by Jerry
This is the true purpose of creation, not that. So join me, Mara, be free of illusion and be my bride—”
Are you a devil then? she thought fearfully. She stared at the timeless pool, tasted his faceless kisses on her cheeks, his fingerless ruffling of her hair, in that place where the Hokusai wave hung like the ultimate battlement—not penning in the chaos of the Black Hole, but resisting the weak thrust of the silt of matter that had piled up against this mind’s domain over aeons of spurious reality; stars, starships, bodies . . .
“But what are you?” she hesitated.
“I am the Lover,” the answer came. “The Allembracing. There is no loneliness. But I invite you—”
She remembered the Tantric myth of Shiva and Shakti, the sexual pair so deeply joined in eternal copulation that they did not know of their difference. Shiva and Shakti, united at first, had separated. Shakti had danced the dance of illusion to convince Shiva he was not One, but Many, creating from her womb the world of multiple objects existing in the illusory flow of time. He, then, the Void, played the role of Shakti, to the Shiva of the matter universe which she, and Habib, represented. The fact that in the myth Shakti was woman, and Shiva man, was irrelevant. “He” had been as ready to love Habib . . . as he was ready to love her. “He” was an arbitrary pronoun, at best.
Yet she sensed a terrible danger if she yielded to him, if “solid” matter was to be wooed by the original nothingness at its heart. Perhaps in a few billion years a final copulation of the “Universe” with “Void” was destined to liberate the energy to restart the cycle . . . But so soon—already?
But why should she care about danger to stars and ships and bodies? A surge of joy took hold of her. She could be the first creature of matter to live the Tantric myth right through to its end, and be truly loved, as no one else had, by this being who was not “being.”
“You are the Lover; then love me—” she whispered.
And the mind in the Black Hole gathered about. Her lips were brushed, her hair stroked, the palms of her hands traced sensuously.
The Hokusai wave itself began to tremble; not to fall in on her—rather, to roll backward, away from the still pool, towering up kilometers into the void sky . . .
Through a mist she sensed cries, orders—voices tissue-thin and torn like tatters in a storm. For the Black Hole was changing its configuration in space, gathering itself for an assault on Being and Matter; and as charged particles were sucked in toward it they sprayed the danger signal of increased outpourings of synchroton radiation and gravity pulses . . .
As he reached out to embrace her, along the line of her thoughts, tracing the yantric geometry of her teletrance back to its origin in the orbiting starship, dune and pool dissolved, and she was snatched away . . .
They had executed Emergency Return Procedure on her—a violent coitus interruptus of chemicals and sheer brute force.
A syringe gleamed in Nielstrom’s hand. Habib lay weeping, naked, in a corner of the room, his penis a shrivelled button. He coughed, a thin smear of blood on his lips; hunched over his nakedness and bruises, gathering the energy to reach his aba and cover himself. It looked as though some urban vigilantes had caught him raping Mara and beaten him up. Mainly this was the action of the trance-cancel drug whose results showed so dramatically—a massive physiological aversion: cold turkey compressed into seconds. But perhaps, too, some gratuitous violence had been used in wrenching him away from Mara and depositing him there.
Mara hurt so badly that the pain crumpled her into a foetal ball, around a belly raped by withdrawal and not by entry. Her nipples were bee stings mounted on top of cones of soft agony like tortured snails stripped of their shells and teased with burning matches (a flicker image from Lew Boyd’s childhood sucked in during the decaying moments of the trance).
Lodwy Rinehart stood there in the room with Boyd and Nielstrom, his face blank stone.
They played tapes of her poetry back at her. The voice was slurred and smeared, barely recognizable as Mara’s, but the words were identifiable enough. At least the poetry was.
“May you rot in Hell, Boyd,” swore Habib through his tears. “May Allah use your guts for spinning yarn.”
“There’s no alien being in there, is there, Habib?”
“Of course there’s a—a being in there,” Mara gasped. “I met him. Touched him—”
“Even fell in love with him,” smirked Nielstrom.
Mara couldn’t understand what was happening, except that it must be one more cruel effort to humiliate her.
Boyd’s lip curled in anger and contempt.
“Did you think you’d fooled us, Habib? But nobody deserts the Navy, mister—but nobody! That’s what cathexis with home is all about.”
He swung round on Mara.
“And as for you, little witch—didn’t you suspect what Habib was up to? No, I guess you didn’t, or you’d have been more scared for your sanity.”
His every word was a slap in her face, so recently brushed by love.
“I don’t understand any of it,” she moaned. “Leave me alone—leave me to myself.”
“Ah there it is! The root of the matter exposed. To be left to yourselves. That’s what you’d like, isn’t it? But how, eh? You can’t trance-trip without a rider. That’s where the energy comes from, to jump light-years, the rider’s sexual frustrations. You keep him rooted to Earth, he keeps you rooted to the ship. The psychological security of the ship and its whole communication net rely on this interplay—”
Mara wept, at these hateful, bewildering people around her. She cried for the still pool beneath the dune . . .
“Why don’t you tell her, Habib?” Boyd sneered. “You’re supposed to be her teacher.”
“Tell her what? She knows what is down there.”
“Does she? Shall I tell her what we know? There’s an event horizon—a one-way membrane into the Black Hole. But what if a mind could perform a balancing act on the very horizon itself, eh, Habib? If you could attach yourself to the standing wave there? No more Navy duty then, Habib—you’d be able to hole up in there and forget about us.” He smiled bitterly at his own unintended pun. _
“What’s this about standing waves, Boyd?” the captain demanded. “Don’t make me play guessing games on my own ship.”
“It’s something we’ve theorized about at BuPsych-Sec, sir. The universe hangs together because of causal relationships. But ever since Pauli, in the twentieth century, scientists have speculated about other, alternative relationships—noncausal ones. Clearly these telemediums function because of this noncausal aspect of things. But with the explosive development of star travel, we’ve been far too busy exploiting the phenomenon efficiently at BuPsych-Sec, and holding society together, to do really deep research. Damn it, we’re just fighting to hold the line. You’ve got to protect society against the disruptive effects of star travel! Well—whereabouts in the universe do you find a tangible physical boundary between the causal and the noncausal?”
“The event horizon,” nodded Rinehart.
“On one side is the world of cause and effect,” Boyd went on effervescently. “On the other side there isn’t any meaningful framework for cause and effect to operate in. Effectively, it’s a non-causal zone. We think the friction between the two models of reality generates a kind of standing wave of what I suppose you have to call ‘probabilities.’ Strange things can happen there. And Habib saw his chance of breaking the causal chains that fasten him to his body and his rider, and the starship, and escaping. But he had to be physically close to the place—and it had to be a two-stage process—”
“Boyd’s wrong—there is a Being,” gasped Habib. “It’s not me.”
“Mental mutiny?” growled Rinehart, paying no attention to the Arab’s protests. “That’s a new one for the book.”
“A particularly ingenious crime, Captain. Habib sacrificed that sailor’s life force to build himself a matrix for his mind to fix on, in there. In doing so, you could
say he had to split his personality. No wonder we found so little of all this in his mind, beyond the glaring desire to escape, back there in Annapolis. Habib had covered his tracks up skilfully, like the furtive Bedouin he is. Part of his mind stayed there at the event horizon, ready to receive the rest of him, the major portion of his consciousness. But the BuPsych-Sec officer who rode him that second time had the sense and the training to break the trance. He pulled out, took Habib home. BuPsych-Sec decided we’d give him sufficient rope to hang himself. He didn’t realize the rope would be round his ankle restraining him at the critical time! It was no use his being the rider, you see—he couldn’t make a transference that way. We’ll be most interested to learn his tricks when we strip him down again, and the little Swedish witch has her mind peeled to yield up her memory imprint of that bit of fractured mind she fell in love with. We’ll have the full picture then.”
Habib’s eyes met Mara’s urgently, begging her to believe him, not Boyd. Her own mind swam with doubts. Had that only been a simulacrum of Habib she had met in there, and all the symbols telling her of how the universe was nothing, only lies—part of a cheap trick?
No—he couldn’t have contrived it; couldn’t have invented a whole alien presence, a viewpoint that reversed the universe! It had to be real! Boyd was still talking.
“The most important thing of all to know is how Habib did this thing. I don’t just mean from the security angle. Once we know how the noncausal force operates in conjunction with the universe of cause and effect, given a stretch of luck we can discover how to build a noncausal stardrive. I feel it in my bones. Imagine instantaneous travel, Captain—the power, the expansion, the control! Imagine the whole galaxy in our back yard—and all the other galaxies!”
Lodwy Rinehart could imagine. Still, one thing puzzled him.
“Why did the Hole act up, just then? It’s stabilized now. But it expanded by two or three percent in a matter of minutes. If I remember my physics, that should require the swallowing of something of the order of a whole sun—”
“We’ll know all about it when we analyze the data, but if you want my snap judgment on that, just remember we were tampering with noncausal forces there, at their physical interface with the causal universe. You can take it as an indicator of the kind of power we’ll be able to tap . . .” They played more tapes, but the poetry degenerated into a verbal mishmash—a semantic white noise that sounded like the very entropy of language itself, except where occasional words and phrases came through, treacherously, twisted out of context.
What Boyd was saying about Habib’s “Plot” had to be the maddest fantasy. Perhaps he could be right about harnessing the energy of the void. But he didn’t understand the danger. She had known what the danger was, as the alien mind dilated to receive her. They might build themselves a machine that would wreck matter and reality itself, instead of a stardrive. But for all she cared, they could wreck the whole galaxy of stars. Her sex ached so fiercely, and her soul . . .
“Incidentally, Boyd,” the captain inquired casually, “what would have happened if you’d sent Habib in there as medium, with his little witch riding him? Do you suppose he’d have sacrificed her to escape?”
“It’s not true, Mara,” cried Habib. “They are mad, not us. They can’t stand the knowledge that all is based on illusion in the universe!” However, he began to giggle stupidly, because the effort of subterfuge—or the effort of explanation—was too much for him (since she knew anyway). It was one of the two, but which?
Boyd glanced at her ironically, as Nielstrom slipped a sedative needle into Habib’s arm.
“I imagine he was pretty desperate, sir.”
“No!” moaned Mara. “It isn’t true. You don’t know anything.”
It wasn’t you in there, Habib. It was Him. Though I could share with you. He was big enough, my Lover.
They’re celebrating in the lounge. Fat Ohashi. The Prussian. The Chicano. Boyd and Nielstrom. Rinehart has spliced the mainbrace in true old Navy style, as we race away from the Black Hole and away from . . . love.
The autopsy on my love will be starting soon; the unpeeling of my mind; the final rape.
What shall I do, Habib? Kill myself?
For I’ve known an inch of loveliness. And an inch is all I’ll ever be allowed to know of loveliness.
Little witch.
Big nightmare.
MY BOAT
Joanna Russ
Milty, have I got a story for you!
No, sit down. Enjoy the cream cheese and bagel. I guarantee this one will make a first-class TV movie; I’m working on it already. Small cast, cheap production—it’s a natural. See, we start with this crazy chick, maybe about seventeen, but she’s a waif, she’s withdrawn from the world, see? She’s had some kind of terrible shock. And she’s fixed up this old apartment in a slum really weird, like a fantasy world—long, blonde hair, maybe goes around barefoot in tie-dyed dresses she makes out of old sheets, and there’s this account executive who meets her in Central Park and falls in love with her on account of she’s like a dryad or a nature spirit—
All right. So it stinks. I’ll pay for my lunch. We’ll pretend you’re not my agent, okay? And you don’t have to tell me it’s been done; I know it’s been done. The truth is—
Milty, I have to talk to someone. No, it’s a lousy idea, I know and I’m not working on it and I haven’t been working on it, but what are you going to do Memorial Day weekend if you’re alone and everybody’s out of town?
I have to talk to someone.
Yes, I’ll get off the Yiddische shtick. Hell, I don’t think about it; I just fall into it sometimes when I get upset, you know how it is. You do it yourself. But I want to tell you a story and it’s not a story for a script. It’s something that happened to me in high school in 1952 and I just want to tell someone. I don’t care if no station from here to Indonesia can use it; you just tell me whether I’m nuts or not, that’s all.
Okay.
It was 1952, like I said. I was a senior in a high school out on the Island, a public high school but very fancy, a big drama program. They were just beginning to integrate, you know, the early fifties, very liberal neighborhood; everybody’s patting everybody else on the back because they let five black kids into our school. Five out of eight hundred! You’d think they expected God to come down from Flatbush and give everybody a big fat golden halo.
Anyway, our drama class got integrated, too—one little black girl aged fifteen named Cissie Jackson, some kind of genius. All I remember the first day of the spring term, she was the only black I’d ever seen with a natural, only we didn’t know what the hell it was, then; it made her look as weird as if she’d just come out of a hospital or something.
Which, by the way, she just had. You know Malcolm X saw his father killed by white men when he was four and that made him a militant for life? Well, Cissie’s father had been shot down in front of her eyes when she was a little kid—we learned that later on—only it didn’t make her militant; it just made her so scared of everybody and everything that she’d withdraw into herself and wouldn’t speak to anybody for weeks on end. Sometimes she’d withdraw right out of this world and then they’d send her to the loony bin; believe me, it was all over school in two days. And she looked it; she’d sit up there in the school theater—oh, Milty, the Island high schools had money, you better believe it!—and try to disappear into the last seat like some little scared rabbit. She was only four eleven anyhow, and maybe eighty-five pounds sopping wet. So maybe that’s why she didn’t become a militant. Hell, that had nothing to do with it. She was scared of everybody. It wasn’t just the white-black thing, either; I once saw her in a corner with one of the other black students: real uptight, respectable boy, you know, suit and white shirt and tie, hair straightened the way they did then with a lot of grease and carrying a new briefcase, too, and he was talking to her about something as if his life depended on it. He was actually crying and pleading with her. And all she did was
shrink back into the corner as if she’d like to disappear and shake her head No No No. She always talked in a whisper unless she was on stage and sometimes then, too. The first week she forgot her cues four times—just stood there, glazed over, ready to fall through the floor—and a couple of times she just wandered off the set as if the play was over, right in the middle of a scene.
So Al Coppolino and I went to the principal. I’d always thought Alan was pretty much a fruitcake himself—remember, Milty this is 1952—because he used to read all that crazy stuff, The Cult of Chthulhu, Dagon Calls, The Horror Men of Leng—yeah, I remember that H.P. Lovecraft flick you got 10 percent on for Hollywood and TV and reruns—but what did we know? Those days you went to parties, you got excited from dancing cheek to cheek, girls wore ankle socks and petticoats to stick their skirts out, and if you wore a sport shirt to school that was okay because Central High was liberal, but it better not have a pattern on it. Even so, I knew Al was a bright kid and I let him do most of the talking; I just nodded a lot. I was a big nothing in those days.
Al said, “Sir, Jim and I are all for integration and we think it’s great that this is a really liberal place, but—uh—”
The principal got that look. Uh-oh.
“But?” he said, cold as ice.
“Well, sir,” said Al, “it’s Cissie Jackson. We think she’s—um—sick. I mean wouldn’t it be better if . . . I mean everybody says she’s just come out of the hospital and it’s a strain for all of us and it must be a lot worse strain for her and maybe it’s a strain for all of us and it must be a lot worse strain for her and maybe it’s just a little soon for her to—”
“Sir,” I said, “what Coppolino means is, we don’t mind integrating blacks with whites, but this isn’t racial integration, sir; this is integrating normal people with a filbert. I mean—”