Free Starfarers by Poul Anderson Page B

placing the hors d’oeuvres and the first bottles.
    When the whole company was seated, Nansen tapped his goblet with a knife. The chime brought talk buzzing to a halt. Attention swung toward him, at the head of the table in a gray tunic with gold trim. “Silence, please,” he said. “A moment for those who wish to bless our meal.”
    He crossed himself. He was nominally a Reform Catholic, as observant as he felt good manners required. Ruszek did likewise. Zeyd bowed his head. Mokoena looked down at her folded hands and whispered. Yu and Sundaram grew meditative. The rest waited respectfully.
    “Well, ladies and gentlemen,” Nansen resumed, “now that we are properly on our cruise, let’s do more than practice being a crew. Let’s take pleasure in each other and in the voyage we’ll share.” His cordiality gave way to seriousness. “I promise not to make speeches at you as a regular thing, but on this first occasion a few remarks do seem in order. You are all aware of these matters and have given them much thought. I would simply like to set them forth in a few words, to make sure we share the same understanding. Anyone who feels I am wrong about anything, please say so, if not here then at our regular discussion sessions.
    “We are going on what may be the greatest adventure in human history. I believe it will be even more an adventure of the spirit than of the body and mind. We’ve had our different reasons for joining it, and not all those reasons are happy. But let us leave sorrow, guilt, and doubt behind us. Let us expect wonders.
    “Nevertheless, we will be more alone than ten souls ever were alone before. Only ten—”
    Lesser expeditions had borne more, as many as fifty, not individual scientists and technicians but teams of them. Advances in computer systems and robotics had not brought the desirable number quite this low. But willingness and competence rarely came together for a voyage like
Envoy’s
; and, yes, a skeleton crew required less mass of supplies and life support, which meant that the ship’s drive, unprecedentedly powerful though it was, could bring them still closer to
c
, slicing centuries off the journey time; and, psychologists thought, an uncrowded interior should make for less human friction, which might well prove important. When the very objective of the mission was unknown, you proceeded according to your best guess to do the best you were able with what you had.
    “We can never return home. When we come back to Earth, we will necessarily come as foreigners, immigrants. I think that what we bring will make us welcome, and we will find new friends and found new homes. But none can ever be close to us in the way that we are—that we must be—to each other. We have to become more than a crew. We have to become a family.
    “I wish we could start with established, stable relationships between us, especially between men and women. But we are who we are, the handful of people best suited for this voyage, and we cannot wait for a fall set of arrangements to develop, or the voyage will never begin. So we must not only be brave, we must be tolerant, sympathetic, and generous. Let us remember always, above and beyond everything else in us, we are the crewfolk of humankind’s
Envoy.
    “All this is perfectly obvious. But—word magic, if you like—I felt it needed saying forth. Now, if you please, I will propose one toast before we dine.” He lifted his dry sherry. “To the stars.”
    Coming from anyone else the speech might have been pretentious. Don Ricardo knew how to carry such things off.

8.
    After the ship returned to high Earth orbit, her people had six weeks’ liberty before she departed for the Centaur.
    Steel rang. Nansen parried and riposted. Light flashed at the tip of his saber as it made contact.
“Touché!”
acknowledged Pierre Desmoulins.
“Très belle!”
In a series of lunges, glides, and thrusts, Nansen had driven him back halfway across the floor.
    For a