Starcrossed
Zebrowski, George. "Starcrossed." Eros in Orbit. Joseph Elder, editor. New York City: Trident Press, 1973. Human-Machines: An Anthology of Stories About Cyborgs. Thomas N. Scortia and George Zebrowski, editors. New York City: Vintage, 1975. And for the text we use: the Cybersex anthology. For translations and many reprints, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of February 2023, on-line here.[1]
Sort of "Rites of Love and Death"[2] in English, in space, and in a short story featuring two — two as we think we should count them — cybernetic/organic entities.
Not exactly "point of view" anything but 3rd-person "indirect discourse" narration from the space/time volume perceptions and mentation within a "starprobe's hull" of a "MOB — Modified Organic Brain embodied in a cyborg relationship with a probe vehicle en route to Antares" (p. [374]) and in relationship with either itself/himself or, a separate entity who genders itself as herself: female (pp. 376-77).
The "ship-embodied MOB" — a brain in a vat — is also in intimate, hardwired connection with the simpler cybernetics of the ship, which themselves include organic portions: "MOB was aware of the myoelectrical nature of the nutrient bath in which it floated, connected via synthetic nerves to the computer and its chemical RNA memory banks of near infinite capacity" (p. 375), and "He remembered the perfection of his unity with the ship as a circle of infinite strength." With her — the other entity (or Other), "his intensity was a sharp line cutting into an open sphere. He saw her vision of him, a hard-muscled body, tissue wrapped around bone, opening her softness, readying to thrust" (p. 379). And she has told him,
"You would have been a man," she said, "if they" [we assume other humans] had not taken your brain before birth and sectioned it for use in this . . . hulk. I was a woman, a part of one at least. You are the only kind of man I may have now. Our brain portions — what remains here rather than being scattered throughout the rest of the probe's systems — are against each other in the core unit, close up against each other in a bath, linked with microwires. As a man you could have held my buttocks and stroked my breast, all the things I should not be remembering. Why can I remember?"
MOB said, "We might have passed through some turbulence when the hyperdrive was cut in. Now the probe continues to function minimally through its idiot components [...] while the Modified Organic Brain core has become two different awarenesses. * * * [Soon enough]:]
He drew himself toward her with an increasing sense of power. (p. 378)
And they have their rite of love — "'I love you,' MOB said, knowing it would please her" — and they arrive at Antares and a cosmic climax: a small one as cosmic events go, but cosmic, and, we think, freeing them (p. 380).
++++++++++++++++ Cf. and contrast ship's brains in such stories as "Mr. Spaceship," "Chicken Little," "Tithonus," "Plus," Mayflies, "The Knights of Arthur," and McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang series. For a life-support vat, see Count Zero.
RDE, finishing, 14Feb23