Galaxies Read online

  “Oh, now it is coming,” Lena says, “it is coming upon me hard and fast, I can feel it growing within, do not abandon me now nor let me fail, but rather penetrate me more deeply, more darkly, until at last suspension is over and all is done.” John, not unwillingly, humps and jumps over her, rising and sinking to various heights and depths, the surfaces of his body gleaming with the honesty of his efforts as underneath Lena begins to twitch and contract. “Here it is,” she says, “here it is now and now and now and known again,” and, in a falling scream, goes into her small and at last silent spasms which are all that she will ever know of pleasure, nipples gleaming, teeth gleaming, eyes flat and widened, and she climaxes with a groan, reaches her hands toward him, puts her fingers in his shoulders as if she were adjusting various levers shipside and sets off again. Patiently, doing the best that he can, John stalks her.

  If these passages give the impression that Lena is not attractive, they have been poorly handled, because the fact is that she is quite beautiful. The aesthetic standards of this age are very close to those of our own, history tending to reenact itself more often than not, history having an impoverished invention, and Lena would certainly compare well with a movie star of the late 1950s to the middle 1960s, before anachronisms invaded our own life cycle. She has huge breasts, a tiny waist, full lips, lush thighs, large nipples which stand up under the most superficial kind of titillation… . She is, in sum, wildly attractive in terms of those sexual obsessions which framed the author, and perhaps a few of his fantasies have slid into the confrontation here.

  The author is not being prurient. I can no more imagine myself having intercourse with Lena than I could conceive of myself as being in Skipstone; it is all detached in the extreme. I am not one of those writers whose creations become so vital to him that he literally laughs, weeps, argues, confers with them. My literary influences are more Russian than Mediterranean, so to speak, and I can therefore derive only the slightest prurient feedback from the depiction of Lena.

  Nor, the contract with the reader being firm, is this description for prurient release upon the reader either. The author has other and far easier devices of arousal and so, for that matter, do his publishers; I refer you to the rack of books slightly to the right of here and above eye level if you are seeking an easy release and good luck to you as well; I have surely been there myself in one guise or another. No, Lena’s beauty is more cleansing than sensual; she is one of those women who induce reverence rather than lust, at least with the majority of partners, and I can offer no better evidence of this than how little pleasure John is really obtaining from sex with her. This is a profound commentary not only upon his character—which is in many ways more interesting than hers and it is a pity, accordingly, that he is a minor figure in this novel—but upon the society from which both of them have evolved. For here sex is little more than a medium of social exchange, an extension of the contract which all humans make with one another to give no pain, at least superficially, unless forced, and far more could be read into this coupling than is truly there. Sex is not that important in the fortieth century, although it is important enough to make possible even here, even then, their own kind of pornography.

  Regardless. John is able at last to achieve his orgasm; with a whine and cry so feeble that he might be a child, he tumbles in and out of her, falls away so that Lena, clutching at him, still seeking that last lunge of his which will touch off her final satisfaction (but she will not find it and would not have found it if he had stayed atop her for an hour), gives a bleat of anguish as he revolves upon the pallet to look through the dome arid then, putting her disappointment aside, turns onto her own back. She is a controlled woman, she has a sense of proportion about these matters and knows the triviality of seeking orgasm.

  “I’m afraid of the dead,” she says.

  It is as if they have not copulated at all. She merely picks up on the conversation. “I’m frightened of them,” she says again as if John had argued with her. “I have a right to feel that way if I want.”

  “You shouldn’t be.”

  “I don’t want to go with them. They have no right to make them cargo.”

  “They become companions in space,” John says. These are indeed the reports brought back by commanders of the other FTL craft, that at times they feel that they are close to the dead, that there is a true communion, space being so alien that living and dead are more possessed of the humanity that once touched them than separated by mortality. “If anything you will be glad to have them there. And if things get too bad you have the prostheses to keep you company, to talk to.”

  John wonders vaguely why he is arguing this point with Lena. Any pilot who so resists the conditions of the voyage should be relieved of the command; that is the policy that he would adopt if he had any true influence. He does not, however; he is merely another functionary of the Bureau and the Bureau’s dictates are quite clear, have been explained to him: it is absolutely imperative that Lena take the Skipstone. Too much has been invested in her for command to be shifted now.

  “That’s the other thing,” she is saying. “The prostheses aren’t company. Metallic frames. Machines which work on tape. They’re horrible.”

  “But they have the personalities and the memories of some very wonderful people, skilled technicians, counselors, advisers, supportive people who can—”

  “That doesn’t matter. They’re still machines. Dead and machines in space; that’s all that they give me.”

  “Lena,” John says, although this disturbs him, too; he has long thought that the craft should be dual-controlled even though the Bureau insists that the costs and the intra-personal tensions would be unmanageable, “they can’t send more than one live person into space. That’s always been the case. The support systems would not carry more than one person. Within those limits, Bureau is trying their best.” He is careful to say Bureau. Under normal role-provisions he would say we, but increasingly John is separating himself from the Bureau in his mind. He does not agree with how it has handled Lena’s preparations. More than before, he is severely disturbed by what he feels to be a lack of comprehension on its part of her real anguish, an anguish he is beginning to apprehend. “They want you to be happy.”

  “But I’m not happy.”

  “Happiness is not that necessary,” John says reasonably. “No one empowers us to be happy; it is not part of your training, not part of our life. All that is necessary is that you be able to handle the circumstances of the voyage and in that regard Bureau has done its best.”

  “I know that,” she says a little sullenly, “I know that; I realize what you’re saying, but it isn’t fair, John, it just isn’t right,” and she goes on then to make certain statements about the Bureau, express certain opinions of what she thinks it has made the true purpose of her mission which are perhaps best excluded from the text of the novel since they are, let us understand this, merely the paranoid outpourings of a young woman who is under a good deal of strain, who possesses only modest intellectual gifts and whose emotional state has begun to buckle under the impact of the voyage and her realization of its importance. If there were anything useful in these meanderings, the author would be the first to put them down (and John, he says to himself, would be the first to report them to the Bureau; he would have no choice; he would have to tell them everything because that is his responsibility, but he does not think that there is anything significant here; he wishes to believe that).

  Also beside the point would be text on what happens later, how John and Lena in these last days before the flight of Skipstone stumble into a slightly deeper emotional relationship, how John manages to find her desirable after all, how certain commitments are stressed in their final coupling which, although instantly forgotten the day the ship departs, are taken very seriously by both at the time that they are said.

  And, since it falls outside Lena’s point of view, it will not be necessary to describe John’s uneasy relationship with the Bureau,
the careful reports he hands it almost daily, the intimate and terrible nature of his confessions. To probe his mind superficially is one thing, but to reproduce these confessions is quite another. In order to approach the material, I would have to use full multiple point of view—a largely discredited technique which can only work in odd snippets and flashes—or worse yet the archaic, omniscient author, and although there has been a little of both here, Galaxies really needs a more intense focus, a narrowing. Multiple points of view are obviously unacceptable.

  Suffice it to say that John omits discussion of Lena’s mental state from his reports, that the Bureau, in any case, files those reports without reading, keeping them merely as a procedural hedge against Skipstone’s failure so that there will be someone to blame. It would be John’s fault for not reporting emotional or psychic inadequacies to his superiors, the Bureau would say. John feels somewhat guilty for omitting the many disturbing things that Lena has said, but this guilt is hardly to the point where he would leave anything out of the reports that he felt the Bureau really ought to know. Instead he discusses her sexual behavior, material which he knows has never failed to interest the clerks. (He would be most distressed to know that nothing interests the clerks and that his reports are unread.)

  Of Lena’s relationship with John little more will be made of here, but it is one of those details which come upon her as she relives her life while falling into the neutron star and should be included on that account. By no means has the material been incorporated for the sake of prurience, since the sexual material is relevant to understanding Lena.

  XXIII

  Many years ago I appeared in concert on a radio talk show attended by two grim-faced men representing the Citizens’ League for Decent Literature who were attempting to hold a Mother’s Day rally in a local stadium celebrating, with the help of bicyclists and Miss Teenage America, the temporarily outflanked but risen-to-anger forces of virtue. “The thing that I hold against pornography,” one of the grim-faced men pointed out, “is that any hack can write it, any hack can turn out a scene describing sex and the human body and create a perverted interest, but that isn’t writing. That isn’t art. That isn’t what a novel is all about.”

  I raged toward the microphone to destroy the grim-faced Decent Citizen with an aphorism which would wrap him into the wire, but as I started to speak, I realized that I agreed with him. The man was right. “I agree with you. You are right,” I said. The Decent Citizen smiled. “But, of course, the First Amendment covers all that,” I added hastily. The Decent Citizen smiled again. The Mother’s Day rally, however, fell through. Not enough financial support from the public.

  XXIV

  As Skipstone dives, the relationship with John is merely one of the events which pass stately across the panels of Lena’s mind. There are many others, events that is, and if I were interested in a little discreet padding, I would have no difficulty in filling many pages with exposition. Lena’s whole life could be placed here in a terse but endless number of scenes, dropped in to bulk up the word count. (Any professional learns things like this almost before he has started selling.) I could flash back and flash forward, depict Lena at work and at play in many postures through her young life, could feed in colorful dramatic snippets which would illuminate the strange and wonderful nature of the society from which she comes. There are at least twelve thousand words available here, and perhaps I would be a fool not to do it, depending, of course, on how short the novel would look in first draft. There may be enough already. Then again the book may be short and under deadline pressure, and I may have to add those twelve thousand words. It all depends. Everything depends. It is a wholly dependent universe except in the matter of morality where there may be certain absolutes.

  Fortunately this is merely a set of notes for a novel and not the novel itself, and therefore I should not have to concern myself with what will be padding and what will not be. I can put in precisely what I want, what will advance the plot and no more. There is little plot in these early moments of falling, and therefore the material will be held down.

  Then, too, I am not terribly interested in Lena or her society. They have little to do with what is going on here which could be at any time. … I only want to posit a technology which makes possible FTL craft that can find the neutron stars. The word for this 3902 is arid. It is hard to conceive that a system which could populate the numerous stars could be homogenous, rigid, dull and puritanical, but that is really what humanity has become, even though it numbers fifty billions on one hundred and seven separate worlds, moons and asteroids. The polyglot variety of our time, which comes from relatively high social mobility and institutions in decay, is really an aberrant event in man’s history. Institutions tend to stabilize and control; socioeconomic levels tend to stratify. Goods are distributed unequally by heredity; religious or state sanctions merely function to keep the system in place. The years from 1900 through 2155 happen to mark one of those infrequent periods of our history when this was not the case, because the technological devices are far ahead of the ability of the culture to absorb them; but 3902 is deep in a period of stability. Under the hand of the Bureau which controls everything related to space, there have been no conflicts in several hundred years, except for minor disputes between governments of colonies too widely separated to engage in warfare.

  The Bureau should not be thought of as tyrannical—it merely occupies a place; it is a quality of the environment. Those in its service have no sense of being oppressors, nor does the Bureau adopt the attitudes of the totalitarian.

  These are dull times. Despite the infinite variety which they would seem to have for us, the people of the fortieth century find them unremarkable and similarly dull. Because of the functionality of the system, the tight integration of institutions and individuals, most are rather well compensated. It is just as well that this is so and that Lena has been drawn from a pool of people even more stable than the norm. Thirty seconds in FTL would drive any of our contemporary astronauts mad. A month under the devices of the Bureau would give any of us severe social illness. Different times, different conditions … the gladiators would not have done very well in the New York subway system.

  This all taken into account, there will be little time spent on explication of Lena’s past life. Lena is as unremarkable as most of her contemporaries, and her training has acted to flatten her further, it being sickening, repetitive, technical and dull. Material could be put in for padding if conditions forced, but it would seem better to pad the novel in other areas, areas in which the extraneous material could react more vitally with its theme.

  For instance, as the ship falls, there could be some elaboration on the suggestion that neutron stars might be pulsars which would be most intriguing, if the reader has not been intrigued sufficiently already by the notion that all of “life” as we understand it when we glimpse the heavens may be merely an incidental by-product of the cycle of neutron stars.

  So there, Cheever, Barth, Barthelme, Oates. What in the collected works would touch that for angst?

  XXV

  Pulsars occur on spectrographs or other sophisticated receivers as rhythmic messages from space, messages which may be defined as light or sound but which have no visual counterpart. In short, their signals give evidence of their existence, but they cannot be seen, which, in the early days of their discovery, led to the theory that they might indeed be coded messages sent by intelligent aliens.

  Later it was found that the pulsars do not emanate from single stars but are probably impulses received from entire galaxies, galaxies so many light-years distant that they can be traced by no telescopic equipment available and which are indeed so unimaginably far that their light may not yet have reached us, may not yet reach us for billions of years, although they may well have a history equivalent to our own.

  New theories suggest that, while some of the pulsars may be galaxies, others may represent the dying neutron stars or, then again, a neutron star in collapse
might become a galaxy. What we receive, then, are messages of the imminent collapse of the universe. The neutron stars chatter out their little warnings in clear spectrographic pattern. This concept, that the pulsars are the squalling of failed stars, causes anguish. This possibility would not be evaded during the course of Galaxies, and the period of Skipstone’s fall would be the proper place of insertion, since it is here, finally, where all the strands of the novel meet, no tension at the center, all of it in the filigree and dark of its suggestion.