by Jerry
Habib made a point of joining in the merriment, while Liz Nielstrom flashed a grin of pure malice at Mara for failing to join in.
How the human race struggled against Beauty! Mara wept silently. How desperately they strove to make the Singular and Remarkable, dirty and shameful!
Mara was young. With the perpetual rush to draft telemediums into the Navy, and the fewness of those with the potential among Earth’s billions, the Swedish girl was barely out of her fifteenth year before being drafted.
One thing she didn’t know about Habib was the kind of debriefing BuPsych-Sec put him through after the first expedition, when he reported the existence of that mind inside the Black Hole to the incredulity of practically everyone in the Navy. They’d peeled his mind down like an onion at the Navy Hospital in Annapolis. They’d used strobe-hypno on him. Neoscopalamine. Pentathol-plus. Deepsee. It had been a harrowing, insane-making three weeks before they believed him. And it was another two years before the second expedition sailed.
But one thing she did know about him, that no one else did, was the utter difference between the image he presented publicly of a dirty street Arab, and the sense of his mind she had whenever they’d taken the psionic trigger drug, 2-4 Psilo-C, together, to cathect with Earth across the void. Then it was like a light being switched on in a dark room, and he was a different Habib—a Bedouin of the sands, a poet, and a prophet.
The people who rode the carrier beam of the teletrance never knew the pure beauty of the desert between the stars. All they got a sense of was the dirty urchin hanging around the oasis of far Earth, plucking at their sleeves and mumbling, “Mister, you want to buy my sister?” But Habib was the desert Bedouin too. Why did he always deny the desert beauty, out of trance?
Maybe this was the last lesson she had to learn—the final breaking in of the foal, to insure she could be safely graduated with flying colors and posted to some star frigate by herself.
Just then, strangely, as though he was reading her thoughts out of trance, Habib grasped her arm softly and whispered in her ear, with the voice that she’d longed to hear from his lips for the past three months—yet quietly, so that no one else could hear:
“Compared with the void of space, Mara, whatever is the void inside that thing?”
He asked her gently and eerily—as though the Mecca pilgrimage of their minds was at last underway and the furtive shabbiness of the caravanserais, the whores and beggary and disease, could be put behind them.
“It is so solid a void that ‘here’ and ‘there’ are meaningless words. There will be no referents in there, except those you yourself manufacture, Mara . . .”
But could she really trust this sudden shift from urchin to muezzin calling the faithful to prayer—or was it just another round in the game of cruelty?
“It’s so dense in there that it must be like swimming through stone.” Habib went on murmuring in her ear. “Yet even that comparison’s no good, for he has no power to swim about his dwelling place—”
Puzzled, Mara stared out without replying.
The captain stepped into the nacelle a moment later—a thick-set, hard-headed grandson of Polish-German immigrants to America, who still had the air of being a peasant in from the country dressed in his best, ill-tailored suit, and who ran the ship with all the cunning and blunt persistence of the peasant making a profitable pig sale: this, alloyed to a degree or two in Astronavigation and a star or two for combatin some brushfire war in Central Africa stirred up by the draft board’s “child-snatching.” Immune to the wonders of space, Lodwy Rinehart barely glanced outside.
“May I have your attention a moment? We’ll be sailing down to the ergosphere commencing twenty hundred hours—”
Ted Ohashi gobbled nervously:
“You mean tonight? Maybe we should fire a few drones near that thing first, to check the stability of the ergosphere—”
“After three months you want to hang back another few days? Maybe you want another session with Mara Glas in case you get killed and never know those joys again, is that it? Sorry, Dr. Ohashi. Twenty hundred, we’re going right down on her up to the hilt.”
“Just not too close,” the fat man pleaded. “We could be sucked in, you know. Space is so bent there. No power could get us out then. Fifty nautical miles off the top of the ergosphere’s fine by me, Captain!”
“Point taken, Dr. Ohashi,” Rinehart smiled acidly. “That’s also fine by me. ‘Up to the hilt’ was just a colorful bit of naval slang. Need I spell it out for you?”
The German from Hamburg guffawed. “That’s good, I like it, Captain.”
The Hawaiian snickered dutifully too then, his fat wobbling in the starlight, but he was scared.
Mara shivered. Habib shrugged indifferently; by shrugging he hid his features in the shadow of the haik . . .
Space presents itself to the telemedium’s mind in symbolic form. The mind can only see what it has learned to see, and it has certainly not learned to see light-years and cosmic rays and gravity waves. Therefore space must present itself in terms of symbols learned by the brain during the cognitive processes of life on Earth.
The symbols Habib presented Mara with were those of the desert Bedouin. Perhaps, taught by someone from her own part of the world, she would have learned to see the wastelands of the arctic tundra, the icefloes of the northern seas, or endless flows of forest. But Habib presented her with the golden desert—and for this she thanked him from the bottom of her heart, for its pure beauty had a wealth of heat and color—stark as it was—that awakened her Swedish soul to life, as the brief hot summer awakened her country from its wintry melancholy once a year.
She remembered so clearly the surprise of that first cathexis with Earth across the light-years, in company with Habib . . .
Every Navy man had the right and duty to cathect with Earth through the ship’s telemedium. At the other end of the link would be a home-based telemedium ridden by one of BuPsych-Sec’s professional “Mermaids”: forging what the Reichian-Tantric adepts of BuPsych-Sec liked to refer to as “libidinal cathexis” with Someone Back Home, therefore with Mother Earth herself.
The energies of the libido, bottled-up deliberately by sex depressive drugs until the time of trance, were unleashed upon the responsive nervous system of the medium in a copulation that was both physical and transmental. The energy that ejaculated thought impulses across the light-years, through a symbolic landscape of the medium’s own devising, had been called different things at different times in history. In the twentieth century Wilhelm Reich named it Or-gone Radiation. The Tantric sexual philosophers of Old India called it, more picturesquely, the Snake of Kundalini.
Reich had built crude machines to harness and condense this sexual energy that he believed permeated space. The Tantrics used yogic asanas to twist the body into new, prolonged forms of intercourse; they used the Om chant to make the nervous system a hypersensitive sounding board; and hypnotized themselves with yantra diagrams to send this energy soaring out of the copulating body through the roof of the skull toward the stars—toward some subjective cosmic immensity, at least . . .”
BuPsych-Sec had rationalized and blended Reichian therapy with the Tantric art of love and yantra meditation. In its crash course for sensitizing the potential telemediums, much of this learning was force-fed hypnotically in deep sleeps from which the medium woke, haunted by erotic cosmic ghosts, to days of pep talks on such topics as “The Spaceman’s Psychological Problems” and “The Need for Cultural Unity in an Age of Translight.” Yet there could be no live test runs of the contact techniques till a novice was on his or her way, light-months from Earth with a supervisor medium, able to draw on the repressed sexuality of the crew to reach out to another medium at BuPsych-Sec, Annapolis. And every single trance-trip had to figure economically in terms of vital Navy information transmitted. Each crew member riding a medium was subliminally primed with data that the mermaid at the other end received the imprint of, to be retrieved by the dru
g Deepsee. The Annapolis data banks were thus constantly updated; and the data copied to other banks hidden deep in the Rocky Mountains. Earth’s Navy was not a string of ships, but an integrated nervous system spread out over thousands of cubic light-years.
Yet the doctrines of Reich and Tantra would have been nothing without the development of the trance drug 2-4-Psilo-C. It was an unforeseen spin-off from BuPsych-Sec’s routine work on psychedelic gases for military and civil policing.
The two crew members who were going to ride Habib and Mara’s bodies for the first liberty of the voyage stood twiddling their thumbs with sheepish sleazy grins on their faces, their anticipation of pleasure somewhat muted by the supercilious, sophisticatedly brutal aura of Lew Boyd and his assistant.
The previous BuPsych-Sec officer had been more of a therapist in the Masters and Johnson line, with less of the policeman about him. This man Boyd knew his Reich and Tantra inside out, but he carried the stamp of a trouble-shooter from the moment he joined the ship, along with that enigmatic bitch Liz Nielstrom. What kind of relationship had they had been involved in before? Their degree of mental complicity indicated more than a mere working relationship. Yet they didn’t seem to have been lovers in the ordinary sense. Rather, they appeared bound together by the cruel magic of their roles, this ugly woman and this smart cop, in a mutual indifference to sex itself except as an instrument of power. Sternly they reveled in the dialectic of the twin faces of authority, the repressive and permissive, gaining their private accord from the games they could play with this psychosexual coin. For them, the galaxy was a gaming table they could amuse themselves at, with the induced Tantric orgasms of others for chips. Professional croupiers of the cosmic naval brothel they were, dedicated to seeing that the Bureau always won, and hunting endlessly for cheats. (But who could possibly cheat? And how?)
There were two couches with encephalographic commune helmets at one end; these helmets swivelled to accept a prone or supine posture . . .
“You can get stripped, the four of you,” Liz Nielstrom told them, glancing at her watch. “Earth’s standing by.”
One of the sailors shuffled about on his feet. “Excuse me, ma’am, but who’s riding the girl; do I get to ride her? I hear it’s her first time out,” he pleaded.
“It must be your first time too,” Nielstrom responded sarcastically. “Since it makes not the least difference to you whether you’re riding male or female.”
“It’s just the idea of it,” the sailor mumbled. “So as I’ll know afterwards—”
“Think what you like then, sailor. Believe it’s her, not him, for all I care. But your request’s out of order, and denied.”
It was true that it made no difference . . . Habib slipped off his haik and aba, and stretched out his slim knotty Bedouin body prone on the couch while Nielstrom was busy injecting the two naked sailors in their upper arms. They soon lolled upright in a stupor, awaiting the “Simple Simon Says” command.
Turning to Mara, she gestured the naked girl to take up a supine position on the other couch, where Boyd maneuvered her head carefully into the commune helmet as he had already done for Habib. He pricked her arm with the injection of 2-4-Psilo-C. While Nielstrom carried out her ointmenting of Mara’s shaven sex, the light sensation of the other woman’s fingers was already slipping away. In the dark of the helmet Mara concentrated her attention on the meditation pattern of the shri yantra diagram. This was an interweaving of upward-pointing and downward-pointing triangles, unfolding from around a central nub. The downward-pointing triangles were female; the upward, male. The central dot was the stored energy, compact in a bud.
Remotely, she heard Boyd give the command—his words slowed down and booming dully, like a tape played at the wrong speed.
“Simple Simon says, make love to Habib, Mr. Monterola! Simple Simon says, make love to Mara, Mr. Nagorski!”
(But it was Monterola who had wanted her.)
Libidinal cathexis started. Time drew further out for her. Distantly, she felt her central bud opening slowly to the man Nagorski’s slow thrust. A clammy smell of sweat and the heavy pressure of a body on top of hers receded utterly from her awareness. The yantra opened up hugely, to reveal a vision of symbolic grace through that sexual eye embedded in its heart.
The vision was a beautiful, wonderful thing; something that preliminary training at BuPsych-Sec and all the jokes on shipboard had never hinted at . . .
There was a world of magic and beauty, after all. The dreams she’d dreamed as a girl were realities—but secret, hidden realities.
As the drug increased its effect, and Nagorski thrust into her, her sensitivity spread outward: the starship dissolved, her body dissolved, and her mind became a shining mirror seeking for mental images of reflect out there. She was conscious of the nearby presence of Habib; the sense of him varied between shining light and robed, hooded figure whose robes were like sails, like wings. She began to pick up speed together with him, till they were skimming over dunes and dimes of empty golden desert, hunting for the oasis of Earth.
“Beware of mirages,” his mind whispered to hers. “Beware of pools that seek to reflect yourself—pools of illusion that would lock you up in their waters. You have to seek the far-off mirror that bears the imprint of another mind within it, like the hallmark on a piece of silver. That’s the telecontact you must seek.”
He was no dirty-fingered, runny-nosed urchin now, he was the desert hunter, the bird that flies to Mecca, the prophet in the wilderness.
It wasn’t so far to Earth, that first cathexis: a half light-year or so. Oasis Earth was still nearby.
The flow of her sensitivity streamed above the empty, thirsty dunes, clutching at Habib’s hem. Soon she was flowing into the crowded Oasis where so many streams mixed together, aiming at the tent where Habib beckoned her. Habib held the tent-flap aside for her and they skimmed inside.
The telecontact was a clear pool within the tent; a mirror with the hazy image of the shri yantra floating in it. The two mirrors came together, becoming screens for other minds to use.
The yantra image dissolved: it was no more than a call-sign. There was a time of calm and silence and clarity.
The telemedium was the mirror itself, not the image in the mirror; was the white wall, on which puppet shadows briefly danced and postured and copulated; was the vase of wine for others to get drunk at—but the vase itself doesn’t get drunk; was the drum-skin—but not the sticky fingers tapping a rhythm out on to it to set the player’s nerves on fire . . .
Mara found herself whispering words to Habib: one slave whispering to another. The words she whispered were poetry.
There stood upon auction blocks
In the market of Isfahan
A thousand and one bodies
A thousand and one souls . . .
The souls were like women
The bodies were like men . . .
Habib, his clear mirror pressed tight to the mirror of his telecontact beside her in the tent, heard. He asked:
“What are those words, Mara?”
“He was a poet in my own country, Sweden,” she thought. “But he never lived in his own country, inside his mind. He lived in the East—in your East, Habib. He sang about the desert of the soul before it became real for a starcruising world.”
“What was this man’s name?” A hint of sincere curiosity reverberated in the question.
“Gunnar Ekelof. He lived in the twentieth century—but inside his mind he lived in another time. Thank you, Habib, for showing me this desert. I understand his poems now . . .”
Then the mirrors were flying apart. Wind rushed out of the torn drum. They were both back in the desert outside the tent again, forced to fly home to their bodies. The sailors had climaxed. Their energy was vented. Their own commune helmets were switching the experience off. Time was up.
Mara and Habib flew back across the desert of golden dunes to the lonely, isolated caravan of the Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar—a single camel
plodding far out on the sand of stars . . .
As Mara woke up on the couch, the two sailors were already exiting from the trance room, grinning sheepishly. Spurning her tenderness, Habib was his dirty urchin self again.
Mara went back to her tiny cabin to weep her bewilderment.
Mara was Swedish for “little witch.” But it was also Swedish for “nightmare”.
One month out from Earth, there’d been a discussion in the lounge about the Black Hole and the nature of the creature trapped in it . . .
“When we get there, we can fire particles into the ergosphere,” Kurt Spiegel explained to an impromptu audience. “This ergosphere is the region between the so-called ‘surface of infinite redshift’ and the ‘event horizon.’ ‘Infinite red-shift’ is the outer layer of the Hole, where queer things really start happening. But there is still a possibility of extracting news from there. A particle is fired into the ergosphere; if it breaks up in there, part falls down the Hole, but the other part may pick up energy from the spin of the Hole and emerge into normal space again, where we can measure it. But beyond ‘infinite redshift’ is the terrible ‘event horizon’ itself. Geometry collapses, becomes meaningless. Thus there is no longer any way out, since there is no way: no way up or down, no in or out, no physical framework. So that’s the end of matter, radiation, anything falling in there. I believe we may find out something from the ergosphere—but beyond that, nothing. Anything else is impossible.”
“So you believe that Habib is lying about the thing in there?” Liz Nielstrom demanded.
Habib sat silent, face half hidden by the haik, though Mara imagined she saw him smile faintly and mockingly.
“Look at it this way, Miss Nielstrom,” Carlos Bolam intervened. He was a Chicano physicist who came from a desert region utterly unlike Habib’s desert of the mind—from a Californian desert of freeways, drive-ins, hotdog stands, and neon signs. “Thought must be a function of some matrix or matter or organized radiation. It’s got to be based on something organized. But by definition there’s no kind of organization possible within a Black Hole.”