Galaxies Read online

  “You see,” she says almost conversationally, her emotion drained by the anguish of what she has said, what she has had to fight through to have reached that knowledge, “you see, I don’t care about the dead. My concern is for the living among us.”

  “What living? Just yourself?”

  “For all of us.”

  “If you care only for the living,” the dead man says, winking one, large, bleak eye in the center of the ruined forehead, this new form one with which she is comfortable, meeting and mocking her perception of him as utterly vile, “if you care for the living, then you must show some concern for the universe itself which contains all of the living.”

  “The universe is of the dead.”

  “Now that would be an alternative universe, one which you could not conceive, could not know of. The universe in which you live holds only life. And do you know what can happen if you try to come through it?”

  “No. Of course not. Nor do you.”

  “But I am not seeking to do it. You have to have concern for what may happen.”

  “Ah, well,” she says, “we will just find out. We will find out what happens because we will go through it.”

  “I will tell you,” the dead says, “I will tell you what could happen. No one can be absolutely sure of this, but this is as close as one can come to true suggestion. By going through the center of the black hole, which is what will happen when you switch to tachyons without transition, you will rupture the seamless fabric of space and time themselves. Normal considerations which you hold do not apply. The effect of the tachyonic switch will be absolutely calamitous; you will fall through, and you will destroy space and time itself, the totality ripped.”

  “If I don’t know that how can you?”

  “Because there are layers of knowledge open to the dead which cannot be shared by the living. Everything will be destroyed.”

  “Why don’t I hear from any other of the dead? Why just from you?”

  “I am their spokesman.”

  “Who decided?”

  “Through my voice you hear many voices. Through my voice you hear all voices. The explosion working against the implosion of the star may extend the funnel of gravitational forces to infinite proportion.”

  The dead pauses, blinks his eye, seems to investigate the images evoked by what he has just said. “All of the universe will fall through that hole,” he says, “and all of time as well. Time will reconstruct itself but only in the abyss. You will never know what you have done, because you will never move past that point. Do you know what that means, then? You will relive this over and again. So you will never leave. Never. You will be in anguish forever, reenacting this constancy over and again.”

  Lena shakes her head. If she is jolted, she will not show it at any level which the dead can apprehend (although, she thinks, this is foolish because the dead can apprehend everything). “All right,” she says, “that’s terrible. But it still makes no difference.” She will yield nothing to this creature. Nothing whatsoever. She will give no part of herself or feeling. The dead must be another of her tempters; the dead has become a fourth comforter in yet more cunning and outrageous guise. It is a plot. It is all a plot worked out by the Bureau to make her progressively confused and malleable. It never had her interests at heart. Now it does not want her to return and expose it. She must believe this. She must hold onto this, because if she does not, she has gone through all of this exactly nowhere and seventy thousand years have had no significance.

  “You are lying,” she says.

  “I cannot lie by definition.”

  “And even if it’s the truth, so what? So who cares? You do not even exist; there is no reality to you. I hear your voice, but it is merely hallucinative. It is another effect of the neutron star; it has made me irrational.”

  “You are irrational.”

  “I am responsible only to myself. The universe is merely an excuse, an extension of my own personality and the Skipstone’s struggle. It is not an issue. It never was. It’s only an excuse for doing things that afore terrible.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “It does!” she says desperately. “It does! It isn’t a rationalization, it isn’t an excuse. I know that this is the truth, that you’re just trying to confuse me with talk of the universe, space and time because of my own fear of leaving, of taking the risk. I’ve no need to listen to you. You aren’t telling me the truth. You can’t be!”

  “But I am,” he says. He has seen her hesitation, scented her pain and feels as if old mysteries were moving the ruined blood again his victory. He knows that if he can pursue the advantage opened here they will never leave this galaxy, because in the end he has proven the stronger. The dead are stronger than the living always, he thinks, because they are destination. “You are rationalizing,” he says; “you will not confront the truth. You know it now as well as I do. You cannot avoid it”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Yes! You can’t be an utter solipsist, Lena, not here, not even under seventy thousand years of the lash. You aren’t God, there is no God, not here.”

  “Yes, there is. There must be a God.”

  “If there was, He would not be here. This is dead space, this is null time. This is that from which the universe was created. This is before the beginning.”

  “That’s evil to say. If there is a God, He would be everywhere, certainly here.”

  “Would He? Do you really believe that? This is the truth. You must measure this universe by yourself; that is the only faith that you can ever find, the only constancy that you will ever know. You can look for no one, nothing else.”

  The dead has said this triumphantly, his inner voice arching through a shout. He knows that he has won. She looks at him and he looks at Lena and in that confrontation, in the shade of his one, clouded eye as his glance passes through the dull illumination of the neutron star, she sees that they are close to a communion so terrible that it will become a weld, will be a true connection. If she listens to this dead for even another instant, she will collapse within those features as Skipstone has collapsed into the black hole, and she cannot bear this. It cannot be.

  No, it cannot be; she must preserve herself at all costs. She must hold onto her individuation, the feeling that she is right, that she has at all costs won through to an epiphany worth the having and that the separation between the living and the dead is real, that it will hold and that there will be dignity in that situation. Life, she thinks, life is not death, because if that is so, there is no point in having struggled. If she believes that, she denies herself and all the becoming necessary for her to be here.

  XLV

  So she does not consider further. She will not think because to give thought is submission. Quickly she moves toward the controls, the levers of power which when hit will convert the ship instantly past the speed of light, and then in the explosions of many suns that might only be the illumination of the network of pain within her, she hides her head in her arms. She screams.

  Screams not for herself but for the dead, not for the dead but for all the cargo, the lusterless, gelatinous forms lying in the hold, slipping like fish through the ocean of space: now she sees them, holds onto them in a sense of fusion unlike anything she has known before. They are not the but her dead, all of them, gliding in and out in a sleek possession harder and brighter than anything, almost as if all of them have been massed to plead with her.

  “Oh, no,” she says, for the pain is quite inexpressible, and she has been reduced to simple moans and murmurs. ‘Oh, no, it can’t be. Something like this cannot be.”

  “Yes,” the dead says, stronger now even though knowledge of his defeat has seeped through him sudden in the backwash of victory; he does not quite understand how this has happened to him, and yet loss seems to renew him as victory never would; he has the strength drawn from doom. “Yes, this is what has happened. This is the way that it will be.”

  “It’s too terrible.”

>   “All of us with you, Lena. All of us. No separation, just the complete binding.”

  “I never wanted it this way. I didn’t want—”

  “It could have been no other.”

  “Please—”

  “Yes,” she says, “yes.”

  They speak to one another now in the short, abbreviated barks of lovers, little stumps of words and thought. They might indeed be lovers intertwined on a bed rather than on the canopy of space. Please. No. Yes. Willwon’t. Ahoy. Help. Now. Later. The murmurs of exchange pass between them like the darker and older coins of love. She finds herself too weary to continue and yet she must. She finds that she cannot go on and yet she continues. If she does not, then it has all been futile. She wants not only his acceptance—which acceptance he could never have denied—but his understanding. Can she make this clear to him? Can she communicate? “I want to live,” she says, “that’s all, live.”

  “All did. All do.”

  “I have a right to live.”

  “Not at the cost of time.”

  “At any cost At any cost at all.”

  “Life should not only be an expression of selfishness.”

  “It must be. You’re wrong. In order to persist, it has to be. Otherwise I would be dead. No one would have ever lived. Life itself would not exist.”

  “It is your decision, Lena.” Centuries of anguish have flowed through him like water, just since she pushed the levers; now he has nothing left. He cannot continue the disputation. Whatever it is, it is over. “It was always your decision, if you wanted to do it. No one can change you. You can never be changed.”

  “No matter the cost.”

  “You have made it that way.”

  “Yes,” she says, “yes. I have made it that way. I want it I want eviction from this galaxy. I want the sun again, I want light I want this, I want that, I want, I want—”

  She stops. She throws back her head. And then she screams.

  And the dead screams, too; it is not a cry of accomplishment or joy, but not of terror either; this must be understood; what comes out of this, what comes from the two of them, is the true natal cry suspended, as it were, in these moments of limbo. Life and expiration become fused here, their shrieks intertwine much as all the themes of the novel can be said at this point to blend, and if the work has been done well, the reader at this point should feel a real jolt of terror, terror of recognition, of course. Then in the womb of Skipstone they continue to scream in a rhythmic fashion, the shrieks entwined as the ship pours through the redeemed and climactic light

  XLVI

  We are upon the conclusion and that conclusion, obviously, is open-ended.

  Cunningly it has been built into the construct from the very outset It is a characteristic of a certain kind of well-structured fiction that it will lead toward a resolution which in retrospect may appear inevitable but which in fact is only one of a series of choices which could have been made and which, in the fact of its selection, has become the trans-mutative force of the work, has cast back little slices of light from which the novel, read once again, may acquire additional depth. The proper ending for the writer, then, is not so much constructed as discovered; it is a matter of working through the material consciously or subconsciously so that the ending is seen retrospectively as having been in place all along, not to be recognized until the point of its organic extension from the material.

  This is not quite such a construction, alas; the ending could go any way at all, much as could Skipstone. It would be hard to write a tight resolution, an elegantly structured novel given the material here. With nothing less than all possibility as its field, how could Galaxies cleanly seize one from a set of alternatives as to make it appear that there were none other?

  No, anything at all can happen here. The novel, many-leveled and certainly provocative in premise if not characterization, would yield to a number of endings. Only a few of them can be suggested here. Let them represent a much larger number.

  Perhaps, then, Lena emerges once again into her own time and space. She finds that all of the events in the black galaxy have merely been a concealing sheath over the greater reality.

  “I see,” she would say as she flicked into normal space a hundred light years from Sirius, the breath of her anticipation cooling in her chest, all voices silenced, “I see now, I see what they wanted to do. It is not fair,” she would say, her eyes filling with stunned wonder at the audacity of the Bureau, at its cruelty. It was all a test. “It cannot be this way; they cannot do this to us; we have more importance than they give us credit for having,” and so on and so forth, the force of her discovery taking her almost all the way to madness and then back again as the ship on automatic settles toward its predetermined docking where the experiments would swarm and pull from Skipstone every last scrap of data embedded on those tapes, the tapes a full recording of all the interesting events just as the Bureau had hoped in setting up its ultimate stress reaction as Lena herself, a muttering husk, is committed to the deepest, institutional abscess of the Bureau where for the next several years she might lie under the electrodes, being at last gutted. Not a happy conclusion, this, not happy at all, and yet one can see that she has gotten what she deserved all the time. The Bureau, having manipulated the conquest of space for more than a millennium, would hardly have allowed the ship to fall into a black galaxy: the only black galaxy that would exist would be one prepared by the simulators. So much for metaphysics. So much for the seriousness of the issues raised. It was all an experiment, and the decadent Bureau has decadently manipulated her, to say nothing of the reader, only to find out to what limits its technicians will sustain their humanity. Knowing those limits, they can then easily move past them.

  That is one ending; another might see Lena emerging into an otherness. One moment she is being torn through the black galaxy, in the next she finds herself in a gray space where all of time, light, depth, possibility have been suspended. In emptiness the tachyons strain, trying to lift the ship beyond. In perfect nullity the thing that was Lena stands rooted to the plates of the ship, waiting for that moment of stasis to pass, but this will never happen.

  No, it cannot: she has fallen through the pit of the universe in the one moment of leap and now toward a state of denial, of anti-existence. One can see denial in her finger, her eyebrows, the desperate attempt of what was once her mouth and is now a horror to form words of prayer … but in this void words cannot be formed nor thoughts. In perfect stasis she stays there forever. She has no sensation of time passing nor does she have the sensation of it being instantaneous. She is not dead nor is she alive. She does not succeed nor does she fail. Mindlessly, she and the ship are imploded within to hold the moment in which she pushed the cruel lever home.

  Maybe a monument is erected to her in memory of this; maybe at another time she becomes an artifact to be glimpsed by fascinated tourists who pass in and out of hyperspace on their tours, circling the black galaxy at a time infinitely advanced when the gravitational effects can at last be exploited. All of the universe may someday be an amusement park; Lena would be an exhibit well worth the trouble. Galactic Wonderburgers would be nearby. This ending would be flooded with warm, individuating touches to augment its irony; it would deal with the imperishability of man, his ability to make junk out of any part of the cosmos. Nothing can defy his trivialization, but that trivialization becomes in itself a profundity; it is a comment which makes as much sense, if not more, than a deification. Why deify the unknown if it can be manipulated, controlled, packaged and sold? Idolatry need not blind the eye; it may seem to sharpen it, lift that which it reflects to celebration.

  And there might be another ending, here a construction in which Lena does escape. She emerges into a vortex of fire and is grabbed by the thrashing heart of a star, winking instantaneously into death along with all of her dead; they muddle and mingle together in a star song of extinction. So much here, then, for celestial exploration, so much for the broken spirit of
man. So there for all of you, so there. All of the pain, the struggle for acquisition, the explanation and metaphor for nothing. A burst of epiphany and then obliteration. All of them overwhelmed and yet unthinking.

  But, of course, of course, there are many such alternatives, and all of these must be passed over in pursuit of the real and true, the absolute conclusion which has not yet been stated.

  XLVII

  For, after all, not any ending will do. Not everything would fall into place, would be emotionally satisfying. The discovered ending which would be the truth is hard bought, but it is there, and I think that I have found it. The going has not been easy through any of this, and the climax has oozed rather than leaped from that canister of the unconscious to which it has been confined … but still, there it is, there it is now, and looking at it with mingled revulsion and awe, the author can do nothing but state it.

  And it must be understood before that resolution is given that, just as these are merely a set of notes for a novel, so, similarly, the ending as conceived is just that, nothing more: a series of notes toward the conclusion. For the ending cannot be sculptured any more satisfactorily than the novel to which it is prefatory matter can be. It is simply too audacious, this, too broad, entirely too removed from the experience of even the most broad-minded of us. It can only be hinted, and perhaps circumvention is the way to get at this rather than using confrontation. What is there to say? What can be easily stated? If Lena’s dilemma is immeasurably vast, then the way in which the novel comes to terms may simply be slight. Any outcome would seem trivial.

  But, the resolution is there. It is viable, it is, in fact, inevitable. Emerging textually from the material, it has been hard bought, and perhaps one can see that it was, after all, implied from the very beginning, from the onset of these notes. The author has struggled, he has worked hard, he has done what he could to piece out this resolution. Give him, then, give him that ending.