by Brian Stableford
The house where I was born stood on a cliff-top far above an ocean shore. I grew up with the sound of waves and the taste of spray. I spent long hours watching the sailing ships making their slow and graceful progress along the skyline. They never came close. There was no harbor within thirty miles of the house.
My mother called me Malachi, and surnamed me Fagan, after my father. It wasn’t a comfortable name to bear amongst the insular, xenophobic people who were our neighbors. They all remembered my father, although none of them had known him well, and they kept the rumors and the legends in constant circulation within our small community, so that my name was a permanent stigma. I couldn’t understand why, because my father was long gone by the time I was old enough to have remembered him, and my mother was careful to see that the malicious talk never reached my ears. It wasn’t until I was old enough to work, and to earn a certain degree of independence, that I began to hear about Captain Hawker Fagan.
He had lived on many worlds before he came to mine. I could track the course by which he had come in the stars that shone in the sky by night. A second chain of starlight delineated the direction of his going. There was no shortage of people to tell me the names of the stars and the things that he was rumored to have done there.
The local people took a particular interest in Hawker Fagan, because he was the only living legend which was ever likely to come close to them. They enjoyed some tiny fraction of his notoriety, and they looked at me—his son—with fascinated repulsion. I was something not quite of their world. A part of my identity belonged out in the stars, in the strange modern mythology which had grown up around such men as Leander A Chara, Falcon Smith, Stephen Stranger—and Hawker Fagan.
They couldn’t tell how much of the legend was true and how much false, and nor could I—but they didn’t want to know; it made no difference to their narrow, futile lives. To me, though, the truth was important and I didn’t want it confused with lies and fancies. All through my adolescence and my early manhood I carried the idea of one day being able to follow the trail that my father had left in the sky, in order find the truth, and to find him. It grieved me that I couldn’t remember his face or the sound of his voice. It disappointed me that none of the men I knew could describe him. To them, all strangers looked alike, and it was only in the quality of their names that there was any meaningful difference.
Only my mother could talk about Hawker Fagan in any genuinely knowledgeable fashion, and I could never be sure how much trust I could safely place in her memories. She loved to talk about him, but not in the same awestruck way that the others did. She hadn’t known him intimately for more than a few weeks, but she talked about him as if he had spent many years by her side.
She told me about his charm and his beauty. For her, the important thing about Hawker Fagan had been his charisma. He had been an idealization of her faint, flimsy daydreams. In her eyes, he was forever strong, forever kind. He was simple and understanding. She couldn’t see that all she retained was a frail, colorless image of a man who must have been so much more—but she was a contented daughter of a contented people. She didn’t have the imagination, or the capacity, to be unhappy.
I grew up to believe that my mother and all of her kind were too shallow to have seen even a fraction of what there was to see in Hawker Fagan. I always knew and felt that I would have to go out to the stars before the name could take on the least significance, but I dared not hurry. I was all that my mother had left of the one love of her life, and I loved her too much to take it away from her. So I lived and worked with her people for long years, while my heart was always reaching out to the silver roads in the night sky.
It was a good life, in its way. The sea was never harsh or angry, the fields were fertile and the climate calm. We lived largely without hate, and there was never any hint of anguish or the bearing of grudges. I was very much like those people, I suppose, while I shared their livelihood, but they and I were equally enthusiastic to make certain that I could never be one of them. I was always isolated, always different, always the son of another kind of man.
My mother died when I was twenty-four years old. I don’t know exactly what it was that killed her. She had a cancer, I believe, but I think that she was also sickened with loneliness and a lingering contamination of other-worldliness. Perhaps she knew how badly I needed to go into deep space while I still had some sort of a chance to find my father, and perhaps she wanted me to make that pilgrimage, more than either of us realized.
I watched her fade away into the personal darkness of her painless dying and although she made it easy for us both, I shed a good many tears during the last few days. Then I made haste to sell the house, and the land attached to it, in order that I might buy my way on to a starship. I would have preferred, before I left, to set a light to the house in which I had been born and lived, and watch it burn— but that would not have been practical. Even so, when I left the cliff-top, I left nothing tangible behind me. There was no longer anyone there that I loved, and no property to which I could ever return.
I cast away my worldly identity to become a wanderer, like my father: a creature of the vast emptiness of space. It seemed to me to be the only thing that I could do—the only interpretation I could put upon the purpose of my life.
In the slum that surrounded the spaceport, where I lived while I waited for a berth I could afford, I found a human wreck who actually remembered Hawker Fagan. The old man was maddened by addiction to some kind of alien poison, and dying of half a dozen different parasites and diseases. No one else would go near him to give him water and food—but the quality of his remembrance was worth more to me than all the insipid chatter that had circulated around my home because, whatever he might have been reduced to by the time I fond him, when that man had known Hawker Fagan, he had been a spaceman—a real man.
I helped him to live long enough to defeat his sickness and clean him of most of his parasites, and even managed to get him on to one more ship, bound for one more world, where his addiction would undoubtedly drive him to another filthy death in another filthy slum. Perhaps it was no great kindness to put one last turn on the thread of his life, but it was all that I could do to make my presence felt in his span of existence, and I hope that I gave him something more than a few more days of misery.
The Hawker Fagan he had known—or, at least, the Hawker Fagan he chose to depict—had been a cruel and brutal individual who had spent years hopping from world to world in a tiny, filthy ship, which devoured the living flesh of its crews with radiation and time-distortion. He talked about “Captain Fagan” as if he had lived in close intimacy the man, sharing more than his ship and his landfalls. He painted that Captain Fagan as a pirate, a killer, a hero, a demon and a demigod, and himself as a shadow of all those personalities. In his mind, he and Fagan had shared a long and incoherent tale of adventure and suspense, which was so dramatic as to be obviously fictitious. He wasn’t lying, though—I think I could be sure of that. His memory was obviously playing him false, but it could only twist, not create.
His shattered mind sometimes made sarcastic mockery of his friendship with Captain Fagan, making their exploits into a humiliating farce of bombast and superheroism, but there was a reality somewhere in the disjointed account—a reality of action, violence, strife, misery and occasional triumph—and in the tragic end to which the tale had brought its teller, there was also terror and despair. I felt that it gave me a taste and a touch of the real Hawker Fagan, albeit blurred by a crippled mind. The man had flown on Hawker Fagan’s ship—and had lived to fly others.
I found no one else on my own world who could give me any account of my father, though. They had all passed on, in one way or another.
The stars beckoned. I bought a crewman’s berth on an ultraship, and encountered deep space and deep time. The experience alone was enough to give me new perspective on my quest for Captain Fagan. I had imagined that the empty vastness of deep space would make me feel tiny and humble, but Ultra was quite unlike anything I could have imagined. Ultra isn’t empty. Ultra is full—filled with power and fear. Ultra liberates the mind from the body; it gives a mind room to expand, to change and to mature. Return to space from Ultra gives you claustrophobia; space is a cage made of vacuum, locking you inside your tiny skull. World-dwellers can’t understand that, although they understand well enough that hardened and habitual starmen are a different breed, alien to their own.
I learned very quickly why it is that so many ships go into Ultra and never come out. I began to understand why star wanderers are very special men.
I obtained passage on a number of ships, always as crew, never as a “passenger”, despite the fact that the pay was sometimes high enough for one long haul to pay for two or three sleep-rides. To me, as to most crewmen, there was no difference between a “passenger” and an item of cargo. Passengers had destinations; I didn’t. I wanted to share the way of life that had long been Hawker Fagan’s, at least in some small measure. I didn’t want to travel wrapped in a cocoon, deeply asleep, with my brain tenderly preserved from all the stress and strain of Ultra, as well as its exotic radiations.
I worked one ship, the Lady Helen, alongside an engineer named Corelli who had once nursed a drive for Captain Fagan—but that fraction of his memory related to the Captain’s better days, in a cleaner, faster ship which leaked hardly any radiation and damped the time-distortions to a tolerable level. Corelli’s story was not one of triumph and bravado in the face of adversity; such horror as there was in the account hadn’t been shared between Fagan and his men, but inflicted by the one upon the others.
Corelli told me how my father loved to take his ship too close to the corona of a blue sun, hugging a tight orbit until men began to drop because of heat prostration—and all for no reason. Because, he quoted, the stars were there. He told me about the Captain Fagan who liked to explore the caves of dead planets drifting between the stars, looking for the living organisms that their deep, lukewarm cores sometimes still sheltered—the deadly, desperate organisms that had reached the end of their evolutionary path, which maimed and destroyed everything that came near, in a futile attempt to prove their immortality and invincibility.
The engineer also gave me second-hand accounts of Hawker Fagan’s duels with hyperspatial storms still raging in the chaotic skies where gaseous nebulae had imploded or stars had slipped through the fabric of time into other universes. Captain Fagan, it was said, had sometimes done the impossible, and ridden out time-storms while the memory-fed nightmares and the echoes of Ultra had destroyed the minds of his crewmen. Corelli, of course, couldn’t vouch for the truth of such tales personally, but he claimed that they fitted the character of the Hawker Fagan that he had known: the man who had no reasons for what he did; Death’s tormentor and tempter; the man who had to show how brave and indestructible he was, and keep on showing it in every possible way at every possible opportunity.
Corelli, too, had survived expeditions not unlike those he had attributed to Fagan. Ultra led many men to such extravagances—but the single-minded fanaticism of Captain Fagan was something that Corelli had never encountered in any other man. Captain Fagan was his hero, because had survived, where hundreds of men had died or lost their minds. Whenever the engineer pronounced the name of “Captain Fagan” there were shadows of fear and awe in his eyes and in his voice—and yet, he said, Captain Fagan was never afraid, and never awestruck.
On another world, three years after my mother had died, I found another woman who had loved him. She was not like my mother. My mother had been shadow-like and delicate. This woman was self-assertive and strong. Her love had not lingered, but had been neatly packed away and carefully isolated the day my father had left her, forgotten unless and until the need and opportunity came to revive it. She claimed that what she told me contained nothing but the truth—perhaps not the whole truth, but truth uncontaminated by rumors, lies and legends. She said that Hawker Fagan was simply mad. She said that he had lost his own identity, and was therefore as careless and diffident in the way he dealt with his own fate as the stars were themselves in their dealings with microbial mankind. He lived in a whirlwind of irrational fervor and fury. He destroyed objects, people and relationships with equal randomness and passion.
I wondered how it was possible for her to have loved a man such as she described, but she was far more cautious in discussing her own motives than is describing his lack of hem. She talked about my father dispassionately and clinically, as if she had known him well, and had thought about him a great deal since, even though she claimed to have stopped thinking about him as soon as he had left her. She gave the impression of having analyzed him minutely and interpreted him assiduously, but I could sense something in her that she dared not reveal. She was keeping secrets from herself. There were depths in Hawker Fagan that she had never even glimpsed.
The next man I found who had something to contribute to my quest had been a star wanderer himself—a man who had once had some aspiration to match my father: to be accumulated in legends and to leave his name in the minds of lesser men like a signature. There was no lingering proof of his course through life, though. He was a failure. Nobody knew his name as they knew the name of Richard Orpheus or King Fury or Sigor Belle Yella. Nobody remembered the things he had done. No one would ever write novels or compose song-cycles about him. It was simply not that he had done too little, but rather that he had not done it in the right way. He used up too much effort in his exploits, and had shown too little flair.
“It’s almost impossible consciously to ensnare the attention of legend-mongers,” he told me, “because they’re firm in the belief that men can only have greatness thrust upon them. Fame can’t be earned, in their way of thinking—it has to be won in a different way, by means of gambling against all odds.”
He wasn’t a bitter man, though; he still had hope, even though he knew what he was and how little chance he had of becoming anything more. I liked him, and I believed him to be as honest as circumstances permitted him to be. Other men in his position might have been forgiven a little foolishness, and their accounts might have been contaminated with wholly understandable fantasy, but I thought that I could accept what that man told me without too many reservations. He told me a little about Hawker Fagan’s inner needs, especially the need that he had to absorb everything he could from his encounters with reality and unreality alike—the need to listen and to hear, to touch and to feel, to look and to see, to search and to find.
I knew even then how rare it is for a man to accept even a tiny fraction of his environment. “Most men are cowards,” I told him, in return for his own confidences, “desperately afraid of their opportunities and the consequences of their most insignificant actions. They lock themselves away within themselves, and will not see what is immediately outside them, let alone what there in the wilderness of Ultra. They aren’t interested in truth, in reality, in understanding. They seek only to live in pious peace with the power lurking in our souls. They search for the safe bliss of ignorance rather than the fearsome freedom of personality—and perhaps they’re wise to hide from the wholeness of the universe, and of themselves within it. They are, after all, small men, microbial men. But men like Hawker Fagan are more than that, and even men like you and me might be more, if only we could find the trick of it.”
The failed star wanderer thought that I was too self-confident, and too ambitious. He tried to show me the gulf that existed, and always would exist, between my father and myself—but I wasn’t convinced. Hawker Fagan, I knew, had not been content to be a microbial man. Malachi, his loyal son, could not be content with it either.
“Can a failure like you judge anyone else’s chances of success?” I asked him, in order that I would not have to share his doubt. In any case, his mere existence seemed to be proof of Hawker Fagan’s greatness. Every man and woman that had been left in the wake of Captain Fagan’s passing seemed to have glimpsed some aspect of his enormous presence. They had looked up to him, and had viewed him from a distance. The failed star wanderer had understood what he was trying to be and do, but not how or why—and it was the latter incapacity that disqualified him from passing judgment on me.
The trail went on. I wasn’t alone in following it. There was a black angel, from a world called Inferno, who crossed my path three times—too often for our meetings to be called coincidence. He never mentioned my father, but angels never talk about their intended victims. The angel’s name was Gabriel Hart, and although he had been born human he had gladly forsaken his humanity in order to become an agent of an alien justice that no human could understand. He had nothing to do with law—he wasn’t a policeman or a judge, or an executioner—but merely a servant of an alien ideal that I couldn’t pretend to understand.
I tried to talk to Hart about my father, but he was perpetually evasive. I was afraid of him, at first, determined to tell him nothing which might assist him in his search for Hawker Fagan, but I came to realize that such an attitude was ridiculous. There was nothing I could do that might hinder a black angel in the pursuit of justice. Eventually, I conceived a certain fascination for Hart, which magnified him to superhuman proportions. I couldn’t like him, though, because I was obliged to fear him. I began to fear that his very existence might be a kind of curse upon my quest, a premonition of its failure.
And yet, the quest seemed to proceed as well as might be expected. As the years and the worlds went by, I found more and more clear indications of Hawker Fagan’s recent presence. It wasn’t simply that there were people who remembered him, and more clearly, but that the worlds he had visited retained more of him. The impressions that he left on the course of events were deeper and clearer. I wasn’t forced to deal solely in distant and unreliable memories. I found houses in which he’d lived. I found broken, abandoned ships in which he’d flown. I found the stains of his sweat and his blood. I found things he had written and I saw the consequences of crimes that he’d committed. I dealt less often with his admirers than with his victims. I even found his children: my half-brothers and my half-sisters. In none of them could I find any hint of familiarity. None of them looked like me. There was no distinctive feature that they shared between themselves. I remembered all their faces, but there was nothing that I could sort out of a composite image of those faces that could tell me what Hawker Fagan might actually look like.
The other children were all younger than me, of course. One of the older boys—he was sixteen, perhaps, or a little less—wanted to join me in my quest, but I could see that it was only a fragile adolescent whim. He didn’t have my determination, or my need. I wasn’t surprised. I had found no trace of other searchers of my own ilk: children of his that were older than me. Hawker Fagan’s other adult sons were evidently content simply to be his sons. Only I, Malachi, needed to find the man, to touch him, to partake of his reality.
The clearer the memories of my father became, the starker became the contradictions and the paradoxes in the stories. He had left not one trail but many. To different people, he was different things. He was one man’s lunatic, another’s paragon of sanity and strength. He was one man’s hero and another’s image of evil incarnate. He was one man’s friend and another’s most treacherous and bitterly feared enemy. He was one man’s savior and another’s betrayer and murderer. He was one woman’s lover and another woman’s violator. He was one man’s defeat and another man’s victory. He was life and promise, despair and poison.
Perhaps it wasn’t all true—but I felt that it was all real. The person for whom I was hunting had become Protean, capable of shifting his form and his identity. It is a mistake to assume that legends are reduced to human dimensions as we approach them more closely.
On the day when my quest finally came to its not-so-inevitable end, I disembarked from a freighter on which my extensive familiarity with the vagaries of Ultra had qualified me to serve as its inter-dimensional co-pilot. The world on which the ship set down was called Calo, and I knew that my father had landed there not long before. When I discovered his latest—and last—ship enshrined in a launch reactor, primed for a takeoff that would never happen, I knew that I was nearing the end of my search.
I asked about Captain Fagan all over the spaceport, until I found a man named William Johnston, who claimed to be his friend.
“Can you take me to him?” I asked.
He nodded, but his eyes didn’t dip with his head. They remained cool and hard, fixed on mine. He didn’t understand why I’d come. He hated me.
“How is he?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“He’s dying.”
There was no apology, no embarrassment. It was a simple statement of a simple fact.
“Where?”
“Let’s go,” he said. “It’s about sixty or seventy miles.” He didn’t want to take me, but he knew that I would go anyway.
We walked slowly out into the sunlight, and I looked around. The city might have been a busy port on any one of a thousand worlds. It wore the uniform of human conception and human occupation, the indelible imprint of human thinking and human microbiality. I had hated hundreds of similar ports, purely and simply because of their similarity; they had conspired to give me the illusion that my quest was getting nowhere. They had implied that I would be forever locked into the same landscape, just as I was forever locked into the same space, whenever I came back from Ultra, no matter how long I chose to follow my dream. I no longer hated such places, though. I knew that I’d finally beaten the drabness and the narrowness of human imagination. I’d succeeded in finding what I needed to find.
Johnston’s car was an open-topped affair with big tractor-like wheels. It was a standard cross-country vehicle, but the road was even and comfortable, and an ordinary car would have been adequate.
We drove in silence. There was nothing I had to say to Johnston that I had not said before, on other worlds, at other times, to men who were intrinsically no different. He had nothing to tell me, nothing to ask me.
The sun sank swiftly to the horizon and left us driving through a dim and silent twilight. Pale tresses of atmospheric halo-light fell from the dark sky like soft silver rain. There was no absolute night on Calo.
The strange light gave the plain over which we drove the appearance of green jade shot through with streaks of purple and brown. The road was rutted with cart-tracks, and the land sloped away gently on either side. All around us I could see tiny sparks of light forming and fading, as specks of polished material reflected the strange luminosity.
We passed through a number of small villages built around the road—shanty towns of broken brick, rough-hewn stone and wood. The people we saw were mostly human, but there were a good many aliens of a dozen different races. I guessed that the planet was a dumping ground for forced emigrants from the civilized, crowded planets in the local volume of space. There were no signs of heavy industry or extensive planned farming. The machines had not yet followed the people. It was an infant world, a world that no one wanted—yet.
Johnston pulled up in one of the villages, in front of a well-sculptured house that looked a great deal better than any of its neighbors. It was older, made completely of wood, and testified to the investment of far more effort than the rest of the village.
Johnston just sat still, relaxing in the driver’s seat. As I got out, he said casually; “The angel’s here already.” He had expected to surprise me, but he was disappointed. I nodded calmly.
“I’ll wait for you,” he said, with a hint of malice. “You won’t be long.”
“You’re very kind,” I said.
I went inside, without knocking. The angel, Gabriel Hart, was sitting beside a bed, but the man lying in the bed appeared not to have noticed his presence. The man in the bed looked up when I came in, though. Hart rose to his feet and went outside, without a word or a gesture.
Oddly enough, the man on the bed didn’t look much older than me. Even lying there, obviously dying, he looked young and strong, lie wasn’t a wasted man. He didn’t seem tired. He wasn’t falling apart. There was no sign of pain or of disease or of decrepitude; there was merely an irresistible impression that he was carrying a heavy, intolerable load. Hawker Fagan was dying, but I had never seen death like it.
“I’m your son, Captain Fagan,” I said to him. “My name is Malachi. I’ve been following you for ten years.”
“Why?” he asked. His eyes shifted from my face to a spot on the scarred ceiling. He affected disinterest.
“Isn’t it enough that you’re my father?”
“No.”
“Can you remember where you were thirty-four years ago?” I asked him.
“No. I don’t remember anything.”
“A world called Wayland. A house on a cliff. A vast grey ocean. Slow waves and sour spray. A small woman with thin features. Delicate and pretty.”
“There was nothing delicate and pretty,” said the man on the bed, scornfully. “I never had any sons. Not one.”
“You’ve had twenty and more,” I told him, quietly.
“No,” he said. Bitterness oozed out of him.
“Why do you say that?” I demanded. “Because you left them all behind you? Because you left everything behind you? Because you had to keep going in order to maintain your sense of being?” Clever Malachi. He knew it all. He had guessed it all.
Hawker Fagan laughed, choking on the laughter. “I brought it all with me,” he said. “Everything. I left nothing behind. I carried it all. Every last word. Every last thought. Every last idea.”
I wasn’t really wrong. It doesn’t matter where you think everything is. Leaving it all behind you is the same as carrying it all with you. It all depends where you are - inside or outside. That’s the paradox of Ultra. That’s the nature of the impotent god-men who are its natives, its navigators, its rulers.
I took his hand in mine, and he snatched it back instantly. “No!” he said. “You can’t take it away. Not the words from my mouth, not the touch from my hand. It’s all mine. Everything. None of it belongs to you or to anyone else. You can’t take any of it.”
“It’s killing you,” I told him. “You’re full to overflowing. You can’t hold all that. Even the universe is too big to fit inside one tiny microbial man, let alone Ultra. No man’s mind is big enough to be outside of it all. Your mind is breaking, and your body too. Let it go—some of it, at least. Give it to me, or give it to the black angel. I want it. He needs it. You can’t hold on to it.”
“It’s mine,” he said. “It has to be mine. If the universe is bigger than a man, then a man is less than a microbe. He’s nothing.”
“You’re not nothing,” I told him. “You’ve found your way through Ultra. You’ve done enough.”
He laughed again, and coughed again. He still seemed relaxed and comfortable. The coughing wasn’t a symptom of affliction. “All or nothing,” he told me, “Ultra is all or nothing. So am I.”
I sat down beside him on the bed, and his eyes flashed with anger. “You’re my father,” I said. “I can’t let you die alone. Whatever you think and whatever you feel. I’m your son and I’m going to stay here with you.”
“I have no sons,” he said. “And I’ll die alone whatever you do.”
We sat in silence for some time, while I thought about what he said.
It was true. I couldn’t touch him if he wouldn’t yield to the touch. I couldn’t be with him if he wouldn’t let me be there.
Eventually, I stood up, and went out. I hoped that he wouldn’t let me go, but he made no move. Everything that he said, he believed, however crazy it might be.
Gabriel Hart was waiting for me outside. Beyond him, William Johnston was sitting in the car, patient and uncaring.
“Is that justice?” I asked Hart. “Your kind of justice? That a man, a legend, like Hawker Fagan can end his life in that kind of chaos?”
Hart nodded. “What is it that makes you humans think you’re the lords of creation?” he asked. “What makes you imagine that all the stars are yours. Alien worlds, alien life, alien thought—not just space, but Ultra too, not to mention the span of time and the smile of chance. You can’t have it all. If you try, it will kill you. That’s justice.”
“You’re human too,” I accused him.
“No. It doesn’t happen to me. It doesn’t happen to the blind, the deaf, the stupid, the cynical, the insane, the despairing and the immovable. We’re safe, because we never look the universe in the face. What about you, Malachi? Do you really want to be human? Wouldn’t you settle for something less? You can choose. You can be like him, and it will kill you. You can settle for less, and die on your own terms.”
I walked past him, back to the car. “You’re apologizing for your own inadequacies,” I told him. “We have no choice. You and I could never be like him.”
“Yes I could,” the angel said.
Johnston started the car.
Captain Fagan died alone.