The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Vraiment, is not the history of man from pigments smeared on the walls of caves to our present starflung age, our sciences and arts, our religions and our philosophies, our cultures and our noble dreams, our heroics and our darkest deeds, but the dance of spirit round this central void, the striving to transcend, and the deadly fear of same?

  Only now, in the machineries of the Jump, via the ultimate expression of our mastery of the matrix to which our spirit is bound, have we at last thrust our will beyond the boundaries of mass-energy’s maya into that formless realm.

  Only then, as I drifted from shadow play to shadow play, each a striving to transcend and an illusion with which to deny, did I begin to perceive the meetness of the Pilots’ name for the Unnamable—the Great and Only, that which lay beyond even our quotidian void.

  Cafard? Obsession? Anomie? Or the vision absolute from which our spirits shrink? Cannot they be the same?

  After a time, I wandered from this venue of the arts to the vivarium, where previously my spirit had been drawn in such fits of existential angst. Here, in the company of the mindless trees, the free-flying birds, the bugs and frogs that passed from stimulus directly to response without the interval of consciousness between, did I hope to lose myself in the living mandala of evolution’s less self-tortured forms.

  Instead, as fate would have it, I encountered that most exotic denizen of the Dragon Zephyr’s aviary humaine, Maddhi Boddhi Clear, the one man aboard whose obsession matched my own, a kindred caricature of my spirit.

  He was sitting alone on a crumbling stone bench staring into the artificial sunset now deepening the illusory rose and purple sky toward the impending appearance of the starry void, as if to capture the moment when the illusion dissolved into the true vision of stellar night. This most thespically social of Honored Passengers, this white-maned pilot fish of the floating cultura, seemed lost in the private contemplation of his own secret realm; I felt both a reluctance to intrude upon his solemn meditation and a magnetic attraction to the very inwardness his face now seemed to declare.

  It was he who spoke awareness of my ambivalent approach.

  “Ah, Captain Genro, seek you also the sight of the naked stars?”

  I started somewhat at this manner of greeting, so close to the core of my secret mood, so distant from the mode of discourse between Honored Passenger and Captain. “Quelle chose!” I dissembled. “In the course of my duties on the bridge, I view them to surfeit. It is Honored Passengers such as yourself who might find the sight outre or picturesque, not to say daunting.”

  He stared up at me with even dark eyes. “They daunt me not,” he said, “though admittedly my fellow voyagers tend to vacate these premises when the illusion at last gives way to less occluded vision. In that respect, at least, I sense in you a fellow creature.”

  Indeed, as the shadows lengthened and the disappearing rim of the sun sent flickering umber and carmine shafts through the foliage, I now perceived parties of passengers scurrying for the exit with a certain uneasy haste, even as the birds of day retreated into their tree-top perches. There went Mori, arm in arm with Rumi, glancing in our direction with a certain widening of eyes at our congress as they made their way along a nearby path.

  “Will you not sit here beside me and watch the stars come out?” Maddhi invited.

  I hesitated for a moment. Certainement, the public sight of the Dragon Zephyr’s Captain seated together with this outre personage, this mystical mountebank, would no doubt become a topic of some bemusement, not to say jocularity, in the gossip of the floating cultura; yet I could not deny that I sensed a certain desire in myself to seek his counsel on matters which otherwise need go unvoiced.

  As I stood there frozen in stasis between my true desire and the social bounds of my Captainly role, I spied Lorenza walking round the far shore of the nearby pond, brightly plumed admirers clustered about her. She chanced to glance in our direction, and a quick moue of distaste puckered her lips, her eyes narrowed, her eyebrows raised; then she turned and said something to her companions which elicited a twittering of mirth, a covert flicker of glances in our direction, no doubt at my expense.

  “Por que no?” I said to Maddhi, speaking also to Lorenza and her party in my heart of hearts. I seated myself beside him, flourishing my indifference in the sight of all; if I was Captain of this ship, was I not also the Captain of my own soul?

  “May I speak to you frankly?” I asked somewhat foolishly.

  “It can hardly be prevented.”

  We both laughed good-naturedly, albeit perhaps not without a certain reserve.

  “Jocularities aside, Captain, I do believe I already know what you wish to ask, and the difficulty of framing it within the bounds of politesse and taste. Con su permiso, allow me to relieve your burden. Is this so floridly named fellow fraud or seer, mountebank or pilgrim? Do We Who Have Gone Before truly speak to him in dream and trance and sexual cusp, or is this a ploy to cozen otherwise unwilling lovelies into his somewhat overripe embrace?”

  I laughed again, this time a discharge of uneasy tension. “I would not have quite framed it thusly…”

  “But you would have it answered, nicht wahr?” Maddhi said, the humor vanished from his eyes.

  I nodded silently. The last oblique rays of artificial sunset glazed his eyes with blood-red highlights and chiseled his features with chiaroscuro shadows; a trick of lighting, a change of voice, and all at once a deeper spirit seemed to speak through this thespic shell.

  “If you will indulge, I will answer you with the tale of my name, though I warn you it is no less outre than my cognomen’s form…”

  “Por favor…”

  Maddhi stared up into the near blackness as he spoke as if unwilling to miss the moment when the planetary illusion gave way to the tele view of the naked void itself. Perhaps with thespic intent as well.

  “My name is Maddhi Boddhi Clear, and as you have no doubt surmised, I have chosen all three as freenoms, leaving my pedigree in the mists of the long-forgotten past. Tambien have I chosen them not in homage to some personages I admire but as ensign of my chosen path, homage a the satoric moment that set my feet upon it, and admittedly with declarative intent as well.

  “I was born a considerable time ago on a planet I choose not to name for reasons that also leave my pedigree best unsaid. Suffice it to say that poverty was my birthright and knavery my means of escape therefrom; in my youth and indeed far into mature manhood my physical charms were held in high repute by femme and homme alike and I did utilize them sans merci or shame for the pecuniary advantage of the moment.

  “Thus did I find myself on the nameless planet of We Who Have Gone Before as courtesan companion to a woman of great wealth and great age, whose name I will not defile in this outre tale. Suffice it to say that though her corpus had long since decayed beyond my body’s desire, her spirit was such that each performance of the tantric arts which I was compelled to give might fairly be said to have been an act of love, if such sentiments may be granted to a plyer of that trade.

  “I knew not what she sought, there on that world of ancient mysteries in the twilight of her life, save that I knew her to be a far-traveling seeker of those ineffabilities whose essence I was then far too jejune to comprehend; indeed, I had surmised that her connoisseurship of outre molecules and charges, of sexual excess, was a famine not of the spirit but the flesh.

  “When at last her true goal was revealed, scandalized, horrified, I at first refused. Until with tears and blandishments and discourse which hovered just beyond my powers to understand, mayhap through subtle influence of the venue itself, I was persuaded to relent.

  “Scattered about that planet, clustered here, in isolation there, are the ultimate machineries of We Who Have Gone Before; deceptively simple black cubic slabs, or couches, or altars, within which lay the devices from which our scientists have derived the stardrive of the Jump. Most have long since ceased to function; the few that remain active are closely guarded by the curat
ors of that planetary museum.

  “But wealth in the service of true obsession may purchase all, and so we secured a period alone, high on a mountain crag under the all-knowing night sky, in the presence of a still functional altar. And there the deed was done.

  “Naked beneath the stars, we ingested some arcane brew of molecules of her devising, and, when the air seemed pregnant with the ghostly spirits of that discorporate race, when the blood beneath our skins seemed to boil, and the stellar concourse seemed to whirl about us in a cosmic dance, she laid herself out on that altar of the unknown.

  “As is known, these devices are not precisely tuned to the nervous system of our species; sin embargo, when I laid myself upon her and began to apply my erotic skills, almost at once was she transported into orgasmic ecstasy’s embrace. Not once, not twice, nor any discretely numerable amount of times did she achieve her orgasmic peaks; rather did her cries and spasms meld into a single, endless, fiery plateau of ecstasy too extreme to bear pleasure’s name.

  “At the moment when I could prolong this state no more, as my being sought to pour itself through my phallic connection to her state of masculinely unknowable transfleshly grace, she bit upon a poison cap, and in that instant, she was Gone Before. Leaving me behind to tell this tale.”

  Somewhere in the darkness of the deserted vivarium, a single frog croaked its forlorn song. Dreaming birds rustled the leaves in their sleep. Above us glowered the million pinpoint eyes of the stellar abyss, each an oasis of pale, frail light in that black sea of nonbeing, a random speckling of matter thrown across the void. Maddhi Boddhi Clear turned from that countenance of the infinite deeps to stare, human to human, man to man, into my own.

  “What did I feel in that moment of her blissful death? Did something then speak to me from the great beyond? The drug? My own orgasmic peak? A final farewell kiss of thanks? Quien sabe? Memory would not bind.”

  He sighed, a sad, longing, regretful sound. “But one thing I will never forget—in the moment of her death, as my body poured forth its measly manly essence into that which she was leaving behind, I gazed upon the last instant of animating life moving through her face. Never, before or since, have I seen such perfect, tranquil, utter bliss.”

  He shrugged, he smiled ruefully, he seemed to don his quotidian persona by conscious act of will. “Thus, mein Captain, was my life transformed. Pilgrim? Seer? Mountebank? All that and more. From that day until this, my entire life has been the effort to taste that which left me behind. Seer have I become in hope of attracting greater seers. Mountebank to the rich and seeking so as to finance my pilgrim’s travels—”

  “But do voices from the Great and Only truly speak to you in dreams and at the peak of sexual embrace?” I asked, regarding him now with sympathetic eyes.

  Chilled with this confirmation that my obsession had touched another’s heart through darker deed than any I had done, I was yet moved by his courage to speak its black name clear. For was his quest not that which in less naked guise had seized my spirit as I ejaculated into the void of Dominique’s releasing lips Lorenza’s abstracted flesh, pierced to my own quick by the mystery’s black and fiery lance?

  “Do We Who Have Gone Before truly speak in dreams or orgasmic cusp to my poor mannlichen ears?” Maddhi said, throwing up his hands in a gesture of self-reflexive irony. “Quien sabe? Long have I studied all the available lore, long have I dreamt in waking hours of the fulfillment of my denied desire, long have I lusted after such communion beyond and within the flesh. Does something truly speak to me from beyond the void or is it merely my own desire? Do I use this vision to entice women into my embrace or is the reverse the truth? After all these years, am I sincere, or is all this but a ploy to gain largesse?”

  “You yourself do not know?”

  Maddhi Boddhi Clear seemed to shrink in upon himself then, beneath the pitiless eyes of the all-seeing yet occluded void; yet a third persona seemed to emerge, this an aged, weary man facing the end of his long unfulfilled quest.

  “One thing in truth I know quite well, mein Captain of the Void,” he said in undissembling tone. “I seek a path I have not found. And I know it to be there.”

  “Know? Or merely believe?” I said without an interval of reflective thought. And immediately was chastened by the frisson of pain that passed across his face and then was gone.

  “I know that We Who Have Gone Before…have Gone Before. I know that she followed through aid perhaps of their instrumentality and my own phallic grace. And I sense in you, Genro, a fellow creature, a man who has looked through the window of the Jump itself and seen what lies beyond, if only in the mirror of some woman’s eyes, nicht wahr…?”

  I started in guiltily unmasked surprise. Our eyes locked, gaze to gaze, homme to homme; fellow creatures beneath it all, and that I could not deny.

  “Beyond that, are we not reduced to logical belief, you and I?” said Maddhi Boddhi Clear. “We Who Have Gone Before appear not to have been a race divided into genders of femme and homme. Where they went, their species went entire. And this prison of mass and energy in which we find ourselves confined teems not with halfling remnant races left behind, though all our science declares that sapient spirit should arise as the crown of every biosphere. Vraiment, justice is more than we can expect from evolution’s random chance, but does not logic itself declare that we poor human males be not the only poor benighted sapients doomed to be forever left behind?”

  “You truly believe that it is possible for us to…to…?”

  The concept could scarcely form itself within my mind, let alone frame itself in words upon my lips. In what manner were his quest and my obsession one? Only in that place sans words or form. But as I stared into Maddhi’s haunted eyes, there I saw the mirror of my own as down some contracting warp of time, old with years, freighted with knowledge, yet still peering longingly at that final mystery beyond the voidly veil.

  “The path must be there for us as well,” said Maddhi Boddhi Clear. “Otherwise…”

  Otherwise, are we not lost? I thought, and sensed the congruent frisson of doubt pass through his anguished heart.

  “Otherwise, we overpride ourselves on our unique wretchedness in the universal scheme, nicht wahr?” he said, breaking the intensity of the chilling moment with dryly delivered jocularity noir.

  He shrugged, he looked away, far away, up into the eternal, endless night. “In fifteen billion years did spirit out of less than dust evolve,” he said. “In fifteen billion more will not this universe of stars to less than dust return? Whence did it come? What is there when it is gone? Surely, mein gut Captain, we are not paranoiac enough to believe that such paradoxes are posed solely for the chastisement of the sons of Earth? That would be reference delusions on a cosmic scale! If the path exists for spirit to transcend this sorry scheme of things entire, vraiment, it must exist for all.”

  Or for none at all, I thought, but deigned not to voice.

  And so we sat there for a time in silence: two sentient creatures hunkered on a slab of stone beneath the leafy trees by a tranquil pond, moving in our bubble-world through the great abyss. Wrapped around us, the vision of the seemingly all-embracing void, the womb of time which gave us birth. Was that too but sentience’ veil of dreams, a bubble of illusion in a greater beyond?

  In such a state did my spirit confront the self-appointed hour come at last, and so once more I found myself stealing up the Dragon Zephyr’s spinal corridor, not like a lover in some farce d’amour, but like a somnambulist in a fever dream. I started not at the sound of approaching footfalls, nor did I scuttle crablike up cul-de-sacs to avoid the sight of Honored Passengers or crew.

  Was it clarity of vision that made all else seem a shadow play, or had my obsession clouded my perceptions of the puissance of the quotidian realm? Even now, as this other Genro sits here at the terminus of his spirit’s path through time, I cannot say. My ship seems doomed, my duty betrayed, my honor gone, and yet, gifted or cursed with foreknowledge of its end,
would I have stepped away from this path? If clarity be madness, then must we not make the most of it or be doomed to make the least?

  As fortune and custom’s use would have it, few were the witnesses to my zombie march, and none to see this gaunt-eyed ghost slip inside his Pilot’s cabin, though not through any worldly care of mine.

  Dominique feigned not surprise at my apparition; indeed she awaited me, propped up alertly on pillows in her bed with her hair combed neatly, as if this were an assignation long since planned and I a tardy swain.

  Vision seemed to sharpen, fog to dissolve; in this innermost of all forbidden venues, the charade was over, for the game of persona, having never begun, could neither be won nor lost.

  “So, cher liebchen, we tryst once more,” she said, a thin smile creasing her bluish lips.

  “As we both knew we would…”

  “Vraiment, am I not your fated femme fatale?” she said dryly. “You will sit here beside me, no, and fear not, mein pauvre petit, la belle dame in an outre sense perhaps, aber nicht sans merci.”

  Without verbal riposte, I found myself reclining on the bed beside her, close enough to smell the sour perfume of metabolic malaise, close enough to see the capillary red marbling the whites of her fevered eyes, the bits of whitish crust at the corners of her lips. Was this my fated femme fatale? I was seized by a protoplasmic revulsion for that which drew my spirit near. What manner of man was I to eschew the arms of the fair Lorenza to seek such unwholesome embrace? And yet…

  And yet…

  And yet I felt my treacherous phallus on rise as a cold and nauseous serpent oozed down the chakras of my hollow spine.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” I finally said.

  For a moment, her rheumy eyes seemed to peer deep down into my soul, and then, as if rebounding off nether truths, glazed for an augenblick into mirrors of my own internal void, her pale and blotchy face stylizing into a lifeless mask through which peered some dark spirit which animated us both.