The third time, it’s the same every step, and still you can’t stop it, still you can’t reduce it.
You can feel the strength of those quicksands, and it really terrifies you. You’ve never ever been afraid like this before. You can feel the implacability, the massiveness, the insidiousness, you can feel the whole thing in all its glory. (Blame the Commies, blame the lady next door, bow down to self-pity and despair, blow your hopeless brains out, mix the barbiturates, stick your head in the oven, break it, burn it, hit it, smash and slash and . . .)
(Etc.)
This is when you stand on the parapet of the bridge, weigh death in one of your hands, look down into the boiling water . . .
. . . And mock the crippled fingers of the darkness.
You get down, and you walk away, and you go home.
(Or you lose.)
This is when you curl up in your favorite chair and play embryo. This is when you mime your favorite ritual in catatonic ecstasy. This is when you wake up in the cold pack and you fill yourself full of psychotropics, and this is when they haunt you with the dreaded, hideous label.
You show them the door and you kick them down the steps. You get up from your chair and you say no. No bending. No breaking. The precipice is only underneath your toes. Your heels are on solid rock. You need not fall, even though you do look down.
Maybe it helps to begin spreading the blame a little here. But you’ve got to spread it in the right places. Blame overwork. Blame stress. Blame traumatic experiences in your early childhood, if you’re into that sort of thing. Only blame things which are intangible. Above all, blame only things which are yours to blame.
What helps most is people. What pulls you out, in the end, is people. They don’t have to be doctors or samaritans or relatives. They can be bus conductors and shop clerks and secretaries and prostitutes. But not in their professional capacities. Only as people. Functioning as people. One can be enough. Two is better. A crowd can be great.
Some breaks have got to go your way. Most go against you, but any man who claims they all do is a liar and a loser. You always get some breaks. They may not be big ones, but you have to use them. You have to make breaks of your own, too. There’s no such thing as luck. Chance is manipulable. By you.
You play the cards as they’re dealt. But in every game of five-card stud there’s a card that you play face down, and you have to play that card as a blind card, knowing what it is as well. It’s not easy. It’s poker. But it can be done. A good poker player wins. Not every time, but he absorbs his losses. Consistently, forever, a good poker player wins.
Never, ever blame the cards you’re dealt.
If you do, you lose.
By now, you should have won. How does it feel to be a hero? Unsung, of course.
There’s one thing, though, that you can’t help inheriting from the whole thing, and that’s a deep and constant fear. Not a shrinking, cowardly fear, but a less-than-pleasant certainty that you could always slip back, that it could always get you again, that you haven’t won for good and all, you have to keep winning. Now and forever.
It gets harder every time.
You have to find yourself a good working order and have service checks regularly and treat yourself with a certain amount of caution and good manners. You have to remember that something, somewhere, wants you broken apart, and that wherever you are it’s only just behind you. You have to expose it and know it and establish a basis for negotiation with it. You have to do it while you’re sane, because while it’s wrestling you down in that pit you have no opportunity.
It’s sane people that need shrinks.
There is no cure, only coexistence.
Courage and common sense can only keep you going in spite of it all.
Really, it’s no kind of winning at all. But it’s the only kind of winning in the game.
Madman’s Dance
Crying in the Wilderness
I remember, my faceless friend, that all these torments were made by your steel-sheathed hands, even the heart of this infernal summer when the thinnest of winds burns me like vitriol, and stones by the wayside glow like salamanders in the fearful violence of the multitude of suns.
I remember, and I will remember.
Always.
Remember the brittle-black corpse on a bed of sand pebbles, with its limbs like fire-fraught twigs — ashen, ghostly forms which yield to the slightest question.
Remember the poisonous vapors which halo its stark form, and the unbearable heaviness of the air which walks around it.
Remember the thin dust, which the vibration of our toilsome passage made of that dead thing, rendering it instantaneously into the earth from which its ancestors dragged their original seed. And even the black dust burns, so finely divided it becomes, and the rest of the carcass is transformed into the lesser substance of the air.
Remember the sound of the hovering flies and the marching beetles crying anguish for the wholeness of a death which robs even the carrion of their accustomed part. Even the all-conquering worm cannot play its heroic last scene in the harrowing script which you have designed to fit every act of the play that you have named “Man.” Death is cruel and unrelenting in all your days and nights, and even the carrion grow hungry and cannot sleep.
Remember the grasses that conquered the empires of Rome and Babylon, sighing this day and growing dark-skinned themselves, their stems crouching low upon the ground like fugitive snakes. The wind does not sigh in the crowns of the trees, because the trees have abdicated their given kingdom, and shed their raiment out of season.
Remember the lizards in the rocks and the cockroaches and the painted frogs which are frozen by fire, their marbled eyes glaring anger and reproach from their petrified skins.
Remember. I do and I will. I survive.
You can make me forget everything except the way home. There is another shore, you know, upon the other side . . . another world.
You can’t kill me. I’m you.
This totally consumed offal, without any legacy of life to give away, even to the worms, is the end that you promise to the chosen of Canaan. Not loss of life, but loss of being. Not extinction, but erasure. This end is the privilege of all that you have given to keep me company in Canaan — the faceless and the forlorn, the hopelessly insane, the images of antiman, the idols and the demons which look into my face when I am only a mask. The eyes without a face, behind the mask that is myself, remember and record these reflections of my garish, painted face, my false and hypocritical soul. I know this for what it is — not hell, but an attempted exorcism that would deny me even that. But no matter what qualities of mercy you renounce, however utterly, no matter how vengeful your spirit, you cannot cast away this mask that is myself. You cannot burn it, any more than you can crack it or dissolve it in acid.
Remember, my faceless friend, that if the mask is all that I am, it is all that you are, too. You remember that, Godman. When I pay court to darkness, embracing oblivion, it is you that trembles on the brink of nonexistence.
Kill me, and there is nothing left.
Think, my faceless friend, which things of this kind need to be wrought by your steel-sheathed hands, and which are better left unmade. It will do no good for you or me to say: forgive them, for they know not what they are. In this architecture of this reality they have no existence and leave no legacy.
Not even as ghosts may we taste the verminous kiss and the bliss of decay.
They are nothing, and nothing is what you would make of us, if you would make us a part of them.
I will remember. . . .
This cratered world called Yrilene, a shattered satin skull, where the heart which beat within the loculus beats still, an everlasting pulse of force and promise.
In a dream called Yrilene, chapel bells are summoned to sound from cities buried in the sea, and the richest of s
plendors decorate the myth. The bells ring and ring again, to celebrate the marriage of Harker Lee and his sister of the shadows.
The gilded stars look down, and the sacred images of father and grandfather and forefather’s sons are given life by the lambent life of Yrilene, and smile their sullen blessing.
Beyond the hills, I can hear breaths of sweet nocturne, the scent of lavender, and the dreams of amaranth. The caprine company and the ophidian walkers in the night have laid themselves to their eternal rest, and the gibbous admirals of evil have paused in the passages of the storm-black night. The alchemy of Yrilene holds us cradled, safe for an instant, and we suck from her blood-filled mammillae to toast the deaths of murderers and martyrs.
I am dressed in my coat of many colors, and I hold the hand of Harker’s shadow-bride. There is no escape. There is no relenting in the pressure of existence.
The puppet master bids me dance.
Dance we all. It is a feast — a carnival. Harker is dancing, and every man in the multitude has a shadow-bride to be his own, until midnight, when the chapel bells will cease and the great bell tolls, and all the brides will turn to dust, and the toastmaster will bid us all unmask.
We all wear masks.
But we have no faces underneath.
Titan Nine
The Titans
Fred Jacobson, the assistant director, gave me the definitive history of titan. I don’t think anyone else dared to be so free with highly classified information.
FMA stands for Free Mass Acceleration. Apart from the official, sanctified jargon, it is also known as “the female principle.”
It seems that Einstein, for all his heroic attempts to make life into equations, wasn’t quite right. Not, you understand, that he was actually wrong, but he just tended to oversimplify a little. It happens to the best of us. (And the worst — more often the worst.) The Einstein theory really had very little to say about traveling faster than light except that it was patently absurd. The idea of the tachyonic phase — wherein things could only travel faster than light and whereby traveling slower than light became an absurdity — cropped up first in somebody’s fertile imagination. But it did get people to thinking, even without any observations to back them up.
Einstein, it seems, was a bit of a fundamentalist. He never quite appreciated the hideous complexity of reality. He thought that mass was mass, and only one form of energy. According to Jacobson, there is mass and mass. Bound mass, free mass, and energetic mass. So what’s the difference? Don’t ask me, I only work here. The man was knocking himself out trying to tell me in the simplest way he could, but it’s just not my field. I didn’t have an adequate command of the jargon. I couldn’t quite follow him into the further regions of abstrusity.
The sum total of the theory was this: that effective mass can be reduced to zero by the adroit manipulation of a countermass. Once mass is zero, one doesn’t have to bother one’s pretty head about minor concerns such as gravity or elegant equations which tend to involve one in the mysteries of infinity.
Hence, titan one. A tin can loaded with hardware. They sent it out and brought it back. It went out a little further than the orbit of Pluto, and spent a good sixty hours, in three bursts, at faster-than-light velocities relative to Earth. The purpose of the flight was purely and simply to prove that it could be done. No measurements were taken, no useful data were gleaned. It was simply a yes/no question, and the universe gave the right answer.
Perhaps the nicest thing about the Project at this stage was its cheapness. No rockets. No waste. No fuel. Titan one was flown on the same sort of power that you use to heat your house. All the hardware came back intact, and it soft-landed, too.
It was the technological accountant’s dream. A ticket to the stars for the price of a hamburger and a cup of coffee. It was Mike Sobieski’s dream, too, or it became that dream — the escape from what he called a cage of darkness.
A second ship was built — much bigger — intended eventually to accommodate personnel and all kinds of equipment — lab fittings and operative hardware. This ship became titan two and was dispatched on a programmed flight which would take it once around Proxima Centauri and back again.
In the meantime, the first ship was touched up again — no point in putting it in a museum just yet — and modified so that she could go out again and accomplish just a little bit more. She was still designed purely as a probe, though. She was sent out to loop Barnard’s Star. Both probes came back, and the human race had touched the stars, although with mechanical fingers. What we learned from these probes came as no surprise.
There was already quite a lot known about both the stars involved, including the fact that they had no planets. But titan base was obliged to know that both stars possessed a retinue of dust and debris of various density and composition. Many people took this as an indication that with only minor changes in the way things were/might have been, the stars could have had planets, and other stars almost certainly would.
And so the second ship was refitted as titan four and was sent out once again. This time it had a name — the Ambassador — and a pilot. The pilot’s name was Doug Mason, and he and his ship were the subject of one of the biggest PR campaigns in history. Mason was an experienced Air Force flyboy who’d rocket-jockeyed a good deal in his time.
The press coverage was extensive. Millions and millions of words were printed about what the whole thing meant to the human race. The public didn’t actually get to know much about titan — only that four was lifting at such and such a date, and was due back in approximately so long. But they got to know an awful lot about Mason and about the great big wonderful galaxy.
Doug Mason and titan four simply disappeared from human ken. They went into tachyonic phase right on schedule, and that was the last the world ever heard of its ambassador to the stars.
You can imagine what happened. At titan, panic, fear, and execution. In the world, not a lot. Doug Mason was just another celluloid hero, just another figment of media imagination. Who cared? Who’d ever cared? The public had become virtually immune to the reality behind the headlines. Nobody told them about titan four’s failure, and they didn’t make a fuss. But the cage door, which had been officially declared open, was now shut firmly once again. There was just no point in throwing more parties in advance, to wish the heroes on their way. Titan died in the media, and continued on its own. The pressmen and the cameras came to watch launches, came to be ready for return deadlines, but nothing went out. Nothing was going to go out until someone came home. The next time the opening of the cage door was advertised, it would have to be for real.
There was absolutely nothing that anyone could know about what had — or might have — happened to titan four. Once Mason took her into tachyonic phase she was beyond human ken. The signals she might have sent just couldn’t get back. Once a titan was lost, it was lost forever. And titan four was lost.
Mike Sobieski had already conveyed to me the emotional meaning of the loss, and that was far more important, really, than the loss to the economy.
The new ship was bigger, better, and safer than Ambassador. Not that the first ship hadn’t had its complement of backup devices, fail-safes, and duplicate controls. Nothing should have gone wrong with Ambassador. But one can always make extra certain. One can always find a little more safety margin to allow. Jacobson, like Mike and many others on the project, was always of the opinion that it was not the Ambassador but its pilot who had failed, and so they duplicated him, too.
Titan five — the Destiny — carried Patrick Bowen and Michael Janusson (Pat and Mike. Neither was Irish. Janusson was USAF; Bowen was Army). Janusson was set to look after the ship. Bowen was set to look after Janusson. Anything which took out one of them would have to take out both.
Everyone knew, however, that there was just one thing Janusson and Bowen might need that they couldn’t have, and that was time. The tachyonic tin
can couldn’t be brought back sub-c just like that. There was no ejector seat. The brakes just couldn’t make an emergency stop. They were sent out with instructions to keep as close to the magic c as was reasonable, but even then, time wasn’t really on their side. The phase shift was a delicate operation — it wasn’t like flicking a switch. If something did go badly wrong aboard the Destiny, neither Janusson nor Bowen would be coming back.
And they didn’t.
Ideas now had to be found and they had to be good, despite the almost total lack of data. There was a split in the Project, about what was going wrong, about what could be done to stop it going wrong again. The military blamed the technical staff, the technical staff blamed the pilots, and the PR brigade hated everybody because the public and political image of the Project had been shot to hell. PR didn’t know whose fault it was, but it sure as hell wasn’t theirs.
This was a bad time. But Mike Sobieski weathered it. The sacking of the first figurehead had been ritualistic. There was no point in being recriminative. Titan had to be given every chance to sort itself out. Mike thought there was only one way to look at the problem. The ships came back on their own. If they didn’t come back with men aboard, then something was going wrong with the men.
The scientific method provided one logical step. The next ship had to be sent out with no provision whatsoever for manual interference. A robot tin can carrying a coffin. In the coffin — a passenger.
They built a newer, glorified version of the first robot probe. They used the same FeMAle that had brought titans one and three safely home. They trusted her. They dressed her in steel and put her robot controls in a sealed cavity. The living quarters were simply one tin can inside another — a cage within a cage, exactly like Block C. Titan six was scheduled to loop Proxima at high speed and then come home. The drive had already done a longer trip just as fast.
Man in a Cage Page 13