Starborne

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And it will.”

“It will. It will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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