The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  “You, perhaps, ma belle Domo?” Maddhi japed, leering exaggeratedly at Lorenza. “The other possibility seems entirely occupied.” This with a knowing patronly glance from Mori to Rumi.

  The luncheon fete was thus allowed to exhaust itself in sexual japes and thespic play at assignations; indeed, I openly arranged dinner a deux with Lorenza as an appropriate gesture with which to close the festivities.

  But as we retired from the dining chamber, I sought and seized the opportunity to study the face of Maddhi Boddhi Clear in unguarded repose. What I saw then was not a mountebank rogue of self-possession but an old man suffering some ineffable fatigue d’esprit, some inner unfulfilled longing, an anguished pilgrim behind the prophet’s thespic mask.

  What I perceived then was that he had deliberately and in retrospect rather crudely diverted the discourse into ribaldry when something had penetrated that facade. As if Argus’ suggestion had been taken seriously by his spirit, as if her jape that he become a Pilot had chanced to touch some inner wound. Chance that his escape from this slip of the mask had been into sexuality verbal? Or something darker and deeper which was becoming increasingly more difficult for me to evade?

  That part of me which had rushed to view the supine body of Dominique Alia Wu fresh from congress with the mystery of the Jump yearned to draw him aside and slake some unwholesome thirst with the loathsome semblance of a kindred spirit.

  Fortunately, however, Void Captain Genro Kane Gupta was still in command, and I forswore this empathetic temptation, retiring alone behind the mask of my own persona to brood upon my all too un-Captainly thoughts.

  I spent the interval between luncheon and my intimate dinner with Lorenza seeking to escape true psychic contact with my fellow beings by chatting aimlessly with as many of them as possible and seeking to escape true psychic contact with my own chaotic inner being by overloading my sensorium and thus drawing my attention outward. Most of all, of course, I was seeking to escape from the true focus of my spirit’s attention, a feat of psychic gymnastics problematical even for perfect masters.

  I can code those words onto crystal now, sitting here in my cabin in the doom glow of hindsight with all the deeds that were then to come already done, but at the time I had no such ironic insight. Vraiment, insight was what I both fled and sought. I certainly knew on some unadmitted level that this was true, and I knew all too well that there was only one way to lay that paradox away—exactly the path I sought to avoid. The path to where I sit now, a moral monster screwing up his courage to face crew and Honored Passengers with his own bizarre version of the standard tactic of final desperation.

  Yet even now there is an ambiguity to this tale as I recite it to my own spirit in the full knowledge of the enormity I have committed. Great is the sin I have committed against those entrusted to my stewardship, great the sin that Dominique Alia Wu committed against me. Yet in some way is this not also a tragic triumph of love? Even now, I cannot decide whether I was foolish dupe or noble and tragic lover. Or whether the two are one and the same.

  With Lorenza, however, no such arcanities pertained. If Dominique was the invisible focus of the inner void, Lorenza was certainly the ubiquitously visible focus of the outer reality, the fete-mistress of the floating cultura into which I sought to flee. As her amour, my social patterns were programmed by my Captainly role, needing no true attention from my troubled spirit, and our dinner a deux in the chamber of booths proceeded smoothly toward its inevitable conclusion like the oft-danced pavane that it was.

  No doubt this was in great part why I had made this assignation; by throwing myself into my Captainly role, I was in some measure able to bring about an inner state of relative thoughtlessness. Moreover, Lorenza Kareen Patali as a self-created work of art was a sexual offering of great pouvoir, our pheromones were relatively congruent, and I could look forward to erotic exercises in which performance was everything and psychic connections were nothing.

  We dined with the curtain drawn open, to delectate the Honored Passengers and also, at Lorenza’s insistence, to delectate ourselves with the knowledge of their titillated and approving observance. We feasted lightly on Fruit de Mer Cru Galatique, turning the consumption of the iced tray of assorted raw mollusks into a game d’amour as old as time, forking bits into each other’s mouths, accepting them with overdramatic flourishes of tongue and lips, caressing the raw flesh lasciviously as we devoured it. All with foot play under the table, lidded glances above, and a liter of Ariel blanque.

  As I played my role with a certain psychic detachment but growing somic involvement, I began, in an involuted way, to appreciate Lorenza Kareen Patali, and to comprehend her eminence as Domo supreme. Lorenza was a sincere citizen of the floating cultura, which is to say her social persona and her inner psychic structure were in congruence; her spirit clearly believed in the esthetic merit of the way she had chosen; there was no tension between role and reality.

  If this gave her a certain flattening of inner ambiguity and hence of fascination, it also allowed one to meet surface with surface without qualms of insincerity. After a period noir of inner turmoil and half a liter of wine, I welcomed this refreshment.

  “So, mon cher, your dinner has sweetened the taste of your luncheon, ne? You must teach your Second Officer the subtleties of table drollery, so as not to provoke such inartistic conversation. This foolish Maddhi of hers became a bore at her provocation. Do they no longer teach such arts at the Academy?”

  “They teach the craft, Lorenza, but who can teach the art?” I said gallantly. “Genius such as yours is a genetic gift.”

  “So I have heard from my parents,” she said lightly, playfully forking a final oyster into my mouth.

  She was wearing transparent red pantaloons and blouson; beneath these, brazen latticework jewelry curled like vines and serpents about her breasts and pubes. A headdress of similar brass filigree secured her red hair into a flowing helmet, this actually done up in animal and vegetative forms, sapphire- and emerald-eyed serpents peering out from the forest of her coiffure. Red, brass, and black, mist over metal pressing skin; the whole was a sensual image of self-created erotic art. How could a natural man fail to respond?

  She leaned forward and watched my mouth with those ice-blue eyes as I slowly ate the last morsel for her benefit, tasting, and smoothing, and licking my lips. “Now that we have tasted the appetizer, it is time for the piece de resistance, ne?” she said when I had finished, kissing my lips clean with gustatory exaggeration to the half-murmured attention of our fellow diners.

  “I see no reason for resistance,” I replied.

  “You resist nothing, mon cher?”

  “Nada,” I said, “you are the Domo, are you not, the mistress of the fete?”

  “I may choose a chamber of dreams and this time you will enter?”

  “I will follow you anywhere,” I said gaily, holding up her hand and giving it a courtly kiss. In truth, I did now welcome the synergy of erotic exercise and crafted fantasy which I had previously rejected. I was ready to follow our Domo into the playful netherworld of the floating cultura, to indulge myself in her reality and thus find respite from my own.

  Boisterously and with much fondling did we descend to the dream chamber deck in the lowest part of the Grand Palais, and boisterously did Lorenza lead me through the serpentine rose passageway in search of the dream chamber that would pique her desire, deliberately yet in a curious sense unself-consciously displaying the public flag of our romance and thereby fulfilling the archetype of our appointed roles.

  After an artistically suitable movement of this social foreplay, Lorenza led me into her chosen chamber of dreams.

  Lucent jungle-green walls of protoplasmic softness, heated to body temperature, enwombed us in emerald glory as we floated weightless in the thick, steamy, musk-scented air. No, we were not quite weightless; like leaves in a breeze, we drifted slowly to the floor, kicking ourselves off into flight again at the flick of a toe. Mantric fugues on stringed and e
lectronic instruments vibrated the nearly palpable air with soaring energy.

  We bounded and flew into a clean, perfumed sweat, intimately exploring the fleshly simulacrum in which we cavorted, its cunningly crafted mounds and folds, troughs and crevices, swellings and concavities, all somehow abstractly reminiscent of the textures of a lover’s body.

  Imperceptibly, Lorenza’s diaphanous garments began to deliquesce into the air like vanishing tendrils of rose-colored fog evaporating into sunrise; as they evaporated, baring her gleaming black flesh restrained at breasts and mound by tight-fitting brass accents flashing emerald highlights with every movement of her body, the smoldering aroma of fire suffused into the musky air.

  Slowly and languorously, she let her floating body find its rest not on the floor of the chamber but against the abstract erotiform wall, straddling a soft, saddlelike protuberance, supported on her pubes with her legs hanging free, arms thrown back into a long cushioned crevice between two mounds.

  Surely this was as pure and artistic a sensual invitation as I had ever been presented.

  I drew off my sweat-sodden clothes, let them slowly drift toward the floor where I stood, bounded lightly into the air, kicked high off the far wall, so that I soared slowly and languidly toward her from away and above, bellying in like a great swan upon the breast of a dark, still lake.

  Arms outstretched, chest to chest, lip to lip, I landed softly in her embrace, and we hung by our mutual tantric junctures together on the skin-soft, flesh-warm erotiform perch.

  Naturellement, like any other male of the species humaine, I had experienced upon occasion the inability to spring to erection when the situation warranted, either through fatigue or distraction or the triumph of inner esthetic judgment over situational expectation.

  Now, however, I felt neither fatigue nor distraction, and esthetic judgment coincided gloriously with the expectations of both parties. There I hung, suspended pube a pube, mouths intertwined, in the embrace of a more than willing woman of dazzling beauty who had brought us together in this emerald garden of flying delights, light as feathers riding the mantras that fugued the erotically perfumed air.

  Nevertheless, my natural man had deserted me.

  There are, of course, certain exercises, techniques, and niceties that a man of civilized savoir faire has recourse to under such limp circumstances, and I employed a sequence of these before Lorenza could become offended by my lack of phallic homage to her undeniable charms.

  I stretched out supine upon the erotiform divan and lavished upon her yoni such skillful and prolonged caresses as to transport her repeatedly into moaning peaks of distraction while I applied will and physiology to the problem at hand. Certain meditative yogics will more often than not harmonize the state of the soma with the desire of the psyche, and when these proved somewhat ineffective, simple venus manipulation achieved at least the desired physiological effect.

  In fact in point of pure tantric performance, I was indefatigable thereafter. The test of any performer is triumph over mal karma, and the proof of such triumph is the approval of the audience; in that regard, Lorenza’s surfeited peaks of ecstasy validated this self-perception.

  Nevertheless, it was performance in more than metaphor. The pleasure I was giving aroused no joy in me, and the transports of Lorenza brought me no closer to release. I performed my phallic variations in conscious fulfillment of my duty, not in a trance of mindless ecstasy.

  Ultimately it was Lorenza, overwhelmed with orgasm, gasping raggedly for breath, glowing with perspiration, who admitted her fatigue and satiation.

  “Beaucoup, mon cher,” she panted in my ear. “Seek your own fulfillment.”

  This I attempted one more time, not informing her that my prolonged priapism had been anything other than gallantry, before ruefully admitting defeat.

  At this imbalance in the ecstasy of our pas de deux, Lorenza displayed a sincere concern and bent her neck and her energies to oral caresses designed to redress it.

  While her skill at these erotic exercises was unimpeachable and her intent of the highest morality d’amour, by this time I knew that the attempt was futile, for in my psychic exhaustion and physical frustration, I had passed over to the stage where the only pleasure possible to me was rest. Though it was ungallant of me to do so, there was finally no alternative, and with rueful but firm gestures, I bade her cease.

  “Que problem, mon cher?”

  “Quien sabe?” I said soothingly. “Perhaps it was the wine. Or the overwhelming pleasure that I sought to prolong into eternity. Or some temporary infirmity. De nada.”

  She looked at me inquiringly, and now perhaps there was something more speculative behind her concern.

  “Certainly there was nothing lacking in the pleasure of the chase,” I told her, “and the true pleasure lies not in the goal but in the journey, nicht wahr.”

  With this and other similar verbal niceties, Lorenza was mollified, and the pas de deux ended not in overt tension between us. We both had too much civilized concern for each other for that, and our roles in the floating cultura needed not further perturbation. We boistered through the passageway and into the grand salon together as if buoyed on tantric energies and exchanged light pleasantries with a number of Honored Passengers over brandies before repairing to our respective private cabins.

  But despite these appearances, I sensed that the void within me, that black hole of confusion which had somehow been bored through my Weltanschauung, had finally begun to fracture the phenomenological realm precisely at its point of greatest ambiguity—the sexual interface where psyche and soma could no longer be dualized. I only hoped that the pattern would not spread to the sphere of social duty, that this most subtle of breaches with the Domo of the Honored Passengers could be healed before its vibrations disharmonized the social dynamics of my ship.

  I passed the period until the third Jump in a fitful melange of dream-haunted sleep and hypnogogic half-wakefulness, erotic ideograms of ever-increasing extremity filling my sensorium in hormonal frustration while my somic indicator lay unresponsive to the demands of release.

  —— VIII

  Hollow-eyed and haggard as I was from lack of any but haunted sleep, my condition was taken with unvoiced jocularity as the nobly earned aftermath of heroic indulgence by Argus and Mori when I arrived on the bridge. I was mercifully glad that neither of them sought to banter bon mots concerning events chez Grand Palais; surfeited of erotic imagery in word, deed, and thought, I was relieved to detumesce through duty’s mantra into the professional performance of my absolute rather than social Captainly role.

  Or so I thought as we began the countdown ritual, sitting on my throne of power gazing into the starry sea from the bow of my vessel.

  “Jump Drive generator activated…parameters nominal…Harmonizer circuits activated…Jump Circuit electronics on standby…”

  But with every amber ready point that winked on in sequence, another quantum of energy seemed to surge into the strange tension building within me, a twisting wind in the viscera, an unbidden flow of prana from psyche into soma…

  “Primer circuit activated…parameters nominal…”

  Far from escaping the center of my malaise, I found myself whirling right into it. Far from detumescing through the Jump ritual, I was confronted in the most inescapable way possible with the fact that my libido had been magnetized by the sexual ideogram of the Jump. For as the moment approached, the treacherous schlange kundalini uncoiled into attention. All that had been missing in the dream chamber with Lorenza was activated now, and with it the realization that an engrammic dybbuk foreign to my will had seized control of my libidinal lance.

  “Pilot in the Circuit…,” Mori chanted.

  Pilot in the Circuit indeed! I satoried as the image contacted my sensorium. I understood with dreadful new clarity why Captains did not want to meet their Pilots. Why Captains feared meeting their Pilots, though they knew it not. Once this relationship was personified, it became eroticize
d, and once it became eroticized, it captured the imagination of the unnatural man. In the ancient literal sense, I had been bewitched by my Pilot; Dominique Alia Wu had secreted a succubus into my consciousness.

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

  As I gave my first command, I determined to take a more active role in the rite in more ways than one; I surrendered to the pattern moving through me in a therapeutic spirit. I would self-consciously allow this enigma I had discovered within me to play out its scenario through me under observation of my intellection and thus leach it of its programmatic power.

  “Take your position, Man Jack.”

  “Vector coordinate overlay computed and on your board…”

  “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit computer,” I found myself chanting with an unholy anticipation, and as I actually touched my first command point, I felt a momentary metaphorical if not electronic feedback from the Circuit, from the ship, and the sparkling stars, and the energies moving through my command.

  “Jump Field aura…erected.” Even random words of the ritual now seemed to synchronize into the building rhythm pulsing through me, driving me forward into a cyborged embrace.

  My body seemed to crackle with unreleased energy as my finger paused above the ultimate command point and the chimes sounded, as if that digit were pressed as tight against the fabric of the universe as my nether pole against my trousers. I stared out into the bright, hard glory of the void as into the eyes of a lover—

  “Jump!” I shouted, not, so it seemed, to Argus or Mori or to the ship’s annunciators, but to the one person aboard my voice could not reach; she whose ecstasy lay at the touch of my hand, she whose ultimate purpose I now served as I touched the command point.

  It was over. In an augenblick, the stars had changed configuration, Dominique had passed through ecstasy into coma, and the Dragon Zephyr had Jumped closer to Estrella Bonita.