Starborne

“And yet you could distinguish relative sizes, at least. These things were big.”

“Bigger than me, yes. Much bigger. Immense. That was easy enough to tell. I felt enormous power. It was like standing at the edge of a gigantic furnace. I could hear it roaring.”

“One furnace, or many?” Huw asks.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes it felt like just one, sometimes I thought there were thousands of them all around me.” Noelle gives them a faint, ashen-faced smile. “You’re all trying to get me to put what I felt into concrete, understandable terms, but that just isn’t possible. All I can tell you is that I went out there and after a little while I felt something,something, very large, very powerful, a huge radiant source of energy. If that’s what angels are like, then I encountered an angel. I don’t know what meeting an angel is supposed to be like. Or how important it is to call what I met by any sort of name. I only know? that there wassomething out there and I think that it’s the something that’s interfering with the transmissions.”

“Will you want to try contacting it again?” the year-captain asks gently.

“Not right now.”

“I understand. Later on, though?”

“Of course. I’m not going to stop here. I can’t. But not now — not — now—”

Leon says, “We should let her rest.”

The year-captain nods. “Yes. Absolutely.” He signals to the others, and they begin to leave. “Come,” he says to Noelle. “I’ll take you back to your cabin.”

Ordinarily she bridles at being offered help in getting around the ship. Not today, though. She gets slowly to her feet and he slips his arm around her shoulders, and they walk together down the corridor, slowly, very slowly.

He halts at the door of the cabin. He does not attempt to go in with her, nor does she invite him to.

Softly he says, “Was it very scary?”

“Scary and wonderful, both. I’ll go out there and do it again when I’ve had a chance to rest.”

“I don’t want you to harm yourself, Noelle.”

“As long as I rest enough between each attempt, I’ll be all right.”

“And if you should make contact, real contact, and the power turns out to be too strong for you to handle — ?”

“Semele?”

“Semele, yes.”

“I looked the story up, you know. It’s in the myth section of the archives, exactly the way you told it to me, except that you left out the part about Zeus hiding the baby in his thigh. But that isn’t important. Semele dies, yes. But first she gets to be the lover of a god. And the mother of another one. And she lives forever in the myth.”

“That’s all well and good. But you mustn’t take any u

“These are necessary risks. It has to be done.”

“Yes,” the year-captain says. “It does have to be done, doesn’t it? I should let you rest now, Noelle.”

She goes inside. He closes the cabin door behind her and walks slowly up the corridor to his own room.

There is great general excitement and no little bewilderment over Noelle’s discovery outside the ship; but then a few days go by, and a few more, and she does not make a new attempt at reaching the angels. She is not ready yet, she says. She must find ways of insulating herself against the immense magnitude of the force that she will encounter.

And so they wait, and discuss, and speculate, and wonder. What else can they do?

During this time the ship continues to head toward Hesper’s Planet C, and Hesper continues to fill them with his usual torrent of optimistic details about their upcoming destination’s great potential as a settlement world. It is, he says, the large and impressive sixth planet of a large and impressive golden-red sun. It has, he declares, all the right properties of atmosphere and gravitation and temperature and such, and a crust that he is completely certain will yield a richly rewarding abundance of every useful element known to the universe. He believes that Planet C has oceans and rivers and lakes, and a fine-looking moon just about as large as the moon of Earth, and a great many other outstanding Features that will afford much comfort and pleasure to the lonely wanderers from Earth.

In Hesper’s mind, it would seem, the Wotan has already reached Planet C and a successful surveillance mission has been carried out, and now they have all shuttled down to its richly rewarding surface and are busily constructing the crude but charming buildings that will house the colony in its developmental stages. No one else, though, pays much attention to Hesper’s rapturous forecasts. The minds of the others are focused almost entirely on the angels that lurk somewhere all about them in the mysterious void outside the ship. “Angels” is still what everybody calls them, for lack of any better term.

But nothing more will be learned about the angels until Noelle is ready to make another try at speaking with them. And Noelle is not ready yet. She spends her time apart from everyone else, emerging from her cabin only for meals, saying little when she does.

So they wait. What else, after all, can they do? They playGo and visit the baths and swim laps in the pool, and draw books and plays and music from the almost infinitely capacious resources of the ship’s archives, and indulge, as most of them always have indulged, in couplings and triplings and other sexual entertainments. And the time passes.

She keeps her distance even from the year-captain, which he finds very painful. Now that he has broken through his ascetic forbearance, finally, he has no further interest in living a monastic life. He longs for her as intensely as he has ever longed for anyone or anything. But she has retreated into herself; and so does he. Julia lets it be known that she is still available to him, and he thanks her warmly, but he doesn’t avail himself of her availability. Time passes. Like everyone else, the year-captain waits for Noelle.

At last she a

She is alone when she does, in her cabin, everything as before. Closes her eyes. Lets herself drift upward, outward.

The grayness.

She is in the tube. The infinite void of nospace. She extends herself across it until she has no begi

Angels? Are you there today, angels?

Yes. She feels one almost at once, the immensity of it, the power. Goes toward it. Spreads her arms wide, lifts up her face to it, feels the warmth. The heat. That burning fiery furnace, roaring and hissing and sizzling and crackling.

She thinks — hopes — that she has insulated herself this time against destruction, that she has found a way of cha

She is very frightened.

But she realizes that this must be done. And she is aware that she stands at the brink of wonders.

Now. Now. The questing mind reaches forth.

Touches.

Or almost touches. There is still a barrier, and Noelle is afraid to cross it. She waits there, looking outward,seeing the angel, actuallyseeing it. Its vast cosmos-filling surface. An ocean of fire. The angel’s face is awash with hurricanes of unthinkable activity. Wild tongues of flame rise from it like bristling curls. The broad face is veiled in places, but where the veil parts she is able to see coherent fountains of power climbing through the turbulence, coming up from the angel’s depths, hot cells of fiery matter bigger than entire planets swimming up out of the core of the angel and gliding back down. At the surface itself, again and again, frenzied eruptions leap out across the firmament like daggers of energy stabbing at the cosmos.