An Exaltation of Stars (1973) Anthology

by Terry Carr (Ed. )

  —They know you’re sane because you’re an astronaut?

  —Of course, Johnny. What does an astronaut know about the irrational? What sort of capacity for ecstasy does he have, anyway? He trains for ten years, he jogs in a centrifuge, he drills with computers, he runs a thousand simulations before he dares to sneeze, he thinks in spaceman jargon, he goes to church on Sundays and doesn’t pray, he turns himself into a machine so he can run the damnedest machines anybody ever thought up. And to outsiders he looks deader than a banker, deader than a stockbroker, deader than a sales manager. Look at him, with his 1975 haircut and his 1965 uniform. Can a man like that even know what a mystic experience is? Well, some of us are really like that. They fit the official astronaut image. Sometimes I think you do, Johnny, or at least that you want to. But not me. Look, I’m a yogi. Yogis train for decades so they can have a glimpse of the All. They subject their bodies to crazy disciplines. They learn highly specialized techniques. A yogi and an astronaut aren’t all that far apart, man. What I do, it’s not so different from what a yogi does, and it’s for the same reason. It’s so we can catch sight of the White Light. Look at you, laughing! But I mean it, Johnny. When that big fist knocks me into orbit, when I see the whole world hanging out there, it’s a wild moment for me, it’s ecstasy, it’s nirvana. I live for those moments. They make all the NASA crap worthwhile. Those are breakthrough moments, when I get into an entirely new realm. That’s the only reason I’m in this. And you know something? I think it’s the same with you, whether you know it or not. A mystic thing, Johnny, a crazy thing, that powers us, that drives us on. I he yoga of space. One day you’ll find out. One day you’ll sec yourself for the madman you really are. You’ll open up to all the wild forces inside you, the lunatic drives that sent you to NASA. You’ll find out you weren’t just a machine after all, you weren’t just a stockbroker in a fancy costume, you’ll find out you’re a yogi, a holy man, an ecstatic. And you’ll see what a trip you’re on, you’ll see that controlled madness is the only true secret and that you’ve always known the Way. And you’ll set aside everything that’s left of your old straight self. You’ll give yourself up completely to forces you can’t understand and don’t want to understand. And you’ll love it, Johnny. You’ll love it.

  When he had stayed in the city about three weeks—it seemed to him that it had been about three weeks, though perhaps it had been two or four—he decided to leave. The decision was nothing that came upon him suddenly; it had always been in the back of his mind that he did not want to be here, and gradually that feeling came to dominate him. Nick had promised him solitude while he was in the city, if he wanted it, and indeed he had had solitude enough—no one bothering him, no one making demands on him, the city functioning perfectly well without any contribution from him. But it was the wrong kind of solitude. To be alone in the midst of several thousand people was worse than camping by himself in the desert. True, Matt had promised him that after the Feast he would no longer be alone. Yet Oxenshuer wondered if he really wanted to stay there long enough to experience the mysteries of the Feast and the oneness that presumably would follow it. The Speaker spoke of giving up all pain as one enters the all-encompassing body of Jesus. What would he actually give up, though—his pain or his identity? Could he lose one without losing the other? Perhaps it was best to avoid all that and return to his original plan of going off by himself in the wilderness.

  One evening after Matt and Jean had set out for the downtown revels, Oxenshuer quietly took his pack from the closet. He checked all his gear, filled his canteen, and said good night to the children. They looked at him strangely, as if wondering why he was putting on his pack just to go for a walk, hut they asked no questions. He went up the broad avenue toward the palisade, passed through the unlocked gate, and in ten minutes was in the desert, moving steadily away from the City of the Word of God.

  It was a cold, clear night, very dark, the stars almost painfully bright, Mars very much in evidence. He walked roughly eastward, through choppy countryside badly cut by ravines, and soon the mesas that flanked the city were out of sight. He had hoped to cover eight or ten kilometers before making camp, but the ravines made the hike hard going; when he had been out no more than an hour, one of his boots began to chafe him and a muscle in his left leg sprang a cramp. He decided he would do well to halt. He picked a campsite near a stray patch of Joshua trees that stood like grotesque sentinels, stiff-armed and bristly, along the rim of a deep gully. The wind rose suddenly and swept across the desert flats, agitating their angular branches violently. It seemed to Oxenshuer that those booming gusts were blowing him the sounds of singing from the nearby city:

  I go to the god’s house and his fire consumes me

  I cry the god’s name and his thunder deafens me

  I take the god’s cup and his wine dissolves me

  He thought of Matt and Jean, and Ernie who had called him brother, and the Speaker who had offered him love and shelter, and Nick and Will, his sponsors. He retraced in his mind the windings of the labyrinth until he grew dizzy. It was impossible, he told himself, to hear the singing from this place. He was at least three or four kilometers away. He prepared his campsite and unrolled his sleeping bag. But it was too early for sleep; he lay wide awake, listening to the wind, counting the stars, playing back the chants of the city in his head. Occasionally he dozed, but only for fitful intervals, easily broken. Tomorrow, he thought, he would cover twenty-five or thirty kilometers, going almost to the foothills of the mountains to the east, and he would set up half a dozen solar stills and settle down for a leisurely reexamination of all that had befallen him.

  The hours slipped by slowly. About three in the morning he decided he was not going to be able to sleep, and he got up, dressed, paced along the gully’s edge. A sound came to him: soft, almost a throbbing purr. He saw a light in the distance. A second light. The sound redoubled, one purr overlaid by another. Then a third light, farther away. All three lights in motion. He recognized the purring sounds now: the engines of dune cycles. Travelers crossing the desert in the middle of the night? The headlights of the cycles swung in wide circular orbits around him. A search party from the city? Why else would they be driving like that, cutting off arcs of desert in so systematic a way?

  Yes. Voices. “John? Jo-ohn! Yo, John!”

  Looking for him. But the desert was immense; the searchers were still far off. He need only take his gear and hunker down in the gully, and they would pass him by.

  “Yo, John! Jo-ohn!”

  Matt’s voice.

  Oxenshuer walked down the slope of the gully, paused a moment in its depths, and, surprising himself, started to scramble up the gully’s far side. There he stood in silence a few minutes, watching the circling dune cycles, listening to the calls of the searchers. It still seemed to him that the wind was bringing him the songs of the city people. This is the god who burns like fire. This is the god whose name is music. Jesus waits. The saint will lead you to bliss, dear tired John. Yes. Yes. At last he cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Yo! Here I am! Yo!”

  Two of the cycles halted immediately; the third, swinging out far to the left, stopped a little afterward. Oxenshuer waited for a reply, but none came.

  “Yo!” he called again. “Over here, Matt! Here!”

  He heard the purring start up. Headlights were in motion once more, the beams traversing the desert and coming to rest on him. The cycles approached. Oxenshuer recrossed the gully, collected his gear, and was waiting again on the cityward side when the searchers reached him. Matt, Nick, Will.

  “Spending a night out?” Matt asked. The odor of wine was strong on his breath.

  “Guess so.”

  “We got a little worried when you didn’t come back by midnight. Thought you might have stumbled into a dry wash and hurt yourself some. Wasn’t any cause for alarm, though, looks like.” He glanced at Oxenshuer’s pack, but made no comment. “Long as you’re all right, I guess we can leave you fini
sh what you were doing. See you in the morning, okay?”

  He turned away. Oxenshuer watched the men mount their cycles.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Matt looked around.

  “I’m all finished out here,” Oxenshuer said. “I’d appreciate a lift back to the city.”

  “It’s a matter of wholeness,” the Speaker said. “In the beginning, mankind was all one. We were in contact. The communion of soul to soul. But then it all fell apart. ‘In Adam’s Fall we sinned all,’ remember? And that Fall, that original sin, John, it was a falling apart, a falling away from one another, a falling into the evil of strife. When we were in Eden we were more than simply one family, we were one being, one universal entity; and we came forth from Eden as individuals, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. The original universal being broken into pieces. Here, John, we seek to put the pieces back together. Do you follow me?”

  “But how is it done?” Oxenshuer asked.

  “By allowing Dionysus to lead us to Jesus,” the old man said. “And in the saint’s holy frenzy to create unity out of opposites. We bring the hostile tribes together. We bring the contending brothers together. We bring man and woman together.”

  Oxenshuer shrugged. “You talk only in metaphors and parables.”

  “There’s no other way.”

  “What’s your method? What’s your underlying principle?”

  “Our underlying principle is mystic ecstasy. Our method is to partake of the flesh of the god, and of his blood.”

  “It sounds very familiar. Take; eat. This is my body. This is my blood. Is your Feast a High Mass?”

  The Speaker chuckled. “In a sense. We’ve made our synthesis between paganism and orthodox Christianity, and we’ve tried to move backward from the symbolic ritual to the literal act. Do you know where Christianity went astray? The same place all other religions have become derailed. The point at which spiritual experience was replaced by rote worship. Look at your lamas, twirling their prayer wheels. Look at your Jews, muttering about Pharaoh in a language they’ve forgotten. Look at your Christians, lining up at the communion rail for a wafer and a gulp of wine, and never once feeling the terror and splendor of knowing that they’re eating their god! Religion becomes doctrine too soon. It becomes professions of faith, formulas, talismans, emptiness. ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary—’ Words. Only words. We don’t believe, John, that religious worship consists in reciting narrative accounts of ancient history. We want it to be real. We want to see our god. We want to taste our god. We want to become our god.”

  “How?”

  “Do you know anything about the ancient cults of Dionysus?”

  “Only that they were wild and bloody, with plenty of drinking and revelry and maybe human sacrifices.”

  “Yes. Human sacrifices,” the Speaker said. “But before the human sacrifices came the divine sacrifices, the god who dies, the god who gives up his life for his people. In the prehistoric Dionysiac cults the god himself was torn apart and eaten; he was the central figure in a mystic rite of destruction in which his ecstatic worshipers feasted on his raw flesh, a sacramental meal enabling them to be made full of the god and take on blessedness, while the dead god became the scapegoat for man’s sins.

  And then the god was reborn and all things were made one by his rebirth. So in Greece, so in Asia Minor, priests of Dionysus were ripped to pieces as surrogates for the god, and the worshipers partook of blood and meat in cannibalistic feasts of love, and in more civilized times animals were sacrificed in place of men, and still later, when the religion of Jesus replaced the various Dionysiac religions, bread and wine came to serve as the instruments of communion, metaphors for the flesh and blood of the god. On the symbolic level it was all the same. To devour the god. To achieve contact with the god in the most direct way. To experience the rapture of the ecstatic state, when one is possessed by the god. To unite that which society has forced asunder. To break down all boundaries. To rip off all shackles. To yield to our saint, our mad saint, the drunken god who is our saint, the mad saintly god who abolishes walls and makes all things one. Yes, John? We integrate through disintegration. We dissolve in the great ocean. We burn in the great fire. Yes, John? Give your soul gladly to Dionysus the Saint, John. Make yourself whole in his blessed fire. You’ve been divided too long.” The Speaker’s eyes had taken on a terrifying gleam. “Yes, John? Yes? Yes?”

  In the dining hall one night Oxenshuer drinks much too much wine. The thirst comes upon him gradually and unexpectedly; at the beginning of the meal he simply sips as he eats, in his usual way, but the more he drinks, the more dry his throat becomes, until by the time the meat course is on the table he is reaching compulsively for the carafe every few minutes, filling his cup, draining it, filling, draining, filling, draining. He becomes giddy and boisterous; someone at the table begins a hymn, and Oxenshuer joins in, though he is unsure of the words and keeps losing the melody. Those about him laugh, clap him on the back, sing even louder, beckoning to him, encouraging him to sing with them. Ernie and Matt match him drink for drink, and now whenever his cup is empty they fill it before he has a chance to. A serving girl brings a full carafe. He feels a prickling in his earlobes and the tip of his nose, feels a band of warmth across his chest and shoulders, and realizes he is getting drunk, but he allows it to happen. Dionysus reigns here. lie has been sober long enough. And it has occurred to him that his drunkenness perhaps will inspire them to admit him to the night’s revels.

  But that does not happen. Dinner ends. The Speaker and the other old men who sit at his table file from the hall; it is the signal for the rest to leave. Oxenshuer stands. Falters. Reels. Recovers. Laughs. Links arms with Matt and Ernie. “Brothers,” he says. “Brothers!” They go from the hall together, but outside, in the great cobbled plaza, Matt says to him, “You better not go wandering in the desert tonight, man, or you break your neck for sure.” So he is still excluded. He goes back through the labyrinth with Matt and Jean to their house, and they help him into his room and give him a jug of wine in case he still feels the thirst, and then they leave him. Oxenshuer sprawls on his bed. His head is spinning. Matt’s boy looks in and asks if everything’s all right. “Yes,” Oxenshuer tells him. “I just need to lie down some.” He feels embarrassed over being so helplessly intoxicated, but he reminds himself that in this city of Dionysus no one need apologize for taking too much wine. He closes his eyes and waits for a little stability to return.

  In the darkness a vision comes to him: the death of Dave Vogel. With strange brilliant clarity Oxenshuer sees the landscape of Mars spread out on the screen of his mind, low snubby hills sloping down to broad crater-pocked plains, gnarled desolate boulders, purple sky, red gritty particles blowing about. The extravehicular crawler well along on its journey westward toward the Gulliver site, Richardson driving, Vogel busy taking pictures, operating the myriad sensors, leaning into the microphone to describe everything he sees. They are at the Gulliver site now, preparing to leave the crawler, when they are surprised by the sudden onset of the sandstorm. Without warning the sky is red with billowing capes of sand, driving down on them like snowflakes in a blizzard. In the first furious moment of the storm the vehicle is engulfed; within minutes sand is piled a meter high on the crawler’s domed transparent roof; they can see nothing, and the sandfall steadily deepens as the storm gains in intensity.

  Richardson grabs the controls, but the wheels of the crawler will not grip. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Vogel mutters. The vehicle has extendible perceptors on stalks, but when Vogel pushes them out to their full reach he finds that they are even then hidden by the sand. The crawler’s eyes are blinded; its antennae are buried. They are drowning in sand. Whole dunes are descending on them. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Vogel says again. “You can’t imagine it, Johnny. It hasn’t been going on five min
utes and we must be under three or four meters of sand already.” The crawler’s engine strains to free them. “Johnny? I can’t hear you, Johnny. Come in, Johnny.” All is silent on the ship-to-crawler transmission belt. “Hey, Houston,” Vogel says, “we’ve got this goddamned sandstorm going, and I seem to have lost contact with the ship. Can you raise him for us?” Houston does not reply. “Mission Control, are you reading me?” Vogel asks. He still has some idea of setting up a crawler-to—Earth-to-ship relay, but slowly it occurs to him that he has lost contact with Earth as well. All transmissions have ceased. Sweating suddenly in his spacesuit, Vogel shouts into the microphone, jiggles controls, plugs in the failsafe communications banks, only to find that everything has failed; sand has invaded the crawler and holds them in a deadly blanket. “Impossible,” Richardson says. “Since when is sand an insulator for radio waves?” Vogel shrugs. “It isn’t a matter of insulation, dummy. It’s a matter of total systems breakdown. I don’t know why.” They must be ten meters underneath the sand now. Entombed.

  Vogel pounds on the hatch, thinking that if they can get out of the crawler somehow they can dig their way to the surface through the loose sand, and then—and then what? Walk back, ninety kilometers, to the ship? Their suits carry thirty-six-hour breathing supplies. They would have to average two and a half kilometers an hour, over ragged cratered country, in order to get there in time; and with this storm raging, their chances of surviving long enough to hike a single kilometer are dismal. Nor docs Oxenshuer have a backup crawler in which he could come out to rescue them, even if he knew their plight; there is only the flimsy little one-man vehicle that they use for short-range geological field trips in the vicinity of the ship.

  “You know what?” Vogel says. “We’re dead men, Bud.” Richardson shakes his head vehemently. “Don’t talk garbage. We’ll wait out the storm, and then we’ll get the hell out of here. Meanwhile we better just pray.” There is no conviction in his voice, however. How will they know when the storm is over? Already they lie deep below the new surface of the Martian plain, and everything is snug and tranquil where they arc. Tons of sand hold the crawler’s hatch shut. There is no escape. Vogel is right: they are dead men. The only remaining question is one of time. Shall they wait for the crawler’s air supply to exhaust itself, or shall they take some more immediate step to hasten the inevitable end, going out honorably and quickly and without pain?