Starborne

Poor old Earth! All the ancient squalor is gone, most of the pain — and yet something is wrong. Disease and hunger are conquered. Life is just about eternal if you want it to be that way. War is something we read about in history texts, something anthropological and remote, an odd obsolete practice of our ancestors, like cannibalism or bloodletting. And yet! Something wrong! I think back through all that I know of human history, and I know a great deal, really — the plagues, the massacres, all the episodes of torture for the sheer fun of it, the great and petty vilenesses, the whole catalog of sins that Sophocles and Shakespeare and Strindberg understood so well — and I wonder why we aren’t more jubilant about what we have attained in our own time. What I have to conclude is that we are a driven race, never satisfied with anything, even with utter blissful contentedness. There’s always something missing, even in perfection. And our awareness of that missing something is what drives us on and on and on, forever looking for it.

Which is what caused the massacres and all of that — a sense even among our primitive forebears that something needs to be fixed, by whatever ham-fisted methods happen to be available at the moment. Our methods have become more humane and also more efficient as we grow more — well, civilized — but that need, that hunger, still operates on us. And now has pushed us out among the stars to grapple with unknown worlds.

Or am I projecting my own needs and hungers and awareness of inadequacies onto the whole human race? Are most of us quite happy with our lived in this glorious modern age, and do those happy ones feel sorry for the pitiful maladjusted few who were willing to go off on this wild voyage into the dark?

I don’t relieve that. I don’t want to believe that, at any rate. And we will go onward, we fifty, until we find what we are seeking. (We forty-nine, I should say now, but the old phrase is ingrained so deeply!) And when we find it, which I am certain we will, I want to think that for a moment, at least, we will know a little peace.

I wish we were still in touch with Earth.

I worry about Noelle. She seems to be all right, even in the absence of the contact with her sister that has nourished and sustained her all her life. But is she, really? Is she?

The breakdown in the communication link with Earth has been the subject of much discussion, naturally.

Whether it is a total and irreversible breakdown is not entirely certain yet. Yes, Noelle had said, at the meeting between the year-captain and the delegation that had come to apprise him of the election results, that there was no way of restoring contact with her sister; but — as she admitted privately to the year-captain the next day — she had simply been saying that by way of bolstering Heinz’s arguments in favor of amending the Articles of the Voyage. In truth Noelle has no idea whether contact can be restored, and she feels just a little guilty for having given everyone the notion that it can’t be. “I did it because I wanted everyone to go along with the deal that was taking shape,” she confesses, but only to the year-captain. “If we can’t speak with Earth any more, we don’t need to worry what they’ll think about our changing the Articles, isn’t that so? But it’s always possible that I’ll regain Yvonne’s signal sooner or later. It’s happened before that the signal has weakened and then become strong again.”

She does, she says, still feel Yvonne’s mental presence somewhere within her. But, as has been true for days now, she is unable to pick up any verbal content in what Yvonne is sending, and she suspects — it is only a guess, but she thinks there’s real probability to it — that nothing she’s sending Earthward is reaching Yvonne, either. She still makes daily attempts at reopening the link, but to no avail. For all intents and purposes they are cut off from Earth and very likely will remain cut off forever.

No one believes that the problem is a function of anything so obvious as distance. Noelle has been quite convincing on that score: a signal that propagates perfectly for the first sixteen light-years of a journey ought not abruptly to deteriorate a couple of light-minutes farther along the road. There should at least have been prior sign of attenuation, and there was no attenuation, only noise suddenly cutting in, noise that interfered with and ultimately destroyed the signal.

“It’s some kind of a force,” Roy suggests, “that has reached in here and messed up the connection.”

A force? What kind of force?