Starborne

“To control the largest possible area with the smallest possible number of stones. You build walls. You try to surround your opponent’s pieces even while he’s trying to surround yours. The score is reckoned by counting the number of vacant intersections within your walls, plus the number of prisoners you have taken.” She is staring steadily in his direction, fixedly, an intense and almost exaggerated show of attention, all the more poignant for its pointlessness. Methodically the year-captain explains the actual technique of play to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by setting up simulated situations on the board, calling out the location of each stone as he places it. “Black holds P12, Q12, R12, S12, T12 — got it?” A nod. “And also P11, P10, P9, Q8, R8, S8, T8. All right?” Another nod. “White holds—” Somehow she is able to visualize the positions; she repeats the patterns after him, and asks questions that show she sees the board clearly in her mind.

He wonders why he is so surprised. He has heard of blind chess players, good ones: they must be able to memorize the board and update their inner view of it with every move. Noelle must have the same kind of hypertrophied memory. But playingGo is not like playing chess. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing fewer than two dozen possible moves. InGo, there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game ofGo to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The chessboard has just sixty-four squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, reducing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original thirty-two pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number ofGo pieces also diminishes gradually as the game proceeds, but their absence makes the patterns on the board more complicated rather than simpler during the unfolding battle for territory.

Even so, Noelle seems to be grasping the essentials. Within twenty minutes she appears to understand the basic ploys. And there is no question that she is able to hold the board firmly fixed on the internal screen of her mind. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, the year-captain gives her an incorrect coordinate — the first time by accident, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and letters, and since it is a long time since he last has played, he misgauges the coordinates occasionally — and then twice more deliberately, to test her. Each time she corrects him, gently saying, “N13? Don’t you mean N12?”

At length she says, “I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”

In the baths later that day Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth discuss the year-captain’s putative sex life. It is one of their favorite speculative subjects. Most of the sex that goes on aboard the ship, and there is quite a good deal of it, takes place in complete openness, figuratively and often literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps overcivilized, epoch. Very little is taboo to them. But the year-captain, unlike virtually everyone else on board, is scrupulous about his privacy.

“He doesn’t have any sex and he doesn’t want any,” Paco insists. “He was a monk just before he joined us, you know. That weird colony of meditating mystics up by the North Pole somewhere off the coast of Scandinavia. And a monk is still what he is, at heart. A man of ice through and through. It shows in his face, that lean and grim thin-lipped face with that little beard that he keeps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Lake the blue ice of a glacier, they are. They show you the interior of the man himself.”

“Wrong,” Elizabeth says. “Ice outside, fire within.”

“And you hold with those who favor fire,” Paco says jeeringly. “Don’t think I don’t listen when you start quoting poetry.”

Elizabeth, reddening down to her bony breast, sticks her tongue out at him.

“You’re in love with him,” Paco says. “Aren’t you, Lizzy?”