In the Enclosure Read online

  Also therapeutically blocked from our conscious and subconscious reflexes was any explanation of our mission—why we were to go to these aliens and reveal to them all our enormous technological capacities and secrets. Knowledge of the motives of our mission, we were told, might somehow block our performance.

  We were promised, however, that upon the successful completion of the assignment we would have all memories returned in full and would find, one by one, that they were far more exquisite than anything which had happened to us during the mission.

  There were rumors on the ship going toward that system that we might be a crew of felons whose crimes had been blocked from consciousness as part of remission, but that would not comply with the promised exquisiteness of our history.

  “We will do what we have to do and are told to do and then we will return,” the first in the hierarchy, the leader of the mission (who said he knew as little about his history as any of us), told us at our initial meeting; and I have no reason, these many years later, to think that he wanted to be mysterious.

  We have, of course, told them of the process which blocked our location, memory, and purpose and the aliens have, in their own way, tried to loosen the restraints. Nothing comes under therapy, however, but blankness. Before the time of the ship I recall nothing, other than that I lived simply and was not happy.

  The implantation was so successful we can hold back absolutely nothing. For reasons I do not yet completely understand, those who sent us wanted them to know everything they demanded. Yielding information sometimes I feel the machinery of the program itself working within me, tearing synapses and ganglia; but this is more suggestive than biological, I think.

  But at a reduced level the pain is constant. I am wrapped in sheets of pain, small mumbles of anguish constricting me even during sex or sleep. I do not understand myself. I did not think that I was this complex. I had simple desires, simple passions: I wanted to maintain my spot in the hierarchy and not upset the balance.

  Plotar ranked seventeenth in the hierarchy. (I can never forget these numbers; they were graven into us.) In the old days he was master of the rituals; now he comes to my room and says that he has urgent business to discuss. I greet him with feigned politeness but ask him to be quick, I have things on my mind and females to pursue during the free time and, as much as I would like to talk with him at leisure, I cannot.

  “I know that you keep to yourself,” he says after a subsequent pause during which I realize that I have intimidated him—I have intimidated the seventeenth man in the old hierarchy, “and in the usual circumstances we would simply not come to you. But I am afraid that this matter is now extreme. Extreme, and we have no time to waste.” He helps himself to one of the destructive cigarettes which we have learned to enjoy and sits uncomfortably on a hassock. “You see, I must talk to you now. We need your help; your gifts are irreplaceable at this time. Remember how it was in the shiptime. Did I not always find a place for you; a good role? You were never made sacrificial during the ceremonies. You must listen to me now, Quir. Our time is short. Things do not slacken but become taut as apocalypse approaches.” I decide that he is insane.

  Plotar then explains, somewhat disjointedly, that a careful plot has been constructed in the enclosure. The plot is to take it over by subduing institutional personnel and then make an effective mass escape. The plot has been worked out by a group whose number Plotar will not divulge. Despite the constant surveillance of the enclosure and the equally constant attention of the therapists, the existence of the plan has somehow been concealed from the aliens … and now the time for enactment is here. Selected individuals whose specialties are vital are being sought for enlistment and instruction; the remainder of my shipmates will merely be the beneficiaries of the escape, without prior knowledge. This maldistribution is necessary since the more who know of the plot, the greater the risk of revelation by someone untrustworthy. “Some of us must take risks so that all may be free,” Plotar says sadly, gesturing with the cigarette, bumping it against one of the walls. “Still, nothing is really fair.”

  He points out that I am needed and am now being approached because of my specialty. My geological sophistry will enable me to detect key points of weakness in the construction of the enclosure through which planned incendiary devices may be thrust and exploded with a good chance of success. The subsequent fires will be terrifying but will succumb to extinguishers which are already being constructed. The plot has progressed quickly in these final stages and actions are scheduled to begin only two days hence. Plotar states that all I will have to do on the following evening is take a casual walk with him through selected portions of the enclosure, pointing out what I take to be places of particular susceptibility to the explosives.

  “There’s no risk to that,” he explains. “Just taking a walk and selecting sites for the explosives. I wouldn’t think of asking you if there were any risk. They’re so pitifully sure of themselves at this time that they now let us socialize freely. I doubt if we’re even observed anymore as we were in the beginning. Who could object in any event to the two of us taking a brief, bracing walk through the enclosure, talking together about the ship time, remembering ceremonies? And then, when we have taken the enclosure, it will be a simple thing to arrange transportation to the ship and our freedom.”

  “I don’t think so,” I say, giving his remarks the aspect of discussion although this is not what he has in mind. “It is not that simple.”

  “Certainly it is! The enclosure is important to them; all of the records and data are here. They could hardly risk our threat to destroy it. There will be an honored place on the voyage home for you, a very honored place, and an immortal role for you in the lexicon of our heroism when we return. I ask of you only this one small service, Quir, for we cannot continue this way indefinitely. I have it on the best authority that they plan to kill us when they have extracted the last shreds of vital information, and that point is not far distant. We have told them everything. Quir, we must act quickly.”

  Plotar finishes off the cigarette in a spasm of choking and extinguishes it on the floor of my cubicle; looks at the dead end with disgust and then puts it carefully into sole of one of my shoes. The master of ritual was always permitted to take such liberties with the personal property of others and I do not resent this although I regard it with sadness. “We have been totally corrupted, you see,” he says. “These cigarettes are the proof. We are no longer what we were; we have become only an aspect of them, an extension, a series of retrieval devices. They will seize everything from us now if we do not act quickly. Action, Quir! Think of our obligations!”

  I point out to Plotar, as gently as possible, that I find his plan unworkable and insane. That it does not seem to have any connection with the reality of the enclosure. I add that under no circumstances will I grant him any cooperation at all and that the hierarchical system is well behind us now. “I won’t be intimidated,” I say with only the slightest lilt to my voice. “That’s all behind us now and I don’t have to listen to you anymore.”

  “You are not being intimidated. I am asking for your cooperation; I am really working for you, you understand. Think of this as another ritual if you will, the most elaborate and systematized of them all; we will reconstruct our freedom and give it to ourselves whole and subsequently—”

  “You don’t understand the enclosure. It makes no impression upon you. But in my specialty I do, and I have had ample time to think about this and many other things. This enclosure is impenetrable. It is a total barrier not only without but within. There is no way that we can break free, for what you do not understand is that it is not only a condition but a state of mind. I have worked over all of this for a long time and I have thought much of the enclosure. It is a trap. It cannot be broken. I will have nothing whatsoever, nothing at all, to do with your foolish plan. And now I want you to leave my room.”

  Shudders of rage assault me; they intersect with that larger sense of revulsion I feel toward Plotar. I remember him as master of the rituals, and I cannot stand him. I do not like any of my shipmates anymore, not one of them. They are all as despicable as me for their imprisonment, but with him the dislike has become personal. I cannot bear him. I see no reason to bear him. The rituals, even the slaughters, are far behind us.

  “If you don’t leave,” I say, “I’ll tell my therapist, then. I’ll tell him everything that has gone on here and warn him about your insane plan. That will finish you. And I will come more to their favor; when we are released I will be the first through the walkways.”

  “I pity you,” Plotar says. He rises. “They have completely possessed you. You are their property. I did not think that this had happened to you. I had a certain respect; you always participated skillfully in the rituals. And one hundred and ten of us were lower than you.”

  “If you feel that way you have spent twenty-nine months here for nothing. You understand not at all what has happened to us, what they want.”

  “They want to destroy us,” Plotar says, “and you have become their slave. You will help them destroy us. These simple barbarians have broken you and converted you into their property. I should have judged this and known.”

  “Make no judgments, ritual-master.”

  “There are others who have not reached your condition. They will not crumple so easily. I have found them. You are not needed, you are completely optional. It was my idea to approach you and give you a chance to participate for your sake. I do not need your participation.”

  “You understand nothing,” I say again. “Your experience here has accomplished little. The enclosure is final, it is total. It is miles in circumference, hundreds of yards in height. We will get out of here due to their mercy or we will not get away at
all. This cannot be broken. How else could they have kept us here for twenty-nine months?”

  “I understand now why you were ranked so,” Plotar says. In the old hierarchy, this is the most damaging statement possible: one cannot make comments upon the inferior worth of those holding lower status without risking exclusion from all rankings and banishment. One cannot even be patronizing. It is some indication of the state Plotar has reached that he would resort, master of the rituals, to such a comment at this time. “The mistake is that you were not at the bottom.” His old face trembles, he rubs his hands together, seems on the verge of saying something else, something final and freeing which will vault me past this simple confrontation and into utter complexity, a knowledge so deep that, Plotarlike, I would be able to organize my thoughts like dancers at a rite; but then it switches off, all of it switches off, and he leaves the room quickly, muttering what I cannot hear. “Bastard,” I think I hear him whisper, but from this aspect it is a caress. “Bastard,” Plotar says in their old rhetoric, and then he is gone.

  I return to contemplation. There is nothing else to do.

  Thinking, I realize that life in the enclosure, then, has driven all of us toward our separate aspects of desire; we have become the essence of what we wanted to be. It has taught me resignation, it has taught the females accessibility. Some of the others have become obsessive. Plotar is insane. It all depends, then, upon the individual: the perverse and basic identity will always come through … and then I put the issue out of my mind, exerting my usual discipline and mental control.

  I spend the next hour not thinking but reading instead selected materials given to me for the week by my therapist. I read The Bobbsey Twins Visit the City by Laura Lee Hope. I skim a paper called Procrustean Igneous Formation presented to the Society of the Resigned by J. L. Envers, M.A. I spend some time with the March 29 issue of The Morning Telegraph, the Opening Day issue; a publication which my therapist gives me only rarely as a special favor but which I believe that I am finally beginning to understand. My calculations about the outcome of the races always seem correct but since I am never given consecutive issues I am unable to verify them.

  I find that I am no longer interested in reading. Enough. I leave my room in search of a female. I meet a familiar one in the hall and I seize.

  Lying across her I feel instants of penetration, access, doom, warmth, connection, and then the long-promised, necessary darkness. I am drawn into the center of that darkness by her murmurs and whines, finding at the end a moment totally damp and empty and I move through and out of the other end of that moment, gasping. For a time I think that I have seen something but, as always, it turns out that I have not. Nothing is new: consortment changes nothing. After the requisite time, then, I disengage delicately, having lost interest, and return to my room. Behind me I hear her whimpering madly in the darkness and wonder if she is an ally. She is saying words that Plotar said but in a different way. Bastard, she says. Bastard.

  The first weeks in the enclosure were bad because they did not understand us nor we them, and no relationship had been established. Instead, they took to us devices that were painful and humiliating. Some of us nearly died and there was an abortive revolt put down with weaponry that made our flesh burn. They thought that we had come to destroy them. Two hundred and forty-eight against a planet

  They did not know that we would tell them anything they asked. They thought that our mission and our knowledge had to be beaten from us by occult means of torture similar to devices that our own hierarchies had repudiated. Some were terribly hurt in those first weeks because their confessions were judged to be not truthful, and only when formulae for alchemy that one of us gave them turned out to work did the torture cease.

  Can I be blamed for not wanting to relive those early weeks? It is not cowardice but compassion; I could not bear to see my shipmates suffer again. And the torturers as well, for the instruments always turn the other way.

  My therapist tells me now that all of this was merely a dreadful failure of communication and that as soon as their experiments and findings began to corroborate, those who had been in charge of the enclosure were discharged in disgrace, some of them imprisoned. I do not know if this is actually so or if we were told this to solicit our further cooperation, but I do not think that it matters particularly, either way. Whether a new administration or a chastened older one took over, our accommodations became somewhat larger, the food a little better, and we were given a schedule providing for some free time and conversation with one another. Not that we had or have anything of interest to say. Can I be blamed for not wanting the tortures again?

  I have learned to trust my therapist. It is the easier way. I try to find credible all that he says to me. Once, when information I gave on the half-life of radioactive fossils was not verified quickly enough to satisfy, he subjected me to deep hypnosis and starvation, tormented me by playing on ganglia with sensors … but shortly thereafter the fault turned out to have been an equipment malfunction and he was extremely apologetic. This was early after his assignment to my case. He not only suspended all questioning for two days but arranged for me to be given a large, private room at the rear of a corridor instead of my participating in the dormitory arrangement given to most of my shipmates. It was at about that time that I began to be truly successful with the females, although it has now been a long time since I have permitted any of them to come to my room. I invade theirs. I toy with their possessions. I hold my own privacy more valuable than theirs.

  “Our demands upon you cannot be indefinite,” he has assured me. “Despite our native suspicion, despite our lust for torture, we are a race given to odd moods of guilt or compassion, swings toward altruism and self-flagellation and in the bargain there is a very strong mystical pattern which underlies almost all of our cultures, one which has to deal with martyrdom and redemption. The benefits you have given us are incalculable; part of their feedback will be changed attitudes toward you that will result in equitable treatment. Believe. Believe.”

  I am given assurances of this nature often, and they comfort me. But my therapist still refuses to divulge his name or details of his personal life although I frequently ask these now. “It wouldn’t make any difference, you see,” he has pointed out. “Our lives, our society, our identity is so totally alien to you that there is virtually none of this which you could understand or which would contribute to our relationship. I could tell you, say, for speculation, that my name is X and that I live in monogamous relationship with S, a woman: I could say that I am Y and that I dwell inside a homosexual commune with J and L, my partners in lust and necessity. What would it matter? What could you make of all this or know of the quality of our lives? In time I hope that you will be free and come to understand us and that we will know one another. But that time is not yet. Not just yet, I fear. Besides, we are under strict orders still to divulge nothing and I cannot break with the administrators on this very important point, not if I want to stay here and continue to help you.”

  He has small hands and a high voice. He seems to perch on the edge of appliances rather than sit or straddle them. Like most of them I have seen he appears to be more delicately constructed than we, although the basic anatomical features are identical. Identical; I could enter one of their females; silly, sad creatures on the periphery of the enclosure, bringing us food and checking, every so often, our elimination-functions.

  So the morning comes; the morning after Plotar’s visit. I see my therapist as per schedule. I tell him everything.

  I tell him of Plotar’s plot, his confidences, his plan of organization and his request. I describe how he wanted me to find places for incendiary plants in the enclosure. In a way this is bitter for me to say because I still have greater feelings of loyalty to my shipmates than to the aliens who confine us, but sentiment cannot interfere with what I know must be the right. Plotar’s plan will fail and the consequences of this will make life in the enclosure more hideous for most of us than it is already. It will be like the early days. I cannot bear this. I cannot bear the tortures. It is not a question of personal weakness; I have the strength to withstand them if I must, but cannot think of my shipmates’ suffering.