A Day for Damnation twatc-2

by David Gerrold

  Accessible. Available.

  Beginning to feel enveloped. Like sunshine. Bathe in it. Withhold nothing. Let it go. Giggling. Feeling. Silly.

  Crazy. Mind-noise. Wondering what patterns. Meaning. Applying. Here. Confusing. Concepts. Silly. Feeling

  Shook my head. Puzzled. Startled myself back to reality-turned around slowly in confusion. Looking for?

  I wandered in a daze, I wasn't sure how long. I remember stopping to drink at the wading pool again, and I remember emptying my bladder in a sodden ditch at the east end of the park.

  I remember getting hungry and finding my way over to the trucks when they rolled into the park. I pulled off a piece of the loaf and found a place to sit and eat.

  Blinking. What was-happened?

  Moment after moment after moment, but none of them bound together-so none of them are remembered. All lost as soon as they occur. A roller coaster.

  No control.

  I'd thought I'd understood. I'd thought that I could get a sense of it. I was mistaken.

  I had to get out.

  I stood up and headed toward the Jeep. Toward where the Jeep had been parked. And Fletcher. "I'm coming out," I said. I touched the collar. "This isn't going to work. Fletcher, are you listening? I'm coming out. This is Jim." I touched the collar like an icon. My life depended on it. "Fletcher?"

  There was no reply.

  Was the collar still working?

  It didn't matter. I'd just go straight to the Jeep.

  I realized I was naked. Where had I dropped my shorts? I should look for them. I moved through the milling bodies with a purposefulness they lacked. Some of them turned to look at me. Then they turned back to their own concerns. Their food. Their mates. Their games. Most of them were naked. Turning.

  I didn't see my shorts. I gave up looking. There'd be a blanket at the Jeep anyway, or a coat. I stopped and turned around slowly, scanning the edges of the plaza. Now, where-?

  -am I?

  No, don't panic. It's all right. She's probably monitoring from a distance. That's all. She said it herself, it wouldn't be a good idea for her to stay too close to the herd.

  A note in the air. I turned to look.

  Children, humming. A tuneless hum, but

  -and the females humming too. Chorusing. An odd atonal wail. All vowels.

  Oh, no. No. That wasn't supposed to happen until tomorrow. Oh, God. The gathering. The tuning. It's accelerated again. Two days in a row now!

  Others picking up the hum. Discordance. Babbling. Trying to find the note

  I have to get out of here. Now. I turned around in panic.

  It was building rapidly. Much too fast. Remember what happened to me last time. I have to get out of here while I still remember.

  And now, the males-the voices deep growling at the bottom end of the scale. And the females are unearthly, an almost heavenly chorus. The cubs' voices are high and sweet... and curiously musical.

  And ... I could hear what they were trying to do. All of them. It was a resonance in the air, and each one of us was trying to fit his or her own particular note into that resonance.

  I turned around and around, looking for the way out, feeling like I was about to dissolve. Turning

  I could feel my own body vibrating in response. I wanted to add my own note. It was in my throat. It came welling up, rumbling like two heterodyning engines. "Mmmmhhhmmmmhhhm mmm.. . .

  And I found it. It clicked into the chorus and I disappeared into the sound. The sound was larger than the universe. There was no me any more. Only the sound. The incredible sound. All the voices. All together. And. All of us. Echoes of me. I put my note out and it echoed in all those other throats, all those other bodies.

  All the bodies,

  all the hands,

  all the bodies turning, not

  not lost at all, not

  and

  turning

  found

  home

  here

  cry

  happ

  ing

  FORTY-FOUR

  THE FAT black lady was naked.

  She was sitting on an old toilet, laughing and rocking happily. She saw me and began to laugh even harder. Her eyes were twinkling.

  I couldn't help myself I moved closer.

  Her breasts were large and voluminous. They shook like jelly with her every movement; when she laughed, they rippled with waves of hilarity. Her nipples were large and black against her chocolate skin.

  Her arms were immense, thicker around than my legs. They shook too with great masses of flesh. I found myself grinning. Her thighs were massive. Her hands were balloons. I loved her. Who wouldn't?! !

  I could feel her joy. It poured from her like light-I wanted to bathe in the light.

  She knew I was standing in front of her, watching her. She knew I was smiling with her, but she didn't do anything except watch me and rock and laugh.

  I wanted to ask her who she was-except I already knew. She couldn't hide it.

  She saw it in my eyes that I knew-and she laughed even harder. She laughed and laughed at the joke. Her joke. Our joke.

  I laughed too. It was a terrific joke. We looked at each other and we laughed like crazy. It was the craziest joke in the universe. There we were, the two of us, knowing what we knew about each other, each knowing how silly the other looked, each knowing how silly we looked to the other, each knowing how silly all of everything was-and we laughed and laughed ... until we fell into each other's arms.

  When the fat black lady hugged you, you stayed hugged.

  I was happy in her arms. She loved me. She would hold me forever. I was happy here. She laughed and held me and rocked me and cooed at me.

  I whispered, "I know who you are. . . ."

  And she whispered back, "And I know who you are-"

  I glanced around at the others and giggled; I looked back to her and whispered again, "We're not supposed to be talking here, are we?"

  She boomed with hearty guffaws then and hugged me to her massive breasts. "S'all right, hon-bun. None o' them can hear us. Not 'less we want 'em too." She stroked my hair.

  Her nipple was near my mouth. I kissed it, and she laughed. I looked up at her, sheepishly. She leaned down to me and whispered, "Don't you stop that, hon-bun. You know your mamma likes it." She lifted her breast toward my mouth and--

  --for an instant, I was a baby again, safe and warm and rocking in my mother's arms, happily enraptured--

  Mamma loved me. Everything was all right by Mamma. Mamma says yes. Come here and let your mamma hug you, honey-bunny--

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks again--

  I looked up at Mamma and asked her, "Why--?"

  Her face was kind, her eyes were deep. She brought her hand up to my cheeks and with her massive thumb, she gently wiped my tears away.

  "Mamma," I repeated. "Why--why did you let this happen here?"

  Mamma's face was sad. She whispered to me--something, but I couldn't understand the words--

  "Say what, Mamma? I didn't understand--"

  Her mouth was moving, but I couldn't-- The sounds weren't turning into words--

  "Mamma, please--! Why?"

  "Baba-baba-baba--" The black lady was babbling. She wasn't making sense.

  "Mama-Mama--" I begged-

  But she wasn't Mamma any more. She was just a fat black lady, dirty and smelly. Not laughing, not Mamma, not anyone I knew or wanted to know or--

  I was crying again. Again and again for everything I'd lost--but especially for losing my mamma again.

  Mamma, please don't leave me--Mamma--

  FORTY-FIVE

  WHEN I was fifteen, I discovered chess.

  We had at least thirty different chess-playing programs in the house, including a copy of Grandmaster Plus, the one that finally won the title and held onto it until they changed the rules to exclude artificial intelligence. Most of the programs were public domain, or review copies that had been sent my dad.

  On
e of the programs, Harlie, allowed you to redefine the pieces and the board, so that you could play "fairy" or nonstandard chess. I remember, I'd never wanted to get involved with chess before, because it had seemed so rigid; but with Harlie, I could redefine the game the way I thought it should be played. In my own image.

  I spent my fifteenth summer inventing new chess pieces and new playing fields.

  One piece was the Time Traveler. It leapt forward in time, any number of moves-but they had to be specified at the beginning. If there was a piece on the square when the Time Traveler materialized, both were destroyed. That was how you destroyed a Time Traveler. You parked a pawn on his arrival point.

  Another piece was the Gulliver. Gulliver was a giant. He stood on two squares at once-but they had to be the same color, so there was always another square between them. Because the Gulliver straddled, he could only move one leg at a time. You could only kill him by moving an enemy piece between his legs. Preferably the Time Bomb.

  Two other pieces were the Magician and the Troll. The Magician moved like a Bishop, but couldn't capture. It moved into position so that another piece was attacking it. If a piece attacked the Magician, even inadvertently, it died. The Troll was the only piece that was safe from the Magician because it couldn't attack anything. It was just a big inert block that could only move one square at a time. It couldn't attack and it couldn't be attacked. It was useful for getting in the way.

  I also invented Ghouls and Vampires and Zombies. Ghouls moved through tunnels under the board. Vampires attacked enemy pieces and turned them into Vampires too. Once you started a Zombie moving, you couldn't stop it. It just went on forever.

  In order to play a game with all these new pieces, I had to redesign the chessboard. I invented a gigantic spherical playing field with the opposing armies starting the game at opposite poles. I found I had to put in oceans then-blank areas that no piece could move through to allow for edge strategies. Very quickly, I reached the point that the game could only be played on multiple high-resolution terminals. It was the only way to keep track of what was happening on all sides of the globe at once.

  Then I added civilians-pieces whose loyalties were unknown until they either enlisted on one side or the other-or were drafted. Civilians always started out as pawns.

  I also randomized the initial setups and board layouts to confuse opening-book strategies. It made the opening hundred moves far more tentative.

  By the end of the summer, the game was so big and so complex that the strategy part of the program was taking almost five minutes to compute its options and report back its move. And I was running the program on Dad's desktop Cray-9000 with the 2-gigaherz, multiple-gate, 256-channel optical chip, with pseudo-infinite parallel processing. I was more proud than annoyed. I was the only person I'd ever heard of who'd produced a noticeable delay out of a Cray logic processor. But when I showed it to my dad, he pointed out that most of the delay was due to unnecessary branching. I was letting the program test every possible move, sometimes as many as ten moves ahead to see if there was an advantage, before it made its choice. That was when my dad taught me about orchards-in other words, how do you grow a self-pruning matrix of logic trees? He showed me how to implement the search for live and dead branches.

  The rewritten version of my fairy-chess program was reporting back its moves even before I'd lifted my fingers from the keyboard. I was very annoyed at my dad for that. Sure, he was only trying to help, and yes, I appreciated the increased speed-but the total absoluteness of the machine's response was ultimately just too intimidating. It made me feel ... stupid. As if the answer was so obvious, the machine didn't even have to consider it. I finally had to put in a random delay-but it wasn't the same. I still knew.

  When I finally sat down to actually play the game, I realized that something very interesting had happened.

  My perception of chess had shifted.

  I no longer saw the game as a board with a set of pieces moving around on it. Rather, I saw it as a set of arrays and values and overlapping matrices of shifting dimensions-and the pieces merely represented the areas of influence and control. The game was not about tactics and strategy any more-it was about options and relationships.

  I had a bizarre experience of looking at a chessboard and realizing that it and the pieces were actually unnecessary. They didn't need to exist at all. They were only placeholders in the physical universe-something with which to annotate the actual relationships which the game was truly about.

  The pieces weren't the pieces any more-they were their move patterns. A King was a square block, three squares by three. A Queen was a star-shaped radius of power. A Rook was a sliding cross. A Bishop was an X-shape. And I didn't play chess by just studying the pieces any more. I looked instead at the overlapping relationships.

  I rewrote my program one more time.

  I added an option to display the relative strength of the opposing sides. The pieces were black and white, the areas they controlled were colored red and green. The more a square was under the black control, the redder the square was shown. The more a square was under white's influence, the greener it was displayed. Squares that were equally contested showed up yellow. It became possible to look at the sphere and see all the strong and weak points all at once.

  The game was no longer chess. It had become something else. You didn't move your pieces to move pieces, but to change the coloring of the board-to control space. Controlling space was more important than capturing it. Capturing a piece tended to decrease the amount of area controlled. The game was won by juggling threats, not actions.

  That realization transformed chess for me. The game took on a whole new dimension.

  It became a game of balance more than one of action. There were very few actual battles in this game. Mostly it was minor skirmishes. When the end did come, it often came as capitulation before the inevitable. Or sometimes not. Sometimes, there was a flurry of battles that decimated both sides. That was usually quick and violent.

  I remember, my dad was impressed. He spent more time play-testing the game than I did. Then he sent it out to a play-testing company for their evaluation. I'd almost forgotten about the game when he got their report back. I had already gone back to school, so Dad made a few minor modifications according to Playco's recommendations, named the game Globall, and put it on the network. I made eighteen thousand caseys the first year. Not too shabby. After that, it tapered off to a few hundred caseys a month, which Dad insisted I put in a college trust.

  The point is that there was a moment when chess stopped being chess for me and turned into something else-a perception of the relationships that chess was actually about. The pieces disappeared and all that was left were the patterns.

  That's what happened to me in the herd. I learned to see patterns.

  FORTY-SIX

  I KEPT fading in and out of consciousness.

  My mind was like something else in my head. It was a voice that wasn't me. I had the weird sensation of not being my own mind any more. Instead, I was just a disembodied listener. All that babbling-it didn't have anything to do with me.

  It was a network of connections. A computer made of meat. A reaction machine. Something with a hundred million years of history attached to it. A reptilian cortex. A monkey's reactions.

  I remember, I started laughing, "Help me! I'm trapped inside a human being." And then I cried because it was so sad. Why a human being? Why did God make us into these things? Why hairless apes-!!

  I could see the horror of it. I had a computer inside my head. A computer that I couldn't shut off. It was a vast, uncontrollable memory-storage-and-retrieval device. It kept bubbling up with thoughts and images and emotions-all those emotions-like bubbles in a tar pit. I felt as if I were drowning. I couldn't escape from it. I wanted to stop listening to it.

  And then I did.

  All that noise-that wasn't me.

  It was as if I could see my own thoughts-so clearly-and how my body automati
cally followed each thought without question.

  The mind and body were one. The body was a robot-and I was just the soul trapped inside, watching and listening. I had no control at all. I never had. It was the machinery that ran-even the freewill machinery was automatic.

  At first, I thought--

  Thought. Hmp. That's funny. Thought. How can you think about thinking without thinking? Thinking is its own trap. But I wasn't thinking any more. I was just... looking. Looking to see what was happening.

  It was very peaceful.... It was ...

  Like--

  When I was sixteen, my dad took me to a programmers' convention in Hawaii. Globall paid for it. That was Dad's rule. You could do anything you want, if you could afford it.

  The first night we were in Hawaii, we were taken out to dinner by three of the members of the convention committee. We went to one of those revolving restaurants that they always have on top of the tallest hotels. I remember, one of the ladies asked me what I thought of Honolulu, and I told her, I couldn't figure out what it was-but it was different somehow. But I couldn't figure out what the difference was.

  She smiled and told me to look out the window. I did. I spent a long time studying the twilit streets of Honolulu below us. The cars were the same cars. The buses were the same buses. The street signs, the streetlights, all looked the same as I was familiar with in California. Even the style of architecture was familiar. It could have been a suburb of Oakland or the San Fernando Valley.

  "I'm sorry," I told her, "I can't tell what it is."

  "No billboards," she said.

  I turned back to the window and looked again. She was right. There was no outdoor advertising of any kind.

  She told me that there was a state law prohibiting signs larger than a certain size. She said that was one of the reasons Hawaii always seemed so quiet to tourists. You walk down a city street anywhere else in the world and you're bombarded with advertising, so you learn to "tune it out." All that advertising is like a steady chattering noise in your ears. In order to function, we have to make ourselves deliberately blind and deaf to that part of our environment. The advertisers know that we do this, so they increase the size, the color, the intensity and the repetitions of their ads. They give us more, better, and different ads. And we tune them out even harder.