Starborne

He watches in silence as she comes up to him. “Good morning, year-captain,” she says.

Noelle is infallible in making such identifications. She claims to be able to distinguish each of the members of the expedition by the tiny characteristic sounds they make: their patterns of breathing, the timbre of their coughs, the rustling of their clothing. Among the others there is a certain skepticism about this. Many aboard the starship believe that Noelle is simply reading their minds. She does not deny that she possesses the power of telepathy; but she insists that the only mind to which she has direct access is that of her sister Yvonne, her identical twin, far away on Earth.

He turns to her. His eyes meet hers: an automatic act, a habit. Her eyes, dark and clear and almost always open, stare disconcertingly through his forehead. Plainly they are the eyes of a blind person but they seem weirdly penetrating all the same. The year-captain says, “I’ll have a report for you to transmit in about two hours.”

“I’m ready whenever you need me.” Noelle smiles faintly. She listens a moment, head turned slightly to the left, to the clacking of the Go stones. “Three games being played?” she asks. Her voice is soft but musical and clear, and perfectly focused, every syllable always audible.

“Yes.”

What extraordinary hearing she must have, if she can perceive the sounds of stones being placed so acutely that she knows the number of game-boards that are in use.

“It seems strange that the game hasn’t begun to lose its hold on them by now?”

“Go can have an extremely powerful grip,” the year-captain says.

“It must. How good it is to be able to surrender yourself so completely to a game.”

“I wonder. Playing Go consumes an enormous amount of valuable time.”

“Time?” Noelle laughs. The silvery sound is like a cascade of little chimes. “What is there to do with time, except to consume it?” Then after a moment she says, “Is it a difficult game?”

“The rules are actually quite simple. The application of the rules is another matter entirely. It’s a deeper and more subtle game than chess, I think.”

Her glossy blank gaze wanders across his face and suddenly her eyes lock into his. How is she able to do that? “Do you think it would take very long for me to learn how to play?” she asks.

“You?”

“Why not? I also need amusement, year-captain.”

“The board is a grid with hundreds of intersections. Moves may be made at any of them. The patterns that are formed as the players place their stones are complex and constantly changing. Someone who — isn’t — able — to see—”

“My memory is excellent,” Noelle says. “I can visualize the board and make the necessary corrections as play proceeds. You would only have to tell me where you are putting down your stones. And guide my hand, I suppose, when I make my moves.”

“I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”

“Will you teach me anyway?”

I have not yet ceased to wonder at the fact that we are here, aboard this ship, carrying out this voyage, acting out this destiny that the universe has chosen for us. How many times have I made this entry in my journal, after all? Five? Ten? I keep returning to this one slender point, worrying it, prodding at it, marveling that this is happening and that it is happening to us. Not to me, particularly — what good would all my training on the island have been if I were still the center of my own world, like a child? — but to us, this larger entity, this group of individual and disparate and oddly assorted people who have come together willingly, even joyously, in this curious endeavor.

How odd it all is, still! Traveling through endless night to some unknown destination, some virgin world that awaits our finding. There has been nothing like it in all of human history. But this is the proper time, evidently, for it to be happening. It is our fate that we fifty people live at just this moment of time, this present epoch, when it has been made possible to journey between the stars, and so here we are, making that journey, seeking a new Earth for mankind. Someone had to do it; and we are the ones who have stepped forward to be selected, Leon and Paco and Huw and Sylvia and Noelle and I, and all the rest of us aboard this vessel.

In the minds of all those myriad people who have come and gone upon the Earth before our time, when they look forward toward us and try to envision what our era must be like, we are the godlike glittering denizens of the barely imaginable future, leading lives of endless miracle. Everything is possible to us, or so it seems to them. But to those who are not yet born, and will not be for ages, we are the merest mud-crawling primitives, scarcely distinguishable from our hairy ancestors. That we have achieved as much as we have, given our pitiful limitations, is fascinating and perplexing to them.