Galaxies Read online

  XXVI

  And, then, too, this is Lena’s novel. The focus must be kept on her; it would serve no purpose to wander further from her because to the degree that Galaxies generates power, it will come from its portrait of the protagonist who is the filter of all impressions. So let it be known, let it be taken into account, that all of the time that Skipstone is falling, Lena is in terrible pain. She is suffering. Her anguish is real and her desolation barely a measure of her fear.

  For this novel is about people. Evolution is about people; so are neutron stars, pulsars and even the machinations of the Bureau: at the center is always the frail, human form under the lash of brutality or the light-years, and in the hold of the ship which falls interminably in a flight which may go on forever because not only light but time is contained by gravitation, Lena is screaming. She comes in and upon herself over and over again, ripped from end to end, her joints like sealing wax, her eyes torn out like water, lots not being cast over her vestments only because she has no vestments, and there is no one alive, no one alive in the hold of the ship to cast lots over her. But this will come. All of this will happen to her, and since she knows not only the past but the future, she sees this, and it adds to her anguish, although she cannot express it. She can express nothing. She merely holds and falls.

  And falling she sees the dead, falling she hears them, the dead address her from the hold and they, too, are screaming. In this new gravitation, the dead and the living have, as John has predicted, merged, the dead not knowing their condition nor the living, everything the same; meat distended, and yet the old distinction somehow holds if only in attitude, for the dead are other than Lena and they shout.

  They shout: “Release us, release us, we are alive. What is happening? We are in terrible pain. What is happening? Why are we in such torment?” and so on and so forth, their many voices speaking with one through the hold, revolving speech marking passage from one to the other, poor baffled creatures coming to consciousness after centuries of emptiness in a condition which means that every dream that they have ever known of horror has come true. (Perhaps this is the secret of death itself; we live in the hope of a merciful God who looks upon us with benevolence, but what do we know of the disposition of souls or what is planned for us?) So there they lie, there in that gelatinous flux, their distended limbs sutured finger and toe to the membranes which have held them. Their decay has, if not reversed, at least been halted and imploded as the neutron star has itself imploded; the warp into which they have fallen has reversed time so that now they are alive (or at least they are not-dead), and they beg Lena to release them from anguish which they cannot express, so profound is it.

  The voices are in her head, they peal and bang like oddly shaped bells and where, oh, where, is she? She does not know. She has no sense of partition but seems, instead, to exist in all space.

  “Release us,” they scream. “We are no longer dead; the trumpet has sounded and we have been raised; we have been raised incorruptible in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet!” and so on and so forth; perhaps they do not shout this but some other theological scrap or snippet, but this is how their cries are referred to Lena who is familiar with some of the old texts. She knows, then, she knows exactly what is happening and maintains consciousness of what has occurred, but then again, she does not, there is no circumstantial function. In the larger sense she is aware, but in the matter of particular she is not.

  Not only the issue of her pain holds her here. She is merely the ferryman on this passage, not a medical specialist, and she knows nothing of the mysteries of return, of the effect of supergravitational properties upon the corpus of the dead. All that she knows of those dead is that their passage through hyperspace has, in some way unknown to her, changed the very ions of which they are constituted so that they will be in a state of preanimacy and that the process will be further extended upon their return. This is the very latest and most sophisticated of all the experiments in unlocking the dead which have been going on for several hundred years, and although it has returned a scattering of them to perilous life, the expense of carrying them as cargo has been so high, the chances of their continued animation (most of the restored die for a second and final time very quickly) so slight, that the process can be considered to be only at its most rudimentary stages. It may be a false pursuit which will then be abandoned. On all the planets and galaxies no more than twenty of the previous dead exist, and their lives can hardly be said to be satisfactory, since their chemistry has become so precarious that they exist only in tanks, immobilized. Was it for this that they willed enormous sums to have themselves preserved hundreds of years ago? Lena cannot possibly answer this. She cannot speak for them.

  She could not, in any event, grant them release. Despite their cries, their vows of life restored, their departure from the medium which nourishes them would surely destroy. She would explain this to them if only she could, take it patiently step by step through the process of causing them to know what has happened, but her technical knowledge is entirely too slender and she has succumbed to her own responses.

  Those responses overwhelm her.

  For here, in this black hole, if the dead indeed are risen (and this is a question which the novel just cannot confront, staggering in the thin and shrinking line between metaphysics and science where little but the hope for rationality can be said to exist), then the risen can be considered the dead. For she, too, dies in this space. She dies a thousand times over a period of seventy thousand years. There is no objective time here; chronology is controlled only by the psyche, and so Lena has a thousand full lives, a thousand individual and richly textured deaths, and it is awful of course as only something like this can be, but it is also interesting, because for every cycle of death there is also a life. Seventy thousand years, one thousand times seventy upon which she may meditate, if not reenact, her condition.

  XXVII

  And this is a concept so broad, so (as the old pulp magazines might have billed it) mind-shattering, that it is worth considering for just a little while. As the ship, past its initial lurch into the field of the neutron star, becomes part of the black galaxy, as the ship partakes of the energies and properties of a gravitation so immense, Lena begins to live not only her life again, but also the life of various separate identities which are not hers.

  Some of these are identities transferred from the dead in the hold, others are taken from those that she has known in her previous life and others still (like this novel itself) have been completely constructed, fictional lives that nevertheless have all the reality and omnipresence of truth. Self-invention, spontaneous creation are as pervasive as anything that has happened, Lena finds, and as she lives a thousand lives over these seventy thousand years (give or take a few years overall and falling well within the Bell Curve of chances), she has the time to find out a great deal.

  It is quite painful. It would have to be this way. Who can possibly describe or imagine what it would be like to live seventy years in solitude, let alone one thousand times seventy, let alone the complete recall of all the previous lives available to the present? There is simply no language for this within the present, and although the author’s technical resources are well to the level of any of his peers, he would not even make the attempt. It is simply beyond him. Before something like this, a decent sense of awe must be kindled.

  But it can be said that the black galaxy not only repeats and intensifies time, but also compresses so that although seventy thousand years are in one sense quite extended, in another they are short enough for Lena to undergo all of the sensations of her various lives in what she knows—as a dreamer might be able to make assessment outside his dreams—to be a shorter span. Knowledge and memory are not so much enacted through her as implanted. She knows in every way what those seventy lives were like, then, but it is a knowledge of recollection rather than partaking, much as one might stagger from a dream, recollecting for the instant all of its myriad d
etails without, however, having experienced them. What can one say? The black hole, like dreams, destroys time.

  Here, in short, is the point at which the novel could be extended. To put it another way, it could be padded out to almost any length demanded by the publisher. One could conceive of a whole cycle of novels here, a recherché pas du space age, seventy volumes interrelated, each of them dealing with another of Lena’s lives, all of them locked together by the prologue—title it Before the Black Galaxy— and the novel of epilogue which would conclude everything in a fulfilled and satisfying manner. An author with a modicum of energy, a modest scale of expenses and moderate pretensions might well be able to draw a publisher’s advance on this scheme for the rest of his working life, for, in the way that all series in genre fiction can be said to be, these novels would be self-reinforcing. The audience would build from book to book as well as sending its newer readers in search of the earlier works of the series.

  So, then, one could compose a work which would span the centuries and the world, which would describe all of human history in chiaroscuro from the present day or a little earlier right through the year 3902, and the series would mesh cleverly, since a character in one novel could share certain memories and events with characters in the other, a complex, towering fugal arrangement which would keep the author lunging from novel to subsequent novel until, in simple exhaustion, from audience apathy or in search of better things to do, the author would abandon the series in midcareer. Or drive it to a fast conclusion: Lena rescued from the black hole, Skipstone falls through and out the other end, Lena resigns herself to an eternity of plunge and so on. There would be as many ways to finish it off, in short, as to expand, and even at a relatively modest advance, the author would find the temptation hard to put off. Security and the middle class beckoning. As Lena’s problems multiply so could the author’s be said to have come under control.

  This, however, is not the line that Galaxies would take. Put it down not to an excess of integrity nor laziness: I simply do not want the work moving in that direction. The point, after all, is not what happens to Lena as a side effect of her fall but what she does to get out of her predicament and what effect those struggles have not only upon her own consciousness, but also upon that of the reader. The true basis of the novel, then, would not be found in the side effects which are merely peripheral to these basic points.

  Besides, the author confesses to a certain boredom. His own life is at least as difficult to manage as Lena would find her seventy; too much of his energy is involved with assuming mastery of his own existence. Why create false proposals? Galaxies will assume Lena’s multiple lives without undue explication and leave the reader, that collaborator, to judge the effects of all this upon her.

  Sufficient to say that, although Lena is neither stupid nor insensitive, she is not one of the strongest personalities available in this culture. If she were, she would not be in what is essentially a technician’s job. [The effect of the multiple existences upon her thus might be crushing, but then again it might only inspirit her to a deeper characteriological and metaphysical framework than she had ever known previously.] Who is to say? There are certain areas which even science-fiction writers are not equipped to explore with any certainty, and before the mysterious curtains which shroud the one, discrete human soul, it may be best, after all, to stay silent.

  XXVIII

  Galaxies, having set up its background, having reached its crisis early on (in conformation with the basic principles of good plotting), would then plunge into its basic argument and conflict which would occur when Lena at last decides that she must summon help. She must obtain from the prostheses an evaluation, or, failing that, she must in some way establish communication with the dead.

  Now, the fact that it has taken her seventy thousand years to reach this decision is in one way incredible, and yet in another and more significant way it is simple and miraculous. In an infinite universe, possibilities similarly multiplied, only a fraction of them reconstituted even now, it is highly unlikely that even once in seventy thousand years of lives and reenactments she would have intercepted a personality which would seek help in this way, and had it not been for the fact that she is unusually strong-willed and that the personality which she inhabits is so weak that she can override it, it might not have happened yet—Skipstone and its denizens might be plunging onward instead of having reached a point of resolution which, later on, we will be able to explicate.

  Before she has summoned the prostheses, Lena has had time to think, and she decides that the prostheses might provide her with the only set of answers. There has been an accretion of memory from life to life so that she has been able to do some almost conterminous thinking, and when the moment comes when she may act, she is prepared to do so.

  Some of her previous personalities have also been weak but not in this way, in a fashion to encourage override. Others have been strong, not a few have been insane, but there has been a little residue even in the worst of them to carry forth the knowledge of what she must do, and so in the seventy thousandth and first year, when the cumulative truth of the matter has come upon her, Lena realizes what has happened and what will happen next and what she must do to deal with this.

  She summons all of her strength and will. She is, in this thousandth existence, occupying the persona of a sniveling, whining old man of the 3200s who had enough money to embalm but not quite enough to seal off his body from relatives who, for profit, put it on exhibition in their temple for many years as an artifact and the center of a sect, until one by one the members of the family left the temple, the cult fell into disgrace and the institutions of the time began to confiscate its property. Meanwhile the corpus was immaculately preserved, the society of all times having had one consistency: to protect and perpetuate the bodies of the embalmed so that they could enjoy the possibility of revival.

  In this persona she summons John. As he did not tell her until the very moment of her embarkation, his personality is also on Skipstone, one of the prostheses, implanted within a metallic block approximately but not truly in the shape of a man. (It was deliberate that the prostheses not appear human. It prevents the ferryman, who may at the time of summoning be in a near-psychotic stage, from reacting to them as if they were people; at one time there were some terrible incidents which need not be described here.) Sensors turn, little lights and wiring play, and as the machine whirs, coughing into the block the preserved persona of John, Lena gasps in relief, too weak even to respond with pleasure to the fact that in this condition of null time, canceled light, ruined causality, the machinery still works!

  But, then, the machinery would. It would function. Even in this final and most dreadful of situations, the machinery continues to function. This has always been the point of science fiction: that if we did not master the future, it would be from our own incapacities and never those of the machines. They may have been right, they may have been wrong, but those old science-fiction writers had one core insight: whatever happened would eventually devolve upon technology. Fail in that and everything fails.

  “Hello,” John says within a shimmering, silver block, crudely sculptured into a parody of human form, little blind lights winking at one end, little extensions balancing at the other. “I’m glad to see you.”

  Fully implanted with the personality and memories of he who has been obtained, the prosthesis assumes at this moment of summoning the condition of her superior. Of course it is not John. Lena must remember this at all times and also must know that the prosthesis has no memory of the voyage. Its recollections have been shut off from the time that John fed the log of his personality, piece by aching piece, into the receptors during the weeks before the voyage. She cannot, then, fall upon this contrivance and beg for salvation. It would literally not know what she was talking about; it is there to provide technical and humanitarian assistance only to the point that information can be given to it. That is true, Lena says to herself, moving her lips, subvocali
zing these assurances; that is true, I must remember this at all times, I must not think that this thing is human.

  This knowledge is wrenching, and the old man with whom she shares the cavern of consciousness is similarly distressed and somehow she maintains enough control to keep the two in balance, to maintain her sense of control and identity and to address John in a slow, reasonable tone. This is no small accomplishment. It cannot be dismissed easily. Possibly I have underestimated Lena to this point She is showing a kind of behavioral control and absolute discipline which would be beyond anyone of this time and highly exceptional even in hers.

  “What is the matter, Lena?” John says. He knows—it knows, whatever the device may be called—that he would only be summoned if there were some kind of serious trouble in flight. “Can you tell me what’s wrong? What can I do for you?” Her mentor would have phrased it just this way, yet—in the context—it seems absolutely stupid to her.

  And the blundering nature of this question, its naivet6 and irrelevance in the midst of what she has occupied, stuns Lena, and yet more when she compares this mask to the actual John who would never (well, would he? could he be this way?) act so stupidly, but she realizes even through the haze of blockage that this John would, of course, join her without any memory of immediate circumstance. He would have to be told what is happening. He knows nothing at all.

  Inevitably, then, she must brief him. It is hard to maintain control over that other personality which once again has panicked and is scrambling desperately against the walls of consciousness, trying to get out of there, trying to find sleep once again but of course it cannot, not until the genetic allotment of its mortality has been exhausted. She must reassert her own personality. Whining and sniveling she manages to brief the thing that is John, half in one voice, half in another, as to what has happened.