Robert Silverberg: Starborne

— oh God I am Semele—

Now she is terrified. This is too much to face. She will be consumed; she will be obliterated. Noelle withdraws again, hastily. Back within the sanctuary of the ship. Rests, regroups. Tries to regenerate her powers , but they are badly depleted. Exhausted, at least for the time being. Rest, then. Rest. This is very difficult, very dangerous. She knows it’s unwise to continue right now. She will not attempt to go out into the Intermundium a third time that day.

They’re really and truly there,” she says. She is pale, weary, still badly off balance. It is two hours since her return from her adventure. The entire excursion had taken no more than a few minutes, apparently. It seemed like years to her. And to those waiting for her to emerge from her trance.

They are with her in the control cabin for the debriefing: Heinz, Huw, Leon, Elizabeth, Imogen, Julia. The year-captain is there too, of course. “I could feel them hovering somewhere outside the ship. Angels.”

“Angels?” Heinz asks, sounding startled. He seems uncharacteristically subdued. “Actually, literally?”

“You mean, divine beings with human form, only with wings, like in the old paintings?” Noelle says.

“And names and identities,” says Elizabeth. “Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, Azrael. God’s lieutenants.”

“I don’t know that they’re really angels,” Noelle says. “That was just the word we all started to use for them.”

“And surely you must know that I was just using the word lightly,” Heinz says. “It was only a hypothesis, a thought-experiment, when I talked about angels. I never seriously believed there was any kind of intelligence out there, let alone angels. You say you saw something , though.”

There are frowns. It is strange to speak of Noelle as “seeing” anything. But who knows what sort of sense-equivalents she experiences through her mind-powers?

“Felt,” says Noelle. “Didn’t see.”

“And were they really angels or weren’t they?” Heinz asks.

Noelle smiles faintly, shakes her head. “How would I know? But I don’t think they were, not literal angels. I told you, I didn’t see anything. But I felt them. Forces . Immense nodes of power, each one revolving on its own axis. If that’s what angels are, then the presence of angels is what I felt.”

“Forces,” Elizabeth says. “I wonder, is that one of the categories of angels?” She counts on her fingers. “Choirs, Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers — Powers, that would be just about the same as Forces—”

The year-captain leans forward and says quietly to Noelle, “Are you able to give us any kind of description in words of what you experienced?”

“No.”

“How far from the ship were you when you began to perceive them?”

“I can’t tell you that, either. Nothing makes sense out there. Certainly not distance. It’s all just one infinite featureless gray blur, just like what you say you see through the viewplate, but going on and on and on.”

“Did they seem relatively close, at least?” he asks.

Noelle turns the palms of her hands upward and outward, a gesture signifying helplessness. “I can’t say. There’s nothing like ‘close’ or ‘far’ out there. Everything is the same distance from everything else. I don’t know whether I was in the tube or out of it when I saw them.”

“And yet you could distinguish relative sizes, at least. These things were big .”

“Bigger than me, yes. Much bigger. Immense. That was easy enough to tell. I felt enormous power. It was like standing at the edge of a gigantic furnace. I could hear it roaring.”

“One furnace, or many?” Huw asks.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Sometimes it felt like just one, sometimes I thought there were thousands of them all around me.” Noelle gives them a faint, ashen-faced smile. “You’re all trying to get me to put what I felt into concrete, understandable terms, but that just isn’t possible. All I can tell you is that I went out there and after a little while I felt something, something , very large, very powerful, a huge radiant source of energy. If that’s what angels are like, then I encountered an angel. I don’t know what meeting an angel is supposed to be like. Or how important it is to call what I met by any sort of name. I only know? that there was something out there and I think that it’s the something that’s interfering with the transmissions.”

“Will you want to try contacting it again?” the year-captain asks gently.

“Not right now.”

“I understand. Later on, though?”

“Of course. I’m not going to stop here. I can’t. But not now — not — now—”

Leon says, “We should let her rest.”

The year-captain nods. “Yes. Absolutely.” He signals to the others, and they begin to leave. “Come,” he says to Noelle. “I’ll take you back to your cabin.”

Ordinarily she bridles at being offered help in getting around the ship. Not today, though. She gets slowly to her feet and he slips his arm around her shoulders, and they walk together down the corridor, slowly, very slowly.

He halts at the door of the cabin. He does not attempt to go in with her, nor does she invite him to.

Softly he says, “Was it very scary?”

“Scary and wonderful, both. I’ll go out there and do it again when I’ve had a chance to rest.”

“I don’t want you to harm yourself, Noelle.”

“As long as I rest enough between each attempt, I’ll be all right.”

“And if you should make contact, real contact, and the power turns out to be too strong for you to handle — ?”

“Semele?”

“Semele, yes.”

“I looked the story up, you know. It’s in the myth section of the archives, exactly the way you told it to me, except that you left out the part about Zeus hiding the baby in his thigh. But that isn’t important. Semele dies, yes. But first she gets to be the lover of a god. And the mother of another one. And she lives forever in the myth.”

“That’s all well and good. But you mustn’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“These are necessary risks. It has to be done.”

“Yes,” the year-captain says. “It does have to be done, doesn’t it? I should let you rest now, Noelle.”

She goes inside. He closes the cabin door behind her and walks slowly up the corridor to his own room.

There is great general excitement and no little bewilderment over Noelle’s discovery outside the ship; but then a few days go by, and a few more, and she does not make a new attempt at reaching the angels. She is not ready yet, she says. She must find ways of insulating herself against the immense magnitude of the force that she will encounter.

And so they wait, and discuss, and speculate, and wonder. What else can they do?

During this time the ship continues to head toward Hesper’s Planet C, and Hesper continues to fill them with his usual torrent of optimistic details about their upcoming destination’s great potential as a settlement world. It is, he says, the large and impressive sixth planet of a large and impressive golden-red sun. It has, he declares, all the right properties of atmosphere and gravitation and temperature and such, and a crust that he is completely certain will yield a richly rewarding abundance of every useful element known to the universe. He believes that Planet C has oceans and rivers and lakes, and a fine-looking moon just about as large as the moon of Earth, and a great many other outstanding Features that will afford much comfort and pleasure to the lonely wanderers from Earth.

In Hesper’s mind, it would seem, the Wotan has already reached Planet C and a successful surveillance mission has been carried out, and now they have all shuttled down to its richly rewarding surface and are busily constructing the crude but charming buildings that will house the colony in its developmental stages. No one else, though, pays much attention to Hesper’s rapturous forecasts. The minds of the others are focused almost entirely on the angels that lurk somewhere all about them in the mysterious void outside the ship. “Angels” is still what everybody calls them, for lack of any better term.