Starborne

He and Noelle are recognized now aboard ship as lovers. Hiding it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, anyway: he has no desire to impose on her the sort of hole-and-corner relationship that he had carried on for so long with Julia. Let them see. Let them know. They were all expecting it to happen anyway; he understands that now. Some, like Heinz, evidently had seen the whole thing coming a couple of years before he did. Julia too: she smiles knowingly at him, as if to acknowledge that the long-awaited inevitable has at last occurred. Julia doesn’t seem to be hurt by it. Quite the contrary.

So he and Noelle are seen together in the baths, in theGo lounge, in the corridors. He spends nights in her cabin, or she in his — the first time since the beginning of the voyage that he has known anything but solitary sleep. She is a marvelous mixture of passion and innocence, or at least the semblance of innocence; there is unexpected skill and fire in her lovemaking, but also an eagerness to be led into unfamiliar paths, to be taught previously unknown ways. It reminds him, after a fashion, of the way Noelle had approached learningGo once upon a time: the attentiveness, the seriousness, the concern with understanding the fundamentals of the game — and, ultimately, the revelation of enormous mastery.

TheGo obsession has never diminished aboard ship, and the year-captain, who has been only an occasional player since his reawakening of interest in the game, now goes to the lounge whenever his official duties permit. His superior skills make it difficult for most of the others to enjoy playing with him, and he plays almost exclusively with Roy and Leon and Noelle, most often with Noelle.

She is a merciless player. He wins against her no more often than once out of every four or five games.

Today, playing black, the year-captain has been able to remain on the offensive through the 89th move. But Noelle then breaks through his north stones, which are weakly deployed, and closes a major center territory. The year-captain finds himself unable to mount a satisfactory reply. Before he can get very much going, Noelle has run a chain of stones across the 19th line, boxing him in, in an embarrassing way. He manages to fend off further calamity for a while, but he knows that all he is doing is playing for time as he heads toward inevitable defeat. At Move 141 he launches what he suspects is a hopeless attack, and his forces are easily crushed by Noelle within her own territory. A little while later he finds himself confronted with the classic cat-in-a-basket trap, by which he will lose a large group in the process of capturing one stone, and at Move 196 he concedes that he has been beaten. She has taken 81 stones to his 62.

As they clear the board for a rematch he says, trying to be casual about it, “Have you been giving any thought to the business of the angels, Noelle?”

“Of course. I think about them a great deal.”

“And?”

“And what?” she asks.

“Do you have any idea how you’d go about it? Making the contact, I mean.”

“I have some theories, yes. But naturally they’re only theories. I won’t really know anything until I make the actual attempt.”

The year-captain waits just a beat. “And when do you think that will be?”

She gives him one of those special looks of hers, those baffling sightless focusings of her eyes that somehow manage to convey an expression. The expression that she conveys this time is one of disingenuousness.

“Whenever you’d like it to be,” she says.

“What about today, then?”

What about today? Yes. What about today. There is no way that it can be postponed any longer. He knows that; she knows that; they are in agreement. This is the moment. Today. Now.

In her cabin. Alone, among her familiar things. She has insisted on that. She grants herself a few moments of delay first, a little self-indulgence, moving about the room, picking up things and handling them, the sea-urchin shell, the polished piece of jade, the small bronze statuettes, the furry stuffed animal. In her former life these things had been hers and Yvonne’s jointly; neither of them had ever had any sense of “mine” or “yours,” not while they were together, but Yvonne had insisted, as the time for the launch of the Wotan drew near, that Noelle take all these with her, these beloved objects, the talismans of their shared life. “After all,” she had said, “I’ll be able to feel them through your hands.” Yes. But not any longer.

Perhaps what Noelle is about to do will restore Yvonne’s access to these little things, the things that once had been theirs and now were merely hers. Perhaps. Perhaps.

She lies down. Takes deep breaths. Closes her eyes. Something about having them closed seems to enhance the force of her power, she often thinks.

Extends a tenuous tendril of thought now that probes warily outward like a rivulet of quicksilver. Through the metal wall of the ship, into the surrounding grayness, upward, outward, toward, toward—

Angels?