The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  “I have awakened that which might better for you have slept,” she said in a clear voice devoid of all remorse. In this same emotionless, unromantic spirit did she lay a cold and clammy hand upon the undeniable proof. My reflex was to shrink at this all-knowing touch, a chill went through my protesting flesh, but it was all a foolish psychesomic lie. The serpent uncoiled into her pitiless hand, its kundalinic body engulfing my spine, an electric connection between my phallus and my mind.

  She gripped my cold-blooded erection in a demanding fist “What do you feel now, mein Captain? This is not the amour, nicht wahr?” I groaned as she deliberately kneaded my flesh just this side of pain. Her eyes showed not passion, nor would they let mine alone.

  “Fear not the truth, Genro,” she said. “I know that this bums not with passion for the beauteous Dominique Alia Wu. Nor do I feel fleshly lust for my Captain of the Void. Aber we both seek consummation of the selfsame desire, liebchen, and in that, our spirits touch.”

  “A consummation which only you have found.”

  A tremor of some momentary irony humaine flickered beneath the mirrors of her eyes; her mouth quivered with a hint of unknown fear or loss which, though occluded, failed not to touch what remained of my human heart. For a moment, it seemed as if there were something more than congruent desire that we shared.

  “A consummation which you have not found, vraiment,” she said. “And which you wish to understand.”

  “Which in my madness I seek to contain,” I said, and felt the serpent’s mouth engulf my brain as my soul at last admitted all.

  Dominique touched my cheek with a trembling hand. “I have awakened that which better should be left asleep, poor creature,” she said again.

  “Such was not your intent?”

  “I serve that purpose which is its own intent,” she said. “Toward you, mon cher, I had no intent at all.”

  “And now?”

  “And now, perhaps, I am infected with the conscience humaine. Quien sabe? But we are fellow seekers now, travelers together, though we are each alone.”

  “Mad creatures both, beyond the social pale,” I said, and in so doing felt a tension part, a crossing over to another realm, where figure had reversed with ground, and the dancer dared to step beyond the dance.

  As she had exposed my true karmic state to its own self-aware perception not without my own collusion, so did she now free its priapic proclamation from the camouflage of social concealment not without my own inevitable aid.

  “Shall I give you the ghost of what you desire as best I can?” she said, gripping my heated flesh with a hard, unsensuous hand. “Ah, liebchen, if I could give you more…,” she said with a sigh, palpating waves of sensation up my central core to batter at the portals of my final pride.

  “When I’m on the bridge now,” I whispered, “when my finger is poised above the Jump command point, it feels like this, Dominique, it feels as if…” I shuddered in a spasm of self-revulsion, unable to go on.

  But my Pilot eased away this clotted moment with a suddenly tender hand, a finger placed upon my lips, and words that balmed and cozened. “Ach, mein Genro, do not imagine that this is the perverse passion to one who understands! You wish to be with me in the Great and Only now, do you not? So, mein pauvre petit, I take you there in the only way I can. Imagine I do for you what you do for me and be not ashamed. Who are the shadows of this ship to say that what we do is not the act of love, verdad?”

  I felt my flesh surrender to her ministering hand, my spirit surrender to my flesh, and both surrender to the moment itself—the timeless, mindless now, beyond the moral realm of future deeds or judgments past. Who indeed could say that what we did was not an act of love? Through this inadequate flesh did not Dominique in selfless mode seek to repay my own altruistic role for its service of her spirit in the Circuit of the Jump? Was it not a mere cruel trick of time that our completions could not in temporal congruence merge? Was it not a grace to transcend our timebound fate through mutual act of selfless will? If this is not love, the word has no meaning; I believed it then, and I believe it yet.

  I closed my eyes and gave over my mind’s eye to her words: “It is velvet dark in the Pilot’s module, liebchen; there is neither light nor sound nor pain. You float as if in the womb, sans gravity, sans temperature exchange, sans tout. There is neither a you nor an it, for you have melted into the perfect, formless, featureless darkness…”

  Waves of stately energy moved in tranquil grace up the kundalinic connection between our fleshly nexus and the darkness behind my eyes. Under her tantric ministrations, I practiced the yoga of sensual disconnection, cleansing my eyes of vision and focusing my sensorium on the sound of her words and the electricity of her touch. Slowly but steadily, the tempo increased, bringing me to the quivering brink of orgasm and holding me there on the sweet razor edge as I floated in the timeless and formless blackness.

  “And then, at once, you are there! From nothing into All, from darkness into the endless white light!”

  Spasm bolts of lightning seared up my spine to explode in brilliant shards behind my eyes, piercing the pleasure centers of my brain, galvanizing my nervous system with a white-hot charge—

  “Ah, the moment, liebchen, when the blackness explodes into the light and you are all, and you are not, and it is Great, and it is the Only, and it is forever, beyond the veil containing space and time…”

  —the fibers of my body contracting in a coldly glorious final tsunami of formless, modeless, emotionless ecstasy pouring my spirit through my phallus into the vulval void!

  “…soon, alas, to end, as webs of darkness fracture the light into form, into the vortex of maya drawing you down into the dance of space and time…”

  Slowly my eyes opened to the vision of Dominique, staring down at me with a thin but not entirely cruel little smile, a knowing communion of the unknowableness of the unknowable, a moue of empathetic loss.

  “Tu sabes, liebchen?” she said softly. “For you, it is to know but the shadow that poor words and flesh can give you; for me, it is to taste the Great and Only vraiment, and then to be cast out once more into the shadow world.”

  I lay there in supine and detumescent lassitude on the soiled and rumpled sheets of our transaction, feeling in truth soiled and rumpled myself, aware now of the fluids and sweats that are the quotidian aftermath of the highest psychesomic cusp.

  And yet, even in this most extreme of revulsive postcoital depths, I understood that the bargain was worth the price, that to touch the heights one must indeed wager all, that the spirit’s purpose truly was indeed to serve no purpose lower than its own.

  “To awake here slowly in agony and pain to pay the price…,” I said, clasping her hand to me and stroking her ragged hair.

  “The aches and agues of the body our Healer soothes with drugs,” she said. “Aber, to be returned from the Great and Only, that, my friend, is the pain for which there is no balm.”

  “And so our spirits touch in exile in this shadow realm,” I said. “And comfort each other as best they can.”

  She kissed me lightly on the lips. Her pale, sickly face was transfigured by the first smile thereon that had truly touched my heart. “Ah, mein liebe Genro,” she said. “Your Pilot meets a Captain whose spirit understands.”

  —— XI

  Like this word crystal being replayed, the period confined within the temporal bounds of the next three Jumps seems a subjective nonlinearity measured by event rather than duration; it all seems to exist simultaneously before memory’s unreeling eye.

  Naturellement, I fed my body, eased its fatigue with sleep, abluted and relieved myself when necessary, and performed my duty’s rounds. Perforce did I also hold congress with Honored Passengers and crew like a socially conscious man.

  But these concessions to mundane imperatives existed in a timestream alien to the causal skein of meaningful events whereby the spirit measures time; as heartbeat and breathing are given over to cerebral centers beneath t
he cortical crown, so were the biological and social niceties given over to the peripheral systems of my mind.

  For in truth those events which mattered were warps through linear time, compressions of experience whereby temporal distancing was overcome, at least within the illusion of subjective desire.

  How convoluted and arcane does that apologia sound as I play it back with its true meaning hovering just beyond my own comprehension! Vraiment, I am dissembling still, or perhaps any craft is insufficient to render a coherent image of vision or madness from memory’s other side.

  The unembellished truth is that my full attention came alive only at the moment of the Jump and at the time-warped completion of the act in Dominique’s boudoir; the interval between was the realm of shadows through which my true spirit slept.

  How this puppet Captain must have appeared to the other actors on the stage is something which even now I can but dimly recollect as data shorn of all affect.

  Seven meals were taken, or mayhap eight; six of these were social events spiced with discourse in which I no doubt took part. There are sense memories of many noble dishes artfully prepared and vintages of appropriate savor. There was a grand banquet given by Lorenza, where I was the object of a certain jocular contempt for my congress with Maddhi, as well as thinly veiled japes from our Domo of a more unseemly erotic nature. There was a meal with Argus and Mori passed in formal discussion of the ship’s duties and events. Other repasts were taken in various cuisinary venues with names and faces that blend into a babble of sprachs.

  A customary status report on the human cargo stored in electrocoma was made to me by Maestro Hiro; this impressed itself upon my memory owing to his expressed concern for the status of my health. Erotic overtures were made to me by a somewhat unusual plenitude of Honored Passengers whom I repulsed with as little personalization as possible, feigning weariness or malaise or pleading duty elsewhere.

  On a number of occasions, I was entrapped in conversations of hermetic intensity which in another state might have piqued my curiosity or attention, but from that period my memory can extract only intellectual shards. A discourse by Rumi Jellah Cohn on the dialectic between the universality of the artistic impulse and the diversity of cultural forms. A woman who spoke of faint messages now perhaps being received from the galaxy of Andromeda, millions of years in our nonrelativistic past. A scurrilous tale about a Domo who conceived an infatuation for her ship’s Second Officer and sought to undermine the Captain’s authority in the service of her inamorata’s ambition.

  It all seems an automaton’s dance to me now as did it then, a shadow play in which I slept through the playing of my own part. Only one imperative seems to have left the memory trace of the exercise of my will: not without consciously applied skill and guile did I seek to avoid Lorenza, Maestro Hiro, and Maddhi Boddhi Clear—the only humans on board who, through divers instrumentalities, might have penetrated the perfection of my fugue.

  If analytic perception may be granted to a being in such a state, it seemed to me then that only by abstracting my being from the intervals between could I endure the temporal gaps between the Jumps and the discontinuity between Dominique’s fulfillment and the shadow of my own. Indeed, the universe of space and time itself had become reduced to an unseemly intrusion between those augenblick perceptions of that which lay beyond.

  As for those brief bright moments themselves and her with whom I shared them, if Dominique and I were lovers, it was by no classic definition of the dramaturge’s art. We stared not limpidly into each other’s eyes, we shared not romantic meals a deux, no soulful solitary strolls, and of dream chambers we knew only one, and that the product of no human craft. Certainement, all the loverly sentimentality and sacraments of the quotidian realm sullied not the purity of the passion transhumaine that we shared.

  There are certain tantric dyadic asanas in which erect lingam penetrates yoni immobilely for the duration of the mutual meditative trance. If such partners in the solitary inward quest may be said to perform an act d’amour, then mayhap Dominique and I were lovers, for although our tantric configuration was different, its goal and spirit were the same. If such exercises be informed with mutual Caritas, are they not a rarefied act of love?

  Certainement in the linear timestream our discontinuous performances were unselfish acts of love; on the bridge, I served her spirit, in her bed, she served my flesh, and never in this time-warped transaction did yoni and lingam meld to give as they received.

  Was this not a human bond between us, this leap of trust through time? Were we not two souls in our isolation magnetized by the same pole?

  She was the Pilot of my kundalinic circuit, as I was the Captain of her own. But in the chord of our mutual vibration, I was the minor note. What the Captain bought was not half so precious as what he sold, and I now perceive that even then the baser note of envy was a throbbing undertone.

  Thus while our time-transcending congresses had merged into a seamless generality where event was subsumed into the archetypal now, as I replay that memory’s worldless crystal, I see the fault lines of its eventual shattering marbling the whole.

  I sit on my throne of power beneath the canopy of stars as it seems I have always done, and as the familiar Jump ritual proceeds, the now-familiar electric current begins to flow along my spine, deja-vued by memories and anticipations coiled round the illusory now.

  I gaze into the starry void, into Dominique’s eyes, into the blackness behind my own sealed eyelids as her lips envelop my lingam, and I feel a feedback channel opening between this creature of obsession and the dormant natural man.

  “Pilot in the Circuit…”

  Even as my spirit perceives our cycle as a time-warped act of love, phallic logic goads me with its egobound primal throb; now she would ride the whirlwind and I would be her steed, through the electronic Jump Circuitry my will would serve the purpose for which my flesh was disdained…

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

  In the Jump, I was the master of her ecstasy, and in the flesh Dominique the mistress of my surcease; au contraire, was she then not the servant of my flesh and I now her spirit’s slave?

  “Captain? Captain Genro? The checklist is completed.”

  “Well then, take your position, Man Jack,” I say with serene distraction, and Mori repairs to her chaise with an expression of bemusement that seems to be eternally there.

  “Ship’s position and vector verified and recorded,” Argus declares, her voice shrill and peremptory as it seems to have always been. “Vector coordinate overlay computed, Captain, and on your board.”

  Was this erotic equation not truly the ideogram in which we were bound, and was it not an injustice, an imbalance in the universal scale? Had not Maddhi—

  “Captain Genro, the vector coordinate overlay is on your board and ready to be dumped!” Argus fairly snapped; the slap of her voice, the keen edge of contempt in her eyes as she turned to regard me shattering the crystalline temporal generality into the unseemly and all-too-specific now.

  “Are you all right, Captain?” Argus demanded with little show of sympathy. “Are you suffering from some malaise?”

  “Attend your console, Interface,” I snapped with an ersatz Captainly peckishness. “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into the Jump computer now. Please activate the final two command points.”

  Sullenly, Argus returned to her duties, and the last two command points reddened on my board. “Jump Field aura erected,” I announced with a deliberate reduction of curtness, although I jabbed the command point with a vehemence I was hard put to understand.

  Like a reveler awakening the morning after a multi-molecule binge and wondering what enormities the gap in his memory track conceals, I found myself surveying the traces of the past three ship-days in the timebound causal world. Had this disharmony on my bridge been building while my attention was vanished from my Captainly role? Had I sleepwalked through my duty as I had through the floatin
g cultura in a somnambulistic haze?

  Even then I knew that my fellow officers were no just objects for my ire, nor in hindsight’s clarity was it Dominique against whom my passion raged. Nevertheless, as my finger curled toward the Jump command point like a tautening steel spring, slowly did the unselfish tantric figure reverse with the angry thwarted ground, did impotent envy come to inform the impending act.

  The Jump warning notes sounded, reverberating down my spine, and my digit stiffened into a vengeful phallic lance. My lips twisted into a soundless sneer as I confronted my rider in the void, serene in the crystal blackness beyond my manly powers.

  “Jump,” I growled gutturally, “Jump, damn you, Jump.” And as I thrust at the red quick of the Jump command point, I longed to feel that orgasmic moment impaled on my own exploding flesh.

  In an augenblick the moment came and went. Outside the ship, the stars were different, and on the bridge, I sat there foolishly, regarded with discomfort by the widened eyes of my crew.

  Mori’s startlement seemed innocent of knowledge or judgmental tone, but Argus studied me narrowly as if I sat there naked, sweating, and tumescent on my Captain’s throne.

  “Captain Genro, are you sure you’re all right?” she said. “Would not a consultation with our Healer be—”

  “I am in perfect health and in command of my faculties,” I replied coldly. “Though I appreciate your concern.”

  “I only meant—”

  “It is of no importance, Interface; I will let the matter pass,” I said with as much authoritatively Captainly finality as I could feign. I locked eyes with my feminine Second Officer, willing her accession to the authority of my command, to the potency I longed to feel.

  After a moment, Argus looked away from what she saw, and in that moment perhaps I might delude myself that some sense of my manly power had been regained. But this was the pouvoir of the Captain only, not the puissance of the man.

  I departed the bridge with my consciousness in a somewhat less fugal state—not that my spirit had been deflected from its inner focus; rather that quotidian events of sufficient import had intruded themselves upon my attention to the point of forcing me to act. For the first time in three ship-days, I had truly donned my Captainly role and dealt with a psychic exigency of command beyond the mechanical round of automatic duties.