Moonstar

by David Gerrold

  And now the lovers pause to think—the alternative is to flee before the storm again, and each will die alone, afraid. They touch each other’s hands, their cheeks, their eyelids and their lips, and whisper, “I would die within your arms, and in a peaceful way. You have given me much joy in life; let it end in a fitting manner.” And Reethe enfolds them then and takes them with here down into the bottom of the sea. And it is told that they did die within each other’s arms, and that it was as gentle and beautiful as if they were just dropping into sleep’s sweet embrace.

  If this myth of Lono and Rurik seems unhappy in its resolution, that is only an illusion. It is a joyous tale in that it allows Lono and Rurik to die as they had lived—within each other’s arms. Perhaps this is a wistful thought, but could you ask for better for your own lover than to end with her? Let this story serve as recognition that all love stories are inherently sad, because a love story is not complete until the ending of that love has been detailed. All loves do end sometime, some when one partner or the other grows tired, others through the vagaries of circumstance, and many when once partner or the other dies. The love of the survivor is always a good measure of the strength of the relationship and it is this that gives the happy quality to the overall sadness of Satlik passion; it is happy in its recognition of the timelessness of love itself, in the fact that such joy is free for everyone to share, if only they can open up their hearts. And in that, such stories are happy ones, happiness transcending any sadness, because we share the joy that two of us have learned how to touch the greatest source of power in our world. Love, for each of us, is a reaffirmation of our ability to flow with the holy currents of humanity. It is the noblest of human passions, and it is only through its expression that one can be complete. If we are individuals, we are still reflections of a larger truth, and when we can reflect that truth within ourselves as radiance and light, then we become the best that we can be.

  Such is the final lesson of the love of Rurik and Lono. And every time we tell it again, it lives on. They may have passed into the night, but as long as people share their story, their love lives on forever.

  “Option was an experiment in social relationships. It was well-intended, but like all social experiments it would teach more through its failures than it ever could possibly teach by its successes.

  “If that sounds bitter, then perhaps it is. I would have much rather been one of its successes than failures.

  “The problem with social experiments is that you can’t flush the residue down the drain after you’ve found the hypothesis unworkable. The residue is human lives.

  “Who cleans up after the experimenters are through in the lab?”

  In the evenings, Jobe would wander down to the arcade, where a screen had been mounted under a thatched roof with roll-down walls of silk-net to keep out flying insects. While others might come here for amusement, or for education or for news, Jobe came because there was nothing else she wished to do. It wasn’t that she wished to be here; it was just that there was nowhere else she wished to be and here at least was a place to be while she wasn’t being anywhere. Everyone else was paired off; Jobe still slept alone. So she watched the flickers on the screen, which was a kind of sleeping alone too.

  Nyad had told her she was beautiful; in her refusal to believe it, Jobe made herself unbeautiful. Here, beautiful meant sexy—and that was dangerous. Sex was something you did for release anyway, not for satisfaction. A messy business at best. The screen was cleaner. The blue-gray flicker in the dry and windy night became her life at Option, a projection of what she wished she could have had, but wouldn’t dare to take—instead of dancing, she sat and disliked music. Instead of singing, she listened and disliked singers. Instead of loving, she watched the images of people loving, and decided she was offended. The screen dazzled pictures into her skull and created alternate realities; pleasanter ones because they were flat with simple images, clichés and stereotypes—they were easier to understand and manage.

  These images and sounds were only shorthand symbols, intended to suggest a more rounded, three-dimensional world behind them—but the symbols were projected across the wall three meters high and in colors so intense and garish, they were too rich to be real. They worked too well, they were too powerful and they became more real than the things that they were symbols of. They became Jobe’s reality. Flat and garish. Artificial.

  The screen was saying something, “—but the real thing can’t be expressed in images; it can only be expressed—and never in symbols, only in truth.” Jobe nodded at the words. Yes, how true, how true. The screen enlarged the horizons of perception; it was a magic window. But when she moved with hand outstretched as if to step into it, she discovered that a screen is just a wall and not a window. Not a window at all. Her hands would bump against its oily surface without touching, but the message to her eyes was louder, more intense. And besides, the message to her eyes was the one she wanted to believe. The moving-mural shadows were a nicer set of truth—much better than the one that lurked behind her in the hills, calling her in gross, unlovely ways: “Hey, Jobe! There’s a bed up here with your name on it. Come on up! The loving’s fine. Get your legs up in the air, girl! You’ll love it!”

  But, no—Jobe had to reject that reality. It was too dangerous. It was too real. You could get hurt. You would have to deal with other people. Worse, you might have to . . . care about them. You could get hurt. If they didn’t care about you.

  Yes, the projected mosaics of glimmering colors, images of almost-truths, stretched across a wall of whitewashed rice paper on a bamboo framework, those mosaics were much safer, much more comforting. Not involving, not at all. Safely distant. If they started to disturb her, or even rippled through her consciousness, through the wall of her steady dazing, she could walk away from it—she couldn’t do that with the other, not while impaled to a bed with someone plunging into her.

  That involved her lying flat on her back while some immature and inexperienced sister-friend who thought she was going to be Dakkarik—or wanted at least one chance to taste the way of Dakka and prove to herself that she didn’t really want that Choice—pumped in and out of her, rocking with a frantic beat, back and forth, sprawling hard across her, sometimes slamming painfully (sometimes it was hard to breathe), sometimes squirting something warm, sometimes far too soon and sometimes not at all, pumping at her till she chafed, sometimes even burned. If only she could do it right, she thought, or get enough, or—sometimes there was something. The beginning of a tickle—yes, she knew what orgasm was; she’d had them, infrequently. The failing wasn’t all her own; she enjoyed sex, she even liked it—it was people she could not deal with.

  Most of the Dakka ones were growing alien. That was part of her dismay. She’d thought that adulthood would be the end of childhood problems—and it was; the little problems shrunk in magnitude—and were replaced by larger ones, the problems of encroaching maturity, the shapes of Reethe and Dakka; and Jobe couldn’t comprehend the Dakka-ness of Dakkarik! She couldn’t be a part of it, even though that was to be her Choice. And because she couldn’t understand the ways of Dakka-Choice, she became uncomfortable—and using her discomfort as a mortar, she built a wall of sullenness between herself and the thing she longed for. She couldn’t stand to have a Dakka touch her, as if that person were enjoying something she could not. And she couldn’t see or share the other’s joy. As if that person had achieved a magic she would never know. What was it in them that made them able to be Dakkarik? Why should they experience the magic and not herself? She was Jobe—she was the heroine of the story of her own life; she was the center of her circle—she was the one around which her universe revolved; why should the magic be deprived from her and given to those clumsy others who could not understand the gift that they possessed? She could understand it—if only she could understand it!

  Sex was—well, Reethe would worship and console Dakka for her imperfections. Reethe would share herself with Dakka, taking Dakka into her.
Reethe would hold Dakka inside of her and share her holiness with her flawed lover—she would touch her lover’s heart and feed upon her growing strength, giving Dakka the knowledge of the magic of perfection for the one bright flashing moment of ecstatic wonder when all ego and identity become lost in larger whirlpools of the flows of Holy Tau. The magic happened when you were a part of the vast flows of space and time, when you were a part of all life’s greater moments. That’s what it was supposed to be. Reethe gave Dakka knowledge of perfection, and in experiencing Dakka’s ecstasy at having all the pieces fit, achieved it for herself.

  But Jobe couldn’t achieve her own perfection—and she’d tried, she really had. Was she doing it wrong? She couldn’t be—she had the motions right, and the feelings too; at least she thought she did. Or did she? It was said that Reethe cannot achieve perfection until she gives it to her Dakka—

  She did it. She liked it even. A little bit. She couldn’t help but like it, even though she didn’t like it, not inside. That is, her body liked it, but she didn’t, not in the place she really lived. But she did it because she didn’t know how not to. She wouldn’t say no because she hoped for her miracle, yet didn’t know why she should be saying yes. But she had not yet . . . not yet . . . not yet something. She knew that it was incomplete somehow, something lacking—in herself or in the act. Prefer ring to believe that it was something lacking in the act, she kept trying to achieve it—but she could not identify what it was that was missing, only that it wasn’t there. If she could just . . . grab the feeling that each act of sex seemed somehow to be reaching for, then she’d know exactly what it was that she’d been missing because then she would not be missing it anymore, would she?

  Jobe tried. And then she stopped trying. Not all at once, but bit by bit. As each new answer failed, it became a signpost of a way that wouldn’t work, until finally there was nothing left but dead-end markers and no paths that she could see were left to try. Inside, she would not admit that she would not give another that which she still wanted for herself. Even though she knew too well just what it was that she would not admit. Me first—then someone else? Her self was screaming in her skull; she would not give it away until she knew what it was that she was giving. Perfection enlarges when it’s shared? Who says? She could not give it away while she was jealous of the one she gave it to. Why should Dakka receive perfection first? Why not Jobe, who was more desperate? And even when they told her—as they had, repeatedly—that it was the act of giving that made perfection happen, she still would not believe.

  It needed a lover, a lover. If Jobe ever thought of lovers—and despite the pain of such a thought, she dreamed occasion ally of it, a relationship so deep and pure that it transcended life and time and became immortal of itself—the possibility of such was never quite immediate however; it was something held apart, as if expected not today, or even in a coming month, but in a not too formless future just beyond the definitive tomorrow, taking shape but still a blur—that’s where her lover was. Her lover—oh, yes, Jobe’s lover was a fine and golden one, living comfortably right here, in that tiny space behind her eyes, the safest place of all, protected from reality. She was there whenever needed, catering to every whim, servant of desire. And of course Jobe loved her so that she would give her life for her, do anything; they never argued, never. Lovers never argued, they were much too much alike, always agreed on everything. Love, Jobe explained to herself, doesn’t need sex. It is spiritually transcendent. The sex is something else—oh, it’s there, of course. Lovers hide inside each other for their sex so they don’t have to turn to others, which is something harder. Far simpler to work it out with someone who understands the messy needs. Love—real love—now that was something that should exist beyond the obviousness of sex, separate, a thing in and of itself apart from bodies grappling in the dark. Love, you see, is a submergence of oneself into a larger experience—that part of her ideas she took from the Philosophies—and as the experience enlarges, so does the selves that it contains, taking them higher than they’ve ever been before. The viewpoints gained are from a new perspective, and the newer vision turned back on love, expands it all the more, as if grateful for the dazzling upward trip. Love grows on love. It doesn’t need the slimy sexual side, except as refuge for the body. Love should be pure. Transcendent. She liked that word, she craved that kind of love. Sex—? Well, she wanted to be worldly without the ugly business of actually having to live in the world herself.

  Once in a while, it would come to her: I’m going to die alone and old and unloved. And once in a while, she would scream, panic-stricken inside of her own life, I must do something! I can’t go on like this!

  But those were nighttime thoughts—the nighttime thoughts evaporate in the blue and yellow light of day. If she thought about it at all during the day, she’d dismiss those fears as foolish meanderings (I’m still young; I have time), obsessive ones and unimportant. So, whatever it was she lacked, she didn’t realized the lack of it, because she wouldn’t trust her own nighttime thoughts for being truer than the daytime ones. Oh, why didn’t someone come and save her from herself already, bringing her the kind of life she knew she really deserved?

  The screen was still talking: “Dissatisfaction, frustration, desperation—these are conditions that would pervade the greater mass of all human life, were it not that each human life determines the limits of its territory, the size of the battles it will fight, the challenges that it considers worthy of intention. Each human life defines its terms of confrontation, and by that definition, defines the person acting in them. The person either grows to meet those challenges—or fails to grow and is defeated by them.

  “Confront yourself—and the outcome of that conflict, the shape of the resolution will eventually set the tone for the rest of your life. You will decide if you are satisfied or not with whom you will discover yourself to be, and that satisfaction or dissatisfaction will become the roots of your whole being.”

  Jobe had heard it all before. Some philosopher or other. Or some Watichi. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t what you believed that was important—it was merely that you believed; it was the very act of believing that accomplished. But right now Jobe did not, could not, would not, believe in anything, not in herself, not in her life. Not in sex, not in love.

  “If you can challenge your own self, then you will find yourself plunging into new and ever larger challenges—challenges that you will seek on purpose to continue challenging yourself so that you can continue growing. Or—if you avoid the challenge, you will avoid all of the possible growth-making situations, and the lack of growth is death, a living one, but death nonetheless. You will die, even if it takes a hundred holy years.”

  Maybe that was it, Jobe thought. Maybe I am dying. Have I been offered challenge? Isn’t Choice a challenge to a life? The acceptance of my body, and ultimately myself?

  Jobe backed away quite cautiously from that appraisal. It cut too close to home. No one here at Option knew how to teach her how to deal with a thought like that, and Jobe had her own way of dealing with challenge anyway—retreat to higher ground, regroup and study the situation carefully. Usually, by that time, it had passed, or at least become another situation. Confrontation could be avoided safely; Jobe had learned that much at least. The screen’s voice was misinformed—or this part just did not apply to her, it was not matter now.

  “Just because we understand some of the laws of nature, doesn’t mean we are exempt from the. We use our words to set ourselves apart from what we are—we manipulate our symbols and think we control the concepts they represent. Talking about feeling is self-defeating when it is more important to feel. Talking about civilization is not the same as being civilized. Just because we can define it, doesn’t mean we are. Just because you know these thoughts does not mean that we are masters of them, or even masters of ourselves.”

  Yes, Jobe nodded, yes; understanding what the screen was saying. What a pity all those others who were watching would never kno
w that it was really aimed at them; they would miss the truth of it. They weren’t gifted, weren’t special—they were lesser humans; the ones who weren’t me. Dying, the same as everybody else, victims of the heat-death of the universe.

  Dying? Nonsense! I live my life for me.

  In front of a screen?

  Why not? It doesn’t hurt me—

  But then, why aren’t you happy, Jobe? Why aren’t you loving?

  Well—

  Well?

  I’m not beautiful. I mean, I’m not bad-looking, but only beautiful people find love.

  What about all those people who aren’t beautiful, yet seem to have a partner to sleep with whenever they wish? Every night. Sometimes even love.

  The uglies? Well, I’m not as bad as them—

  But isn’t it odd how they always seem so happy compared to you?

  Shrug. It doesn’t matter. They do it with each other. The uglies have to do it with someone. They do it with other uglies. Yes, that makes sense. Of a sort.

  If that’s what you want. All right.

  Anyway, the screen doesn’t demand beauty for its involvement. It doesn’t even demand involvement, merely acceptance.

  It asks for time.