Issue

His love is alchemy; his touch transmutes. I turn to gold at his faintest glance.

“Do I have a mother?” he asks me. He is precocious. Every father thinks his son is special, but I know. His eyelashes are so fine they are almost transparent. His skin is the color of ripe wheat. He is as beautiful as his mother, but more so, because she was so full of fear. She was a creature of shadows, and my boy is all sunlight.

“You did,” I tell him. “But she traded her life for yours.” It is a falsehood, but not quite a lie: technically she traded his life to keep her own, but I cannot tell him this. He has bird bones, a heart like flint. How can I tell my son, Your life was nothing to her, she could not yet imagine you – all she meant to promise was her body. Sell the oil to save the jar, am I right? And she was willing enough to promise something that did not yet exist.

Jude and Immogen float in their ship’s sensorium, holding hands and viewing the Schwarzschild radius stamped on the star field before them. The ring of detoured light surrounds a profound blackness that whispers faintly with Hawking radiation. Jude has pondered this quantum flaw in relativity for a long time, as he has pondered death and love.

He and his wife are human again. They have been through countless modifications, but have returned to their baseline forms for this occasion. They are naked and youthful and imperfect, like they were when they accepted the Spectators into their bodies long ago. Jude quiets his mind and listens for some sign of his Spectator. It is quiet today. Sometimes he can feel Its presence, the strange harmonies of Its alien emotions, but not now.

“Mine sleeps too,” Immogen says. She knew what he was doing, of course. They read each other perfectly after all these millennia.

The Spectators are most noticeable during a suicide attempt, and Jude has not yet ordered the ship to dive. Now that he’s here, he knows an odd sense of finality: if this doesn’t work, nothing will, and he will be compressed by the weight of time into something new. He will become a slavish consumer of meaningless experience. He’ll have no choice. There’s a kind of comfort in that, though not the one he seeks.

“Hawking radiation,” he says.

“Yes,” Immogen replies, a note of husky excitement in her voice. She doesn’t need to say more. Her exhaustive studies have yielded a confident prediction: their attempt will fail. She has always been the scientist, the observer. Jude used to call her the ideal vessel for a Spectator, back when they were capable of lovers’ quarrels. He has long since accepted the strange appetite she built for herself.

A light moan escapes her lips. She’s aroused by the thought of defying death once again. She’s imagining her escape from Einstein’s prison, vacuum fluctuation by vacuum fluctuation. She is possessed of a certain faith in the Spectators, despite her scientific acumen. She believes They will save their hosts from anything the universe has to offer. It is because of this faith that she became what she is. Jude will never understand the universe like she does, but if they don’t die this time, he must come to accept compulsory immortality.

She gasps, her free hand straying toward her sex. The sensorium has picked out a dim red scar on the blackness: a red-shifted starship, apparently frozen in mid-dive. It is not unlike their own, a vessel constructed by immortals. In its own reference frame it will plunge through the event horizon at speed, but for the rest of the universe it must hang there, slowing and dimming.

Many Spectator-hosts have taken The Plunge and faded beyond the long radio wavelengths. None have been heard from again, but as Immogen loves explaining, that doesn’t mean they found repose.

Jude loves his wife, and hates her and fears her. He has watched her climax inside trillion-degree gamma ray bursts. She has enjoyed her beloved petite mort during many brushes with death. She has shaped herself into something that thrives under the Spectator Curse. With her preternatural submission to the Curse, she dominates It. At the same time, she’s gone further than anyone Jude knows in understanding the Spectators.

“We didn’t comprehend what They offered us,” she said once. She tried to describe the universe They came from, Their alternate physics. She and Jude were a thousand years old by then. They were living in an Oort habitat with a tribe of fellow immortals, preparing to leap star-ward. Jude and others were already tired of the universe. They were coming to understand the prison they’d agreed to.

Falling toward Proxima Centauri, the tribe learned that sleep akin to death would bring no relief from the Curse. Their Spectators filled their anesthetized brains with restless fever dreams. Jude hunted shifting labyrinths for his Spectator. He called out to It through the years and was ignored. The Spectators never spoke, even when They first came to human minds with Their Faustian offer.

Jude remembers that wordless proposition clearly.

Like everyone who accepted, he loved life too much to understand it.

 #

“What are you waiting for?” Immogen says.

Jude contemplates the void. “I’m relishing the uncertainty.”

“It is uncertainty that will save us. Of that I’m certain.”

He doesn’t ask Immogen which one of them has embraced life, and which death. They exhausted that semantic game centuries ago.

“You’re going to be disappointed again,” she says. She would have him adapt, like she has. Sometimes Jude must remind himself that his wife is, in fact, operating on a long-term vision. She is more than a sensualist living thrill to thrill. She anticipates their Spectators saving them from heat death, when the time comes–saving them forever. She wants to share that never-ending orgasm with her husband.

Jude can’t commit to her religion just yet. Instead, he hugs her and savors the possibility of losing her.

She writhes against him. “Do it,” she breathes in his ear.

Jude orders the ship to dive, and immediately feels his Spectator react. It emotes a familiar harmonic of titillation and despair, but this time there’s something new: strains of yearning and panic, and something like laughter.

Jude can only hope it’s the omen he’s been waiting for, the raven he’s chased across light-years. He holds his shuddering wife and closes his eyes. One way or another he’s about to change–but for the rest of the universe, he’ll remain pinioned to this moment of ecstatic doubt, fading beyond long radio.

Away up in the heart of the Allegheny mountains, in Pocahontas county, West Virginia, is a beautiful little valley through which flows the east fork of the Greenbrier river. At a point where the valley road intersects the old Staunton and Parkersburg turnpike, a famous thoroughfare in its day, is a post office in a farm house. The name of the place is Travelers’ Repose, for it was once a tavern. Crowning some low hills within a stone’s throw of the house are long lines of old Confederate fortifications, skilfully designed and so well “preserved” that an hour’s work by a brigade would put them into serviceable shape for the next civil war. This place had its battle — what was called a battle in the “green and salad days” of the great rebellion. A brigade of Federal troops, the writer’s regiment among them, came over Cheat mountain, fifteen miles to the westward, and, stringing its lines across the little valley, felt the enemy all day; and the enemy did a little feeling, too. There was a great cannonading, which killed about a dozen on each side; then, finding the place too strong for assault, the Federals called the affair a reconnaissance in force, and burying their dead withdrew to the more comfortable place whence they had come. Those dead now lie in a beautiful national cemetery at Grafton, duly registered, so far as identified, and companioned by other Federal dead gathered from the several camps and battlefields of West Virginia. The fallen soldier (the word “hero” appears to be a later invention) has such humble honors as it is possible to give.

True, more than a half of the green graves in the Grafton cemetery are marked “Unknown,” and sometimes it occurs that one thinks of the contradiction involved in “honoring the memory” of him of whom no memory remains to honor; but the attempt seems to do no great harm to the living, even to the logical.

A few hundred yards to the rear of the old Confederate earthworks is a wooded hill. Years ago it was not wooded. Here, among the trees and in the undergrowth, are rows of shallow depressions, discoverable by removing the accumulated forest leaves. From some of them may be taken (and reverently replaced) small thin slabs of the split stone of the country, with rude and reticent inscriptions by comrades. I found only one with a date, only one with full names of man and regiment. The entire number found was eight.

In these forgotten graves rest the Confederate dead — between eighty and one hundred, as nearly as can be made out. Some fell in the “battle;” the majority died of disease. Two, only two, have apparently been disinterred for reburial at their homes. So neglected and obscure is this campo santo that only he upon whose farm it is — the aged postmaster of Travelers’ Repose — appears to know about it. Men living within a mile have never heard of it. Yet other men must be still living who assisted to lay these Southern soldiers where they are, and could identify some of the graves. Is there a man, North or South, who would begrudge the expense of giving to these fallen brothers the tribute of green graves? One would rather not think so. True, there are several hundreds of such places still discoverable in the track of the great war. All the stronger is the dumb demand — the silent plea of these fallen brothers to what is “likest God within the soul.”

They were honest and courageous foemen, having little in common with the political madmen who persuaded them to their doom and the literary bearers of false witness in the aftertime. They did not live through the period of honorable strife into the period of vilification — did not pass from the iron age to the brazen — from the era of the sword to that of the tongue and pen. Among them is no member of the Southern Historical Society. Their valor was not the fury of the non-combatant; they have no voice in the thunder of the civilians and the shouting. Not by them are impaired the dignity and infinite pathos of the Lost Cause. Give them, these blameless gentlemen, their rightful part in all the pomp that fills the circuit of the summer hills.