Starborne

The chances are, of course, that B won’t work out any better than A did. Our requirements are too fastidious: a place with our kind of atmosphere, a place with actual H₂O water, one that isn’t too hot or too cold, that doesn’t already belong to some intelligent species, et cetera, et cetera. But Hesper has more worlds up his sleeve, eight or ten of them by now that strike him as promising prospects. And there will be others beyond those. The galaxy is unthinkably huge, and we are, after all, still essentially in Earth’s own backyard, bouncing around a sphere no more than a hundred light-years in diameter, out here in one small arm of the galaxy, 30,000 light-years from the center. The galaxy in its entirety has — how many stars? two hundred billion? four hundred billion? — and if only one out of a thousand of those has planets, and one planet out of a thousand falls within the criteria for habitability that we must impose, then there are more potential worlds for us out there than we could ever reach in our lifetimes, or in those of the children that may be born aboard this starship as our voyage proceeds. Surely one of those will work out for us.

Surely.

They are well along now in this leg of their journey, and interference problems have developed again for Noelle. The static, the fuzziness of transmission quality, that first had begun to set in in the fifth month of the voyage, and that had at some points become severe and at others had almost vanished, has returned again in much greater force than before. There are some days when Noelle can barely make contact with her sister at all.

Though the voyage is uneventful now, one serene day following another, the year-captain insists on making the daily transmissions to Earth. He continues to believe that that is an important, even essential, activity for them: that the people of Earth are vicariously living the greatest adventure of their languid lives through the men and women of the Wotan, and derive immense psychological value from their daily dose of news from those intrepid travelers who fearlessly roam the distant stars. It does his crew some good, too, to get word from Earth regularly of the things that are taking place there, such as they are.

But now, day by day, the transmission problems are becoming more extreme, and Noelle must struggle with ever-greater outlay of effort to maintain her weakening connection with far-off Yvonne. She is working at it so hard that the year-captain has begun to fear for her. He is feeling the strain himself.

“I have the new communiqué ready to send,” he tells her edgily. “Do you feel up to it?”

“Of course I do.” She gives him a ferocious smile. “Don’t even hint at giving up, year-captain. There absolutelyhas to be some way around this interference.”

“Absolutely,” he says. He rustles his papers restlessly. “Okay, then, Noelle. Let’s go. This is shipday number—”

“Wait,” she says. “Give me just another moment to get ready, all right?”

He pauses. She closes her eyes and begins to enter the transmitting state. She is conscious, as ever, of Yvonne’s presence. Even when no specific information is flowing between them, there is perpetual low-level contact, there is the sense that the other is near, that warm proprioceptive awareness such as one has of one’s own arm or leg or hip. But between that impalpable subliminal contact and the actual transmission of specific content lie several key steps. Yvonne and Noelle are human biopsychic resonators constituting a long-range communications network; there is a tuning procedure for them as for any other transmitters and receivers. Noelle opens herself to the radiant energy spectrum, vibratory, pulsating, that will carry her message to her Earthbound sister. As the transmitting circuit in this interchange she must be the one to attain maximum energy flow. Quickly, intuitively, she activates her own energy centers, the one in the spine, the one in the solar plexus, the one at the top of the skull; a stream of energy pours from her and instantaneously spans the galaxy.

But today there is an odd and troublesome splashback effect: Noelle, monitoring the circuit, is immediately aware that the signal has failed to reach Yvonne. Yvonne is there, Yvonne is tuned and expectant, yet something is jamming the channel and nothing gets through, not a single syllable.

“The interference is worse than ever,” she tells the year-captain. “I feel as if I could put my hand out andtouch Yvonne. But she’s not reading me and nothing’s coming back from her.”

With a little shake of her shoulders Noelle alters the sending frequency; she feels a corresponding adjustment at Yvonne’s end of the connection; but again they are thwarted, again there is total blockage. Her signal is going forth and is being soaked up by — what? How can such a thing happen?