by Anthology
Snug and cozy we may be, but jolly we are not. The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows. We will have, after all, a century or so to become acquainted. We feel no need to rush things.
So that for these first two weeks the corridors have seemed to rustle with ghosts, who hurry past with, at most, a furtive glance through the eyeholes of their masks. Speaking of which, I must say that I have seldom seen so many exquisite pieces of craft. One that I especially admired, a woman’s—full-face and crown in heavy tarnished silver, with the curls that ringed the face applied free-form with solder. Her eyes were dark brown, solemn. I smiled. Since I’ve been wearing a plain velvet domino, she could not help but see it. And did she smile too, beneath the silver mask?
Aside from these scurryings down the corridors to the dining hall or the library, my sole communal activity has been orchestra rehearsals. With only thirty members we will not have much occasion to tackle the heavier romantics without electronic assists, and our conductor, Hamline Quinn, gives evidence of being too much of a purist for that. He’s done very well with the Haydn, and the Ives fantasia is coming along, coming along. Quinn is, rather drolly, an activist and interlards his musical fiats with Anarchist messages that even he must see aren’t very relevant so far from his native New Zealand.
The girl in the silver mask is also in the orchestra, but as she plays cello I have yet to see the face behind the mask.
Tuesday, May 14, 2084
Here I am, right in the front lines of History, rushing at the stars with a constant acceleration of 1.25 gravities, the last word in the contemporary, and what has been, and becomes increasingly, my preoccupation? The past.
It must be due to the sudden atrophy of social life. Or perhaps it is the psyche’s reaction to leaving the comfortable Copernican universe so far behind. Whatever the reason, I have become a veritable Proust, lounging in my cubicle, chewing over scraps of old memories. It is not that I worry, as my father claims he does, that I will lose them unless they are exercised regularly, that the past will slip away from me. On the contrary, I grow annoyed with these intruding memories. I have better things to do. I have, as they say, my whole future ahead of me.
One image that recurs and recurs, like (sweet ancient metaphor!) a broken record: it is the painting my stepmother did shortly before she suicided. “The Struldbrug Dot” my father used to call it, though he must have realized it was intended to be his own portrait. Sometimes I think I can see the same vermilion disc, like a glowing traffic light, set into the brows of my fellow-voyagers, as if, despite our unaging faces, we bear the seal of that undying, undead senility which poor mad Swift, and my poor mad mother, thought immortality would be.
We are so smug, we chosen ones, and can afford the saintly luxury of self-castigation.
I wonder if my father still has that painting. I must remember to ask him the ‘next time’ we meet.
Later that day:
Another stab at the exhaustive (that forlorn ideal of the second-rate), at gathering up all those things that ‘go without saying’ in order to try to say them. In short—what am I doing here?—or for that matter, where am I?
I am on the Extrovert, a starship, the constuction of which began some 20 years ago in orbit above the Earth. It is the shape, give or take some dozen protuberances, of a honeycomb. It measures 1.6 kilometers from end to end (large for a ship, small for a microcosm), and is veined with 1,174 miles of corridors and catwalks. It is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. Using a photon drive it will reach .9 the speed of light in 250 days. A postcard would convey all this more graphically, I’m sure. Will there come a time when these press-agent specifications will be thought remarkable, as for instance I find the dimensions of the Mayflower remarkable? The faith that such a time will come is the only justification for such a journal as this.
There are 246 of us, ranging in age from Sheila Dupont, 23, to our captain, Lester Gorham Gray, who became a centenarian some dozen years ago. The median age is 68. Each of us had distinguished himself one way or another, and one might wax lyrical at this point. It seems to me, however, that Distinguished Achievements are, in the modern scheme of things, only to be expected.
My own D.A., which earned me my berth? I did a complete genetic map of the mouse, Mus musculus. When the Nobel committee extended their invitation to me, citing this as my largest glory, I felt rather as though I had been honored for having written a definitive haiku. It didn’t help when Veronica began to speak of me as “The Star-Mouse.”
But it is not so much for any single accomplishment that a person is selected. Rather, as I understand it, each of us is here because he has shown himself to be the most polly of polymaths. Our community thereby incorporates the widest possible range of interests and skills, and each astronaut is susceptible, presumably, to being caught up in, or trained for, any of them. And thus we can hope to wile our time away, as we crawl through the long light-years from star to star.
Personality was also a consideration, of course. We’re expected to have stable, stolid characters. Lacking facilities for ego-restructuring, self-satisfaction is at a premium. I imagine it came as a blow to most of us to learn that we were stable stolids. I’ve always tended to think of myself as the volatile type.
More than enough exposition. Back now to my musky, cork-lined nest.
Sunday, June 3, 2084
Her face is every bit as lovely as her mask.
Last night after another deadly dull emergency drill I approached her in the outer perimeter arcade, removed my mask, and introduced myself.
“Ah yes,” she murmured through unmoving silver lips, “the oboe. And my name, since I see I must surrender it now, is Aspera.”
“Per Aspera ad Astra,” said the Star-Mouse, with a gallant flourish.
“It is a readymade pun, Mr. Regan, but I fear that I’ll encounter it in the next century as many times as I am introduced. You can, if it suits you better, call me Hope. Many of my friends do.”
“Aspera is a lovely name. Your mask is lovely too.”
She removed the mask. She was smiling. There was a natural beauty-mark (mole seems too harsh a word) high on her left cheek, an unusual feature, surgery being the preferred course. Close-grained procelain skin of the sort Ingres delighted to paint. Silver-blond curls in a careless, crafty tumble—not unlike the curls of the mask. And such eyes—large, dark, vulnerable, a doe’s eyes beseeching a hunter to come after her. Ah, she turned me to jelly, like an inverse Medusa.
As simply as that.
Afterwards I checked at the library (where Slade recounted another of his dreams; he seems to have made an art of dreaming). Aspera Donatio is 54, an Olympic swimmer, and a noted psychotherapist, specializing in the psychoses of children and addicts. An unusual specialty to bring aboard the Extrovert. Except in the ghettoes of the mortals, there are few enough children these days even on Earth. As for drugs, we stable stolids are virtually teetotalers. And, as I already knew, she acts.
There is something about the woman, something that haunts, like a telephone ringing in a bricked-up room.
Later:
The haunting is solved. It came to me as I was going to sleep. She has the same eyes as that child, the dark eyes of mortality and old earth.
Wednesday, June 13, 2084
Slade seems a more unaccountable fellow each time I visit him. I visited the library again today to see him, though maintaining the pretext of impersonality—i.e., a request for book-films of Proust, whom I have been exhorting myself to reread for the last month. At first glance Slade strikes one as being a most unprepossessing sort, anomalous, an error on the part of the selection committee. Shy, Coptic eyes; a Turkish moustache to mask his overbite; a reticence in ordinary conversation that takes him to the brink of invisibility. After I’d gone on a bit in my own bland way, parroting the usual textbook things about Proust, Slade smiled and started to tell me, with his usual disconcer
ting directness, of his latest dream:
“I dreamt that I had written Remembrances of Things Past, though in the dream they became Things Lost. I’ve never read the book, and so the only thing it had in common with the original is probably that it was written in the first person. In the part I can remember I was walking through a French village with Gene Shaw. Perhaps you know her—she programs some of our environments? Well, no matter. Gene and I used to be very close years and years ago, during the pogroms in the States, and that’s surely the significance of ‘Things Lost.’ We came to a square at the center of the town, and as I’ve never seen any more of France than Paris, the square was a replica of the little park in front of the courthouse in Clarion, Iowa, where I grew up. It was ringed round with bright brick houses plagiarized from Vermeer and de Hooch. A public lav that looked rather like a bandstand—my notion of a French urinal, I suppose—stood at the center of the square. Gene and I looked in through the stained-glass windows. A nasty-faced little boy was whipping the toilet bowl with a length of heavy chain. He destroyed it completely. While I wrote the story, I kept changing the boy’s name. At first it was Genet, but that looked too much like Gene. It was a huge novel, but I forget the rest of it. Do you like it?”
“I think it’s one of your best.”
“Oh, I’m not sure. In some ways it’s quite transparent. Gene and Genet, for instance. Still, it has its points.” Then, as though embarrassed by his candor (no matter that these dream-recitals have by now become almost a tradition between us), he muttered an excuse and retreated into the fastness of his archives.
Little danger that I’ll get to know this fellow too quickly. In a way it even seems a pity, for he’s quite likeable.
Friday, June 15, 2084
Inundations of memory, Proust’s and my own alternately, keep me from my proper work.
The U of M. I had entered the business school there in 2009, the year before the Berkley Rumor, with no other intention in the world than to serve my time and get a Master’s in Business Administration. A follower in my father’s footsteps and a Young Republican. $40,000 a year, a vice-presidency at Freedom Mutual or any company with as good a retirement program—these were my goals. I had even persuaded myself that I wanted these things, much as a mortal, told of his cancer, or after a stroke, will persuade himself that he really wants to die, that death is a boon and a culmination. So soon did the sense of the limits of our time wrap its iron bands about us in those days. Eighteen years old, and I was already as fearful of ‘wasting myself,’ of letting the sand slip through the hourglass, as any invalid octogenarian.
It all returns with such vividness: the dreary brick-and-glass buildings; the torpid hours in the classroom; the frightened, mean-souled, bickering teachers; the cafeterias of hasty, ill-synthesized food; the occasional psychedelic blast that illumined with such terrible clearness the drab texture of the everyday; the ritual fun of the frathouse and secret despair; the attrition, almost day by day, of the alternatives left before one. I recall these things with a strange sense of disbelief. Was I ever such a caterpillar as that? I was, and but for the gruesome bounty of the Plague I would have never left the cocoon, I would, in all probability, be dead.
What power that word used to have, how feebly it rings today.
“My proper work.”
I have shied away from that subject, as I shy away from the task. Essentially it is the feeling that they will laugh when I sit down to play.
I introduced myself to this journal in the role of a novelist (unpublished). I am unpublished for the unassailable reason that I have never written a novel. I am a novelist, therefore, only in the Platonic sense. Somewhere in the Empyrean there is an Ideal Form of Oliver Regan, and it is shaped like a Novelist.
The novel I balk at will be based on the voyage of the Extrovert. My characters will be the 246 of us, no more nor less. Their dialogue will be of their invention, not mine. I have trained myself (and this is my meager credential as a novelist) to reproduce conversations I have heard with 95% accuracy. To invent nothing, to include everything, each word and gesture, and yet it must be a work of art as well, it must gleam. I ask no more than any realist asks—the impossible. And, in consequence, I write nothing.
Still, the conditions here are uniquely well-suited for one to attempt the impossibility: a finite environment and cast, a vast but bounded span of time. I am far from being the only voyager engaged upon the task. There is something absurd, indeed, about the degree to which we voyagers chronicle our voyaging—as though Columbus were to staff his three ships with nothing but historians and diarists. But then, why not? The age of tar-buckets and windlasses is past.
Saturday, June 16, 2084
Immediately I say a thing I begin to see it as a misrepresentation. For of course the Extrovert is maintained by the labor of human mind and muscle, even if no larger effort is required, often, than that of uncorking the genie-jug of automation. Thus, concerning ‘my proper work,’ it would be more honest to say I am a farmer or, at most, a cook. I am in charge of all the ship’s organic synthesis operations, exclusive of the hydroponics system. My background in molecular biology prepared me to take over this task with a minimum of pre-flight training. The technics of the factory differs only in magnitude from the technics of the laboratory, and the ship’s plant is so abundantly supplied with genies that my supervisory visits have taken on the tone already of church-attendance, a moral rather than a practical necessity.
As an administrator I have also a non-priestly function: I am training two other crew-members as replacements, a process that is going on at all levels of the ship’s organization and will continue for decades, until, ideally, a crew of only twenty, taken at random, should be able to keep the Extrovert running smoothly.
My trainees are Khalid Hatoum, 38, and Amelia Borman, 45. Hatoum is a ritualist (it was he who pointed out to me the priestly character of our work) and was responsible for the parade and launching ceremonies. Suspicious as I am of “The New Forms” (Can a compulsion neurosis be a work of art?), I find Hatoum immensely impressive, a decathlon champion of the intellect. His is the sort of analytic that can mount whole staircases of thought at one bound. Already I feel played out as a teacher. Borman is more my own intellectual size. She comes to this work with a background in cybernation, though most of her programming experience has been in the applied arts. She has been responsible for the quarter-mile stretch along the outer arcade that I’ve most consistently admired. A superb color-sense and dazzling kinetics. I eavesdropped once, over the plant intercom, on an argument she had with Hatoum over the merits of her ‘quotations’ from art history. Hatoum (who is, outside his own speciality, wholly intolerant of the traditional) savaged her. I’ve been pleased to see that his arguments haven’t affected her programs.
Wednesday, June 27, 2084
I am going to be psychoanalyzed!
“At my age?” I asked, but Aspera insists that it is exactly my age that provides the fascination—rather the way an archaeologist might enthuse over the seven layers of Troy. If nothing else, analysis will provide a frame for all these intruding memories. Not to mention that it guarantees two hours a week alone with Aspera.
Orchestra rehearsals are being cut down. The ship starts to come alive. Ghosts whisper to each other, doors open, masks are put aside. We are two months out, and the old Copernican sun is very dim, a mere star among a million others. We approach ever nearer the speed of light.
Friday, June 29, 2084
Today Slade, instead of telling me his latest dream, handed me this typed note:
“Dream, June 28, 2084
“Part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung. I showed him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I can’t remember the rest.”
Slade’s dreams have come to have a peculiar fascination for me, as they seem to have so often a bearing on my own preoccupations. It is as though he we
re dreaming for me. When I told him this, he became quite embarrassed.
Saturday, June 30, 2084
My first session in Aspera’s cabin. We sat on cushions and drank a mild scopolamine tea. We had both learned the tea ceremony when that fad went round in the ‘30’s, and we resurrected it today with a good deal of panache, considering.
The mask I had so much admired proves to be Aspera’s own handiwork. Her cabin is decorated with others she has made, the most striking of which was a crown and visor in clear polly thickly set synthetic diamonds. Though I expressed my admiration by no more than a smile, she was quick to apprehend my wish and put on the mask. Ravishing!
Then I began to put on my masks—or to take them off, it amounts to the same thing. Somehow I got to talking about my three years in Mexico—from 2011 to 2014—and though I spoke under the influence of the tea I can’t help but think there was something crafty in that choice, for I’ve seldom appeared in such a good light as I did in those years. The President had just confirmed the Berkley Rumor, and I—and anyone else younger than 40—had to cope with the disquieting idea that my probable life-span was of unknown extent. I left the U of M without much hesitation. What did I want with that Master’s now? Was I going to spend an unending lifetime drudging in the brick-and-glass buildings of some monster corporation? Such a life had become unthinkable. I didn’t know what I wanted then, but it certainly wasn’t that. Also, our mortal elders, still holding the reins of power, were starting to make ugly innuendos; one got the distinct impression, like Isaac walking alongside his father on the way to Mount Moriah, that it wasn’t quite safe in that neighborhood. Though why we should have thought Mexico any safer, I don’t know.
But they were wonderful, lazy, wildly cerebral years while they lasted. Truly, I believe I must have been half-dead until that time. I would tumble long guiltless weekends in the sand—there was time for it—or read any book I took a fancy to—there was time for it—or, if that was all I wanted, I could get the ultimate suntan—there was time for it. Perhaps there had always been time for it, but I, craven mortal that I had been, had not believed it. There is still a little part of me that refuses to believe it, but I think the younger generation, anyone born after 2025 or so, lacks that feeling altogether. Aspera, for one, claims to find the idea quite alien. I pointed out that it was curious to find a psychiatrist who claims to be a Freudian of the most reactionary stamp and who denies the central importance of the sense of death.