Approaching Oblivion

by Harlan Ellison

“Where am I? What is this place?”

  “N’vada,” said the woman, coming over and hunkering down. She was wearing plowboy overalls chopped short at the calves, held together at the shoulders by pressure clips.

  “Where in Nevada?” Joe Bob asked.

  “Oh, about ten miles from Tonopah.”

  “Thanks for helping me.”

  “I dint have nothin’ to do with it at all. Had my way, we’d’ve moved on already. This close to the tramway makes me nervous.”

  “Why?” He looked up; the aerial tramway, the least impressive of all Paolo Soleri’s arcologies, and even by that comparison breathtaking, soared away to the horizon on the sweep-shaped arms of pylons that rose an eighth of a mile above them.

  “Company bulls, is why. They ride cleanup, all up’n down this stretch. Lookin’ for sabooters. Don’t like the idea them thinkin’ we’s that kind.”

  Joe Bob felt nervous. The biggest patriots were on death row. Rape a child, murder seven women, blow the brains out of an old shopkeeper, that was acceptable; but be anti-country and the worst criminals wanted to wreak revenge. He thought of Greg, who had been beaten to death on Q’s death row, waiting on appeal, by a vark-killer who’d sprayed a rush hour crowd with a squirter, attempting to escape a drugstore robbery that had gone sour. The vark-killer had beaten Greg’s head in with a three-legged stool from his cell. Whoever these people were, they weren’t what he was.

  “Bulls?” Joe Bob asked.

  “How long you been onna dodge, boy?” asked the incredibly tall one with the hook for a hand. “Bulls. Troops. The Man.”

  The old man chuckled and slapped the tall one on the thigh. “Paul, he’s too young to know those words. Those were our words. Now they call them…”

  Joe Bob linked in to the hesitation. “Varks?”

  “Yes, varks. Do you know where that came from?”

  Joe Bob shook his head.

  The old man settled down and started talking, and as if he were talking to children around a hearth, the others got comfortable and listened. “It comes from the Dutch Afrikaans for earth-pig, or aardvark. They just shortened it to vark, don’t you see.”

  He went on talking, telling stories of days when he had been younger, of things that had happened, of their country when it had been fresher. And Joe Bob listened. How the old man had gotten his poached egg in a government medical shop, the same place Paul had gotten his metal hook, the same place Walter had lost his tongue and Marty had been done with the acid that had turned him half-white in the face. The same sort of medical shop where they had each suffered. But they spoke of the turmoil that had ended in the land, and how it was better for everyone, even for roaming bands like theirs. And the old man called them bindlestiffs, but Joe Bob knew whatever that meant, it wasn’t what he was. He knew one other thing: it was not better.

  “Do you play Monopoly?” the old man asked.

  The hunchback, his plastic dome flickering in pastels, scampered to a roll-up and undid thongs and pulled out a cardboard box that had been repaired many times. Then they showed Joe Bob how to play Monopoly. He lost quickly; gathering property seemed a stupid waste of time to him. He tried to speak to them about what was happening in America, about the abolition of the Pentagon Trust, about the abolishment of the Supreme Court, about the way colleges trained only for the corporations or the Trust, about the central computer banks in Denver where everyone’s identity and history were coded for instant arrest, if necessary. About all of it. But they knew that. They didn’t think it was bad. They thought it kept the sabooters in their place so the country could be as good as it had always been.

  “I have to go,” Joe Bob said, finally. “Thank you for helping me.” It was a stand-off: hate against gratitude.

  They didn’t ask him to stay with them. He hadn’t expected it.

  He walked up the gravel bank; he stood under the long bird-shadow of the aerial tramway that hurtled from coast-to-coast, from Gulf to Great Lakes, and he looked up. It seemed free. But he knew it was anchored in the earth, deep in the earth, every tenth of a mile. It only seemed free, because Soleri had dreamed it that way. Art was not reality, it was only the appearance of reality.

  He turned east. With no place to go but more of the same, he went anywhere. Till thunder crashed, in whatever dark closet.

  Convocation, at the State University of New York at Buffalo, was a catered affair. Catered by varks, troops, squirters and (Joe Bob, looking down from a roof, added) bulls. The graduating class was eggboxed, divided into groups of no more than four, in cubicles with clear plastic walls. Unobstructed view of the screens on which the President Comptroller gave his address, but no trouble for the quellers if there was trouble. (There had been rumors of unrest, and even a one-page hectographed protest sheet tacked to the bulletin boards on campus.)

  Joe Bob looked around with the opera glasses. He was checking the doggie guards.

  Tenure and status among the faculty were indicated by the size, model and armament of the doggie guard robots that hovered, humming softly, just above and to the right shoulder of every administrator and professor. Joe Bob was looking for a 2013 Dictograph model with mist sprayers and squirt nozzles. Latest model…President Comptroller.

  The latest model down there in the crowd was a 2007. That meant it was all assistant profs and teaching guides.

  And that meant they were addressing the commencement exercises from the studio in the Ad Building. He slid back across the roof and into the gun tower. The guard was still sleeping, cocooned with spinex. He stared at the silver-webbed mummy. They would find him and spray him with dissolvent. Joe Bob had left the nose unwebbed; the guard could breathe.

  Bigger killer!

  Shut up.

  Effective commando.

  I told you to shut the hell up!

  He slipped into the guard’s one-piece stretchsuit, smoothed it down the arms to the wrists, stretching it to accommodate his broader shoulders. Then, carrying the harness and the rucksack, he descended the spiral staircase into the Ad Building proper. There were no varks in sight inside the building. They were all on perimeter detail, it was a high caution alert: commencement day.

  He continued down through the levels to the central heating system. It was June. Hot outside. The furnaces had been damped, the air conditioners turned on to a pleasant 71° throughout the campus. He found the schematic for the ducts and traced the path to the studio with his finger. He slipped into the harness and rucksack, pried open a grille and climbed into the system. It was a long, vertical climb through the ductwork. Climbing—

  20 do you remember the rule that was passed into law, that nothing could be discussed in open classes that did not pertain directly to the subject matter being taught that day 19 and do you remember that modern art class in which you began asking questions about the uses of high art as vehicles for dissent and revolution 18 and how you began questioning the professor about Picasso’s Guernica and what fever it had taken to paint it as a statement about the horrors of war 17 and how the professor had forgotten the rule and had recounted the story of Diego Rivera’s Rockefeller Center fresco that had been commissioned by the Rockefeller family 16 and how, when the fresco was completed, Rivera had painted in Lenin prominently, and Nelson Rockefeller had demanded another face be painted over it, and Rivera had refused 15 and how Rockefeller had had the fresco destroyed 14 and within ten minutes of the discussion the Comptroller had had the professor arrested 13 and do you remember the day the Pentagon Trust contributed the money to build the new stadium in exchange for the Games Theory department being converted to Tactics and they renamed the building Neumann Hall 12 and do you remember when you registered for classes and they ran you through Central and found all the affiliations and made you sign the loyalty oath for students 11 and the afternoon they raided the basement 10 and caught you and Greg and Terry and Katherine 9 and they wouldn’t give you a chance to get out and they filled the basement with mist 8 and they shot Terry through the mouth a
nd Katherine 7 and Katherine 6 and Katherine 5 and she died folded up like a child on the sofa 4 and they came in and shot holes in the door from the inside so it looked like you’d been firing back at them 3 and they took you and Greg into custody 2 and the boot and the manacles and the confessions and you escaped and ran 1

  Climbing—

  Looking out through the interstices of the grille. The studio. Wasn’t it fine. Cameras, sets, all of them—fat and powdered and happy. The doggies turning turning above their shoulders in the air turning and turning.

  Now we find out just how tough you really are.

  Don’t start with me!

  You’ve actually got to kill someone now.

  I know what I’ve got to do.

  Let’s see how your peace talk sits with butchering someone—

  Damn you!

  —in cold blood, isn’t that what they call it?

  I can do it.

  Sure you can. You make me sick.

  I can: I can do it. I have to do it.

  So do.

  The studio was crowded with administrative officials, with technicians, with guards and troops, with muftiladen military personnel looking over the graduating class for likely impressedmen. And in the campus brig, seventy feet beneath the Armory, eleven students crouched in maximum security monkey cages: unable to stand, unable to sit, in cages built so a man could only crouch, spines bowed like bushmen in an outback.

  With the doggies scanning, turning and observing, ready to fire, it was impossible to grab the President Comptroller. But there was a way to confound the robot guards. Wendell had found the way at Dartmouth, but he’d died for the knowledge. But there was a way.

  If a man does the dying for you.

  A vark. If a vark dies.

  They die the same.

  He ignored the conversation. It led nowhere; it never led anywhere but the same. The squirt gun was in his hands. He lay flat, spread his legs, feet turned out, and braced the wire stock against the hollow of his right shoulder. In the moment of light focused in the scope, he saw what would happen in the next seconds. He would squirt the guard standing beside the cameraman with the arriflex. The guard would fall and the doggies would be alerted. They would begin scanning, and in that moment he would squirt one of them. It would short, and begin spraying. The other doggies would home in, begin firing among themselves, and in the ensuing confusion he would kick out the grille, drop down and capture the Comptroller. If he was lucky. And if he was further lucky, he would get away with him. Further, and he would use him as ransom for the eleven.

  Lucky! You’ll die.

  So I’ll die. They die, I die. Both ways, I’m tired.

  All your words, all your fine noble words.

  He remembered all the things he had said through the bullhorn. They seemed far long lost and gone now. It was time for final moments. His finger tightened on the trigger.

  The moment of light lenghtened.

  The light grew stronger.

  He could not see the studio. The glare of the golden light blotted everything. He blinked, came out from behind the squirt gun and realized the golden light was there with him, inside the duct, surrounding him, heating him, glowing and growing. He tried to breathe and found he could not. His head began to throb, the pressure building in his temples. He had a fleeting thought—it was one of the doggies: he’d been sniffed out and this was some new kind of mist, or a heat-ray, or something new he hadn’t known about. Then everything blurred out in a burst of golden brightness brighter than anything he had ever seen. Even lying on his back as a child, in a field of winter wheat, staring up with wide eyes at the sun, seeing how long he could endure. Why was it he had wanted to endure pain, to show whom? Even brighter than that.

  Who am I and where am I going?

  Who he was: uncounted billions of atoms, pulled apart and whirled away from there, down a golden tunnel bored in saffron space and ocher time.

  Where he was going:

  Joe Bob Hickey awoke and the first sensation of many that cascaded in on him was one of swaying. On a tideless tide, in air, perhaps water, swinging, back and forth, a pendulum movement that made him feel nauseous. Golden light filtered in behind his closed lids. And sounds. High musical sounds that seemed to cut off before he had heard them fully to the last vibrating tremolo. He opened his eyes and he was lying on his back, on a soft surface that conformed to the shape of his body. He turned his head and saw the bullhorn and rucksack lying nearby. The squirt gun was gone. Then he turned his head back, and looked straight up. He had seen bars. Golden bars reaching in arcs toward a joining overhead. A cathedral effect, above him.

  Slowly, he got to his knees, rolling tides of nausea moving in him. They were bars.

  He stood up and felt the swaying more distinctly. He took three steps and found himself at the edge of the soft place. Set flush into the floor, it was a gray-toned surface, a huge circular shape. He stepped off, onto the solid floor of the…of the cage.

  It was a cage.

  He walked to the bars and looked out.

  Fifty feet below was a street. A golden street on which great bulb-bodied creatures moved, driving before them smaller periwinkle blue humans, whipping them to push-and-pull the sitting carts on which the golden bulb-creatures rode. He stood watching for a long time.

  Then Joe Bob Hickey went back to the circular mattress and lay down. He closed his eyes, and tried to sleep.

  In the days that followed, he was fed well, and learned that the weather was controlled. If it rained, an energy bubble—he didn’t understand, but it was invisible—would cover his cage. The heat was never too great, nor was he ever cold in the night. His clothes were taken away and brought back very quickly…changed. After that, they were always fresh and clean.

  He was someplace else. They let him know that much. The golden bulb-creatures were the ruling class, and the smaller blue people-sorts were their workers. He was very someplace else.

  Joe Bob Hickey watched the streets from his great swaying cage, suspended fifty feet above the moving streets. In his cage he could see it all. He could see the golden bulb-rulers as they drove the pitiful blue servants and he never saw the face of one of the smaller folk, for their eyes were constantly turned toward their feet.

  He had no idea why he was there.

  And he was certain he would stay there forever.

  Whatever purpose they had borne in mind, to pluck him away from his time and place, they felt no need to impart to him. He was a thing in a cage, swinging free, in prison, high above a golden street.

  Soon after he realized this was where he would spend the remainder of his life, he was bathed in a deep yellow light. It washed over him and warmed him, and he fell asleep for a while. When he awoke, he felt better than he had in years. The sharp pains the shrapnel wound had given him regularly, had ceased. The wound had healed over completely. Though he ate the strange, simple foods he found in his cage, he never felt the need to urinate or void his bowels. He lived quietly, wanting for nothing, because he wanted nothing.

  Get up, for God’s sake. Look at yourself.

  I’m just fine. I’m tired, let me alone.

  He stood and walked to the bars. Down in the street, a golden bulb-creature’s rolling cart had stopped, almost directly under the cage. He watched as the blue people fell in the traces, and he watched as the golden bulb thing beat them. For the first time, somehow, he saw it as he had seen things before he had been brought to this place. He felt anger at the injustice of it; he felt the blood hammering in his neck; he began screaming. The golden creature did not stop. Joe Bob looked for something to hurl. He grabbed the bullhorn and turned it on and began screaming, cursing, threatening the monster with the whip. The creature looked up and its many silver eyes fastened on Joe Bob Hickey. Tyrant, killer, filth! he screamed.

  He could not stop. He screamed all the things he had screamed for years. And the creature stopped whipping the little blue people, and they slowly got to their feet an
d pulled the cart away, the creature following. When they were well away, the creature rolled once more onto the platform of the cart, and whipped them away.

  “Rise up, you toadstools! Strike a blow for freedom!”

  He screamed all that day, the bullhorn throwing his voice away to shatter against the sides of the windowless golden buildings.

  “Grab their whips away from them! Is this what you deserve?! There’s still time! As long as one of you isn’t all the way beaten, there’s a chance. You are not alone! We are a large, organized resistance movement…”

  They aren’t listening.

  They’ll hear.

  Never. They don’t care.

  Yes! Yes, they do. Look! See?

  And he was right. Down in the street, carts were pulling up and as they came within the sounds of his voice the golden bulb-creatures began wailing in terrible strident bug voices, and they beat themselves with the whips…and the carts started up again, pulled away…and the creatures beat their blue servants out of sight.

  In front of him, they wailed and beat themselves, trying to atone for their cruelty. Beyond him, they resumed their lives.

  It did not take him long to understand.

  I’m their conscience.

  You were the last they could find, and they took you, and now you hang up here and pillory them and they beat their breasts and wail mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, and they purge themselves; then they go on as before.

  Ineffectual.

  Totem.

  Clown, I’m a clown.

  But they had selected well. He could do no other.

  As he had always been a silent voice, screaming words that needed to be screamed, but never heard, so he was still a silent voice. Day after day they came below him, and wailed their guilt; and having done it, were free to go on.

  The deep yellow light, do you know what it did to you?

  Yes.

  Do you know how long you’ll live, how long you’ll tell them what filth they are, how long you’ll sway here in this cage?

  Yes.

  But you’ll still do it.