Starborne

The interference has been growing worse, day by day. Neither Noelle nor Yvonne has any explanation for what is happening; Noelle clings without much conviction to her sunspot analogy for lack of any better answer. The sisters still manage to make contact twice daily, but the effort is increasingly a strain on their resources, for nearly every sentence must be repeated two or three times, and whole blocks of words now do not get through at all. Noelle has begun to look drawn, even haggard. The only thing that seems to refresh her, or at least divert her from this failing of her powers, is her playing of Go. She has become a master of the game, awarding even the masterly Roy a two-stone handicap; although she occasionally loses, her play is always distinguished, extraordinarily original in its sweep and design. When she is not playing she tends to be remote and withdrawn, as she is right now as she stands before die year-captain in his working quarters: head downcast, shoulders slumped, arms dangling, blind eyes no longer even attempting contact with his. She has become in all aspects a more elusive person than she had been before the onset of this communications crisis.

Her deepening solitude must be frightful. The year-captain often yearns to extend some sort of comfort to her that would take the place of the ever more tenuous contact with her sister: to sweep her into his arms, to hold her close, to permit her to feel the simple proximity of another human being. But he does not dare. He is afraid of giving offense, or perhaps of frightening her. And he is afraid, also, of certain upwelling inchoate emotions of his own. He has no idea how far things might go once he lets them begin, and he fears letting them begin.

Noelle’s classic beauty no longer seems quite so marmoreal to him. He has started, since the time that that apparition of her intruded on his lovemaking with Julia, to admit to himself the existence of a feeling of something as uncomplicated as desire for her. Why else had she entered his mind at that moment in the cubicle, if not that hidden feelings, feelings to which even he himself had had no access up till now, were beginning to break through to the surface?

But he keeps his distance. He does not dare to touch her. He does not dare.

“Tell them,” he says, “that the transverse journey across nospace will take approximately four and a half ship-months, after which—”

“Wait. Too fast.”

“Sorry.”

She seems to be shivering. Some part of her mind, he knows, is linked to a woman essentially identical to herself who happens to be some twenty-odd light-years away, even as she seems to be focusing her attention on him. Who is more real to her, the identical twin far away on Earth, or the odd, edgy, troubled man just a hundred fifty centimeters distant from her in this cabin aboard this starship?

“The transverse journey across nospace,” he says again, and waits.

“Yes.”

“Will take approximately four and a half ship-months—”

“Yes. All right.”

“After which the Wotan will have reached the vicinity of—”

“Wait. Please.”

A ripple of something not much unlike pain crosses her face. This is hurting her, this unclarity, the effort of maintaining the weakening link to Yvonne. The year-captain clenches his fists and presses his knuckles together until they pop. Waits. Waits.

“Go ahead,” Noelle says. “Now.”

“Will have reached the vicinity of the G-type star which—”

“Wait. I’m sorry. It’s bad today.”

He waits.

They finish sending the message eventually. Noelle seems to be at the verge of tears by the time they are done. Her breath is coining in ragged bursts. Her dusky, lustrous skin has taken on a ghostly subcutaneous pallor. But after a moment she manages a sort of a smile.

“Yvonne says she’ll tell everyone the news right away. She says it sounds wonderful. She wishes us all the luck in the world. No. In the universe.”

Indeed, at the next transmission Noelle learns from Yvonne that the news of the Planet A surveillance mission has generated tremendous excitement everywhere on Earth. The reaction to the bulletin has been extreme, a kind of worldwide intoxication, a frenzied communal agitation such as has not been experienced by the staid people of Earth in centuries. It is as though the voyagers have announced not merely a surveillance mission but the actual discovery of a habitable New Earth. Yvonne says that they demand further reports at once: descriptions of the new planet’s climate and topography and other geographical details, conjectures about its possible flora and fauna.

The year-captain is pleased that the news from the Wotan is having the appropriate beneficial psychological effect on the citizens of the home world. But he knows he must clarify the actual situation, and quickly, before their unrealistic expectations become embedded so deeply that it will be difficult for them to deal with the possible, even probable, disappointment that awaits.