Free Starborne by Robert Silverberg

But the Earth and Sun disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by an eerie pearly blan k ness, as the Wotan made its giddy leap into a matter-free tube and began its long jou rney toward an unknown destination.
    ***
    Someone is standing beside him now, here at the six-month-anniversary celebration. Elizabeth, it is. She puts a glass of wine in his hand.
    “ The last of the wine, year-captain. Don ’ t miss out.” She has obv i ously alrea dy had her share, and then some. “   ‘ Drink! For you know not whence you came, nor why: Drink! For you know not why you go, nor where. ’   ” She is quoting something again, he realizes. Her mind is a warehouse of old poems.
    “ Is that Shakespeare?” he asks.
    “ The Rubaiyat ,” she says. “ Do you know it? ‘ Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring the winter garment of repentance fling. ’   ” She is very giddy. She rubs up against him, lurching a little, just as he puts the wine to his lips; but he keeps his balance an d not a drop is spilled. “   ‘ The bird of time, ’   ” she cries, “   ‘ has but a little way to fly — and lo! The bird is on the wing. ’   ”
    Elizabeth staggers, nearly goes sprawling. Quickly the year-captain slips his arm under hers, pulls her up, steadies her. She pre sses her thin body eagerly against his; she is murmuring things into his ear, not poe t ry this time, but a flow of explicit obscenities, startling and a little funny coming from this bookish unvoluptuous woman. Her slurred words are not entirely easy to mak e out against the roaring background of the pa r ty, but it is quite clear that she is inviting him to her cabin.
    “ Come,” he says, as she weaves muzzily about, trying to get into p o sition for a kiss. He grips her tightly, propelling her forward, and cuts a p ath across the room to Heinz, who is pouring somebody else ’ s di s carded drink into his glass with the total concentration of an alchemist about to produce gold from lead. “ I think she ’ s had just a little too much,” the year-captain tells him, and smoothly hands Elizabeth over to him.
    Just beyond him is Noelle, quiet, alone, an island of serenity in the tumult. The year-captain wonders if she is telling her sister about the party.
    Astonishingly, she seems aware that someone is approaching her. She turns to face him as he comes up next to her.
    “ How are you doing?” he asks her. “ Everything all right?”
    “ Fine. Fine. It ’ s a wonderful party, isn ’ t it, year-captain?”
    “ Marvelous,” he says. He stares shamelessly at her. She seems to have overcome yesterday ’ s fatigue; she is beautiful again. But her bea u ty, he decides, is like the beauty of a flawless marble statue in some museum of Greek antiquities. One admires it; one does not necessarily want to embrace it. “ It ’ s hard to believe that six months have gone by so fast, isn ’ t it?” he asks, wanting to say something and unable to find an y thing less fatuous to offer.
    Noelle makes no reply, simply smiles up at him in that impersonal way of hers, as th ough she has already gone back to whatever convers a tion with her distant sister he has in all probability interrupted. She is an eternal mystery to him. He studies her lovely unreadable face a moment more; then he moves away from her without a further word . She will know, somehow, that he is no longer standing by her side.
    ***
    There is trouble again in the transmission the next day. When Noelle makes the morning report, Yvonne complains that the signal is coming through indistinctly and noisily. But Noelle, telling this to the year-captain, does not seem as distraught as she had been over the first episode of fuzzy transmission. Evidently she has decided that the noise is some sort of local phenomenon, an artifact of this particular sector of nospace — someth i ng like a sunspot effect, maybe — and will vanish once they have moved farther from the source of the