Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  Was that a vessel he saw, that speck on the horizon beyond which lay Mauritius and Réunion and Madagascar (places he had glimpsed only from thirty thousand feet up, on scavenging trips in Martine’s plane)? Out there in the direction of the forgotten trade routes which had once slashed this untonused old ocean? Way off to the west there, where if you traveled long enough you came at last to Africa, whose toppled cities were filled with fabulous paisley scarves and tennis caps, cummerbunds and opera hats and cricket sneakers, even crates of penicillin and electroencephalographs, and no people? The speck seemed to be moving, he could not be sure.

  “No,” the old man said. “Otherwise, Doctor, prognosis not favorable.”

  His features settled in a deeper frown, it felt like a hand grabbing his face. He re-entered the jungle to begin the descent on the far side of the summit, a galago dashed hysterically across the path.

  In a few moments he reached the landmark, a tall column of scaly rock almost entirely overrun with creepers and ferns. Squatting in the thicket, he called out as loudly as he could, “Peace to all! Peace and long life. Open up, here is Ubu.” It was not English he spoke now but the throaty, resonant, richly voweled tongue of the Mandunji.

  Facing him was a boulder which bulged out from the base of the rock, hidden from sight by a tangle of briers. It swung inward, briers and all. Stooping, Ubu stepped into the cavern.

  “Peace to all,” he repeated. His hands went up in the ceremonial greeting, fingers extended and palms up as though a tray were resting on them, to indicate that their owner came without weapons and therefore in friendship and good will.

  “Peace, Ubu,” the tall teak-complexioned young man at the gate answered sleepily. He yawned, a cosmic gape. Then he remembered the rest of the salutation and awkwardly stuck his hands out in turn. They were not empty; in one was a brush dripping red berry juice and in the other a sheet of pounded bark partially covered with rows of painted mynah birds and manioc plants. Apparently he had been working on this decorative drawing when Ubu arrived.

  “I . . . do not mean . . . to offend,” he said slowly, searching for the words. It was dawning on him, Ubu could see, that he had committed a serious breach of etiquette by not emptying his hands before holding them out. “My thought is far away . . . I was making a design and. . . .”

  Ubu smiled and patted him on the shoulder. At the same time he leaned forward to examine the scar on the young man’s shaved head, a ribbon of pink tissue which ran in an unwavering line from the forehead past both ears to the nape of the neck. It was the welt that was always made when the dome of a troubled one’s skull was sliced off with a Mandunga saw and then neatly pasted back in place.

  “It heals nicely,” Ubu said, pointing to the scar.

  “It has stopped itching,” the boy said.

  “No more trouble there?”

  The boy looked puzzled. “I do not remember the trouble people speak of,” he said. “Dr. Martine says I used to fight much . . . and there was much tonus in my muscles . . . I do not remember. Mostly I like to sit and draw birds and trees. I want to sleep all the time.”

  “You are much improved, Notoa. I noticed just now that when you said, ‘Peace’ it was not just a thing to say, you meant it. The reports I hear from Dr. Martine are very good.”

  “People say I used to fight,” Notoa said, looking down at the floor. “When I hear about it I feel ashamed. I do not know what used to make me hit my relatives.”

  “You were troubled.”

  Notoa regarded his hands with wonder. “It is very hard now even to make a fist, when I try it is a great effort and it does not feel right. Dr. Martine says the electric charge in my tensor muscles is down many points, he showed me on the measuring machine. Most of the time I am very sleepy.”

  “Only the troubled are afraid of sleep.” Ubu patted the youngster again. “Speaking of Dr. Martine, where is he?”

  Notoa yawned again. “In surgery. Moaga was brought this afternoon.”

  “Yes, I forgot.” Ubu nodded and started down the corridor. Notoa swung the slab of rock to, and abruptly the rustling, crackling, croaking, twittering, twanging, twitching, ranting, jeering sounds of the jungle were cut off. In the sudden hush Ubu became aware of the throttled hum from the fans Dr. Martine had installed in camouflaged shafts overhead to pump a steady flow of fresh, filtered, dehumidified and aseptic air into the great underground hollow. The doctor liked to put his motors everywhere: on fishing boats, on the chisels and adzes used in hollowing out logs to make canoes, on stones for grinding maize, even on the saws for cutting skulls off. Such machines were not necessary, of course, they only took a man away from his natural work and made his mind and hands idle. One thing only was bad about this mechanization, it upset the routine. Because there were so many machines to do the work the young men now had much time to talk and study with the doctor and the old habits of work began to slip. The old habits made for a great steadiness, a looking in one fixed direction along a straight line. . . .

  As he passed the row of cubicles, Ubu peered through the oneway glass on each door at the patient inside. Most of these Mandungabas were recent operatees, with tentlike bandages still on their heads, but some of them had had their dressings removed and were beginning to sprout new crops of hair over their scars. Ubu studied their faces as he went along, looking for signs of the tautness which had been a chronic torment for all of them before Mandunga. He knew what to watch for: narrowed eyes, tight rigid lips, corrugated foreheads, a hunched stiffness in the shoulder muscles—flexings of those who live in a world of perpetual feints and pounces.

  No, there was no telltale strain in these once troubled people. If anything, their features and bodies seemed to have relaxed to the point of falling apart: heads lolling, mouths loose and hanging open, arms and legs flung like sacks of maize on the pallets. Well, a sleepy man does not break his uncle’s nose.

  Beyond the cubicles was the large animal-experimentation chamber in which the tarsiers, marmosets, pottos, lemurs and chimpanzees huddled listlessly in their cages, most of them also wearing head bandages; beyond that, the laboratory in which most of the doctor’s encephalographs and other power-driven apparatus were kept; and finally, in the farthest corner of the hollow, the operating room. The window in this door was of ordinary two-way glass, Ubu could see that Dr. Martine was just slicing through the last portion of Moaga’s cranium with his automatic rotary saw.

  What a sick one was this poor Moaga, Moaga the troublemaker, the sullen, the never-speaking, the vilifier of neighbors and husband-slasher. The riot had been drained from her body now, she lay stretched out on the operating table like a mound of tapioca (it would be nice to have some now), so completely anesthetized by rotabunga (would be nice to have some of that too) that although her eyes were wide open they could see nothing. She was naked and Ubu could see the tangle of wires that led from her arms, her legs, her chest, her eyelids, from all the orifices of her bronze body, to the measuring machines scattered around the room. He knew that in a few minutes, when Mandunga took place, the indicating needles on those machines would sink from the level of distress to the level of ease and Moaga’s sickness would be over, she would stay away from ganja (“marijuana,” in the doctor’s peculiar language) and eat more tapioca, take more rotabunga. Done with electric trepans and chrome-steel scalpels and sutures, or with an old-fashioned chisel driven by an old-fashioned rock, the result was always the same magic: the troubled one came out of it no longer troubled, only a little sleepy. When, of course, he did not die. It was true, fewer patients died since the doctor had introduced trepans and asepsis and anatomy and penicillin.

  Dr. Martine inserted a thin metal instrument into the incision and pried; in a moment the skull gave and began to come away. An assistant was standing by with gloved hands held out, in spite of the surgical mask Ubu recognized him as Martine’s son Rambo. The boy took the bony cup, holding it like a bowl in the ritual of the tapioca feast, and immediately submerged it in a l
arge tray containing the usual saline bath.

  Despite the dozens of times Ubu had watched this ceremony, despite the hundreds of times he had performed it (at least the ancient rock-and-chisel version of it) himself in the old days, before Martine, he still felt a certain thrill at the sight of the brain’s crumpled convolutions—“those intellectual intestines, that hive of anarchy,” the doctor called them.

  Suddenly Ubu thought of the black dot he had seen on the horizon: had it really been moving? Involuntarily his shoulders hunched and he sucked his lips in until they were thin and bloodless.

  “You are lucky, Moaga,” he said, reverting to English. “Soon no more worries, prognosis good. But for some worries, no scalpel, prognosis very bad. . . .” This time he did not add the articles and verbs and so on.

  chapter two

  PULSE NORMAL, respiration normal: the rubber bladders through which she breathed clenched and unclenched in perfect rhythm, two pneumatic fists. Rambo trundled a large Monel metal cabinet over to the table, through its glass front a bank of electronic tubes glowed. Everything was in order.

  From the machine, which contained an array of slender steel probes attached by coiled wires to the electronic circuits within, Martine selected a needle and brought it close to the exposed brain. He applied the point carefully to an area on the cortex, signaled his readiness with a nod, Rambo twisted one of the control dials on the machine’s operating panel. Moaga’s left leg shot up and twitched in an absent-minded entrechat. Another contact made the shoulders writhe, another doubled the hands into fists and sent them paddling in the air, a fourth set the teeth to grinding.

  Now the doctor began the multiple stimulation tests, applying four, then six, then eight and ten needles simultaneously to various cortical centers; with the final flow of current Moaga’s face grew contorted, its muscles worked in spasms and her abdomen arched away from the table and began to heave. In spite of himself Martine felt his own abdominal muscles contracting, he always had this sympathetic response to the mock intercourse induced by a few expertly distributed amperes. “I got rhythm,” he said to himself.

  He looked around the chamber. All his assistants were at their posts, watching their measuring dials and recording at each stage Moaga’s variations in temperature, muscle tonus, skin moisture, blood pressure, pulse rate, intestinal peristalsis, pupil dilation and eyelid blinking, lacrimation, vaginal contractions. Measure for measure. A measure operation. “Measure’s in the cold, cold ground,” he said under his mask. He was annoyed with himself for indulging in such nonsense but he knew he couldn’t stop it, luckily he was light of hand, sly of hand, sleight of hand, his fingers were so agile and dedicated that they did their job even under an avalanche of bad jokes from their massa in the cold cold groan.

  Rambo wheeled away the machine and brought up a table, on it was a row of hypodermic needles filled with liquid. Strychnine. The next step was neuronography, strychninization, the firing of certain key areas of the cerebrum with this potent excitant in order to trace the pathways from the brain’s jellied rind to the hidden cerebellum, the thalamus, the hypothalamus. He made the injections expertly—but tensely: he was always tense with hypodermic needles—while his assistants jotted their scrupulous notations about the pursing of the lips, the fluttering in the cloaca, the squirmings of the pelvis.

  While the strychnine bulleted through the brain’s maze and the indicators jumped, he looked down at Moaga’s face, down into the wide-open eyes which saw little and said much. Babbling eyes, ranting eyes. As always, the rotabunga drugs had induced a completely comatose state in which the eyes remained open; for almost nineteen years he had been performing Mandunga here in the cave and never once had he been able to turn his attention entirely from those open soapboxing eyes. What was it he always thought he saw in them? Icy accusation, glaciers of accusation.

  Once the routine experiments were out of the way it did not take long for the actual surgery. First he put in place the fine surgical threads which marked the upstart areas on the patient’s frontal lobes, then he speedily made incisions along them and added several deft undercuts with the scalpel to free the spongy masses at the desired depth, then he removed these masses with a suction cup and quickly tied off the blood vessels. He reached down into Moaga’s throat and made her cough: no leakage from the sliced veins, everything in order.

  Rambo returned with the Monel cabinet. The ten electric needles were applied to the same spots as before: the woman’s pelvic area remained inert, the vaginal indicators did not move. While Martine doused the exposed area with penicillin Rambo brought the skull and very soon it was back in place, the flaps of skin knitted together with stitches and silver clips.

  Martine nodded and stepped back, beginning to strip off his rubber gloves. “Done it again,” he said to himself. “Goddamned Siamese twins. I’ve cut out the aggression, I’ve cut out the orgasm, can’t seem to separate the two. Sorry, Moaga. The pig-sticker did his best.”

  Masseur in the cold cold groin. . . .

  Martine looked up at the door and saw Ubu’s face through the window. His eyes widened with pleasure, then hardened. He yanked his mask off and came out looking angry.

  “Peace to—” Ubu began, in English.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I bring news.”

  “Couldn’t it have waited?”

  “No. We must have talk together.”

  “Well. . . . What’s it all about?”

  “Another fishing boat. The men went as far as Cargados Island, they were following a big school of swordfish. They bring a bad report.”

  “The queer-limbs again?”

  “Yes, the queer-limbs. Yes, forty, fifty. And a large ship, most peculiar shape.”

  “They were white?”

  “White like the others, speak English like the others. They called to the fishermen but our boys pretended they did not understand and went away.”

  Martine raised his hand and rubbed his eyes wearily. He thought: I know why he’s telling me this in English. This is the most terrifying thing that’s ever happened to him, he’s got to push it away from him, by talking about it in a remote language he hopes to make the whole thing remote. He always switches to English when we talk about orgasm, too.

  “So,” Martine said. “This makes the seventh time they’ve been seen in, let’s see, five weeks or so. Each time they come a little closer.”

  “More news,” Ubu said. “Over an hour ago I stopped at the clearing and looked out at the sea. I am not all sure but I thought I saw something moving far away to the west, where the water ends.”

  “Sounds to me as though they’ve got some base of operations around the Mozambique waters. They seem to be covering the whole area pretty systematically, they re obviously looking for something, Christ knows what,”

  “Maybe—for you?”

  Martine stared at the chief in astonishment. “That’s crazy, old man, in over eighteen years they’ve forgotten all about me.”

  The door of the operating room swung open and Rambo came out, wheeling Moaga. Ubu watched as the bed rolled down the corridor, then he said hesitantly, “You think of something to do?”

  Martine laughed; these gentle people were good for everything but crisis. Then he put his arm around his friend’s shoulders and began to walk with him down the corridor. “Not exactly, but I’m not going to go up to them with my hands held out and say, ‘Peace to all.’ A guy can get himself very dead that way.”

  “You suggest we hide then?”

  “No good, they’d find the village and know we were around somewhere. We’ve got to face them, I guess, but it’s not easy to work out a way of dealing with them. All we know so far is that these people, creatures, monsters, whatever they are, are exactly like us—except that where their arms and legs ought to be they’ve got tubular appliances that you can see through and that flicker as though they were filled with fireflies. And they speak English, American.”

  �
�That bothers you?”

  “As much as anything,” Martine admitted. For eighteen and a half years, he had to confess to himself, he hadn’t thought too much about his home and the people there, hadn’t even been much concerned to know whether there were any people left there. He’d had so little interest in the past that when his plane cracked up he’d saved all the machinery and surgical equipment and energy capsules but hadn’t hesitated to destroy the radio and video. “I wish,” he said, “I’d kept the short-wave radio from my plane.”

  “You are good with machines,” Ubu suggested. “Perhaps you could build such a radio”

  Martine laughed again, shaking his head. “It’s a little late for that,” he said. He reached out and squeezed Ubu’s arm affectionately. “That’s the trouble with you, dear Ubu, with all the Mandunji—you’ve become such congenital pacifists that when a threat finally does show up, your minds just go blank. One pugnacious bum with a slingshot could take over the village and dispose of the lot of you.”

  It was perfectly true: six hundred years of doggedly good will had left these people without any will at all, you just had to say boo and they all but fell to the ground in a hebephrenic huddle. The village had been in a state of frozen panic for weeks, Ubu hadn’t been able to sleep, his whole metabolism was on the blink.

  “Do not make fun,” Ubu said. “I have a great worry.”

  “Calm yourself, old man. There is nothing to be done.”

  “I have a worry not only for the village. Since these queer-limbs came, I have stayed awake many nights thinking—he will go, the doctor will go.”

  “Suppose that happened?” Martine said. “Would it be such a calamity?”