The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  So saying, and with the lack of any other recourse, I stalked out of the room in righteous outrage, but not quite swiftly enough to escape the sound of the pandemonium that erupted as soon as my back was fairly turned.

  I could not have been sulking in my cabin for more than an hour when Healer Lao interrupted my broodings with a request via the annunciator to visit the sick bay for a medical perusal, which, he solicitously hoped, would restore the confidence of crew and Honored Passengers in the health of the Captain of their ship.

  Nor could I say that such a summons had been entirely unexpected. While there was no authority aboard to supersede my own, in extreme instances a Captain might be placed under medical supervision of the Healer if that functionary was sufficiently convinced of his inability to perform his duties to risk his own career on such a diagnosis and if the Second Officer could be persuaded to assume command under the circumstances at even greater risk than his own.

  Such involuntary transfers of command have been exceedingly rare, and instances in which the Healer and Second Officer involved were later held blameless are rarer still, to the point where the particulars of them all are known by all Academy graduates.

  Therefore there remains a wise and practical ambiguity as to such procedures; the situation is recognized as one by definition so extreme that no regulation can define its parameters. Thus an extreme politesse is maintained in these matters between all parties. I could refuse Healer Lao’s request with Captainly impunity, but to do so might incline him to draw conclusions therefrom which could expand speculation further and cause him to ponder more extreme measures. Whereas a cooperative attitude and a nominal chart, as it were, might do much to tranquillify the situation if it were made public knowledge.

  I therefore readily agreed to proceed to the sick bay at once and made my passage thence as conspicuous as possible, rather than slinking like a miscreant to some shameful venue. Indeed, I took several conversational opportunities to inform the generality that I was on my way to the examination, a disclosure which was greeted with a mixture of relief and bemusement.

  Only when I reached the Healer’s lair was my composure fractured. For waiting for me there amidst the cabinets, chaises, and instruments was not a solitary Hippocratic monk, but a veritable conclave of inquisition: Lorenza, Argus, and Maestro Hiro himself, surrounding the obviously disquieted Lao with grim expressions.

  “What is the meaning of this?” I snapped, donning my persona of command.

  “This examination was suggested by our Domo,” Lao said uneasily.

  “And by myself as well,” said Argus. “When Domo Lorenza told me of your bizarre behavior in the refectory, I agreed that such was prudent, coming so soon after our own encounter. I trust you will accept our initiative in the dutiful spirit in which it was intended.”

  “Under the circumstances, Healer Lao naturally thought it meet to have me present,” Maestro Hiro said evenly.

  I paused on the brink of asserting my power to dismiss these onlookers; to avoid the appearance of a conspiracy against me, they could hardly refuse to grant me privacy, and I was outraged by their unseemly presumption.

  But upon reflection, I realized that I had much to gain and little to lose by their witness. In the unlikely event that Healer Lao was willing to opine that my functionality was impaired, they would be informed in any case, and when I was found fit to command, as I was certain I would be, what better vectors to spread the word of this outcome than my chastened accusers?

  I met their eyes, one pair after the other, with a cold, unwavering gaze. “Very well,” I said, “since you all consider yourselves sympathetically interested parties, I would be an ingrate and a churl not to allow you to remain. Let us proceed expeditiously; I wish to have my usual full untroubled sleep before the next Jump.”

  And so, under the nervous gaze of my Second Officer, the professional neutrality of Maestro Hiro, and the lidded stare of Lorenza, the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr gave his corpus up to the probings, readings, samplings, and palpations of the ship’s Healer. Electrodes of all sorts were attached to various portions of my anatomy, samples of blood, skin, hair, saliva, and the like were collected and analyzed. Arcane instruments were passed over, around, upon, and into my nooks and crannies.

  At length, vraiment at considerable length, these rituals were concluded, and the diverse data digested by a med computer, which shortly displayed a summary readout for the perusal of Healer Lao and Maestro Hiro.

  The two medical officers studied this for a time together, whispered to each other briefly, nodded their agreement, shrugged, and turned to report their findings.

  “Well?” I demanded. “Is there any evidence of dysfunction?”

  “Your metabolic intake has a slight insufficiency of calcium, your brainwaves indicate an undesirable level of fatigue, and there is a noticeable deficiency of iron in your corpuscles,” Healer Lao said owlishly. “I advise you to consume more cheeses, fresh green vegetables, and organ meats and to sleep more regularly.”

  “And you, Maestro Hiro, do you have anything to add to this calamitous diagnosis?”

  “Only that such an examination reveals only the absence of any somic components of psychic malaise,” he replied unhappily. “Without a detailed psychic audit of some duration, no further conclusions can be drawn, for only subjective analysis can detect purely psychic anomalies.”

  “But what of behavioral bizarrities?” Lorenza demanded. “Surely these are objective evidence of a malfunctioning mind?”

  “Behavioral bizarrities?” I shouted. “I lust not after your favors, I choose not to make idle conversation, I exercise my Captainly prerogatives to inspect the exterior of my ship, and these are self-evident proofs of derangement?”

  “There has been no talk of derangement,” Lao said soothingly, clearly embarrassed at such unseemliness in his sanctum.

  “Indeed?” I said with exaggerated evenness. “Then you are now willing to attest to my full possession of sapient sanity?”

  “I have no cause to attest otherwise,” he replied.

  “Then as far as I am concerned, the matter is ended,” I declared. “Be assured that I lodge no recriminations. My Med crew was merely performing its appointed duty, and my Second Officer can be accused of nothing worse than an excessive concern for the safety of the ship.”

  I shifted my attention to Lorenza, whom I had deliberately exempted from this profession of forgiveness. “As for you, cher Lorenza,” I said cruelly, “while your comportment has been less than exemplary, who cannot forgive the folly of a woman scorned?”

  With a wordless growl of outrage, Lorenza stormed from the room.

  As Argus somewhat shamefacedly made to follow, I held her back. “A moment please, Interface, I have an order to give you before you are dismissed.”

  Argus turned to regard me with a neutral professional readiness which aroused my own professional admiration under the circumstances even though my ire against her could hardly be said to have completely cooled.

  “I delegate to you the duty of reporting via the ship’s annunciators the result of this inquiry,” I said.

  Her eyes widened. Lao and Hiro glanced at each other in bemusement.

  “You…you wish me to report publicly to the Honored Passengers that the Captain is in full possession of his faculties?” she said incredulously.

  “I order you to do so, Interface,” I said. “Since you so rightly perceived it your duty to ask the question on behalf of the commonality, it is tambien your duty to announce the answer to same, nicht wahr?”

  “Captain, do you think such a procedure is advisable?” Maestro Hiro said.

  “If I did not, I would hardly issue the order.”

  “But—”

  “Enough,” I said roughly, but without losing control. “In medical matters, I defer to your judgment, as I have just proven. But as Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, I will brook no argumentation on the procedural orders I give on my ship.”

&n
bsp; And to spare both them and myself further confrontation, I let that caveat serve as my exit, assured that I had reestablished the rightful authority of my command.

  —— XIV

  The telling of this tale nears its end; soon, all too soon, I must put aside this word crystal encapsulating the past and face the ultimate consequences of my action in realtime. While I approach the moment when I must leave this cabin to confront my Honored Passengers and crew with something less than serenity, I believe that these confessions have lightened my burden, not so much through the hoary tradition of guilt-lancing self-flagellation as by enabling me to view past incarnations through hindsight’s ruthless clarity and by so doing becoming at least no less than the integrated product of assimilated karma.

  In such a state of clear untimebound composure, I can now comprehend the wisdom, or at the very least the low self-serving cunning, of what from a more merely rational perspective, such as that of Argus or Maestro Hiro, must have seemed self-defeating madness. For the Captain of the ship to order the Second Officer to publicly proclaim that he has been found not mad was, naturellement, to induce the opposite impression in the community at large to the detriment of his authority.

  While such a bizarre pronunciamento from any quarter could hardly fail to exacerbate the paranoia of the floating cultura, by ordering Argus to make it instead of the Healer himself, I had served public notice that my ability to command had been challenged, that the ship’s Healer had found me fit, and that therefore this question was now closed by order of the Captain and accepted as such by his Second Officer.

  Thus, from the moment of that announcement to my present command of this Pilotless marooned ship, no further challenge to my authority has presumed to appear, despite the growing conviction that I was possessed by dark demons. Having quashed the notion of my psychic inability to perform my duty at this stage and in such a self-evidently outre manner, I had divorced the definition of my sanity as Captain from acts performed outside that official role. That I was irrevocably in command had become axiomatic. Like Ahab, I had made myself an object of fearful mystery whose very darkness enhanced his charisma, a figment of inevitable destiny.

  Naturellement, such clear self-awareness informed not the deed in the doing; indeed, at that point I could not have been more indifferent to the social perception of my image, for my central concern was to encapsulate myself in solitude so as to confront my own tormented being.

  For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight. Social morality requires a shared matrix of communal reality to which to relate thought and deed, and the illusion of an objective ethical esthetic requires at the very least the conviction that objective reality is more than a contradiction in terms.

  But I had passed over to a realm of perception where all that could be said to have objective existence was the conundrum of unknowable chaos out of which our quotidian relativities spring. And the only phenomenon of the dance of maya which touched any absolute ground was the Jump itself. By this instrumentality alone was the veil parted, revealing the trace of the Great and Only in the ship’s translation through it.

  Had my mind therefore not accepted through a form of reason, that which my spirit could seek but not touch? Did I not then comprehend that in the most absolute sense only this Void beyond the void was real and that I myself existed as a shadow in a world of shadows?

  This conviction grew within me as I went through the motions of the next Jump ritual, exchanging stiff orders and affectless phrases with Mori and Argus, who remained, like myself, sealed within duty from any emotional acknowledgments of the tension on the bridge.

  In retrospect, I do not think that I could have been unaware of the odor of psychic ozone which had pervaded the ship as I marched from my cabin to the bridge, nor of the uneasy greeting I received upon entering, nor of the carefully unacknowledged pregnancy of the Jump countdown itself. Rather did I simply not deign to pay it heed, for was this not a mere shadow play itself?

  Tambien do I now believe that I could not have been unaware of the ultimate implication of this logic, though by some functionally protective psychic mechanism I succeeded in hiding the knowledge from myself.

  Which is to say that even then I saw that from what had become our shared Weltanschauung, Dominique’s ruthless indifference to all but the absolute goal could not be judged against any system of merely human morality. If only the Great and Lonely was really real, then only it was absolute, and any ethical esthetic which denied this truth was a formal failure.

  In a sprach more terribly plain, I had reached the point of no way out but through, though I dared not admit this to myself.

  Au contraire, I sought to use the Jump ritual to deny this unacknowledged inner reality, to mechanize the experience, to purge it of its erotic charge.

  Indeed, as I went through the motions in a detumescent disconnected trance like some ancient manual laborer moving to the rhythm of a collective worksong, outer reality made no connection to my inner realms until Argus spoke the words “Vector coordinate overlay on your board.”

  Then, abruptly, inner and outer reality snapped into congruent focus at the glowing red point of tangency between decision and mechanism, perception and morality, the Captain and the spirit—the command point beneath my fingertip.

  It all came down to this act or its exclusion. Duty demanded that I touch this glowing point and dump the vector coordinate overlay into the Jump Circuit Computer, thereby ensuring the safe passage of my ship through the Jump and back into the world of men. Temptation’s fulfillment required only that I omit to will its denial.

  I could never face this moment again without this awareness of its true meaning.

  And as I achieved this chilling satori, my finger came down like a reflex hammer, as if to avoid the awful responsibility of this conscious choice. “Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit Computer,” I fairly sighed in relief.

  So doing, I then erected the Jump Field aura and commanded the Jump itself without any psychic connection to these acts. And in the moment of the Jump, I felt nothing at all.

  For I now knew that my fantasies were fraudulent and empty if I had not the courage or moral monstrousness to act, mere masturbation when the means to true mutual fulfillment for myself and Dominique were mine to command.

  At this point, naturellement, I had long since passed the point of inevitability as I slid down the geodesic of my lifeline toward my present destiny, but the acceptance of such a conclusion was still anathema to the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, the Genro who had been, still loyal to his command.

  Thus in a mode of abnegating and slowly eroding denial, I determined to relegate myself to isolation, both from the temptation and irresistible influence of any congress with Dominique, and from the milieu of social consequences, which for me had become a shadow play in which my role was Flying Dutchman at the fete.

  Like that ghostly Hollander, I haunted my cabin, or, daunted by my own unwholesome company, wandered the corridors of my ship in an ectoplasmic phase that allowed no connection to protoplasmic beings.

  “All else,” Dominique had said often enough, “is waiting.” Now I experienced the true vacuum implied therein, a state in which no event was meaningful, in which no figure stood out from ground to mark the slow crawl of time.

  Thus was I reduced to measuring its passage by conventional instruments, becoming a watcher of timepieces and schedules, running a mental countdown to the next Jump as I waited for hands to move and digits to change. Twenty hours to the next Jump, and Dominique was being transferred from sick bay to her cabin. Sixteen hours, and by now her coma would be lightening to a more normal sleep, and consciousness would be slowly coalescing out of the Great and Lonely dream. Fifteen hours, and by now I should be on my way to her cabin…

  Of the
venues of previously mechanically passed hours I remember only a gray generality, but the moment I realized that I was now making the choice to eschew our by-now-regular assignation engraved itself with painful clarity on my memory track.

  It was precisely fifteen hours till the next Jump, and I can recall this datum with such precision because I was eating a solitary meal in my cabin, staring at a down-counter I had set with the Jump as zero point and watching the digits change. As they did so, I felt a coldness in my limbs, whatever I was chewing turned to paste in my mouth, and for the first time since Dominique had presented me with her ultima thule and my terrible temptation, the faint uncoiling rustles of my kundalinic serpent.

  Sense memories of our previous erotic encounters were released by this missed beat in our rhythm, and with them the memory of the state of being produced by her descriptive and erotic ministrations, and with that, the lust to regain it, transcending the morality of lesser desires. But with that frisson of arational temptation came the realization that this aching throb of nerve endings was directed not at the flesh of Dominique Alia Wu but through it to what lay beyond, to the state I had denied to both of us when my finger had reflexively dumped the vector coordinate overlay into the computer.

  I wanted to do this thing. I could no longer deny the reality of this terrible lust. I could no longer pretend that powerful components of my psyche which might be called my essential spirit did not long to commit it in defiance of all other considerations. I was horrified by the presence of this monster within me; at the same time I despised the coward crucifying the highest impulse of his spirit upon an ethical code.

  Nevertheless, I was gripped in the bounds of both a denial-stiffened determination of Captainly will and a karmic equation of far greater puissance. Just as my role in this transaction as commander of the Jump had been revealed as both engine of ecstasy and ultimate denier of its highest fulfillment, so did I now perceive that the being denied was both Dominique and myself. Thus I knew that I could no longer seek the illusion of my true desire in her flesh any more than she was able to delude herself with mine.