Starborne

Perhaps what Noelle is about to do will restore Yvo

She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to enhance the force of her power, she often thinks.

Extends a tenuous tendril of thought now that probes warily outward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—

Angels?

Who knows what they are? But she has been conscious of their presence all along, ever since the interference first began, cloudy presences, huge, heavy masses of mentation hovering around her, somewhere out there in — what does he call it? The Intermundium? Yes, the Intermundium, the great gray space between the worlds. She has felt them out there, not as individual entities but only as presences, or perhapsone presence having many parts.

Now she seeks them.

Angels! Angels! Angels!

She is well beyond the ship and keeps moving outward and outward into the undifferentiated void of the nospace tube, extending herself to what she thinks is the limit of her reach and then reaching even farther yet. She envisions herself now as a line of bright light stretched out across the cosmos, a line that has neither begi

Reaching. Reaching.

Angels!

Oh. She feels the presence now. So they are real, yes. Whatever they are, they are really there. They may not be actual angels, but they are there, not far away. They exist. Brightness. Strength. Magnetism. Yes. Awareness now of a fierce roiling mass of concentrated energy close by her. A gigantic mass in motion, laying a terrible stress on the fabric of the cosmos.

How strange! The angel has angular momentum! It tumbles ponderously on its colossal axis. Who could have thought that angels would be so huge? But they are angels; they can be whatever they please to be.

Noelle is oppressed by the shifting weight of the angel as it makes its slow, heavy axial swing. She moves closer.

Oh.

She is dazzled by it.

Oh. Oh.

She hears it roaring, the way a furnace might roar. But what a deafening furnace-roar this is! Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. She hears a crackling too, a hissing, a sizzling: the sounds of inexorable power unremittingly unleashed.

Too much light! Too much power!

She is fascinated as much as she is frightened. But she must be cautious. This is a great monster lurking here. Noelle draws back a little, and then a little more, overwhelmed by the intensity of the other being’s output. Such a mighty mind: she feels dwarfed. If she touches it even glancingly with her own mind she is certain that she will be destroyed. She must step down the aperture and establish some kind of transformer in the circuit that will shield her against the full bellowing blast of power that comes from the thing.

So she withdraws, pulling herself back and back and back until she is once again inside the ship, and rests, and studies the problem. It will require time and discipline to do what has to be done. She must make adjustments, master new techniques, discover capacities she had not known she possessed. All that requires time and discipline. Minutes, hours, days? She doesn’t know. She will do what is necessary. And does it, patiently, cautiously.

And now. She’s ready once more.

Yes.

Try again, now. Slowly, slowly, slowly, with utmost care. Outward goes the questing tendril.

Yes.

Approaching the angel.

See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me—

Just a touch—

Touch—

Oh. Oh.

I see you. The light — eye of crystal — fountains of lava — oh, the light — your light — I see — I see—

Oh, like a god—

She had looked up the story in the ship’s archives of literature just after the time the year-captain had told it to her, the story of Semele, the myth. And it was just as he had said that day, the day that they first became lovers.

— and Semele wished to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus, who loved her, could not refuse her; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her remained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh, bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him—

— oh God I am Semele—

Now she is terrified. This is too much to face. She will be consumed; she will be obliterated. Noelle withdraws again, hastily. Back within the sanctuary of the ship. Rests, regroups. Tries to regenerate herpowers, but they are badly depleted. Exhausted, at least for the time being. Rest, then. Rest. This is very difficult, very dangerous. She knows it’s unwise to continue right now. She will not attempt to go out into the Intermundium a third time that day.

They’re really and truly there,” she says. She is pale, weary, still badly off balance. It is two hours since her return from her adventure. The entire excursion had taken no more than a few minutes, apparently. It seemed like years to her. And to those waiting for her to emerge from her trance.

They are with her in the control cabin for the debriefing: Heinz, Huw, Leon, Elizabeth, Imogen, Julia. The year-captain is there too, of course. “I could feel them hovering somewhere outside the ship. Angels.”

“Angels?” Heinz asks, sounding startled. He seems uncharacteristically subdued. “Actually, literally?”

“You mean, divine beings with human form, only with wings, like in the old paintings?” Noelle says.

“And names and identities,” says Elizabeth. “Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael. God’s lieutenants.”

“I don’t know that they’re really angels,” Noelle says. “That was just the word we all started to use for them.”

“And surely you must know that I was just using the word lightly,” Heinz says. “It was only a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, when I talked about angels. I never seriously believed there was any kind of intelligence out there, let alone angels. You say you sawsomething, though.”

There are frowns. It is strange to speak of Noelle as “seeing” anything. But who knows what sort of sense-equivalents she experiences through her mind-powers?

“Felt,” says Noelle. “Didn’t see.”

“And were they really angels or weren’t they?” Heinz asks.

Noelle smiles faintly, shakes her head. “How would I know? But I don’t think they were, not literal angels. I told you, I didn’t see anything. But I felt them. Forces. Immense nodes of power, each one revolving on its own axis. If that’s what angels are, then the presence of angels is what I felt.”

“Forces,” Elizabeth says. “I wonder, is that one of the categories of angels?” She counts on her fingers. “Choirs, Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers — Powers, that would be just about the same as Forces—”

The year-captain leans forward and says quietly to Noelle, “Are you able to give us any kind of description in words of what you experienced?”

“No.”

“How far from the ship were you when you began to perceive them?”

“I can’t tell you that, either. Nothing makes sense out there. Certainly not distance. It’s all just one infinite featureless gray blur, just like what you say you see through the viewplate, but going on and on and on.”

“Did they seem relatively close, at least?” he asks.

Noelle turns the palms of her hands upward and outward, a gesture signifying helplessness. “I can’t say. There’s nothing like ‘close’ or ‘far’ out there. Everything is the same distance from everything else. I don’t know whether I was in the tube or out of it when I saw them.”