The Star Diaries (32 page)

“What is this? Who—what—killed him?”

He stood beside me like a statue and suddenly I was struck dumb by the realization that he was in fact a statue, of iron; beneath the earth the masked monks in their pointed cowls had not appeared so alien as they did now in the full sunlight, amid the white geometry of the roads, under the open sky; there, behind a wall of glass, that twisted body in the grip of metal seemed the only thing near and dear to me, while I stood terribly alone in the midst of cold, logical machines, that were capable only of abstract reasoning. I was seized by the desire—more, the determination—to leave without another word, without even looking in their direction, for in that single moment an impassable gulf had opened up between them and myself. Yet still I stood, beside the prior, who was silent as if waiting for something more.

In the chamber, flooded with blue light filtering through the glass of the ceiling and walls, something twitched. The sparkling arms of the mechanisms above the stiffened corpse began to move. Carefully they straightened the victim’s limbs, cleaned his wounds with a fluid clear as water, though steaming while it washed away the blood, and now he lay stretched out, as if composed for the sleep eternal, but knives gleamed and the thought flashed through me that they were going to dissect him; although he was already dead, I wanted to run and save him from being cut into pieces, but the prior placed an iron hand on my shoulder and I didn’t move.

The shining bell lifted and I beheld a face, an inhuman face; by now all the machines were working at once, and so rapidly, that I saw only a blur and the motion of a glass pump beneath the table, inside which a red liquid churned, till finally in the middle of this confusion the chest of the corpse began to rise and fall; before my eyes his wounds sealed up, he twitched all over, he yawned.

“He’s come back to life?” I asked in a whisper.

“Yes,” said the prior. “In order to die once more.”

The one lying flat looked around and with a limp, seemingly boneless palm gripped a handle that stuck out on the side, gave a pull, and the bell slid back over his head, the slanting pincers, emerging from their sheaths, clutched the body, and a scream rang out, the same scream as before; so confounded was I now, that I let myself be led without resisting to the patiently waiting caravan of masked robots. In a kind of trance I clambered back up on my mount and listened to the words addressed to me—it was the prior explaining that the pavilion was a special service station, where one could live and relive one’s own death. The purpose here is to experience sensations as powerful as possible, and not necessarily suffering, for with the aid of stimuli transformers pain becomes an excruciating pleasure. All this derives from the fact that thanks to certain types of automorphosis Dichoticans can enjoy even the pangs of death, and those for whom once is not enough can—upon resurrection—have themselves remurdered, that they may experience that awful thrill again. And in fact, our iron caravan moved away from that place of self-service execution slowly enough for the groans and shrieks of the connoisseur of strong emotions to reach us long afterwards. This particular method bears the name of “Agonanism.”

It is one thing to read of bloody maelstroms in a history text, another entirely to see with your own eyes, to experience even a tiny fragment of them. I was sick of our sojourn on the surface, beneath the sun, with the silver arcs of highways all around, and the pavilion shimmering in the distance behind us filled me with such horror, that it was with genuine relief that I descended into the gloom of the sewer, which received us with a cool and sheltering silence. The prior, divining my troubled state of mind, said nothing. Toward evening we visited the hermitage of an anchorite, also the order of some friars minor, who had taken up residence in the filtration plant of an outlying district, till finally, having completed our circuit of the diocese, we returned to the dwelling of the Demolitian Friars, in whose presence I felt a strange embarrassment for that brief moment in which I had conceived such fear and loathing of them.

The little cell seemed like home to me; already waiting was a portion of cold stuffed drawer prepared by my thoughtful novice; wolfing it down, for I was hungry, I opened the volume of Dichotican history that dealt with modern times.

Chapter One spoke of the autopsychic trends of the 29th century. The ennui with transmutability was by then so great, that the idea of turning away from the body and engaging in mind formation seemed to instill new life into society and rouse it from its indolence. Thus began the Renaissance. The wisdomites led the way, with their plan of turning everyone alive into a genius. This soon awakened a great thirst for knowledge, intensive activity in the sciences, the establishment of interstellar contact with other civilizations, but the information explosion necessitated further biological alterations, since the educated brain wouldn’t fit now even in the abdomen; society enwisdomized itself hyperbolically, and waves of braininess swept the planet. This Renaissance, finding the purpose of life in cogitation and cognition, lasted about seventy years. There were no end of great minds, masterminds, hyperminds and, finally, counterminds and underminds.

And since moving a high-powered brain around on a processional grew more and more cumbersome, after the passing phase of the doublethinkers (these had two bodily wheelbarrows, fore and aft, for thoughts highbrow and low) life itself rendered the wisdomites immobile. Each sat in the tower of his own intelligence, wrapped in snaking cables like a Gorgon; society grew to resemble a vast honeycomb of wisdom, in which the living human larva lay imprisoned. People communicated by radio and paid televisits to one another; subsequent escalation led to conflict between those that advocated the pooling of individual stores of knowledge and the hoarders of wisdom, who wanted to own every scrap of information for themselves. The thoughts of others began to be tapped, brilliant ideas were intercepted, soon you had the towers of opponents in philosophy and the arts undermined, data falsified, wires cut, and there were even attempts to expropriate the psychic possessions of others along with the identity of their owner.

The reaction, when it came, was violent. Our medieval woodcuts, offering representations of dragons and monstrosities from other lands, are child’s play alongside the physical abandonment that then beset the globe. The last wisdomites, half-blinded by the sun, crawled out from under the ruins and left the cities. In the resulting chaos whippersnappers, pederants and spotted thuglies stalked the land. There arose units of flesh and metal, adept at fornication (the collops, canards, pessaries and glyphs), and outrageous caricatures of the clergy sprang up—nunks and nunnesses—not to mention the caternary and the scroffle.

This was also when
agonanism
came into vogue. Civilization retrogressed. Hordes of muscular throts in rut went crashing through the forest with tractor-dryads. In secluded hollow logs lurked flukes. There was nothing on the planet now to indicate that once it had been the cradle of anthropoid intelligence. In the parks all overgrown with table weeds and wild china there lay basking, between clumps of napkill,
hullocks
—veritable mountains of breathing meat. The majority of these monstrous forms did not arise through conscious choice and planning, but rather were the ghastly consequence of breakdowns in the body-building machinery: it produced not what had been ordered, but degenerate and crippled freaks. In this period of social
teratolysis,
as Prof. Gragz writes, prehistory seems to have taken astonishing revenge on the future, for that which the primitive mind had only imagined, peopling its myths with nightmares, that unearthly, hair-raising Word was—by the biotic machinery run out of control—made flesh.

At the beginning of the 30th century the dictator Dzomber Glaubon assumed control of the planet and in the course of the next twenty years introduced physical unification, normalization and standardization, held then to be the means of salvation. He was an enlightened despot, of humanitarian principles, therefore did not permit the extermination of the degenerated forms of 29th-century vintage, but had them herded into special reservations. It was, incidentally, precisely at the edge of one of these reservations, beneath the rubble of an ancient provincial capital, that the subterranean monastery of the Demolitian Friars—where I had taken refuge—had ensconced itself. At D. Glaubon’s behest every citizen was to be a hindless she-male, that is, a sexually neutral individual that would have the same appearance coming and going. Dzomber wrote
My Thoughts,
a work in which he set forth his whole program. He deprived humanity of contrasting gender, for he saw in it the cause of the decline of the preceding century; the centers of pleasure he let his subjects keep, when they were socialized. He also let them keep their reason, not wishing to reign over idiots but be, instead, a reviver of civilization.

But reason means variety, and so includes unorthodox ideas. The opposition, outlawed, went underground and abandoned itself to cheerless antifemasculine orgies. Or so at least said the official press. Glaubon however did not persecute the dissenters, who took on protest-shapes (lumplings, rumpists). Reportedly there were also doublerumpists active in the underground, who claimed that reason was only for realizing that reason ought to be disposed of, and quickly too, seeing as it was the cause of all the calamities in history; the head they replaced with what we think of as its opposite—they considered it encumbering, harmful, old hat; but Father Darg assured me that the official press had overstated the case. The rumpists didn’t like the head, so they discarded it, but the brain they merely moved lower, letting it look out at the world through an umbilical eye—the other was positioned in the back, a little farther down.

Glaubon announced, having brought about some semblance of order, a plan for the millennial stabilization of society with the aid of “hedalgetics.” Its introduction was preceded by a great campaign in the press under the slogan of “SEX IN THE SERVICE OF LABOR!” Each citizen was assigned a particular job, and the nerve path engineers hooked up the neurons of his brain in such a way, that he experienced pleasure only when he worked diligently and with a will. So whether someone planted trees or carried water, he wallowed in bliss, and the better he worked, the more intense his ecstasy became. But that perversity so typical of intelligence cut the ground from under this fool-proof (one would have thought) sociotechnological method as well. For nonconformists considered the pleasure experienced at work to be a form of compulsion. Resisting the lust for work (the laboribidinal urge), despite the sensual desires that pulled them irresistibly to their appointed tasks, they did not that to which their appetite inclined them, but exactly the reverse. The water carrier chopped wood, the woodcutter—hauled water, demonstrating in this way against the government. The intensification of the socialized sex drives, carried out several times at Glaubon’s command, produced no effect, except that the historians call these years of his reign the Age of the Martyrs. The biolice had great difficulty identifying the offenders, for those caught red-handed in torment would dissemble, claiming they had been groaning
out of pleasure.
Glaubon withdrew from the arena of biotic life deeply disillusioned, for his great plan lay in ruins.

Then, at the turn of the 31st and 32nd centuries, you had the wars between the Diadox; the planet split up into provinces, each inhabited by citizens shaped according to the wishes of the local government. This was already the time of the postteratolytical Counter Reformation. From the many centuries there remained conglomerates of half-demolished cities, fetal factories, reservations only sporadically supervised by air, abandoned sex stadiums and other relics of the past, sometimes still functioning in a half-hearted way. Tetradox Glambron instituted censorship of the genetic codes, proclaiming certain genes forbidden, but uncensored persons either managed to bribe the inspection officials, or else used masks in public places, make-up, taping their tails between their shoulders, slipping them furtively down their pant legs, etc. These practices were an open secret.

Pentadox Marmozel, operating on the principle of “divide et impera,” increased by law the number of officially recognized sexes. During his rule, in addition to the male and female, there were introduced the hipe, the syncarp, and two auxiliary sexes—frunts and fossicles. Life, especially one’s sex life, became in the reign of this Pentadox quite complicated. Moreover secret organizations, when holding their meetings, did so under the guise of government-approved six-person (sexisexual) intercourse, consequently the project was dropped, at least in part: today only the hipe and syncarp still exist.

Under the Hexadoxies physical allusions came into use: these enabled one to get around the chromosomal censor. I saw sketches of people whose ear lobes extended into little calves. It was impossible to tell whether such a person was merely perking up his ears or making an allusion to the act of kicking. In certain circles tongues ending in miniature hooves were highly prized. True, the hoof was uncomfortable and served no real purpose, yet this was precisely how the spirit of somatic independence manifested itself. Guryl Hapsodor, who passed for a liberal, permitted citizens of extraordinary merit to own an additional leg; it was taken as a mark of distinction, but later on the leg, losing its locomotive character, became a badge of the rank one held; high officials had up to nine legs; thanks to this, it was now possible to recognize any person’s standing immediately, even in the public bath.