The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Yet what greater grandeur could the true spirit within encompass than to sit here on the throne of the Captaincy, naked before this ultimate unveiled, and dare to challenge it with the mere machineries of men?

  As the familiar countdown ritual began, I perceived it as if for the first time as solemn rite in more than metaphor, as the mantra whereby we few initiates who faced the visage beyond maya’s veil, here on this ersatz mountaintop above the inner world of men, might shield ourselves from the true sight of chaos in our functional dance of duty.

  Thus did we exchange one illusion for another; thus did we avert our gaze from the ultimate challenge to our spirits.

  “Jump Circuit electronics on standby…Primer parameters normal…”

  As Mori went through her checklist, I found myself reversing the polarity of the ritual; rather than focus my gaze and attention on the amber ready points winking into incandescence on my board, I stared upward and outward at the naked void itself, letting the rhythm of the words carry my consciousness not into the rite but beyond it, into awareness of all that it sought to deny.

  “Pilot in the Circuit…”

  A cold wind seemed to move through me as the ritual reminded me that deep within the enveloping machinery, enwombed and sightless in the Pilot’s module, Dominique, of all aboard, alone confronted the true reality, the true unreality, the faceless and formless Great and Lonely before which even the universal void was but illusion’s final veil.

  “…checklist completed and all systems ready for the Jump…”

  “Take your position, Man Jack.”

  “Vector coordinate overlay computed and on your board…”

  “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit computer,” I chanted, touching the command point through kinesthetic memory, the starry blackness still flooding my sensorium. As I did so, I was aware of this action as the umbilical connection to quotidian reality, the projection of human will into the impending mass-energy discontinuity of the Jump, the bread-crumb trail through the forest, the way through to the hearth of home.

  “Jump Field aura…erected…”

  In truth, once more I felt erotic stirrings, but now these were overlayed with empathy humaine; if eros is the sharing of psychic communion through translation into the sprach of the flesh, then dare call it love that I felt as envy of the voyage fused with admiration for the voyager.

  Slowly I moved my finger toward the Jump command point as if through the thick crystalline syrup of time; the interval seemed to expand as my consciousness poured satori into it.

  The first note of the Jump signal sounded, reverberating through the bridge, the ship, my body; everywhere but the center, the Pilot’s module, the hub which was void.

  With it came the memory of Dominique—leaning into my body space, the acetone smell of her breath, the odor of the void and the courage to dare it; and with that olfactory memory-trace, the congruent memory of my sexual arousal, called forth now in realtime.

  The second note sounded, releasing the words she had spoken. “If you insist on metaphor erotique, bitte do not choose to imagine our transaction as the rape brutal. You ravish not my spirit.”

  But now the music of those words seemed to be a tune of new meaning. “You ravish not my spirit,” sang the melody. Au contraire, au contraire! whispered the after-beat.

  The final note sounded.

  My memory track looped back upon itself, compressing her lips gliding down the nerve-trunk of my phallic ecstasy into temporal congruence with her last words uttered in the afterglow, her eyes glazed like mirrors over the beyond within: “So, mon cher liebchen, 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.” Au contraire, au contraire!

  And as I stared out into the starry blackness as into a lover’s eyes, her eyes, with my finger paused in erect attention over the point of ultimate penetration, I understood.

  “Jump,” I said, my mouth seeming to form the word with infinite slowness, rolling it, tasting it, and blowing it into the void like a kiss. Neither rape nor cold mechanics nor ideogram of psychic malfunction, I perceived my touch upon the command point as act of love; true, ultimate, and beyond the realm of selfish satisfaction.

  In that durationless augenblick, I seemed to feel an electric channel open; from my mouth surrounding our single shared word of love and the tip of my finger upon the electronic quick of her center, through memory’s orgasmic trace, to Dominique, up there in the Great and Lonely, down there in the Pilot’s module, and a great soundless sigh of airy energy exploded from my inner being.

  The stars had shifted. The moment had passed. In fleshly realtime, my body hummed once more with the jagged energy of unreleased fulfillment.

  Not without enormous psychic effort and duty-bound act of will did I remove myself from the seat of that fast-fading satori. It seemed as if I might somehow recapture that which was dissolving from the forefront of my realtime mind into the depths whence it came by contemplation of that starry mandala we take for all that is, or failing that, to complete the circuit by congress with the only soul aboard whose spirit had touched mine in the moment that had passed.

  But Argus had announced our new position, my crew awaited orders to secure the bridge, Dominique lay comatose, and my assignation with Lorenza awaited. Once more must Genro Kane Gupta don the mask of role and duty; once more must my disharmonized spirit serve the harmony of my ship. Already, Argus and Mori were regarding their Captain peculiarly as he slumped there staring into space.

  It was a thing of some small mercy that I had arranged to meet Lorenza in the deck of dream chambers itself rather than in the grand salon or other social venue; for as I made my way through the corridors and lifts, I was sorely pressed indeed to return the salutations of those I passed along the way. Shadows, poor, pale shadows, and I an unwilling player in this quotidian charade.

  Was I then aware of the slippage of my persona; did I perceive in the mirror of passing faces my own gathering social anomie?

  As the lift deposited my corpus in the nether reaches of the Grand Palais, Lorenza was there to greet me. Wrapped in flowing gauzy veils whose rosy hue matched to perfection the uterine walls of the corridor coiled about the dream chambers, her long red hair trailing off into the subtle currents of perfumed mist, she seemed a concatenation of the atmosphere itself, an apparition, a dryad of this lust-pink forest.

  Nevertheless, it took a certain act of will, a blinking back of darker spirits, to rouse my natural man from his bubble of fugue, even in the face of this vision of fleshly delights.

  “Ah cher Genro, what dream shall we now share?” she said, gripping my hands lightly like a small child anticipating a trip to a fete.

  “Nada beside the vision which now is mine,” I replied, summoning up the ghost of gallantry while avoiding a specific response, for in truth such considerations of venue had not passed through my attention since I had last entered the bridge, and indeed even my previous musings upon these erotic esthetics had fled down memory’s abyss.

  With a show of some gaiety, I led her through the maze by the hand, peering teasingly into this chamber and that as if sure of my destination but spicing what was to come with playful mock indecision; naturellement, the reverse was true, as I sought a chamber that might pique not only her desire but the flagging spirit of my own.

  Was it karma working through random motion, the subtle sense that the charade was wearing thin, or was it outer congruence with my inner tropism that finally made the choice? In truth perhaps all three, for the venue presented itself just as Lorenza’s hand in mine was tightening with a certain questioning impatience; and certainement, the dream chamber that presented itself at that very moment mirrored that which called to me from within.

  The dream of this chamber was space itself: an illusory infinity of jewel-pierced blackness into which we floated free from gravity’s turgid embrace. Naturellement, not the cold, deadly void beyond the
hull of the Dragon Zephyr but a stylized abstraction of same. Not a frozen vacuum but lambent, humid air heated to the temperature of the blood’s desire. Nor were the stars fixed like eternal vertices in a crystal lattice; rather did they perform a complex and stately interweaving waltz to the music of some celestial orchestra. The void, yes, but denatured and molded closer to the human heart’s desire.

  “Que drole, mon Captain,” Lorenza said, her amusement perhaps shaded with a certain dubious restraint as she drifted slowly in the swirling mists of her garments. “The Void Ship Captain chooses the void, ne?”

  No bon mot sprang to my mind; indeed, for an augenblick of paranoia noir, it seemed as if those ice-blue eyes had seen to the very core of my transfleshly desire. And in truth a strange energy began to uncoil down the chakras of my spine to raise my phallic lance to rigid, somehow metallic awareness; not the sensual unfurling of prana humaine but the sudden cold flashing of bright-blue electricity along the circuitry of my wires.

  I unpeeled myself from my clothing with mechanical efficiency, scarcely noticing the slow disrobing dance of veils which Lorenza performed for my delight. As if some hidden sensors had marked this opening movement of our pavane, the music’s tempo began to quicken, and the stars whirled faster in their interweaving orbits.

  Ebon skin naked against the deeper darkness, Lorenza’s body seemed to melt into the void, becoming a mounding, curving, palpitating extension of the atmosphere itself, an esprit de la nuit emerging from the clinging black waters in a foam of stars; blue eyes, white smile, red nebula of hair incarnating the ineffable itself.

  Stars whirled faster, music quickened, and I drifted open-armed toward her, down, down, down the vortex of memory’s desire—into the Circuit, into the void, into the Captain’s throne, my finger erect over the command point as I stared out into the countenance of the great beyond.

  My spine was an arc of cold electric fire, my phallus was engorged with painful charge; my sense of who, and where, and what, like the vortex of stars drawing me down into their center, like the face of the incarnated void itself, seemed to dissolve and fragment into chaos sans form, sans interface between.

  As we touched, as our arms enfolded, as flesh rippled into flesh, as lips and tongues coalesced and intertwined, as the music rose into an ongoing crescendo and the whirling stars became a black hole vortex around our central void, there was naught but a searing succession of lightning bolts sparking down my spine and into the tortured lance of my phallus, twitching and throbbing in the throes of the heterodyning charge.

  Groaning, my finger touched the command point; with a single swordstroke thrust, I penetrated to the core quick of the darkness—

  Jump!

  —and exploded in a sharp-sharded shower of electric glass, bolt after bolt of searing cold ecstasy surging through my galvanic flesh into the vulva of the void.

  Like the Jump itself, it was over in an augenblick, leaving me spent, fragmented, and rapidly detumescing, hanging limp and panting in the darkness.

  Lorenza floated before me, eyes like cold blue marbles, lips curled into a violent sneer. “Animal!” she snarled roughly. “This is for you the art tantrique?”

  I floated there for a long, silent moment under the withering contempt of her gaze; absorbing it, encompassing it, making its judgment my own. Wretched with shame, squamous with vile and unvoiceable secret knowledge, shivering in my own guilty sweat, how could I reply?

  And yet…and yet…

  Slowly, my psychic focus began to coalesce back into my quotidian Captainly persona; I became all too aware now of the enormity I had wrought, the unseemly breach between Captain and Domo, and all which it might portend in the social realm. Hesitantly, I swam toward her, my conscience politique aroused to some reptilian notion of redressment via the willful but juiceless application of the oral tantric arts.

  “No!” Lorenza shouted, holding up a fending hand, arching her body away from me in an ideogram of reflexive disgust. Then, regarding me through narrower and more thoughtful eyes, more softly: “No…”

  “I’m sorry, Lorenza, I—”

  “Vraiment!” she snapped. “You are sorry indeed!” Then, once again, a softer echo: “Vraiment, mon pauvre petit.” She sighed, her shoulders relaxed, and slowly she came to regard me more in sorrow than anger. “Truly, you are possessed by some malaise, Genro. First the priapic frustration for you, then this…this loss of civilized control.”

  I nodded my mute agreement, grateful for her sympathy on this level, but knowing full well that a true connection empathetique between us was impossible on a higher one.

  Aware now of my shameful discomfort, she moved somewhat closer, brought her hand up as if considering a touch of my cheek. “De nada, cher Genro,” she said. “I have experienced the maladroit performance sexual before. Surely Healer Lao will cure you of this malady.”

  “I think not,” I told her, shaking my head. For I knew full well that no cure for my affliction could be found within the sphere of the Healer’s art, if indeed that which had infected my spirit could rightly be called disease.

  “Por que no?” she said with some renewed pique. “To fail in the pas d’amour through some malaise, this I can pity, but to refuse to seek a cure out of foolish masculine pride, this is conscious act of ego!”

  “Call it what you will,” I said with the stubbornness born of secret knowledge which I could not reveal. “But you will, bitte, speak of it not to passengers or crew. We must not infect the social realm with our…with our—”

  “You presume to hector me with the canards of duty?” she snapped. “You, who refuse to properly perform your own? I am Domo of the Grand Palais of the Dragon Zephyr! I will disturb not the harmony of my own domain with personal pique! We will, naturellement, maintain the facade civil.”

  “I appreciate your discretion, Lorenza.”

  “Discretion, pah!” she declared with loftly coldness. “I maintain the facade civil for the sake of my duty, my wretched Captain, and that is all!”

  I nodded, I sighed, I retreated behind the wall that now lay between us, a barrier of my own creation, willful or not. But as I drew my clothes over my cold, detumescent flesh, I was possessed by a perverse sense of bitter freedom. I knew now that the focus of my consciousness had been released from the performance of my Captainly role into a self-imposed purdah d’esprit. Like Dominique, the purpose that my spirit served was now its own.

  Or so in my malaise did I believe.

  —— X

  Mal d’esprit, sexual malaise, cafard, obsession noir; thus might masters of the healing arts have taxonomized my mental state as Lorenza and I went our separate ways. Those of less therapeutic but more moral bent not without the justice of the tribe might deem me a rogue bull, a sociopath, a monster of anomie faustian.

  Chez moi, I would no doubt have pled my guilt to all these things, then as now. The turning away from succor’s hope into the darkest heart of the obsession itself was surely a willful act of my own choosing.

  And yet, now as then, at the baleful end-point of this self-chosen geodesic curve of fate, I still cannot deny a certain secret pride in having chosen the vision absolute over the quotidian vie humaine.

  Voila, I have at last allowed this awful truth to pass from my self-occluded coeur onto the word crystal of this account where all may confront it, even if the only soul ever to read this naked truth will be my own!

  Think of me what you will, regard me as did Lorenza as a prideful fool in love with my malaise; as I left that chamber of voidly dream, I longed not for the status quo ante, for the lost innocence of my Captainly role, but for she who had led me into the dark depths of this cafard—indeed, for the orgasmic countenance of the void itself.

  But though an age had turned in the augenblick of the dream chamber, in the realm of flesh and time barely an hour had passed since the Jump, and Dominique lay in sick-bay coma still, leaving me to wander the ship like the Fliegende Hollander of ancient operatic lore, a lorn ghos
t-Captain in a shadow realm.

  Hours passed in a fugal fog. Lorenza had departed for the environs of the grand salon; I therefore repaired to the entertainment deck, where we would not meet, where congress with Honored Passengers and crew might meetly be confined to the silent communal passivity of the spectatoral mode. Here I attended the performance of a string and electronic septet, a holocine in the kabuki mode, a dance of sword and fire, an erotic triplet, a concert of spontaneous musical odes.

  Or rather did I drift from one to the other, sipping at this and that but never drinking deep; notes and movements, costumes and gestures, words and vistas, melanging into a fragmented abstraction of the arts humaine, the frenzied dance of captive spirit through maya’s forms, or so it seemed to me in my timebound daze.

  Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form.

  Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s striving to transcend the realm of time and form, lay that which could not be encompassed by the artifice of man. From nothing are we born, to nothing do we go; the universe we know is but the void looped back upon itself, and form is but illusion’s final veil.

  We touch that which lies beyond only in those fleeting rare moments when the reality of form dissolves—through molecule and charge, the perfection of the meditative trance, orgasmic ego-loss, transcendent peaks of art, mayhap the instant of our death.