Mysteries of Motion

by Hortense Calisher

  Finally it was decided we must make every effort—but only as we could—toward the flight deck. It was not so brave of us. By now, no one seemed to be holding us back.

  We went as a body, the women, too. We had never traversed the whole length of the Courier in a body. It is the kind of travel people do in their own houses, huts or condominiums, circling beyond habit, approval or repulsion, testing their place. When we passed Cabins Three and Four we checked our speech, took stock of each others’ faces and stole by as past an ambush. Though we keep them in conscience, we have since come to believe this the best way of dealing with Cabins Three and Four.

  Yet when we came to the flight deck, behind which were men of the same order, we halted in awe. Stupid men though these officers inside might be in other contexts, here we had been hostages to their expertise. Also we felt some pleasure, for we had been trained to defer to them as invulnerable. Finally, though, we felt generous. They had the computers. For this we would free them, if they needed it.

  So we stood before the hatch. Who was it prewarned us to don our oxygen masks? As so often happens between close inmates, most likely a common impulse arose in all of us.

  First off we pressed the signal-plate, then the hidden spare. Then, the four men abreast, the women leaning their weight behind, we pushed. The door gave. Then we tried to hold the women back. Those two would have none of that. It was a necessary rite, to file in one by one—to see what could happen here—and file out again.

  They had died at their posts. Steadfast. In their Auxiliary Environment. Which we civilians had not been allowed. Though an inhalation of hyperbaric oxygen over 5 ATA (atmospheres absolute), and possibly beyond, does indeed induce convulsion, the harness they died in gave them no leeway. As each scarab-dyed face with its risus sardonicus testified. Identification could not be routine, but we managed some. Flight Commander Charles Dove (or Mission Captain or Head Pilot, since we are not sure of these distinctions, but most certainly alumnus of a college whose class ring, found in his breast pocket, is an amethyst in sterling) died in the extra or jumpseat. The head seat, or head astronaut’s, was occupied by a male, probably white, in Army uniform, rank major general, identity unknown.

  Though the atmosphere had returned to normal, our masks were needed. For your aeromedicals: either death from central-nervous toxicity has a special morbidity or in spite of the dryness here other factors make decomposition quick. Or else we were deceived, as we so often are now, on how much duration had passed.

  But flesh—one cannot simply close the door on it. Or not immediately. In our next log I hope to record what has been done. Though promises congeal here. Action proposed retrogrades into performance already accomplished. Motion is catatonic, and sometimes occurs only in the head. On occasion we have even used mirrors—the walls serve as they can—to confirm our acts. But of this I am sure. Jettison—of those bodies—will be contemplated.

  LOG FOUR: Timeless

  From the need to clear the flight deck of those bodies have come all our assigned tasks. Indeed, is it not the same with you and your work? What is one of your decades at bottom, other than a process by which bodies are got rid of, to provide space for those to come? And that is its motion.

  Lievering refused volunteers. So, though Jack each time helps him remove and transfer a body to the designated point outside the vehicle, he stops there; it is Wolf who jettisons. The satisfaction he gets from this is clearly a form of justice the rest of us couldn’t attain to but can respect. (We grow ever more tolerant here. In certain reprises of clarity, the kind you might have at the end of a hard day’s work, or gazing suddenly at a friend immersed in his, this worries me.)

  Our other great task has been to classify the supplies in the bay and arrange a system of provendering the Galley. Solids are in impressive supply, and as the Galley nozzles run dry—the soft drink one, lately more popular, already has—we shall broach the cases of distilled water which were for manufacturing use but appear drinkable. What we have not fathomed is how to restock the Galley mechanically, so we must in a sense shop in the Bay and carry home each day. Day? Without ways to sector our duration would we not grow abstracted, even anarchic? The weather at the portholes is no help diurnally. To our relief, our circadian rhythms have taken over, not only privately, as with the bowels, but collectively. Certain rhythms were to come naturally, from living close.

  For sleep, we return to the cabin, and it is remarkable how we begin to converge upon it from whatever point in our small terrain, at an hour we tend to think coincides with your dusk, Wolf and Jack in from the hunt as it were, stopping by at the Hygiene Unit for the necessary ablutions afterward, followed by each of us, in from one of the domestic chores we have so handily divided. A toy satisfaction can come of that alone. The danger, as you know, is its comfort, in which one can sink larger concerns. So we have our discipline, which is each “night” to don our support-suits, for excusable display to you—and in the hope that the call will come.

  When, however, you do not, all our problems recoil on us. Well supplied as the Bay is, we cannot replenish. Though the WASTAT bins and Dry Johns appear stable, chemicals have their limits. Our situation cannot go on as is forever. Of course, neither can yours, and you too are veterans of unanswered prayer. Under this analogy, a kind of blessing, we are able to fall asleep. It is almost a religious experience. So, by the careful manipulation of this and other analogies, we survive, to arrive at the next stage of what it may please you to dub our culture. If you do monitor us, you may be expecting it, cast in your image as we are. For there has always to be an enemy, doesn’t there? Your Joint Command, who indeed presented themselves, were too remote. Carefully we repressed any thought of engaging you down there in toto, even psychologically. As I warned, an island may never entirely reject the mainland. Interdependent, and permanently land-locked as we were, only an ideological quarrel was open to us. So ours was, yet like any of yours still based on supply and demand.

  One day Wolf came to us. You must understand that the disposal of each of the dead was a project in itself, involving what may have been weeks of logistical planning, even at the outset some mechanical drawing, followed by the construction of slings, preparation of cerements for each poor scarab—whose weight loss did help—all the way to the final execution, to which the rest of us, trouping forward, contributed a few simple choirings. Basta, you know the process! But now our supply had run out. Wolf had long since sent the tenth body into space. Moreover, not wishing to disturb us with questions of sentiment, and knowing how badly we kept track, he had proceeded on. The whistlers were also already in space.

  With your resources, you may have no notion how that disquieted us. A rite was gone with them. It was then we allowed ourselves to think consciously of Cabins Three and Four. We had long suspected that the substitute passengers there might have life in them. Or—we had not fully convinced ourselves they were dead. Allowing ourselves this suspension we had never tried those hatches and never spoke of it. As yet we had had no need of them. Now we did.

  I’ll spare you our arguments—radical and conservative, voluble, lyrical, profound. Prisons were now mentioned in stifled accents—and passed over. Youth—those handsome mouths—was eulogized. Honor, Decency, Shame—or the beginnings of them, for we were by now at the opposite end of the road from you, you see—were somewhat explored. Vengeance—was finally mentioned. Jack was for it. Wert advised a prudent wait. Soraya agreed passionately, for two. Lievering, wanting his bodies, stood mute. I myself, of course, locked in my lifelong role, perhaps sustained by being safely the weakest, went and pounded on the doors. Veronica, though hardened by the death of Mole, and reminding us there were no women there, came and listened behind me. We were never able to agree on what we had heard.

  Was there a response from those cabins? I still think so. But then my philoprogenitive love of my fellow humans, which lies so heavy on this narrative and on me, has never been trustworthy. I always overhear. We could have bore
d a hole, I thought later. And perhaps I would have done so, if I had had my shooting-stick.

  We were in the end the kind of jury you know well—able to demur privately and concur publicly. It was suddenly recalled that in their doubled quarters they must have double provisions. The suggestion which carried came spontaneously, as it often does. Even vivaciously. “Why don’t we wait until rescue?” several said.

  Until then, no one had dared mention the word. But in this context, not to draw spiritual help from all the reserves of science, as well as your own good will would be remiss. No one could object to hope. Or to equality in it for all.

  So we generously gave up our routine, but did not abandon them. We left them to you.

  So, for some cycles, and still in a state of primitive shock, we led a life similar to yours as we ourselves had once known it—a regulated existence, beneath which lurked certain secrets, dirty or arcane.

  But in the end, is there any spur to change quite like unanswered prayer? Wolf had served us in his way, so had Jack. The women in a way were already serving, as was I. Even Mole had had his turn. Now it was Wert’s.

  One day at dusk we were again converging on our cabin. In our restlessness we have become what the American Indians of yore called “walkers,” those who must wander their hours instead of fixate them, very like those urban ones who parse your city streets. Within the Courier’s limits we were becoming nomad, after any task always compulsively on the wander again, often taking up some little bundle for company. Even among close tribes the persona can become sick of its kind. Performance was already affected. Though we helped each other suit up, we did so without the usual solicitude. There might even come a dusk when we would not bother to suit up for the possible reentry which would pull us out and back to you. We might simply present ourselves to you bare, in our aboriginal state. I see I have at last named our condition to you. One comes to it.

  But we are after all like you—or like those of you I address. Men and women of responsibility—even of a chosen one, if half by circumstance. All of us are now agreed that in the recesses of our awakening intellects we were: noting. Or walking, we had arrived. But it was Wert’s turn to speak. Or he felt our collective pressure, and bowed to it. Not to you. Even though we had all settled in our couches for the daily prayer. Plea.

  Wert leaped up, facing us as accommodations allow. Indeed we have those to thank in that once cabined we seldom have orations of length. “This has got to stop—” he shouted. “We are worshiping them.”

  We were stunned. Wert never shouts. We knew he spoke the truth.

  Wert pointed downward. As you in your devotions look upward. Saying in the deepest voice he could manage, penetrating indeed to the depths restirring in us, “They are no different from us.”

  Only more powerful. Only at the—moment. No one had to say it. We were passengers once again.

  And perhaps there’s no sharper spur to meditation than answered prayer.

  Two dusks ago, just as most of us were settling in, the call-boxes all over the ship began emitting a white sound. The poor medic came running into the cabin; he does that at anything untoward. The others sat him in my seat.

  I was in the Hygiene Unit. For fear of weight loss, and the gradual anorexia which can come of it, we take appetite pills. When I first saw the stodged walls and spilled crates in the Payload Bay, supplies enough to last us for years, I was encouraged; at least cannibalism will not be a problem, or not soon. Passing by there now I see that whole étape as a mound we shall have to excrete—the bombs too, if that’s what they are. Waste will be our problem in the midst of plenty. So I must eat, but I constipate. I am public-spirited even in the bowel.

  As I sat, a video high on the wall opposite began to activate. In the cabin, the others told me later, our old home-video, spider-gray in its corner, did not; instead, the ceiling camera, long since forgotten, opened wide. Leaning back, they opened their mouths to you, and let your news fall in. As for me, I said at once: Kidney failure. I hallucinate.

  I do it well. There they seem to me to be again, your newscasters, bringing us our destiny exactly as they bring it to the rest of you, though I see them not pink and lemony in their happy-skins but dotted in black and gray high frequency on the white gist of space. Age has not got to them, nor art either, but otherwise the picture has such painful verisimilitude I have to watch—and listen.

  They are speaking of the Courier as they do of all the luckless, in the third person only, in their evenly festival voices. (Confirming—that we have intuited well. And may have to go on doing it.) They don’t yet know that they have got through to us. Or else my subconscious will not allow them to know what it overhears the world say, being always a little shamed.

  Still, when I get back to the cabin, I may hint that it seems we are a security risk—though I’ll spare them the details. Why should the medic have to hear it suggested that we are to be in orbit indefinitely? Would Soraya be happier to hear that though neither Earth nor an expensive installation like the Island is yet prepared to receive us in our present state, ultimately a rendezvous with us is planned—if we can hold out?

  Nevertheless I sit there spellbound at how a masterly subconscious can secrete detail utterly foreign to it. You newsmen are by now describing the radio-emissions designed to attract our call-boxes, as being not too dissimilar from the coded picture once sent by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, designed to alert advanced beings to our existence. That message included numerical representations of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorus atoms, a graphic illustration of a twisted DNA molecule in binary numerical symbols and a human figure of a height in terms of the transmitted wavelength (12.6 centimeters), all of this to indicate that on the third planet out from the sun there exists a civilization whose beings depend on molecules of DNA deoxyribonucleic acid for the continuity of their species. It is not the message I would send. To the target star-cluster Messier 13. Even at the speed of light. But then, look how well I am receiving, even in a Hygiene Unit. Whereas Messier cannot possibly reply until the year 49,975.

  I’m afraid my attention wandered from you some. I’m always sore when my symbols are chosen for me—even by myself.

  Then—I sat up hard, on my pot. You are telling each other how concerned you have been for the state of our minds. In your most lulling tones, you decree what is in store for us: to hold out.

  I stand up. The Dry John, grown so familiar, now looks like a dream. Yet I had shat in it.

  Going back to the cabin, I want only to look into companion eyes. There they are. My seat blessedly waits. I’m in a bad way, I’m about to say, no longer fit to be their historian; I hallucinate. Just then they point upward, just a flicker of the eye and finger, as children do when nursey is back. I look where they're pointing. My comrades’ hallucination and mine are the same.

  And we have pulled ourselves up. For re-entry. Into the modern world? Or the old? Though it appeared we were going to be looked after, we do not yet know the terms of it. Or whether you do. Whether the Courier can be returned to Earth direct from here, or will be drawn onto Island, or as seems more likely we ourselves might be transferred in some midspace operation, we have not been apprised. Or whether anything can be done without crew. The word rescue, implying a past disaster, is never spoken. On grounds of security we are in Limited Access I believe the communications term is. The limits being ours, the access yours. Having monitored us all through a period of what I prefer to call a variant sanity, you found us purportedly in a state of disorientation which your medics pronounced either a Jungian reversion to the primitive, or a fetal progression from barbarian to man. For psychological steadying, your calendar was beamed us, but now that has stopped.

  Shortly, we feel, you will stop monitoring us. We feel so very cleverly, more and more. Perhaps you have come up against your own limitations. Or you will be on the way to forgetting us. Are we now to you what Cabins Three and Four are to us. Now and then a haunting? A non-n
oise from another apartment, heard by the last tenant of the deserted housing project, in the East Bronx.

  Disorientation, my beloved dictionary says, is only a turning from the east. Who can say whether, as we turn and turn, ours is not an adaption new to the world? Well worth monitoring. More and more in our own minds we are passengers of one century, our destination another. And we are almost there.

  In return, we want to give you something. Should that surprise you? It comes of the dusk—of circumstance. It comes of our location.

  So, say that one dusk, we hear that sweetest click, and all the hatches opening—and you coming through to greet us, or your chosen representatives. Say—six of them.

  This is how you will find us:

  The cabin dapples now, an old loved place. It is real. Real as the light that each night comes through the portholes with you, as you leap through to us in your jumpsuits, your life-supports. We lie on our couches, suited-up also, but in reality we are bare, all our crammed cells revolving. As are yours, though your stories are still ahead of you.

  Nowadays, I use the word processor. I must rush on. While all around me the stillness becomes so lovable.

  I say at once—don’t think of us as an image of life squeezed—as a hospital is a paranoia of the sick. We remind ourselves more of birds at a continual nesting-time, domestic with chirps. Though glory, which I see now should only be dwelt on in duration, creeps in.

  Soraya’s belly is our true calendar. Laughably vain of it as she is, we find ourselves worshiping it. There we are aborigines still. By its persuasion we are getting many things done. Among these—a net for the birth. The medic, now partially recovered to the point of resuming drawings for his children, is making it. He does not draw us.

  I recount our activities in no special order. What order could there be? As part of our regimen, we often change seats. In orbit, order is too much what you have. Consequently, when piecing together Mulenberg’s Latin song—Pergolesi’s “Stabat Mater,” as it one night came to him—while Wolf-Jacques obligingly Englishes it we may break off to help Soraya pry out from the Farsi Veronica’s poem. Lievering refuses to be consulted there, alleging it is not his style of poetry. He suspects all wordage of being minor. The poet herself is reluctant to help, even though it is suspected that she now has another stanza in her head. In their hearts those two have always doubted the motion of words. Perhaps only an amateur like myself can revel in them—and with my eye on something else.