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CHAPTER 14 THE TELLING OF this tale nears its end; soon, all too soon, I must put aside this word crystal encapsulating the past and face the ultimate consequences of my action in realtime. While I approach the moment when I must leave this cabin to confront my Honored Passengers and crew with something less than serenity, I believe that these confessions have lightened my burden, not so much through the hoary tradition of guilt-lancing self- flagellation as by enabling me to view past incarnations through hindsight's ruthless clarity and by so doing becoming at least no less than the integrated product of assimilated karma. In such a state of clear untimebound composure, I can now comprehend the wisdom, or at the very least the low self-serving cunning, of what from a more merely rational perspective, such as that of Argus or Maestro Hiro, must have seemed self-defeating madness. For the Captain of the ship to order the Second Officer to publicly proclaim that he has been found not mad was, naturellement, to induce the opposite impression in the community at large to the detriment of his authority. While such a bizarre pronunciamento from any quarter could hardly fail to exacerbate the paranoia of the floating cultura, by ordering Argus to make it instead of the Healer himself, I had served public notice that my ability to command had been challenged, that the ship's Healer had found me fit, and that therefore this question was now closed by order of the Captain and accepted as such by his Second Officer. Thus, from the moment of that announcement to my present command of this Pilotless marooned ship, no further challenge to my authority has presumed to appear, despite the growing conviction that I was possessed by dark demons. Having quashed the notion of my psychic inability to perform my duty at this stage and in such a self-evidently outre manner, I had divorced the definition of my sanity as Captain from acts performed outside that official role. That I was irrevocably in command had become axiomatic. Like Ahab, I had made myself an object of fearful mystery whose very darkness enhanced his charisma, a figment of inevitable destiny. Naturellement, such clear self-awareness informed not the deed in the doing; indeed, at that point I could not have been more indifferent to the social perception of my image, for my central concern was to encapsulate myself in solitude so as to confront my own tormented being. For truth be told, I was tormented by perceptions and their corollary temptation which from a social definition rendered me unsane, though from a more absolute viewpoint what I might be said to have been suffering from was an excess of insight. Social morality requires a shared matrix of communal reality to which to relate thought and deed, and the illusion of an objective ethical esthetic requires at the very least the conviction that objective reality is more than a contradiction in terms. But I had passed over to a realm of perception where all that could be said to have objective existence was the conundrum of unknowable chaos out of which our quotidian relativities spring. And the only phenomenon of the dance of maya which touched any absolute ground was the Jump itself. By this instrumentality alone was the veil parted, revealing the trace of the Great and Only in the ship's translation through it. Had my mind therefore not accepted through a form of reason that which my spirit could seek but not touch? Did I not then comprehend that in the most absolute sense only this Void beyond the void was real and that I myself existed as a shadow in a world of shadows? This conviction grew within me as I went through the motions of the next Jump ritual, exchanging stiff orders and affectless phrases with Mori and Argus, who remained, like myself, sealed within duty from any emotional acknowledgments of the tension on the bridge. In retrospect, I do not think that I could have been unaware of the odor of psychic ozone which had pervaded the ship as I marched from my cabin to the bridge, nor of the uneasy greeting I received upon entering, nor of the carefully unacknowledged pregnancy of the Jump countdown itself. Rather did I simply not deign to pay it heed, for was this not a mere shadow play itself? Tambien do I now believe that I could not have been unaware of the ultimate implication of this logic, though by some functionally protective psychic mechanism I succeeded in hiding the knowledge from myself. Which is to say that even then I saw that from what had become our shared weltanschauung, Dominique's ruthless indifference to all but the absolute goal could not be judged against any system of merely human morality. If only the Great and Lonely was really real, then only it was absolute, and any ethical esthetic which denied this truth was a formal failure. In a sprach more terribly plain, I had reached the point of no way out but through, though I dared not admit this to myself. Au contraire, I sought to use the Jump ritual to deny this unacknowledged inner reality, to mechanize the experience, to purge it of its erotic charge. Indeed, as I went through the motions in a detumescent disconnected trance like some ancient manual laborer moving to the rhythm of a collective worksong, outer reality made no connection to my inner realms until Argus spoke the words "Vector coordinate overlay on your board." Then, abruptly, inner and outer reality snapped into congruent focus at the glowing red point of tangency between decision and mechanism. perception and morality, the Captain and the spirit--the command point beneath my fingertip. It all came down to this act or its exclusion. Duty demanded that I touch this glowing point and dump the vector coordinate overlay into the Jump Circuit Computer, thereby ensuring the safe passage of my ship through the Jump and back into the world of men. Temptation's fulfillment required only that I omit to will its denial. I could never face this moment again without this awareness of its true meaning. And as I achieved this chilling satori, my finger came down like a reflex hammer, as if to avoid the awful responsibility of this conscious choice. " Dumping vector coordinate overlay into Jump Circuit Computer," I fairly sighed in relief. So doing, I then erected the Jump Field aura and commanded the Jump itself without any psychic connection to these acts. And in the moment of the Jump, I felt nothing at all. For I now knew that my fantasies were fraudulent and empty if I had not the courage or moral monstrousness to act, mere masturbation when the means to true mutual fulfillment for myself and Dominique were mine to command. At this point, naturellement, I had long since passed the point of inevitability as I slid down the geodesic of my lifeline toward my present destiny, but the acceptance of such a conclusion was still anathema to the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, the Genro who had been, still loyal to his command. Thus in a mode of abnegating and slowly eroding denial, I determined to relegate myself to isolation, both from the temptation and irresistible influence of any congress with Dominique, and from the milieu of social consequences, which for me had become a shadow play in which my role was Flying Dutchman at the fete. Like that ghostly Hollander, I haunted my cabin, or, daunted by my own unwholesome company, wandered the corridors of my ship in an ectoplasmic phase that allowed no connection to protoplasmic beings. "All else," Dominique had said often enough, "is waiting." Now I experienced the the vacuum implied therein, a state in which no event was meaningful, in which no figure stood out from ground to mark the slow crawl of time. Thus was I reduced to measuring its passage by conventional instruments, becoming a watcher of timepieces and schedules, running a mental countdown to the next Jump as I waited for hands to move and digits to change. Twenty hours to the next Jump, and Dominique was being transferred from sick bay to her cabin. Sixteen hours, and by now her coma would be lightening to a more normal sleep, and consciousness would be slowly coalescing out of the Great and Lonely dream. Fifteen hours, and by now I should be on my way to her cabin. ... Of the venues of previously mechanically passed hours I remember only a gray generality, but the moment I realized that I was now making the choice to eschew our by-now-regular assignation engraved itself with painful clarity on my memory track. It was precisely fifteen hours till the next Jump, and I can recall this datum with such precision because I was eating a solitary meal in my cabin, staring at a down-counter I had set with the Jump as zero point and watching the digits change. As they did so, I felt a coldness in my limbs, whatever I was chewing turned to paste in my mouth, and for the first time since Dominique had presented me with her ultima thule and my terrible temptation, the faint uncoiling rustles of my kundalinic serpent. Sense memories of our previous erotic encounters were released by this missed beat in our rhythm, and with them the memory of the state of being produced by her descriptive and erotic ministrations, and with that, the lust to regain it, transcending the morality of lesser desires. But with that frisson of arational temptation came the realization that this aching throb of nerve endings was directed not at the flesh of Dominique Alia Wu but through it to what lay beyond, to the state I had denied to both of us when my finger had reflexively dumped the vector coordinate overlay into the computer. I wanted to do this thing. I could no longer deny the reality of this terrible lust. I could no longer pretend that powerful components of my psyche which might be called my essential spirit did not long to commit it in defiance of all other considerations. I was horrified by the presence of this monster within me; at the same time I despised the coward crucifying the highest impulse of his spirit upon an ethical code. Nevertheless, I was gripped in the bounds of both a denial-stiffened determination of Captainly will and a karmic equation of far greater puissance. Just as my role in this transaction as commander of the Jump had been revealed as both engine of ecstasy and ultimate denier of its highest fulfillment, so did I now perceive that the being denied was both Dominique and myself. Thus I knew that I could no longer seek the illusion of my true desire in her flesh any more than she was able to delude herself with mine. Between us now, only a truly mutual act was possible, and that was the act of sublime criminality which I both detested and sought, the only meaningful event remaining in the repertoire of our destiny. Our lifelines therefore must be sundered if such an enormity was not to be, the status quo ante must be regained, and I must proceed as if that chance meeting on the sky ferry and all events consequent had never occurred. Upon such an improbable feat of mental judo was my forbearance based; such was the absurdity to which my moral calculus was reduced in its combat with fate. Moment by moment, hour by hour, I held myself at bay with this foredoomed false mantra. Never did it occur to me as I watched time squeeze slowly by that the will of another would never permit such denial, that my failure to appear long after the customary hour would cause Dominique to commit some escalatory act. Ten hours and thirteen minutes until the next Jump, and as the digits changed, there was a thumping and a shouting at my cabin door. There stood Lorenza, vibrating with outrage, wild-eyed and clench- jawed. "If you are not a madman, Genro Kane Gupta, you are sin doubt the poorest excuse for a Void Captain that I have ever seen!" she said shrilly. "You have a duty to my Honored Passengers as well as to your machines! The public disharmonies between us may be laid to personal pique, and despite all appearances, your sanity has been certified by your own Med crew, but this occurrence is evidence that you've lost all control of your own command!" "What are you talking about, Lorenza?" I snapped. "You're the one who's making no sense." "This beastly Pilot of yours! Like a fool, you permit this creature the cuisinary rights of an officer, indeed you squire her at her repast, and as a result, she now has the presumption to attend our fete." "What?" "She holds court in the grand salon even now, attempting to engage Honored Passengers in discourse and refusing to leave on her rights as an officer of the ship." "By no authority of mine," I told her. "In any event, you must order her to leave. My clients are in a fever, and the damage to my reputation as a Domo I think has been more than sufficient for one voyage!" Unable to calm Lorenza, I followed her distraught footsteps to what I perceived all too well was a tableau of confrontation arranged by Dominique for my regard. There was no other person aboard whom she saw as other than a shadow and no purpose animating her actions save the One. She would as soon have invaded the grand salon for the purpose of vexing Lorenza or her Honored Passengers as she would have forborn the same out of consideration for their tranquility. Sin doubt, what she sought was what she had achieved: to force me thither. When we reached the grand salon, Dominique was sitting alone at a cafe table across the floor from the entrance, where the ascending spiral balcony began its climb to the vivarium; thus she was both of the generality and perched about four feet above it, on the first shallow turn of the ramp. As we stood for a moment on the elevated landing overlooking the fete, the ripples this apparition had created were visible in the geometric configuration of the would-be revelers. The distribution of Honored Passengers within the levels of the sculptural room was flattened like an amoeba flowing around the invisible obstacle of Dominique's sphere of influence. Then Dominique perceived our entrance from her vantage below. "Good abendzeit, Genro," she called loudly over the heads of everyone in the grand salon. "We've all been waiting for you to arrive!" A hush descended upon the room as heads swiveled back and forth between Dominique and the object of her greeting as I stood there naked upon the stage. "Why have you come here?" I called back reflexively in a voice whose projection was no less thespic. "You are contributing to this sorry spectacle," Lorenza muttered and, gripping me firmly by the wrist, fairly dragged me down the steps and out of this highly involuntary limelight. "You must remove this creature without further discussions, " Lorenza hissed as we made our way through the throng towards Dominique. The press of bodies parted before me as if fearing contamination, and I was the object of a plethora of fearful sidelong glances. A semi-circle of onlookers had already formed beneath Dominique's balcony table, creating a stage beneath upon which for me to perform, like a foil, below her. There was no way I was going to avoid further contribution to Dominique's spectacle; certainement, I was not at that moment able to remove this creature without further discussions. Dominique was dressed in a plain yellow bedrobe. Her feet were unshod, her hair a tangle, her eyes hollow and bloodshot, and the mottlings and marks of the Jump Circuit machineries were still evident on her skin. She was an apparition of the postcoital price of congress with the Great and Only, and she spoke to me as if no other beings of consequence were there. "Where have you been, mannlein?" she said from on high. "As you can see, when I missed your company, I thought enough of the lack to seek you here, in the tropical fish tank. No higher proof of my regard for you is needful, nicht wahr!" "Dominique! How could you?" Never in my life had I experienced a moment of public exposure of such enormity so cavalierly delivered as if from Olympic realms, such a total disregard for the social surround, such an act of psychic terrorism, such a sea of stunned faces, such a feeling of nude unwholesomeness as might only be remembered from primal childhood dreams of appearing pantsless in a crowd. "With the Pilot?" "--his secret amour--" "--demented verdad--" "--explains his cafard--" "--quel horror--" The uproar spread in growing ripples, then rebounded from the outer confines to fill the entire grand salon with a shrill, scandalized, horrified, rolling-eyed babble. Bodies eddied and swirled as the mob pressed closer. Lorenza, her body bent backward as if at the sudden release of a vile odor, snarled at me under disbelieving eyes. Dominique stared down at me, her bloodshot eyes twin tunnels of overlapping images; opaque and fathomless, fatigued and burning with feverish energy, clear, black, and infinite as the void behind them. "Look at them, Genro," she declaimed in a voice of withering thespic scorn. "Watch the shadows caper and dance. See how they become terrified when you rattle the bars of their cage!" "Stop it! Stop it!" I shouted at her, choking on the miasma of rage and fear in the air. "The power to stop the dance is yours alone, mon cher," Dominique said evenly, transfixing me with the truth of her unwavering gaze. "Genro Kane Gupta, have you been conducting an affair d'amour with this creature?" Lorenza shouted. "As Domo of this ship, I demand an answer. If such a monster is in command, we all have a right to know." Silence fell like a curtain behind the figure of Lorenza confronting the miscreant with hands on hips and outraged eyes. "Tell her, Genro" Dominique said with a thin little smile. "Tell her as little or as much as you like. It is a thing of no consequence." I was psychically paralyzed, frozen on the interface between persona and being, logic and emotion, social reality and inner impulse. I was literally incapable of response, for none could conceptualize itself out of my utter chaos. "It is a thing of the greatest consequence," a familiar voice called out, and Maestro Hiro, accompanied by Healer Lao, elbowed his way through the press to Lorenza's side. "Argus Edison Gandhi, are you here? Your presence is required." A moment later, Argus emerged from the crowd to join the phalanx of my judges, all regarding me with a cold, horrified contempt. "Med crew Maestros have been rendered unfit for duty by congress with pilots, as you and I, mein Captain, have had occasion to discuss," Hiro said. "If you are the unlikely victim of such a cafard, you must be placed under medical supervision and your command remanded to your Second Officer. I am willing to stake my reputation on the necessity for such action, and I am sure all present would concur." A guttural rumble of righteous agreement greeted his words, a low feral sound overtoned with the subsonics of fear. A strangely anomalous feeling began to seep into my bones, a cold, clear counterpoint to the nauseous helplessness of my position. "Au contraire, all present do not concur," Dominique snapped sardonically. "And since I do not, this foolishness is at an end." In the dead stillness that followed, Dominique--pale, unshod, frail creature in tangled hair and bedrobe--seemed yet to speak with some unsheathed queenly authority, her voice as clear and sharp and gleaming as a naked blade. "I am the Pilot of this ship until it reaches Estrella Bonita, nicht wahr, for there is no other. And Genro Kane Gupta is your Captain until then too, for I will accept no other. Come, Genro, come up here beside me where you belong." To the angry murmurings of all and sundry, I mounted the balcony as if in a trance and stood beside Dominique's table surveying a mob that bayed for my blood. Daunting as such a tableau might be, from this vantage the cool tendrils of calm creeping along my bones began to make connections with my main spinal core, and I seemed to be looking down on this melee as if from some mountaintop height. "For the Jump is required the clear, untrammeled willingness of the Pilot, verdad?" Dominique said, fixing her gaze on Maestro Hiro. "Tell them, O Maestro of my worldly machineries!" Hiro stared back at her in the confounded terror of a man of urban civilization weaponlessly confronting a wild beast. "Tell them! If there is resistance in my spirit, there will be no Jump. If I do not freely offer myself up, this ship will hang here in the long light- years forever. If another's hand but Genro's touches the Jump command point, I promise you all that nothing at all will occur. In this regard, my will is absolute. Can you deny this, Maestro Hiro?" Hiro glared back at her for a moment; then polarities reversed, and he was the one who averted his gaze from the more sapient eyes. So too did the gazes of the others transmute from red ire and hot fear to a sullen, smoldering evasiveness, crusting over this volcanic flow with the ash of frozen destiny. A vast shrug of nervousness seemed to twitch around the room. From my viewpoint on the balcony, I could see the rear edge of the mob eroding away as hunch-spirited figures slunk toward other venues. Lorenza, Hiro, Argus, and Lao all seemed to flow backwards as if to lose themselves in the generality of the now beaten and dully terrified throng. "Genro Kane Gupta is Captain of your destiny as I am Pilot of your fate," Dominique declaimed grandly. "So it is written, so it shall be." Turning slowly to me, she stared intently but said softly, with an almost fey smile, "You are the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, cher liebchen, please be so good as to dismiss these churls." Her expression hardened as if challenging me to exert my puissance as nakedly as she had displayed hers, to seal us here together on our Great and Lonely throne. "This public forum is ended," I declared in my voice of command. "As Captain of this ship, I will brook no further interference with my authority." I glared down at Dominique with as much outrage as I could muster. "As for you," I said, "I will return you to your cabin." Dominique's eyes became opaque and unfathomable, mirrors of amusement tossing back a reflection of my ire distorted into an intimate jest. "Certainement, liebchen," she said, loudly enough to be well overheard. "You are the Captain as always, and I am yours to command." *** Guiding the shaky-legged Dominique before me like a toddling child, I removed us from the grand salon with as much dispatch as the hysteria that formed in our wide wake would allow, and deigned not to speak to her until we had escaped into the nearly deserted environs of the central corridor, where I grabbed on to her arm and, fairly dragging her forward toward her cabin, demanded: "Why did you deem it necessary to commit such an atrocity?" "To teach a lesson that you must learn, mannlein," she said harshly. "To strip away the final veil." "Revealing what?" I snapped back. "Revealing what was already known." "'That you and I have been lovers?" I said, dumbfounded. "Known to you, Genro, not to those poor shadows. To me, you are the only other one who matters." "Is that some bizarre profession of love?" "It is a statement of our karmic configuration, mannlein," she said, pausing to regard me with an expression seemingly devoid of any tender emotion. "Have you still not accepted the truth?" "Your truth?" I said. "The truth that has caused you to destroy my career?" "Forsaking all else, liebchen. You know that is the price." "And now that you've forced me to pay it, I have no choice but to continue to the end, is that it?" "That," she said, "is what was already known." I glared at her. Our eyes locked in some ultimate contest of will, but as my spirit drifted into the bottomless depths of her orbs, I was forced to admit that this combat existed within my own soul. "Was it not you who first came to my cabin?" she said insinuatingly. "Was it not you who chose to return more than once? Was it not you who walked the hull of the ship so as to bring this very moment into being?" "Was it not you who seduced me down every step of this path?" "Certainement," Dominique admitted freely. "It was my destiny to do so, as it was yours to be seduced. We would not do what we do if we were not who we are, ne? And who we are is the Pilot of the Great and Only and the Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, and we both know what we want. And together we have the power to attain it. Have you finally not the courage to acknowledge the nature of your own being?" "I acknowledge the true nature of my desire," I told her. I acknowledge that I have the power to attain it. I acknowledge that I have become all but convinced that nothing else is real. But unlike you, Dominique, this single reality, puissant though it be, does not totally define the nature of my being." "Doesn't it?" she said coldly. "What else is there?" "The social realm, the responsibilities of duty, the--" "Shadow games in a shadow realm," she said flatly, daring me with her eyes to deny it. "Did you not experience it as such but a moment ago, mannlein?" In my silence I could read my answer on the thin smile that twisted her lips. Still, I could not accept myself as the mirror of what I saw in her eyes and nothing more or less. "The spirits of other human beings," I said with much greater conviction. "No less real than our own." "And no more, Genro," she said assertively. "You speak of violating the spirits of other humans, but have they not violated yours and mine? They fall upon you, do they not, like a dog pack upon a strange animal, and for what? For not fulfilling your duty? Nein! For congress with the pariah. For seeking vision beyond the bounds of their egg. For things that are the rightful province of your spirit alone." She wrinkled up her nose and nodded contemptuously down the corridor toward the grand salon. "That is the lesson I sought to impart with my little theater," she said. "What moral obligation do you have to those who willfully refuse to open their eyes and deem you mad for seeing?" "And what about you?" I said in inwardly evasive anger. "Am I more to you than another shadow, Dominique? Another means to the only purpose, which, as you say, is its own?" "You are the only other one who matters to me, Genro," she said. "As I am the only other one who matters to you." "Because we each need the other to attain our desire. ..." "Yes." "And nothing more?" I said, studying the muscular ideogram of her face, the shifting surface of her eyes, for any new emotive response. "There is nothing higher, so there can be nothing more." "Sophistry," I said. "You ask if I feel for you l'amour humaine, the caritas of personal treasurement?" she said much less certainly. "I have caritas enough to erect no easy untruth between us. And the truth, liebchen, is that this is a question I cannot answer. We are what we are and our karma is inextricable. This may not be enough to you, mi mannlein, but it is everything to me. If this be self-serving sophistry, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa." We had reached her cabin door. She cocked me an inquisitive look. "You would grant me your favors even now?" I said with a certain incredulity. "After this contumely? Even though I forswear the reciprocation you seek?" "Perhaps that is the measure of my affection for you, mon liebchen," she said, not without a certain warmth, but not without a certain irony either. "I grant you all within my poor powers sans reserve against reciprocation, and I ask only the same from you. Is this not the essence of the true unselfish amour humaine?" "I know not any more," I said, opening the cabin door and ushering her through it. I stood in the doorway for a long moment regarding Dominique as she regarded me. Many things had passed between us, but none of these could ever have simply been called love. Indeed, to enter her boudoir now would only result in another act of masturbatory fantasy in which the image of ecstasy would become a mocking reminder of the true desire, the only true sharing of which destiny had rendered us capable. This too had become a meaningless shadow. "You wish not to come inside?" Dominique finally said. I shook my head. "There is no longer any point to it." She nodded her agreement. "There is only truth between us now," she said. "Or nothing at all." Her eyes widened in quite ordinary alarm. "You do not mean that, ne," she said shakily. "You merely hide from your own lack of courage to do what must be done. ..." 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 momenlt." "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." |