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The Rape of The Sun Page 15


  “Now you’re changing the subject, Hel, and I won’t have it. I think I am saying that what Collins has achieved is indeed a magnificent contamination, a together-welding of* four oriental mystery-comers to an occidental mystery-center.”

  “So?”

  “So I know that Wel, saw it. But what I don’t understand is—why does Wel fear it?”

  “Our Wel, ” I declared, “fears nothing. However, Wel is reticent about certain suppressed egoisms. And now I do badly need a change of subject, but I don’t expect to find it here.” I strode out of the kitchen.

  Hubbub was no longer general; people had broken into small clusters all over our house. In the dining room, several were gathered around Wel at the hors d’oeuvres. Wel had taken up the conversation himself and was, talking about Shakespeare—apologetically, but willingly. When Wel traps himself into talking about Shakespeare, superbly he avoids cliches; neither will he quote lines merely for the sake of the lines, nor dissect lines like a scholarly sadist.

  Just now he was interested in the man Shakespeare as an expert in theater, as a lusty lover of theater. How he was a man of all theatrical trades, a trouper. How his dancingest comedies and his profoundest tragedies were yeasty with stagecraft. The amazing paradox of The Tempest: ballet-poetry to read, enticing sleight-of-hand to watch, intricate mechanics to stage. Shakespeare had one eye on posterity, certainly; but mainly you imagined him bouncing his mind from stage to box to pit to stage like a clown-fencing Mercutio or a subtly flitting Ariel, imaginatively seeing it played and feeling the playing of it while he wrote it.

  “That’s why he has lasted,” quoth Welland Carr. “It is not primarily audiences who now demand Shakespeare; the great productions nowadays are by no means responses to popular demand, even though they evoke popular response. It is instead the stage folk who primarily demand Shakespeare. They resurrect him because he rises up in them and churns in them until they express him to gain peace. The ham yearns to play Hamlet because on the surface Hamlet appears arousingly playable by a ham; even that should not be knocked; even that is a cheap case of resurrection. Meanwhile a truly great actor, responding to his own searching intuition, longs to produce and play in any one of a dozen or fifteen Shakespearian plays wherein the actor can cry out to the audience, in effect: “Here is Theater, my lords and ladies! Identify me with it, because it is my life!’”

  Wel paused; and conversation erupted, because for those who find this topic interesting, this is a most interesting topic. Out of it, though, Sven and I heard the French teacher remark: “What was that story about Shakespeare coming back and seeing one of his own productions on Broadway?”

  Again Wel went ghastly! And volubly he re-launched his theme, covering to beat hell.

  Sure that he would gather from Wel no more evidence about Wel for a while, Sven drifted into the kitchen to be alone and to ruminate on the evidence he already had. Wel could not have missed the noble Collins contamination: man-to-manness, the bridge, material transiency, the All, the Nothing. Perhaps the All-Nothing connection had simply scared the stuffing out of Wel a long time ago, and so he had settled down comfortably with Confucius who was content with the lesser mysteries. But then publicly tonight Collins had flung the connection at Wel, had asserted that these lesser, more comfortable mysteries were in fact tantamount to the greatest of all mysteries. Whereafter the biologist had traced the stream of life back to primeval ooze, and the French teacher had brought back Wel's beloved Shakespeare to watch his own stuff being played in the late twentieth century.

  And, Sven self-queried, what was it about Helen? Why, Hel had long ago grasped intuitively the uncomfortable inwardness of her Wel; and tonight, with Collins and a few side-stimuli involving others at the party, she was maneuvering to draw it all out into the open for Wel's own good, because she loved him.

  And so did Sven. ...

  The randomly roving Jensen eyes lighted on an unmolested reserve platter of hors d’oeuvres. Drifting thither, he reflected that he was on the verge of forming a Wel-theory; all he needed was one or two more psychic ingredients. He was summarizing as he reached for an anchovy biscuit: Wel was disturbed by the mystical Collins contamination, yet Wel was a Confucian; Wel was disturbed by the idea of Shakespeare’s return, and yet he was a lover of Shakespeare. ...

  Instead of the anchovies, Sven discovered that he had grasped fingers belonging to Wel. Both jerked back, then both reached again; Wel was quicker, and he handed Sven a biscuit. They munched, looking each other over.

  “You are quite right, Sven,” Wel gratuitously admitted. “Tonight has got me into trouble with myself. Let me make us drinks and we’ll talk about it.”

  Sven hunched on a counter while Wel poured; they drank in silence. Presently Wel said: “I admire that man Bill Haley. He’s an original thinker. He’s made a stir in astronomy, a real stir—and rightly so, I’ve read him.”

  Obviously Wel had started with Haley because the astronomer’s hard logic was the opposite of Collins’s mysticism. It was an association of sorts, and therefore a self-calming lead-in. Noncommittally Sven snorted: “Haley is an anti-hylozoist.”

  “Now take me,” Wel added, frowning meditatively. “I was never an original thinker.”

  “You’re original enough for my money.”

  “Thanks, you’re always very kind. In this case, I’ll be friendly and agree with you. However. Fact is, I’m a parasitical worm with two eating ends: my physical-social end feeds on scientists and other beautiful people; my ^spiritual end nestles in the bosom of Shakespeare, and the blood of his genius is what sustains me. Never mind what that leaves me for excretion.”

  Wel reached for the plate, grabbed another anchovy, passed the plate to Sven; and while Sven seized on a caviar biscuit, Wel came right out and asked: “What did you think of Collins?”

  “Amazing,” Sven answered, only in part meaning Collins. Setting the platter aside, Wel said, “I know it didn’t escape you that he bothered me. Let me tell you why. A long time ago I reached the same conclusions that Collins voiced—not counting the world shrinkage, which is interestingly unprovable like every mystical mystery. Reflecting, I decided that my conclusions must be crazy. I prefer not to be crazy, so I forgot them. Now I hear this guy tonight, publicly voicing the same stuff. And he’s queer/”

  Wel, a purist, was using the very old word queer without reference to anybody’s preferences in sex. Sven, equally a purist, had the same old meaning in mind when he answered: “So am I.”

  “Sven—you believe Collins?”

  “Oh—yes and no. I agree with him that something downright mystic goes on in honest friendship. Each friend feels: I like you—I am like you, although I am different.’ I suspect there is a growing identity between close friends—identity of the ways they experience things, of their feelings, of their memories even.”

  Wel demanded, “Does their communion of memories extend even to that—unbroken stream of heredity from any human baby back in time to primeval life and beyond?”

  “Carl Jung thought so.”

  Wel pushed it. “Can experiences persist from generation to generation? From—life to life? Otherwise it is futile, futile simply. Take my Shakespeare. He put in a lifetime growing, producing, culturing, and harvesting experiences and integrating them into a self—and what finally came of it? For him, I mean. Plenty for us—but what for him?”

  “What would you want for him?”

  “If Shakespeare could come back in some way . . . if he could see his own plays later, remembering that they were his plays ... if he could forget for a little bit, experiencing his plays as utterly new and yet somehow familiar, like the music you never heard before and yet you must have heard it—and then suddenly have it flash over him: Why, I wrote them! You see? I’m nuts.”

  Sven began to reply, but Wel stopped him. “So then tonight I met with the All identified with the bridge, and a reference to Plato who believed in soul-transmigration, and an unbroken stream of heredity, an
d the transmission of germinal characteristics from parent to child all shifting and interweaving and every so often coming back to something approximating some ancestor. . . .

  “Now, Sven, suppose that a man living today has native mental characteristics which in a small way are similar to those of some man who lived yesterday. And suppose further that the man today has saturated his mind with the known experiential fruits of the man who lived yesterday—”

  Sven had his final ingredient.

  In full honesty, he told my husband, “I do not deny, my friend, that you could be a psychically reincarnated instance of your Avon bard.”

  Swinging open a kitchen door on them, I entered. Going to the doorbell chimes hanging on the wall, I picked up a wooden spoon and beat upon those chimes. The musical din signaled all guests that it was one o’clock and the party was over.

  Host Wel, Hostess Hel, and Co-Host Sven formed at the front door what my husband called a deception line: opposite of reception. Guests dutifully filed past us, shaking hands gravely if not too steadily and assuring each of us what a wonderful party it had been; some of them were no longer sure who the host or hostess was, but one or two of us had to be he-she.

  After some thirty minutes, everyone seemed to have departed, except that two cars remained in the drive; my car and Wel's were in our garage—that should leave only Sven’s. We three separated to go hunting for the owner of the stray car, and presently Wel found Bill Haley under the diningroom table. “Over here!” Wel called; then: “Goddamn, it sure is too late to ask him any questions—” He and Sven carried Bill to Sven’s rented car and crammed the astronomer into the diminutive back seat; following them out, shamelessly I searched Bill’s pants pockets and found his keys, so Sven could drop Bill off at his apartment. Drop? well, drag and drop.

  When I emerged from the back seat, my two men were looking at each other, and Wel wore his grin-crinkles. They shook four hands.

  Sven said: “Many thanks, my friend.”

  Losing his grin, Wel went earnest. “Our thanks to you, Sven. Mine and maybe also Will’s—and I don’t mean Haley.”

  I put my hands on the Jensen shoulders. He put his hands on my waist. I kissed him—all out. Then he hurried to the car, slid in behind the wheel, and started the engine. Backing around Bill’s abandoned car, Sven did a contorted 180-degree turn and paused before driving away. Wel and I stood at the driver side of the car.

  Wel sang out: “O rare Sven Jensen!”

  Sven peeled out of the drive.

  Truthfully now, Sven reflected (alone in his bed after the later evening of shriveling revelations), Wel-Will Shakespeare-Carr was going to the sun—would fly there, not in Wel's time, nor in Shakespeare’s time, but in a nontime some-when between a departed past and an abandoned present.

  Drifting sleepward, Sven felt vaguely that Shakespeare would somehow be in the action.

  Action Phase Alpha

  OUR SUN-RUN

  15

  We did make launch on June 17. Breathlessly semi-serene in shuttle cockpits, we watched Earth drop away.

  The procedure for shuttle-launch had undergone some evolution. During the sub-orbital shakedowns in 1977-78, shuttles had risen into near space piggybacked on 747’s. At the first actual orbital launch in 1980, they had reverted to the original plan: rocket boosters took them up. Later, however, shuttle-launches had become blessed by the development of a mighty jet plane which, with merely three engines, could carry a shuttle with payload and auxiliary power pod all the way up to thirty-one kilometers aloft, whence (in view of reduced Earth-gravity and air pressure at that altitude) the economical power pod, which was recoverable, could easily boost the shuttle to any desired altitude short of Moon. This was the better way: fewer g’s, less fuel. It was the way that was taken by the five shuttles which carried the Southeastern solar-power package into space.

  Sven Jensen as mission commander and I as exec and systems controller shared with the pilots the bridge of Shuttle One which carried the knocked-down command vehicle Mazda. My presence with Sven was logical in terms of Southeastern Power rank-protocol, although that protocol had been transiently ruptured by the fact of Sven’s command over me during this mission. Wel, apart from wishing that he had been the one to take off with me, could find no fault.

  Welland Carr, auxiliary vehicle coordinator, aboard Shuttle Two, supervised transport of dissembled mirror-laser satellites One and Two. Bill Haley, crew scientist, on Shuttle Three mother-henned satellites Three and Skiddoo. Aboard Shuttle Four, which carried the command vehicle’s sun-escape booster, diffidently rode Willkie Collins, medic and backup.

  There was a fifth, top-secret shuttle. It carried four smart missiles having nuclear warheads of five megatons each. Sven had not pilfered these missiles, although he was capable of having done so. As a result of an astonishingly persuasive conference among us five crew-people and J.C., a second startlingly persuasive conference had followed between J.C. and the President alone at Camp David:

  “There are more things in heaven and Earth, Mister President, than are—well, you know. The visions of our psychic crewman seem incredible, but Doctor Haley assures me that they are in all respects consistent with the findings of his committee of scientists. Haley posits that the Collins long-distance insights are mental receivings of some unknown transmission medium which accords with natural laws yet to be discovered. As for the proposed missiles, the magnificent Navy and NASA record of Captain Jensen assures us that they will be responsibly deployed. No star or planet and no terrestrial enemy or rival will be the target. I respectfully submit, sir, that if the Collins views are wrong, there will simply be no target at all, the missiles will not be fired; whereas if Mister Collins is right, and we meet the enemy without weapons, Earth will die by reason of our malfeasance.”

  A lot more followed, including high-level top-secret conferences federal and international. In the end, Sven got his missiles, each potent enough to take out a city.

  Over the years, my tongue had been driven back into my throat by high-g ascents in rocket-boosted capsules. I knew it would happen to me again when we would be seeking escape from Sun. Contrariwise, I found that the high beauty of an ascent by shuttle was the relative gradualness of it. Sure, the g’s were high, but not that high. Reasonably comfortable in my hydraulically cushioned seat, facing steep degrees upward but not vertically upward, I could alternate between looking through the windshield with space roaring by and peering at a closed-circuit TV screen which panorama’d my blue-and-white planet as a convexly curved vista of land, sea, and clouds—a vista which broadened as convexity grew, including most of North America, then all of North and some of South America and much of the Atlantic and some of the Pacific.

  Sven and I talked little, we were primarily interested in the aesthetics of the experience—which had never paled even for Sven.

  Wel, in the shuttle behind us, was mainly and sympathetically-sardonically interested in the diminishing significance of passional human animals on Earth.

  Bill, next back, had brought a few portable instruments with him in the cockpit and was taking continual readings on differential plasma-behavior in sixteen cloudy kilometers of troposphere, then another thirty-two cloudless kilometers of stratosphere culminating in a richness of ozone, then thirty-three kilometers of mesosphere eventless except for a couple of meteors which threatened the orbiters as they neared the top of the layer, then eighty-one kilometers of plasma-rich ionosphere with plasma activity thickening in the and E2 Kenelley-Heaviside layers and through the Aurora Borealis region. Bill was confirming the well-known but amusingly queer temperature curve: down from Earth’s early June warmth to sixty below zero Celsius at sixteen kilometers, then up to above zero at forty-nine kilometers, then a zooming increase until beyond a hundred sixty-two kilometers we were headed for a seething 1700 degrees.

  “All space,” Bill had told us, “is filled with ionic plasma; and if you think the concentration is heavy in our ionosphere, wait unt
il we get into the neighborhood of Sun!”

  As for Collins in Shuttle Four, he was watching and auditing activities two million light-years distant; but also, he was melancholy for the shrunken humans of departed Earth.

  Having worked our way upward through the ionosphere (a transit which our orbiters brought off in minimum time, eager to get past that zone of weird instrumental behavior), we inserted ourselves into preliminary staging orbit a thousand kilometers out, freefalling at velocity a bit under twelve thousand kilometers per hour. At that altitude, our horizons extended far beyond the round of Earth: an entire hemisphere dominated our downward visual field. Downward, since we were up, that is, out from our major gravitational center which still was Earth—although, at our orbital velocity, we felt now down-signaling gravity, we were freefalling in our shuttles, we had to hang on to things.

  Our orbital path was from west to east, the direction of Earth’s rotation—chosen so we would be favored, in our preliminary vaulting, by the catapult-action of gravity. We orbited all of Earth in less than two hours; and there was no wobble to our path, our orbit being equatorial. So we kept overtaking and passing chosen points near the equator as those points hurried with Earth’s rotation at a velocity far less than ours; in a matter of minutes, the Amazon was ahead of us, below us, and behind us as we ran out over the Atlantic with the western coast of Gabon looming into view.

  We rested then, after hours of lofting. We ate and drank and eliminated, relearning the old freefall difficulties with such common crud. But we rested only a few hours: much hard work had to be done while we would be coasting in this orbit.

  During the next fourteen days, all of us were bird-flying individuals in space as we got our sun-vehicle sections unloaded from the shuttles and assembled; our missiles would stay aboard shuttle until nearly the end of this. “We” were the five principals, and the ten shuttle pilots and copilots, and two dozen space mechanics, all flitting in space suits with Buck Rogers compressed-air rockets on our backs. (When will the environmentalists challenge us about all the contaminated earth-atmosphere we inject into -hitherto clean space?) A point of intent labor was the final sealing of the weld-seams with Jacobite: the reflecting substance had been applied to all vehicle-segments when they were preassembled earthside, but the seams now welded in space were Achilles’ heels that needed to be protected.