James Eloi Trosclair - Jet - was delighted with the weightlessness. It eased minor aches of arthritis and rheumatism he had forced himself to ignore and forget years before. The new comfort proved to him that pain is never really forgotten. He hoped it would give him a new rapport with his spirit associates who were nonchalant about whizzing through air. Aside from weightlessness, the sights of the transfer were most effective. The colors and brilliance of space were magnificent, captivating, not at all the deadly blackness he had imagined.
Jet was the only passenger on the transfer vessel. For an elastic instant, he drifted in space like some cosmic pod, alone. There was only the tenuous thread of electrical impulses from Western Coalition Space Armada/Research Carrier Conqueror to guide him, instruct him. Via video cube came the standard officer's briefing. Enlisted men's cubes were attuned to cornea movement, so they couldn't escape the lecture. Jet was free to gaze through the titanium skeleton at the moons and whirling asteroids, comets and just-discovered constellations of stars more powerful than the sun.
When he looked back at the cube, politely on hold, a clicking buzz began again the litany of the Conqueror's crew. Commodore Jonathan Martinez-Guzman. The skipper was a Surlandian. The Surlandians had dominated W.C. Space Armada since the formation of the coalition after the Hemispheric Wars.
Martinez looked the part. His appearance exuded mature masculine robustness. The kind of look they used to call macho during the Chicano migrations. His service record matched his image, scientifically as well as militarily. Jet shuddered, goose-bump frissons for what the commander of the Conqueror must have witnessed during his short years in the cosmos. Jet managed not to think of it. With age, his ability not to think of things increased steadily. Now, in his white-bearded period, he was quite good at it.
He was welcomed aboard the carrier with the usual VIP quasi-military courtesies. With artificial gravity, his newly re-acquainted aches returned and it was necessary to forget them again as soon as possible. During the Initial Interview, in fact.
"But we frankly don't know why you're here," Capt. Hans Marcantel, Jet's 'burrow' commander said. They lived in burrow-like compartments along the skin of the carrier. A 'burrow commander' was like a mayor.
"I'm here," Jet said, "because I have contacts in Washington and Brasilia."
Marcantel reddened a little. He was very young and ambitious and knew that Jet was somehow influential. Jet did not supply a soothing remark.
"Yes, sir ... but what I mean is .... Well, sir. You don't really have any ... uh ...."
"'Qualifications.' The word you want is 'qualifications'."
"Well, yes, sir. I mean, your aero-dynamics...."
"I'm not here in a technical capacity," Jet said.
Marcantel paused. It was likely he had never considered any qualification other than technical.
"Well, sir, everybody else on this ship has agreed to a mission of three generations. They've even agreed to have their reproductive enzymes altered to insure technical aptitude of offspring ...."
"You flatter me, sir," Jet said with mock formality. "Perhaps the reputation for sexual prowess established by my generation of Cajuns has been a bit overstated. In my case, I assure you, the question is quite moot."
Marcantel did not 'get it', as they used to say. He seemed stunned. Lips parted slightly, Jet longed for just one fly to crawl inside. A sense of humor had become quite unappreciated in recent years. Everything was sterile.
"You know about the speed cube?" he said instead.
"Tell me again," Jet said.
The young man went through it and Jet translated in his head, scaling it down from one strata of technolese into another until it reached his own. Where the cosmos bends, whether at the edge or near the swirling center, the Conqueror would be whipped into a speed never before reached by Man nor Man's devices, except for the unmanned probes which had already been swept out of contact, into some uncharted pocket of time or distance.
This was the real test of Einstein's Time-Distance-Rate equation. They were to travel on an autobahn of speed and distance through space and into ages not yet born or millennia already forgotten in the age of Moses. Not only had the young no sense of humor, they had lost all sense of poetry. The explanation was dry.
"Yes, I understand," Jet said simply, dead pan.
The burrow commander cleared his throat.
"Well … you're a parapsychologist, I see by the ... uh .…"
"Might as well know now, son. I'm a ghost hunter. It don't do no good for a tattoo artist to say he's a skin illustrator."
"Yes, well, do you find many … uh … ghosts?"
Already, surreptitiously, the interviewer was going through his dossier for the psychological profile.
"Armies of them. Legions. Where I come from, the bayou country of Louisiana, we manufactured ghosts for hundreds of years. Indians killing one another. Europeans killing the Indians and getting killed. Europeans killing each other. Africans, Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese. You name it. Bombs, disasters, famine, pestilence, death and war."
Jet paused but, seeing the effect had not set in, he continued.
"Yellow fever, malaria, cancer, lots of folks with old chemical money getting haunted by ghosts of cancer victims right now. It's a kind of vogue, a fashion. Add to that all the turmoil of any private human life and you get a lot of ghosts, son. No doubt about it. One thing about it, though, no matter how many ghosts you create … like with one great swing of the sickle … the Thermal Wars or the Great Aleutian Slip … most folks still don't learn how to see them. That's what I do, Burrow Commander Marcantel, I see ghosts. Now that you've seen from my Personal Profile that I'm sane, I'll be taking my leave. You see, son, it's just that I'm elderly. I'm an elderly man who's used to being in the generation of majority. We told the world what to do when we were young, middle-aged and now old. This carrier's reversed the order of my generational preference. I'm going to bed."
After he got over the space lag, he was more tractable. In fact, he found the crew delightful. He was a popular man with the young ladies, in a fatherly way, of course. Jet tried not to be disappointed.
Getting acquainted over dinner in the skipper's cabin, Martinez teased Jet about it in a polite, Latin way. Jet was frankly impressed.
Martinez was a mature yet still physically vibrant man. He moved with a catlike swift power even in the tiniest of matters, cutting steak, for instance, or stirring coffee.
But what was most impressive was his Latin way of weaving interesting and pointedly trivial dinner conversation. From soup to brandy, Martinez never violated the hospitality of unhurried and unworried thought. It was Jet who brought it up. He didn't want to miss the chance.
"Yes," Martinez said thoughtfully, a dimple of amusement in one brown cheek. His features were robust, a man ready to smile. "Marcantel told me of his inquiry into your... ah ... profession."
They were at ease in big simulated leather chairs, the entire Commander's Bay open to them, the glittering, fiery, opaque and translucent glory of a charted but unexplored heaven.
"You don't ask questions, do you?" Jet asked. Jet had lived the Age of Wonders. He was more amused by human interaction.
"I am a soldier," Martinez said, right hand on his chest in mock self-pride, left bringing to his lips the brandy-laced coffee. When Jet said nothing, he sipped and smiled. Then he set his cup down.
"I am a soldier who knows a man who has something to say," he said. The Caribbean accent was like the artificial French once popular in the Cajun country. A sort of verbal ethnic badge.
"I feel strong movement of spirits, here," Jet said.
"Good. I like spirits," Martinez said, lifting the cup.
Jet smiled. It was a tired old joke.
"Sorry," Martinez said. "Well. I am a soldier and I believe you were put on this mission for some reason by the High Command. So you're welcome to all the ghosts aboard; although, since we are the first human beings in this region of existence, I do not think you will find many of them."
Jet frowned. The effect was opposite.
"Perhaps we've escaped some kind of cosmic restraint," he said.
Martinez leaned forward.
"We've escaped them all," he said slowly, deliberately, eyes glinting like polished amber. "The dark of the moon, professor, where witches play."
Then Martinez chuckled amiably. Finally, a sense of humor and a Latin one at that. Perhaps it was a privilege of command. The Latin sense of humor had always been facile for Jet, it seemed so much akin to the Cajun humor which nourished him as a boy.
Martinez had that rare ability to convey technical terms in language understandable to an automobile-age relic like Jet. 'V-Zone', for instance. After that dinner in Martinez's cabin, Jet heard it often and always assumed that Martinez had coined the phrase and that the 'V' meant velocity. He was only half-right. Martinez had invented the term.
There was a change aboard ship, a sort of fretful giddiness that overtook the crew as they approached the V-Zone. With no adjustment of the power plant, the gigantic ship picked up speed. Captain Marcantel, who had lost that early stiff reserve, explained they were being swept into a cosmic vortex. The really revolutionary change in speed would come abruptly, with a firing of re-entry rockets.
"In twenty earth hours, we'll be a thousand years into history and deeper into the unknown reaches of space than any human being has ever before ventured."
"You sound un 'ti peu scared, son," Jet said.
"That means a little bit, doesn't it?"
Jet nodded.
"I'm a lot scared. "
"Fear's a natural thing, son, healthiest emotion there is, particularly in circumstances like ours."
"I'm not afraid of the mission. I have confidence in our technology."
"What is it, then?" Jet asked, setting himself for listening. Marcantel hesitated.
Jet waited him out.
"I probably shouldn't be telling you this ...."
"I've got the highest security clearance, son," Jet said.
'That's why I am telling you this."
"You ain't told me nothing yet, son," Jet said.
"Duty transfers."
"Pardon?"
"Wholesale duty transfers. I've seen nothing like it. He's surrounding himself with Surlandians."
Jet sympathized with Martinez.
"Man likes to have his own kind 'round him," Jet said. Marcantel shook his head.
"This is something else. I'm a navigator and he's got me assigned to staple maintenance."
"That's an important job. Napoleon said an army travels on its stomach."
"Funny you should say that," Marcantel said.
"What?"
"About Napoleon."
"What do you mean?"
Marcantel paused.
"Nothing," he said.
Jet spent the rest of the evening wishing for the regular rotation of the sun. He thought he must be dreaming when he smelled incense and honeysuckle. At his house in the Atchafalaya Basin years ago, incense and honeysuckle had come to him on a breeze one night when ....
Jet raised to an elbow. He was not sleeping. The scent was all around him. He was swathed in it.
What he saw was like the tinkle of little bells. A sprinkling of stardust, a constellation in his sleeping cubicle. The glittering outline of female hips. A leg in a tight dress sequined with whispers. A hidden light lit the sparkle. The beautiful lady Eleanor. All the lost decades but a whisper, but a sigh.
No voice, though. And no embrace of wind and passion and fury. But she was with him. Jet lay back against the synthetic mattress, inhaling the last of the fading scent and falling, finally, to sleep.
He awoke to a ship in a state of excitement. They were moving into the vanguard of creation. A first human glimpse at eternity.
The actual V-Zone penetration did not come until two hours into what Jet still persisted in calling night, the time he was supposed to sleep. He was gazing out of the porthole when it happened. The constellations changed abruptly, like a china dish or a license plate flipped around. There was a tiny instant of speed and then the cosmos was simply reordered.
In the 'morning' the porthole bay was closed. The bully-com was attuned to the brain wave frequency of wakefulness, so the announcement came, automatic and immediate. Complications. An unexpected meteor. Battle stations. Emergency conflagration. The video system demonstrated with a mockup. Essentially, it meant that each life-support corridor was sealed off, like wax blocking each section of a beehive.
"An' duh beat go on."
It was Angelo Cusumano, who for years had haunted Jet's 1968 Cadillac.
"Angelo!"
"Issa one inna same, Angelo Cusumano," Angelo said.
Jet could see him, now. The little jaunty hat, the loud clothes, the bullet hole over his heart.
"You left the Cadillac? You?"
"Uh ... you gotta be 'bouta hunnert thousand years inna future, ri' now. An' ainta no whaddya call interference way out here. Ainta no more 'Families' down dere. Ainta nothin. Hey! Da dude, bossaman, he a whaddya call ... capo di guerra ... uh ... a war bossaman. Watchim. I gotta go. Mama mia, she say hello. Ciao."
"Wait, what did you mean ...?"
"He means, sir, the admiral... whatever he's called … commander, he's an unprincipled individual."
Jet whirled in the darkened cubicle. He had already recognized the voice. Now he fondly watched materialize the blue kepi and uniform, the brass buttons and combat belt with sidearm. Lt. Jordon Fredericks, Fleet Marine Force, United States Marine Corps.
"Lieutenant," Jet said, looking into the face which formed from the sterile darkness as eager and young and idealistic as ever, "you're supposed to be … uh … billeted at Arlington."
"Much obliged for the transfer, sir," the ghost said. "Truth is I volunteered for this special assignment. They call it TDY these days, or at least what used to be these days. Thousands of years back, now."
"What the hell's going on?"
"Not at liberty to say, sir. It amounts to war information. Divided loyalties, sir. Most I can say, sir, is this… this Martinez, he's on what they call an advance ...."
"Who calls it this?" Jet asked hurriedly, but the vision ended. The cubicle door sliding open dispelled it. Marcantel came through.
Jet was about to demand his privacy when Marcantel held up a hand in urgent plea for silence. He held a shiny instrument with many bristling appendages. He set it on the floor. It activated with a tiny whirr that spread to every corner with a soft, blue light.
"Now we can talk," Marcantel said. "I designed this secretly, as soon as I knew Martinez was to command. It jams the immediate audio/visual devices. I can also get access to most ports … not all passages or modules… not the command module, at least not without detection. I want you to brace yourself. I'm about to show you ...."
"Earth," Jet said.
"Who are you?" Marcantel asked. "Well, it doesn't matter. You are the only one who can stop this."
A penlight pointed at the porthole, opened a kind of space-camouflaged screen to a ball of earth not tinted blue and green. Instead it had molted to a gaseous sickly orange-yellow, clouds dung-colored.
"Look," Marcantel said bitterly. "See what's become of our great mission of discovery! Damn!"
Jet, sickened, wished the porthole closed. It closed. The two men exchanged surprised glances. Jet smiled like a child. He wished the porthole open. It opened!
"Are you doing that?" Marcantel asked.
"With a little help," Jet said.
"That'll come in handy."
"Hah," Jet said, noncommittal Cajun. "Tell me what he's doing, this Martinez of Surlandia."
It wasn't a new story. Jet saw it as one of the oldest in human history, dating from the discovery of tools. When it was the Spanish overrunning the Americas, the historians dubbed it The Black Legend. Now technology had elevated that nightmare to the cosmos. Martinez was conquering Earth ad Infinitum, descending out of time and space always with superior weaponry, picking times of weakness. A perpetual entrada, mercenary penetration.
"Are you with us?"
"Yes," Jet said.
"Our only hope is to jettison him while we're in the V-Zone. He's got Surlandians in control everywhere; but, without their leader, I don't think they'll offer much resistance. Especially if we can open the burrows. I have the technology to take back the ship."
"Why do you need me?"
"Until I saw your magic, I thought only because yours is the one personality imprint that can get into the command module. Incredible as it seems, you and Martinez have exactly the same components. The sums add up to different wholes, though."
"I wish that nun that taught me 'rithmatic was here right now," Jet said dryly. "When do we reach the V-Zone?"
"In eight STU."
"Eight Space Time Units, ainh? Twenty-four hours."
Marcantel smiled.
"You're learning," he said.
For twenty-four hours, Jet meditated, concentrated, readied himself. Then he walked through the corridors of the ship at will, opening the frozen passages like a pirogue sliding gently through the mist. Martinez turned from the command module display, smiling as Jet entered.
"Ah, yes, the purveyor of phantoms," he said in that accent rich as thick coffee with rolling R's and dark, deep vowels. "I've been waiting for you. I knew it was only a matter of time before they somehow got you to that door, but I expected you to enter with a mob of Christian-minded North Americans. You are all alone. Can you hope to kill me alone?"
"I don't hope to kill you, Martinez," Jet said. "It's hardly in my line of work. I want to show you the wonders of the universe."
Martinez laughed loudly, laughter uncontrolled. The eyes shone with triumph but the face was robust, healthy. Not the face of a madman, but one who would have been the same, sane or mad.
Jet, too, laughed. He was suddenly very happy. His lady appeared, the lady Eleanor. She appeared at the shoulder of Martinez. The Surlandian did not see her, but Jet laid eyes for the first time on his great love, a love that had spanned not merely the years but centuries, epochs, ages.
Instantly, she was before him. She smiled a bright, red, oxbow-shaped smile. Her fair hair was held back in Saxon tresses, a jeweled band about her forehead. The sheer fabric of stardust clung to her body. Golden amulets embraced her arm. Then her image darted to each part of the command module, each apparition more beautiful than before, differently dressed, differently coiffured, the mirth increasing on the sensual face.
"Look," Jet said on impulse, sweeping his arm to the darkest shadows. There, Eleanor remained, bathed in a light softer, more golden than sunlight. She was tall, very blonde. Her svelte body was clad in a clinging gown of gossamer bound at the deep indentation of her narrow waist by a wide, jeweled belt that draped softly from her hips down the center to the hem and platinum sandals. Jet felt no urge to speak, her blue eyes glittered so.
Martinez fired a bolt of laser into her, ricocheting on the impregnable titanium behind her without a scorch to the delicate weave. When he turned the laser gun on Jet, it smoldered, glowed, caught fire in his hand. The commander dropped it, held his wrist in pain.
Eleanor came to Jet. Slowly. Borne to him on fresh flower scents. They kissed. Youth breathed into him. Revitalized, they entered the V-Zone and hurtled through the centuries like seconds ticking on a timing watch.
Now others were with them. The fierce, black, warrior-prince-slave-visionary Long-Spear-Thrower, dripping with Atchafalaya magic. Osh Ha'tchna and the others of the Men-Altogether-Red. Colonel Sellers and his Tunica. Attakapas. Spaniards of five centuries. Gabriel still fleeing the determined Emmeline. Yellow fever victims weeping blood. Cadaverous cancer casualties. Soldiers of a dozen wars, a hundred allegiances. Adventurers, coureurs de bois, pirates and privateers, peasants, lords, masters and human chattel.
They overflowed the bay and stood outside against the darkening secret of the universe. Now Martinez did seem insane. With his uninjured hand, he jammed at the instrument panel. He glanced through the bay in time to see the lighthouse of Sabine Pass sailing like the rocket ship it resembled and the crawling, drunken Emma Laffite dragging useless legs across the cosmos.
"Dios!" Martinez shouted, "Goya's witches!"
"Commander," Jet insisted calmly. He felt his virility restoring. "The wedding party has assembled. Please do the honors."
"What?"
"Marry us, of course. Captains of ships used to be able to do it. I'm sure out here it would be fine. Marry us and we'll be going home."
"Home?" Martinez asked suspiciously.
"Yes," Jet said. He put an arm around Eleanor and felt her solid, living warmth, the curve of her shoulder and hip. "Trou Noir, Black Hole."
"I join you together," Martinez said immediately, like playing a trump in bourré. At that instant, the command module separated with the ignition of the booster rockets. It became a worm descending a tree-borne cocoon on an invisible, silken thread. Martinez jammed all his fingers, scorched or not, at the levers and buttons, but it did no good. The irreversible had been activated. Destiny more lasting than history hurtled toward them.
The blue lights of the power boosters set up a swirling surge against the sparkling white-water of the universe. Swept into the final frontier by the current of creation, they spun and whirled in cosmic winds. Drawn irrevocably, inevitably into the deepest matrix of being. Existence's great, black hole. Le Trou Noir.