The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  So I mounted a Captain’s banquet for the entire complement of Honored Passengers, not without much stroking and praising of Bocuse while earnestly and artfully discoursing with him on our proposals for the menu. I explained to him the practical necessity of not antagonizing the Pilot, one exasperated professional to another, and I even praised the drollery with which he had arranged Dominique’s fetid fare.

  As a result of these ministrations, harmony was restored between the Captain and the great Chef Maestro, and Bocuse presented a series of dishes truly representative of his genius at the peak of its form.

  This savory evidence of rapport between Captain and Chef Maestro did much to erase any lingering vibrations noir between myself and the Honored Passengers by the time the long meal ended, and the rest was washed away by my easy jocularity on the subject of the confrontation, Lorenza’s professionally gracious praise of my Solomonic resolution of the matter, and many wines of noble vintage.

  Yet throughout my performance at the banquet, I was aware of it as just that, the Captain playing out his archetypal role of bonhomie and raconteurship. Even as I feasted on the Peking Goose with Red Heldhime Fungi, the Delight Garden of the Ten Worlds, the Marfleish Stuffed with Sturgeon Pate in Sauce Haricot Noir, the Jalapeno and Palm Heart Salad, and the rest of it—even as my gustatory sense retained full intellectual awareness of the glories of the table, I could not rid my consciousness of Dominique’s “supreme indifference” to the cuisinary arts, and part of me was watching all of us as protoplasmic mechanisms stuffing fuel into our input orifices.

  “Shadows,” she had called them—us?—and shadows they all seemed, these Honored Passengers, these brightly plumed birds of passage twittering away in their gilded cage, which, carefully obscured from their conscious perception, floated precariously in the empty infinity of the void. A void which I myself was beginning to perceive as a shadow of something even greater and more absolute beneath the mask of what I had once considered the ultimate reality.

  With such outre demons gnawing at my consciousness, it took a certain social heroism, or rather perhaps a certain psychosocial skill, to allow my persona to perform its accustomed functions without realtime connection to its animating being. I began to understand those moments in which Dominique’s consciousness seemed to have vacated her eyes, and now and again in augenblicks of paranoia noir, I wondered if the same might be revealing itself on my own visage.

  Maintaining this dichotomy between Captainly role and psychic malaise, while a smoothly running automatic process, proved quite fatiguing, and, once the banquet had lapsed into third cordials and psychoactive herbals, I pled torpor with no little justification and repaired alone to my cabin. There reality swiftly followed artifice, and I fell into a black, dreamless sleep which mercifully lasted until it was time to make ready for the next Jump.

  “—checklist completed, and all systems ready for the Jump.”

  “Take your Jump position, Man Jack.”

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

  “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit Computer…Jump Field aura erected…”

  The chimes announced the impending Jump, all my ready points were amber, my finger was poised once more above the Jump command point—all was as it had been more times than I could count. Not an iota of the ritual had changed.

  Only the subjectivity of he who perceived it. Naturellement, I had never been intellectually unaware that the Jump Circuit my fateful finger was about to activate contained more than inanimate machineries, that below me in the Pilot’s module, floating in an ersatz amnion, breathing through the umbilical mask, electronically connected to the command point beneath my finger, was a human component. But previously that objective description had truly encompassed my total existential awareness of the act I was about to perform.

  But now, unwanted and unbidden, awareness of another subjectivity in the Circuit had entered my cold equations. That human circuit module now had a name, personality, a connection to my spirit. I had eaten from the tree of knowledge, or rather, perhaps, had its bittersweet fruit thrust down my throat.

  Now I was all too aware of another and alien sense of purpose alive in the Circuit, another subjectivity mated to my own by the mediating machineries, and with this awareness came a disconcerting sense of the relativity of my own objective reality. To me, the purpose of the Jump Circuit was to transport the Dragon Zephyr toward Estrella Bonita. In Dominique’s reality, though, the purpose of the Jump Circuit, the ship, indeed of myself, was, as she had put it, “to reach that state of being which is its own purpose.”

  Her means was my end, my end was her means; there was a tension between our realities that was almost sexual, indeed—

  “Captain Genro? Is something wrong?”

  Argus had swiveled around in her seat to regard me with an expression of some concern.

  “Wrong?” How long had my finger been poised above the command points? Had I lost all sense of objective time?

  “My board shows all amber. Do you have an anomaly?”

  “No, all amber here. You are ready for the Jump?”

  “Of course,” she said, giving me a most peculiar look.

  “Well then…Jump!” I said, and brought my finger down on the command point.

  And as I did, the grotesque image that had been coalescing at the periphery of my consciousness sprang unbidden into full fetid flower.

  Via the lightest touch of my finger upon the Jump command point, I was, in cold objective reality, quite literally inducing in Dominique an orgasm far beyond anything of which I would have been capable as her fleshly lover. As long as the Pilot had been a mere protoplasmic module in the Jump Circuit, this sexual connection between Captain and Pilot, this reality which went far beyond erotic metaphor, existed not in the sphere of my awareness. But now that awareness of her as a taled name, another subjectivity, a woman, had been thrust upon me, I was aware of myself as her cyborged demon lover, as electronic rapist, yet somehow also the victim of the act as I plunged into her with my phallus of psychesomic fire.

  “Jump!”

  One instant the stars were in one configuration, then in another. Did I imagine that I had experienced the impalpable interval between, that I could feel her being flash through its unknowable ultimate ecstasy? Did we silently sigh in unison or mutually shriek our mute violation?

  One thing was certain as I sat there trembling—I now had a far deeper perception of why Captains did not want to know their Pilots, of the wisdom of the barriers our civilization had erected between.

  And having been forced to that perception, I was forced to realize as well that I had unknowingly staggered across that psychic rubicon, that it was already too late to go back the way I had come. Any attempt at willful ignorance would now be futile or worse; the only talisman against excessive knowledge that might have puissance would be more knowledge.

  So, once our new position had been computed, I too took another quantum leap along the geodesic toward my terminal destination.

  In violation of all unstated protocol, I made my way down the spine of the ship to the Pilot’s module, lingering in the passageway outside until the Med crew transferred Dominique to sick bay so as to simulate a chance meeting.

  I did not have long to wait. In a few minutes, Lao and Bondi appeared, wheeling a gurney up the passageway where I stood along the route to sick bay, with Hiro himself trailing close behind.

  “Captain!”

  “What are you doing here?”

  I froze, arms akimbo, living in a nightmare of what I must have looked like to the Med crew, the violator standing over the ravished in the presence of his accomplices.

  “On my way to the generator room,” I extemporized gruffly. “Something of a flicker in the output, but nothing serious, I think.”

  The three of them looked at me peculiarly; guiltily, I thought, perhaps perceiving yet another
previously unexamined psychic reality, perhaps merely projecting my own angst upon them.

  But the moment passed in silence, and then they were wheeling the gurney hastily past me. Not, however, before I got a good, full look at Dominique.

  Her pale sweat-covered body was partially covered by a sheet. A red welt was fading across her forehead where the electrode band had been; there was a small plexi-seal over the contused pit of her right arm; and bits of grayish electrode cement still clung to her forearms and exposed nipples. Her cheeks were a hideous blotchwork of flush and pallor, and there were great blackened hollows under her grit-sealed eyes.

  And she was smiling beatifically.

  —— VII

  Naturellement, because I was Captain, there was no authority aboard to whom I could confide my mal d’esprit without undermining all confidence in my command. Thus far I had been able to pass off social intercourse with the Pilot, support of her right to limited officers’ privileges, even the viewing of her ravaged corpus straight from the bed of the act, as random strokes of karma or the exigencies of command, but if I bared the nature of the consciousness behind my acts to officer or Honored Passenger, surely that person would question my fitness to fulfill my Captainly role and would hardly feel bound to social silence on my behalf.

  Still, there was the ghost of a shipboard tradition far older than starfaring whereby captains of lonely command might seek a certain circumscribed counsel from the ship’s physician, bound as that officer was by the ancient oath of Hippocrates to silence on anything that could be construed as a private medical matter. Of course this officer was not bound to silence in extremis, that is, in cases where the dementia of the Captain endangered the ship, but some semblance of this Hippocratic discretion still survived in the Second Starfaring Age as a sort of psychic safety valve.

  On the Dragon Zephyr, the Healer was responsible for correcting malfunctions of body and mind, but Maestro Hiro was First Medical Officer by dint of his overall responsibility for the passengers in electrocoma, and, more apropos in this case, by his responsibility for the functional maintenance of the Pilot.

  Thus, using my “accidental” vision of the severely ravaged state of our Pilot as an excuse, and not without putting on a certain false innocence about such matters, I might use my legitimate Captainly concern for the safety of the ship to circumspectly approach Maestro Hiro on the matters that troubled my spirit.

  While the customary social reserve between Captain and Med crew Maestro had not been breached, I had of course perused a summary of his name tale upon assuming command of the Dragon Zephyr.

  Hiro Alin Nagy had been born on Earth. His father, Alin Mallory Fried, was an astrophysicist of some minor renown, specializing in mass-energy aspects of the Jump. His freenom, Alin, he had chosen upon acceptance of his thesis, homage a Alin Vladimir Khan, leader of the scientific team which had finally produced the first working Jump Drive. Hiro’s mother, Nagy Toda Gala, was an exobiologist who had retired to a Terran university to pursue theoretical studies relating to the failure of the multiplicity of known biospheres to crown their creation with sapience. Her freenom, Nagy, she chose homage a Galen Nagy, a biologist of the early First Starfaring Age, the first scientist to study a complex extra-solar ecosphere.

  Thus from his mother, Hiro had inherited a certain interest in starfaring as well as a bent for the biological sciences, while from his father he had received an interest in the physics of the Jump itself.

  His freenom, Hiro, he had chosen somewhat bizarrely homage a Hiro Karim Abdullah, an involuntarily retired Void Ship Med Maestro he had encountered as a patient in a mental retreat.

  A short, dark man of the reserve traditional to his calling, Maestro Hiro betrayed little overt emotion upon being summoned to my cabin, although surely he must have been bemused by this outre procedure, especially coming so soon after the unseemly confrontation outside the Pilot’s module.

  After a formal offer of liquid refreshment, which was just as formally refused, I decided to come immediately as close to the point of this peculiar seance as was politic.

  “I realize this is a somewhat unusual occurrence, but then it is not usual for the Captain to view the Pilot, and especially not so soon after…ah…”

  A mere raising of an eyebrow; I could sense a certain distaste, a total lack of forthcomingness hardly surprising under the circumstances.

  “Quite frankly, I am concerned about the physical condition of our Pilot,” I said. “She seemed, well, severely depleted…”

  A brittle and entirely humorless laugh. “Trouble yourself not, mein Captain,” Hiro said brusquely. “Of all the Void Pilots I have had under my care, Dominique Alia Wu has the strongest physique. Anomalously so, in fact.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Vraiment. An amazing specimen. Most of these creatures remain in vegetative state between Jumps. This one exercises its musculature through perambulation—as you have had unfortunate occasion to observe. Most of them will not eat and must be nourished intravenously. This one not only cooperates fully with nutritional mandation but orders up viands on the cuisinary deck to the discomfort of all.”

  “But she looked so pale, so comatose, so near-moribund—”

  Emotion for the first time—a derisory snort, a curl of the lip, a certain moue of unpleasant superior knowledge. “Au contraire, the physiological consequences of the Jump were minimal.”

  “Minimal? You call that minimal?”

  “Minimal,” Hiro said flatly. “You need parallax to comprehend this, mein Captain; you should observe what most of them look like afterward.” He gave me a hard, speculative look, and for a moment I felt he was perceiving my inner being, that confusion of spirit which I both sought to bare and feared to reveal.

  “I withdraw that, Captain Genro,” he said. “Already you have seen more than you should have. That is the true reason for this meeting, nicht wahr?”

  It was, I think, a certain act of courage for me merely to nod numbly.

  A certain concern for my well-being seemed to steal into Maestro Hiro’s features, albeit of a stern fatherly species. “There is a paradox noir about this Pilot,” he said. “I have been favored with the most superior specimen of the breed that I have ever encountered, and one, moreover, who cooperates with the recovery regime to an unnatural degree; this should please a man of my profession. Alas, it does not. There is an aura of…unwholesomeness here, a blackness of das energei, a…” He threw up his hands in a gesture of verbal defeat. “She speaks, she examines her own physiological readouts, she treats us like…like…”

  “Shadows?” I ventured. “Servants of her purpose rather than the accustomed reverse?”

  Hiro’s eyes widened; in surprise and perhaps a frisson of sudden self-discovery. “This is your perception, Captain, or…?”

  “Something she said to me,” I admitted. “That the purpose of ship and crew, your purpose and mine, Maestro Hiro, is to send her forth into the Great and Only, and that all else is shadow. You are as versed in the lore of the Jump as any man may be. Can you elucidate the inner meaning?”

  Hiro scowled, he shrugged, he threw up his hands—all an ideogram of philosophic dismissal that was less than entirely convincing. “These creatures, when they manage a coherent sprach, babble about naught but their Great and Only, aber semantic content, nil…”

  “It is a reference to Jump space itself, ne?” I persisted. “There is no such thing as Jump space, Captain, as you well know; this is a contradiction in terms.”

  “Well then to the Jump itself, to psychesomic orgasm, to what happens between the time I touch the Jump command point and the time the ship—”

  “This interval is also nonexistent,” Hiro said testily.

  “To psychesomic orgasm, then,” I replied with congruent petulance. “Surely you will concede that that exists, being a verified expert on same.”

  “What is the point of all this, Captain Genro? You did not truly summon me here out of mere concern for the
health of our Pilot, verdad?”

  “Verdad,” I admitted. “Dominique spoke to me of the sublimity of the experience, I have seen the baleful physiological results, and yet…You have never pondered these matters, Maestro Hiro?”

  “What matters, Captain Genro?” he said with what seemed to be willfully, if not fearfully, crafted ignorance.

  “The essence of it, Maestro. Of the Jump, psychesomic orgasm, the Great and Lonely, the mysterious nonexistent interval, that upon which starfaring and our entire civilization revolve, the center which is void.”

  “So…” Maestro Hiro said slowly. “This Pilot, she has projected her obsessions into your mindfield, nicht wahr? ‘Dominique,’ you have called her? You have been favored with the tale of this name perhaps as well?”

  I could only nod. “You wish to hear it?”

  “Nein!” Hiro snapped with unmistakable shrillness. “It is exactly what I do not want to hear!”

  “You have no curiosity about the pedigree and freenom of your patient?”

  Maestro Hiro inhaled slowly and deeply, held his breath for a long moment, then exhaled fully; when he had completed this exercise, he seemed to have composed himself by an act of will. He now regarded me with an expression of sagely and perhaps slightly forlorn sympathy.

  “I begin to encompass more fully what has compelled this consultation, mein Captain, though I fear you possess not full self-awareness of what moves you,” he said softly and evenly. “I have observed this cafard before in members of my own profession, aber in a Void Captain, nimmer.”

  “Cafard of your profession…?”

  “Ja,” Hiro said thickly. “Once have I observed the aftermath, twice the malaise in process, and other cases are enshrined in the literature. It is why it is a grave mistake to allow oneself to regard the Pilot as a ‘patient.’ Why also Med crews have Healers like Lao subordinate to the Maestro, even though, naturellement, all Maestros are versed in the Healing arts. If I may presume a philosophic digression…?”