Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  It is true that the sky is blue only if I am correct in assuming that the sky is blue, after which I can prove it. All sensory perception is as conditional as logical analysis and in the same way.

  There is no absolute truth.

  But even without truth at all, there is still reality, which is not conditional. The silly idea that something has to be true to be real (or vice versa) is the curse of modern society.

  A lie/an illusion/a hallucination deceives. A lie is a lie because it deceives and for no other reason. A lie may be untrue, but there is no conceivable reason why it should be. A lie cannot be the opposite of a truth because a truth is conditional and a lie can only deceive if it is unconditional.

  A truth might be a lie if it deceives. It deceives (virtually all truths do this) by implication.

  The statement “This statement is a lie” is only a lie if it is true. It is a lie, because it deceives. It is therefore true. It deceives by implying a paradox which has no reality. All paradoxes stem from errors of this kind. One would think that the mere existence of paradoxes would inform people that their way of looking at things is not real, however true it may be, but not so, alas.

  There is no polarity in reality.

  Opposites do not exist.

  Cogito ergo sum is a lie. It is a lie because it implies logic where none exists. This is an example of logic constructing its own traps. Beware of logic. Cogito assumes sum. (For those interested, one might also note that sum [word] assumes cogito [concept described by word] and therefore the whole thing is mutually self-supportive and therefore [or ergo] ergo is [a] redundant and [b] a false concept anyway.)

  Belief is commitment. Belief in a statement, principle, or truth inherently rejects the possibility that opposite statements, principles, or truths might exist. Yet the concept of opposites itself arises from the infrastructure of belief. Belief is self-contradictory. All truth is conditional and therefore all belief is absurd. Belief denies the conditionality of truth.

  All beliefs deceive. All beliefs are lies.

  Belief can only harm me.

  I reject it.

  You will find it just as easy to reject if you reject all emotion. Emotion is the source of belief. Without emotion, one can shed belief easily.

  The sole reason I can survive the titan flight is because I cannot be trapped into denial of — and thus loss of — reality.

  It is all a game. The only object is to keep the piece in play (not to win).

  The piece is me. Identity, person, being.

  I’ll come back from hyperspace.

  I can, and I will.

  Appendix Two. I suppose I had better justify that last statement. Explain it anyhow. I always have to explain things. Well, we all have our ex-es to bear (axes?). I’ll pretend you’re a moron. (Chalk, this is for you.)

  Imagine a piece of paper three units by two.

  Imagine the paper divided by a line into two equal halves. The line is two units long.

  Imagine that line moving sideways along the piece of paper. It still divides the paper into two parts, but the parts are no longer equal in size. The line, however, is still two units long, and will remain so until it reaches the edge of the paper, at which point the two divided parts of the paper are six square units and zero square units in area.

  The magnitude of the spaces which that line divides cannot be known by knowing the length of the line. (Author’s message.)

  Now extend the model into three dimensions. We now have a surface dividing a cube. Dispense with the squareness — we have a surface separating two volumes of whatever shape and size.

  A man is a surface. He separates his inner being from the world which contains him. It is equally true to say that he separates the world outside from the inner being which contains it. We are now operating in a total of four dimensions; the human surface is itself possessed of three, just as the surface dividing the cube had two and the line dividing the piece of paper had only one.

  The important point is this. By measuring the dimensions of a man, we cannot possibly hope to deduce anything about the relative dimensions of inner being and outer space, nor even of their actual sizes (the original piece of paper might have been an infinite streamer, with the dividing line still two units long).

  Either inner being or outer space or both might be infinite. Either inner being or outer space or both might be negligible. We do not know. We cannot know. Our observations are founded only upon our assumptions.

  In order to travel faster than light — to reach into the realms of outer space — we must side-step mass, and therefore the matter-phase. We must go, in fact, into a tachyon-phase, into a state where the relationship between mass and velocity is different and manipulable.

  But in order to translate ourselves into a phase which gives us access to outer space, we must also, by that translation, give ourselves access to inner being. We know very little about either. We might be very surprised indeed to find the territories which are actually available for exploration, rather than those which we believe to be there.

  Faster-than-light travel translation into tachyon-phase is an implicitly schizophrenic experience. I have some notion of what it will be like. I have some idea as to how to cope with it. The men who rode the other titans did not.

  What happened to the other spacefarers was this: in the tachyon-phase they found themselves in a new context of reality. They found themselves, for the first time, in their own inner being. They were in no way prepared for what they found there. They were, in fact, in a context which all their socially conditioned beliefs told them was unreal and could not exist. They were each alone in a mode of reality which had been forbidden to them by the terms of their earthly existence.

  They could not be expected to adapt themselves.

  They were each given godhood. It is by no means easy to be a god. Their beliefs could not cope with it.

  Their selves disintegrated.

  Except for Lindquist’s. Lindquist’s self survived.

  But it can’t get back.

  I can. You can.

  A footnote. Probably the last words that this autobiography will ever wring from me.

  They let me name the ship. I didn’t think they’d do that — not for a poor crazy man who’s more a victim in this game than a hero. But they did. It really is my ship.

  I named the ship Canaan.

  Of course.

  Madman’s Dance

  Recombinations in the Kaleidoscope

  Crowds are not common in my dreams; crowds are always difficult to handle. For this reason, when the crowds do appear, pushing and jostling and pressing their empty faces into kaleidoscopic circles, I feel the pressure that much more intensely. I have always had a sort of horror of being watched, and the fact that the watchers have no faces, but only eyes, makes the horror more real.

  As the mob pushes and presses, the man in the death-mask, who is always present in the crowd, but never a part of it, is withering a rose with an artful gesture of his rotting fingers. The petals, crushed in a gnarled hand, drop to the ground like stones. The man in the death-mask smiles at me, and I bow my head in acknowledgment.

  The multitude is horrified.

  “How can death be your friend?” asks a man in the crowd — Cain Urquhart, I think, though I cannot be sure because I cannot see him.

  “Why not?” I say. “We can work together. I think we are on the same side.”

  This thought may be dangerous, but only if it is wrong. Death and the devil have often been seen hand-in-glove by wiser visionaries than I. On being asked to renounce the devil and all his works, the dying man replies: this is no time to make enemies. So it should be. It could be Judas behind that mask. It might be Mastervine. Either way . . .

  “I don’t understand,” says the voice in the crowd. Definitely not Cain Urquhart, the master of unders
tanding. Madoc? Petrie? Chalk?

  “We collaborate,” I tell him (her?). “We have similar ideas and similar concerns. We are twin prisms, distributing light in different directions only because the source of light is so infinitely variable. We have the same potentials.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?” The crowd comes closer, stifling me with its attention and curiosity. Only the man in the death-mask has space in which to move.

  I do not answer.

  “We writhe in agony beneath the shadow of his skeletal hand,” they tell me. I cannot decide whether they are warning me or marveling at my lack of fear.

  “Everyone holds that hand,” I tell them. But the crowd does not understand — does not even believe me. Where is Dalquier? Or Cannon? Or Sam Mastervine? Surely the . . .

  The man in the death-mask reaches his hands out into the crowd, and he begins crushing their skulls, and the bones fall like rose petals, and we laugh, sharing the joke between our divided self.

  The crowd scatters.

  I follow them, leaving the man in the death-mask behind me, to tidy up after himself. I cry to the crowd, because suddenly I feel that it is very important they should understand: “I am teaching you to be supermen. I teach by example. We are supermen. The cage of darkness is a barrier to be broken down, and this is the way to break it.”

  Now I am lonely. The crowd is still all around me, but the people are now nothing more than fugitive shadows, fading before the power of my glance, hiding from the echoes of my words.

  “We have created something above ourself,” I tell them, though they will go to almost any lengths to avoid listening. “The great tide will never ebb. We will not relegate ourselves to the situation of the beast. We will transcend man. As the ape to the man is only a thing of shame, so the man to the Titan is only a thing of shame. . . .

  “We have come the way from worm to man, and we bear within us the whole legacy of the worm, as we bear the legacy of the crawling reptile and the climbing ape. We are composites of plant and phantasm, but we are nevertheless Titans. . . .

  “Titan is the purpose of the human race. If we will only say: titan will be the purpose of the human race. . . .

  “Remain true to the Earth, yet carry with me my extraterrestrial dreams. If these are poison, then take this poison into your bellies. When God was declared dead, blasphemies against that God ceased to be. Now the sin which preys on the human soul is blasphemy against man, against life, against knowledge.

  “When your souls looked with contempt upon the body of a man, did you ever really doubt that you were right? That the soul should leave the body meager, ugly, and ill-provided, was that malice or reality? Thus the soul sought to escape body and Earth, and have we not done so? Could they ever cage our souls? Could their cages leach out our souls?

  “Are your souls meager, hideous, and starved of wisdom? Are you a pollution upon the face of the earth? Must the afterman be an ocean of content and contempt to contain such a pollution and destroy itself with guilt?

  “Not if we would not have it so. The hour of contempt need never come. Happiness need never be loathsome to us, or reason, or feeling, or sympathy.

  “The soul is free. There is space for dreams and truth within the dreams. There is space for the heir to the crawling reptile among the stars in the sky. . . .

  “We are titans. . . .”

  They flee from my words into every corner that chance might offer them. In order to escape me, they flee even back to the arms of the man in the death-mask, who welcomes them with a smile, and a smile, and a smile. . . . I no longer laugh with him. I could cry, but there is no need. In a different time, in the cages, they will listen, and even if they refuse to believe or understand, they will take what they have to. Judas Dancer will captain a ship to the stars; Sam Mastervine will steer her; Luis Dalquier will plot her course; Nathan Petrie and Steve Cannon and Manny Madoc and Con Radley and Cain Urquhart will be her crew. Bedbug will nurse her engines, and I will wait for her in the sky.

  I let the crowd run from me into the blaze of light. I remain.

  I walk through the silken air, the lightness of my feet taking me upon a mountain ridge. I come upon a small man whose shoulders are badly bent beneath a gaudy bundle.

  “May I help you with your load?” I ask him. My heart is cold and stiff, as though it is locked in a granite cave, but I cannot bear to look at the hideous warping of his shoulders. It makes me feel sick.

  The small man shakes his head and says, “You cannot bear this burden.”

  “Is it so heavy?” I ask him, with a laugh hovering upon my lips.

  “It is the vault of heaven,” he replies, quietly.

  And he smiles.

  Titan Nine

  Sobieski’s Shield

  They didn’t want to let me in to see Mike Sobieski on my own, despite Jenny’s kindly say-so. I contrived to tell the fresh-faced Major Hurst (my second-string nursemaid) to go to hell, but Sobieski’s doctor (also military) wanted to stick around to make sure I didn’t spit poison darts at his patient. But when I went into the sickroom, with the doctor trailing me, Mike told him to get out and leave us in peace.

  “He’ll only watch us through the glass, of course,” said Mike, pointing at the mirror, “but I’m damned if I’ll have him hovering around me like the angel of death.” I pulled up a chair and situated it carefully in between Mike and the mirror.

  He didn’t sound any too good. It wasn’t the faintness of his voice or anything like that — just a sort of sour inflection which suggested frustration and bitterness.

  “How d’you feel?” I asked him.

  “How d’you think I feel?” he retorted. “Numb. Only half of me in this world — the other half’s chopped off and parceled up in Morphia or some such place. They kill the pain and me with it. I’m surprised they let me have my own head. Morphine’s good stuff, though — lovely dreams I have during my afternoon nap. Very vivid.”

  “You don’t take afternoon naps,” I said.

  “Don’t tell them that,” he said. “But it’s not for want of trying. They ration out my real time, and there’s nothing to do with the time they steal but sleep and dream. If I can. More dream than sleep, I’m afraid. But very vivid, as I say. Relax, dammit. You’ll scare me to death sitting like that.”

  I relaxed. He was busy pausing for breath.

  “Are you going to do it?” he asked, abruptly.

  “Do I have a choice?” That was the wrong thing to say. I forgot that you don’t say the same things to different people. You don’t show the same Harker Lee to everybody. You have to change. I regretted the error.

  “I hope not,” he said, not offended by my remark. “If you need to choose, you’re in a bad way.”

  “I am in a bad way,” I said, muttering to take the bite out of it. “But I’m going. Of course I’m going.”

  “Fine.”

  It was his turn to relax. But he only sagged a little. He hadn’t been able to muster the tension to face my reply head on.

  “Blasted pillows,” he said. “Ought to be possible to let me lie in a position where I can look human instead of flopping about like a worm.” He tried to force himself further up the bed. I suspected that was what the doctor didn’t want him to do. I couldn’t decide whose side I was on, but I restrained him so that the doctor wouldn’t get overexcited if he found out.

  “You don’t really know what you’re in for yet?” he said.

  “No. Hartner’s going to brief me on the titans. With Hurst in attendance to keep a check on classified material and so on. Jenny will take care of the psych side, of course — get me mentally fit, show me why I’m going to survive, that sort of thing. Then there’ll be physical training, I suppose. But no, I don’t know much about it as yet. It still seems absurd to me.”

  “You believe you can do it?” he asked. I knew that he only wante
d to hear me say yes, but I was damned if I was going to humor him like an idiot child.

  “I don’t know. I’ll try. You must have a good argument on paper or I wouldn’t be here. But all sorts of things get committed to paper. Paper doesn’t mean a thing. Jenny has a model of my mind and a computer decode. But I have a mind. There’s a big difference. You know that.”

  “You helped build the model. The model stands up. We’ve tested it in the computer with everything we know about hyperspace.”

  “That’s fine. It’s my model. I believe in it. But it’s analogical analysis, and you know full well that the analogue only replaces the properties of the original. It doesn’t duplicate. And what you actually know about hyperspace could be written legibly on a postcard. The model stands up in the computer. That’s good. But the Harker Lee you have in your files is only a paper frog that jumps when its neck is tickled. I respect the work you’ve done, but nothing is going to give me faith. I’ll do it, if I can. But no promises. We’ll have to see.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “That’s your side of it. I want you to hear mine as well.”

  “That’s what I came for.”

  “Exactly. Jenny could tell you, or Fred Jacobson, or Andy Machen. But they’d tell you in a false voice, trying to put it my way, for me. That’s bad. All you want from them is their ideas, not mine. So I’m going to give you mine myself.”

  I nodded my understanding.

  “Titan’s been going for a long time, now,” he continued. “You can’t even tell where or when it began. I guess it just growed. I got into the action a little late for the sweat and the searching — I came straight out of the armchair where I’d been doing the dreaming. The Project actually started when all the threads were gathered in together, but you know how much further back the thinking goes. I came straight through the corridors of power, courtesy more of reputation than imagination, when it was time to pick up the little pieces and make a big one.