Starborne

Noelle was the first member of the crew to be chosen, if indeed she could be said to have been chosen at all. Choice had not really been a part of it for her, nor for her sister. The entire project had been built about their initial willingness; had they not been who and what they were, the expedition would probably have gone forth anyway, but it would have been something quite different. Perhaps it would not have happened at all. The mere existence of Noelle and Yvonne was the prerequisite for the whole enterprise. They were central to everything; their consent was mainly a formality; and once it had been determined that Noelle and not Yvonne would be the one actually to travel on board the ship, her examination for eligibility was a mere charade.

Of those who had truly volunteered, Heinz was the first to win the formal approval of the Board, Paco was the second, Sylvia the third, then Bruce, Huw, Chang, Julia. The year-captain was one of the last to pass through the qualification process. The last one of all, technically, was Noelle, but of course, she was already a part of the project, as much so as the ship itself, and for many of the same reasons.

For each of them, but for Noelle, the process of qualifying was the same: simple, cruel, humiliating, insincere. Generally speaking, the crew members had been picked even before it had occurred to some of them that they might be interested in going. The world had become very small. Everyone’s capacities were known. No one was particularly famous any more, but no one was obscure, either.

Certain formalities were observed, though. It was always possible that the coverta priori selection process had been mistaken in one or two instances, and no one wanted mistakes. Eleven hundred candidates were summoned to fill the fifty slots aboard the starship. They came from every part of the world, a carefully impartial and studiedly representative geographic sampling. Many of the old nations that had once been so distinct and noisily self-important still had some sort of tenuous existences, more as sentimental concepts than as sovereign entities now, but they had not completely evolved out of existence yet and it was a good idea to pay lip service, at least, to the continued quasi-fact of their quasi-status. Each of the formerly sovereign nations or historically significant fragment thereof contributed a few of its former citizens to the long list. And then, too, the candidates represented most or perhaps all — who could say, really? The old distinctions had often been so minute and dubious — of the planet’s racial and ethnic and religious groups, insofar as such groups still existed and looked upon themselves as mattering in the small and cozy society that had evolved out of the turbulent, messy societies of the Industrial and immediately Post-Industrial epochs. In the cosmic scheme of things it no longer counted for very much that one person might like to think of himself as a Finn and another as a Turk, or a German or a Brit or a Thai or a Swede, nor was it really easy any more to fit most people into the old racial classifications that had once had such troublesome significance, nor had the world’s innumerable theological distinctions survived very coherently into modern times. But there were those for whom — perhaps for philosophical reasons, or sentimental ones, or reasons of esthetics, or out of a lingering sense of historical connection, or a fondness for anachronisms, or just out of simple cantankerousness — there was still some value in valiantly claiming, “I am a Welshman” or “I am a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church” or “I carry the blood of the Norman aristocracy.” Such people were considered quaint and eccentric; but there were plenty of them, even now. The world had come a long way, yes, yet ancient vestiges of the grand institutions and solemn distinctions of former civilizations still cropped out everywhere like fossil bones whitening and weathering in the sun. They had ceased to beproblems, yes, but they had not fully ceased to be. Possibly they never would. And so the long list of candidates for the Wotan expedition was an elaborately representative one. The final group would be too, insofar as that was feasible. Formalities were observed, indeed.