The Void Captain's tale

by Norman Spinrad

  “You told me when last we parted that there were things I had yet to understand,” she said, crouching like a catamount on the bed, staring at me with eyes that seemed to luminesce opaquely in the semi-darkness. “I wish to understand them, Genro, truly I do.”

  “I wish I could believe you,” I said.

  She laughed; a strange, feral, snorting sound, yet not untinged with a sigh of some inner sadness. “Why should you not believe me, mi mannlein?” she said. “Have I held anything of my least politic aspects back from you? You believe that I have seduced and used you for my own ultimate end, ne, without tender regard for the free will of your spirit. You believe tambien that I have granted you sexual favors for service rendered with utter indifference erotique. You believe that I have done all this to achieve my own Great and Lonely goal without care for another fellow spirit.”

  “Well put,” I said dryly.

  She rose slightly higher on her haunches, looming toward me as she spoke. “If you believe that much, mon cher, then, nicht wahr, you must believe that I know it too. I admit to all. I deny nothing. Believe me when I say that I know what I am and what I have become.”

  She duck-walked closer to me, touched a hand to my knee. My flesh drew not back. “Verdad, I did all that I did in no one’s service but my own. True also that even now I will not deny that my highest desire is for you to do what must be done, and perhaps I am even now exerting my wiles toward this end.”

  Slowly, she began fumbling with the catches of her jumper, parting the garment down her breastbone and wriggling out of it like a moth emerging from its chrysalis as she spoke.

  “But if I thought only to bend your will to my ends, I find that by so doing, I have freed an inner spirit whose nature matches my own. Mayhap all who see beyond the veil become at bottom one; perhaps there is but a single dancer to step outside the dance. This is a thing I do not understand, Genro, for you are the first such creature I have met or made.”

  Naked, she hovered above my body supported on her elbows and knees, the tight brown nipples of her breasts arced centimeters above my chest like twin electrodes, her mouth close enough for me to taste her rose-perfumed breath, her pubes poised to lower themselves onto my detumescent loins, her eyes staring openly into mine with what seemed like simple truthful clarity.

  “Am I supposed to believe tambien that you now truly seek to know me as a man for the sake of amour erotique alone?” I said. “That all at once you are consumed with fleshly lust?”

  She lowered herself upon me; I neither resisted nor returned her touch, and though I felt my body begin to stir under the pressure of her naked flesh, my psychic life-blood ran thin and cold.

  “Tonight I admit all, mon cher,” she said, kissing me lightly on my unmoved and unmoving lips. “I wish us to truly make love, Genro, I wish you to share a moment of ecstasy with me, I wish us to come together in the only way we can in this shadow realm, so that perhaps our spirits may touch beyond it…”

  “So that having once shared such a lesser moment of bliss, I cannot gainsay us the greater…,” I said knowingly.

  “I admit all, mannlein,” she said, undoing the front of my tunic. “Such is my goal, such is my passion, such is my hope that I will make it yours. I want to take you as dose as you can get, I want to feel your ecstasy as you feel mine, I want to bridge the final gap between us, I want us to come together in a place where each can know the other does not lie.”

  I saw no guile in her eyes as she said this, rather, the ruthless openness of spirit that denied all possibility of dissembling, the artful yet artless clarity of purpose beyond all such dances of veils, the essence which had first drawn me to her, and which, in some sense, I admired in a fearful way that might be called love.

  Hesitantly, I moved my arm about her. Tentatively, I cupped her cheek in my hand.

  She smiled with soft passion at me, a smile which for once touched her eyes, but beneath it still was something of cold steel, the purpose whose primacy she did not even in this moment conceal.

  “Be naked to me now, Genro,” she said. “As I have made myself naked to you. When next we embrace, it will not be in this flesh, nicht wahr?”

  Slowly, I began undressing, never taking my eyes off her face. “I make no such promises,” I said.

  “None need be made, liebchen,” she replied. “Now that we are naked to each other, what will be cannot be denied. What will come out of this moment I willingly trust to fate. Can you not do the same?”

  So saying, she stretched the full length of my body, and seized my lips in a kiss of such depth and passion as to take my breath away, molding her soft flesh to my contours, filling me with her untrammeled breath.

  Her hand reached into the quick of my manhood, and as it surged into that embrace, I felt a shockwave of electricity surge up my spinal chakras and into my brain, opening a channel of clear kundalinic energy between our spirits via the instrumentality of our flesh.

  “It has been a long time,” she breathed in my ear, “but in a previous incarnation, I was considered an adept.”

  This was uttered in a tone of jocular challenge, but behind it I sensed the serious truth. Our dialectic had at last reached beyond words or thespic actions to the ultimate plane where being confronted being in the meeting of flesh, and even here did she challenge my manhood to command, even here would our spirits contest in a combat of wills for the ultimate stake.

  Vraiment, did this merely serve to whet my energies as she mounted my steed, drawing it within her with a startlingly muscular grasp, then slowly kneading my passion with rolling and surging grindings of her hips. I felt myself flowing into my phallus as it seemed to float free in an infinite cyclonic eye within her, drawn down my spine from my roiling brain into that nether intelligence of my kundalinic serpent; at the same time, my gaze was locked into hers as if each sought to see their own interior reflection from within the other’s eyes.

  Slowly, without a flicker or waver in our mutual stare, without a word or gesture, I began moving within her energies, first as a minor note, and then, as I raised us into an ideogram of equality, sitting in each other’s laps still locked eye to eye and pube to pube, meeting each inward roll of her hips with a slow burning thrust of my phallic lance.

  This mutual tantric asana is a configuration of long duration, of the slow, even feedback of kundalinic energies, the roll of the yoni and the thrust of the lingam combining in a dance of smoldering fire, an even, calm rhythm through which the energies build not fiercely but with a rising oceanic swell.

  She was adept, vraiment, and so was I, verdad; I knew I had never had or been a lover like this before. Eye to eye, lingam to yoni, spirit to spirit, we performed this exercise for a timeless eternity, until it ceased to be an exercise, until our eyes seemed to meld into endlessly reflected images of each other; until thought, and challenge, and purpose were all subsumed into the void whence they came, until all that remained was an interface of ecstasy oceanically throbbing and rolling in a space beyond space.

  “Be a Captain to me now,” she sighed, “and let me be the Pilot of your soul.”

  Clinging to my neck, she drew me slowly down on top of her, wrapping her legs tightly around my waist, and drawing me down, down, down into her with every muscle of her body, with her rhythm and with her eyes, which seemed not to blink or flicker as they stared up at me with the cold black clarity of the perfect void.

  I was a lance of energy and nothing more, a glowing nerve trunk from spirit to spine, and from spine to phallus, as if a lightning bolt through the fabric of reality had pierced me to the core.

  Like a leaping diver, I thrust myself into the ecstatic void of free fall, soaring and plunging down the geodesic curve into the whirlpool of her center, a demon rider on an eldritch steed.

  I watched her lips part and compress, part and compress, part and compress with the rhythm of my spirit until it seemed that I was synced into the very breath of her body and she into mine as we moaned into a single end
less ecstatic shout, a mantra of clear energy that went on and on as reality dissolved in a timeless flash of sweet nothingness that seemed to pour out of my spirit down the endless tunnel of her open orgasming eyes, and in that moment of utter release, we were Gone—Before, and together and into the All.

  We lay there silently in each other’s arms for a long, long moment, as my consciousness slowly reformed into awareness of time and space and fleshly reality, as my spirit clung longingly to the fading glory, and when I finally reluctantly returned, it was longer still until I could speak.

  “That was…that was…”

  Dominique kissed my lips briefly, then stopped them with her finger. “Only a shadow,” she said, her eyes burning brightly. “Even that, liebe Genro. You know it as well as I.”

  I lay there supinely, still empty of all coherent thought, as she disengaged herself from the memory of our embrace and donned her jumper.

  “Think of this when next you sit on the seat of command, mein Captain,” she said as she drifted like a fading succubus toward the door, “and I will trust my spirit to your command gladly. In my own strange way…I think I love you, Genro Kane Gupta.”

  Then she was gone.

  —— XVI

  And so now I reluctantly approach the end of this tale; soon the recounting of the past will merge into the present act of its telling, and then I will have reached the moment when reflection must give way to action, when self-justification, if such this word crystal be, must give way to the judgment of others, when I must leave the venue of the past and emerge from my solitude into the world of my ship to face the future.

  I find it strange addressing this account which logic declares will likely never be found to a theoretical audience whose future existence I am hard put to find credible. But of course the true audience I have been addressing all along has been myself, as if by recounting my past incarnations to the Genro that now is, I may re-arrive at my present state of being in a fuller awareness of how I got here, how I became what I have become.

  Of what practical use such knowledge may be to the Captain of this marooned ship may seem a moot question. By all logical analysis, the Dragon Zephyr and all aboard it are doomed to drift in the interstellar abyss forever. No one will ever decode the apologia of Genro Kane Gupta, the Void Captain under whose command a Blind Jump occurred, and so no outside viewpoint will ever exist to judge whether he was monster or saint. Nor will an enlightened Genro survive a moment longer than the man who first sat down to tell this tale when the ship’s air finally runs out.

  And yet…

  And yet I have been to a place beyond place where all such considerations were irrelevant. As I arrived there contra all conventional logic, in defiance of anything that might be called human morality, beyond the timebound realm of the universal egg itself, beyond, in short, anything called law, so has my passage through it all but convinced me that, against all rational expectation, there is a way to return.

  So perhaps more than a testament to some theoretical posterity or an exercise in self-justification, this coding of my tale onto word crystal has been a ritual purification for what is to come. By admitting all and in the end perhaps justifying nothing, I bring myself to the present with the ruthless clarity with which Dominique Alia Wu sought and achieved her apotheosis. By so doing, I free myself to act with the same ultimate dedication to my only remaining purpose.

  And perhaps tambien to make my peace with She Who Has Gone Before.

  Even to the end of our congress on this plane of maya, the heart of Dominique Alia Wu remained a mystery; indeed, as men customarily use this word as metaphor for the human tenderness of the spirit, the question is whether she had such a thing at all. And whether such to me remains.

  Certainement, in that first and only temporally mutual act of what men call love, our spirits touched, and merged, and stood revealed in the searing white light of our shared moment of ecstatic nonbeing.

  But undeniable too was the truth she spoke that even this was but a shadow of the Great and Only desire we now both so completely sought.

  No higher union of spirit may man and woman through flesh and destiny attain, but if amour humaine can be nothing more, mayhap it must be something less. For in truth does not such sentiment require a dedication absolute to a kindred being, and not to a shared vision of that which lies beyond the very realm of thought and form?

  But the being of which we had become kindred avatars knows no purpose other than its own, and in the end we each in our own way served it above any mere heart’s desire.

  Was I animated by the tender afterglow of love as I made my way to the bridge for our last Jump? Had I then already fully surrendered to the destiny that we shared?

  Quien sabe? In memory’s eye, I had fallen into a black and perfect sleep after Dominique slipped out my door, so that upon being awakened by the annunciator from this time-slipping state, she seemed to have faded into a dream but a moment before.

  Argus’ voice blared at me through the speaker. She and Mori had long since activated the bridge machineries, the Jump was scheduled within the hour, the Pilot was already in her module. Where was the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, or was he ready to give over his command?

  “I’m on my way to the bridge now, and I’m still in command of this ship, Interface!” I snarled in angry confusion.

  And so I woke into a frenzy of bustle and tension as I drew on my clothes sans grooming or ablution and stormed like a juggernaut of purpose through the terror-ridden corridors of the ship.

  Faces formed and dissolved like mist in my field of vision as I hurtled through the atmosphere like a bolide. The beauteous and fatuous Sar, cringing from sight of me. Lorenza, her eyes spitting sparks. Bocuse, companion of other voyages, regarding me with disgust. Twitterings and scamperings and raucous dismay as I charged through a cage of frightened parrots.

  They passed through my sphere of perception, but in truth I saw them not. My vision was fixed at another point in time, in the ecstatic void of transcendent nonbeing, from whose heights I had seemingly just fallen into this vile quotidian realm.

  Only briefly did another truly perceived being intrude, that being Maddhi Boddhi Clear, whose visage passed for a frozen moment across my trajectory, riveting my gaze for a timeless instant with sapient eyes that seemed to mirror Dominique’s and my own. Therein did I read both an assent and a plea, the longing touch of a brother spirit upon my own, a beseeching camaraderie calling to me to do what must be done, a final moment of vrai connection humaine before I passed on.

  In such a state did I arrive on the bridge, bursting in with a clatter of footfalls that snapped Argus’ and Mori’s heads around to gape at the arrival of the madman on the bridge.

  “What are you staring at?” I said sharply, planting myself in the Captain’s chaise without further ado.

  What were they staring at indeed? In the eyes of my crew, I saw the reflection of my own distracted apparition: tousled hair and stubbly beard, tunic donned in rumpled haste, eyes that these two intrepid farers of the starways dare not meet.

  “See to your duties,” I ordered. “I’m still Captain of this ship!”

  “By whose command?” Argus snapped. “By the will of your Pilot and lover!”

  What then arose in my eyes must have been sufficient to cow my Second Officer, though what I felt bore little kin to feral rage. I had become what I had become and other beings were what they are, and each of us was our own reality. And I no longer cared what impact my persona made on theirs, for that construct had been stripped away to reveal the naked soul within, to whom all this was but vanity and maya.

  In truth, I cannot judge whether this was what Argus Edison Gandhi beheld, or whether her own subjectivity constructed another fearsome Genro out of what she saw. Be that as it may, what she perceived restored through terror the obedience I had once commanded through station and respect.

  She returned to the perusal of her instruments, and Mori, naturellement, followed
suit, and so the final ritual began under a dark canopy of stars veiling the reality of its destined outcome.

  “Jump Drive generator activated on standby…parameters nominal…”

  The first of my ready points glowed an expectant amber.

  One by one, in a tense and utterly mechanical voice, Mori ran down her checklist In this opening act of the ritual, the Captain had no speaking part, and so I sat there staring up into the simulated starry blackness, into the imagined firmament beyond the tele’s illusion, into the utter conundrum of spacetime itself which I had perceived beyond the hull of the ship, into that which lay beyond even that final veil, detached in spirit and function from the instrumentalities of the bridge.

  “Primer circuit activated on standby…parameters nominal Pilot in the Circuit…”

  Only with the sound of those words did my awareness snap back into the here and now, or rather to the only point of tangency between instrumentality and essence which remained. I imagined, if such is the term, Dominique, floating there in her amniotic nothingness, awaiting the moment when her spirit would be released—to soar free forever into the Great and Only, or to be tantalized once more like myself by only a glimpse.

  At that moment, I do now truly believe, the deed was done, in the sense that the decision of the will is the true essence of the act.

  “Checklist completed and all systems ready for the Jump.”

  “Take your position, Man Jack,” I said in a voice that sounded hollow and distant even to myself, a voice that seemed the ghostly generalized echo of those oft-repeated words and which therefore had somehow achieved an archetypal absolute. The mantra of this transtemporal chord moving through my being seemed to leech me of all feeling save a cold, clear, indifferent grandeur, the calm that comes with the final surrender to inevitable fate.

  Mori hesitated at the arcane intonation of this familiar order, glancing at Argus before repairing to her chaise. But Argus had retreated into the world of her console, and Mori, after perusing my expression, dared not step outside the ritual’s pattern.