The year-captain is holding back, though, as he has from the moment any of this first surfaced, because he is afraid that Noelle will somehow be damaged in the attempt.
He has had a classical education. The myth of Semele is very much on his mind.
“Who was she?” Noelle asks him when he allows some of his concern to slip into view.
“Semele was the daughter of an ancient Greek king,” he tells her. They are in the ship’s recreation area, where they have just been swimming in the long, narrow lap-pool, and now they are sitting along the edge of the pool with their legs dangling in the water. “Zeus had taken her as one of his lovers.” Noelle has turned toward him, and she seems to be listening carefully, but her face is completely expressionless. “You know who Zeus was? The chief of the Greek gods, the ruler of the universe.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“And quite a ladies’ man. Zeus was completely infatuated with beautiful young Semele, and had a child with her, who was destined to grow up to be the god Dionysus; and Hera, Zeus’s wife, who had had to put up with much too much of this stuff during the course of her marriage and didn’t care for it, decides to take action. She dons human disguise and goes to visit Semele and asks her if she knows who it is that she’s been sleeping with. Yes, says Semele proudly, he is Zeus, the father of the gods. And have you ever seen him in all his glory? Hera asks. No, says Semele, never, he always comes to me in the form of a man. Well, then, says sly Hera, you should ask him to reveal himself to you in his full majesty. Now,that would be something to see!”
“I think I know this story,” Noelle says.
Nevertheless the year-captain does not halt in his telling of the tale. “The next time Zeus comes to her, Semele says to him, ‘You never show yourself to me as you really are.’ And Zeus says, ‘No, no, that would be too much for you, the sight would be overwhelming.’ But Semele insists. She reminds Zeus that he had promised her, long ago, to grant any wish that she might make. To refuse her nothing. Zeus is trapped. He can’t go back on his promise, though he knows what’s going to happen. So, reluctantly, he gives Semele what she’s asking for. There is a tremendous clap of thunder and Zeus appears before her in his chariot in a great aurora of light. No human being can look upon the true form of Zeus and survive. Semele is destroyed by the heat that emanates from the god. She is burned utterly to ashes by it; and so Hera has had her revenge.”
Noelle has drawn back into herself during this part of the story. She has wrapped her arms tightly around her body, and it seems to the year-captain that she is trembling a little.
“But something good came forth out of that, didn’t it?” she asks. “There was Dionysus the god. Semele’s son. He survived the flames, didn’t he?”
“Yes. He survived. Zeus spared him, and scooped him up in the moment of Semele’s destruction, carrying him off and hiding him from Hera’s wrath until he was grown.”
“So, then. That’s the point of the story. The miraculous birth of the god Dionysus.”
She is definitely trembling, he sees. Shivering, even. They are still naked after their swim, but it is, as always, quite warm here in the recreation area.
“The point of the story is that Semele overreached herself and died,” the year-captain says. “Dionysus is just an incidental part of the myth. The point is that ordinary mortals can’t hope to have unrestricted contact with gods.”
“The birth of a new god can’t just be an incidental part of anything,” Noelle says. The year-captain thinks he hears her teeth chattering.
“Are you feeling all right, Noelle?”
“Just a little chilly.”
“It isn’t chilly in here, though.”
“But I feel that way. Maybe we should go on across into the baths.”
“Yes. Yes. A little time in the hot tub will get you feeling better in no time.”
The baths are just on the other side of the corridor from the lap pool. They collect their towels and discarded clothing and go across. The room is empty when they get there.
“Why did you tell me that story?” Noelle asks him.
“You know the answer to that, don’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I do.”
“I can’t help feeling worried about what will happen when you try to—”
“It isn’t the same in any way. I’m not Semele. The angels aren’t Zeus.”
“How do you know what they are?”
“I don’t,” she says. “Not really. How could I? But I just don’t think — I’m quite confident that I — that they — that when I—” She is really shaking now. They are at the edge of the hot tank. The usual procedure is to step quickly into the cold tub, then go on to the hot one, and finish by returning to the tepid tank or even the cold one. But instead of going into any of them now Noelle stands trembling at the brink of the hot tub for a long moment; and then she turns, suddenly, and presses herself into his arms.
He enfolds her and holds her tightly and gently strokes her back, trying to soothe her, trying to comfort her and ease whatever terror it is that has taken possession of her. All of it very manly and paternal, and then a moment later not paternal in the least, for the year-captain is trembling too, and they stand there for a long while in a close embrace.
Then she breaks free of him and steps a few paces back. She is smiling, and her eyes, those mysterious sightless eyes that are nevertheless often so expressive, have taken on a strange mischievous light. She reaches out a hand toward him.
The year-captain is amazed at how her body, which he has seen on so many other occasions here in the baths and in the pool, now suddenly seems unfamiliar — different, transformed. The same full round breasts, yes, the same flat belly, the same deeply indented navel. But it is all different. There is an inner light emanating from her. She is gleaming, radiant. He is powerfully drawn to her. He wonders how he had ever managed to fail to find her attractive — why she had never seemed to him, really, like a sexual being at all. Certainly she seems like one now.
“Come,” she whispers, and tugs at his hand, and leads him deftly and unhesitatingly over the tiled floor into one of the little lovemaking rooms that adjoin the baths.
They sink down together onto the hard narrow bed. It is entirely obvious to him now that he has wanted this since the beginning of the voyage, that he has always been drawn to her, that he has hedged himself around with a host of caveats and uncertainties and self-imposed prohibitions precisely because he has desired her all along with such frightening intensity.
He covers her lips, her throat, her closed eyelids with kisses. She clings to him, murmuring, thrusting herself against him. At the last moment before he could possibly turn back he remembers that odd thought he once had had, more than a year before, that she might actually be a virgin, and even that her telepathic powers might somehow depend on the preservation of that virginity and would be forever lost at the first touch of a man’s insistent body.
No. No. That’s idiocy. She isn’t a creature out of some fantastic myth. Her telepathy is not a magical power that can be lost through the violation of an oath of chastity.
And in any case there’s no longer any possibility that he can hold back, not now, nor is Noelle willing to allow it. Her legs part and he enters her quickly, almost roughly, and in that moment Noelle throws back her head and lets out a cry that is surely one of ecstasy and not of pain, and in almost the same moment he comes. He is completely unable to prevent that from happening. It erupts from him with a force that he has not felt since he was eighteen. And he hears her ecstatic hissing gasp, feels her bucking almost convulsively beneath him.
He wonders, in the first bewildered and almost distraught moment afterward, whether Yvonne has experienced their pleasure too, somewhere far away. Whether Yvonne has come with them, even, perhaps.