Robert Silverberg - Ship-Sister, Star-Sister

Yes.

Approaching the angel.

See? Here am I. Noelle. Noelle. Noelle. I come to you in love and fear. Touch me lightly. Just touch me —

Just a touch-Touch—

Oh. Oh.

I see you. The light — eye of crystal — fountains of lava — oh, the light — your light — I see —I see —

Oh, like a god—

— and Semele unshed to behold Zeus in all his brightness, and Zeus would have discouraged her; but Semele insisted and Zeus who loved her could not refuse her; so Zeus came upon her in full majesty and Semele was consumed by his glory, so that only the ashes of her remained, but the son she had conceived by Zeus, the boy Dionysus, was not destroyed, and Zeus saved Dionysus and took him away sealed in his thigh, bringing him forth afterward and bestowing godhood upon him —

—oh God I am Semele—

She withdraws again. Rests, regroups her powers. The force of this being is frightening. But there are ways of insulating herself against destruction, of letting the overflow of energy dissipate itself. She will try once more. She knows she stands at the brink of wonders. Now. Now. The questing mind reaches forth.

I am Noelle. I come to you in love, angel.

Contact.

The universe is burning. Bursts of wild silver light streak across the metal dome of the sky. Words turn to ash. Walls smoulder and burst into flames. There is contact. A dancing solar flare—a stream of liquid fire—a flood-tide of brilliant radiance, irresistible, unendurable, running into her, sweeping over her, penetrating her. Light everywhere.

— Semele.

The angel smiles and she quakes. Open to me, cries the vast tolling voice, and she opens and the force enters fully, sweeping through her

She has been in a coma for days, wandering in delirium. Troubled, fearful, the year-captain keeps a somber vigil at her bedside. Sometimes she seems to rise toward consciousness; intelligible words, even whole sentences, bubble dreamily from her lips. She talks of light, of a brilliant, unbearable white glow, of arcs of energy, of intense solar eruptions. A star holds me, she mutters. She tells him that she has been conversing with a star. How poetic, the year-captain thinks: what a lovely metaphor. Conversing with a star. But where is she, what is happening to her? Her face is flushed; her eyes move about rapidly, darting like trapped fish beneath her closed lids. Mind to mind, she whispers, the star and I, mind to mind. She begins to hum—an edgy, whining sound, climbing almost toward inaudibility, a high-frequency keening. It pains him to hear it: hard aural radiation. Then she is silent.

Her body goes rigid. A convulsion of some sort? No. She is awakening. He sees lightning-bolts of perception flashing through her quivering musculature: the galvanized frog, twitching at the end of its leads. Her eyelids tremble. She makes a little moaning noise.

She looks up at him.

The year-captain says gently, “Your eyes are open. I think you can see me now, Noelle. Your eyes are tracking me, aren’t they?”

“I can see you, yes.” Her voice is hesitant, faltering, strange for a moment, a foreign voice, but then it becomes more like its usual self as she asks, “How long was I away?”

“Eight ship-days. We were worried.”

“You look exactly as I though you would look,” she says. “Your face is hard. But not a dark face. Not a hostile face.”

“Do you want to talk about where you went, Noelle?”

She smiles. “I talked with the—angel.”

“Angel?”

“Not really an angel, year-captain. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of alien species. More like the energy-creatures Heinz was discussing. But bigger. Bigger. I don’t know what it was, year-captain.”

“You told me you were talking with a star.”

“—a star!”

“In your delirium. That’s what you said.”

Her eyes blaze with excitement, “A star! Yes! Yes, year-captain! I think I was, yes!”

“But what does that mean: talking to a star?”

She laughs. “It means talking to a star, year-captain. 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. She is traveling again; she is no longer with him. He waits beside her bed. An hour, two hours, half a day. What bizarre realm has she penetrated? Her breathing is a distant, impersonal drone. So far away from him now, so remote from any place he comprehends. At last her eyelids flicker. She looks up. Her face seems transfigured. To the year-captain she still appears to be partly 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. “I touched the consciousness of a sun. Do you believe that, year-captain? 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. “The stars have minds.”

“Yes.”

“All of them? Our own sun too?”

“All of them. We came to the place in the galaxy where this star lives, and it was broadcasting on my wavelength, and its output began overriding my link with Yvonne. That was the interference, year-captain. The big star, broadcasting.”

This conversation has taken on for him the texture of a dream. He says quietly, “Why didn’t Earth’s sun override you and Yvonne when you were on Earth?”

She shrugs. “It isn’t old enough. It takes—I don’t know —billions of years until they’re mature, until they can transmit. Our sun 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.”

“Yvonne too?”

“She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle pauses. “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?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Open to me. Try. See what happens.”

“I’m afraid.”

“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.”

He feels a flicker of momentary resentment. He does not want to share the illumination. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment, he abolishes it. Let them in.

“Take my hand,” Noelle says.

They reach out together. One by one they touch the others. Roy. Sylvia. Heinz. Elliot. He feels Noelle surging in tandem with him, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, eternal. All are joined. Ship-sister, star-sister: all become one. The year-captain realizes that the days of playing go have ended. They are one person; they are beyond games.

“And now,” Noelle whispers. “Now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength into Yvonne, and Yvonne—”

Yvonne draws Earth’s seven billion into the network.