The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  So outre and specific are the psychic parameters for Pilots that the fifty billion population of the habited planets supplies us with no more than two hundred of these rare creatures on duty at any given time, to the great detriment of interstellar commerce and exploration. These are almost entirely recruited from the demi-mondes and mental retreats where those whose wanderjahrs led not to the finding of the true self but to the losing of same live out their lives in obsessive addiction to no particular charge or molecule. Indeed this may be why such bas-kulturs are not merely tolerated but glorified by popular culture and subsidized by corporate entities and magnates, though the circularity of this causality would no doubt be fiercely denied by all concerned.

  So the Pilot-recruit is a nonorgasmic terminal addict recruited from a spiritual vacuum to willingly surrender all to the ineffableness of the Jump. Aimless vagabonds of the spirit, alienated from their own bodies, willingly offering up the last ghost of their humanity to the Jump Circuit.

  And the Jump makes them worse. The physiological price is severe; the required twenty-four-standard-hour recuperation period is the true speed limit of interstellar voyaging, and the average Pilot burns out after ten years. Typically anorexic to begin with, the Pilot loses all interest in the esthetics of nutriment and must be drip-fed during the recuperation period. Needless to say, personal grooming and cleanliness have an even lower priority in the Pilot’s scheme of things.

  So while they are considered officers of the crew with the privileges of same through long tradition, they mingle not with the crew or the Honored Passengers, by both an almost equally long tradition and their own chronic physical enfeeblement. Of all the Pilots I have shipped with, only Dominique Alia Wu ever crossed the walls of this unstated purdah or even acknowledged anything but indifference to its existence.

  Perhaps now you will be ready to understand why the notion never broached my consciousness that Dominique was in fact my Pilot when first I saw her on the sky ferry up to the Dragon Zephyr from Earth.

  In one sense every Void Ship voyage is a new command and in all senses one’s crew is never the same twice, but in the case of the Dragon Zephyr, this was doubly so. The module I had dubbed “Dragon” was not only new to me, it was new to service, straight from the circumlunar fabrik; by one of those mathematical oddities, there was also not a single member of the Dragon crew with whom I had shipped before.

  So what with an enlarged number of technical reports and crew tales to go over in a command assumption rite not expanded beyond the usual week, my consciousness had been warped toward a necessarily speeded-up mode. I seemed to be just barely on time for everything, and in fact I found myself dashing on board the sky ferry rather at the last minute.

  There were only two empty seats available by then: one beside a rather obese and untidy-looking fellow wearing the blazon of the Flinger crew, and the other beside a slim but attractively proportioned woman, plainly but smartly dressed in a functional pale-blue voyaging costume, with a cap of short brown hair, bright dark eyes, and an eagle-visaged profile. Naturally, I chose the beauty over my fellow beast without noticing the decision in my haste as anything but pheromonic esthetics.

  Only when I had strapped in, stretched out, and performed a brief breathing exercise to relax my tempo, did I fully notice my seatmate, who sat staring out the port at what seemed like nothing in particular.

  What I had perceived in my distracted mode as conventional beauty was now revealed as something far less boring. The body within the form-revealing voyaging costume was not a slim, boyish figure but rather that of a buxom voluptuary honed down to its bare functionalism by the practice of some martial or yogic art, or feverish dedication, or both. Her features were not paradigms of stylized beauty in any cultural mode with which I was familiar, and the plain cap of brown hair was seemingly a deliberate anti-dramatic gesture.

  Yet the gestalt had brio, presence, a beauty not of feature but of inner transmutation. Her dark bright eyes were the crown of a curving aquiline nose that served to highlight their intensity, her mouth seemed an ideogram of ironic internal dialogue, and the lack of grand coiffure served to focus visual attention on the inner fires rather than on external fleshly harmonies of form.

  Of course I was well aware that this perception owed a good deal to the chance congruence of her pheromones with the chemical ideal engraved in my genes and I thought little more of it at the time, my thoughts still primarily focused more on taking command than on this frisson of passing glandular attraction.

  At any rate, before I could contemplate initiating a conversation, the warning chord sounded, the luzer was lit, and the sky ferry surged upward atop a pillar of luz, a stream of densified photons pushing it to orbital velocity at an even three gravities—smooth and silent, but still not exactly conducive to artfully casual discourse, and nothing passed between us until the ferry was in the process of matching orbits with the Dragon Zephyr.

  Though all Void Ships are assembled for their voyages out of the same eight basic module classes, no two, even of the same general function, are exact duplicates—appropriately emblematic, it is sometimes said, of the coding mode of the DNA molecule.

  Indeed, the shape of the core module, the Dragon in this instance, all but turns this fanciful metaphor into a parody of itself. With bridge, crew quarters, sick bay, Jump Drive machinery, and Pilot’s module all contained in the ellipsoidal body of the Dragon, and the spine trailing behind like an erect tail, the core module did indeed resemble a giant silvery spermatozoon; the yang, the male, the propulsive principle, ejaculated from the electronic phallus of the Flinger to fertilize the stars with human genes.

  Fortunately, perhaps, the metaphor breaks down at this point. Rather than burying itself in some massive ovum, the prow of the Dragon was the bow of the Dragon Zephyr configuration itself, with the various modules gestalted as the Zephyr slung close against the spine of the core module like a variety of huge metallic sausages.

  The Dragon Zephyr was a free-market merchant conveying a mixed cargo of freight and passengers to Estrella Bonita. This was a planetary system about two hundred light-years or a mean twenty Jumps from Earth—four habited planets, three gas giants, and any number of mineral-rich rocks. A system long on economic opportunity, short on labor, and with enough outre flora, fauna, and impressive scenery to attract the grand tourists and their floating cultura.

  So on this outward voyage, the Zephyr configuration consisted of ten dormodules, each storing a thousand immigrants in electrocoma; twenty freight modules hauling lucrative luxury goods and classic Terrestrial cuisinary items; a stateroom module for fifty Honored Passengers; and the congruent Grand Palais module.

  To the untrained eye, this superficially asymmetric assortment of cylinders of different sizes and masses secured to the spine of the ship in no discernible formal pattern must seem random, but in fact each Void Ship configuration must be carefully balanced as to both mass distribution and congruence with the Jump Field aura.

  This balance is checked and rechecked endlessly to ensure against either excessive stress during conventional acceleration or breach of integrity of the Jump Field aura, and the assembly crew was giving it one final check before turning the ship over to my command as we maneuvered toward it from several kilometers out.

  An aura of pale rainbow brilliance suddenly enveloped the ship, turning it into a shimmery silhouette of itself—the configuration was in fact congruent with the field produced by its Jump Drive generator, as by now all knew it would be. This final test was more a salute to my arrival than anything else, the equivalent rite to the ancient seafaring custom of piping the Captain aboard.

  But my seatmate’s face twisted momentarily into a mask of what seemed like fear. Or anger?

  “Don’t worry,” I said soothingly, “it’s just the final test of the Jump Field congruence, and all is in order. Is this your first stellar voyage?”

  She turned to regard me with curled lip and angry eyes. “Hardly,” she sa
id. “And I ken the procedure. But time-honored stupidity becomes not sage, ne?”

  Her ferocity aroused something primal in me, but what she was saying made no sense. “Time-honored stupidity?” I inquired.

  She didn’t answer until they had turned off the Jump Field and we resumed matching orbits with what was once again entirely a conventional mass-energy construct. And she let out a sharp sigh of what seemed like bitter relief before she spoke.

  “Contra disaster, test the Jump Drive, ja?” she said scathingly. “Sans a Pilot in the circuit, vrai? So as to court the greater disaster, no?”

  “Greater disaster?” I asked in mystification and in a certain mood malo. From whence this contemptuous anger?

  “A Blind Jump, mon cher dummkopf! Pilotless and blind in the Great and Lonely, a current they no se comes and carries them away.”

  Now at least I understood what she was talking about. The “Blind Jump” is of course part of the romance of starfaring; the belief, or the thrill of tempting the belief, that ships have vanished in mid-Jump into the Great and Lonely, passengers and crew translated from matter and energy into the Void beyond the void. Since it is the ingenious nature of this folkchose that its truth can be neither proven nor disproven, and since Void Ships inevitably do disappear without a trace over the centuries and light-years, no Void Captain could utterly deny the possibility.

  But it is surmised, indeed all but proven, that such a hypothetical Blind Jump can occur only when the Pilot dies in mid-Jump, in the exact instant of psychesomic orgasm. Either that or a malfunction in the Jump Circuit computer somehow causes it to fail to impose the vector coordinate overlay on the Pilot’s psychic matrix.

  However, in either case a Pilot must be in the circuit. Without a Pilot in the circuit, the ship will not Jump, and a ship that does not Jump obviously cannot Jump Blind.

  “I can assure you,” I said, “that such a thing is impossible.”

  A wordless snort of derision. “So the Blind Jump, it is impossible, upon your word of honor?” she said, bending her Lingo closer to my anglish sprach, the better, perhaps, to convey her contemptuous sarcasm. “Ships have never vanished, and a dead Pilot in the circuit is nothing?”

  Her arrogance was more than beginning to disturb me. What had I done to offend her? Whence this vehemence on a topic of casual conversation? At the same time, there was something sensually fascinating about the very vehemence that was arousing my own ire. Her psychesomic metabolism seemed turned up to a pitch of barely controlled fever. Her eyes burned, her tongue stung, her body seemed to radiate an attractive excess of prana, and I was sure that this was more than my pheromone receptors coloring my perception. It seemed to me that whatever this mode was, it was not generated by any reaction to me, but by her own internal essence.

  This perception allowed me to recenter myself, to stay my reactive anger. “I didn’t say Blind Jumps were impossible,” I told her. “Or at least I didn’t mean to. All I meant was that there’s no danger in testing the Jump Field without a Pilot in the circuit. Without a Pilot in the circuit, the ship cannot Jump, and if it cannot Jump, it can hardly Jump-Blind.”

  She half-turned in her seat. Her anger seemed to transmute into something else as she studied me with an open, slightly mocking stare. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies,’” she said. An eldritch trick of perception occurred in the next moment. As she continued to stare at me, the irony seemed to vanish from her face and the humanity from her eyes, as if a mask had been removed—or donned?—and I found myself looking into two opaque marbles set in the face of a fleshly statue, classically Greek in their archetypal emptiness. As if the animating consciousness had gone—elsewhere.

  It—whatever it had been—lasted only a moment, just long enough to make me shudder. Thespic art? Vibrational control? Or merely an artifact of my own sensorium?

  “The Great and Lonely is the One and Only,” she said. “The order you see is a dream, mon petit. Only chaos is real, outside the law.”

  “The laws describing the totality of mass-energy phenomena are quite real, have been fully elucidated for centuries, and make any such thing as a Blind Jump without a Pilot in the circuit impossible,” I told her angrily. “I can assure you of that.”

  “You assure me? You assure me?”

  Her arrogance, her patronization, and the pheromonic ambivalence of my reaction to it, finally produced an outraged strut of masculine pride. “You may consider yourself a seasoned stellar traveler,” I told her. “But I’ve been starfaring for fifteen years, and in fact I happen to be Genro Kane Gupta, Void Captain Genro Kane Gupta, commander of the ship you’re about to board!”

  Whatever response my endocrine system might have been expecting, it was certainly not the one that it got. She seemed to choke back some snide species of laugh. She cocked her head at me as if in amusement. A measured devilment seemed to replace the fire in her eyes.

  “You will now spiel for me your name tale, Captain, bitte?” she said more quietly. “And after, if you wish, I will be most pleased to declaim mine.”

  Though I deluded myself not that our discourse had suddenly harmonized into a genuine exchange of courtesies, I could hardly refuse a request for civilized introduction from someone I had just boasted my name and rank to.

  So, while she listened with no apparent keen edge of interest, I told the tales of my paternom, my maternom, and my choice of freenom in what was probably an unduly terse and not very artistic style.

  When I told the tale of Genro Gonzago Tabriz’s haiku-trailing eternal spiral down, into the black hole, intensity of attent seemed to sparkle back into her eyes, but when I had finished, she regarded me with a strange blank uncertainty.

  “An admirable pedigree and a choice of freenom not without more satori than you suppose, Captain Genro,” she said enigmatically. “At your pleasure, my name tale is now yours to hear. But if you will the sparing of the experience, I withdraw feelings of offense now. You may wish the absence of the burden.”

  “Burden?”

  “Verdad.”

  “What burden can your name tale possibly impose on me?” I asked in bewilderment.

  “That you cannot know till you have heard it, ne?” she said sardonically.

  “Speak to me then the tale of your name,” I said, feeling I had been trapped into hearing something I had every intention of hearing in the first place. “I accept full responsibility.”

  She laughed—cruelly, I thought—and her expression grew stranger and stranger as she spoke, distant, abstracted, and yet seeming to study my face for any passing reaction with ironic amusement.

  My name is Dominique Alia Wu.

  My father, Alia Smith Per, was a man of mighty argent, a rich merchant of biologicals, both import and export, on Ariel, but that describes him not at all. His mother originated the enterprise, and while she lived to maintain it, his life was one grand golden wanderjahr of magnificent indulgence of the sensorium, long years of floating orb to orb in the cultura of the Honored Passengers and passionate pursuit of samadhi through its bio-electronic matrix.

  But exit la mama de oro via a flying collision and my father must return to Ariel to sustain that which sustains him or have the courage to continue as a child of fortune sin dinero.

  Choosing that discretion which is no part of valor, he returned home to la vie bourgeoise, a merchant by day, a tourist of the ecstatic by night, and nowhere a center.

  His freenom, Alia, he chose upon assumption of this duality, in foolish wistfulness, homage a Alia Haste Moguchi, merchant princess of the late First Starfaring Age, who, in her quest for wealth, spent her life in pursuit of same at a sublight crawl but stumbled upon the planetary ruins of We Who Have Gone Before, and thus found the key to mass-energy transcendence in the service of her own greed. Thus did my father seek to justify to himself and beg a boon of fate.

  My mother, Wu Jani Martin, was also born on Ariel, but not to the silver. During her w
anderjahr of the customary duration, she experienced much samadhi, or the shadow of same, and upon her return to Ariel, sought to survive as a teacher of inspiration, on the white light of her essence.

  Her freenom, Wu, she chose upon embarkation on this via, homage a an endless line of boddhis who had chosen this freenom back into the mists of dawn man on Earth homage a the purity of being they sought to attain, the clear consciousness of the unself-conscious act, the embrace of the Void.

  My mother and father met on Ariel, in a casa de amor in the seacoast playland of Carondole, sehr romantic, ne? For one path of the many that my mother followed was that of the tantric ecstasies, and my father considered himself a maestro of these arts, though his ultima thule might fall short of the perfected mystery.

  The magic of amor, quien sabe? These two, who each in the mirror of the other should have seen a halfling, and via that vision the halflings in themselves, against all logic made for each other a sexual fascination, and out of that, a period of Caritas, and out of that, me, and out of me, a bond of honor which survived both the cooling of the fires and the war of the spirit which consumed the ashes.

  Upon my nativity, my father conferred upon my mother in a license of honor the irrevocable droit to draw upon his treasure as she saw fit, and when their differences sundered them when I was twelve, the same on me.

  So my kinderhood on Ariel was one of material whim and psychic smorgasbord. Chez mama, satoric disdain for the things of the world in luxurious asceticism; chez papa, professions of dedication to that from which he had turned away and the selfish obsession altruistique that his kleine cher be truly free to follow her own way.