No use. Not even the bitter air could help. Frost in her eyelashes, snow on her lips. The pendant Byrne had given her blazed between her breasts. The air was white with a throbbing green underglow. It seared her eyes. She was off-center and floundering. She felt herself still reverberating through the centuries, going back and forth across the orbit of Nicholson’s interminable life. What year is this? Is it 1386, 1912, 1532, 1779, 1043, 1977, 1235, 1129, 1836? So many centuries. So many lives. And yet always the one true self, changeless, unchangeable.
Gradually the resonances died away. Nicholson’s unending epochs no longer filled her mind with terrible noise. She began to shiver, not from fear but merely from cold, and tugged at her moist tunic, trying to shield her nakedness. Melting snow left hot clammy tracks across her breasts and belly. A halo of steam surrounded her. Her heart pounded.
She wondered if what she had experienced had been genuine contact with Nicholson’s soul, or rather only some trick of Tom’s, a simulation of contact. Was it possible, after all, even for Tom to create a linkage between two non-telepathic minds such as hers and Nicholson’s? Maybe Tom had fabricated it all himself, using images borrowed from Nicholson’s book.
In that case there might still be hope for her.
A delusion, she knew. A fantasy born of the desperate optimism of the hopeless. But nevertheless—
She found the handle, let herself back into the party. A gust accompanied her, sweeping snow inward. People stared. She was like death arriving at the feast. Doglike, she shook off the searing snowflakes. Her clothes were wet and stuck to her skin; she might as well have been naked. “You poor shivering thing,” a woman said. She pulled Nikki into a tight embrace. It was the sharp-faced woman, the bulgy-eyed bottle-born one, bride of her own father. Her hands traveled swiftly over Nikki’s body, caressing her breasts, touching her cheek, her forearm, her haunch. “Come inside with me,” she crooned. “I”ll make you warm.” Her lips grazed Nikki’s. A playful tongue sought hers.
For a moment, needing the warmth, Nikki gave herself to the embrace. Then she pulled away. “No,” she said. “Some other time. Please.” Wriggling free, she started across the room. An endless journey. Like crossing the Sahara by pogo stick. Voices, faces, laughter. A dryness in her throat. Then she was in front of Nicholson.
Well. Now or never.
“I have to talk to you,” she said.
“Of course.” His eyes were merciless. No wrath in them, not even disdain, only an incredible patience more terrifying than anger or scorn. She would not let herself bend before that cool level gaze.
She said, “A few minutes ago, did you have an odd experience, a sense that someone was—well, looking into your mind? I know it sounds foolish, but—?”
“Yes. It happened.” So calm. How did he stay that close to his center? That unwavering eye, that uniquely self-contained self, perceiving all: the lamasery, the slave depot, the railroad train, everything, all time gone by, all time to come—how did he manage to be so tranquil? She knew she never could learn such calmness. She knew he knew it. He has my number, all right. She found that she was looking at his cheekbones, at his forehead, at his lips. Not into his eyes.
“You have the wrong image of me,” she told him.
“It isn’t an image,” he said. “What I have is you.”
“No.”
“Face yourself, Nikki. If you can figure out where to look.” He laughed. Gently, but she was demolished.
An odd thing, then. She forced herself to stare into his eyes and felt a snapping of awareness from one mode into some other, and he turned into an old man. That mask of changeless early maturity dissolved and she saw the frightening yellowed eyes, the maze of furrows and gullies, the toothless gums, the drooling lips, the hollow throat, the self beneath the face. A thousand years, a thousand years! And every moment of those thousand years was visible. “You’re old,” she whispered. “You disgust me. I wouldn’t want to be like you, not for anything!” She backed away, shaking. “An old, old, old man. All a masquerade!”
He smiled. “Isn’t that pathetic?”
“Me or you? Me or you?”
He didn’t answer. She was bewildered. When she was five paces away from him there came another snapping of awareness, a second changing of phase, and suddenly he was himself again, taut-skinned, erect, appearing to be perhaps thirty-five years old. A globe of silence hung between them. The force of his rejection was withering. She summoned her last strength for a parting glare. I didn’t want you either, friend, not any single part of you. He saluted cordially. Dismissal.
Martin Bliss, grinning vacantly, stood near the bar. “Let’s go,” she said savagely. “Take me home!”
“But—”
“It’s just a few floors below.” She thrust her arm through his. He blinked, shrugged, fell into step.
“I”ll call you Tuesday, Nikki,” Tom said as they swept past him.
Downstairs, on her home turf, she felt better. In the bedroom they quickly dropped their clothes. His body was pink, hairy, serviceable. She turned the bed on, and it began to murmur and throb. “How old do you think I am?” she asked.
“Twenty-six?” Bliss said vaguely.
“Bastard!” She pulled him down on top of her. Her hands raked his skin. Her thighs parted. Go on. Like an animal, she thought. Like an animal! She was getting older moment by moment, she was dying in his arms.
“You’re much better than I expected,” she said eventually.
He looked down, baffled, amazed. “You could have chosen anyone at that party. Anyone.”
“Almost anyone,” she said.
When he was asleep she slipped out of bed. Snow was still falling. She heard the thunk of bullets and the whine of wounded bison. She heard the clangor of swords on shields. She heard lamas chanting: Om, Om, Om. No sleep for her this night, none. The clock was ticking like a bomb. The century was flowing remorselessly toward its finish. She checked her face for wrinkles in the bathroom mirror. Smooth, smooth, all smooth under the blue fluorescent glow. Her eyes looked bloody. Her nipples were still hard. She took a little alabaster jar from one of the bathroom cabinets and three slender red capsules fell out of it, into her palm. Happy birthday, dear Nikki, happy birthday to you. She swallowed all three. Went back to bed. Waited, listening to the slap of snow on glass, for the visions to come and carry her away.
Ship-Sister, Star-Sister
At the time I wrote this story—November, 1972—I was going through a prolonged period of skepticism about the value and merit of science fiction, as you will see if you go back to my introduction to “The Science Fiction Hall of Fame,” a story written a few months earlier in that troubled year. I was having difficulties making myself believe in the classic furnishings of s-f. All those starships, telepaths, galactic empires and time machines, all the stuff I had been dealing with as reader and writer for twenty-plus years, had become monstrously unreal, implausible, impossible to me.
That seemed like an unhealthy attitude for a science-fiction writer to hold; and so, when that hyperactive anthology editor Roger Elwood asked me for a longish story for a book called Tomorrow’s Alternatives, I took a deep breath and reached for one of the most far-out Stapledonian concepts in my science-fiction idea file, figuring that if I could write that with some conviction, I’d be able to handle less audacious themes without any problem afterward. Somehow it worked. While I was writing “Ship-Sister” I made myself believe in half a dozen different astonishments at once, long enough (five weeks) for me to bring off this story in, I hope, fairly convincing manner.
When I wrote an introduction to “Ship-Sister” in 1992 for an earlier collection of my stories, I concluded by saying, “The material of this story still fascinates me and I have a feeling that I may return to it some day and deal with it at book length.” Indeed so. I did just that very thing a couple of years later, expanding the original novelette into the novel Starborne, which was published in 1996.
~
&nbs
p; Sixteen light-years from Earth today, in the fifth month of the voyage, and the silent throb of acceleration continues to drive the velocity higher. Three games of Go are in progress in the ship’s lounge. The year-captain stands at the entrance to the lounge, casually watching the players: Roy and Sylvia, Leon and Chiang, Heinz and Elliot. Go has been a craze aboard ship for weeks. The players —some eighteen or twenty members of the expedition have caught the addiction by now —sit hour after hour, contemplating strategies, devising variations, grasping the smooth black or white stones between forefinger and second finger, putting the stones down against the wooden board with the proper smart sharp clacking sound. The year-captain himself does not play, though the game once interested him to the point of obsession, long ago; he finds his responsibilities so draining that an exercise in simulated territorial conquest does not attract him now. He comes here often to watch, however, remaining five or ten minutes, then going on about his duties.
The best of the players is Roy, the mathematician, a large, heavy man with a soft sleepy face. He sits with his eyes closed, awaiting in tranquillity his turn to play. “I am purging myself of the need to win,” he told the year-captain yesterday when asked what occupies his mind while he waits. Purged or not, Roy wins more than half of his games, even though he gives most of his opponents a handicap of four or five stones.
He gives Sylvia a handicap of only two. She is a delicate woman, fine-boned and shy, a geneticist, and she plays well although slowly. She makes her move. At the sound of it Roy opens his eyes. He studies the board, points, and says, “Atari,” the conventional way of calling to his opponent’s attention the fact that her move will enable him to capture several of her stones. Sylvia laughs lightly and retracts her move. After a moment she moves again. Roy nods and picks up a white stone, which he holds for nearly a minute before he places it.
The year-captain would like to speak with Sylvia about one of her experiments, but he sees she will be occupied with the game for another hour or more. The conversation can wait. No one hurries aboard this ship. They have plenty of time for everything: a lifetime, maybe, if no habitable planet can be found. The universe is theirs. He scans the board and tries to anticipate Sylvia’s next move. Soft footsteps sound behind him. The year-captain turns. Noelle, the ship’s communicator, is approaching the lounge. She is a slim sightless girl with long dark hair, and she customarily walks the corridors unaided: no sensors for her, not even a cane. Occasionally she stumbles, but usually her balance is excellent and her sense of the location of obstacles is superb. It is a kind of arrogance for the blind to shun assistance, perhaps. But also it is a kind of desperate poetry.
As she comes up to him she says, “Good morning, year-captain.”
Noelle is infallible in making such identifications. She claims to be able to distinguish members of the expedition by the tiny characteristic sounds they make: their patterns of breathing, their coughs, the rustling of their clothing. Among the others there is some scepticism about this. Many aboard the ship believe that Noelle is reading their minds. She does not deny that she possesses the power of telepathy; but she insists that the only mind to which she has direct access is that of her twin sister Yvonne, far away on Earth.
He turns to her. His eyes meet hers: an automatic act, a habit. Hers, dark and clear, stare disconcertingly through his forehead. He says, “I’ll have a report for you to transmit in about two hours.”
“I’m ready whenever.” She smiles faintly. She listens a moment to the clacking of the Go stones. “Three games being played?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“How strange that the game hasn’t begun to lose its hold on them by this time.”
“Its grip is powerful,” the year-captain says.
“It must be. How good it is to be able to give yourself so completely to a game.”
“I wonder. Playing Go consumes a great deal of valuable time.”
“Time?” Noelle laughs. “What is there to do with time, except to consume it?” After a moment she says, “Is it a difficult game?”
“The rules are simple enough. The application of the rules is another matter entirely. It’s a deeper and more subtle game than chess, I think.”
Her blank eyes wander across his face and suddenly lock into his. “How long would it take for me to learn how to play?”
“You?”
“Why not? I also need amusement, year-captain.”
“The board has hundreds of intersections. Moves may be made at any of them. The patterns formed are complex and constantly changing. Someone who is unable to see —”
“My memory is excellent,” Noelle says. “I can visualize the board and make the necessary corrections as play proceeds. You need only tell me where you put down your stones. And guide my hand, I suppose, when I make my moves.”
“I doubt that it’ll work, Noelle.”
“Will you teach me anyway?”
The ship is sleek, tapered, graceful: a silver bullet streaking across the universe at a velocity that has at this point come to exceed a million kilometers per second. No. In fact the ship is no bullet at all, but rather something squat and awkward, as clumsy as any ordinary spacegoing vessel, with an elaborate spidery superstructure of extensor arms and antennas and observation booms and other externals. Yet because of its incredible speed the year-captain persists in thinking of it as sleek and tapered and graceful. It carries him without friction through the vast empty gray cloak of nospace at a velocity greater than that of light. He knows better, but he is unable to shake that streamlined image from his mind.
Already the expedition is sixteen light-years from Earth. That isn’t an easy thing for him to grasp. He feels the force of it, but not the true meaning. He can tell himself, Already we are sixteen kilometers from home, and understand that readily enough. Already we are sixteen hundred kilometers from home —yes, he can understand that too. What about Already we are sixteen million kilometers from home? That much strains comprehension —a gulf, a gulf, a terrible empty dark gulf —but he thinks he is able to understand even so great a distance, after a fashion. Sixteen light-years, though? How can he explain that to himself? Brilliant stars flank the tube of nospace through which the ship now travels, and he knows that his gray-flecked beard will have turned entirely white before the light of those stars glitters in the night sky of Earth. Yet only a few months have elapsed since the departure of the expedition. How miraculous it is, he thinks, to have come so far so swiftly.
Even so, there is a greater miracle. He will ask Noelle to relay a message to Earth an hour after lunch, and he knows that he will have an acknowledgment from Control Central in Brazil before dinner. That seems an even greater miracle to him.
Her cabin is neat, austere, underfurnished: no paintings, no light-sculptures, nothing to please the visual sense, only a few small sleek bronze statuettes, a smooth oval slab of green stone, and some objects evidently chosen for their rich textures —a strip of nubby fabric stretched across a frame, a sea-urchin’s stony test, a collection of rough sandstone chunks. Everything is meticulously arranged. Does someone help her keep the place tidy? She moves serenely from point to point in the little room, never in danger of a collision; her confidence of motion is unnerving to the year-captain, who sits patiently waiting for her to settle down. She is pale, precisely groomed, her dark hair drawn tightly back from her forehead and held by an intricate ivory clasp. Her lips are full, her nose is rounded. She wears a soft flowing robe. Her body is attractive: he has seen her in the baths and knows of her high full breasts, her ample curving hips, her creamy perfect skin. Yet so far as he has heard she has had no shipboard liaisons. Is it because she is blind? Perhaps one tends not to think of a blind person as a potential sexual partner. Why should that be? Maybe because one hesitates to take advantage of a blind person in a sexual encounter, he suggests, and immediately catches himself up, startled, wondering why he should think of any sort of sexual relationship as “taking advantage.” Well, the
n, possibly compassion for her handicap gets in the way of erotic feeling; pity too easily becomes patronizing and kills desire. He rejects that theory: glib, implausible. Could it be that people fear to approach her, suspecting that she is able to read their inmost thoughts? She has repeatedly denied any ability to enter minds other than her sister’s. Besides, if you have nothing to hide, why be put off by her telepathy? No, it must be something else, and now he thinks he has isolated it: that Noelle is so self-contained, so serene, so much wrapped up in her blindness and her mind-power and her unfathomable communion with her distant sister, that no one dares to breach the crystalline barricades that guard her inner self. She is unapproached because she seems unapproachable; her strange perfection of soul sequesters her, keeping others at a distance the way extraordinary physical beauty can sometimes keep people at a distance. She does not arouse desire because she does not seem at all human. She gleams. She is a flawless machine, an integral part of the ship.