Starborne

It is time, therefore, for him to pick the site of the first landing and head for it in these closing months of the first year, while he is still in command. The die will be cast, that way. That way the timing will be right for him to hand his executive responsibilities on to his successor just as they arrive at their destination, and thus to be able to take part in the initial planetary expedition.

But here is Noelle, drifting silently, wraithlike, into the room where he is working. She looks older and less beautiful today than she usually seems to him: weary and drawn, so much so that she is almost translucent. She appears unusually vulnerable, as though a single harsh sound would shatter her.

“I have the return transmission from Yvonne,” she tells him. There is an oddly timid, tentative inflection in her voice that is not at all like her. He wonders if something terrible has taken place on Earth. But what could possibly go awry on that torpid, tranquil world?

She hands him the small, clear data-cube on which she has archived her latest conversation with her sister on Earth. As Yvonne speaks in her mind, Noelle repeats each message aloud into a sensor disk, and it is captured on the cube.

He rests the cube on the palm of his hand and says to her, “Are you all right, Noelle? You look wiped out.”

A faint shrug. “There was a little problem.”

He waits. She seems to be having trouble articulating her thoughts.

“What kind of problem, Noelle?” he says finally.

“With the transmission. I had some difficulty receiving it. Or rather — what I mean to say is, it wasn’t quite clear. It was — fuzzy.”

“Fuzzy,” the year-captain says. His voice is flat.

“Distorted. Not much, but some. A kind of static around the edges of the signal.”

“Static,” he says, flatly again, playing for time, trying to understand, though he does not really see how merely echoing her words will help him to do that. Yet what else can he do? “Mental static,” he says, looking straight into her sightless eyes.

“That’s the best word I can use for it.”

Yvonne’s mental tone, Noelle says, is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before. Plainly she is worried by it. Frightened, perhaps.

“Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests gently. “Or maybe she was.”

Noelle smiles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a troubled inner state.

He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her customary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently, and often can be heard asking Yvonne to repeat something. The message from the mother world, what the year-captain can make out of it, is the customary chattery blather, no surprises. But this business of static disturbs him. Is this the beginning, he wonders, of the breakdown of their one communication link with Earth, the onset of a steady inexplicable degradation of the signal, leading inevitably to the isolation of the starship in a realm of total silence?

And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvonne and Noelle are nonrelativistic; they travel instantaneously across a cosmos in which light itself can go no faster than 300,000 kilometers per second and even this nonrelativistic faster-than-light starship crosses the topological folds of nospace at finite, though immense, velocity. Without the sisters, they would have to fall back on radio transmission to make contact with Earth: from their present distance a message would take two decades to get there.

The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to abandon. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, outward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct religions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere archaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?

But hedoes care. The link matters.