Starborne

“Hear, hear,” Huw bellows, as Huw likes to do. Huw knows that much depends now on his show of hearty high spirits and indomitable will, and he makes sure that he is never seen to be anything but his usual stalwart self, even after all that he has observed and felt on Planet A and the very different but equally oppressive Planet B. There is a price for this. He is willing to pay it.

But there are some aboard who have become deeply bemired in funk. These are the ones who had chosen, for whatever reason, to put a great many emotional chips down on the success of the Planet B mission, and were devastated by the spectacular failure of their wagers. Elizabeth is part of this group, and Imogen, and Sylvia, and several of the men: Roy, Elliot, Chang, Jean-Claude. Among these, who now spend most of their time atGo in the gaming lounge, there has begun to be some talk of giving up the voyage entirely, of swinging around and heading back to Earth.

“Don’t be idiots,” Paco says. “I can’t even imagine creeping back there.”

“You can’t imagine it,” says Elliot. “But I can.”

Elliot’s specialty is urban pla

Paco says to him, “If you want to go back, Elliot, why don’t you go? Maybe Huw will let you have one of the drone probes, and you can ride back to Earth in that. You and whoever else wants to go home. It’ll take you about three hundred years, give or take five or six, but if you’re as homesick as all that you won’t mind waiting a—”

“Stop it, Paco,” Elizabeth says.

Paco turns to her. “You’d like to go with him, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s fine with me. I’ll even calculate the course for you, if you like.” The Paco-Heinz-Elizabeth triad has just about collapsed in recent weeks; Heinz has been sleeping in a random, intermittent way with Jean-Claude and sometimes with Leila; and Paco, though he still spends some of his nights with Elizabeth and the occasional one with Heinz, has drifted off into a collateral entanglement with Giova

Elliot is so a

“I hate all this talk of giving up and going back to Earth. It’s completely insane.”

“Is it, now?” Roy asks, looking up from the game ofGo he is playing with Noelle. He is another who has let it be known that he may have already had a sufficiency of nospace travel.

“Of course it is. We’re here to do a job, and we’re going to do it. Julia’s right — one or two bad planets, that doesn’t mean a thing. We’ve only begun to search. Besides, do you think anyone could ever talk the captain into turning back? Has that man ever turned back from anything in his life?”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to go on being captain forever,” Elliot says, a little sullenly. “The job was supposed to be for one year. We gave him three. We could replace him.”

“With someone who wants to bring the voyage to an end?” Paco asks. “Somebody willing to turn back, you mean?”

“Absolutely.”

Huw says, from the corner where he is playing a languorous game ofGo with Chang, “He would never step down in favor of anyone who would take that position. He may not have wanted to keep the job this long, but he’ll keep it forever rather than hand it over to someone who—”

“I’m not talking of asking him voluntarily to step down,” says Elliot. “I’m talking of replacing him.”

“Mutiny?” Huw asks. “Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“A new captain,” says Elliot doggedly. “That’s what I’m looking for. And a new direction for the voyage.”

“You’re talking mutiny,” Huw says, lost in wonderment. “You’re talking a coup d’état aboard the ship, overthrowing the captain by force, abandoning the Articles of the Voyage completely—”

“He’s talking idiocy,” Paco says. “He’s talking like a lunatic. He ought to be sedated. Where’s Leon?” Leon is playingGo with Sylvia. He looks up, scowling. “Leon, we’ve got a crazy man here for you to take care of! Give him an injection of something, will you?”

“Please,” Noelle says, very softly.

She has been silent up until now, concentrating entirely on her game, bending over herGo board as though it were the entire universe. As it so often does, the very softness of her tone succeeds in drawing the attention of everyone in the room, and they all look in her direction.

“Please,” she says again. “We mustn’t fight like this. The voyage is going to continue. You know it will, Elliot. Ithas to. So why even talk about these things?”

“We have to talk about them, Noelle,” says Elliot, sounding a little abashed at persisting. No one wants to be on the wrong side of a discussion with Noelle, because she is widely believed to possess a kind of i

“Its purpose is to find another world where people can live,” says Noelle. “And we haven’t lost contact with Earth.”

There is a general gasp of amazement in the room.

“We haven’t?” several of them ask at once.

Noelle smiles. “Not forever. I’m sure of that. It’s just a temporary thing, this interference, these ‘angels’ that Heinz was talking about—” Every one of them is staring intently in her direction now. “I’m going to try to speak with them,” she says. “You know that I promised to do that. To speak with them, to ask them to let me make contact with my sister again. If I can do that — and if they agree—”

So the project of making contact with the angels is alive once again, at Noelle’s own instigation, after having been in suspension the whole time of the Planet B event. The hope of regaining contact with Earth inspires them all; the mood of despair that has enshrouded so many of them since the return of Huw and the year-captain from Planet B begins to lift.

The project is alive, yes, but nothing actually is attempted just yet. The days go by — they are heading now toward Planet C, a hundred fifteen light-years from Earth in some entirely different part of the galaxy from the one they have just visited — and it is assumed by everyone that Noelle is preparing herself to reach out in some telepathic fashion toward the extraterrestrial beings that supposedly have interrupted the contact between her and her sister. But the two people who are most closely concerned with the project — the year-captain, who must give Noelle the order to make the attempt, and Noelle herself — are both in their separate ways uneasy about the enterprise to which Noelle has so publicly committed herself. And so both of them in their separate ways have hesitated to move forward with it.

Noelle has never so much as experimented with opening her mind to anyone but her sister, and the idea is a little troublesome to her. It seems almost like an act of infidelity. But, on the other hand, doing it might very well restore the contact with Yvo