The Letter Killers Club (11 page)

The enclave of exes grew and grew. Surely it was time to ask: Why were there so many of them? Weren't there too many, if they were meant only for madmen? But the excitement of building had everyone in thrall. It was as if the ether wind, overstepping its bounds, had swept away all the criticism and skepticism in the world. I'm afraid it may sweep me and my words …

Das suddenly stopped rapping out dashes and dots with his stick. He seemed stuck and regarded us uneasily with his round lenses.

“Yes, I nearly missed the switch: my theme—as I see it—may now take one of two tracks. It may perfect the exes and turn their ether blasts into a whirlwind against which all physiological innervations are powerless, and then … But then I would have to give up my ancillary theme of ‘facteaters.' That won't do: an image, once introduced, must exist to the end. The structure of a plot is like that of an ex: activation is possible, deactivation is not. So I will try to sail through my theme against the wind. Now then.”

Work in Nototti's bacteriological laboratory continued without respite. Trusting his assistants to obtain a hardier variety of vibrophag, he undertook to determine whether a person could be immunized against facteaters. Soon both tasks had been more or less completed: on the one hand, his assistants had obtained an extremely resistant variety able to withstand water loss, fluctuations in temperature, and brief periods outside the brain, in any environment; on the other hand, Nototti had discovered a new chemical compound (“init”) which, when introduced into the bloodstream, penetrated the brain and, without damaging it, killed vibrophags while immunizing the organism against them in perpetuity. During preliminary trials, several violent lunatics who had been ex-activated were injected with init: their old illness came gushing out of their brains and flooded their muscles. The bedlamites, thrashing furiously about on the laboratory floor, were promptly destroyed, and the trials pronounced a success. Tutus instructed Professor Nototti to start manufacturing init. At the next secret meeting of the Supreme Government Council, Tutus, tooth fillings agleam, reported.

“I would consider myself mad were I to agree to confine the use of ether wind to madmen alone. The invisible forest of exes is growing daily. I long ago renounced the artificial method of tuning muscular systems. Any musculature, if isolated from the brain, may be innervated to the right frequency. Each of our exes is designed for a specific frequency and, once up and running, will activate a whole series of people tuned to that frequency. Assuming, of course, that their muscular receivers have been cut off from internal innervation, from that damned ‘good old brain' with which we have had and, I fear, will have still a great deal of trouble. To sum up: our country, as we all know, supplies world markets with all sorts of canned foods, extracts, dried fruits, and compressed nutrients. This new variety of vibrophag is sufficiently robust to withstand compression, dehydration, etc., etc., so as to reach the organisms of our worldwide consumers, thence to be whisked by the blood to the brain and … Init shall be kept, of course, strictly for our own use. I needn't describe to you, statesmen, what we stand to gain from all of this and the new world we are bound to find between init and ex.”

In no time, countless vibrophag cultures—pressed into bouillon cubes, dried and frozen inside all sorts of comestibles, sealed into millions of cans—were on the way to the millions of trusting mouths that would swallow themselves themselves, if I may so express it. The first grams of init, made extremely slowly by Nototti with no assistants present, did not go beyond a small circle of top government officials and their retinue: having consigned all lunatics to the exes, they had decided to immunize the sanest people first—themselves, that is—against possible activation by a machine. In future, as more grams and scruples became available, init would be allocated by the center to all authorized citizens in the regions whose money had gone to build all the exes, but … But then Nototti dropped dead. He was found with a swollen neck and bulging white eyes among the glass retorts in his secret laboratory. No notes or formulas for init turned up. The phial containing the few grams of init that Nototti always carried with him—unbeknownst to anyone but Tutus and members of the Privy Council—had also vanished. Even Tutus was anxious and perplexed. At an emergency meeting of the council, this man, who had been accustomed only to answer or not to answer, posed his first question: “What is to be done?”

The very youngest member, by name Zes, stood up.

“Why not Zez?” Zez leapt up, surveying us all with a puzzled smile.

The conceivers exchanged glances.

But Das went on rapping out his dots.

So then. As I was saying, a certain Zes stood up: until now he had done little to distinguish himself. He was intelligent, but cruel—that traditional villain essential to any fantastic narrative forced to replace personalities with cardboard cutouts. Yes. He had the answer: Launch the exes. All of them. Without delay.

The council members shifted in their seats. Tutus objected.

“But see here, the immunization program hasn't been implemented. Therefore the exes could activate even—”

“So much the better. The fewer the managers, the greater the manageability. And then: oughtn't we to consider the fact of the init's disappearance? Our plans, including the secret of init, could fall—if they haven't already—into the wrong hands. If we delay, rumors about our plans will slip across the border, and even before that our compatriots, if they have any sense at all, will make short work of the exes, and of us: or do you think they'll forgive us our immunity?”

“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.