Starborne

It is time, therefore, for him to pick the site of the first landing and head for it in these closing months of the first year, while he is still in command. The die will be cast, that way. That way the timing will be right for him to hand his executive responsibilities on to his successor just as they arrive at their destination, and thus to be able to take part in the initial planetary expedition.

But here is Noelle, drifting silently, wraithlike, into the room where he is working. She looks older and less beautiful today than she usually seems to him: weary and drawn, so much so that she is almost translucent. She appears unusually vulnerable, as though a single harsh sound would shatter her.

“I have the return transmission from Yvo

She hands him the small, clear data-cube on which she has archived her latest conversation with her sister on Earth. As Yvo

He rests the cube on the palm of his hand and says to her, “Are you all right, Noelle? You look wiped out.”

A faint shrug. “There was a little problem.”

He waits. She seems to be having trouble articulating her thoughts.

“What kind of problem, Noelle?” he says finally.

“With the transmission. I had some difficulty receiving it. Or rather — what I mean to say is, it wasn’t quite clear. It was — fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy,” the year-captain says. His voice is flat.

“Distorted. Not much, but some. A kind of static around the edges of the signal.”

“Static,” he says, flatly again, playing for time, trying to understand, though he does not really see how merely echoing her words will help him to do that. Yet what else can he do? “Mental static,” he says, looking straight into her sightless eyes.

“That’s the best word I can use for it.”

Yvo

“Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests gently. “Or maybe she was.”

Noelle smiles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a troubled i

He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her customary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently, and often can be heard asking Yvo

And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvo

The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to abandon. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, outward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct religions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere archaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?

But hedoes care. The link matters.

He decides that it has to do with the symbolic function of this voyage to the people of Earth: the fact that the voyagers are the focal point of so much aspiration and anticipation. If contact is lost, their achievements in planting a new Earth on some far star, whatever they may ultimately be, will have no meaning for the people of the mother world.

And then, too, it is a matter of what he is experiencing on the voyage itself, in relation to the intense throbbing grayness of nospace outside: that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal co

“Maybe,” he says, “we ought to let you and Yvo

A celebration: the six-month a

“It’s because we aren’t far enough out yet,” Leon suggests. “We still really have one foot in space and one back on Earth. So we keep time on the Earth calendar still. And we focus on these little milestones. But that’ll change.”

“It already has,” Chang observes. “When was the last time you used anything but the shiptime calendar in your daily work?”

“Which calendar I use isn’t important,” Leon says. He is the ship’s chief medical officer, a short, barrel-chested man with a voice like tumbling gravel. “As it happens, I use the shiptime calendar. But we still think in reference to Earth dates too. Earth dates still matter to us, after a fashion. All of us keep a kind of double calendar in our heads, I suspect. And I think we’ll go on doing that until—”

“Happy six-month!” Paco cries just then. His broad face is flushed, his dark deep-set eyes are aglow. “Six months cooped up together in this goddamned tin can and we’re still all on speaking terms with each other! It’s a miracle! A bloody miracle!” He holds a tumbler of red wine in each hand. For tonight’s party the year-captain has authorized breaking out the last of the wine that they brought with them from Earth. They will be synthesizing their own from now on. It won’t be the same thing, though; everyone knows that.

Paco may not be as drunk as he seems, but he puts on a good show. He caroms through the crowd, bellowing, “Drink! Drink!” and bumps into tall, slender Marcus, the planetographer, nearly knocking him down, and Marcus is the one who apologizes: that is the way Marcus is. A moment later Sieglinde drifts past him and Paco hands his extra wineglass to her. Then he loops his free arm through hers. “Tanz mit mir, liebchen!” he cries. The old languages are still spoken, more or less. “Show me how to waltz, Sieglinde!” She gives him a sour look, but yields. It’s a party, after all. They make a foolish-looking couple — she is a head taller than he is, and utterly ungraceful — but looking foolish is probably what Paco has in mind. He whirls her around through the crowd in a clumsy galumphing not-quite-waltz, holding her tightly at arm’s length with a one-armed grip and joyously waving his wineglass in the other.