Let me unmask myself. Let me confess everything. There is no Center for Pre-Dynastic Studies. I am no Metalinguistic Archaeologist, Third Grade, living in a remote and idyllic era far in your future and passing my days in pondering the wreckage of the twentieth century. The time of the Dynast may be coming, but he does not yet rule. I am your contemporary. I am your brother. These notes are the work of a pre-dynastic man like yourself, a native of the so-called twentieth century, who, like you, has lived through dark hours and may live to see darker ones. That much is true. All the rest is fantasy of my own invention. Do you believe that? Do I seem reliable now? Can you trust me, just this once?
All time converges on this point of now.
My……hurts me sorely.
The……of my……is decaying.
This is the path that the bison took.
This is the path that the moa took.
This is the……of the dying (beasts?)
Let us not……that dry path.
Let us not……that bony path.
Let us……another path……
O my brother, sharer of my mother’s (womb?)
O my sister, whose……I…………
Listen……close……the wall……
Now the cold winds come.
Now the heavy snows fall.
Now……………………
…………the suffering…………
…………the solitude…………
……blood…………sleep……blood………….
……………………blood…………
……………………
…………the river, the sea…………
……me…………
The Feast of St. Dionysus
We were still in the very weird year of 1971 when I began this novella, a year when we all wore our hair in strange ways, dressed in odd-colored clothing, and experimented with varying degrees of boldness with conscious-altering chemical substances. And I was in the process of leaving my identity as a New Yorker behind and reinventing myself as a Californian, which meant that by the time I had finished “The Feast of St. Dionysus” I was well on my way toward the very capital of all the weirdness, the San Francisco Bay Area. That was a place where even Republicans, that year, would shyly admit that they were dabbling a bit in Buddhism, meditation, and Tantric sex.
It could not fail to happen that our immersion in psychedelia, Eastern philosophies, far-out music, and other phenomena of the moment would have its effect on the sort of science fiction that we were writing at the time. There was a Day-Glo splendor to the world in those days, and science fiction is nothing if not a reflection of the era in which it is written. One editor who knew that very well was my friend and neighbor Terry Carr, who was, I think, the preeminent science-fiction editor just then, the man who helped bring into print such classic novels as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and (in a later, very different era) William Gibson’s Neuromancer).
Terry was not only a book editor; he also edited anthologies, some containing reprints, others featuring material written specifically for that collection. One of his projects in 1971 was a book called An Exaltation of Stars, subtitled Transcendental Adventures in Science Fiction, for which he invited three writers to do novellas embodying the excitingly mind-expanding concepts many of us were grappling with at the time. “Science fiction has always been fascinated by the irrational, the numinous and transcendental,” Terry wrote in his introduction to the book. “I suppose this is because science fiction likes to ask large questions: not simply How? but Why? And what are the implications?” He cited such books as Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and James Blish’s A Case of Conscience as examples of what he meant.
The writers he chose for An Exaltation of Stars were all seriously involved in the cultural manifestations of the Zeitgeist that had exploded around us, although they could hardly be called revolutionaries, let alone hippies. Roger Zelazny was a former employee of the Social Security Administration; his novella, with a name so complicated I refuse to reproduce it here, dealt with spiritual ecstasy as it might be experienced by alien life-forms. Edgar Pangborn, a quiet, elderly man of a philosophical nature, examined the religious beliefs of a far-future civilization. And I, who had been making an extensive study of the Dionysiac cults, provided Terry in January of 1972 with “The Feast of St. Dionysus,” a novella that dealt with, of all unlikely things, an unhappy astronaut who becomes entangled in a transcendental cult in the California desert.
It was a wild and wonderful time. I wouldn’t want to be doing today a lot of the things I did back then, but I don’t have to, because I was there the first time around. And the era left some interesting artifacts behind, such as the story you are about to read.
~
Sleepers, awake. Sleep is separateness; the cave of solitude is the cave of dreams, the cave of the passive spectator. To be awake is to participate, carnally and not in fantasy, in the feast; the great communion.
NORMAN O. BROWN: Love’s Body
This is the dawn of the day of the Feast. Oxenshuer knows roughly what to expect, for he has spied on the children at their catechisms; he has had hints from some of the adults; he has spoken at length with the high priest of this strange apocalyptic city; and yet, for all his patiently gathered knowledge, he really knows nothing at all of today’s event. What will happen? They will come for him, Matt who has been appointed his brother, and Will and Nick, who are his sponsors. They will lead him through the labyrinth to the place of the saint, to the god-house at the city’s core. They will give him wine until he is glutted, until his cheeks and chin drip with it and his robe is stained with red. And he and Matt will struggle, will have a contest of some sort, a wrestling match, an agon: whether real or symbolic, he does not yet know. Before the whole community they will contend. What else, what else? There will be hymns to the saint, to the god—god and saint, both are one, Dionysus and Jesus, each an aspect of the other. Each a manifestation of the divinity we carry within us, so the Speaker has said. Jesus and Dionysus, Dionysus and Jesus, god and saint, saint and god, what do the terms matter? He had heard the people singing:
This is the god who burns like fire
This is the god whose name is music
This is the god whose soul is wine
Fire. Music. Wine. The healing fire, the joining fire, in which all things will be made one. By its leaping blaze he will drink and drink and drink, dance and dance and dance. Maybe there will be some sort of sexual event, an orgy, perhaps, for sex and religion are closely bound among these people: a communion of the flesh opening the way toward communality of spirit.
I go to the god’s house and his fire consumes me
I cry the god’s name and his thunder deafens me
I take the god’s cup and his wine dissolves me
And then? And then? How can he possibly know what will happen, until it has happened? “You will enter into the ocean of Christ,” they have told him. An ocean? Here in the Mojave Desert? Well, a figurative ocean, a metaphorical ocean. All is metaphor here. “Dionysus will carry you to Jesus,” they say. Go, child, swim out to God. Jesus waits. The saint, the mad saint, the boozy old god who is their saint, the mad saintly god who abolishes walls and makes all things one, will lead you to bliss, dear John, dear tired John. Give your soul gladly to Dionysus the Saint. Make yourself whole in his blessed fire. You’ve been divided too long. How can you lie dead on Mars and still walk alive on Earth?
Heal yourself, John. This is the day.
From Los Angeles the old San Bernardino Freeway rolls eastward through the plastic suburbs, through Alhambra and Azusa, past the Covina Hills branch of Forest Lawn Memorial-Parks, past the mushroom sprawl of San Bernardino, which is becoming a little Los Angeles, but not so little. The highway pushes onward into the desert like a flat, grey cincture holding the dry, brown hills asunder. This was the road by which John Oxenshuer finally chose to make his escape. He had had no part
icular destination in mind but was seeking only a parched place, a sandy place, a place where he could be alone: he needed to re-create, in what might well be his last weeks of life, certain aspects of barren Mars. After considering a number of possibilities he fastened upon this route, attracted to it by the way the freeway seemed to lose itself in the desert north of the Salton Sea. Even in this overcivilized epoch a man could easily disappear there.
Late one November afternoon, two weeks past his fortieth birthday, he closed his rented apartment on Hollywood Boulevard; taking leave of no one, he drove unhurriedly toward the freeway entrance. There he surrendered control to the electronic highway net, which seized his car and pulled it into the traffic flow. The net governed him as far as Covina; when he saw Forest Lawn’s statuary-speckled hilltop coming up on his right, he readied himself to resume driving. A mile beyond the vast cemetery a blinking sign told him he was on his own, and he took the wheel. The car continued to slice inland at the same velocity, as mechanical as iron, of 140 kilometers per hour. With each moment the recent past dropped from him, bit by bit.
Can you drown in the desert? Let’s give it a try, God. I’ll make a bargain with you. You let me drown out there. All right? And I’ll give myself to you. Let me sink into the sand; let me bathe in it; let it wash Mars out of my soul; let it drown me, God; let it drown me. Free me from Mars and I’m m all yours, God. Is it a deal? Drown me in the desert and I’ll surrender at last. I’ll surrender.
At twilight he was in Banning. Some gesture of farewell to civilization seemed suddenly appropriate, and he risked stopping to have dinner at a small Mexican restaurant. It was crowded with families enjoying a night out, which made Oxenshuer fear he would be recognized. Look, someone would cry, there’s the Mars astronaut, there’s the one who came back! But of course no one spotted him. He had grown a bushy, sandy moustache that nearly obliterated his thin, tense lips. His body, lean and wide-shouldered, no longer had an astronaut’s springy erectness; in the nineteen months since his return from the red planet he had begun to stoop a little, to cultivate a roundedness of the upper back, as if some leaden weight beneath his breastbone were tugging him forward and downward. Besides, spacemen are quickly forgotten. How long had anyone remembered the names of the heroic lunar teams of his youth? Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins. Scott, Irwin, and Worden. Each of them had had a few gaudy weeks of fame, and then they had disappeared into the blurred pages of the almanac, all, perhaps, except Armstrong: children learned about him at school. His one small step: he would become a figure of myth, up there with Columbus and Magellan. But the others? Forgotten. Yes. Yesterday’s heroes. Oxenshuer, Richardson, and Vogel. Who? Oxenshuer, Richardson, and Vogel. That’s Oxenshuer right over there, eating tamales and enchiladas, drinking a bottle of Double-X. He’s the one who came back. Had some sort of breakdown and left his wife. Yes. That’s a funny name, Oxenshuer. Yes. He’s the one who came back. What about the other two? They died. Where did they die, daddy? They died on Mars, but Oxenshuer came back. What were their names again? Richardson and Vogel. They died. Oh. On Mars. Oh. And Oxenshuer didn’t. What were their names again?
Unrecognized, safely forgotten, Oxenshuer finished his meal and returned to the freeway. Night had come by this time. The moon was nearly full; the mountains, clearly outlined against the darkness, glistened with a coppery sheen. There is no moonlight on Mars except the feeble, hasty glow of Phobos, dancing in and out of eclipse on its nervous journey from west to east. He had found Phobos disturbing; nor had he cared for fluttery Deimos, starlike, a tiny rocketing point of light. Oxenshuer drove onward, leaving the zone of urban sprawl behind, entering the true desert, pockmarked here and there by resort towns: Palm Springs, Twenty-nine Palms, Desert Hot Springs. Beckoning billboards summoned him to the torpid pleasures of whirlpool baths and saunas. These temptations he ignored without difficulty. Dryness was what he sought.
Once he was east of Indio he began looking for a place to abandon the car; but he was still too close to the southern boundaries of Joshua Tree National Monument, and he did not want to make camp this near to any area that might be patrolled by park rangers. So he kept driving until the moon was high and he was deep into the Chuckwalla country, with nothing much except sand dunes and mountains and dry lake beds between him and the Arizona border. In a stretch where the land seemed relatively flat he slowed the car almost to an idle, killed his lights, and swerved gently off the road, following a vague northeasterly course; he gripped the wheel tightly as he jounced over the rough, crunchy terrain. Half a kilometer from the highway Oxenshuer came to a shallow sloping basin, the dry bed of some ancient lake. He eased down into it until he could no longer see the long yellow tracks of headlights on the road, and knew he must be below the line of sight of any passing vehicle. Turning the engine off, he locked the car—a strange prissiness here, in the midst of nowhere!—took his backpack from the trunk, slipped his arms through the shoulder straps, and, without looking back, began to walk into the emptiness that lay to the north.
As he walks he composes a letter that he will never send.
Dear Claire, I wish I had been able to say goodbye to you before I left Los Angeles. I regretted only that: leaving town without telling you. But I was afraid to call. I draw back from you. You say you hold no grudge against me over Dave’s death; you say it couldn’t possibly have been my fault, and of course you’re right. And yet I don’t dare face you, Claire. Why is that? Because I left your husband’s body on Mars and the guilt of that is choking me? But a body is only a shell, Claire. Dave’s body isn’t Dave, and there wasn’t anything I could do for Dave. What is it, then, that comes between us? Is it my love, Claire, my guilty love for my friend’s widow? Eh? That love is salt in my wounds, that love is sand in my throat, Claire. Claire. Claire. I can never tell you any of this, Claire. I never will. Goodbye. Pray for me. Will you pray?
His years of grueling NASA training for Mars served him well now. Powered by ancient disciplines, he moved swiftly, feeling no strain even with forty-five pounds on his back. He had no trouble with the uneven footing. The sharp chill in the air did not bother him, though he wore only light clothing, slacks and shirt and a flimsy cotton vest. The solitude, far from oppressing him, was actually a source of energy: a couple of hundred kilometers away in Los Angeles it might be the ninth decade of the twentieth century, but this was a prehistoric realm, timeless, unscarred by man, and his spirit expanded in his self-imposed isolation. Conceivably every footprint he made was the first human touch this land had felt. That grey, pervasive sense of guilt, heavy on him since his return from Mars, held less weight here beyond civilization’s edge.
This wasteland was the closest he could come to attaining Mars on Earth. Not really close enough, for too many things broke the illusion: the great gleaming scarred moon, and the succulent terrestrial vegetation, and the tug of Earth’s gravity, and the faint white glow on the leftward horizon that he imagined emanated from the cities of the coastal strip. But it was as close to Mars in flavor as he could manage. The Peruvian desert would have been better, only he had no way of getting to Peru.
An approximation. It would suffice.
A trek of at least a dozen kilometers left him still unfatigued, but he decided, shortly after midnight, to settle down for the night. The site he chose was a small level quadrangle bounded on the north and south by spiky, ominous cacti—chollas and prickly pears—and on the east by a maze of scrubby mesquite; to the west, a broad alluvial fan of tumbled pebbles descended from the nearby hills. Moonlight, raking the area sharply, highlighted every contrast of contour: the shadows of cacti were unfathomable inky pits and the tracks of small animals—lizards and kangaroo rats—were steep-walled canyons in the sand. As he slung his pack to the ground two startled rats, browsing in the mesquite, noticed him belatedly and leaped for cover in wild, desperate bounds, frantic but delicate. Oxenshuer smiled at them.
On the twentieth day of the mission Richardson and Vog
el went out, as planned, for the longest extravehicular on the schedule, the ninety-kilometer crawler-jaunt to the Gulliver site. Goddamned well about time, Dave Vogel had muttered, when the EVA okay had at last come floating up, time-lagged and crackly, out of far-off Mission Control. All during the eight-month journey from Earth, while the brick-red face of Mars was swelling patiently in their portholes, they had argued about the timing of the big Marswalk, an argument that had begun six months before launch date. Vogel, insisting that the expedition was the mission’s most important scientific project, had wanted to do it first, to get it done and out of the way before mishaps might befall them and force them to scrub it. No matter that the timetable decreed it for Day Twenty. The timetable was too conservative. We can overrule Mission Control, Vogel said. If they don’t like it, let them reprimand us when we get home. But Richardson, though, he wouldn’t go along. Houston knows best, he kept saying. He always took the side of authority. First we have to get used to working on Mars, Dave. First we ought to do the routine stuff close by the landing site, while we’re getting acclimated. What’s our hurry? We’ve got to stay here a month until the return window opens, anyway. Why breach the schedule? The scientists know what they’re doing, and they want us to do everything in its proper order, Richardson said. Vogel, stubborn, eager, seething, thought he would find an ally in Oxenshuer. You vote with me, John. Don’t tell me you give a crap about Mission Control! Two against one and Bud will have to give in. But Oxenshuer, oddly, took Richardson’s side. He hesitated to deviate from the schedule. He wouldn’t be making the long extravehicular himself in any case; he had drawn the short straw; he was the man who’d d be keeping close to the ship all the time. How then could he vote to alter the carefully designed schedule and send Richardson off, against his will, on a risky and perhaps ill-timed adventure? No, Oxenshuer said. Sorry, Dave, it isn’t my place to decide such things. Vogel appealed anyway to Mission Control, and Mission Control said wait till Day Twenty, fellows. On Day Twenty Richardson and Vogel suited up and went out. It was the ninth EVA of the mission, but the first that would take anyone more than a couple of kilometers from the ship.
Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume Three Page 34
