Robert Silverberg: Starborne

“The eighth day. Do you think she’ll come out of it at all?”

Leon shrugs. “How can I say? What do I know? Am I an expert on things of this sort? Is anybody?”

“I understand,” says the year-captain softly.

She has been wandering in delirium most of the time since losing consciousness. Troubled, fearful, the year-captain has kept a somber vigil at her bedside, losing track of the time himself as the days slide by and there is no change in her condition.

Sometimes it seems to him that she is rising toward consciousness; intelligible words, even whole sentences, bubble dreamily from her lips. The dreaming Noelle 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.

A metaphor for what , though? Where is she, what is happening to her? Has she been speaking with angels, actual holy angels, or are they stars, or has she simply shed the last shred of her sanity during her venture into the gray nothingness beyond the ship? She seems lost in some unknown and unknowable realm. Her face is flushed; her eyes move about rapidly, darting like trapped fish beneath her closed lids. Words continue to come from her from time to time. Mind to mind, Noelle whispers, the star and I. Mind to mind. Sometimes she begins to hum — an edgy whining sound, climbing almost toward inaudibility, a high-frequency keening. It pains him to hear it: it has the force of hard radiation, expressed as sound.

He has never felt so tired before. He has scarcely slept at all since he and Huw pushed open the door of her cabin and found her in the coma.

She is humming again now, that terrible sound. He clenches his jaws, balls his hands into fists, and forces himself to withstand it. After a while she is silent again.

Then her body goes rigid, pelvis thrusting upward. A convulsion of some sort? No. She’s simply stirring, awakening, at last! He sees lightning bolts of perception flashing through her quivering musculature: the galvanized laboratory frog, twitching at the end of its leads. Her eyelids tremble. She makes a little moaning noise. And her eyes are open.

She looks up at him.

The year-captain stares into her eyes. There is something different about them now. Something new. Something astonishing.

Gently he says, “Your eyes are open. I think you can see me now, Noelle.” He moves his hand back and forth across her face, and her eyes follow the movement.

“I — can — see you, yes. I can see you.”

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 very worried.”

“You look exactly as I thought you would look,” she says. “Your face is thin and hard. But not a dark face. Not a hostile face. I like your face, year-captain.”

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

She smiles. Nods. “I went to visit the … angel. I talked with it.”

“Angel? Really, an angel ?”

“Not really, no. That’s just a word, ‘angel.’ It wasn’t an angel, I suppose, not the kind people used to pray to. Not a physical being, either, not any kind of intelligent organic life-form. It was — was—”

He waits. He stares at her in wonder and bewilderment. He is stunned by the beauty of her eyes, now that her eyes are alive and focused on him.

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?”