Starborne Read Online Free PDF Page B

you, sometimes quite an extensive list indeed, and ask you to offer comment on your most flagrant failings, your choice of five. The whole interrogation lasted, in most cases, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes. Then they told you you w e re rejected. Every single candidate who came before the Board of Examiners was told that, calmly, straightforwardly, without show of regret or apology: “ Sorry, you ’ re off the list.” They wanted to see what you would say then. That was the real examination ; everything that had gone before had been mere maneuvering and feinting.
    The ones who passed were the ones who had rejected the rejection. Some did it one way, some another. Points were given for arrogance, so long as it was sane and sensible arrogance. Th e man who eventually would become the expedition ’ s first year-captain had simply said, “ You can ’ t be serious. Obviously I ’ m qualified. And I don ’ t like it that you ’ re playing games with me.” Heinz, who was Swiss himself and indeed was the son of one of th e Examiners, had taken a similar stance, telling them that it would be the whole world ’ s loss if they stuck to their position, but that he had a high enough opinion of the human race to think that they would reconsider. Heinz had helped to design the still unconstructed Wotan ; he knew more of its workings than anyone. Did they really think that he was going to build it for them and then be left behind? Huw, who did indeed proudly call himself a Welshman, was another who reacted with the cool and confident at titude that the Examiners were making a big mistake. He had designed the planetgoing equipment with which the people of the Wotan would explore the new worlds: was he to be denied the right to deploy his own devices, and if so, who was going to handle the job of modifying them on-site to meet unanticipated challenges? And so on.
    Most of the female candidates tended to temper their annoyance with a touch of sorrow or regret, partly for themselves but primar i ly — constructive arroganc e again, only imperfectly concealed! — for the enterprise itself. Sylvia explained that she knew more about tectogenetic microsurgery than anyone else alive: how would the coming generations of starborn colonists be able to adapt to some not-quite-suitable p lan e tary environment without her special skills? Giovanna too observed that it would be a great pity for the expedition to be deprived of her unique abilities — her primary specialty was metabolic chemistry, and there was something magical about her insight into the relationship between m o lecular structure and nutritional value. From Sieglinde, who had helped to work out some fundamental theorems of the mathematics of nospace travel, came the simple comment that she belonged aboard the ship and would not acce pt disqualification. Et cetera.
    What the Examiners looked for — and found, in all of those whom they had chosen anyway before the examinations had even begun — was the expression of a justifiable sense of self-worth, tempered by phil o sophical realism. Anyone w ho raged or blustered or wept or begged would have been unanswerably rejected. But no one did that, none of the pre-designated fifty.
    At the end of the entire process it was Noelle ’ s turn to come before the Examiners, and they played out their little chara de with her, too. They spoke with her for a while and then they gave her the ritual ve r dict, “ Sorry, you ’ re off the list,” and she sat there in calm silence for a time, as though trying to comprehend the incomprehensible words they had just spoken, and the n at last she said in her soft way, “ Perhaps you would want to have my sister go, then.” It was the perfect answer. They told her so. Her sister, they said, had given them the same response at the same point in her examination.
    “ Then neither of us will go? ” Noelle asked, mystified.
    “ It was only a test of your reaction,” they told her.
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