And therein lay the marketing genius .
The One Who Was Many, being unknowable, omnipresent, and ... well, basically, everything, it went without saying, could never be explained, not in any authoritative way, so there were no priests or clerics or gurus to claim any kind of privileged knowledge of the fundamental nature of Its all-knowing being. However, some of Its infinite aspects were describable ... and thus highly marketable. For example, the fact that the One was Many, which it patently and indisputably was, ** which meant that everything that was was one. Now, obviously, all of these many things (these things that were) were also themselves, and therefore, in that aspect, many, but at the same time, they were also one. Moreover, although each one of the Many (the Many Who Were One) was, in that aspect, a unique, nameable, knowable entity, taken altogether, in their unified aspect (i.e., as attributes of the One Who Was Many), they ceased to be nameable, knowable entities, being, as they were, merely parts of the One, whose Oneness was ipso facto unknowable. (How could a part of the whole presume to “know” the whole of which it was part?)
What all this nonsense essentially meant was that Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, Brahman, Vishnu (or whoever, take your pick), every major and minor deity, were simply aspects of the One Who Was Many, and thus merely parts of a larger wholeness ... a boundless, unimaginable Oneness, existing everywhere, containing everything, the will and essential nature of which were beyond the limits of human understanding.
The newly appointed interfaith consultants seized on this then revolutionary concept, called in their serious marketing guys, and went to work on the old religions with pretty much everything they had in their arsenals. The transformation didn’t happen overnight, but after two or three generations of around-the-clock relentless messaging (and the summary arrest and indefinite detention of anyone deemed “fanatically religious”) the overwhelming majority of people had successfully adjusted their faith-based thinking.
By the 27th Century, H.C.S.T. (or the time of our story, in any event), the very notion of religious intolerance was unimaginable and beyond absurd. The Normals, irrespective of their faiths, took for granted that their personal deities were nothing but symbols, work-alike signs, each one referring to the One Who Was Many, which could never be represented in Its Oneness. Thus, it made no difference whether one prayed to Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, Vishnu, or to God as you understood Him ... whoever you prayed to, you prayed to the One. Likewise, the strictures of any one faith were just one Path (one Path among many) which led one onward, to other Path(s), each of which led one closer to the One. As all Path(s) led one closer to the One, the whole idea of forcing others to walk one’s Path, or worship one’s symbols (or otherwise adopt one’s personal values, which had been the cause of so many of those wars, persecutions, pogroms, and so on), was not just Anti-Social behavior, and a Terrorist Act. It was also pointless.
Which didn’t stop the faith-based Terrorists from plotting their devastating Terrorist attacks, which they did relentlessly, and under the threat of which everyone had lived for several centuries. But then, they were all late-stage Anti-Socials, not to mention religious fanatics ... we’ll get into all that Terrorist stuff later. The point at the moment is, for the majority of Normals (i.e., those who weren’t receiving personal messages from God, like Valentina), faith was a strictly personal affair. It didn’t matter what other people did. All that mattered was walking their Path(s), and keeping the focus on themselves, and meditating and praying for guidance, and for knowledge of the loving Will of the One. This, the Normals knew, was the key to successfully walking the Path(s) to Prosperity, not judging others, nor judging themselves, nor attempting to understand the One, or the inscrutable logic of Its cosmic plan, or questioning Its loving Will, but asking only, in a state of humility, to be shown what the One would have them do.
Taylor, of course, could have given a fuck. The One Who Was Many, the Many Who Were One, God as the Normals chose to understand Him, Jesus, Allah, Jehovah, Brahman, Krishna, Ahura Mazda, et al., each and every one of these entities, individually or together as a group, were welcome, as far as Taylor was concerned, to astrally travel across the universe, take human form at the bar at Gillie’s, and suck foul wind out of his ass. And as for the so-called Cosmic Plan, it didn’t seem much of a plan to Taylor. That is, unless the main objective was to wreak as much pointless suffering as possible on as many varieties of life forms as possible and then piss off to some other cosmos and nuke the ruins of the first from orbit. The way Taylor saw it, assuming there were some Higher Power, or Master Architect, He was some kind of twisted Über-Sadisto who got his rocks off torturing people, first in this life, just for kicks, then later, in earnest, for all eternity. Taylor had read The Path(s) to Prosperity , as well a number of older scriptures (i.e., the Christian Bible, the Torah, the Koran, the Way of Nature, and other such crap), all of which seemed to be variations on the same inspiringly jubilant message ... that people were basically pieces of shit. And it wasn’t just that they were pieces of shit, and inherently worthless, and bad, and wrong, they were also selfish, stupid, and faithless, and, above all, they were disobedient. According to all these holy scriptures, God, or the Truth, or Reality, or something, was going to show them the error of their ways, and teach them a lesson, and punish them, and kill them, and fry their souls in Hell forever, or send them back to the Wheel of Karma, to suffer, until they got their minds right.
Which, what do you know, as it just so happened, God was about to do to Taylor. Oh yes, God was going to whale on Taylor. God was going to fuck Taylor up. God was going to rip Taylor’s head off and take a big shit down Taylor’s neck. First, though, He was going to torture Taylor, and not just any old type of torture, like having the skin peeled off your body or being boiled in oil or whatever. No, God had something very special in the way of torture in mind for Taylor. Before God smote him, and sent his soul to burn in the fires of Hell forever, God was going to make Taylor do The Worst Thing He Had Ever Done. He was going to make him do this sober, so Taylor could take the vivid memory, which would be like a Hi-Def replay loop, down into the Inferno with him, and suck on that for all eternity. According to these various holy scriptures, God was going to do this to Taylor, not because He hated Taylor, and all other human beings generally, and wanted to hear what they had to say now, as they roasted in the fires of Hell forever ... no, God was going to do this to Taylor because God was Taylor’s spiritual Father, and the Father of Time, and of all Creation, who had conjured light from the primordial darkness, and whose essence was pure and infinite Love .
Taylor, who wasn’t infinite anything (he was just an all-too-human being, and an Anti-Social human being at that), was sitting at the bar at Gillie’s Tavern watching an ad for The Path(s) to Prosperity and nursing a pint of piss-warm beer. He’d been sitting there for about ten minutes. Casual Dad was talking over a series of shots of ecstatic children playing on swing sets and merry-go-rounds and other such cloying Normal treacle. The ad was running on the pirate Viewer that T.C. kept behind the bar, the screen of which was all warped and dusty. The time was approximately 0650. At this point, he had about forty-five minutes to get to Cassandra’s and make a decision, which, all this faith-based bullshit aside, the decision he needed to make was simple. He needed to decide what he thought was happening, or believed was happening, which was one of two things. See, either whatever was happening out there, the sealed-off Sector, the choppers, et cetera, was the Day of Autonomous Decentralized Action, which meant there was still an outside chance that Sarah was out there, and on her way to the rendezvous, or it wasn’t, which meant she probably wasn’t. Simple either/or equation. Subject to the laws of probability. Nothing fuzzy, metaphysical or remotely fucking faith-based about it.
So, OK ... reason it out, he thought. What were the odds that this was the D.A.D.A., and that now, as in right at that very moment, autonomous factions of the A.S.U. were launching a series of militant actions, coordinated actions, as in bombings, and so on,
and not just there in Zone 23, but in Zones throughout the Northeast Regions, and possibly the entire United Territories?
What were the odds that that was happening?
The odds were lousy. They were virtually zero ... virtually, but not definitively zero, which slim contingency was eating at Taylor, because, all right, unlikely as it certainly was, desperate pipe dream that it probably was, still, if Sarah was still out there, and hadn’t disappeared, or been disappeared, the plan was still the best way to go. However, if she wasn’t out there, and today was just Tuesday, and not the D.A.D.A., and whatever was happening was simply the work of some random assholes who had blown up a building, or worse (and this was definitely possible), some IntraZone Waste & Security scheme, and he went ahead tried for the rendezvous, and ended up out on Jefferson Avenue with nowhere to go and Security on him, there wouldn’t be any other choice at that point ... he’d have to do what he’d have to do, and he’d have to do it quick and dirty. And he didn’t want to have to do it quick and dirty. If he had to do it, which he probably did, he wanted to do it clean and painless ... but mostly he didn’t want to have to do it.
Gillie’s Tavern, at this time of morning, was usually quiet, but not this quiet. The air felt like it was charged with static. Sector C was locked down tight. The northern perimeter was just outside, running both ways on Clayton Avenue, bomb units, barricades, APCs, water cannons, robots, the whole fucking circus. Taylor, obviously, had made it across by the skin of his balls as they sealed off the border. Now, officially, he was sheltering in place, trying to get his thoughts in order (which, for how that was going, see above). Across from Taylor, behind the bar, Young Man Henry was washing glasses and telling Jim MacReady the story of T.C.’s dog, a Brazilian pit bull, name of Bullet, who’d been dead for years. MacReady, who had already heard the story of T.C.’s dog about a thousand times, and who’d been on a drunk for three days running, was squinting across the dark, dank, windowless basement that was Gillie’s Tavern at a withered old hag named Coreen Sweeney, who looked like a starving chicken on speed. MacReady, who under normal conditions wouldn’t have fucked a walking corpse like Coreen Sweeney with Taylor’s dick, was smiling a kind of goofy drunken smile that was meant to look lascivious. Coreen Sweeney was smiling back at him, or she would have been, had she had any teeth. Across the barroom, at a table in the back, a gang of fairly nefarious-looking Class 3 Anti-Social-type Persons, most of whom Taylor knew from around, guys like Shane and Charlie Gilmartin, Estrellita Klein, and Vaclav Borges, and Palmer, it looked like, were playing poker. All these people, MacReady, Coreen, the nefarious poker players, Young Man Henry, as well as a lot of other people who’d had the sense to drag themselves home, had been there at Gillie’s the night before when Taylor, having recently killed several people, and staring up into the Asshole of Doom, had put down all that fucking tequila and lost what little remained of his shit. He couldn’t be sure what he’d said or hadn’t, but he figured he hadn’t said anything damning, or at least hadn’t loudly announced his intention to go out and kill several other people, people whose names he had on his kill list, beginning with one J.C. Bodroon ... or no one had made any mention of it. He sat there, staring down into his beer, mentally cursing God and the One, and himself, and Adam, and the A.S.U., and Sarah, and Meyer, and the faith-based Terrorists, and the Hadley Corporation of Menomonie, Wisconsin, and trying to decide what the hell to do.
Gillie’s Tavern, like all the taverns, was owned by IntraZone Waste & Security, *** but was run by a one-legged half a Cajun named T.C. James, who had transferred north when the Zones down south got inhospitable. Young Man Henry, who was in his eighties, or possibly his nineties, or maybe even older, and was the blackest black man Taylor had ever seen, had transferred up with him. They were like a team. T.C. James was a straight out racist, but not in any kind of serious way. **** He sported an impervious, silver pompadour, wrap-around glasses with elaborate frames, the lenses of which were as thick as your finger and made his eyes look way too big. He wore this second-hand prosthetic leg that strapped to the stump that was left of his thigh, the left one, just below the hip joint, which didn’t fit right and was terribly painful. He’d cut loose with all these racist slurs, “nigger” this and “wetback” that, and would call people “Ivan” and “Jerry” and “Charlie,” drawing upon some redneck lexis no one in the Zone had ever deciphered. An ancient American Confederate flag (a faithful reproduction, of course) hung on the wall behind the bar, which T.C. and Young Man Henry had built, as they had most everything else down there, and had run the electrics, fixed the plumbing, and rigged up the toilets to halfway work. They had done all this with scavenged materials, T.C. limping around on his leg, measuring lengths of wood and cursing, Henry swinging a hammer and singing, the two of them taking turns telling old stories, lies, and jokes, which they’d told for years, Henry talking in his “Sambo” voice, like some kind of weird old minstrel routine.
Henry was up to the part of the story where Bullet just stood there, saying “nnnnnnnnnnnnn.” He was standing slightly to the left of Taylor. MacReady was sitting at the bar in front of him (i.e., in front of Henry, to the left of Taylor). Coreen Sweeney was off to his right. The poker players were at a table behind him. MacReady pulled himself off his barstool, downed the lukewarm dregs of his beer, took one step toward Coreen, fell face first onto a nearby table, rolled off, taking the table with him, and lay there on the floor, unconscious. It didn’t appear to be Coreen’s morning. Henry went on telling his story, exactly to whom now it was not clear, which didn’t seem to matter to Henry, and definitely didn’t matter to MacReady. Taylor turned back to T.C.’s Viewer, which was showing some sort of Edu-Content in which a team of enthused archeologists were reassembling the skull of a cow. This was the kind of Content they ran when they took the IntraZone grid offline, which meant there wouldn’t be any more news until whatever was happening was over.
“You look like shit, boy,” Henry said.
Obviously he was done with story.
“I feel like shit,” Taylor told him.
“I expect you do, the way you was drinking.”
“Any idea what the fuck this is?”
“Nary a clue,” Henry said. “Last they locked down a sector like this was Jackson Avenue, far as I recall. You was just a kid then, probably.”
“Yeah ... I was ten,” Taylor said.
Henry sucked his teeth and snorted. Then he went down the bar to tend to Coreen. Taylor went back to staring at his beer. He shook a dash of Sansalt into it, trying to get it to bring up a head, which, of course, it wouldn’t, and he sat there and watched as the crystals slowly sank and dissolved. Tiny circles of carbon dioxide rose to the surface and spread like ripples, growing, expanding, surrendering their forms ... something clicked inside his head.
Perfect, he thought, and he had to smile, because this was how this whole thing had started, these past six months with the A.S.U., Sarah, whoever she really was, Meyer, whatever his fucking deal was, the faith-based Terrorists, if they even existed, Dodo, Bodroon, the Community Watchers, Cassandra’s bedroom sequestration, the kill list, Max ... the whole fucking mess. This was it. This image right here. This was how it all began, not with a glass of beer at Gillie’s, but back at Cassandra’s with a glass of urine ...
Seven months and week or so earlier, on a hazy, humid September morning, a particularly hot one if memory served, Taylor, having traveled his usual route, and having stopped for his usual beer at Gillie’s, and having wound his way up the rusted-out fire escape that led to Cassandra’s third-floor bedroom, crawled through her window and found her sitting there ... holding a glass of piss in one hand and a plastic pregnancy tester in the other. She was sitting on the side of the head of her bed, which Taylor had built the platform for, and which seemed to be floating in the sea of clothes, discs, books, plates, glasses and various other random items that she’d never once picked up off the floor in all the time that Taylor had known her. She looked like a
mannequin, sitting there, staring. Or like she was dead. She wasn’t breathing. Then she turned and looked at Taylor. She didn’t say anything. Not with words.
Taylor stood there at the window a moment, looking like men often look at such times, which is kind of disbelieving and clueless.
“How the fuck could this have happened?” he asked.
Cassandra shot him a withering look. He knew exactly how this had happened, and when, and exactly why this had happened.
Six weeks earlier, so back in July now, she’d lost her Anti-Baby pills among the profusion of clothes, discs, books, and assorted other crap that was always strewn around her bedroom, and she’d had to go to the CRS and get a new package and start all over. By the time she did that, she had missed a few days (too many days, she explained to Taylor), which meant she would have to wait until she got her next period to start the new round. In the meantime, Taylor would have to wear a condom, which he wasn’t used to and had always hated. He reiterated this fact to Cassandra. She was overcome with sympathy for him.
“Grow the fuck up. It’s just for a month. ”
“I fucking hate them.”
“Join the club.”
“I’ll just pull out.”
“The fuck you will.”
Taylor stood at the window and pouted.
“Have you ever even worn one?” she grilled him.
“Of course.”
“When?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
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