Galaxies Read online

  (Some comment should be made on background: the awful stillness of the ship in the fall, an absolute cancelation of motion, even a placidity in the grip of collapse which gives an almost pastoral stillness to the interior whose support systems continue to function. It also should be clearly stated that seventy thousand years is subjective time to Lena; no such period has actually elapsed. No time at all can be said to have passed since the fall began, and the biological systems are frozen. Naturally she could not have survived seventy thousand years or even seventy thousand seconds in plunge. All event is perceived only through the engineering which controls the subjective time-belt; it is by no means implied that the objective passage of time can be measured at all.)

  Lena does know what has happened. A thousand lives, seventy thousand years, have enabled her to reconstruct, quite painfully but piece by piece, the cosmology which has put her in this position. It has not been easy, but then again in seventy thousand years of thought almost anyone could reconstruct the cosmos. This, in any event, is the premise of the novel, take or leave its essential optimism as you will. She tells John, then, about the neutron star, about the implosion which has brought her to this condition, about gravitation. About light and pain. John in metallic frame stands there quietly, listening to this. Indeed there is little, else that he can do; the prostheses are triggered only by pauses in conversation, will otherwise stand mute, and Lena’s jumble of recollection, explanation and hysteria goes on without pause. Finally she is done, and when it is certain that this is so, the device moves its rudimentary head in what might be a very human gesture or then again might only represent its projection by Lena of her need to have it be human.

  “Remarkable,” it says.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s really remarkable. And terrible, of course. You’ve shown a great deal of strength in being able to assess the situation.”

  “Yes.”

  “And not to panic. That’s remarkable also. You’ve met this test with real strength.” The programs, of course, are slanted to be encouraging and supportive, this being Bureau’s conception of how users might best be served. “You’re a remarkable woman. I’m really proud of you. Then, too, you have a right to be proud of yourself. Are you? I truly hope you are.”

  “That has nothing to do with anything,” Lena says. “You’ve got to help me.”

  “You say that this falling continues still? That at this moment we’re diving?”

  “Falling now, falling forever.”

  “How terrible for you.”

  Lena looks at the blank masking which covers the portholes, wondering what would happen now if she were to strip that masking away so that she could see the black hole itself. She does not think that she could bear it, and yet at some point, even past seventy thousand years, she knows that she will have to do it. The compulsion is absolute.

  “Would you care to talk some more about your feelings, Lena? Why don’t you talk?”

  “You’ve got to help me,” she says. “This has nothing to do with feelings.”

  “What would you like me to do? What do you think that I could do? How long have you had these feelings that you could derive help from me, Lena? Do you really think that the solution lies outside yourself?”

  “You’ve got to have a function,” she says. “All of you were placed here in order to help with some emergency; this is an emergency. Do something. Tell me what can be done to end this.”

  “Well, now,” John says, “well, now, Lena, let’s consider that a little if we may.” It addresses her with superb calm which has also been programmed in, the only emotion which is picked up on the tapes. It would hardly be supportive, the Bureau has long since calculated, to have prostheses capable of other emotions on these flights; they would lead to vast complications far beyond the ability of the Bureau itself to contain. At one time it was argued at the highest levels that emotions of warmth, affection, passion might meet the program, but in the end it had been decided against, since none of them would serve any technological purpose.

  “Let us consider,” the prosthesis is saying. “I could hardly help you, although I know that to you I represent a factor that you always looked to for help. Still, the means for release are beyond me.”

  “Are they?”

  “If beyond you, beyond me,” John points out. “That would stand to reason, wouldn’t it?”

  “But you’ve got to have an answer! You were installed to be called upon, so that you could help.”

  “Only in those matters which would fall within my experience,” John says with a little regret. “Really, I am little more than a mechanical contrivance, a data bank as it were which can give you faster access to facts of a certain kind than you could obtain by research. I mean I’m perfectly willing to be supportive—that’s what we’re here for after all, to render support—but you’d be wrong in looking at me as much more than a catalog or perhaps a synthesis of information. So you see I’m not capable of that kind of action.”

  “You must be.”

  “But I’m not.” Although the crude metal is not designed for expression, she seems to think that John is betraying grief, but this is undoubtedly emotional; she is being emotional once again. “I’m truly not.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Not impossible. Objective fact. In truth your problem is that you are projecting on me certain emotional needs which I cannot possibly fulfill.”

  “Emotional needs?”

  “Of course. I am not your mentor, your lover John, but merely a representation of his personality, a simulacrum of this real person who is certainly not at all here.”

  “I know that.”

  “But perhaps you are not sure. At an emotional level, Lena, you may be shielding yourself from this fact. Be honest with yourself. You did not call upon me for intellectual advice but emotional support, and I cannot yield that at all.”

  Consider this: they tumble into a black hole in an eternity of pain and yet the prosthesis is engaging in elemental casework procedure. Surely this appears confusing to the reader—how, after all, can the sense of wonder be congealed with the principles of modern social work?—but this is among the points the novel has to make; that the Bureau’s attack upon the universe has been to obliterate its pain and hence its parameters by acting as if it could be handled with routine techniques of therapeutic approach which have not changed at all in two thousand years, have merely become ritualized.

  “You’re going to have to deal with this yourself, Lena,” the metallic thing points out. “There is quite little that the cyborg technique can do for you; you can no longer displace the responsibility for your condition upon machines. In fact I seem to recall raising this very point in discussions at the Bureau a long, long time ago, but no one ever listened to me. They never listened at all there.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lena says. “I have no idea what you’re saying.” This is only a partial truth. She knows quite well indeed what is being suggested—that she is alone, that she is in a void, that this metal merely simulates companionship and that no one can save her—but at the level of emotional acceptance she has indeed become blank. Something impenetrable within her through all the subjective centuries of pain has finally shifted, and she now feels open in a way which hardly dignifies her. “Help me,” she says again,

  “I can’t.”

  “You must Otherwise this will go on forever.”

  There is, here, a pathos which I cannot really transmit. Open sentiment has never been one of my virtues; the ironic sense is too strong for me to bring off a scene at the level of simple emotional clarity which gives sentiment its often despised power. I could say that what gives this scene much of its horror is that Lena yearns toward a lover whose very form mocks that yearning, a form the Bureau has designed to parody that emotion. “Oh,” she says, “if you don’t help me, who will? Who can?”

  “There are others,” the device says. “Engineers, tutors, advisors are also in the bank
, and they might be able to give you more practical advice, although I doubt this. But there’s no reason for you to feel that everything begins and ends here; truly it does not have to. It’s merely your emotional condition running away with you.”

  “I hate you,” she says then. “I hate you.”

  “Don’t hate me. I am merely an abstraction; that would get you nowhere. Get hold of yourself.”

  “I have hold of myself. I hate you now.”

  “You can only find these feelings of hatred destructive. In any case,” the cyborg continues, “the situation as you’ve put it is frightening and upsets me no less than it does you. In fact, although no decent machine should ever confess to something like this, I’m beginning to feel my own balance starting to disappear. This is a very tenuous creation here, weak and frozen circuitry, levels of fusion which can hardly put up with any severe stress. I am going to disconnect.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Of course I can do that. Don’t be silly; I can do anything that I want. We have a complete range of free-willed choices available to us; we can regulate our own participation. Otherwise we would be dominated and utilized in such a way as to make yourself quite mad. By free will I must detach myself before something drastic happens, and of course I obey it absolutely.”

  The cyborg labors in a rather clumsy way toward one of the portholes and lifts its tentacles to part the curtains.

  Lena can do nothing. She is astonished by the action, does not understand it and yet unwillingly, as she stares, she begins to see the sense. She can see what the cyborg has said to her and realize that it is quite right: it could hardly bear this staggering situation. It was not made for it; Bureau did not anticipate black galaxies or their interception when the lists for Skipstone were compiled. She had no right to expect anything; it was foolishness even to summon, but then again, what choice did she have? What could she have done? She needed help and thought that it could be provided here, and the weakness, then, is not that of the cyborg but her own. She must understand this. She remains in place as the thing rolls to a porthole, tears open the curtains and takes a long look at the aspect glinting through, an aspect which Lena herself will not witness even though she has seen it in her mind for seventy thousand years; she will not look at it, and then a cry both human and metallic emerges from the thing at the porthole.

  It bellows in a pain which might be pleasure so acute is the sound, and then the very joints seem to decompose (although Lena knows that this must be, it would have to be, an illusion; sight could not destroy steel nor could sensation alone break an engine, could it? Could this happen?), and then it leans and staggers against a bulkhead, arches in upon itself and collapses. It does not, after that first stricken bellow, make any sound at all, as if all feeling had been drawn from it on that one single line. Lena manages to stand, move in that direction and, her hand become a tentacle, her eyes closed, she seizes the curtain and draws it closed, shutting off the light and the death of the black galaxy, and then she is alone.

  “I am alone,” she says with just a hint of self-dramatization (but she can be pardoned this); I am alone, she thinks, and knows that she is not, not in any sense which will profit her. Because somewhere below her the cyborg that was once John lies, but she neither sees nor touches; instead her body shrinks and then she scuttles away. The personality of the dead with which her persona has shared this momentarily becomes the stronger, and she begins to whine and mumble then like an old incontinent, shudder within the container of her flesh as if it were despicable, and this may go on for years and then again it may go on for moments (there is no time in the black galaxy, except the time that she feels has elapsed; time is a function of condition), but eventually, like all things, it stops, and she must confront her basic problem again. Always she will have to do this.

  She is alone in the ship. Her descent continues. Her pain does not remit. She is out of control and yet she is in control. Nothing can be understood and yet in another way all is comprehensible. All. All can be known. Something must be done. She cannot bear this eternally.

  XXIX

  And here could run yet another moody flashback concerning Lena’s relationship with John, dropped in to provide color and poignancy, augmenting the mood of despair. Long sexual passages here could alternate with painful streams of consciousness in the present. Sex and space, orgasm and isolation could run counterpoint, and the author’s gifts for irony, which are not modest, would be exhibited to their fullest range. Also, in the traditions of modern science fiction, the sex scenes could be quite titillating, render the novel some extra-literary interest. A construct like this could use all the extra-literary interest it could get.

  But this would not work. Space is asepsis: straddling this simple and irrevocable insight, the temptation to write long and easy scenes of coupling falls to ash. How can I show sex, even retrospectively, against a background where light and history are themselves contained?

  I cannot. I would not even attempt it; that is all there is to say about the matter, and in addition to this Lena’s thoughts have already veered far from John. They are less retrospectively concerned than fixed on the immediacy and difficulty of her situation, the need to deal with it and obtain escape.

  She wants to change her condition. She wants to get out of this. Of course she does, how natural a need; but consider the measure of her entrapment in that it has taken seventy thousand years for her to have reached this point of decision. There are monolithic writers and those who pace slowly, but even a Jamesian standard weakens by comparison here. This is a character who has taken a thousand selves and seventy times that to decide that her situation is unbearable. Science fiction must truly be a superior medium if it can involve such an extension, such a superimposition of leisurely pace upon material. Nothing else in any other form could begin to approach it

  Still, if it is understood that the black galaxy does indeed contain time as well as light and sensation, memory as well as all sub-FTL speeds, then it is not unreasonable that it would take Lena this long to reach any point of decision. Indeed, it is quite a substantial declaration that she would come through all of these stresses alive. There is nobody of our time who could have survived what has happened, yet training methods and the undoubted factor of evolution have produced many Lenas, individuals whose capacity for experience and the weight it bears goes far beyond our own. They can, in our terms, tolerate anything. Governments throughout history, in fact, have sought a population with Lena’s patience and malleability; to many of them she would have been the ideal citizen. Her tolerance levels are quite high.

  Nor (because she considers her survival unexceptional, because it is merely a concomitant of her training) can she truly understand the remarkable nature of her survival. She does not consider herself to be an exceptional individual, and this is one of the bitterest of all factors.

  The thing that contained John’s persona lies near a bulkhead. It makes no gesture. Dead before, it is more dead now, containing nothing. Again she is alone in the ship and overwhelmed once more by the cries of the dead.

  XXX

  “You were foolish,” a dead says to her. “You asked more than could be given.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. It fit not the programs. There is nothing that they can do for you.”

  ‘Then I had no choice. I had to call upon them. I was instructed to call upon them if I needed help.”

  “Even here you have choices,” the dead says. “No matter what your condition, no matter what has happened to you, you exist in a scheme of choice. You must remember this.”

  The seventy thousand years have had their effect upon the dead as well. At least some of them, it would seem, have learned something. The one to whom she is speaking is extremely patient; he seems to have moved to a new plane of knowledge, but then again the dead may not truly exist in a sentient condition; their apparent existence may simply be a projection of Lena’s wild and altered mental sta
te upon their abstraction, or then again the factor of change in the field of the neutron star may make all of her impressions merely hallucinative along with any questions of growth or choice. That would lend Galaxies yet another series of levels, of course. The possibility that the acts described may be occurring only as patterns falsely encoded within the protagonist renders everything in it liable to suspicion, although I can give assurance that there are certain poles in this work, that the work can be said to exist in revolution around them. One of the poles is the neutron star and the other is the hypocrisy of the Bureau and the way in which they mesh—becoming, ultimately, the same thing. Also significant is the statement that both Lena and Skipstone do exist; they exist at this moment in the sense that all that will be can be said to have already existed, sending back its reverberations to the time before it was created.

  “Choices,” the dead repeats, since Lena’s stream of consciousness has been wandering as it is prone to do. “And you are compelled to make them.”

  “He did not try to help me.”

  “He could not have helped you. How could you have expected that he would? You are being very naive; they are not programmed to deal with anything like this.”

  “I thought he would.”

  “You are a fool.”

  “I thought he would help me—”

  “He is not John. You called upon John but found only a mechanical recreation,” the dead says gently. “How can you be brought to realize that what you thought happened did not happen? Everything was based upon a set of false expectations.”

  “It cannot be.”

  “It can and it is. If you did not face the truth of the matter, you would not have summoned him. You know where you are and what is happening to us, but you must continue to face that truth, Lena.”