Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  There are no misfits in your Creation.

  Some distance away he sees the sharply defined outline of a city rising from the gently curving ground, and he begins walking toward it. It appears to be small — he judges that it is no more than a mile from one edge to the other — but as he watches he sees that it is growing slowly. New silhouettes appear all along the black line of buildings, strange square silhouettes, taller than those in the center.

  His mind attunes itself, focuses like a pair of binoculars, so that the gaze of his eyes compensates for the stroboscopic effect of night and day, and imparts a three-dimensional quality to the fluid city. He sees the rectangles at the edges of the city spring straight from the ground to soar erect into the air. Even without the persistent flashing, he receives an impression of jerky, sporadic growth as though there are lapses of time in between images. This he attributes to the changes in the pace at which the buildings are constructed: the differences are too small to be seen individually, but have a collective effect of unevenness. The whole of the border of the city is in constant and violent movement. The center changes, too, gradually. Its symmetry is never quite given over to the regimentation of the suburbs, but it grows, and its lines are somewhat smoothed.

  All at once, clumps of buildings begin to appear a few miles removed from the city. Harker is witnessing the birth and development of a megalopolis, something which the universe he had previously known had made him no stranger to, save for the fact that the megalopoli had run into one another and fused, never being left alone, surrounded by wilderness, closed communities, city-shelters, city-coffins, city-wombs.

  The buildings no longer huddle but lie ranged like the jagged outline of a row of broken teeth along the horizon. It is sprouting darkly outlined shapes along the whole of its still increasing length. More buildings vanish and more grow up in the space they vacate. The pace of enlargement increases. The whole skyline is wavering and oscillating.

  A road suddenly extends across his field of vision, traveling from horizon to horizon in what is, to him, scant minutes. There are no people or vehicles visible — their presence is too ephemeral for him to detect. Only by the hectic life of the silhouetted city is life on a smaller scale manifest. He is seeing humanity in the whole — alive, growing, and building like a lunatic of stone and metal.

  And then, all in one instant, while he is yet many miles from its outskirts, it falls. In one moment the city is standing straight and mighty, presenting a proud face to the sun and stars, and in the next it collapses into ruin. In one moment it is complete, a dynamic system of growth. Then a sudden flash of intense glare transcends the chain of night and day, and in the next moment there is a transient thin swirl of black smoke and half of it cascades as though vaporized into a thin smear of rubble. There is only the merest glimpse of a halo of flame, and then it is gone, swept into the skies by the surge of time, and only ruin is left.

  Harker Lee never felt the shock wave of the bomb, nor felt its heat. He stops while the pantomime goes on — sporadic, feeble growth for a short while, which slows and then ceases. The wavering stops, gently and quietly. There is no rebirth.

  There is none of the violent thrashing of the wounded beast, only a tranquil passivity. Slowly the city falls into disrepair. The helter-skelter passages of night and day have not altered, yet the scene slows, as though the city is consumed with tiredness.

  The city is dying.

  It slowly surrenders its hold on the chaotic life it once possessed. The blunt, square-ended figures abandon their claw-handed reach for the stars and slide to the ground. The road is washed gently into oblivion by the loving caress of the tidal sands, their waves sweeping lethargically across the plain. The lone towers which had carried power lines fall, make stony mounds for a little while, and then they, too, are swept into smoothness by the marching plain.

  The horizon lapses deeper and deeper toward its former flatness and again curls away evenly to disappear in the haze. The shifting colors of cultivation pale. The sand shifts and stirs. The skyline is dead, the city buried without a monument to signal its passing. It is lost and forgotten. Peace has come. Peace and emptiness, hand in hand.

  But even the peace has small durations. Order, like chaos, proves to be only temporary. Far, far away in the shimmering distance a tiny black dot appears. Then, after a while, another, and another, and . . .

  Harker Lee is laughing. He has been laughing for a million years.

  Was it a bomb or a thunderbolt from the hand of God which destroyed the first city? Was it the reward of civilization, or the price of building roads across the wilderness?

  Ask Harker. He knows all about the megalopolis, all about the wilderness.

  He knows.

  While I walk by the banks of a river which girdles the world, I stop to rest where a boatman waits to ferry passengers across the river.

  “A coin,” cry the beggars, scampering around my feet, dragging their maimed children and rolling over and over in the dirt to display the full complement of their injuries and their agonies.

  “A coin, a coin, a coin, a coin!” they chant, in endless harmony, for the one strength they have left to them is the strength of their voices.

  “I have no coin,” I tell them.

  But there is another man passing by, and the beggars rush to him to surround him, the better to assault his pity and his kindness with the arrows of their need and the spears of their despair. The man has one coin, and he gives it to the most despicable of the beggars, who thereupon abandons her broken-limbed child to leap into the waiting boat. Steadily and unhurriedly, the boatman stirs the quiet water with his spatulate oars.

  “A coin?” he asks, with a voice like idle thunder. The beggar gives the boatman the coin she has been given, and the boat swings out onto the river, transporting the delirious beggar to her reward.

  The generous man turns to me. “How long?” he asks.

  I stare at him coldly, and then look down at the beggars, who are settling to wait by the roadside.

  “A thousand years,” murmur the beggars sleepily. “Perhaps forever.”

  They know the value of pity and conscience.

  My dreams are haunting me and taunting me with beggars. I know what the beggars mean. How many times have I accused civilized men of maiming and crippling their children as the beggars of Calcutta used to do — still do in some strange other world? All the better to beg, all the better to fit the mold that the social slot machine has destined the child for. Everywhere it is the same story, the same mythology. I know why you have made beggars to haunt madmen. Do they cluster around the feet of poor Judas as well? And all the others, too?

  I wish you joy of them. Judas will laugh at them; Sam Mastervine will kick them to death; Luis Dalquier will gamble with them and take from. them everything that they have or will earn. Cain Urquhart will try to convert them. Who do you think will find pity for them? Bedbug? Perhaps.

  Is that what you want? Do you want us to scorn the whole human race for beggars? You want us to cheat them? You want us to turn our backs on the whole human race? It won’t work. Not with beggars. Whatever makes you think that they have that much consequence? Whatever makes you think that we have repulsion left in our hearts to spare for your meager hauntings?

  Show us glory, God, show us pride and ambition, if you want to win us. Give us the pride and the power. Don’t ask us to find our own. We can’t.

  Titan Nine

  Letter to Canaan

  Dear Judas,

  I am addressing this letter to you because of the individual-to-individual rule imposed by the prison, but I hope that you can use your own judgment wisely as to the extent to which you communicate these contents to your fellow inmates.

  I’ve been out only a matter of days, but I don’t really want to talk about being out, and I’m not allowed to talk about being in, so what am I going to talk abou
t?

  My purpose in writing this letter is the same as my purpose in writing all my letters, and the same as your purpose in writing all yours: I need somebody to talk to. And it’s always easier to talk to people when I’m on my own. You know how much easier it is to cry on a shoulder that isn’t there.

  I can’t tell you where I am, or why, but I can tell you that I don’t like it and I’m scared of it. Most of all, I’m scared of people. I’ve been away from the sort of people-contacts that these people use for a long time. I can’t go around treating them as if they were homicidal maniacs condemned to life, now can I? But this isn’t like the other time — the time I told you about, when they only wanted to reel my brain out onto miles and miles of magnetic tape, and they didn’t expect me to be a person — just a specimen. This is different.

  I never got a chance to say good-bye, and this is no time or place — this whole letter is to say hello. I don’t know what you thought when they just took me out and never brought me back. Perhaps you think I’m dead. Reassure yourselves, I’m still in the land of the pseudo-living. Or is it reassurance? Am I just going to condemn you to jealousy? I hope not. I think not. I’m sure not. You’re not going to turn to hate me because I’m in a different cage. Sure, there might be slight cause for envy — I can see the sun and I have space — but life here isn’t going to be that much different from life there.

  I’m afraid — I guess that is the real reason why I’m setting pen to paper so quickly, so urgently. Sheer cowardice. Events are moving fast, after standing still for years. The world is moving me (certainly not I moving the world), and I’m afraid of opportunity and action and ambition.

  But enough of orgiastic self-pity (a lie — when did anyone exhaust his supply of self-pity?). What am I talking about? What can I talk about? I’ll just venture to say a few simple things — nothing that anyone could object to — and hope they’re still in the letter when it gets to you. I’ll write on one side of the paper only so that if they cut bits instead of erasing or inking them, you won’t lose what’s on the other side.

  Harmless comment one. I’m working on a Project. You must know that already. For what other purpose do they snatch people out of the coffin? Only for guinea-pig purposes in exceptional circumstances. This is Project with a capital P, which means that it’s serious — they haven’t hired me out to a crackpot, as — it is rumored — may have happened in the past.

  As you know, I have spent years wrestling with the burdensome superabundance of my talent — I am probably suited only to Projects and not to projects. Do you know the difference? I suppose not. You got off the carousel fairly recently compared to poor bastards like Manny and Luis who were in before me, but even so you didn’t get much of a chance to study the ways of the world. Briefly, projects with small ps are the kind of thing where any guy with a bit of paper can amuse himself more or less harmlessly. They’re in the territory where the language of bits of paper and letters after the name is quite adequate for communication. You don’t have to be a Whiz Kid. They’re work — bread and butter. Trivia. Projects with big Ps, on the other hand, are not 99 percent perspiration and zero percent imagination. They are tasks which demand a certain waywardness in their exponents. They are crazy men’s scientific territory — what some would call the products of genius. This is blind-man’s-buff country, where work and diligence are not the answers to all questions. This is territory where there are more questions by far than one can hope to answer. I know it. I feel it. And I wouldn’t be here if that weren’t the case.

  You remember the last Project I was on. Quite crazy. Reading minds. Not sensibly reading minds, like the guys in the SF movies or the stage acts, but actually reading minds, like by taking a trace of the resonance currents in the cortex (and everywhere else), sorting them by computer, and printing them out into a language. Then translating the language and reading — literally reading — the mind. We were successful on that one, as you know. Somebody somewhere has a copy of my mind. Maybe lots of people. I’m the textbook mind. The textbook insane mind, that is. Do you know, they could read my mind far better than a sane one? I was more consistent. I had aberrations that were strong enough to record and sort and print, yet specific enough to decode. Ain’t that a triumph for science? I have the only fully decoded mind in existence. They think. Course, it doesn’t do much good being able to read the minds of crazy people. As far as I can see, that is. Not that I know. Nobody bothered to keep me up to date. Just thanks a lot, bye-bye, and good luck in your coffin. Jenny and I got along just fine, but facts were facts, and there was nothing could be done. Anyway, that’s all in the past, and I’m telling you this only so you can understand the sort of thing that they need people like us for.

  By the time you get this letter, knowing the speed of the mail these days, especially with the various holdups which the letter might accidentally fall prey to, I shall probably be a lot more settled, maybe even a bit comfortable. Almost certainly, I will have written you again. You know me — always scribble, scribble, scribble, like a gibbon. Even in the cells I set a new record for notebooks. They wouldn’t give me an extra supply, so I used yours and Bedbug’s and some of the others. I’m used to writing down my thoughts, and there’s no point here in me filling notebooks for the benefit of Security and no one else. I might as well communicate while I have the chance. I know you’ll read this and I know you’ll make whatever sense of it there is to be made, and I know that it’ll mean something whether or not. I will try to tell you something of how I am and how I am feeling.

  You write to me. I cannot put an address on this letter, but I think if you get me put on your official list of correspondents the prison will know how to get the letters to me. I know you have little enough to tell, but you know that I want to hear from you and I want to know what you have to say. Curse me for my luck, if you imagine I’m lucky. Tell me anything — nothing you say to me is wasted and you know it. I’m only sorry I haven’t set you a better example here, but you know how my mind runs on and away. Irresponsible. I plead insanity, and I have the means to prove it. . . . You have to humor me, so they say. . . .

  Finish, for now. Events will be descending upon me any minute.

  All the best,

  Harker

  Cage of Darkness

  The Bottom Falling Out of the World

  Life is patterned. Socialization divides us up into sections and places parts of our being in a whole series of pigeonholes. Life is classified and categorized. Because of the convenience of this perceptive anabolism we can deal with life easily, as it comes, as a matter of routine. And if one small part of life goes wrong, we have all the rest to support it while we patch it up. By cutting up life into small sections, we safeguard the whole.

  Tragedies do occur. Tragedies cut across the sectioning process, disturbing whole areas of the pattern. There are problems so extreme — though we do not all encounter them — that one’s life as a whole seems threatened with reduction to ruins. One’s sense of self, one’s whole being in the world, is threatened by tragic circumstance. The tragedy might be sudden and physical — an accident; or it may creep up on one — a steady decline into bankruptcy. Such experiences have a deep and considerable effect on those who encounter them. People are scarred for life, go gray overnight, will never be the same again. The bottom falls out of the world. The pigeonholes are shattered, and all one’s life tumbles into a heap from which it has to be resorted and repatterned. Sometimes, it doesn’t seem worth it. Sometimes, people decide to die instead. Sometimes, even when they try, they are unable to reconstitute the world. Almost always, though, for those willing and able to take it, there is a route of escape, one category of existence left inviolate, in which one can take refuge while gathering one’s resources to prepare for rebuilding an existence. Always, there seems to be a hiding place. It might be a job, or one particular person who alone can help. It may be somewhere to which one can return — an old home wher
e parents still live, so that one can almost literally return in time to an easier way of life, a different set of categories.

  Tragedy, like common, everyday misfortune, can be defeated by the pattern of life, by the process of categorization.

  In Block C, however, in the cage, I am stripped even of my categories of life. The pattern is replaced by a constant monotone. There is no variety of input and output. There is only one routine. I have lost my home, my job, my friends, my environments, my car, my bed, my mailbox.

  The effect of this shearing away of the categories of life until I am left with only one gray existence in which to operate is to make every common misfortune into a terrible tragedy. There is no hiding place from the slightest of emotional hurts, anxieties, fears. Everything is naked.

  I left people behind me. I try to keep in touch. How? Not why, but how? To them, I am a dead man. To me, they are the living and I the dead. The only human contacts I have are with my fellows, and these I cannot avoid. I cannot divide up my life. I am living it all simultaneously, and that is why I am living no life at all. The world of Block C — my world — has no bottom at all.

  Let me tell you about Sam Mastervine. He used to be a scientist. Which means that he had a whole chain of rational thoughts to support every single opinion that he carried in his head. Which means that he had at his mind’s disposal a vast body of eminent authority to back up his every statement. Which means that he carried into Block C a whole mass of serious and meaningful thinking to tell him what he was and how and why, and to give him a life as rich as any that was possible inside the concrete womb.