The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  “You have never seen the face of a Pilot who has died in the Jump,” she began. “Aber, mon cher, I have, on the Feather Serpent, the face of the Pilot who died on that voyage, Dominique Noda Benares, whose destiny and freenom I took upon viewing it.”

  She shivered. For a moment her eyes became shimmers of mirrored opacity, but then I began to glimpse something forming out of my own inner chaos beginning to be reflected back.

  “Tres drole, no, sehr macabre, I look into the face of a corpse, and I know that I can be a Pilot, and I know tambien that I must. Had you seen it, Genro, perhaps you would understand. The face of a soul that had died transformed.”

  In her eyes, in the memory of her own mask of comatose bliss glimpsed on the gurney, in the congruence of her words with Maddhi Boddhi Clear’s description of the dying moment of his lover who had sought this apotheosis on the altar of We Who Have Gone Before ecstatically impaled on his lance, I could almost see the dead Pilot’s face.

  “Perhaps I am beginning to understand,” I said. “You sought that blissful moment of final release, you were seduced by ecstatic death.”

  Dominique shrugged, breaking the intensity of the moment, perhaps through breathless choice. “Could I truly know what I was seeking before my first Jump?” she said. “I knew not what I sought, only where it was to be found. It took me many Jumps to begin to understand.”

  She paused, breaking eye contact and leaning back against the pillows as if to inform me that this discourse had a distance to go before it reached the answer I both sought and dreaded.

  “Dominique Noda Benares must have been gifted by fate with the death of the body in the moment of the Jump. Somehow, the Feather Serpent passed through, and she went on.”

  “Went on?”

  “On. On and on and on. Forever.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Poor creature, of course you do not!” she said ruefully. “To you, the Jump is an augenblick too brief to register on your instruments, nicht wahr, aber within it lies eternity. There is no time in the Great and Only; therefore, within it, there is all time. There is no space, and so there is all space. Nothing is contained, and so the spirit contains all…” She shrugged, she squirmed, her face twisted and twitched, as if her whole corpus were frustrated by the impossibility of speaking the unwordable.

  “The antique human religions, nicht wahr,” she finally said, “with their cravings for nirvana, Atman, life everlasting in the heavens above—these must have been dim perceptions of that which underlies and transcends this temporal illusion, where spirit grows from flesh, only to depart into the nothingness from which it came.”

  She sighed. She smiled at me, a smile not without human warmth but not without something else too.

  “We swim in deep waters, liebchen,” she said softly. “Con su permiso, we go deeper still. I hold back nothing; I tell you my dream that I have never dared to reveal to another soul. The dream that makes me a sport even among Pilots, the hope that has caused me to preserve my flesh with nutriment and exercise so that it may maintain my spirit in this realm as long as possible. I have told you I do this so as to experience as many Jumps as possible in my life span. But now that I have found you, I reveal the truth of which that is the shadow…”

  She stared into my eyes, uncertainly it seemed, as if trying to verify some conclusion written therein. I stared back at her shorn of all artifice or manipulative intent, opening my windows to reveal whatever unknown essence she sought to perceive within.

  “My dream, cher Genro, is to find a Captain who will help me to make one last Jump into the Great and Only, who will let me go on and not come back. And I believe I have found him in you.”

  “WHAT?”

  “You have heard of the Blind Jump, nicht wahr,” she said in a strange, distant tone that seemed to echo down the corridors of my mind. Without conscious awareness of the process until it was completed, I found myself sinking silently into the pillows beside her as if my body were no longer willing to bear its own weight.

  “No one here knows what happens to a ship that Jumps Blind except that it vanishes from the here and now,” she went on. “Science has its limited surmises as to how. A malfunction of the electronic instrumentality. Biological failure as the overlay guides the Pilot through the cusp. Some mad test of a Pilotless Jump Circuit. This much you are taught at your Academy, verdad?”

  I nodded numbly, reduced to silent absorption of what I already sensed was about to be revealed.

  “But there is that of which the scientists dare not speak,” she said. “The Blind Jump achieved by the will humaine. Aber not by the will of the Pilot. What I have sought is a Captain of the Void with the vision and the understanding to do it for me. And you, mein Genro, are you that man?”

  “What is it you expect me to do?” I whispered.

  “In technical terms, a trivial act. It is the vector coordinate overlay which guides the Pilot and through her the ship through the Great and Lonely back into this pale realm, nicht wahr, which forces her spirit to return. When next we Jump, neglect to feed the vector coordinate overlay into the Jump Circuit computer, let me Jump free, up and out and on into the Great and Only. Set me free, liebe Genro, set me free!”

  “Set you free!” I shouted. “Kill myself and destroy my ship for the sake of your cosmic Unnamable! What ego! What arrogance! What madness! What demonic gall! How can you believe that I would even consider such a thing? What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  Dominique looked back into my outrage with eyes of black ice. “You were told that to achieve what fleshly destiny has decreed you can never have you must forsake all else, mannlein. You were told that you must be mad or sane enough to follow the path to its ultimate end. Now you have arrived.”

  Her voice had become distant and hard and cosmically cold, sans emotion humaine, sans pity, sans morality, and yet, somehow, informed by a quality that seemed to transcend all of these.

  “What happens to a ship that Jumps Blind, Genro?” she asked in that same even and unyielding voice.

  “No one knows,” I said softly. “No one can.” But already my visceral precognition was oozing forward within my bowels toward the awful inevitable, toward the ultimate and monstrous bargain offered up to my soul.

  “If Pilot and ship Jump free into the Great and Only, if there is no vector coordinate overlay to dragoon us back, will we not go on together eternally in the timelessness beyond the void, and will that untimebound moment not last forever for our spirits? Free me, Genro. Free me and I’ll take you with me.”

  “And everyone else on this ship.”

  “Yes,” she said coldly, without a flicker of regret or guilt.

  “That’s mass murder…,” I declared righteously. “That’s evil beyond all rationalization…”

  “Only if you also believe it is suicide,” she said evenly. “Aber chez moi, if you believe as I believe, as you cannot help yourself from believing, is it not the bestowing of the ultimate good?”

  “No man has the right to make such a choice for another,” I said firmly. In that, at least, my conviction was not feigned.

  “Forsaking…all…else…,” she said slowly and harshly, emphasizing every syllable as if to express the whole as a single, terrible, indivisible truth. “You were told that was the price. All else, mannlein. All considerations of this shadow realm.”

  My heart seemed to stop in my chest as I saw my own depths mirrored in her eyes. As I looked through those windows into the eternity within, time froze, perspective reversed itself, and all that I saw seemed a reflection of myself.

  “I’d never do such a thing,” I said bloodlessly. “Surely you must realize that.” Was the waver only in my voice, or had it already come to express a tremor in my resolve? Was it the thin, knowing smile on her lips that made my own words ring hollow in my ears, or was it already the shadow of the inevitable emerging like leviathan from my own depths?

  “There are many Jumps between here and Estr
ella Bonita,” Dominique said calmly, dismissing my protestations from her discourse as if their finality had never been uttered. “And never is not so long a time as forever, verdad?”

  Our eyes locked in a long, silent contest of wills.

  “Never,” I finally said, crawling from that bed of unspeakable temptation to stand as my own man. “And never will I allow you to tempt me so again. I put all this behind me! It’s time we said goodbye.”

  She looked up at me evenly as I backed toward the door. “Say what you will, mon cher,” she said with ruthless knowingness, “this is only auf wiedersehen.”

  —— XIII

  I wandered sternward down the main corridor in a daze, or, mayhap, stunned by the clarity of too much truth. Past the entrances to the stateroom module and Grand Palais and through the cross traffic as if on rails, oblivious to anything outside the compass of my own inner universe. If indeed anything could be said to exist outside the parameters of the conundrum which had now become my own inner demon.

  I had exited Dominique’s cabin in a burst of righteous indignation, but this emotional clarity felt fraudulent even as I allowed it to move me; and once I was outside, other, more serpentine voices became insinuated in my inner ear, and all I knew at that moment was that I had to escape the chaos inside my own mind before I could even begin to center a focus.

  In previous bouts of what the ship’s gossip was no doubt calling my cafard, I had sought out either the solitude of my cabin or the pseudo-natural realm of the vivarium as refuge from the storm, but now the company of my own four walls offered anything but the promise of escape, and the vivarium, with its simulated biosphere and false sky seemed but the quintessence of the floating cultura of maya. As for social roles and niceties with my fellow denizens, I hardly trusted my ability to maintain a coherent persona.

  My feet propelled me ever sternward, beyond the habited area of the ship, into the sections of corridor to which the various freight modules were secured; regularly spaced hatches leading to inspection passageways lined this seldom-traveled section of the Dragon’s spine on both sides. As this pattern became a featureless generality my footsteps slowed, my mind began to ruminate on what my spirit had swallowed, and I began to understand why I had brought myself here.

  The true ambivalence of my connection empathetique to Dominique Alia Wu could not for long be subsumed under the rubric of moral outrage, which is not to say that in a moral matrix her small suggestion was less that outrageous. But I could not deny that my spirit was amorally attracted to this ultimate temptation as my conscience was morally repelled by it.

  As for emotions of a human level, here too, repulsion and attraction were locked in stasis around the central void.

  Had this utterly ruthless creature not seduced me step by step into this ultimate confrontation with my own spirit for her own self-proclaimed higher purpose which brooked of no tender feelings for me as a man? Or had something in her sensed a kindred something in me which drew us together in our outre tantric pattern like the more fleshly but no less unwilled tropism of mutual pheromonic lust?

  Certainement, there was truth between us, in abundant surfeit. Truth absolute, truth noir, but truth without a moral dimension. My very state of being proclaimed that we were, alas, kindred spirits, although that to which we together were kin might be a less than romantic matter.

  Against the will of self-esteem’s desire, I could not fail to acknowledge that the true chasm between us lay both below and beyond the moral realm of ethical esthetics. Indeed, her ruthless dedication to her one true grail, proceeding as it did from a single absolute axiom to an entirely unwavering pursuit of this axiomatic higher good, might be said to be at least formally superior to my chaotic involutions.

  Which is to say that I had become a creature of unresolved doubt while she never doubted her priorities for a single instant.

  Did I not envy such terrible clarity of spirit even as I was repelled and outraged by its ultimate expression in the realm of action? For her certainty, her ghastly willingness to ignore all morality in the pursuit of the eternal Great and Only, was based upon the actual experience, whereas my morally superior outrage was that of a spirit in ignorance.

  Each cargo module was connected to the central core of the Dragon Zephyr by an inspection passageway. Each passageway had a tele monitor for inspecting the condition of its module via remotes. In case of emergency necessity, each passageway was also equipped with an egress and a rack of voidbubble belts.

  Excursions out onto the exterior of a Void Ship faring between the stars at relativistic high velocity are not common, which is to say that, uncommon as they are, Void Ship crews would prefer that they be less common still. Indeed I had attained to my Captain’s rank and served in that capacity for many years without ever experiencing the unmediated reality of the interstellar void.

  The bridge tele and lesser viewers scattered all over the ship were all equipped with compensation circuits which rendered outside reality not as it would have appeared to the naked senses but as the eye would have perceived the galactic abyss from some abstract point of rest Thus, the starry seas I surveyed from my throne on the bridge were at once another illusion and recreated reality in its untimedistorted incarnation.

  Those whom emergency has constrained to work outside a ship declare the experience most unsettling. At these relativistic speeds, the spectrum is dopplered blue toward the bow, red toward the stern, and the shockwave of the ship as its shield deflects the velocity-compacted interstellar medium paints a rainbow aura before it; these effects, however, are said to be mere outre visual curiosities. But the bending of space itself does things to the human visual sensorium that are described as akin to staring into the foveal blind spot in effect, if not in content.

  Despite the queasy and arcane repute of this experience, in another sense because of it, I found myself opening a hatch and entering an inspection passageway, moved by the perverse determination to match Dominique’s experiential knowledge of the naked void with as close an encounter as I could conjure this side of sharing her Blind Jump.

  Quien sabe? Somehow I felt I owed such a direct confrontation to her and to myself; somehow I perhaps believed that the most absolute morality demanded that I look as deeply into the ultimate as my nature would permit before I could in true conscience put it behind me. Only by facing that reality could I in true clarity renounce it.

  The inspection passageway was a simple flextube connection between the Dragon’s spine and the freight module, about fifty meters long and atmosphere-sealed at either end so as to do double duty as a roughhewn airlock. Immediately upon entering, I confronted the rack of voidbubble belts, donning one and sealing the hatch behind me before proceeding up the tube to the simple egress hatch equidistant from both ends. This was equipped with a system for valving air in and out of the sealed passageway, and twin green-glowing ready points, which now indicated that the seal was complete.

  The tele remote monitor was installed directly across the tube from the egress for convenience’ sake, and before erecting my bubble, I paused before it to regard for the last time with virgin eyes the electronic simulacrum that had always been my least-indirect perception of the reality of the deep interstellar void.

  The image on the tele screen was a snugly contained picture of what lay beyond the ship’s skin, unlike the great firmament of illusion which overarched the bridge; the necessary distortion of representational scale served, in that moment, to render the still pointillist starscape obviously unreal.

  Nevertheless, it was, in a sense, a truer image of the reality than my naked vision was about to experience in the reality itself. On the tele, the distortion was the product of craft and intellect striving to represent an image of the absolute from a theoretical point of detachment, whereas the relativistic distortions of the raw reality were the means by which random chaos hid behind its own veil.

  Thus did that which lay beyond the egress insinuate its vibrations into my perceptua
l field by the mere fact of my decision to confront it. I erected my bubble of polarized force and began valving air out of the passageway, staring at the tele as the pressure came down as if to impress this human representation of the transhuman reality onto my brain before venturing forth.

  All exterior surfaces of the Dragon Zephyr were charged with a quarter-gravity field perpendicular to their plane, so that when I opened the egress hatch and crawled out, I was immediately able to rise to my feet and stand at an unsettling angle to the curved exterior of the passageway without kinesthetic vertigo or back-brain fear of falling, like a fly upon a glowglobe.

  When I allowed my visual focus to shift from the metal beneath my feet, however, my equilibrium was severely taxed.

  I was standing on a thin branch of an enormous metal tree, the stem, as it were, of one of the dozens of huge metallic fruit depending from the trunk of the Dragon’s spine, which towered up toward a rainbow sheen high above me. Attempts to look out into the depths around me were met by a sense of nauseous and formless constriction, as if reality itself were hiding in the blind spot of my visual field no matter where I tried to focus my gaze. Blue-and-red-streaked reflections in a black distorting mirror swirled around me at the edge of my peripheral vision, which itself seemed to iris in to a narrow perceptual tunnel warped at a bizarrely pitched angle.

  Stomach heaving, I redirected my visual focus to the sight of my feet touching metal, and walked hastily and easily with my eyes downcast to the juncture of the passageway tube with the central core of the Dragon. Here I placed one foot on the “wall” before me, leaned backward as I completed the perpendicular step, and found myself standing on the ship’s spine itself, looking forward along the mighty length of my vessel.

  Like an immense metal javelin, the Dragon’s spine on which I stood seemed to pierce the fabric of space as it hurtled into the rainbow shield of the ship’s deflectors, a giant needle whose prick maintained a prismatic meniscus of surface tension through the oil-slick surface of reality.