Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  You didn’t miss your humanity, of course. They made sure of that. They were the hell-raisers. You only had to burn.

  You can’t blame them, of course. They were in a mess of their own. They were beginning their own beginnings and pursuing their own ends. They were down at the department store buying their beautiful new egos. Trading in their football shorts for codpieces. Trading in their savagery and barbarity for a caseful of dirty jokes and exam passes, without a qualm. Making memories of their toys and toys of their futures.

  No, you can’t blame them for slaughtering you. You can’t blame them for laughing and sneering and needing to destroy and decoy you. They had to go their way. Every pecking order has a dead, dummy hen. The only way to grow up in a hurry is to stand on somebody else’s shoulders. Who else but the loners, the freaks, and the outsiders could they use to fill their persecution quota?

  So you were a fall guy. So what?

  No, you can’t blame them for that.

  You’d have done the same if you could have found something alive and crawling to trample on. And didn’t you try? Didn’t you pull out every last resource you had to keep ahead in the arrogance stakes? Didn’t you still know it all and a bit more besides? Couldn’t you still outsneer them? Didn’t you still have the wordy weapons? Didn’t they walk in fear of you even while they walked all over you?

  They lost their effect for a while, the words. The others went through a period of immunity as they moved from one world to another, where you needed a new set of magical incantations to hurt their feelings. It took a new kind of wizardry to masquerade as wisdom.

  But you caught on. You were still fast. They didn’t call you lightning for nothing. Because you were yellow, flashy, and bent.

  You kept jumping, hey? You rode out the storm. You’re jumping still, paper frog. What’s that hump on your back?

  In fact, this is where you really made some tracks. This is where you set up your big lead. While we were all slowing down, you were still driving on. You still had somewhere to go, though God only knew where. And you got there too. Your lofty pinnacle of self-awareness, of ultimate rationality, of diabolical cleverness. Finally, you won your crazy race, by sixty points. They couldn’t see you for dust.

  Hallelujah.

  And what do you have from it all?

  Answers?

  Yes, you have answers. All the answers. We can’t beat you. We can’t shake you. You can outword us every time. Because you know. You’re there, where we never even tried to go. But where are you? I ask you, do you know? What are you? What do you want to be? Why did you want to go?

  I’ll tell you what you are. You’re an alien being. A man from another star, from a hollow world inside the Earth. A hollow man. An alien. A driver with no steering column, no brake, no reverse gear, and the engine in the trunk because there’s nothing but dirty washing under the hood. All you have is lots and lots of gears. Forward gears. And wheels and axles and twin carbs and overdrive and a whole series of accelerators. You can really travel, Harker, but how do you get to where you need to go?

  How do you get back?

  You’re an emotional cripple, Harker. You have no positive side to your mind. That showed, you know, in your trial. Not to mention in your crime.

  All you are is the progeny of fear. You’re a generation of bogeymen. And a big generation. That’s a fertile mind you have there. You could fill up the Earth with phantoms. You have little enough apart from your almighty fear. No pride. No joy. No love. You’re scared shitless even of such as they. You dare not feel, Harker, not really.

  Whose fault, Harker?

  Yours.

  You always said: there’s enough happiness in this world for everyone, and if I ever find the bastard who has my share I’ll cut his heart out. Will you, Harker? Find him, that is.

  Go to it, Harker, go to it. Write chapter two and three and four. Cut it all out. Heart and brain and everything. Schizophrenia. Split it, boy. Split it and spill it. All over the pages. Every idiot-syncrasy. Leech out all the bad blood, old friend.

  Bleed yourself to death.

  Madman’s Dance

  Sensual Experiences in a Virgin Universe

  Alio Shan, which is the second moon, is rising above the Nicobar Mountains. Dulce Nombre, larger and closer than her sister, hangs in the sky above the city, her brilliant whiteness causing the city lights to seem softer. On the roofs of the tallest buildings — the spires of the galleries and the clock towers and the temples and the college of arts — gemlike points of fire shine clear, but lower down the lights are so numerous that they blur together into a haze of gold and silver. In the city square, the statues of dead lords with arms upraised to heaven cast gigantic shadows. The hum of the solar batteries is gone, leaving a strange unevenness to the sound of the city. The machines rest peacefully in their underground repositories, because this is the quiet hour — the hour for thought and dreaming, when the streets remain unswept for a brief while, when odors are permitted to drift unhindered upon the air, when the temperature is allowed to fall a fraction, and introduce a hint of freshness into the life of the city.

  Beyond the tall, mirror-shining city wall, the trees writhe in a wind which is never allowed to clutch the clothing of the men who walk abroad in the city. The flags that fly upon the spires are fluttered by careful streams of air produced by discreet fans.

  The waters of the sea throw valiant waves against the gleaming wall, but it remains completely unimpressed. Its luster will not fade. Even the sound of the furious waters is delicately muted and is relayed to the interior only as a dull, sweet murmur — an insult to the tempestuous gray swell.

  There is, eventually, a distant clicking as the first period of night comes to an end, and the machines begin to cleanse the city of the effects of some two hours of neglect.

  The faint scent of the sea which has been allowed briefly into the air is sucked away into the metal belly of the city, and exhaled beyond the wall.

  This is how my new world is sculptured: it is a landscape of wombs, its prisoned cities populated by faceless, hidden men. Only the madmen walk the face of the world. I am a traveler, of course, being no worshiper of wombs but merely one who rests therein when the occasion demands.

  I wander — after all, the world is mine. For whom did you shape it save for ourselves? It is my part in all this to tread every road, to search out the limits of this new Creation, to discover and to judge whether this might or might not be only another cage to confine me and put pressure on my being.

  By the shore of a many-eyed, gray-bodied sea — that same sea which beats its futile fists against the impregnable womb-walls of your fabulous cities — I meet three old men whose eyes have the form of the hearts of vultures, and whose hearts are open and staring. Their lips are like worms, and their hands are not their own, being borrowed from the artisan dead, and responding still to forgotten reflexes.

  They are drawing lots for the fragments of my existence.

  The one who draws the longest straw whispers soundlessly into his white beard, and he does not smile. At length he makes his decision, and he chooses to have dominion over the time in advance of my birth — my history and my heritage, when all my choices remain unmade, and the world is in my embryonic hands. He is a creator of sorts, this old man, a Godman in his own tiny way.

  The second, whose eyes have grown darker while the first man spoke, and whose skin is wrinkling fiercely even while he contemplates the second straw and the decision to which it is title, elects to possess me when I am dead, to own my memories and legacies, when only the echoes of my being that are to spread out and permeate the universe are yet unsounded.

  The third man, a very tired man, a very poor man, stares at the shortest straw of all. And as his pulsing, blood-filled eyes turn their blind gaze upon me and the worms thrash about the cavity of his mouth, I feel pity for him.

 
“What is left?” I ask him.

  “Only life,” replies the scavenger, “only life.” He releases the straw, and it flutters away on the wings of a mocking wind which has already dismantled his companions.

  He is faceless, this man, in that I do not know his face. Because I cannot put a name to it, I cannot put a mask to it, and he remains a ghost, which is so often the way of things in dreams. And this is a dream, for all that it is a whole universe of a dream, and there is nothing of what I thought was reality which can invade its privacy. It is a dream without awakening, for an eternity whose duration I cannot estimate, yet I must haunt myself with the open door which will, one day, have another, an older, world beyond it. The world of the cage.

  I have no control over the images of the dream, though I think you do if you would only exert yourself, instead of playing God with such a godlike passivity and patience. Sometimes I am almost happy here, and grateful for the way of things, but I dare not allow myself the luxury of so much contentment. I must remain aware, and I must put my strength of will into a purse which must never leave my clenched fist, for I will need it again.

  At other times, the assault on my sensibility takes on a different form, when the dream becomes grotesque and I am flooded by an ocean of images which wants to drown me in a fear and panic, or simply to blast me apart with profusion and nonsense. I remember such dreams, but I also remember the release which could always be obtained by the desperate struggle for wakefulness. Here, no matter how desperate the struggle, there can be no wakefulness. There can be, in fact, no struggle, because I dare not commit myself in that way to anything so futile that I may forget my secret, sacred purposes.

  You could help me here, but neither of us knows whether it is in your interests. It is my decision. It is my struggle. It is my trial.

  I could hate you.

  But I dare not even that. . . .

  As I sleep . . .

  (Yes, I must sleep even here, I must let my mind fall into pools of oblivion, because I cannot stand the curse of eternal wakefulness. I think, I hope, that sleep is safe. It is dreamless — or is it full of dreams, because dreams within a dream are still one with the dream? — and my fear that the oblivion will claim me is no more nor less than the fear of death, and that, of course, one has to live with.)

  As I sleep, the mountain screams in anguish, and it coughs out the hot flood from its bowels (I groan in my sleep, and I sweat, and my heart is racing), hurling magma and flame over the verdant slopes it retches bubbling cauldron-brews over its witch-haunted sides. I see fire and thunder erupting from the cauldron to destroy — destroy me and my work and my future and my people as the fireballs roar and howl I see the faces of the people afraid, shocked, bewildered, and most of all accusing.

  I am free of no needs. The sexual impulse that you have carved all over your universe I still carry in my belly. I need release, as I remember needing release in the cage-years, over and over and over again, and no release offered, but it had to be sought and found inwardly, in sleep more painful than in wakefulness, but in sleep with less shame than in wakefulness. Pain or shame — this is a dilemma I have lived with in my life, and it is no less so now that you are the creator, and this is what tells me more than any of your absurdities that freedom, as you would have it, is nothing more nor less than a cage.

  And when I awake, the fire would die, but slowly, leaving the last scenes of carnage half-visible fugitives in my mind. While I am awake, the volcano sleeps, and while I sleep, the volcano is awake. Alive I am master of the mountain, dead the mountain rules me, showing me its power in my bursting forth from darkness into new dreams, showing its hatred and its anger.

  The day comes when I wake sweating, the thunder of the volcano in my ears; as I emerge from sleep, the red fire rises. I fall into the insane crater. I fall for a million miles like a fluttering leaf gently swimming in the hot tower of uprushing air, my skin scorching and cracking. . . .

  Then I stop and I order the lava back into the bowels of the Earth like a king ordering the tide to turn back.

  And it does, or it does not.

  There is no easy answer, and you cannot make it so.

  Titan Nine

  Security

  Colonel Henneker had been a very tough man in his day, and it still showed in the way he moved his body and his face. He’d gone gray and leathery, the craggy way that all heroes would like to go in their old age. He was like a big bear. Of course, it could have been an act.

  His office — or at least, the office I saw (you never can tell with military security) — was plush and warm. It was steeped in permanency — it radiated “home.” It said loud and clear that from Henneker’s point of view titan was not so much an assignment but a way of life. He’d been here for a long time, and it was his last hitch before they pensioned him off to the Army Old Folks’ Home. More than that — this wasn’t just a kill-time environment. On the evidence of Henneker’s working conditions he was a man who cared a great deal for his work. Titan was his child. He was involved with it, deeply. He had more commitment to it than just ending his career without a whisper.

  There was a shadow on his face, though — a shadow which told me that there was a threat to all his lovely happiness and job satisfaction and career perfection.

  And I was it.

  He gave me a cigarette and lit it for me, but he didn’t light up himself. I took the cigarette out of my mouth and held it. I took a slight draw on it, but I blew the smoke out right away. I intended to let it burn itself out. I hadn’t had a smoke in a long time.

  Henneker settled himself into his chair with a practiced shuffle of relaxation.

  “You know why you’re here?” he asked me.

  “Here this office or here generally?” I parried.

  “Titan,” he said.

  “I was told to volunteer,” I said. “I jumped at the chance. But all I know is this is titan. Ideas I have; information I don’t.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you want to send me up in one. What else?”

  He sighed and turned a little in his chair. I knew it was all put on. Men in Henneker’s kind of job don’t sigh. He didn’t bother to tell me how right my guess was. We both knew how much I knew.

  “I’m sorry that you were brought here first,” he said, conversationally. “I know you’d rather have been received by Dr. Sobieski or Dr. Segal. But we all share the responsibility for your being here, and we all agree that it’s me who’s sticking his neck out furthest. You’re one hell of a solution to a problem, you realize that? You’re 90 percent problem yourself.”

  “You’re trying to tell me that I owe you something,” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You owe me something. Segal wanted you here, Sobieski backed her up. They talked the rest into it. They came to me. But it’s me who takes the rap if you cause any trouble. Not them. Yes, I’m trying to tell you that you owe me something, because if you accept that we can make a good start. If you don’t . . . well, in that case I just have to get to know you a bit. Get the feel of the problem. See?”

  I saw. He was handing me a line. Softening me up. I didn’t say a word. He was asking the questions, not me.

  All of a sudden (I was expecting it) he asked me:

  “Do you think your being committed to Block C was an injustice?”

  “Had nothing to do with justice,” I told him, carefully flicking ash into the tray on the desk. “It was a security matter.” I emphasized the word “security” ever so slightly.

  He nodded. “You reckon they shouldn’t have put you in there?” he said.

  I shrugged. “I cannot tell a lie. I did it. They got me. I’m as mad as they say I am. But, hell, what do you expect me to say? No, I wouldn’t wall up a toad in there. Jenny got me out once before, and I’m very grateful. She’s done it again, and I’m twice as grateful, and if
you’re running interference for her, you’re included in. But let’s face it, no one is doing anything for Harker, are they? They’re doing it because they need a sucker, right?”

  “You’re bitter,” he said. He deserved a gold medal for observation.

  “My voice always sounds that way,” I told him. “Comes of talking to myself instead of listening to other people. So I’m told.”

  “Aren’t you just a little bit afraid that making such an exhibition of your hostility might get you sent back to Block C?” he asked me.

  “No.” I didn’t like the way he kept saying “Block C” — it was to inform me, subtly, that he knew more about me than he might. I always referred to the block, never to the prison, and he knew that.

  “One might have thought,” he said — using “one” to show that he didn’t — “that having been out once, you’d have made the most of your second outing.”

  “Why?” I said. “You’re going to put me back no matter how nice I am. When I’m finished, that is. Unless it kills me, that is.”

  “No,” he said. “We’re not going to put you back. It might kill you, but if it doesn’t we won’t send you back.”

  “In that case,” I said, with devastating logic, “I’ve nothing to lose by being hostile. Have I?”

  “Nothing except the job,” he said. “And if you lose the job, you will go back, to be replaced by the man who does do it. Now wait a minute. . . . I’m not just leaning over backward to threaten you. As I said, I’m carrying the can for you. If you’re replaced, odds are that I will be, too. We’re in this boat together, and if you feel uncomfortable, try to imagine how I feel. I have a job to do here, and that’s enforcing security. The strictest. Now the titan ship is not a big secret — it’s been going too long to be that, and it had more than its fair share of publicity at one time. But you are something else again. You’re the biggest secret I’ve ever had occasion to keep a lid on, and already too many people know all about you. The scientist brass knows, and so does half my staff — that’s not a big risk. The prison authorities also know, and so do some of the political brass — and that is. Now you’re hot, son, and it’s my hands you’re sitting in. There are a lot of eyes on you apart from mine, and they don’t all have the eye of faith. Your enemies are legion, for one reason and another, and to them you can add me. You’re trouble, son. For me. For the project. For yourself. There are any number of men who’d like to see you safely caged again — not just out of malice, because malice we can cope with one-handed, but out of politics and out of simple back-stabbing self-interest. Maybe you think no one has anything to gain from a knife in your back, but you’ve got to see that a knife in your back is one in mine, and one in Dr. Segal’s, and one in Mike Sobieski’s. Now think to yourself, Harker. How much bitterness can you afford?”