The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg Page 3

  But even if this were not so, even if she could by releasing them give them peace, she cannot because she is succumbing to her own responses. In the black hole, if the dead are risen, then the risen are certainly the dead; she dies in this space, Lena does; she dies a thousand times over a period of seventy thousand years (because there is no objective time here, chronology is controlled only by the psyche, and Lena has a thousand full lives and a thousand full deaths), and it is terrible, of course, but it is also interesting because for every cycle of death there is a life, seventy years in which she can meditate upon her condition in solitude; and by the two hundredth year or more (or less, each of the lives is individual, some of them long, others short), Lena has come to an understanding of exactly where she is and what has happened to her. That it has taken her fourteen thousand years to reach this understanding is in one way incredible, and yet it is a land of miracle as well because in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, all of them reconstituted for her, it is highly unlikely that even in fourteen thousand years she would stumble upon the answer, had it not been for the fact that she is unusually strong-willed and that some of the personalities through which she has lived are highly creative and controlled and have been able to do some serious thinking. Also there is a carry-over from life to life, even with the differing personalities, so that she is able to make use of preceding knowledge.

  Most of the personalities are weak, of course, and not a few are insane, and almost all are cowardly, but there is a little residue; even in the worst of them there is enough residue to carry forth the knowledge, and so it is in the fourteen-thousandth year, when the truth of it has finally come upon her and she realizes what has happened to her and what is going on and what she must do to get out of there, and so it is [then] that she summons all of the strength and win which are left to her, and stumbling to the console (she is in her sixty-eighth year of this life and in the personality of an old, sniveling, whining man, an ex-ferryman himself), she summons one of the prostheses, the master engineer, the controller. All of this time the dead have been shrieking and clanging in her ears, fourteen thousand years of agony billowing from the hold and surrounding her in sheets like iron; and as the master engineer, exactly as he was when she last saw him fourteen thousand years and two weeks ago, emerges from the console, the machinery whirring slickly, she gasps in relief, too weak even to respond with pleasure to the fact that in this condition of antitime, antilight, anticausality the machinery still works. But then it would. The machinery always works, even in this final and most terrible of all the hard-science stories. It is not the machinery which fails but its operators or, in extreme cases, the cosmos.

  “What’s the matter?” the master engineer says.

  The stupidity of this question, its naiveté and irrelevance in the midst of the hell she has occupied, stuns Lena, but she realizes even through the haze that the master engineer would, of course, come without memory of circumstances and would have to be apprised of background. This is inevitable. Whining and sniveling, she tells him in her old man’s voice what has happened.

  “Why that’s terrible!” the master engineer says. “That’s really terrible,” and lumbering to a porthole, he looks out at the Black Galaxy, the Galaxy Called Rome, and one look at it causes him to lock into position and then disintegrate, not because the machinery has failed (the machinery never fails, not ultimately) but because it has merely recreated a human substance which could not possibly come to grips with what has been seen outside that porthole.

  Lena is left alone again, then, with the shouts of the dead carrying forward.

  Realizing instantly what has happened to her fourteen thousand years of perception can lead to a quicker reaction time, if nothing else — she addresses the console again, uses the switches and produces three more prostheses, all of them engineers barely subsidiary to the one she has already addressed. (Their resemblance to the three comforters of Job will not be ignored here, and there will be an opportunity to squeeze in some quick religious allegory, which is always useful to give an ambitious story yet another level of meaning.) Although they are not quite as qualified or definitive in their opinions as the original engineer, they are bright enough by far to absorb her explanation, and, this time, her warnings not to go to the portholes, not to look upon the galaxy, are heeded. Instead, they stand there in rigid and curiously mortified postures, as if waiting for Lena to speak.

  “So you see,” she says finally, as if concluding a long and difficult conversation, which in fact she has, “as far as I can see, the only way to get out of this black galaxy is to go directly into tachyonic drive. Without any accelerative buildup at all.”

  The three comforters nod slowly, bleakly. They do not quite know what she is talking about, but then again, they have not had fourteen thousand years to ponder this point. “Unless you can see anything else,” Lena says, “unless you can think of anything different. Otherwise, it’s going to be infinity in here, and I can’t take much more of this, really. Fourteen thousand years is enough.”

  “Perhaps,” the first comforter suggests softly, “perhaps it is your fate and your destiny to spend infinity in this black hole. Perhaps in some way you are determining the fate of the universe. After all, it was you who said that it all might be a gigantic accident, eh? Perhaps your suffering gives it purpose.”

  “And then too,” the second lisps, “you’ve got to consider the dead down there. This isn’t very easy for them, you know, what with being jolted alive and all that, and an immediate vault into tachyonic would probably destroy them for good. The Bureau wouldn’t like that, and you’d be liable for some pretty stiff damages. No, if I were you I’d stay with the dead, “ the second concludes, and a clamorous murmur seems to arise from the hold at this, although whether it is one of approval or of terrible pain is difficult to tell. The dead are not very expressive.

  “Anyway,” the third says, brushing a forelock out of his eyes, averting his glance from the omnipresent and dreadful portholes, “there’s little enough to be done about this situation. You’ve fallen into a neutron star, a black funnel. It is utterly beyond the puny capacities and possibilities of man. I’d accept my fate if I were you.” His model was a senior scientist working on quasar theory, but in reality he appears to be a metaphysician. “There are comers of experience into which man cannot stray without being severely penalized.”

  “That’s very easy for you to say,” Lena says bitterly, her whine breaking into clear glissando, “but you haven’t suffered as I have. Also, there’s at least a theoretical possibility that I’ll get out of here if I do the build-up without acceleration. “

  “But where will you land?” The third says, waving a trembling forefinger. “And when? All rules of space and time have been destroyed here; only gravity persists. You can fall through the center of this sun, but you do not know where you will come out or at what period of time. It is inconceivable that you would emerge into normal space in the time you think of as contemporary. “

  “No,” the second says, “I wouldn’t do that. You and the dead are joined together now; it is truly your fate to remain with them. What is death? What is life? In the Galaxy Called Rome all roads lead to the same, you see; you have ample time to consider these questions, and I’m sure that you will come up with something truly viable, of much interest.”

  “Ah, well,” the first says, looking at Lena, “if you must know, I think that it would be much nobler of you to remain here; for all we know, your condition gives substance and viability to the universe. Perhaps you are the universe. But you’re not going to listen anyway, and so I won’t argue the point. I really won’t,” he says rather petulantly and then makes a gesture to the other two; the three of them quite deliberately march to a porthole, push a curtain aside and look out upon it. Before Lena can stop them—not that she is sure she would, not that she is sure that this is not exactly what she has willed—they have been reduced to ash.

  And she is
left alone with the screams of the dead.

  XI

  It can be seen that the satiric aspects of the scene above can be milked for great implication, and unless a very skillful controlling hand is kept upon the material, the piece could easily degenerate into farce at this moment. It is possible, as almost any comedian knows, to reduce (or elevate) the starkest and most terrible issues to scatology or farce simply by particularizing them; and it will be hard not to use this scene for a kind of needed comic relief in what is, after all, an extremely depressing tale, the more depressing because it has used the largest possible canvas on which to imprint its messages that man is irretrievably dwarfed by the cosmos. (At least, that is the message which it would be easiest to wring out of the material; actually I have other things in mind, but how many will be able to detect them?)

  What will save the scene and the story itself, around this point will be the lush physical descriptions of the Black Galaxy, the neutron star, the altering effects they have had upon perceived reality. Every rhetorical trick, every typographical device, every nuance of language and memory which the writer has to call upon will be utilized in this section describing the appearance of the black hole and its effects upon Lena’s (admittedly distorted) consciousness. It will be a bleak vision, of course, but not necessarily a hopeless one; it will demonstrate that our concepts of “beauty” or “ugliness” or “evil” or “good” or “love” or “death” are little more than metaphors, semantically limited, framed in by the poor receiving equipment in our heads; and it will be suggested that, rather than showing us a different or alternative reality, the black hole may only be showing us the only reality we know, but extended, infinitely extended so that the story may give us, as good science fiction often does, at this point some glimpse of possibilities beyond ourselves, possibilities not to be contained in word rates or the problems of editorial qualification. And also at this point of the story it might be worthwhile to characterize Lena in a “warmer” or more “sympathetic” fashion so that the reader can see her as a distinct and admirable human being, quite plucky in the face of all her disasters and fourteen thousand years, two hundred lives. This can be done through conventional fictional technique: individuation through defining idiosyncrasy, tricks of speech, habits, mannerisms, and so on. In common everyday fiction we could give her an affecting stutter, a dimple on her left breast, a love of policemen, fear of red convertibles, and leave it at that; in this story, because of its considerably extended theme, it will be necessary to do better than that, to find originalities of idiosyncrasy which will, in their wonder and suggestion of panoramic possibility, approximate the black hole … but no matter. No matter. This can be done; the section interweaving Lena and her vision of the black hole will be the flashiest and most admired but in truth the easiest section of the story to write, and I am sure that I would have no trouble with it whatsoever if, as I said much earlier, this were a story instead of a series of notes for a story, the story itself being unutterably beyond our time and space and devices and to be glimpsed only in empty little flickers of light much as Lena can glimpse the black hole, much as she knows the gravity of the neutron star. These notes are as close to the vision of the story as Lena herself would ever get.

  As this section ends, it is clear that Lena has made her decision to attempt to leave the Black Galaxy by automatic boost to tachyonic drive. She does not know where she will emerge or how, but she does know that she can bear this no longer.

  She prepares to set the controls, but before this it is necessary to write the dialogue with the dead.

  XII

  One of them presumably will appoint himself as the spokesman of the many and will appear before Lena in this new space as if in a dream. “Listen here,” this dead would say, one born in 3361, dead in 3401, waiting eight centuries for exhumation to a society that can rid his body of leukemia (he is bound to be disappointed), “you’ve got to face the facts of the situation here. We can’t just leave in this way. Better the death we know than the death you will give us.”

  “The decision is made,” Lena says, her fingers straight on the controls. “There will be no turning back.”

  “We are dead now,” the leukemic says. “At least let this death continue. At least in the bowels of this galaxy where there is no time we have a kind of life or at least that nonexistence of which we have always dreamed. I could tell you many of the things we have learned during these fourteen thousand years, but they would make little sense to you, of course. We have learned resignation. We have had great insights, Of course all of this would go beyond you.”

  “Nothing goes beyond me. Nothing at all. But it does not matter. “

  “Everything matters. Even here there is consequence, causality, a sense of humanness, one of responsibility. You can suspend physical laws, you can suspend life itself, but you cannot separate the moral imperatives of humanity. There are absolutes. It would be apostasy to try and leave.”

  “Man must leave,” Lena says, “man must struggle, man must attempt to control his conditions. Even if he goes from worse to obliteration, that is still his destiny. “ Perhaps the dialogue is a little florid here. Nevertheless, this will be the thrust of it. It is to be noted that putting this conventional viewpoint in the character of a woman will give another of those necessary levels of irony with which the story must abound if it is to be anything other than a freak show, a cascade of sleazy wonders shown shamefully behind a tent … but irony will give it legitimacy. “I don’t care about the dead,” Lena says. “I only care about the living.”

  “Then care about the universe,” the dead man says, “care about that, if nothing else. By trying to come out through the center of the black hole, you may rupture the seamless fabric of time and space itself. You may destroy everything. Past and present and future. The explosion may extend the funnel of gravitational force to infinite size, and all of the universe will be driven into the hole.”

  Lena shakes her head. She knows that the dead is merely another one of her tempters in a more cunning and cadaverous guise. “You are lying to me,” she says. “This is merely another effect of the Galaxy Called Rome. I am responsible to myself, only to myself. The universe is not at issue.”

  “That’s a rationalization,” the leukemic says, seeing her hesitation, sensing his victory, “and you know it as well as I do. You can’t be an utter solipsist. You aren’t God, there is no God, not here, but if there was it wouldn’t be you. You must measure the universe about yourself.”

  Lena looks at the dead and the dead looks at her; and in that confrontation, in the shade of his eyes as they pass through the dull lusters of the neutron star effect, she sees that they are close to a communion so terrible that it will become a weld, become a connection … that if she listens to the dead for more than another instant, she will collapse within those eyes as the Skipstone has collapsed into the black hole; and she cannot bear this, it cannot be … she must hold to the belief, that there is some separation between the living and the dead and that there is dignity in that separation, that life is not death but something else because, if she cannot accept that, she denies herself … and quickly then, quickly before she can consider further, she hits the controls that will convert the ship instantly past the power of light; and then in the explosion of many suns that might only be her heart she hides her head in her arms and screams.

  And the dead screams with her, and it is not a scream of joy but not of terror either … it is the true natal cry suspended between the moments of limbo, life and expiration, and their shrieks entwine in the womb of the Skipstone as it pours through into the redeemed light.

  XIII

  The story is open-ended, of course.

  Perhaps Lena emerges into her own time and space once more, all of this having been a sheath over the greater reality.

  Perhaps she emerges into an otherness. Then again, she may never get out of the black hole at all but remains and lives there, the Skipstone a planet in the tubu
lar universe of the neutron star, the first or last of a series of planets collapsing toward their deadened sun. If the story is done correctly, if the ambiguities are prepared right, if the technological data is stated well, if the material is properly visualized … well, it does not matter then what happens to Lena, her Skipstone and her dead. Any ending will do. Any would suffice and be emotionally satisfying to the reader.

  Still, there is an inevitable ending.

  It seems clear to the writer, who will not, cannot write this story, but if he did he would drive it through to this one conclusion, the conclusion clear, implied really from the first and bound, bound utterly, into the text.

  So let the author have it.

  XIV

  In the infinity of time and space, all is possible, and as they are vomited from that great black hole, spilled from this anus of a neutron star (I will not miss a single Freudian implication if I can), Lena and her dead take on this infinity, partake of the vast canvas of possibility. Now they are in the Antares Cluster flickering like a bulb; here they are at the heart of Sirius the Dog Star five hundred screams from the hold; here again in ancient Rome watching Jesus trudge up carrying the Cross of Calvary … and then again in another unimaginable galaxy dead across from the Milky Way a billion light-years in span with a hundred thousand habitable planets, each of them with their Calvary … and they are not, they are not yet satisfied.