The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  And I, once more, was left in a state of hormonic and psychic frustration. During that imperceptible insertion through the fabric of space-time, did I seek to experience the subjective eternity of the Great and Lonely through which my machineries had propelled my cyborged demon lover through feedback with the Circuit? Had I imagined I had succeeded? Meaningless conjecture. The climactic moment came and went in an instant quite literally too short to leave a memory trace.

  In my reality, nothing had happened, save the translation of the ship 3.8 light-years toward our destination; even the starfield shift, as always, had gone unperceived in the quotidian timestream.

  So I departed the bridge in an extenuated amplification of the state in which I had arrived; my unfulfilled priapism wilting in the aftermath of yet one more dream of ideogrammically abstracted sexuality.

  Yet now, minimal, I had achieved knowledge of that which had seized my spirit; by confronting the dybbuk I had beheld the face of that from which I fled. Since that exchange of name tales on the sky ferry, I had become a man obsessed; I was obsessed still, but now knowledge gave me both the courage and the anger to perceive the nature of that obsession and do what duty demanded.

  Vraiment, I judged myself contaminated in spirit, impaired in the functioning of my Captainly role, sexually disharmonized, and in danger of losing my will to command the Jump. In these circumstances, I could conceive of only two honorable alternatives. I could remove myself from command for psychic disequilibrium and no doubt be rightly found unfit for another berth as Void Captain, or I could seek the knowledge necessary to free myself from this karmic quagmire from the source of the mal d’esprit herself.

  Thus formulated, the proposition was a tautology. Great risk might there be in disregarding the prescription of Maestro Hiro and interviewing Dominique Alia Wu again, both to my authority as Captain and my own psychic destiny, but all this would in any event be lost if I surrendered my command.

  Once breached, my innocence was gone forever, and the only path back to the Captaincy of my own soul was that of inner knowledge, that very knowledge which we are taught at the Academy not to seek.

  During the first three hours of the recovery period, the Pilot remains in coma in sick bay as intravenous infusions and charge inducers bring her life readings into stabilized equilibrium and restore her to a semblance of consciousness. She is then transferred to her cabin, where, custom dictates, she remains to recuperate for the next Jump. Thus the recovery routine for that abstraction “the Pilot”; Dominique Alia Wu might be “exercising her musculature” and taking nourishment on the cuisinary deck within five hours of the Jump for all I knew or dared to ask concerning the generality of her unprecedented habits.

  This interval I passed alone in my cabin, unwilling to submit myself to further social stimuli, uncertain of my ability to function within my role, and searching unsuccessfully for a mode of encounter with my Pilot which would not arouse the disapproving interest of Maestro Hiro or further project the disharmony of my being into the social dynamics of the ship.

  But there was no socially benign path to further congress with Dominique Alia Wu, no channel of command or Captainly duty which I might invoke; even were I to arrange to encounter her by chance on the cuisinary deck, to engage her in conversation there once again would be a publicly proclaimed act of will.

  Lacking any pretext that would have borne public or officerly scrutiny, I at last lapsed into the sad and tragicomic stratagem of stealth.

  Thus could the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr be found slinking guiltily up the spinal corridor toward the Pilot’s cabin like a buffoon in some farce d’amour, starting at sounds, and detouring up side passages at approaching footfalls, until at last the coast of his assignation was clear of observers and he could slide like a shadow through a half-opened door.

  Dominique was propped up on pillows in a bed whose headboard displayed a full array of physiological parameters a glance at which told me that her inner resources were already recovering from her ordeal. A few welts and blotches were still fading from her face, and her eyes were still deeply pinkened and hollowed in greenish black shadows. She started at my clandestine entry, but what surprise she displayed in the afterknowledge of my identity seemed mere thespic display; perhaps it was my projection, but she appeared rather to be stifling some wry moue of amused confirmation.

  “Mon Captain?” she said. “Que pasa? You look terrible. Do sit down.” Though there were two chairs in the cabin, she patted the bedclothes with a somewhat shaky hand, and I seated myself at the foot of the bed, wondering how I was going to begin. And what.

  “Are you all right?” I muttered inanely.

  “Nominal for this timeframe,” she said, nodding in the direction of the headboard monitors. “Aber for small talk and salutations the Void Captain of the Dragon Zephyr does not secretly steal into the boudoir of the Pilot. Grand scandal were you to be seen in such an act. I shun not your company, liebchen, but your duty requires you to shun mine. So…?”

  “Very well, Dominique,” I said sternly, donning my Captainly persona as best I could under the circumstances. “I have reason to believe…”

  What? What could I say to her? I have reason to believe you have bewitched me? I accuse you of planting a sexual ideogram in my consciousness? Truth be told, in that augenblick I was confronted with my own perception of how demented any verbal rendering of the state of my consciousness would sound. What was I doing here? Should I not remove myself as Captain at once as unfit for command?

  “Well?” Dominique snapped. “Can you not speak?” Then she leaned forward slightly, squinted her bloodshot eyes as if truly seeing me by active choice for the first time, and when she spoke again, it was in another voice from another place. “Perhaps I understand, Genro. There is something troubling you, ne, something that must not be revealed to another person, aber something that must be voiced for the sake of your psychic equilibrium, nicht wahr?”

  “Yes,” I gasped in simple amazement. Did she know? Was it written so plainly in my body language that all could see it? Or did she know because she had done it to me deliberately?

  “So,” she said in a strange, ironic, almost darkly gay tone, “you have come to me, the Pilot, demi-person, a sympathetic ear sans transmitting mouth, a psyche in social purdah.”

  “I didn’t mean to suggest I deny your humanity—”

  “No, no, no, cher liebchen,” she said, actually smiling upon me. “You are right. Any secret is secure with me. No hay falta. You deny not my essence humaine, merely my social existence, a lack of shadow role to which I could not be more indifferent. Speak, cher Genro, your dark secrets are as safe with me as if you were proclaiming them into the void.” Her hands seemed to creep unconsciously toward mine over the bedclothes. Her words seemed to ambiguify their meanings. Her eyes, reddened and shadowed though they were, suddenly had the power to capture my gaze and then hurl it back like silvered mirrors.

  I felt that we had passed over into another level of discourse. In truth, the knowledge of my malaise d’esprit was safe with she who was its focus; in truth, confronting her with it would be proclaiming it into the void in the center of the vortex. Somehow I had been given new energy by this frail creature newly returned from comatose exhaustion.

  “Have you done this to me for the sake of revenge?” I demanded softly.

  “Revenge?” she said ingenuously. “For what? Por que? What is it that you conceive I have done?”

  “Since I unwittingly exchanged name tales with you on the sky ferry, my consciousness has been invaded by uncertainties, obsessions noir, matters that impair my…my…”

  “Ach so,” she cooed, rising from her pillows to regard me from a greater height. “Adam has nibbled little green apples from the tree of knowledge and now he has indigestion cosmique.”

  “And did not Eve hand the fateful fruit to him by act of will?”

  “Blame the serpent of circumstance,” she said. “A random meeting on the ferry,
an altercation which required your intercession—from this I am accused of conspiring to seduce mein bon Captain from his faithful duty?”

  “An altercation you knew would require my attention,” I said more uncertainly, for is the essence of paranoia not the projection of willed patterns into random event?

  Dominique laughed. She disentangled her body from the bedclothes and crawled prone across the bed toward me, then propped her head in her hands and stared at me with some dark amusement. “So smitten was I by your manly charms in our chance encounter that I fomented a cause celebre in order to be with you, vraiment, and then with this fleshly envelope I captured your imagination erotique, so as to seduce you into invading my boudoir with amorous intent, where I now hold you at my sensual mercy?”

  She laughed again, colder this time. “You have no low opinion of your charisma d’amour, mi caballero,” she said with a decidedly sharp edge to the jape.

  “A Void Captain is an archetypal figure of romance; is it impossible for such an aura to have affected a Pilot who offered up her name tale unbidden in its presence? Particularly in view of our…functional relationship.”

  Dominique drew herself shakily up into a yogic squat, visibly feeble at first, but seeming to extract strength from the completed posture, facing me now eye to eye on a shared level.

  “Precisely in view of our functional relationship, such infatuation is impossible,” she said. “Not through any paucity of your manly potency or conscience sympathetique, liebchen, for I sense in you a hidden fellow being. Aber, chez moi, the fulfillment of the flesh stands revealed as a pale shadow of the Greater Glory, beyond the power of any tantric hero to grant.”

  “Then it is revenge! First you ensorcel me and then you declare me the erotic inferior of a concatenation of electronic circuitry.”

  “But why would I do such a thing?”

  “Is it not the ancient sexual technique of the femme fatale, the capture of the erotic impulse and its channelization toward a goal unobtainable? Is this not the classic feminine mode of vengeance?”

  “Moi, femme fatale? Genro, Genro, can you not comprehend that erotic games interest me not, whether of the body or the mind? Least of all the pettiness of vengeance. Why vengeance? Por que?”

  “The natural hostility between Pilot and Captain…” I muttered uncertainly as she regarded me as if I were some pauvre petit. Nevertheless, I pressed on. “After the last Jump, I…I chanced to see you being wheeled out of the Pilot’s module. For the first time, I comprehended the full price the Jump exacts, and after all, it is in a very real sense I who…who…”

  I realized as I spoke that I was dissembling, and not only to Dominique but to myself. Indeed I had a perception of this whole conversation as a pavane of dissembling, a careful tiptoe dance about the void at its center. I knew that she sought not vengeance. She knew that I was not consumed with fleshly lust for her body. We both knew that the Jump involved no rape of her will.

  Nevertheless, I danced out the figure. “I fear my enhanced perception is weakening my will to command the Jump,” I recited, repairing in guile to Maestro Hiro’s assessment of my cafard.

  Her eyes flared in alarm, then hardened into a frightening coldness. “I know what you are doing,” they said.

  “If it be my absolution you seek, take it gladly and truly, mon cher dummkopf,” she said. “You know that any price I pay as fare to the Great and Only is a bargain I willingly make.”

  “Then it truly is worth everything to you—your health, your life, your spirit humaine?”

  Dominique leaned closer to me. I could smell the acetone on her breath, the biochemical signature of the price she paid for the ecstasy of the Jump. Somehow this excited my pheromonic receptors, somehow I was aroused, somehow the smell of her words was the odor of truth.

  “Truly, liebchen,” she said softly. Her tired eyes seemed as human as I had seen them, and she smiled assuringly as she touched a tremulous hand to my cheek. “If you insist on metaphor erotique, bitte do not choose to imagine our transaction as the rape brutal. You ravish not my spirit.”

  “I think I believe you,” I said, sexually aroused by her presence in my body space, the odor of dark mystery tainting her breath, all the hidden subtexts of our discourse. In that moment, I recognized through somic memory’s congruence that my erotic vision of the Jump, the dreams that had haunted my sleep, my sexual dysfunction chez Lorenza, were all metaphorical dybbuks of the same erotic engram, the one that rose to the surface now, coded into my very hormonic metabolism. Even the lust I now allowed myself to feel for Dominique might be merely another somic metaphor for this psychic ideogram.

  “I believe, but I don’t understand,” I breathed softly, aware that I too was leaning closer, that her hand was now pressed firmly and warmly against my cheek. “The enormity of the price you pay is all too apparent; explain to me then this glory for which you forsake all else gladly.”

  “No words can tell, poor creature,” she said with sad finality, and I knew we had at last danced our way through to the heart of the matter. To the void at the heart of the matter, the mystery to which I found my phallic pulse beating.

  “I don’t know whether I can command another Jump without knowing,” I said, half cruelly, and half provocatively.

  “But you must!” she hissed in cat-sudden fury, clutching at my shoulders with both hands.

  Startled by the angry passion I had aroused, I made sure my eyes gave the lie to my words, and she subsided almost immediately. A succession of expressions passed across her face in such rapid perfusion that the process of transformation was beyond my gestalting, but somehow, in the next moment, she was regarding me tenderly and holding me with a lover’s touch.

  “Ach, mein pauvre Genro,” she said lornly. “Words there are not. You seek truly, but you know not what. You seek what I have found, but where I go, you cannot.”

  “Try,” I implored simply.

  “Try?” she said strangely. “You wish me to try in the only way I know how?”

  I stared silently without waver into those hollowed, bloodshot, feverish eyes, smelled the odor of flesh pushed far beyond its natural limits on her breath, and my phallus pressed against the fabric of my pants as my spirit pressed against the interface of her secret knowledge, and the kundalini fire that ran along this circuit I somehow finally perceived as envy.

  “Bon,” she said, and without romantic preamble or false formalities, she freed that tormented serpent from its civilized restraints and exposed its declaration to the open light of day. “Surrender to the moment, imagine it forever, and quien sabe, maybe it is not impossible you begin to understand.”

  So saying, she arched her neck gracefully, swallowing the blind serpent of my forbidden desire down a long, warm, silky passage that both eased the pain of thwarted passion and inflamed it into a nerve trunk that drew my spirit down it into a place beyond thought.

  Waves of ecstatic energy pulsed through me, mirrored in the moire light flashes that formed fantastically complex visual ragas behind my rolling eyes. My flesh seemed to ripple as knots of sour tension passed up and through me to discharge themselves through my finally activated tantric focus.

  Faster and faster and ever more freely, these waves of pranic energy surged through me as I became a transparent medium for* their transmission. Crest to crest they came now, compressing through linear time into a clear shaft of white light on all psychic and protoplasmic wavebands that lanced through me, a bolt of total discharge which left me shouting wordlessly in some time without space.

  Slowly, the fragments of my consciousness reformed into an awareness of place and time, into the kinesthetic awareness of my back against the softness of the bed, into the sight of Dominique Alia Wu looking down at me, her features calmly composed, her eyes mirrored windows over what lay within.

  “A shadow,” she said. “Just a pale shadow.”

  That interior-focused moment passed and humanity returned to her tired, hollowed eyes. “So, mon
cher liebchen,” she said, “You will remember that should your will waver at the time of the Jump, nicht wahr, and you will at least know it is no rape you do.”

  And so it began. So it truly began.

  —— IX

  How can an act of social madness tranquillify the spirit? How can a breach of one’s bound duty lead to the more proper performance of same?

  No doubt our Healer could have supplied some theoretical abstraction to account for the generality of such paradoxical abreaction, but I was hardly about to consult Lao or Maestro Hiro concerning the alchemical sexuality of the specific release.

  Suffice it to say that once I had made my secret exit from Dominique’s cabin and returned to the environs of the floating cultura, I found myself somewhat more comfortable within my Captainly persona, more able to function in the phenomenological realm on a phenomenological level.

  Naturellement, one did not have to be a Healer to know that release from the hormonic torture of the most prolonged and convoluted act of coitus interruptus that I could have conceived of had a good deal to do with restoring my psychic and hence social functionality. From the first faint stirrings at the time of the second Jump to the long-delayed release in Dominique’s cabin, my metabolism had been flushed with adrenal and gonadal imperatives the continual arousal and frustration of which could hardly have been said to be conducive to psychic clarity.

  Now, at least, the somic component of my “cafard” had been removed by the ministrations of Dominique Alia Wu and my psychic dialectic could at least proceed from a base of biochemical equilibrium.

  The ancient volkwisdom that an erect phallus knows no morality is meant as an ironic jocularity, but it contains an approximation of the truth; when your libidinal energy is captured by a sexual engram, the logic of further action is that not of your will but of the engram itself until that energy is discharged.

  Moreover, surrender to my passion noir had at least granted me a truer image of its essence; I had confronted the void at its coeur and passed through into knowledge however partial of my true position in the sexual equation of the Jump.