Starborne

Her beauty fascinates him too. She is precisely groomed, her straight dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. She has deep-toned Mediterranean-African skin, smooth and lustrous, gleaming from within. Her lips are full, her nose is narrow, high-bridged. She wears a soft flowing black robe with a border of silver stitching. Her body is attractive: he has seen her occasionally in the baths and knows of her full rounded breasts, her broad curving hips. She is light-boned, almost dainty, but classically feminine. Yet so far as he knows she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled by the strangeness of his own thought, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship between adults as taking advantage. Well, then, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling: pity too easily becomes patronizing, and that kills desire. He rejects that theory also: glib, implausible. Could it simply be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? Noelle has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that Noelle is so self-contained, so calm, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communication with her distant sister, that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems unapproachable: her strange perfection of soul sequesters her, keeping others at a distance the way extraordinary physical beauty can sometimes keep people at a distance. She does not arouse desire because she does not seem at all human. She gleams. She is a flawless machine, an integral part of the ship.

He unfolds the text he has prepared, the report that is to be transmitted to Earth today. “Not that there’s anything new to tell them,” he says to her, “but I suppose we have to file the daily communiqué all the same.”

“It would be cruel if we didn’t. We mean so very much to them.”

The moment she begins to speak, all of the year-captain’s carefully constructed calmness evaporates, and instantly he finds himself becoming edgy, oddly belligerent, distinctly off balance. He is bewildered by that. Something in the softness and earnestness of her sweet gentle voice has mysteriously annoyed him, it seems. Coils of sudden startling tension are springing up within him. Anger, even. Animosity. He has no idea why. He is unable to account for his reaction entirely.

“I have my doubts about that,” he says, with a roughness that surprises him. “I don’t think we matter at all.”

This is perverse, and he knows it. What he has just said runs counter to all of his own beliefs.

She looks a little surprised too. “Oh, yes, yes, we do, we mean a great deal to them. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel, all over the world and to the Moon as well. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

He will not concede the point. “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace. A nine-day wonder.” His voice sounds harsh and unfamiliar to him, his rhythms of speech coarse, erratic, words coining in awkward rushes. As for his words themselves, so bleak and sardonic, they astonish him. He has never spoken this way about Earth and its attitude toward the starship before. Such thoughts have never so much as crossed his mind before. Still, he finds himself pushing recklessly onward down the same strange track. “That’s the only thing we represent to them, isn’t it? Novelty, vicarious adventure, a bit of passing amusement?”

“Do you really mean that? It seems so terribly cynical.”

He shrugs. Somehow this ugly idea has taken possession of him, repugnant though his argument is, even to him. He sees the effect that he is having on her — puzzlement turning to dismay — but he feels that he has gone in too deep now to turn back. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiqués. Perhaps sooner than that. They’ll stop paying attention. A year’s time and they’ll have forgotten us.”

She seems taken aback. Her nostrils flicker in apparent alarm. Normally her face is a serene mask. Not now. “What a peculiar mood you’re in today, year-captain!”

“Am I? Well, then, I suppose I am.”

“I don’t see you as in any way a cynical man. Everything about you is the opposite of cynical. And yet here, today — saying such— such—” She falters.

“Such disagreeable things?”

“Yes.”