The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  One by one, the amber ready points lit up before me as Mori scurried along the bank of monitors rimming the curving front wall of the bridge. As she scrambled back and forth before the chest-high monitors, her eyes fixed on her instruments as she chanted her part in the ritual, I understood for the first time, or at least had the unique perception, that these consoles had been so arranged as a piece of psychic engineering.

  After all, they could more conveniently have been heaped up around the Man Jack’s chaise; there was no purely functional need to string them out along the curve of the bridge’s “bow” like a retaining wall. Indeed, this was an inefficient arrangement that forced the poor Man Jack to hop about from one to the other like a slavey.

  But without this curved retaining wall of instruments, this fence between us and the lip of the abyss, this foredeck railing, if you will, the three of us would have been vertiginously planted on the bridge deck surrounded by a sea of stars with nothing to keep a random breeze or a fumblefooted stumble from spilling us over the edge into the infinite void.

  Naturellement, in reality the starry sea was but a color-corrected tele image; we were not on an open deck but in an enclosed capsule, and there were no galactic breezes or waves about to sweep us away. The mind understood this, but now, close on to the first Jump, with no projected maneuvering grid to fracture the totality of the illusion, the spirit could begin to wonder.

  “…Primer circuit activated on standby…parameters nominal Pilot in the circuit…life signs within acceptable parameters…checklist completed, and all systems ready for the Jump.”

  Mori glanced back at me expectantly, her young face bright with anticipation, her eyes eager yet professionally cool. “Take your Jump position, Man Jack,” I ordered from my Captain’s throne, feeling a certain tightness in my voice, the usual building of tension.

  Mori took her seat beside Argus, who now began her own brief speaking part in the ritual.

  “Ship’s position and vector verified and recorded…vector coordinate overlay computed—and on your board, Captain Genro!”

  Two more red command points lit up on my console, and now I had reached the peak moment of total command. “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit computer,” I announced, touching the first command point.

  Now the vector coordinate overlay that Argus had computed was programmed into the Jump Circuit Computer a specific solution to the equation that related the mass-energy universe to the co-extensive non-Einsteinian psychesomic space of the Jump, which would guide—or force—the mindfield of the Pilot and the congruent mass-energy phenomenon of the ship through that ineffable Great and Lonely and out the other side in more or less the right direction.

  All my ready points remained amber. I touched a second command point. “Jump Field aura erected.”

  Three soft musical notes sounded throughout the ship, the traditional announcement of an impending Jump. Now the Dragon Zephyr was entirely englobed in the complex energy field known as the Jump Field aura. My ready points all stayed amber, indicating that the Jump aura was in the proper configuration without breach or waver, that the Jump Circuit electronics were still functioning nominally, that the Harmonizer was ready to tune the ship’s Jump aura to the Pilot’s mindfield, impressing the higher psychesomic coordinates on the lower mass-energy pattern that was the ship, pulling it into the Jump as soon as I touched the final red command point.

  As I always do, as all Void Captains surely must, I paused for a long contemplative moment, taking a slow intake of breath as my finger poised just above this point of ultimate command.

  What actually happens during the Jump? A schematic description is possible. When I touched the command point, the Primer circuit would boost the Pilot’s nervous system into total psychesomic platform orgasm; simultaneously, the Harmonizer would sync the Jump aura with this psychoelectronic configuration, the Jump Circuit computer would overlay this combined field with the vector coordinates, and—

  —the ship Jumps.

  But what happens during the Jump? What does the Pilot do, what does the Pilot experience, in that eternal nanosecond of psychesomic orgasm?

  An electrophysiological description of psychesomic orgasm is possible. The Primer circuit simultaneously stimulates the Pilot’s nervous system to sexual orgasm, nirvanic fugue, alpha wave peak, vagal spasm, adrenal flush, and about twenty other less drastic electrophysiological cusps. And keeps her there for something less than a micromininanosecond of objective time, for the timeless subjective eternity of the Jump.

  But what happens there in the discontinuous Great and Only? How does the Pilot Jump the ship? How does the vector coordinate overlay usually enable her to Jump it in more or less the right direction? Why do the lengths of the Jump vary with such total unpredictability?

  A psychoelectronic theory of the Jump more or less exists. In psychesomic orgasm, the electronic hologram in four-space that is the Pilot’s psyche becomes coextensive with the space-time hologram that is the total eternal universe, existing in this hypothetical Jump space for a literally timeless moment co-extensive with eternity itself. The vector coordinate overlay somehow serves as an “anchor” to four-space, pulling Pilot and ship back into what we are pleased to call “the universe,” several light-years more or less along the computed vector.

  Or so we are taught at the Academy. By this process do we mighty Captains con our ships between the stars! Do you begin to appreciate the true discontinuity between Void Pilots and quotidian humanity?

  Then consider this ultimate mystery of the Jump: the process itself was developed from a cryptic device found in the neat and perfect ruins left by that long-vanished race who identified themselves only as We Who Have Gone Before, after thirty years of experiments on a purely trial-and-error basis.

  So as I sat there on my throne of command, my finger poised to initiate this literally timeless process beyond my true comprehension or control, I held my breath for a long moment, staring out into the sea of stars, the infinite universe of matter and energy which we are pleased to call the void, and for the first time, that awesome vista seemed no more an absolute reality than its image on the great tele before me. The tele image was a color-compensated mask beyond which lay the naked universe itself; was this not in turn a mask of matter and energy, the final veil of maya, behind which lurked, beyond which lurked…?

  I blinked. I forced myself to exhale slowly and completely. Even as I first realized that it was there, I forced myself to banish the name of Dominique Alia Wu from that corner of my consciousness where I suddenly found it lurking, the human personification of that mystery, the psyche behind that functional glob of protoplasm known as the Pilot wired into the circuit that ended at my fingertip. I perceived a new level of the time-honored wisdom that isolated the Pilot from human intercourse with Captain and crew; now that it had been breached, however briefly, I saw that she had already perturbed the equilibrium of my spirit, the focus of my will to put her through the Jump.

  I stared intently into the starry sea, using it as a mandala to center my being on the moment at hand, to banish these dark musings. I was the Captain, this was my ship, and here was the realm through which I would now sail her. “Jump!” I shouted, and as of old, I played the time-honored and futile Captain’s game of trying to perceive the starfield’s shift as I touched the command point.

  And as of old, failing. One instant the stars were in the previous configuration, and then in another, no motion, no blurring of image, no instant of discontinuity that the human eye could record.

  We were elsewhere. We had Jumped.

  Argus projected a gridwork across the naked countenance of these new stars. Ghost images of other starfields flickered rapidly across the tele, doubling vision, tripling it, as the computer sought to match reality with the perspective patterns in its memory bank. In less than a minute, this process ended as one of the memory images locked in, synced to the master image of the reality without.

  Numbers fli
ckered across the tele, then held. Mori let out a wordless cry of approval.

  “Four-point-oh-one light-years,” Argus said proudly. “Radial deviation from nominal course .76 percent. We couldn’t ask for a better Jump, Captain. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you, Interface,” I replied somewhat hollowly, wondering, in truth, who was really being congratulated for what.

  Wandering under the bright morning sky of the vivarium not long after that first Jump, inhaling the life-redolent air, listening to the converse of the twittering finches, observing small groups of Honored Passengers walking, conversing, assignating, and in general acting very much like strollers in any planetary garden, I wondered, perhaps for the first time, why they all chose to be Honored Passengers in the first place.

  To travel from star to star? But that was achieved more easily and at far less cost by the ten thousand the Dragon Zephyr carried in electrocoma; go to sleep at your point of origin, awake at your destination with no passage of subjective time, and with nil expenditure of lifespan in the bargain. To experience the adventure and romance of sailing the starry main? But Honored Passengers hardly deigned to admit awareness of the ship’s passage into their consciousness; everything in the Grand Palais, like this planetary simulacrum, was designed to deny it.

  Of course I knew full well that the true answer was to enjoy the endless fete of the floating cultura itself; people chose to be Honored Passengers for the ambiance created for them by Domos such as Lorenza. But if the floating cultura was its own tautological raison d’etre, why then did it need the venue of Void Ships to exist? Could not all this as easily be called into being on a planetary surface or an orbiting pleasure palais?

  Obviously not, since no such phenomenon existed. There must be an inner reason, some subtle and deeper psychic need buried within these seemingly straightforward devotees of the hedonic arts, a call from the void to their spirits of which they were consciously unaware, which, paradoxically, they spent their endless voyages both seeking and fleeing.

  Truth be told with hindsight’s vision, these musings were no doubt the externalization of the roilings and bubblings beginning to stir the deeper waters of my own being. Why had I devoted my life to this selfsame starfaring? To share the vie of the floating cultura in the only way feasible to my economic station? To experience the variety of the far-flung worlds of men? To encompass the exhilaration of command? To gaze from my Captain’s throne into the starry seas and know the full soul-stirring glory of confronting the void absolute?

  All this had always seemed well and good, but now, although I knew not why, it was beginning to seem like another veil of maya, a tissue of illusion that was beginning to shred. Like some primal lungfish confronting the interface between sea and air for the first time, I could dimly sense some evolutionary force urging me onward into the fearful unknown.

  “Ah, Captain Genro, I surmised that here you might be found.”

  Lorenza Kareen Patali had appeared around the next bend of the brook, seated on a stone bench amid a brightly plumed entourage, reminiscent, in that moment, of the flock of tiny finches twittering in the willow above it. Four men in suits of green, crimson, ice blue, and white, the latter two sporting cloaks of contrasting brown and black; a short, buxom blonde woman of ripening age in a suit of gold with high, tight black boots, and a tall, spectrally thin woman magnificently clad in a knee-length gown crafted of some arcane material perfectly simulating the tail plumage of a male peacock.

  Lorenza herself was attired in understated contrast to both her companions and her previous persona. Halter and shorts of white silk and calf-high white boots, all plain and unadorned, were her only garments, but these, set off against her velvet black skin, created a stunning harlequin effect. Not a jewel was in evidence, and her long hair flowed over her shoulders and breastbone in artful disarray.

  Whether this effect was calculated for my benefit I knew not; certainement, it aroused a less ambivalent desire than her previous style, sufficient to burn away my complex mental mists in the fire of unalloyed sexual lust.

  “Come sit beside me,” she invited amid the flutterings and rustlings of her standing flock, whom she introduced in a chirping of syllables that passed through the forefront of my attention without leaving a significant memory trace.

  Similarly, the ensuing idle discourse made scant impression at the time, still less in memory’s recollection. Two of the men, Seldi Michel Chang and Peri Donal Jofe, green- and white-clad respectively, were obviously longtime devotees of Lorenza’s voyages; amours of one time or another—as, I surmised, was the woman dressed as a peacock. The other woman was a light composer of some obscure renown, and the men in blue and crimson were traveling merchants. The talk of connoisseurship—the vintages of the Grand Palais’s cellar, comparison of Bocuse Dante Ho with other chef maestros of renown, who had worn what at the departure fete, amateur critiques of various holocines, the psychic effects of sundry drugs, und so weiter.

  In this refined discourse I took little active part, nor, really, was such expected of me. The true interest, the inner dialog, lay, for Lorenza, myself, and our audience, in the placing of her hand on my knee, the covert stage glances between us, the languages of our bodies as the pavane of assignation was played out in public for the amusement, delectation, and perhaps somehow the reassurance of our Honored Passengers.

  Now I took an unself-conscious pleasure in the playing out of my Captainly role; perhaps there was as well reassurance for myself as I allowed sexual magnetism and the ritual of the cultura to sync the focus of my being into the expectations inherent in my persona, banishing the tension between inner and outer man. Or perhaps banishing, for the moment, the inner man himself to the subworld whence he had intruded upon my tranquillity. Thus the wisdom of properly crafted ritual—and its folly.

  After a time, our audience detected that the first movement of the piece was over, and, with bows, hand kisses, exchanges of glances and body signals, they made their departures, whispering and gossiping their way among the trees, perhaps inspired to intrigue d’amour of their own by our archetypal example.

  Lorenza arose, drawing me to my feet by the hands, stretched in languid invitation, gazed at me with those sapphire-blue eyes. “You have noticed, have you not?” she said.

  “How could any man have not?” I replied gallantly.

  She laughed a bit perfunctorily; a moue of impatience seemed to form on her lips. “I mean that I am more suitably attired for amour,” she said, touching a finger to the fastener between the cups of her halter, another to a strip running down the front of her shorts. “A touch here…and here…and voila, the inner woman.”

  “To please your perception of my taste?”

  “Por que no?” she said, shrugging. “As I informed you, I will prove an amour of considerable variety. At another time, you will grant me gallant reciprocation, ne?”

  “Certainement,” I replied, glancing about. The vivarium, though, was relatively crowded at this juncture; seclusion for long seemed unlikely, and public performance less than genteel for this occasion. “I venture not to suggest this natural venue.”

  “You have now a choice of dream chambers?”

  “Your stateroom and yourself would be dream enough for now,” I said. “I need not alloy with fantasy such an enticing reality.”

  She wrapped her arm around my waist and drew me close. “For now,” she said, “like this ship, I am under your command. Later, I shall school you in the sensory refinements.”

  And so, our bodies pressed together, our arms around each other’s waists, we promenaded out of the vivarium, down the ramp to the main floor of the grand salon, across it, up the display stairs to its entrance, through the passageways of the ship, to her private chamber. All under the approving gaze of multitudes of Honored Passengers, freeservants, and even Mori, who favored me with an engaging smile.

  Of what transpired between Void Captain Genro Kane Gupta and Domo Lorenza Kareen Patali in her stateroom, t
here is much to say and little. Lorenza’s body sans its final scant bits of concealment provided but one slightly unexpected frisson of surprise—the hair of her pubes matched the red hue of her long mane. As to whether this verified the naturality of her tresses, or, more likely, the subtlety and completion of her artifice, I retained too much gallantry to inquire. Lorenza nude differed not in total effect from Lorenza clothed, and to say that both were beautiful is to belabor the obvious.

  Like any conceivable Domo, indeed like any woman of the floating cultura, she proved well schooled in the techniques of erotic performance and adept at their execution. Whatever my personal or psychic limitations, I have always cultivated the arts of civilized sexuality as well as being a natural man of no less than normal animal energy, and I think it accurate to say that my repertoire and performance thereof was, at the least, adequate to the occasion.

  Together we enjoyed chingada in several configurations, amour de la bouche in equal measures, the delicate diddling of the pain-pleasure interface with no little satisfaction, and in between the less orgasmic-oriented arts of erotic massage and digitation, achieving both a satisfying prolongation of libidinal tension and an abundance of orgasmic completions.

  That is the much and this is the little: that during the entire passage d’amour we practiced not those higher exercises of the tantra which seek to harness the libidinal energies and fleshly possibilities in the service of a communion of the spirit. Thus while it might be fairly said that our practices of the erotic crafts left little to be desired, it cannot be said that our duet achieved the level of true art. At the surfeited conclusion of our exercises we were no less strangers and no more lovers.

  Nor, do I think, did either of us seek such higher union. Whatever the pheromonic congruences that might have drawn us together on a biological level, the psychic extension of our passage d’amour lay not in the personal sphere but the social, not in any tropism toward emotional intimacy but in our fulfillment of our roles within the shipboard dynamics of the floating cultura. The Void Captain and the Domo had successfully completed their nuptial dance; if our congress attained anything beyond the purely physical, it was this.