THINGS LOST
Thomas M. Disch
Tuesday, April 31, 2084
Yippy, the stars! An outburst of real enthusiasm.
Though, at my age?
Well, we must allow that it has been a very special occasion. There was even a parade, a work of the most meticulous archaeology, with military bands and bunting, with drum majorettes and such sententious speeches as I have not heard since my high school graduation. A camp—but what else is one to do for a launching, after all?
The most memorable moment from the pageant: Traffic had bottle-necked and we, the astronauts, were stalled in the Saragossa of Piccadilly, where the raving thousands waved their flags and spread their banners and cheered and sang and wished to hell we'd move our asses on. But there was one little creature who was having no part of it all. She stood not five feet from our scallop shell—the saddest, smallest nymph (surely a mortal)—and stared at me so solemnly with her dark, credulous eyes, eyes much too large for so diminutive a face, but this is an agreeable fault in a child. Four or five or maybe a very untermensch six-year-old, and dressed all in the deepest mourning. (Again: a mortal? Or only prematurely in the vogue?) Her black-brown clustered curls were a proper rat-king tangle. Quite steeped in pathos, the darling. Right out of Dickens—Little Dorrit, perhaps. Better yet, Little Nell. The traffic unsnarled, and our scallop began to inch ahead. The crowd grew lively again, but she waved no goodbyes nor breathed a word of farewell but only stared and stared. What did she make of it all? Did she know who we were, where we were bound? How the image of her face sticks with me! As though those dark eyes were the emblem of everything we are leaving behind, earth and old mortality. Good-bye then, little sister. Forgive me if there was no time to explain. I ear there never will be, now. What, still staring after me? Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye.
Then, reluctantly (and lushed to the gills) I turn to face the stars.
Wednesday, May 1, 2084
That wasn't the sort of opening I had had in mind for this journal. I would have preferred something at once more formal and less florid, an introduction that would say in a polite and orderly fashion that this is the journal of Oliver Wendall Regan, only son of Joseph and Hope Regan, age 92, astronaut, geneticist, novelist (unpublished). But if I had begun so, I would probably have found myself (as I find myself now) with nothing left to say.
Nevertheless, sail on.
Since coming on board the Extrovert I haven't left my cabin. For 24 hours I have merely fussed, disposing the contents of my little carton of Earth Fetishes about the cabin—the chessboard on this shelf; then, above it and a little to the left, my Authentic Souvenir Ashtray of Boston Massachusetts 1999; then this drawer for masks and this drawer for the tea service. At the conclusion of which I discover that there is no niche for my oboe, unless it shares the drawer with my shirts, so I have to begin all over again. Then I must decide where to hang the Rauschenberg litho (Inferno, Canto XII) and whether to hang Veronica's fakey engraving of Hohen-tübingen. Decisions, decisions. And all the while, of course, overriding this fuss and quite drowning it out, the delicious sense of imminent adventure, boundless possibility, endless journeying, so that I feel as if each beat of my heart were an explosion, and that it is only by the carefullest magic (this goes on this shelf, and that goes in that drawer) that I am able to keep myself from blowing up and splattering these immaculate walls. It is quite plain to see that I am in no shape yet to keep a journal—and probably won't be till we're quite outside the solar system.
We passed the orbit of Mars this morning, and soon we can begin to count asteroids. (A memory: the game I used to play with my father when we would go out on long dull rides to Vermont for the family's vacation—Counting Cows. He'd count the cows on his side of the road, and I'd count the cows on my side of the road. Somehow I usually won. Did I cheat? Or did he cheat on my behalf?)
Lord, how I ramble. No, I'm not in fit shape. Till such time as I am, I give you my very warmest hiatus.
Sunday, May 12, 2084
The stars, the silence, the cold. The growing sense that it is all—all that vastness out there—alien, empty, inimical. But there is also the sense of how cozy we are, we voyagers, in our snug little whalebelly.
Snug and cozy we may be, but jolly we are not. The distances between the stars seem brief by contrast to the distances between each of us and his fellows. We will have, after all, a century or so to become acquainted. We feel no need to rush things.
So that for these first two weeks the corridors have seemed to rustle with ghosts, who hurry past with, at most, a furtive glance through the eyeholes of their masks. Speaking of which, I must say that I have seldom seen so many exquisite pieces of craft. One that I especially admired, a woman's—full-face and crown in heavy tarnished silver, with the curls that ringed the face applied free-form with solder. Her eyes were dark brown, solemn. I smiled. Since I've been wearing a plain velvet domino, she could not help but see it. And did she smile too, beneath the silver mask?
Aside from these scurryings down the corridors to the dining hall or the library, my sole communal activity has been orchestra rehearsals. With only thirty members we will not have much occasion to tackle the heavier romantics without electronic assists, and our conductor, Hamline Quinn, gives evidence of being too much of a purist for that. He's done very well with the Haydn, and the Ives fantasia is coming along, coming along. Quinn is, rather drolly, an activist and interlards his musical fiats with Anarchist messages that even he must see aren't very relevant so far from his native New Zealand.
The girl in the silver mask is also in the orchestra, but as she plays cello I have yet to see the face behind the mask.
Tuesday, May 14, 2084
Here I am, right in the front lines of History, rushing at the stars with a constant acceleration of 1.25 gravities, the last word in the contemporary, and what has been, and becomes increasingly, my preoccupation? The past.
It must be due to the sudden atrophy of social life. Or perhaps it is the psyche's reaction to leaving the comfortable Copernican universe so far behind. Whatever the reason, I have become a veritable Proust, lounging in my cubicle, chewing over scraps of old memories. It is not that I worry, as my father claims he does, that I will lose them unless they are exercised regularly, that the past will slip away from me. On the contrary, I grow annoyed with these intruding memories. I have better things to do. I have, as they say, my whole future ahead of me.
One image that recurs and recurs, like (sweet ancient metaphor!) a broken record: it is the painting my stepmother did shortly before she suicided. "The Struldbrug Dot" my father used to call it, though he must have realized it was intended to be his own portrait. Sometimes I think I can see the same vermilion disc, like a glowing traffic light, set into the brows of my fellow-voyagers, as if, despite our unaging faces, we bear the seal of that undying, undead senility which poor mad Swift, and my poor mad mother, thought immortality would be.
We are so smug, we chosen ones, and can afford the saintly luxury of self-castigation.
I wonder if my father still has that painting. I must remember to ask him the 'next time' we meet.
Later that day:
Another stab at the exhaustive (that forlorn ideal of the second-rate), at gathering up all those things that 'go without saying' in order to try to say them. In short—what am I doing here?—or for that matter, where am I?
I am on the Extrovert, a starship, the constuction of which began some 20 years ago in orbit above the Earth. It is the shape, give or take some dozen protuberances, of a honeycomb. It measures 1.6 kilometers from end to end (large for a ship, small for a microcosm), and is veined with 1,174 miles of corridors and catwalks. It is faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. Using a photon drive it will reach .9 the speed of light in 250 days. A postcard would convey all this more graphically, I'm sure. Will there come a time when these press-agent specifications will be thought remarkable, as for instance I find the dimensions of the Mayflower remarkable? The faith that such a time will come is the only justification for such a journal as this.
There are 246 of us, ranging in age from Sheila Dupont, 23, to our captain, Lester Gorham Gray, who became a centenarian some dozen years ago. The median age is 68. Each of us had distinguished himself one way or another, and one might wax lyrical at this point. It seems to me, however, that Distinguished Achievements are, in the modern scheme of things, only to be expected.
My own D.A., which earned me my berth? I did a complete genetic map of the mouse, Mus musculus. When the Nobel committee extended their invitation to me, citing this as my largest glory, I felt rather as though I had been honored for having written a definitive haiku. It didn't help when Veronica began to speak of me as "The Star-Mouse."
But it is not so much for any single accomplishment that a person is selected. Rather, as I understand it, each of us is here because he has shown himself to be the most polly of polymaths. Our community thereby incorporates the widest possible range of interests and skills, and each astronaut is susceptible, presumably, to being caught up in, or trained for, any of them. And thus we can hope to wile our time away, as we crawl through the long light-years from star to star.
Personality was also a consideration, of course. We're expected to have stable, stolid characters. Lacking facilities for ego-restructuring, self-satisfaction is at a premium. I imagine it came as a blow to most of us to learn that we were stable stolids. I've always tended to think of myself as the volatile type.
More than enough exposition. Back now to my musky, cork-lined nest.
Sunday, June 3, 2084
Her face is every bit as lovely as her mask.
Last night after another deadly dull emergency drill I approached her in the outer perimeter arcade, removed my mask, and introduced myself.
"Ah yes," she murmured through unmoving silver lips, "the oboe. And my name, since I see I must surrender it now, is Aspera."
"Per Aspera ad Astra," said the Star-Mouse, with a gallant flourish.
"It is a readymade pun, Mr. Regan, but I fear that I'll encounter it in the next century as many times as I am introduced. You can, if it suits you better, call me Hope. Many of my friends do."
"Aspera is a lovely name. Your mask is lovely too."
She removed the mask. She was smiling. There was a natural beauty-mark (mole seems too harsh a word) high on her left cheek, an unusual feature, surgery being the preferred course. Close-grained procelain skin of the sort Ingres delighted to paint. Silver-blond curls in a careless, crafty tumble—not unlike the curls of the mask. And such eyes—large, dark, vulnerable, a doe's eyes beseeching a hunter to come after her. Ah, she turned me to jelly, like an inverse Medusa.
As simply as that.
Afterwards I checked at the library (where Slade recounted another of his dreams; he seems to have made an art of dreaming). Aspera Donatio is 54, an Olympic swimmer, and a noted psychotherapist, specializing in the psychoses of children and addicts. An unusual specialty to bring aboard the Extrovert. Except in the ghettoes of the mortals, there are few enough children these days even on Earth. As for drugs, we stable stolids are virtually teetotalers. And, as I already knew, she acts.
There is something about the woman, something that haunts, like a telephone ringing in a bricked-up room.
Later:
The haunting is solved. It came to me as I was going to sleep. She has the same eyes as that child, the dark eyes of mortality and old earth.
Wednesday, June 13, 2084
Slade seems a more unaccountable fellow each time I visit him. I visited the library again today to see him, though maintaining the pretext of impersonality—i.e., a request for book-films of Proust, whom I have been exhorting myself to reread for the last month. At first glance Slade strikes one as being a most unprepossessing sort, anomalous, an error on the part of the selection committee. Shy, Coptic eyes; a Turkish moustache to mask his overbite; a reticence in ordinary conversation that takes him to the brink of invisibility. After I'd gone on a bit in my own bland way, parroting the usual textbook things about Proust, Slade smiled and started to tell me, with his usual disconcerting directness, of his latest dream:
"I dreamt that I had written Remembrances of Things Past, though in the dream they became Things Lost. I've never read the book, and so the only thing it had in common with the original is probably that it was written in the first person. In the part I can remember I was walking through a French village with Gene Shaw. Perhaps you know her—she programs some of our environments? Well, no matter. Gene and I used to be very close years and years ago, during the pogroms in the States, and that's surely the significance of 'Things Lost.' We came to a square at the center of the town, and as I've never seen any more of France than Paris, the square was a replica of the little park in front of the courthouse in Clarion, Iowa, where I grew up. It was ringed round with bright brick houses plagiarized from Vermeer and de Hooch. A public lav that looked rather like a bandstand—my notion of a French urinal, I suppose—stood at the center of the square. Gene and I looked in through the stained-glass windows. A nasty-faced little boy was whipping the toilet bowl with a length of heavy chain. He destroyed it completely. While I wrote the story, I kept changing the boy's name. At first it was Genet, but that looked too much like Gene. It was a huge novel, but I forget the rest of it. Do you like it?"
"I think it's one of your best."
"Oh, I'm not sure. In some ways it's quite transparent. Gene and Genet, for instance. Still, it has its points." Then, as though embarrassed by his candor (no matter that these dream-recitals have by now become almost a tradition between us), he muttered an excuse and retreated into the fastness of his archives.
Little danger that I'll get to know this fellow too quickly. In a way it even seems a pity, for he's quite likeable.
Friday, June 15, 2084
Inundations of memory, Proust's and my own alternately, keep me from my proper work.
The U of M. I had entered the business school there in 2009, the year before the Berkley Rumor, with no other intention in the world than to serve my time and get a Master's in Business Administration. A follower in my father's footsteps and a Young Republican. $40,000 a year, a vice-presidency at Freedom Mutual or any company with as good a retirement program—these were my goals. I had even persuaded myself that I wanted these things, much as a mortal, told of his cancer, or after a stroke, will persuade himself that he really wants to die, that death is a boon and a culmination. So soon did the sense of the limits of our time wrap its iron bands about us in those days. Eighteen years old, and I was already as fearful of 'wasting myself,' of letting the sand slip through the hourglass, as any invalid octogenarian.
It all returns with such vividness: the dreary brick-and-glass buildings; the torpid hours in the classroom; the frightened, mean-souled, bickering teachers; the cafeterias of hasty, ill-synthesized food; the occasional psychedelic blast that illumined with such terrible clearness the drab texture of the everyday; the ritual fun of the frathouse and secret despair; the attrition, almost day by day, of the alternatives left before one. I recall these things with a strange sense of disbelief. Was I ever such a caterpillar as that? I was, and but for the gruesome bounty of the Plague I would have never left the cocoon, I would, in all probability, be dead.
What power that word used to have, how feebly it rings today.
"My proper work."
I have shied away from that subject, as I shy away from the task. Essentially it is the feeling that they will laugh when I sit down to play.
I introduced myself to this journal in the role of a novelist (unpublished). I am unpublished for the unassailable reason that I have never written a novel. I am a novelist, therefore, only in the Platonic sense. Somewhere in the Empyrean there is an Ideal Form of Oliver Regan, and it is shaped like a Novelist.
The novel I balk at will be based on the voyage of the Extrovert. My characters will be the 246 of us, no more nor less. Their dialogue will be of their invention, not mine. I have trained myself (and this is my meager credential as a novelist) to reproduce conversations I have heard with 95% accuracy. To invent nothing, to include everything, each word and gesture, and yet it must be a work of art as well, it must gleam. I ask no more than any realist asks—the impossible. And, in consequence, I write nothing.
Still, the conditions here are uniquely well-suited for one to attempt the impossibility: a finite environment and cast, a vast but bounded span of time. I am far from being the only voyager engaged upon the task. There is something absurd, indeed, about the degree to which we voyagers chronicle our voyaging—as though Columbus were to staff his three ships with nothing but historians and diarists. But then, why not? The age of tar-buckets and windlasses is past.
Saturday, June 16, 2084
Immediately I say a thing I begin to see it as a misrepresentation. For of course the Extrovert is maintained by the labor of human mind and muscle, even if no larger effort is required, often, than that of uncorking the genie-jug of automation. Thus, concerning 'my proper work,' it would be more honest to say I am a farmer or, at most, a cook. I am in charge of all the ship's organic synthesis operations, exclusive of the hydroponics system. My background in molecular biology prepared me to take over this task with a minimum of pre-flight training. The technics of the factory differs only in magnitude from the technics of the laboratory, and the ship's plant is so abundantly supplied with genies that my supervisory visits have taken on the tone already of church-attendance, a moral rather than a practical necessity.
As an administrator I have also a non-priestly function: I am training two other crew-members as replacements, a process that is going on at all levels of the ship's organization and will continue for decades, until, ideally, a crew of only twenty, taken at random, should be able to keep the Extrovert running smoothly.
My trainees are Khalid Hatoum, 38, and Amelia Borman, 45. Hatoum is a ritualist (it was he who pointed out to me the priestly character of our work) and was responsible for the parade and launching ceremonies. Suspicious as I am of "The New Forms" (Can a compulsion neurosis be a work of art?), I find Hatoum immensely impressive, a decathlon champion of the intellect. His is the sort of analytic that can mount whole staircases of thought at one bound. Already I feel played out as a teacher. Borman is more my own intellectual size. She comes to this work with a background in cybernation, though most of her programming experience has been in the applied arts. She has been responsible for the quarter-mile stretch along the outer arcade that I've most consistently admired. A superb color-sense and dazzling kinetics. I eavesdropped once, over the plant intercom, on an argument she had with Hatoum over the merits of her 'quotations' from art history. Hatoum (who is, outside his own speciality, wholly intolerant of the traditional) savaged her. I've been pleased to see that his arguments haven't affected her programs.
Wednesday, June 27, 2084
I am going to be psychoanalyzed!
"At my age?" I asked, but Aspera insists that it is exactly my age that provides the fascination—rather the way an archaeologist might enthuse over the seven layers of Troy. If nothing else, analysis will provide a frame for all these intruding memories. Not to mention that it guarantees two hours a week alone with Aspera.
Orchestra rehearsals are being cut down. The ship starts to come alive. Ghosts whisper to each other, doors open, masks are put aside. We are two months out, and the old Copernican sun is very dim, a mere star among a million others. We approach ever nearer the speed of light.
Friday, June 29, 2084
Today Slade, instead of telling me his latest dream, handed me this typed note:
"Dream, June 28, 2084
"Part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung. I showed him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I can't remember the rest."
Slade's dreams have come to have a peculiar fascination for me, as they seem to have so often a bearing on my own preoccupations. It is as though he were dreaming for me. When I told him this, he became quite embarrassed.
Saturday, June 30, 2084
My first session in Aspera's cabin. We sat on cushions and drank a mild scopolamine tea. We had both learned the tea ceremony when that fad went round in the '30's, and we resurrected it today with a good deal of panache, considering.
The mask I had so much admired proves to be Aspera's own handiwork. Her cabin is decorated with others she has made, the most striking of which was a crown and visor in clear polly thickly set synthetic diamonds. Though I expressed my admiration by no more than a smile, she was quick to apprehend my wish and put on the mask. Ravishing!
Then I began to put on my masks—or to take them off, it amounts to the same thing. Somehow I got to talking about my three years in Mexico—from 2011 to 2014—and though I spoke under the influence of the tea I can't help but think there was something crafty in that choice, for I've seldom appeared in such a good light as I did in those years. The President had just confirmed the Berkley Rumor, and I—and anyone else younger than 40—had to cope with the disquieting idea that my probable life-span was of unknown extent. I left the U of M without much hesitation. What did I want with that Master's now? Was I going to spend an unending lifetime drudging in the brick-and-glass buildings of some monster corporation? Such a life had become unthinkable. I didn't know what I wanted then, but it certainly wasn't that. Also, our mortal elders, still holding the reins of power, were starting to make ugly innuendos; one got the distinct impression, like Isaac walking alongside his father on the way to Mount Moriah, that it wasn't quite safe in that neighborhood. Though why we should have thought Mexico any safer, I don't know.
But they were wonderful, lazy, wildly cerebral years while they lasted. Truly, I believe I must have been half-dead until that time. I would tumble long guiltless weekends in the sand—there was time for it—or read any book I took a fancy to—there was time for it—or, if that was all I wanted, I could get the ultimate suntan—there was time for it. Perhaps there had always been time for it, but I, craven mortal that I had been, had not believed it. There is still a little part of me that refuses to believe it, but I think the younger generation, anyone born after 2025 or so, lacks that feeling altogether. Aspera, for one, claims to find the idea quite alien. I pointed out that it was curious to find a psychiatrist who claims to be a Freudian of the most reactionary stamp and who denies the central importance of the sense of death.
"But I don't deny it," she protested. "We've changed, but death has changed too."
"What is death if not the darkness at the end of every corridor? And what does it mean if the corridor doesn't end?"
"You've answered that question yourself, Oliver. Death is a symbol."
Leapday, 2084
Here in space every day is Leapday, the day that is part neither of any week nor of any month. To commemorate the day, the entire crew assembled in the auditorium where we were addressed by Captain Gray and Doctor Stillhøven, who pushed through the calendar reform in 2000, the first of his many famous exploits with the U.N. 2000: I can just barely remember that. I was in third grade and Miss ? (I don't recall her name, but she wore a lavender sweater and a string of pearls. She had come over from England, and we all made fun of her accent behind her back), who had just taught us that "Thirty days has September, April, June, and November, etc.," was under the onus of explaining that from now on February, March, May, June, August, September, November, and December all have thirty days. How Miss ? must have hated Dr. Stillhøven.
Another little atavism of mine: before Dr. Stillhøven came up to the podium I had expected to see a venerable, white-haired patriarch. He is III years old. I was shocked to see that he wore a codpiece and powdered his hair like the youngest dandy among us.
Later:
Harness. Her name was Harness, and she was nutty about flowers.
Tuesday, July 3, 2084
The doe has fallen to the hunter's arrows. How quickly things happen, after all!
Friday, July 6, 2084
The analysis proceeds apace. Aspera tells me now that her surrender and our continuing liaison are diagnostic tools. Well, she has her tools and I have mine. She complains that I don't have enough dreams, so I have begun borrowing Slade's.
An outsider listening to these sessions would have trouble discerning more than the ordinariest teatime duelling. Everyone, after all, is always 'psychoanalyzing' everyone else; it is part of our culture, the basic form of modern romance, in which one party tries to invade the psyche of another, the victim agreeing provisionally to assist the invader. Rather, in a way, like an old vampire movie.
Nevertheless, there is something piquant in making love to a woman who is so forthright in her assaults. Yet the curious thing—the feeling just the other side of my power to define it (and isn't this always the most interesting kind?)—is this: that despite that she has assumed the role of vampire and I am, for the moment, her willing victim, I am convinced that it is she who is basically the more vulnerable, that she is, despite all she can do, my predestined victim. Such are the paradigms of love.
Of what, Oliver?
Sunday, July 8, 2084
On reading over all of the above, I sense a curious lack of—is it?—texture. The world I present here is so intangible. A bubble drifting through the void. No, that isn't it exactly.
It is as though I were a fetus in a jar—a curled-up, withered, half-formed little homunculus—one of a series lining a long shelf. Aspera inhabits the bottle next to mine, and we occupy the long hours tapping messages to each other on the glass.
We are the figures in the novel that Slade dreams he is writing.
Wednesday, August 8, 2084
A month gone by, and yet it seems that I have only just closed this journal upon the last entry. I have still to begin my novel, unless I can count it to my credit that I have been eavesdropping extensively and transcribing what I like in another notebook. I have been neglectful of my priestly duties, since Hatoum knows them now as well as I do and claims to enjoy them. I have wasted hours and hours trying to read Genji in the Japanese, a hopeless task. And I remember things . . .
For the humor of it let me transcribe a little scrap of paper that I found addressed to myself in my shirt pocket: "I must learn to hold to a more commonplace tone, even at the risk of seeming banal. I shall hold up, as an exemplar, my father, who was—and who essentially remains—a businessman."
Sunday, August 12, 2084
Genji and his three friends were watching a dance called the "Warbling of the Spring Nightingales," following which they recited appropriate poems to each other on the subject of nightingales, each of which entailed a page of footnotes. Suddenly the book struck me as intolerably insipid. Tides of adrenalin began to spill through me, and I could think but one fearful thought: "Spring! Good God, I won't see spring again for centuries. Or never—never again!" I tore out of my cabin without a mask. I had to do something. I had to go outside.
This being impossible, I went to the gym, which seemed unusually crowded. (How often what seem our most private emotions turn out to have been part of an epidemic!) I competed in an obstacle race (and lost) and wrestled (and lost). To the extent that my panic had been due to excess adrenalin, I rid myself of it. I was still reluctant to return at once to Lady Murasaki, so I looked at the Activities Board to see what alternatives I had. It was a toss-up between a Silent Dance recital (shades of Genji!) and a séance conducted by our own medium, Mme. St. George. Aspera (who saw her in London) says she is a droll performer, but it was booked solid.
Though I pride myself on the catholicity of my tastes, I have never been able to enjoy Silent Dance. I always sit there trying to imagine music to go along with it. A gaucherie, but one I can't help. Also I find that a nude body can give rise to thoughts extraneous to High Art. (I said this once to Aspera, and she was outraged. She thinks me an awful Philistine.)
Today's performance was an astonishment of beauty, and my conversion has been complete. I shall never be able to look at a ballet again. There was, in effect, but a single dancer (the other bodies on the stage were mere ornaments to her own commanding presence)—but she was a goddess. Sheila Dupont. It seems almost criminally wasteful that such an artist should be cloistered aboard the Extrovert.
How she radiated youth! How she gloried in the fact of it! How vast a footnote it would have required to lay bare all the significances implied in the turning of her wrist. After all, I have breathed spring air today.
Aspera was present too, in a mask I haven't seen before. Though we were no more than twenty in the audience, and though I went unmasked, I don't think she noticed me. She too was under the enchantment of that child.
Monday, August 27, 2084
An embarrassing passage-at-arms with Aspera. Embarrassing partly because she aggressed so blatantly, partly because she found me out in a small deception.
I had been teasing her about her professed orthodoxy and the lack of science in her methods. Taking my taunts in earnest, she suggested that I submit to a test case.
"Anything you name," I promised.
"Then I propose that you see me, and have seen me from the first, as your mother. And I'll prove it to you."
I shrugged. "Well of course. The resemblance is incontrovertible. No doubt I see Captain Gray as my father too. He's the same age."
"You can't wriggle out of it that easily. I'm not speaking in parables. There is some very specific point of correspondence, something that caught your attention from the first. This, and nothing else, was the reason you came bounding after me."
"To be candid, Aspera, what first attracted me to you was your mask. My mother was dead long before masks came into fashion."
"Tell me about her. You've scarcely mentioned your mother, you know, all this time you've been seeing me. That in itself is significant."
"By that token, what wouldn't be significant?"
"You're resisting like all Ireland."
"I am, aren't I? Well then, which mother shall I tell you about? I had two."
"How morbid." Aspera settled herself on a cushion and, like a wise, hungry cat, waited. "Siblings?"
"One, a half-brother. He was mortal."
"Well, go on. Tell your yarn and be done with it."
"My first mother died in an automobile crash when I was five. 1997 that would be, long before anyone had begun to suspect what the Plague had wrought and accidents of that sort were still common. No clear memories. I suspect that much of what does pass for 'memories' are no more than stories my father told me at a later time. He has always been obsessed with the past. One, though, that I'm certain is my own: she took me to a museum. High ceilings. Marble stairways. And I remember that she lifted me up to look at an Egyptian statue, and I was scared. She was very pretty. My father claimed that that was the only reason he'd married her. It was an imprudent marriage. They were both very young, and father was, as the saying goes, impecunious."
"Oh yes, that saying."
"But I don't remember her face, her living face—only the photographs of it. She looked nothing like you. Her eyes were blue, like mine, and her hair was brown streaked with copper. I remember the funeral. It rained. Emma went to the cemetery with us. The path was muddy, and the wind blew the wreath off the headstone, and I had to go running after it. There were just the three of us. Dad and me, and Emma. And Mommy, of course."
"Emma became his second wife?"
"Yes. They married within two months of my mother's death. The funeral meats, and all that. The second time Dad was prudent. Emma's father was the President and Chairman of the Board of Freedom Mutual Insurance, where he worked. Within ten years of his marriage Dad was a vice-president. Emma was a year older than Dad, twenty-seven, single, and she'd been left standing at the altar twice. She was beginning to worry. Dad had been having an affair with her for a year before the accident, though at that time I knew nothing about that. Or maybe, in a way, I did. In any case, I hated Emma heartily."
"She was twenty-seven in 1997?"
"Yes, she was a mortal. After the Berkley Rumor she was one of the first to commit suicide. Her last ten years must have been hell for her. She could see herself aging, thickening, drying out—and Dad staying just as young as on the day he married her. She must have spent fifty dollars a week on beauty treatments in the last couple years. Then, right at the end, she cracked up. She was hysterical all the time. And I told you about the picture she painted of my father. I'll say this for the mortal condition—none of us could ever have painted a picture like that."
"Pish! Of course they could. You have silly notions about what art is. What did she look like, your stepmother?"
"Now, that's strange . . ."
I paused, but I could see that I'd let myself in for it. "The first image that came to mind was of Emma lying in bed asleep—with a beauty mask over her eyes. A mask, you see!"
"Elementary, my dear Watson. But tell me this—did she have brown eyes, like mine?"
"As a matter of fact, very like yours. Oh, it's that way round." The memory of the eyeless beauty mask had been a means of evading the true point of correspondence, her eyes—their eyes.
"I'll bet you were about twelve or thirteen when you saw her like that. And that you were, like young Hippolytus, aroused? Perhaps for the first time?"
"Ah, you're a clever woman, Aspera."
"Not clever. Just, as you were complaining, orthodox."
"It's so much easier than thinking, isn't it?"
"Mm. But you'll concede that I was right?"
"With the proviso that it was my stepmother you reminded me of—yes."
"How you do resist, Oliver. Don't you realize the point of the mask, why you should have found it so attractive from the first?"
"Well, I've already let it slip—the beauty mask . . ."
"What was it that your mother lifted you to see in that museum?"
"An Egyptian statue."
"A mummy. And within moments of your telling me about it, that's what you called her. Then you described her funeral in necrophile detail. Your dead Mommy, indeed! And the beauty mask, eyeless, black, serves a double purpose: it unites the images of the two women into a single image and it expresses that which seems to have impressed you most about both of them—their death, which also unites them."
"Astonishing," I said.
She kissed my nose. "Did I win, or did I win?"
"Both."
"One other thing, Oliver—what was her name?"
I blushed. "Whose name?" I asked, trying to temporize, knowing she had caught me.
"Your mother's, dolt!"
There was no getting out of it. But how in hell had she thought to ask just that? "Hope," I said abashedly.
Aspera laughed. Truly, she had cause to laugh, but she kept it up longer than was really called for. "Hope!" she crowed triumphantly. "Hope! Hope!"
Tuesday, August 28, 2084
Aspera confesses that it was all a trap. She had learned my mother's name at the library the day after I introduced myself to her. She's been spinning her web all this time.
In reparation for the blood she drained yesterday, she has promised to make me a mask. It is to be of silver, the mate of her own—to make the punishment fit the crime.
Thursday, August 30, 2084
Chagrin comes not singly. Today, borne on the wind of my usual intercom eavesdropping, I overheard a conversation between Khalid Hatoum and another fellow (though I must know him, I couldn't place the voice) concerning me. They were in the synthesizing plant, where the occasional bleat and whistle of the vats would blot out a phrase or two, though nothing less than pandemonium would have left me unscathed.
The Unknown: Ah well, sentimentality! That can be excused. It's a color with more or less gracefulness. It's the way he mixes his colors—or fails to—that's so ruinous.
Hatoum: It's simpler than that. The man is stupid.
The Unknown: You've claimed to admire many people stupider than Regan.
Hatoum: I don't mean his native unintelligence. When one has reached his age—he's in his nineties—it's what one has made of oneself that matters. Regan has petrified. He's become a bibelot, some piece of Sèvres, callow and full of cheap fancies. Talk to him about art some time. He's living in the twentieth century. He's pre-War. He's—
NOISE.
The Unknown: Garrulous, certainly, but not—
NOISE.
Hatoum:—a stamp-collector's notion of art. He appreciates its residues, 'works' and 'pieces'—little turds lined up in rows behind glass. He admires art because he supposes it endures. It's the outlook of a mortal.
The Unknown: (laughing) It's the card catalogue he really loves. Not even the turds, but their classification. But why do you let it upset you?
Hatoum: Stupidity always upsets me, when it gives itself airs.
The Unknown: We all give ourselves airs; we all presume too far. Besides, deadheads are necessary. There has to be someone around to whom this sort of thing—
NOISE.
—importance. The world will always need farmers, and farmers will always seem a little more mortal than the rest of us. That can be worn with style too.
Hatoum: I like farmers. It's the Sunday painters I despise.
I have been the rest of the day carrying on imaginary arguments with Hatoum. The bastard always shows me up. It is small consolation that he is unaware of these victories.
Friday, Sept. 1, 2084
I discovered today, by accident, that Aspera has a second 'patient'—and that it is none other than the young goddess, Miss Dupont. I insisted that Aspera introduce us. She agreed, but her reluctance was as evident to the sense as a sliced onion. I pretended not to notice.
Within a quarter-hour she had brought up the subject of my father. A very irresponsible man, she said. A weak man. How so? I asked. Because he had thrown over my mother for Emma and deserted Emma in turn for Veronica. Men are that way, I said—men are fickle. She wanted to say more, but she saw that she had already said too much.
Worried, Aspera?
Monday, Sept. 4, 2084
Aspera, bravely, brought us together. Like so many of the performers I have known, Sheila initially seems unremarkable in her merely private capacity. She fumbled making the tea, and Aspera retrieved her errors in the most unobtrusive way. She seemed genuinely concerned that her protegée make a good impression. Nor was Sheila ungrateful. She is, indeed, a very Cordelia of daughterliness—to the extent that she addresses Aspera, not without some whimsy, as "Little Mother."
Yet how little Sheila needed such assistance, after all. Hers is not so smooth and practiced a beauty as Aspera's. Her body is thinner and her face more angular than a bland taste might desire. Her graces are idio-rhythmic. But all that is of no matter, for she is a goddess. She is the full, and Aspera the crescent, moon. I find her eyes especially appealing: narrow and blue, they are positively wicked in their liveliness—quick, glistening, and—paradoxically—depthless. They are two mirror-bright shields held up before her, a sign at once of her shyness and of warning. Her hair is dyed a metallic blue-gray that sets off those cold eyes with a severe grace. She reminds me of Veronica—the way Veronica used to be, before she turned brittle. Yes, I find her most attractive. And young, so very young!
I wish I could admire her conversation in equal measure. A sample:
"Aspera tells me, Mr. Regan, that you know everything about mice."
"I spent some forty-odd years looking at bits of them through a microscope. It's been more than a passing fancy."
"Oh, I think that's disgusting," she said, with a disingenuous shudder. "Mice are so horrible. Little squirmy crawly things—ish!"
"I'm afraid my sensibilities have become rather blunted."
"Do you have some here—on the ship?"
"We keep some in cages in the laboratory, and there is a large supply of ova in the outer freezing vaults."
"Where mine are too?" she asked, wide-eyed.
"Yes. But I'm sure there's no chance of their becoming confused, if that's worrying you."
As on Earth, all the ova of the women are kept on ice here. No one has yet been able to think of a better remedy for the problem resulting from immortal women with a finite number of ova, and without this rather crude expedient the menopause would be inescapable.
"But just think—if they were! And if I had a baby, and it were a little mouse! Or would it be half-mouse and half-baby, like the Minotaur? Then I could run him through a maze. It all has to do with chromosomes, doesn't it? And genes. Aspera says you know every gene a mouse has. You must be very brave. But what is there left for you to do, now that you know everything?"
"Now that I know everything, I shall try to make an immortal mouse."
"Oh, I wouldn't do that until they've learned about birth control. You know what a problem we had until the Freezers opened, even with free pills for everyone."
"It's not a present danger. Unfortunately, we're a long way from realizing our aims."
"Unfortunately? Do you really identify with them so much then?"
"I say unfortunately because if we knew how to make a mouse immortal we would be much nearer an understanding of the cause of our own mutation. And then we would be able to make the mortals on Earth immortal too. Though, Lord knows, if I came up with anything, I don't see what good it will do, so far from Earth."
"And that's why you worked forty years with mice, and why you're working with them now?"
"Yes. Except that, strictly speaking, I'm not working now. I'm on vacation, as it were."
"Oh, you shouldn't do that! If you have a talent you should use it, not hide it away. I'm only a dancer, of course, but I shall always use my talent." I could not tell if this were more disingenuousness, or if she really were so very young as to believe what she said.
"Can I come to your laboratory and see one of the mice some time?"
"Any time you like."
"And touch one?"
"Yes. At your own risk."
She clapped her hands. "Oh, Little Mother, Little Mother, do say you'll let me go and touch Mr. Regan's mouse!"
Aspera was visibly annoyed with this display of childishness, which seemed almost to parody her own relationship with Sheila. But Little Mother could not, though she seemed to grow pale, withhold her consent.
Wednesday, Sept. 6, 2084
Aspera came around today with my mask. It is magnificent, and I overflowed with gratitude.
Afterwards, we discussed Sheila. I criticized the girl's faerie manner with more severity than I really felt or Sheila deserves. Aspera agreed, all too earnestly agreed, but insisted that she had redeeming virtues, though they might not be evident to me. I said that seemed doubtful.
"Oh, I can assure you," Aspera protested.
"You know her very well, then?"
"We have been rather close, in the course of analysis. Transference is a ticklish business between two women."
"I can imagine." I did not go so far as to inquire what diagnostic tools she was employing in this ticklish business. It was understood.
"You will leave her alone, won't you, Oliver?"
I promised. She kissed me on the cheek. "You're a darling, and I love you very much." And despite the smile with which she sought to temper this statement, I think it may be true. More's the pity.
Monday, Dec. 25, 2084
And all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
Two months! More. And what has the Star-Mouse been up to? Spying on the microcosm, making my fellow-mice immortal. Without, as yet, signal success.
It is good, better, best to be at work again, to feel the familiar bite of that bug curiosity again. Sheila visits the lab regularly to exclaim over the freak mice that my experiments have produced, but so far I have been faithful to my promise to Aspera. My talk with Sheila has been limited to lectures in the field of my speciality. She is shockingly ignorant of the elements of science, but an apt—even an earnest—pupil.
Hatoum has been present during some of these lessons and has fallen under the same enchantment. Sheila either has not seen this or refuses to recognize it. Her sights are fixed on me, and I take a spiteful pleasure in tormenting Hatoum with the spectacle of my pretended indifference. Where are your gibes now?
New Year's Day, 2085
We have reached our terminal velocity, and now we just coast until we have to brake for our first stop, Tau Ceti, some dozen years off. There are nearer stars, of course, and even nearer stars with planets, but our itinerary has been planned with a view to spacing our stops as evenly as possible. Unless we find something better than our own barren solar system has had to offer us, we shall be passing by a total of twenty-six planeted suns in the next century and a half. With such a prospect, one does not greet the New Year with wild carousal.
Friday, Jan. 6, 2085
Against all expectation, there has been a casualty—Gene Shaw, one of our navigators and the concertmaster of our orchestra. Her helmet was insecurely fitted during lifeboat drill. Death was instant. After hearing the news, I went round to see Slade, knowing he'd once been in love with her. He showed no signs of emotion, though his very willingness for us to speak of something other than his dreams or my reading might be the equivalent, for him, of hysterics.
He was puzzled by his own lack of response, and I told him of other people I'd known who had received the news of a friend's death with the same coolness. I ventured the theory that the classic expressions of grief are only possible among those who have lived long and intimately with the notion of death and its dominion. If it becomes too rare an event, its meaning is unassimilable.
Slade, I discover, is an historian, another odd speciality to bring aboard the Extrovert. Seldom has any society been so completely divorced from its antecedents as we. Slade claims that it is just this, the fact that we exist, as it were, without history, without any past but our own, that interests him. He thinks that it will become, as the voyage goes on, the most conspicuous feature of our lives.
Monday, Jan. 9, 2085
Despite all that homeostasis can do, changes occur, and sometimes they are unalterable.
Poor Aspera. When the blow falls, it never falls gently, does it?
This is what happened:
I entered her cabin without knocking, knowing that the deliberate and unaccustomed rudeness would pleasure her. She had unrolled a mirror and was standing before it, in her silver mask and a ceremonial robe, preening herself. She started when I opened the door, seeming for a moment not to know who I was. I was masked, but surely she recognized this mask.
"Aspera, my very own," I said, without removing the mask. "Have I startled you?"
She hung her head, refusing to meet my gaze, and I knew then with certainty—I had suspected as much from the first slight movement of her body—that it was not Aspera's face behind the mask.
"Forgive me for returning to this again, my dear, but you must give her up, you really must. If not for my sake, for your own; if not for your own sake, then for the child's. Truly, she is lovely. I can understand your passion. I might even say that in a distant way, in silence, I share it. But you must relinquish her. I will say nothing of the scandal, for that's of small account here. Though there may be some, the most fusty of us, who would consider less than professional in you, an abuse of the child's confidence. They might whisper—unjustly, of course—that perhaps it was no coincidence that your fame was won in dealing with children . . .Of course, Sheila is only relatively a child, relative to ourselves. But let's not talk of scandal. I speak for the girl's sake. You forget when you surrender to your maternal feelings—"
The mask lifted far enough to betray a fleeting glimpse of blue eyes. I continued my charade unheedingly.
"—when you allow yourself to play Pygmalion like this, you forget how young she is, how malleable. It is evident, Aspera, that she will never leave you voluntarily—even if she might have the desire, she would never be able to find the strength—and therefore I want you to promise me, Aspera . . .Aspera, look in my eyes."
Once more the mask lifted, and the two glistening shields confronted me boldly, behind those bland silver features.
"You must promise me that you'll see no more of her."
"Must I?"
She knew of course that Aspera would have felt nothing but indignation at such a pigslop of blackmail and innuendo. She recognized my deceit, relished it, and joined me in these amateur theatricals.
"Then I do," she said, and put her hands about my neck, drawing me closer until our silver lips were pressed together in a passionate kiss.
We consummated our double betrayal, suitably, in Aspera's bed. Once the initial impetus of the deed had been exhausted, Sheila became her usual kittenish self. "Tell me some more about genetics," she begged. "Tell me about my chromosomes and things like that."
"I've told you everything I know," I complained lazily.
"Tell me why your eyes are blue."
"Because my mother's eyes were blue."
"And why did you make one little mousey with whiskers instead of eyes?"
"It was an accident. So much of what I do is only trial and error. We know what each gene controls, we know their arrangement. But we know too little about what's inside them. Despite the work of the molecular biologist, we're still in the pre-atomic stage, so to speak. We can eliminate genes, or shuffle them around, but we have yet to study the morphology of the living gene to any significant degree."
"Poor Mousey! And was the Plague just another accident? Is it only an accident that I'm immortal? That would be sad."
"My dear, we're all accidents. Of the Plague, who can say? It appeared, infected mankind, and vanished before the agent could be isolated and identified. It must have died out through having exhausted its supply of hosts. Most of the literature seems to favor the theory that it was an accident—a mutated virus. In the long run, it wouldn't have been a viable mutation, since in rendering its hosts' progeny immortal (and, presumably, immune) it shut off its own supplies."
"But there are still mortals, after all. What of Ireland, Madagascar, Taiwan? I was in love with an Irish fellow when I was sixteen. He was thirty and just starting to age. I couldn't imagine anything more handsome at the time. Why didn't the little bug get him?"
"The mortals living now are all descended from infants who were in utero at the time of the Plague. Their mothers were infected, but survived to give them birth, without, however, passing on the genetic alteration. By the time such infants were born the Plague had passed on. It was over in less than two months, you know. Surely, you do know that much?"
"Oh yes, I think science is just fascinating. I'm going to do a dance about genetics and the Plague. The wonderful thing about science is that it's so logical. You don't have a mole anywhere on your body, do you?"
"No."
She sighed. "Aspera had a mole on her left cheek. It always made me feel decadent to kiss it."
Had she used the past tense deliberately? That is the entrancing thing about Sheila—that I shall never be able to answer such questions with any finality.
When she had returned to her cabin, Aspera immediately noticed the damage that had been done to the two masks.
"My dear Sheila," she said with acidy sweetness, "let me make a present of this mask."
"Thank you, Little Mother. As you know, I've always admired it. I might even confess to have envied you."
"Oliver admires it too. For Oliver it's a symbol not only of his mother, but of death. Oliver loves mothers and death."
"Ah, but Aspera," I reminded her pleasantly, "—death itself is only a symbol."
"Yes," she said, smiling (for once again I had walked into one of her traps). "Of our lives here."
Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2085
I have begun to work on the novel. Aspera suggested the title, and we are all in it.
Afterword
A year ago, in response to Harlan's request for an afterword, I wrote something called "Why I've Stopped Writing Science-Fiction," or some such. It was so awful that even then I could see it was pretty bad, so I sent Harlan only a letter explaining that I had written him an afterword, but that etc. Another afterword was forthcoming, I promised.
Not only was the first afterword awful, but it turned out to be untrue. I have since then written some science-fiction, a little. However, the gist of it hasn't changed—I can't earn a living writing s-f at the standard rates for stories and novels that the field offers. I write too slowly these days.
That was only half the truth, and that's why it made such a poor afterword. The whole truth is that the standard story and novel that standard rates are paid for is a commodity I no longer have the stomach for. I think my most persuasive and candid argument in this respect would simply be the list of titles of all the s-f or fantasy stories I have no intention of writing. The list is about three years old, and even then I could see some of the things on the list were never going to be written, though any of them, I'm convinced, could have been published in one or another of the magazines in the field.
The list:
The Alien Anthology
Among the Rednecks: a Report from the Field
Approximately Joe
The Ball
The Compassionator
Cosmo in the Engines of Love
The Cowboys
The Day the Curve Broke
Diet of Worms
The Exorcist in Spite of Himself
The General Theory of Electro-magnetic Tidal Waves and Volcanoes
Ghost Story
Glad Hand
The Goldwater Experiment
The Good Losers
The Governor's Temptations
Grabenstein
The Hamadryad
Horror and Lester McCune
An Investigation into the Activities of My Body
Joseph and the Empress
The Little Family
The Magic Square
Mind Donor
The Original June Bly
The Orphan's Birthday Party
The Other Door to Dutch Street
The People Eater
The Reluctant Eavesdropper
The Satyr
The Servant Problem (or, The Fatal Passion of Lancelot Kramer)
Strip Poker
The Tarantists
Three Square Parables
The Three-Masted Spaceship
300 Pound Weakling
The Time of the Assassin
The Vicar's List
Walt Little's Soul
Wednesdays Off
You Can't Get There From Here (or, The Intersection)