It was time to go back to the lounge. The captain was going to make a speech to the assembled crew just before the launch itself. Coolly Noelle moved through the corridors of the ship, touching this, stroking that, drawing its strange sterile air deep into her lungs so that she would begin to feel native to it, familiarizing herself with textures and smells and highly local patterns of coolness or warmth. She had already been aboard twice before, during the indoctrination sessions. They had built the starship up here in space, for it was a flimsy thing and could not be subjected to the traumas of the acceleration needed to lift it out of a planetary gravitational field. For months, years, hordes of mass-drivers had come chugging up from bases on the Moon, hauling tons of prefabricated matériel as the great job of weaving and spinning went on and on. And gradually the members of the crew had been chosen, brought together here, shown their way around the strange-looking vessel that would contain their lives, perhaps, until the end of their days.
Yvonne will still be there once we have set out, she told herself. Why should the link fail?
There was no reason to think that it would; but none to think that it would necessarily hold, either. She and Yvonne were something new under the sun. No body of experimental study existed to cover the case of telepathic twin sisters separated by a span of dozens of light-years. Noelle had nothing but faith to support her belief that the power that joined their minds was wholly unaffected by distance, but her faith had been secure up till that moment of sudden panic just now. She and Yvonne had often spoken to each other from opposite sides of the planet without difficulty, had they not?
Yes. Yes. But would it be so simple when they were half a galaxy apart?
The last hours before departure time were ticking down. The ship was full of people, not all of them actual members of the crew. Noelle felt their presences all around her: men, a lot of them, deep voices, a special sharpness to their sweat. Some women too. The rustle of different kinds of garments, thin robes, crisp blouses, the clink of jewelry. Everybody tense: she could smell it, a sharpness in the air. She could hear it in the subliminal hesitations of their voices.
Well, why not be tense? Switches would be thrown and incomprehensible forces would come into play and the starship would vanish with all hands into nowhere.
There had been test voyages, of course. This project was almost a century old. The unmanned nospace ships, first, going out on short journeys into absolute strangeness and successfully sending radio messages back, which arrived after the obligatory interval that radio transmission imposes. And then two manned journeys into interstellar space, small ships carrying unimaginably courageous volunteers — theColumbus and theUltima Thule, names out of antiquity given new gloss. TheColumbus had traveled eleven light-months, theUltima Thule fourteen; and both had returned safely. The second of those voyages had been carried out seven years ago. Members of its crew had spoken to them, trying to explain what nospace travel would feel like to them. No one had grasped anything of what they were saying, least of all Noelle.
Now the Wotan — more ancient mythology, a ship named for some shaggy savage indomitable headstrong god of the northern forests — was ready to go. And am I? Noelle wondered. Am I?
Final speeches. Much orotund noise. Drums and trumpets. The exit of the high governmental officials who bad come aboard to see them off. The year-captain — they had elected him yesterday, the dour Scandinavian man with the wonderfully musical voice — telling them to prepare themselves for departure, by which he meant, apparently, to say any sort of prayers that they might find meaningful, or at least to do whatever it was they did to compose their minds as they prepared to make the irrevocable transition from one life to another.
— yvonne? Do you hear me?
— Of course I do.
— We’re about to get going.
— I know. I know.
There was no sensation of acceleration. Why should there be? This was no shuttle ride from Earth to the Moon, or to some satellite world. There was no propulsive engine aboard other than the relatively insignificant braking motor to be used when they reached their destination; no thrust was being applied; none of the conventional patterns of acceleration were being established. Some sort of drive mechanism was at work in the bowels of the ship, yes; some sort of forces was being generated; some kind of movement was taking place. But not Newtonian, not in any way Einsteinian. The movement was from space to nospace, where relativity did not apply. Mass, inertia, acceleration, velocity — they were irrelevant concepts here. One moment they had been hanging in midspace only a few thousand kilometers above the face of the Earth, and in the next they were floating, silent as a comet, through a tube in a folded and pleated alternative universe that ran adjacent to and interlineated with the experiential universe of stars and planets, of mass and force and gravitation and inertia, of photons and electrons and neutrinos and quarks, of earth, air, fire, and water. Caught up in some unthinkable flux, hurled with unimaginable swiftness through an utter empty darkness a thousand times blacker than the darkness in which she had spent her whole life.
It had happened, yes. Noelle had no doubt of it. There had been an instant in which she seemed to be at the brink of an infinite abyss. And then she knew she was in nospace. Something had happened; something had changed. But it was unquantifiable and altogether undefinable. Forces beyond her comprehension, powered by mysterious energies that spanned the cosmos from rib to rib, had come abruptly into play, hurling the Wotan smoothly and swiftly from the experiential universe, the universe of space and time and matter, into this other place. She knew it had happened. But she had no idea how she knew that she knew.
— Yvonne? Can you hear me now, Yvonne?
The reply came right away, with utter instantaneity. Not even time for a moment of terror. There was Yvonne, immediately, comfortingly:
— I hear you, yes.
The signal was pure and clear and sharp. And so it remained, day after day.
Throughout the strange early hours of the voyage Noelle and Yvonne were rarely out of contact with each other for more than a moment, and there was no perceptible falling off of reception as the starship headed outward. They might have been no farther from each other than in adjacent rooms. Past the orbital distance of the Moon, past the million-kilometer mark, past the orbital distance of Mars: everything stayed clear and sharp, clear and sharp. The sisters had passed the first test: clarity of signal was not a quantitative function of distance, apparently.
But — so it had been explained to them — the ship at this point was still traveling at sublight velocity. It took time, even in nospace, to build up to full speed. The process of nospace acceleration — qualitatively different,conceptually different, from anything that anyone understood as acceleration in normal space, but a kind of acceleration all the same — was a gradual one. They would not reach the speed of light for several days.
The speed of light! Magical barrier! Noelle had heard so much about it: the limiting velocity, the borderline between the known and the unknown. What would happen to the bond between them, once the Wotan was on the far side of it? Noelle had no real idea. Already she was in a space apart from Yvonne, and still could feel her tangible presence: that much was immensely reassuring. But when the starship had crossed into that realm where even a photon was forbidden to go? What then, what then? No one had discussed these things with her. She scarcely understood them. But she had always heard that traveling faster than light involved paradox, mystery, strangeness. There was an element of the forbidden about it. It was against the law.