Starborne

Lightfootedly he makes his way past a dangling maze of thrumming conduits and scrambles over a long series of swelling shallow mounds. These are the cargo nodules. In sheltered chambers beneath this level lies all the precious furniture of their journey: mediq machines, bone banks, data bubbles, pre-read vapor chips, wildlife domestication plaques, excavator arcs, soil samplers, gene replacement kits, matrix jacks, hydrocarbon converters, climate nodes and other planetary-engineering equipment, artificial intelligences, molecular replicators, heavy-machinery templates, and all the rest of their world-building storehouse. Below all that, on the deepest level of all, is the zygote bank, ten thousand fertilized ova tucked away snugly in permafreeze spansules, and enough additional sperm and unfertilized ova to maintain significant genetic diversity as the succeeding generations of the colony unfold.

He reaches a Y-shaped fork, where the passageway abruptly widens and takes the abrupt left turn into Hesper’s little room. A blare of colored light confronts him, blue and green and dazzling incandescent red. Things blink and flash in comic excess. Hesper’s screen is the center of the universe, toward which everything flows: from every corner of the firmament data comes streaming in torrents, and somehow it all is captured and reconstituted into visual form here. But only Hesper can understand it. Possibly not even he, the year-captain sometimes thinks.

The air in Hesper’s room is warm and close, dense, moist jungle air. Hesper likes heat and always keeps humidity turned to the max. He is a small black-ski

“Look here, year-captain,” Hesper says immediately. “Four new prospects!”

He taps the screen, here, here, here, here. Hesper is an eternal optimist. For him the galaxy brims and overflows with habitable worlds.

“How many does that make? Fifty? A hundred?”

“Sixty-one, within a sphere a hundred and thirty light-years across. Plausible suns, probable planetary configurations.” Hesper’s voice is light, high-pitched, inflected in a singsongy way. “Of course, I’m not yet ready to recommend an inspection of any one of them.”

The year-captain nods. “Of course.”

“But it won’t be long, year-captain! It won’t be long, I promise you that!”

The year-captain offers Hesper a perfunctory smile. One of these days, he knows, Hesper actually will find a planet or two that will be worth taking a look at — it’s an article of faith for everyone on board that there must be such a world somewhere — but he understands that Hesper’s early enthusiasms are just that, enthusiasms. Hesper is a quick man with a hypothesis. No matter: the voyage has just begun, really. The year-captain doesn’t expect to be greeted here with any real discoveries, not yet. He simply wants to stare at the screen.

Hesper has told him, more than once, what the blazing swirls and squiggles on the screen are supposed to signify. The sequence of criteria for habitable worlds. The raw astronomical data, first. Each sun’s place on the main sequence, the indications of the presence of planetary bodies in constructive positions. Mean orbital distances plotted against luminosity. And then a spectroscopic workup. Evidence for the presence of an atmosphere. The chemical components thereof: suitable or not? And then — biospheric analysis — conditions of thermodynamic disequilibrium, indicating the possible presence of transpiration and respiration — the temperature range, probable mean highs and lows—

The starship has data-gathering tentacles reaching far out into the incomprehensible void. A host of sensory receptors, mysteriously capable of piercing the nospace tube in which the ship travels and extending into the dark reality beyond, collects information tirelessly, information that is not actual realspace data but is somehow a usable equivalent of such data, and processes it into these bright designs. Over which this bubbly little man hovers, evaluating, discarding, reconsidering, unendingly searching for the ultimate new Eden that is the goal of their quest.

Hesper wants to discuss his newest prospects. The year-captain listens with half an ear. He wants nothing more just now than the simple relaxation that watching the screen affords. The abstract patterns, so very bright and cheerful. The wild swirls of color that whirl and clash like crazed comets. Is there any real meaning in them? Only Hesper knows. He devised this information-gathering system; he is the only one, really, who can decipher and interpret the mysterious factoids that the ship’s sensors suck in. When the time comes, the year-captain will pay close attention to the little man’s data. But this is not yet the time.

The year-captain stands and watches for a while, mindlessly, like a small child, taking i

He savors the light-show gratefully until his eyes begin to ache a little and the wild spectacle starts to weary his mind. Then he thanks Hesper gravely and goes out.

Noelle’s cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuettes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some objects evidently chosen for their rich textures — a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea urchin’s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision, moving this object a centimeter or two to one side, lifting another and fondling it a moment before returning it to the exact place where it had been. The supreme confidence of her movements is fascinating to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down.

Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver stitching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship between adults as taking advantage. Well, then, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling: pity too easily becomes patronizing, and that kills desire. He rejects that theory also: glib, implausible. Could it simply be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? Noelle has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that Noelle is so self-contained, so calm, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communication with her distant sister, that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her i