Starborne

What the Examiners looked for — and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun — was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by philosophical realism. Anyone who raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the predesignated fifty.

At the end of the entire process it was Noelle’s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little charade with her too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual verdict, “Sorry, you’re off the list,” and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and then at last she said in her soft way, “Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.” It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point inher examination.

“Then neither of us will go?” Noelle asked, mystified.

“It was only a test of your reaction,” they told her.

“Ah,” she said. “I see.” And she laughed — giggled, really — as she almost always did when she used that particular verb, and they, not sure of the meaning of her laughter, laughed along with her anyway.

Noelle had wanted to know, right at the end of her examination, how they had decided which sister would go and which would stay.

We flipped a coin, they told her.

She never found out whether that was really true.

Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. She sees it, she actually sees. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery shiny coating of thin, hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they have been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It congeals, coagulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice floes, colliding, grinding, churning: the floes are at war, destroying one another’s edges, but some are entering into treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it has begun to freeze. The vessel can barely make headway. The sails belly out uselessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her cabin, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind’s fist will punch through the stiff frozen canvas of the sails. Nothing can save them. But now! Yes! Yes! A glow overhead! Yvo

Some say the world will end in fire,’” Elizabeth offers. In the lounge, the talk among those who are not playingGo has turned to apocalyptic matters. “’Some say in ice.’”

“Are you quoting something?” Huw wants to know.

“Of course she is,” says Heinz. “You know that Elizabeth’s always quoting something.” Long-limbed, straw-haired Elizabeth is the Wotan’s official bard and chronicler, among other things. Everyone on board has to be Something-Among-Other-Things; multiple skills are the rule. But the center of Elizabeth’s being is poetry. “I think it’s Shakespeare,” Heinz says.

“Not that old,” says Giova

“Frost,” Elizabeth says. “Robert Frost.”

“Is that a kind of ice?” someone asks.

“It’s a name,” says someone else.

“’From what I’ve tasted of desire,’” Elizabeth says, and her tone makes it clear that she is reciting again, “’I hold with those who favor fire.’”

The year-captain enters the room just then, and Paco glances toward him and says in his booming unfettered way, “And what about you, year-captain? How do you think the world’s going to end? We’ve done the sun going nova, we’ve done the entropic heat-death, we’ve done the rising of the seas until everything has drowned. We’ve done plague and drought and volcanoes. Give us your take, now.”

“Fimbulwinter,” the year-captain says. “Ragnarok.” The barbaric half-forgotten words leap instantly to his tongue almost of their own accord. The northern winds of his childhood sweep through his memory. He sees the frost-locked boreal landscape gleaming as though ablaze, even in the parsimonious winter light.

“The Twilight of the Gods, yes,” Elizabeth says, and gives him a melting smile of unconcealed love, which the year-captain, lost in polar memories, does not see.

Faces turn toward him. They want to hear more. The year-captain says, reaching deep for the ancestral lore, “A time comes when the sun turns black. It gives no light, it gives no warmth, winter comes three times in succession with no summer between. This is the Fimbulwinter, the great winter that heralds the world’s end. There is battle everywhere in the darkness, and brother slays brother for the sake of greed, and father lies with daughter, sister with brother, many a whoredom.”

Elizabeth is nodding. She knows these ancient skaldic poems too. Half to herself she murmurs, rocking back and forth rhythmically, “’An axe-age, a sword-age, shields shall be cloven. A wind-age, a wolf-age, ere the world totters.’”

“Yes,” says the year-captain, shivering now, his mind swirling with the powerful ancient images. “A great wolf will swallow the sun, and another wolf the moon. The stars vanish from the heavens. Trees are torn up, and mountains fall, and all fetters and bonds are broken and rent. The sea bursts its bounds, and the Midgard Serpent stirs and comes up on the land and sprinkles all the air and water with his venom, and the Fenris-Wolf breaks free and advances with his mouth agape, his lower jaw against the Earth and the upper against heaven. Nothing is without fear anywhere in the world. For this is the day on which the gods will meet their doom.”

He falls silent, playing out the final titanic battle in his mind, Thor putting the Serpent to death but dying himself of its venom, and the Wolf devouring Father Odin, only to have his gullet torn asunder by Vidar, and the demonic Surtr riding out of Muspelheim and casting fire over the Earth that burns all the world. But of these things the year-captain says nothing aloud. He feels he has had the center of the stage long enough just now. And an Arctic gloom has begun to seize his spirit. The ice, the darkness, the ravening wolves rising above the blazing world. And the Earth of his Viking forefathers is so far away, floating through the emptiness of the night, spi

After a moment Elizabeth’s voice continues the tale:

“’Smoke-reek rages, and reddening fire. The high heat licks against heaven itself.’” Her mind is a crowded storehouse of poetry. But even she is unable to remember the next line.

“And then?” Paco asks. He throws his hands upward and outward, palms raised. Paco is a small, compact-bodied man of great strength and personal force, and any gesture he makes is always more emphatic than it needs to be, just as his shoulders seem twice as wide as those of a man his height should be. “That’s it? The End? Everybody’s dead and there’s nothing more? The curtain comes down and there’s not going to be any next act, and we look around and see that the theater is empty?”