Starborne

Elizabeth says out of another long stark silence, “I nominate you to succeed yourself.”

The year-captain closes his eyes just for a moment. “I don’t choose to retain the office,” he says quietly.

“There’s nobody better qualified.”

“Surely that isn’t so. Surely. I decline the nomination.” He looks around again, a little desperately, now. No one says anything. The wild thought crosses his mind that this is a conspiracy of the whole group, that they are determined by their obstinacy to force him to reassume the captaincy by default. He will not let them do that to him. He will not.

“Well, then,” he says, “I’ll place some names in nomination myself. There’s nothing in the Articles preventing me from doing that, is there?”

This is unexpected. Startled glances are interchanged. Everyone looks troubled. There is no one in front of him, except perhaps Noelle, who does not show visible signs of fearing to be among those who are named.

“Heinz,” the year-captain says. “I nominate Heinz.”

Cool as usual, Heinz says, “Oh, captain, you know that that’s a bad idea.”

“Is that a refusal?”

Heinz shrugs. “No. No, I’ll let the nomination stand. What the hell, why not? But anybody who votes for me is crazy.”

“Are there any other nominations?” the year-captain asks. “If I hear none, nominations are closed.” He stares at them almost imploringly. Heinz is an impossible candidate, and surely they all know that; the year-captain has put his name in nomination only for the sake of getting the process moving. But what if no one rescues the situation now? Can he blithely allow the captaincy to go to Heinz?

Rescue comes from an unlikely quarter. It is Heinz himself who says, smiling wickedly, “I nominate Julia.”

There are gasps at his audacity. But it is just the sort of thing, the year-captain thinks, that one would expect from Heinz. He looks toward Julia. Heinz has taken her by surprise. Her handsome face is flushed with sudden color.

“Do you accept?” he asks her.

Flustered though she is, she hesitates only a moment. “I accept, yes.”

The year-captain feels a flood of relief, and something much like love for her, for that. “Thank you,” he tells her, trying to maintain a purely businesslike tone. “Are there any further nominations? Or does someone want to make a motion that nominations be closed?”

Paco says, troublesome to the end, “I nominate Huw.”

“Declined,” Huw snaps back. And swiftly says, “I nominate Paco.”

“You bastard,” Paco says amiably, and nearly everyone laughs. Not, however, the year-captain, who sees the proceedings degenerating rapidly into farce and does not like that at all. He glances from one to another of them, trying to silence the laughter that is still rolling nervously around the group. His gaze comes to rest on Noelle. She is the only calm one in the group. As usual she stands by herself, her expression serene and impassive, as though she is present at this meeting only in body and her mind is actually on some remote planet at this very moment. Perhaps it is. Very likely she is in contact with Yvonne and is reporting on the election to her as it unfolds.

“Will you allow your nomination to stand?” the year-captain asks Paco.

“Sure. I might even vote for myself too.”

The year-captain fights back his anger. “We have three nominees, then,” he declares in his most solemn official tone. Any more than three, he knows, and it will be difficult or perhaps impossible to achieve the prescribed 33 percent plurality, the seventeen votes required to elect. “A motion to close nominations, please.”

“So moved,” Elizabeth says.

“Seconded,” says Roy.

They will vote by notifying the ship’s intelligence of their choices. The year-captain, watching them line up at the terminals, runs through quick calculations in his mind. The women, he thinks, will mostly vote for Julia, not merely because she, too, is a woman, but because they mistrust the flip, irreverent manner of Heinz and generally dislike Paco’s coarse jeering attitude toward most matters of importance. Probably most of the men will take the same position. So Julia will be the new year-captain. It is not a bad outcome, he feels. She is a calm and decisive person, certainly capable of handling the job. Heinz, in a spirit of mockery, has done him a great favor: the year-captain can feel only gratitude. And he is grateful to Julia, too, for allowing the nomination to stand, busy as she already is with her responsibilities on the drive deck. She is doing it for him, he knows. She understands, though he has never spoken of it with her, how eager he is to lay down his captaincy and go forth to Planet A’s surface as part of the exploratory mission.

The voting takes just a few minutes. The year-captain, who is the last to vote, casts his own vote for Julia.

“Very well,” he says, looking up at the grid through which the voice of the ship’s intelligence emerges. “Let’s have the totals, please.”