Galaxies Read online

  Lena is doing it for the money, to be sure. It is the only rational motive with which she can live. Certainly she is not an idealist. No idealist would study for a decade in order to take on cargo of the dead.

  When she is finished with this latest probe, three months hence, she has decided that she will return to her quarters on Uranus and request a six-month leave. She is entitled to it, and surely the Bureau will not object; after her debriefing is concluded, it cannot hold her. She will not be denied and she will insist upon the leave. She is only twenty-eight, as young or a little younger in her culture than she would be in ours, and she does not like having been sent with the dead to tumble through the spectrum of the tachyons for weeks at a time. She would like to be, at least for a while now, a young woman. She would like to be at peace. She would like to be taken for herself and not merely as a lever of FTL manipulation. She would not mind being loved. She would not mind a physical relationship. Her needs are the needs of any of you.

  XI

  Saying that Lena “would not mind a physical relationship,” which is a delicate way of saying for the category market that she would enjoy some sex, means that we must confront the element of sex in this novel if only because it deals with a female protagonist. Culture is culture, Ti-Grace to the contrary, and readers would not stand for the idea of asepsis with a young woman, although they would not be similarly suspicious if Lena were an attractive young man. Still, this is modern, literary science fiction where some credence is given to the entire inferred range of human needs and desires. One cannot ignore the issue of the sexuality of the protagonist.

  And the easy scenes could be included and to stunning literary effect; perhaps in the final draft they might be. The writer could win high marks for his poetic vision if not his subtlety. Lena masturbating as she stares through the porthole at the colored levels of hyperspace, that space a series of steps that seem to lead her, twitch by twitch upon the lever of the clitoris to the very altar of self. Lena dreaming thickly of intercourse, as deep in sleep she massages her nipples, the ship plunging deeper this instant (as she could not possibly know) toward the black galaxy, the black galaxy itself some sort of ultimate vaginal symbol whose Freudian overcast would not be ignored in the imagery of the novel as it has been ignored in the imagery of little modern science fiction. Indeed one can envision Lena stumbling toward the evictors at the depths of her panic in the black galaxy as she tries to bring out one of the dead, struggling with it in the blocks, her grim and necrophiliac fantasies as the body moves slowly on its glistening slab, the way her eyes would look as she slowly comes to the awareness that, through the devices of autoeroticism, she has become one of the dead, indistinguishable from the body that is risen … oh, this could be a powerful scene indeed; almost anything having to do with sex in space is powerful, and one must conjure also with the possible effects of hyperspace upon the orgasm. I would face the issue un-intimidated and in line with the use to which the novel can place powerful and effective dialogue.

  Dialogue:

  “For God’s sake,” Lena would say at the end, the music of her entrapment squeezing, coming over her, rending her toward extinction, “for God’s sake, all that we ever sought was sex, that was what must have sent us into the tiers of space as well, that was all space ever meant to us, another level of extension. I’ve got to have it, do you understand?”

  “Oh, yes,” her partner, perhaps the dead itself would say, “I agree with you; you’ve got to have it.”

  “Then give it to me!”

  “Oh, I will,” her partner would say thoughtfully, “I will give it to you, but then think of sex being the life-force and representing so many other things. Are you sure you want it? You had better think this through very carefully.”

  “You’re mad,” she says, “you are mad; I’m pleading for you.”

  “But what are you pleading for?” her partner says, moving slowly; “unless you know, I’m afraid that I had better not cooperate; I wouldn’t want to give you what you think you’re seeking only for you to learn that all of this was a lie; we can’t be lied to; we have got to face the truth now,” lying across her, odors coming in little whiffs from his body, which is, of course, utterly corrupt, the cryonic factor being lock to death rather than its obliteration. “I’d like to do it very much you understand; I agree with you that this may be the only freedom that we can find—”

  “Must you talk?”

  “But of course! Inexhaustibly. It may be our only freedom, but I can’t quite give it to you. I can’t give you what you want. I’m not quite right you see,” he would point out, his wasted little limbs like the wings of a ruined bird’s fluttering upon her. ‘Terribly sorry.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes, surely, but after all you are demanding more than you can possibly be given. You are—”

  “No,” she would say, “no, I don’t want to hear your excuses, don’t want to hear any of that at all. It does no good, it excuses nothing, get inside me, get inside me, damn it! Don’t you understand this is the only thing we ever wanted?” seizing his wasted organs, dropping them with disgust as she sees them like a pendulum hung within her hand, giving up then and pushing him away with revulsion to jam her fingers instead through her aqueous surfaces, slippery and waiting, opening up the walls to the image of a culmination that if she could only touch she could have then, swimming through the surfaces of the self, but the nearer she gets to it the further seems the climax, and not only that but there is something else wrong, something nagging at the periphery of realization, if she could only touch it—

  Well, if she could touch it, then she would, but this is not the direction that the novel would take, at least in the present conceptualization. Attempts at poetry fall into the pornographic tumble,.one variety of pulp becomes another, organs are substituted for machinery and the center takes hold of all. Say it and be done then: space is asepsis; it cancels differences, renders sexuality barren. That has been the secret of the power of science fiction for almost fifty years. It is not deceit or its adolescent audience or publication codes or difficult editors which have deprived our literature of the range of human sexuality, but the fact that in the clean and abysmal spaces between the stars, sex, that demonstration of-our perverse and irreplaceable humanity, would have no role at all. For we are not human out there in any way which can join with another; our humanity, frail at best, is fully concentrated within ourselves to defend ourselves against the void.

  Consider. It was not casual that our astronauts returned to give us their vision of otherworldliness, not casual that they staggered in their thick landing gear as they came under the salute on board, not casual that White screamed on his space walk and begged to return to the capsule or Carpenter shouted get me out of here! Not for nothing did all of those marriages, all of those wonderful kids undergo such terrible strains as many went undersea or toward poetry, hypnosis, transcendental meditation. Sex was squeezed out of them up there and many have not yet recovered. It does not fit. It will never occupy any meaningful role in all of the history of space travel.

  Lena knows this. Somewhere toward the end of the novel she would in fact come to terms. “I never thought of sex,” she would say, “never thought of it once, not even at the very end when everything was exploding around and I was falling.”

  XII

  Naturally when we speak of the absence of sex at this time we are dealing only with the faster-than-light craft and their solitary voyagers; the conventional ferry ships, those that take people at sublight speeds from planet to planet, from star to star within the galaxies, are populated by the ordinary voyagers of their time and like ordinary voyagers of any time; they couple randomly or otherwise, stare through the portholes and think of their wasted lives, perform their hasty scuttling in the dark. In all cultures at any stage of their history, sex will be important, but it does not seem to have anything to do with the opening of new frontiers, which is, of course, Lena’s mission and which will simil
arly be the mission of this novel.

  XIII

  Thirty-nine zero two. There has yet been no contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life, although humanity has colonized many planets and investigated several thousand more. This seeming exclusivity of human intelligence baffles cosmologists and mathematicians while pleasing the theologians; perhaps humanity is unique in the universe, perhaps by the laws of chance it is to be expected that, in nearly two thousand years of exploration, contact with an intelligence Other than our own in a limitless universe would be highly unlikely. Bovine animals found on a planet of Sirius have turned out to have an intelligence close to that of birds and are the most intelligent race yet encountered, but these animals—called Sirians by the uninventive colonists—have enough xenophobia to be dying off slowly, their grazing culture succumbing to fires which the colonists have set for the purposes of atmospheric balance. It would be nice to compound the myth of faster-than-light drive with deeper and richer myths of strange races amidst the great stars, but this cannot be.

  The farther humanity voyages, then, the more it seems merely to confront itself. At least this is the point of view which Galaxies will take. This is merely one of a set of alternatives. One could write colorful chapters about the many strange, civilized races colonists have encountered, all of them celebrative of man and his works, except for those few misguided who would fight him and so would have to be destroyed. That would be polemic, however. Despite the excesses of my youth, polemic has no place even in a science-fiction novel. Leave those innocent races alone. Upon investigation they would be found out to be not so damned innocent at all. Too, the higher the level of innocence, the more room there is for corruption.

  XIV

  Because of the asepsis and the fact that she is alone on the ship when the novel opens and there are no intelligent aliens, it will be necessary to obtain characterization for Lena, definable idiosyncrasy, in some other fashion. Some channel, then, will have to be found to trigger conflict and color and that opportunity will come only through the moment of crisis, that moment at which Skipstone is drawn slowly into the black galaxy of the neutron star.

  Now this moment will occur fairly early into the novel. Perhaps only eight or nine thousand words of expository material will precede the disaster. There will be a shade of exposition in which the spectra of hyperspace are interwoven with Lena’s fantasy and then, her only indication a quiver in the gut of the ship, Skipstone will fall. It will fall for twenty-five billion miles with its load of the dead and its screaming pilot. It will fall not only through space, but also through time, but of time Lena will know nothing at all, only of her pain and her astonishment.

  To explain why she screams during the fall, it is important to explain hyperspace. To Lena the tachyonic drive is merely to draw the curtains across the portholes and to be in a cubicle. There is no cessation of motion in hyperspace; there could not possibly be, the drive taking the ship past any concept of light or motion and into an area where there is no language to encompass nor glands to register. Were Lena to draw these curtains (similar in their frills and pastels to what at one time hung in the author’s own familial home), she would be deprived of any sensation; but of course she cannot; she must open them to the portholes and through them she can then see the song of the colors.

  Inside, in tachyonic drive, there is for Lena a deep and painful wretchedness, a feeling of terrible loss not unlike the emotions of the unknowing and invisible dead which may be ascribed to the effects of hyperspace upon the psyche. But these sensations can be shielded. They are not visible from the outside and can be completely controlled by the phlegmatic personalities who comprise most of the pilots of these interstellar flights. Lena herself is phlegmatic. She reacts more to stress than do some of her counterparts, but she is well within the normal range prescribed by the Bureau, which, it must be admitted, tends to do a rather superficial job of profiling.

  But phlegmatic or not, contained or not, the effects of falling into the black galaxy are entirely different from the hyperspace in which Skipstone “normally” dwells, and it is here where Lena’s emotional equipment comes apart

  XV

  And it is here where the writer’s emotional equipment begins to come apart as well; the writer, no mere engine of creation, has his own problems with which to deal. His powers fail, likewise his will, his desire, a welter of personal difficulties which are rightfully no concern of the reader (do not worry about them) similarly overwhelm. He is exploited by a series of weaknesses which his own novels savagely probe and exploit the way that a surgeon’s cunning tool might burst rather than remove a cyst. The writer’s background in physics is slight, his astronomy shaky, his astronautics shakier yet nor does he grasp chemistry. He has a certain feeling for the scientific spirit, but surely this cannot carry him through. What he lacks is that systematized and rigorous grasp of the hard sciences which the novel will have to utilize in order to succeed, and the writer cannot rely, at least this one time, upon his stylistic gifts to carry him through.

  The writer’s stylistic gifts are notable. Even he will testify to that. For many years he has been able to write in the style and vision of almost any writer living or preferably dead: he is a skillful parodist, a creator of pastiche so smooth as to be almost undetectable from the original. He has access to rhetorical tricks and devices which have time and again enabled him to force his way through a difficult novel on technique alone. From publisher to publisher the writer has carried his little carnival with its cheap masks, greasepaint, assortment of mirrors and depressed freaks; even when the spirit has failed him yea unto the very sinuses, his magic and revolving light shows, with the energetic cooperation of his freaks, never have. But for reasons which the writer cannot quite understand—is it possible that he has been smitten by artistic integrity?—he does not want magic and revolving freak and light show inc. to perform its wondrous if somewhat mechanical convolutions this time. He would like to do this novel the difficult way, which is to say upon the basis of its rather awesome and terrible concept, but he does not know if he has the courage, he does not know if he can summon the will to work on his research base or even to command the material. He is not sure, like Lena herself, that he belongs in a project of this sort at all, and therefore only with much moaning and groaning does he address himself to the task which this one time he will not write himself out of but into … and courage, he has decided, has nothing to do with this at all. Ignore everything above. Courage is facing a man with a gun or protecting your wife against attack or risking your job to protest policies you despise or running a mile in three fifty-seven flat when the heart seems turned to ashes. Nothing to do with the writing of fiction, particularly science fiction, has anything to do with courage. Do riot let anyone tell you otherwise. Most science-fiction writers are drunks and almost all of them have unhappy lives. A, B and C.

  XVI

  The Skipstone falls into the black galaxy. Needed here are great gobs of physics; astronautic and mathematical data must likewise be transmitted. If they are not, Galaxies would be a space romance, a work of fantasy, and this is no fantasy at all. The heavy-science data must be furnished in a way, however, which will illuminate the reader without repelling him.

  In traditional literature this is not so easy; in science fiction it never is quite so difficult. A science-fiction writer does not have to worry as much as a literary writer about impelling his audience by trying to teach it. Readers of this genre expect to be bored; in fact they are seeking boredom as a means of release from too much self-confrontation. They want bad writing as well, because bad writing does not energize; it makes almost no one (except stuffy critics and jealous fellow writers) uncomfortable. Science-fiction readers, thus, will sit for a lecture much more willingly than would, say, the sophisticated readers of the esteemed John Cheever who could hardly bear sociological diatribes spliced into those already difficult landscapes. Thus it would be possible without awkwardness or the need to dramatize to p
ut down a hard body of facts, and these facts could indeed be set off from the novel. They would be a separate chapter.

  Through all of the time that these facts are being articulated, Lena is in the black galaxy, stunned and suffering, and this is certainly too bad for her, but life is cruel, art is everlasting, one must treat characters cruelly in order to make a point. They are, after all, constructions; they have no existence. A writer with compassion for his characters is a writer without guile or control, uninterested in the truth. Fictional characters must be manipulated coldly; they permit this, having no choice. Would that this were true for all characters and not those merely confined to the contract between writer and reader.

  XVII

  In some of the myriad galaxies which revolve through the known portion of the universe, a universe which is either finite, expanding or circular (the debate continues in 3902; perceptions of the size of the universe have expanded through the millennia, but there are those who say that a limit has been found), there exist phenomena known as neutron stars.

  Neutron stars, several hundred times the size of “average” stars such as Sol or Sirius, must, because of their gigantic dimension, create and consume energy at a fearsome rate of atomic combustion merely to sustain themselves. In this sense, neutron stars, like all heavenly constructions, are sentient: they fight for self-preservation in the way that our near planets fight for life by spinning faster than those distant; if they did not do so, they would fall into the Sun and be consumed. So does the neutron star ferociously consume its energy.