Science Fiction and Fantasy
A Galaxy
Called Rome
By Barry N. Malzberg
contemporary
A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg
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A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg
I
THIS IS NOT a novelette but a series of notes. The novelette
cannot be truly written because it partakes of its time, which is
distant and could be perceived only through the idiom and
devices of that era.
Thus the piece, by virtue of these reasons and others too
personal even for this variety of True Confession, is little more
than a set of constructions toward something less substantial ...
and, like the author, it cannot be completed.
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II
The novelette would lean heavily upon two articles by the late
John Campbell, for thirty-three years the editor of
Astounding/Analog, which were written shortly before his
untimely death on July 11, 1971, and appeared as editorials in
his magazine later that year, the second being perhaps the last
piece which will ever bear his byline. They imagine a black
galaxy which would result from the implosion of a neutron star,
an implosion so mighty that gravitational forces unleashed
would contain not only light itself but space and time; and A
Galaxy Called Rome is his title, not mine, since he envisions a
spacecraft that might be trapped within such a black galaxy and
be unable to get out ... because escape velocity would have to
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exceed the speed of light. All paths of travel would lead to this
galaxy, then, none away. A galaxy called Rome.
III
Conceive then of a faster-than-light spaceship which would
tumble into the black galaxy and would be unable to leave.
Tumbling would be easy, or at least inevitable, since one of the
characteristics of the black galaxy would be its invisibility, and
there the ship would be. The story would then pivot on the
efforts of the crew to get out. The ship is named Skipstone. It
was completed in 3892. Five hundred people died so that it
might fly, but in this age life is held even more cheaply than it is
today.
Left to my own devices, I might be less interested in the
escape problem than that of adjustment. Light housekeeping in
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an anterior sector of the universe; submission to the elements, a
fine, ironic literary despair. This is not science fiction however.
Science fiction was created by Hugo Gernsback to show us the
ways out of technological impasse. So be it.
IV
As interesting as the material was, I quailed even at this series
of notes, let alone a polished, completed work. My personal life
is my black hole, I felt Re pointing out (who would listen?); my
daughters provide more correct and sticky implosion than any
neutron star, and the sound of the pulsars is as nothing to the
music of the paddock area at Aqueduct racetrack in Ozone Park,
Queens, on a clear summer Tuesday. “Enough of these
breathtaking concepts, infinite distances, quasar leaps, binding
messages amidst the arms of the spiral nebula,†I could have
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pointed out. “I know that there are those who find an ultimate
truth there, but I am not one of them. I would rather dedicate
the years of life remaining (my melodramatic streak) to an
understanding of the agonies of this middle-class town in
northern New Jersey; until I can deal with those, how can I
comprehend Ridgefield Park, to say nothing of the extension of
fission to include progressively, heavier gases?†Indeed, I almost
abided to this until it occurred to me that Ridgefield Park would
forever be as mysterious as the stars and that one could not
deny infinity merely to pursue a particular that would be
impenetrable until the day of one's death.
So I decided to try the novelette, at least as this series of
notes, although with some trepidation, but trepidation did not
unsettle me, nor did I grieve, for my life is merely a set of notes
for a life, and Ridgefield Park merely a rough working model of
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Trenton, in which, nevertheless, several thousand people live
who cannot discern their right hands from their left, and also
much cattle.
V
It is 3895. The spacecraft Skipstone, on an exploratory flight
through the major and minor galaxies surrounding the Milky
Way, falls into the black galaxy of a neutron star and is lost
forever.
The captain of this ship, the only living consciousness of it, is
its commander, Lena Thomas. True, the hold of the ship carries
five hundred and fifteen of the dead sealed in gelatinous fix who
will absorb unshielded gamma rays. True, these rays will at
some time in the future hasten their reconstitution. True, again,
that another part of the hold contains the prosthesis of seven
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skilled engineers, male and female, who could be switched on at
only slight inconvenience and would provide Lena not only with
answers to any technical problems which would arise but with
companionship to while away the long and grave hours of the
Skipstone's flight.
Lena, however, does not use the prosthesis, nor does she feel
the necessity to. She is highly skilled and competent, at least in
relation to the routine tasks of this testing flight, and she feels
that to call for outside help would only be an admission of
weakness, would be reported back to the Bureau and lessen her
potential for promotion. (She is right; the Bureau has monitored
every cubicle of this ship, both visually and biologically; she can
see or do nothing which does not trace to a printout; they would
not think well of her if she was dependent upon outside
assistance.) Toward the embalmed she feels somewhat more.
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Her condition rattling in the hold of the ship as it moves on
tachyonic drive seems to approximate theirs; although they are
deprived of consciousness, that quality seems to be almost
irrelevant to the condition of hyperspace, and if there were any
way that she could bridge their mystery, she might well address
them. As it is, she must settle for imaginary dialogues and for
long, quiescent periods when she will watch the monitors, watch
the rainbow of hyperspace, the collision of the spectrum, and
say nothing whatsoever.
Saying nothing will not do, however, and the fact is that Lena
talks incessantly at times, if only to herself. This is good because
the story should have much dialogue; dramatic incident is best
impelled through straightforward characterization, and Lena's
compulsive need, now and then, to state her condition and its
relation to the spaces she occupies will satisfy this need.
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In her conversation, of course, she often addresses the
embalmed. “Consider,†she says to them, some of them dead
eight hundred years, others dead weeks, all of them stacked in
the hold in relation to their status in life and their ability to
hoard assets to pay for the process that will return them their
lives, “Consider what's going on here,†pointing through the
hold, the colors gleaming through the portholes onto her wrist,
colors dancing in the air, her eyes quite full and maddened in
this light, which does not indicate that she is mad but only that
the condition of hyperspace itself is insane, the Michelson-Morley
effect having a psychological as well as physical reality here.
“Why it could be me dead and in the hold and all of you here in
the dock watching the colors spin, it's all the same, all the same
faster than light,†and indeed the twisting and sliding effects of
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the tachyonic drive are such that at the moment of speech what
Lena says is true.
The dead live; the living are dead, all slide and become
jumbled together as she has noted; and were it not that their
objective poles of consciousness were fixed by years of training
and discipline, just as hers are transfixed by a different kind of
training and discipline, she would press the levers to eject the
dead one-by-one into the larger coffin of space, something
which is indicated only as an emergency procedure under the
gravest of terms and which would result in her removal from the
Bureau immediately upon her return. The dead are precious
cargo; they are, in essence, paying for the experiments and
must be handled with the greatest delicacy. “I will handle you
with the greatest delicacy,†Lena says in hyperspace, “and I will
never let you go, little packages in my little prison,†and so on,
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singing and chanting as the ship moves on somewhat in excess
of one million miles per second, always accelerating; and yet,
except for the colors, the nausea, the disorienting swing, her
own mounting insanity, the terms of this story, she might be in
the IRT Lenox Avenue local at rush hour, moving slowly uptown
as circles of illness move through the fainting car in the bowels
of summer.
VI
She is twenty-eight years old. Almost two hundred years in the
future, when man has established colonies on forty planets in
the Milky Way, has fully populated the solar system, is working
in the faster-than-light experiments as quickly as he can to
move through other galaxies, the medical science of that day is
not notably superior to that of our own, and the human lifespan
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has not been significantly extended, nor have the diseases of
mankind which are now known as congenital been eradicated.
Most of the embalmed were in their eighties or nineties; a few of
them, the more recent deaths, were nearly a hundred, but the
average lifespan still hangs somewhat short of eighty, and most
of these have died from cancer, heart attacks, renal failure,
cerebral blowout, and the like. There is some irony in the fact
that man can have at least established a toehold in his galaxy,
can have solved the mysteries of the FTL drive, and yet finds the
fact of his own biology as stupefying as he has throughout
history, but every sociologist understands that those who live in
a culture are least qualified to criticize it (because they have
fully assimilated the codes of the culture, even as to criticism),
and Lena does not see this irony any more than the reader will
have to in order to appreciate the deeper and more
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metaphysical irony of the story, which is this: that greater
speed, greater space, greater progress, greater sensation has
not resulted in any definable expansion of the limits of
consciousness and personality and all that the FTL drive is to
Lena is an increasing entrapment.
It is important to understand that she is merely a technician;
that although she is highly skilled and has been trained through
the Bureau for many years for her job as pilot, she really does
not need to possess the technical knowledge of any graduate
scientists of our own time . . . that her job, which is essentially a
probe-and-ferrying, could be done by an adolescent; and that all
of her training has afforded her no protection against the
boredom and depression of her, assignment.
When she is done with this latest probe, she will return to
Uranus and be granted a six-month leave. She is looking
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forward to that. She appreciates the opportunity. She is only
twenty-eight, and she is tired of being sent with the dead to
tumble through the spectrum for weeks at a time, and what she
would very much like to be, at least for a while, is a young
woman. She would like to be at peace. She would like to be
loved. She would like to have sex.
VII
Something must be made of the element of sex in this story, if
only because it deals with a female protagonist (where asepsis
will not work); and in the tradition of modem literary science
fiction, where some credence is given to the whole range of
human needs and behaviors, it would be clumsy and amateurish
to ignore the issue. Certainly the easy scenes can be written and
to great effect: Lena masturbating as she stares through the
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port at the colored levels of hyperspace; Lena dreaming thickly
of intercourse as she unconsciously massages her nipples, the
ship plunging deeper and deeper (as she does not yet know)
toward the Black Galaxy; the Black Galaxy itself as some
ultimate vaginal symbol of absorption whose Freudian overcast
will not be ignored in the imagery of this story ... indeed, one
can envision Lena stumbling toward the Evictors at the depths of
her panic in the Black Galaxy to bring out one of the embalmed,
her grim and necrophiliac fantasies as the body is slowly moved
upwards on its glistening slab, the way that her eyes will look as
she comes to consciousness and realizes what she has become
... oh, this would be a very powerful scene indeed, almost
anything to do with sex in space is powerful (one must also
conjure with the effects of hyperspace upon the orgasm; would
it be the orgasm which all of us know and love so well or
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something entirely different, perhaps detumescence, perhaps
exaltation!), and I would face the issue squarely, if only I could,
and in line with the very real need of the story to have powerful
and effective dialogue.
“For God's sake,†Lena would say at the end, the music of her
entrapment squeezing her, coming over her, blotting her toward
extinction, “for God's sake, all we ever needed was a screw,
that's all that sent us out into space, that's all that it ever meant
to us, I've got to have it, got to have it, do you understand?â€
jamming her fingers in and out of her aqueous surfaces
—But of course this would not work, at least in the story which
I am trying to conceptualize. Space is aseptic; that is the secret
of science fiction for forty-five years; it is not deceit or its
adolescent audience or the publication codes which have
deprived most of the literature of the range of human sexuality
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but the fact that in the clean and abysmal spaces between the
stars sex, that demonstration of our perverse and irreplaceable
humanity, would have no role at all. Not for nothing did the
astronauts return to tell us their vision of otherworldliness, not
for nothing did they stagger in their thick landing gear as they
walked toward the colonels’ salute, not for nothing did all of
those marriages, all of those wonderful kids undergo such
terrible strains. There is simply no room for it. It does not fit.
Lena would understand this. “I never thought of sex,†she would
say, “never thought of it once, not even at the end when
everything was around me and I was dancing.â€
VIII
Therefore it will be necessary to characterize Lena in some
other way, and that opportunity will only come through the
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moment of crisis, the moment at which the Skipstone is drawn
into the Black Galaxy of the neutron star. This moment will
occur fairly early into the story, perhaps five or six hundred
words deep (her previous life on the ship and impressions of
hyperspace will come in expository chunks interwoven between
sections of ongoing action), and her only indication of what has
happened will be when there is a deep, lurching shiver in the gut
of the ship where the embalmed lay and then she feels herself
falling.
To explain this sensation it is important to explain normal
hyperspace, the skip-drive which is merely to draw the curtains
and to be in a cubicle. There is no sensation of motion in
hyperspace, there could not be, the drive taking the Skipstone
past any concepts of sound or light and into an area where there
is no language to encompass nor glands to register. Were she to
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draw the curtains (curiously similar in their frills and pastels to
what we might see hanging today in lower-middle-class homes
of the kind I inhabit), she would be deprived of any sensation,
but of course she cannot; she must open them to the portholes,
and through them she can see the song of the colors to which I
have previously alluded. Inside, there is a deep and grievous
wretchedness, a feeling of terrible loss (which may explain why
Lena thinks of exhuming the dead) that may be ascribed to the
effects of hyperspace upon the corpus; but these sensations can
be shielded, are not visible from the outside, and can be
completely controlled by the phlegmatic types who comprise
most of the pilots of these experimental flights. (Lena is rather
phlegmatic herself. She reacts more to stress than some of her
counterparts but well within the normal range prescribed by the
Bureau, which admittedly does a superficial check.)
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The effects of falling into the Black Galaxy are entirely
different, however, and it is here where Lena's emotional
equipment becomes completely unstuck.
IX
At this point in the story great gobs of physics, astronomical
and mathematical data would have to be incorporated, hopefully
in a way which would furnish the hard-science basis of the story
without repelling the reader.
Of course one should not worry so much about the repulsion of
the reader; most who read science fiction do so in pursuit of
exactly this kind of hard speculation (most often they are
disappointed, but then most often they are after a time unable
to tell the difference), and they would sit still much longer for a
lecture than would, say, readers of the fictions of John Cheever,
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who could hardly bear sociological diatribes wedged into the
everlasting vision of Gehenna which is Cheever's gift to his
admirers. Thus it would be possible without awkwardness to
make the following facts known, and these facts could indeed be
set off from the body of the story and simply told like this:
It is posited that in other galaxies there are neutron stars,
stars of four or five hundred times the size of out own or
“normal†suns, which in their continuing nuclear process,
burning and burning to maintain their light, will collapse in a
mere ten to fifteen thousand years of difficult existence, their
hydrogen fusing to helium then nitrogen and then to even
heavier elements until with an implosion of terrific force,
hungering for power which is no longer there, they collapse
upon one another and bring disaster.
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Disaster not only to themselves but possibly to the entire
galaxy which they inhabit, for the gravitational force created by
the implosion would be so vast as to literally seal in light. Not
only light but sound and properties of all the stars in that great
tube of force ... so that the galaxy itself would be sucked into
the funnel of gravitation created by the collapse and be
absorbed into the flickering and desperate heart of the
extinguished star.
It is possible to make several extrapolations from the fact of
the neutron stars—and of the neutron stars themselves we have
no doubt; many nova and supernova are now known to have
been created by exactly this effect, not ex- but im- plosion—and
some of them are these:
(a) The gravitational forces created, like great spokes wheeling
out from the star, would drag in all parts of the galaxy within
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their compass; and because of the force of that gravitation, the
galaxy would be invisible ... these forces would, as has been
said, literally contain light.
(b) The neutron star, functioning like a cosmic vacuum
cleaner, might literally destroy the universe. Indeed, the
universe may be in the slow process at this moment of being
destroyed as hundreds of millions of its suns and planets are
being inexorably drawn toward these great vortexes. The
process would be slow, of course, but it is seemingly inexorable.
One neutron star, theoretically, could absorb the universe. There
are many more than one.
(c) The universe may have, obversely, been created by such
an implosion, throwing out enormous cosmic filaments that, in a
flickering instant of time which is as eons to us but an instant to
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the cosmologists, are now being drawn back in. The universe
may be an accident.
(d) Cosmology aside, a ship trapped in such a vortex, such a
“black,†or invisible, galaxy, drawn toward the deadly source of
the neutron star, would be unable to leave it through normal
faster-than-light drive ... because the gravitation would absorb
light, it would be impossible to build up any level of acceleration
(which would at some point not exceed the speed of light) to
permit escape. If it was possible to emerge from the field, it
could only be done by an immediate switch to tachyonic drive
without accelerative buildup ... a process which could drive the
occupant insane and which would, in any case, have no clear
destination. The black hole of the dead star is a literal vacuum in
space ... one could fall through the hole, but where, then, would
one go?
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(e) The actual process of being in the field of the dead star
might well drive one insane.
For all of these reasons Lena does not know that she has fallen
into the Galaxy Called Rome until the ship simply does so.
And she would instantly and irreparably become insane.
X
The technological data having been stated, the crisis of the
story—the collapse into the Galaxy—having occurred early on, it
would now be the obligation of the writer to describe the actual
sensations involved in falling into the Black Galaxy. Since little
or nothing is known of what these sensations would be other
than that it is clear that the gravitation would suspend almost all
physical laws and might well suspend time itself, time only being
a function of physics it would be easy to lurch into a surrealistic
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mode here; Lena could see monsters slithering on the walls,
two-dimensional monsters that is, little cut-outs of her past; she
could re-enact her life in full consciousness from birth until
death; she could literally be turned inside-out anatomically and
perform in her imagination or in the flesh gross physical acts
upon herself; she could live and die a thousand times in the
lightless, timeless expanse of the pit ... all of this could be done
within the confines of the story, and it would doubtless lead to
some very powerful material. One could do it picaresque
fashion, one perversity or lunacy to a chapter—that is to say,
the chapters spliced together with more data on the
gravitational excesses and the fact that neutron stars (this is
interesting) are probably the pulsars which we have identified,
stars which can be detected through sound but not by sight from
unimaginable distances. The author could do this kind of thing,
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and do it very well indeed; he has done it literally hundreds of
times before, but this, perhaps, would be in disregard of Lena.
She has needs more imperative than those of the author, or
even those of the editors. She is in terrible pain. She is
suffering.
Falling, she sees the dead; falling, she hears the dead; the
dead address her from the hold, and they are screaming,
“Release us, release us, we are alive, we are in pain, we are in
torment"; in their gelatinous flux, their distended limbs sutured
finger and toe to the membranes which hold them, their decay
has been reversed as the warp into which they have fallen has
reversed time; and they are begging Lena from a torment which
they cannot phrase, so profound is it; their voices are in her
head, pealing and banging like oddly shaped bells. “Release us!â€
they scream, “we are no longer dead, the trumpet has
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sounded!†and so on and so forth, but Lena literally does not
know what to do. She is merely the ferryman on this dread
passage; she is not a medical specialist; she knows nothing of
prophylaxis or restoration, and any movement she made to
release them from the gelatin which holds them would surely
destroy their biology, no matter what the state of their minds.
But even if this were not so, even if she could by releasing
them give them peace, she cannot because she is succumbing to
her own responses. In the black hole, if the dead are risen, then
the risen are certainly the dead; she dies in this space, Lena
does; she dies a thousand times over a period of seventy
thousand years (because there is no objective time here,
chronology is controlled only by the psyche, and Lena has a
thousand full lives and a thousand full deaths), and it is terrible,
of course, but it is also interesting because for every cycle of
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death there is a life, seventy years in which she can meditate
upon her condition in solitude; and by the two hundredth year or
more (or less, each of the lives is individual, some of them long,
others short), Lena has come to an understanding of exactly
where she is and what has happened to her. That it has taken
her fourteen thousand years to reach this understanding is in
one way incredible, and yet it is a land of miracle as well
because in an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, all of
them reconstituted for her, it is highly unlikely that even in
fourteen thousand years she would stumble upon the answer,
had it not been for the fact that she is unusually strong-willed
and that some of the personalities through which she has lived
are highly creative and controlled and have been able to do
some serious thinking. Also there is a carry-over from life to life,
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even with the differing personalities, so that she is able to make
use of preceding knowledge.
Most of the personalities are weak, of course, and not a few
are insane, and almost all are cowardly, but there is a little
residue; even in the worst of them there is enough residue to
carry forth the knowledge, and so it is in the fourteen-
thousandth year, when the truth of it has finally come upon her
and she realizes what has happened to her and what is going on
and what she must do to get out of there, and so it is [then]
that she summons all of the strength and win which are left to
her, and stumbling to the console (she is in her sixty-eighth year
of this life and in the personality of an old, sniveling, whining
man, an ex-ferryman himself), she summons one of the
prostheses, the master engineer, the controller. All of this time
the dead have been shrieking and clanging in her ears, fourteen
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thousand years of agony billowing from the hold and
surrounding her in sheets like iron; and as the master engineer,
exactly as he was when she last saw him fourteen thousand
years and two weeks ago, emerges from the console, the
machinery whirring slickly, she gasps in relief, too weak even to
respond with pleasure to the fact that in this condition of
antitime, antilight, anticausality the machinery still works. But
then it would. The machinery always works, even in this final
and most terrible of all the hard-science stories. It is not the
machinery which fails but its operators or, in extreme cases, the
cosmos.
“What's the matter?†the master engineer says.
The stupidity of this question, its naiveté and irrelevance in the
midst of the hell she has occupied, stuns Lena, but she realizes
even through the haze that the master engineer would, of
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course, come without memory of circumstances and would have
to be apprised of background. This is inevitable. Whining and
sniveling, she tells him in her old man's voice what has
happened.
“Why that's terrible!†the master engineer says. “That's really
terrible,†and lumbering to a porthole, he looks out at the Black
Galaxy, the Galaxy Called Rome, and one took at it causes him
to lock into position and then disintegrate, not because the
machinery has failed (the machinery never fails, not ultimately)
but because it has merely recreated a human substance which
could not possibly come to grips with what has been seen
outside that porthole.
Lena is left alone again, then, with the shouts of the dead
carrying forward.
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Realizing instantly what has happened to her fourteen
thousand years of perception can lead to a quicker reaction
time, if nothing else-she addresses the console again, uses the
switches and produces three more prostheses, all of them
engineers barely subsidiary to the one she has already
addressed. (Their resemblance to the three comforters of Job
will not be ignored here, and there will be an opportunity to
squeeze in some quick religious allegory, which is always useful
to give an ambitious story yet another level of meaning.)
Although they are not quite as qualified or definitive in their
opinions as the original engineer, they are bright enough by far
to absorb her explanation, and, this time, her warnings not to go
to the portholes, not to look upon the galaxy, are heeded.
Instead, they stand there in rigid and curiously mortified
postures, as if waiting for Lena to speak.
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“So you see,†she says finally, as if concluding a long and
difficult conversation, which in fact she has, “as far as I can see,
the only way to get out of this black galaxy is to go directly into
tachyonic drive. Without any accelerative buildup at all.â€
The three comforters nod slowly, bleakly. They do not quite
know what she is talking about, but then again, they have not
had fourteen thousand years to ponder this point. “Unless you
can see anything else,†Lena says, “unless you can think of
anything different. Otherwise, it's going to be infinity in here,
and I can't take much more of this, really. Fourteen thousand
years is enough.â€
“Perhaps,†the first comforter suggests softly, “perhaps it is
your fate and your destiny to spend infinity in this black hole.
Perhaps in some way you are determining the fate of the
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universe. After all, it was you who said that it all might be a
gigantic accident, eh? Perhaps your suffering gives it purpose. “
“And then too,†the second lisps, “you've got to consider the
dead down there. This isn't very easy for them, you know, what
with being jolted alive and all that, and an immediate vault into
tachyonic would probably destroy them for good. The Bureau
wouldn't like that, and you'd be liable for some pretty stiff
damages. No, if I were you I'd stay with the dead, “ the second
concludes, and a clamorous murmur seems to arise from the
hold at this, although whether it is one of approval or of terrible
pain is difficult to tell. The dead are not very expressive.
“Anyway,†the third says, brushing a forelock out of his eyes,
averting his glance from the omnipresent and dreadful
portholes, “there's little enough to be done about this situation.
You've fallen into a neutron star, a black funnel. It is utterly
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beyond the puny capacities and possibilities of man. I'd accept
my fate if I were you.†His model was a senior scientist working
on quasar theory, but in reality he appears to be a
metaphysician. “There are comers of experience into which man
cannot stray without being severely penalized.â€
“That's very easy for you to say,†Lena says bitterly, her whine
breaking into clear glissando, “but you haven't suffered as I
have. Also, there's at least a theoretical possibility that I'll get
out of here if I do the build-up without acceleration. “
“But where will you land?†the third says, waving a trembling
forefinger. “And when? All rules of space and time have been
destroyed here; only gravity persists. You can fall through the
center of this sun, but you do not know where you will come out
or at what period of time. It is inconceivable that you would
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emerge into normal space in the time you think of as
contemporary. “
“No,†the second says, “I wouldn't do that. You and the dead
are joined together now; it is truly your fate to remain with
them. What is death? What is life? In the Galaxy Called Rome all
roads lead to the same, you see; you have ample time to
consider these questions, and I'm sure that you will come up
with something truly viable, of much interest.â€
“Ah, well,†the first says, looking at Lena, “if you must know, I
think that it would be much nobler of you to remain here; for all
we know, your condition gives substance and viability to the
universe. Perhaps you are the universe. But you're not going to
listen anyway, and so I won't argue the point. I really won't,†he
says rather petulantly and then makes a gesture to the other
two; the three of them quite deliberately march to a porthole,
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push a curtain aside and look out upon it. Before Lena can stop
them—not that she is sure she would, not that she is sure that
this is not exactly what she has willed—they have been reduced
to ash.
And she is left alone with the screams of the dead.
XI
It can be seen that the satiric aspects of the scene above can
be milked for great implication, and unless a very skillful
controlling hand is kept upon the material, the piece could easily
degenerate into farce at this moment. It is possible, as almost
any comedian knows, to reduce (or elevate) the starkest and
most terrible issues to scatology or farce simply by
particularizing them; and it will be hard not to use this scene for
a kind of needed comic relief in what is, after all, an extremely
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depressing tale, the more depressing because it has used the
largest possible canvas on which to imprint its messages that
man is irretrievably dwarfed by the cosmos. (At least, that is the
message which it would be easiest to wring out of the material;
actually I have other things in mind, but how many will be able
to detect them?)
What will save the scene and the story itself, around this point
will be the lush physical descriptions of the Black Galaxy, the
neutron star, the altering effects they have had upon perceived
reality. Every rhetorical trick, every typographical device, every
nuance of language and memory which the writer has to call
upon will be utilized in this section describing the appearance of
the black hole and its effects upon Lena's (admittedly distorted)
consciousness. It will be a bleak vision, of course, but not
necessarily a hopeless one; it will demonstrate that our concepts
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of “beauty†or “ugliness†or “evil†or “good†or “love†or “deathâ€
are little more than metaphors, semantically limited, framed in
by the poor receiving equipment in our heads; and it will be
suggested that, rather than showing us a different or alternative
reality, the black hole may only be showing us the only reality
we know, but extended, infinitely extended so that the story
may give us, as good science fiction often does, at this point
some glimpse of possibilities beyond ourselves, possibilities not
to be contained in word rates or the problems of editorial
qualification. And also at this point of the story it might be
worthwhile to characterize Lena in a “warmer†or more
“sympathetic†fashion so that the reader can see her as a
distinct and admirable human being, quite plucky in the face of
all her disasters and fourteen thousand years, two hundred
lives. This can be done through conventional fictional technique:
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A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg
individuation through defining idiosyncrasy, tricks of speech,
habits, mannerisms, and so on. In common everyday fiction we
could give her an affecting stutter, a dimple on her left breast, a
love of policemen, fear of red convertibles, and leave it at that;
in this story, because of its considerably extended theme, it will
be necessary to do better than that, to find originalities of
idiosyncrasy which will, in their wonder and suggestion of
panoramic possibility, approximate the black hole ... but no
matter. No matter. This can be done; the section interweaving
Lena and her vision of the black hole will be the flashiest and
most admired but in truth the easiest section of the story to
write, and I am sure that I would have no trouble with it
whatsoever if, as I said much earlier, this were a story instead
of a series of notes for a story, the story itself being unutterably
beyond our time and space and devices and to be glimpsed only
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in empty little flickers of light much as Lena can glimpse the
black hole, much as she knows the gravity of the neutron star.
These notes are as close to the vision of the story as Lena
herself would ever get.
As this section ends, it is clear that Lena has made her
decision to attempt to leave the Black Galaxy by automatic
boost to tachyonic drive. She does not know where she will
emerge or how, but she does know that she can bear this no
longer.
She prepares to set the controls, but before this it is necessary
to write the dialogue with the dead.
XII
One of them presumably will appoint himself as the
spokesman of the many and will appear before Lena in this new
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space as if in a dream. “Listen here,†this dead would say, one
born in 3361, dead in 3401, waiting eight centuries for
exhumation to a society that can rid his body of leukemia (he is
bound to be disappointed), “you've got to face the facts of the
situation here. We can't just leave in this way. Better the death
we know than the death you will give us.â€
“The decision is made,†Lena says, her fingers straight on the
controls. “There will be no turning back.â€
“We are dead now,†the leukemic says. “At least let this death
continue. At least in the bowels of this galaxy where there is no
time we have a kind of life or at least that nonexistence of which
we have always dreamed. I could tell you many of the things we
have learned during these fourteen thousand years, but they
would make little sense to you, of course. We have learned
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A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg
resignation. We have had great insights, Of course all of this
would go beyond you.â€
“Nothing goes beyond me. Nothing at all. But it does not
matter. “
“Everything matters. Even here there is consequence,
causality, a sense of humanness, one of responsibility. You can
suspend physical laws, you can suspend life itself, but you
cannot separate the moral imperatives of humanity. There are
absolutes. It would be apostasy to try and leave.â€
“Man must leave,†Lena says, “man must struggle, man must
attempt to control his conditions. Even if he goes from worse to
obliteration, that is still his destiny. “ Perhaps the dialogue is a
little florid here. Nevertheless, this will be the thrust of it. It is to
be noted that putting this conventional viewpoint in the
character of a woman will give another of those necessary levels
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A Galaxy Called Rome by Barry N. Malzberg
of irony with which the story must abound if it is to be anything
other than a freak show, a cascade of sleazy wonders shown
shamefully behind a tent ... but irony will give it legitimacy. “I
don't care about the dead,†Lena says. “I only care about the
living.â€
“Then care about the universe,†the dead man says, “care
about that, if nothing else. By trying to come out through the
center of the black hole, you may rupture the seamless fabric of
time and space itself. You may destroy everything. Past and
present and future. The explosion may extend the funnel of
gravitational force to infinite size, and all of the universe will be
driven into the hole.â€
Lena shakes her head. She knows that the dead is merely
another one of her tempters in a more cunning and cadaverous
guise. “You are lying to me,†she says. “This is merely another
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effect of the Galaxy Called Rome. I am responsible to myself,
only to myself. The universe is not at issue. “
“That's a rationalization,†the leukemic says, seeing her
hesitation, sensing his victory, “and you know it as well as I do.
You can't be an utter solipsist. You aren't God, there is no God,
not here, but if there was it wouldn't be you. You must measure
the universe about yourself.â€
Lena looks at the dead and the dead looks at her; and in that
confrontation, in the shade of his eyes as they pass through the
dull lusters of the neutron star effect, she sees that they are
close to a communion so terrible that it will become a weld,
become a connection ... that if she listens to the dead for more
than another instant, she will collapse within those eyes as the
Skipstone has collapsed into the black hole; and she cannot bear
this, it cannot be ... she must hold to the belief, that there is
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some separation between the living and the dead and that there
is dignity in that separation, that life is not death but something
else because, if she cannot accept that, she denies herself ...
and quickly then, quickly before she can consider further, she
hits the controls that will convert the ship instantly past the
power of light; and then in the explosion of many suns that
might only be her heart she hides her head in her arms and
screams.
And the dead screams with her, and it is not a scream of joy
but not of terror either ... it is the true natal cry suspended
between the moments of limbo, life and expiration, and their
shrieks entwine in the womb of the Skipstone as it pours
through into the redeemed light.
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XIII
The story is open-ended, of course.
Perhaps Lena emerges into her own time and space once
more, all of this having been a sheath over the greater reality.
Perhaps she emerges into an otherness. Then again, she may
never get out of the black hole at all but remains and lives
there, the Skipstone a planet in the tubular universe of the
neutron star, the first or last of a series of planets collapsing
toward their deadened sun. If the story is done correctly, if the
ambiguities are prepared right, if the technological data is stated
well, if the material is properly visualized ... well, it does not
matter then what happens to Lena, her Skipstone and her dead.
Any ending will do. Any would suffice and be emotionally
satisfying to the reader.
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Still, there is an inevitable ending.
It seems clear to the writer, who will not, cannot write this
story, but if he did he would drive it through to this one
conclusion, the conclusion clear, implied really from the first and
bound, bound utterly, into the text.
So let the author have it.
XIV
In the infinity of time and space, all is possible, and as they
are vomited from that great black hole, spilled from this anus of
a neutron star (I will not miss a single Freudian implication if I
can), Lena and her dead take on this infinity, partake of the vast
canvas of possibility. Now they are in the Antares Cluster
flickering like a bulb; here they are at the heart of Sirius the Dog
Star five hundred screams from the hold; here again in ancient
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Rome watching Jesus trudge up carrying the Cross of Calvary ...
and then again in another unimaginable galaxy dead across from
the Milky Way a billion light-years in span with a hundred
thousand habitable planets, each of them with their Calvary ...
and they are not, they are not yet satisfied.
They cannot, being human, partake of infinity; they can
partake of only what they know. They cannot, being created
from the consciousness of the writer, partake of what he does
not know but what is only close to him. Trapped within the
consciousness of the writer, the penitentiary of his being, as the
writer is himself trapped in the Skipstone of his mortality, Lena
and her dead emerge in the year 1975 to the town of Ridgefield
Park, New Jersey, and there they inhabit the bodies of its fifteen
thousand souls, and there they are, there they are yet, dwelling
amidst the refineries, strolling on Main Street, sitting in the
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Rialto theatre, shopping in the supermarkets, pairing off and
clutching one another in the imploded stars of their beds on this
very night at this very moment, as that accident, the author,
himself one of them, has conceived them.
It is unimaginable that they would come, Lena and the dead,
from the heart of the Galaxy Called Rome to tenant Ridgefield
Park, New Jersey ... but more unimaginable still that from all the
Ridgefield Parks of our time we will come and assemble and
build the great engines which will take us to the stars and some
of the stars will bring us death and some bring life and some will
bring nothing at all but the engines will go on and on and so
after a fashion, in our fashion will we.
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