Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  Chalk put his hand back into the deck and began to shuffle.

  “It’s my deal,” said Goodman.

  “You owe me eight and a half thousand dollars,” I told Chalk.

  Goodman took the cards. I pulled the cash out of the middle and inspected the check.

  “Suppose he had gotten one of the other two aces,” said Goodman, “and you hadn’t improved?”

  “I’d have lost,” I said.

  Madman’s Dance

  Lost in the Metaplastic Maze

  There is a fountain which rises within the roots of a great ash tree where I rest one day in my traveling.

  A giant of a man, with a great beard and breastplate of carven gold, approaches the tree and asks — apparently of the tree — whether he might drink the water of the fountain and thus take into himself the sap of the tree, so that he could thereby know all that the tree knows and all that it yet might know.

  And the tree allows him to do so, but plucks out one of his eyes as a tribute, and sets it in its branches as a gorgeous fruit.

  Now the great warrior drinks, and he knows all that he has asked to know. Sadness descends upon him like a cloak when he perceives the hollowness of his self, and in particular his empty heroism. Both in his backward path and in his forward path, it seems that he is nothing. He will not weep, because he thinks to do so will dishonor his sword, but his face is drawn across with grayness, and lines are graven therein, as though he has become suddenly most ancient.

  Slowly, he continues on his way.

  I have drunk from the spring myself, and I know that it is only water, but my eye is not hanging from the branches of the tree like a succulent apple, and I have not asked the tree to permit me a share in its store of knowledge.

  A multitude of small, colored birds fly about the tree now, and each of them in turn hovers by the strange new fruit, and each in turn takes a tiny bite therefrom. Then they fly away, in all directions, into all the corners of the world, and as they fly they weep the tears of the warrior’s surrendered eye, which falls like rain upon the ground.

  And their colors slowly fade, because they, like the warrior himself, inherit all the burden of a lifetime in a single moment. But they do not die.

  They do not die.

  I take advantage of the rarest of all chances when I have walked a little further along the road. I find a statue of Justice which has been temporarily imbued with life by a fragment of chance. She is on her bended knee before a group of small children, sorting through their petty disputes. One by one, I watch the children turn away from her blindfolded face, and each begins to cry as each limps away.

  Then she stands, and faces me, though I know she cannot see me because of the stone bandage which imprisons her eyes.

  “How can you read the inclination of your scales?” I ask her, pointing at the scales which she carries in her left hand, though it is useless to point, because she cannot see.

  “I cannot read,” she tells me. “I am blind.”

  “Then how can you judge?” I ask her.

  She laughs and laughs and laughs, her mouth gaping wide with the rushing mirth, her stone bandage stirring not a fraction of an inch, though her loose dress flaps like a storm-pressed sail.

  She makes no answer, but she waves aloft the sword which she holds in her other hand.

  One by one, she beheads the children.

  I know my enemies.

  They bear marks upon their foreheads, and the signs label them with stupidity, blindness, intolerance, and avarice. Their bodies are fueled by the hungry engines of their vanity. They are not remorseful, they make no apologies.

  Their errors are obstinate in their insistence on a counterfeit reality. It is cowardice which makes them oblivious to the humiliating truth. They make certain that their meager concessions and their pitiful overtures to honesty do them no harm, rob them of no illusions, and help to prop up their tattered self-confidence. With armor of happiness and weapons of faith they tread their downward path to a meaningless fate. They cry and they crow and they make false images to mirror their imaginary affections, as if the effluent of their tiny minds could alter the course of aeonic destiny.

  I, in my pretty disguise as cloven-hoofed Satan, choose to offer solace to their prisoned minds by selling them vice in the absurd commerce of evil, but my sense of humor will not permit them to have any real joy of it. They are seeking the cheap fabric of a synthetic existence, and willingly pay the price, which is their own humanity.

  There are puppet strings tied to my fingers, and I can make the world dance to an idiot’s tune. I pour filth upon their heads, and they pay no more heed to it than if it were the gentle rain which falls from heaven. Each day they are further dissipated upon the great rack of my ever-present hell, but they are forbidden to feel horror or disgust, by virtue of the fact that the gloom of the pit is the covenant which they themselves have sought and signed and sealed — and thought themselves the winners of a bargain.

  They cannot even suspect the poverty which they crave and the pain which they court, for they will not gamble what they have, and they use it all to buy the anesthetic of furtive pleasure and the meager squeezing of bloodless stones.

  The opaque eyes in their powdered clown masks will not see the emptiness of their minds, but prefer to adhere with wormlike tenacity to the thin curtain of matter which is set in the floor of the cage where I keep them for amusement. They live in a Lilliput of the soul, yet imagine themselves gods and Titans.

  Among the jackals and the rats and the scorpions and the spiders and the bloodsucking bats they make their home. They are my guests. And yet they imagine themselves the Lords of Creation. And with what fervor do they point to one or another among them whom they imagine to be uglier or filthier or more riddled with the plague than the rest. Their minds permit an infinite quantity of self-pity and the denigration of one another.

  I love them all, my wonderful enemies, in the way that they love one another. I laugh at their miseries and their hypocrisies, and most of all at their feeble, futile castles in the stagnant air.

  And the path of my journey lies clear before me across the sky. I can see it now, where it was hazy before.

  I will pass through the earthly depths where devil-drums will sing my praises and set out a rhythm for my feet to follow, and I will need no rest, not even in the heights where the mountains meet the sky above the clouds.

  I will search the caverns where every shape is gray, and return to the gentle light of a kindly sun, and roam the pitfalled pages of my youth.

  I will fight with every army that ever went to war, and learn to savor in the utmost the agonies of death and wounding.

  I will leap to catch the starlight and the comet’s tresses. I will tramp the mighty skies, along the avenue of the zodiac, and saturate my tiny self with every pain and pleasure known to the frivolities of flesh.

  I will aim for heaven, and leave my heart in hell. And descend via misspent time and ill-spilled blood, by the lost, forgotten years, tasting the wounds and the tears, looking for lust and ecstasy, and experimenting with eternity.

  I will grope in passing fancy for the empty womb, but pass on and through to the luxuries of unknown, unsought dooms. The sands of time will run through my shriveling fingers. Ape and bird I will be, and fly and cry while I grow scales and mollusk shell. I will search the ultimate oblivion of fleeing life in the primeval sea.

  And on and on, through lifeless paradise and limitless death.

  And I will return, because the journey is cyclic.

  I will stand, as I do now, on the threshold of eternity, again and again.

  I have discovered that you are dead. The universe is mine.

  Titan Nine

  The Waiting Game

  It was about ten when I knocked on Jenny’s door. I was almost surprised when she answered.

 
; “Hi,” she said. Sounded unenthusiastic, like: Oh, it’s you.

  I wandered in and sat down.

  “Long time no see,” I said.

  “All of thirty hours,” she said. “You want some coffee?”

  “That’s right. What’d you do today?”

  Her answer floated back from the kitchenette. “Work.”

  “The new tape the same as the old one?”

  “Just about.”

  “I had a look at your torture chamber. Jacobson showed me around with a ghoulish grin on his face. I asked for a demonstration, but poor Hurst looked quite pale and I didn’t have the heart.”

  “It is a bit cramped,” she admitted, leaning in the doorway while she waited for the water to boil. “But it’s only for a few weeks. And you’ll be so full of happy thoughts you won’t even notice the time pass.”

  “Happy thoughts,” I echoed. “Houdini couldn’t have got out of that thing with all the picklocks in his armory. D’you really think it’s necessary?”

  “No.”

  “But it’s safe?”

  “No chances. We do it all the easy way. I don’t think the equipment matters. All we want to know is whether your mind can stand up. I think it can. But the others didn’t. So we take no chances.”

  “It’s a hell of a way to travel.”

  “For the time being, it’s the only way. It brought Lindquist back in one piece. We’d be fools not to use it to bring you back in one piece.”

  “Does it occur to you that if deep space doesn’t drive me mad, the Iron Maiden treatment might?”

  “Not you, Harker. Not you. You’re a practiced survivor. Anyhow, come back catatonic if you feel like it. Feel free. We’ll fish you out of it.”

  She came in with the coffee, and I sipped gingerly. I couldn’t understand why everybody was so perpetually ghoulishly cheerful these days. Nobody was sparing my feelings.

  “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty-Dumpty together again,” I observed.

  “So they should have hired a psychiatrist.”

  “You aren’t a psychiatrist. You’re only a theorist.”

  “I’m the world’s foremost expert on you. And I’ve practiced. Psychiatry, that is.”

  “In the midst of all this happy jollity,” I said, “I feel about as merry as an undertaker at a christening. Sometimes I get the feeling nobody thinks I can do it except me and thee, so nobody cares much. I feel like the butt of a big joke.”

  “So laugh.”

  “It’s not funny. I have my doubts, you know. Real doubts. Sometimes I mull over your fascinating logic — you know, Harker Lee is the one man we can send to spend six weeks in hell, because he’s done it all before.

  “Well, that’s right. I have done it before, and it wasn’t nice. So maybe it wasn’t spectacular; I just stared at spots on the ceiling till they crawled, and gave up talking for Lent. Big deal. But it wasn’t that easy. There were an awful lot of things involved in my recovery after that breakdown, and one of them was a knowledge that it could be beaten and if it could be beaten it wouldn’t happen again. You know, that’s a whole lot of different circumstances to the ones I’m likely to find out by Proxima Centauri.”

  “The trip won’t take six weeks,” she said. “And most of the weeks it does take you’ll be in normal space at sub-c and you can talk, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be absolutely okay.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that when a guy standing on top of a high building manages to talk himself out of jumping off it doesn’t necessarily mean he could survive the fall if he did?”

  She sighed.

  People who understand you are often very difficult to talk to. They understand you too well. They know when you’re talking beyond your real feelings, and they know why. If they play the game, you know they’re fooling. If they don’t play the game, you can’t either. Sometimes it does me good to talk, to say things I don’t mean. But I need an audience. It’s easier by mail.

  “So what do you want?” she said. “You want to go home?”

  “Can I?”

  “No.”

  “Then that’s not what I want, is it?”

  “No,” she said, tiredly, “you want to sound off. You want to feel sorry for yourself and make me feel sorry for you, too.”

  “So humor me.”

  “Has it occurred to you that it isn’t so easy for the rest of us?”

  “I’m the guy qualifies for the coffin if it doesn’t work.”

  “Exactly,” she said. She sounded bitter — something I’d not known her sound before. She didn’t usually show ragged edges. She was normally determined and dedicated. No frayed nerves at all. But not now. Pressure was beginning to work on her. Why? Surely not because it was little old Harker that had his head on the chopping block? Maybe it was a build-up over a long period, I thought. The strain of work, the strain of seeing Lindquist every day, his tape clicking away, the strain of seeing Mike, too, with his time running out.

  But she was carrying on: “All you have to do, sweet child, is lie on your cushioned couch in your steel vest, all your needs supplied directly and automatically. And live or die. Just that, no more. It’s no trouble at all. The worst place you can end up is nowhere. I know damn well you’re scared, but how the hell can it hurt you when you’ve been crying good and loud for the last ten years that you’re dead anyway and only walking around because they won’t put you in the ground? All the time I’ve known you you’ve complained what a damn hard life it is and how little difference it would make if you were dead. So this job comes natural to you. Tailor-made. You have nothing to lose. Well, we have. We have to live with the problems and keep living with them and keep on fighting them. You don’t.”

  Hoist with mine own petard.

  “Great,” I said. “You send me out because it doesn’t matter a damn whether I come back or not.”

  “To you, Harker, to you. It matters to us whether you come back or not. It’s we who have to face the consequences if you don’t.”

  “That’s a pretty heartless attitude, if you don’t mind my saying so,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “But it’s you who’s doing all the whining.”

  “I’m only the fall guy,” I said. “I don’t get to whine.”

  “I just wish you wouldn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re just the victim,” she said. “We’re the murderers, and we have to keep right on murdering until we need to murder no more. Do you think we like that? Do you think that we like being dragged into your morbid speculations and your fears, day after day? Don’t you think we’re scared for you? Don’t you think we might have morbid speculations of our own? Don’t you think we might feel guilty?”

  “I’m a murderer, too,” I said.

  “Then you know how I feel.”

  I did know how she felt. It was good to know that she really did feel. There had been times when I was in doubt. I’d finally made her mad at me. I needle people deliberately. I always have. But I felt sorry because I’d needled Jenny. I’d come for a little self-help, as a predator on her good nature. I hadn’t intended to trespass on her finer feelings.

  There was a silence. Not a pregnant silence, but an empty, vacuous silence. A silence that needed to contain something, but didn’t.

  An aborted silence.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, to intrude something into the pause.

  “I know,” she said. “I know you didn’t mean that.” She was still bitter, softly bitter. I lit two cigarettes and passed one to her.

  “It’s tough,” I said, meaning tough for her.

  “It’s never easy,” she said, calming quickly.

  “It won’t be your fault,” I said, “if it doesn’t work out.”

  “It will,” s
he said, and she wasn’t going to hear any arguments.

  “You’re scared,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “You never said anything before,” I said. “I didn’t know. Miles of computer printout and a few years, and a few letters. That’s all I am. You know that. You don’t love me. Hell, you don’t even like me very much.”

  “Don’t be an idiot,” she said.

  “Meaning?”

  “What I said.”

  “You like me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I suppose,” she said, “that if it were you that had to send me out there, on the heels of seven dead men, it wouldn’t matter a damn.”

  “It’d break my heart,” I said, “if you didn’t come back.”

  “Your heart’s already broken,” she said.

  “It’d break again.”

  “Well, it’ll break mine if you don’t come back.”

  “You don’t love me.”

  “You don’t love me. You don’t have to be in love with someone to be on the same side.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “That’s very nice. I’d rather be carrying your good wishes than the hopes of the human race. I can keep your good wishes when I come back.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “By the way,” I said, “talking about the hope of the human race, who does take the accolades if I do come back? Who do you gypsy switch for me?”

  “I thought you knew,” she said. “Young Hurst is going through training with you. Not for nothing, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “He’s the hero type.”

  Cage of Darkness

  The Man Inside

  If Bedbug ever had a name, we took it away from him. We called him Bedbug instead, and that became the only name he had — all he had, in fact, in the whole world. The only thing that was truly his. If we ever offered him anything else, he refused it. Maybe that’s why everyone outside Canaan hated him so.