The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Primitive man evolved many cultural techniques for the sexual subjugation of the femme of the species, as crude as clitoral excision and as subtle as denying spiritual equality. Even in enlightened ages, this was perceived as economically motivated behavior or possessive greed, the transformation of feminine favors into a commodity of trade in the commerce of the masculine ego.

  Actually, this is just one more transformation of the deeper motivation to a more palatable rationalization, albeit a self-admittedly unsavory one. What I had learned in the embrace of my Pilot was something well established in the annals of biology and even a truism of Jump technology: the orgasmic potential of the female of our species transcends that of the male.

  Thus the sociosexual subjugation of femme by homme, far from being an aggressive act of phallic aggrandizement, is actually a defense mechanism, a flight from confrontation with this cosmic injustice. The whole cultural labyrinth of male courtship of feminine favors is actually a shrill denial of the true nature of the transaction, namely, that the erotically sophisticated male grants higher favors than any he can receive. Women of course collude in this deception, since masculine perception of the true situation would not only subject them to naked and unwholesome envy but reverse the polarity of the archetypal duality to their strategic disfavor.

  The wall of purdah between Captain and Pilot was perhaps the ultimate expression of this denial, as the mechanism of the Jump Circuit was the ultimate extension of that which was denied. Here the imbalance reached beyond biology, beyond the realm of mass-energy phenomena, into the Great and Lonely itself; so named by those few female initiates who rode alone on the masculine machineries into its hidden ecstatic heart.

  In cold scientific fact, not mere metaphor, the Jump was half of a sexual act; the result of my touch on the Jump command point was as much the granting of sexual ecstasy as my performance for Lorenza in the dream chamber, and in both cases it was not my own purpose that I served.

  To expose a Void Captain to the human reality of his Pilot is to expose him to the sexual core of his duty, to the one-sided sexual congress of the Jump, to his own envy—of feminine platform orgasm, of the true mistress of the ship’s destiny, of that which his masculine spirit cannot touch.

  Small wonder then that our starfaring culture has evolved this wall of purdah around the mystery at its heart. Small wonder that the floating cultura has elaborated itself around it in order to divert the Captain’s erotic attention into his archetypal relationship with the Domo. Small wonder that this relationship stands at the center of harmonious shipboard dynamics. Small wonder that once Dominique had breached that wall, my libido reverted its focus from the social to the psychic.

  Naturellement, this logical analysis did not spring full-blown into my brow at the moment of Dominique’s act of noblesse oblige; rather did it proceed to evolve to my present rueful understanding via contemplation, perusal of relevant word crystals, and further karmic lessons from that moment until this. Even now, as I code this ultimate justification onto word crystal, I am aware that I am still somehow dissembling, or rather failing to render a logical memory of that satori in a mode comprehensible to my quotidian mind.

  Nevertheless, it is just to state that now I was aware that I was in the grip of a futile passion, not for the body or even the spirit of Dominique Alia Wu, but for that which I could only taste as a pale shadow through her mediation. The very ludicrity of such a fixation served to render it less puissant as a poisoner of my psyche, or so it seemed at the time. For this was no pheromonic infatuation or passion for psychoerotic communion, but a mere malfunction of my psychic processes, a mutation on the chromosome caused by a chance cosmic bolide. Like all such maladaptive mutations, would it not be self-extinguishing through the passage of evolutionary time?

  Or so I seemed to have persuaded myself after a short period of untrammeled sleep, and judiciously distant participation in the niceties of the Grand Palais.

  Upon stealing from Dominique’s cabin, I had repaired to my own, where I almost immediately sank into dreamless slumber; upon awakening, I practiced several yogic asanas and a long, contemplative ablution, at the conclusion of which I had sufficiently reformulated my rationale to continue my digestion of inner events in the artificial outer world of the vivarium.

  Here, amid the lush foliage, the groaking frogs, the insectile motes, the twittering rainbow flocks of finches, and parties of no less lavishly plumaged Honored Passengers, did I perceive the evolutionary imperatives at work. Frogs yearned not to fly, birds yearned not to swim, and the floating cultura that bridged the stars yearned not to encompass the region between. For a bird to swim the deeps is to die out of air; for a frog to fly it must cease to be a frog; for men to leap naked into the void is similarly proscribed by our genes. Of the three, however, only men had the power to transcend their species programming, to encapsulate themselves in technology and art and culture and invade the alien element in a bubble of their own self-created reality.

  Thus, these human survival mechanisms, when functioning properly, represent not the triumph of determinism over the individual but the triumph of spirit over evolutionary determinism.

  To be thrust by chance outside this reality humaine for a vision of what lay beyond and below was to achieve a more sympathetic perception of one’s fellow travelers as they danced their part in the figure. I was sure that my mutant obsession had vanished in the cold clear evolutionary light of day.

  Soon I was taking part in conversations, sipping wine from goblets, exchanging pleasantries once more with the Honored Passengers in my charge.

  And was not the discourse of the floating cultura the highest to be found among the worlds of men? In a few hours of light banter, subjects of conversation included the outre ecospheres of two recently discovered habitable planets, a comparison of modern vintages with those of ancient Terrestrial tradition, the relative balance of yin and yang in our transtellar culture, speculations on the paucity of sapient life in our small region of the galaxy, trends in contemporary painting and sculpture, und so weiter, as well as the inevitable shipboard gossip.

  If the floating cultura contained its fair share and then some of subsidized children of fortune, wealthy sybarites, refugees from ennui, and their attendant parasitic organisms, did these not serve as a communal matrix for the merchants, artists, scientists, esthetes, and pilgrims who traveled among the stars for higher purposes? In ancient days, the courts of monarchs served as similar distillations of the more rarefied essences of human culture; these too were gilded cages filled with self-pampered birds of paradise, but in their precincts were also to be found the philosophers, artists, and mages of the age.

  Wealth of a primary order surrounds itself with choicest viands, vintages, art, and luxuriousness, but beyond these sensual indulgences of the rich lay the possibility of the ultimate patronly purchase—the company of the intellectual, artistic, scientific, and spiritual creme de la creme of human society. Surely in our Second Starfaring Age the floating cultura represented this heady distillation; churlish of me, nicht wahr, to look down my lofty nose at the pinnacle of my society from some haughty Olympus when in reality I too was the direct beneficiary of its patronage.

  Thus had the secret violation of the central taboo of my social matrix somehow restored to me some semblance of harmony with same.

  Only the inevitable confrontation with Lorenza Kareen Patali was to perturb this immersion in the social waters with the post- and fore-shadowing of the intrusive void; with intimations of the less social dynamics that nevertheless still surrounded and underlay both this golden bubble of human gaiety and my own presently integrated social persona.

  I had made entrance into the grand salon in the company of Mori, her merchant artiste Rumi Jellah Cohn, Sar Medina Gondo, a ravishing golden-haired woman of great wealth and little intellect who had attached herself to my Captainly person, and Orvis Embri Rico, a somewhat threadbare light sculptor who seemed to be either her amour d’argent,
under her patronage, or both.

  Lorenza was reclining in a padded niche spotlighted in somber rose with a large muscular man in loose-flowing pantaloons and blouson of black silk; by their body postures, the pipe of herbal intoxicant they were sharing, the silver goblets of wine resting lip to lip on the tabouret before them, I surmised that they had but recently emerged from passage in a dream chamber.

  Arcane, diverse, and unsettling were my reactions to this perception. Lorenza was at her most enticing in this configuration of sated repose; her long red hair artfully disarrayed, her glowing ebon skin cleansed of all artifice, her body languid within a formless, translucent yellow boudoir robe. This vision, enhanced perhaps by the presence of her consort of the moment, aroused in me a certain glandular ardor of the sort that had been lacking in our recent pas de deux, a nostalgia for the pleasure in her embrace that had been denied me by my own psychic dysfunction, a desire to replay the episode to a more mutually satisfying conclusion.

  At the same time, I felt a certain Captainly displeasure at this open proclamation of the fact of the matter, a frisson of atavistic male jealousy, but also a sense of disruption of subtle social harmonies of which I, not she, had been the true causal agent. While it is not unseemly for Domo and Captain to share dream chambers with all and sundry, the illusion, at least, of the meetness of discretion is better preserved in the public realm lest such liasons be perceived by the Honored Passengers as a statement of reproach, as deliberate violation of the archetypal fiction.

  Which, I sensed, this tableau was meant to be; as if, somehow, on some subliminal level, Lorenza had been aware of my tryst with Dominique and sought to chide me with a public redress of the balance. Or so I surmised in my suddenly reactivated and guilt-ridden sexual malaise.

  Hesitant as to whether to rise to the perhaps self-projected bait or to leave the pair to their own devices, I was relieved of this decision by Sar, who seized me possessively by the arm and paraded me toward them with the others in train.

  “Ach, Lorenza,” she said rather floridly, “I must to you give thanks for the enjoyment of a tres rare voyage! The cunningness of the vivarium, the glories of the table, the piquancy of the entertainment! The companionship sympathetique! The dream chambers so daring…”

  The last with a thespic giggle, a rolling of eyes, and a drawing closer to me as subtle as the rest of it, which soured Orvis’ expression and fairly caused Rumi to hide his amusement behind his hand.

  Lorenza seemed oblivious to this repartee, or feigned indifference, or more likely perceived the nullity at its heart. “Merci, good Sar,” she said languidly. “The appreciation of the connoisseur is the highest pleasure of the artiste.” She was looking at the two of us as she said it, but the deliberate lidding of her eyes, the moist parting of her lips, gave me to understand that the inner meaning of the riposte was directed at me.

  “And you, good sir, are you also a connoisseur of the pleasures of the Grand Palais, or do you travel in a more functional mode?” I said, addressing the black-garbed fellow.

  “Neither, or perhaps both,” he answered mildly, drawing on the herbal pipe. “Like yourself, Captain Genro, I provide service for Honored Passengers. Aga Henri Koram, servidor de usted, freeservant in the employ of our fair Domo.”

  “Indeed,” said Sar with some raising of her brow. “And what manner of services do you provide?”

  Aga smiled blandly at her with his calm brown eyes. “I am skilled in the serving of wines and cuisine in the classic manner as well as the composition and performance of musical odes,” he said. “In addition, I have mastered the tantric arts, for the successful freeservant must be versatile in many modes of pleasure.”

  “A pleasure to make your acquaintance,” Sar said silkily. “Perhaps before this voyage is completed I shall commission your services—”

  “If so, I trust you will find my rates just and my performances appealing, as most have in the past,” Aga said without either false modesty or boastful pride. “Domo Lorenza can attest to that; we have voyaged together on a number of occasions.”

  Lorenza, who had been regarding this byplay with a carefully crafted air of detached amusement, inclined her head in Aga’s direction with a slow toss of her hair, her icy-blue eyes fixed all the while upon mine, or so it seemed. “Vraiment, Aga’s performances are of the highest caliber,” she said feyly.

  A moment of uneasy silence reigned; had it not been for this, it might have been possible for me to dismiss my perception of the inner dialog aimed at me as delusion of paranoid reference. As it was, the expression on the observatory faces confirmed my Weltanschauung; Lorenza had deliberately fashioned this tableau so as to externalize the subtle disharmony between us into an only slightly less subtle social rebuke.

  If the piquing of my manly and Captainly attention had been the ultimate goal of this charade, the ploy had met with no little success; after a seemly period of further niceties, I drew Lorenza aside on the pretext of discussing certain aspects of our duties. Though in truth, the harmonious performance of our duties was not exactly beside my point.

  “You are angry with me because of what happened in the dream chamber; that is the raison d’etre for this public display of gamesmanship, nicht wahr?”

  Lorenza regarded me from behind a facade of ingenuous innocence. “Gamesmanship? Public display? Que pasa, mon cher Genro?”

  “Surely you do not deny sharing a dream chamber with this freeservant Aga?” *

  “Surely I do not indeed,” she said mildly. “For what reason should I?”

  I stared intently into her icy eyes, realizing that this mode of discourse could overtly communicate nothing without the collaboration empathetique which she was deliberately withholding. Paradoxically, however, true messages were being passed back and forth here below the primary verbal surface; obliquely, she was telling me she marked indeed my meaning. Which, after all, was only that her own previous oblique communique had found its mark.

  “No reason at all, Lorenza,” I said. “But it would be better if such rebukes were delivered less publicly.”

  “Rebuke, mon cher?” she said evenly. “Why would you imagine I wished to rebuke you?” But she favored me with a smile that reversed the polarity of her meaning.

  “No doubt it is I who rebuke myself by projecting my own self-judgment upon your acts of innocence,” I said, ironically nuancing my words with facial commentary in turn.

  “Tres gallant,” Lorenza said dryly.

  To my own surprise, though perhaps not to hers, I was beginning to find this subtle duel erotically arousing. “I am not without such graces,” I said evenly. “Though I do not profess the skills of the professional.”

  Her eyes warmed somewhat toward me and she delivered the next words with a small smile. “Pero for an amateur tantrique, your performance lacks little. Except, perhaps, the true sincerity.”

  “Perhaps that may be remedied with sufficient practice.”

  “Quien sabe?” she said with a little laugh. “Vraiment, I am willing to continue this dialog in more intimate detail after a suitable period of reflection.”

  “After the next Jump?” I suggested. “In another dream chamber of your choosing?”

  “No, cher Genro. This time, the choice of venue should be yours, ne, since my previous choice did not entirely fulfill your satisfaction.”

  “You too are not without gallantry, Lorenza,” I said, sealing the assignation with a kiss of her hand, although in truth we both knew that I was being challenged.

  Thus was the veneer of civilization maintained and defended, thus did Captain and Domo preserve the rhythm of their public pavane from unseemly disharmony. Lorenza took my hand as we returned to the milieu of social interaction; and by eye contacts and touches, shared wine and duets of jocularity, did we proclaim that our personas had returned to the proper fulfillment of our expected roles.

  No doubt those unfamiliar with the rarefied atmosphere of the floating cultura may protest that such obliquenes
s represents not so much the niceties of gentility as a certain anomie, a spiritless charade, a decadent concern with surface over substance.

  Perhaps this subjective truth has its validity, just as the converse proposition is not without its own puissance—namely, that true civilization consists precisely of conventions, rituals, and modes of oblique communication whereby the chaos within and the void without may be expressed and contained within the harmonious consensus of shared social objectivity, thus maintaining our bubble of crafted reality, the necessary illusion. Indeed, there are those who define the essential nature of all artistic forms in just this manner.

  Be that as it may, the transaction between Captain and Domo, sincere or not in terms of Genro and Lorenza, served not only to reharmonize the social surface but to submerge my inner chaos beneath the social dialectic of the dance. For the next few hours, I do believe that I was entirely concerned with the duties and niceties of my Captainly role, my interior musings given over to considerations of an appropriate choice of dream chamber, to the esthetique d’amour, rather than arcane metaphysic, to style rather than substance.

  Only as I made my way to the bridge for the fourth Jump did this comforting mantle of illusion begin to unravel.

  As I walked briskly toward the bridge up the ship’s spinal corridor, awareness of a by-now-familiar tension began to creep into the forefront of my consciousness with every marching step. For the first time, I believe, I noticed how few Honored Passengers that I chanced to meet saluted me, nor did I acknowledge their existence; as if by unstated, indeed by until-now-unperceived, agreement this transition from the inner illusion of the floating cultura to the outer reality of my true command was a solemn rite to be conducted in social isolation.

  Indeed, as I emerged onto the bridge, I felt my persona dissolving under the cold black vault of the starry void; vast impersonal energies seemed to pour in upon me from those millions of unwinking stellar eyes; a hard-edged and entirely indifferent reality enfolded me in its chill yet somehow darkly sensual embrace. Clearly the armor of psychic construct, the cultural surface of the persona, was entirely inadequate to confront the naked countenance of the void; how vain seemed such illusion in the face of this pitiless reality.