Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  Jerry looked outraged. “You must be kidding, Doc. There’s one thing about a pro that makes it entirely different from a real limb—it’s detachable, see, I already told you.”

  “You mean—Immob doesn’t do away with panic, it just makes it detachable?”

  “You’re getting the idea. In this lab guys who are first-degree and second-degree amps learn that they can begin to control their panic by detaching their pros and then subduing the glands and nerves and muscles through Yoga breathing and progressive relaxation. It helps to build up the ego, which in itself is a sure cure for animal panic. Props up the shaky megalomania. Naturally, it’s just for the transi—”

  “One . . . two,” the instructor chanted. “Iiiiinnnn . . . oooouuuut. Dunlap! Watch those sphincters, boy!”

  “—it’s just for the transitional period.”

  “All right, men,” the instructor went on. “That’s all for today. You can put your pros back on now.”

  The students opened their eyes, sat up on their cots, yawning and stretching. All except one, the young man down near the end whose abdomen had seemed to cave in entirely during the breathing exercises. The instructor walked down to his cot, took him by the shoulders and began to shake him.

  “All right, Higby,” he sad. “Higby. Come out of it now. Higby! Snap out of it!”

  Almost all of the indicating needles behind Higby’s cot were down to zero. Suddenly they all jumped and began to jerk wildly. The young man opened his eyes with a start, blinked rapidly several times, then heaved himself into a sitting position.

  “Good work, Higby,” the instructor said. “That makes ten days, for ten days in a row you’ve relaxed so completely at the signal that you’ve lost consciousness. You’ve got the knack of it now. Men!” He turned around and addressed himself to the class. “I have an important announcement to make, men. Higby has now mastered the breathing and relaxation techniques perfectly—something that practically never happens before the quadro stage. Never again will he be so enslaved by his body that he’ll have to lie down in bed and wait to fall asleep. Sleeping will never be a passive falling expreience for him again. He can now send his Atman soaring into the Brahman any time he wants to. He’ll never again have to lose consciousness, he’ll simply thrust it away from him. Higby will never again know panic. He has dodged the steamroller. I’m going to give him his P.C. certificate and what’s more, I’m going to recommend that he be allowed to go on to full amputeeism, he’s earned it.”

  The other members of the class had plugged their pros back into their sockets. They all stood up now, still in the nude, intense emotion on their faces. Turning toward Higby, they all began to applaud wildly, they shouted phrases like “Bravo!” and “That’s the stuff, Hig!” and “Good going, kid!” The instructor stood alongside Higby’s cot, a pleased smile on his face; Higby sat quietly, a little sleepy and bewildered but tremendously moved, his lips trembled.

  “What a break,” Jerry said enviously. “A Panic Control certificate and a recommendation for quadro at his age! That kid’s got the makings of a real champ psychosomaticist.”

  What, the final speaker demanded, is Immob? Immob is the cyber-cyto dialectic—the dwindling distance between cybernetics and cytoarchitectonics. The bridging of the gap between the mechanical and the human—the discovery of the Hyphen between machine and man—thus enabling man finally to triumph over the machine because it’s man who has the Hyphen and not the machine.

  There was always a great paradox in pre-Immob history, the lecturer pointed out. Why should it be that the human brain can produce perfection only outside itself—in the machines it conceives and builds? If it can conceive and project such perfection, why can it not apply the same grandiosity of vision to itself, rebuild itself? The answer is that it can, once it stops being cowed by its own creations. The slogan, “Physician, heal thyself!” yields to the Immob admonition, “Cyberneticist, redesign thyself!”

  There were two plastic models of human brains on the demonstration table. The speaker now turned to them, pointing first to the smaller one. “Here,” he said, “is a typical brain of homo sapiens circa 1970—on the verge of the EMSIAC war. A bird brain, a peanut brain. It suffers from one fatal debility: in EMSIAC it has produced a fantastic mechanical image of its own dream of perfection but, because it is trapped and enervated by arms and legs, it has no Hyphen to relate itself to that metallicized dream. Therefore the dream is about to turn on the dreamer and steamroller him into oblivion. . . .”

  The speaker turned to the larger brain. “Now consider the second model. It is an Immob brain circa 1990. Already it is larger by many, many grams. After the agony of the Third, the war in which the dream of perfection became a steamrollering nightmare, this brain has finally discovered how to link itself to its own projected vision—it has lopped off its animalistic tails. It has suddenly made the breath-taking discovery that the perfection of EMSIAC and other robot brains lies in the fact that they are sheer brain with no irrelevancies, no arms and legs, just lines of communication and feedbacks—and it has begun to overhaul itself in the image of the robot. This, by the way, is no hypothetical brain—it is an exact copy of a real one, one belonging to a great Olympic athlete of our times, Brother Theo. This brain is beginning to realize itself. Notice the specific cortical areas in which it has begun to grow, now that no more energies are drained from it—in the sensory centers here, the manual centers here, the locomotor centers here—”

  “Of course,” Martine whispeed to Jerry. “Theo was pretty brachycephalic to begin with.”

  “These are bumps of maturity—humanity is sprouting all over this cortex. This Immob brain is beginning to catch up with its best machines. Soon it will outstrip them. Then, of course, it will invent still more fantastic machines to outstrip, for the machine is eternally the brain’s dream of fulfillment. . . .”

  But, the speaker cautioned, before a territory can be developed we need some preliminary picture of it, a map. This holds for the territory of the brain as well as for the territory of British Guiana or Timbuctoo. It was the wisdom of Brodmann and all the neurological researchers inspired by him that they saw this need and set themselves the task of charting the brain’s wily topography.

  The lecturer pressed some buttons on the wall, from rollers suspended above the blackboard two large multicolored sheets began to descend. They were both cytoarchitectonic maps, one a post-Brodmann drawing belonging to the period just before the Third, the other an Immob product of the year 1990.

  “For years,” the lecturer was saying now, “Brodmann and his followers performed their painstaking lobotomies, transorbital leukotomies, selective ablations, their electric-needle stimulations and strychninizations to fire the cortical neurones. At first they were much too concerned with esoteric subjective matters, but they were soon obliged to correct this one-sided emphasis. Things were happening in another field which vitally concerned them. More and more there was a need for super high-speed electronic computing machines—to guide radar tracking equipment, to act as mechanical brains in the operation of totally mechanized atomic piles, to direct remote-control missiles, to solve the incredibly complex mathematical problems posed by nuclear physics, above all to take over the increasingly unwieldy complexities which were the concern of managerial groups in both industry and government. Cybernetics spurted forward. And the moment it did, it had to tear the cytoarchitects away from their futile subjective researches and press them into service. Before men could build mechanical brains which would outstrip human brains, they had to know more about human brains. The engineer’s brain had arrived at a point where it had to listen to the ancient Greek admonition: Know thyself. So the Wienerites had intense and urgent need of the Brodmannites. The result of their marriage was dianetics—a remarkable technique for making the human brain into a lightning-fast computing machine by clearing it of its noms, or inhibiting ‘devils,’ and jolting it into recall.”

  Dianetics drew in bold outlines the b
lueprint of the optimum human brain. But before this model could be of much practical use, the whole anatomy of the id, ego and superego had to be traced. Only when such a full picture was available could the human brain build electronic brains still better than itself, after which it could then pattern itself. Brains without aberrations, without a debilitating unconscious. The crying need was to explore the all-important neural Hyphens. Not until that was done would it become clear, as it subsequently did, that the animal unconscious persists, with all its disruptive norns, only because of the animal Itness of arms and legs—that the electronic brain is pure and self-determined because it is not shackled to arms and legs.

  “The great work along these hyphenic lines,” the lecturer said, “was done by a man you all know about. Although a very young scientist before the Third, only at the beginning of his career, he had already managed to trace many neuronic networks which had never been imagined before.”

  The lecturer turned now and waved his hand dramatically in the direction of the Immob cytoarchitectonic map.

  “This is the map of maps,” he went on. “Over its terrain will be fought the wars of the future. The cyber-cyto wars. The man of whom I am talking knew that. He gave us the main elements of this map as a living testament to his vision. What further earth-shaking discoveries might not have come from his inspired scalpel if his life had not been cut short, almost at the moment of its beginning, by the EMSIAC war! And yet, in handing down this map to us, he did, in a sense, triumph over EMSIAC. For, armed with this revoluntionary tool, we can now march forward into the cybernetic future in which we shall become our own EMSIACS, the human brain will overtake and outstrip its own projected greatness. Yes, the Immob world will never forget its debt to the greatest cybernetic hero of all, its towering genius and immortal martyr. He, more than anybody else, was responsible for the cyber-cyto revolution of Immob. Dr. Martine was the first and greatest adversary of the steamroller. . . .”

  Steam hissing, roller rumbling. Iiiiinnnnn . . . ooooouuuuut.

  “There’s a break for lunch now,” Jerry said.

  Let me tell you about my aberration—

  “Want to come up to the cafeteria and put on the feedbag?”

  Feedbag’s clogged. It makes my sphincters very tense. The riddle of the sphincters, I say, not Oedipus, is to take the fool by the norns—

  “Hey, Doc.” Jerry stopped and looked hard at Martine. “You look kind of funny, you’re awful pale. You got something on your mind? Sounded like you were mumbling something to yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, Jerry. Yes, there is something on my mind—I mean, something’s trying to put itself on my mind. . . . What were you saying?”

  “Just that it’s time for chow. How’s about it?”

  “Sure.”

  What was it he was trying to remember, what confounded mess was churning, turning, burning, yearning, norning in his anachronistic unconscious? Something overheard from his listening post inside some anachronistic uterus of a bunk way back at the begining of time’s slickumed track, the hissing of steam, the rumble of roller. What the hell did the fellow mean, whooping it up about Martine that way! Did a guy become a hero just because he wrote a few technical papers on the cortical-thalamic circuits in the higher primates? A martyr? Something was very definitely the martyr, With Martine. . . .

  On the roof, forty-odd stories up, they found a table to one side of the huge glass-enclosed penthouse restaurant. The whole city was stretched out below, wheels within wheels: directly to the right was the circle of park at the hub, with the statue of the steamroller hunched massively in the middle.

  He was hungry, and the turkey sandwich (dark meat, with East Union dressing) was wonderfully tasty, but after a moment he put it away and sighed: looking down at the statue, he found that he’d lost all interest in food. What was it about that mammy-jamming symbol that upset all his gastric functions?

  “All that talk about Martine,” he said.

  “Great man!” Jerry said reverently. “Did I tell you, I was born October 19? My mom says with a start like that I can’t help but be a world beater.”

  October 19. Oh, God, yes, and back on the ship one afternoon Jerry had said something about another date, he’d said, why, sure, everybody knows somebody who was born on July 16th. And—back on the island all the amp athletes had worn big blue “M’s” on their sweatshirts. “M’s” which could hardly have stood for Man. . . .

  “Like Martine. He beat it right out of this world on October 19.”

  “Didn’t he, though? Plop into immortality.” Martine decided to change the subject: he was beginning to sweat badly again: Helder had snored so goddamned loud. “These lectures,” he began.

  “What’d you think of them?”

  “They were meaty, all right.” He stared at the slivers of turkey protruding from his sandwich. “They contained plenty of food for thought.” He was silent for a moment, blank. “I want to ask you an important question. Remember that African bushman I told you about a while back?”

  “Yup, what about him?”

  “Well, I was trying to imagine how he’d react if he’d sat through this morning’s lectures. He’d be awfully impressed, of course, but all the same I think he’d sense a certain contradiction.”

  “A contradiction? Seems to me all the theories fit together pretty neatly.”

  “You bet, it’s perfectly amazing. Square concepts are plugged into round theoretical holes and, by some miracle of non-Aristotelian logic, they seem to fit. But a naïve guy like Ubu might still say that the two halves of the overall theoretical picture don’t seem to dovetail.”

  “Which halves?”

  “The Yogi half and the Commissar half. Let me explain what I mean—seeing it through Ubu’s childish eyes, naturally. Immob was founded on the idea of immobilization, right? That is to say, the new ideal was simply quiescence, the passive condition—Yogi donothingism.”

  “All that’s kid stuff,” Jerry said. “Where’s the problem?”

  “I’m coming to that. Now, this Yogi tendency is founded on a real disdain for the body, it’s an attempt to humiliate the body, crush it, petrify it, escape from it. But there’s another side to Immob. The Commissar side. The feverishly active, striving, fast-moving side. All that seems to be based on adoration for the body, not a rejection of it. Anyhow, the upshot is that the immobilized acquire greater mobility and the passive get around more than ever. To an outsider like Ubu, you see, all this might seem a bit inconsistent.”

  Jerry stared at him. “Why?”

  “Look, people start out truncating themselves in order to disengage themselves from the world—and they wind up capable of greater engagement than ever. Ubu would flip his wig trying to figure out how a program for detachment metamorphoses into a program for the oceanic.”

  Jerry frowned, he seemed bored by the whole discussion. “I’d give your Mr. Ubu a very simple answer,” he said. “I’d tell him to stay the hell out of politics.”

  “Politics?” Martine said in bewilderment.

  “Sure. What you’re talking about, this so-called contradiction Ubu would hit on, that’s the whole bone of contention between our two big parties.”

  “You have parties?”

  “Natch, haven’t you heard about the Pro-Pros and the Anti-Pros? They’re just what their names imply: the Pro-Pros are in favor of prosthetics and most of the Immob big shots belong to it, while the Anti-Pros have been dead set against prosthetics from the start because they think such developments foul up the original principles of Immob.”

  “I gather,” Martine said, “that you belong to the Pro-Pros.”

  “Gather again, Doc. I don’t belong to anything. Politics, any kind of politics, makes me sick—too verbalistic an activity, it’s for blabbermouths. But all the same, I think the Antis are a bunch of dizzy extremists. What are you going do to with a guy after you make him into a hero and give him all this charisma—tuck him away in a basket without even a pair of thumbs t
o twiddle? Is that the thanks he gets for his sacrifice?”

  “Ubu,” Martine suggested, “might say that, as he understands Immob, amputeeism is supposed to be a privilege and not a sacrifice.”

  “Quibbling,” Jerry said firmly. “What’s the sense in kidding ourselves? The whole thing’s nothing but a semantic difficulty. In the Age of the Hyphen we’re bound to work out ways of bringing such polarities together. Through dialectic materialism—idealism, I mean.”

  “You think you’ll reconcile all polarities? Even the North and South Poles?”

  “Sure thing. The split is just semantic. Isn’t the real silent world a mighty solid hyphenation of north and south? Take the equator, for example, it’s only an Aristotelian construct of man’s, it exists only on the map, not the territory. Vishinu may forget it but the territory’s been a pretty compact little unit all along.”

  “So it has. But then, so is an eight ball.”

  “Right.” Jerry yawned. “Well, I’ve got to get on down to cyber lab. Want to come along and see what it’s like?”

  “Thanks for the invitation, but I’ve got some things to do this afternoon. I hope I meet up with you again, Jerry—it’s been very helpful talking to you.”

  “Tell this Ubu to read some Martine. It’ll give him a new slant on things.”

  Hissing of steam in diaphragm, rumbling of roller in sphincters: Helder’s loose lips flapping—“I’ll do that,” Martine said. “Happy cortico-building, and don’t let it go to your head.”

  He’d left not a moment too soon. Another minute with Jerry and he would have lost control completely, already toward the end there he’d felt the convulsive tremors beginning in his viscera. The morning’s pedagogical fare had been the most enormous joke he’d ever heard or imagined, very possibly the greatest and most obscene joke ever conceived of by mortal would-be man: and nobody had laughed. Nobody had chuckled. All those hyphenated sobrieties! Those oceanic pomposities! Everybody had the drag-ass bring-down cyber-cyto blues!

  Walking away from the University, down through the spacious gardens and past the girl with the pink-and-blue skirt and the sketch pad—not really seeing her, not seeing anybody, moving blindly and mechanically—he found that his mind was reeling.