Man in a Cage

by Brian M Stableford

  We do not have words.

  We have philosophies: do your time; don’t let your time do you.

  We make comparisons: there is hard time (slow, troubled, agonizing) and sad time (when you’re dying). When one man tries to unburden his troubled conscience onto another, he may be accused of stealing that man’s time. But usually, in Canaan, we acknowledge theft as a legitimate activity. We are usually ready to listen.

  This is what I know of one man’s troubles:

  Poor Judas never had a chance. This is a sob story. It is calculated to pluck at your heartstrings and make cinematic violin music. If you don’t enjoy it, that’s your privilege. Could your heartstrings be out of tune? Almost certainly. It’s too much to expect that you could play Dancer’s music. You don’t belong to Dancer’s world.

  And that’s the real killer.

  Nobody lives in Dancer’s world. Most certainly not the people who are in it. Because Dancer’s world is beyond the limit of endurance. It is an inhuman world, and he didn’t make it with human beings in mind. Why not? Where would Judas Dancer ever see a human being? There are too many of them. You can’t see humanity for the sheer weight of the flesh. World population, five billion. Everybody knows. Human? How?

  Forget the myriad deaths that the strange face of tomorrow might threaten you with. They aren’t important. They don’t matter. Everybody dies. It doesn’t matter how or of what. Forget all the poison and the disease. Forget the starvation and the thirst. Forget what the TV screen tells you. That kind of peril is always around the corner. It’s what they’re saving you from, and what they’ll always be saving you from. And they’ll continue to save you, just so long as tomorrow wears a face that is worse than today’s. They have a vested interest in that Dracula mask that tomorrow always wears. Forget it. It doesn’t matter a damn. Death, for all its lopsided smile and its drooling blood, is not what scares Judas Dancer. It’s not what moves him. It couldn’t ever be. Judas Madman’s dance is not a dance of death. Judas Dancer’s chessman motives weren’t forced on him by the way he was going to die. What’s important, in Judas Dancer’s world, is what you live with.

  And what did Judas have to live with?

  Four billion people on the day he was born. Five billion on his tenth birthday. How many now? Don’t ask me. I lost count.

  So what?

  Is five billion people too many? Is four? Is three? Too many for Judas Dancer. I don’t know about you. Hell, I don’t even know about me. It all depends where you are and where you can go. I know where I am. Where are you?

  Crowding causes stress. Stress causes shock. Shock causes Judas Dancer. Madman’s Dance is a shock-strained world. It behaves kinda dazed. It doesn’t know quite where it’s at. It can’t walk a chalk line. It needs lots of hot, sweet tea and sympathy. It has wild eyes, and it swears itself blind it’ll never be the same again. When it can swear at all, that is. Mostly it just mutters.

  Madman’s Dance is the world, of course. Not Judas. Judas isn’t dazed. He’s sharp and pointed. He can walk a straight line over broken glass. It cuts his feet to ribbons, but he can keep straight. And narrow. He has tame, quiet eyes and he swears all the time.

  Sometimes, though, he mutters. Just a bit.

  Judas isn’t the product of evolution. He isn’t a machine shaped by a few million years of environment and ancestry. Shock isn’t part of his innate psychology, his basic anatomy, the purposeful state of his being. What comes out of Judas isn’t just the nature of the beast. What comes out of Judas is what went in. Interpreted. Processed. Analyzed. Analogized. Reacted to.

  GIGO.

  Judas is a bone broken because he was bent too far. He’s an innocent little blood cell lysed by unfair osmotic conditions. He’s a heart stopping because his blood is bubbling nitrogen.

  He has rhapsody of the depths. He’s really deep down.

  Where else could they put him when he surfaced but in a decompression chamber? Along with the rest of us. We all got the bends. We’re as bent as that cracking bone.

  There’s no way on Earth of stopping Judas’ Madman’s Dance. It’s Newton’s third law. Action: crowding. Reaction: shock. Or maybe it’s Newton’s second law. Then again, remember the first. Judas can always keep a straight line. There’s no force big enough to turn him aside. How could there be? Mass infinite, acceleration absolute zero. How does that compute?

  When Judas Dancer was living in his mother’s womb, he was driven mad by his mother’s blood. Mummy had no bandages. She had blood instead of embalming fluid. Mummy even had guts. The world got to Mummy, all right. She had no defenses. Perpetual stress causes perpetual shock. First the adrenaline goes. It takes such a pounding that in the end it just leaks. You live your life on a permanent Hill House high. Your brain races — high gear and no way to shift. The gears can’t take it. The pituitary just can’t cope. Your blood goes sour. Okay for Mummy. Just keep taking the pills. But what about the bastard in the cage of flesh? He’s sharing your time, your blood, and you’re in shock.

  So who’s Judas?

  Judas Dancer, unborn, was soaked in stress long before the day he was born. An insane fetus.

  It didn’t show. He wasn’t born microcephalic, phocomelial, or mongoloid. He was born baby shaped. With just a shade more luck, he could have won competitions. But there was always just that little bit too much competition. Baby contests take so much more winning these days. Like wars.

  Baby Judas was colored shocking pink. What else? His whole system was chemically unbalanced. His blood was mad, and his brain never had a chance. His tissues were mad long before they began sucking up the world. He never had a chance. Neoteny cuts both ways. You can absorb the world into your pattern of growth. Great stuff. Judas Dancer absorbed the world into his pattern of growth. That’s Judas. That’s the world.

  Okay, what about the world? Here we are. Day zero. Judas has just emerged.

  That’s nothing remarkable. You don’t even notice. It happens six times every second. Or is it ten? Do you know? Do you care?

  Six times a second, all over the world, lunatics are coming out of their madhouses. You don’t give a tinker’s dam. Quite right. You have your pride. Mirror, mirror on the wall is the portrait of Dorian Gray. Too bad.

  You measure madmen by what they do to you, not by what they are in themselves.

  (Did it ever occur to you that you . . . ? No, of course not. Sorry I asked.)

  You wouldn’t recognize a madman unless he scratched your eyes out.

  You educate Judas Dancer in exactly the same way you’ve been educating your children for centuries. Sorry. Did I say “you”? I meant we. Us. You and me. The old pals act. The old school tie. Brothers of the revolution. Champions of the circular argument.

  As I was saying, we schooled Judas just like anyone else. His madness made no difference to his educability. We pavloved him regardless. What Mummy and Daddy didn’t like they belted out of him. What Mummy and Daddy did like they bribed into him. In the age-old tradition of the beggars of Calcutta, we carved and crippled Judas into his appropriate slot. We knocked the rough edges off him and stuffed him into his hole. With a hammer. Lubricants milk and blood, with just a soupçon of kindness. We betrayed his thinking capacities with arbitrary assumptions. We betrayed his behavioral development with rituals. We carefully obliterated the links between his thoughts and his feelings, between his experience of himself and his experience of the world, between his emotions and his actions, between his wants and his needs. Christ Almighty, we did a job and a half. We killed him dead, and hell, with just a shade more cooperation and gratitude we’d have turned him out as sane as you or I. Sorry, as sane as you. With me is where he ended up. Back in the womb, again. Alas.

  All in all, Judas’s life was nothing unusual.

  Judas was only a little bit unusual. It wasn’t really his fault, though perhaps I shouldn’t make excuses for him. He
just wasn’t very good at being a puppet. He got confused. The strings just weren’t attached. Maybe if we’d hammered a little bit harder and hadn’t allowed ourselves to weaken so that we intruded that seasoning of kindness, it would all have been just fine. He could have been a worker. Bluff, hearty, salt of the Earth. He could have been a brain. Sober, serious, pillar of society. He could have been a snob. A sham whipping boy for the sneers of superior men. Or maybe a clown. One of those quaint and charming cynics, or perhaps an intellectual. Maybe even a media man. He could have done so much. His whole life was ahead of him.

  Too far ahead. It would have beat him on the flat. He had no chance uphill.

  We mustn’t blame ourselves. Judas Dancer was mad. Quite insane. A disgrace to the human race. His shock-strained system persisted in rubbing his feelings up against his thoughts, his thoughts got mingled in with his speech, his feelings interfered with his actions. And for the final humiliation (of us, that is, he didn’t even realize) who he was got all snarled up with what he tried to be. No chance. He was a positive danger to society, and he went right ahead and proved it.

  We all knew it was going to happen.

  We’re all shocked. We’re all sorry. We’re all hypocrites.

  When I come to think about it, I’m not quite sure why Judas came to Canaan instead of one of the other 4,999,999,999. I suppose it must be a matter of degree, or something. Judas is a graduate of society, class of ‘93. Highest honors. On the other hand, it might be that there was something special about him after all. Who would know? Is there any such thing as a single, individual human being? A unique? A singleton? A one-and-only? Is any man an island? Was there anything genuinely, honestly, authentically original about what took place between Dancer and his mother, his father, and his neighbor? Surely not that most of the dramatis personae ended up dead. Everybody dies.

  Judas Dancer might just be a random factor plucked from a pool of five billion. You and he together might even constitute a statistically significant sample. (You don’t believe it? So what kind of a sample do you usually use when you decide what to believe?)

  Do not identify with Judas Dancer. Do not attempt to relate to what he does and says and thinks. Do not try to learn from your experience of him. Don’t listen to a word he whispers in your ear. It’s only a dirty word when all is said and done. Shut your eyes. Forget it. If you can, with all that adrenaline in your system.

  I could tell you whom Judas Dancer killed, but I won’t. It doesn’t matter either. It doesn’t even matter that Judas is on good old Block C (Block Canaan) with the rest of us chosen people.

  After all, he’s among friends.

  Madman’s Dance

  Specific Spatiotemporal Patterns of Neuronal Activity

  The ground beneath my feet is a mobile brown mud, streaked with yellow and black. Caught in the steaming broth are algae and diatoms, their flotsam staining the mud green in places. Scaly insects and tiny frogs dart across the surface, sometimes floundering, sometimes snatching up smaller skimming insects or swimming, spinning rotifers. Occasionally, the gurgling of an animal throat, the splutter of a writhing body in deeper water will indicate that there are larger predators waiting in their hiding places.

  The swamp winds around and between the twisted roots of immense trees, whose foliage forms a dappled canopy way over my head. Many of the trees resemble maidenhairs or twisted replicas of weeds grown many times too tall. Some have stalks like monstrous sticks of rhubarb, with adventitious hairs as thick as my arm all the way up the grooved stems. The forest floor is covered with clumps of mangrove and rhododendron bushes, their tangled branches hanging Medusalike over the stagnant water into which their black roots vanish.

  Many interwoven, mottled creepers festoon the larger trees and provide, in their turn, an anchorage for ferns and fungi and algal webs.

  I see, between the threads of the green curtain, the wings of dragonflies and the scales of fishmen, all hiding, all their forms twinkling briefly in the filtered sunlight. Thousands of gnats and midges and other minute jewel-winged flies with slender bodies and multilenticular eyes form an ever-present cloud that engulfs me.

  The world feeds on my blood.

  Tiny mites and other forms too tiny to see individually swarm over the cork bark of the trees, turning the wood into a living shell.

  There is a stretch of muddy sand beneath my feet. Across the brown surface scurry a horde of sandhoppers and spiders. Dead and rotting shellfish are washed up by turgid ripples into a thin wash of scum around the edges of the sandbank. Small lizards perch above shade-green pools, remaining perfectly still, save for their tongues, which flash back and forth with orgiastic fervor.

  The sounds are all individually slight, but cumulatively they are well-nigh deafening. There are scratches and clickings, the sawing of insect legs and the clucking of amphibian throats, the screaming of a million deaths per minute. There is a steady sucking and hissing in the body of the water, a groaning and creaking in the forest itself, the chatter of rain in the sky. The raindrops never reach the swamp — they are swallowed up by the crowns of the trees. Every single one.

  I am frightened, dissolving into the alkaline water, eaten by the carrion flies, petrified into the boles of the trees, sliced and hung out to dry in the sunless, sickly air with the lianas and the bindweed.

  I am drowning.

  titan base to canaan. titan base to canaan. come in canaan. titan base to canaan.

  The man in the death-mask is stretched out before me — a corpse. The forest is feeding on his flesh-smeared bones. I watch them eating slowly through his mask, holding my breath until I can hold it no longer. The mask dissolves into a thousand beetles and worms.

  But they have already consumed the face inside. They have been working from within as well as without. I do not know who he is — which of us, if one of us at all. I do not know whether you are dead or not.

  At least I know that. I do not know. I have been forced to cry for help and recognize that. But I am still screaming, somewhere in chaos. I have merely fled through a continuum of awakening. I am running through the pages of sleep, but I can find only more dreams and more. I can find neither the beginning of the book nor its close. I cannot find doors, I cannot find windows. I can only wake and wake and wake, while that scream goes on forever in a universe that is empty of everything save the scream, and I cry and cry for help.

  But the answer: the answer . . .

  calling

  You made the Law within which the Earth existed, and by which mankind had to learn to live. And I had to learn to live. And you, if you could. If you did. If you have . . .

  The Law provided that there should be going forward as well as going backward. It provided that we should exist in aeonic time, between the crevices of the ticking clock and above the clicking register of creations. You provided for standstill and rewinding of the clock, rewiring and the setting of alarms. You gave us the procession of night and day, but also said that night would be, and day would be in the random flux of chaos, where we should find them. That was madness, and we welcome it.

  You decided that there should be no death save destruction, and that which could abide could be

  canaan

  immortal, and that the gate of heaven could not be opened by those who suffer under the Law.

  You cast us down to dwell in the deepness of your Earth, while you went away to find out whether there are bars around our cosmic cage.

  Into this wild abyss I was escorted, and my path amid confusion and tumult and discord I charted with my companions, a dancer whose name is Judas and another whose name is very probably

  titan

  nothing more than another mask to conceal him. I took the advice of chance in order to choose my way.

  The way was hard and fierce, because this is a world filled with anger and primal fire. The countenance divine is

 
; calling

  thundered and scarred, and I know that if settlement and peace are to be found then it is only at great expense.

  It is as though you said to me:

  I have lived in your world which has treated me in its fashion. Now you shall live in mine and see your world treated in my fashion, and you shall share it. You are

  calling

  challenging me still, and you are laughing as you point to the forbidden stars.

  I see that I am unwelcome in your world, though you do not hate me, and my threats — and eventually my claim upon your throne (which was madness and welcome) — mean nothing at all to you, if you mean anything to yourself, which now I concede that I do not, and have never, and will possibly never, know.

  c . . .

  Is there an

  . . . alling

  answer?

  Titan Nine

  Tomorrow Morning Is the Beginning of the Rest of Your Life

  On the eve of the journey, I wanted to sit right down and write a letter to all the folks back home, to say hello, and maybe a speculative good-bye, and to wish them all the best, even to tell them that my God I’d do my best to get them out. I wouldn’t have raised any false hopes — they wouldn’t have believed me. But Major Chalk had killed my letter-writing stone dead. I had no private agony columns any more.

  I was too jumpy to play patience, let alone poker. I’d have appreciated more than anything else a chance to get away from the base, but of course that wasn’t on the prescription either. I was beginning to suffer from a kind of misanthropic claustrophobia. I couldn’t bear to be touched, and as zero hour approached with the hands of the clock, people seemed to converge upon me, to become imminent. It wasn’t that there were so many of them, just that they seemed to be getting as close to me as circumstances would allow. I felt like a millionaire about to make my will asking for the loan of a five-dollar bill to light my cigarette. Everybody was anxious to get a slice of me for their souvenir collections. Never before had people been so ready to laugh at my jokes.