"Vestige" (1963)

“Monitors were set up, and their capacity calculated. It was very wide, but not infinite. All credible impressions, projections, motifs, sensories, theories, and cogitations were catalogued. They were revised over a long period, added to as early randoms appeared, and put into final clarified form. Then the door was closed and nothing else could be added.”

Lafferty wrote the unpublished dystopian short story “Vestige” in 1963, between two of his strong stories, “Pani Planet” and “Mad Man.” Of the unpublished stories, “Vestige” ranks near the bottom for me. What came later stole its thunder, though other readers may enjoy it far more than I do. It has a good deal of economy and some tight world-building. Hawkshaw, the robot detective and Stasi stand-in, is memorable, with his bloodhound eyes and a head that seems to end in a deerstalker cap. The story's significance lies in how it anticipates themes found elsewhere, in works such as Past Master, with its world surveillance, Pandomation, and précis machines. Aside from some unusual incidental detail, it is not much like the science fiction Lafferty usually writes, because it is so reportorially and earnestly flat. Its premise, that original thought must be snuffed out into what Lafferty later calls post-consciousness, is handled primitively, as if he were doing a Hanon exercise.

So here is the plot. Humanity is in some kind of post-apocalyptic situation, or maybe it is just that all urbanized areas have been merged into a single town. That is unclear. What is clear is that near-total centralization obtains, and with it, near-absolute order, administered through the monitoring of citizens' thoughts and behaviors. To extinguish unauthorized ideas, past generations surgically altered the population. The state's justification for mutilation is summarized in the Master Interrogator's public address:

“The problem was solved almost completely by slurring the olfactory capsules of seven-day-old infants; the operation was soon broadened to affect the receptors of sight and taste . . . The operation was broadened again to cover the slurring of certain areas of the brain that were once called ‘creative.’ Almost all of our troubles were found to come from those areas.”

Now no human has a sense of smell, and everyone is effectively colorblind. The ability to taste flavor has been reduced. Creative brain activity has been slowed through relentless thought control. Citizens must communicate using only ten thousand approved phrases, and everyone must "lip-think" to enable continuous instrumental detection. This last part looks like talking to oneself silently, and it is just about the only humor in the story. At least, it makes me laugh. It plays out as if one is catching up with one's own thoughts. Whenever an unapproved thought occurs, a World Alert is triggered. There begins a relentless tolling of booming bells that go bong, bong, bong. And that brings Hawkshaw, who patrols and interrogates citizens while Master Interrogator Manlove Mobley who gives public speeches that broadcast a hope: maybe the current deviate will be the last deviate. Society will be perfect with the Final Extinction of the Randoms. This is perfection as completion; completion as annihilation; and, therefore, annihilation as perfection. A version of Ouden.

The poor guy who becomes the Random this time is John Aislingiu. He slowly comes to understand that he caused the alarm and confesses it to his wife, Francine. He had a dream about the smell of an ocher-colored musical note dropped into a pool in a neo-Gothic woods by a large frog that wept. Francine knows thoughts like this are forbidden and monstrous, so she sounds the household klaxon to turn him in. John is arrested, shouting about his thoughts. Rather than recant, he shows himself to be almost too pure a stock character in a dystopian story:

“But I will tell it!” John howled out in the fury for expression that people used to feel in generations past. “I am the only one ever to have this thought! Something is lost if I cannot bring it out! The world is too stuffy if I cannot think grotesquely beyond it. I'll tell it if it kills me!”

He is then put in a soundproof quarantine chamber so that uncatalogued ideas won't contaminate the rest of the population. At dawn, he is brought before a guillotine, following speeches by Hawkshaw and the Interrogators.

Now that John is dead, the bells go silent. The crowd disperses under the assumption that deviance has been eradicated from the world. Then, after only six beats of silence, the monitoring relays panic and the bells resume their chaotic tolling. The new alert is triggered, this time by a dull, three-year-old child who had previously shown no interest in his surroundings. It just played with a crooked stick all day. Yet now the child laughs as a new, unprecedented "almost-thought" flicks into his mind. Lafferty shows how tenuous the social control is in the story's final lines through this chuckle:

Four—five—six beats of slow silence, and the terrifying bells would be forgot.The seventh beat of silence and—Pandemonium Hystericum Profanum! A panic of monitors and a wild activity of relays! The discordant bells took up the cacophonous beat again in their harsh broken thunder... A dull child sits on the ground and chuckles. A random impression has flicked into his mind—an almost-thought that nobody else has ever thought before.And the world is in danger.

That is "Vestige," another Lafferty story about the impossibility of any system so closed that the human potentials cannot help slipping its bounds. The authoritarian regime in it does all it can to crush and control every single human member, and Lafferty thinks that this is not possible. True to what we might expect, he associates this kind of political project not, as many of his readers will, with the ideologies of the right, but with those of the left.

It is why the instrument of execution is that of the French Revolution, the guillotine. Lafferty sees the threat of scapegoating deviates—who are, of course, ordinary people with the capacity for free thought and the capacity to be rightly ordered—as coming from the Left. This means his deviates are not the X-Men or people who like Foucault. The villains, in typical Lafferty fashion, bear names of a leftist ideology: Goodworld, Solidarity, Manlove. They might as well be named Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité. This would probably be easy to miss if one didn't know his work, that his target is radical forms of this-worldly communitarianism, not fascism, which he of course also hates.

On the story's critique of the Left, there is also a Cathead/Cosmopolis factor at work: most people in "Vestige"'s post-conscious society do nothing, and this idleness has been a cultural disaster. Spiritual alienation in Lafferty is always worse than any Marxist form of economic alienation in the sphere of production. Only those with an "inner compulsion" to activity do the work of the world, and there are almost exactly enough of them to handle affairs; work is considered "unsettling to the non-worker types."

The re-engineering of human perception of color and the abolition of smell satirize the Enlightenment impulse to measure everything, thereby rationalizing government through political arithmetic and the science of society. More broadly, Lafferty locates the problem in the attempt to regulate positive liberty, which he equates with the desire to change human nature from the ground up. Making people free through rationalized control is the mistake of the French Revolution, positivism, Marxism, and every form of technocratic progressivism. Here, the process is unnamed, but in Lafferty we know it by many names: the Astrobe Dream of Past Master, the Red Revolution of the Coscuin Chronicles, the Kangaroo of Serpent's Egg, and much besides. The problem is that "Vestige" itself is just not very interesting, especially in light of what was to come from Lafferty's imagination, even if he is arguing for that freedom by writing "Vestige." To me, Lafferty is always more interesting on the implications of, and the breakdown of, consensus than on the problem of political control.

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