The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4: Trips: 1972-73

by Robert Silverberg

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

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

  “I wonder.”

  “Oh, yes. Yvonne says they take our messages from her as fast as they come in, and send them out on every channel. Word from us is terribly important to them.”

  “As a diversion, nothing more. As the latest curiosity. Intrepid explorers venturing into the uncharted wilds of interstellar nospace.” His voice sounds harsh to him, his rhythms of speech coarse and blurting. His words surprise him. He had not known he felt this way about Earth. Still, he goes on. “That’s all we represent: a novelty, vicarious adventure, a moment of amusement.”

  “Do you mean that? It sounds so awfully cynical.”

  He shrugs. “Another six months and they’ll be completely bored with us and our communiqués. Perhaps sooner than that. A year and they’ll have forgotten us.”

  She says, “I don’t see you as a cynical man. Yet you often say such—” She falters. “Such—”

  “Such blunt things? I’m a realist, I guess. Is that the same as a cynic?”

  “Don’t try to label yourself, year-captain.”

  “I only try to look at things realistically.”

  “You don’t know what real is. You don’t know what you are, year-captain.”

  The conversation is suddenly out of control: much too charged, much too intimate. She has never spoken like this before. It is as if there is a malign electricity in the air, a prickly field that distorts their normal selves, making them unnaturally tense and aggressive. He feels panic. If he disturbs the delicate balance of Noelle’s consciousness, will she still be able to make contact with far-off Yvonne?

  He is unable to prevent himself from parrying: “Do you know what I am, then?”

  She tells him, “You’re a man in search of himself. That’s why you volunteered to come all the way out here.”

  “And why did you volunteer to come all the way out here, Noelle?” he asks helplessly.

  She lets the lids slide slowly down over her unseeing eyes and offers no reply. He tries to salvage things a bit by saying more calmly into her tense silence, “Never mind. I didn’t intend to upset you. Shall we transmit the report?”

  “Wait.”

  “All right.”

  She appears to be collecting herself. After a moment she says less edgily, “How do you think they see us at home? As ordinary human beings doing an unusual job or as superhuman creatures engaged in an epic voyage?”

  “Right now, as superhuman creatures, epic voyage.”

  “And later we’ll become more ordinary in their eyes?”

  “Later we’ll become nothing to them. They’ll forget us.”

  “How sad.” Her tone tingles with a grace-note of irony. She may be laughing at him. “And you, year-captain? Do you picture yourself as ordinary or as superhuman?”

  “Something in between. Rather more than ordinary, but no demigod.”

  “I regard myself as quite ordinary except in two respects,” she says sweetly.

  “One is your telepathic communication with your sister and the other—” He hesitates, mysteriously uncomfortable at naming it. “The other is your blindness.”

  “Of course,” she says. Smiles. Radiantly. “Shall we do the report now?”

  “Have you made contact with Yvonne?”

  “Yes. She’s waiting.”

  “Very well, then.” Glancing at his notes, he begins slowly to read: “Shipday 117. Velocity…Apparent location…”

  She naps after every transmission. They exhaust her. She was beginning to fade even before he reached the end of today’s message; now, as he steps into the corridor, he knows she will be asleep before he closes the door. He leaves, frowning, troubled by the odd outburst of tension between them and by his mysterious attack of “realism.” By what right does he say Earth will grow jaded with the voyagers? All during the years of preparation for this first interstellar journey the public excitement never flagged, indeed spurred the voyagers themselves on at times when their interminable training routines threatened them with boredom. Earth’s messages, relayed by Yvonne to Noelle, vibrate with eager queries; the curiosity of the homeworld has been overwhelming since the start. Tell us, tell us, tell us!

  But there is so little to tell, really, except in that one transcendental area where there is so much. And how, really, can any of that be told?

  How can this—

  He pauses by the viewplate in the main transit corridor, a rectangular window a dozen meters long that gives direct access to the external environment. The pearl-gray emptiness of nospace, dense and pervasive, presses tight against the skin of the ship. During the training period the members of the expedition had been warned to anticipate nothing in the way of outside inputs as they crossed the galaxy; they would be shuttling through a void of infinite length, a matter-free tube, and there would be no sights to entertain them, no backdrop of remote nebulas, no glittering stars, no stray meteors, not so much as a pair of colliding atoms yielding the tiniest momentary spark, only an external sameness, like a blank wall. They had been taught methods of coping with that: turn inward, demand no delights from the universe beyond the ship, make the ship itself your universe. And yet, and yet, how misguided those warnings had been! Nospace was not a wall but rather a window. It was impossible for those on Earth to understand what revelations lay in that seeming emptiness. The year-captain, head throbbing from his encounter with Noelle, now revels in his keenest pleasure. A glance at the viewplate reveals that place where the immanent becomes the transcendent: the year-captain sees once again the infinite reverberating waves of energy that sweep through the grayness. What lies beyond the ship is neither a blank wall nor an empty tube; it is a stunning profusion of interlocking energy fields, linking everything to everything; it is music that also is light, it is light that also is music, and those aboard the ship are sentient particles wholly enmeshed in that vast all-engulfing reverberation, that radiant song of gladness, that is the universe. The voyagers journey joyously toward the center of all things, giving themselves gladly into the care of cosmic forces far surpassing human control and understanding. He presses his hands against the cool glass. He puts his face close to it. What do I see, what do I feel, what am I experiencing? It is instant revelation, every time. It is—almost, almost!—the sought-after oneness. Barriers remain, but yet he is aware of an altered sense of space and time, a knowledge of the awesome something that lurks in the vacancies between the spokes of the cosmos, something majestic and powerful; he knows that that something is part of himself, and he is part of it. When he stands at the viewplate he yearns to open the ship’s great hatch and tumble into the eternal. But not yet, not yet. Barriers remain. The voyage has only begun. They grow closer every day to that which they seek, but the voyage has only begun.

  How could we convey any of this to those who remain behind? How could we make them understand?

  Not with words. Never with words.

  Let them come out here and see for themselves—

  He smiles. He trembles and does a little shivering wriggle of delight. He turns away from the viewplate, drained, ecstatic.

  Noelle lies in uneasy dreams. She is aboard a ship, an archaic three-master struggling in an icy sea. The rigging sparkles with fierce icicles, which now and again snap free in the cruel gales and smash with little tinkling sounds against the deck. The deck wears a slippery, shiny coating of thin hard ice, and footing is treacherous. Great eroded bergs heave wildly in the gray water, rising, slapping the waves, subsiding. If one of those bergs hits the hull, the ship will sink. So far they have been lucky about that, but now a more subtle menace is upon them. The sea is freezing over. It congeals, coagulates, becomes a viscous fluid, surging sluggishly. Broad glossy plaques toss on the waves: new ice-floes, colliding, grindi
ng, churning; the floes are at war, destroying one another’s edges, but some are making treaties, uniting to form a single implacable shield. When the sea freezes altogether the ship will be crushed. And now it is freezing. The ship can barely make headway. The sails belly out uselessly, straining at their lines. The wind makes a lyre out of the rigging as the ice-coated ropes twang and sing. The hull creaks like an old man; the grip of the ice is heavy. The timbers are yielding. The end is near. They will all perish. They will all perish. Noelle emerges from her cabin, goes above, seizes the railing, sways, prays, wonders when the wind’s fist will punch through the stiff, frozen canvas of the sails. Nothing can save them. But now! Yes, yes! A glow overhead! Yvonne, Yvonne! She comes. She hovers like a goddess in the black star-pocked sky. Soft golden light streams from her. She is smiling, and her smile thaws the sea. The ice relents. The air grows gentle. The ship is freed. It sails on, unhindered, toward the perfumed tropics.

  In late afternoon Noelle drifts silently, wraith-like, into the control room where the year-captain is at work; she looks so weary and drawn that she is almost translucent; she seems unusually vulnerable, as though a harsh sound would shatter her. She has brought the year-captain Earth’s answer to this morning’s transmission. He takes from her the small, clear data-cube on which she has recorded her latest conversation with her sister. As Yvonne speaks in her mind, Noelle repeats the message aloud into a sensor disc, and it is captured on the cube. He wonders why she looks so wan. “Is anything wrong?” he asks. She tells him that she has had some difficulty receiving the message; the signal from Earth was strangely fuzzy. She is perturbed by that.

  “It was like static,” she says.

  “Mental static?”

  She is puzzled. Yvonne’s tone is always pure, crystalline, wholly undistorted. Noelle has never had an experience like this before.

  “Perhaps you were tired,” he suggests. “Or maybe she was.”

  He fits the cube into the playback slot, and Noelle’s voice comes from the speakers. She sounds unfamiliar, strained and ill at ease; she fumbles words frequently and often asks Yvonne to repeat. The message, what he can make out of it, is the usual cheery stuff, predigested news from the homeworld—politics, sports, the planetary weather, word of the arts and sciences, special greetings for three or four members of the expedition, expressions of general good wishes—everything light, shallow, amiable. The static disturbs him. What if the telepathic link should fail? What if they were to lose contact with Earth altogether? He asks himself why that should trouble him so. The ship is self-sufficient; it needs no guidance from Earth in order to function properly, nor do the voyagers really have to have daily information about events on the mother planet. Then why care if silence descends? Why not accept the fact that they are no longer Earthbound in any way, that they have become virtually a new species as they leap, faster than light, outward into the stars? No. He cares. The link matters. He decides that it has to do with what they were experiencing in relation to the intense throbbing grayness outside, that interchange of energies, that growing sense of universal connection. They are making discoveries every day, not astronomical but—well, spiritual—and, the year-captain thinks, what a pity if none of this can ever be communicated to those who have remained behind. We must keep the link open.

  “Maybe,” he says, “we ought to let you and Yvonne rest for a few days.”

  They look upon me as some sort of nun because I’m blind and special. I hate that, but there’s nothing I can do to change it. I am what they think I am. I lie awake imagining men touching my body. The year-captain stands over me. I see his face clearly, the skin flushed and sweaty, the eyes gleaming. He strokes my breasts. He puts his lips to my lips. Suddenly, terribly, he embraces me and I scream. Why do I scream?

  “You promised to teach me how to play,” she says, pouting a little. They are in the ship’s lounge. Four games are under way: Elliot with Sylvia, Roy and Paco, David and Heinz, Mike and Bruce. Her pout fascinates him: such a little-girl gesture, so charming, so human. She seems to be in much better shape today, even though there was trouble again in the transmission, Yvonne complaining that the morning report was coming through indistinctly and noisily. Noelle has decided that the noise is some sort of local phenomenon, something like a sunspot effect, and will vanish once they are far enough from this sector of nospace. He is not as sure of this as she is, but she probably has a better understanding of such things than he. “Teach me, year-captain,” she prods. “I really do want to know how to play. Have faith in me.”

  “All right,” he says. The game may prove valuable to her, a relaxing pastime, a timely distraction. “This is the board. It has nineteen horizontal lines, nineteen vertical lines. The stones are played on the intersections of these lines, not on the squares that they form.” He takes her hand and traces, with the tip of her fingers, the pattern of intersecting lines. They have been printed with a thick ink, easily discernible against the flatness of the board. “These nine dots are called stars,” he tells her. “They serve as orientation points.” He touches her fingertips to the nine stars. “We give the lines in this direction numbers, from one to nineteen, and we give the lines in the other direction letters, from A to T, leaving out I. Thus we can identify positions on the board. This is B10, this is D18, this is J4, do you follow?” He feels despair. How can she ever commit the board to memory? But she looks untroubled as she runs her hand along the edges of the board, murmuring, “A, B, C, D…”

  The other games have halted. Everyone in the lounge is watching them. He guides her hand toward the two trays of stones, the white and the black, and shows her the traditional way of picking up a stone between two fingers and clapping it down against the board. “The stronger player uses the white stones,” he says. “Black always moves first. The players take turns placing stones, one at a time, on any unoccupied intersection. Once a stone is placed it is never moved unless it is captured, when it is removed at once from the board.”

  “And the purpose of the game?” she asks.

  “To control the largest possible area with the smallest possible number of stones. You build walls. The score is reckoned by counting the number of vacant intersections within your walls, plus the number of prisoners you have taken.” Methodically he explains the technique of play to her: the placing of stones, the seizure of territory, the capture of opposing stones. He illustrates by setting up simulated situations on the board, calling out the location of each stone as he places it: “Black holds P12, Q12, R12, S12, T12, and also P11, P10, P9, Q8, R8, S8, T8. White holds—” somehow she visualizes the positions; she repeats the patterns after him, and asks questions that show she sees the board clearly in her mind. Within twenty minutes she understands the basic ploys. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, he gives her an incorrect coordinate—the board, after all, is not marked with numbers and letters, and he misgauges the point occasionally—but each time she corrects him, gently, saying, “N13? Don’t you mean N12?”

  At length she says, “I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”

  Consider your situation carefully. You are twenty years old, female, sightless. You have never married or even entered into a basic pairing. Your only real human contact is with your twin sister, who is like yourself blind and single. Her mind is fully open to yours. Yours is to hers. You and she are two halves of one soul, inexplicably embedded in separate bodies. With her, only with her, do you feel complete. Now you are asked to take part in a voyage to the stars, without her, a voyage that is sure to cut you off from her forever. You are told that if you leave Earth aboard the starship there is no chance that you will ever see your sister again. You are also told that your presence is important to the success of the voyage, for without your help it would take decades or even centuries for news of the starship to reach Earth, but if you are aboard it will be possible to maintain instantaneous communication across any distance. What should you do? Consider. Consider.

&nb
sp; You consider. And you volunteer to go, of course. You are needed: how can you refuse? As for your sister, you will naturally lose the opportunity to touch her, to hold her close, to derive direct comfort from her presence. Otherwise you will lose nothing. Never “see” her again? No. You can “see” her just as well, certainly, from a distance of a million light-years as you can from the next room. There can be no doubt of that.

  The morning transmission. Noelle, sitting with her back to the year-captain, listens to what he reads her and sends it coursing over a gap of more than sixteen light-years. “Wait,” she says. “Yvonne is calling for a repeat. From ‘metabolic.’” He pauses, goes back, reads again: “Metabolic balances remain normal, although, as earlier reported, some of the older members of the expedition have begun to show trace deficiencies of manganese and potassium. We are taking appropriate corrective steps, and—” Noelle halts him with a brusque gesture. He waits, and she bends forward, forehead against the table, hands pressed tightly to her temples. “Static again,” she says. “It’s worse today.”

  “Are you getting through at all?”

  “I’m getting through, yes. But I have to push, to push, to push. And still Yvonne asks for repeats. I don’t know what’s happening, year-captain.”