Starborne

The year-captain is fascinated by that sudden pout of Noelle’s: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. In the past few days she and he have passed through the small bit of tension that had so unexpectedly sprung up between them, and are working well together again. He gives the messages to her to transmit, she sends them to Earth, and back from her sister at the far end of the mental transmission line swiftly come the potted replies, the usual cheery stuff, predigested news, politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of doings in the arts and sciences, special greetings for this member of the expedition or that one, expressions of general good wishes — everything light, shallow, amiable, more or less what you would expect the benign stodgy people of Earth to be sending their absconding sons and daughters. And so it will go, the year-captain assumes, as long as the contact between Noelle and Yvonne holds. Of course, someday the sisters will no longer be available for these transmissions, and real-time contact between Earth and its colony in the stars will be severed when that happens, but that is not a problem he needs to deal with today, or, indeed, at all.

“Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “I really do want to know how to play the game. And I know I can learn it. Have faith in me.”

“All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a timely distraction. She leads such a cloistered life, more so even than the rest of them, moving in complete tranquillity through her chaste existence, intimate with no one but her sister Yvonne, sixteen light-years away and receding into greater distances all the time.

He leads her toward the gaming tables. Noelle bridles only an instant as his hand touches her elbow, and then she relaxes with an obvious effort, allowing him to guide her across the room.

“This is aGo board,” the year-captain says. He takes her hand and gently presses it flat against the board, drawing it from side to side and then up and down, so she can get some idea of the area of the board and also of its feel. “It has nineteen horizontal lines, nineteen vertical lines. The stones are played on the intersections of these lines, not on the squares that the lines form.” He shows her the pattern of intersecting lines by moving the tips other fingers along them. They have been printed with a thick ink, and evidently she is able to discern their slight elevation above the flatness of the board, for when he releases her hand she slowly draws her fingertips along the lines herself, seemingly without difficulty.

“These nine dots are called stars,” he tells her. “They serve as orientation points.” He touches her fingertips to each of the nine stars in turn. They, too, are raised above the board by nothing more than a faint thickness of green ink, but it seems quite clear that she is able to feel them as easily as though they stood out in high relief. All of her senses must be extraordinarily sharp, by way of compensation for the one that is missing. “We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines going in the other direction letters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we have coordinates that allow us to identify positions on the board. This is B10, this is D18, this is J4, do you follow?” He puts the tip of one of her fingers on each of the locations he names. She responds with a smile and a nod. Even so, the year-captain feels despair. How can she ever commit the board to memory? It’s an impossible job. But Noelle looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “A, B, C,…”

The other games have halted. Everyone in the lounge is watching them. He guides her hand toward the two trays of stones, the black ones of polished slate and the white ones fashioned of clamshell, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and clapping it down against the board. The skin of her hand is cool and very smooth. The hand itself is slender and narrow, almost fragile-looking, but utterly unwavering. “The stronger player uses the white stones,” he says. “Black always moves first. The players take turns placing stones, one at a time, on any unoccupied intersection. Once a stone is placed it is never moved unless it is captured, in which case it is removed at once from the board.”

“And the purpose of the game?” she asks.