reading in hindsight: Albatross by Stanislaw Lem
I’ve always enjoyed reading Stanislaw Lem, and one of my favorite characters of his is the pilot Pirx. As far as I’m aware, Lem wasn’t in any of the novels, but rather he can be found in two collections of stories, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the pilot. The tales follow Pirx through his career, from rookie pilot to grizzled veteran.
I picked up Tales earlier today and picked a story at random, Albatross. And yes, there will be spoilers. Herein, Pirx is a passenger on a space going luxury cruise liner, on his way to his next job. He notices that the liner and accelerating, and so he makes his way to the main control room. There he finds out that his ship, the Titan Aresterra, along with a handful of other ships, are on a rescue mission to the Albatross, which has suffered a cataclysmic failure.
There is a lot we don’t find out in the story, for instance what happened to the Albatross. What happened to the Dasher, one of the first ships to arrive on the scene, having broken its own engines doing so.
I like the story for the writing, even though Lem does things that I don’t always like in the stories I read. (And yes, I feel a bit as though I’m committing a sin by even writing those words.) Pirx is not directly involved; the Titan gets called off rescue duties as other ships have arrived and she is full of passengers. And even the crew of the Titan are bystanders, and so we’re just watching as they listen to the story of the Albatross unfold over the radio.
But I think part of the reason it rang a chord in me is that I read an article in the Atlantic yesterday, on Point Nemo, the point in the southern Pacific that’s the point on Earth farthest from land. When ships do pass near there, it’s sometimes the case that the nearest other humans are those in the International Space Station passing overhead.
There is mention of Michael Collins, alone on the lunar orbiter when Armstrong and Aldrin have descended to the Moon’s surface, more alone than anyone had ever been.
I was having a conversation with a friend this week just past, about how we each need, every once in a while, a bit of time alone. But this is a very different sort of time alone, because we knew that there are always people near by. There is connection near by.
We are not like the sailors passing through Point Nemo, or the crew of the Albatross, or the astronauts who went to the moon. We can take our hour, or our day, and then walk down the street, alone in our thoughts but not alone in our presence.
I suppose this echoed in me because I’m also thinking about the characters in my half written stories. Some of them are engaged in long voyages and journeys, through barren lands, and I need to think about their sense of loneliness and how that shapes them and their stories. And I will keep coming back to Point Nemo and the Albatross.
multijimbo 