Starborne

There had been a party much like this six months before, on Earth, the eve of their departure. The same people acting foolish, the same ones being shy and withdrawn. They all knew each other so superficially, then, even after the year-long training sessions — names, professional skills, that was about it. No depth, no intimacy. But that was all right. There would be time, plenty of time. Already couples bad begun to form as launch time drew near: Paco and Julia, Huw and Giovanna, Michael and Innelda. None of those relationships was destined to last past the first month of the voyage, but that was all right too. The ship’s crew consisted of twenty-five men, twenty-five women, and the supposition was that they would all pair neatly off and mate and be fruitful and multiply on the new Earth to come, but in all likelihood only about half the group would do that at most, and the others would remain single to the end of their days, or pass through a series of intricate and shifting relationships without reproducing, as most people did on Earth. It would make little difference in the long run. There was a sufficiency of frozen gametes on board with which to people the new world. And one could readily enough contribute one’s own to the pool without actually pairing and mating.

Partying was not a natural state for the year-captain. Aloof and essentially solitary by nature, marked also by his wintry years at the monastery in Lofoten, he made his way through these social events the way he had managed his notable and improbable career as an actor, stepping for the time being into the character of someone who was not at all like himself. He could pretend a certain joviality. And so he drank with the others at the launch party; and so he would drink here tonight.

The launch party, yes. That had called for all his thespian skills. The newly elected year-captain going about the room, grinning, slapping backs, trading quips. Getting through the evening, somehow.

And then the day of the launch. That had needed some getting through too. The grand theatrical event of the century, it was, staged for maximum psychological impact on those who were staying behind. The whole world watching as the chosen fifty, dressed for the occasion in shimmering, absurdly splendiferous ceremonial robes, emerged from their dormitory and solemnly marched toward the shuttle ship like a procession of Homeric heroes boarding the vessel that will take them to Troy.

How he had hated all that pomp, all that pretension! But of course the departure of the first interstellar expedition in the history of the human race was no small event. It needed proper staging. So there they came, ostentatiously strutting toward the waiting hatch, the year-captain leading the way, and Noelle walking unerringly alongside him, and then Huw, Heinz, Giovanna, Julia, Sieglinde, Innelda, Elliot, Chang, Roy, and on and on down to Michael and Marcus and David and Zena to the rear, the fifty voyagers, the whole oddly assorted bunch of them, the short ones and the tall, the burly ones and the slender, the emissaries of the people of Earth to the universe in general.

Aboard the shuttle. Up to the Wotan, waiting for them at its construction site in low orbit. More festivities there. All manner of celebrities, government officials, and such on hand to bid them farewell. Then a change of mood, a new solemnity: the celebrities took their leave. The fifty were alone with their ship. Each to his or her cabin for a private moment of — what? prayer? meditation? contemplation of the unlikeliness of it all? — before the actual moment of departure.

And then all hands to the lounge. The year-captain must make his first formal address:

“I thank you all for the dubious honor you’ve given me. I hope you have no reason to regret your choice. But if you do, keep in mind that a year lasts only twelve months.”

Thin laughter came from the assembled voyagers. He had never been much of a comedian.

A few more words, and then it was time for them to go back to their cabins again. By twos and threes drifting out, pausing by the viewplate in the great corridor to have one last look at the Earth, blue and huge and throbbing with life in the center of the screen. Off to the sides somewhere, the Moon, the Sun. Everything that you take for granted as fixed and permanent.

The sudden awareness coming over them all that the Wotan is their world now, that they are stuck with each other and no one else for all eternity.