She says, “It was more like the energy creatures that Heinz was talking about. Incorporeal, is what I mean. But bigger than we could have imagined. Bigger than a whole planet, even. Tremendously big. I don’t know what it was. Not at all.”
“You told me you were talking with a star.”
“ — with a star!” As though it is a completely new idea to her.
“In your delirium. That’s what you said. Talking with a star.”
Her eyes blaze with wild excitement. “Of course! A star! Yes! Yes, year-captain! I think that’s what it was, yes! I was talking with a star.”
Despair engulfs him. She is very far gone in madness, he tells himself.
But he keeps his voice calm. “But how can you talk with a star? What does that mean, talking with a star, Noelle?”
She laughs. “It means talking with a star, year-captain. Nothing more, nothing less. A great ball of fiery gas, year-captain, and it has a mind, it has a consciousness. I think that’s what it was. I’m sure now. I’m sure!”
“But how can a—”
The light goes abruptly from her eyes. They have lost focus. Has she reentered the coma? Apparently so. At any rate she is traveling again; she is no longer with him.
He waits beside her bed. An hour, two hours. Rises. Paces. Sits. Waits. Where has she gone? In what bizarre realm is she journeying now? Her breathing is a distant, impersonal drone. So far away from her now, so remote from any place that he is capable of comprehending.
At last her eyelids flicker again. And then they open.
She looks up at him. Her eyes are living eyes, as they were before. Her face seems transfigured. She is in bliss. To the year-captain she seems still to be at least in part in that other world beyond the ship. “Yes,” she says. “Not an angel, year-captain. A sun. A living intelligent sun.” Her eyes are radiant. “A sun, a star, a sun,” she murmurs. The words are crazy, but not the voice. “I touched the consciousness of a sun. Many suns. Do you believe that, year-captain? Can you? I found a network of stars that live, that think, that have minds, that have souls. That communicate. The whole universe is alive.”
“A star,” he says dully. “You talked with a star. The stars have minds.”
“Yes.”
“All of them? Our own sun too?”
“All of them. They sit out here and talk to each other. We were moving between them, out here in the middle of the galaxy, and their conversations drowned out my link with Yvonne. That was the interference, year-captain. It was the stars, talking to each other out here. Filling my wavelength, leaving me no room to get through to Yvonne.”
This conversation has taken on for him the texture of a dream. Quietly he says, “Why wasn’t our sun overriding you and Yvonne while you were still back on Earth?”
She shrugs. “It isn’t old enough. I saw it — the angel took me to see it. Our sun. It’s like a child, a little child playing a game of hoops in a playground. It takes — I don’t know, many billions of years — until they’re mature, until they can talk to each other on the main frequency. Our sun just isn’t old enough, year-captain. None of the stars close to Earth is old enough. But out here—”
“Are you in contact with it now?”
“Yes. With it and with many others. And with Yvonne.”
Madness. Madness.
“Yvonne too?” he asks.
“She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle looks straight into his eyes. “I can bring others into the circuit. I could bring you in, year-captain.”
“Me?”
“You. Would you like to touch a star with your mind?”
“What will happen to me? Will it harm me?”
“Did it harm me, year-captain?”
“Will I still be me, afterward?”
“Am I still me, year-captain?”
He is silent for a long time.
Then in a dull, strange voice he says, “I’m afraid, Noelle.”
“No. You’ve never been afraid of anything.”
“I’m afraid now. Afraid of this.”
“No. No.”
“I am.”
“Open to me. Try. See what happens.”
“And if I don’t like it?”
“You will. You will. Have faith, year-captain. You had faith in something when you joined this expedition, didn’t you? You must have. Have faith now. Tell me: do you believe any of what I’ve been saying to you since I awakened?”
He hesitates.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he says, recklessly.
“Then have faith in me. Touch a star, year-captain.”
He puts his hand on hers. “Go ahead,” he says, and his soul becomes a solarium.
Afterward, with the solar pulsations still reverberating in the mirrors of his mind, with blue-white sparks leaping in his synapses, he says, “What about the others?”
“I’ll bring them in too.”
The year-captain, for all the changes that he has undergone in these last few moments, nevertheless feels a sudden surprising flicker of momentary petty resentment. He does not want to share with all of them the thing that he has attained with Noelle. She is his; he is hers. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment he realizes the absurdity of it, and he abolishes it. Yvonne is here too. He can feel her, Noelle’s other half. Earth-sister, star-sister, both together once more, and he is with them. The others should join them also. Yes. Yes. Let them in.
“Take my hand,” Noelle says.
They reach out together. Their mind moves through the ship and one by one it finds and touches the other voyagers. Sieglinde is the first they encounter, blustery, recalcitrant Sieglinde; and she seems to understand at once, and yields. Then Zena; then Leila, then Elizabeth, with a cry of joy. Heinz. He dives in without hesitation. Paco, after just a moment of uncertainty, gives himself to it in the deepest gladness and relief. Leon. Roy. On and on through the ship. One after another, and the more of them that are in it, the more swiftly the rest accede. The year-captain feels Noelle surging in tandem with him as the union grows, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, ancient. All are joined. The whole ship is one. The words of the final verses of the ancient Norse poem that he once knew so well, that dark saga of the Twilight of the Gods, roll through his mind. Now do I see the earth anew rise all green from the waves again… In wondrous beauty once again shall the golden tables stand ‘mid the grass…
He and Noelle step out into the corridor. They are all out there, wandering around in wonder. No one speaks. He sees shining eyes everywhere. The year-captain realizes that he is captain no longer: there is no need for a captain here. And the days of playingGo have ended too. They are one person; they are beyond games. Go would be impossible now for them to play, for how can one compete against oneself?
…then fields unsowed bear ripened fruit. All ills grow better, and Baldur comes back…
“And now,” Noelle whispers, “now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength in Yvonne, and Yvonne will—”
Yvonne draws Earth’s hundreds of millions of souls into the network in one great gulp, everyone, everyone, and the next phase of human life begins.
The Wotan hurtles onward through the nospace tube. Soon they will arrive at Planet C; and they will send down explorers to see if the newest world they have found is a fair and lovely place where the sons and daughters of mankind can thrive. If it is, they will settle there. And if not, they will go on, on toward Planet D, and Planet E, and Planet X and Y and Z. They are confident that eventually they will find a world whose air they can breathe and whose water they can drink and whose land they can farm, and where they can plant the seed of Earth in a new beginning. But it will not matter at all if they never do. All will be well, even so. The ship and its hundreds of millions of passengers will course onward through the universe forever, warmed by the light of the friendly stars.