Galaxies Read online

  But not now, of course, not now: there is the instant situation with which to deal and that is certainly more than enough. Lena through Skipstone has not been testing the tachyonic drive—that has already been known and stabilized for several hundred years—but modification on the tachyons which would enable them to carry a much larger payload at the same speed, a payload, to be sure, mostly concerned with loading more of the dead aboard, getting greater cargo, greater remuneration. The more dead the more income the larger the payload and the more dead … or at least this is the circularity in which the Bureau—which I hope has been made clear by this time is a rather tragic institution—has gotten itself trapped.

  At the beginning there were plans to carry larger crews on the FTL, having larger and more diversified colonization teams than had been true in the past, but early on, when the principle of financing pay-as-you-go through the dead had been evolved, it seemed to the Bureau that it would be better to outfit the ships with dead rather than living. This may show a certain dimness of thought, shortsightedness on its part, but then again the Bureau is decadent and running a decadent age. In 3619 it would have been inconceivable for someone as casually qualified as Lena Thomas to have been in solitary command of a piece of equipment as complex as Skipstone. There would have been a crew of at least a half-dozen, and she would have been no more than fifth in seniority. But more living would have been here, fewer dead, and it is the dead who have made the program possible. One must leave metaphysical considerations out of this. Only spiritual reasoning, if that is the word, could apply, for in the Bureau’s estimation the dead have become the living and the living merely dead space, using up resources that could be better assigned to several of the more economically stacked dead.

  At ten point eight million miles per second, Skipstone has moved in free fall, searching the arms of the spiral galaxy until caught by the neutron star and sent with its dead into the pit that will end time. And in a way this is all the Bureau’s fault, for the experiments themselves and for failing to take proper precautions, for not having anticipated the possibility of the black galaxy. But in another way it is not the fault of the Bureau at all.

  It has nothing to do with the Bureau, has nothing to do with anything except preordination and the shaping hand of the author, because it was always destined—one can find this out for sure by correctly interpreting the prophecies contained in the Book of Daniel—for time to end in this seventh month of the year 3902, three thousand nine hundred and six years since the birth of the Saviour and a few more dozens of centuries past that from the second destruction of the temple which rendered the Jews forever a scattered people, wanderers and exiles like the FTL ship, probing the crevices of space for something which they could occupy. But there is little mysticism about the Judaic condition, something which cannot be said about what has happened to Skipstone.

  XLII

  “It would be apostasy to leave here,” the dead says. All the time that the author has been laboring through his expository creaks and joints, the dead and Lena have still been trying to work things out, locked in their confrontation in Skipstone which will go utterly to resolution without extrinsic pressure because there is no time here. “You must stay. You owe that obligation not only to us, but also to yourself. In what form do you think you will be when you emerge? Have you opened that issue to your heart? Do you understand what you might become?”

  “Yes,” Lena says, “I have thought of that, I have thought of everything without you. And it does not matter. It does not matter what form I will take. Nothing matters.”

  “Everything matters. Everything affects everything else in an endless chain of consequence. I have made you; you are the product of all the dead, just as you in turn will be the product of those who will make us. Life does not exist in cubicles but only in terms of what it inhabits.”

  “I know that.”

  “There is an endless chain of consequence of which everyone is a link. You must accept that.”

  “I do,” Lena says. She has entered a mystical, almost penitential frame of mind. Nothing can touch her. She feels easy; her joints seem to glide, she has an impression of herself as a physical being which she has not had in a long time. ‘1 do understand. I am not stupid. Nor am I dead.”

  “Of course you aren’t,” the dead says rather vaguely. He seems to be discombobulated, but this may only be the shift of vapors in the hold, impossible to say. Confidence drains from him; he seems to take on a rather imploring tone as if he had realized that the right of decision had passed to Lena, which, of course, it has. “That has nothing to do with it. Who said that you were dead?”

  Twitches of the pain which sent him into the vault, closed down the windows of his mortality, assault him then; he feels an old weakness which is composed not only of metaphysical spite but seems to occupy a physical plane. “Please,” he says, “I don’t know what you’re talking about now. I really don’t know what you want. How can you try to leave? Are you possessed? If you do, then it will surely destroy us all.”

  “So be it We need destruction.”

  “It may even destroy time. Have you thought of that? You may shake the balance of the universe. You may end all time as we comprehend it. Have you thought of doing this? Would you end everything?”

  “Let the universe take care of itself.”

  “What a selfish answer.”

  “What a human answer. Why do I have to think of the fate of the universe? That’s only an excuse for the truth. The truth is what becomes of me.”

  “Is your vanity so great?”

  “Great enough,” she says, “great enough.” Then she attempts to put everything which she has so perilously learned in terms so simple that even this obdurate dead can understand. “We are obligated to try. We must do the best we can for ourselves. If we do that, the universe will follow. We cannot be concerned with the universe; our concern is our own fate.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “We fell in, we must get out”

  “Not we. Just you”

  “All of us carry within ourselves the totality of humanity. We must reconstruct our history at every moment Man must struggle, attempt to control the conditions that oppress him.”

  “Even if they cannot be controlled?”

  “Only the dead believe that” she says, “but the living are not the dead and that is the difference, the belief that we can control. Isn’t that the only difference between us? And even if it’s only a passage from struggle to oblivion, that still is a kind of destiny. Isn’t it?”

  “You are a fool. You are saying that you know you will become the dead. We wait for you. All of your struggles are toward that end. But if you know the answer, if you know your fate, then what is the point of the struggle?”

  “No point,” she says. “That must be left in judgment out of the equation. Since we cannot understand death, it is of no matter what revelation it must hold. We must struggle as if death were merely a transitional stage.”

  “Bullshit” the dead man says. “You are a fool. Now you will destroy everything.”

  “But it’s life.”

  “This is life?”

  “It isn’t death,” she says, “and if we can’t hold onto that difference then what, tell me, what is the meaning of any of this?”

  And the music of the fall overwhelms her as the dead does not answer. The dead does not answer. There is nothing, at last, to say.

  XLIII

  “I’m afraid,” she had said to John at some point in her training, impossible to localize the time, but then she had always been afraid. She can admit that now; she had entered the Bureau in fear, and fear magnified had been all of . growth that she knew. “I don’t want to go. I don’t like what they’re doing to us here. It isn’t right”

  “It’s merely your fear of the unknown,” he said to her. Perhaps they were twined together in bed somewhere, perhaps they were having this discussion under the cool high glare of circuitry in some public place. It d
oes not matter. He leaned forward, put his cheek against her, she felt the arching slab of his face as he spoke. “It’s natural, it’s normal to feel this way. Put it under the name of xenophobia. The atavism of the savage, the fear of that which he feels he cannot control. You can conquer it; you will be able to deal with it if you only will. All of that is to be expected and they have taken it into account.”

  “It isn’t right,” she said, “it isn’t right. Can’t I make you see that?”

  “Right doesn’t matter.”

  “They don’t know what’s going on there, and they’re merely using us for experimentation.” She shook against him; he touched her but was cold, cold now, his body shadows and clutching. She could not see his eyes. “But they won’t let me stop now, will they?” she said. “That’s for sure.”

  “No,” he said, “no, there’s no turning back, and you wouldn’t want to anyway; this is where you should be, this is what you should be doing,” and thought that he had lied, this was not normal; she was, in fact, at a dangerous point where she might go now in either direction. She might retreat into panic and refuse to take the Skipstone out and in that case what would the Bureau do? She may have no legal right of refusal, but it could hardly send a reluctant pilot There have, in the past, been commanders who had refused, ultimately, to partake of the voyages, but none of them had taken hold of anything as significant as this, had had this large a cargo or that much of an investment in the voyage. “Don’t worry about it” John said, feeling futile, and held her more tightly, reaching for some affectional basis (he hated himself for thinking in this way, but that was what the Bureau had delegated him to do), the aftermath of sex and its ruined fires like a damp wall crumbling between them but trying to force her by pressure into an accommodation which reason itself might not accomplish.

  “Everything will be all right” he said. ‘The training goes satisfactorily, you are doing well, you should be without fear. All will work out for the best, and you will be glad, at the end, that you have done this.”

  “The dead,” she said. “The dead.” She held herself against him, her hands up and dawn the running surfaces of his body, and John, trembling underneath, felt the touch of those hands open him to a kind of darkness which he could not comprehend but which would penetrate him, he knew, to levels that he had never before touched, a pain which went to the very core of his relationship with the Bureau and which took him into areas he was simply not equipped to handle. (For all of his superficial intelligence and charm, he was really quite limited, and he has just enough intelligence to know this.) He pushed her away from him and said then, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” even though he did. “Please, Lena; you must stop this now. It does nothing for us.” Something like fear coiled within him. He had never before thought of the emotional significance of carrying the dead, vaulting a cargo of corpses at unspeakable speed. What would it do to one, what did it really mean? He did not want to think any more of this.

  “The dead,” she said again, her eyes closed against the light of her vision, “that’s the purpose of this mission; there is no other. To convey the dead, to carry them. Everything else, the tachyonic drive, the search for new galaxies, the colonization rationale are merely excuses. Why won’t they tell us the truth? Everything is for the dead and what they have given us.”

  “No,” John said, “not for the dead but the living,” but he did not believe this, when all was finally at conclusion, he knew then as he always would that he was not a fool and what he said was so obviously untrue, so pointless and equivocating as against the simple power of her statement, that he could hardly take himself seriously much less the attempts that he made then to soothe and quiet her, holding her against him, talking to her deeply, intensely, trying to communicate through touch and tone what words would not bring.

  “For the living,” he said, “only for the living,” and she said, “No, for the dead; that was the way that they always wanted it, to find a way to deal with the dead, and if they ever solved that problem then they would be committed to death,” and at the end of this it would be only weariness which brought them together, not passion, their opposition welded, dead and living, living and dead, meshed over all the spaces of the pallet on which once again they entered one another because in this year 3902, just as today except more so, because of the decadence and rigid formulations of those times, sex was sought as a release from the tensions and pressures of the common existence, although it only led more often than not to frustration, doubt, misery and loss, this being one of the numerous ironies played upon the race by the conditions of its mortality.

  Living and dead, dead and living, the scent of them flowing on the hard, brown surrounding husk of their union.

  XLIV

  Eager to make his argument, eager for once to make the issues clear and without the masking of characterization, the author has been in such haste to hurl didacticism at the reader that intention may be too forthright Expository material, individuating touches have been scrapped in these concluding sections; the dialogue has become florid. It need not, for example, have been so compressed; it might have been useful to have moved away from such philosophic or metaphysical intensity, to have described yet again the interior of the cabin, the appearance of the prostheses, the sensations of falling, the sound of the engines, the whispers of the dead. Also, one could have woven in detail the past life of the dead with whom she has had her final argument, certain details of his biography, rowdy and solemn by turns, to give him a warm, human aspect, the actual physical projection of him which she sees mentally, the way in which she reacts to this vision as contrasted to and compared with the way that she reached her lover/superior John. Once again the old equation between sex and death, so popular in modern literature, could have been a serviceable metaphor for the argument that passes between them.

  Impatient for once, however, I have scrapped these details for the more abstract Issues are more important than people in science fiction, and even that kind of science fiction which devotes relative attention to characterization or pain must when confronted with the ultimate necessity to keep things scientific, move away from the matter of humanity. If you want to write about people, you had better stay away from this format; this is a truth taken to heart by everyone who has ever worked successfully, within the form, and the author is no exception; he is involved with the effects here. The neutron star comes as close to a protagonist as this novel will ever have.

  This is not to say that the intention all along was a disguised lecture in astrophysics and time. I am certainly no less interested in metaphor, description, idiosyncrasy, structure than a writer of any routine literary bent … but the arguments of Galaxies can best be accomplished through letting the rags of didacticism flutter, however drably, in the breeze of dialogue. If this will alienate some readers, well then, again, it will be of attraction to others. Science-fiction readers have historically shown themselves more willing to settle for straight factual presentation and argument than the readers of any other class of popular literature.

  Indeed, many of us modern-type, science-fiction writers have been criticized for ignoring the intellectual interests of our readers, failing to provide them with a nourishing diet of ideas to complement the technical displays and characteriological evasions with which so much of the literature of the field has been recently concerned. That being so—of course it is so—I can hardly be criticized for having been so straightforward in these chapters. Indeed, I have taken the instructions of those critics to heart and, for once, am doing it their way. The argument is certainly the core of this novel, for if it is not, then there cannot, by any means, be an emotional effect.

  No, the author busily wants this to be a freak show, one of his characteristic productions of sleazy wonders shown giggling and peeping back at the onlookers through the tent of purpose; he does not want this to be yet another display of idiosyncrasy but instead a solid and thoughtful attempt to limn out a future history a
rching toward the end of time, setting up the base pivot which has caused all of this to happen. The end of the universe cannot, should not, be done within the context of the freak show. A certain decorum is called for. Nothing should be done below the literary waist. One must not take liberties. One should not seek to titillate but to appeal to the intellectual faculties of the reader, for the reader must have respect for the writer if anything is to come through. We must not violate one another.

  And if nothing else, the writer is confident that, having come to this point, the reader with him, he has at least gained the respect of the reader. He knows that the author’s intentions are pure, that he will not, at the least, be violated. What after all is the writer but the reader’s creation, helping him to construct collaboratively that ultimately satisfying novel which he seeks to leave the place where he has been? It is a long flight; the reader needs all the help available to get through this one. He can almost but not quite do it by himself.

  And the author has been a deferential guide: slow, sincere, a little pedantic and inclined toward self-mockery, but he has revealed himself while asking no revelations in turn (and thereby foregoing catharsis) but merely the grim knowledge that, if it were not for this, the novel could not work at all. He is sure that his honesty will be rewarded. The reader will make allowances for any obscurities; he will go along at this stage. Because if those allowances are not made, you see, all of this has been pointless … much as if Lena is wrong in her determination and decision, then the novel itself must be without point.