An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  He realized he had not been told his host’s last name. Somehow it seemed too late to ask Matt directly, now. When one of the little girls came wandering into his room he asked her, “What’s your name?”

  “Toby,” she said, showing a gap-toothed mouth.

  “Toby what?”

  “Toby. Just Toby.”

  No surnames in this community? All right. Why bother with surnames in a place where everyone knows everyone else? Travel light, brethren, travel light, strip away the excess baggage.

  Matt walked in and said, “At council tonight I’ll officially apply to stand brother to you. It’s just a formality. They’ve never turned an application down.”

  “What’s involved, actually?”

  “It’s hard to explain until you know our ways better. It means I’m, well, your spokesman, your guide through our rituals.”

  “A kind of sponsor?”

  “Well, sponsor’s the wrong word. Will and Nick will be your sponsors. That’s a different level of brotherhood, lower, not as close. I’ll be something like your godfather, I guess, that’s as near as I can come to the idea. Unless you don’t want me to be. I never consulted you. Do you want me to stand brother to you, John?”

  It was an impossible question. Oxenshuer had no way to evaluate any of this. Feeling dishonest, he said, “It would be a great honor, Matt.”

  “You have any real brothers?” Matt asked. “Flesh kin?”

  “No. A sister in Ohio.” Oxenshuer thought a moment. “There once was a man who was like a brother to me. Knew him since childhood. As close as makes no difference. A brother, yes.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died. In an accident. A long way from here.”

  “Terrible sorry,” Matt said. “I’ve got five brothers. Three of them outside; I haven’t heard from them in years. And two right here in the city. You’ll meet them. They’ll accept you as kin. Everyone will. What did you think of the Speaker?”

  “A marvelous old man. I’d like to talk with him again.”

  “You’ll talk plenty with him. He’s my father, you know.” Oxenshuer tried to imagine this huge man springing from the seed of the spare-bodied, compactly built Speaker and could not make the connection. He decided Matt must be speaking metaphorically again. “You mean, the way that boy was your nephew?”

  “He’s my true father,” Matt said. “I’m flesh of his flesh.” He went to the window. It was open about eight centimeters at the bottom. “Too cold for you in here, John?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Gets cold sometimes, these winter nights.”

  Matt stood silent, seemingly sizing Oxenshuer up. Then he said, “Say, you ever do any wrestling?”

  “A little. In college.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “One of the things brothers do here, part of the ritual. We wrestle some. Especially the day of the Feast. It’s important in the worship. I wouldn’t want to hurt you any when we do. You and me, John, we’ll do some wrestling before long, just to practice up for the Feast, okay? Okay?”

  They let him go anywhere he pleased. Alone, he wandered through the city’s labyrinth, that incredible tangle of downtown streets, in early afternoon. The maze was cunningly constructed, one street winding into another so marvelously that the buildings were drawn tightly together and the bright desert sun could barely penetrate; Oxenshuer walked in shadow much of the way. The twisting mazy passages baffled him. The purpose of this part of the city seemed clearly symbolic: everyone who dwelt here was compelled to pass through these coiling, interlacing streets in order to get from the commonplace residential quarter, where people lived in isolated family groupings, to the dining hall, where the entire community together took the sacrament of food, and to the church, where redemption and salvation were to be had. Only when purged of error and doubt, only when familiar with the one true way (or was there more than one way through the maze? Oxenshuer wondered) could one attain the harmony of communality. He was still uninitiated, an outlander; wander as he would, dance tirelessly from street to cloistered street, he would never get there unaided.

  He thought it would be less difficult than it had first seemed to find his way from Matt’s house to the inner plaza, but he was wrong: the narrow, meandering streets misled him, so that he sometimes moved away from the plaza when he thought he was going toward it, and, after pursuing one series of corridors and intersections for fifteen minutes, he realized that he had merely returned himself to one of the residential streets on the edge of the maze. Intently he tried again. An astronaut trained to maneuver safely through the trackless wastes of Mars ought to be able to get about in one small city. Watch for landmarks, Johnny. Follow the pattern of the shadows. He clamped his lips, concentrated, plotted a course. As he prowled he occasionally saw faces peering briefly at him out of the upper windows of the austere warehouselike buildings that flanked the streets. Were they smiling? He came to one group of streets that seemed familiar to him, and went in and in, until he entered an alleyway closed at both ends, from which the only exit was a slit barely wide enough for a man if he held his breath and slipped through sideways. Just beyond, the metal cross of the church stood outlined against the sky, encouraging him: he was nearly to the end of the maze. He went through the slit and found himself in a cul-de-sac; five minutes of close inspection revealed no way to go on. He retraced his steps and sought another route.

  One of the bigger buildings in the labyrinth was evidently a school. He could hear the high, clear voices of children chanting mysterious hymns. The melodies were conventional seesaws of piety, but the words were strange:

  Bring us together. Lead us to the ocean.

  Help us to swim. Give us to drink.

  Wine in my heart today,

  Blood in my throat today,

  Fire in my soul today,

  All praise, O God, to thee.

  Sweet treble voices, making the bizarre words sound all the more grotesque. Blood in my throat today. Unreal city. How can it exist? Where does the food come from? Where does the wine come from? What do they use for money? What do the people do with themselves all day? They have electricity: what fuel keeps the generator running? They have running water. Are they hooked into a public-utility district’s pipelines, and if so why isn’t this place on my map? Fire in my soul today. Wine in my heart today. What are these feasts, who are these saints? This is the god who burns like fire. This is the god whose name is music. This is the god whose soul is wine. You were called, Mr. Oxenshuer. Can you say no? You can’t say no to our city. To our saint. To Jesus. Come along, now?

  Where’s the way out of here?

  Three times a day, the whole population of the city went on foot from their houses through the labyrinth to the dining hall. There appeared to be at least half a dozen ways of reaching the central plaza, but, though he studied the route carefully each time, Oxenshuer was unable to keep it straight in his mind. The food was simple and nourishing, and there was plenty of it. Wine flowed freely at every meal. Young boys and girls did the serving, jubilantly hauling huge platters of food from the kitchen; Oxenshuer had no idea who did the cooking, but he supposed the task would rotate among the women of the community. (The men had other chores. The city, Oxenshuer learned, had been built entirely by the freely contributed labor of its own inhabitants. Several new houses were under construction now. And there were irrigated fields beyond the mesas.) Seating in the dining hall was random at the long tables, but people generally seemed to come together in nuclear-family groupings. Oxenshuer met Matt’s two brothers, Jim and Ernie, both smaller men than Matt but powerfully built. Ernie gave Oxenshuer a hug—a quick, warm, impulsive gesture. “Brother,” he said. “Brother! Brother!”

  The Speaker received Oxenshuer in the study of his residence on the plaza, a dark ground-floor room whose walls were covered to ceiling height with shelves of books. Most people here affected a casual hayseed manner, an easy, dr
awling, rural simplicity of speech, that implied little interest in intellectual things, but the Speaker’s books ran heavily to abstruse philosophical and theological themes, and they looked as though they had all been read many times. Those books confirmed Oxenshuer’s first fragmentary impression of the Speaker: that this was a man of supple, well-stocked mind, sophisticated, complex. The Speaker offered Oxenshuer a cup of cool, tart wine. They drank in silence. When he had nearly drained his cup, the old man calmly hurled the dregs to the glossy slate floor. “An offering to Dionysus,” he explained.

  “But you’re Christians here,” said Oxenshuer.

  “Yes, of course we’re Christian! But wc have our own calendar of saints. We worship Jesus in the guise of Dionysus and Dionysus in the guise of Jesus. Others might call us pagans, I suppose. But where there’s Christ, is there not Christianity?” The Speaker laughed. “Are you a Christian, John?”

  “I suppose. I was baptized. I was confirmed. I’ve taken communion. I’ve been to confession now and then.”

  “You’re of the Roman faith?”

  “More that faith than any other,” Oxenshuer said.

  “You believe in God?”

  “In an abstract way.”

  “And in Jesus Christ?”

  “I don’t know,” said Oxenshuer uncomfortably. “In a literal sense, no. I mean, I suppose there was a prophet in Palestine named Jesus, and the Romans nailed him up, but I’ve never taken the rest of the story too seriously. I can accept Jesus as a symbol, though. As a metaphor of love. God’s love.”

  “A metaphor for all love,” the Speaker said. “The love of God for mankind. The love of mankind for God. The love of man and woman, the love of parent and child, the love of brother and brother, every kind of love there is. Jesus is love’s spirit. God is love. That’s what we believe here. Through communal ecstasies wc are reminded of the new commandment He gave unto us, That ve love one another. And as it says in Romans, Love is the fulfilling of the law. We follow His teachings; therefore we are Christians.”

  “Even though you worship Dionysus as a saint?”

  “Especially so. We believe that in the divine madnesses of Dionysus we come closer to Him than other Christians are capable of coming. Through revelry, through singing, through the pleasures of the flesh, through ecstasy, through union with one another in body and in soul—through these we break out of our isolation and become one with Him. In the life to come we shall all be one. But first we must live this life and share in the creation of love, which is Jesus, which is God. Our goal is to make all beings one with Jesus, so that we become droplets in the ocean of love which is God, giving up our individual selves.” “This sounds Hindu to me, almost. Or Buddhist.”

  “Jesus is Buddha. Buddha is Jesus.”

  “Neither of them taught a religion of revelry.”

  “Dionysus did. We make our own synthesis of spiritual commandments. And so we see no virtue in self-denial, since that is the contradiction of love. What is held to be virtue by other Christians is sin to us. And vice versa, I would suppose.”

  “What about the doctrine of the virgin birth? What about the virginity of Jesus himself? The whole notion of purity through restraint and asceticism?”

  “Those concepts are not part of our belief, friend John.”

  “But you do recognize the concept of sin?”

  “The sins we deplore,” said the Speaker, “are such things as coldness, selfishness, aloofness, envy, maliciousness, all those things that hold one man apart from another. We punish the sinful by engulfing them in love. But we recognize no sins that arise out of love itself or out of excess of love. Since the world, especially the Christian world, finds our principles hateful and dangerous, we have chosen to withdraw from that world.”

  “How long have you been out here?” Oxenshuer asked.

  “Many years. No one bothers us. Few strangers come to us. You are the first in a very long time.”

  “Why did you have me brought to your city?”

  “We knew you were sent to us,” the Speaker said.

  At night there were wild, frenzied gatherings in certain tall, windowless buildings in the depths of the labyrinth. He was never allowed to take part. The dancing, the singing, the drinking, whatever else went on, these things were not yet for him. Wait till the Feast, they told him, wait till the Feast, then you’ll be invited to join us. So he spent his evenings alone. Some nights he would stay home with the children. No babysitters were needed in this city, but he became one anyway, playing simple dice games with the girls, tossing a ball back and forth with the boy, telling them stories as they fell asleep. He told them of his flight to Mars, spoke of watching the red world grow larger every day, described the landing, the alien feel of the place, the iron-red sands, the tiny glinting moons. They listened silently, perhaps fascinated, perhaps not at all interested: he suspected they thought he was making it all up. He never said anything about the fate of his companions.

  Some nights he would stroll through town, street after quiet street, drifting in what he pretended was a random way toward the downtown maze. Standing near the perimeter of the labyrinth-even now he could not find his way around in it after dark, and feared getting lost if he went in too deep—he would listen to the distant sounds of the celebration, the drumming, the chanting, the simple, repetitive hymns:

  This is the god who burns like fire

  This is the god whose name is music

  This is the god whose soul is wine

  And he would also hear them sing:

  Tell the saint to heat my heart

  Tell the saint to give me breath

  Tell the saint to quench my thirst

  And this:

  Leaping shouting singing stamping

  Rising climbing flying soaring

  Melting joining loving blazing

  Singing soaring joining loving

  Some nights he would walk to the edge of the desert, hiking out a few hundred meters into it, drawing a bleak pleasure from the solitude, the crunch of sand beneath his boots, the knife-blade coldness of the air, the forlorn gnarled cacti, the timorous kangaroo rats, even the occasional scorpion. Crouching on some gritty hummock, looking up through the cold brilliant stars to the red dot of Mars, he would think of Dave Vogel, would think of Bud Richardson, would think of Claire, and of himself, who he had been, what he had lost. Once, he remembered, he had been a high-spirited man who laughed easily, expressed affection readily and openly, enjoyed joking, drinking, running, swimming—all the active, outgoing things. Leaping shouting singing stamping. Rising climbing flying soaring. And then this deadness had come over him, this zombie absence of response, this icy shell. Mars had stolen him from himself. Why? The guilt? The guilt, the guilt, the guilt—he had lost himself in guilt. And now he was lost in the desert. This implausible town. These rites, this cult. Wine and shouting. He had no idea how long he had been here. Was Christmas approaching? Possibly it was only a few days away. Blue plastic Yule trees were sprouting in front of the department stores on Wilshire Boulevard. Jolly red Santas pacing the sidewalk. Tinsel and glitter. Christmas might be an appropriate time for the Feast of St. Dionysus. The Saturnalia revived. Would the Feast come soon? He anticipated it with fear and eagerness.

  Late in the evening, when the last of the wine was gone and the singing was over, Matt and Jean Would return, flushed, wine-drenched, happy, and through the thin partition separating Oxenshuer’s room from theirs would come the sounds of love, the titanic poundings of their embraces, far into the night.

  —Astronauts are supposed to be sane, Dave.

  —Are they? Are they really, Johnny?

  —Of course they are.

  —Are you sane?

  —I’m sane as hell, Dave.

  —Yes. Yes. I’ll bet you think you are.

  —Don’t you think I’m sane?

  —Oh, sure, you’re sane, Johnny. Saner than you need to be.

  If anybody asked me to name him one sane man, I�
��d say John Oxenshuer. But you’re not all that sane. And you’ve got the potential to become very crazy.

  —Thanks.

  —I mean it as a compliment.

  —What about you? You aren’t sane?

  —I’m a madman, Johnny. And getting madder all the time.

  —Suppose NASA finds out that Dave Vogel’s a madman?

  —They won’t, my friend. They know I’m one hell of an astronaut, and so by definition I’m sane. They don’t know what’s inside me. They can’t. By definition, they wouldn’t be NASA bureaucrats if they could tell what’s inside a man.