Fornax Halloween 2018 Issue: The Unnumbered Horror Fiction THE DARKCLOUD by Gerd Maximovic (Translation: Isabel Cole) They had crammed 83 men, none of them over the age of 25, into a spaceship which had been christened VIRGIN, no doubt in order to conjure up the image of an innocent humanity free of greed and covetousness, setting out into space to new shores, new treasures, to the gold land Ophir and to the uranium planet, to where the fat planets revolve around the stars like moths which have eaten their way through golden garments, where lands of Cockaigne loll in the sun like weak women, ready to give themselves to the quickest and the strongest, the most brutal moneybags, with their masses of living beings which promised to be easy to exploit, and with their immense natural resources which would be catapulted back to earth over a radio bridge through hyperspace. It was the first expedition of this kind. The light barrier would be broken, and just as Columbus's SANTA MARIA was no holy virgin, with her crew of criminals and prisoners who would have torn down her halo again, the VIRGIN was far from transporting 83 innocent lambs whom the Lord would pasture. This was not a comfortable party trip on which domestics eagerly hastened up at the wink of an eye. This was a business venture in which everything, from the smallest screw down to the ticking in the captain's brain, had been precisely calculated, and the last little grain of dust on board had been investigated as to its extra profit potential. The expedition, worked out most finely, was a risk-benefit calculation. They were perfectly aware that the risk in the indispensable, well-filled explosives tanks was dangerously close to its upper limits. That did not keep the press, insofar as it was run by the moneybags, from calling the expedition a departure into the unknown, an advance toward new borders, the eagle flight of the bold human spirit comparable to the American migration to the West, carefully avoiding mention of the sober calculations and the potential blood which dripped from every single number. First of all they had to be young, the 83 men; at 27, the captain was the oldest on board. The trip to the stars might take thirty or forty years. Of course the barriers which nature imposed, condensed in the light barrier, had been overcome, but the flight through paraspace was not exactly a stroll to the pub to get a beer tapped, either. And the stink of beer breath was nothing in comparison to what escaped the throats of modern conquistadors who have drunk blood. What kind of men were these who threw away their youths, their good middle years, even their grey temples with an apparently contemptuous gesture, plunging themselves into an adventure which could not be grasped in either its spatial or its temporal dimension, which in fact are one and them same? They all had one thing in common: they wanted to get away. Not merely away from this or that country or from the entire planet. They wanted to shake from their feet all the proton dust which the sun wafts into the earthly planetary system. Each bore his past like a tiny, grim rider, invisible, preserved only on tape and in psychographs and of course in their memory molecules. They set out to master it. But since they were not capable of analyzing the origin of their pain, unable to trace it back to the despicable social circumstances, they anchored their dull thoughts to superficial riffs, upon which, like sirens, thoroughly analyzed by the psychiatrists, the female sex was invariably ensconced. The captain was a good-looking, handsome boy who couldn't stand it when his wife cheated him in the fashion which he considered his sole, self-evident right. His marriage had been a mistake. He should not have let himself be snared in the net of silver legal threads. But he had had the desire to try out this cage as well. The stewardess on the flight from Saint Tropez to Port Gordon in the orbit around Mercury had looked at him with black, shimmering eyes. Later, when their thoughts and feelings no longer oscillated in the same sinus curve, the silver wedding threads turned into rattling chains. He began to cheat on her. When Jean-Claude, a friend from the old days, returned to Transpluto from a long trip and visited her, she took the opportunity to cheat on her husband. Alarmed by the housekeeper, the police had to drag him out of the bed where he continued to choke the two throats from which no sighs and no groans would ever emerge again. He did not have enough connections to pave the way out of prison with bank notes. He was offered the alternative of taking over the command of the VIRGIN rather than molder away in a comfortable but boring cell. The first officer, a gaunt, intelligent, often sarcastic man, had taken refuge from half of humanity. According to the statistical average around the globe, every other human being is a woman. Despite these masses of female beings - in our progressive times their number has grown into the billions - he had not managed to get along with a single one of them, and since he did not dare approach decent girls, he was always getting mixed up with screwed-up types who managed to increase his horror. Whether it was because of his father's early death, or an anatomical question, at any rate his failures added up to a complex called impotence. That was why, despite a certain aversion to the military, he had joined his country's army, which consisted only of men, and had immediately seized the chance offered him by the expedition of the VIRGIN. Neither the captain nor the board psychiatrist, a deadbeat who had once been a knacker - a good doctor would have been no use, for in the end he might even have been able to help - had been informed about the problems of the crew, with a few exceptions. And there was no reason to fear that the men might help one another. That did not fit in with the picture of a real man, and after all there was also the ship hierarchy. It was said of the second officer, a heavily-built man of unusual physical strength, that in a single night in 1997, when the Green Comet enveloped the earth in its tail, he had killed five or six ladies of the oldest profession in the world in the Western European red light district which reached from Hamburg to Naples, until the pimps were finally able to overpower him. The courts rejected the pseudotheory based on the comet with which his lawyer had attempted to save his skin, but did not seriously investigate the true reasons for his murderous spree. It quickly became obvious that the flight on board the ship would not free the men of their sexual obsessions nor from their problems in this regard. On the contrary, the sardine-tin effect only aggravated their difficulties, occasionally driving them into spheres where reason grows foggy. A natural evasive reaction was the initiation of homosexual relationships, which were very much handicapped by the close quarters, from which mainly the crew suffered, and the morals brought from Earth which prevailed on board, as well as the steely suppression by the captain and the hierarchy, though the captain knew quite well that he could not suppress all activity, lest the cauldron explode in his face one day. One could observe and register and employ stool-pigeons and occasionally put down a putsch in distant regions. Thus people retreated to the latrines, and a market for jealousy and vanities developed, with about two dozen men taking part. Although the walls of the latrines were made of the hardest possible material, which could even withstand a meteorite impact and repelled graffiti, the men found ways to scratch messages on the walls. Jokes with almost exclusively sexual content began to circulate, and despite the restricted number of crew members, no one was ever able to find out the originator of any given joke. It was as if they came into being simultaneously in everyone'sheads. And only the leadership clique, which kept its distance, remained uninvolved. One could have the impression that the crew as a whole, smelling of sweat, diesel and other things, was creating a world of humid sexual wishes the further they got from the reality of humanity on the Earth and on the planets, and that as the journey progressed they increasingly succumbed to a collective neurosis. The men with the fine calculations, so careful in their estimates of blood and feelings, had taken this into consideration as well. They had told themselves that the best performance, coupled with dog-like subservience, could best be obtained from unfree people kept on a short sexual leash. It was an almost brilliant thought to locate the blame for such a state of affairs not in the economic conditions which, ultimately, had led the men to undertake the journey, but in the men themselves, as if the lack of women on board was a sickness which made every one of them waste away. It would have been simple and humane to allow women on board, but that would have required a larger ship and the diminishment of its amortization. The difficulties which would arise, for they included failures otherwise fit to work, amounted to a jeopardization of the entire expedition.