Starborne

“We don’t really need to continue this discussion, do we, Noelle? It isn’t getting us anywhere useful.”

“Let’s just finish it with this one last point. Tell me what you think. What do we seem like to them?”

“Right at this point, I suppose, as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage.”

“Yes. And later, you think, they’ll regard us as being more ordinary — as being people just like themselves?”

He searches himself for his truest beliefs. He is surprised at what he finds, but he shares it with her anyway, even though it tends to support the dark, unexpectedly harsh words that had come blurting from him earlier. “Later,” he says, “we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us. What was important to them was the great global effort of getting this expedition launched. Now that it is launched, everything that follows is an anticlimax for them. We’ll go on to live our lives, whatever they’re going to be, and they’ll proceed with theirs, pleasant and shallow and bland as always, and they and we will travel on separate and ever-diverging paths for all the rest of time.”

“You really believe that?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I do.”

“How sad that is. What a bleak finish you foresee for our grand adventure.” Her tone tingles with a grace note of irony. She has become very calm; she may be laughing at him now. But at least there is no danger that he will unsettle her again. She has taken command. “One more question. You yourself, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”

“Something in between. Rather more than ordinary, but certainly no demigod.”

“I think you are right.”

“And you?”

“I regard myself as quite ordinary,” she says sweetly. “Except in two respects. You know what they are.”

“One is your—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable for a moment at naming it. Then he pushes ahead. “Your blindness. And the other, of course, is your telepathic communion with your sister.”

“Indeed.” She smiles. Radiantly. A long moment’s pause. Then she says, “Enough of this, I think. There’s work to be done. Shall we send the report now?”

The speed with which she has regained her poise catches him off balance. “You’re ready to go? You’ve been able to make contact with Yvo

“Yes. She’s waiting.”

“Well, then.” He is numb, hollow. She has completely routed him in whatever inexplicable duel it is that they have been waging here. His fingers tremble a little as he unfolds his notes. He begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity… Apparent location…”

Noelle naps after every transmission. They exhaust her terribly. She was begi

By what right, he wonders, has he said that Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? And that the voyage will have no ultimate consequence for the mother world? He was blurting idiotic foolishness and he knows it. The expedition is Earth’s redemption, the most interesting thing that has happened there in two hundred years, the last best hope of a sleepy stagnant civilization smothering in its own placidity: it matters to them, it matters terribly, he has no reason whatsoever to doubt that. All during the hundred years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement had scarcely ever flagged, indeed had spurred the voyagers themselves on at times, when their interminable training routines threatenedthem with boredom. And the fascination continues. The journey, eventless though it has been so far, mesmerizes all those millions who remained behind. It is like a drug for them, a powerful euphoric, hauling them up from their long lethargy. They have become vicarious travelers; later, when the new Earth is founded, they will be vicarious colonists. The benefits will be felt for thousands of years to come. Why, then, this morning’s burst of gratuitous pessimism? There is no evidence for the position he has so impulsively espoused. Thus far Earth’s messages, relayed by Yvo

And, knowing the importance of the endeavor they have embarked upon, the voyagers have tried to make full reply. But there is so little to tell, really, except in that one transcendental area where there is so much. And how, really, can any of that be told?

How can this—

He pauses by the viewplate in the main transit corridor, a rectangular window a dozen meters long that provides direct access to the external environment of the ship. None of Hesper’s sophisticated data-gathering analog devices are in operation here: this is the Wotan’s actual visual surround. And what it is, is the void of voids. The pearl-gray utter emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the Wotan’s skin. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to count on nothing in the way of outside inputs as they crossed the galaxy; they would be shuttling through a void of infinite length, a matter-free tube, and in all likelihood there would be no sights to entertain them, no backdrop of remote nebulas, no glittering stars, no stray meteors, not so much as a pair of colliding atoms yielding the tiniest momentary spark, only an eternal sameness, the great empty Intermundium, like a blank wall surrounding them on all sides. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, require no delights from the universe that lies beyond the ship, make the ship your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided, those warnings had proved to be! Nospace was not a wall but rather a window. It was impossible for those on Earth to understand what revelations lay in that seeming emptiness.

The year-captain, his head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now seeks to restore his shaken equanimity by indulging in his keenest pleasure. A glance at the viewplate reveals that place where the immanent becomes the transcendent: the year-captain sees once again the infinite reverberating waves of energy that sweep through the grayness, out there where the continuum is flattened and curved by the nospace field so that the starship can slide with such deceptive ease and swiftness across the great span of light-years. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; the Intermundium is a stu

He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it.

What do I see, what do I feel, what am I experiencing?

It is instant revelation, every time. The sight of that shimmering void might well be frightening, a stu