Starborne

Starborne by Robert Silverberg

Friends, take heart, banish all fear.
One day — who knows? — we will
look back even on these
things and laugh.

— The Aeneid, Book One

For Dave and Nancy Deroche

Sixteen light-years from Earth today, in the fifth month of the voyage, and the silken force of nospace acceleration continues to drive the starship’s velocity ever higher. Three games of Go are in progress in the Wotan’s lounge. The year-captain stands at the entrance to the brightly lit room, casually watching the players: Roy and Sylvia, Leon and Chang, Heinz and Elliot.

Go has been a craze aboard ship for weeks. The players — some eighteen or twenty members of the expedition have caught the addiction by this time, more than a third of the entire complement — sit hour after hour, contemplating strategies, devising variations, grasping the smooth black or white stones between forefinger and second finger, putting the stones down against the wooden board with the proper smart sharp clacking sound. The year-captain himself does not play, though the game once interested him to the point of obsession, long ago, in what was almost another life; his shipboard responsibilities require so intense an exercise of his energies that he can find little amusement in simulated territorial conquest. But he comes here sometimes to watch, remaining five or ten minutes, then going on about his duties.

The best of the players is Roy, the mathematician, a large, heavy man with a soft, sleepy face. He sits with his eyes closed, awaiting in tranquillity his turn to play. “I am purging myself of the need to win,” he told the year-captain yesterday when asked what occupied his mind while he waited to put down his next piece. Purged or not, Roy continues to win more than half of his games, even though he gives most of his opponents a handicap of four or five stones.

He gives Sylvia a handicap of only two. She is a delicate woman, fine-boned and shy. Genetic surgery is her specialty. Sylvia plays the game well, although slowly. She makes her move. At the sound of it Roy opens his eyes. He studies the board the merest fraction of a second, points, and says, “Atari,” the conventional way of calling to his opponent’s attention the fact that her move will enable him to capture several of her stones. Sylvia laughs lightly and retracts her move. After a moment she moves again. Roy nods and picks up a white stone, which he holds for nearly a minute, hefting it between the two playing fingers as though testing its weight, before he places it. Which is not at all typical of him: ordinarily he makes his moves with intimidating speed. Perhaps he is tired this morning. Or perhaps he is simply being kind.

The year-captain would like to speak to Sylvia about the anaerobic gene-cluster experiment, but evidently the game is barely under way; he supposes that she and Roy will be occupied with it for another hour or more. His questions can wait. No one hurries aboard the Wotan. They have plenty of time for everything: a lifetime, maybe, if no habitable planet can be found. All the universe is theirs to search, yes. But it may well be the case that nothing useful will be found, and this ship’s walls will mark the full boundary of their universe, forever and a day. No one knows, yet. They are the first to venture out this far. At this point there are only questions, no answers. The only thing that is reasonably certain is that they are bound on a voyage from which there is no expectation of returning.

All is quiet for a time in the lounge. Then Heinz, at the far side of the room, loudly places a stone. Elliot acknowledges it with a little chuckle. Chang, at the board next to them, glances over to look; Sylvia and Roy pay no attention. The year-captain scans the board of Roy and Sylvia’s game, trying to anticipate Sylvia’s next move. His eyesight is sharp: even at this distance he can clearly make out the patterns on the board. Indeed, everything about the year-captain is sharp. He is a man of crisp boundaries, of taut edges carefully drawn together.

Soft footsteps sound behind him.

The year-captain turns. Noelle, the mission communicator, is approaching the lounge. She is a slim sightless woman with long gleaming blue-black hair and elegantly chiseled features. Her tapering face is a perfect counterpart of the year-captain’s own lean, austere one, though she is dusky, and he is fair-haired and so pale of skin that he seems to have been bleached. She customarily walks the corridors unaided. No sensors for Noelle, not even a cane. Occasionally she will stumble, but usually her balance is excellent and her sense of the location of obstacles is eerily accurate. It is a kind of arrogance for the blind to shun assistance, perhaps. But also it is a kind of desperate poetry.