The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  True, I had done this only when my Captainly authority had been frontally threatened; true tambien that my own prolonged disattention had been the causal agent of Argus’ challenge. Nevertheless, the event had occurred, and it opened my void-glazed eyes to the effects left in the wake of my somnabulary trajectory.

  In retrospect, I then began to see that while my spirit had been traveling other realms, its animating absence from my persona had perhaps not gone entirely unnoticed by those who encountered the resulting creature in the course of duty or social discourse. My Second Officer had perceived it well enough to challenge my authority not so much as Captain but as a properly functioning man, and even my young Man Jack had not been oblivious to the bizarre nature of my behavior. Truth be told, I feared a seance with Maestro Hiro or Healer Lao, for my confidence in my ability to pass the muster of their profession was not exactly great.

  Yet even as I left the bridge with a certain determination to restore the potency of my persona as Captain in command, even as I admitted to the practical cunning of avoiding the close perusal of the Med crew, I doubted not the absolute reality beyond the worldly veil, nor did it seem to me insanity to pursue it.

  Rather were the realms in which I found myself in disjunction with the ideal spiritual state. The bubble-world of human culture was but a shadow parade through timebound space, and that which lay beyond it lay also just beyond my grasp, floating mockingly before me in the tender ministrations of Dominique. Once more I empathized with that first lunged fish to crawl out of the englobing ocean into the open unknown air; I was gasping on the interface between the lower and the most high, unable to go on, unwilling to return.

  But unlike that first self-tortured amphibian, I was possessed of the dualities of mind and the reflectiveness of spirit to realize that in order to evolve, an organism must first survive. Chez moi, that meant survival as Captain of my ship, and as I tentatively entered the grand salon, I wondered what I would find. How far had the erosion of my social persona drifted while its essential spirit was gone?

  The grand salon was well attended as is customary during the Jump. Like gaily colored tropical fish habiting a convoluted coral reef, Honored Passengers of every species and hue were floating about the levels, nooks, and cubbies of the great sculpturefied room in hovering schools and shoals. Trays of dainties were everywhere, carafes and goblets of spirits, essences, and wines, herbal pipes, and braziers of intoxicating incense.

  As I stood there on the entrance landing in the highlighted sight of all surveying this generality as if from a mountain peak, a certain psychic odor seemed to waft to the back reaches of my brain: the ripeness of overrichness, the proclaimed artifice of superabundant perfume, the ozone of circuitry sizzling near overload. Private islands of variously tinted light picked out archetypal floating cultura scenes as if some classic painter had laid out a vast genre canvas of the fete. Here were lovers bent together on a pinkly chiaroscuroed chaise, there a scene of Maddhi Boddhi Clear amid feminine acolytes in a hazy golden glow, a slim woman playing a sandovar silhouetted in bright white, drinkers, diners, amorous adventurers, and the quite intoxicated all incarnating this dramatic baroque tableau.

  Here was the vida real of the starfaring floating cultura, the distilled and heady essence of this greatest age of man; here were wealth and art and beauty, science, curiosity, and intrigue; why then was I reluctant to be the Captain of its ship of fate, to play my leading role? Why then did I stand there until I had once more made myself a strange-eyed spectacle to these brightly accoutered shadows?

  Indeed, Sar Medina Gondo, with great thespic flourishes of her flowing white, gold-embroidered robes, ascended from the fete to fetch me like a great maternal bird.

  “Ach, gut Captain, you have been quite an illusive figure,” she said, capturing my arm in hers and leading me like a prize down the stairs before all.

  She clung to me assertively as she guided us through the swellings and thinnings of the throng, never ceasing all the while to prattle of this and that in a grand, projecting voice. “I see that Rumi and your little Third Officer are still keeping to themselves, pero from other voyages with that bravo, I tell you it will not last, of course we sophisticated voyagers know what rogues d’amour you Void Ship officers are, and nicht wahr, mi mannlein, you can say the same; why even you apparently have become indifferent to the great Lorenza’s charms, leaving other hearts to hope…”

  She stole a glance d’amour in my direction as she offered me a goblet of wine from a tabouret, her long blond hair combed into golden waves, her shining green eyes clear and empty as fine crystal.

  When this was not returned, she continued apace, squiring me about the grand salon and simulating our rapt conversation with an endless monolog of public bon mots.

  “Ah, mon cher, there is Ali Barka Baraka, surely the richest creature aboard, they say he owns an unreported planetary system in the outer fringes where the economic overlords of creation gather to engage in unspeakable vice, though alas I’ve never been invited, but I did once share a dream chamber with one of his lovers who had the most amazing tales, speaking of which, I’ll wager you’ve heard some droll ones from our Maddhi over here…”

  By design or fortune, she had thrust me into the center of a group gathered about Maddhi Boddhi Clear, with her own person attached and little reluctance to assume responsibility for the intrusion.

  “Why everyone is talking about your little tete a tete up there in the darkness together, my dears, have you finally made a convert out of a comrade of your own foolish gender, Maddhi, pero surely, nicht wahr, not through the usual means…?”

  Maddhi, not to be nonplussed in his own venue, shot a brotherly glance in my direction and replied in fine, florid style. “My heterosexuality is a legendary scourge of the galaxy, cher Sar, as you have had occasion to know; it goes beyond the fleshly tastes to regions alas beyond your ken. As for the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, I judge him a similar spirit, a fellow pilgrim of the way.”

  At this there was jocular and at the same time befuddled laughter from those gathered about us, whose numbers now seemed to have spread.

  “So this is the cause of our Captain’s distraction,” some unseen sly voice said. “Like Maddhi Boddhi Clear, he listens to voices in his head.”

  The laughter at this was raucous and prolonged, and to his own considerable discomfort Maddhi was unable to sail a jape above it, which is not to say he did not try. “Like Maddhi Boddhi Clear, he has not stoppers in his ears.”

  But this riposte sounded lame to his clearly critical ear even as he launched it, and it was in any event shouted into a whirlwind of jocularity, in which it vanished without a trace.

  “So does it happen to those who stare into space too long!”

  “Better men than we have gone before!”

  I found myself within a flock of bright-plumed and riotous parrots, squawking their laughter at their own birdbrained sallies, shrill life-denying cackles flung round my smarting head. No riposte presented itself to my blushing mind, nor could I flee except in even more unseemly disarray, and so I was reduced to standing there like a comic foil till the japery finally died away.

  Yet though I clearly stood there as the victim of their jests, still did it seem to me that there was a higher joke of which they were the butt, the cosmic conundrum which their laughter sought to veil. Was this japery not their means of trivializing the unconfrontable profound? Was not the laughter longer and louder than such banalities should command?

  Mayhap such analysis is the rationalization of the public buffoon, and certainement I itched with the burning rash of same, and verdad it took the mercy of the good-hearted Mori to effect my extraction by leading me away with my ears still ringing on the pretext of some nonexistent technical question.

  But even as I released my rescuer back into the dyadic company of her inamorato and attempted to melt away into the anonymous generality of the fete, I smelled even more strongly a shrill, overripe odor in the psyc
hic air, of hidden and unbidden alchemies smoldering beneath the scenery. Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied: beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night.

  The embarrassing and unsettling scene chez Maddhi was not, at least, without its practical compensation: in the process of being rescued from my discomfort by Mori, I had been extracted as well from the clutches of Sar. I resolved to make myself the center of no more attention than was unavoidable and certainement to eschew the company of anyone whose style or intent was likely to propel me into bold relief.

  Indeed, I contemplated leaving the fete for some more solitary venue, there to pass the time until my hour with Dominique away from this madding throng. But in a peculiar fashion, my very unease in the grand salon made it both psychically and practically difficult to depart. Of what unseemly and perhaps less humorous gossip would I become the object if I retreated from the venue of my jocular disgrace into solitary broodings? Might not my comings and goings become a subject of closer public scrutiny, endangering the secrecy of the ultimate enormity of my assignations with the ship’s Pilot?

  Certainement as Captain I could ill afford to appear unwilling to face the discourse of my own Honored Passengers, and as a man I refused to slink off like a creature of no consequence from the bemusement of these shrill buffoons.

  So, like a nectar-dipping butterfly, I fluttered from bloom to bloom, tasting this conversation and that, sipping wine, inhaling incenses, nibbling dainties, never securing a static perch but hovering at the peripheries while sampling the garden’s questionable delights.

  Nevertheless, I was the object of no little attention and not merely the accustomed flutter attending the Captain on his social rounds. I was constantly aware of covert glances behind my back of the sort conducive to a self-diagnosis of paranoia, had I not occasions to trap unwary watchers with a sudden shift of my gaze. While I encountered no more verbal assassins lurking in the shadows, my mental state seemed the subject of subtle probing scrutiny assayed through the idle discourse. Particularly were my difficulties with Lorenza an object of prying gossip.

  “Quelle chose, my dear Captain, why was our Domo not in attendance at our lunch?”

  “It was a rare meal Lorenza conjured, Genro, peculiar you weren’t there.”

  “She seemed more than willing to share dream chambers with us all.”

  “Ah, my roguish Captain, you have the secret amour, ne? For surely poor Lorenza’s behavior reveals the claws of a woman scorned.”

  “Or is it you, pauvre Genro, who have lost Lorenza’s favors? Is that the cause of your malaise? If so, allow me to suggest a stratagem d’amour which I’ve never known to fail…”

  “Certainement, mon cher, there are others more than willing to cast away your gloom. You need only look about you—or into my own eyes.”

  Und so weiter ad infinitum, as I wandered in a growing discomfort which began to take on an edge of anger as the proceedings evolved. For as they all assayed me, I passed over into judging them, and in my vision they were no less haunted figures than the Captain whom they regarded as such an object of psychic speculation.

  Indeed, while my admitted distraction might have wrapped me in enigma, and the disharmony between Captain and Domo might be ample cause for this social concern, the true meaning was beyond their courage to attempt to comprehend. Thus, while their perceptions were clouded by self-willed ignorance, mine were honed by the all-too-puissant clarity of the inner eye.

  From which vantage did all this gaiety seem somewhat overheated and thin, like a phantom oasis city shimmering in the desert eye. Like wasteland travelers, did they not dwell in their own mirage, wrapping their illusion round them in the empty awful night? So fragile was the structure of their reality that a single unsubsumed consciousness, a solitary ripple in their little pond, was enough to roil the social waters into a frothing, burbling foam.

  “Ach, the wandering spirit returns!”

  I was in the act of pouring wine into my goblet from a flagon, standing for the moment alone in a blue-illumined concavity, rather like a tiny sea-cliff grotto carved into the overhanging rock, a bubble of relative solitude, or so I had thought.

  But there Lorenza found me, and not without her entourage. Two of them were supporting her, or, rather, she lounged luxuriantly in their arms. Aga Henri Koram, the freeservant master of erotic entertainments, done up in bare chest and mail of brass, held her about the waist like a sack of plunder while she draped her arm around the neck of a thin blond fellow dressed in wine-red silks artfully arranged to simulate noble rags. Lorenza herself wore but a short white sarong clasped with a wooden brooch and slit to expose her inner thighs and a wreath of bejeweled golden flowers choked tight about her throat. Sweat glistened on her body or mayhap some unguent gel, and her ice-blue eyes were glazed with intoxicants and the reddened haze of voluptuary intent.

  Behind them, like the background in some erotic frieze, were half a dozen Honored Passengers similarly dressed for fetishistic fantasy of diverse styles and modes, leaning against each other and regarding me with lidded eyes.

  “Greetings, Lorenza,” I said stiffly. “I see you are enjoying the spirit of the fete.”

  At this, there was tipsy laughter from the followers in her train; no few of them were charged or moleculed, and sans doubt all of them were drunk.

  “And you, pauvre Genro, are your pleasures being met?” Lorenza said somewhat thickly. “Or would you care to join our troupe?”

  I stared evenly into her bleary eyes. “You seem quite well escorted at the moment,” I said. “What need do you have of me?”

  “What indeed!” she said with a sudden ice-hard coldness that provoked intakes of breath. The moment hung there suspended like a thundercloud of storm. Blue daggers of lightning seemed to flicker in her eyes. All within range seemed locked in unwholesome attention.

  “Ah, but surely, mon cher, there is always room for one more,” Aga said with naive good-naturedness despite his chosen persona of naked flesh and chains.

  With that, the tension burst into erotically overtoned laughter, in which all save Lorenza joined.

  “Yes, do come along, we have more than enough of everything to go around.”

  “Come let me stroke away your gloom.”

  “Let us all repair to a dream chamber and invent an erotic figure no one has seen before.”

  “What do you say, my gallant Captain, is this not an occasion to which you can rise?” Lorenza said in a slurry yet piercing tone that silenced the sycophantic rustlings like the cracking of a whip.

  “The question is, mon cher,” I snapped, “whether you can remain erect much longer.”

  There was a collective inhalation at my bluntly pointed rejoinder, a whiff of the ancient arena of our most timeless gladiator game; the onlookers observed this contretemps with a naked hungry glee.

  “Supinity will suffice for my part, ne, is not the other yours?”

  My ears fairly burned crimson and my groin grew damp and cold. The audience laughed uneasily in a squirm of sympathetically crawling flesh.

  “I fear our fair Domo has passed beyond the realm of nicety,” Aga said distastefully, loosening his grip upon her waist.

  “Oh, the niceties and gallantries have long since passed between the Captain and myself,” Lorenza pressed on, hazy of countenance but crystal cold of eye. “Verdad, Genro? No doubt there are numerous others who have piqued your manly interest. As there are others, many others, to be honored in your stead.”

  Now Aga disengaged himself with righteous manly indignation. But Lorenza barely noticed, merely flowing closer against her other momentary swain. “Unless you have become a sour celibate, as the all-knowing Sar would have it.”

  “Or perhaps there is another whose charms exceed your own,” I snapped back cruelly, no longer prudent in my shameful rage. “Is such an unlikely miracle beyond your ego’s power to imagin
e?”

  “Name her, then, and tell us her tale!” Lorenza said with serpent softness. “Produce this beauty for our delectation. Hide not treasures for yourself!”

  “And if she conducts her amours not as theater as some others I could name…?”

  Lorenza looked coldly into my eyes and I glared just as coldly back. Though my mocked and outraged manhood called for vengeance against her taunts, my higher cortex abruptly clarified with the knowledge that this scene had been played out much too far.

  Lorenza too seemed to have attained this relative state of cerebral civilization or at least had seen what was in my eyes; she gave off staring with a thespic wobble of her head, feigning a sudden awareness of her own intoxicated state.

  “I do believe I am not entirely within my powers, good playmates,” she said in an exaggeratedly syncopated voice. “Let us find a place softly cushioned and leave our Captain to his ectoplasmic soul-mate.”

  So saying, she departed with her entourage in her wake, and I stood there for quite some time in my shadowed little niche, watching them reel and bob like flotsam through the wrack of faces, spreading the gossip of this latest unsavory addition to my unwholesome mystique like windblown foam.

  —— XII

  By the time I had screwed up my courage and screwed down my anger to the point where I might risk another immersion in the floating cultura, the effects of the contretemps were all too evident in the lidded and carefully neutral eyes that everywhere met my glance, in the murmuring and swift whispering that sprang into being wherever I turned my back.

  Goaded into an unthinking reaction by intoxicated outrage to my manhood like some naive adolescent or detumescent aging roue, I had myself exacerbated exactly the perception that I had sought to prevent.