Starborne

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

I can see, Yvonne! I can see!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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