The Ryl ship is no more than a few dozen feet away now, and he sees Ningal waiting for him underneath the outer edge of the ship’s hull. She opens her arms as if she’s welcoming him home. He steps into her embrace and she takes hold of him with great affection. It feels remarkably good to see her again.
“It is good to see you again, Frank Borman. Are you ready?” She makes him feel like he’s the only man alive with whom she would deign to spend her time.
He nods. She leads him inside the ship.
36
A remarkably familiar sense of surprise washes over Borman as he steps through the entryway and into the interior of the Ryl spacecraft. Seeing it again is a revelation. At the same time, he remembers everything from his first onboard visit. Thus, he gazes about the ship with a distinct and unsettling sense of déjà vu. He hears a dull thud and remembers this is the outer hatch closing. Meaning they will be airborne within moments. He seems to recall there is no immediate need to strap himself in — by some peculiar quirk of Ryl technology, the ship’s interior is unaffected by the G-forces of the ship’s acceleration. On his first flight, they were in space before he knew they’d left the ground.
“We are airborne,” she confirms. “You can remove your helmet, you don’t need it in here.”
He’s more than happy to do so. For one thing, he can barely hear her above the sound of his own breathing. He snaps open the airtight seal and pulls off his headgear with a hiss as the suit pressure equalizes with the thinner atmosphere of the ship’s interior.
Borman looks around. Almost everything he sees is black. But it’s a nuanced black, sometimes glossy, elsewhere dull and matte — the floor gleaming and mirrored, the walls plush and cross-hatched like a quilted blanket. He takes off his gloves to touch them, and is surprised to find they are warm and leathery like skin. The spacecraft’s surfaces appear feminine… soft and curved, with no hard lines or edges visible anywhere.
He feels like he is standing inside the belly of some massive alien beast. It’s alive, this ship. This much he remembers clearly. It also smells like her. As he comes to this realization, he immediately has the sense he is standing inside her private chamber, a space built for her comfort and ease of travel. And a part of him remembers it is for her alone. Her brother, and whoever else may be aboard with them, travel in separate quarters.
He wants to ask her questions, but at the same time is reluctant to say or do anything that may seem foolish to her. So for the time being, he keeps his mouth shut. Toward the front of the open cabin, there are two deep blue seats — one larger than the other — set behind a plain white panel. They are curved and inviting, like comfortable recliners. He puts his gloves inside his helmet and drops it to the floor beside the smaller of the chairs, then sits down. Its edges curve around his body, moving to the shape of his spine and shoulders. It feels remarkably like being cradled in a massive hand. Ningal takes the seat beside him and he watches as her seat likewise changes shape, hugging the curves of her body.
“No harnesses,” he says, intending it as a question, but then remembering this is indeed the case.
“No,” she concurs. “Not needed.” She smiles patiently. She touches the white panel in front of her; lights and symbols of various colors appear beneath her long fingers as they dance across the ship’s propulsion and navigational interface. A touch-sensitive keypad, minus the keys.
A window appears on the ship’s black interior directly in front of them, a giant display screen so clear and sharp, it’s as if a hole has opened up in the hull. He watches as the Earth gets rapidly smaller, just like when Apollo 8 flew to the Moon… although this time with far greater velocity and acceleration. Yet there is no sense of movement. It’s the strangest thing, knowing he is moving at great speed, but feeling not even the gentlest vibration. The flight chair hardly seems necessary, no more than an affectation. Perhaps it is intended to put him at ease, but it serves no real purpose. All of these things flash through his mind in moments as the Earth becomes smaller and smaller.
“I’ve been thinking about that moment we met,” he says. “Wondering if you and Utu were alone on your ship, or whether you had a platoon of heavily armed soldiers in here poised for action if the talks didn’t go so well.”
She says, “It was just us.”
“But surely you have weapon systems on this ship, right? I mean, you don’t just land at a US airbase without taking some precautions.”
She nods sagely. “We know you better than you know yourselves, Colonel Frank Borman. We also know our presence, indeed our very existence, remains a closely held secret among you. We were familiar with all who attended the meeting, and knew in advance who would be there. Which is not to say we trust their intentions, but we knew enough to feel our safety was not under threat.”
Her avoidance of the weapon question only makes him suspect all the more that the Ryl ship is armed. The Earth finally disappears as they change course and fly across the far side of the Moon, at an altitude of about a hundred miles above the surface. He watches the ship’s progress intently through the window, but is also careful to observe her movements to control the ship. “I thought you said we weren’t going to the Moon?”
Ningal does very little with her hands, that much is obvious. It makes him wonder whether much of the control is mental, even telepathic. Well aware of what he’s doing, she laughs at his bewilderment. “I said we wouldn’t land. But I thought you might like to take a closer look. I could bring you right down close to the surface.”
Tempting as that may be, Borman is superstitious enough to worry that such a joy flight would be bad luck ahead of Neil and Buzz landing in the Sea of Tranquility. “Take me somewhere else,” he urges. “It’s fast, this ship of yours.” He touches the panel himself, but nothing happens. “Exactly how fast can you go?”
She taps something on the panel, then asks, “Do you remember I explained this to you?”
As if triggered by the question, he does remember. “You told me it’s configured to respond only to you.” The panel’s surface is smooth, cold and hard like glass. But when he looks more closely, he sees it is finely pitted, rendering it opaque when not lit from within. A simple and elegant display linked directly to her neural pathways. Triggered by thought and touch alone.
Configured to fly at nine tenths the speed of light.
“Then I will take you to Mars,” she declares, like someone planning a Sunday drive through the countryside. “Mars and Earth will soon be in opposition, so the planet is relatively close to us right now.”
“Relatively,” says Borman. But still about fifty million miles away. “So how long…?”
“To get there? A little over five of your minutes at full speed. But we’ll take things a little more slowly than that. Let us say around fifteen minutes.”
He is still staring at her hands on the panel. “You can control what I remember, can’t you?”
“The ship controls it.”
“Yes, but you control the ship. Like it’s a part of you. It does whatever you tell it to do.”
Ningal smiles. “Yes, you remember what I wish you to remember. Is that of concern to you?”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t play around with my memories at all. What would you say to that?”