Starborne

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

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

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

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

“You don’t like it that she wins?”

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

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

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

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

“Thank you.”

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

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

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

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

“Everything?”

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

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

Yvonne? Yvonne?

All is still. Where is Yvonne?