In Cabin Six, his restraint bag is still hanging; it might have to do. He wishes it could. But in the Sick Bay there’s a better deal, a couch to which he can be strapped. The one on top of that box whose lock has no clunk. He recalls struggling with the suit, having no purchase in this cylinder for his feet or his haunches, intent meanwhile on whether it should be the cabin or the bay—all along aware it will be what he can get to. When—what was it met his eyes, right there, where wall meets floor? Though he knows it amazed him, he’s blank on what it was. He remembers hunkering over it, gratified. When—caught in a lurching of the Courier in which his own bowels joined—he slipped. There are no handrails here. And now his neck won’t move. Foolish economies, both of them.
Or is he immobilized in one of those loopholes which come just before dawn, from which, while boarding train after train, arms and speech powerless—all are gathered; only he will not be on time—he is unable to awake?
Or is it the delirium to which no mother comes, while the bed turns to rock?
No, that one’s long outgrown, together with that drama, always staged in a dull afternoon’s pewter-gray, with him upstairs at his nap time, while downstairs his mother, who during their poor years cooked when she was upset, is silent in the kitchen against the cry from the dining room—“I’m drowning in food.” Whereafter, a chair being shunted, a door slammed, he feels them float up the stairwell hand-in-hand to the bedroom next to his, to clench there as he once caught them. Wherefore the next time he lay as now, mummy-still in his toys.
No, he’s much older now. He’s hungry, morning-hungry. His girl-in-bed—who?—is murmuring to his blanket-twisted figure, All the covers are on your side. And for a split second, a frenzied second, he is locked in them, bound with hairs so fine he cannot feel them, or with cord so strong it must have paralyzed all sensation, wanting to scratch his nose with a forefinger that won’t—move.
He’s grown up by these loopholes and dreams, and grown out of them. He’s here. Lying so he can’t see his toes or even the curve of his chest. He can see his faithful nose now, slightly akimbo to the left, and an arm flung upward, atop of the fallen gun. That must be uncomfortable. He can’t feel it. Butt, Mole, butt. How lucky. He is so lucky. He has very slightly moved his head. He can open and shut his eyes.
This is not a loophole. This is a glimpse. Wet with the future. Has he pissed? He can’t say. Or shat? Does one, in such a—contingency? Or get that same awkward protrusion which happens to men hanged? He can’t see. Or feel. Go higher, Mole, above the waist. Higher. Don’t swarrow, Mole. You can’t.
He will not close his eyes. He is about to know the flight facts.
I am the vehicle. Always was. Nobody else can horn in on it. Quick, bearers, I’m arriving. On Platform X. Quick, medic, toward me. Can’t move my fingers. Somebody counted on them. I press yours anyway. Paddy-cake.
Time is in his limbs. He’s heard talk of this since he was born. Who do they always want for it? Angels. Grotty little space-angels, calling you over the edge. He’s grown out of that, too.
He stares straight up. He sees the speck he saw. On the low ceiling above him, a traveling dot. Just before he slipped, he bent down to it, yelled to it. Not a vision of the retina. A live mote, of the kind one sees in winter libraries, on the white page, traveling.
Let it be that mote please, crawled up that far. It is. A stowaway. He stretches to see.
One neck-click. Dock.
A giant hand has pushed his shoulders square. Nothing shows on his face.
HOLDINGS
THE SILENCE IN Cabin Six is now the quiet of some ordinary plane in a holding pattern over a city—holding up, holding on, holding out—too long. In its whine they feel to the quick what they are. Passengers. Ear-stopped, they hear themselves. In all their voices.
Bad luck, to think of a destination while landing. But the idea of Island 5, held back all these weeks, fills the cabin with floundering cloud. Spinning into a glittering city, on whose sharp roof-points only a holy saddhu can walk. Declining into burrows half sheepfold and open to every rapine, half bank vaults to which they have no key. Now that finally it’s no use to think of the small holdings they left back home, they do—the flight bag which held everything, the old pair of shoes crocked and bunioned like the very soul of transportation, the tea-bag life-supports of a house. A hand going cosmic finds itself searching for carfare. They are losing altitude to the small, draining images of the ordinary. The grand manner of space is abandoning them. And they aren’t yet safe.
Tom Gilpin is holding his breath. He’s going through all the stages of his flighthood from his first time. Called back then from the mainland because of his father, he and the pilot of the tiny Coast Guard plane bobbing through a nor’easter like a tandem bike, he had been convinced that he, too, was flying it. Out of the hundreds of flights logged since, certain are bound to flash on during any new landing.
Coming in on the most insignificant hop, he will follow his first transcontinental one over the ranches of Montana and Idaho, black Morse code in the snow. Tokyo non-stop from New York approaches in sultry autumn, its oriental wind machines already babble-bowing him to a Maple Leaf Viewing, while with a first class shrimp in him for every air pocket and his cells floozy with champagne he himself is negotiating the touchdown. Over the green death-cones of Cebu where the air currents draw you in like the answer to a theorem, he sucks his breath in harder, in reverse. He likes best those flimsy carriers of Southeast Asia and Africa; in them he has more influence.
Over Bonn, Belgrade, Budapest, Prague and other secondary European cities—a qualification to be avoided when angling in on them—he invariably clutches his briefcase for political guidance on their ancient Reichstags—but works his lungs nevertheless. The capitals of the world overween him; coming in on Orly his eyes bulge like a gargoyle’s from the provinces; hover-hovering on the ever-ever London fog his breath dissipates in bell-chime; about to fall on New York’s scalpels, he closes his mind entirely—but never fails to keep going the good faith, the abiding breath.
Up ahead, Veronica will be hang-gliding among the narrow ecstasies of her own choice. Mulenberg is no doubt back again in what the airlines call the V.(ery) I.(mportant) P.(erson) Lounge, leaving it all to his importance, and to them. The Werts, in the parentdom which now obsesses them, are made physically fearless by the proper world-hopes—and by a lack of the shakier concerns beyond. Though they will never fly higher than internationally.
Lievering is to be envied. A religious by default and surely doomed to the separate life, he is out there putting both conditions to work. Mole’s case is still too young to settle. Also, in realms other than the physical he shows signs of a flighthood not unlike Gilpin’s own. He can only be loved.
He, Gilpin, is the ultimate passenger. Ignorant and broken-lanced as he is out here, his consciousness insists on its role. He is breathing for all of them. Just as he does on the ground. Always ready to explain, to Christ Jesus if need be, why people should be saved.
He’s wiser now though, on why even the common people will be drafted, and will want to come on these missions from an earth ever more trapped in its history. Only a Boston philosopher, and one who’d ended his life with the nuns as Santayana had, would expect history to be understandable. Gilpin would not now write in emulation what he once had: “We can be pioneers again—but will there be time for it? Oh yes. Vandalism is the architecture of the future. For people who want to burn the past, there is always time.”
From here, what a perspective he has, far chillier than the moon’s. In whose atmosphere, since Leonardo’s perspective, yes the best we have, does not pertain, a distant mountain is as sharp as a pebble six inches away. Why shouldn’t our new lives be like that—not from history but from present intent? As it seems to him his life on the Courier has been. History has never been logical enough to help. Any art it has is post-mortem, and heavy with that odd vanity which comes of posthumously rapping the knuckles of emperors. Isla
nd 5 may not be claustrophobe, at least not at first. Possibly for long enough to make heroes which time will not despise?
“Ha.”
They’re used to his ejaculations here, those laughs and expletives which he has explained make him feel concrete “after a lifetime of the vapors.” Their acquiescence has become one of the many courtesies he’ll be sorry to leave. But this time it’s no use. He’s begun again to hyperventilate. Call it that. The aeromedics will.
They’d prefer him to be busy noting changes in his “cardiac silhouette.” All here have noted some in their own, except for Soraya whose heart, doubly anchored, does not fibrillate. Walkers on the moon maintained their C.S. at preflight value. Maybe lack of perspective contributed, But he hasn’t much walked. After these days of even partial weightlessness, the brutally headward acceleration of any reentry can’t help but warp that dim profile he carries within him. Who will be the “recovery doctors” waiting for them? He imagines himself confounding them. This one has a complaint, Doc, about his silhouette. Used to feel pretty butch there. Doesn’t like l’art nouveau.
No jokes will cover over what he’s found out the world he deplores and incontinently loves is in for. Nobody really expected the extraterrestrial imperative to soar by spiritual affirmation wholly—if only because it was so glib about it. Yet he’d still assumed it must somewhere continue to acknowledge what we humbly are. It does—oh how it does—but only as a basis for altering that. The whole external process of this greatest of pioneer splurges is to move toward and by—a denial of what we are.
“Oh Lord—” Tom Gilpin said. “Lord—in the hour of our descent shall not the heart skip?”
In the Courier’s Cabin Six, courtesy prevailed.
The light is now that phenomenon which comes rarely, a trick of the dust specks they don’t have. Old afternoon tawniness, with the slub of fake silk. When it comes, the cabin’s heads go up as if listening. The old sense-confusions which on Earth used to come so reliably—there’s so little chance for them.
The last person to speak out in this silence—perhaps twenty minutes ago?—had been Mulenberg, pathetically eager. “That film of us—they will see it? In all cities?” The vast blondness which has kept him youthful now has heavier facial lines. Though he’ll have a giant lightness of foot until he dies, he’s the only one who hasn’t lost weight; he is flatulent with lost hope. Sexual abstinence has aged his self-confidence. Gilpin has had fantasies of reviving him under the group ministrations of some space-brothel to come, where he will bloom if he can be made to enter it. Not even Veronica now teases him. They had all reassured him at once that his daughters would see the film, all of them overcome at the scope of how tender they are going to have to be with him. To read of such a business-type being pierced by his own enigmas might once have filled them with glee; now his conundrums are theirs, and maybe soon his same lineaments. “Of course, of course,” they all said. Cabin Six had never before spoken in chorus.
“I—want to share something with you—” he’d then blurted. That phrase from his California darling must have cost him something. “Has it occurred to you—that our hearts might be being monitored?”
What delusion is he asking them to share this time—as always in that flat, office-voice guise of informing them? For of course they have all worn heart-monitors from the outset. In dismay, they hadn’t answered. He’d sat back in his seat without comment. The curve of his visor-bubble rears just visible above it, as it has always done. The trickle from his couch has stopped.
The cabin’s radiance is now oppressing, a Fort Knox of solar gold. Are they flying directly toward the sun, that hole with its tutu of flame? Or would that put them in shadow. Deep enough into the magnetic field so as not to worry about solar fires. Though of course there are water hoses, foam bottles and U.V. sensors in all areas. U.V.—ultraviolet. It now occurs to Gilpin that Jack may have meant—not monitored by their own crowd. He can’t deal with that. He won’t.
He sees that their counsel these last hours: STAND BY—is now turned off. Probably all such circuits are. Time’s up. They are going to dock. “The sweetest sound in space—” an early astronaut called it, “the click when two spacecrafts have completed docking.” For old passenger cargo like himself, it’s when the undercarriage bump-bumps the runway, grinding on without flare. Newer commercial planes now have rubbery, bendable wings, with subtler leanings. Stewardesses on landing remain the same, vestal in their corners, navels calm. He wishes with all that had been his uncontrolled heart—to see the faces of his companions.
As the headlong rush begins, he thinks he sees them. Not so much faces as crimps of light, as if he stares through the branches of a mountain laurel bearing toward him its own gravitation, demonstrating its force. His heart? A focus, too. His heart is being monitored, toward those. But he does not have to breathe for them.
Thank God. Thank whatever is about to be conceived as God, whose ovens must be drawing near. He is tired of the world he was born to. So was the world. There was only so much of the illimitable a man, a world, could take. Only so much, yet more and yet more, for this is what illimitability is. Until at last the mind stopped. At the new intergalactic pub, if need be. And got off.
He wept with the relief of it. Tears coursed warmly through his stubble of beard, blinding him to any sight of his neighbors, who might be undergoing the same. Each tear stood in his eye, golden. Each was crosshatched with that massing of light—which thus entered him. He began to sob deep in the larynx, or laugh deep in the abdomen. His sphincter let go, only slightly, so that a warm bit of his inner self must be staining his quasi-uniform; at the same time his penis rose excitedly, like a man hanged, or ready as it hadn’t been in years. Probably he was not at all suited to non-gravity living or at best was not going to be one of its aristocrats. What did it matter? His pupils were all gold now, all idolatrous. Continents chased briefly over his cornea and were gone. A trace of war cloud hemorrhaged near the tear gland of one eyelid; there was the smallest tic in the other, as if a vestige image of an inferno Earth or of its innocently starved skeletons had lodged there; then all were gone in the rage of relief that spent from him. Agh. Ugh. Agh. Dazed, he entered Paradise. There was going to be somebody else to take the responsibility.
6
ORBITING SOME ETERNITY
O B A F G K M R N S
O Bring A Full Grown Kangaroo My Recipe Needs Some
O Brutal And Fearless Gorilla Kill My Roommate Next Sunday
THOSE CAPITAL LETTERS refer to star categories in that great work of nineteenth-century spectrum analysis, the old Henry Draper catalogue.
Those two lines beneath are how a couple of Harvard students of the era, reeling from the telescope, tried to remember them.
Idling at the porthole here, I compose my own jargons. In continuous star-weather it takes stamina not to be Olympian. The Courier might be some cracked palace in which a small royal clan is under house arrest, at standstill in an omnipresent golden cave of carbuncles whose fires burn well back or are extinct. While the populace, though at enormous distance, may stroll by to view. Prison used to be more private. Prisons open to view are the last refinement of my century.
But no one can prevent us from leaving our century. No one. My heart, which after strange infarction seems once more coiled red in its original factory tubings, leaps at that. The nature of nature is always to begin again.
As I, Gilpin, begin this log:
We cannot tell you where we are except by intuition. We speak often of how we came. There was a moment—we decided after many sittings on the question—which must have been the one when a try for jettison was made. This moment we reverted to again and again, describing the sensation in the flesh as we dropped, yet our cells held fast, as bottomless loss sucked us downward, to a point where in our former lives we would have smashed, fallen from a skyscraper’s pinnacle to the Lilliputian pavement below. Then, at the nadir, came that stony reply—we all felt it—from space itself:
No. Gather them. There has been some discussion about the No.
At the moment we speak of, Lievering was in the Payload Bay, alone. The special cargo he’d been left to shift—by means of a set of computer commands he can still repeat like the stations of a rosary—had not budged. Later, as each of us in turn became his apprentice to carry back to the cabin the day’s ration of consumables, he would point out how the rest of the payload around it had. So, our consensus is that the Courier still has in its belly a terrible beauty which may be born—Wolf’s own phrase for it—but not by any push from him. It’s the least he can do, he’ll say, with that stiffish grin of his; he doesn’t say for or against whom. Considering the work he has done on the flight deck since, we can only bow to it.
For we did not dock, did we. During those first hours—or days?—after that fierce pull-up, it seemed to us, in our numbed, almost pleasant state, that we had, and were merely being held for embarkation in some customs process under which all clocks were stopped. I remember hunting for my scrip. For, during the next days—or hours?—we were still in communication with you—it can only have been you, just as we had been during those two apogee weeks of what we now think of as the Courier’s youth.
Certain never before activated remote-call boxes—our ignorant term for them, located in the public rooms, which installations Mulenberg has since explained are on unique radio-telephonic circuits decoding to ordinary ones—did bring you in, in one of your ordinary broadcasts. We heard nothing from Joint Command itself and of course had no way of talking back—though if we could have got to the flight deck, whose circuits to us were out, we would have tried. But like all watches and dials in the cabin, which had stopped, the door to the corridor had self-sealed, as it would at docking, according to its own dial, and like our watches, at half-past two. This has since become our calendar.
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