Galaxies Read online

  Still, we deal not with A, B or the others (although they would make for an interesting study which I might someday do) but only with this writer, thirty-five years old and stricken M, easy to quick judgments of his contemporaries, slow to wrath or judgment of himself. I would like to accept, that challenge: the welding of hard, technological insight with the full range of modern literary technique, but even so, a first confrontation with this material made me feel that I should pass it by. My personal life—I wanted to say this and in an earlier draft, in fact, did—my personal life is my black hole; my two daughters provide more correct and stiffening implosion than does any neutron star, and as far as the song of the pulsars, it is as nothing, as nothing at all to the sounds which come from the paddock area at Aqueduct Race Track in the Borough of Queens, New York, on a dark summer Tuesday. Get me out, Angel; get that seven horse out flying.

  “No,” I could have said like Cheever’s adolescent in Bullet Park, “No, enough of your breathtaking concepts, infinite distances, quasar leaps, binding messages from the Crab Nebula; be away with your light years, asteroids, Van Allen belts, methane systems and heavy planets. No, I am aware that there are those who find an ultimate truth there and would bend their lives toward their perception but this is not for me. Where is the pain, the remorse, the regret and guilt and terror? No, I would rather dedicate the years of my productive life which remain to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class suburb in northern New Jersey. Until I deal with those how can I comprehend Ridgefield Park, to say nothing of Scarsdale, Shaker Heights or the unknown lands of the west? Give me not the year two million which I will not see; give me now. The year two million can say nothing to me, but I may address it if, of course, the collected works can be carefully preserved. At least one writer will survive from this era and if not the notorious Q or the obscure N or the unfortunate A, why could it not be me?”

  Nicely put. Cheever’s adolescent would have approved, if not Cheever. Indeed, I found it convincing, until it occurred to me in one of those quick changes of consciousness which control the lives of all of us yet which may never be acknowledged in fiction that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious to me as the swamp of lights perceived through the refinery smog which are known to my children as “stars” … and that one should never deny infinity to pursue a particular which until the day of one’s death—if not for longer than that—would always be a mystery.

  So I decided to try Galaxies after all, although with some trepidation. I felt better when I came to understand that it did not have to be a novel but merely a set of notes for one. Knowing this I was not shamed nor did I grieve, for one’s life is merely a set of notes for a life and Ridgefield Park merely a rough working model of Trenton in which nonetheless several thousand people live unable to divine their right hand from their left, and also some cattle. Shalt thou have not pity on the cattle? For they too grew up and perished in a night.

  VIII

  So in the novel, which takes place in 3902, the spacecraft Skipstone, on an exploratory flight through the major and minor galaxies surrounding the Milky Way, falls into the black galaxy of a neutron star and is lost forever.

  The captain of Skipstone and the only living consciousness aboard is its woman commander, Lena Thomas. True now, all true: the hold of the ship carries five hundred and fifteen of the dead, sealed in their gelatinous fix, absorbing the unshielded ultraviolet of space which will at some future time hearken their reconstitution. True that yet another part of the enormous hold contains inactivated prostheses in which have been installed the personalities of seven skilled engineers who could be switched on at only slight inconvenience, who would provide Lena not only with answers to any problems technical but also with companionship to while away the long and grave hours of this flight; true also that Lena’s consciousness would, if it were so directed, reel and teem with memory, the rich and variegated colors of all the associations she has had through her twenty-eight years, aided by a whiff of psychogenics to augment the totality of her recall. True that, as has been explained to her during training, solitude is merely a state of mind and has little to do with the interior geography of the soul in which we all must reside.

  True. All of it Lena, however, does not use the prostheses until the time that Skipstone falls into the black galaxy nor has she had any desire to. She is a willful person, highly skilled and competent at least in relation to the routine tasks of this testing flight and quite self-reliant To call upon artificial engineers for aid would be an admission of weakness, as would any resort to the dead who are, of course, dead and cannot be reached. She feels that to lean upon anything outside of herself would only be an admission of weakness, would be carried back to the Bureau by the monitors which constantly scan the ship to report gross physical functions and only the Bureau knows what else and this would lessen her chances for promotion at the end of the voyage. Lena is reasonably ambitious and propelled by self-interest; it is not unfair to her to say this or to point out that much of what occurs in her mind and actions from henceforth are spurred by selfish motives. In this sense her humanity is merely increased; witness is borne to it.

  (In her suspicions she is quite right. The Bureau monitors everything. Not only are there biological readouts, but also visual scanners which transmit all activities aboard to tape at headquarters which when fed through another machine can reconstitute the interior of the ship. One can barely conceive the efficacy of the monitors to which Lena is exposed. Our own astronauts could have functioned under a sheath of independence so complete is the Bureau’s fashioning of images. To be sure the monitoring ceases immediately as the ship falls into the black galaxy … but Lena is not sure of this and even then moderates her responses with caution. She has lived too long in Skipstone under the assumption that she has been spread out into a series of charts on a desk somewhere which reveal everything, even desires of which she is unaware.)

  Sometimes Lena thinks that she would like to talk to the dead. Her feelings toward them are not as ruthless as those toward the Bureau or toward the prostheses; her condition, as she rattles in the hold of the ship moving on tachyonic drive, often seems to approximate theirs. Although they are deprived of consciousness, that quality seems almost irrelevant to the condition of hyperspace, and if there were any way in which she could bridge their mystery, she might well address them. What would she say to the dead? Anything, of course; just whatever comes into your mind, but she does not wish the Bureau to think she is mad. Surely they would adduce dialogues with the dead as evidence of insanity. So, caught between desire and necessity, she must settle for imaginary dialogues deep within the cells of consciousness and for long, quiescent periods when she will watch the monitors, watch the rainbow of hyperspace, witness the collisions of the spectrum. And say nothing whatsoever. Deny her life. It is a ship, at times, like this: utterly of the dead and yet beyond.

  Lena, however, is not always mute. On certain occasions she will talk incessantly, as a matter of fact, if only to herself. (Her interior dialogue at these rare and explosive moments—when thoughts of the Bureau fall from her mind and she is only a lonely and frightened woman—is helpful, because in Galaxies dialogue will be important, both to heighten dramatic incident and to break up the long and inevitably difficult sections of expository prose.)

  No device better than dialogue has been found to persuade the paperback reader, skimming a book on the newsstand, to opt for purchase. It gives a book a look of accessibility, gives the reader the assurance that he can penetrate it, and to say this is not to cast aspersion but to pay the reader the respect due his simple deductive insight. We must, all of us, become more human and can communicate our humanity only in the way that we deal with one another.

  “Is that not so?” Lena asks the monitors, whispering in the darkness.

  “Oh, it is surely so,” she imagines that they say to her; “we become human only by approaching those who are of ourselves and by sharing our thoughts with them.”


  “Well then there is nothing wrong in talking to you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You should. You certainly should.”

  “Who can make judgments that it is wrong to talk? Does Bureau know what is going on here?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Do the dead? Do the engineers?”

  “No. No again.”

  “Only I know.”

  “You and we, Lena, you and we.”

  “Of course. So I will continue to talk to you when I wish to do so.”

  “You should.”

  “I will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Thank your”

  Thus dialogue to open the partitions of the novel. It will play the same role here that repetitive sex scenes play in the pornographic novel. We cannot use sex here, since sex could hardly be conducted in Skipstone. With whom would she have it? Also the role of sex in science fiction is uncertain; it is an uneasy addition to a category of literature many of whose readers find sex (or at least written sex) directly uncomfortable.

  Sex does not play an insignificant role in Lena’s inner life, and eventually this issue will have to be discussed, in the best taste of course, but for now we consider merely the matter of dialogue. Lena talks to herself. She has dialogues with herself, with the monitors, often with the dead. She roams the ship and declaims. She maintains soliloquies, sometimes for hours. “Consider,” she will for instance say to the dead this time, “consider what is going on here,” the dead quiescent in the hold, some of them here for eight hundred years, others scaled down from that to only a few weeks, the recent dead and the far-gone dead nestled in the same gelatinous container that has been transferred wholly into the ship, “Consider where we are now,” pointing through the hold, the colors gleaming through the portholes onto her wrist, colors dancing in the air, her eyes full and maddened in this light which is not to say that she is mad but that the condition of hyperspace is itself insane. The Michelson-Morley effect has a psychological as well as physical reality. “Why now,” she says, “it could be me dead and in the hold and all of you here in the dock watching the colors spin, all the same, living and the dead together as we move faster than light,” she says … and indeed she is right The tachyonic drive has such a profound effect upon subjective reality that the living can become the dead, the dead the living.

  Faster-than-light speed drives all things toward the center of the Bell Curve of existence, you see. Here the dead live, the living are dead, all together in that mix as she has pointed out, and were it not that the objective poles of her consciousness remain fixed intensely by her years of trained discipline, she would press the levers, eject one by one the dead into the larger coffin of space, something which is indicated only as an emergency procedure under the gravest of circumstances and which would result in her removal from command post immediately upon her return. It would be an outrageous action, for the dead are precious cargo: their accumulated estates, willed toward preservation and revival, have, in essence, funded the faster-than-light experiments.

  “I will handle you with the greatest delicacy,” Lena says; “I will treat you with great respect and I will never, oh, I will never let you go, little packages in your little prisons, exquisite goods, delightful cargo, precious weight,” and so and on and on as the Skipstone moves in excess of one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second. Indeed it now moves at two point three million miles per second, still accelerating … and yet except for the colors, the nausea, the disorienting swing, her own mounting insanity, the terms of this novel as it must be written, were it not for all of this, Lena might be in the IRT Lenox Avenue local at rush hour moving slowly uptown as circles of illness track her in the fainting car in the bowels of summer in New York in 1975 as mortality, known over and again, presses in.

  IX

  But the novel is not of mortality but immortality. It is of the vaulting extension of human life as it will be known not only within the spaces of the ship, but also in the minds that one by one, painfully in that hold, are being freed by radiation to tenant the cyborgs that have been constructed precisely against such an emergency. Of the dead, Lena will learn much more. Of herself she knows much already. As Galaxies opens she is twenty-eight years old.

  It is almost two thousand years in the future. Man has established colonies on forty planets in the Milky Way, including the system of Sirius, the well-known Dog Star; he has fully populated the solar system, except for Jupiter whose methane gases are not only inimical to life, but also destructive to the gearing of life support. Jupiter, thus, was given up for lost in 2814, but all of the other planets are populated and on several of them—Venus, Neptune, Titan, largest moon of Saturn notably—there is already severe evidence of overpopulation and the breakdown of social and technological systems. For this reason great emphasis has been placed upon the faster-than-light experiments which will, hopefully, open up worlds outside the few already known that might not be inimical to human life. The three planets of Sirius already have a fragile colony, the Antares Cluster has twenty worlds upon which autonomous colonists are presumed to exist, but this is not sufficient, and now the social engineers and philosophers of this time, who are no more numerous or farsighted than those of our present, predict the collapse of the multitechnological system within a century unless more space is found.

  The colonies of the solar system are under the government of Earth, and on Earth a feudal system has been reconstituted, an autocracy with nobles, vassals and a hereditary monarchy … but fortunately none of these need be developed in the novel. They will merely lurk in the background, a set of assumptions underlying, perhaps, Lena’s character or the necessity of certain confrontations, but not developed. It will be understood, of course, that the alienation produced by a feudal/hierarchical system works upon almost all those not high in the hierarchy and that much of Lena’s anguish is social as well as metaphysical.

  It is 3902. Still, the medical science of that distant time is not notably superior to that of our own in terms of human mortality. The life-span has not been significantly extended, and although certain serious illnesses have been almost eradicated—heart seizure by cortisone derivatives in the late twentieth century, cancer through horse antibodies in the middle 2500s, cerebrovascular accident by glandular therapy only two hundred years ago—others have risen to take their place as if certain universal laws of mortality must be served, diseases only being their humble agents. So nephritis is killing people now, and arteriosclerosis and pancreatitis are major killers. Meningitis, transmuted into a hereditary disease, is a common cause of mortality over eighty. All in all the life-span is only five or ten years longer than what it is during our time, say seventy-seven years for men, eighty-four or eighty-five for women. Perhaps this is tragic, but perhaps it is not; there is no way that humanity-would ever have been able to deal with the social chaos produced by a greatly extended life-span or practical immortality; the systems in which men have always lived are geared to common mortality tables as are the institutions.

  Indeed, most of the dead embalmed in the hold were merely in their sixties or seventies. There is irrelevant irony in the fact that man can have at least established peripheral colonies through sections of the Milky Way, can travel through most of it, can have solved the mysteries of the FTL drive and constructed such a craft as Skipstone and yet finds his own biology as stupefying and mysterious as he did in Elizabethan times. But, then, every sociologist understands that those who live in a culture are least qualified to judge it, because they have so fully assimilated the codes of the culture that they are unable to be objective, and Lena does not see this irony any more than it is necessary for the reader to in order to appreciate the deeper and more metaphysical irony of Galaxies. Which is this:

  That greater speed, greater space, greater progress, greater sensation has not resulted in any real expansion of the limits of consciousness and pe
rsonality … and that Lena, much less than appreciating the wonders of the FTL drive, merely perceives it as a form of further entrapment and delimitation.

  (This is a familiar theme in my work: that the expansion of technology will only delimit consciousness, create greater feelings of alienation, impotence, hopelessness and so on, and that the neurological/psychological equipment of our species is programmed to record sensations equally alien in the stars or on the sea. Although many literary critics and philosophers tend toward this vision, most science-fiction readers or writers do not, since science fiction is about control, not dysfunction. Still, I beg your various indulgences, pointing out that, even if matters are not hopeless, writing about hopelessness may serve cautionary ends just as the sermons of John Calvin enabled Puritans of the seventeenth century to better appreciate their lot on Earth. I am doing the best I can, just as each of you is doing the best you can, and I am as much in awe of Skipstone as is Lena; in fact my awe is greater than hers, since Skipstone is my creation.)

  X

  Lena is merely a technician. Let us not misunderstand this; it is crucial. Although she is highly skilled and has been trained by Bureau personnel for many years, she really does not need to possess much more than the knowledge of any graduate physicist of her time. Her role, which is essentially to maintain the ship on its preselected course and respond to computer check-out, could be done by any of our own astronauts, could, in fact, be done by anyone capable of flying a single-engine plane. The nature of the investment, however, has demanded that Lena be intellectually qualified far beyond the true demands of her job, and this leads to boredom, depression and further alienation, the Bureau not understanding in the fortieth century what NASA does not understand now: that there is no one happier than he or she who is in a position utilizing fullest capacity; no one more prone to depression and incompetence than the overqualified.