DREAMFARER
We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.
The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands
in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak
is because it was out of the way
and served no large commercial purpose.
Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
You must’ve heard. Touchdown took place early this morning on a desolate stretch of the Tharsis Bulge in the shadows of cloud-ringed Mount Olympus. Violent squalls of swirling carbon dioxide had delayed final descent. It took all of my piloting skills and the capsule’s exceptional maneuverability to help maintain the right downward thrust-to-weight ratio for a near-perfect landing.
Bent by gravity, distorted by cosmic rays and electromagnetic waves, sounds of euphoria, distant, almost alien, soon began to crackle on the radio. It was Mission Control. I heard the thunderous applause of a thousand jubilant specialists. Bone-tired and listless, I acknowledged Earth perhaps more tersely than I’d intended. I asked for everyone’s indulgence, turned off the transmitter and surrendered to sleep.
A frozen silence now fills my ears. I’m peering beyond the pockmarked spaceport, through rising gales of pelting sand and dust. Before me, stretches a crumpled terrain the color of anger. Its disfigured visage splits into winding trenches that look like dry riverbeds. Here and there, jagged nickel-iron meteorites protrude from the sandy surface. Water, if it ever existed, has either long since evaporated or is now permanently frozen deep beneath the surface. I’ll know soon enough. To the east, the sky is a rich brassy copper. Farther north it assumes a ruddy hue. Another storm is fast approaching. Brooding, it will erupt with untold fury as invisible demons claw at the tortured landscape and obscure it from view.
What I see of Mars through the porthole, and what I will face tomorrow as I alight on the planet’s surface will best be told in pictures. Cameras have no soul, only eyes. That’s what keeps them honest. They will record the awesome spectacle with poetic unconcern.
What I feel is less easily defined, far more prone to understatement or exaggeration. Feelings, like dreams, are hard to apprehend and just as slippery. I shall not risk distorting them by analyzing them just yet; perhaps when I return to Earth; if I return to Earth. This is Mars, I keep telling myself, the fourth planet from the Sun, an old friend now at last chanced upon face to face.
Sunrise: my first on Mars. Will it be my last? Remote, aloof, no bigger than the moonlit eye of a prairie wolf, the sun sets Olympus Mons’ barren ridges afire, sending a kaleidoscopic scattering of ochre, burnt umber and blood-red into the thin golden sky. Wispy contrails of ice crystals levitate against the forbidding blackness of space. How very strange for a dead planet to be enshrined in vestments of such daunting beauty.
I shut my eyes but a star-studded canopy spreads out against my closed eyelids. This is Mars or else I must be dreaming. Only in a dream can the folly, the arrogance, the deceptive face of reality seem so vivid. Mars? I may as well have journeyed to Venus or mighty Jupiter or enigmatic Saturn or self-effacing Pluto, or some other celestial neighborhood, undiscovered, unsuspected, barely imagined, not unlike the unexplored regions of the psyche, perhaps even like this dream.
Forgive the metaphors, the circuitous twists of thought, the gloomy sophistry of it all. I, who always took pride in the clarity of my reasoning power, I now drown in a vortex of sensations forever crippled by the meagerness of words. How do I paint a point in space? How do I behold the face of God? By surrendering to sightless, speechless slumber? Perchance by dreaming? After all a dream is a voyage to the end of night. But unlike a cruise or the clan’s yearly motorcade to Aunt Bertha’s clambake a dream has no fixed itinerary, no scheduled destination. It just unfolds. And there’s no need to pack.
It is the very nature of such journeys that compels those of us who embark on their gossamer wings to question their significance or merit. What’s the point? Why wander when the old armchair cradles our weary frames and conformity extends its all-embracing arms the better to receive us? We are apt to discover on arrival at some unscheduled port of call, as I did on Mars’ barren shores, that there may have been no good reason to make the trek in the first place. For when all is said and done, at the very end of some aimless expedition, worn out and confused, we will sadly conclude that some dreams are just too close for comfort, some dreams are just not meant to be.
So I wake up.
Opalescent moonbeams filter through my bedroom’s lace curtains and I see shadows dancing on the wall. Could dawn be far behind? On the short ride to the launch pad, past Building D where tomorrow’s dreamers train, I’m struck by the notion that knowledge is rewarded with an ever-widening chasm of ignorance and superstition.
Today is the first day of winter -- December 21, 2012. The sun is aligned with the plane of our galaxy. At its center, the gigantic black hole is as black and elusive as ever. Earth’s magnetic field has not changed. The only calamities recorded on this fateful date echo man’s bestial cruelty to man. Apocalypse has been big business for 2,000 years or more. From ancient Persia to Daniel and Enoch and Habakkuk and Ezekiel and the deranged author of Revelation and the death-obsessed Maya, deceivers and impostors and self-deluded mystics acting under the pretense of divine inspiration have hoodwinked the multitudes and driven them to act like lunatics.
As I ease myself into the pilot’s seat, I tell myself that future explorers, however vast their knowledge might be, will bear burdens of ignorance immensely heavier than my own. But once aloft, their sails will hug the wind and ride the tempest. For, they too shall have dared to go beyond their dreams as prophets of doom, foiled again, rewrite their contemptible scripts.
THE VAMPIRE STATE
(First published in the December 1991 issue of OMNI Magazine)
Like flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.
William Shakespeare -- King Lear
A rank, sulfurous halo hangs low over Manhattan. Driven by icy gusts, tentacle-like fingers of swirling amber gases swoop toward the slime-slick pavement, probing deep into yawning doorways, arcades and atria, seeking out the specters that lurk within their drafty expanse.
It’s Christmas Eve in the Big Apple. Chiming in the distance in pious unison, ethereal and uninvolved, church bells summon the faithful. Chiming? No, tolling -- a lugubrious knell for a swarming, moribund metropolis, for the one thousand and one night creatures that stalk its streets, for the living dead I get paid to hunt down and kill.
It all came together half a century ago or more when politicians, anxious to save face and give voters the impression that justice was being served, let the long simmering rancor, the restive hatred burst like an ugly abscess. Violence, sporadic and extemporaneous at first, grew bolder and deadlier with each secret municipal emergency meeting.
No one complained. Not a single cry of horror was ever heard. It was too late. Justice -- like truth -- the stronger of two conflicting arguments, justice, the paradox suspended on the tip of a sword, put on its most fearsome face. The Lady took off the blindfold and winked lasciviously at the oligarchs. And the carnage began.
‘Tis the season of all folly, falalalala … and the blood of the young, thinner than water, cheaper than hogwash, coalesces with the putrid rivulets of swill and excrement that hug the curb and cascade into the storm drains.
Torn by crime, soaring unemployment, triple-digit inflation, homelessness, merciless slashes in social services, suffocated by Orwellian federal statutes, America’s big cities are putrefying and crumbling like the