Starborne by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online Page B

like playing ches s. When a chess game begins, the first player to move is facing less than two dozen possible moves. In Go , there are 361 potential moves in the first turn. There are more possible ways for a game of Go to unfold than there are atoms in the universe. The ch ess board has just 64 squares, across which an ever-diminishing number of pieces is deployed, redu c ing and simplifying the number of options available to each player as the original 32 pieces dwindle down to a handful. The number of Go pieces also diminish es gradually as the game proceeds, but their absence makes the patterns on the board more complicated rather than simpler during the unfolding battle for territory.
    Even so, Noelle seems to be grasping the essentials. Within twenty minutes she appears to u nderstand the basic ploys. And there is no que s tion that she is able to hold the board firmly fixed on the internal screen of her mind. Several times, in describing maneuvers to her, the year-captain gives her an incorrect coordinate — the first time by acc i dent, for the board is not actually marked with printed numbers and le t ters, and, since it is a long time since he last has played, he misgauges the coordinates occasionally — and then twice more deliberately, to test her. Each time she corrects him, gently saying, “ N13? Don ’ t you mean N12?”
    At length she says, “ I think I follow everything now. Would you like to play a game?”
    ***
    In the baths later that day Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth discuss the year-captain ’ s putative sex life. It is one of their favorite speculative subjects. Most of the sex that goes on aboard the ship, and there is quite a good deal of it, takes place in complete openness, figuratively and o f ten literally. These people are the product of a highly civilized, perhaps over-civilized, epoch. Very little is taboo to them. But the year-captain, unlike virtually everyone else on board, is scrupulous about his privacy.
    “ He doesn ’ t have any sex and he doesn ’ t want any,” Paco insists. “ He was a monk, just before he joined us, you know. That weird c olony of meditating mystics up by the North Pole somewhere off the coast of Scandinavia. And a monk is still what he is, at heart. A man of ice through and through. It shows in his face, that lean and grim thin-lipped face with that little beard that he k e eps cropped so short. And in his eyes, especially. Those terrible blue eyes. Like the blue ice of a glacier, they are. They show you the interior of the man himself.”
    “ Wrong,” Elizabeth says. “ Ice outside, fire within.”
    “ And you hold with those who favor f ire,” Paco says jeeringly. “ Don ’ t think I don ’ t listen when you start quoting poetry.”
    Elizabeth, reddening down to her bony breast, sticks her tongue out at him.
    “ You ’ re in love with him,” Paco says. “ Aren ’ t you, Lizzy?”
    Instead of answering, she turns the tank nozzle toward him and douses him with a foaming spray of hot water. Paco, more amused than annoyed, snorts and bellows like a breaching walrus and rises with a powerful thrust of his elbows, launching himself towar d her, catching her around the middle, pulling her down into the tank and pushing her head under water. Elizabeth thrashes about in his grasp, wildly wigwa g ging her lean delicate arms, then frantically kicking her long frail legs in the air as Paco, roaring with laughter, up-ends her. Heinz, who is elo n gated and lean, with a sly ever-smiling face and a slippery, practically hairless body, glides forward and jams Paco under the surface with her, and for a couple of moments all three of them are splashing chao tically, forming an incoherent tangle of writhing limbs, the pale thin Nordic Elizabeth and the stocky swarthy Latin Paco and the gleaming, beautiful Teutonic Heinz. Then they bob to the top all at once, laughing, gasping merrily for breath.
    Paco and Heinz and Elizabeth have been an inseparable triad for