Starrigger

by John Dechancie

  Darla yawned elaborately, then apologized. “I’m done in,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

  “No problem, really. I was just thinking about how she happened to pick the right direction today—and about how she knew her way through the jungle back on Hothouse.”

  Darla stifled another yawn. “Inborn sense of direction, I guess.” She lost the fight and gave in to another one. Recovered, she said, “Maybe she’d been that way before… through the jungle, I mean.”

  “And today?”

  “Lucky guess?” she ventured.

  “Simple enough, but again I remind you of what you said about her people’s reluctance to leave their territory.”

  “Again I’m reminded. But that doesn’t mean Winnie herself hasn’t traveled. After all, she did come with us. Who knows? She may have worked for a jungle-clearing crew before signing on at the motel.”

  “She helped destroy her home?”

  Darla conceded the point with a tilt of her head. “You have me there.” She looked at the sky and stopped walking. “You know, your question is valid. We must have covered eighty klicks before we reached the Skyway.”

  “Which is what led me to ask it.”

  Darla was about to say something, then keeled over in a mock swoon and rested her head on my shoulder. “I’m so tired, Jake,” she said.

  I put my arms around her and found a nesting place for my face in her hair. It smelled of hayfields, those I played in as a kid, a memory contained in an odor, like so many. She pressed her body close and put her arms around my neck as the wind reared up a chilly gust, making a sound like a moan over the mesa. We hugged; I kissed her neck, and a little ripple of pleasure went through her. I kissed it again. She raised her head, her eyes heavy-lidded, gave me a sleepy smile of contentment, and kissed me tenderly. Then she kissed me again, this time with a probing intensity. With my fingers I found the deep groove of her spine and followed its course under her jacket down to the beginning of the rift of her buttocks, stopping there teasingly. She answered with a thrust of her hips against mine, and I caressed her behind, came back up by way of the curve of her hip, all the way up to interpose a cupped hand between my chest and hers. Her breasts were small and firm.

  But the wind got steadily colder, and it was time to get back to the house. We started walking back.

  When we got there we found the Teleologists in the backyard, sitting in a circle on the ground in silent meditation. We stood and watched them. Nobody spoke for a long while, then suddenly Susan did.

  “Sometimes I didn’t get along with Kirsti.” It sounded like part of a conversation, but nobody responded.

  After a long interval Roland said, “Zev was a good man. I’ll miss him.”

  Then it was John’s turn. “Silvia knew I had to follow my conscience. It was part of my Plan, and she could see that…” He trailed off.

  This went on for a time. Eventually John looked up at us. “I suppose you two are hungry. Well, so are we.”

  They all rose and came toward us. “We were having a Remembrance,” John explained. I started to apologize, but John cut me short. “No, no. We were done,” he said. “Let’s eat.”

  Supper involved little in the way of preparation, since the main course came out of hotpaks, but Roland had unhinged the useless back door (the front one was missing) and made a dining table out of it by shoring it up with rocks. Places for everyone were set with plates and utensils from a mess kit John had bought. A biolume lantern stood in for a centerpiece, the fire was crackling cheerily, and we settled down to a good meal.

  I tore off the top of my hotpak and watched until the contents started to steam and bubble, then dumped the glop onto my plate. The stuff looked more like beef Romanov, after the executions, then beef Stroganoff as advertised, but it tasted surprisingly good.

  Conversation was upbeat for a change. The Teleologists talked about Teleologist stuff, but John was kind enough to include us in the chitchat, explaining things as we went along. It turned out that John and his crew were a sect that had splintered off from the main church in Khadija, although terms like “sect” and “church” didn’t quite seem to apply. Teleological Pantheism sounded more and more like a framework within which one engaged in a freewheeling brand of theology rather than a body of dogma, and I gathered that the schism between John’s group and the parent body was more personal than doctrinal.

  I asked John to give me a definition of Teleological Pantheism in twenty-five words or less, fully granting that such an encapsulation would be grossly oversimplified and unfair.

  “Well, I think I can,” John answered, “and it wouldn’t be too far off the mark.” He paused to compose, as if he were about to give birth to a rhyming couplet. “Teleological Pantheists hold as an act of faith, unsupported by reason, that the universe has a purpose, and that there is a Plan to it all. I mean by ‘act of faith’ that it’s a Kierkegaardian sort of leap, since there certainly is no empirical evidence to support such a belief.”

  “Then, why believe it?” I asked. “Sorry. Go on.”

  “No, the question is valid, but I couldn’t answer it in a paragraph, or even fifty. I’ll certainly talk about it later, if you like. But anyway, that’s the teleological part of it. The theistic part of it involves the notion that the universe is greater than the sum of its parts, that the totality of that which is—reality, if you will—is a manifestation of something beyond the plenum of sensory data we perceive it to be.” He stopped to regard the design of his rhetoric, and shook his head. “No, that doesn’t quite do it. All that does is allude to a fuzzy metaphysics. Shall we say this?” he went on, drumming the table with spidery fingers. “We also accept on faith that there is some Unifying Principle to reality, of which natural laws are only signposts pointing in the direction of the heart of things.”

  He shifted his weight on the hardened foam floor. “That’s more or less it, but I think I should point out that the chief difference between us and almost any other religion that involves a deity is that we impose no structure on this Unifying Principle. We don’t refer to it as God, or use any identifying tag, and we reject all anthropomorphic notions entirely. We hold that there is little we can know about the nature of this Principle, since it is always in a dynamic state, in a constant process of becoming, if you will, as the Universal Plan unfolds. We differ from classical deists in that we can’t imagine a state of affairs in which a creator slaps together a clockwork cosmos and then abandons it.” He took a sip of coffee. “I think I went over twenty-five words.”

  “John,” Roland said, “you can’t fart in less than twenty-five words.”

  John led the laughter. “I stand accused, and plead guilty, m’lord.” And with a furtive smile he added, “But after all, to air is human.”

  Groans.

  “You could at least be original, John,” Roland chastised him. “That was terrible, and I’d never forgive you, if it weren’t for this flat you lent me,” he added, indicating the house. Shudders.

  “Besides punning,” Susan told us, by way of an apology for the punishment her compatriots were inflicting on us, “Teelies love to talk. A good thing, too, because there’s not much else to this religion.”

  “Susan’s right,” Roland said. “We don’t worship in the conventional sense. We have few ceremonies, nothing approaching a liturgy, and precious little in the way of doctrine. We believe that there must be a flux in these matters as well.”

  “Thinking is worship,” John put in. “So’s talking about what you’re thinking about. But not everybody thinks alike.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Roland agreed. “We want a religion stripped of every kind of dogmatic rigidity, hidebound orthodoxy, papal bulls, infallible preachings … everything.”

  “We reject revelation as a source of truth,” Susan said. “More blood has been spilled over questions of whose holy book is holier than over anything else in history.”

  “People write books,” Roland said pointedly. “Not gods
.”

  “Of course,” John said, “there’s much more. There are ethical currents flowing from the theological spring. We believe in cooperative living, for example. Granted, that’s nothing new…”

  “One thing we don’t do is proselytize,” Susan broke in. “We want to convert, if at all, by example or by a kind of osmotic process. Not by handing out pamphlets on street corners.”

  “Sounds like my kind of religion,” I said finally. Actually, to me it sounded like Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel run through a protein synthesizer, spiked with a bit of mid-twentieth-century radical theology. “Where do I sign up?”

  “Right here,” John said, gesturing around us, “and you do it by asking that question.”

  I eased back against Darla’s pack, uncrossed my legs, and put them under the table. “Well, now, I don’t think I’d take to communal living too well. I’m nasty in the morning and I raid the cooler at night. Generally, I’m an uncooperative son of a bitch.”

  John gave me a sugary smile. “But lovable in your own way, I’m sure. However, you don’t have to live with other Teelies to be one.”

  “Just as long as I drop my weekly tithe into the collection plate, eh?”

  “No. Add to that list of ‘don’ts’ the fact that we don’t tithe our membership.”

  “Or take contributions from anybody,” Roland said, “or solicit them.”

  “Who pays the rent?” I asked, kind of shocked. Maybe this was my old-time religion.

  “Our support mainly comes from the Schuyler Foundation, set up by an Australian multi-billionaire who was an early convert to TP. He read and was impressed with the writings of its originator, Ariel MacKenzie-Davies.” John stretched out on the floor, propping a head up on an elbow. “She’s an interesting figure. I’d give you a copy of her seminal work—that is,” he said, his voice suddenly going hollow, “if I hadn’t been so careless as to leave my kit behind.”

  That brought it all back, and the conversation died. I tried to resuscitate it.

  “Besides,” I said, “I’m not one for leaping, faithwise. I mean, I’ve tried to read Kierkegaard, but I usually wind up Soren logs.”

  Only Susan, an American, got the joke. Her face brightened enough to register great pain. “Really, Jake,” she scolded.

  Roland was suspicious. “Did I miss something?”

  “Oh, my God,” John said. “I just got it. Of course, sawing logs.”

  Roland was mystified until John explained. Roland shook his head. “Jake, sometimes your cultural allusions and a great deal of your vocabulary are very obscure. To me, at least. You’re Nor’merican, of course, but what part?”

  “Western Pennsylvania, old US of A. It’s pretty isolated, and there’s about a one-hundred-year culture-lag. Linguistic atrophy, too. Most of the colloquialisms are out of the midtwentieth century, even earlier. It was my milk-tongue, and I’ll probably never outgrow it.”

  “But you seem an educated man.” “That was out here, later on.”

  “I see. Darla, you seem to have an accent I can’t place. It sounds … well, mid-Colonial, for want of a better term.”

  “My mother worked for the Colonial Authority for years,” Darla said, “and dragged me around from planet to planet. She was Canadian, my father Dutch. So, it was alternately Dutch and English at home, Intersystem in school, and Portuguese, Tagalog, Bengali, Swedish, Afrikaans, Finnish—”

  We all laughed. The usual language salad.

  “Thank God for Intersystem and English,” John said. “Otherwise we’d have Babel out here.” His face split into a yawn. “And speaking of sawing logs…”

  Everyone agreed. We cleaned up the supper mess quickly and made preparations for spending a cold night in a shell of a rundown shack in the middle of East Jesus. (There’s one for Roland.)

  But before we turned in, a talk with John was necessary. “John, I should have said something before… but there’s a price on my head. You and your people could be in danger.”

  “I thought as much. The Colonial Authority?”

  “Yes, them too, but that’s the least of it.”

  “I see.”

  “How did you know?” I asked wonderingly.

  “Those rumors we mentioned. They have it that everyone is after you.”

  Again, this mysterious shadow following us. I was getting fed up. “Everyone?” I tugged at my lower lip. “Perhaps we should leave.”

  “I am not about to drive to town at this hour. I’d never find my way back at night.”

  “We could walk it.”

  “What? Hike across this wilderness? A strange planet?” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Jake, we owe you our lives. Roland will take the first watch. We would have stood watches anyway, you know. Skywaymen about.”

  “Right. And, John…” He turned around. “Thanks.”

  “It’s not often one gets a legend for a house guest.” He looked around. “Or shed guest, I should say.”

  Darla and I watched her sleeping egg inflate. It grew and grew until it looked like a giant, fat green worm. I said so. “Big enough to eat us both,” she said.

  We crawled inside. Chemical heat had already made the interior a warm, pillowy green womb, delightfully snug, lit softly by bioluminescence panels. Undressing was a little difficult, though. I felt the cold barrel of Darla’s Walther against my back.

  “I give up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Darla, keep that thing handy.”

  “I will,” she said.

  “What about Winnie?”

  “I gave her an extra blanket. She said she’s not sleepy.”

  “Are you?”

  “I was, but not now, love. Come here.”

  Music …

  Music, not loud …

  Music, not loud but omnipresent and overpowering, a single towering, shifting chord stacked with notes from the lower end of the keyboard to the top, covering octave after octave. It sounded over the mesa like a choir of lost souls bewailing their damnation, drear and haunting. Violins sang with them, flutes, oboes, bassoons, more strings—lilting violas, threatening double basses … a harp, a celeste tinkling contrapuntally. The structure changed, harmonies rearranged, and now it was God playing the church organ of the universe, beatific sonorities flowing from his hands, reverberating from the roof of Creation.

  Darla awoke with a start, clutched at me. “Jake!”

  “The Wurlitzer trees,” I said. “It’s all right, lovely one.” She melted in my arms, sudden fear dissolving like frost before a flame. “I was dreamin…” she said in a lost little sleep-voice. The egg was dark. I passed a thumb gently over both her closed eyelids, kissed her warm, moist cheek. She exhaled, all tension flowing out. I drank in her breath, held her close.

  Outside, the chord modulated from minor to major, back to minor again, then shifted once more and droned in a modal harmony as the wind passed its airy fingers among the pipes. There were solo passages, virtuoso performances. A concerto. Then the wind blew it all away and left an atonal chaos that resonated with the indeterminacy of existence … muddled, mysterious, in the end incomprehensible…

  A great sinewy hand poised over the starless dark… waiting? Watching? The Hand of the Conductor. Or the Composer.

  Both? Neither? The void was formless and embraced, all that was to be, would never be … infinite possibilities. Skeins of chromatic tones unspooled in the black, the raw stuff of being. Then structures began to build themselves as a diatonic order was imposed. (By what? By whom?). Fugues wove out of the deep, classic symphonies in sonata form drew together. The Hand withdrew, and a ponderous hymn resounded throughout the firmament, praising Oneness, Fullness, Positivity, the Plan, the Organizing Principle…

  Strange light, a bundle of softness in my arms, the momentary, odd sensation of not knowing exactly where you are, when you are. The egg was dark, but tissue-thin walls leaked a shifting light.

  The Hand… the Hand among the waste and void, at the heart of things, the w
omb of time …

  “Dawla! Jake!”

  There in the secret center, the impenetrable core …

  “Dawla-Jake! Dawla-Jake!”

  … of nothingness … nothing … no thingness…

  “Jake! Dawla! Up! Up!”

  I jerked awake, groped for one of the biolume panels. I wiped one with a palm and saw in its glow a double-thumbed hand in front of my face.

  The music had stopped. I poked Darla.

  Her eyes opened wide instantly. “What is it?”

  “Winnie, ‘sat you?” I whispered hoarsely, widening the birth-canal entrance to the egg. Winnie’s face showed alarm. “Big machines! Big machines! Get up! Get up!”

  Darla swiped at the quick-exit seam with two stiffened fingers and the egg cracked us naked into a freezing night.

  The fire was a huddle of glowing embers. Roland lay near it, asleep, swaddled in blankets. I went over and kicked him sharply once, then grabbed folds of the other egg and flipped it. There were two bodies in there; good.

  “Darla!” I said. “Get out the door, take your pack and gun!” Moaning and mumbling inside the egg.

  “Jake, I’m not going without you.”

  “Get!” I commanded. “Run that way.” I pointed toward the rear of the house. “I’ll find you.”

  Darla grabbed some things, threw me my squib, and ran.

  “Get up!” I shouted. “John! Susan!”

  Roland was struggling to his feet, bleary-eyed, disoriented. Outside, probing beams of light played over the ground near the house, and the darkness hissed with the exhaust of flitterjets.

  Roland straightened up. “I was just—” He saw the lights, heard the sound of approaching aircraft. “My God! Who is it?”

  “Want to stay and find out?”

  “Jake?” It was Sukuma-Tayler, head protruding from the end of the egg.

  “Trouble, John,” I told him. The egg sprang open and Susan stood up, naked, arms wrapped around her ribcage, grimacing from the sudden cold. “Everybody out and into the bush. Now! Scatter!”

  John got to his feet unsteadily. Susan stooped to find clothes—I rushed at them both, grabbed a blanket and flung it over Susan, and shoved both of them forward. Susan grunted, stumbled, and I caught her.