ometime during the middle of the 21st century, North America—and perhaps the rest of the world as well, for all we learn—has undergone the Collapse, a general disintegration of society, causes unspecified. But if the precipitating factors of the Collapse are unknown, the results are not. The United States and Canada are now divided into Shields and the wilderness. In the former enclaves live an elite with access to plenty of wealth and technology. The wilderness and wastelands are inhabited by Freemen, who live primitively but honestly.
A third class exists, however: the exiled criminals of the Shields. For various severe offenses, the citizens of the enclaves are dyed a color corresponding to their crime and sent as permanent drifters into the wilderness. A network of rude shelters, where the Dyed People may obtain a day's supplies to sustain their meaningless lives, requires them to be in constant movement. Scorned and abused by many of the Freemen, the DPs are pariahs without any effective alliances even among their own kind.
Our protagonist is known simply as "the indigo man," for his original name—Gaetan Nuccion—has been stripped from him by the aversive conditioning he underwent after his sex crime. (Gaetan attacked a teenage boy.) He has been wandering the California coastline for some 30 years, and is reaching the end of his physical abilities. The only hope that keeps him going is that his accursed coloration seems to be unprecedentedly fading. His one dream is to regain his old skin shade.
The frame of Gaetan's story is his last journey and the events thereof. He is tormented by two Freemen teens. He keeps a journal. He meets a red-dyed man who tells him of a utopia in Mexico. He visits a seer who interprets his dreams. And finally, in the novel's climax, he comes face to face with a figure from those very dreams: the piebald or rainbow man.
But within this frametale, through extended flashbacks, we relive key moments from the indigo man's past. We witness his warped upbringing as a pampered Shield child, tutelage under his grim Aunt Marguerite that twisted his sexual urges. We learn the details of the crime that earned him exile, a crime that was more a subconscious explosion than one of malice aforethought. We experience his first days as a DP, when he befriended a runaway Shield servant, Lisha. And finally we watch as Lisha, Gaetan and a hermit named Lucius battle the pursuers who wish to recapture Lisha.
Picturing
a planet without pity
Science fiction has a small but important collection of texts that concern themselves with criminals, justice and the hypocrisy of societies that label some behaviors deviant while applauding others that are objectively just as wrongful. An important milestone in this subgenre was Robert Heinlein's "Coventry" (1940), which firmly established the notion of a specific land ceded to criminals. Next in line came Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953), with its cat-and-mouse game among telepaths. Damon Knight's "The Country of the Kind" (1956) brilliantly crystallized the notion that criminals could be uncaged, given the perfection of invisible restraints. Robert Sheckley detoured the discussion into satire with his tale of a penal world, The Status Civilization (1960). Typical of his outrageous imagination, Cordwainer Smith created a world where mutagenic criminals served as organ banks in "A Planet Named Shayol" (1961). Most recently, George Zebrowski's Brute Orbits (1998) added a new twist to justice by imagining prisoners trapped on asteroids that return to Earth only at long intervals.
Gene O'Neill's book is a fine addition to this canon. Focusing tightly on a lone individual rather than examining broad social forces, this novel nonetheless manages to implicate the whole future society in the miseries and injustices embodied in Gaetan's single life.
O'Neill's scenario harks back to the classics in tone and treatment, mainly Heinlein and Knight. In fact, the novel seems almost adrift from contemporary SF. There's nothing postmodern or cyber-anything about the book. The language and pacing and conceptualization are determinedly old-fashioned, almost retro, as if we were reading some serial finally rescued from the pages of Galaxy magazine. Yet this very characteristic also imbues the book with a timeless feel. The indigo's man plight seems eternal, the allegorical fate of every outcast from some Biblical leper to a Depression-era hobo. O'Neill's future society—reminiscent of that in Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969)—while it hangs together logically and is supported by a handful of good neologisms ("chuckleheads," a drug named "smoke") and cultural speculations (deadly televised game shows), is sketched in just enough detail to carry the action along. O'Neill's real focus is the mental state that three decades of ostracism can produce. And here he accomplishes a lot. The indigo man is on every page, and often not even interacting with others. To sustain our interest with just the stream of consciousness of a single character is no mean feat. And Gaetan's delusion that he is losing his taint of color is intensely pathetic.
O'Neill manages to produce the same reaction in the reader that Ray Bradbury achieved with his own ink-stained pariah character, the Illustrated Man. (Gaetan's skin is specifically labeled "inky." In effect, he becomes a man who is one giant blotted tattoo.) His protagonist is a kind of Wandering Jew or Melmoth figure, doomed to make an instructive pilgrimage across the earth. In the varied reactions of the Freemen to his presence—anger, pity, disdain, comradeship—we see a whole human range of emotions, emotions that Gaetan is almost too worn out to respond to.
O'Neill's ending is satisfying, too, a kind of transcendental encounter that grants Gaetan the only surcease he could ever realistically expect.
