Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  Being a scientist is exactly the same as being a priest. You know the truth. There is no difference between religious dogma and scientific paradigm. Both are sheep’s clothing wrapped snugly around wolves. Both are the clothes which can make a pauper look like a prince.

  The only difference is that science conforms to certain standards of peculiarity known as rationality, which purport to answer all criticisms, while faith simply maintains itself impervious to all criticisms.

  The importance of Mastervine’s being a scientist was that it put him in the know. It made him the intellectual elite. Because he knew the word “psychosis” and understood its references, the word held no terrors for him. Like a sorcerer of old, once he knew the true name of an elemental, he held power over that elemental, and it would serve his purposes rather than its own.

  Psychosis did Sam Mastervine’s bidding, served Sam Mastervine’s purposes. He hurled the fits of madness around like tennis balls in a dazzling display of intellectual elegance and competitive expertise. He played them in the manner of a virtuoso reproducing a masterpiece on a baby grand. He knew them, he dealt with them, he “cured” them.

  His own personal king-sized specimen was no trouble to him. The chain of rationality, though it never breaks, has rubber links which can stretch to accommodate all the ignorance, stupidity, self-delusion, perversion, and insanity that accumulate in the interstices like dirt under the fingernails.

  Sam Mastervine, like all the rest of his insidious breed, could never ever conceive of the possibility that he might be wrong. He might not know what the hell he was talking about, but he would defend to the death whatever he happened to be saying, with the invincible magic weapons of reason and logic. He kept his Superman uniform wrapped up inside his desk calculator, under his slide rule, or in the case which usually held his horn-rimmed glasses.

  He was kind to his mother, in favor of nuclear disarmament, and a great fan of Mickey Mouse. There was nothing particularly odd about Sam. He had his life measured out into its cavities. He was pretty much of a cliché, taken as a whole. It’s not surprising — clichés breed clichés and educate them into being clichés. Sam’s father was kind to his mother, drank his whiskey neat, and always talked straight to shop assistants. Cardboard people don’t have thirteen-carat-gold baby sons.

  When Sam Mastervine came to Canaan, he was all set to be king of the castle, a creative genius, and the Second Coming of Walter Mitty. He had it all taped. Being a scientist, he lacked all sense of proportion. He had himself all confused with Einstein, Galileo, Pasteur, and Doctor Who. Being a scientist, he really thought he could bring it off and live.

  He couldn’t.

  It’s not that his intelligence let him down, though he gave himself credit for too much. He conceded Edison’s glib and terribly reassuring definition of genius, and he knew it wouldn’t be easy.

  It was purely and simply that he lacked contexts. He couldn’t reapportion his life, because the pieces wouldn’t fit. Sam found himself in hell, the ultimate failure. Science, like religion, provides for human frailty but not for human individuality. Sam found that it was all useless to him. It wasn’t that he was short of answers, nor that he came up with the wrong ones. It was just that there weren’t any questions.

  Sam, when I knew him, was the bitterest of men. People — especially nuts — who are denied their rightful hallowed shrine in the ephemeral esteem of their subservient neighbors, often become bitter. Sam became bitter because he was not a better man than those with whom he shared his fate. He’d been prepared to come to Canaan and be alone. He’d not been prepared to come to Canaan and cease to exist. He could have coped with any sort of a conflict between his own identity and the society into which he was thrust, but he wasn’t ready to find no society at all, and that he couldn’t cope with.

  In the final analysis, Sam was a creature of reflex — socially conditioned reflex. His science was no more than a version of faith. In the end, it was no more use to him than prayer. And no one was listening. No one at all.

  Madman’s Dance

  Mime to Silent Music

  While the surf gently lips and sucks the gray dome of rock, a silent, liquid piping is poured like sweet effluent into the bleak, inarticulate water.

  It is a song I cannot understand as I search for the hidden entrance to the dome. It is an absolute song. Without sound, there is no medium for interpretation. I could have understood it once: it used to be a blind force that would have torn me from the rock and battered me to death trying to hurl me through the wall and into the heart of the chamber.

  But the notes are changed. The urge and vitality have gone from the song. It is attractive still, but wistful rather than sensuous, and far from irresistible. It is a contented song, nostalgic, with a new — subtler — magnetism, born of an interplay of forces.

  The watcher now may only sit atop the smooth hemisphere and listen to the entombed amniotic music. I am trapped in the surf and the spray. The sirens slumber. The Rheingold is safe. There is no prospect of defilement, no question of theft. Perfect security.

  The music is synesthetic. It is the pulse of the blood. Blood mingles with blood. The music of the womb. The music of the machine. The machine which holds me still and which would not let me even kill myself. Do I still have being-in-the-world? Of course not. I have brought the music with me. I play it, within my body, and my body is the musical instrument. It is mine. It cannot belong to the machine. Here, there is no such thing as a machine. A machine has no being, no mind. It cannot exist. Save in me.

  I am the mind of the machine. I am the mind of the ship. In me is the machine and the ship and the world which sent me. In me, they are music. Synesthesia. What were they in Lindquist? An itch? An occlusion of the eye? Why did he forget? How did he forget?

  I am Titan. Titan is a rhythm in my heartbeat. We are safe and well. Having a lonely time, Jenny. Wish you were here.

  I am standing at the Gate of Heaven and waiting. The first thing you learn is that you always have to wait. I see a man whose face is smiling with fear, and he walks to the Gate and tries to make it yield to his touch. He is faceless, but I think he is Petrie. Poor Nathan Petrie. They won’t let you through, Nathan. They know it doesn’t matter whether you did it or not. Do you think they even care?

  “It won’t open,” he says, smiling.

  “It won’t open,” agrees the man in the death-mask, watching as ever. I don’t know who is behind the death-mask. Perhaps it is a problem for me to worry about. Perhaps he is supposed to frighten me. Perhaps he intends to unmask at the end of the play, so that I can see that his face is my own. I don’t care. It might just as well be his own face. What do I care whether death is only a mask or not?

  And we are all waiting: the man who smiles, my companion and good friend Death, the star-haired girl, and myself.

  And now comes a fire-eyed man who wears courage like a cloak around his shoulders. He approaches us, and his eyes pass over the smiling man and Death, coming to rest upon the face of the star-haired girl.

  “You keep strange company,” says the brave man. I try to look inside his coat to get a peek at his medals, but he has the buttons done up tight. It is possible that once upon a time he was only a cowardly lion. I think he is Steve Cannon, but how can one be sure when those who have no masks have no faces either?

  The star-hair replies, “It is not for me to choose who waits by my side at the Gate of Heaven.” Very true, that. Can Love choose what company she keeps? Of course not. Anyone and everyone might discover Love beside him, or inside him. Even Courage can’t be all that choosy. I’ve watched cowards do some very brave things, in my time.

  “Come with me,” says the man with fire in his faceless eyes.

  She bows her head, and together they open the Gate of Heaven and pass through.

  The man who smiles in fear again tests the strength of the Gate.

&nbs
p; “It will not open,” he says.

  “It will not open,” agrees Death, watching as ever.

  “What did you expect,” I say, “justice?”

  In a root-skulled chamber of black earth I want to find myself a house, a refuge, and a crib. There I can decorate my bones with tinsel and green bottle-glass, and share the vacuum of oblivion with the labyrinth of Minos and the heroes of Rome.

  I do not want my footprints to linger after me and tell the direction of my going, nor do I want the scrawling of my fingertips to testify the falseness of my temporary feeling.

  I want to be alone, except for the maggots which will clean the filthy flesh from my beautiful white bones, and the worms which will map the streets of my unending empire. The blind and crawling worms I choose now form my brothers and my lovers. They will kindly strip me of my worldly clothes, and my bones will be the arches and the thoroughfares of a great and wonderful city, beneath the sea of grass and tree.

  It is a city built in ruins, as nature intended cities should be, existing only to die, to be carcasses harboring the poor and the lonely. And my skull will be a palace and a temple, and kings and priests will look benignly down from the sockets of my eyes.

  Your best chance, of course, is with Thanatos. If the man in the death-mask is my companion and my friend, then he is your most favored ally. I know the face which ought to lurk behind the mask, yours and mine. You cannot delude me with facelessness.

  And yet I live. I always have. The man in the mask has been my friend since the day I was born, and he has not won me yet. You cannot kill me with death-wish, any more than you can scourge me with despair and sorrow and grief and hate. I survive. I am a survivor. This game, of course, is a test in itself. Death is only one of your victories, the other is gluttony for life. But I have walked that boundary all my life, and I can walk it now. You will not lure me into death, nor pain me into oblivion. My dreams remain my own, whether dreams within dreams within . . .

  Or worlds to cage me.

  I meet her by the edge of a river which flows forever around a Möbius circuit, so that the same water is cycled past the same shore once in every million years, and all the tears and drowned corpses are thus returned to their haunted wombs.

  In my eyes, she is perfect. But in her eyes, and any eyes which care to stare, I am misshapen.

  I speak to her in many lying voices, in languages which she cannot know, in cadences which hurt her ears. She cannot hear, she can only understand. Her eyes are fixed within my twisted face, and I feel their scalding glare.

  She sobs, and her hands flutter like moth wings to carry the tears from her painted face and drop them in the harrowed waters of the sacred river.

  Helpless, I watch her melt into the substance of the river, her tears and her blood borne away on an endless silvery shroud, her flesh and her bones turned fluid in the fertile, faithful earth, which bears her up triumphantly in the infant spring, as a cluster of reeds.

  I stay by her moist bedside until the snow-shrouded winter kills the reeds, and then I steal them from the frost-bound soil and make them into panpipes.

  And then I play upon them, a random song of loneliness and failure. A song without tune and without beauty. A song of death and heartlessness.

  She cannot hear, her eyes are fixed within my twisted face.

  I mingle with the absent melody the rhythm of my absent tears.

  And in a million years, it is the same again, and in a further million years, the same again, yet as I look down the kaleidoscope of the years, the mirrors flush the music into new patterns and new rhythms, the music becomes silent, and the whole play of it becomes a mime.

  Titan Nine

  Horizons

  “Hello, Harker,” she said.

  “Come on in.”

  “How are things?”

  “Same as always. Damn awful.”

  She grinned faintly. Not because it was a funny line — it was a standard, incorporated into a private ritual, but it was a very old standard. She hadn’t heard it in quite some time. She grinned because we weren’t back then, but here and now instead. I’ve never been able to master this business of greeting and parting which demands such hollowness from its participants. She knew.

  “Sit down,” I told her. “I’ll make some coffee.” I seem to remember somehow that conversations always begin with coffee. Mind you, I’ve been out of circulation for a long time. Still, a cup in your hand and a cigarette in your mouth enable you to be doing something even when the talk threatens to lapse. And it does — all the time. I can only really talk to people when they’re not there. The legacy of Block C. Sometimes it doesn’t show in the dialogue, but it always shows in the fingers. Without a cup of coffee and a cigarette I have at least two hands too many for talking to friends.

  They’d given me a fine apartment. It was small — everything in the fake town was three-quarter-sized, to emphasize the fact that it was lurking in a crater in a desert — but it was complete and self-contained. A nine-by-six bedroom and a closet-sized kitchen didn’t bother me much. I’m no claustrophobe: I like walls, and low ceilings, and compactness. Empty space, particularly wasted space, is beautiful and good for the eyes, but better at a distance.

  “Well,” I said, handing her the cup without having to ask about white or black or how much sugar (when you haven’t so many memories they’re easy to keep), “what have the years done to you?”

  “Disfigured me for life,” she answered.

  “It doesn’t show.”

  “You don’t look in the same kind of mirrors that I do.”

  “Mirrors, hell,” I said. “You look just like you always did.”

  “The years haven’t done a lot for you,” she said.

  “My troubles have aged me.”

  She paused, just long enough to consign the pointless exchange of gay banter to the realms of outer darkness, then she repeated the remark.

  “The years haven’t done you any good, have they?” Her voice was quite gentle.

  “What do you expect?”

  “Once now and again,” she said, “I saw letters. But you only write letters when you’re in a strange kind of a mood, don’t you?”

  “I write letters all the time,” I said. “I’m in a strange kind of a mood all the time. The letters that get through are the ones that have nothing to tell you. They stop the others.”

  “Your letters don’t read like you,” she said. “Like a weird caricature of you.”

  “I am a weird caricature of me,” I said. No flip talk, no silly chatter. I meant that.

  “Self-portrait with exaggerated color scheme and big nose,” she said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with my nose.”

  “You could have put more into the letters.”

  “Don’t talk like a shrink. You know the censorship system as well as I do. If you’d wanted, you could have got a look at damn near anything, on the grounds of being my psychiatrist. Letters I couldn’t send, even private notebooks.”

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “Not until the decision was taken to bring you here.”

  “But you’ve seen them now?”

  “I’m looking through them.”

  For a moment, I was almost afraid. Afraid of what might be in those notebooks that I wrote for me in the privacy of my cell. But nothing’s sacred — they photocopy everything, and all Security has to do is ask. The mountains move, let alone pieces of paper.

  “Find anything interesting?” I asked.

  “I won’t,” she said. “I know you. If anyone finds anything it’ll be someone who doesn’t know you.”

  “Well, you don’t have to bother anyway,” I said. “You can read my mind.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We can read your mind. We can read a lot of minds, but it isn’t doing us any good. We can’t decipher them fast en
ough, and they don’t make sense when we do.”

  Business at last.

  “I forgot to ask,” I said. “How’s titan?”

  “There’s nobody else you’d rather hear about before titan?” She meant Mike.

  “In time,” I said. “In time.”

  “Titan’s as well as can be expected,” she said. “A technological miracle. In human terms, pretty close to being a total disaster.”

  “Nobody’s perfect,” I lamented. “So you’re desperate.”

  “Ever since six they’ve been wheeling out the physicists in threes and hauling in psychiatrists to replace them. The whole base is a mindblower’s nightmare now. Theater of the absurd.”

  “So you all decided that the time had come to put away your petty human talents and call upon the worn-out, pig-sick, security-smeared, maniac-murderer whose secret identity is Captain Magnificent?”

  “That’s about it.”

  “Yeah, great,” I said. “But don’t you think it could be a good idea to tell me exactly how I stand? Is the army so tired of wasting the flower of American youth that it decided to stock all future titans with totally expendable lifers from the condemned cell, or is there some incredible chain of twisted logic by which some budding genius has actually worked out that I might stand a cat in hell’s chance where the nine lives of the flower of American youth seem to have simultaneously gone up in smoke?”

  “We think you can go out and come back.”

  “The others who went out didn’t?”

  “All dead except one. Lindquist. The last. He’s alive, but terminal schizophrenia has him.”

  “I see the logic,” I said. “Space drives men mad. Hence send a madman. What harm can it do him?”

  “Crudely put,” she said, “that’s about it.”

  “The others are all dead,” I pointed out.

  “Under suspicious circumstances. In locked rooms.”

  “I’m not the man I used to be,” I told her. “I wasn’t kidding when I said my troubles had aged me. I’ve been away a long time, kid. I might not be up to it. I really am dog tired from doing nothing but wasting. There’s no use pretending. I might shit out faster than the military boys, sooner and further. You’re going to have to do some very fast thinking if you’re going to find me in some kind of shape to ride a titan.”