The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  Vraiment, from her viewpoint, this no doubt was so, but in truth I sensed then no connection of our spirits, no mutuality of emotion beyond a shared passion for that which I perceived was not declared the Great and Lonely as less than an ultimate jest.

  “Perhaps,” I said, “there are things which in your infinite wisdom you have yet to understand.” And left her standing there in the doorway, struggling to digest this ambiguous food for thought.

  In truth, the meaning of my words was as much a conundrum to myself as it must have been to Dominique; I only knew that ours was an amour shorn of all Caritas, a force of nature, a passion noir sharing only the same object, and, certainement, it could not be said to be generative of nobility of character in any quotidian sense. And yet…

  I had not proceeded thirty paces down the corridor when my dark musings were interrupted by the apparition of Maddhi Boddhi Clear, bustling up the passageway toward me like some pursuing demon, his white mane of hair an aura about his distractedly determined face.

  “Captain Genro,” he said, fairly grabbing me by the elbow, “I must talk to you, and I think you are a man who now must talk to me.”

  I attempted to regard him with detached bemusement even as he peered earnestly into my eyes. “How so?” I said.

  “You need not dissemble to me, mein Captain, for we are brother spirits,” he said. “Do we not seek the same goal?”

  “Do we?”

  Annoyance clouded his features. “Have I not to you revealed the darkest of my secrets?” he demanded in a somewhat whining voice. “Is the Pilot of this ship not your lover? Do you imagine that a man such as myself cannot perceive the inner meaning of such congress, having experienced the psychic equivalent on the planet of We Who Have Gone Before? We can speak freely, you and I, as each of us can to no other.”

  Shamed by his intensity and by the terrible but undeniable truth of his words, I softened my expression. “Very well, mon ami,” I said not without a certain rush of relief, “perhaps we should speak.”

  We had now reached more habited environs, and those passing back and forth across the corridor between the Grand Palais and the stateroom module scuttled across our path like frightened crabs; skittish, sidewise, and clickingly brittle.

  “Let us repair to my stateroom,” Maddhi said softly. “A surfeit of ultimately private matters have already been made public.”

  Maddhi’s stateroom was strewn with stacks and piles of word crystals, antique leaved books, vials of arcane substances, holocubes, and mandalic paintings, and his bed showed the evidence of recent amorous use. Eschewing the chaises, we seated ourselves across the small dining table, littered as it was with pipes and wine goblets and an assortment of learned detritus.

  “Let us speak plainly, mein Captain,” Maddhi began. “You have been engaged in a sexual relation with a Pilot, as is now publicly known, and such congress reveals you as a fellow seeker of the ultimate moment.”

  “You speak in riddles…,” I protested queasily.

  “Please do not evade me, Void Captain!” he said sharply. “Who better than I to understand that such congress is as close as we mortal men have come to that which only such as my dying lover and your Pilot have achieved? Not to my face can you deny that we both do know what you truly seek to taste in her embrace! I, who have fruitlessly sought this shadow in all possible feminine flesh…”

  I met his gaze with an openness born perhaps of fatigue d’esprit not uncomplicated with a certain pity, or perhaps it was merely plain that his age-hollowed eyes saw too obviously through my defensive facade.

  “Since you know all,” I said, “what then is the purpose of this conversation?”

  “But I know not all, my friend,” he said. “Vraiment, it is you who know more than I. It is you who have experienced the sexual truth of a Pilot, a deed which I never dared to conceive, an impossible dream, or so I had thought. You must tell me all. I must know what you have found in the center of this ecstasy and how you have achieved it.”

  “What I have found,” I said bitterly, “is but another shadow, and as to how our affair was conceived against all custom and reason, you would do better to interrogate Dominique on that score.”

  “She seduced you?” Maddhi cried. “Quelle chose! Everything I have ever heard about these creatures has led me to believe that none of them seeks or obtains fulfillment from the phallic prowess of any man.”

  “This, alas,” I said, “is quite so.”

  Maddhi’s eyes widened at this, then narrowed. For once, he studied me with a quiet, receptive calm, as if politely inviting me to bend the ear of a kindred spirit in the service of my own, rather than hectoring me for his own enlightenment. By so doing, naturellement, he achieved that very end.

  “Dominique and I share no mutual fulfillment in the flesh,” I said, lowering my eyes a few degrees. “Through the oral tantric arts or other noncopulatory means does she simulate the true experience in my spirit as she titillated my body to orgasm,” I blurted, feeling unmanly and unclean. “She herself eschews all fulfillment save the Jump itself.”

  But Maddhi displayed no pity or revulsion at this admission; au contraire, on his visage I read only an unexpected sense of confirmation. “Of course,” he said, “this must be so.”

  “It must?”

  “Naturellement. You speak as one whose erotic cusp has been revealed as an unsatisfying shadow of that which floats beyond our grasp; how much more so for one who has truly for fleeting moments Gone Before?”

  Maddhi paused, his brows furrowing. “But why then did your Pilot conceive this affair?” he asked, perplexed. “Surely not out of tenderness of the heart? Her actions cannot serve another purpose but the One…”

  The moment seemed to hang there for a very long while. What did I know of this man? That he made his way through life as a parasitic organism of the floating cultura. That he sought the ineffable whose beatific countenance he had glimpsed in a dying lover’s eyes. That nothing I had broached to him thusfar had been received as either admission of mental dysfunction or heinous act. That there was no one else aboard save Dominique with whom I could even admit to the existence of these ultimate matters.

  Was this enough?

  Au contraire, from what other quarter could I expect more?

  “How the affair started, whether through chance or design, seduction or pheromonic congruence, is a moot matter,” I said quietly. “Mayhap it started out of dreadful guile and evolved into some kind of demonic affection, mayhap the reverse. In any event, in realtime, my friend, you are right. Dominique wants a service from me indeed, a service which…which…”

  I began to gag on my words. How could I even voice such a proposition? Would not the mere fact of revealing such a thought to another fellow being reveal its own ghastliness to my eyes through his horrified reflection?

  But why did I fear to reveal this to myself? I suddenly realized as another part of my psyche observed this thought moving through my realtime mind. Because I would then be prevented from succumbing to the temptation?

  Without further inner dialectic, it was this satoric aspect which then spoke, determined that I would commit no act that could not bear the light of day.

  “She wants my collusion in Jumping this ship Blind,” I blurted.

  Maddhi’s eyes bugged, fairly rolling in their sockets; his jaw gaped; and in a certain sense his expression was the expected ideogram of outraged horror. But behind this mask, I sensed, lay something else, something already overruling the socially programmed moral reflex.

  “This would entail failing to dump the vector coordinate overlay into the Jump Circuit computer,” I went on doggedly but not without a certain sense of relieved tension as I spit the whole thing out. “The ship would then be translated into the nonbeing of the Jump along with the Pilot as usual, but neither would return to this quotidian realm, leaving us all either expired or Gone Before into the Great and Only, the existence of which we poor mortal men can only deduce through logic or
faith.”

  Maddhi’s expression became truly unreadable. His face slackened, his eyes seemed turned inward, his mouth seemed on the verge of muttering to itself. “You comprehend the meaning of this technical sprach?” I asked.

  “Of course…” Maddhi mumbled slackly. Then more forcefully: “Of course!” Then, amazingly enough, he fairly beamed at me.

  “Ah, mein Captain, I knew that it was time for us to speak truly,” he said. “So much that was occluded now stands so clearly revealed!”

  “It does?”

  “Jawohl! That is how they did it! They never intended that which we call the Jump Circuit as a stardrive. Mayhap the thought never even trammeled their minds. It was our human scientists studying that which they could hardly comprehend who perverted the purity of purpose of the ultimate instrumentality of We Who Have Gone Before into a mere propulsion system, a beast of karmic burden. But for We Who Have Gone Before, the only way to Jump was to Jump Blind!”

  He clapped hands upon my shoulders. “Do you not understand what this means?” he demanded in some consternation at my puzzled expression.

  “It is no less than the answer to the ultimate question, the revelation I have sought all these long decades,” he said. “Why we have never encountered the expected abundance of sapients in our starfaring and how our species entire may at last follow We Who Have Gone Before into the higher realm.”

  I regarded him not without a certain confusion, but a part of me was already beginning to encompass the meaning of his words.

  “Most sapient species which survive a sufficiency of their own history to achieve the necessary level of knowledge must discover the means to produce the transcendent phenomenon that we call the Jump. Mayhap this independent discovery requires a far more advanced state of knowledge and wisdom than our species had achieved when it stumbled on the clue to the Jump’s premature development. Thus, we, in our youthful ignorance, created a stardrive therewith, whereas the general course of galactic evolution was for this secret to be discovered by older civilizations, which would comprehend its full purpose.”

  “That which is no other purpose but its own…” I whispered as the vista opened up before me.

  “Exactly,” Maddhi said, correctly reading my expression. “It is the grand and noble paradox of the universe of mass and energy—that out of its very substance evolves the generality of sapient spirit and, out of that sapience, the means for transcending the very matrix which gave it birth. Your Dominique has conceived of the Jump Circuit as evolutionary destiny intended, and in this ultimate incarnation the full experience should not be limited to any biological specificity.”

  “And as proof of this we have the dearth of other sapient species—most of whom have Gone Before!”

  Maddhi nodded his excited agreement. “We ourselves have always had the means for all to Go Before,” he said. “We but hid this from ourselves with our guidance machinery, anchoring ourselves to maya by act of twisted will. All of us can Jump freely into the Great and Only—it but requires the courage of spirit to be willing to Jump Blind!”

  “You mean…you think…?”

  “Of course,” Maddhi Boddhi Clear said with finality, for there was no dissembling or ambiguity between us now. “You must do as you have been given the knowledge and power to do, mein Captain. You must summon up the courage to do it for all of us. You must.”

  “Would it not be better to go on to Estrella Bonita and there inform the scientific commonality of this discovery…?” I stammered foolishly. “For if we do not, will the knowledge not vanish from the universe with this ship?”

  Maddhi snorted contemptuously. “Inform the scientific commonality of what?” he said. “If this conversation were reported, we would both be judged mad, nicht wahr? You would never command a Void Ship again, and Dominique Alia Wu would be retired as a Pilot forthwith. Can you deny this?”

  I lowered my head almost imperceptibly, for surely I could not deny the truth of his words. Indeed, neither could I deny that the likelihood that another command would be entrusted to me at the end of this voyage was vanishingly slim in any event, in light of events aboard, which had already cast a heavy public cloud over my sanity.

  “I see your spirit is troubled by what you must do, my friend,” Maddhi said softly. “But knowledge inherent in existence itself can never be lost. Mayhap the generality of our species will not be ready to accept it for generations to come. But by then, you and I and the denizens of this ship will have long since expired in vain. For us, the only thing that can be lost is this opportunity. For us, the only time is now. You must seize this moment, for you will never be vouchsafed another.”

  I shook my head in soul-deep weariness. “How,” I asked plaintively, “can I believe that I have the right to decide such ultimate questions for the unknowing passengers on this ship?”

  “Believe what you like about your right to decide, Genro,” he said with an edge of ruthless knowingness in his voice all too reminiscent of Dominique. “Destiny has placed the power to decide in your hands, and in yours alone. And to decide not to use it, that too is to make a decision that must haunt you always, nicht wahr?”

  I sighed. I hung my head limply. I could bear no more. Indeed there was nothing left for me to bear as heavy as this ultimate moral load.

  “I can hear no more of this,” I told Maddhi without censure or rancor, “there is nothing left to know.”

  He nodded his agreement. “Of knowledge,” he said, “there is now at last a sufficiency. It remains but to act.”

  —— XV

  I left the cabin of Maddhi Boddhi Clear in a strange sort of daze—not a clouding of my clarity but an excessive sharpness of same; a cold, hard, black, ultimate knowledge of the ideogram of karma in which my spirit was frozen, and of the impossibility of seeking freedom from its inevitability through the intervention of forces beyond my will.

  My existential options had been reduced to a clear duality. I must either surrender to entropic fate or will my own destiny via the only path left open. There was no middle ground. Either I would fail to act and this temptation would be gone, or I would screw up my madness or courage and Jump Blind. Either I would become a purposeless hulk deemed unfit for command and doomed like Maddhi to wander hopelessly, longing to find the Path once more, or, having already forsaken all else, I would seize the unknowable prize for which I had already paid the price.

  Stated thusly, the proposition becomes a tautology, leading inevitably to the very event which has now come to pass. As I sit here encoding this onto crystal and contemplating what now must be done, I could no doubt find facile justification in the self-serving notion that all I have done and will do has been pre-determined by fate.

  But as I returned to this very cabin where I now sit in self-judgment, I was still then struggling with the ethical conundrum, there was still a social creature inside me protesting against amoral destiny with the voice of the tribe.

  And in the dialectic between the psychic construct and the amoral spirit a certain anger of conflict found form; as a man of duty and human emotion, I found it not difficult to conceive a certain hatred for Dominique.

  Had I not met her on the sky ferry, would I not now be existing in the relative tranquillity of innocence? Had she not used my spirit as an instrument, bending it, and sharpening it, and baring it to its own self-awareness, all in the service of her own solipsistic purpose? Her pity on my poor maya-bound masculine state and her unselfish-seeming granting of orgasmic simulation of that which supposedly lay forever beyond my reach, was this not too a seduction, a dance of veils knowingly crafted to lead me on to this final naked moment?

  Did she not disdain me both as a fellow spirit and a natural man? Was it not impossible for her to truly share so much as a simple mutual act of love?

  Was she not a monster of inhuman obsession? And if I now shared that transcendent monstrosity, was it not Dominique Alia Wu who had knowingly captured my soul for purposes not its own?

 
; I lay on my bed trying to force my consciousness into sleep, unwilling to bear the torture of experiencing the hours of endless contemplation before the next Jump, both hoping to escape into nothingness, and willing the time till that moment not to pass.

  As a result, naturellement, I hovered on the interface between wakefulness and sleep; slipping into blackness only to awake with a start, tantalized by unremembered dreams, my consciousness fragmented into jagged jigsaw shards.

  In such a hypnogogic state, half awake and half asleep in the semi-darkness, did I suddenly bolt upright, staring into a human face not more than two feet from my own.

  It was Dominique. She must have slipped soundlessly into my cabin during one of my flashes of sleep. Now she was standing beside my bed looking down at me, a Dominique transformed.

  I had never seen her this close to her pre-Jump psychic and physiological peak before; nearly a full day after the last Jump and only a few hours till the next, she was radiant compared to the sickbed lover I had previously known. Her skin was pale, but even of color. Her hair was neatly combed, her simple blue jumper freshly laundered, and her body seemed to vibrate with nervous energy. The dark eyes staring down at me were clear, powerful, and only slightly shadowed by fatigue. Until this moment, I had never fully comprehended how severely the Jump drained her animal vitality, for I had never before seen how much there was to drain.

  “What are you doing here?” I said, sitting up in bed and checking the bedside timepiece. “We Jump in less than four hours.”

  “Perhaps that is why I have come to you, liebchen,” she said, joining me on the bed without solicitation. “Since it was obvious when last we spoke that you would not come to me again.”

  My mind began to clear of fog. When last we spoke, she had accused me of lack of ultimate courage, and I had left her with a rejection of her further favors, and in fact my ire toward her had fallen asleep aroused.

  Yet somehow this seemed like another time and another place, perhaps because Dominique seemed such another woman.