The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Read online

  This concord freed Zoo’s spirit to an unexpected extent. He found himself responding to his lover Aff with a new access of intensity. Moral upbringing, no doubt.

  Two weeks later, his wife took him out to dinner.

  ‘Something’s happened, Zoo,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been to bed with someone.’

  He’d had a presentiment that she might be going to ask him for details of his dealings with Aff before their separation, but no; quite the reverse. She was buoyant with delight. Her new lover, as it chanced, and here her voice tightened a little, was that nice young person who’d been coming around to use Her’s word processor: Ir, the Girl Next Door.

  All Zoo’s cute hypotheses collapsed. He belted Her one in the face and cursed her for a filthy poofter whore. Reeling from the table, he took to strong drink.

  ~ * ~

  THE CODE OF PUZZLES

  Not a bit of it. For shame. Zoo nodded, poured out a glass of cabernet sauvignon with a certain smug satisfaction. This revelation exactly fulfilled his hunch that Her’s affections would take this direction when his absence was settled (if not before). It had seemed to him quite plausible that she might turn to the Left Hand Path, at least for a time. She had, after all, trodden it briefly in her late adolescence, and possessed no ingrained abhorrence for the scheme.

  What’s more, he’d rather supposed that Ir was developing an interest in Her, and since Ir was a droll, energetic person, he thought it likely that Her would respond in kind, if and when. As indeed she had. It had worked out quite nicely, though with some tricky bits of social interfacing (Ir’s dyke chums not being entirely enthralled by the intrusion into their world of a visiting hetero; it was hard for Her to introduce her new lover to family, friends and workmates; the obvious catalogue).

  Was Zoo really this cool? Not entirely. A couple of wobbly days found him uttering informative slips of the tongue which suggested that his unconscious was up to no good. By and large, though, it was all extremely agreeable and even satisfying, for now Zoo could surrender an admission of his own affair with Aff. His wife accepted this news in a kindly way. For a time, evidently, she feared Zoo might not actually get it together with this excellent person who was, after all, a fellow feminist. Nor was the case absolutely news to her, since Ir’s friends on campus had borne word to her lover’s ear.

  In the cleansing air engendered by this full and frank exchange of views, this inner-city glasnost, Zoo found himself in the following days opening quite poetically to Aff, to her amazement and delight. They made love all the following weekend with fiery lust augmented by unbounded sensitivity and tenderous beauty, and after a charming stroll by the Sunday sea and declarations of mutal love Zoo took her for the first time to visit some old chums, mutual friends of his and Her’s, who proved to enjoy Aff’s company and she theirs, and when the afternoon was done she set off to a pre-arranged dinner a deux with Heff, a fellow computer specialist. Zoo, as it chanced, had known Heff slightly since undergraduate days. ‘I’d rather you kept out of his bed,’ he’d told her, early on. Now Zoo saw Aff to her car in a haze of wine and love. He was rueful. ‘Have a nice fuck.’ She drove into the twilight. Zoo rejoined his friends and drank wine.

  Under the terms of their agreement, Aff rang Zoo next morning.

  ‘I’ll give you the bad news first,’ she said cheerfully.

  Zoo’s lights powered down and went out. The sea moved through his head.

  It had been a pretty dull evening, all told; she’d been about to leave at eleven in fact and zip over to visit Zoo, but as she drew on her coat and made for the door her colleague had urged her to stay, so what the hell, why not, she’d been wondering for months, and it was okay but nothing to write home about, truly she loved Zoo the better for it, and the chances were she’d only fuck Heff another four or five times before she got quite bored with him.

  ~ * ~

  THE CULTURAL CODES

  Zoo’s reaction did not shock him shitless because instead, over the next few days, it had precisely the opposite effect.

  All those things you see in movies, read in short stories, all those cliches. The last time this had happened to Zoo was in 1971 when Her told him that he’d have to go back to Melbourne because she was going to remain with her first husband. The time before that he was totally wet behind the ears, twenty years old, the start of 1966 when his first love broke his heart by responding to an offer of marriage with the report that she’d been screwing another guy over the hols and didn’t wish to see him again anyway.

  You know the syndrome. Zoo is holding the phone against his ear, attending to Aff’s news. His stomach drops out, smack! Gut full of acid, muscles paralysed. (Zoo looked it all up later in his paperback medical reference.) Taken aback, Aff said she would come over in a few hours for a cuddle. Zoo hung up. He sat down in an armchair, more or less regarding the digital clock on the video machine. The little number jumped from one position to another. Hours later turned out to be five minutes. Half a second proved to be half an hour.

  When she arrived after an hour and a half Aff was pretty horrified by this carry-on. She was sweetly considerate and crisp and a touch crabby, and while Zoo was deciding that, first, he was having a perfectly standard experience from which he’d far too long been shielded, and hence with which he had never learned to cope, and which therefore meant nothing beyond its own description, and that, second, even so he was to his tremendous surprise powerfully in love with this woman, and only cowardice could contrive to send him back within the tatters of his shocked shell; Aff in turn was trying to deal with this unexpected reversal. Drought to inundation; neither pleasant, when all is said and done.

  The next days were ruinous. Sleep destroyed, no work, commitments ignored. The sexual side-effects of this grief and jealousy, as cliche inscribes, were overwhelming: initial anaesthesia pricking to priapism, teary lovemaking, coming in thunderclaps and lightning again and again and again and again—but none of it offering much guidance about what you do when you get out of bed (or more precisely, whom you get back into bed with in another day or month).

  Zoo and his estranged wife attended to each other’s reports, giving the odd if tentative hug when it helped. In the midst of it all, by a revolting and tragic coincidence, Her heard from Sydney that her dearest pal, a gay one-time neighbour they’d always made a point of keeping in touch with, had just been killed in a car accident. He’d been AIDS positive, had declared at their last dinner together that he’d certainly kill himself if the virus went active. Since he was a passenger and the woman driver ended up with nothing worse than a sprained ankle joint this was not the probable explanation for his death.

  ~ * ~

  THE CONNOTATIVE CODES

  The balance sheet: Her feels that she’s doing quite nicely with her new lover, though she finds the Girls somewhat irritating (lots of dogged goddess worship and do-gooder attitudinizing). Still, she’s pleased with herself, awash with forgotten jouissance (her nails are now very closely clipped). Aff leaves for a fortnight in New York, ringing Zoo at enormous expense with messages of, probably, she thinks, love, um. Inter-semester Zoo lolls on his virtuous bed reading Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, an amusing, politically dubious, but nicely wrought work of Darwinian advocacy.

  A full week after the dirty deed, and to his complete amazement, Zoo’s scalding gut still bears an inner bruise. He purchases a fresh bottle of Donnagel. Before her departure, Aff, with rather a lot of grumbling, has told her colleague that she’s decided, in deference to Zoo’s strong feelings about the matter, to cool it with him. Heff finds this a cause of some annoyance, suggesting that he and Aff might readily deal with the difficulty by the simple expedient of keeping Zoo in the dark. It is, of course, pretty much what Zoo would have urged upon a new lover whose partner lodged the equivalent complaint.

  Zoo muses on his ideological position, wondering whether one’s tendency to feel at forty-one things other than one felt at twenty-seven i
s not necessarily a proof of the brain’s softening, of loss of moral fibre, but perhaps a hint of maturity. He recalls that while Bertie Russell swore by hearty fornication everyone else involved in the proceedings tended to think him a shit for it...

  And yet, and yet—bugger, one can hardly change one’s views because of the return of the repressed.

  Zoo is terribly pleased whenever Aff rings from New York. He really never expects her to.

  In Melbourne, the late autumn night’s balmy, soft and warm, and Bach is playing on Jaroslav’s programme. Aff keeps jumping out of the world, catching Zoo unawares. He’s been zipping along through an enchanting account of echolocation in bats, and the expression ‘chirp’ chirps at him. One of her words. Some reverberation of her voice in the page. Zoo gets a rush. Isn’t it odd? Isn’t it nice? (Isn’t it sickening, he imagines Aff saying with a wince. No she doesn’t, she yearns to hear it. But yes she does, she squirms a little at the pushiness, damn it. . .)

  What’s happening to Zoo, he senses, is a sort of unpeeling, exhilarating and hopeful, not just the usual trudge downhill, and if there’s some risk, he thinks, even a lot of risk, and some nasty footwork and defences thrown up to be snuck through, well, okay, right now he’s buzzing beautifully even if his gut still feels the bruise. And that’s the thing, Zoo tells himself, that’s the difference between his cool more-or-less indifference at her up-front general policy announcement (and his own) of the joys of existential rooting, and his present preposterous pains—Zoo cares now, yes, the cliches inscribe and traverse him, for the first time in years he’s vulnerable, and things hurt vilely that a mere week back barely registered.

  Is all this a byproduct of his years of evasion with Her? No doubt. What is driving him has nothing much in common with any regressive urge to ward off the threat of the world touching him, to anaesthesia, which Zoo suspects is the secret of most marriages. His woundedness, it now seems to him, is quite the reverse of running away. Not being hurt before was running away. Hurting Her and ignoring it, often enough not even noticing the fact, was, he concludes, running away. He notes the banality of this conclusion and chooses not to give a shit.

  What is posed for the future by these reflections, these feelings, Zoo cannot decide. He is clear at least that he is neither demanding nor offering ‘fidelity’; his brain has not turned entirely sideways. What he desires above all is to continue barrelling along this heart-crushingly luminous and sudden road. And yes: his love, his consciousness of Aff, is central to this alteration. Can he tell her? Certainly it is news which might not please her, might seem an imposition merely, might reek of an implication that Zoo wishes to limit her choices in the interests of pursuing his own moment (perfectly commonplace, after all) of—-is it saying too much?—joyful happiness.

  ~ * ~

  THE SYMBOLIC CODES

  They inhabit such different interior worlds, it seems to Zoo. Aff has her being within an alien langue, computer codes that articulate worlds he knows nothing much of, though Zoo prizes information above all. Zoo speaks (and sometimes prances drunkenly in) one tongue only plus a barrage of analytical tricks and tropes which merely simulate echt-science. (Wissenschaft?) Yet surely they meet again and again somewhere other than in their conjoined flesh, prick and cunt, cunt and mouth, mouth and prick, delicious though those joinings are. Zoo wishes to linger in that place as long as they can manage it; wants to turn his hurting energy into something more than tumult.

  Aff had said to him after their first night together, ‘I’m feeling all soft and benevolent this morning’ (and so blurred then was their contact that his absolute delight in this remark came across to her as cool disregard). It is that sense of benevolence he wishes to foster; he wishes to draw power from their mutuality.

  Zoo sees, or seems to, that if this choice means he must learn to regovern emotions he’d forgotten he owned (bitter jealousy, all those disagreeable passions they obliterated by fiat in the seventies) he believes he will endure their lash rather than abandon this possible life shared (at a decent distance, yes, naturally) with his lover Aff. And if it means that one or both of them must come to terms with some skids in the ideological grammar, well then, that is a text to be interpreted in due time.

  <>

  ~ * ~

  THE MAGI

  Writing ‘The Magi’, I must have attained an altered state of identification: much of the syntax is markedly different from my usual manner. So I find it curiously moving, a story I feel very proprietorial about, which even so is clearly the work of someone else. It is not three thousand light-years from Arthur Clarke’s famous short story ‘The Star’, for example, in which a Jesuit priest flees appalled from the scorched world whose elegant inhabitants died when its sun went nova to become the Star of Bethlehem. Robert Silverberg’s allegories of religion are not absent. But most particularly, the spirit of the late James Blish gusts cool and spooky across section VI.

  While I absolutely repudiate Father Raphael Silverman’s values (his moral aversion to abortion, for instance, is profoundly misplaced), for the compass of the story I can identify with his shock and grief. A primary task of fiction is, surely, to elicit provisional moral empathy with positions one otherwise would find odd, repellent, even literally unthinkable.

  You might wonder if here, as in my case for ‘Bowsprit’, I’m copping a plea of irony? Not quite, for I did not adopt Father Silverman’s viewpoint to ridicule it; rather, to forge a reductio ad absurdum which clouts the reader with ontological shock. The big question is not finally left open, as it is in Blish’s superb A Case of Conscience. Traditional patristic doctrine turns out to be The Truth, and that’s it, folks. As a thoroughly ex-Catholic, I find this a distinctly creepy postulate—just the sort of thing speculative fiction is good at...

  Perhaps because it is an elaboration of the first science fiction story I ever wrote for publication, nearly thirty years ago, ‘The Magi’ (of all these tales) pleases me best.

  ~ * ~

  I

  How art thou fallen from heaven

  O day-star, son of the morning!

  ... And thou saidst in thy heart:

  ‘I will ascend into heaven,

  Above the stars of God

  Will I exalt my throne;

  ... I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;

  I will be like the Most High.’

  Yet thou shalt be brought down to the netherworld,

  To the uttermost parts of the pit.

  Isaiah 14: xii-xvi

  ~ * ~

  The forsaken City is all one thing, and very lovely: a filigree of silver, shadow, light.

  Looking across it, Silverman is near to tears, like a green boy flushed with early love, transfigured by a first kiss. His throat knots; for a lingering moment, a heady anaesthesia rebukes his senses. At last joy takes the aging man like pain, compressed and burning beneath his ribs, an exalted melancholy. That bitter joy tells him: cherubim lived here.

  It is a reflection scarcely detached and scientific, and there is about it as well more than a whiff of heresy. Yet he can find no safer response rich enough to bear scrutiny. Peace is instinct in the empty City. With absolute conviction he tells himself: It’s waiting for them to come home.

  Exile with all his Order from High Earth, professed in the Society of Jesus under four solemn vows and five simple, Father Raphael Silverman gazes down with misery. From the edge of the cyclopean cliff he can smell warm wind rising from an unpeopled world of rippled grasses, a breeze that washes through the selective membrane of his filter-skin like memories of boyhood. At the horizon stand blurred violet hills, falling in the distant east to an ocean’s cerulean shore. In the crucible of his breast they mingle. They streak into a haze on the moist film of his eye’s curve.

  Regretfully, then, Silverman turns his back on the dove-grey lace coral of the City and works his way back to the skiff. A sizzle of interference is still the best he can raise from his tele
metry systems. Cirrus feathers the sky; from the ground, the forces that shield the City are transparent to the visible spectrum. No doubt a signal impressed upon a maser beam would reach him, but it is unlikely that he could return an answer.

  His shadow goes ahead of him, stretched by the slant of the morning sun, gaunt anyway, climbing the hard stone that separates him from the Monastery skiff. Paradox, an internal wound, sends darts to every vital place. The routine trick of scientific analysis is already in play, shredding the City and its planet into notional constituents, worrying with a terrier’s impertinence at the anomaly of a structure (A) deserted for aeons which (not-A) bears no sign of decay. And this is the paradox: that from the deeper seat of his being he cries out in pain. Where are they? Silverman demands. Where did they go? Their radiant and sombre City speaks solely of beauty and sanctity. There is no hint of corruption, of vice, even of mere worldly utility. They had known God so well that their dwelling place is a tabernacle, a temple, the New Jerusalem raised three thousand light-years from those dismal hills of Palestine where His Son walked briefly before men slew Him.