The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Between us now, only a truly mutual act was possible, and that was the act of sublime criminality which I both detested and sought, the only meaningful event remaining in the repertoire of our destiny.

  Our lifelines therefore must be sundered if such an enormity was not to be, the status quo ante must be regained, and I must proceed as if that chance meeting on the sky ferry and all events consequent had never occurred.

  Upon such an improbable feat of mental judo was my forbearance based; such was the absurdity to which my moral calculus was reduced in its combat with fate. Moment by moment, hour by hour, I held myself at bay with this foredoomed false mantra.

  Never did it occur to me as I watched time squeeze slowly by that the will of another would never permit such denial, that my failure to appear long after the customary hour would cause Dominique to commit some escalatory act.

  Ten hours and thirteen minutes until the next Jump, and as the digits changed, there was a thumping and a shouting at my cabin door.

  There stood Lorenza, vibrating with outrage, wild-eyed and clench-jawed. “If you are not a madman, Genro Kane Gupta, you are sin doubt the poorest excuse for a Void Captain that I have ever seen!” she said shrilly. “You have a duty to my Honored Passengers as well as to your machines! The public disharmonies between us may be laid to personal pique, and despite all appearances, your sanity has been certified by your own Med crew, but this occurrence is evidence that you’ve lost all control of your own command!”

  “What are you talking about, Lorenza?” I snapped. “You’re the one who’s making no sense.”

  “This beastly Pilot of yours! Like a fool, you permit this creature the cuisinary rights of an officer, indeed you squire her at her repast, and as a result, she now has the presumption to attend our fete.”

  “What?”

  “She holds court in the grand salon even now, attempting to engage Honored Passengers in discourse and refusing to leave on her rights as an officer of the ship.”

  “By no authority of mine,” I told her.

  “In any event, you must order her to leave. My clients are in a fever, and the damage to my reputation as a Domo I think has been more than sufficient for one voyage!”

  Unable to calm Lorenza, I followed her distraught footsteps to what I perceived all too well was a tableau of confrontation arranged by Dominique for my regard. There was no other person aboard whom she saw as other than a shadow and no purpose animating her actions save the One. She would as soon have invaded the grand salon for the purpose of vexing Lorenza or her Honored Passengers as she would have forborn the same out of consideration for their tranquillity. Sin doubt, what she sought was what she had achieved: to force me thither.

  When we reached the grand salon, Dominique was sitting alone at a cafe table across the floor from the entrance, where the ascending spiral balcony began its climb to the vivarium; thus she was both of the generality and perched about four feet above it, on the first shallow turn of the ramp.

  As we stood for a moment on the elevated landing overlooking the fete, the ripples this apparition had created were visible in the geometric configuration of the would-be revelers. The distribution of Honored Passengers within the levels of the sculptural room was flattened like an amoeba flowing around the invisible obstacle of Dominique’s sphere of influence.

  Then Dominique perceived our entrance from her vantage below. “Good abendzeit, Genro,” she called loudly over the heads of everyone in the grand salon. “We’ve all been waiting for you to arrive!”

  A hush descended upon the room as heads swiveled back and forth between Dominique and the object of her greeting as I stood there naked upon the stage.

  “Why have you come here?” I called back reflexively in a voice whose projection was no less thespic.

  “You are contributing to this sorry spectacle,” Lorenza muttered and, gripping me firmly by the wrist, fairly dragged me down the steps and out of this highly involuntary limelight.

  “You must remove this creature without further discussions,” Lorenza hissed as we made our way through the throng towards Dominique. The press of bodies parted before me as if fearing contamination, and I was the object of a plethora of fearful sidelong glances.

  A semi-circle of onlookers had already formed beneath Dominique’s balcony table, creating a stage beneath upon which for me to perform, like a foil, below her. There was no way I was going to avoid further contribution to Dominique’s spectacle; certainement, I was not at that moment able to remove this creature without further discussions.

  Dominique was dressed in a plain yellow bedrobe. Her feet were unshod, her hair a tangle, her eyes hollow and bloodshot, and the mottlings and marks of the Jump Circuit machineries were still evident on her skin. She was an apparition of the postcoital price of congress with the Great and Only, and she spoke to me as if no other beings of consequence were there.

  “Where have you been, mannlein?” she said from on high. “As you can see, when I missed your company, I thought enough of the lack to seek you here, in the tropical fish tank. No higher proof of my regard for you is needful, nicht wahr?”

  “Dominique! How could you?”

  Never in my life had I experienced a moment of public exposure of such enormity so cavalierly delivered as if from Olympic realms, such a total disregard for the social surround, such an act of psychic terrorism, such a sea of stunned faces, such a feeling of nude unwholesomeness as might only be remembered from primal childhood dreams of appearing pantsless in a crowd.

  “With the Pilot?”

  “—his secret amour—”

  “—demented verdad—”

  “—explains his cafard—”

  “—quel horror—”

  The uproar spread in growing ripples, then rebounded from the outer confines to fill the entire grand salon with a shrill, scandalized, horrified, rolling-eyed babble. Bodies eddied and swirled as the mob pressed closer. Lorenza, her body bent backward as if at the sudden release of a vile odor, snarled at me under disbelieving eyes.

  Dominique stared down at me, her bloodshot eyes twin tunnels of overlapping images; opaque and fathomless, fatigued and burning with feverish energy, clear, black, and infinite as the void behind them. “Look at them, Genro,” she declaimed in a voice of withering thespic scorn. “Watch the shadows caper and dance. See how they become terrified when you rattle the bars of their cage!”

  “Stop it! Stop it!” I shouted at her, choking on the miasma of rage and fear in the air.

  “The power to stop the dance is yours alone, mon cher,” Dominique said evenly, transfixing me with the truth of her unwavering gaze.

  “Genro Kane Gupta, have you been conducting an affair d’amour with this creature?” Lorenza shouted. “As Domo of this ship, I demand an answer. If such a monster is in command, we all have a right to know.”

  Silence fell like a curtain behind the figure of Lorenza confronting the miscreant with hands on hips and outraged eyes.

  “Tell her, Genro” Dominique said with a thin little smile. “Tell her as little or as much as you like. It is a thing of no consequence.”

  I was psychically paralyzed, frozen on the interface between persona and being, logic and emotion, social reality and inner impulse. I was literally incapable of response, for none could conceptualize itself out of my utter chaos.

  “It is a thing of the greatest consequence,” a familiar voice called out, and Maestro Hiro, accompanied by Healer Lao, elbowed his way through the press to Lorenza’s side. “Argus Edison Gandhi, are you here? Your presence is required.”

  A moment later, Argus emerged from the crowd to join the phalanx of my judges, all regarding me with a cold, horrified contempt.

  “Med crew Maestros have been rendered unfit for duty by congress with Pilots, as you and I, mein Captain, have had occasion to discuss,” Hiro said. “If you are the unlikely victim of such a cafard, you must be placed under medical supervision and your command remanded to your Second Offic
er. I am willing to stake my reputation on the necessity for such action, and I am sure all present would concur.”

  A guttural rumble of righteous agreement greeted his words, a low feral sound overtoned with the subsonics of fear. A strangely anomalous feeling began to seep into my bones, a cold, clear counterpoint to the nauseous helplessness of my position.

  “Au contraire, all present do not concur,” Dominique snapped sardonically. “And since I do not, this foolishness is at an end.”

  In the dead stillness that followed, Dominique—pale, unshod, frail creature in tangled hair and bedrobe—seemed yet to speak with some unsheathed queenly authority, her voice as clear and sharp and gleaming as a naked blade.

  “I am the Pilot of this ship until it reaches Estrella Bonita, nicht wahr, for there is no other. And Genro Kane Gupta is your Captain until then too, for I will accept no other. Come, Genro, come up here beside me where you belong.”

  To the angry murmurings of all and sundry, I mounted the balcony as if in a trance and stood beside Dominique’s table surveying a mob that bayed for my blood. Daunting as such a tableau might be, from this vantage the cool tendrils of calm creeping along my bones began to make connections with my main spinal core, and I seemed to be looking down on this melee as if from some mountaintop height.

  “For the Jump is required the clear, untrammeled willingness of the Pilot, verdad?” Dominique said, fixing her gaze on Maestro Hiro. “Tell them, 0 Maestro of my worldly machineries!”

  Hiro stared back at her in the confounded terror of a man of urban civilization weaponlessly confronting a wild beast.

  “Tell them! If there is resistance in my spirit, there will be no Jump. If I do not freely offer myself up, this ship will hang here in the long light-years forever. If another’s hand but Genro’s touches the Jump command point, I promise you all that nothing at all will occur. In this regard, my will is absolute. Can you deny this, Maestro Hiro?”

  Hiro glared back at her for a moment; then polarities reversed, and he was the one who averted his gaze from the more sapient eyes.

  So too did the gazes of the others transmute from red ire and hot fear to a sullen, smoldering evasiveness, crusting over this volcanic flow with the ash of frozen destiny. A vast shrug of nervousness seemed to twitch around the room. From my viewpoint on the balcony, I could see the rear edge of the mob eroding away as hunch-spirited figures slunk toward other venues. Lorenza, Hiro, Argus, and Lao all seemed to flow backwards as if to lose themselves in the generality of the now beaten and dully terrified throng.

  “Genro Kane Gupta is Captain of your destiny as I am Pilot of your fate,” Dominique declaimed grandly. “So it is written, so it shall be.”

  Turning slowly to me, she stared intently but said softly, with an almost fey smile, “You are the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, cher liebchen, please be so good as to dismiss these churls.” Her expression hardened as if challenging me to exert my puissance as nakedly as she had displayed hers, to seal us here together on our Great and Lonely throne.

  “This public forum is ended,” I declared in my voice of command. “As Captain of this ship, I will brook no further interference with my authority.”

  I glared down at Dominique with as much outrage as I could muster. “As for you,” I said, “I will return you to your cabin.”

  Dominique’s eyes became opaque and unfathomable, mirrors of amusement tossing back a reflection of my ire distorted into an intimate jest. “Certainement, liebchen,” she said, loudly enough to be well overheard. “You are the Captain as always, and I am yours to command.”

  Guiding the shaky-legged Dominique before me like a toddling child, I removed us from the grand salon with as much dispatch as the hysteria that formed in our wide wake would allow, and deigned not to speak to her until we had escaped into the nearly deserted environs of the central corridor, where I grabbed on to her arm and, fairly dragging her forward toward her cabin, demanded: “Why did you deem it necessary to commit such an atrocity?”

  “To teach a lesson that you must learn, mannlein,” she said harshly. “To strip away the final veil.”

  “Revealing what?” I snapped back.

  “Revealing what was already known.”

  “That you and I have been lovers?” I said, dumbfounded.

  “Known to you, Genro, not to those poor shadows. To me, you are the only other one who matters.”

  “Is that some bizarre profession of love?”

  “It is a statement of our karmic configuration, mannlein,” she said, pausing to regard me with an expression seemingly devoid of any tender emotion. “Have you still not accepted the truth?”

  “Your truth?” I said. “The truth that has caused you to destroy my career?”

  “Forsaking all else, liebchen. You know that is the price.”

  “And now that you’ve forced me to pay it, I have no choice but to continue to the end, is that it?”

  “That,” she said, “is what was already known.”

  I glared at her. Our eyes locked in some ultimate contest of will, but as my spirit drifted into the bottomless depths of her orbs, I was forced to admit that this combat existed within my own soul.

  “Was it not you who first came to my cabin?” she said insinuatingly. “Was it not you who chose to return more than once? Was it not you who walked the hull of the ship so as to bring this very moment into being?”

  “Was it not you who seduced me down every step of this path?”

  “Certainement,” Dominique admitted freely. “It was my destiny to do so, as it was yours to be seduced. We would not do what we do if we were not who we are, ne? And who we are is the Pilot of the Great and Only and the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, and we both know what we want. And together we have the power to attain it Have you finally not the courage to acknowledge the nature of your own being?”

  “I acknowledge the true nature of my desire,” I told her. “I acknowledge that I have the power to attain it. I acknowledge that I have become all but convinced that nothing else is real. But unlike you, Dominique, this single reality, puissant though it be, does not totally define the nature of my being.”

  “Doesn’t it?” she said coldly. “What else is there?”

  “The social realm, the responsibilities of duty, the—”

  “Shadow games in a shadow realm,” she said flatly, daring me with her eyes to deny it. “Did you not experience it as such but a moment ago, mannlein?”

  In my silence I could read my answer on the thin smile that twisted her lips. Still, I could not accept myself as the mirror of what I saw in her eyes and nothing more or less.

  “The spirits of other human beings,” I said with much greater conviction. “No less real than our own.”

  “And no more, Genro,” she said assertively. “You speak of violating the spirits of other humans, but have they not violated yours and mine? They fall upon you, do they not, like a dog pack upon a strange animal, and for what? For not fulfilling your duty? Nein! For congress with the pariah. For seeking vision beyond the bounds of their egg. For things that are the rightful province of your spirit alone.”

  She wrinkled up her nose and nodded contemptuously down the corridor toward the grand salon. “That is the lesson I sought to impart with my little theater,” she said. “What moral obligation do you have to those who willfully refuse to open their eyes and deem you mad for seeing?”

  “And what about you?” I said in inwardly evasive anger. “Am I more to you than another shadow, Dominique? Another means to the only purpose, which, as you say, is its own?”

  “You are the only other one who matters to me, Genro,” she said. “As I am the only other one who matters to you.”

  “Because we each need the other to attain our desire…”

  “Yes.”

  “And nothing more?” I said, studying the muscular ideogram of her face, the shifting surface of her eyes, for any new emotive response.

  “There is nothing higher, so the
re can be nothing more.”

  “Sophistry,” I said.

  “You ask if I feel for you l’amour humaine, the Caritas of personal treasurement?” she said much less certainly. “I have Caritas enough to erect no easy untruth between us. And the truth, liebchen, is that this is a question I cannot answer. We are what we are and our karma is inextricable. This may not be enough to you, mi mannlein, but it is everything to me. If this be self-serving sophistry, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.”

  We had reached her cabin door. She cocked me an inquisitive look.

  “You would grant me your favors even now?” I said with a certain incredulity. “After this contumely? Even though I forswear the reciprocation you seek?”

  “Perhaps that is the measure of my affection for you, mon liebchen,” she said, not without a certain warmth, but not without a certain irony either. “I grant you all within my poor powers sans reserve against reciprocation, and I ask only the same from you. Is this not the essence of the true unselfish amour humaine?”

  “I know not any more,” I said, opening the cabin door and ushering her through it. I stood in the doorway for a long moment regarding Dominique as she regarded me. Many things had passed between us, but none of these could ever have simply been called love. Indeed, to enter her boudoir now would only result in another act of masturbatory fantasy in which the image of ecstasy would become a mocking reminder of the true desire, the only true sharing of which destiny had rendered us capable. This too had become a meaningless shadow.

  “You wish not to come inside?” Dominique finally said.

  I shook my head. “There is no longer any point to it.”

  She nodded her agreement. “There is only truth between us now,” she said.

  “Or nothing at all.”

  Her eyes widened in quite ordinary alarm. “You do not mean that, ne,” she said shakily. “You merely hide from your own lack of courage to do what must be done…”