The Void Captain's Tale

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Welcome aboard the sex-drive void ship . . . Captain Genro commands the giant spaceship Dragon Zephyr - on board are ten thousand passengers in electrocoma, a smaller number of conscious passengers eagerly utilising the ship's dream chambers - and a Pilot. In the context of space travel, the Pilot is merely a biological component in the machine. Always a woman, her function is to launch the ship into the Jump by means of a cosmic orgasm. She is a pariah, shunned by all. Void Captain Genro should never even have spoken to his Pilot, let alone tried to embark on a relationship with her. When he did so, the result was every space traveller's nightmare. A Blind Jump into the Void . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 252

Sample

I am Genro Kane Gupta, Void Captain of the Dragon Zephyr, and mayhap this is my todtentale. Of necessity, it is also the tale of Void Pilot Dominique Alia Wu, but she is gone into the Great and Only, and I lack both the art to present her point of view in the late 20th Century novelistic mode and the insight to say in what sense her tale goes on.

So this tale must not be presumed to mirror any consciousness but my own. Indeed, so acutely aware am I of my own imperfections as a subjective instrument that, were I a Sea Captain of Old rather than a Void Captain of the Second Starfaring Age, I would be sorely tempted to adopt the literary mode known as Ship’s Log, in which Captains even less versed in the tale-teller’s art than I scribed terse laconic descriptions of daily events, reporting everything from the ship’s position to occurrences of tragic enormity in the same even, stylized, objective prose.

Thusly:

On the day that Void Captain Genro Kane Gupta assumed command of the Dragon Zephyr in orbit around Earth, he engaged in an unwholesome exchange of name tales on the sky ferry to the ship with the Void Pilot Dominique Alia Wu.

On the day of the first Jump, he conversed with her at unnatural length afterwards.

After the third Jump, they performed a sexual act.

On the ninth Jump, Void Captain Genro Kane Gupta neglected to pump the vector co-ordinate overlay into the Jump Circuit Computer prior to activation of the Jump Circuit. The consciousness of Void Pilot Dominique Alia Wu left its material matrix and did not return, though the Dragon Zephyr somehow survived this Blind Jump.

The ship is now marooned about a score light-years from the nearest habited star, without a Pilot. This is the last Log entry I shall make before I call for volunteers.

One must admit that this mode achieves a certain power an understatement, the wu of an unselfconscious artifact crafted entirely by functional imperative.

But like any product of an unselfconscious mechanism, it touches not the spirit. It does not explain how a man could come to sacrifice himself and his ship, his centre and his duty, to an unwholesome passion for the unattainable, nor does it enable the audience to judge for itself whether this be a romance or a tragedy or an evil farce.

For that, a mode that admits of its own subjectivity is required, and besides I have neither handscriber nor book leaves with which to produce an artfully pleasing ersatz of an ancient Ship’s Log. So I am encoding an admittedly personal tale on word crystal in our contemporary manner in the wan hope that by doing so, by attempting to tell the story without excluding the storms of the spirit, I may in the end come to gain that insight in the telling which failed to inform the acts in question. In the unlikely event that this account should reach another human spirit, I ask that you decode it first into print, so that some small reflection of lost objectivity be retained.

Having made this miserable and pathetic apologia, I shall henceforth abandon all pretence of objectivity and speak my final tale from the heart as if I were recounting it into the sympathetic ear of a fellow being.

Thus I shall now proceed in the conventional manner with the tales of my pedigree and freenom.

My father, Kane Krasna Alda, was a Void Ship Man Jack without any desire for command. Rather for him the attraction of starfaring was the rhythm of the via itself – the shipboard opportunity for solitary contemplation, and the long planetary layovers he chose to take, which enabled him to savour fully a multiplicity of worlds. While he was a rounded man who practised several Ways from time to time as a matter of civilized course, his goals were aesthetic rather than spiritual. He travelled widely to enrich his store of sensory data rather than approach the One through its multiplicity, and he used his shipboard solitude not for spiritual meditation upon all he had encompassed but for the practice of many sensory arts.

He practised the eternal arts of painting and sculpture in many styles and with a multiplicity of tools and materials. He composed music conventionally on sound crystal but also on a silver flute, of which ancient instrument he had achieved considerable mastery. He crafted world bubbles and the tiny organisms within. None of his works achieved commercial validation or critical incorporation into the stream of the art, but then, he chose not to offer them up for such.

His freenom, Kane, he chose homage a Karl Kane, a semi-legendary figure of the First Starfaring Age, an artist of visual images, who, upon completing a thirty-year voyage from Earth to Novi Mir in one of the slower-than-light torchships of the period with an oeuvre of completed works that supposedly put him in the class of Leonardo, Hokusai and Bramjonovitch, packed his works and himself on the next torchship leaving the planet and disappeared into legend.

My mother, Gupta Lee Miko, never left Arcady, the planet where she was born, where she served as a judicial arbitrator when she met my father, and where she so serves still. Arcady is a rather pastoral planet of soaring mountains, broad plains, and placid crystal seas; moonless, without significant axial tilt or orbital eccentricity, its habitable regions are lands of eternal autumn briskness, the heimat of a people similarly cool and clear and brisk. Justice on Arcady has been likened to a clear blue light proceeding from a centre of platonic logic, and this is the consciousness that my mother has always sought to maintain, ironized by a gemutlich perception of the merciful impossibility of ever achieving this goal absolute.

Her freenom, Gupta, she chose homage a Sanjiro Gupta, an ark administrator of the early First Starfaring Age, who left the system of Sol with a consignment of stellar colonists dredged up from the deepest political dungeons of a consortium of sponsoring national governments, and arrived three generations later as the guiding memory of the sanest political system of the day, the forerunner of our modern transtellar society. Though this model colony ship society did not long survive planetary dispersion, and the proto-Lingo that had evolved soon began to break down into its constituent sprachs, it was Sanjiro Gupta who tossed the first pebble of modernity into the dark pool of that chauvin-ridden age, whose time-amplified ripples are the social mantra of our day.

My parents met on Arcady of course, on one of his open-ended planetary sojourns. Though she was ten years his senior and their consciousness interface was mutually recognizable as ultimately unstable from the start, their pheromone profiles matched chemical objects and desires so mutually that amour was inevitable.

Since each was a person of caritas and both understood the transience of their passage together, a mutual agreement was conceived to commemorate it with a child, namely myself.

My father remained on Arcady with my mother as agreed until I was six. While my father’s Lingo was dominantly nihonogo and the sprach of my mother more deutsch than anything else, the parental sprach they evolved together was heavily anglic. I grew up speaking this, and my Lingo is an anglish sprach to this day.

On my sixth birthday, my father resumed his wanderlebe, returning to Arcady at long irregular intervals from his starfaring. Since the rhythm of their time together was long and intermittent and since their love song had a pre-designed end, my parents were able to maintain a mutual caritas long after amour had faded, despite their basic psychic dissonance, and my upbringing was satisfyingly complex.

From the intermittent appearances of my starfaring father, I naturally acquired an image of the romance of travel, and, more subtly, the yearning to achieve a broadness of psyche, to become a man who was more than a functional description of his work.

The influence of my mother tempered this romanticism and subjectivism with a certain respect for logical detachment, with the belief that a truly centred person would always retain a cool, clear void in the eye of his storm.

Even then I was probably not entirely unaware that in this dynamic I was merely choosing my own psychic sprach of the social Lingo of our Age, finding for myself in my own carefully naive way the specific expression of the general image of menschkeit.

Which for me became the desire to be a Void Ship Captain even before I passaged through my wanderjahr to adulthood, though of course I spent the traditional year or so aimlessly wandering through the mondes and demimondes of the habited star sphere anyway, sampling molecules and charges, masters, adventures, and hardships, wandering women and vagrant vias. Like everyone else, I passed through adolescence as a child of fortune, but, unlike many, I never felt the seduction of an eternal wanderjahr as the ultimate incarnation, and, unlike most, I wasn’t reluctant for this golden summer to end.

After a seemly interval searching for the true essence of my being, which I had long since found, I entered the Academy of the Stars, and graduated as a general officer of Void Ships after an unexceptional and unexceptionable apprenticeship.

My freenom, Genro, I chose upon graduation, homage of Genro Gonzago Tabriz, a famous Void Ship Captain of the early Second Starfaring Age, who had attained almost three centuries of age, spent most of that time as a Captain of Void Ships, visited most of the habited planets of his day, and planted colonies on a score more. When advanced age finally caught up with him, he recorded what is still considered one of the most artistically satisfying todtentales ever told, then flew a small scoutcraft in a downspiralling orbit about a black hole, sending back his impressions continuously in the haiku mode until he reached the event horizon, where, so the legend might be crafted, he exists as an external human haiku even today.

I did not, I think, choose Genro as my freenom out of my romantic admiration for the life that the man had led and my desire to emulate it – which of course existed – but for the finished work of art that was its end result. Though at the time all I probably understood was that Genro had been all that a Void Captain should be, that Genro was what I wished to someday become.

Only the Genro that I now am can begin to appreciate the irony of the choice of freenom of that naive young man.

Now that I have properly introduced myself, one tale-telling mode would have me recite my exploits and adventures and glorify my rise to Captain before proceeding to confess the story of my fatal obsession, thus rendering what might otherwise be a mere tale of perverse passion into formal high tragedy. Another, less classical, mode would proceed at once to my exchange of name tales with Dominique Alia Wu.

As I sit here in my cabin encoding this on to word crystal before screwing up my courage to face crew and passengers once more, I can hardly summon the hubris to paean what glory I may have attained prior to that karmic nexus, but on the other hand my prior experience shipping with close to three score other Void Pilots seems both relevant as a background of generality regarding my previous congress with the creatures, and necessary to recount if I am then to convey the absolute uniqueness of the Void Pilot Dominique Alia Wu.

At the time that I assumed command of the Dragon Zephyr, I had been a Void Ship Captain for eight years, had served as second officer for four, and had served the usual junior apprenticeship for three. Thus I would estimate that I would have shipped with some three score Pilots before I met Dominique, a good twenty per cent or so of those extant within that timeframe.

Dominique Alia Wu was the first and only Pilot with whom I ever exchanged name tales, let alone amour.

For those who have neither crewed on Void Ships nor travelled extensively as Honoured Passengers, this total lack of social intercourse between Captain and Pilot may amaze; for those who have, only my crossing of this interface will be anything but a restatement of the obvious.

Of course there can scarcely be any citizens of the Second Starfaring Age who do not think they know something about the Void Pilots who make our transtellar civilization possible. In functional terms, the Pilot is the human component of the Jump Circuit, the organic element of our star drive, who, cyborged to the Jump Drive by the Harmonizer and actived by the Primer Circuit, navigates the ship through the spacetime discontinuity of the Jump and out the other side the requisite number of light-years in the right direction.

There is no falsehood in this, but none of the inner truth either.

Alas, literature and, to a lesser extent, the pictorial arts have archetyped the Pilot as the mystical, sensual belle dame transhumaine of the spaceways, and this is a lie both so enormous and so cunningly twisted around the truth that it forms an all-too-necessary foma at the heart of our transtellar Weltanschauung.

To dispose of the trivialities of surface with a surface refutation: few Pilots choose to be beautiful and none are sexual sports between Jumps. Far from it. They are as divorced from the sphere of human desire as it is possible for a member of our species to become.

‘Pilot’ is an ironic misnomer. Far from the mastery of ship and vector that the word implies, a Pilot is merely the psycho-organic resistor in the Jump Circuit, a living module of circuitry in a far larger mechanism. The Primer induces a specific configuration of psychesomic orgasm in the nervous system of the Pilot. The vrai Jump Drive, the actual propulsion system, is entirely a mass-energy device, which enmeshes the ship in the psychoelectronic matrix of the Pilot’s psychic reference state, the fields synergized by conventional inorganic circuitry. Once this synergy is achieved, the Jump ‘begins’. At the other side of a quite literally immeasurable temporal discontinuity, the ship ‘comes out’ of the Jump an average of 3.8 light-years away and most often roughly along the desired vector.

For what happens within this timeless moment, not for any romance of the spaceways or altruistic desire to serve the species, Pilots surrender all else.

When they lapse into occasional coherency on the subject of their beloved Great and Only, Pilots claim that the interval of the Jump is both timeless and eternal, like the orgasm itself, that all else is shadow, that true union with the Atman is achieved, und so weiter.

Whether this is subjectively true or not and whether this subjective truth transcends phenomenological reality, it has very real phenomenological effects on both the recruitment parameters imposed by reality upon our Void Ship fleet and the social role or lack of same of the Void Ship Pilot in shipboard dynamics.

For obvious biological reasons, a Pilot must be a woman; the male psychoelectrical physiology is simply incapable of platform psychesomic orgasm. Less well known are the rigid psychic parameters, which evolved through a process of trial and error over half a century. The Pilot must be a willing volunteer. The Pilot must possess what in ancient days would have been called an ‘addictive personality’, which here translates into a willing surrender to the Jump and all that it implies – the ultimate coeur addiction on a metaphysical level. The Pilot must be incapable of ordinary orgasm at the touch of congruent flesh, though the causality direction here is sometimes disputed.

So outre and specific are the psychic parameters for Pilots that the fifty billion population of the habited planets supplies us with no more than two hundred of these rare creatures on duty at any given time, to the great detriment of interstellar commerce and exploration. These are almost entirely recruited from the demi-mondes and mental retreats where those whose wanderjahrs led not to the finding of the true self but to the losing of same live out their lives in obsessive addiction to no particular charge or molecule. Indeed this may be why such bas-kulturs are not merely tolerated but glorified by popular culture and subsidized by corporate entities and magnates, though the circularity of this causality would no doubt be fiercely denied by all concerned.

So the Pilot-recruit is a nonorgasmic terminal addict recruited from a spiritual vacuum to willingly surrender all to the ineffableness of the Jump. Aimless vagabonds of the spirit, alienated from their own bodies, willingly offering up the last ghost of their humanity to the Jump Circuit.

And the Jump makes them worse. The physiological price is severe; the required twenty-four-standard-hour recuperation period is the true speed limit of interstellar voyaging, and the average Pilot burns out after ten years. Typically anorexic to begin with, the Pilot loses all interest in the aesthetics of nutriment and must be drip-fed during the recuperation period. Needless to say, personal grooming and cleanliness have an even lower priority in the Pilot’s scheme of things.

So while they are considered officers of the crew with the privileges of same through long tradition, they mingle not with the crew or the Honoured Passengers, by both an almost equally long tradition and their own chronic physical enfeeblement. Of all the Pilots I have shipped with, only Dominique Alia Wu ever crossed the walls of this unstated purdah or even acknowledged anything but indifference to its existence.

Perhaps now you will be ready to understand why the notion never broached my consciousness that Dominique was in fact my Pilot when first I saw her on the sky ferry up to the Dragon Zephyr from Earth.

* * *

In one sense every Void Ship voyage is a new command and in all senses one’s crew is never the same twice, but in the case of the Dragon Zephyr this was doubly so. The module I had dubbed ‘Dragon’ was not only new to me, it was new to service, straight from the circumlunar fabrik; by one of those mathematical oddities, there was also not a single member of the Dragon crew with whom I had shipped before.

So what with an enlarged number of technical reports and crew tales to go over in a command assumption rite not expanded beyond the usual week, my consciousness had been warped towards a necessarily speeded-up mode. I seemed to be just barely on time for everything, and in fact I found myself dashing on board the sky ferry rather at the last minute.

There were only two empty seats available by then: one beside a rather obese and untidy-looking fellow wearing the blazon of the Flinger crew, and the other beside a slim but attractively proportioned woman, plainly but smartly dressed in a functional pale-blue voyaging costume, with a cap of short brown hair, bright dark eyes, and an eagle-visaged profile. Naturally, I chose the beauty over my fellow beast without noticing the decision in my haste as anything but pheromonic aesthetics.

Only when I had strapped in, stretched out, and performed a brief breathing exercise to relax my tempo, did I fully notice my seatmate, who sat staring out of the port at what seemed like nothing in particular.

What I had perceived in my distracted mode as conventional beauty was now revealed as something far less boring. The body within the form-revealing voyaging costume was not a slim, boyish figure but rather that of a buxom voluptuary honed down to its bare functionalism by the practice of some martial or yogic art, or feverish dedication, or both. Her features were not paradigms of stylized beauty in any cultural mode with which I was familiar, and the plain cap of brown hair was seemingly a deliberate anti-dramatic gesture.

Yet the gestalt had brio, presence, a beauty not of feature but of inner transmutation. Her dark bright eyes were the crown of a curving aquiline nose that served to highlight their intensity, her mouth seemed an ideogram of ironic internal dialogue, and the lack of grand coiffure served to focus visual attention on the inner fires rather than on external fleshly harmonies of form.

Of course I was well aware that this perception owed a good deal to the chance congruence of her pheromones with the chemical ideal engraved in my genes and I thought little more of it at the time, my thoughts still primarily focused more on taking command than on this frisson of passing glandular attraction.

At any rate, before I could contemplate initiating a conversation, the warning chord sounded, the luzer was lit, and the sky ferry surged upward atop a pillar of luz, a stream of densified photons pushing it to orbital velocity at an even three gravities – smooth and silent, but still not exactly conducive to artfully casual discourse, and nothing passed between us until the ferry was in the process of matching orbits with the Dragon Zephyr.

Though all Void Ships are assembled for their voyages out of the same eight basic module classes, no two, even of the same general function, are exact duplicates – appropriately emblematic, it is sometimes said, of the coding mode of the DNA molecule.

Indeed, the shape of the core module, the Dragon in this instance, all but turns this fanciful metaphor into a parody of itself. With bridge, crew quarters, sick bay, Jump Drive machinery, and Pilot’s module all contained in the ellipsoidal body of the Dragon, and the spine trailing behind like an erect tail, the core module did indeed resemble a giant silvery spermatozoon; the yang, the male, the propulsive principle, ejaculated from the electronic phallus of the Flinger to fertilize the stars with human genes.

Fortunately, perhaps, the metaphor breaks down at this point. Rather than burying itself in some massive ovum, the prow of the Dragon was the bow of the Dragon Zephyr configuration itself, with the various modules gestalted as the Zephyr slung close against the spine of the core module like a variety of huge metallic sausages.

The Dragon Zephyr was a free-market merchant conveying a mixed cargo of freight and passengers to Estrella Bonita. This was a planetary system about two hundred light-years or a mean twenty Jumps from Earth – four habited planets, three gas giants. . .