The Letter Killers Club Read online

  “No-o”—Tutus sounded unsure—“but it’s still too early to launch the exes. The bacilli haven’t yet reached all brains around the world. And then, I’m not convinced that our exceedingly powerful exes, even if launched all at once, will activate more than, say, two- thirds of humanity. Discrepancies in individual musculatures may appear—one can’t sort them all according to series.”

  “Fine and good,” Zes interposed, “two-thirds of the world’s musculatures will be more than enough to exanimate the un-ex-activated: completely. I propose we do as follows. First: put bacillinized canned foods on the domestic market as well. At rock-bottom prices. Second: no matter the cost, finish construction of our extra-high-powered Super Ex within days. Third: as soon as that’s done, switch from science to politics.”

  But events were moving even faster than could be computed by Zes, who agreed with Tutus that bacilli would beat thoughts in the race for the brain. The morning after the emergency meeting, workers failed to turn up at the ex construction site; the streets betrayed a hostile animation: freshly printed illegal leaflets passed from hand to hand. Outside the city a demonstration droned to life; troops sent to surround the mob disobeyed the order. Zes realized there wasn’t a moment to lose. Rather than waste time convening the council, he rushed with a dozen henchmen to the invisible enclave where the innervators’ transparent masts stood: no one stopped them—the entire operating staff was at the demonstration.

  A crowd summoned by the leaflets had gathered—shoulder to shoulder—in an enormous gully just over the city line. Speakers screamed from the trees in shrill voices: some about a conspiracy, supposedly half uncovered; others about public funds wasted on who knew what; some about an act of treason; others about revenge and reprisal. Fists and sticks shot up from the milling anthill, thundering anthems rolled over the vitriolic roar. Because of the noise, no one heard the soft, glassily thin cheeps perforating the air. But something strange had already begun to happen: part of the crowd had suddenly fallen away and was returning to the city. The speakers up in their trees thought it was their words that had spurred people to action, but they were mistaken—it was the work of the first new-generation exes. The crowd fell silent. Now one could distinctly hear the innervators’ intermingling chimes; another high-pitched peal reverberated, and a new procession, amassing people as a magnet does metal filings, stretched away at a ninety-degree angle to the first. Even the young agitator perched in an oak tree could see that these people were not bent on revenge and destruction: they were all marching along with their elbows pressed to their bodies, rapping out their steps with automatic exactitude. Almost weeping with rage, the young agitator called after the retreating figures, only to feel something invisible grip his muscles, relax his fists, and pull his elbows to his body. Losing his balance, he tumbled to the ground, but could not cry out: the invisible something had clamped his jaws shut and forced his badly broken legs, bending and unbending at the knee, to attach him to the procession. His heart welled with hatred and impotent fury: “If I can just get home, get my gun—then we’ll see.” His brain rebelled, but his muscles propelled him in the opposite direction. “Where am I going?” the isolated thought darted about his mind, while his steps, as if in reply, led the owner of that thought slowly—at two beats a second—up to the metal fence around the invisible enclave. “So much the better,” the agitator exulted, “just what I wanted.” With an almost sensual pleasure he imagined smashing the transparent threads with whatever came to hand, gouging out the glass masts and ripping the wires from their unseen rotors; his steps, as if in accord, led him up to the interlacements of the largest ex, the not yet finished Super Ex. He strained every muscle—something mysterious seemed to be helping him—and grabbed hold of a glass mast that was only half screwed in, but then his hands slid down the slippery surface as if by accident and began slowly, yet methodically, screwing the glass mast firmly into place: only now did the poor fellow realize that he and the others, who had stationed themselves about the site automatically, were there to finish building the exes.

  The ether wind that had begun to blow from the invisible enclave soon overturned the constitutions of every state adjacent to the country harboring the Nototti-Tutus scheme. A few blasts of ether could foment a few revolutions: Zes called them “machine-made revolutions.” The process was extremely simple: jerking people by their muscles, like wire-drawn marionettes, the ex would mass the puppets in capital cities, then force them to surround government offices and palaces while chanting, in unison, some simple two- or three-word slogan. People who had eluded activation by an innervator could only run—far away from the machine’s ether tentacles. But soon the Super Ex was finished and started up: it reached muscles even across oceans. Ragtag bands of runaways tried to organize a resistance; they had certain advantages—flexibility and complexity of movements—over the metronomic, straight-stepping new persons unable to navigate on their own. Now began the methodical, square-by-square extermination of the unactivated. Perfectly even rows of “new men” strode like haymakers over ripe fields—from boundary to boundary—mowing down every living thing in their path. In mortal fear, people hid deep in the forests or in underground dugouts; some, imitating the automatic movements of the new men, joined their ranks to keep from being killed. The work of winnowing out the human chaff, as our Zes once put it, was monitored in the regions by special observers from among the two or three hundred people who had been immunized. When the ether broom had made a clean sweep, all nations were merged into a single world-state whose moniker joined the name of the machine to that of the reagent: Exinia.

  That done, Zes the dictator announced a transition to peaceful development. The first imperative was to create human machinery capable of servicing—with reasonable dexterity and skilled automaticity—the machinery in Tutus’s system. During the coup and ensuing struggle the same handful of immunized officials had had to man the machines: running the exes required complex movements and consideration of equally complex signals. Tutus’s last creation—an ex to run all exes—was finally finished, largely freeing the oligarchs of the hard and nervous work of supplying innervation. The second imperative was the liquidation throughout Exinia of public education: to teach people this or that seemed utterly unnecessary when both that and this could be done by innervators: budget funds earmarked for public education would instead pay for improvements to the single central nervous system in the invisible enclave. Meanwhile, the “ex” of each and every person, his muscular potential, was registered. Sitting at the controls of the Central Ex, Zes always knew exactly how much muscle power he had on hand to apply to this or that task, to distribute or redistribute as he saw fit. Soon the cities of Exinia were studded with colossal skyscrapers of cyclopean might; true, they were all built according to a single design determined by the lines of the ether waves: streets straight as bowling alleys—from residential blocks to factories and back—ran along all parallels and meridians. The workers, from whom the innervators took all the available strength, lived in light and spacious palaces and ate well, but whether this made them happy is unknown. Their psyches—cut off from the outside world, isolated in brains separated from musculatures—gave no sign of their existence.

  The government, bent on the total exification of life, was at pains to continue that life. The Planned Love Organization requested construction of one more ex, the Mating Ex, whose brief but powerful blasts of periodic ether tumbled men on top of women, coupled and uncoupled them so that the smallest investment of time would yield the greatest number of conceptions. By the way, one of the people immunized was Zes’s personal secretary, a young man with a forelock just like our Mov’s. Rather than hunt for a name, I’ll call him Moov.

  “You’ve a rather cavalier way of coming up with names,” Mov flinched. “I would advise you to—”

  “Order! The right to make criticisms here is mine alone,” Zez raised his voice. “Go on with your story.”

  Well then, this Moov—long
before any exifications, he had pined in vain for a lady who, in spite of his good qualities, set no store by him—this Moov decided on the following move: to enlist the services of an ex. It made no difference to the machine. At the appointed hour, it brought the woman to the appointed place, but then it would not leave; the nervous and mistrustful youth could sense it even inside the love—with an almost hallucinatory clarity he could hear the steel rotors turning, the vibrating currents closing and opening, and the monotonous high-pitched whistle. Yes, my friends, the wind that kept tugging—that first day, remember?—at the straps of those lacy hemispheres could fill them only with air. The exes too could manufacture anything, except emotion. Next morning our poor Mov—beg pardon, Moov—was sad and withdrawn. When his patron, who was kindly disposed toward him, began rubbing his hands and boasting that the reorganization of the world was as good as finished, he met with silence and a gloomy glint in Moov’s eyes.

  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,” M
oov’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.”