Noelle has so publicly committed herself. And so both of them in their separate ways have hesitated to move forward with it.

Noelle has never so much as experimented with opening her mind to anyone but her sister, and the idea is a little troublesome to her. It seems almost like an act of infidelity. But, on the other hand, doing it might very well restore the contact with Yvonne that has been the most precious thing in her life. Therefore Noelle remains willing to try it, if uncertain about how the task is actually going to be accomplished, when and if. But she is waiting for the year-captain to tell her to initiate the maneuver.

The year-captain is holding back, though, as he has from the moment any of this first surfaced, because he is afraid that Noelle will somehow be damaged in the attempt.

He has had a classical education. The myth of Semele is very much on his mind.

“Who was she?” Noelle asks him when he allows some of his concern to slip into view.

“Semele was the daughter of an ancient Greek king,” he tells her. They are in the ship’s recreation area, where they have just been swimming in the long, narrow lap-pool, and now they are sitting along the edge of the pool with their legs dangling in the water. “Zeus had taken her as one of his lovers.” Noelle has turned toward him, and she seems to be listening carefully, but her face is completely expressionless. “You know who Zeus was? The chief of the Greek gods, the ruler of the universe.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“And quite a ladies’ man. Zeus was completely infatuated with beautiful young Semele, and had a child with her, who was destined to grow up to be the god Dionysus; and Hera, Zeus’s wife, who had had to put up with much too much of this stuff during the course of her marriage and didn’t care for it, decides to take action. She dons human disguise and goes to visit Semele and asks her if she knows who it is that she’s been sleeping with. Yes, says Semele proudly, he is Zeus, the father of the gods. And have you ever seen him in all his glory? Hera asks. No, says Semele, never, he always comes to me in the form of a man. Well, then, says sly Hera, you should ask him to reveal himself to you in his full majesty. Now,that would be something to see!”

“I think I know this story,” Noelle says.

Nevertheless the year-captain does not halt in his telling of the tale. “The next time Zeus comes to her, Semele says to him, ‘You never show yourself to me as you really are.’ And Zeus says, ‘No, no, that would be too much for you, the sight would be overwhelming.’ But Semele insists. She reminds Zeus that he had promised her, long ago, to grant any wish that she might make. To refuse her nothing. Zeus is trapped. He can’t go back on his promise, though he knows what’s going to happen. So, reluctantly, he gives Semele what she’s asking for. There is a tremendous clap of thunder and Zeus appears before her in his chariot in a great aurora of light. No human being can look upon the true form of Zeus and survive. Semele is destroyed by the heat that emanates from the god. She is burned utterly to ashes by it; and so Hera has had her revenge.”

Noelle has drawn back into herself during this part of the story. She has wrapped her arms tightly around her body, and it seems to the year-captain that she is trembling a little.

“But something good came forth out of that, didn’t it?” she asks. “There was Dionysus the god. Semele’s son. He survived the flames, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He survived. Zeus spared him, and scooped him up in the moment of Semele’s destruction, carrying him off and hiding him from Hera’s wrath until he was grown.”

“So, then. That’s the point of the story. The miraculous birth of the god Dionysus.”

She is definitely trembling, he sees. Shivering, even. They are still naked after their swim, but it is, as always, quite warm here in the recreation area.

“The point of the story is that Semele overreached herself and died,” the year-captain says. “Dionysus is just an incidental part of the myth. The point is that ordinary mortals can’t hope to have unrestricted contact with gods.”

“The birth of a new god can’t just be an incidental part of anything,” Noelle says. The year-captain thinks he hears her teeth chattering.

“Are you feeling all right, Noelle?”

“Just a little chilly.”

“It isn’t chilly in here, though.”

“But I feel that way. Maybe we should go on across into the baths.”

“Yes. Yes. A little time in the hot tub will get you feeling better in no time.”

The baths are just on the other side of the corridor from the lap pool. They collect their towels and discarded clothing and go across. The room is empty when they get there.

“Why did you tell me that story?” Noelle asks him.

“You know the answer to that, don’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“I can’t help feeling worried about what will happen when you try to—”

“It isn’t the same in any way. I’m not Semele. The angels aren’t Zeus.”

“How do you know what they are?”

“I don’t,” she says. “Not really. How could I? But I just don’t think — I’m quite confident that I — that they — that when I—” She is really shaking now. They are at the edge of the hot tank. The usual procedure is to step quickly into the cold tub, then go on to the hot one, and finish by returning to the tepid tank or even the cold one. But instead of going into any of them now Noelle stands trembling at the brink of the hot tub for a long moment; and then she turns, suddenly, and presses herself into his arms.

He enfolds her and holds her tightly and gently strokes her back, trying to soothe her, trying to comfort her and ease whatever terror it is that has taken possession of her. All of it very manly and paternal, and then a moment later not paternal in the least, for the year-captain is trembling too, and they stand there for a long while in a close embrace.

Then she breaks free of him and steps a few paces back. She is smiling, and her eyes, those mysterious sightless eyes that are nevertheless often so expressive, have taken on a strange mischievous light. She reaches out a hand toward him.

The year-captain is amazed at how her body, which he has seen on so many other occasions here in the baths and in the pool, now suddenly seems unfamiliar — different, transformed. The same full round breasts, yes, the same flat belly, the same deeply indented navel. But it is all different. There is an inner light emanating from her. She is gleaming, radiant. He is powerfully drawn to her. He wonders how he had ever managed to fail to find her attractive — why she had never seemed to him, really, like a sexual being at all. Certainly she seems like one now.

“Come,” she whispers, and tugs at his hand, and leads him deftly and unhesitatingly over the tiled floor into one of the little lovemaking rooms that adjoin the baths.

They sink down together onto the hard narrow bed. It is entirely obvious to him now that he has wanted this since the beginning of the voyage, that he has always been drawn to her, that he has hedged himself around with a host of caveats and uncertainties and self-imposed prohibitions precisely because he has desired her all along with such frightening intensity.

He covers her lips, her throat, her closed eyelids with kisses. She clings to him, murmuring, thrusting herself against him. At the last moment before he could possibly turn back he remembers that odd thought he once had had, more than a year before, that she might actually be a virgin, and even that her telepathic powers might somehow depend on the preservation of that virginity and would be forever lost at the first touch of a man’s insistent body.

No. No. That’s idiocy. She isn’t a creature out of some fantastic myth. Her telepathy is not a magical power that can be lost through the violation of an oath of chastity.

And in any case there’s no longer any possibility that he can hold back, not now, nor is Noelle willing to allow it. Her legs part and he enters her quickly, almost roughly, and in that moment Noelle throws back her head and lets out a cry that is surely one of ecstasy and not of pain, and in almost the same moment he comes. He is completely unable to prevent that from happening. It erupts from him with a force that he has not felt since he was eighteen. And he hears her ecstatic hissing gasp, feels her bucking almost convulsively beneath him.

He wonders, in the first bewildered and almost distraught moment afterward, whether Yvonne has experienced their pleasure too, somewhere far away. Whether Yvonne has come with them, even, perhaps.

They lie still for a little while. Neither of them speaks. He is faintly stunned by what has happened; and also relieved, enormously relieved, that the long half-conscious courtship is over, that they have at last put an end to all the games of attraction and repulsion that they have been playing with each other almost since the beginning of the voyage, and finally have allowed themselves to come crashing together in the union — a union of opposites, is it? — that had been ordained for them all along. He is pleased, pleased and happy, and a little amazed, and just a bit frightened, also.

Then very shortly he feels his strength returning, coming back to him with unexpected and almost improbable quickness, and they begin to move once again, less hastily this time, less wildly. It is as though they have traveled in just these first few moments beyond the initial stage of breathless heedless frenzy and are already beginning to become experienced lovers.

This time when it is over she grins up at him and says, “I waited and waited. I thought you never would.”

“I was afraid.”

“Of me?”

“Of damaging your powers, somehow.”

“What?”

“As though the magic would go away if you — if I — if you and I—”

“Silly. You’ve read too many old fables.”

“Maybe I have.”

“Yes. I definitely think you have.”

But now, even now, even after all that, another week goes by and still nothing is done about reaching out to the angels. This time the excuse is that Noelle and the year-captain want to explore their newfound bliss; the effort of the angel experiment will certainly be an immense drain on her energies, and so it is better to postpone it a little while longer, they tell themselves, while the two of them devote their energies to endeavors of a more familiar kind.

The truth is that they are both still afraid to make the attempt. He continues to have Semele’s fate on his mind, troubling him all the more now that a new dimension has been added to their relationship; and she has hesitations of her own, a complex mixture of things — the natural fear of the unknown, and that curious feeling that she would somehow be unfaithful to Yvonne if she were to speak with the angels, and also a certain sense that she was simply inadequate to the task, incapable of fulfilling the high hopes that her shipmates are investing in her.

But it has to be attempted. Of that much the year-captain is certain. Whatever the risks, it has to be attempted. They all placed themselves permanently at risk the moment they first affiliated themselves with this project. If there is a possibility that Noelle can extricate them from their predicament, then that possibility must be explored. He sees no choice. He can’t allow himself so great an evasion.

They have had no contact with Earth for many ship-weeks, for months, even, and the psychological effects are beginning to manifest themselves in a host of troublesome ways. It has started to seem almost as though Earth has been destroyed in some great cataclysm, that they are the sole surviving representatives of humanity, an ark, unfettered by any ties to the past whatsoever and permitted to reshape the rules of their lives whichever way they please. The year-captain’s conservative nature rebels at such anarchy. Earth still is there. The voyagers are beholden to Earth for their presence here. This mission is being executed at the behest of Earth, to fulfill certain needs of Earth.

But with Earth lost to them forever in the vast whirlpool of the skies—

He bides his time. He waits for his moment.

He and Noelle are recognized now aboard ship as lovers. Hiding it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, anyway: he has no desire to impose on her the sort of hole-and-corner relationship that he had carried on for so long with Julia. Let them see. Let them know. They were all expecting it to happen anyway; he understands that now. Some, like Heinz, evidently had seen the whole thing coming a couple of years before he did. Julia too: she smiles knowingly at him, as if to acknowledge that the long-awaited inevitable has at last occurred. Julia doesn’t seem to be hurt by it. Quite the contrary.

So he and Noelle are seen together in the baths, in theGo lounge, in the corridors. He spends nights in her cabin, or she in his — the first time since the beginning of the voyage that he has known anything but solitary sleep. She is a marvelous mixture of passion and innocence, or at least the semblance of innocence; there is unexpected skill and fire in her lovemaking, but also an eagerness to be led into unfamiliar paths, to be taught previously unknown ways. It reminds him, after a fashion, of the way Noelle had approached learningGo once upon a time: the attentiveness, the seriousness, the concern with understanding the fundamentals of the game — and, ultimately, the revelation of enormous mastery.

TheGo obsession has never diminished aboard ship, and the year-captain, who has been only an occasional player since his reawakening of interest in the game, now goes to the lounge whenever his official duties permit. His superior skills make it difficult for most of the others to enjoy playing with him, and he plays almost exclusively with Roy and Leon and Noelle, most often with Noelle.

She is a merciless player. He wins against her no more often than once out of every four or five games.

Today, playing black, the year-captain has been able to remain on the offensive through the 89th move. But Noelle then breaks through his north stones, which are weakly deployed, and closes a major center territory. The year-captain finds himself unable to mount a satisfactory reply. Before he can get very much going, Noelle has run a chain of stones across the 19th line, boxing him in, in an embarrassing way. He manages to fend off further calamity for a while, but he knows that all he is doing is playing for time as he heads toward inevitable defeat. At Move 141 he launches what he suspects is a hopeless attack, and his forces are easily crushed by Noelle within her own territory. A little while later he finds himself confronted with the classic cat-in-a-basket trap, by which he will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone, and at Move 196 he concedes that he has been beaten. She has taken 81 stones to his 62.

As they clear the board for a rematch he says, trying to be casual about it, “Have you been giving any thought to the business of the angels, Noelle?”

“Of course. I think about them a great deal.”

“And?”

“And what?” she asks.

“Do you have any idea how you’d go about it? Making the contact, I mean.”

“I have some theories, yes. But naturally they’re only theories. I won’t really know anything until I make the actual attempt.”

The year-captain waits just a beat. “And when do you think that will be?”

She gives him one of those special looks of hers, those baffling sightless focusings of her eyes that somehow manage to convey an expression. The expression that she conveys this time is one of disingenuousness.

“Whenever you’d like it to be,” she says.

“What about today, then?”

What about today? Yes. What about today. There is no way that it can be postponed any longer. He knows that; she knows that; they are in agreement. This is the moment. Today. Now.

In her cabin. Alone, among her familiar things. She has insisted on that. She grants herself a few moments of delay first, a little self-indulgence, moving about the room, picking up things and handling them, the sea-urchin shell, the polished piece of jade, the small bronze statuettes, the furry stuffed animal. In her former life these things had been hers and Yvonne’s jointly; neither of them had ever had any sense of “mine” or “yours,” not while they were together, but Yvonne had insisted, as the time for the launch of the Wotan drew near, that Noelle take all these with her, these beloved objects, the talismans of their shared life. “After all,” she had said, “I’ll be able to feel them through your hands.” Yes. But not any longer.

Perhaps what Noelle is about to do will restore Yvonne’s access to these little things, the things that once had been theirs and now were merely hers. Perhaps. Perhaps.

She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to enhance the force of her power, she often thinks.

Extends a tenuous tendril of thought now that probes warily outward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—

Angels?

Who knows what they are? But she has been conscious of their presence all along, ever since the interference first began, cloudy presences, huge, heavy masses of mentation hovering around her, somewhere out there in — what does he call it? The Intermundium? Yes, the Intermundium, the great gray space between the worlds. She has felt them out there, not as individual entities but only as presences, or perhapsone presence having many parts.

Now she seeks them.

Angels! Angels! Angels!

She is well beyond the ship and keeps moving outward and outward into the undifferentiated void of the nospace tube, extending herself to what she thinks is the limit of her reach and then reaching even farther yet. She envisions herself now as a line of bright light stretched out across the cosmos, a line that has neither beginning nor end but has no substance, either — an infinitely extended point of radiant energy, a dazzling immaterial streak, a mere beam.

Reaching. Reaching.

Angels!

Oh. She feels the presence now. So they are real, yes. Whatever they are, they are really there. They may not be actual angels, but they are there, not far away. They exist. Brightness. Strength. Magnetism. Yes. Awareness now of a fierce roiling mass of concentrated energy close by her. A gigantic mass in motion, laying a terrible stress on the fabric of the cosmos.

How strange! The angel has angular momentum! It tumbles ponderously on its colossal axis. Who could have thought that angels would be so huge? But they are angels; they can be whatever they please to be.

Noelle is oppressed by the shifting weight of the angel as it makes its slow, heavy axial swing. She moves closer.

Oh.

She is dazzled by it.

Oh. Oh.

She hears it roaring, the way a furnace might roar. But what a deafening furnace-roar this is! Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. She hears a crackling too, a hissing, a sizzling: the sounds of inexorable power unremittingly unleashed.

Too much light! Too much power!

She is fascinated as much as she is frightened. But she must be cautious. This is a great monster lurking here. Noelle draws back a little, and then a little more, overwhelmed by the intensity of the other being’s output. Such a mighty mind: she feels dwarfed. If she touches it even glancingly with her own mind she is certain that she will be destroyed. She must step down the aperture and establish some kind of transformer in the circuit that will shield her against the full bellowing blast of power that comes from the thing.

So she withdraws, pulling herself back and back and back until she is once again inside the ship, and rests, and studies the problem. It will require time and discipline to do what has to be done. She must make adjustments, master new techniques, discover capacities she had not known she possessed. All that requires time and discipline. Minutes, hours, days? She doesn’t know. She will do what is necessary. And does it, patiently, cautiously.

And now. She’s ready once more.

Yes.

Try again, now. Slowly, slowly, slowly, with utmost care. Outward goes the questing tendril.

Yes.

Approaching the angel.

See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me—

Just a touch—

Touch—

Oh. Oh.

I see you. The light — eye of crystal — fountains of lava — oh, the light — your light — I see — I see—

Oh, like a god—

She had looked up the story in the ship’s archives of literature just after the time the year-captain had told it to her, the story of Semele, the myth. And it was just as he had said that day, the day that they first became lovers.

— and Semele wished to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus, who loved her, could not refuse her; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her remained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh, bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him—

— oh God I am Semele—

Now she is terrified. This is too much to face. She will be consumed; she will be obliterated. Noelle withdraws again, hastily. Back within the sanctuary of the ship. Rests, regroups. Tries to regenerate herpowers, but they are badly depleted. Exhausted, at least for the time being. Rest, then. Rest. This is very difficult, very dangerous. She knows it’s unwise to continue right now. She will not attempt to go out into the Intermundium a third time that day.

They’re really and truly there,” she says. She is pale, weary, still badly off balance. It is two hours since her return from her adventure. The entire excursion had taken no more than a few minutes, apparently. It seemed like years to her. And to those waiting for her to emerge from her trance.

They are with her in the control cabin for the debriefing: Heinz, Huw, Leon, Elizabeth, Imogen, Julia. The year-captain is there too, of course. “I could feel them hovering somewhere outside the ship. Angels.”

“Angels?” Heinz asks, sounding startled. He seems uncharacteristically subdued. “Actually, literally?”

“You mean, divine beings with human form, only with wings, like in the old paintings?” Noelle says.

“And names and identities,” says Elizabeth. “Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael. God’s lieutenants.”

“I don’t know that they’re really angels,” Noelle says. “That was just the word we all started to use for them.”

“And surely you must know that I was just using the word lightly,” Heinz says. “It was only a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, when I talked about angels. I never seriously believed there was any kind of intelligence out there, let alone angels. You say you sawsomething, though.”

There are frowns. It is strange to speak of Noelle as “seeing” anything. But who knows what sort of sense-equivalents she experiences through her mind-powers?

“Felt,” says Noelle. “Didn’t see.”

“And were they really angels or weren’t they?” Heinz asks.

Noelle smiles faintly, shakes her head. “How would I know? But I don’t think they were, not literal angels. I told you, I didn’t see anything. But I felt them. Forces. Immense nodes of power, each one revolving on its own axis. If that’s what angels are, then the presence of angels is what I felt.”

“Forces,” Elizabeth says. “I wonder, is that one of the categories of angels?” She counts on her fingers. “Choirs, Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers — Powers, that would be just about the same as Forces—”

The year-captain leans forward and says quietly to Noelle, “Are you able to give us any kind of description in words of what you experienced?”

“No.”

“How far from the ship were you when you began to perceive them?”

“I can’t tell you that, either. Nothing makes sense out there. Certainly not distance. It’s all just one infinite featureless gray blur, just like what you say you see through the viewplate, but going on and on and on.”

“Did they seem relatively close, at least?” he asks.

Noelle turns the palms of her hands upward and outward, a gesture signifying helplessness. “I can’t say. There’s nothing like ‘close’ or ‘far’ out there. Everything is the same distance from everything else. I don’t know whether I was in the tube or out of it when I saw them.”

“And yet you could distinguish relative sizes, at least. These things were big.”

“Bigger than me, yes. Much bigger. Immense. That was easy enough to tell. I felt enormous power. It was like standing at the edge of a gigantic furnace. I could hear it roaring.”

“One furnace, or many?” Huw asks.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes it felt like just one, sometimes I thought there were thousands of them all around me.” Noelle gives them a faint, ashen-faced smile. “You’re all trying to get me to put what I felt into concrete, understandable terms, but that just isn’t possible. All I can tell you is that I went out there and after a little while I felt something,something, very large, very powerful, a huge radiant source of energy. If that’s what angels are like, then I encountered an angel. I don’t know what meeting an angel is supposed to be like. Or how important it is to call what I met by any sort of name. I only know? that there wassomething out there and I think that it’s the something that’s interfering with the transmissions.”

“Will you want to try contacting it again?” the year-captain asks gently.

“Not right now.”

“I understand. Later on, though?”

“Of course. I’m not going to stop here. I can’t. But not now — not — now—”

Leon says, “We should let her rest.”

The year-captain nods. “Yes. Absolutely.” He signals to the others, and they begin to leave. “Come,” he says to Noelle. “I’ll take you back to your cabin.”

Ordinarily she bridles at being offered help in getting around the ship. Not today, though. She gets slowly to her feet and he slips his arm around her shoulders, and they walk together down the corridor, slowly, very slowly.

He halts at the door of the cabin. He does not attempt to go in with her, nor does she invite him to.

Softly he says, “Was it very scary?”

“Scary and wonderful, both. I’ll go out there and do it again when I’ve had a chance to rest.”

“I don’t want you to harm yourself, Noelle.”

“As long as I rest enough between each attempt, I’ll be all right.”

“And if you should make contact, real contact, and the power turns out to be too strong for you to handle — ?”

“Semele?”

“Semele, yes.”

“I looked the story up, you know. It’s in the myth section of the archives, exactly the way you told it to me, except that you left out the part about Zeus hiding the baby in his thigh. But that isn’t important. Semele dies, yes. But first she gets to be the lover of a god. And the mother of another one. And she lives forever in the myth.”

“That’s all well and good. But you mustn’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“These are necessary risks. It has to be done.”

“Yes,” the year-captain says. “It does have to be done, doesn’t it? I should let you rest now, Noelle.”

She goes inside. He closes the cabin door behind her and walks slowly up the corridor to his own room.

There is great general excitement and no little bewilderment over Noelle’s discovery outside the ship; but then a few days go by, and a few more, and she does not make a new attempt at reaching the angels. She is not ready yet, she says. She must find ways of insulating herself against the immense magnitude of the force that she will encounter.

And so they wait, and discuss, and speculate, and wonder. What else can they do?

During this time the ship continues to head toward Hesper’s Planet C, and Hesper continues to fill them with his usual torrent of optimistic details about their upcoming destination’s great potential as a settlement world. It is, he says, the large and impressive sixth planet of a large and impressive golden-red sun. It has, he declares, all the right properties of atmosphere and gravitation and temperature and such, and a crust that he is completely certain will yield a richly rewarding abundance of every useful element known to the universe. He believes that Planet C has oceans and rivers and lakes, and a fine-looking moon just about as large as the moon of Earth, and a great many other outstanding Features that will afford much comfort and pleasure to the lonely wanderers from Earth.

In Hesper’s mind, it would seem, the Wotan has already reached Planet C and a successful surveillance mission has been carried out, and now they have all shuttled down to its richly rewarding surface and are busily constructing the crude but charming buildings that will house the colony in its developmental stages. No one else, though, pays much attention to Hesper’s rapturous forecasts. The minds of the others are focused almost entirely on the angels that lurk somewhere all about them in the mysterious void outside the ship. “Angels” is still what everybody calls them, for lack of any better term.

But nothing more will be learned about the angels until Noelle is ready to make another try at speaking with them. And Noelle is not ready yet. She spends her time apart from everyone else, emerging from her cabin only for meals, saying little when she does.

So they wait. What else, after all, can they do? They playGo and visit the baths and swim laps in the pool, and draw books and plays and music from the almost infinitely capacious resources of the ship’s archives, and indulge, as most of them always have indulged, in couplings and triplings and other sexual entertainments. And the time passes.

She keeps her distance even from the year-captain, which he finds very painful. Now that he has broken through his ascetic forbearance, finally, he has no further interest in living a monastic life. He longs for her as intensely as he has ever longed for anyone or anything. But she has retreated into herself; and so does he. Julia lets it be known that she is still available to him, and he thanks her warmly, but he doesn’t avail himself of her availability. Time passes. Like everyone else, the year-captain waits for Noelle.

At last she announces, with a show of outward confidence, that she is ready to try again.

She is alone when she does, in her cabin, everything as before. Closes her eyes. Lets herself drift upward, outward.

The grayness.

She is in the tube. The infinite void of nospace. She extends herself across it until she has no beginning, no end; she has become infinite herself, an infinite being in a universe of infinities. A streak of pure light. Which reaches out. Reaches. Reaches.

Angels? Are you there today, angels?

Yes. She feels one almost at once, the immensity of it, the power. Goes toward it. Spreads her arms wide, lifts up her face to it, feels the warmth. The heat. That burning fiery furnace, roaring and hissing and sizzling and crackling.

She thinks — hopes — that she has insulated herself this time against destruction, that she has found a way of channeling the overflow of energy so that it will run down past her and dissipate itself harmlessly. She thinks so. Hopes so.

She is very frightened.

But she realizes that this must be done. And she is aware that she stands at the brink of wonders.

Now. Now. The questing mind reaches forth.

Touches.

Or almost touches. There is still a barrier, and Noelle is afraid to cross it. She waits there, looking outward,seeing the angel, actuallyseeing it. Its vast cosmos-filling surface. An ocean of fire. The angel’s face is awash with hurricanes of unthinkable activity. Wild tongues of flame rise from it like bristling curls. The broad face is veiled in places, but where the veil parts she is able to see coherent fountains of power climbing through the turbulence, coming up from the angel’s depths, hot cells of fiery matter bigger than entire planets swimming up out of the core of the angel and gliding back down. At the surface itself, again and again, frenzied eruptions leap out across the firmament like daggers of energy stabbing at the cosmos.

And deeper within, behind and beyond all the turmoil of the surface, there seems to be a zone of shining stillness, like a wall separating the flamboyant forces of the angel’s face from the calm, imperturbable core of the giant being. Noelle longs to reach that quiet core. But how? How? The roaring all about her numbs her soul. She can barely think in that great tumult.

Angel? Angel, do you hear me? This is Noelle.

Roaring. Hissing. Crackling. Sizzling.

Touch me, angel. But touch me only a little, touch me gently. Gently, please. Because I am so very small and you are such a giant.

A silence, a stillness. Then searing ropes of flame reach up as though to caress her.

Oh. Oh.

Around her the whole universe is aflame. The fire — the fire — that burning ocean — those grasping arms of flame — Noelle recoils from them, those writhing fiery strands that are reaching for her—

She pulls back, afraid. Still afraid. It is too much for her; she will be destroyed. She turns. Flees.

Finds a safe place, somewhere. Halts. Draws deep breaths.

Opens her eyes.

All about her is darkness, as usual. There are no flames anywhere near her. Everything is perfectly still. The angel is gone. She is in her own cabin, aboard the Wotan. Alone. Trembling. She has failed again.

I’m going to give it one more shot,” she tells the year-captain.

“But if the risk is so great—”

“I don’t know that it really is.”

“You said—”

“I said, yes. But maybe I was wrong. I’ll try one more time, and we’ll see.”

He is silent for a long while.

“You don’t want me to do it,” Noelle says eventually, in a completely neutral tone, nothing reproachful about it.

“I do and I don’t,” the year-captain says. “I’ve been the one pushing you toward this all along. And pulling you back with the other hand. I’m afraid of losing you, Noelle. We need to see what these things are, yes. But I’m afraid of losing you.” And he says, after another almost interminable pause, “You know that I love you, Noelle.”

“Yes.”

“And if something should happen to you—”

“Nothing will happen to me,” she says. “Nothing bad.”

This time as she enters the gray Intermundium she pauses before even beginning to search for the angel, and sends a shaft of thought across the light-years to Earth, to Yvonne.

She has had no contact of the kind that she once had enjoyed with Yvonne for months, nothing on the level of message-interchange. But she knows Yvonne is still there and trying to reach her, and in some indefinable way the link between them is still open, however clouded it is by the interference caused by the proximity of the angels. It is that link that Noelle attempts to widen and strengthen now.

Yvonne? Can you hear me? Can you feel me?

There is the hint of a hint of an affirmative reply. Only the hint of a hint, is all, but that is better than nothing.

Ride with me, Yvonne. When I want you to let me lean on you, be there beside me. Let me draw strength from you. I’m going to need you soon.

Does Yvonne hear? Does she know?

I love you, Yvonne. You are me. I am you. We are in this together.

Noelle thinks she feels Yvonne’s silent affirmative presence. Hopes she does.

And now. Now. Noelle moves deeper into the void beyond the ship. She can feel the force of the angel now, the vast godlike thing that waits for her out there.

Angel? Listen to me, angel! This is Noelle!

The angel is listening. The angel is waiting.

I am Noelle. I come to you in love, angel. I give myself to you, angel.

This time she holds nothing back. She yields herself completely, permitting herself no fear. Yvonne is with her. Yvonne stands beside her, lending her her strength.

I am yours, Noelle tells the angel.

Contact.

optic chiasma thalamus

sylvian fissure hypothalamus

medulla oblongata limbic system

pons varolii reticular system

corpus callosum cingulate sulcus

cuneus orbital gyri

cingulate gyrus caudate nucleus

— cerebrum!—

claustrum operculum

putamen fornix

choroid globus medial lemniscus

— mesencephalon!—

dura mater

dural sinus

arachnoid granulation

subarachnoid space

pia mater

cerebellum

cerebellum

cerebellum

The universe splits open. The whole cosmos is burning. Bursts of wild silver light streak across the shining metal dome of the sly. Walls smolder and burst into flames. Worlds turn to ash. There is contact, yes. A sensory explosion — a dancing solar flare — a stream of liquid fire — a flood tide of brilliant radiance, irresistible, unendurable, running into her, sweeping over her, penetrating her, devouring her. Light everywhere. Fire. A great blaze in the firmament.

Semele.

The angel smiles and she quakes. Open to me, Noelle, cries the vast tolling voice, and she opens and the force enters fully, taking possession of every nook and cranny of her brain, sweeping resistlessly through her.

And she and the angel are one. She lies within its bosom, resting, regaining her strength steadily, moment by moment, as its great warmth fills her and revives her.

After a while she is strong enough to rise and move about within the angel. She discovers that she can travel freely and at will, going as she pleases into any sector of the great being. She drops down beyond the zone of outer turbulence, past the huge fiery cells of angel-stuff that come constantly floating up from the interior, and disappears into the tranquillity of the angel’s core, the cool hidden place where no firestorms rage and the deepest of wisdom resides. There she remains for a considerable while, feeling a peace that she has never known before, until at last it comes to seem to her that if she does not move along she will stay there forever; and so she moves upward again, toward the surface, entering the realm of fiery turmoil that is the angel’s outer semblance. But the fire does not harm her. She is of the angel now; the angel is of Noelle.

Come. Let me show you things.

They drift across the face of the cosmos together. There are angels everywhere, a vast choir of them wherever she looks — great ones, small ones, bright ones, faint ones, some massed in clusters, some burning in solitary splendor. The sound of their voices fills the heavens.

She and her guide halt in a place of deep darkness, and there Noelle sees what she understands to be a new angel coming into being, barely glimmering as it is born. It coalesces swiftly as she watches, out of a cool, dark cloud of dust that is collapsing inward on itself to become a compact ball. As it shrinks and takes on spherical form it begins to turn, slowly and then faster and then much faster yet, and to give off heat, faintly at first, and then with increasing force, until it is glowing red-hot, white-hot. It has begun to spit matter into the void too, feverishly hurling segments of itself in every direction in what seems like a tantrum: a prodigious and prodigal outpouring of energy, ferocious and yet somehow comical.

A playful baby. An infant angel savoring the first throes of life. They watch for a while; and then they leave it in the midst of its sport.

Come along, now. Onward.

Onward, yes. The sky is very bright here, full of angels, and all of them are singing as angels should sing, a wonderful celestial choir whose harmonies fill the void. There is brightness everywhere, a sea of light.

Here Noelle sees a giant angel that burns with so steady and fierce a radiance that she does not understand why it has not already exhausted its own substance. It blazes in the firmament like an angry blue eye, unwearyingly hurling its fires outward to an immense distance. It is more like a god than an angel, this giant, an angry god, pouring itself forth in inexplicable wrath upon the fabric of the universe.

And then here, farther away, in one of the deepest places, are angels all in a cluster, old angels, ancient ones, thousands of them, millions, each pressed up close against its neighbor so that they seem to form one huge shining wall, a single brilliant mass. But Noelle’s angel shows her that they are many, not one, and lets her reach toward them so that she can experience their great age, their inordinate wisdom. How old are they? Millions of years? Billions?

We were old before the sky was young, one of them tells her.

And another says — or perhaps it is the same one — We came out of the All-Engulfing and one day we will return to the All-Engulfing, but we have been here since before the before, and we will remain until after the after.

And a third tells her, We precede and we follow, and we exist when there is no existence, and we are love when love no longer is. And we are you and you are us.

Noelle understands perfectly, or at least thinks she does; and when they give her their blessing, she gives them hers. And moves along, for her guide has other things for her to see in other parts of the cosmos.

And here is a very old angel, an angel that is dying.

That surprises her. She says that she would not have believed that it was possible for angels to die, and her angel tells her calmly that it is, it is not only possible but necessary. If angels can be born, angels must also die. Everything dies, even angels; and everything is born again. The only thing that has neither a beginning nor an end, it says, is the universe itself, which was there at the beginning and before, and will be there at the end and afterward.

Look. Here.

They have reached the dying angel, in a region apart from the others. Its light is very dim, though there still is warmth coming from it, the midday warmth of a winter day, perhaps. There is no brilliance to this angel. Its face is dull and dark, as though it is covered by an ocean of heavy mud, or thick lava, perhaps, sultry in color, a deep purple streaked with occasional widely separated regions of crimson and scarlet. Across the cooling surface of the dying angel there still is some sparse sign of sluggish activity, the slow, difficult movement of lumpy masses of matter sliding forward in the mud, some of them black or gray, some glowing dull red like metal ingots that have fallen from the forge but are not yet cold.

There is no roaring here, no hissing, no crackling, no sizzling. There is only the deep muffled sound of titanic forces grinding to a halt, of colossal energies winding down. Even as Noelle watches, the painful movements of the traveling masses grow even more slow and the bright streaks of crimson and scarlet give up much of the richness of their hue. Everything here will stop, soon. There will be nothing left but cinders and ash. But when she looks up, beyond the place where the dying angel hangs in the firmament, she sees dust already coalescing in the distance, the first glimmers of brightness taking form. This angel is going; a new one will soon be arriving. And so it has been, Noelle understands, since the beginning of time. And before the beginning.

And now see this one, Noelle’s angel tells her.

They travel onward, and come to a golden angel, a small one in a region of the void that has very few other angels around it. It pays no heed to them, but goes on turning steadily on its axis like a child amusing itself in a playground. Noelle understands that this is a young angel, not a newborn one by any means, but not yet mature — an adolescent one, perhaps. They remain in its vicinity for a time, watching its self-absorbed antics. There is something extremely pleasant about being near this charming young angel, Noelle thinks. Watching it, she feels almost as though she has returned to her own childhood. Yvonne seems very near, closer than she has been in a long while. They are girls again together, giggling, running, colliding, giggling again as they tumble down in a heap.

There is more to see. There is so much to see that Noelle is dazzled and dazed by it all, here in this universe of angels, this infinity of godlike beings, beings who were old when the sky was young, beings who have seen the before and will see the after. After a time she can absorb nothing more of it. Her guide seems to comprehend that; for the tour is brought to an end, and Noelle returns to the bosom of her own angel, and glides downward and inward, to that hidden zone of serenity that lies beneath the roiling tongues of fire, and there she rests, there she sleeps.

Sleeps. Sleeps.

How long has she been in the coma now?” the year-captain asks. “Is it a week yet?”

“This is the eighth day,” Leon says.

“The eighth day. Do you think she’ll come out of it at all?”

Leon shrugs. “How can I say? What do I know? Am I an expert on things of this sort? Is anybody?”

“I understand,” says the year-captain softly.

She has been wandering in delirium most of the time since losing consciousness. Troubled, fearful, the year-captain has kept a somber vigil at her bedside, losing track of the time himself as the days slide by and there is no change in her condition.

Sometimes it seems to him that she is rising toward consciousness; intelligible words, even whole sentences, bubble dreamily from her lips. The dreaming Noelle talks of light, of a brilliant unbearable white glow, of arcs of energy, of intense solar eruptions. A star holds me, she mutters. She tells him that she has been conversing with a star.

How poetic, the year-captain thinks: what a lovely metaphor. Conversing with a star.

A metaphor forwhat, though? Where is she, what is happening to her? Has she been speaking with angels, actual holy angels, or are they stars, or has she simply shed the last shred of her sanity during her venture into the gray nothingness beyond the ship? She seems lost in some unknown and unknowable realm. Her face is flushed; her eyes move about rapidly, darting like trapped fish beneath her closed lids. Words continue to come from her from time to time. Mind to mind, Noelle whispers, the star and I. Mind to mind. Sometimes she begins to hum — an edgy whining sound, climbing almost toward inaudibility, a high-frequency keening. It pains him to hear it: it has the force of hard radiation, expressed as sound.

He has never felt so tired before. He has scarcely slept at all since he and Huw pushed open the door of her cabin and found her in the coma.

She is humming again now, that terrible sound. He clenches his jaws, balls his hands into fists, and forces himself to withstand it. After a while she is silent again.

Then her body goes rigid, pelvis thrusting upward. A convulsion of some sort? No. She’s simply stirring, awakening, at last! He sees lightning bolts of perception flashing through her quivering musculature: the galvanized laboratory frog, twitching at the end of its leads. Her eyelids tremble. She makes a little moaning noise. And her eyes are open.

She looks up at him.

The year-captain stares into her eyes. There is something different about them now. Something new. Something astonishing.

Gently he says, “Your eyes are open. I think you can see me now, Noelle.” He moves his hand back and forth across her face, and her eyes follow the movement.

“I — can — see you, yes. I can see you.”

Her voice is hesitant, faltering, strange for a moment, a foreign voice; but then it becomes more like its usual self as she asks, “How long was I away?”

“Eight ship-days. We were very worried.”

“You look exactly as I thought you would look,” she says. “Your face is thin and hard. But not a dark face. Not a hostile face. I like your face, year-captain.”

“Do you want to talk about where you went, Noelle?”

She smiles. Nods. “I went to visit the … angel. I talked with it.”

“Angel? Really, anangel ?”

“Not really, no. That’s just a word, ‘angel.’ It wasn’t an angel, I suppose, not the kind people used to pray to. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of intelligent organic life-form. It was — was—”

He waits. He stares at her in wonder and bewilderment. He is stunned by the beauty of her eyes, now that her eyes are alive and focused on him.

She says, “It was more like the energy creatures that Heinz was talking about. Incorporeal, is what I mean. But bigger than we could have imagined. Bigger than a whole planet, even. Tremendously big. I don’t know what it was. Not at all.”

“You told me you were talking with a star.”

“ — with a star!” As though it is a completely new idea to her.

“In your delirium. That’s what you said. Talking with a star.”

Her eyes blaze with wild excitement. “Of course! A star! Yes! Yes, year-captain! I think that’s what it was, yes! I was talking with a star.”

Despair engulfs him. She is very far gone in madness, he tells himself.

But he keeps his voice calm. “But how can you talk with a star? What does that mean, talking with a star, Noelle?”

She laughs. “It means talking with a star, year-captain. Nothing more, nothing less. A great ball of fiery gas, year-captain, and it has a mind, it has a consciousness. I think that’s what it was. I’m sure now. I’m sure!”

“But how can a—”

The light goes abruptly from her eyes. They have lost focus. Has she reentered the coma? Apparently so. At any rate she is traveling again; she is no longer with him.

He waits beside her bed. An hour, two hours. Rises. Paces. Sits. Waits. Where has she gone? In what bizarre realm is she journeying now? Her breathing is a distant, impersonal drone. So far away from her now, so remote from any place that he is capable of comprehending.

At last her eyelids flicker again. And then they open.

She looks up at him. Her eyes are living eyes, as they were before. Her face seems transfigured. She is in bliss. To the year-captain she seems still to be at least in part in that other world beyond the ship. “Yes,” she says. “Not an angel, year-captain. A sun. A living intelligent sun.” Her eyes are radiant. “A sun, a star, a sun,” she murmurs. The words are crazy, but not the voice. “I touched the consciousness of a sun. Many suns. Do you believe that, year-captain? Can you? I found a network of stars that live, that think, that have minds, that have souls. That communicate. The whole universe is alive.”

“A star,” he says dully. “You talked with a star. The stars have minds.”

“Yes.”

“All of them? Our own sun too?”

“All of them. They sit out here and talk to each other. We were moving between them, out here in the middle of the galaxy, and their conversations drowned out my link with Yvonne. That was the interference, year-captain. It was the stars, talking to each other out here. Filling my wavelength, leaving me no room to get through to Yvonne.”

This conversation has taken on for him the texture of a dream. Quietly he says, “Why wasn’t our sun overriding you and Yvonne while you were still back on Earth?”

She shrugs. “It isn’t old enough. I saw it — the angel took me to see it. Our sun. It’s like a child, a little child playing a game of hoops in a playground. It takes — I don’t know, many billions of years — until they’re mature, until they can talk to each other on the main frequency. Our sun just isn’t old enough, year-captain. None of the stars close to Earth is old enough. But out here—”

“Are you in contact with it now?”

“Yes. With it and with many others. And with Yvonne.”

Madness. Madness.

“Yvonne too?” he asks.

“She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle looks straight into his eyes. “I can bring others into the circuit. I could bring you in, year-captain.”

“Me?”

“You. Would you like to touch a star with your mind?”

“What will happen to me? Will it harm me?”

“Did it harm me, year-captain?”

“Will I still be me, afterward?”

“Am I still me, year-captain?”

He is silent for a long time.

Then in a dull, strange voice he says, “I’m afraid, Noelle.”

“No. You’ve never been afraid of anything.”

“I’m afraid now. Afraid of this.”

“No. No.”

“I am.”

“Open to me. Try. See what happens.”

“And if I don’t like it?”

“You will. You will. Have faith, year-captain. You had faith in something when you joined this expedition, didn’t you? You must have. Have faith now. Tell me: do you believe any of what I’ve been saying to you since I awakened?”

He hesitates.

“Do you?”

“Yes,” he says, recklessly.

“Then have faith in me. Touch a star, year-captain.”

He puts his hand on hers. “Go ahead,” he says, and his soul becomes a solarium.

Afterward, with the solar pulsations still reverberating in the mirrors of his mind, with blue-white sparks leaping in his synapses, he says, “What about the others?”

“I’ll bring them in too.”

The year-captain, for all the changes that he has undergone in these last few moments, nevertheless feels a sudden surprising flicker of momentary petty resentment. He does not want to share with all of them the thing that he has attained with Noelle. She is his; he is hers. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment he realizes the absurdity of it, and he abolishes it. Yvonne is here too. He can feel her, Noelle’s other half. Earth-sister, star-sister, both together once more, and he is with them. The others should join them also. Yes. Yes. Let them in.

“Take my hand,” Noelle says.

They reach out together. Their mind moves through the ship and one by one it finds and touches the other voyagers. Sieglinde is the first they encounter, blustery, recalcitrant Sieglinde; and she seems to understand at once, and yields. Then Zena; then Leila, then Elizabeth, with a cry of joy. Heinz. He dives in without hesitation. Paco, after just a moment of uncertainty, gives himself to it in the deepest gladness and relief. Leon. Roy. On and on through the ship. One after another, and the more of them that are in it, the more swiftly the rest accede. The year-captain feels Noelle surging in tandem with him as the union grows, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, ancient. All are joined. The whole ship is one. The words of the final verses of the ancient Norse poem that he once knew so well, that dark saga of the Twilight of the Gods, roll through his mind. Now do I see the earth anew rise all green from the waves again… In wondrous beauty once again shall the golden tables stand ‘mid the grass…

He and Noelle step out into the corridor. They are all out there, wandering around in wonder. No one speaks. He sees shining eyes everywhere. The year-captain realizes that he is captain no longer: there is no need for a captain here. And the days of playingGo have ended too. They are one person; they are beyond games. Go would be impossible now for them to play, for how can one compete against oneself?

…then fields unsowed bear ripened fruit. All ills grow better, and Baldur comes back…

“And now,” Noelle whispers, “now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength in Yvonne, and Yvonne will—”

Yvonne draws Earth’s hundreds of millions of souls into the network in one great gulp, everyone, everyone, and the next phase of human life begins.

The Wotan hurtles onward through the nospace tube. Soon they will arrive at Planet C; and they will send down explorers to see if the newest world they have found is a fair and lovely place where the sons and daughters of mankind can thrive. If it is, they will settle there. And if not, they will go on, on toward Planet D, and Planet E, and Planet X and Y and Z. They are confident that eventually they will find a world whose air they can breathe and whose water they can drink and whose land they can farm, and where they can plant the seed of Earth in a new beginning. But it will not matter at all if they never do. All will be well, even so. The ship and its hundreds of millions of passengers will course onward through the universe forever, warmed by the light of the friendly stars.