“She’s back in the link with me. She’s in the circuit.” Noelle pauses. “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?”
“I’m afraid.”
“Open to me. Try. See what happens.”
“I’m afraid.”
“Touch a star, year-captain.”
He puts his hand on hers. “Go ahead,” he says, and his soul becomes a solarium.
Afterward, with the solar pulsations still reverberating in the mirrors of his mind, with blue-white sparks leaping in his synapses, he says, “What about the others?”
“I’ll bring them in too.”
He feels a flicker of momentary resentment. He does not want to share the illumination. But in the instant that he conceives his resentment, he abolishes it. Let them in.
“Take my hand,” Noelle says.
They reach out together. One by one they touch the others. Roy. Sylvia. Heinz. Elliot. He feels Noelle surging in tandem with him, feels Yvonne, feels greater presences, luminous, eternal. All are joined. Ship-sister, star-sister: all become one. The year-captain realizes that the days of playing go have ended. They are one person; they are beyond games.
“And now,” Noelle whispers. “Now we reach toward Earth. We put our strength into Yvonne, and Yvonne—”
Yvonne draws Earth’s seven billion into the network.
The ship hurtles through the nospace tube. Soon the year-captain will initiate the search for a habitable planet. If they discover one, they will settle there. If not, they will go on, and it will not matter at all, and the ship and its seven billion passengers will course onward forever, warmed by the light of the friendly stars.