Seeking the Mythical Future Page 12

  *

  She knelt on the grass, her belly-burden wedged between her thighs. It was like trying to comfort a statue. The sun had disappeared behind the trees, a few lingering rays touching the highest branches, just as the larger of the two moons was rising palely in the northern sky.”

  6

  Psy-Con

  ‘It’s simply a matter of Logik,’ Benson said. ‘Where’s your training, old man? Approach the thing logikally and there shouldn’t be any problem.’ Then he had the gall to smile.

  His smile, his confidence, his smugness, his height – above all, his height – infuriated Dr Mathew Black. He was even more incensed to learn that Benson had been sent as Special Envoy, appointed by King’s Commission, to review the screening procedure at Psy-Con. Benson had been nothing in the sanatorium, nothing, a mere pip-squeak, a jackanapes, and here he was, with power and overall responsibility handed to him on a plate. While he, Black, had been saddled with a babbling madman fit only for the High Intensity Complex. He felt like murdering them both.

  ‘I suppose you would have disposed of the patient and filed your report by now.’

  ‘You’ve had weeks, old chap,’ Benson said, raising his eyebrows yet retaining a trace of a smile. ‘The MDA were generous enough to permit an extension, but even that doesn’t appear to have satisfied you.’ He added as an afterthought, ‘And that’s something else the Authority will have to answer for.’

  There had been another purge. It made Black sick to think about it. The rules were changed, the priorities switched, the Authority restructured, yet again. Cases would be reclassified according to a new set of criteria, the medikal jargon reinterpreted and redrafted to embrace a different code of ethiks. The guards, of course, remained.

  ‘And I thought you were one of our best people,’ Benson said condescendingly, shaking his head from side to side.

  Black nearly exploded. Our best people! Our best people! He had to turn away to the window to hide his emotion, looking out blindly at the baked landscape and plumes of dust – red, brown, orange, yellow – swirling in the hot wind. This was the pitiless Pilbara, separated from any decent human habitation by several hundred miles of desert and raw scrubland. The roof of the hut in which they were standing was hot enough to evaporate water at a touch, had anyone been foolish enough to squander it in this way.

  Benson leaned over the trestle-table and turned a page of the report, which stuck damply to his thin fingers. Everything about him was thin, from his bare spindly legs to his bare bony arms and shoulders and the stringbean of a neck with its jutting Adam’s apple. His sun helmet with its King’s Commission insignia reminded Black of a bucket balanced on a flagpole. He resisted the urge to laugh.

  ‘You don’t seriously expect me to submit this do you?’ Benson said, frittering through the pages. ‘This nonsense. I should have said HIC classification and got rid of the fellow. What are you trying to prove, some new-fangled theory of diagnosis that’ll get your name in the medikal books?’ His bulging eyes looked up from the report and compelled Black to turn and meet them.

  Black said, somewhat rashly, ‘I suppose that’s the new order of the day, classify everyone HIC and have done.’

  ‘Not at all, old chap, not at all.’ Benson was unexpectedly fraternal. He was so sure of himself that he could afford to be lax about protocol, to be expansive, even. Black was enviously eating himself away. He moved his veiled eyes and looked once more through the window. The dust plumes obscured the horizon. This heat must affect the brain, it must send men mad.

  ‘You tried galvanology, I see,’ Benson said, wiping his hands on his handkerchief.

  ‘Yes,’ Black said without turning his head.

  ‘Was it a success?’

  ‘It’s all there in the report.’

  ‘I asked you if—’

  ‘I think so. But I had to discontinue the experiment. The MDA don’t believe in galvanology.’

  ‘Didn’t believe.’

  ‘You mean they do now?’

  ‘Considering it, considering it,’ Benson said slowly, turning the pages. He had adopted the mannerisms of power and authority with infuriating ease.

  ‘Do I take that to mean I’ll be allowed to continue the experiment?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Benson drawled. ‘Possibly.’ He straightened up. ‘I conducted some experiments myself in galvanology, as you may recall. Nothing quite so elaborate, but I fancy the results were equally valid.’

  A nasty suspicion had entered Black’s mind. Benson wanted to take over the patient himself. He had tumbled to the importance of the work Black was engaged on and had decided to step in and take the credit for himself. They would see about that. The nerve of the man – of this long streak of nothing with as much savvy as the rasp of a dry fart.

  ‘I got the impression that you weren’t keen on the report,’ Black said, a shade too smugly for his own good.

  ‘Some of it I find interesting; mildly interesting.’ (I’ll bet, thought Black.) ‘The patient is obviously at the mercy of a chaotic imagination quite beyond his control. He invents people, events, other worlds even, willy-nilly. He even refers’ – Benson turned several pages – ‘to another patient, fellow by the name of Stahl, who by some tomfoolery or other finds himself in this world, adrift on the ocean.’

  ‘The explanation is very simple. The patient was himself discovered in the ocean and he’s unconsciously incorporated the experience into his ramblings. He’s done the same with Psy-Con, which has become PSYCON in his imagination. It’s very obvious.’

  ‘And the other similarities?’

  ‘What others?’ Black said sharply.

  ‘Why, the names of course.’ Benson tapped the page with his bony knuckles. ‘He mentions someone called Blake, a name similar to your own. There’s also a fellow called Brenton, which I take to be a reference to myself. This chap Q is living in two quite separate worlds simultaneously, one of which is imaginary.’

  ‘I could have told you that.’

  ‘Don’t be stroppy,’ Benson said, glancing up. ‘I needn’t remind you of your position here. As Special Envoy I have complete authority over all activities in or pertaining to Psy-Con. The patient Q is under my jurisdiction. Strictly speaking, your duties are now discharged. I could have you sent back on the next airship or seconded to the High Intensity Complex.’

  ‘But I’m a qualified doktor attached to the Medikal Centre,’ Black protested hotly. ‘I’m not here on permanent loan.’

  ‘You will go where I say you must go and do what I say you must do,’ Benson told him crisply, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his skinny throat. A drop of perspiration gathered on the tip of his nose and fell on to the page. ‘As for the patient, I suggest you continue the Gestalt Treatment under my supervision. When the report is complete we can put it forward jointly; I think that’s fair enough.’

  Black couldn’t trust himself to speak; he could barely nod, too furious and sick at heart to do anything else. He prayed that there would be another purge. He wanted to see Benson suffer. He would like to have seen him bitten by a two-headed King snake and his yellow shrunken corpse thrown into the alligator pits.

  *

  The inmates were allowed to wander freely within the wire enclosure, though for most of the day it was too hot to venture outside the huts. Inside, it was like a Turkish bath, while outside was an open-hearth furnace. Along with two hundred other newly-arrived deportees, Q was herded into F Compound, one of the twenty or so pre-screening compounds; they were a mixed bunch of both sexes and all ages, several of them under twelve years of age. One of the women was with child.

  They were fed twice a day, morning and evening and, in between, there was nothing to do except lie on the bunks and run with sweat. A few made paltry attempts at conversation, but the heat eventually overcame all activity, even that of moving the tongue and mouth to produce sounds. It was as if the brain had gone flaccid, like a heavy decomposing sponge resting on the cranial nerves. Water was strict
ly rationed, one cupful of warm brackish liquid with each portion of food. The children were allowed half-a-cupful each.

  Escape was never discussed, nor even mentioned, because it was plainly impossible: there was nowhere to escape to. Outside the compound lay the desert, and beyond that the sea. These people were here for ever; perhaps the odd one might return to civilization, but he or she would be altered beyond all recognition. And for those who, after screening, would find themselves committed to the High Intensity Complex there was no hope whatsoever. The journey was one way, deeper into the burning hinterland.

  Towards sunset a sluggish movement would manifest itself as the inmates drifted from the huts into the faint stirring of air, hardly a breeze, which merely shifted the heat from the desert into the compound. But, with the day advanced, it was fractionally cooler, bearable enough to walk on the ground without blistering the feet. The guards usually waited till after the sun had set before issuing food – not for the benefit of the inmates but because it was less arduous for them, carrying the slop and ladling it into the waiting wooden bowls. Anyone not in the queue didn’t receive any food.

  Afterwards, in the fast falling darkness, there was the sound of slurping and grunting as everyone sucked the bowls dry, crunching to fragments whatever bones they happened to find. It was sustenance of a kind, just enough to keep body and soul together. And sometimes there were other sounds – cries and frantic scramblings – as one of the guards, for a bit of amusement, threw a snake over the wire and watched it wriggle among the close-packed bodies before being stamped to death in the red earth. It was a harmless diversion at the end of the day, good spectator-sport for the three or four guards who stood laughing outside the perimeter fence. On other nights they might decide to prolong their pleasure, swaggering into the compound and selecting one of the younger females and raping her in full view of the other inmates. If she protested they would beat her with wooden sticks; providing they didn’t kill her, anything was permitted.

  With the fall of darkness, and the guards retired for the night, the inmates would gather in small groups, sitting crosslegged or slumped in the dust, conversing in low murmurs and perhaps bartering the few meagre possessions they had managed to conceal. The talk was mostly of the past: no one was willing or prepared to visualize a future which they knew to be, though hardly conceivable, worse than the present.

  Q was accepted as just another inmate. His peculiar paleness – even more noticeable in this blistering climate – aroused no comment or curiosity. He sat with the others, listening to their reminiscences, now and then prompting them when their stories seemed fragmentary or incomplete. His own past was still largely a mystery to him. He could remember parts of it, dimly realized, as though perceived in dreams, but these dreams were insubstantial scraps which seemed distorted, as if viewed at immense distances through clouds of whirling gas. At other times a revelation crystallized complete in his head, usually a piece of knowledge or information which arrived out of nowhere, so that he knew its most intricate detail, except how it had got there. The thought occurred to him that it might be a religious vision, that he was a prophet of the coming Messiah. But he also knew that if he revealed the thought it would only confirm – to his fellow inmates as much as to Black – that he was truly insane.

  In the warm pressing darkness the people sat huddled in groups, talking quietly. Above them the stars were like beacons, huge and near enough to touch, filling the sky to every horizon.

  ‘In New Amerika, so they say, the King has ordered a purge,’ someone was saying – a woman in her thirties with thick glossy black hair tied back with grimy ribbon.

  ‘What happens in New Amerika needn’t bother you,’ said a man’s tired voice. ‘You are here, my friend. There could be fifty purges and you’d still be here.’

  ‘The King might grant a pardon. It has been known.’

  ‘Has it? I’ve never heard of it. You’re living in daydreams. Better give up hope now, then you won’t be doubly disappointed later on.’

  *

  ‘There has been a purge,’ someone else said, a young man in his early twenties. ‘It was on the telegraph.’

  ‘How do you know what was on the telegraph?’ the man scoffed.

  ‘I heard the guards discussing it. They said a message had been received direct from King Jimmy K himself; they said it would affect everyone but them. They were laughing about it.’

  ‘Purges come and purges go,’ said the man. ‘We stay here for ever.’

  A middle-aged woman sitting a little apart from the group said, ‘My family are making representations to Court. They’ve hired a lawyer and an advocate.’

  ‘Is that so,’ the man said dryly.

  ‘The lawyer has discovered an edict, an ancient one, which prohibits deportation for any person if more than two members of their family have been on active duty in the service of the King.’

  ‘I take it you’ve paid the lawyer in advance,’ the man said, turning his head to look at her.

  ‘He’s been paid a retainer,’ the woman admitted.

  ‘A handsome one, I’ll bet. Well, I’ll tell you this for nothing: there is no such edict.’

  ‘Are you a lawyer?’ the woman said coldly.

  ‘No. Not that it makes any difference. You’ll find that the larger the retainer, the more ancient the edict; it seems there are edicts by the score just waiting to be discovered.’ He turned back into the circle. ‘The one you mention is pure invention.’

  ‘We were assured on oath—’

  ‘Of course you were. They can be very assuring. That’s their job.’

  ‘The Court wouldn’t permit malpractice of that sort.’

  The man laughed harshly. ‘The Court not only permits it, it encourages it. Where do you suppose the bulk of the Court’s revenue comes from? Every representation to Court costs exactly half the lawyer’s fee; the higher the fee the sooner the representation is heard and considered. And all that means is that you get the same answer as everyone else, only quicker. You’d have done better to save your money …’

  His voice dropped away as he heard a sound, that of the woman crying. She wept with the utmost consideration, inwardly, not seeking to impose her grief or elicit sympathy. It was the most private and intense kind of anguish: utter hopelessness.

  The murmur of voices filled the compound, the bowl of dust underneath the stars. Q said: ‘There’s no possibility of reprieve, then?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ the man said.

  ‘It doesn’t seem that any of you are dangerous people,’ Q said. ‘What is it you’ve done wrong?’

  The young man said, ‘I wrote some poetry that didn’t rhyme. It wasn’t logikal. It defied reason, so they said.’

  ‘What about you?’ Q asked the man.

  ‘I don’t know, they wouldn’t tell me. I was accused of subversion against the Crown and the State. Apparently the MDA had been keeping a file on me for some time, observing my movements, and so on. I think it was a neighbour who put them on to me. I don’t really know.’ He added lamely: ‘You can’t fight because you don’t know what you’re fighting against. There’s no sense to it.’

  ‘But it’s logikal,’ the young man said.

  ‘So they say. I don’t understand their Logik, perhaps that’s the trouble.’

  The woman with black glossy hair said, ‘If there has been a purge, perhaps there’ll be a new ruling. We might be released any day now, without warning.’

  ‘But don’t you see,’ the young man said, ‘that wouldn’t be logikal.’ He leaned earnestly into the group, the soft darkness all around them. ‘Whenever there’s a purge and a new ruling no one is released. Releases are only made when there isn’t a purge.’

  ‘But if there isn’t a purge things will go on as before, nothing is changed.’

  ‘You’ve got it. That’s logikal.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ the woman said.

  ‘That’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re all here. I
f everyone understood, there’d be no need for Psy-Con.’

  ‘What if we try to understand?’ the woman asked. ‘What if we say that we understand?’

  ‘That isn’t being logikal. If you did understand, you wouldn’t be here. Saying that you understand now only proves that you don’t understand their Logik.’

  The woman said helplessly, ‘So, if there has been a purge, it won’t make the slightest difference.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the young man. ‘There’ll be a new ruling, new people in charge, new methods introduced. There’s no point in having a purge if nothing is changed.’

  ‘But that means we won’t be released … isn’t that what you said? When there’s a purge no one is released.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why?’ the woman said desperately. ‘Why couldn’t they change their minds and release us? Why couldn’t they suddenly decide that everyone in Psy-Con has been deported in error?’

  ‘I don’t think they could do that.’

  ‘But why not?’ the woman cried. ‘Why? Why?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be logikal,’ said the young man.

  *

  Black was in a ferment of desire. During the early evening he had walked along the perimeter of the pre-screening compounds, trying hard though none too successfully to conceal his frustration; the guards were surly and suspicious, recognizing that he was not a member of the permanent staff – who in any case were never seen near the compounds, but kept strictly to the circle of huts which comprised the medikal section and their own private quarters. Black didn’t care; he was desperate.

  He watched the inmates feeding, just as darkness was falling, and selected two or three likely candidates. The trouble was, he soon realized, there was no way of identifying them. They weren’t named or numbered and wouldn’t be until screened and assigned to their ultimate destinations, wherever those might be. All that he could do was make mental notes of their appearance and trust that the guards would be able to pick them out from the descriptions he gave. He only needed one, just one.