The Letter Killers Club (12 page)

Now came months and years of a reality that was read off meters, correctly dosed and distributed; history, calculated in advance with near-astronomic precision, became a kind of exact science effected with the help of two classes: the inits (the rulers) and the exons (the ruled). Nothing, it seemed, could disturb
Pax Exiniae
, but nevertheless …

The first “plan evaders,” as they were protocolled at a meeting of the Supreme Council, looked like chance exceptions in the world of activated persons. Instead of crossing bridges lengthwise, for instance, certain (evidently incorrectly innervated) exons did so crosswise; a fair number of these quitters, their muscles that is, had to be written off; the amortization coefficient for exes was on the high side. Then the Mating Ex began to malfunction: forecasts for the human harvest proved overblown—the birth rate was quite low. This mightn't have mattered, but the situation became alarming when unforeseen technical errors and irregularities surfaced in the operation of the Central Ex in charge of all the exes in Exinia. Bombarded with questions, Tutus shook his head abstractedly—and finally declared: “The only way to check a machine is to stop it.”

Following a lengthy conference the Exinians decided to stop Ex No. 1 as a test. They chose Ex No. 1 because (a) as the longest-running ex, it misfired the most often, and (b) it activated, you may remember, the madmen—to sacrifice them seemed the most humane.

On the appointed day and hour, Ex No. 1 cut off innervation and all of a sudden several million people—like sails reft of wind—subsided, sank down, and, wherever they were, crumpled to the ground. Walking past written-off exons, some inits saw eyes moving in the motionless carcasses, fluttering eyelashes and breathing nostrils (certain minor muscles deemed harmless to the socium remained at the exons' disposal); within three or four days one could not walk past those immobilized mounds of human flesh without holding one's nose since they had begun to rot alive. The checks on the machine were still not finished, therefore—as a matter of public hygiene—all that lash-fluttering flesh had to be dumped into pits and smoothed over with earth.

Meanwhile the long and painstaking inspection of No. 1, which had been taken entirely to pieces, produced entirely unexpected results.

“The innervator is in perfect working order,” Tutus, the designated expert in chief, announced with pride. “The charges against the machine are false. But if the cause of the excesses is not in the exes, then … it must be in the exons, in the isolation and neglect of their psyches. I recently observed a simple and instructive incident: an exon, stationed by the handle of a machine and innervated to turn it from right to left, was in fact turning it now to the right, now to the left, as if his muscles were affected by two warring innervations. Yes, when we cut off their brains' access to the world, we also cut off our access to their psyches. You cannot cross a threshold—from the inside or the outside—if the door is locked. I, of course, don't care about all those soul-like adjuncts known in the barbaric old days by such absurd names as ‘inner world' and so on …”

“You don't care either, Das.” Mov struck the story a resounding blow. Turning a burning face to Das despite the president's warning gesture and speaking so fast he nearly swallowed his words, Mov charged the story's flank: “Yes, you, like your Tutuses and Zeses, have no interest in the only interesting thing in this whole phantasmagoria—the problem of a demuscled psyche, a spirit robbed of its ability to act; you enter facts from the outside, not the inside; you're worse than your bacteria: they eat the facts, you eat the facts' meanings. Tell us the story not of the exes but of the exons, and then …”

If you can believe it, Moov felt the same way. After Tutus's speech at the meeting I mentioned, he—somewhat to his patron's surprise—leapt up and, eyes flashing, began saying that … but Mov has spared me having to repeat that “that.” Thank you. I'll go on. So then, you need to know that this Moov, about whose existence I have already told you, devoted his leisure hours to composing short stories. In secret, of course, and purely “for himself,” since finding “others” … In the age of exes, literature was completely cut off along with all those “inner worlds,” and so could find no others. One of Moov's novellas—“The Disconnected Man,” I believe it was called—described a supposedly brilliant thinker who, at the time of the coup carried out by the invisible enclave, had been completing his system for discovering new great meanings. Abruptly inserted into the ranks of automatons, he did the same simple work they did, five or six motions, day in, day out, and was powerless to throw humanity his saving idea: in a world where action and thought, conception and substantiation had been separated, he, you see, was a disconnected man.

Another sketch was about a beautiful lady, beautiful from the depths of her soul to the tips of her fingers (biography often goes where it's not wanted)—a lady to whom the machine had given the very man to whom she had lost her heart, but “he” did not know this and never could. This story contained many crossed-out lines and ink blots, so I can't tell you any more about it.

Finally, our “promising” young author decided to consider a life that meets with existence and exification at the same time: this was the story of a boy growing slowly into adolescence—by the time his consciousness wakes he has been activated by an ex. For this being, no world exists beyond the ex: the ex to him is transcendental, he sees his own actions as external things, just as we see the objects and bodies around us. He sees his own body as removed from his consciousness and in no way connected to it. In short, he sees the operation of the machine, which conditions all objective phenomena, as a third Kantian form of sensibility,
*
on a par with time and space. The ex-like thinking of this boy—who knows nothing of the possibility of passing from will to action, from conception to realization—naturally comes to recognize the existence of a world of conceptions and volitions in themselves, comes, that is, to an extreme spiritualism. And yet, move by move, Moov leads his hero out of this closed circle, compelling him to seek and find an exemplum that has escaped ex logic: Moov achieves this, as in the previous story, by means of happy coincidences (however rare) where the heart's prayers happen to be answered by the action of an ex. These accidental moments of harmony set the exon to dreaming about another world where such exceptions are the rule and— But I won't finish because neither did Moov: a radiogram from Zes requested his immediate presence.

Moov found his patron with company—although “company” is scarcely the right word—he found Zes standing in front of two exons that had been maneuvered into armchairs.

“If I understood you right at the last meeting, you would like to step into the other world. Close the door. Good. Now I'll open the souls of these two for you. Sit down and watch closely.”

“But I don't understand …” Moov mumbled.

“You will shortly. Two hours and forty minutes ago I injected them each with almost a gram of init. This phial contains enough for two or three more such experiments. Init takes effect at the end of the third hour. Now pay attention.”

“But that means that Nototti … his death,” Moov's lost eyes dashed from the mannequins to Zes to the tiny phial on the table.

“Stop talking nonsense. Look: that one is beginning to stir. A few minutes ago I had them both deactivated. That means, you realize …”

One of the mannequins twitched in an odd way, thrust out his chest, and clenched his fists. His eyes remained closed. Then foam began to bubble from his lips, he opened his unblinking eyes, and stared dully at Zes and Moov. His brain, parted for long years from his muscles, seemed to be feeling its way back to them—then suddenly there was contact: leaping out of his seat with an animal cry, the exon hurled himself at Zes. In an instant they were rolling across the floor, knocking into table legs and overturning chairs. Moov rushed up to the ball of tangled bodies and, brandishing the key still clutched in his hand, struck the exon a violent blow on the temple. Zes, released from the other's grip, struggled to his feet, gasping for breath through bloodied lips. His first words were: “Finish him off. Then tie the other one up. Quick.”

As Moov was knotting the rope around the hands of the live exon, he began to stir like a man awakening from a long and deep sleep.

“Tie his legs,” Zes snapped, spitting blood on the floor. “I don't need another scuffle.”

Bound hand and foot, the man finally opened his eyes. The spasms convulsing his body did not resemble those of a raving lunatic; he did not scream, he merely whimpered and sobbed, quietly and plaintively, almost like a dog; his empty blue eyes streamed with tears. Zes, regaining his composure by degrees, drew his chair closer and regarded the bound man with a slightly mournful smile.

“I used to know them both, Moov, in their former, pre-ex life. This one who's still alive, I almost loved, almost like you. He was a handsome youth, a philosopher and a bit of a poet. I confess I was biased in my choice of subjects for this deactivation experiment—I wanted to give old friends their unmechanized life back, their freedom. Well: you can see the result. But enough about that. The point is that if these two (men of sound mind and great intelligence prior to their exification) haven't withstood excommunication from reality, we can assume that other psyches haven't either. In short, we are surrounded by madness, millions of lunatics, epileptics, maniacs, idiots, and imbeciles. The machines hold them in check, but should they be released, these madmen will all attack us and trample both us and our culture. Exit Exinia. I must also tell you, my romantic Moov, that in tackling these experiments, I thought to hasten a new era, the Era of Init. I wondered if I hadn't been wrong to disconnect Nototti from life and others from freedom. But now I see … Actually, it's fortunate that during our scuffle the phial containing the last grams of init broke.”

Turning out into the street, Moov set off automatically without knowing where he went. This was the hour when the series returned from work. Falling in with their methodical ranks marching slowly along—two steps a second—our poet failed to notice how quickly he submitted to their strict and exact tempo; he even liked the light, soulless emptiness infused into him by this contact with the machines' dead thrusts. After what had gone on in Zes's study, he wanted not to think for as long as possible, to play for time, and so he purposely, as if joining in some game, pressed his elbows to his body and, staring at the round head of the exon in front of him, thought: “I must do as he does; everything as he does—it's easier that way.” The round head, rhythmically rocking, turned left at the crossroad. Moov too. The round head marched straight down the avenue to the steel humpback of a bridge. Moov too. Then up the echoing rise between stone balustrades. Suddenly, the round head—like a billiard ball ricocheting off rail cushions—banged first into one balustrade, then—at the angle of reflection—into the other. Moov too. The round head, now rounder and reddening, hung over the balustrade and plunged into the billiard-pocket below: splash. Moov too: splash.

Informed by the supervisor on duty of the death of his secretary, Zes frowned for a fitful instant then raised his eyes to the suddenly silent init. “Go on.”

He went on, but what followed was highly alarming: cases of insubordination to innervations were multiplying by the hour and becoming widespread. The exons who serviced the Central Ex (which required extremely fine motor coordination) had had to be taken off the job and destroyed: they were becoming too dangerous. Now at the controls of all exes, as during the struggle for Exinia, were inits. Dark and difficult days lay ahead: unaccustomed to working, the coddled oligarchs had again to work almost round the clock, rapping out an artificial existence on the keys of a colossal instrument. But harmony, the old exactly calculated harmony, did not result: the keys kept kicking up and causing the innervators' thrusts to dissipate before reaching the exons' recalcitrant muscles, the score of fact-phrases never reached the strings. The transparent masts in the invisible enclave went on sounding like a swarm of glassily whining wasps, but their once-wise refrain was a dissonance of warring ether waves, disturbing and distorting the celebrated
Pax Exiniae
.

Every day the barbed-wire entanglements around the invisible enclave, now home to all inits, were wreathed with the corpses of exons who had tried to break through the steel ring. Most of the monitors (from among the inits) who worked in the regions had died a violent death; the rest had fled to the center. To send out replacements was not deemed possible—the enclave was now isolated and surrounded: by barbed wire, by madness, by the unknown.

Autopsies were performed on the bodies of all self-deactivated exons, their brains and peripheral nervous systems carefully examined. Their brains turned out to contain a mysterious substance: produced inside nerve tissue in infinitesimal quantities, it appeared to be a protective secretion that had built up gradually and was somehow connected with the process of self-deactivation. Zes summoned the head of the laboratory and asked for an exact description; then he pulled some yellowed sheets out from under a paperweight and put them before the chemist.

“The handwriting is Nototti's,” he muttered in confusion, his eyes leaping up from the lines.

“I was told you were a chemist, not a graphologist. Now come to the point. Does this formula resemble that of the just-discovered protective secretion?”

“It is identical.”

“Thank you. In that case, we can say that this substance has been discovered for a second time by you, its name by me: init.”

At the last meeting of the Privy Council, Zes listened to the members' opinions, then summarized.

“So then,
in
has risen against
ex
. The outcome of a war between init and vibrophags is clear. But so long as the vibrophags haven't opened a front, so long as millions of madnesses haven't broken through to muscles, we may still even the score. I propose we stop the exes. All of them—without delay.”