Limbo

by Bernard Wolfe

“You must not leave us.”

  “Nonsense.” Martine took Ubu’s arm and steered him over to the row of cubicles which housed the convalescents. “These Mandungabas,” he said, “used to be pretty scrappy characters. They spent a lot of time in hiding, making themselves spears and bolos and stilettos and poison darts that are forbidden by village law. They refused their doses of rotabunga and smoked ganja and went into trance and raided their neighbors’ yam gardens at night. They made effigies of their mothers-in-law and other people they didn’t like and stuck pins in them, a form of magic which is strictly taboo. They had a terrible thirst to be different from the others, to stand out, to be raised above the mass, while our normal citizens are so leery of distinguishing themselves in any way they have to be brow-beaten into taking any kind of office, including your own. They poured so much aggressive energy into their sexuality that their mates were often seriously maimed and disfigured, sometimes even killed. All in all, a pretty edgy, stand-offish and bloodthirsty lot. Well, it certainly looks as though they’ve become very meek and mild citizens—except for the ones who have relapses or develop other infirmities, you and the elders don’t like to think about them. So I guess you’d say they’re improved.”

  “Prognosis good,” Ubu said happily. “Is.”

  “From the point of view of the village, sure. But how does it look from the point of view of the man? Prognosis one big yawn.”

  “A man,” Ubu said, “is well to the extent that his village is well.”

  “A moot point. Come on in here for a minute.” He led the way into one of the cubicles. There was no one on the pallet. “This is Notoa’s room,” he explained. “Before he was assigned for Mandunga, you remember, he gave his wife quite a thrashing—her eyes were black for days after. But he seemed to love his wife as passionately as he hated her, made love to her much more often and for much longer periods of time than our more normal men do with their wives. Well, Notoa doesn’t want to beat his wife any more, that’s true, but he doesn’t want to caress her either, he’s bored with her. When she came to visit him yesterday she obediently lay down on his pallet so that he could take his pleasure of her but he simply ignored her, sat in a corner munching on his nails and drawing parakeets and dozing off from time to time.”

  “Love which is tabooed by the village,” Ubu said, “cannot be enjoyed. True love is gentle and with much quiet and no tonus, not wild.”

  “When I cut out the aggression much of the sexuality goes too, they’re Siamese twins. Maybe love is only for the wild.”

  “Those who enjoy such love are sick.”

  “Tell that to Notoa’s wife,” Martine said. He remembered his last conversation with the woman: she hadn’t had an orgasm since Notoa’s operation, she was scared out of her wits that she might never be satisfied any more, she knew that often happened to the wives of Mandungabas. “She’s getting very tense.”

  “Then she is sick also. Perhaps Mandunga—”

  “Absolutely not!”

  Ubu was disturbed by the doctor’s sudden forcefulness. “Dear friend, is there something wrong?”

  “We’ve had this out before. So long as a woman is not an active physical danger to anybody I will not attack her orgasm with a knife, even if you think its’s worse than an epileptic fit.”

  “It is a sickness,” the old man said stubbornly. “We have many normal women in our village. Why do they not have this wildness?”

  “For a very good reason—because you define a normal woman as one who does not have this wildness. It’s a joke, Ubu. Do you know why we always speak of these matters in my language, English? I’ll tell you why, it’s because you have no words for such things in Mandunji. Oh, I know, I know, for you this orgasm business, especially in a woman, is a collapse, a pathological letting-go, the same thing has been believed by many tribes. But I have told you over and over that it is a sickness only if the community says it is a sickness. In the West, where I came from, it was something that everybody wanted and was encouraged to want, even women. Perhaps one woman out of ten fully achieved it and perhaps only four men out of ten, but the sickness was not to have it. According to the doctors, anyway, the better doctors. The priests were a little mixed up about the subject.”

  “It cannot be a good thing,” Ubu said. “The women who work to have it build up too much tension.”

  “Orgasm is the body’s best way of discharging its tension. Maybe a seesaw is better than a coffin. But look, I’d forgotten what I wanted to show you. . . .”

  In the corner was a stack of sheets of pounded bark, and nearby several pieces of statuary carved out of mahogany. Martine picked up the sheets and held them out, one by one, for the old man to see.

  “Ah!” Ubu’s face lit up. “Notoa is making many pretty things. Good! Very good!”

  “Not so good,” Martine said. “Look at them.”

  “I see, I see. The boy always had much talent, but before he drew nightmares and daydreams and visions and such troubled things from inside, he lived too much inside himself. Your scalpel has given Notoa back to his people!”

  “Sure. But maybe I’ve taken him away from himself.”

  “A man only finds himself when he belongs to his village.”

  “Notoa has found nothing,” Martine said emphatically. “He’s only gone to sleep. Look: who else in the village would have the plain inventive audacity to carve a man with a canoe for a nose—cassava leaves sprouting from his ears—the fanged head of a cobra springing out where the genitals should be—malevolent lynx eyes bulging from each finger in place of the usual nails! Notoa made such a statue, I have it in my hut. Now look at the trash he’s turning out—rows of cute little symmetrical raffia trees, all combed and curried, well-groomed parakeets flying about, one in each corner, and stupid manicured rays of gold pouring from a stupid manicured orange slice of a sun! No, Ubu. Notoa the man has been excommunicated, thanks to my scalpel. In his place, wielding the artist’s tools, is—the village. Notoa’s changed from a madman into a spokesman, and Notoa the Spokesman turns out only vast sunny mediocrities, all symmetry and slop. This stuff is, balls, insipid.”

  “You are saying strange things,” Ubu said patiently. “Now that he expresses himself as other artists do, the whole village can understand and take joy in his work. It is a cure.”

  “Listen to me,” Martine said. “If you tell me, better that the social life should be good and peaceful than that the individual devil be nourished, I’ll readily agree—granted there has to be a choice. But first, let’s make sure the village is really happy, not just drugged. And don’t, for heaven’s sake, don’t pretend to me that the pretty-pretty paintings and statues that come out of people who see through the eyes of the village instead of their own unique bedeviled ones are automatically, ipso facto, good.”

  “If there are no more people with a taste for disease,” Ubu said softly, “then will disease have any, uh, what you call esthetic value?”

  “Fortunately,” Martine said, “that situation will never come about. The meekest, most self-effacing people will always, from time to time, spew up wild-eyed self-assertive individuals with riot in their souls. And these deviants will always make up an amuck fringe-world ringing you subdued ones in. Which is probably a good thing for the normal ones, Ubu. The sleepwalkers should occasionally hear a spine-chilling bellow from the blowtops on the outskirts, just to keep them from falling asleep entirely. If disease isn’t an esthetic good of and by itself, neither is stupor.”

  “Mandunga will in the end do away with this fringe. All will be quiet.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. It drains off the most vital blood from the much-needed lunatic fringe. That’s the reason I’ve always insisted, all these years, that I wouldn’t operate on anybody, no matter how off-center he was, unless he had definitely, physically, harmed another person or tried to.”

  “Always, when you talk this way, I think to myself—he must come from a place of much tonus.”

  “Tha
t’s very true,” Martine said. “My people couldn’t sit still, that was always their trouble.”

  He went to the door, opened it, and motioned to Ubu to follow him.

  “All right!” he said. “For the sake of the village: no more bolos, broken ribs, black eyes, pins in effigies, tonus, bohemians, or cobras where the genitals should be. But seriously, we’re in bad trouble, we must have some sort of plan. Let’s go to my office and talk. . . .”

  They passed through the animal lab; marmosets and spider monkeys, pottos and slow lorises raised their bandaged heads and regarded the two men with indifference. At the far end of the room they passed through an archway and entered Martine’s office-library. They sat down on matted-straw chairs.

  Martine waved his hand at the bound volumes which lined the walls, hundreds of them, the case histories and experimental records accumulated in eighteen and a half years of Mandunga. “If the queer-limbs come,” he said, “they must not get their hands on all this. Whether they come as friends or as enemies.”

  “What bad could they do with it?”

  “Such knowledge can be misused, it’s happened before.”

  “You have something to propose?”

  “If you had asked me that earlier,” Martine said seriously, “I would have proposed something very concrete. Instead of destroying the contraband spears and poison darts and bolos made by the troubled ones, cache them away and keep them sharp. And instead of cutting the bloodthirstiness out of the troubled ones, keep them in fighting trim.”

  “Ah,” Ubu said, shaking his head, “you are making fun again.”

  “Not at all. Obviously, these violent ones are the only Mandunji ready to fight for the village. That lunatic fringe might have made a first-rate rampart. . .”

  “This is not meeting the problem.”

  “Right,” Martine said gloomily. “But mumbling peace-to-all and holding empty hands out isn’t meeting it either.” He sat up in his chair and waved his index finger at the chief. “Look here,” he said, “suppose we took all those hacked-up monkeys out there and set them loose in the jungle? Why, their unlobotomized brethren, who still have the pathways of lust and attack open in their corticalthalamic areas, would tear them to ribbons in a minute. . . . Hell, I don’t know what to propose, really. . . .”

  They sat without talking, the old man with a look of bewilderment on his face, the doctor stroking his chin and staring at the volumes in his bookshelves.

  Sound of running in the corridor; a young villager burst into the room panting and covered with sweat. His hands were trembling as they went out in greeting. “The elders sent me,” he said, in between shuddering breaths. “The queer-limbs, the glass-limbs have landed!”

  “Not glass,” Martine said irritably. “I’ve told you over and over. Plastic, probably. Some kind of plastic.”

  Ubu stood up, pulling his robe around him. “How did it happen?”

  “A ship came near the shore,” the boy said. “Then from the ship a second ship, a smaller one, rose up in the air with wings flying around and around very fast and floated over the village.”

  “Helicopter,” Martine muttered.

  “Then it went back to the large ship and picked up many men and brought them in to land at a clearing. All men with funny arms and legs. Now they are cutting their way through the jungle with flames and saws.”

  Martine sighed and rose to his feet. “All right,” he said. “If they mean us harm we can do nothing, but if they don’t then we must play a game.”

  “A game?” Ubu was puzzled.

  “Yes. First, these strangers mustn’t find out that so many of the villagers know English. Only a few, including you, Ubu, must let on that they know the language. You be spokesman, you like the role. You can easily explain how you know the language by saying that long before the war—the third war, in case there’ve been others since then—you were over on the African mainland, say in Johannesburg, as a student.”

  “What shall I say?”

  “Tell them nothing about the village, nothing. And try to find out everything you can about why they’ve come here. Oh, and one other thing—” Here Martine hesitated, made a face.

  “Tell me,” Ubu said eagerly.

  “If it seems in order, try tactfully to inquire about their arms and legs. Ah—no, on second thought, maybe you’d better not. I’ve got a feeling. . . . Maybe you’d better skip the whole thing.”

  “What will you be doing, Martine?”

  “I’ll be hiding in my hut. Under no circumstances breathe a word about a white man living in the village.”

  “Yes,” said Ubu. “Anything else?”

  “All the Mandungabas must be kept out of sight. If it does happen that these men notice the Mandunga marks on somebody, explain them this way: say they are harmless decorations, like tattoos. You know what a tattoo is, you’ve seen the one on my arm.”

  “Let us pray it works.”

  “Yes,” Martine said as they walked down the corridor to the entrance. “And if it doesn’t let’s regret all those lunatics we whittled into pacifists. A little spare tonus might come in handy in the next hour or so.”

  chapter three

  THE FIRST ones came by land. Deep in the jungle there was a low woosh and rumble like the surge of surf far away, strangled bassoons, it grew louder and soon there was added to it a soprano effect, shrill metallic yelps such as might be made by steel teeth eating into bark and wood pulp. Wisps of smoke began to curl out of the foliage; the villagers stood motionless around the maize grinder, watching.

  The smoke grew denser, billowing black clouds spurted from the trees. Suddenly a ten-foot-wide wall of fire appeared on the edge of the jungle, the villagers sighed in terror, trees were crashing and bushes and vines went up in puffs of intense white flame. In a moment, as though by the flick of a switch, the sheet of fire was gone and behind it everyone could see that a ten-foot tunnel had been blasted open in the vegetation.

  In the pathway stood the strangers.

  Martine lay on the wooden floor of his haphazard attic, Ooda beside him. Through a slit in the thatching he studied the first white men he had seen in over eighteen years. It was true, it was all true. They were wearing shorts and T-shirts with large blue “M’s” on their fronts, their limbs were exposed. Instead of arms and legs they had transparent extensions whose smooth surfaces shone in the sun. Each of these limbs was a tangle of metallic rods and coils, scattered all through each one were tiny bulbs which lit up and faded as the limb moved, sending off spatters of icy blue light. The strangers advanced a short distance into the open, arms and legs flashing as though, yes, as though they contained swarms of fireflies. And now something else: with each movement a very faint staccato sequence of clicks and clacks, an almost inaudible susurring, as of twigs snapping.

  All of these men had four artificial limbs, always four, but the ones in front, the ones who had cleared the path through the jungle, were wearing specialized instruments in place of their right arms. Some had what looked like flame-throwers, long tubes terminating in funnel-shaped nozzles which were still smoking, a moment ago they had been spitting out fifty-foot tongues of fire (the bassoons); others had long many-jointed claws on the ends of which were mounted high-speed rotary saws (the sopranos). Some twenty of these men emerged from the thicket. When they stopped, those in the lead pulled the tools from their arm stumps, picked up regular plastic arms which were hanging from their belts and snapped them into place in the empty sockets.

  They stood in a group, surveying the village and the natives assembled in dead silence behind Ubu. They made no further move. Except for the blasting and cutting tools now dangling from their waists they seemed to have nothing even remotely resembling a weapon with them. They talked quietly among themselves, looking up to the sky from time to time as though expecting something there.

  In a few seconds another group, aerialists, came into sight some forty or fifty feet over the tops of the raffia trees. Each was self-prope
lled: two counter-rotating rotors attached to an elongated right arm made each man a human helicopter.

  The airborne ones landed as a unit and quickly substituted regular arms for the helicopter ones. Then they closed ranks with the others and the whole group began to move toward the center of the village where Ubu stood waiting, the elders arranged in an anxious half-moon behind him. The strangers walked with the ease and assurance of normal men, even more, even a little cockily, their legs taking firm, brisk steps and their arms swinging gracefully at their sides. At the head of the party strode a well-built, good-looking man in his late thirties, close-cropped moustache, rather taller than the others and with an indefinable air of authority about him. The face under his crew-cut blond hair was firm and powerful in spite of its ruddy youthfulness, there was strength in it, but he was smiling now.

  “Oh, bad,” Ooda whispered. “Bad, bad, bad.”

  “Shhh,” Martine said, squinting to get a clearer look at the leader’s face. “Be patient, monkey. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think.”

  “They are all like you, Martine. Only for the arms and legs.”

  “That’s a big only.”

  That handsome, genial, youngish face interested him. In fact, the whole shape of the head interested him. The skull was impressively broad, that was one thing. “Brachycephalic,” he whispered. His free hand automatically curled, as though taking hold of something.

  The big man came to a halt several feet from Ubu, flanked by two of his comrades; the others remained tactfully behind him. At a nod from the leader his two companions turned to Ubu.

  “Wamba domuji kuana ashatu?” one said.

  Ubu’s eyes opened wide, he said nothing.

  “Bwa zamzam, bwa riri?” the second man said.

  Ubu was still silent.

  “Try again,” the leader said in English. “Maybe you’ll hit on something.”

  “Fakshi tumpar, oo ah?” the first man said.

  Through his terror Ubu finally got the point: these men were not simply making peculiar noises, they were translators. He understood what he had to do and raised his hands in the palms-up gesture. “Peace to all,” he said in English. “Long life. May the war stay on the other side of the river.” He felt it was only polite that on such an occasion he should use the full greeting rather than one of its abbreviated forms.