Starborne

“It can’t be done,” Leon cries. “Earth will have a fit!”

“Earth won’t ever know a thing,” says Heinz. “We’re permanently out of touch with Earth. Isn’t that so, Noelle? No contact with your sister any more, and no hope of restoring it?”

“That’s so,” Noelle says, in a tone that barely rises above a whisper.

“Well, then. We’re on our own from now on, right?” declares Heinz triumphantly. “Sorry, Leon. We can’t let ourselves worry about what positions Earth may take about decisions that we choose to make. We just have to make the best possible decisions for ourselves in the light of changing circumstances that Earth couldn’t begin to understand anyway.” He turns toward the year-captain. “Let’s hear it once more, captain, just to be sure that we have it right. You’ll take the job for another year, under the condition that we change the rules so that you can go off for a look at Planet B, is that it?”

“Yes.”

“And if we don’t change the present rules about planetary landings, there’s nothing else that could induce you to stay on in office?”

“Nothing.”

Now Heinz faces the others again. “So it’s a take-it-or-leave-it situation, friends. We can have the year-captain on his terms or not at all. Under the circumstances, considering that Earth’s wishes in this matter are not only unknown but are unknowable and irrelevant as a result of the unfortunate breakdown in communications with Earth, I propose that we regard ourselves as free agents from this point onward, and that we call a general assembly and put the matter of amending the Articles to a vote.”

“Seconded,” Huw and Julia say at the same time.

Leon sputters but says nothing.

So there is an agreement of sorts. The delegates leave, and later in the day the proposal is put to a vote of the entire voyage, and it is passed handily, with Leon the only voice in opposition. The year-captain accepts the outcome with reasonably good grace. Despite it all, he is almost as uneasy as Leon about amending the Articles; there is something disturbingly nihilistic about doing that, a kind of blithe lawless willfulness that offends his sense of the proper order of things. Theyhave, after all, promised most solemnly to govern themselves by the terms of the Articles, and here they are tinkering with those terms behind Earth’s back, so to speak, without the slightest sort of by-your-leave.

But Heinz is right. With contact apparently lost for good — Noelle continues to have no luck in reaching Yvo

So my third term as year-captain now begins. I think I should perhaps get used to the idea of bolding this job for the rest of my life.

The election was a grubby thing, of course, a lot of shameless political bargaining. But the deal is done: they have their quid, I have my quo, and that’s that. I’m used to being captain by now. Ironic, considering how elaborately I always used to go out of my way to spare myself from taking on the responsibilities of society; but what I used to do can’t be allowed to control my sense of what must be done now.

The ship has to have a captain. I seem to be the right person for the job. What I need is to continue traveling the course I chose for myself long ago, which means continued exploration of one kind or another. What Earth needs—

Yes, what Earth needs. I must never forget about that.

Poor old Earth! All the ancient squalor is gone, most of the pain — and yet something is wrong. Disease and hunger are conquered. Life is just about eternal if you want it to be that way. War is something we read about in history texts, something anthropological and remote, an odd obsolete practice of our ancestors, like ca

Which is what caused the massacres and all of that — a sense even among our primitive forebears that something needs to be fixed, by whatever ham-fisted methods happen to be available at the moment. Our methods have become more humane and also more efficient as we grow more — well, civilized — but that need, that hunger, still operates on us. And now has pushed us out among the stars to grapple with unknown worlds.

Or am I projecting my own needs and hungers and awareness of inadequacies onto the whole human race? Are most of us quite happy with our lived in this glorious modern age, and do those happy ones feel sorry for the pitiful maladjusted few who were willing to go off on this wild voyage into the dark?

I don’t relieve that. I don’t want to believe that, at any rate. And we will go onward, we fifty, until we find what we are seeking. (We forty-nine, I should say now, but the old phrase is ingrained so deeply!) And when we find it, which I am certain we will, I want to think that for a moment, at least, we will know a little peace.

I wish we were still in touch with Earth.

I worry about Noelle. She seems to be all right, even in the absence of the contact with her sister that has nourished and sustained her all her life. But is she, really? Is she?

The breakdown in the communication link with Earth has been the subject of much discussion, naturally.

Whether it is a total and irreversible breakdown is not entirely certain yet. Yes, Noelle had said, at the meeting between the year-captain and the delegation that had come to apprise him of the election results, that there was no way of restoring contact with her sister; but — as she admitted privately to the year-captain the next day — she had simply been saying that by way of bolstering Heinz’s arguments in favor of amending the Articles of the Voyage. In truth Noelle has no idea whether contact can be restored, and she feels just a little guilty for having given everyone the notion that it can’t be. “I did it because I wanted everyone to go along with the deal that was taking shape,” she confesses, but only to the year-captain. “If we can’t speak with Earth any more, we don’t need to worry what they’ll think about our changing the Articles, isn’t that so? But it’s always possible that I’ll regain Yvo

She does, she says, still feel Yvo