t is almost certain that the great Pentateuch authoress J, who bought the story from a Sumerian who swore his cousin was the pilot, never thought of Noah's Ark as a ship of fools. Noah sure didn't. It is on the other hand pretty certain that, if the equation of ship of state and ship of fools had been articulated in her hearing, J would have found it impossible to shake the idea off. To think of society as a craft with idiots at the helm, as a commedia dell'arte gig whose actors have fatally bungled their roles, is not only apt, irresistibly apt, it is also funny. And we do need to laugh. We need to laugh at owners.
In the western world the topos of the ship of fools--and the dance of death conga that traditionally pounds its decks--has been haunting us for a very long time, ever since (at the latest) 1494, when the German Sebasian Brant published Das Narrenschif ["The Ship of Fools"], a narrative poem soon widely translated and deeply influential. Brant may have been thinking of Noah as he wrote, though he almost certainly wasn't, or of Columbus, which is almost equally unlikely, but ever since 1494 every ship that sails, and every tale of every ship that sails, has carried within its bones a doppelganger ship of fools, a mocking Dies Irae whose main target--often disguised for fear of reprisal--has always been the owners: the captains, the kings, the dubyas from the oozy depths of Florida the Bro Swamp, the indifferent duffer God. It is no mistake that a movie like Titanic offers nothing but contempt for those at the helm, and for the first-class passengers who assume rightly (as do first-class passengers in any modern airplane) that there will always be an exit door nearby, for them alone.
So it is a maelstrom of story that Richard Paul Russo hoves into
with Ship of Fools, an SF novel about the Argonos, which is a
generation starship lost in the ocean of space at the end of its tether.
It is captained by an inbred aristo named Nikos, whose marriage is
dysfunctional and whose control of the ship is constantly threatened by a
sexually-frustrated bishop. In addition, he is haunted by an underclass
which rightly hates the owners. Also, he does not know where to go.
He is not, however, the protagonist of the tale (at points I
rather wondered why he wasn't). Ship of Fools is narrated by Bartolomeo
Aguilera, Nikos's consigliere, who though cynical and machiavellian and
melancholic and profoundly deformed from birth is not, as one might
expect, a dwarf: in the literature of the Western world, the number of
stories about inbred monarchs of decadent city states which are narrated
by Dark Twin dwarfs who run the show in secret and kind of love the guy on
top is legion.
But Bartolomeo's best friend is a dwarf, whose name is Par, perhaps in homage to Par Lagerkvist, whose The Dwarf (1944) is about a Dark Twin dwarf who haunts the ship of state as Par haunts the Argonos. He is an instigator of the attempted rebellion which, though doomed, helps Bartolomeo realize how decayed the ship world has become. But the main tale Bartolomeo has to tell--in a morose and monotonal hindsight hum uncannily similar to the voice of William Holden when, face-down in the swimming pool in Sunset Boulevard, he tries desperately to remember how he'd gotten dead--is a tale of profound and utter frustration.
Riddles within starry riddles
The Argonos has been in search of planets colonized by humans in the deep past, but nobody knows where they might be located (though FTL travel exists, interstellar communications, it seems, do not). All the ship records--except for secret handwritten archives held by the Christian church that dominates society--had been destroyed in an earlier social conflagration (the word computer appears, I think, only once in the novel; in any case, nowhere in the vast ship, not even in one of Par's cubbyholes, can be found a single hint of the knowledge of the past). The planet Earth, which the Argonos has managed to visit fairly recently, is an empty husk. The ship of fools is alone; the bishop thunders anathema from the heart of his cathedral, a vast chamber festooned with images of torture and grief taken from Christianity's vast repertory of same; Nikos is crippled by nescience and despair.
A planet is found, which the ruling bishop christens Antioch. Humans had lived there, but seem to have disappeared suddenly. An underground chamber is discovered, full of dead people. They seem to have been tortured to death and hung on hooks. The Argonos leaves posthaste; Par's ill-timed rebellion is put down; Bartolomeo spends a year in jail, during which period (he discovers later) Nikos has followed a strange communication beam that originates in Antioch and points into the middle of the interstellar void, where a vast alien spaceship, apparently deserted, lies in wait.
A few fumbling attempts have been made to explore the ship, but untoward accidents have killed several crew members. Now rehabilitated, Bartolomeo leads a new expedition into the alien labyrinth. He finds enigma piled upon enigma, and at the heart of them a further enigma: an aged human woman, who has apparently been living on the ship's life support for decades, utterly alone. She is brought back babbling into the Argonos. Bartolomeo returns to the alien ship, and finds another torture chamber, even larger than the one on Antioch.
In space, no one can hear the end
The woman turns out to be ... but that would be telling. Here's a clue, though: Ship of Fools is deeply similar to Michael Bishop's "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" (1973), the extraordinary novella which grew into his greatest full-length book, Transfigurations (1979), and which is no more a cheerful read than Russo's weary tale. The underlying burden of Transfigurations is that we humans may find the universe--and those who inhabit it--inherently indecipherable, that we may never find out the end of the story.
That may be the burden of Ship of Fools, too. None of the SF puzzles it poses are solved. None of the failures in communication that cripple its cast are redeemed by more than a few firefly flickers of consanguinity, before fading into entropy and melancholia and chill. Disasters mount, but the cast is paralyzed. The Argonos, with a rump crew aboard, disappears into an interstellar hole, leaving behind in shuttles Bartolomeo and a few thousand fellow humans, all as desperate as he is, with nowhere to go but Antioch, which may be a very bad destination. For the torture chambers remain; and everyone is a fool.
Russo may have despaired of this novel, for the melancholia which suffuses it sometimes spills right off the page. But his underlying burden--that the ship of fools of human life never reaches port--is not exactly full of cheer, and Russo shows no gift for gallows humour. So he may have had no choice but despair. It may be best to presume that he just means every word:
Here is the bullet (says corpse Holden) which I bit. Now you bite it, too.
