Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  They had crossed the park now and were standing on the curbstone of a broad avenue, waiting for the light to change.

  “How do you find things around here?” Jerry asked. “I guess the old place must’ve changed a lot since your day.”

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la maim chose. Plus ça change, plus c’est les mêmes shows.

  “Yes, it’s changed.”

  As they started across the street Martine took hold of the boy’s arm and began to talk intently. “Listen, Jerry, I’ve been away for so long, I’d like to put a few kindergarten questions to you.”

  “Shoot, Doc.”

  “Well, suppose I were one of the African tribesmen I’ve been living with—say the chief of the tribe, a fellow named Ubu—”

  “I like names like that, Hannah, Asa, Otto, they’re the same backwards or forwards.”

  Martine suddenly remembered, for the first time in three decades, a palindrome that had once been told him by an elder of the Mormon Tabernacle: “Lewd did I live & evil I did dwel.”

  “That’s right,” Martine said. “Palindromically speaking, it’s much more symmetrical to be called Ubu than, say, God. No balance there, backwards that’s doG. Well, just imagine that I’m this chief named Ubu. He’s never seen an amp or even heard of Immob, then one day you show up with your pro. First off he wants to know: How did you lose your leg?”

  “I’d set him straight fast, Doc. I didn’t lose it.”

  “I know, but how would you explain it so that it makes sense to a complete outsider like him?”

  Jerry looked a little bewildered. “That’s a cinch,” he said. “I’d just tell him what I went down to the Immob registration office like anybody else, on my sixteenth birthday, and passed all my entrance exams. One week later my turn came and I reported for surgery.”

  “And what about the pro?”

  “Well, when the stump was all healed I went back and had another operation. This time they inserted the permanent socket, tied in with the muscles and nerves of the stump. And when I recovered from that I went down to the Neuro-Loco Center and had my pro fitted. Then I went through nine months of tough neuro-loco training, passed my co-ordination tests, and got my certificate as a first-degree amp. Nothing to it.”

  “That’s the how of it, all right. But Ubu might want to know something else: Why? People who don’t know anything about Immob might be a bit taken aback by the idea of anybody volunteering to have a leg cut off.” Martine shuddered: it was the first time he’d said the word aloud.

  “Uh, I suppose so. Primitive people, you mean. Well, I’d just point out to this guy that demobilization doesn’t mean a thing without immobilization. There’s no pacifism without passivity. I’d put it to him that way.”

  “Not bad—but you’d have to enlarge on that a little.”

  “O.K., I’d explain that disarmament can’t amount to much unless, well, a man is really disarmed. Arms are what men fight with, and legs are what take them to the battlefield, right?”

  “I see. But suppose Ubu said it was a contradiction to remove a man’s arms and legs and then fix him up with even better artificial ones?”

  “Oh, come on, Doc. Even Ubu couldn’t be that naïve.”

  “Naïve?”

  “All thumbs in the brain. Muscle-bound between the ears. Listen, remember that clenched-fist emblem the communists used to have? Well, in the old animalistic days they, everybody, used to be slaves of the clenched fist—a real hand always wants to make a fist and slug somebody, and it can’t be stopped. But the pro, it’s detachable, see? The minute it starts to make a fist, zip, one yank and it’s off. The brain’s in charge, not the hand—that’s the whole idea of humanism.”

  “Pretty neat.”

  “Sure. Through amputeeism you make a man into a perfect pacifist. All right. You going to leave him flat on his back? A pacifist’s got to get around to have any effect, otherwise all his charisma is wasted.”

  “We can’t waste any charisma, God knows. Now. What would you tell Ubu about—about the steamroller?”

  “Oh, it’s got to be dodged,” Jerry said gravely. “That’s the main thing.”

  “Right,” Martine said, his stomach fluttering.

  Blur of color flitting among the pedestrians across the street, pinks and blues in a provocative ripple of skirt. Martine caught it out of the corner of his eye but just as he was about to turn his head and look, something happened.

  They were crossing the street, they were almost at the curb. Suddenly Jerry’s artificial limb erupted with a series of loud explosions as he was beginning to mount the curbstone. Instead of accomplishing the movement naturally and gracefully he halted in the middle of it, poised on his real leg, and the pro snapped upward with such force that the bent knee hit him squarely on the chin. The boy was thrown so badly off balance that he would have fallen if Martine had not reached out hurriedly and grabbed him by the elbow.

  The streets were crowded, quite a few people had seen the incident. Martine noticed something strange: everybody in the immediate neighborhood was looking at Jerry and grinning. It was the first time since his arrival that Martine had found any hint of a comic sense among these people.

  “Goddamn,” Jerry said furiously. “Oh, balls. I’ll never learn.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t co-ordinate right.”

  “How come? I thought you went through a pretty exhaustive training program.”

  “Sure, only some cortexes take to this advanced co-ordination better than others. Even in the best of cases it takes an awful lot of progressive exercising, along with drug-induced hypnosis, various kinds of auto-suggestion, and so on. You see, if the neural directions your brain sends down are the tiniest bit out of line, what you intended to be a crook of the finger might turn out to be a hefty right to somebody’s jaw, and what you meant as a wriggle of your big toe might be a spine-crushing kick in somebody’s ass.”

  “That being the case,” Martine said, “it’s a lucky thing everybody with pros is a pacifist.”

  “That’s no lie. What happened just now, I slipped back into pre-amp co-ordination and sent out the kind of impulse you would to step up on a curb with a real leg.”

  “Very interesting—your kinesthetic centers went nostalgic on you.”

  “Maybe, but according to the neuro-loco guys it’s a lot tougher to be a mono than a duo or a tri than a quadro. That’s because with the mono and the tri the neuro setup of the body isn’t symmetrical. On one side there’s an artificial limb and on the other a real one and the brain has to keep on sending out two entirely different sets of impulses at the same time.”

  “Lopsided,” Martine said. “Like being God on the one hand and Dog on the other.”

  “It’s a bitch,” Jerry said.

  “Why not take off both legs or both arms at the same time and keep your symmetry?”

  “Heck, that’s out, this step-by-step induction is a kind of initiation. They want you to learn your co-ordination the hard way and then they give you the symmetry, kind of as a reward.”

  “Years ago,” Martine said, “secret societies like the Masons had a system like that. They had different degrees of membership and you had to get into it gradually. It took a lot of work.”

  “So does this,” Jerry said. “I can’t tell you too much about the neuro end of it, though. Metallurgy’s more up my alley.”

  “Metallurgy,” Martine said. “That reminds me. What about this metal called columbium?”

  “Well, you can’t build pros without it. The reason it’s so important is because it’s the only metal whose alloys will stand up under real terrific temperatures.”

  “Is it really so rare?”

  “You’re darn tooting it is. During the fifties everybody began to make a lot of high-powered jet fighters and bombers and they discovered that columbium was the only metal whose alloys would hold up in a jet engine’s combustion chambers. Well, between the Second and the Third the aeronaut
ical engineers cooked up certain things that would pinch-hit for columbium in jet engines. But in an atomic power plant, which gets a hell of a lot hotter than a jet engine, there’s simply no substitute for columbium. It’s a funny thing, we’re so advanced technologically that we can work out substitutes for damned near everything under the sun, including arms and legs, but we can’t find anything at all to replace the almost nonexistent metal that’s needed for our substitute arms and legs. Looks like Nature played a big joke on us cyberneticists.”

  “Yes,” Martine said, “it was very unkind of her to give us so many arms and legs, so much chromium and steel to make saws with which to cut these arms and legs off, and so little columbium to build bigger and better arms and legs. But where is this stuff found?”

  “Most of the deposits, such as they are, are located in out-of-the-way places. The main ones have all been divvied up between us and the East Union, of course. Now we’re getting the idea that more deposits may be found at the poles, so the Strip has been assigned the Antarctic regions and the Union has the North Pole. The trouble is, we haven’t had a chance yet to explore the poles very thoroughly. Boy oh boy, that’s something I’d really like to get into when I pass my civil service exams. That is, if I couldn’t get into the Lake Victoria Dredging Project, but everybody puts in for that. Next to Victoria, I’d like best to do my Moral Equivalents in polar exploration.”

  Lake Victoria? Dredging? Martine frowned. “If all the possible sources of columbium have been divided equitably, why all this tension?”

  “Oh, lots of reasons. For example, there’s a suspicion that some deposits may exist along the southeast coast of Africa and maybe on some of the more mountainous islands of the Madagascar group. Do they go with the South Pole? Then there’s an outside chance some will turn up on the edges of the Humboldt Glacier in north-western Greenland. Does that go with the North Pole? Besides, since we haven’t had a chance to do much systematic looking yet, neither one of us knows for sure whether the other didn’t get the better pole.”

  “As far as columbium goes, the Strip and the Union would seem to be poles apart.”

  “Only because of the semantic hangover,” Jerry said earnestly. “Poles are apart only in the old vocabulary. Immob supplies the Hyphen.”

  They were now approaching a haberdashery establishment which seemed to specialize in garments for amps. On display in the window, draped on amp dummies, were fine tweed and gabardine suits, slacks and sports jackets, all of them with truncated sleeves and legs. To the rear of the window was a long placard along the top of which were drawn rows of miniature steamrollers, interspersed with triskelions, in a pattern of decorative waves; this sign carried the company’s slogan: SHOW OFF YOUR PROS TO BEST ADVANTAGE-WEAR BROOKS BROTHERS CUSTOM-MADE SHORTIES. Reflections of passing pedestrians paraded across the window; among them a pink-and-blue dress swirled momentarily, then disappeared into the crowd again.

  “About the Olympics,” Martine said. “I’m especially interested in the dexterities and discernments.”

  “They’re keen,” Jerry said.

  “Theo’s really good at them, isn’t he?”

  “He’s the greatest.”

  “The d-and-d’s must be hard to master.”

  “Don’t let anybody tell you different. The sensory parts of the cortex were never intended to register such fine impressions as the neuro system of the pro can transmit and the kinesthetic parts weren’t built to send out such delicate impulses as the amplifiers can receive and act on. That poses a real challenge to the brain; it’s got to catch up with the machines it runs.”

  “Sounds like these pros can be something of a headache.”

  “Oh, you’re not kidding,” Jerry said soberly. “Sometimes I get terrible migraines.”

  “Maybe the brain just can’t catch up with the pros.”

  “It will, the headaches are just growing pains. There was an article in Reader’s Compress just the other week pointing out that, according to some research they’ve been doing up in the Neuro-Loco Center, the brains of many Immobs are already larger and heavier in certain areas than those of non-amps, and that eventually Immob will lead to an entirely new kind of brain, once we get through this transitional period. Of course, I don’t remember the technical details very well, all that’s pretty much over my head.”

  Martine laughed at the phrase but Jerry’s face remained serious.

  “I gather that the East Unionists don’t show up very well against us in the Olympics,” Martine said.

  “No, they just haven’t got the engineers or metallurgists or neurologists or cyberneticists to stand up to ours. Wait’ll the Games, you’ll see, we’ll beat the shorties off them.”

  On the next block, across the boulevard, was a pale green skyscraper. When they reached the corner Jerry stopped and jerked his thumb in the direction of this building.

  “That’s where I’m heading,” he said. “That’s the M.E. University.”

  “M.E.? Mechanical Engineering?”

  “Oh no, M.E. stands for Moral Equivalents. Say—” He looked at Martine with sudden enthusiasm. “Look, Doc, why don’t you come in with me and visit around in some of the classrooms? The summer session’s on right now and we’re having pre-exam reviews today.”

  “I don’t know,” Martine said cautiously. “I’d be rather out of place, wouldn’t I?”

  “Not a chance, we have loads of visitors all the time, nobody’ll even notice you. The last few weeks especially, we’ve had these East Union artists and other tourists wandering all over the place.”

  “Artists from the East Union?”

  “It’s part of the cultural exchange program between the Strip and the Union. When the Games are held in New Jamestown a lot of Unioneers come over here and when they’re held in New Tolstoygrad a lot of our people go over there. Haven’t you seen all these foreign-looking people around town with their sketch pads and everything?”

  “Yes—yes, I guess so. I just didn’t know who they were.”

  “Well, that’s it. What do you say, want to come in with me?”

  “If you’re perfectly sure—”

  “Sure I’m sure. Tell you what, I’ll sit with you in the different classrooms and if there’s anything you don’t understand I’ll tip you off.”

  “O.K. I warn you, though, I may need a lot of tipping off. Most of this brain-building stuff is way over my head.”

  At the top of the stairs Martine turned and saw the girl in the dirndl skirt and peasant blouse crossing the street. She came up the pathway that wound through the University lawn, seated herself on a bench near the entrance, opened her sketch pad flat on her knees and began to draw. On the stone back rest of the bench was a representation, in bas-relief, of a steamroller. The pattern of her full-cut skirt, Martine now noticed, consisted of diagonal rows of tiny steamrollers, some of them pink, some of them blue.

  chapter eleven

  ON THE demonstration table Martine saw a foot-long machine built in the shape of an insect. The glossy black plastic body was segmented into head, thorax and abdomen, beady eyes projected from stalks mounted on the frontal hood of the carapace, delicate feelers probed the anterior air, rows of bony articulated legs jutted from both sides like fractured oars drooping from a Roman galley.

  It was moving. Slowly, with loathsome arthropod doggedness, it crawled across the table. Several feet above, suspended by wires from the ceiling, was a circular track rather like those used in toy railroads; gliding along this track was a floodlight whose rays were focused by a reflector on the robot below. As the light moved the mechanical monster followed suit, its ciliated toothpick legs groping with stiff centipede rhythms across the platform.

  The lecturer behind the table was a scholarly-looking young man, a quadro.

  “You all know Jo-Jo the Moth-Bedbug, I think,” he said, patting the robot insect on the back. “Let’s review what we’ve learned about him. Jo-Jo, of course, is a tropism machine, a machine with one simple
fixed purpose built into it. What is this purpose? To respond to light either positively, by moving toward it—in which case Jo-Jo is a moth—or negatively, by moving away—in which case he’s a bedbug. Jo-Jo has a communication and control system inside him, complete with feedback mechanisms which, through his photo-electric-cell eyes, keep him in touch with a constantly changing environment—a sort of primitive nervous system, with wires and transistors taking the place of neural strands and synapses. Jo-Jo’s feedback mechanisms are designed to make him responsive to certain changes in the intensity and position of the light source. But if these changes become too extreme he has a nervous breakdown.”

  The lecturer played with some switches behind the table. The traveling bulb immediately picked up speed and began to flash dazzlingly. The insect stopped in metallic consternation, it stood stock still and began to quiver. At first the tremors were tiny, then the oscillations grew in scope until the whole organism was racked with huge shudders. The lecture hall rocked with laughter: any breakdown of any mechanism, apparently, was an occasion for great merriment to the Immobs.

  “The feedback’s too intense and rapid,” the lecturer said. “Jo-Jo’s drowning in tonus that can’t find any outlet in action.”

  Now the speaker pressed a button and the room was plunged into darkness. In a moment a movie was projected on a large screen hanging over the blackboard: a man dressed in hospital pajamas was sitting at a table on which there was a glass of milk. The man began to reach for the glass; as his hand went out it began to oscillate, in little swings at first, then in wider and wider sweeps. Concentrating, a look of sweaty despair on his face, the man could not manage to get hold of the glass and lift it.

  “Intention tremor,” the lecturer resumed, “frequently occurs with certain types of injury to the cerebellum. This man’s trouble is exactly the same as Jo-Jo’s, motion-picture studies prove both oscillations are of the same order. Result of overloading the feedbacks in both cases: breakdown, accumulation of tonus, purposeless flutters.”