by Damon Knight
We have reality now. We never had it before because of diverse viewpoints. The modern psycho-resolution-projection movement has begun to move with electronic speed and spread, and with exponential growth.
—Notes on the History of the Theory of Projected Persons, by Jonathan Fomry Bierce
* * *
Crispin and Sharon Babcock had once seemed to be in love. What they were in now, with the arrival of reality, was uncertain; but the old “in love” business was shown to have had no reality. Probably they were no more than “associated persons with prejudice” now.
In that earlier time, though, they had both seemed to be quite attractive in all ways, and well fitted to each other. They had even seemed to have a clear physical and mental beauty. Their body measurements and weights would still reveal a fine proportion and beauty; but are you going to believe measurements or are you going to believe your own eyes? Crispin and Sharon were both clearly substandard now, and that was all there was to it.
It was because of his saying “I don’t believe that that is all there is to it” about a number of things that Crispin first got into trouble. By this he showed himself to be an unconforming young man, unfaithful to the holy and historical disestablishment, and it was right that he should have gotten into trouble. And Sharon was tied so deeply into a complex of inanities that she was beyond correction.
“As long as we have each other, it will not matter what the rest of the world does or thinks,” Sharon said once.
“If we are faithful to ourselves and to each other, then we can survive even the ruination of the world,” Crispin had said. And both of them, for a while at least, had believed these things.
There had been a time when Crispin and Sharon had appeared to be successful in their lives. They had satisfaction and station and money and children and a happy home and fine friends. Or so they thought. They even had the illusion of a cup running over with sheer delight. Self-deception must have been rampant in them. And when they finally had to face up to reality there was never a couple who opposed that facing-up so stubbornly or so unreasonably.
Both of them had refused to have personality-correction-projection. They just didn’t want it, they said. They didn’t believe they needed it, and they preferred things the way they were. Refusals like theirs would tear the very fabric of the new society.
On the matter of giving up their children, they had even defied the law. And they had refused for a long time to admit that their children were ugly and malodorous and moronic and repulsive.
“They are beautiful children, they are pleasant children, they are intelligent children, and they are good children,” Sharon had insisted to an official, in defiance of all reason. “We love them and they love us. Let us alone! We will maintain our own ways. We will walk in beauty and happiness as we have walked. You have no right to interfere!”
But the officials had the “right of reality” to interfere. So the children were projected as officially deficient. And this projection, by definition, was the reality of the case. And Crispin and Sharon became more and more suspect after the termination of their children. Their attitude just wasn’t good.
They retained, however, a sense of humor. But unsanctioned humor in bestial persons can be made to project itself badly. Their magic together had been very much weakened when it became the case that they couldn’t stand to be too close to each other.
2
We are the sick, ungallant band Whose once bright step must lag.
We are the people who live in the land Where even the buzzards gag.
—Rotten People's Rollicks
* * *
Judge Roger Baluster had once been a magistrate, and later he had been a manufacturer and businessman. Still later he had been a tycoon. And that was where he broke it. Tycoons are so easy to type and tear.
And really had he ever had the nobility of character that a magistrate and a businessman and a tycoon should have? What he did have was a long history of noncooperation with the person-projector firms.
As a young man Roger had been a crusading judge. He had crusaded against a complex of disintegrating things when they had been new and unestablished. And now when they were set and established they crusaded against Baluster to his ruination. But through the years he had become a man of much hidden wealth. He was a full-feathered bird and his plucking would take a long time.
In the beginning of it, he had refused to pay to a firm that was in the person-projection business the simple monthly fee for “Personality Updating and Maintenance.” This was petty of him, for he was a rich man.
Roger had had the look of an eagle. He had had pride and judgment and compassion. And humor. He had been (this is hard to believe in the light of his real character as it was later revealed) admired and liked and respected by almost everyone.
But he had refused to pay a simple fee. Well then, he would have to pay a complex fee of a much steeper sort. He was handed upward. A bigger and more comprehensive firm in the person-projection business decided to take the enhancing of Baluster’s personality in hand. And, unaccountably, he refused this offer also. He was placing himself above the law and above the community.
“Well, then, Baluster, we will degrade your personality till you are held in universal contempt,” the men of the first-class person-projector firm told him. “We will reveal a totally shabby person who is the valid ‘you.’ Of the false image which you built for yourself nothing will remain. That is the way things are, and there is only one side to things.”
“Aw, I think there is another side to this,” Roger Baluster said resolutely. “And I believe that something of what I built will remain. The ‘Inner Me’ will remain.”
“So, then, it will remain,” said those huckstering men of that firm. “But it will remain as it really is and not as you imagine it. We will give you a certain transparency now. There is nothing like letting the honest light of day into a dark man like yourself.
This transparency will be subliminal, of course, but it will be near universal. Everybody will be able to see into you in those faster-than-a-blink moments. And nobody’s ‘Inner Person’ is attractive. People will see you, in those multitudinous intervals that are too short to be recorded, with complete revulsion. They will see you as a dirty complex of entrails and uncased organs. Yours will be the sharp and foul smell of blood and viscera and illegally opened persons. Other aspects of you will become other vile things, but the ‘Inner You’ will have become a charnel house in its offensiveness.”
“There will be another sort of ‘Inner Me,’” Baluster insisted, “and you will not be able to touch that.”
“Whatever there is of you, we can touch it and bend it and twist it,” they said.
Well, they did touch and bend and twist every discoverable aspect of Judge Roger Baluster. They rotted every element of him, and they set his reputation into reeking corruption.
Once there had been the time when Roger Baluster had had the look of an eagle. Now he had the look of a buzzard or vulture. His pride and judgment had been destroyed utterly. His compassion and his humor had been horribly twisted. His appearance, whenever a glimpse could be got of it, was completely repulsive. As were so many now, Roger was cloaked and masked and swathed most of the time. But a really foul appearance can come through every swathing and speak to every sense.
They had disrupted Baluster’s household also. They had taken his wife away, and he couldn’t find out what they had done with her. They had destroyed two of his children, and they had turned the other two against him.
But he still had money, very much money, cannily hidden. That was what kept him alive. Money can buy a grudging sort of acknowledgment as long as there is any of it left.
Silvester Sureman had gotten crossways with the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. Before that, things had gone well with him. He had, on the day of the misunderstanding, moved into a new suburban home, a sign of affluence. Silvester himself had a misunderstanding-removin
g business which he called “Roadsmoothers, Inc.” He was a good relations man. He talked now to the men of the firm that handled the maintenance of his personality. “There is no need for misunderstanding here,” he said. “I beg of you to take no action on this now. I beg you to take no action till tomorrow morning. Misunderstandings often disappear overnight.” Silvester thought that he had them convinced, but something must have gone wrong. That firm did take action against Silvester that night while he slept. A night-shift man at the firm found a note on Silvester that had been written by a day-man. The day-man had forgotten to put a hold on that note. So the night-shift man routinely had Silvester destroyed in the area of his strength: his sureness in things, and his ability to remove misunderstandings. A split-second echo had gone and come from the world mind that this was a man who was Mr. Quagmire himself, the man who would always be bogged down in indecision and misunderstanding.
On the day of the misunderstanding, Silvester Sureman had phoned the Morning Enterprise to tell them to begin delivering the paper at his new house. “These changes take a little time,” the man at the Enterprise said. “It may be the day after tomorrow morning before you receive the paper at your new place.”
“I am sure that it can be done by tomorrow morning,” Sureman said. “With effort and understanding all things can be done quickly.”
Then it was the next morning and Sureman went out from his new house early in the morning to get his paper. Yes, it was there. Or was it his? The paper was exactly midway between his house and the house next door. Did the people next door take the morning paper? The light was on there, so Sureman went and knocked on the door. A huge man with oversized eyes and lather on his face came and opened. (Those oversized eyes—the man either had a thyroid condition or he was a Groll’s Troll.)
“Do you take the Morning Endeavor newspaper?” Silvester Sureman asked brightly.
“That is no possible business of yours,” the man said. “No, I do not take such a thing. What this neighborhood does not need is one more nut. Don’t be one.”
“Thank you, thank you,” Sureman said. “I am just trying to prevent misunderstandings before they start.” He patted the man on the shoulder and the man winced. How awkward of Sureman! Possibly the fellow was a Groll’s Troll, and they hate to be touched.
Sureman picked up the paper and sat at the little sidewalk bench in front of his house to read it. And after a while the huge, shaven man came out of the house next door. He seemed to be looking for something. Then he came over to Silvester Sureman and punched him in the nose and took the paper.
“I told you not to be a nut in this neighborhood,” the man said. “Stealing my morning paper is in the order of being a nut.”
“But you said that you didn’t take the Morning Endeavor,” Sureman said reasonably out of his bloody face.
“I don’t,” the huge man said. “This is the Morning Enterprise. There isn’t any such paper as the Morning Endeavor.”
The man started back into his house with the paper. Sureman had gotten his tongue twisted on the name, that was all. Oh-oh, that big man was coming back again!
That huge man came up to Silvester Sureman again and punched him in the nose so hard that he broke it.
“It’s one thing to be a nut,” the huge man said. “It’s something else to be a nut with a worm in it. That last punch was because you have a worm in you.”
And Silvester Sureman did have a worm in him. It rotted him and it ate him up from the inside, and it brought him down and still further down. Silvester lost his business, of course. He lost everything. He was prone to total misunderstandings and he could do nothing right. He went down and down till he had become one of the vile untouchables.
Conchita Montez had once been legendized as a stunningly beautiful woman of the Latin persuasion. It had been believed that she had great charm and elegance and intelligence and presence. Her way with the English language had seemed enchanting, with all those delightful slurrings and mispronunciations. Her eyes and her wit twinkled, and she was one of the persons who brightened her era. That was the legend. But beautiful legends are not always self-sustaining; there is a fragility about even the best of them. And those were the times of fragile personalities.
It isn’t known quite where Conchita went wrong. She had given so much enjoyment to everyone! But it was said that she was very particular about whom she gave more special enjoyment to. She apparently didn’t know who was running the world in those years. Her rejection of some of the high lords was resented.
“The old way would be to throw acid in your face and so wreck your beauty,” one of those lords told her. "We are more subtle and more thorough now. We throw the acid behind your face and it wrecks your whole person. Then your face will crumble of itself.”
So those Person-Projectors did a job on Conchita and she became repulsive at once. Became repulsive? She had always been repulsive, of course. Hers was a repulsive nature.
What did we ever see in her? Old posters of her had shown her as absolutely beautiful. That was when those old posters were new. Well, why didn’t those same posters still show her as beautiful? Because she was repulsive and had always been. And now they showed her as repulsive.
But no poster could show her as repulsive as she really was. A poster could not show the mush-mouthed offensiveness of her speech or the screaming tediousness of her person.
So she became a hooded and swathed untouchable, ringing her cracked bell when she had to be out of doors, avoiding and avoided by all decent people.
3
My wife is a doll with a crooked back
And a voice like a broken fiddle.
I love her like a potato sack
With a rope around her middle.
—Rotten People’s Rollicks
* * *
Crispin and Sharon Babcock went that evening into what was probably the most beautiful sly hall in the world. If it had not been so before, their entering almost guaranteed that it would be so now. The sly halls were the last refuge where obnoxious people could gather to enjoy (it was as if the word “en-joy” had been minted fresh just for the sly halls) the rousing old pleasures and beauties. The enjoyments and the beauties were very subjective and selective, and they were awfully tenuous. But they were the only enjoyments and beauties that these people could bring about. These places might be kept enjoyable as long as their people held together on their dear course.
“The thing will work as long as we are all faithful to each other,” Crispin Babcock said. “Oh, Lord of the Sick Scorpions, please don’t say that again, and again, and again!” Sharon Babcock moaned to herself. (Crispin’s statement was one that he made a thousand times a day.)
All the members of the sly halls were outcasts. They ate and drank in the sly halls. They played music and chukki there. They had shows, they had arts, they had books and all graphics. There were body sports and mind sports. There was song and dance, conversation and cookery and casuistry.
In every sly hall were the one- and two-room mansions for the couples and for the families (though there were few children; most of the children of the outcasts had been destroyed). There were the single rooms for the singles. There were the blessed rituals that are at the heart of every sly hall; and there was the intense civilization that is the seal of all the sly people.
Some of the folks in the halls were neither masked nor veiled. Some did not even wear the great cloak, the wrongly called “invisibility cloak.” They were guised of themselves, they said; they had no need to be disguised. But that was only fancy talk. Most of them were as masked and swathed as it was possible to be.
“Wintergreen was knocked off today,” Judge Roger Baluster said. “That’s nine of the sly halls knocked off in four days and nights. Somehow the companies are shattered and the people flee out of the halls. They haven’t anywhere to go then, after they abandon their last refuges which are the halls. So they are arrested for being persistently in public places, and some of them are ex
ecuted for it. They can’t live anywhere except in the halls. Who would rent or sell rooms or houses to the outcasts? But the people get more fun out of the outcasts when they are driven into the open. There were complaints before that they hardly got to enjoy those of us who made such shelters for ourselves. Some new technique is being used to break up the companies and make the outcast people flee the halls.”
Baluster was keeping his hands busy arranging the ritual pieces in the sly hall: the 3.05 meter poles, the pairs of mittens, the desperation-philosophy texts, the tin cans and the wires to run between them, the electric helmets with their euphoric vibes, the piles of good-will mottoes.
“What is the new technique, Roger?” Silvester Sureman asked. “Dammit, Roger, can’t you do something about your appearance?”
“I’m sitting out of your line of vision, Silvester,” Roger Baluster said, “and I’m completely swathed, so that not one particle of me can be seen in any case. What do you mean by my appearance?”
“It’s nauseating, you know, and your voice is worse. Well, what is the technique that they’re using on us now?”
“I don’t know, Silvester, but they’re attacking out of a new dimension. I thought they couldn’t hit us with anything else, but they seem to be doing it. We thought we could set up asylums here and there, the sly halls, and make them into worlds of our own. We thought that, in our own circles, we could gradually become less repulsive, to ourselves and to each other, and so regain a measure of self-respect. And we have made progress, very slow progress.”