Universe 1 - [Anthology] Read online

  (And the Cork plumbed the poisons from my mind, and I was purged, cleansed... .)

  The ship plunged on.

  * * * *

  In the control room, I fell forward as something took the Charter and shook it.

  Walls canted up around me; I fell sliding from the set, caught myself on the arm before the wires could tear out of my skin. In the distance, alarms screamed.

  Somehow I was back in the set, strapping the emergency bands across my chest, snapping them into place around my feet. Another shock threw the ship forward; I slammed into the bands, thumped back.

  “Engineer . . . status report.” Calm. Tendrils of calm played with the burgeoning shadows of panic lacing my consciousness; I gripped the arm rest, forced myself to relax.

  Forced—

  I cut off the hurried string of numbers from the Engineering section. “The Cork—where is he? I want him up in the control room with me. Now.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Punching a key on the board console to my left, I studied an exterior view of the ship. It showed a bowl of gray curving away to either side, unstained save for a congealing mass of vibrating black dead center on the screen.

  “He’s not in his section, sir.”

  “Find him, then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Not in his section. It drove home, fell away; I stared at the screen, not registering the view. Not in his section.

  “Sir?”

  “What?”

  “We’ve found him, sir.”

  “Where?”

  “In the ... ah, in the mess, sir. Drinking coffee.”

  Goddamn!

  “Send him up.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The ship lurched forward again, and the view on the screen flickered, faded, grew large again. I sent out impulses to reverse the thrust.

  Behind me a pneumatic hiss signaled the entrance of the Cork.

  “Where in hell were you?” He started to explain; I cut him off. “Never mind. You’ll be stationed here. I want you near me when we push through that hole.”

  He didn’t answer. I was busy again, making corrections, feeding in new figures to the computer brains lining the shell of the control room, relaying the decisions and revisions on sight along the mental circuits binding the ship.

  During a pause, I glanced up at him.

  He was ready to blow.

  It was there in his posture; he slouched, slumping weakly against the bank of machines leading up into the Captain’s set; his shoulders curved away into his back, a line of trembling muscle. His hands quivered at his jacket front, fumbling with the nubbin of a zipper, nervous, more nervous than I’d ever seen him before. His eyes were shadowed, and they didn’t meet mine; it wasn’t a new thing—only now it seemed to have meaning, where before ...

  “Oh god.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  If I’d cared just a bit more, I would have seen it coming. Just a small bit more awareness, and perhaps . . . No good.

  I groped in the slot under the left arm rest, came up with the syringe kept filled there for the Captain’s use during a hard pull; I grabbed his arm, plunged it in. He seemed unaffected.

  “Just stay. Just keep thinking...”

  He didn’t answer; he didn’t seem to hear me.

  I turned away from him, made the connections that would send me over into mind-drive, and blacked out.

  Black:

  Shrieking:

  Writhing and alive: Light.

  It curled from away, from everywhere, and it bent in on us, a great, blistering, ebon sore.

  I threw the ship forward, peeling away the layers of hyperspace—

  —boxes, each flowering into the next and (A ghost form came and took the fear from me, swallowing it into himself)—

  —battering against the gravity well eating into our drive, slamming up through seas of force, while the burning sun flared around us, the Back Region consumed with heat, the fabric of hyperspace wrinkling in a white-hot energy storm, and the fiber bent, and it warped, and it fell away from us—

  Twist-

  Seething sun golden bronze madness leaping now larger ever larger always ta—

  (Shadow hands came, and took our madness)

  (Weak, soft, frail hands—like tissue)

  (Tissue in a maelstrom)

  (Breaking)

  A hundred sick souls poured out their insanity, and the sewer swallowed the festering ichor, and it drove us on, funneling the power, driving.

  The black spot erupted before us.

  I slid the ship around, away—cut forward and then punched into overdrive.

  We were gone, caught in a side-drift, splicing away from the side-space between real and unreal, in and out—gone.

  Where we’d been, the black spot blossomed, flowed, spread like ink—and drained away.

  The ship slipped through a fold in space, came out in the grain-black midnight of outside. We drifted through sudden calm. Stars were brilliant chalk against a velvet paint sky.

  Silence.

  Everywhere ...

  ... no.

  From some dim corner of our collective consciousness came a low moan, a pitiful moan of pain and agony, not an audible moan, not a physical scream of swollen torment—but a whimpering mental whine.

  The Cork.

  I came back to the control room, tore off my straps, swung down out of the Captain’s set—and found him slumped on the floor inches from my feet, arms outstretched as though groping for something yet out of his reach.

  * * * *

  His mind was gone, lost somewhere back in the torrent of madness I’d forced him to drain; he lay in a huddle at the foot of the set, wound in on himself, fetus-like, his pale hair tumbling in disarray over eyes blanked white, staring; he’d clamped down on his tongue sometime during the flight, and a stream of red-black blood dribbled through his lips to the floor, already turning brown. His clothes were torn in ragged strips; his arms were bleeding. He was whimpering when I came to him, a gurgling whimper that spat up clots of blood. I bent to him quickly, removed the twists of wire from his forehead, pulled him up to a sitting position. His body was limp, sagging in my hands; the bones seemed to jut through the skin like dry sticks. I stared at him, and after a while I let him down and left him there to whimper alone, in silence.

  * * * *

  We cut ourselves with small knives. An old man doesn’t matter, but a young man’s different: an old man’s something you’re going to be ... a young man’s something youwere.

  Why did I take on an inexperienced Cork? Not just my own inexperience; oh, no: something dark within me that made me strike out against myself, against the Cork—against a wealth of hates and frustrations I could never quite touchbefore having them taken away. . . . Something about a sand planet. . . .

  But I still can’t quite touch it. I never will. Sometimes I think about that Cork, and what I did to him. Sometimes I have nightmares in which I’m strapped to a table and people stick knives and pins into me, needling me with private things, and I scream, not for myself, but for them. Sometimes I’m another man’s sewer, and I realize: we’re all leeches.

  Sometimes I’m a little bit mad.

  But not for long.

  The silken fingers quickly come, and take the pain away....

  <>

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Barry Malzberg has published most of his science fiction novels and short stories under the penname “K. M. O’Donnell,” but is now going back to writing under his own name. What bizarre or baroque reasons he may have had for these machinations, I don’t know precisely. The following story (maybe the Borgesian term ficcion would be more precise) gives ample evidence that Malzberg’s mind doesn’t work in established ruts, though.

  NOTES FOR A NOVEL ABOUT THE

  FIRST SHIP EVER TO VENUS

  Barry N. Malzberg

  I

  It is 2119. The space arm of the government amalg
amated with the military a century ago and now owns everything. Five million people are employed directly in this program and fifty-eight million others work in wholly space-related projects.

  For a hundred and twenty years a self-sufficient colony of forty thousand has dwelt on the moon. Satellite colonies on space stations orbiting the moon and Earth contain some ten thousand other souls. There has not been a manned exploratory flight for a long time but until a decade ago it was not deemed quite necessary as things seemed to be working out so nicely otherwise. Most of the mass media now emanates from orbit and from the moon since it has been found far less expensive to segregate the entertainment and news industries in an artificial environment. Intricate rocketry devices implanted upon the moon in 1985 allow its orbit to be juggled and rearranged and there is always a full moon for national holidays.

  * * * *

  II

  The captain of the Venus expedition is forty-two years old. He is the cream of a selection process which picked him from over four thousand men and women eligible for the position. He commands a crew of eight hundred and sixty-one, of whom more than fifty are entertainment and political personalities who will participate in the broadcast. A slight tendency toward aphasia which came upon him in the latter stages of the preparation-program is well compensated by two grains of disulfiamazole taken three times daily. His blood pressure under stress is one hundred and thirty over sixty-five. In his youth he was prone to premature ejaculation but has not been bothered by this problem for twenty years. He is happily married and the father of two grown children who accompany him on this flight. His wife must remain home due to imminent liver troubles but remains of good disposition and will take part in some of the broadcasts.

  * * * *

  III

  The chief engineer of this project, a man named Willoughby, knows that it is headed for disaster. No exploratory flight of this nature has taken place for over thirty years, the moon being approached through remote devices and the unmanned flights to Venus having occurred in ships one-twentieth the size of the one being prepared. Willoughby knows that the training procedures are both inadequate and fallacious because the equipment itself will not work on the long, difficult flight being planned, and time and again he has thought of bringing his opinions to the heads of government. Nevertheless, he cannot: his life is committed to the space program and he understands the desperate reasons underlying the expedition to Venus; to hinder the project in any way would bring the program, massive as it may be, into total disrepute and destruction. (Because he is something of a bureaucrat, he cannot allow himself to think of what will happen to the program if the expedition aborts spectacularly; he will worry about that when the time comes.) Also, Willoughby does not totally trust his judgment; none of the scientists who are over him or the technicians underneath seem to share his fears about the project and he cannot be the one to break the news. He does not discuss this with anyone but continues his work on an elaborate diary of suspicion and predicted failure which he decides he will release when the ship explodes in orbit

  * * * *

  IV

  The captain and Willoughby have known one another vaguely for many years and do not seem to get along. This is because many years ago Willoughby laid the captain’s then-youthful wife in secret at a large holiday party conducted by the agency on the moon, bringing her to a violent orgasm during which she confessed that he was much better than the captain. Since then, the two men have not been able to truly confront one another although Willoughby has no evidence that the captain is certain what happened.

  He found the captain’s wife vague and out-of-synchronization while he fornicated with her and decided that the captain was a man in need of sympathy. He has no idea whether this incident plays any part in his decision to suppress his fears about the project but hopes that it does not since he has always prided himself upon being an objective and competent man.

  * * * *

  V

  Wilt Okun, the celebrated knuit player, will be on the Venus expedition and it is planned that he will play the National Anthem as the ship touches down on Venus. His presence on the flight will be concealed from the general public until then since his performance is supposed to be in the nature of a surprise and his stature as an entertainer this year promises that he will do excellent things for the public relations of the expedition. In order to get Okun, the agency was forced to guarantee his agent three percent of the flight budget plus a percentage of all eventual cassettes of his landing, but this expenditure was lumped with general procurement and thus is not public knowledge. In any event, the expenditure is well worth it as Okun is the best knuit player since 2112 and the days of Lester Carter. Appeals to his patriotism failed and bureaucratic threats were met with defiance, making the expenditure necessary.

  * * * *

  VI

  Massive riots, in 1972, resulted in the destruction of important equipment and personnel in many of the agency centers. Since then, security has been increased to the point that the centralized agency, located over three hundred square miles in the state of Nebraska, is totally-self-contained and impregnable to assault. More importantly, the agency moved in the wake of the riots to improve its public relations and to educate the public into understanding that their fate and importance as human beings devolved totally upon the ability of humans to pierce the heavens and it was the agency who was going to pierce the heavens for them so why not be reasonable and respond to the agency the way people used to respond to archaic religious totems and slogans?

  * * * *

  VII

  The efforts of the agency in this regard have, by this year, 2119, succeeded in convincing over ninety percent of the electorate that the human condition is inextricably bound to landing on Venus and if the mission fails, their lives will be utterly worthless. Population engineers in the higher level of the bureaucracy issued covert warnings about 2108 that this was dangerous because if the mission failed a good deal of disenchantment might devolve upon the agency, which could find its base of popular acceptance undermined and the lives of some of its employees might even be endangered. These population engineers were overruled however since the agency had decided by 2105 that a really large, effective push had to be undertaken within the lifetime of most people in the country; otherwise its position might erode. By 2110 Venus had been selected as a near and likely target and the enormous appropriations and efforts had commenced. Researches indicated that eight years was the longest effective period of public involvement and so, when plans were finalized, June 4, 2119 was selected as the date of Venus landing and the countdown began at V minus two thousand, nine hundred and twenty(days). Millions were invested in accompanying materials and national holidays were declared on V minus two thousand, V minus fifteen hundred, V minus one thousand and V minus five hundred. Also V minus four hundred, V minus three hundred and V minus two hundred. Also V minus one hundred and fifty, V minus one hundred and V minus fifty. Also V minus forty, thirty, twenty, ten and five. Also V minus one.

  * * * *

  VIII

  On V minus three Willoughby decides that he can no longer live a lie and through extraordinary efforts secures an appointment with the Chief of Cabinet. He tells the Chief that the Venus flight will fail to reach orbit and will definitely fall into the sun. The Chief, who really has no authority whatsoever, and whom the agency has enlisted to participate on the voyage as head of state, immediately places Willoughby under state arrest and has him shot the morning thereafter.

  * * * *

  IX

  On the way toward Venus a massive spectacle is presented by the personalities on board which is sent back via transistorized devices to the five billion people remaining on Earth. Wilt Okun, who is not part of the performance, being held back as the surprise of surprises, sits hunched over his knuit under the dome of the ship, staring out into the wasteland of space and playing diminished sevenths and quadruple-stopped arpeggios on his instrument while his mind, so
to speak, wanders free over his history. He recalls a girl with whom he had sexual intercourse fifteen years ago, when he had insinuated his way in the project as a messenger, and thinks of what a truly splendid, if asymmetric fuck she was. Although Okun does not know this, this girl is the wife of the captain; she is in a hospital in West Town at the moment and she will, in some cunning way, be the key to any understanding of this novel.

  * * * *