It is time, therefore, for him to pick the site of the first landing and head for it in these closing months of the first year, while he is still in command. The die will be cast, that way. That way the timing will be right for him to hand his executive responsibilities on to his successor just as they arrive at their destination, and thus to be able to take part in the initial planetary expedition.
But here is Noelle, drifting silently, wraithlike, into the room where he is working. She looks older and less beautiful today than she usually seems to him: weary and drawn, so much so that she is almost translucent. She appears unusually vulnerable, as though a single harsh sound would shatter her.
“I have the return transmission from Yvonne,” she tells him. There is an oddly timid, tentative inflection in her voice that is not at all like her. He wonders if something terrible has taken place on Earth. But what could possibly go awry on that torpid, tranquil world?
She hands him the small, clear data-cube on which she has archived her latest conversation with her sister on Earth. As Yvonne speaks in her mind, Noelle repeats each message aloud into a sensor disk, and it is captured on the cube.
He rests the cube on the palm of his hand and says to her, “Are you all right, Noelle? You look wiped out.”
A faint shrug. “There was a little problem.”
He waits. She seems to be having trouble articulating her thoughts.
“What kind of problem, Noelle?” he says finally.
“With the transmission. I had some difficulty receiving it. Or rather — what I mean to say is, it wasn’t quite clear. It was — fuzzy.”
“Fuzzy,” the year-captain says. His voice is flat.
“Distorted. Not much, but some. A kind of static around the edges of the signal.”
“Static,” he says, flatly again, playing for time, trying to understand, though he does not really see how merely echoing her words will help him to do that. Yet what else can he do? “Mental static,” he says, looking straight into her sightless eyes.
“That’s the best word I can use for it.”
Yvonne’s mental tone, Noelle says, is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before. Plainly she is worried by it. Frightened, perhaps.
“Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests gently. “Or maybe she was.”
Noelle smiles. The year-captain knows that smile of hers by now: it is meant entirely to deflect unpleasantness. But it usually reflects a troubled inner state.
He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. It is not her customary voice; it is this new unfamiliar voice of hers, thin and strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently, and often can be heard asking Yvonne to repeat something. The message from the mother world, what the year-captain can make out of it, is the customary chattery blather, no surprises. But this business of static disturbs him. Is this the beginning, he wonders, of the breakdown of their one communication link with Earth, the onset of a steady inexplicable degradation of the signal, leading inevitably to the isolation of the starship in a realm of total silence?
And what if it is? What if the telepathic link should fail, what if they should lose contact with Earth altogether? The transmissions between Yvonne and Noelle are nonrelativistic; they travel instantaneously across a cosmos in which light itself can go no faster than 300,000 kilometers per second and even this nonrelativistic faster-than-light starship crosses the topological folds of nospace at finite, though immense, velocity. Without the sisters, they would have to fall back on radio transmission to make contact with Earth: from their present distance a message would take two decades to get there.
The year-captain asks himself why that prospect should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth for its proper functioning, nor do the voyagers really derive any particular benefit from the daily measure of information about events on the mother planet, a world which, after all, they have chosen to abandon. So why care if silence descends? Why should it matter? Why not, in that case, simply accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they are on their way to becoming virtually a different species as they leap, faster than light, outward into a new life among the stars? He is not a sentimental man. There are very few sentimental people on this ship. For him, for them, Earth is just so much old baggage: a wad of stale history, a fading memory of archaic kings and empires, of extinct religions, of outmoded philosophies. Earth is the past; Earth is mere archaeology; Earth is essentially nonexistent for them. If the link breaks, why should they care?
But hedoes care. The link matters.
He decides that it has to do with the symbolic function of this voyage to the people of Earth: the fact that the voyagers are the focal point of so much aspiration and anticipation. If contact is lost, their achievements in planting a new Earth on some far star, whatever they may ultimately be, will have no meaning for the people of the mother world.
And then, too, it is a matter of what he is experiencing on the voyage itself, in relation to the intense throbbing grayness of nospace outside: that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal connectedness. He has not spoken with any of the others about this, but the year-captain is certain that he is not the only one who has felt these things. He and, doubtless, some of his companions are making new discoveries every day, not astronomical but — well, spiritual — and, the year-captain tells himself, what a great pity it will be if none of this can ever be communicated to those who have remained behind on Earth. We must keep the link open.
“Maybe,” he says, “we ought to let you and Yvonne rest for a few days.”
A celebration: the six-month anniversary of the day the Wotan set out for deep space from Earth orbit. The starship’s entire complement is jammed into the gaming lounge, overflowing out into the corridor. Much laughter, drinking, winking, singing, a happy occasion indeed, though no one is quite sure why they should be making such a fuss about the half-year anniversary.
“It’s because we aren’t far enough out yet,” Leon suggests. “We still really have one foot in space and one back on Earth. So we keep time on the Earth calendar still. And we focus on these little milestones. But that’ll change.”
“It already has,” Chang observes. “When was the last time you used anything but the shiptime calendar in your daily work?”
“Which calendar I use isn’t important,” Leon says. He is the ship’s chief medical officer, a short, barrel-chested man with a voice like tumbling gravel. “As it happens, I use the shiptime calendar. But we still think in reference to Earth dates too. Earth dates still matter to us, after a fashion. All of us keep a kind of double calendar in our heads, I suspect. And I think we’ll go on doing that until—”
“Happy six-month!” Paco cries just then. His broad face is flushed, his dark deep-set eyes are aglow. “Six months cooped up together in this goddamned tin can and we’re still all on speaking terms with each other! It’s a miracle! A bloody miracle!” He holds a tumbler of red wine in each hand. For tonight’s party the year-captain has authorized breaking out the last of the wine that they brought with them from Earth. They will be synthesizing their own from now on. It won’t be the same thing, though; everyone knows that.
Paco may not be as drunk as he seems, but he puts on a good show. He caroms through the crowd, bellowing, “Drink! Drink!” and bumps into tall, slender Marcus, the planetographer, nearly knocking him down, and Marcus is the one who apologizes: that is the way Marcus is. A moment later Sieglinde drifts past him and Paco hands his extra wineglass to her. Then he loops his free arm through hers. “Tanz mit mir, liebchen!” he cries. The old languages are still spoken, more or less. “Show me how to waltz, Sieglinde!” She gives him a sour look, but yields. It’s a party, after all. They make a foolish-looking couple — she is a head taller than he is, and utterly ungraceful — but looking foolish is probably what Paco has in mind. He whirls her around through the crowd in a clumsy galumphing not-quite-waltz, holding her tightly at arm’s length with a one-armed grip and joyously waving his wineglass in the other.