A Perfect Vacuum

by Stanisław Lem

  But who, then, is this old man prowling the passageways of the basement halls? The legal adviser of General Sexotics? For he recalls the celebrated cases brought before the Supreme Court, the battle for the right to duplicate with manikins the physical appearance of famous people, beginning with the First Lady. General Sexotics had won, at the cost of twenty million dollars—and now the wandering beam of the flashlight plays on the dusty plastic bell jars under which stand frozen the leading film stars and the world’s foremost women of society, princesses and queens in splendid dress, for by the decision of the courts it was forbidden to exhibit them otherwise.

  In the course of the decade, synthetic sex came a long way from the first models, the inflatables and the hand-windups, to the prototypes with thermostats and feedback. The originals of these copies are long dead, or else are now decrepit crones, but teflon, nylon, dralon, and Sexofix have withstood the wear of time; like waxwork figures in a museum, leaping from the darkness into the light, elegant ladies smile immobilely at the old man, and they hold in their raised hands cassettes, each with its siren text (by Supreme Court ruling, the seller was not permitted to place the tape inside the manikin, but the buyer, of course, could do so in the privacy of his home).

  The slow, shaky step of the old hermit raises clouds of dust, through which glimmer from across the room, in pale pinks, scenes of group erotica, some of them thirty-membered, resembling giant pretzels or intricately braided breads. Could this be the president of General Sexotics himself who walks the aisles among these high gomorrarcades and cozy sodomy sofas, or perhaps the chief designer of the company, the man who made all America, and then the world, crotch-aware? Here are videos (“viewrinals”) with their controls and programs, and with that lead seal of the censor over which lawsuits ran through six courts; and here are stacks of containers ready for shipment overseas, filled with Japanese spheres, dildos, precoital creams, and a thousand similar articles, complete with instructions and service manuals.

  That was the era of democracy come true at last: one could do anything—with anyone. Heeding the advice of their own futurologists, the corporations, having quietly divided up among themselves the global market in contravention of the antitrust act, went into specialization. General Sexotics worked on equal rights for deviants, and the remaining two companies invested in automation. Flagellashes, batterabusers, black-n-blue’s appeared as prototypes, to assure the public that there could be no talk of a glut on the market, for a great industry—if it be truly a great industry—does not simply meet needs: it creates them! The old methods of home fornication—the time had come for them to be laid to rest alongside the flints and clubs of the Neanderthals. Scholarly bodies offered six- and eight-year courses of study, then graduate work and advanced degrees in the higher and lower eroticisms; the neurosexator was developed, then throttles, mufflers, insulating materials, and special sound absorbers, in order that one tenant not disturb another’s peace or pleasure with uncontrolled outcries.

  But they had to go on, further, fearlessly, and ever forward, because stagnation is the death of production. Already in the works was an Olympus for individual use; already the first androids in the shape of Greek gods and goddesses were being fashioned out of plastic in the blazing ateliers of Cybordelics. There was talk, too, of angels, and a financial reserve was set up for legal battles with the churches. However, certain technical problems still had to be ironed out: what should the wings be made of; feathers might irritate the nose; should they be movable, or would that get in the way; how about the halo, what sort of switch to turn it on, where to put the switch, etc. And then the lightning struck.

  A chemical substance—code name Nosex—had been synthesized some time before, possibly as early as the 1970’s. Only a small group of experts, security-cleared, knew of its existence. The drug was immediately recognized to be a type of secret weapon, and was manufactured by the laboratories of a small firm connected with the Pentagon. The use of Nosex in aerosol form could in fact decimate the population of any country, because the drug, taken in quantities of fractions of a milligram, eliminated all sensation accompanying the sex act. The act, true, continued to be possible, but only as a variety of physical labor, fairly fatiguing, like wringing out clothes, scouring pots, scrubbing floors. Later on, consideration was given to the idea of using Nosex to check the population explosion in the Third World, but the plan was thought to be dangerous.

  No one knows how the world-wide catastrophe came about. Was it true, as some said, that a stockpile of Nosex blew up as the result of a short circuit, a fire, and a tank of ether? Or did there come into play here a move on the part of the industrial enemies of the three corporations that controlled the market? Or, then again, did some subversive organization—reactionary or religious—possibly have a hand in it? We are not told.

  Wearied by his trek through the miles of vaults, the old man takes a seat on the smooth knees of a plastic Cleopatra, but not before pulling her brake, and his thoughts travel back, as to the edge of a precipice, to the Crash of 1998. Overnight, in an instinctive feeling of revulsion, the public turned its back on all the products then flooding the market. That which yesterday enticed, today was what an ax is to a tired logger, a washboard to a laundress. The eternal (it had seemed) enchantment, the spell cast by biology on the human race, was broken. Thereafter, breasts brought to mind only the fact that people are mammalian; legs, that they have with what to walk; buttocks, that there is something also with which to sit. Nothing more, but nothing more! How lucky McLuhan, that he did not live to witness this catastrophe, he who in his later works had interpreted the cathedral and the spaceship, the jet engine, the turbine, the windmill, the saltcellar, the hat, the theory of relativity, the brackets in mathematical equations, zeros, and exclamation points as surrogates and substitutes for that single function which alone is the experiencing of existence in the pure state.

  This line of reasoning lost its validity in a matter of hours. The specter of extinction hung over humanity. It began with an economic crisis compared to which the one of 1929 was as nothing. The entire editorial staff of Playboy, in the forefront as ever, set fire to itself and died in flames; employees of striptease clubs and topless bars went hungry, and many leaped from windows; magazine publishers, film producers, huge advertising combines, beauty schools went bankrupt; the entire cosmetic-perfume industry was shaken, as was lingerie. In the year 1999, there were thirty-two million jobless in America.

  What now was still capable of exciting the public’s interest? Trusses, fake humps, gray wigs, a palsied figure in a wheelchair, for only these did not suggest the strain of sex, that onus, that curse, that grind; only these seemed to guarantee protection from the erotic threat, hence respite and peace. The governments, aware of the danger, were mobilizing all their forces to save the species. In newspaper columns there were appeals to reason, to a sense of responsibility; clergymen of every faith appeared on television with sublime exhortations and admonitions, reminding their flocks of higher ideals, but this chorus of authorities was listened to by the general public with little enthusiasm. Nor did the sounding of the official trumpets help, the proclamations enjoining people to get a grip on themselves. The results were negligible; only one unusually law-abiding nation, Japan, gritted its teeth and followed these injunctions. Then special material incentives began to be instituted, honorary degrees and distinctions, prizes, awards, citations, medals, and fornication competitions (the trophies were loving cups); when this tack also failed, repressive measures were taken. But then the populations of whole provinces began to evade their procreative obligation, teen-age draft dodgers lay low in the surrounding forests, older men presented forged certificates of impotence, and the public boards of enforcement and supervision became riddled with graft, for everyone was ready—if need be—to keep tabs on his neighbor, to see that he wasn’t shirking, though he himself avoided that dreary labor as much as he could.

  The time of the catastrophe is now only a me
mory sifting through the mind of the lonely old man as he sits on Cleopatra’s knees in the basement. Mankind has not perished; fertilization now takes place in a way that is sanitary and hygienic; it is not unlike inoculation; after years of ordeal a stabilization of sorts has taken over. But culture abhors a vacuum, and the terrifying suction of that emptiness caused by the implosion of sex has drawn, into the vacated place, food. The gastronomy of the day is divided into normal and obscene; there exist perversions of gluttony, glossy restaurant publications with centerfolds, and the partaking of meals in certain positions is considered unspeakably depraved. It is not permitted, for example, to consume fruit while kneeling (but for this very freedom a sect of knee deviates is fighting) ; it is not permitted to eat spinach or scrambled eggs with one’s feet propped up. But there exist—of course!—private clubs in which connoisseurs and epicures are treated to indecent floor shows; before the eyes of the spectators special champions gorge themselves, and the drool trickles down the audience’s collective chin. From Denmark are smuggled pornoculinary magazines containing things unbelievably gross. One picture shows the ingestion of scrambled eggs through a straw, during which the ingester, sinking his fingers into heavily garlicked spinach and at the same time sniffing paprika goulash, lies on the table, wrapped in the tablecloth, his feet bound with a cord hooked up to a percolator which in this orgy serves as the chandelier. The Prix Femina that year went to a novel about a character who first smeared the floor with truffle paste, then licked it clean, after having wallowed his fill in spaghetti. The ideal of beauty also has changed: the thing now is to be a two-hundred-and-ninety-pound butterball, for this attests to uncommon ability on the part of the alimentary canal. Changes have taken place in fashion as well, and it is generally impossible to distinguish women from men by their dress. In the parliaments of the more enlightened countries, however, the question is being debated whether or not schoolchildren should be instructed in the facts of life, i.e., the digestive processes. So far, this subject, because it is indecent, has been placed under a strict taboo.

  And at last the biological sciences are nearing the complete elimination of sexual reproduction, that superfluous and prehistoric relic. Embryos will be conceived synthetically and grown according to programs of genetic engineering. From them will come neuter individuals, and this finally will put an end to the terrible memories that linger in the minds of all who have lived through the catastrophe of sex. In bright laboratories, those temples of progress, there will arise the magnificent hermaphrodite or, rather, the neutrone, and then humanity, cut free of its former disgrace, will be able, with ever-increasing relish, to bite into every fruit—now only gastronomically forbidden.

  Gruppenführer Louis XVI

  Alfred, Zellermann

  (Suhrkampf Verlag, Frankfurt)

  Gruppenführer Louis XVI (or Nazi Squad Leader Louis the Sixteenth) is the fiction debut of Alfred Zellermann. Zellermann, practically in his sixties, is a well-known literary historian and a doctor of anthropology. He spent the regnum Hitleri-anum in Germany, in the country with his wife’s parents, having at the time been relieved of his university position; therefore, he was a passive observer of the life of the Third Reich. We venture to call this novel an excellent work, and add that probably only such a German, with such a fund of practical experience—and with such theoretical knowledge of literature!—could have written it.

  Despite the title, it is no work of fantasy we have before us. The setting: Argentina in the first decade after the conclusion of the war. The fifty-year-old Gruppenführer Siegfried Taudlitz, a fugitive from the crushed and occupied Reich, makes his way to South America, carrying with him a part of the “treasure” amassed by the notorious Academy of the SS (“Ahnen-erbe”), a trunk bound with steel bands and filled with dollar bills. Gathering about himself a group of other fugitives from Germany, including various drifters and adventurers, and moreover having taken on a dozen or so women of doubtful character for services unspecified for the time being (some of these women Taudlitz himself buys out of brothels in Rio de Janeiro), the former SS General organizes an expedition deep into the Argentine interior. This, with a skill that reveals his talents as a staff officer.

  In a region several hundred miles removed from the last outposts of civilization, the expedition comes upon ruins that are at least twelve centuries old, ruins of buildings that were raised in all likelihood by Aztecan crews; the expedition takes up residence in these. Attracted by the possibility of earning money, Indians and mestizos of the area show up at this site, which has been immediately named by Taudlitz (for reasons not yet disclosed) “Parisia.” The former Gruppenführer makes efficient work brigades out of them and sets his armed men over them as taskmasters. Several years pass, and from such activity emerges the shape of the realm that Taudlitz had envisioned for himself. In his person he combines a ruthlessness that stops at nothing with the addled idea of re-creating—in the heart of the jungle—the French State in its heyday of monarchical splendor, for he himself is to be the reincarnation of none other than Louis XVI.

  An aside here. The above does not summarize the novel, nor does what follows, for the progression of the action in the novel does not conform to the calendar chronology given in our account. We are well aware of the demands of artistic composition that governed the author; however, we wish to reconstruct in chronicle fashion, as it were, the train of events, so that the central concept, the idea of the work, will stand out clearly and with particular force. At the same time, we are passing over, in our “chronologized” recapitulation of the work, a multitude of side issues and minor episodes, because it is plainly impossible to contain in any capsule form a whole, when that whole runs to two volumes of over 670 pages. But we will attempt in the present discussion to deal as well with the sequence of events that Alfred Zellermann implements in his epic.

  Thus is created—to return to the story—a royal court, with a host of courtiers, knights, clergy, lackeys, and a palace chapel and ballrooms amid the fortress battlements, into which have been transformed the venerable ruins of the Aztec buildings, their rubble rebuilt in a manner architecturally absurd. Having at his side three men blindly loyal to him—Hans Mehrer, Johann Wieland, and Erich Palatzky (soon they become Cardinal Richelieu, the Duc de Rohan, and the Duc de Montbazon)—the “new Louis” manages not only to maintain himself on his bogus throne, but also to shape the life going on about him in accordance with his own designs. At the same time—and this is important in the novel—the historical knowledge of the former Gruppenführer is fragmentary at best and full of gaps. One can hardly say he possesses such knowledge at all; his head is filled not so much with bits and pieces of the history of seventeenth-century France as with tripe carried over from his boyhood days, when he would lose himself in the adventures of Dumas, beginning with The Three Musketeers, and later, as an adolescent with “monarchistic” leanings (that is what he called them; in fact they were merely sadistic), would pore over the books of Karl May. And since onto the memories of this reading cheap romances were afterward added, voraciously devoured and thumbed, it is not the history of France that he is able to bring to life, but only the brutally primitivized, outright imbecilic hodgepodge that in his mind stands for it, and that has become for him a profession of faith.

  Actually—as far as one can gather from the numerous details and references scattered throughout the work—Hitlerism was for Taudlitz only a choice of necessity, the alternative that, relatively speaking, suited him the most, being the closest to his “monarchistic” fantasies. Hitlerism, in his eyes, came close to the Middle Ages—granted, not half so close as he would have liked! But it was, in any event, more welcome than any form of institutional democracy. On the other hand, having his own private, secret “dream of the crown” in the Third Reich, Taudlitz never succumbed to Hitler’s magnetism; he never believed in Hitler’s doctrine, and for this reason was not obliged to mourn the fall of “Great Germany.” Instead, having wit enough to see it coming
, particularly since he had never identified himself with the élite of the Third Reich ( though belonging to it), he prepared himself for the disaster appropriately. His cult of Hitler, universally known, was not even the product of self-deception; for ten years Taudlitz played a cynical comedy, for he had his own myth, which gave him a resistance to Hitler’s, and this proved especially convenient for him, because those disciples of Mein Kampf who made even a small attempt to take the doctrine seriously, more than once—as in the case of Albert Speer—felt themselves alienated from Hitler later on, whereas Taudlitz, as a man who only outwardly professed each day the views prescribed for that day, was immune to any heresy.

  Taudlitz believes implicitly and without reservation only in the power of money and force; he knows that with material goods people can be persuaded to go along with any plan of a sufficiently openhanded master, provided that master be also duly resolute and uncompromising in the carrying out of commitments once made. Taudlitz does not in the least trouble himself about whether his “courtiers,” that many-colored throng made up of Germans, Indians, mestizos, and Portuguese, really take seriously the vast spectacle imposed over many years, which he has staged in a manner that is—would be, to an outside observer—unspeakably insipid, uninspired, crass, or whether any of the actors believe in the reasonableness of the court of the Louis, or are instead only playing a comedy, reckoning on the payment, possibly also on making off with the “King’s bundle” after the death of the ruler. The problem does not appear to exist for Taudlitz.