The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Streaming like a spiraling comet’s corona from this central anomaly, space was a reversed whirlpool of darkling nothingness smeared with a cloud of blue motes, forever exploding into being before me as I rode ever onward into the eye of the storm. Behind, the universe was a red-misted vagueness drawing down a long tunnel to a vanishing point, and the tunnel itself, the reality of my visual perception, seemed to have neither length nor sides.

  Unable to form this visual input into a coherent sensorium via quotidian parameters, my perceptual centers were forced to coalesce my consciousness around an altered matrix. This new spirit perceived itself as a viewpoint on the surface of its own sensorium, a second-order abstraction of the interface between sensory data flow and internal processing mechanism.

  Thus, even the absolutism of physical objectivity was revealed as arbitrary itself from the point of view of this ultimate subjectivity.

  From this altered perspective, I was riding through the cosmos in a bubble of time, which is to say that the only true reality was the great ship on which I stood and the viewpoint that stood upon it, for this was the only reality of which that viewpoint was equipped to form an image.

  Vraiment, was not that reality sufficient to fill the soul? There I stood, a tiny mote upon the back of this mighty metal leviathan, this great silent silvery dragon burning its way through the fabric of the universe itself, the ultimate defiance of the process from which it arose. And was I not, despite all fathomable appearances, the master of the preternatural behemoth on which I rode?

  Thus the warped and twisted reality radiating from the prow of the Dragon Zephyr became a mere artifact of the system, a phenomenon of the interface between a given input and the essential spirit within, which perceived it as through glass darkly.

  I had ventured into this realm in order to confront the unmediated absolute directly, but the revelation which it had forced upon me was the paradoxical nature of the conundrum of absolute reality itself.

  If this star-filled void had any objective reality, was it not that still, cold blackness of invariant crystal pinpointed with abstract points of light which was simulated by the ship’s teles? Contrariwise, was that diorama not an illusion, and the present unmediated natural chaos the unmasked face of the ultimate?

  Au contraire, was my present reality not an illusion generated by the relativistic motion of the ship?

  Vraiment, they were both real and both illusion. For was not the arbitrary distinction between illusion and reality the ultimate illusion itself?

  Cosmic physics informs us that our universe exploded into being from a single space-time point in the deep but finite past; particles, atoms, stars, planets, biospheres, sapience—all implied in that ancient eruption of existence into perfect void. Tambien do the cosmic physicists tell us that this hyperglobular shockwave of being is still expanding to fill the indefinable matrix in which it has occurred. But of that which surrounds this universal exploding mandala of space and time, even our greatest mages remain mute. Indeed, there is a theorem, proven unprovable by its own terms, that knowledge of what lies beyond the universal material matrix is by definition beyond the powers of an internal viewpoint to conceive.

  But as I stood there overcome by the spectacle and by this ultimate perception of that most essential of voids, I realized as well that by one single instrumentality did consciousness thrust its tendril beyond the absolute theoretical shell of this universal egg—the Jump itself transcended the absolute rules which prevailed within.

  And by so doing verified the possibility of attaining a viewpoint beyond maya’s veil.

  I marveled at the clarity of this awesome satori. The absolute reality of the Jump was confirmed within our quotidian realm by the translation of the ship from locus to locus in defiance of our treasured universal laws of mass-energy phenomena. Thus did our technology produce an effect which transcended the Weltanschauung of the very science that produced it, thus did the serpent of the cosmic paradox swallow its own tail, thus was chaos supreme reborn out of the ultimate order.

  I was daunted by the implications in our shadow world of forms. Of all phenomena in the realm of maya, only the Jump itself allowed the spirit to transcend the mass-energy matrix which gave it birth, and in a manner which paradoxically allowed our very instruments to record this fact. Yet just as my sensory perceptors could form no coherent image of the relativistic whirlwind at whose subjective focus I stood, so was our entire rational starfaring civilization unable to gaze with clarity into the anomaly in its very concept of reality, upon which it was nevertheless centered.

  Small wonder then that an intricate floating cultura had evolved to insulate starfarers from this perception. Less wonder still that this social matrix had evolved a wall of purdah to separate the rational will of its Void Captain from the transcendent reality of its Pilot. No wonder at all that these cultural instrumentalities rang hollow in the spirit of one who had seen too far.

  And if I, who even now still viewed the ultimate through distorted reflection from within the illusion, had become a rogue spirit within the human herd, what reality could a concept like social or even human morality have for Dominique, who had experienced the most intimate of congress with that which I apprehended only in tormented fantasy?

  Vraiment was the Great and Only that which served no other purpose than its own. Great. And Only. And solipsistically Lonely.

  The temporal duration of this satoric moment I perceived not; all this could have passed in an augenblick, or I might have stood there transfixed for an hour. Be that as it may, it was a moment that I passed through, not a state of being that my psyche could long coherently contain. And once I had passed through it, my vertigo returned redoubled, transformed from a confusion of the senses into a nausea of the spirit.

  On trembling knees and with my eyes downcast to focus on the mechanics of perambulation alone, I retreated to the egress hatch, all too aware as I crawled through it and closed it behind me that I was scuttling like a blinded mole back into the comforting darkness out of a surfeit of light.

  Reflexively, I activated the passageway’s tele as I waited for it to fill with air, retreating behind the illusion crafted by the sensors of my bunker, striving to purge my consciousness of its vertiginous clarity.

  When the atmospheric pressure had equalized, I folded my voidbubble, returned the belt to its rack, and shakily re-entered the reality of the ship.

  There in the corridor to be confronted by my Second Officer, Argus Edison Gandhi, regarding me with bemusement and no little concern as I emerged from the hatch.

  “Captain Genro? What are you doing here?”

  “I might ask the same question, Interface,” I rejoined hollowly.

  “There was an instrument reading to the effect that someone was out on the hull in this area,” she said. “Mori picked it up on a routine scan. I couldn’t find you, so I came here to investigate myself.” She peered at me narrowly. “Were you…outside?”

  I nodded silently, unable to frame a coherent verbal response.

  “Is there something wrong with this module? Do we have bolide damage? Did you detect an air leak?”

  “External conditions are nominal,” I managed to inform her authoritatively.

  “Well then, why were you outside?” Argus demanded, as if she were the senior officer.

  My initial impulse was to dismiss her with a frost of Captainly ire. My second thought was to invent a harmless anomaly which might have caused me to investigate. But as I regarded this ambitious young officer, this future Void Ship Captain, with her expression of dutiful earnestness, her air of self-conscious competence, and her uncomprehending rational bright eyes, I decided for once to be true to my own inner nature, and thereby, perhaps, to the respect I owed her as an officer and a fellow being.

  “You have never been outside, Argus?” I said.

  “In orbit, but never…never…out here…”

  “Well, neither had I before now. I thought it was time.”
/>   “Time?” she inhaled, openly regarding me now as an object of unwholesome speculation.

  “Time to apprehend the reality through which I guide my ship,” I dissembled. “Has it never occurred to you that we are in a sense traveling blind, that we perceive the seas we sail, as it were, only through the mediation of our technical instrumentalities? Have you never wished to experience the true void firsthand?”

  Her eyes widened. “Everything I have heard of the experience causes me to believe that it is unsettling in the extreme,” she said. “Is this not so?”

  “Verdad. But such unsettlement might make one a better officer, ne, certainement a more knowledgeable one at any rate. I commend it to your consideration, Interface.”

  “Are you ordering me to go outside, Captain Genro?” Argus said in a challenging tone of some insolence. But her expression belied this with a certain fearfulness.

  “I merely grant you the option of the experience,” I told her. “As I have granted myself.”

  “Captain, are you sure you—”

  “The matter is now closed,” I snapped in Captainly fashion, and I strode briskly up the corridor toward the habited areas of the ship without looking back, either upon the further reaction of my Second Officer or upon the gateway between our shared reality and that which lay beyond, through which I had perhaps even then irrevocably passed.

  Much to my dismay, but in a certain sense to a higher form of indifference, before many hours had passed, my sojourn in the void had become common knowledge, not to say obsessive gossip, within the floating cultura. No doubt in the absence of any order to the contrary, Argus had discussed the matter with Mori, who in turn could not have kept the tale from Rumi Jellah Cohn, and thence to the general diffusion via word of mouth. Perhaps Argus herself had also made the subject a matter of public conjecture so that the tale quickly rippled through the body politic from an ever-expanding multiplicity of foci.

  Whatever the vectors of diffusion, it soon became impossible for me to appear anywhere without my mental state and unfathomable motivation for this outre behavior becoming the center of both obliquely inquiring attention and pointedly averted eyes.

  Some, like Maddhi Boddhi Clear, Rumi, and a cosmological physicist named Einstein Shomi Ali, sought openly to engage me in discourse upon the subject of my questionable adventure. Einstein wished fervently to have a detailed description of the distortion effects; Rumi, seeking a somewhat deeper cut, wished me to repair to his cabin, where I could compare my sensory experience with certain paintings and objets d’art said to have been created by artists in various states of psychesomic transport. Maddhi, naturellement, in his florid public style, probed me for evidence of the traces of We Who Have Gone Before written in the perception of the naked firmament, although I sensed beneath this posturing a deeper longing to apprehend the essence of the experience itself.

  To this sort of interrogator I replied with candid truth, albeit of a careful narrowness defined by the parameters of the question. To the cosmologist, I described my sensory experience in terms of distortion, without divulging the psychic consequences. Rumi I put off with the generality that no art I had ever seen expressed this reality, although perhaps in future I would accept his invitation to peruse his collection of arcana. Chez Maddhi, I told him my experience had led me to believe in the ultimate sincerity of his ultimate quest, though I had detected no trace of alien sapience.

  In truth I obtained a certain unwholesome satisfaction from speaking at last from my authentic spirit, be that essence as it may, rather than dissembling through my persona, though I retained enough self-consciousness of the necessities of my Captainly role to refrain from transcending the Weltanschauung of my questioners.

  As for those, who, like Sar, Argus, Mori, Aga, and most of all our Domo Lorenza, sought to diagnose my malaise with oblique inanities and loaded pleasantries, it was this insinuating interrogation which finally drove me to the solitude of my cabin somewhat against my will.

  The vague inquiries as to my pattern of sleep, content of dreams, and physiological function were discomforting enough, but when Lorenza turned this process into a public inquisition, I could tolerate it no longer.

  Although I had been scrupulously avoiding her company as best I could, the most socially conspicuous figure aboard could hardly expect to escape confrontation with the mistress of the Grand Palais indefinitely.

  I was sitting in the refectory of the cuisinary deck where hunger had driven me when the inevitable occurred. Here, where the long white tables and bench seating created the communal ambiance of a barracks dining hall, one might assuage one’s hunger without making of it a social event, at least to the extent that such a thing was possible to the Captain of the ship. Though the public refectory was crowded, here the social niceties required that one did not engage in conversation with one’s neighbor unless the desire was mutual, and such solitary communion with one’s meal was not looked at askance.

  Thus, I had for the moment successfully retreated both from babbling tongues and from inner voices into the sensory universe of a platter of Pasta Goreng a la Fruit de Mer, a confection of noodles, vegetables, seafood, eggs, and spices of daunting complexity, when Lorenza made her grand entrance.

  Bereft now of retinue, she was dressed in a simple white costume of pantaloons and blouson, and her long hair had been gathered behind her neck in a queue. Sans bijoux or pigments, she seemed a bit puffed and haggard, as if from a surfeit of pleasures perhaps too determinedly pursued. Nevertheless, it was impossible for Lorenza Kareen Patali to enter a room in a style not calculated to announce her presence, and not for our Domo the etiquette of privacy in a communal dining hall. She marched up to where I sat and seated herself beside me in a manner which brooked not of the possibility of suave dismissal.

  “I’m sorry for my outburst in the grand salon, Genro,” she said in a normal tone of voice which nonetheless carried to at least the nearest half-dozen Honored Passengers scattered the length of the table. “I had partaken of a considerable complexity of spirits, molecules, and charges and was in the throes of amorous intrigues as well.”

  “A trifling event,” I said with a combination of gallantry, true indifference, and desire to keep the subject closed. “We all have such moments, ne?”

  “But it was an act of cruelty to tax you for your erotic indifference when in fact you were suffering from some deeper malaise.”

  This remark sufficed to draw my attention up from my platter to regard her with raised brows. Tambien did the attention of all within earshot focus upon this confrontation, though their eyes were fixed all the more fully on the meals before them.

  “Ach, pauvre Genro, it is known to one and all that you have been wandering all over the hull of the ship like a lost soul,” she said with an expression of solicitude, although it was impossible not to detect a certain malicious edge to her voice. “How gauche of me to attribute your lack of ardor to indifference to feminine charms when in fact you were the victim of some psychesomic dysfunction.”

  “I am aware of no such malady,” I said frostily, squirming under the covert but obvious scrutiny of our tablemates.

  Lorenza leaned closer, as if into a sphere of confidentiality, but curbed not her verbal projection. “Ah, mon cher, that is the most disturbing symptom of all. You behave like an amateur erotique in the dream chamber with one who has already experienced your sophistication in the tantric arts, you engage in strange seances with the likes of Maddhi Boddhi Clear, you float silently about the ship like a ghost, you spend long periods in solitary brooding, and finalement, you wander…outside where no sane person would want to venture, and yet you cannot detect any dysfunction in your behavior!” Diagonally across the table, a woman made tiny choking noises as if swallowing her laughter, and several pairs of eyes could not resist sidelong glances.

  “I am not aware that my duties have not been performed properly,” I said angrily. “As for the rest, there are philosophic concerns which may cause th
e attention to transcend the realms of social niceties and erotic interest, though mayhap these are beyond your comprehension.”

  Lorenza clicked her tongue and shook her head slowly in a ruefully maternal manner. “Mon pauvre petit,” she crooned with poisonous sweetness, “I seek to aid your recovery, not chide your actions. It is likely your condition has some organic basis, I do believe. Have you trouble sleeping? Does your breath have a peculiar savor? Are you experiencing cerebral agues?”

  I glared at her in something of an impotent rage. The attention of the surrounding Honored Passengers had now become forthrightly overt and titillation seemed to have been replaced in several cases by a certain fearful concern for the mental equilibrium of their Captainly steward.

  “My sleep is undisturbed, my breath offends not my own senses, nor do I suffer head pains,” I snapped.

  “Is your appetite lethargic or outre?” she persisted. “Is your sense of smell perhaps preternaturally keen? Are your bowel movements regular?”

  “I hardly believe my defecations or lack thereof are a fit subject of discourse between us in this or any other venue!” I shouted in dumbfounded outrage.

  The murmurings of conversation lapsed into total silence throughout the entire dining room. All eyes were turned in my direction. Brows were raised, jaws hung agape, and I was suddenly surrounded by a mass perception of my own unwholesome exposure so naked and complete as to set my face burning.

  “Poor Genro,” Lorenza said into this thespic hush, touching a hand to my flaming cheek. “Do you now not think it wise to seek medical attention?”

  I could hear the intake of breath at the voicing of this suggestion, and I could see a dozen glances exchanged with nearly imperceptible nods, as if Lorenza had spoken for them.

  I bolted to my feet, flinging my chopsticks into my dish with disgust, and raked my gaze angrily around the room so as to compel a ripple of averted faces.

  “I thank you for your solicitude,” I snarled at Lorenza, “but I, not you, am still the ultimate authority on this ship! You would do well to keep your insinuations to yourself!”