Starborne

There was no sensation of acceleration. Why should there be? This was no shuttle ride from Earth to the Moon, or to some satellite world. There was no propulsive engine aboard other than the relatively insignificant braking motor to be used when they reached their destination; no thrust was being applied; none of the conventional patterns of acceleration were being established. Some sort of drive mechanism was at work in the bowels of the ship, yes; some sort of forces was being generated; some kind of movement was taking place. But not Newtonian, not in any way Einsteinian. The movement was from space to nospace, where relativity did not apply. Mass, inertia, acceleration, velocity — they were irrelevant concepts here. One moment they had been hanging in midspace only a few thousand kilometers above the face of the Earth, and in the next they were floating, silent as a comet, through a tube in a folded and pleated alternative universe that ran adjacent to and interlineated with the experiential universe of stars and planets, of mass and force and gravitation and inertia, of photons and electrons and neutrinos and quarks, of earth, air, fire, and water. Caught up in some unthinkable flux, hurled with unimaginable swiftness through an utter empty darkness a thousand times blacker than the darkness in which she had spent her whole life.

It had happened, yes. Noelle had no doubt of it. There had been an instant in which she seemed to be at the brink of an infinite abyss. And then she knew she was in nospace. Something had happened; something had changed. But it was unquantifiable and altogether undefinable. Forces beyond her comprehension, powered by mysterious energies that spanned the cosmos from rib to rib, had come abruptly into play, hurling the Wotan smoothly and swiftly from the experiential universe, the universe of space and time and matter, into this other place. She knew it had happened. But she had no idea how she knew that she knew.

— Yvonne? Can you hear me now, Yvonne?

The reply came right away, with utter instantaneity. Not even time for a moment of terror. There was Yvonne, immediately, comfortingly:

— I hear you, yes.

The signal was pure and clear and sharp. And so it remained, day after day.

Throughout the strange early hours of the voyage Noelle and Yvonne were rarely out of contact with each other for more than a moment, and there was no perceptible falling off of reception as the starship headed outward. They might have been no farther from each other than in adjacent rooms. Past the orbital distance of the Moon, past the million-kilometer mark, past the orbital distance of Mars: everything stayed clear and sharp, clear and sharp. The sisters had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance, apparently.

But — so it had been explained to them — the ship at this point was still traveling at sublight velocity. It took time, even in nospace, to build up to full speed. The process of nospace acceleration — qualitatively different,conceptually different, from anything that anyone understood as acceleration in normal space, but a kind of acceleration all the same — was a gradual one. They would not reach the speed of light for several days.

The speed of light! Magical barrier! Noelle had heard so much about it: the limiting velocity, the borderline between the known and the unknown. What would happen to the bond between them, once the Wotan was on the far side of it? Noelle had no real idea. Already she was in a space apart from Yvonne, and still could feel her tangible presence: that much was immensely reassuring. But when the starship had crossed into that realm where even a photon was forbidden to go? What then, what then? No one had discussed these things with her. She scarcely understood them. But she had always heard that traveling faster than light involved paradox, mystery, strangeness. There was an element of the forbidden about it. It was against the law.

That terrible tension rose in her all over again. One more test — the final one, she hoped — was approaching. She had never known such fear. As they entered the superluminal universe it might become impossible for her mind to reach back across that barrier to find Yvonne’s. Who could say? She had never traveled faster than light before. Once more she contemplated the possibility of an existence without Yvonne.

She had never known a lonely moment in her life. But now — now—

And again her fears were proven needless. Somewhere during the day they reached the sinister barrier, and the starship went on through it without even the formality of an announcement. They had, after all, been outside Einsteinian space since the first moment of the voyage; why, then, take notice of a violation of the traffic laws of another universe, when they were here, already safely journeying across nospace?

Someone told her, later in the day, that they were moving faster than light now.