Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories

by Barnacle Bill the Spacer

  Shortly after Reynolds had gone, Brent came over to the port, and to my amazement, he attempted to pick me up. It was one of the most inept seductions to which I have ever been subject. He contrived to touch me time and again as if by accident, and complimented me several times on the largeness of my eyes. I managed to turn the conversation into harmless channels, and he got off into politics, a topic on which he considered himself expert.

  ‘My essential political philosophy,’ he said, ‘derives from a story by one of the masters of twentieth-century speculative fiction. In the story, a man sends his mind into the future and finds himself in a Utopian setting, a greensward surrounded by white buildings, with handsome men and beautiful women strolling everywhere…’

  I cannot recall how long I listened to him, to what soon became apparent as a ludicrous Libertarian fantasy, before bursting into laughter. Brent looked confused by my reaction, but then masked confusion by joining in my laughter. ‘Ah, Carolyn,’ he said. ‘I had you going there, didn’t I? You thought I was serious!’

  I took pity on him. He was only a sad little man with an inflated self-opinion; and, too, I had been told that he was in danger of losing his administrative post. I spent the best part of an hour in making him feel important; then, scraping him off, I went in search of a more suitable companion.

  My first lover on Helios Station, a young particle physicist named Thom, proved overweening in his affections. The sound of my name seemed to transport him; often he would lift his head and say, ‘Carolyn, Carolyn,’ as if by doing this he might capture my essence. I found him absurd, but I was starved for attention, and though I could not reciprocate in kind, I was delighted in being the object of his single-mindedness. We would meet each day in one of the pleasure domes, dance to drift, and drink paradisiacs—I developed quite a fondness for Amouristes—and then retire to a private chamber, there to make love and watch the sunships return from their fiery journeys. It was Thom’s dream to be assigned someday to a sunship, and he would rhapsodize on the glories attendant upon swooping down through layers of burning gases. His fixation with the scientific adventure eventually caused me to break off the affair. Years of exposure to Reynolds’ work had armoured me against any good opinion of science, and further I did not want to be reminded of my proximity to the Sun: sometimes I imagined I could hear it hissing, roaring, and feel its flames tonguing the metal walls, preparing to do us to a crisp with a single lick.

  By detailing my infidelity, I am not trying to characterize my marriage as loveless. I loved Reynolds, though my affections had waned somewhat. And he loved me in his own way. Prior to our wedding, he had announced that he intended our union to be ‘a marriage of souls’. But this was no passionate outcry, rather a statement of scientific intent. He believed in souls, believed they were the absolute expression of a life, a quality that pervaded every particle of matter and gave rise to the lesser expressions of personality and physicality. His search for particulate life upon the Sun was essentially an attempt to isolate and communicate with the anima, and the ‘marriage of souls’ was for him the logical goal of twenty-first-century physics. It occurs to me now that this search may have been his sole means of voicing his deepest emotions, and it was our core problem that I thought he would someday love me in a way that would satisfy me, whereas he felt my satisfaction could be guaranteed by the application of scientific method.

  To further define our relationship, I should mention that he once wrote me that the ‘impassive, vaguely oriental beauty’ of my face reminded him of ‘those serene countenances used to depict the solar disc on ancient sailing charts’. Again, this was not the imagery of passion: he considered this likeness a talisman, a lucky charm. He was a magical thinker, perceiving himself as more akin to the alchemists than to his peers, and like the alchemists, he gave credence to the power of similarities. Whenever he made love to me, he was therefore making love to the Sun. To the great detriment of our marriage, every beautiful woman became for him the Sun, and thus a potential tool for use in his rituals. Given his enormous ego, it would have been out of character for him to have been faithful, and had he not utilized sex as a concentrative ritual, I am certain he would have invented another excuse for infidelity. And, I suppose, I would have had to contrive some other justification for my own.

  During those first months I was indiscriminate in my choice of lovers, entering into affairs with both techs and a number of Reynolds’ colleagues. Reynolds himself was no more discriminating, and our lives took separate paths. Rarely did I spend a night in our apartment, and I paid no attention whatsoever to Reynolds’ work. But then one afternoon as I lay with my latest lover in the private chamber of a pleasure dome, the door slid open and in walked Reynolds. My lover—a tech whose name eludes me—leaped up and began struggling into his clothes, apologizing all the while. I shouted at Reynolds, railed at him. What right did he have to humiliate me this way? I had never burst in on him and his whores, had I? Imperturbable, he stared at me, and after the tech had scurried out, he continued to stare, letting me exhaust my anger. At last, breathless, I sat glaring at him, still angry, yet also feeling a measure of guilt…not relating to my affair, but to the fact that I had become pregnant as a result of my last encounter with Reynolds. We had tried for years to have a child, and despite knowing how important a child would be to him, I had put off the announcement. I was no longer confident of his capacity for fatherhood.

  ‘I’m sorry about this.’ He waved at the bed. ‘It was urgent I see you, and I didn’t think.’

  The apology was uncharacteristic, and my surprise at it drained away the dregs of anger. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Contrary emotions played over his face. ‘I’ve got him,’ he said.

  I knew what he was referring to: he always personified the object of his search, although before too long he began calling it ‘the Spider’. I was happy for his success, but for some reason it had made me a little afraid, and I was at a loss for words.

  ‘Do you want to see him?’ He sat beside me. ‘He’s imaged in one of the tanks.’

  I nodded.

  I was sure he was going to embrace me. I could see in his face the desire to break down the barriers we had erected, and I imagined now his work was done, we would be as close as we had once hoped, that honesty and love would finally have their day. But the moment passed, and his face hardened. He stood and paced the length of the chamber. Then he whirled around, hammered a fist into his palm, and with all the passion he had been unable to direct toward me, he said, ‘I’ve got him!’

  I had been watching him for over a week without knowing it: a large low-temperature area shifting about in a coronal hole. It was only by chance that I recognized him; I inadvertently nudged the colour controls of a holo tank, and brought part of the low-temperature area into focus, revealing a many-armed ovoid of constantly changing primary hues, the arms attenuating and vanishing: I have observed some of these arms reach ten thousand miles in length, and I have no idea what limits apply to their size. He consists essentially of an inner complex of ultracold neutrons enclosed by an intense magnetic field. Lately it has occurred to me that certain of the coronal holes may be no more than the attitude of his movements. Aside from these few facts and guesses, he remains a mystery, and I have begun to suspect that no matter how many elements of his nature are disclosed, he will always remain so.

  Reynolds Dulambre, Collected Notes

  2

  Reynolds

  Brent’s face faded in on the screen, his features composed into one of those fawning smiles. ‘Ah, Reynolds,’ he said. ‘Glad I caught you.’

  ‘I’m busy,’ I snapped, reaching for the off switch.

  ‘Reynolds!’

  His desperate tone caught my attention.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said. ‘A matter of some importance.’

  I gave an amused sniff. ‘I doubt that.’

  ‘Oh, but it is…to both of us.’

  An oily note had crept into
his voice, and I lost patience. ‘I’m going to switch off, Brent. Do you want to say goodbye, or should I just cut you off in mid-sentence?’

  ‘I’m warning you, Reynolds!’

  ‘Warning me? I’m all aflutter, Brent. Are you planning to assault me?’

  His face grew flushed. ‘I’m sick of your arrogance!’ he shouted. ‘Who the hell are you to talk down to me? At least I’m productive…you haven’t done any work for weeks!’

  I started to ask how he knew that, but then realized he could have monitored my energy usage via the station computers.

  ‘You think…’ he began, but at that point I did cut him off and turned back to the image of the Spider floating in the holo tank, its arms weaving a slow dance. I had never believed he was more than dreams, vague magical images, the grandfather wizard trapped in flame, in golden light, in the heart of power. I’d hoped, I’d wanted to believe. But I hadn’t been able to accept his reality until I came to Helios, and the dreams grew stronger. Even now I wondered if belief was merely an extension of madness. I have never doubted the efficacy of madness: it is my constant, my reference in chaos.

  The first dream had come when I was…what? Eleven, twelve? No older. My father had been chasing me, and I had sought refuge in a cave of golden light, a mist of pulsing, shifting light that contained a voice I could not quite hear: it was too vast to hear. I was merely a word upon its tongue, and there had been other words aligned around me, words I needed to understand or else I would be cast out from the light. The Solar Equations—which seemed to have been visited upon me rather than a product of reason—embodied the shiftings, the mysterious principles I had sensed in the golden light, hinted at the arcane processes, the potential for union and dissolution that I had apprehended in every dream. Each time I looked at them, I felt tremors in my flesh, my spirit, as if signalling the onset of a profound change, and…

  The beeper sounded again, doubtless another call from Brent, and I ignored it. I turned to the readout from the particle traps monitored by the station computers. When I had discovered that the proton bursts being emitted from the Spider’s coronal hole were patterned—coded, I’m tempted to say—I had been elated, especially considering that a study of these bursts inspired me to create several addenda to the Equations. They had still been fragmentary, however, and I’d had the notion that I would have to get closer to the Spider in order to complete them…perhaps join one of the flights into the coronosphere. My next reaction had been fear. I had realized it was possible the Spider’s control was such that these bursts were living artefacts, structural components that maintained a tenuous connection with the rest of his body. If so, then the computers, the entire station, might be under his scrutiny…if not his control. Efforts to prove the truth of this had been inconclusive, but this inconclusiveness was in itself an affirmative answer: the computers were not capable of evasion, and it had been obvious that evasiveness was at work here.

  The beeper broke off, and I began to ask myself questions. I had been labouring under the assumption that the Spider had in some way summoned me, but now an alternate scenario presented itself. Could I have stirred him to life? I had beamed protons into the coronal holes, hadn’t I? Could I have educated some dumb thing…or perhaps brought him to life? Were all my dreams a delusionary system of unparalleled complexity and influence, or was I merely a madman who happened to be right?

  These considerations might have seemed irrelevant to my colleagues, but when I related them to my urge to approach the Spider more closely, they took on extreme personal importance. How could I trust such an urge? I stared at the Spider, at its arms waving in their thousand-mile-long dance, their slow changes in configuration redolent of Kali’s dance, of myths even more obscure. There were no remedies left for my fear. I had stopped work, drugged myself to prevent dreams, and yet I could do nothing to remove my chief concern: that the Spider would use its control over the computers (if, indeed, it did control them) to manipulate me.

  I turned off the holo tank and headed out into the corridor, thinking I would have a few drinks. I hadn’t gone fifty feet when Brent accosted me; I brushed past him, but he fell into step beside me. He exuded a false heartiness that was even more grating than his usual obsequiousness.

  ‘Production,’ he said. ‘That’s our keynote here, Reynolds.’

  I glowered at him.

  ‘We can’t afford to have dead wood lying around,’ he went on. ‘Now if you’re having a problem, perhaps you need a fresh eye. I’d be glad to take a look…’

  I gave him a push, sending him wobbling, but it didn’t dent his mood.

  ‘Even the best of us run up against stone walls,’ he said. ‘And in your case, well, how long has it been since your last major work. Eight years? Ten? You can only ride the wind of your youthful successes for so…’

  My anxiety flared into rage. I drove my fist into his stomach, and he dropped, gasping like a fish out of water. I was about to kick him, when I was grabbed from behind by the black-clad arms of a security guard. Two more guards intervened as I wrenched free, cursing at Brent. One of the guards helped Brent up and asked what should be done with me.

  ‘Let him go,’ he said, rubbing his gut. ‘The man’s not responsible.’

  I lunged at him, but was shoved back. ‘Bastard!’ I shouted. ‘You smarmy little shit, I swear I’ll kill you if…’

  A guard gave me another above.

  ‘Please, Reynolds,’ Brent said in a placating tone. ‘Don’t worry…I’ll make sure you receive due credit.’

  I had no idea what he meant, and was too angry to wonder at it. I launched more insults as the guards escorted him away.

  No longer in the mood for a public place, I returned to the apartment and sat scribbling meaningless notes, gazing at an image of the Spider that played across one entire wall, I was so distracted that I didn’t notice Carolyn had entered until she was standing close beside me. The Spider’s colours flickered across her, making her into an incandescent silhouette.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked, sitting on the floor.

  ‘Nothing.’ I tossed my notepad side.

  ‘Something’s wrong.’

  ‘Not at all…I’m just tired.’

  She regarded me expressionlessly. ‘It’s the Spider, isn’t it?’

  I told her that, Yes, the work was giving me trouble, but it wasn’t serious. I’m not sure if I wanted her as much as it seemed I did, or if I was using sex to ward off more questions. Whatever the case, I lowered myself beside her, kissed her, touched her breasts, and soon we were in that heated secret place where—I thought—not even the Spider’s eyes could pry. I told her I loved her in that rushed breathless way that is less an intimate disclosure than a form of gasping, of shaping breath to accommodate movement. That was the only way I have ever been able to tell her the best of my feeling, and it was because I was shamed by this that we did not make love more often.

  Afterward I could see she wanted to say something important: it was working in her face. But I didn’t want to hear it, to be trapped into some new level of intimacy. I turned from her, marshalling words that would signal my need for privacy, and my eyes fell on the wall where the image of the Spider still danced…danced in a way I had never before witnessed. His colours were shifting through a spectrum of reds and violets, and his arms writhed in a rhythm that brought to mind the rhythms of sex, the slow beginning, the furious rush to completion, as if he had been watching us and was now mimicking the act.

  Carolyn spoke my name, but I was transfixed by the sight and could not answer. She drew in a sharp breath, and seconds later I heard her cross the room and make her exit. The Spider ceased his dance, lapsing into one of his normal patterns. I scrambled up, went to the controls and flicked the display switch to off. But the image did not fade. Instead, the Spider’s colours grew brighter, washing from fiery red to gold and at last to a white so brilliant, I had to shield my eyes. I could almost feel his heat on my skin, hear the sibilant kiss
of his molten voice. I was certain he was in the room, I knew I was going to burn, to be swallowed in that singeing heat, and I cried out for Carolyn, not wanting to leave unsaid all those things I had withheld from her. Then my fear reached such proportions that I collapsed and sank into a dream, not a nightmare as one might expect, but a dream of an immense city, where I experienced a multitude of adventures and met with a serene fate.

  …To understand Dulambre, his relationship with his father must be examined closely. Alex Dulambre was a musician and poet, regarded to be one of the progenitors of drift: a popular dance form involving the use of improvised lyrics. He was flamboyant, handsome, amoral, and these qualities, allied with a talent for seduction, led him on a twenty-five-year fling through the boudoirs of the powerful, from the corporate towers of Abidjan to the Gardens of Novo Sibersk, and lastly to a beach on Mozambique, where at the age of forty-four he died horribly, a victim of a neural poison that purportedly had been designed for him by the noted chemist Virginia Holland. It was Virginia who was reputed to be Reynolds’ mother, but no tests were ever conducted to substantiate the rumour. All we know for certain is that one morning Alex received a crate containing an artificial womb and the embryo of his son. An attached folder provided proof of his paternity and a note stating that the mother wanted no keepsake to remind her of an error in judgement.

  Alex felt no responsibility for the child, but liked having a relative to add to his coterie. Thus it was that Reynolds spent his first fourteen years globe-trotting, sleeping on floors, breakfasting off the remains of the previous night’s party, and generally being ignored, if not rejected. As a defence against both this rejection and his father’s charisma, Reynolds learned to mimic Alex’s flamboyance and developed similar verbal skills. By the age of eleven he was performing regularly with his father’s band, creating a popular sequence of drifts that detailed the feats of an all-powerful wizard and the trials of those who warred against him. Alex took pride in these performances; he saw himself as less father than elder brother, and he insisted on teaching Reynolds a brother’s portion of the world. To this end he had one of his lovers seduce the boy on his twelfth birthday, and from then on Reynolds also mimicked his father’s omnivorous sexuality. They did, indeed, seem brothers, and to watch Alex drape an arm over the boy’s shoulders, the casual observer might have supposed them to be even closer. But there was no strong bond between them, only a history of abuse. This is not to say that Reynolds was unaffected by his father’s death, an event to which he was witness. The sight of Alex’s agony left him severely traumatized and with a fear of death bordering on the morbid. When we consider this fear in alliance with his difficulty in expressing love—a legacy of his father’s rejections—we have gone far in comprehending both his marital problems and his obsession with immortality, with immortality in any form, even that of a child…