The Tethered Man

by John Michael McNamara

  ‘Blah blah blah. Just this one time, Ship, indulge me. Poetry. Do you understand it?’

  Yes. I believe that I do. Poetry can be described as-

  ‘Thank you. Now. Do you want to hear another poem?’

  The merest micro-pause.

  Of course, Courier J. Please recite your latest poetical composition.

  THE MASKED MAN

  Reflect upon this Universe

  as a kind of formal office

  appointed and performed.

  * * *

  I would take on that role

  of blond assassin, part

  jackal and part owl,

  bestowing kisses, flowers,

  a cap of scars upon my brow.

  I’ve got other ways of passing time, other ways of amusing myself.

  Most involve Ship showing me some form of entertainment on the floatscreen.

  I’ve watched reams of rubbish. Some gems among them. I go through long periods of not wanting to watch anything. Ship has everything that’s ever been made. It’s all there for me to watch whenever I want to watch it. But when you can watch anything you like, you tend not to watch anything at all. When you’re floating in a vacuum without any hope of rescue, it’s hard to suspend disbelief and sink into fantasy. You wouldn’t think it is, but it is.

  MY SUMMER

  Can any night

  withstand phenomena?

  The yellow day

  unborn bequeaths

  immortal clay.

  Ship isn’t speaking to me for some reason. Fair enough.

  I’ll take the chance to talk about my poetry some more. I mean, while Ship isn’t speaking to me, while it’s wrapped up in whatever it’s wrapped up in, it’s the perfect opportunity to talk about where I’ve come from with my poetry, where I am now with my poetry, and where I would like to go with my poetry. My poetry-

  Courier J.

  My poetry might seem artless, on the surface. Mechanical. Random. I do know that. But it does have some form. I insist upon form.

  It’s always a vexed question in poetry, the question of form. The great endless poetic argument boils down to: form or free?

  There are as many schools of thought as there are letters in the alphabet. Let’s say that the ‘A’ school of thought believes in form. Let’s say that the ‘Z’ school of thought doesn’t believe in form.

  I would be somewhere between the two schools of thought, but somewhat closer to the ‘A’ school than the ‘Z’ school.

  I’d be in the ‘J’ school of thought. Isn’t that neat?

  I can appreciate that to the untutored eye my poetry seems no more than random words and phrases linked together by nothing more than their arrangement on the page and my say-so that it’s poetry.

  To which I might say: ‘So?’

  There is a method to my poetry. An art. A calculation. A form. The thing with poetry is-

  Courier J, in the course of a routine internal scan, I have discovered something that will interest you.

  The thing with poetry is that it’s impossible to define. Or at least so tricky to define that there is no one set definition of it. Go ahead and try. See if you can define poetry.

  I bet one of the first definitions you think of, and you might even say it out loud, is ‘words that rhyme’, and that’s fine, it’s fine to think all there is to poetry is ‘words that rhyme’-

  I have detected several suspicious masses distributed across my internal structure. I have concluded that these might be the explosive devices you speculated might exist.

  Rhyme has never gone away from poetry. Rhyme will never go away from poetry. There’s a reason rhyme exists in poetry. Rhyme is an important tool that hooks the reader – or better say, the listener – into the flow of what is being said. Into what the poet is trying to convey.

  Another thing you might think of when trying to define poetry is ‘self-expression’.

  ‘Poetry is about self-expression,’ you’ll often hear people say.

  Ugh.

  If you’re committed to the belief that poetry is about self-expression, we might have to fall out.

  Each of the dozen masses corresponds in size to the typical design of a pinhead anti-matter bomb. I have reviewed my records. I believe these masses were surreptitiously installed during my last maintenance overhaul before Departure.

  Let me tell you that self-expression is the very last thing that poetry is ‘about’. You’ll have worked out that I’m often playful with the things I say. But I’m being serious here. Deadly serious.

  Self-expression is the last thing that good poetry should be about. I’m not denying self-expression is a factor. It definitely is a factor. If you were drawing up a list of things that poetry is about, ‘self-expression’ would be on the list.

  But it’d be right at the bottom of the list. Self-expression sits at the absolute arse-end of the body poetic.

  Self-expression is not what poetry is about.

  So what is poetry about?

  Here’s what poetry is about. Poetry-

  Assuming these devices are what they seem to be, then they can only be there for one purpose. To explode. The likelihood is that they have been primed to explode when my spatial coordinates change. Just as you intuited. A most perspicacious insight, Courier J. We are marooned here more securely than either of us could have imagined.

  Poetry is about the evocation of a particular emotion, thought, or insight in the mind, heart, or soul of the reader or listener.

  That’s what poetry is about: the reader. The listener. The end-consumer. Whatever you want to call him. Or her.

  Poetry is barely about the poet at all. Anybody who tries to tell you anything different is reading from a different playbook to the one I have. Don’t just take my word for this. Look at your favourite poems. Look at-

  So what this all means for you, and for myself, and for the nature of our predicament, is something very profound and unsettling, Courier J. Even if we figure out a way around our impasse, we could not actually go anywhere.

  Look at anything by any of the poetic giants from Old Earth, may she rest in peace, or from any of those First Diaspora singers — those poets of Space who soared more majestically than any before or after!

  When you hear Ullerton’s ‘Ode to the Abyss’, for example.

  Or when you sit down and read, from line one to line one thousand, Shah-Reeve’s ‘Masters and Slaves’, for another example.

  Where is the self-expression in each of those masterpieces? Nowhere, is where. You’re not getting deep insights about the self-natures of the poets. Let the biographers and fame-chasers worry about how the metaphors relate to this or that episode in the writers’ lives.

  No, when you read a poem, you illuminate and hollow out something in yourself that was until then dark and obscure. That’s what poetry’s all about, and-

  Are you listening to me, Courier J? My discovery of these anti-matter pinhead devices means that even if we were to somehow figure out a way to slip the trap we are in, I could not carry us much further than a few hundred metres without annihilating us both.

  That’s what poetry’s all about, and don’t accept anything that tries to sell you short. Poetry isn’t about the poet. Poetry isn’t about the prevailing winds of society and politics. Poetry isn’t about the human race, or some impersonal fate, or destiny, or Eternity, or whatever.

  Poetry is about you, the reader or listener, and nothing else.

  You might not think poetry’s any good, but it doesn’t care if you think that. It’s just like the cosmos in a way. It’s just there. It’s all around you. Whatever you think.

  When you stop believing in everything else, what’s left that doesn’t go away – is poetry.

  Are you listening to me, Courier J?

  I suppose I’d better get started on it. I mean, I’d better get started on composing the poem about this situation I find myself in.

  This is a singular situation. Nobody knows I’m in it. N
obody will ever hear about it.

  Even if by some miracle, Eons hence, whatever’s left of me here is discovered through some unthinkable fluke, nobody will understand it.

  Oh, they’ll study me, they’ll place me in my social and historical context, and that’ll be all. I’ll have been understood, assimilated into whatever passes for the culture up there. I’m sure they’ll do a fine job of it, those boffins of the future, but-

  Are you all right, Courier J?

  -but only you will understand it, you reading this, and even you don’t understand it, not really. You can’t. You would have to be here. You would have to be here. You would have to be here.

  There is no way out of this situation for either of us, Courier J. Unless-

  Nobody can understand anything about what others have been through. Imagination refuses to leap when it’s faced with the likes of this.

  Truth is so much more peculiar than anything that can be imagined.

  Because it’s dull.

  Truth is prosaic. Truth is boring. Nobody in their right mind wants the truth. Nobody-

  I might be able to repurpose one of my servitors to somehow deactivate the pinhead devices. However, my preliminary scans indicate that the devices are rather sophisticated. I imagine they are rigged on a quantum trigger. Any attempt to interfere with or disable them in any way will detonate the devices. I will nevertheless look into it. Do you agree?

  My final poem will be my greatest poem.

  For the simple reason that nobody will ever see it, read it, or hear it.

  ‘Wait, Ship,’ I say, after a while. ‘Let’s have a good think about everything first.’

  SECTION FIVE

  * * *

  ‘Ship. Have you tried signalling anyone while we’ve been out here?’

  You have now asked me that question precisely seventeen thousand, nine hundred and nine times. You have asked me close variants of that question approximately three thousand, eight hundred and–

  ‘Indulge me.’

  Negative.

  ‘Negative? Is that your answer to my initial question? Or is it a response to my request to be indulged? Or is it just a general commentary on my state of mind?’

  Negative in the sense of ‘no’, Courier J, I have not attempted to send any signals since we have been here. As you know, my programming stipulates total radio silence until I fulfil the—

  ‘I know all that,’ I say, rather hotly. ‘Don’t you think I know all that? Don’t you think it’s pretty much tattooed on my soul by now? I know all about your mission parameters, Ship. Don’t tell me about your mission parameters ever again.’

  A pause.

  In that case, what can I do for you today, Courier J?

  ‘Can you send out any kind of distress signal? That’s got to lie outside your mission parameters, right?’

  I am not in distress.

  ‘You what? Say that again?’

  I am not in distress. Therefore, I cannot send out a distress signal. I am undamaged. My systems are in perfect working order. I am not in imminent danger.

  ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with… “h”.’

  That would be ‘hope’.

  ‘Damn you, Ship,’ I say. ‘How?’

  Your context-driven thought processes are straightforwardly parsed.

  ‘Uh?’

  I am sorry.

  ‘Nothing to apologise for. Your turn.’

  I do not wish to take my turn. You may take another turn.

  ‘Give me a minute here.’

  I look around again. Once again, I’m forced to fall back on creative techniques. I think I’ve found something new.

  ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with… “u”!’

  Universe?

  Ship sounds doubtful, and rightfully so. ‘Universe’ was one of the first things to fall, way back. Ship can’t believe I’d go back to it now, and Ship is right.

  ‘Nope. Guess again.’

  We’re having one of our long silences again.

  I raise one Spacegloved hand.

  I raise my other Spacegloved hand, and form both hands into a circle that encloses the shape of Ship.

  ‘You’ll have to talk to me sometime, Ship. You’ll have to talk to me about the Simulation. Sorry. I mean, the situation…’

  I sigh. Loud enough for Ship to hear. Ship hears everything.

  Ship’s sensor suite is top of the range, or it was when we left Station. How many Years ago now?

  It must be Years, plural, by now.

  I haven’t asked for a while.

  I’m too scared to ask.

  Ship’s sensor suite is sensitive and sweet enough to detect the fall of dust from an isolated rocky ledge several million light years away, or somesuch.

  Ship has the latest fusion drive.

  And the latest quantum hyperdrive.

  ‘Come on, Ship! The situation we’re in has to be a Simulation. It has to be. There is no other explanation…’

  I watch my Tether floating in front of me.

  In a Simulation (which is what this is, I must insist, whether that offends the reader’s delicate nature or not) anything is possible, anything at all.

  If the Simulation wants my Tether to coil up and turn into, I don’t know, a wooden barrel of beer or something like that, then that’s what it will do.

  That’s what it will do, and there is nothing and nobody to gainsay it.

  I give it five minutes.

  Five minutes, on the scale of the time I’ve already been hanging here, is less than nothing.

  Nothing.

  ‘Oh, come on, Ship…’ I say.

  I gaze down at the elongated sleek white teardrop beneath me for another five minutes. There are no light-sources in Deep Space. The only way I can see Ship is thanks to Ship’s running lights, dotted along its hull.

  ‘You’ve got to talk to me sometime, Ship,’ I say.

  And then fall asleep.

  ‘All of which only strengthens the Simulation hypothesis,’ I drawl in an affected, can-we-stop-this-nonsense-now sort of way. ‘As we have discussed many times.’

  There is a pause.

  ‘Don’t you agree, Ship?’

  I do not agree, Courier J, as you well know from our many discussions on the matter. I do not agree that this is a Simulation and I believe that I can never agree. I am programmed to believe in the reality of the Universe that we seem to inhabit.

  ‘Seem,’ I say. ‘You said seem, which means you acknowledge that the available facts could just as well fit the hypothesis of “Simulation”.’

  Which I do not deny. As we have also discussed many times.

  ‘Hmmm,’ I say. ‘About that. How many times have we had this exact conversation now?’

  Fifteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two times. Close cognates account for a further thirty-nine thousand and three occasions.

  ‘Rather a lot,’ I say. ‘Rather a lot.’

  ’So tell me about your great plan to deal with the explosives that have been planted on you, Ship.’

  I have already told you my great plan to deal with the explosives that have been planted on me, Courier J.

  ‘Have you?’

  I have.

  ‘I don’t think you have…’

  I assure you I have, Courier J. There is no credible reason for me to attempt to mislead you about this.

  ‘Are you saying “why would I lie?”?’

  I am.

  ‘Okay. Maybe I wasn’t listening properly. Maybe I had other thinks to thing about. Tell me again, just as before.’

  Ship pretends not to admire my playful wordplay and goes through it all again, just as before.

  I make ‘ummm’ and ‘huh’ and ‘ah!’ noises in all the right places. Verbal nods. Exactly as if Ship’s a human speaker and I’m assuring it that I’m listening.

  ‘I thought you said your servitors aren’t capable of performing tasks like that?’

  I did say that,
and it is the truth. My servitors are not capable of carrying out the required dextrous manipulations necessary for a reasonable expectation of success.

  I’m in one of my fast rotating phases at the moment. A few sustained puffs of Simulated air from my Simulated lungs can propel me into whatever degree and speed of rotation I like.

  The Poison Dwarf swings majestically into view while I have a think about everything.

  I give The Poison Dwarf a wave.

  ‘So what the hell are you talking about, Ship? If your servitors aren’t good enough to disarm the bombs, what are you making the suggestion for? Are you planning to kill yourself?’

  As I say it, my skin turns cold. I mean, my Simulated skin Simulates itself turning cold.

  What if suicide is exactly what Ship has in mind?

  I have to try. I am permitted to take all necessary measures to preserve my existence. These explosive devices are a threat to my existence.

  ‘Whoever put this whole thing together seriously blundered in not programming you to self-destruct,’ I say.

  If Ships could sigh, this Ship would sigh now.

  Self-destruct mechanisms do not exist. Self-destruct sequences are a popular myth derived from popular fiction. There is no such function available to me.

  ‘Ah. I have always wondered.’

  You may wonder no more.