Heaven’s Gate: my new home.
Mother had not taken into account the possibility that all Old Earth accounts would be frozen—and then appropriated into the growing Worldweb economy. Nor had she remembered that the reason people had waited for the Hawking drive to see the spiral arm of the galaxy is that in long-term cryogenic sleep—as opposed to a few weeks or months of fugue—chances of terminal brain damage were one in six. I was lucky. When I was uncrated on Heaven’s Gate and put to work digging out acid canals beyond the perimeter, I had suffered only a cerebral accident—a stroke. Physically, I was able to work in the mud pits within a few local weeks. Mentally, there was much left to be desired.
The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the right side of my body soon returned. Only the language centers had been damaged beyond simple repair. The marvelous organic computer wedged in my skull had dumped its language content like a flawed program. The right hemisphere was not without some language—but only the most emotionally charged units of communication could lodge in that affective hemisphere; my vocabulary was now down to nine words. (This, I learned later, was exceptional, many victims of CVAs retain only two or three.) For the record, here is my entire vocabulary of manageable words: fuck, shit, piss, cunt, goddamn, motherfucker, asshole, peepee, and poopoo;
A quick analysis will show some redundancy here. I had at my disposal eight nouns, which stood for six things; five of the eight nouns could double as verbs. I retained one indisputable noun and a single adjective which also could be used as a verb or expletive. My new language universe was comprised of four monosyllables, three compound words, and two baby-talk repetitions. My arena of literal expression offered four avenues to the topic of elimination, two references to human anatomy, one request for divine imprecation, one standard description of or request for coitus, and a coital variation which was no longer an option for me since my mother was deceased.
All in all, it was enough.
I will not say that I remember my three years in the mud pits and slime slums of Heaven’s Gate with fondness, but it is true that these years were at least as formative as—and probably more so than—my previous two decades on Old Earth.
I soon found that among my intimate acquaintances—Old Sludge, the scoop-shovel foreman; Unk, the slumyard bully to whom I paid my protection bribes; Kiti, the lice-ridden crib doxy whom I slept with when I could afford it—my vocabulary served me well. “Shit-fuck,” I would grunt, gesticulating. “Asshole cunt peepee fuck.”
“Ah,” grinned Old Sludge, showing his one tooth, “going to the company store to get some algae chewies, huh?”
“Goddamn poopoo,” I would grin back at him.
The life of a poet lies not merely in the finite language-dance of expression but in the nearly infinite combinations of perception and memory combined with the sensitivity to what is perceived and remembered. My three local years on Heaven’s Gate, almost fifteen hundred standard days, allowed me to see, to feel, to hear—to remember, as if I literally had been born again. Little matter that I had been born again in hell; reworked experience is the stuff of all true poetry and raw experience was the birthing gift of my new life.
There was no problem adapting to a brave new world a century and a half beyond my own. For all of our talk of expansion and pioneering spirit these past five centuries, we all know how stultified and static our human universe has become. We are in a comfortable Dark Ages of the inventive mind; institutions change but little, and that by gradual evolution rather than revolution; scientific research creeps crablike in a lateral shuffle, where once it leaped in great intuitive bounds; devices change even less, plateau technologies common to us would be instantly identifiable—and operable!—to our great-grandfathers. So while I slept the Hegemony became a formal entity, the Worldweb was spun to something close to its final shape, the All Thing took its democratic place among the list of humanity’s benevolent despots, the TechnoCore seceded from human service and then offered its help as an ally rather than a slave, and the Ousters retreated to darkness and the role of Nemesis … but all these things had been creeping toward critical mass even before I was frozen into my ice coffin between the pork bellies and sherbet, and such obvious extensions of old trends took little effort to understand. Besides, history viewed from the inside is always a dark, digestive mess, far different from the easily recognizable cow viewed from afar by historians.
My life was Heaven’s Gate and the minute-to-minute demands of survival there. The sky was always an eternal yellow-brown sunset hanging like a collapsing ceiling mere meters above my shack. My shack was oddly comfortable: a table for eating, a cot for sleeping and fucking, a hole for pissing and shitting, and a window for silent staring. My environment mirrored my vocabulary.
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion, and Heaven’s Gate was no exception. The Atmospheric Protectorate owned my body but my mind—or what was left of it—was mine.
On Old Earth, my poetry was composed on a Sadu-Dekenar comlog thought processor while I lounged in a padded chaise longue or floated in my EM barge above dark lagoons or walked pensively through scented bowers. The execrable, undisciplined, limp-wristed flatulent products of those reveries already have been described. On Heaven’s Gate, I discovered what a mental stimulant physical labor could be; not mere physical labor, I should add, but absolutely spine-bending, lung-racking, gut-ripping, ligament-tearing, and ball-breaking physical labor. But as long as the task is both onerous and repetitive, I discovered, the mind is not only free to wander to more imaginative climes, it actually flees to higher planes.
Thus, on Heaven’s Gate, as I dredged bottom scum from the slop canals under the red gaze of Vega Primo or crawled on hands and knees through stalactites and stalagmites of rebreather bacteria in the station’s labyrinthine lungpipes, I became a poet.
All I lacked were the words.
The twentieth century’s most honored writer, William Gass, once said in an interview: “Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things.”
And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea which ever cast a shadow into Plato’s dark cave of our perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for “honesty” is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word “integrity” mean? Or “Motherland”? Or “progress”? Or “democracy”? Or “beauty”? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.