Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

  “Not a smirk,” he said aloud to himself, wonderingly. “Not so much as a twinkle in anybody’s eye. Oh God, oh Montreal, oh Martine.”

  Up ahead there was a crowd gathered before a store window. Automatically he stopped and tried to see what was inside. The establishment was called F. A. O. Schwab’s, the gold lettering on the window read TRICKS, JOKES, GAMES, NOVELTIES.

  Jokes? What sorts of jokes would a smart oceanic retailer be merchandising to these dead-pan Immobs: what amp Joe Miller texts, what cyber-cyto itching powder, what non-Aristotelian rubber hot dogs and soluble spoons? It seemed that when the limbs were amputated the funny bone automatically went with them. How would these people know a joke if they saw one?

  Yet they were laughing. Some of them, indeed, among them quite a few amps of varying degrees, were holding on to their sides and quaking helplessly, their eyes wet and hysterical. Martine forced his way into the throng. Marching back and forth on a platform that ran the length of the window were a lot of ingeniously constructed mechanical toys, whole troops of them—little robot quadro-amps hardly more than four or five inches high, each outfitted with tiny plastic limbs which moved stiffly and lit up fitfully as they jerked. Each figure was so constructed that every few steps it would trip, tumble over on its head, then roll back on its feet and rejoin the parade.

  Every time one of the dolls stumbled and toppled over, the onlookers burst out laughing with great heartiness. A stout woman just behind Martine was pressing her bosom solidly against him; with each mechanical mishap she threw her head back and roared, breasts quivering like aspic in a hurricane. The waves of her uncontrolled joy began to call out sympathetic vibrations in him, once again the flutters began in his abdomen.

  Immob was this too! A landscape of bleak solemnities, punctuated with pratfalls both programmed and unprogrammed! A nation of unsmiling priests, top-heavy with mission and frozen-mugged with dedication, stopping every so often, at every pratfall, to laugh in unholy glee at themselves and each other—at the symbols of their mission and the objects of their dedication. Here was ambivalence with a vengeance: a whole inspired people plunging the dagger of the horselaugh into the bowels of its inspiration. No doubt the founding fathers of Immob hadn’t counted on these spurts of mockery, and yet their massive piety had contained in it the seeds of its own negation. Why? By what psychic alchemy did it happen that these plastic hands started out folded in the attitude of prayer and wound up with thumbs to the nose and fingers wagging madly?

  Still giddy, Martine groped for some idea large enough to embrace this staggering fact. Maybe it was something like this:

  There was probably a touch of psychic hara-kiri in every human community. For every community promulgated some sacred mission or other, dedication was the matrix of every group, its psychic glue—and every communal mission was in the end a bit absurd. Why? Well, simply because it demanded of all men within its pale that they order their psychic economies to conform with the group goal, verticalize their horizontal instincts: this was the meaning of the reality principle as superimposed on the pleasure principle. But the reality created and deified by the community, although it undoubtedly paid some emotional dividends to those who kowtowed to it, never turned out a really adequate substitute for the simpler instinctual pleasures sacrificed at its altar: peace, for example, was a hollow gift when purchased at the price of orgasm, or limbs. So even in the most socialized citizen, the most obedient, there was a festering remnant of discontent. Particularly since, when he looked around, he saw other men in other places devoted to goals quite antithetical to his own—and every bit as solemn about it.

  Good enough. It followed, then, that the healthiest society was one which allowed its members ample escape-valves for the discontents fomented by civilization and its instinct-trampling ends: along with the bread of solemnity, plenty of irreverent circuses in which clowns rode all the sacred cows. Where there were enough such circuses, little ambivalence remained to poison the more devotional activities. But among peoples who were discontented enough, and who were not provided with enough drainage systems for their malaise, every day was something of a circus, every solemn undertaking poisoned by a certain tongue-in-cheek attitude—they did obeisance to the community’s lofty goals but always with a shrug of the shoulders and sardonic shadows playing around the mouth and the tacit suspicion that “Dolce far niente.”

  But under Immob something had happened to this dualistic, spleen-venting mechanism. The omnipresent irreverence had been banished. Suddenly America, what was left of America, had begun to take itself seriously, nothing but seriously. Flag waving had been established as a way of life, the wisecrack had been sent into exile. (Helder had always been sober as a judge.) Where ambivalence had formerly seeped into every aspect of life, now officially all was reverence and dedication, the people were mired in mission. (Helder? Missionary through and through.) Why had laughter fallen into such disrepute? Very possibly because the unsmiling priests of the new pacifist philosophy had recognized that behind such mass laughter was a seething fund of aggression—that laughter was the last refuge of the civilized man’s anger.

  So—nobody laughed when the sacred cow named Martine was trotted out. No clown leaped on his back to make grotesque faces and do hilarious flipflops, turning hortatory lectures into circuses. Martine was installed as martyr, decked out with halo instead of dunce cap and putty nose, and heads were bowed in respectful memoriam. No Louis Armstrong appeared to scat nihilistically behind the benediction. They sank to their solenoid knees before an ideological ikon of a cow named, for some schizoid reason, Martine—and nobody sniggered, nobody tittered. It was the greatest, most obscene, most throat-tightening and diaphragm-fluttering joke of all, and it didn’t even call out a faltering tee-hee. Why, in the name of sweet sassafras reason, was the cow called Martine? Why not Bill, or Sigmund, or L. Ron, or Aldous, or Norbert, or Alfred, or Mahatma, or even Helder—why Martine, why Martine? And nobody laughed—

  The woman’s breasts jiggled against his back again. The tremors started up, erupting in his middle. He was lost, there was nothing for it, it was going to seep over him now in a flood of hysteria. His lips quivered, trying to hold it in. Then it came geysering, a harsh, raucous, convulsive bellowing that caused him almost to double up. Martine, the hero, the martyr, was now in a state of complete oscillation. St. Martine had become St. Vitus, St. Parkinson, St. Jo-Jo. He was suddenly sick to his stomach: no doubt something, some semantic something, he’d eaten. The thought made him laugh (or cry?) still harder.

  It went on for several moments: the people standing near him turned away from the window to stare, uncomprehending. As soon as he had recovered enough to move he straightened up and ran down the street, still choking, trying to wipe away the tears with his handkerchief.

  Not far ahead, on the strip of parkway which cut down the center of the boulevard, there was a deserted bench: he reached it and sank down, dabbing at his eyes. The attack had left him weak as a kitten. Funny, he hadn’t swallowed a mouthful of food since early morning but now he felt like throwing up.

  Part Four

  DODGING THE STEAMROLLER

  chapter thirteen

  “LET ’ER ROLL!”

  Martine cocked his head. In a moment he heard it again:

  “Is she getting up steam?”

  He looked down toward the statue at the hub, the voice seemed to be coming from there.

  Just to one side of the stone giant, on the wide pedestal supporting it, a man was doing acrobatics; every few seconds he shouted a nonsensical phrase which boomed through the entire neighborhood, then he catapulted some twenty-five or thirty feet into the air, turning head over heels a dozen times or more before landing on his feet. On his pros, rather; his artificial limbs flickered as he pinwheeled through the air. His gibes were barked into a microphone which stood on the pedestal. A considerable crowd was gathered in the park at the base of the statue.

  Martine rose from the bench, shaking his he
ad, feeling a bit faint, and walked from the street to the meeting. The speaker had now stopped his gymnastic stunts and was talking more earnestly.

  “No! No, brothers! The steamroller doesn’t go chasing after amps who can skedaddle thirty feet into the ozone any time they’ve a mind to! But this poor jerk—he was stretched out flat on his back from the word go, begging for it.” Here the young man pointed an accusing transparent finger at the Christ-like stone figure which lay prostrate, legs crushed under the great cylinder and arms raised in petrified petition to the thin air. “Get this straight: the steamroller’s got to be dodged. Of course, the Anti-Pros will tell you that their one ambition in life is to dodge the old lady too. But take it from me, friends, if you can’t move superfast, with super cortical co-ordination and super neuro controls, why, you stand about as much chance of outdistancing the old lady as Brother Vishinu does of winning the Olympics with his tongue! And it’s plenty nimble!”

  The audience was with the ingratiating young soapboxer, heads nodded vehemently and hands clapped resoundingly. But the speaker waved the applause away.

  “A man,” the Pro went on, “has to be up to something to justify his staying alive. And that means, first of all, that he has to be up. And about. Will some gum-beating Anti kindly tell me how a man gets together with his fellow-humans and with the world around him if he spends his whole blamed life on a hunk of foam rubber, casing his navel and gurgling philosophy? The simple fact is this, friends: Our heroes, our Theos, must be in full view, up at the top, at the controls, guiding and inspiring us all. They can’t do that unless they’re fitted with pros, their badges of merit and honor. Prosthetics versus prostration, folks, that’s the issue. They most decidedly do not serve who only lie and wait—they’re just appeasers of the steamroller—and Immob is first and foremost a philosophy of service. Look it up in Martine if you don’t believe me. . . .”

  Martine gulped, his stomach felt as though it had suddenly turned over. Oh, there were many things that he would like to look up in Martine. Unfortunately, some of the key volumes in his collected works were missing—and that thought in itself seemed to him howlingly funny, although he couldn’t for the life of him, for the death of him, see what it meant.

  “Of course,” the Pro continued, “at this point the Anti boys will start splitting their semantic hairs. They’ll say: ‘All well and good, but doesn’t the very word Immob mean immobilization?’ Well, we Pros are such good Immobs that we refuse to make a fetish of any word at all—even the word Immob. Who cares about names? On the silent level a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet—that’s the law of semantics. Immobilization? Sure, what’s been immobilized in the amp, even rooted out altogether, is the war-making tropism. That’s what Immob was after, not the paralysis of man for its own sake. The moral end is accomplished—why perpetuate the physical means? That’s such slavish devotion to the map that the territory’s lost sight of entirely.

  “Let’s get this straight: something downright magical happens to a man when he’s inducted into the select circle of ampism. The ritual whereby he emerges a full-fledged quadro drives all the malice and mischief out of his system. Good. That’s a nifty beginning. But at that point only the negative job of cleansing has been done, now he’s got to acquire his positive glow, his charisma. How do we give him that? First of all, his brain has got to be expanded to its full human proportions by pros that stimulate it with exercises in co-ordination, the d-and-d’s and all that. When man becomes fully human he will be a pacifist, that’s A.B.C. But no man will ever get the feeling that he’s fully human until he knows that the world is wide open with possibility before him and he’s allowed a choice. That’s the great word, folks, c,h,o,i,c,e, choice, it’s choice that makes us human because it means we’ve dodged all the ‘Its’ that make the animal a robot, we’re self-determined. The first great choice Immob gives a man, obviously, is the choice about cutting his arms and legs off. Before this men became amps only on the battlefield and in bombings, in some accident or other, it was something done to them, they weren’t consulted. So voluntary ampism is a big step forward toward humanness.”

  Voluntary, voluntary: Martine cringed, this seemed to him now the most obscene word he had ever heard, more obscene than a snore.

  “But now, take the same logic and apply it to the Immob after he’s become an amp. What choices remain to him now? Can he choose to lie down rather than stand up, choose to call an attendant to scratch his, ah, ear lobe rather than do it himself, choose to be immobile? No, sir. Without pros he’s all amp and no vol. Even his pacifism isn’t a matter of choice, that’s the point, he couldn’t take a poke at anybody if he wanted to. But fit him with detachable limbs which snap on and off quicker than you can say Norbert Wiener, give him the feeling that his limbs are voluntary, you see, and he stops being a robot. The prosthetic limb, friends, is the means whereby man makes his great leap into human freedom.

  “Oh, I know, I know—the Antis will make a great logical fuss about the so-called contradiction in the idea of militant pacifists, active pacifists. Well, just look around you and you’ll see that all the great men of your time, all your leaders, are Theos, superactive pacifists. The type of new man, fully human man, is here, the first real hyphenated Renaissance man ever produced by the human race. He is the genuine glowing son of Martine. Never forget this: Brother Martine, our immortal martyr, founded the new world in a great act of pacifism. . . .”

  At the final invocation of his name, Martine came out of the fog and his legs, powered by a morality of their own, began to carry him away from the scene superfast. It was hard to keep from breaking into a run, but even as he moved off the voice boomed out again and in will-less fascination he glanced back over his shoulder for a last look.

  The speaker bulleted into the air again, high above the heads of his listeners. This time, though, he had removed the microphone from its stand and attached it to his lapel, so that his voice, steady, controlled, self-assured, mocking, continued without a falter as his body careened through the air.

  “Look at the old lady, she’s so sore she could spit! I’ll dodge you every time, nasty old bitch, I’m the daring young man on the flying prosthetics! Watch me give the old girl the slip! Whee! Zowee! When you can pop up to the ceiling any time you’ve a mind to, well, the old lady’s double-crossed, she can’t get herself a nice juicy victim any more—all she can do is hit the ceiling herself, ha ha, ho ha ha. . . .”

  Over and over he jumped, while his forceful voice licked out over the great landscaped circle. The crowd broke into frenzied applause, there were whistles and shouts of approval.

  Martine hurried around the corner. He began to walk feverishly. For a long time he wandered about the center of town, now hurrying down the main arteries which led away from the hub, now poking into the side streets which bisected these spokes. At a corner stand he stopped and ordered a hot dog, but when he was served a paper napkin and saw stamped in the corner a figure of the ubiquitous steamroller he put the roll down (the frankfurter was still steaming) spat out the one bite he had taken and walked away, stomach quaking. Distraught, thinking the city’s a circle, going around in circles, circling around and around a word and a sound and a sweat, thinking, he never laughed but he snored; his thoughts swimming like hyperthyroid tad-poles in a muddy creek.

  He must have been zigzagging through the streets for fully a half-hour when he turned a corner and came upon the department store with a great neon sign on its façade: MARCY’S GENERAL MERCHANDISE. As he approached the nearest window he saw that a clump of people had gathered in front of it. There was nothing inside but a long row of baskets, each one containing a large doll.

  Something began to bother him. Just as he was about to make an opening for himself in the crowd and pass through, one of the dolls, the one at the very end of the line, the one which seemed to have its large round blue eyes fixed on him—this doll moved.

  It blinked.

  Unmistakably blinked
.

  He moved a few feet, then stopped. He had the sensation that something intolerable was happening, that he was being trapped. The doll’s big blue eyes had moved, they were still fixed on him, picking him out from the crowd. When he turned and looked squarely at the doll with an air of out-rage, the doll’s whole head moved so that it could look squarely back.

  This, he felt, was a scene, some shimmer of improbability, that he would much rather avoid, but he remained rooted to the spot and forced himself to face the fact—it was not a doll, it was alive, its lips were moving, all the doll-sized figures in all the baskets were alive and their lips were all moving too. They were alive, these dolls, and dangling before each one was a microphone. Each one was alive and speaking into its microphone, addressing a group of spectators outside. The low drone of their voices came to Martine now through the traffic noises.

  His impulse was to fight his way to the curb and run but he stood there, his legs limp. The live doll at the far left, its eyes never leaving him for a moment, was speaking to him, directly to him, he heard the one voice above all the others. He did not want to hear, he did not want to stay, but slowly, thinking of the perversity that makes a man poke his tongue into an aching cavity, he made his way to the window and stood there looking down at the figure in the basket.

  The blue eyes gaped up at him, pools of bland accusation or maybe just neutral sheets of mirror reflecting his own guilt, some obscure guilt, something to do with snoring and not snoring, and the lips moved and words came softly into his ears.

  “We have lost the true way,” said the doll that was not a doll, no expression ruffling its doll-like alive features. “It is late—the time for loom weaving is past.”