For those who have never travelled by duchesse brisee in space, and
I was beginning to wonder if my experience was so rare, I should add
a few words on this type of transport. As a species we have always
had a fondness for containers which, I believe, can be traced back to
our cellular origins and accounts for our love of bottles, capsules,
coffins, pods, buds, seeds - I could go on indefinitely rehearsing our
self-protective reactions to the hostile environments that have
surrounded us and our concomitant desire to detach ourselves from
them, burst as it were in orgasmic frenzy and seed the universe.
Minor rehearsals, such as skydiving from the boundaries of space,
describe in miniature the desire to seed the planet, or any planet that
happens to be available. The skydiver may crudely represent the
spermal seed descending, in inexact analogy, on the recipient mother
egg, to become lost in the raped world. His descent may be likened to
the autumnal detachment of the fruits of the forest whose fate is to be
befriended and nurtured or simply to give up their nutrients for the
benefit of others. Certainly, our sense of loss and nostalgia at the
seasonal fall is closely bound up with the inevitable cycle of closing
the old page and opening the new. The past is secure because we
believe it cannot be changed, the future is like walking on water that
freezes beneath one's feet.
Such were my emotions when I entered the cockpit, though I use the
word for want of a better, of the SV LUCA. I cannot say I felt a sense
of power. My recent experiences had left me confused. Though I still
sported the Mark VI I was uncertain of my identity. Had the
engineers cloned the Monarch? As far as I knew there were now 6
versions of the crown holder not counting myself, and I seemed to
constitute a secondary expression of the sacred body, a sort of VIa.
This was to give an entirely new meaning to the concept of the
Queen's two bodies, so valuable for ritual, and yet so blurred as to be
almost useless for headlines. There was the Mark VI sending out
headlines: Regal Lookalike Pilots Spaceship from Europa! Queen of
the Isles at the Controls of State of the Art Duchesse Brisee! Only to
receive automated rejection messages even from such deeply
topazed sites as The Daily Mail, the Chihuahua Tiempo and the
luminously citrous Dum Dum Bonjour. Had the idea of extraterrestrial
royalty been taken too far afield? The underlying principle of
investigative journalism is that nothing can be taken too far in the
search for truth, and here I was, a humble representative of the
