The Void Captain's tale Read online

  And as she conducted me on the customary grand tour of the Grand Palais module, which she had crafted, both traditional archetype and personal attentions served to focus the full puissance of this feminine armamentarium on the conquest of my masculine desire.

  “Do try some of this wine, Captain Genro,” she said, handing me a goblet off a passing floater. “Tres piquant, and rather a rare vintage.” The goblet was antique gold-reddened cut crystal; the wine, though red, was cold, with a strangely refreshing, bitter afterbite; and her eyes regarded me over the lip of her own goblet with frank speculation.

  “Tu tambien,” I said with the expected gallantry, though of course she was also a rare and piquant vintage, which I knew almost as well as she did.

  She laughed, took my arm again, and danced me about the grand salon, displaying for me the artifacts and effects she had gathered, displaying me as well for a brief choice selection of the Honored Passengers who had chosen to voyage under her esthetic direction, all the while contriving to brush briefly against me with thigh and shoulder, private glance and perfumed breath.

  As much, of course, for the Honored Passengers as for myself; this too was a grace note of the total effect, which, I had to admit, was as well crafted or better than any I had experienced on previous voyages.

  While the Domo is neither chef nor interior designer, composer of music nor vintner, dramaturge nor colorist, she is the maestra who directs and blends the products of these diverse arts into the whole that is the Grand Palais, the total voyage-long fete, the overarching ambient artform that will exist for this voyage alone. The style of the duet d’amour of Domo and Captain is also an element of this design—sometimes a chase, sometimes a series of dramatically feigned assignations, sometimes a complex rondole involving Honored Passengers in supporting roles, occasionally a true affair of the heart.

  Here, it seemed, Lorenza was playing to her own legend as seeker after a true eternal life-mate, would-be seductrice of the Captain into the via of the floating cultura.

  While the Honored Passengers to whom I was fleetingly introduced seemed a typical cross-section of the floating cultura—aging children of fortune possessed of unearned wealth, merchant princes and princesses on holiday or permanent vacation, stunning specimens of male and female beauty traveling as companions to the rich, successful artists enriching their input, less successful practitioners gifted with the voyage by patrons, assorted tropical pilot fish of the wealthy cherished for their entertainment value—there seemed to be an unusually high proportion of repeat voyagers, Honored Passengers who chose to follow Lorenza Kareen Patali from voyage to voyage rather than flit from Domo to Domo sampling eternal variety in the more usual mode.

  A few of these—a tall, somewhat anguished-looking merchant from Heimat, Korma Ori Sandoval; an ancient jeweled femme named Sandra Roche Pandit; Picasso Lar Colin, a flashily dressed painter of some repute—seemed wistful suitors for Lorenza’s attentions, but others, exchanging fey glances with her, examining me with deliberately feigned coversion, commenting upon her brushes and touches against me in subtle ideograms of body language, seemed connoisseurs, as it were, of the mystique in which Lorenza had wrapped herself, followers of the perhaps deliberately endless tale of her search for the Captain of her desires.

  I began to wonder if this romance attached to the name tale of Lorenza Kareen Patali was not part of the total persona she had crafted for herself, a deliberate touch of psychic piquancy to enrich the ambiance that was her artistic metier, as much a conscious artifice as the chandelier of light-casting crystal, the bright-blue eyes set in ebon skin, the illumined ruby nipples, the high-sculptured coiffure crusted with snow-pearls.

  Thusly pondering, I began to wonder whether there was anything of essence within the artifice; whether this dazzling persona that so aroused my fleshly desire contained a being whose dimension extended into hidden realms of the spirit, or whether Lorenza Kareen Patali had become entirely the creation of her own consciously crafted mystique, that and nothing more. I do not know why hypothesized perception frissoned my animal appreciation of her libidinal attentions with a moue of contempt.

  Following this tentative nuptial display for the delectation of her Honored Passengers, Lorenza conducted me on a somewhat perfunctory tour of the decks “below” the grand salon, apparently saving the vivarium that crowned it, the piece de resistance, for last.

  Immediately below the grand salon was an entire deck devoted to the cuisinary arts. In the center was an elaborate larder, cellar, and food preparation complex presided over by Bocuse Dante Ho, a truly great chef maestro with whom I had had the pleasure of shipping twice before, master of the daring blend of contrasting cuisinary styles. Arranged in truncated wedges around this hidden hub were no less than four dining parlors in contrasting modes.

  There was a great dining hall done in brass, dark woods, massive stone fireplace, crystal chandeliers, and blue-and-white brocade containing an immense circular table of carven mahogany around which the entire complement of Honored Passengers and crew could be seated for formal banqueting. A second parlor was divided up into a dozen small curtained booths for intimate dining. A third was arranged in the Han floor-sitting mode—immensely ancient decorative wall hangings, low, round red-and-black-lacquered tables around sunken braziers, an abundance of plush bodyform cushions. The fourth and plainest was deliberately severe; long tables of white wood with matching benches, floor of gleaming black tile, matte white ceiling, walls covered with stylized floral designs in bright primary colors—a pleasant enough refectory for strictly functional fressing.

  Beneath the cuisinary deck was a deck devoted to the dramatic arts, thespic and musical, living and recorded. Central to this complex was a circular theater suitable for both live performance and display of the ship’s large library of holocines. Around this central core, libraries of word crystals and traditional leaved books, a small chamber for intimate musical performances, a room suitable for public exhibition of the erotic arts, a storage closet boasting musical instruments spanning three thousand years of history and a multiplexity of cultural modes, a cloud chamber for light and air symphonies.

  Throughout this tour of the lower decks of the Grand Palais she had wrought, Lorenza assumed a certain formal distance like a maestra of production conducting a prospective investor through the machineries of her fabrik; not, however, without the stray touch of thigh on thigh, the taste of perfumed breath on words uttered nearer than aural function demanded, her arm linked in mine all the while.

  Only when we had reached the nethermost region did she grow more openly intimate. The “lowest” deck of the Grand Palais module was given over to a seemingly chaotic maze of dream chambers opening off a convoluted tunneled passageway that curved and wound around them like the interior of a great coiled serpent. The organically rounded walls of the tunnel glowed an erotic rose, a hue picked up and made palpable by the perfumed mist that filled it. Many of the chambers were already occupied, and while the interiors of most of these were screened from our view by light curtains, the sighs and moans, the rhythmic rustlings, were allowed to suffuse into the rosy ambiance of the passageway, surrounding us with the music d’amour, inevitably drawing us deeper into each other’s body spaces.

  Lorenza pressed her side lightly against mine and slid the arm that had been hooked in mine around my waist; I protested not.

  “Let me show you what dreams and pleasures are presently available,” she said close by my ear, close enough for me to feel the tickle of her breath upon it.

  Side by side, virtually cheek by cheek, we peered into an impressive variety of vacant dream chambers—zero-gravity wombs upholstered in vulval pink, holoed in fire, englobed in the illusion of boundless black; simulacrums of bosky groves and grassy dells from half a dozen planets; cunning illusions of grandiose landscapes; rooms and chambers from many epochs and worlds; even a pool of some viscous rainbow fluid undulating in slow motion under enhanced gravity.

  “And yo
ur pleasure, Captain Genro?” she said, slipping around to face me. “Which of these dream chambers would you choose to share?”

  “I cannot answer that,” I told her.

  “Por que no?” she asked, her bright-blue eyes staring into mine, beacons of illusory meaning in an otherwise unreadable and entirely composed countenance.

  “Because it’s not a question one can answer in the abstract. It depends upon with whom.”

  She laughed, perhaps all too perfectly. Lightly, she snaked her hands into my hair and drew me into a short, tight embrace, a brief, deep kiss. Her mouth tasted of mint and roses; her jeweled nipples and gem-crusted dirndl embossed my flesh with patterns of delicate pain.

  “For the sake of argument, then,” she said huskily, drawing away but leaving her arm draped around my waist “Which dream chamber would now be yours?”

  “And yours?” I asked, challenging her with my eyes, feeling the heat of her calling to me, and yet acting out my role in this erotic pavane with a certain annoyed detachment.

  “All this is mine, cher Genro,” she said, leaning forward with utter precision so that the hard-jeweled tips of her bared breasts stung my chest like electrodes. “You will find me an amour of considerable variety.”

  “Will I?”

  “In time,” she said with a sublime frankness that went beyond arrogance. “But now we should finish our little tour, oui?” She ran her fingertips lightly over her dirndl, her breast brooches, her complex coiffure; a series of erotic self-caresses that both aroused my fleshly desire and focused another part of my attention on the complex artifices of her carapacelike persona. “Beauty, alas, does not always allow for function, and I am currently dressed for the former.”

  For a moment, lust, annoyance, and something else not easily identified synergized within me into a desire to tear away the artifices of that persona, strip her naked, and have her not in some chamber of illusion, but there in the functional passageway. But of course that was unthinkable, and besides, I wondered whether, once the wrappings had been peeled, there would be anything within.

  So, without demur, and with a formal little bow of gallantry, I allowed her to lead me back to the lift, which took us directly back to the grand salon itself. The fete was in full flower; many of the Honored Passengers showed the effects of civilized intoxicants; discoursing with extravagant gestures, silently absorbed in contemplating islands of music and patterns of shifting light, caressing each other genteely in private alcoves, or staring into each other’s eyes across the small private tables set along the observatory ramp that led up to the vivarium.

  Argus glanced at me covertly from the center of a small group of admirers as we crossed the main floor to the debouchment of the ramp, obviously playing at officership with this self-selection of Honored Passengers, perhaps fantasizing her future as a Void Captain. Halfway up the spiral of the ramp, we passed young Mori, her eyes shining as she held hands across a table from a handsome young man with a great mane of leonine curls. Shipboard dynamics appeared to be proceeding nominally, at least where my charges and Lorenza’s were concerned.

  “And now, mon Captain, the piece de resistance,” Lorenza said as we reached the pinnacle of the ramp, a light-curtained archway beyond which was hidden the vivarium that capped the Grand Palais module. “I venture to warrant that even a seasoned voyager such as yourself has never quite experienced its equal.”

  Indeed, vraiment, sans doubt! While all Grand Palais modules have their vivariums, and while I had seen many fine specimens of the genre, I had indeed never experienced quite the equal of what lay beyond that light curtain.

  As I had expected, we stepped forth into a cunning simulacrum of nature, an interior garden under an overarching dome. Tall, full-leaved trees of half a dozen species had been thickly planted all around the circumference, screening off the walls, destroying any unseemly sight of periphery or horizon, artificial or otherwise. Jagged peninsulas of this circumferential forest grew out randomly toward the center of the vivarium, perfecting the illusion of a shaded dell in an endless wood.

  The garden floor was thick black loam; here mossed in green velvet, there obscured by undergrowth fringing the solitary trees scattered about the open space, small islands of cropped lawn elsewhere, black baldnesses framing artful arrangements of rock outcroppings, brilliant carpets of fungus scattered everywhere like spilled jewels. There was a pool dappled with green lily-pads and bright violet blooms. A shallow, winding brook burbled over miniature rapids and tiny waterfalls. The distance between trees had been carefully calculated to support a lacy overhead canopy of lianas, vines, Spanish mosses. The air was warm, moist, and fragrant with vegetative abundance just this side of rot. Stone benches anciently patinaed with moss and wooden seats crumbling away were the only visible human artifacts, these seeming to be subsiding into the landscape or growing organically from it.

  Two things raised this vivarium from craft to something approaching genius—the fauna and the sky.

  Insects buzzed torpidly over the pool where frogs croaked their overfed hunger; bright-blue, red, and yellow sauroids, tiny flashes of color, zipped through the undergrowth; shy little rodents darted across our path. And the birds! The air was alive with the song and color of hundreds of minuscule finches, like schools and shoals of tropical reef-fish taken to the skies.

  And the sky itself, beyond the thin overhead canopy, was that of late Earth evening, a deepening blue directly overhead, purpling toward black in the direction of the unseen horizon, where, in the “west,” a smoky orange slice of sun flared somberly as it set through the obscuring foliage, streaking the sky with streamers of mauve, deep pink, and rose.

  We walked for long, silent moments along the edge of the brook, beside the forest pool, serenaded by the birds, steeped in the eternal sunset. Few Honored Passengers were in evidence, and these for the most part solitaries absorbed in themselves. After a time, we found an isolated stone bench highlighted in a magic circle of rose-colored light that poured down through a small break in the forest canopy.

  “You asked me which dream chamber I would chose to share,” I said, drawing Lorenza down beside me. “Now I have found it.”

  “Here?” she said with a moue of distaste, if not of sheer alarm. “In the dirt and shrubbery perhaps, or on this bed of stone? Que drole, Captain Genro! You are of course not serious. In any event, I am hardly dressed for the sharing of such a bizarre fantasy, even should it arouse me to ardor.”

  “Of course,” I said ambiguously, staring at this creature of jeweled and crafted artifice, this woman who prided herself on never having set foot on a planetary surface, and wondering how she had brought such a place into being. And why. And whether for her this was merely an exercise of technical craft, sans spirit. And how it could be possible for one to coldly create such art while remaining indifferent to its own essence.

  Now it was growing noticeably darker; the sky above us was deepening to black, the sun had disappeared behind the forest wall, and the last faint rays of gauzy light were peeling back from the body of night.

  “Night follows day here?” I marveled. “You have arranged that as well?”

  “Naturellement,” she said evenly. “It is the logic of the form, is it not? Projected on the dome is a holocycle; at times there are clouds for sunrise or sunset, the program is randomized a la brute nature.”

  From behind a copse came the intrusive sound of human footsteps, and a moment later came the most intrusive of all possible human apparitions—Hiro, Lao, and Bondi, my Med crew, wrapped in some technical conversation, darker birds of omen, harbingers of another reality.

  “—remarkable parameters—”

  “—we shall see after the first Jump—”

  “—could last another ten years—”

  “Ah, Captain Genro,” Maestro Hiro Alin Nagy said by way of greeting, his swarthy face a mask of abstracted concentration under a short cap of black hair. “We were just discussing the med profile of our Pilot, an ama
zing specimen…”

  I could feel Lorenza tensing beside me; a new aura of chill seemed to emanate from her, and this did not seem a matter of persona.

  “Domo Lorenza,” Hiro said formally, apparently from the look of him picking up the same vibration. Here was another aspect of the Med crew’s alienation from the floating cultura, a subtle pariahhood that even I at this moment could sense.

  “We were just returning to the sick bay in any event,” Lao said uncomfortably. A slight gray-haired man of advanced years and sensitive brown eyes, he at least seemed unhappily aware of the unwelcomeness of their presence.

  “Indeed yes,” Hiro said obtusely. “Soon it will be time for our first Jump.”

  With that, and perfunctory bows, the three of them departed. But the spell of the garden, if only in my own consciousness, had been broken. With a furtive look above, Lorenza rose from the bench.

  “It is time we too departed, ne,” she said. “I must see to my Honored Passengers, and you…you, mon cher, will soon have your duties to attend to as well…”

  Following the line of her glance, I saw that above us the sun had fully set, and all at once the stars had come out, and not via the slow stepwise pinpricking into visibility of a simulated planetary night seen through a misty and comforting curtain of atmosphere.

  No, the holoed illusion had vanished entirely, and the dome now functioned as a direct tele, its only concession to artifice the spectral compensation circuits. Now the full metallic brilliance and icy black emptiness of the naked void itself howled in upon this ersatz garden, upon we poor ostriches hiding our heads in the sands of illusion from the full and terrible perception of that infinite night through which the shadow world of the ship presumed to pass.

  —— V

  “Jump Drive generator activated on standby…parameters nominal…”

  The first red command point lit up on my console.

  “Jump Circuit electronics activated…parameters nominal…Harmonizer circuits activated on standby…parameters nominal…”