Starborne

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! Yvonne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the perfumed tropics, toward the lands of spices and pearls.

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 Giovanna, looking up from her game. “Only four or five hundred years, at most. An American.”

“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.’”