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 Imow 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 downwardpointing 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 Bu- Psych-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 fall- ling 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 des
ert 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.”
Spiegel nodded.
“All organization is doomed, beyond the event horizon. The name means what it says. Events end there, and that’s that. All identity is wiped out, even so basic a difference as that between matter and antimatter. There is only mass and charge and spin—”
“Isn’t that sufficient to sustain a mind?” asked Liz Nielstrom, innocently. ^
Spiegel shook his head brusquely.
“No, even granted a stripped-down kind of existence, this too only lasts a finite time till even this residue is sucked into an infinitely small point. You cannot have a mind organized on a point. That is like angels dancing on a pinhead. Nonsense!”
“I don’t know about that,” hazarded the fat Ohashi. “Maybe relativistically speaking we can contact this mind for a hell of a long time span, though from its own point of view it is rapidly approaching extinction—”
“But what happens to this collapsed matter when it reaches an infinitely small point, I ask you? I say it must spill out someplace else in the universe. Maybe to become a quasar. Maybe to form diffuse new atoms for continuous creation. This ‘being’ must pass through this hole. He cannot stick there—even if he does exist . . .” “And you don’t believe he does, Dr. Spiegel?” “I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, Habib?” Lew Boyd demanded. “What do you have to say to that?”
Habib shrugged.
“We see the universe a different way. I have my symbols, he has his. Did Bu-Psych-Sec think I was lying? That wasn’t a casual chat we had about the matter!”
“I suppose not,” grudged Boyd.
“So.” And Habib retreated back into his robes again. .
“If there is a being in there,” Ohashi pursued, “he must have some crazy ideas by now. I presume he fell in there by accident; didn’t evolve in there. He’ll have memories from sometime of a universe of length and breadth and height, but no evidence to back this up, no reliable sense impressions. It’ll seem like a mad hallucination, a drug trip. Yet he might just be able to tell us what it’s like in there subjectively—”
“To get that information out of Black Hole,” snorted Spiegel, “is by definition impossible!”
“Maybe when one of us rides Habib in there—”
“Remember what happened to the sailor who was riding Habib last time? He died in there—and nobody knows why. I’m not riding Habib.” Carlos Bolam stared bitterly at the Arab, and Mara thought she caught the hint of another cruel smile on Habib’s lips.
“The man wasn’t properly prepared for the encounter,” Lew Boyd stated ominously. “He thought he was going to meet a mermaid back on Earth, poor bastard. But we’ll be keeping a tight eye on the trance this time.”
Despite Boyd’s grudging acceptance of Habib’s story on that occasion, neither he nor Nielstrom showed any sign of trusting the telemedium. It was soon plain to Mara that some trap was being laid for Habib, though if Habib was aware of it he showed no sign of caring.
It puzzled Mara. If Bu-Psych-Sec were so unsure of Habib, why had they sent him out as ship’s telemedium yet again? To the same place where a sailor had lost his life!
A couple of weeks after that discussion in the lounge, Boyd and Nielstrom were in there again interrogating the Arab, while Mara stood out in the nacelle, gazing at the redshifting stars receding from the ship and the violetshifting suns ahead of them: suns which she knew as a pure golden desert of dunes—and which she also knew, with a trace of pity, could never be seen as such by the majority of the human race. Perhaps people’s crudity and violence were brought on basically by anger at their own limitation of vision?
“You went in there, Habib,” she heard.
“In there, there is no ‘there,’ ” said Habib elusively.
“We know all about this collapse-of-geometry business, but you still went somewhere.”
“True. I went to no-where—”
“If you went to nowhere, perhaps there was nothing there?”
“True,” smirked Habib. “Nothing.”
“How do you make contact with nothing, nowhere, Habib? That’s nonsense!”
“He lives imthe midst of non-sense, where even geometry has gone down the drain—”
“He? If everything else is so damned uncertain, how can you be so sure of that thing’s sex?”
“You have to use some pronoun ...”
“Why not ‘it’? It’s only an alien thing, in there. It isn’t human, Habib—”
“Even a thing must be allowed some dignity,’’ muttered Habib.
“Interesting point of view,” said Boyd.
“I don’t see that it’ll have much ‘dignity’,” Nielstrom jibed. “When you isolate a human being in a sensory deprivation tank, he soon starts hallucinating. If you keep him in there long enough, he goes insane. What is the flavor of this thing’s insanity, Habib?”
The Arab glanced down at the floor so that the haik hid his face.
He laughed.
“What flavor would you prefer? Vanilla? Chocolate? Raspberry?”
“That’s not funny,” snapped Boyd.
“Oh no, sir, I know how in earnest you are, I remember Annapolis.”
“So answer! That being’s a psychotic, isn’t it? A fragmented mind—”
“Psychosis,” said Habib stiffly, “is a judgment within a context. But he has escaped from context. Geometry itself has collapsed. Two and two don’t add up to four. The angles of a triangle may be anything from zero to infinity. It’s the Navy who are the psycho tics, from his point of view.”
Habib abruptly raised his head and grinned; he stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked it like a child sucking a lollipop.
He pulled his thumb out with a plop.
“Chocolate? Vanilla? Raspberry?” He smirked.
“It’s all a question of escaping from context, isn’t it, Habib?” Boyd demanded, furiously accenting that single word “escaping” and outstar- ing the Arab, till Habib dropped his eyes furtively.
The Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar changed orbits at 20:00 hours to a circuit as low as they dared fly about the equator of the ergosphere, from where other stars in the sky had their light warped freakishly into long blue worm-like streaks and spirals. But they were still safe enough, orbiting faster than the escape velocity from this zone, flying in a forced curve at great expense of power rather than allowing their orbit to be dictated to them by the local gravity.
Boyd and Nielstrom were waiting for Mara and Habib in the trance room.
“Change of plan,” Liz smiled sweetly.
“New procedure,” Boyd explained. “Our little witch will inject with 2-4-P-C on her own. You, Habib, will ride with her in—”
“What in the name of—!” Habib recovered himself. “But Mara isn’t ready. What a mad thing to do!” He paced up and down between the trance couches in a fury.
“So near and yet so far, eh?” laughed Boyd, enigmatically.
Habib argued; and the more he argued, the more pleased Liz and Lew seemed to be. They taunted him again about the sailor who’d lost his life inside the Hole.
“He poured like water through a sieve, eh, Habib? I wonder if he could have been poured out, deliberately?”
“That’s impossible,” gasped Mara.
“But think, what if the rider wasn’t safe? Just imagine the implications for the Navy.”
“A million-to-one accident,” mumbled Habib, distraught. “I know I lost a rider in there. But what about the Bu-Psych-Sec man who rode in there after him? He didn’t get hurt.”
“He was able to switch off in time. He had the Tantric training to hold back from orgasm and withdraw when he saw there was nothing in the mirror at the end. So now you shall ride in there yourself as passenger and let us see what happen
s.”
The Arab stared queerly at Mara.
“Mekhtoub,” he muttered in Arabic, “it is fated. Poor little witch. May Allah be with you. May you not lose yourself, and me, in there.”
“One more thing,” added Boyd. “We want to keep in better touch with the medium through the trip.” He indicated a slim grey machine, mounted on rubber rollers, backed up against the wall. Tendrils of wire sprouted from it, terminating in tiny suction pads.
“An electromyograph,” he said, tapping the machine, “registers the minute voltage changes in the muscles associated with speech. There’s always some element of subvocalizing in a trance. It only takes time and money to write a computer programme to make some verbal sense of these electrical effects. So we’ve finally taken the time and spent the money. The electromyograph processes its data through the ship’s main computer, so we can hear real-time speech.”
Lew Boyd patted Mara in a patronizingly amiable way.
“Give us a running commentary, won’t you, little witch, while you’re navigating your way through . . . whatever it is?”
Habib darted a look of horror at Mara—a horror she shared.
“Voyeurs!” cried Habib. “You vile peepers. That’s the only privacy we have, our symbol landscape. That’s our only dignity.’’
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