Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  JUNE 15, 1990

  Cape Town, Union of South Africa

  Made it, finally. Things are a little livelier around here, town’s still a mess but a section of the waterfront’s been restored. Handful of Americans around waiting for the liner (due in next week from Dakar), including a few young quadro-amps: they strut around the place like cocks of the walk, everybody kowtows to them.

  Observe with relief that, just as Rambo reported, the non-amp older men dress very much as they did twenty years ago. My elegant prewar tweeds and flannels will do very nicely, seems nobody pays much attention to non-amps anyhow.

  Having my meals brought up to my room. Don’t want to meet any of my fellow countrymen out here, they might get too interested in my story.

  Beard coming along splendidly: beginning to look like General Smuts.

  JUNE 22, 1990

  Cape Town

  Sleeping and eating, eating and sleeping. Mind’s been a blank for a week. Dreamed last night that I was back home with Irene, I was tied down to the bed and she had one of my scalpels in her hand and was cutting off my limbs one by one, me yelling bloody murder. “Oh, stop complaining,” she kept saying. “Didn’t your precious Rimbaud say, “One must be absolutely modern’?” Woke up in a sweat. With a silly phrase knocking around in my head: “There’s too damned much tapioca in the hypodermic needle.”

  Liner’s arriving in the morning. Hallelujah.

  JUNE 23, 1990

  Aboard S.S. Norbert Wiener

  That’s what the liner’s called, all right. Breezed up the gangplank, bought my passage from the purser, installed in nifty outside stateroom, nobody said boo.

  Weird sort of ship. Must be a larger version of the one the Olympic team’s cruising in: like a long box lying on its side, open at both ends, the bottom side missing (the one that would be in the water). Cross section:

  Topside has several layers, decks with staterooms, cargo space, etc.; supporting it are two thin vertical slabs which rest in the water, between them open space. Run by an atomic power plant, of course. Jerry, my steward, tells me the vessel is developed from an experimental ship Gar Wood built back in the forties.

  Real break having Jerry for my steward: nice kid, about nineteen, red-haired, very amiable and very naïve. Uni-amp. No suspicions about my story—parasitologist, staying in my cabin because of a touch of malaria, haven’t been back home for many years.

  “Guess I’m sort of out of touch with things,” I said when he brought my lunch. “As you see, I’m not an amp.”

  “Oh, lots of the older men aren’t,” he said. “It’s not the older men who fight the wars.”

  Gather from Jerry’s remarks that there are two major powers in the world: the Inland Strip, which is the focal point of whatever little clusters of communities have been rebuilt in the Western Hemisphere, and the East Union, which is based in what used to be Russia and takes in whatever centers have sprung up in the Asiatic, Near Eastern and European areas. Together they make up the civilized world: everything’s sweetness and light between them, one big happy family.

  “How big is the Inland Strip now?” I asked.

  “Population’s up to thirty-four million,” Jerry said. “Of course, it’s still peanuts compared to what the States were.

  I guess you’d remember the States, wouldn’t you? They’ve really shrunk some.”

  “They weren’t sanforized,” I said.

  His face was blank and I didn’t press the point.

  JUNE 24, 1990

  Aboard the Wiener

  Just my luck. (Or destiny?) Was looking out the porthole a few minutes ago, daydreaming, when who should stroll by on deck but Theo.

  Theo! Of course he did tell Ubu he had to leave in about a month—guess he flew to Cape Town and boarded the ship yesterday.

  Think I’ll stick close to my cabin—something about this guy bothers me, I’d just as soon avoid him.

  It’s not just that he’s so strikingly brachycephalic. He’s also got a hell of an ugly jagged scar running all the way down from his crown to his neck, I hadn’t seen that on the island. It jumps right out at you when you see him from the rear, because of his crew cut the whole thing’s visible.

  Haven’t seen a male passenger under forty with all his own limbs. Another thing, there’s some kind of hierarchy of status involved, it hits you immediately in people’s attitudes. Seems to depend on how many limbs are gone. I notice, for example, that the captain and first mate of the ship have four artificial limbs, the second-rank officers have three or two, and most of the deck hands and stewards only have one. And those with fewer artificial limbs treat those who have three or four with great deference. Quite a few women on board, none of them amps.

  But, to judge from what I see through the porthole, Brother Theo is really kingpin around here. Everybody butters up to him, even the captain and the other quadros.

  Who in the name of sweet Jesus is he? Why, every time I catch sight of him, do my fingers begin to twitch?

  JUNE 26, 1990

  Aboard the Wiener

  This morning I noticed Jerry’s tie-clasp. Large button with the design of a triskelion, circle with several legs fanning out from the focal point, running legs: miniature prosthetics, transparent, inside them luminous pinpoints representing tubes and gold elements duplicating the moving parts.

  “Nice,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “My mother gave it to me. Birthday present.”

  That reminded me of my own speculations about birthdays; they seem to keep coming back. “Tell me something,” I said. “Do you think the day you’re born on is pretty much a matter of accident? Or do you think it’s all part of a scheme?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, what about people who get born on special days, real red-letter days? Such people often think it was arranged that way—that they were somehow picked for the honor. For example, I know of a fellow who played with such ideas about himself. He was born on July 16, 1945.”

  “Huh!” Jerry said. “Alamagordo Day. Who doesn’t know somebody who was born on that day?”

  I didn’t know what to answer. Did he mean that there’d been a mass labor precipitated around the country on the Day of the Mushroom, that women had given birth all over the place? I’d never heard that before, it irked me a bit, made my distinction seem a commonplace.

  “I’ve got a pretty special birthday myself,” Jerry added.

  “What is it?”

  “I was born October 19, 1972.”

  I choked on the toast, quickly got over it with a couple gulps of coffee. Why, he might have popped on the scene at the very moment the bombs were cascading down over our encampment; maybe even the moment I was taking off in the surgery plane.

  “What’s so special about that?”

  “Heck,” Jerry said, “a lot of people will tell you that Immob really got started that day, that’s all. That’s all that’s special about it.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said. “I see what you mean. For a moment I didn’t make the connection.”

  When he left me my head was spinning. Wish to hell I could make the connection. Something else must have taken place on the day I gave up, something big. Talk about destiny—looks like my career is cluttered with red-letter days. And red-letter nonsense syllables.

  Immob. Is it a word or a hiccup?

  Part Two

  TO THE INLAND STRIP

  chapter seven

  VOICES OUTSIDE the porthole. Martine put his pen down and flexed his cramped fingers, he’d gotten out of the habit of writing, it was tiring.

  Slowly, without concentrating on it, he became aware that one of the voices coming from the promenade deck was Theo’s. He switched off the desk’s softly glowing glass top, turned out the luminous plastic ceiling too; then he went to the porthole and opened the curtains a slit.

  Balmy: in the moonlight the subtropical Atlantic was like melted quartz. Several of the V.I.P.’s were sitting around a large umb
rella-topped table near the railing, drinking lemonade and chatting. They were all quadros—should they be called plus-fours or minus-fours?—among them the ship’s captain, a few of his officers, and some of the more distinguished-looking passengers. All of them, including Theo, their guest of honor, were in evening clothes: white dinner jacket with sleeves shortened to expose the arms, striped black trousers ending well above the knees to show the legs. Logical costume—no extremities to keep warm.

  “So it was a nice trip?” the captain said.

  “Perfect,” Theo said. “Did me a world of good. I always seem to relax more on a boat than in a plane, that’s why I decided not to fly home.”

  “Did you put in at any interesting places?”

  “Well, we just lazed around the Indian Ocean mostly, visited islands here and there. On one of the islands there was a pretty unusual tribe called the Mandunji. I caught some butterflies there that were honeys. Then I flew up to Lake Victoria to see how the Dredging Project is coming along. Got in some fine skiing on Kilimanjaro.”

  “Sort of a pleasure jaunt,” the second mate said.

  “The Olympic team was aboard, it was really a training cruise for them. I just went along for the ride.”

  “That was a real break for them, having you around to give them some pointers,” the first mate said.

  “Well, my athletic days are over, you know. Last time I competed in the Olympics, let’s see, that was six years ago. I’d already slowed up pretty badly.”

  “Slowed up, my eye. That year, if I remember, you broke seven world’s records.”

  “Sure,” one of the passengers said. “I remember the exact figures. High jump, thirty-nine feet something. Pole vault, sixty-three feet something. Broad jump, eighty-seven. Shot put, three hundred and—”

  “Don’t give me too much credit for all that,” Theo said. “Don’t forget, 1984, that was the year our pros got really good.”

  “You had good pros, all right,” the first mate said, “but you still had to co-ordinate your pros. Why, the sports writers still refer to you as the greatest neuro-loco coordinator who ever took part in the Games.”

  “Meadow dressing,” Theo said. “You want to take a look at some of those boys I left out on the training yacht.”

  “What about the East Union team? They’ve been talking pretty big lately.”

  “They always shoot their mouths off before the Games, but look at the record. They’re good, all right, but just not good enough, it’s a question of technological know-how and technique and in those departments they can’t hold a candle to us. We’re a cinch to win every event, just as we always have.”

  Martine pulled the curtains shut and switched on the lumi-ceiling again. He wandered around the room absent-mindedly, did a waltz step, scratched his left armpit, sang a few lines from an old Mandunji chant, a pentatonic work song that went,

  Knots are very hard to cut with an adze.

  They blunt the edges of the adze.

  How hard I am working to cut these knots.

  Then he sat down at the desk, opened his notebook to the last entry and began to write rapidly:

  JULY 2, 1990

  Aboard the Wiener

  They’re very cybernetics-minded, these amps. Also, they seem to be very much interested in metallurgy. (Jerry, for instance, is studying the subject in some university, hopes to get a civil service job as a cybernetics metallurgist.) Which makes sense: you can’t build machines without metals, cybernetics is after all only the science of duplicating in the metal what exists less perfectly—because more ambiguously—in the flesh. All right. But there’s a mystery here: why is this Theo so damned cagey about his interest in metals? Why does he have to dress up a mining expedition around the islands of the Indian Ocean as an Olympic training cruise plus a little innocent tourism? Why does he keep mum about the rock digging and the ore assaying? And he doesn’t only lie to the Mandunji about it, he lies to his friends and fellow amps as well. . . . Like to find out more about this fellow. When we hit Florida tomorrow I may be, by a most peculiar turn of events, the only person in the Western Hemisphere who knows that when Theo says sports he means digging, when he says botany he means digging, when he says zoology he means digging. . . .

  Once again he put the lights out and went to the porthole. “. . . . tell the truth, though,” Theo was saying, “events like weight-lifting and jumping and shot-putting always left me cold. They’re tests of strength, not skill.”

  “I don’t follow you,” the first mate said.

  “Well, take the high jump. What gets a man up thirty-nine feet and down again? Can he take the credit for the leap? No, sir. The real credit goes to the engineers who built his pros, the cyberneticists. What’s being demonstrated, mostly, is the efficiency of the elements in the pro: the solenoids, the atomic-energy plant, the servo-mechanisms, the oleo-strut shock absorbers.”

  “Which events do you like?” the captain asked.

  “The dexterities, most of all. The dexterities and the discernments.”

  “I think I see what you mean,” the ship’s doctor said. “The d-and-d’s test the cortex controlling the pros.”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “You’ve got a point,” a passenger said. “Since we’re all supposed to be humanists—”

  “That’s what I’m getting at,” Theo said enthusiastically. “Immob is the first real humanism in the history of human thought. The d-and-d’s show the potentialities of the human brain and point the way to the superior brain of the future.”

  “According to your way of thinking,” the captain said, “a lot of the standard events ought to be dropped from the Olympics entirely.”

  “I’m sure they will be,” Theo said. “When Immob really comes of age, I foresee that athletics as we know them, in the old strength-testing sense, will disappear.”

  “I’d hate to see the old events go entirely,” the first mate said. “I think we’d lose something. We ought to feel a little proud of our cyberneticists and the machines they make.”

  “Certainly, but from an Immob perspective. If the EMSIAC war taught us anything, it was that all our machines are monsters unless we have a firm mastery over them. In this transitional period, I think, we’re sometimes in danger of forgetting that our pros, marvels though they are, aren’t one straw as astonishing as the brains of the cyberneticists who designed and built them and the brains of the amps who operate them. See what I mean? The human being must always be central, not the products and objects of his skill and energy. Wiener used to say that over and over. That’s the whole spirit of Immob.”

  Theo stood up and raised one plastic hand. With a series of lightning-quick movements he lifted the collar of his shirt, unbuttoned it, undid the tie and slipped it off. “Here,” he said, “I’ll show you what I mean.”

  Still holding the tie, he reached over to the table and took from it two small saucers.

  “Think back,” he said. “Remember how awkward your real hands used to be? For example, most people with real hands don’t co-ordinate well enough to juggle anything at all, even two small saucers, and when it comes to tying a bow tie, well, they’re often all thumbs. Now watch this.”

  Using only one hand, he began to toss the saucers above his head, one at a time. After each heave, in the split second between the release of one and the catching of the other, the hand flew up to the neck, fluttered there, then came down again just in time to meet the descending saucer. The observer’s eye could follow the gross, overall movements—arm raised, hand working at neck; arm down, hand poised to catch saucer—but the detailed twitchings of the digits went much too fast to be seen as anything but a blur. Still, the thing was getting done: while the saucers rose and fell in perfect rhythm, the collar was buttoned, the tie was placed around the neckband, its ends were crossed, one end was tucked under and through to form a knot, the two halves of the bow were pulled out on each side to tighten the knot, the loops were adjusted in length and straightened
, the collar was pulled down.

  Theo put the saucers down, moved over closer to the umbrella (a luminous one), and turned so that his back was to Martine. “It took me almost seven months to learn that one,” he said with a modest laugh.

  His friends began to applaud. Martine ignored them: he was staring again at the long, zigzagging scar which ran down that broad-beamed skull, worm of a scar, white and lumpy.

  Shit, what was he trying to remember?

  He stood in the darkness for a moment, holding his hands up as though he had just sterilized them and were waiting for the rubber gloves: he felt a formicative creeping in the fingertips.

  A peculiar thought came to him: My hands are blushing.

  He turned the light on and examined them, they were glistening with sweat.

  He knew that with him strong emotional states always tried to find some kinesthetic expression through the hands. Naturally, when he was trying hard to grasp something his supremely trained organs of grasp were mobilized in the effort. In this respect his cortex must be very much like that of a watchmaker or an embroiderer or a sculptor.

  Still, he wasn’t prepared for this: a 10:10 brachycephalic, a cranial scar, and immediately his hands were drenched and the fingers poised in a tense curled position and visibly tremulous. It didn’t make sense, this pseudo-Parkinsonianism. It was as though his hands contained their own self-reverberating memory loops.

  Then “in a flash” he saw what this digital positioning meant. He had been side-stepping its meaning for a month now, ever since Theo had first appeared in the village and his fingers had automatically hooked on thin air, but now he saw it. The fingers had fallen into the operative set, one hand was holding an invisible scalpel and the other a suction cup or suture clamp, something like that.