The Void Captain's Tale by Norman Spinrad

Author:Norman Spinrad [Spinrad, Norman]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 0671498991
Publisher: Timescape / Pocket Books
Published: 1984-01-01T21:00:00+00:00

—— X

Mal d’esprit, sexual malaise, cafard, obsession noir; thus might masters of the healing arts have taxonomized my mental state as Lorenza and I went our separate ways. Those of less therapeutic but more moral bent not without the justice of the tribe might deem me a rogue bull, a sociopath, a monster of anomie faustian.

Chez moi, I would no doubt have pled my guilt to all these things, then as now. The turning away from succor’s hope into the darkest heart of the obsession itself was surely a willful act of my own choosing.

And yet, now as then, at the baleful end-point of this self-chosen geodesic curve of fate, I still cannot deny a certain secret pride in having chosen the vision absolute over the quotidian vie humaine.

Voila, I have at last allowed this awful truth to pass from my self-occluded coeur onto the word crystal of this account where all may confront it, even if the only soul ever to read this naked truth will be my own!

Think of me what you will, regard me as did Lorenza as a prideful fool in love with my malaise; as I left that chamber of voidly dream, I longed not for the status quo ante, for the lost innocence of my Captainly role, but for she who had led me into the dark depths of this cafard—indeed, for the orgasmic countenance of the void itself.

But though an age had turned in the augenblick of the dream chamber, in the realm of flesh and time barely an hour had passed since the Jump, and Dominique lay in sick-bay coma still, leaving me to wander the ship like the Fliegende Hollander of ancient operatic lore, a lorn ghost-Captain in a shadow realm.

Hours passed in a fugal fog. Lorenza had departed for the environs of the grand salon; I therefore repaired to the entertainment deck, where we would not meet, where congress with Honored Passengers and crew might meetly be confined to the silent communal passivity of the spectatoral mode. Here I attended the performance of a string and electronic septet, a holocine in the kabuki mode, a dance of sword and fire, an erotic triplet, a concert of spontaneous musical odes.

Or rather did I drift from one to the other, sipping at this and that but never drinking deep; notes and movements, costumes and gestures, words and vistas, melanging into a fragmented abstraction of the arts humaine, the frenzied dance of captive spirit through maya’s forms, or so it seemed to me in my timebound daze.

Flaming torches arching from hand to hand, the silken rolling of flesh on flesh, tautened wire vibrating to the human word, ideogrammic gestures of fear, love, and rage, the mathematical grace of bodies moving through space—all seemed revealed as shadows on the void, the pauvre panoply of man’s attempt to transcend the universe of space and time through the transmaterial purity of abstract form.

Yet beyond this noble dance of human art, the highest expression of our spirit’s

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