Starborne

And the intelligence tells them that Julia has received five votes, Heinz has received two, Paco has received one. The other forty-two votes are abstentions.

For an instant the year-captain is stunned. He can scarcely find his voice. Then his Lofoten training somehow kicks in, and he manages to say, almost calmly, “We have failed of a proper plurality, it seems.”

“What do we do now?” Zena asks. “Take another vote?”

“That would be useless,” the year-captain says, slowly, heavily. He stares at their faces, once again struggling with the rage that he knows he dares not allow himself to express. “You’ve made your position plain enough. Nobody here wants the job.”

“We wantyou to have the job!” Elizabeth cries.

“Yes. Yes. I do see that. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Some of them look frightened. He must be letting the fury show, he realizes.

“So be it,” he says. “The election has failed. I yield to what you apparently want of me. I will stay in office a second year.”

In their secret place belowdecks Julia attempts to offer him consolation for the bitter outcome of the election. But his Lofoten skills have carried him through the crisis; he has already begun to reconcile himself to the loss of the Planet A trip. There will be other worlds to visit beyond this one, and someday he will no longer be year-captain and will be allowed to go down and explore them; or else this will be the planet where they are going to settle, in which case he will be seeing it soon enough. Either way, there is no real reason for him to grieve. So the year-captain accepts, and gladly, the comfort other breasts, and her lips, and her thighs, and of the warm place between them; but Julia’s words of sympathy he brushes gently aside. He does tell her, though, how touched he was by her gesture of willingness to take the captaincy from him so that he would be able to join the landing party. What he does not speak of is that sensation that seemed so much like love for her that passed through him at the moment of her acceptance of the nomination. It was, he has subsequently come to see, not really love at all, only a warm burst of gratitude. Love and gratitude are different things; one does not fall in love simply as a response to favors received. He is fond of Julia; he likes and respects her a great deal; he certainly takes great pleasure in all that passes between them in their little private cubicle. But he does not think he loves her, and he does not want to complicate their relationship with discussions of illusory states.

Noelle, unworldly as she often seems to be, shows surprising awareness of the meaning and consequences to him of the election. “You’re terribly disappointed, aren’t you, at not being able to be part of the landing mission?” she says when they meet the next morning for the daily transmission to Earth.

“Disappointed, yes. Not necessarilyterribly disappointed. I very much wanted to go. But I’ll survive staying behind.”

“Do you mind very much having to be year-captain for a second term?”

“Only insofar as it keeps me from leaving the ship,” he says. “The work itself isn’t anything I object to. I simply accept it as something I have to do.”

She turns toward him, giving him that forthright straight-in-the-eyes look of hers that so eerily seems to deny the fact other blindness. “If one of the others had been elected year-captain,” she says, “then you and I wouldn’t be meeting like this any more. I would be getting briefings from Julia or Paco or Heinz about the messages to send to Earth.”

That startles him. He hadn’t considered that possibility at all.

“I’m glad that didn’t happen. I would miss you,” she says. “I like being with you very much.”

Her quietly uttered words unsettle him tremendously. The statement is too simple, too childlike, to carry with it any deeper meaning. Of that he is certain, or at least wants to be certain. She has said it as though they are playmates and this is their daily game, the loss of which she would regret. And yet she is not a child, is she? She is a woman, twenty-six years old, a beautiful and intelligent and mysterious woman. I like being with you very much. Yes. Yes. The simple straightforward phrase makes something stir in him, something disturbing and turbulent and troublesome, the strength of which is all out of keeping with the innocence of her words. He stares at her smooth, broad forehead, seeking some understanding of what may be going on behind it. But she is utterly opaque to him, as she has always been.

Noelle getting her briefings from Heinz — Noelle and Paco—