|
CHAPTER 11 LIKE THIS WORD CRYSTAL being replayed, the period confined within the temporal bounds of the next three Jumps seems a subjective nonlinearity measured by event rather than duration; it all seems to exist simultaneously before memory's unreeling eye. Naturellement, I fed my body, eased its fatigue with sleep, abluted and relieved myself when necessary, and performed my duty's rounds. Perforce did I also hold congress with Honored Passengers and crew like a socially conscious man. But these concessions to mundane imperatives existed in a timestream alien to the causal skein of meaningful events whereby the spirit measures time; as heartbeat and breathing are given over to cerebral centers beneath the cortical crown, so were the biological and social niceties given over to the peripheral systems of my mind. For in truth those events which mattered were warps through linear time, compressions of experience where temporal distancing was overcome, at least within the illusion of subjective desire. How convoluted and arcane does that apologia sound as I play it back with its true meaning hovering just beyond my own comprehension! Vraiment, I am dissembling still, or perhaps any craft is insufficient to render a coherent image of vision or madness from memory's other side. The unembellished truth is that my full attention came alive only at the moment of the Jump and at the time-warped completion of the act in Dominique's boudoir; the interval between was the realm of shadows through which my true spirit slept. How this puppet Captain must have appeared to the other actors on the stage is something which even now I can but dimly recollect as data shorn of all affect. Seven meals were taken, or mayhap eight; six of these were social events spiced with discourse in which I no doubt took part. There are sense memories of many noble dishes artfully prepared and vintages of appropriate savor. There was a grand banquet given by Lorenza, where I was the object of a certain jocular contempt for my congress with Maddhi, as well as thinly veiled japes from our Domo of a more unseemly erotic nature. There was a meal with Argus and Mori passed in formal discussion of the ship's duties and events. Other repasts were taken in various cuisinary venues with names and faces that blend into a babble of sprachs. A customary status report on the human cargo stored in electrocoma was made to me by Maestro Hiro; this impressed itself upon my memory owing to his expressed concern for the status of my health. Erotic overtures were made to me by a somewhat unusual plenitude of Honored Passengers whom I repulsed with as little personalization as possible, feigning weariness or malaise or pleading duty elsewhere. On a number of occasions, I was entrapped in conversations of hermetic intensity which in another state might have piqued my curiosity or attention, but from that period my memory can extract only intellectual shards. A discourse by Rumi Jellah Cohn on the dialectic between the universality of the artistic impulse and the diversity of cultural forms. A woman who spoke of faint messages now perhaps being received from the galaxy of Andromeda, millions of years in our nonrelativistic past. A scurrilous tale about a Domo who conceived an infatuation for her ship's Second Officer and sought to undermine the Captain's authority in the service of her inamorata's ambition. It all seems an automaton's dance to me now as did it then, a shadow play in which I slept through the playing of my own part. Only one imperative seems to have left the memory trace of the exercise of my will: not without consciously applied skill and guile did I seek to avoid Lorenza, Maestro Hiro, and Maddhi Boddhi Clear--the only humans on board who, through diverse instrumentalities, might have penetrated the perfection of my fugue. If analytic perception may be granted to a being in such a state, it seemed to me then that only by abstracting my being from the intervals between could I endure the temporal gaps between the Jumps and the discontinuity between Dominique's fulfillment and the shadow of my own. Indeed, the universe of space and time itself had become reduced to an unseemly intrusion between those augenblick perceptions of that which lay beyond. As for those brief bright moments themselves and her with whom I shared them, if Dominique and I were lovers, it was by no classic definition of the dramaturge art. We stared not limpidly into each other's eyes, we shared not romantic meals a deux, no soulful solitary strolls, and of dream chambers we knew only one, and that the product of no human craft. Certainement, all the loverly sentimentality and sacraments of the quotidian realm sullied not the purity of the passion trans-humaine that we shared. There are certain tantric dyadic asanas in which erect lingam penetrates yoni immobilely for the duration of the mutual meditative trance. If such partners in the solitary inward quest may be said to perform an act d'amour, then mayhap Dominique and I were lovers, for although our tantric configuration was different, its goal and spirit were the same. If such exercises be informed with mutual caritas, are they not a rarefied act of love? Certainement in the linear timestream our discontinuous performances were unselfish acts of love; on the bridge, I served her spirit, in her bed, she served my flesh, and never in this time-warped transaction did yoni and lingam meld to give as they received. Was this not a human bond between us, this leap of trust through time? Were we not two souls in our isolation magnetized by the same pole? She was the Pilot of my kundalinic circuit, as I was the Captain of her own. But in the chord of our mutual vibration, I was the minor note. What the Captain bought was not half so precious as what he sold, and I now perceive that even then the baser note of envy was a throbbing undertone. Thus while our time-transcending congresses had merged into a seamless generality where event was subsumed into the archetypal now, as I replay that memory's worldless crystal, I see the fault lines of its eventual shattering marbling the whole. I sit on my throne of power beneath the canopy of stars as it seems I have always done, and as the familiar Jump ritual proceeds, the now- familiar electric current begins to flow along my spine, deja-vued by memories and anticipations coiled round the illusory now. I gaze into the starry void, into Dominique's eyes, into the blackness behind my own sealed eyelids as her lips envelop my lingam, and I feel a feedback channel opening between this creature of obsession and the dormant natural man. "Pilot in the Circuit. ..." Even as my spirit perceives our cycle as a time-warped act of love, phallic logic goads me with its egobound primal throb; now she would ride the whirlwind and I would be her steed, through the electronic Jump Circuitry my will would serve the purpose for which my flesh was disdained. ... "... checklist completed and all systems ready for the Jump. ..." In the Jump, I was the master of her ecstasy, and in the flesh Dominique the mistress of my surcease; au contraire, was she then not the servant of my flesh and I now her spirit's slave? "Captain! Captain Genro? The checklist is completed." "Well then, take your position, Man Jack," I say with serene distraction, and Mori repairs to her chaise with an expression of bemusement that seems to be eternally there. "Ship's position and vector verified and recorded," Argus declares, her voice shrill and peremptory as it seems to have always been. "Vector coordinate overlay computed, Captain, and on your board." Was this erotic equation not truly the ideogram in which we were bound, and was it not an injustice, an imbalance in the universal scale? Had not Maddhi-- "Captain Genro, the vector coordinate overlay is on your board and ready to be dumped!" Argus fairly snapped; the slap of her voice, the keen edge of contempt in her eyes as she turned to regard me shattering the crystalline temporal generality into the unseemly and all- too-specific now. "Are you all right, Captain?" Argus demanded with little show of sympathy. "Are you suffering from some malaise?" "Attend your console, Interface," I snapped with an ersatz Captainly peckishness. "Dumping vector coordinate overlay into the Jump computer now. Please activate the final two command points." Sullenly, Argus returned to her duties, and the last two command points reddened on my board. "Jump Field aura erected," I announced with a deliberate reduction of curtness, although I jabbed the command point with a vehemence I was hard put to understand. Like a reveler awakening the morning after a multi-molecule binge and wondering what enormities the gap in his memory track conceals, I found myself surveying the traces of the past three ship-days in the timebound causal world. Had this disharmony on my bridge been building while my attention was vanished from my Captainly role? Had I sleepwalked through my duty as I had through the floating cultura in a somnambulistic haze? Even then I knew that my fellow officers were no just objects for my ire, nor in hindsight's clarity was it Dominique against whom my passion raged. Nevertheless, as my finger curled toward the Jump command point like a tautening steel spring, slowly did the unselfish tantric figure reverse with the angry thwarted ground, did impotent envy come to inform the impending act. The Jump warning notes sounded, reverberating down my spine, and my digit stiffened into a vengeful phallic lance. My lips twisted into a soundless sneer as I confronted my rider in the void, serene in the crystal blackness beyond my manly powers. "Jump," I growled gutturally. "Jump, damn you, Jump." And as I thrust at the red quick of the Jump command point, I longed to feel that orgasmic moment impaled on my own exploding flesh. In an augenblick the moment came and went. Outside the ship, the stars were different, and on the bridge, I sat there foolishly, regarded with discomfort by the widened eyes of my crew. Mori's startlement seemed innocent of knowledge or judgmental tone, but Argus studied me narrowly as if I sat there naked, sweating, and tumescent on my Captain's throne. "Captain Genro, are you sure you're all right?" she said. "Would not a consultation with our Healer be--" "I am in perfect health and in command of my faculties," I replied coldly. "Though I appreciate your concern." "I only meant--" "It is of no importance, Interface; I will let the matter pass." I said with as much authoritatively Captainly finality as I could feign. I locked eyes with my feminine Second Officer, willing her accession to the authority of my command, to the potency I longed to feel. After a moment, Argus looked away from what she saw, and in that moment perhaps I might delude myself that some sense of my manly power had been regained. But this was the pouvoir of the Captain only, not the puissance of the man. *** I departed the bridge with my consciousness in a somewhat less fugal state--not that my spirit had been deflected from its inner focus; rather that quotidian events of sufficient import had intruded themselves upon my attention to the point of forcing me to act. For the first time in three ship-days, I had truly donned my Captainly role and dealt with a psychic exigency of command beyond the mechanical round of automatic duties. True, I had done this only when my Captainly authority had been frontally threatened; true tambien that my own prolonged disattention had been the causal agent of Argus' challenge. Nevertheless, the event had occurred, and it opened my void-glazed eyes to the effects left in the wake of my somnabulary trajectory. In retrospect, I then began to see that while my spirit had been traveling other realms, its animating absence from my persona had perhaps not gone entirely unnoticed by those who encountered the resulting creature in the course of duty or social discourse. My Second Officer had perceived it well enough to challenge my authority not so much as Captain but as a properly functioning man, and even my young Man Jack had not been oblivious to the bizarre nature of my behavior. Truth be told, I feared a seance with Maestro Hiro or Healer Lao, for my confidence in my ability to pass the muster of their profession was not exactly great. Yet even as I left the bridge with a certain determination to restore the potency of my persona as Captain in command, even as I admitted to the practical cunning of avoiding the close perusal of the Med crew, I doubted not the absolute reality beyond the worldly veil, nor did it seem to me insanity to pursue it. Rather were the realms in which I found myself in disjunction with the ideal spiritual state. The bubble-world of human culture was but a shadow parade through timebound space, and that which lay beyond it lay also just beyond my grasp, floating mockingly before me in the tender ministrations of Dominique. Once more I empathized with that first lunged fish to crawl out of the englobing ocean into the open unknown air; I was gasping on the interface between the lower and the most high, unable to go on, unwilling to return. But unlike that first self-tortured amphibian, I was possessed of the dualities of mind and the reflectiveness of spirit to realize that in order to evolve, an organism must first survive. Chez moi, that meant survival as Captain of my ship, and as I tentatively entered the grand salon, I wondered what I would find. How far had the erosion of my social persona drifted while its essential spirit was gone? The grand salon was well attended as is customary during the Jump. Like gaily colored tropical fish habiting a convoluted coral reef, Honored Passengers of every species and hue were floating about the levels, nooks, and cubbies of the great sculpturefied room in hovering schools and shoals. Trays of dainties were everywhere, carafes and goblets of spirits, essences, and wines, herbal pipes, and braziers of intoxicating incense. As I stood there on the entrance landing in the high-lighted sight of all surveying this generality as if from a mountain peak, a certain psychic odor seemed to waft to the back reaches of my brain: the ripeness of overrichness, the proclaimed artifice of superabundant perfume, the ozone of circuitry sizzling near overload. Private islands of variously tinted light picked out archetypal floating cultura scenes as if some classic painter had laid out a vast genre canvas of the fete. Here were lovers bent together on a pinkly chiaroscuroed chaise, there a scene of Maddhi Boddhi Clear amid feminine acolytes in a hazy golden glow, a slim woman playing a sandovar silhouetted in bright white, drinkers, diners, amorous adventurers, and the quite intoxicated all incarnating this dramatic baroque tableau. Here was the vida real of the starfaring floating cultura, the distilled and heady essence of this greatest age of man; here were wealth and art and beauty, science, curiosity, and intrigue; why then was I reluctant to be the Captain of its ship of fate, to play my leading role? Why then did I stand there until I had once more made myself a strange-eyed spectacle to these brightly accoutered shadows? Indeed, Sar Medina Gondo, with great thespic flourishes of her flowing white, gold-embroidered robes, ascended from the fete to fetch me like a great maternal bird. "Ach, gut Captain, you have been quite an illusive figure," she said, capturing my arm in hers and leading me like a prize down the stairs before all. She clung to me assertively as she guided us through the swellings and thinnings of the throng, never ceasing all the while to prattle of this and that in a grand, projecting voice. "I see that Rumi and your little Third Officer are still keeping to themselves, pero from other voyages with that bravo, } tell you it will not last, of course we sophisticated voyagers know what rogues d'amour you Void Ship officers are, and nicht wahr, mi mannlein, you can say the same; why even you apparently have become indifferent to the great Lorenza's charms, leaving other hearts to hope. ..." She stole a glance d'amour in my direction as she offered me a goblet of wine from a tabouret, her long blond hair combed into golden waves, her shining green eyes clear and empty as fine crystal. When this was not returned, she continued apace, squiring me about the grand salon and simulating our rapt conversation with an endless monolog of public bon mots. "Ah, mon cher, there is Ali Barka Baraka, surely the richest creature aboard, they say he owns an unreported planetary system in the outer fringes where the economic overlords of creation gather to engage in unspeakable vice, though alas I've never been invited, but I did once share a dream chamber with one of his lovers who had the most amazing tales, speaking of which, I'll wager you've heard some droll ones from our Maddhi over here. ..." By design or fortune, she had thrust me into the center of a group gathered about Maddhi Boddhi Clear, with her own person attached and little reluctance to assume responsibility for the intrusion. "Why everyone is talking about your little tete a tete up there in the darkness together, my dears, have you finally made a convert out of a comrade of your own foolish gender, Maddhi, pero surely, nicht wahr, not through the usual means ...?" Maddhi, not to be nonplussed in his own venue, shot a brotherly glance in my direction and replied in fine, florid style. "My heterosexuality is a legendary scourge of the galaxy, cher Sar, as you have had occasion to know; it goes beyond the fleshly tastes to regions alas beyond your ken. As for the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, I judge him a similar spirit, a fellow pilgrim of the way." At this there was jocular and at the same time befuddled laughter from those gathered about us, whose numbers now seemed to have spread. "So this is the cause of our Captain's distraction," some unseen sly voice said. "Like Maddhi Boddhi Clear, he listens to voices in his head." The laughter at this was raucous and prolonged, and to his own considerable discomfort Maddhi was unable to sail a jape above it, which is not to say he did not try. "Like Maddhi Boddhi Clear, he has not stoppers in his ears." But this riposte sounded lame to his clearly critical ear even as he launched it, and it was in any event shouted into a whirlwind of jocularity, in which it vanished without a trace. "So does it happen to those who stare into space too long!" "Better men than we have gone before!" I found myself within a flock of bright-plumed and riotous parrots, squawking their laughter at their own birdbrained sallies, shrill life- denying cackles flung round my smarting head. No riposte presented itself to my blushing mind, nor could I flee except in even more unseemly disarray, and so I was reduced to standing there like a comic foil till the japery finally died away. Yet though I clearly stood there as the victim of their jests, still did it seem to me that there was a higher joke of which they were the butt, the cosmic conundrum which their laughter sought to veil. Was this japery not their means of trivializing the unconfrontable profound? Was not the laughter longer and louder than such banalities should command? Mayhap such analysis is the rationalization of the public buffoon, and certainement I itched with the burning rash of same, and verdad it took the mercy of the good-hearted Mori to effect my extraction by leading me away with my ears still ringing on the pretext of some non-existent technical question. But even as I released my rescuer back into the dyadic company of her inamorato and attempted to melt away into the anonymous generality of the fete, I smelled even more strongly a shrill, overripe odor in the psychic air, of hidden and unbidden alchemies smoldering beneath the scenery. Beneath all this gaiety and baroque complexity lay the simple and so carefully denied; beyond the thin metal surrounding us was the endless humorless void. Hollow rings the laughter of orphans in the night. The embarrassing and unsettling scene chez Maddhi was not, at least, without its practical compensation: in the process of being rescued from my discomfort by Mori, I had been extracted as well from the clutches of Sar. I resolved to make myself the center of no more attention than was unavoidable and certainement to eschew the company of anyone whose style or intent was likely to propel me into bold relief. Indeed, I contemplated leaving the fete for some more solitary venue, there to pass the time until my hour with Dominique away from this madding throng. But in a peculiar fashion, my very unease in the grand salon made it both psychically and practically difficult to depart. Of what unseemly and perhaps less humorous gossip would I become the object if I retreated from the venue of my jocular disgrace into solitary broodings? Might not my comings and goings become a subject of closer public scrutiny, endangering the secrecy of the ultimate enormity of my assignations with the ship's Pilot? Certainement as Captain I could ill afford to appear unwilling to face the discourse of my own Honored Passengers, and as a man I refused to slink off like a creature of no consequence from the bemusement of these shrill buffoons. So, like a nectar-dipping butterfly, I fluttered from bloom to bloom, tasting this conversation and that, sipping wine, inhaling incenses, nibbling dainties, never securing a static perch but hovering at the peripheries while sampling the garden's questionable delights. Nevertheless, I was the object of no little attention and not merely the accustomed flutter attending the Captain on his social rounds. I was constantly aware of covert glances behind my back of the sort conducive to a self-diagnosis of paranoia, had I not occasions to trap unwary watchers with a sudden shift of my gaze. While I encountered no more verbal assassins lurking in the shadows, my mental state seemed the subject of subtle probing scrutiny assayed through the idle discourse. Particularly were my difficulties with Lorenza an object of prying gossip. "Quelle chose, my dear Captain, why was our Domo not in attendance at our lunch?" "It was a rare meal Lorenza conjured, Genro, peculiar you weren't there." "She seemed more than willing to share dream chambers with us all." "Ah, my roguish Captain, you have the secret amour, ne? For surely poor Lorenza's behavior reveals the claws of a woman scorned." "Or is it you, pauvre Genro, who have lost Lorenza's favors? Is that the cause of your malaise? If so, allow me to suggest a stratagem d'amour which I've never known to fail. ..." "Certainement, mon cher, there are others more than willing to cast away your gloom. You need only look about you--or into my own eyes." Und so weiter ad infinitum, as I wandered in a growing discomfort which began to take on an edge of anger as the proceedings evolved. For as they all assayed me, I passed over into judging them, and in my vision they were no less haunted figures than the Captain whom they regarded as such an object of psychic speculation. Indeed, while my admitted distraction might have wrapped me in enigma, and the disharmony between Captain and Domo might be ample cause for this social concern, the true meaning was beyond their courage to attempt to comprehend. Thus, while their perceptions were clouded by self-willed ignorance, mine were honed by the all-too- puissant clarity of the inner eye. From which vantage did all this gaiety seem somewhat overheated and thin, like a phantom oasis city shimmering in the desert eye. Like wasteland travelers, did they not dwell in their own mirage, wrapping their illusion round them in the empty awful night? So fragile was the structure of their reality that a single unsubsumed consciousness, a solitary ripple in their little pond, was enough to roil the social waters into a frothing, bubbling foam. "Ach, the wandering spirit returns!" I was in the act of pouring wine into my goblet from a flagon, standing for the moment alone in a blue-illumined concavity, rather like a tiny sea- cliff grotto carved into the overhanging rock, a bubble of relative solitude, or so I had thought. But there Lorenza found me, and not without her entourage. Two of them were supporting her, or, rather, she lounged luxuriantly in their arms. Aga Henri Koram, the freeservant master of erotic entertainments, done up in bare chest and mail of brass, held her about the waist like a sack of plunder while she draped her arm around the neck of a thin blond fellow dressed in wine-red silks artfully arranged to simulate noble rags. Lorenza herself wore but a short white sarong clasped with a wooden brooch and slit to expose her inner thighs and a wreath of bejeweled golden flowers choked tight about her throat. Sweat glistened on her body or mayhap some unguent gel, and her ice-blue eyes were glazed with toxicants and the reddened haze of voluptuary intent. Behind them, like the background in some erotic frieze, were half a dozen Honored Passengers similarly dressed for festishistic fantasy of diverse styles and modes, leaning against each other and regarding me with lidded eyes. "Greetings, Lorenza," I said stiffly. "I see you are enjoying the spirit of the fete." At this, there was tipsy laughter from the followers in her train; no few of them were charged or moleculed, and sans doubt all of them were drunk. "And you, pauvre Genro, are your pleasures being met?" Lorenza said somewhat thickly. "Or would you care to join our troupe?" I stared evenly into her bleary eyes. "You seem quite well escorted at the moment," I said. "What need do you have of me?" "What indeed!" she said with a sudden ice-hard coldness that provoked intakes of breath. The moment hung there suspended like a thundercloud of storm. Blue daggers of lightning seemed to flicker in her eyes. All within range seemed locked in unwholesome attention. " Ah, but surely, mon cher, there is always room for one more," Aga said with naive good-naturedness despite his chosen persona of naked flesh and chains. With that, the tension burst into erotically overtoned laughter, in which all save Lorenza joined. "Yes, do come along, we have more than enough of everything to go around." "Come let me stroke away your gloom." "Let us all repair to a dream chamber and invent an erotic figure no one has seen before." "What do you say, my gallant Captain, is this not an occasion to which you can rise?" Lorenza said in a slurry yet piercing tone that silenced the sycophantic rust lings like the cracking of a whip. "The question is, mon cher ," I snapped, "whether you can remain erect much longer." There was a collective inhalation at my bluntly pointed rejoinder, a whiff of the ancient arena of our most timeless gladiator game; the onlookers observed this contretemps with a naked hungry glee. "Supinity will suffice for my part, ne, is not the other yours?" My ears fairly burned crimson and my groin grew damp and cold. The audience laughed uneasily in a squirm of sympathetically crawling flesh. "I fear our fair Domo has passed beyond the realm of nicety," Aga said distastefully, loosening his grip upon her waist. "Oh, the niceties and gallantries have long since passed between the Captain and myself," Lorenza pressed on, hazy of countenance but crystal cold of eye. "Verdad, Genro? No doubt there are numerous others who have piqued your manly interest. As there are others, many others, to be honored in your stead." Now Aga disengaged himself with righteous manly indignation. But Lorenza barely noticed, merely flowing closer against her other momentary swain. "Unless you have become a sour celibate, as the all-knowing Sar would have it. " "Or perhaps there is another whose charms exceed your own," I snapped back cruelly, no longer prudent in my shameful rage. "Is such an unlikely miracle beyond your ego's power to imagine?" "Name her, then, and tell us her tale!" Lorenza said with serpent softness. "Produce this beauty for our delectation. Hide not treasures for yourself!" "And if she conducts her amours not as theater as some others I could name ...?" Lorenza looked coldly into my eyes and I glared just as coldly back. Though my mocked and outraged manhood called for vengeance against her taunts, my higher cortex abruptly clarified with the knowledge that this scene had been played out much too far. Lorenza too seemed to have attained this relative state of cerebral civilization or at least had seen what was in my eyes; she gave off staring with a thespic wobble of her head, feigning a sudden awareness of her own intoxicated state. "I do believe I am not entirely within my powers, good playmates," she said in an exaggeratedly syncopated voice. "Let us find a place softly cushioned and leave our Captain to his ectoplasmic soul-mate." So saying, she departed with her entourage in her wake, and I stood there for quite some time in my shadowed little niche, watching them reel and bob like flotsam through the wrack of faces, spreading the gossip of this latest unsavory addition to my unwholesome mystique like windblown foam. |