Galaxies Read online

  XXXIII

  But shortly she feels better and the time is done for weeping. Furthermore, she knows that what has been discharged is more profound than tears; it is a whole level of feeling which she will never have again and without which, like a swimmer, she will be able to move more swiftly through the dark waters of purpose. The conversation has discommoded her as the Bureau intended the comforters to do, but it has also brought her to a new level; now, past disorientation and the shaken poles of faith, she begins to sense a new order. She must depend wholly upon herself. In one sense it is posited that this dialogue is taking place in a ship falling madly in a quality of space which could never be described, but in another it can be seen as one of those elegant and terrible drawing-room exchanges so popular with the discredited practitioners of the well-made play in which the slightest alteration of point of view or opinion is supposed to create great tension.

  Any tension, however, is that generated between the furnaces of the dying star, ten million explosions a minute, and Skipstone, arc in its heavens. Lena, knowing this, feels numb. Having moved beyond the comforters, she feels that she has learned little, and yet she must persist. She cannot turn over the very little she has learned to the iron hearts of the machines.

  “Fuck you,” she says.

  They say nothing. Scatology does not move them any more than reason. If anything, their efforts have drained them and left them without visible effect They lurk like crouched animals, only the slight whirring of their transistors indication that they are still functioning.

  “Fuck you all,” she says again. “I’m going to do it and I always was from the beginning. I’m going to get us out of here. It’s all a plot of the Bureau, anyway, to prevent me from getting back should I run into some disaster. I’ll come out all right; I don’t care what you told me. It’s all lies. Bureau just doesn’t want the embarrassment of my returning to tell the tales. They don’t want anyone to know what’s going on in space, what it’s really like. They were plotting this from the beginning; they just want a smooth path so that they can conquer the world. They don’t give a damn about the universe.” She realizes that, although she has phrased this crudely, she probably believes it, that she has always believed it. She puts her hands near the console. All along she hated those in the Bureau. She should have known. If she had only touched her feelings, she would have known the nature of that with which she was dealing. “I’m going to turn you off now,” she says. “You’ll never know the difference anyway when we escape. You’ll be dismantled when we get back, so you’ll never know a thing. What do you care? It’s going to be much easier for you than for me; I’m going to have to go through.”

  The first says, almost agreeably, “You’re right. We have no instinct of self-preservation.”

  “Indeed,” the second says with similar amiability. “I’m finding this quite wearying, and I never did have a forceful personality, even at the best.”

  “If we had self-preservative instincts, it would be too difficult and painful,” the first says cheerfully. “Fortunately, we’re willing to be deactivated. As far as we’re concerned, we did our absolute best. The problem is not ours now”

  “Me, too,” says the third. “I can go along with that completely. I mean, just because we have an argument here, because we tell you a few things that we were programmed to say, don’t think that we don’t have any feelings, because we do, or at least if we did, we’d feel very badly about this. We’re just trying to do what we can in your own best interests, that’s all.”

  “Liars,” Lena says. “Now you’re trying to win my confidence and get me to go along with you by pretending to agree. I don’t believe anything that you’re saying. You’ll never make me believe it, no matter what you do. I won’t cooperate with any of your schemes; I see through you.”

  “But it’s true,” the first says, “all true. You don’t have to get paranoid about this just because we’ve lost an argument and are willing to admit it. You know, you’re entitled to do what you want to; it’s your decision. Stay here or, if you wish, leave. Of course it would be much nobler of you, in probability, to remain here. For all we know your condition gives substance and vitality to the universe. Maybe the basic stresses here are those from which all existence itself came to begin with and you are now at the beginning of time. How do you like that? Good irony, no, and certainly of a large scale! But if time is suspended, you may have caused the universe, Lena, you and Skipstone. You and the ship have generated everything. From your accident came everything including those very conditions which led to the accident. Hah!”

  “Madness,” Lena says, shaking her head, “that’s utter madness,” but the author, busily pulling the handles of his little dumb show, sweating behind the canvas, casting a nearsighted, astigmatic eye every now and then through the cardboard of the set to see whether the audience is paying attention, how the audience is taking all of this, is thinking take that Barth, Barthelme, Roth or Oates! Pace Bellow and Malamud, and may your Guggenheims multiply, but what have any of you or those unnamed created to compare with this? Angst, this is the sigh from which all self-pity once must have come. But the author ducks away, keeps his mind on business, modestly looks away from the audience and then down, transmuting (as he tries to except at very weary moments) his responses, histories, revulsion or envy to his characters. That is, after all, the more lasting and satisfying way to do this. “That would be insane,” Lena says; “it would reduce all circumstance, all of it, to a circular accident caused by that accident. It would mean that there was no purpose in anything other than to create purposes and that—”

  “But why not? What other reason would be as sufficient? You might have created the universe, you might even be the universe, come to think of it, but,” the first concludes, “you aren’t going to listen to any of this so I won’t argue the point. We agreed to end disputation; it won’t get us anywhere. You win, we lose. You’ll have to handle this your way.”

  “Not so. I want to save the mission. I want; don’t you understand that I want to return the dead—”

  “Rationalization, Lena. Shut off the console now. Shut it off, deactivate us.”

  “All right,” she says, “all right then, I will. You want me to do that—”

  “You want to do it, Lena. You’ll be much happier then and so will we. What do you care if you deny all existence by following this course? But we won’t argue the point further. We really won’t. It’s in your hands, it always was, we were never anything more than abstractions anyway,” the first concludes rather mysteriously and then makes a gesture to the other two, something sly and secret in the glint, some level of communication between cyborgs that Lena could not enter, would not understand if she could. In tandem they roll solemnly to the porthole like children trundling their awkward way across a floor. “We’ll just have ourselves a good look at this,” the cyborg says; “we’ll have a look at this so-called black galaxy that you’ve warned us about.”

  “Don’t,” Lena says, “now please don’t do that. There’s no need, no need at all—”

  “Of course we will,” says the second.

  “You bet your life we will,” the third says.

  “We’re absolutely unanimous on this point,” says the spokesman; “you can see that if it’s going to be done your way then it has to be done ours as well,” and the first thrusts aside the curtain again, poking its cylindrical snout, and Lena has an idea. She will get to the console and deactivate the cyborgs manually before they can do what they are seeking, but she does not have enough time to do so. In mid-lunge she is cut off, and then the pure, spectral range of the black galaxy pours through.

  She shrieks, covers her eyes, fights with the switches and so at last, by accident, hits the lever of cancellation, shutting off the power in the cyborgs, and they collapse then in sequence by the porthole, curtains swinging closed, lying there in metallic disarray, clutching one another in a human and dependent fashion as if the moment of confront
ation had driven them out of metal and wire and made them human again, made them seek one another. Lena begins, not unemotionally, to weep. It is manufactured sheerly by emotion and pity; there is nothing else to it.

  But her weeping will pass, everything will pass, there are only certain limits past which emotional anguish can be carried before the psyche seals off, the reflexes of pain are numbed and the reader, too, loses belief, and so in time, kicking the machines aside so that they need not distract her anymore, Lena returns to the business at hand which is now clear to her. She knows what she must do.

  She must will herself to the controls and begin the dance of the tachyons. She must concentrate on dangerous eviction that might destroy all.

  XXXIV

  So this can be said: that the novel sits upon a predetermined conclusion. She will attempt to flee the hold of the neutron star; she either will or will not succeed. Whatever that outcome, the penultimate decision is highly visible, and the textual material interposed between the statement of the problem and that solution is merely a lever for delay. It is quite clear what is going to happen; it is merely a matter of springing that conclusion, and in this sense the novel is not unlike traditional classic tragedy or its modern descendants such as Death of a Salesman or Marat/Sade, where suspense is not predicated so much upon what will happen to the principals as to how many mutually enriching levels of narrative irony can precede that end.

  It should be clear by now, then, that the denouement of this novel has been obvious from the presentation of the problem. Lena, against all urgings and reasonable possibility, will essay to leave the hold of the neutron star through that power which Skipstone can give her. The reader, knowing this, may become restive, may have been running out of patience for some chapters before this. Why not get on with it? he might ask. Why not have her make the attempt, win or lose, wrap it up, but get out of this? What is being gained by holding back on discovery?

  But to say this is to miss the point. I do not wish to accuse the reader; this is the simple basis of the matter. This novel is not about what happens to her—which is merely a function of astronomies after all—but why it has happened and what real effects this must have upon everyone, including the reader. The whyness of matters. The question not of consequence but of implication.

  XXXV

  So it is clear that the satiric aspects of the scene with the comforters could have been milked for great and widening implication, and unless a skillful and controlling hand were kept upon the material, the novel could, at this point, be well on the way toward the truly farcical.

  Consider this. Here is, after all, a background woven of the metaphysical and the hard sciences on a canvas of the inconceivably vast, yet before this construction is being enacted hastily and with a tint of the disreputable the same old comedy, the same folly, the same easy and dreadful juxtapositions of character which would fuel the dullest of well-made plays. Has the novel voyaged out to such inconceivable destination merely to bring the same old messages of human spite and mechanical pointlessness? Is this going to be a recapitulation of the same wearying human limitations which could occur in any split-level beside the intersection of the new interstate with Old Armonk Road, rubber toys in the small backyard, the crabgrass glinting under the haze of the suburban moon? This would be a legitimate question; it will not easily be defeated. The material would indeed have to be handled carefully and with an awareness of how easily it might descend to the riotous. Pain would have to be wrenched out of it; the reader would have to feel with the characters. Not only intellectual content but levels of the ambiguous would have to be woven through less Galaxies become merely an attack upon the technological, a curse against that absurdity. Nothing, surely, could be further from the intent of the novel. Yet the danger is there. Let it be acknowledged.

  Even as the least talented comedian working in the dullest and dirtiest nightclub in the outskirts of Jamaica, Queens, New York, would know, great issues can be reduced to the scatological simply by particularization, by bringing them to the level of common, human necessity. Napoleon had to move his bowels; Hitler had itches; the Kennedys believed in Camelot and said prayers before bedtime (certain biographers informed us) but also had moments of false climax and sieges of pus. The sad stories of the death of kings might have had to do with constipation or embarrassing hemorrhage; the royal families of several nations have had a hereditary syphilis. Similarly, the novel must risk trivialization by bringing its material to the level of human necessity, and the scene with the cyborg, with its clanking, its religious (or antireligious) satire and even the whiff of a fart here or there, cosmological farts to be sure, might well furnish needed comic relief to what is, after all, a rather depressing construct.

  In fact, in fact: why fight the issue? It would be best to accept and utilize the humor that can be found in various passages; to take one’s relief where one can get it. There is no reason why the novel has to be negative; to the contrary. If it can find humor in this, the unstated message might be, well, then, it can find humor in anything. Matters cannot be quite that bad after all.

  (Then, too, it could be easy to wring from the material the fact that, even surrounded by the cosmos and the palpable edge of the universe, man remains a corrupt and flatulent race; the fart will outweigh the metaphysical cry anytime at all. One remains what one must be regardless of circumstance. Could the reader settle for this and leave the novel go there?)

  But, of course, there is ample material available to save from itself this scene with the cyborgs, to keep the novel on track and to make sure that at no point does the construction depart from its basic vision.

  And that basic vision must be nothing less than the setting of the final chapters.

  XXXVI

  For it must be lush in physical depiction of the black galaxy, of the neutron star, of the altering effects that each will have had upon the perceived reality. There must be a heightened sense of the visual; surely it is this otherness which must be communicated, and therefore descriptive passages will not be scanted. Indeed, every time the plot seems to flag, when the dialogue becomes flat, the characters hysterical or the author unctuous, at every such point when the narrative drive appears to falter, Galaxies will drag itself over to the portholes to deep and wondering looks at the terrain of exploration.

  And here is the source of the ultimate power, that which will excuse it from the many deficiencies inevitable with such a scheme. For the terrain is one which can be offered only in the broadest and most ambitious of science fiction, and every rhetorical trick, every typographical device, every nuance of language and memory which the author has in his scruffy, dusty bag of techniques sitting by the typewriter will be called upon to describe the appearance of the galaxy, the effects that the galaxy has upon all those who enter it. Lena—who one must admit is a rather superficial character; there just is not all that much to her, although she is not devoid of sympathetic traits—will nonetheless be used to the limit of her expressive possibilities to work this through; nor will the writer, aware of another factor here, dismiss the dead, who also feel in this space and who can communicate this response.

  Needless to say, this will be a rather bleak vision. There is no way to avoid that; the novel can hardly be said to be optimistic, for the effect the galaxy will have upon anyone trapped will be quite terrible. It results in a complete alteration of consciousness, and the hold which most of us have upon our vision of reality, our assessment of life, is already sufficiently tentative to make almost anything attacking it quite threatening. But with all of that bleakness, with all of the lush and rather prurient imagery which will be used to show how the effects act to destroy consciousness, the novel will not be completely hopeless. Not at all. In fact it will be possible for some to say (and some may even say it) that rather than being terrible the vision is somehow “poetic” here or “optimistic.”

  For, if the rhetorical effects are properly applied, if the writing shows power and control, then the co
nstruct will demonstrate, finally, that those concepts which we label “beauty” or “ugliness” or “good” or “evil” or “love” or “life” or “death” are little more than metaphors, poorly ascribed, semantically limited, refracted through the weak receptors which we possess to the utter diminution of what they really mean, and it will be suggested that, rather than showing us an alternate reality, the black galaxy may only be showing us our own but extended, opened up so that the novel may give us, as science fiction can in the rare times when it is good and as almost nothing else ever can, some glimpse of possibilities beyond ourselves, possibilities not truly compensated by word rates or the problems of categorization to a limited audience.

  What is love? What is death? What is the meaning of all this anyway? The author does not want to start metaphysical disquisition at this or any other point. Sections of an author’s novels written in his true voice are always the dullest and least affecting; the philosophical opinions of writers are of no use to anyone, the writers least of all. The good novelists can compose novels, all right, but even the best of them cannot think, and the “opinions” of a writer taken out of the mask of characterization or structure are always as banal as those of politicians. The ability to create character or assemble a set of narrative materials does not qualify the opinions of the author. If anything, they must be more suspect than those of an essayist: who, after all, is doing the talking? In what persona is the writer speaking now? So the reader will be spared, not only in this set of working notes, but also in the novel itself, laborious and mystical ramblings on the nature of things like “love” or “death” or “theme” or “religion” or “ultimate significances.”

  Who cares? Tolstoy went crazy, Mailer ran for mayor, Dos Passos looked for Communists, Sinclair Lewis went foursquare for Main Street, Kerouac ended hating children. Something happens to writers past the point of their creative options, something obscene, like the damages (not only of age) on the faces of prostitutes or the aspect of actors lumbering their way through retirement homes for grand old troupers. Considering that the best of them will end as fools, the best that a writer can do, it would seem, would be to cultivate a decent silence which will at least hold his folly to himself, and there are a few contemporary examples of this approach, which are worth emulating.