A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

  The tears were rolling down my cheeks. I hadn't realized I'd come so far. I could see exactly what she meant. And I hated her and I hated myself-because I hadn't come far enough yet to stop caring.

  Marcie let me cry until I was finished. Then she took me by the hand and led me back up the slope.

  That night she came to my bed and we made another baby. Another meal for the gods. If necessary.

  A limerick is best when it's lewd,

  gross, titillating, and crude.

  But this one is clean

  unless you are seen

  reading it aloud in the nude.

  24

  Second Thoughts

  "Discretion is the better part of survival."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  Jason looked weak. He asked me to walk with him. I realized I didn't want to.

  I said to him, "You taught me to tell the truth, Jason. Always."

  His eyes were as sharp as ever. "What's the matter, Jim?"

  "There's something wrong somewhere. I've got a nugget of doubt. Part of me still isn't committed. It's still testing. And I don't want to test any more. I just want to do my job."

  "You are doing your job, Jim. Truly." He put his arm around my shoulder. "Part of your job is to test. Do you know that? Your job is to test the truth. Always. That's how you know it's true."

  I shook my head. "It sounds good, Jason. I mean, the funny thing is, it's all so logical. I mean, it's a perfect logical trap. You led my mind down a primrose path and it stepped in the bear trap. It's caught. I can't do anything any more without knowing that it's my mind doing what it has to do so it can survive."

  "Yep," he agreed. "Annoying, isn't it? How do you think I felt when I came to my first Revelation?"

  "I never thought about that."

  "I was pissed as hell for a month."

  "Oh. I'd have thought . . ." I felt foolish. "Thanks," I said.

  "Now, let me ask you. There's something specific that you're concerned about? Right?"

  "Jessie's baby. Why did you let her do it?"

  "I didn't let her, Jim."

  "Huh? Then you disapprove?"

  "I didn't say that either. Listen carefully. It was her responsibility, Jim. She didn't ask for my permission. She didn't ask for my approval. I asked her to look at what was appropriate. After the Revelation, she came to me and told me what she thought was appropriate. She didn't ask me to do anything about it. She just told me."

  "But you agreed with it?"

  "Agreement is irrelevant."

  "You could have stopped her."

  "And that would have diminished her, Jim. She'd had her own Revelation too-just as you did-about her relationship with the new gods."

  "I guess . . . I guess I'm looking for some sign of humanity."

  "You're looking for what you think humanity is, Jim. But remember, all you have as a definition of humanity is the old node of being human. What we're up to here is creating a new mode of humanity. And what Jessie did may very well be a part of it."

  "It hurts," I admitted.

  "I know," he said.

  "Doesn't it hurt you too?"

  "Yes. I have feclings of pain and sorrow, very strong ones. I'm the baby's father."

  I stared at him. He nodded. He touched my shoulder and we kept walking. I didn't know what to say.

  Jason said, "Just remember, Jim. You're not your feelings. Your feelings are never valid justifications for your actions. If you get angry, does that justify your being violent? No. It only explains it or rationalizes it. But it doesn't let you off the hook. You are still responsible. I'm responsible for Jason over here. Jessie will be responsible for Jessie over there."

  I said, "I guess there's still too much I don't understand. It feels wrong to me."

  "I know. And it will probably continue to feel wrong for as long as you keep identifying with your old standards of human lachavior. You're going to have to give those up if you're going to live with the gods, Jim."

  I stared at the ground as we walked. "I don't know, Jason. It keeps getting harder."

  Jason clapped me on the back. "Of course it does. That's because you're getting bigger, more powerful-so you keep needing heavier loads to bear. You're growing up, Jim. Just remember this: God never gives anyone a heavier burden than they can carry."

  "How convenient."

  "Are you ready for your new job, Jim?"

  I shrugged. "I'll find out when I do it, won't I?"

  Jason laughed. "You'll be all right. Listen, we're going to be moving out before summer. We need to arrange a convoy. We need to find a new location. We've got some places in mind, but we really need to access a terminal and see what's available. What we want is a secluded ranch somewhere. We'll need fuel for the trucks, we'll need to replenish our store of rations. We'll need some frozen meat for the babies. We've just about used up the dogs. "

  "Jason?" I interrupted.

  "Yes?"

  "I know the Chtorrans are omnivorous. They can eat trees and plants and shrubs and vegetables and just about anything else. Why do we have to have meat for them?"

  "It forces their growth, Jim. Meat is high-energy food. Plants aren't. Plants are lower on the food chain. The new gods would have to spend all day foraging, all day eating, and pretty soon the countryside around here would get pretty bare. And that would show up on the satellite scans. By feeding them meat, we keep them fat and happy and that buys us enough time for us to school each other. Meat gives us the energy surplus we need to stay at the extraordinary level with the new gods."

  "Oh," I said. I was trying hard to figure out the biology of the situation-without the overlay of philosophy. It was getting harder and harder.

  "We could have a dozen babies if we had the resources to feed them. But we don't. That's why I want to find a place where we can start a food-breeding program. I think sheep or goats. There's so much we have to do. You're going to be a valuable part of it, Jim."

  "Me?"

  "Mm-hm. I'm thinking about your military background. You could access a military terminal, couldn't you?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, I'll bet we could find a lot of the information we need from the central military banks, couldn't we?"

  "I'm certain of it."

  "And supplies?"

  "Sure. The army cached supplies all over the country during the plagues. Especially in the aftermath year, when everybody was trying to put things together. The army had substations all over the place. Some of them are just sitting there forgotten. When the government started to recentralize, a lot of stations were just locked up and left. It'd be easy to list them."

  "There's a station near Atascadero. You mentioned that one once. Would that be a good place?"

  "No. That's a Special Forces base. I sort of lied about that. I wanted you to attack it, because I knew the kind of force they had there. They'd have clobbered you. No, stay away from the Atascadero base. What you want is something like . . . oh, let me see. Not Diablo. Too much radiation. Hm, Stockton's too populated still. Livermore might work. But I think the best bet is to hit one of the numbers on Interstate 5. I'll have to check the maps. "

  "Could you do it by Thursday?"

  "The day after tomorrow?"

  "Mm-hm. What we want to do is target the most likely area, und as soon as we get to a public terminal, update our maps and make u final decision."

  "I'm going with?"

  "Uh-huh. "

  "You trust me? Even with my doubts?"

  "Jim, you'll always have doubts. We both know that. So what? I'm not interested in your doubts. I'm interested in your results. Are you going to produce results for me?"

  "Of course."

  "Terrific. Then there's nothing to worry about, is there?"

  "No. I guess not."

  "You guess?" Jason smiled wryly.

  "No, I don't guess at anything anymore."

  I know of a lass who's for sale.

  She's really a nice piece of tail.


  From June to September,

  she'll devour your member,

  but the rest of the year, she's in jail.

  25

  Denial

  "The moment in which you confront your own death is the moment in which you are most totally alive."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  At least, now I understood what the two gold coins were for. They were to be placed on the eyes of my corpse.

  An old tradition. The coins were to be used by the recently deceased to pay the ferryman's toll. The assumption was that Charon, the boatman who plied the river Styx, did not give freebies.

  So I thought about that for a while.

  The traditional view of the ferry was the one derived from the Gustav Dore illustrations for Dante's Inferno; a hooded, cloaked figure standing dourly in the stern of a grim-looking gondola, poling his way across the dank, fetid Styx with dispassionate gloom.

  That was the traditional view.

  But I expected something more modern.

  With the traffic crossing the Styx these days, a Hovercraft would be far more appropriate, or maybe one of the superferries that ran between Calais and Dover. For that matter, why not just put in a toll bridge and be done with the whole tawdry business of ferries and boatmen and pennies on a dead man's eyes?

  But there would probably be an interminable wait in the customs line.

  I wondered if there would be duty-free shopping.

  What kind of souvenirs would you find in hell anyway?

  I wondered if anyone would be waiting for me. Dad? Shorty? Duke? Or, maybe . . .

  Never mind. I'd find out soon enough.

  Foreman had stepped off the platform. He was conferring quietly with the Course Manager. She nodded and returned to the back of the room. Foreman climbed back up the steps and looked at me. "You don't believe this yet, do you?"

  I blinked back to the present.

  I was still sitting in the canvas chair. I was still on the platform. I was still in The Survival Process.

  "I-I'm sorry. I was thinking."

  "Yes, that's right," Foreman agreed. "You were performing an activity or a learned behavior which you have connected to survival."

  Foreman turned to face the room. "Here's what's going to happen, I'm going to explain some things about how the mind works. Then we're going to talk about them. And we're going to a:vlk about this process. Talking about this process is the main part of the process. It will demonstrate just how firmly connected to survival all of you really are."

  My mind was wandering again. I was trying to visualize Hell. What kind of tortures could I expect? What kind of tortures did I deserve?

  My dad had once defined hell in a game, but nobody took it too seriously. It was just a game. But once, in an interview, he admitted that his vision of hell was "to be trapped forever in the Small World ride at Disneyland."

  Foreman was saying, "One of the first things that happens when the mind is confronted with information that it doesn't want to hear, or doesn't want to believe, is that the mind retreats. It goes unconscious. We saw that rather dramatically demonstrated when McCarthy here passed out.

  "But there are other kinds of unconsciousness too. Daydreaming. for example. Here's the joke. You want to notice when you go unconscious-if you can-because that thing that your mind is trying to block out is very likely the one thing you most need to hear. McCarthy, are you paying attention? Remember, this process continues until you are dead."

  I snapped to attention. There was a little laughter from the room. Had I been daydreaming again? Yes.

  "Good. McCarthy is a textbook case. But don't feel superior. It doesn't matter who we put up here on the stage: any one of you would be a textbook case. The point is, you need to stay conscious today. This may be the single most important day in your training. It's certainly the most important day for McCarthy. Right, James?"

  I was beginning to hate him. How could he talk so calmly about my death?

  "Remember when we were in Africa?" asked Foreman. "Living in trees, scratching for fleas? Remember all those millions of years of evolution that are hard-wired into your cerebral cortex? No? Well, no matter-it's there anyway. The problem is, you think because you're not conscious of it that it's not there, that somehow you can be a human being independent of your evolutionary history. I say that's bullshit. You can no more be free of your evolutionary history than a fish can be free of water. You swim in your history-and it's as transparent and invisible to you as the water is to the fish."

  Foreman grinned abruptly, as if remembering a joke. "The only difference between you and the fish is that the fish doesn't spend half his life making explanations for the other half. That's right, laugh. Laughter is another way of avoiding the issue. Reality evasion. Pretend that this doesn't have to be taken seriously. Yes-remember how we used to joke about Chtorrans and the people who claimed to have seen them?"

  "This is different!" shouted somebody.

  Foreman didn't even look up. "Raise your hand if you have something to say." He looked and pointed. "Yes? Rodman?"

  A man near the front stood up. He had long, shoulder-length hair. He looked like a Navajo Indian. Maybe he was. "This is a stunt," he said. "A very carefully prepared stunt, I'll admit. It's very convincing. But you're not really going to kill McCarthy, it'd be a waste of a good officer."

  "Those are assumptions on your part: one, that we're not going to kill McCarthy, and two, that he's a good officer. Frankly, I've heard he's a terrible officer."

  "He's still a human being!" A woman stood up without waiting to be recognized. "You can't just kill a human being."

  "I can, I have, and I will," said Foreman. "Let me demonstrate something. Every single person in this room who has ever taken a human life, regardless of the circumstances, please stand up." At least a hundred people stood up.

  Foreman nodded. "All right, remain standing. Now, if you have ever been present when a human being was violently killed, please stand up."

  At least another hundred and fifty people stood.

  "You're talking about combat situations--that's different!" The woman protested.

  "That's an assumption," Foreman replied quietly. "We don't know that those deaths occurred in a combat circumstance. It's a probable assumption because most of you think this course is filled with military officers, but it's just as possible that most of the people in this course are murderers, granted conditional reprieves from Death Row. Don't make assumptions." He waved the people back down into their seats.

  "You're horrible!" said the woman.

  "Yes, I am. So, what?"

  "You shouldn't be making jokes about it! This isn't funny!"

  "I agree with you. This isn't funny at all. There's a human life at stake. It was never meant to be funny. I apologize if it came off that way. The point is that violent death is not an uncommon or unusual occurrence to most of the people in this room; so the notion that there is something uncommon or unusual in what we're doing is invalid."

  "We're talking about a human life!"

  "I know that," said Foreman calmly.

  "You can't just kill him!"

  "I can. And I will-if that's what it takes to convince you that I'm serious about this process."

  "It's illegal!"

  "No, it's not." Foreman pointed to the screen where the president's order was displayed.

  "Well, it's still wrong."

  "Ahh! It's wrong. Yes: Life is right. Death is wrong. Therefore, killing is wrong. That's your survival mode speaking. If the truth be told, you personally don't give a shit whether Jim lives or dies-you're just terrified that if we establish the precedent of taking lives without apparent reason, you might find yourself in front of the gun next. Right?"

  The woman didn't answer immediately. After a bitter pause, she snarled, "You're awfully glib. What if it was you in front of the gun?"

  "It's not me in front of the gun. The question is irrelevant. This process isn't about my survival. It's about yours. And Mc
Carthy's." Abruptly, Foreman noticed that Rodman was still standing and waiting patiently. "Actually, Rodman had the floor-you're interrupting; sit down. Rodman, do you have anything else to say?"

  "No. I just wanted to say that I don't believe you. I think the gun is some kind of psychological trick to make us angry or scared. You're trying to get us to jump through your hoop. And it's already starting to work. Your conversation with her shows you scared her silly." He sat down, pleased with himself.

  "Thanks for sharing that," said Foreman. "But what you think has nothing to do with what's actually going to happen. We have a loaded gun up here. I intend to use it before the end of the day." To the rest of the room, "Rodman doesn't believe that. He thinks it's a trick. Let's see, what was it Samuel Johnson said? Oh, yes," Foreman read from the manual, " 'Depend on it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.'

  "It's still very early in the day," said Foreman. "At this point, I'm sure that most of you are still thinking that this gun is only a prop to help you 'concentrate your minds wonderfully.' Well, yes-that's part of the purpose; the gun does focus your attention; but I should also remind you what Chekhov said. That's Anton, not Pavel," Foreman frowned his annoyance at the presumed illiteracy of the group and turned the page of the manual. "'If somebody places a gun on the mantel in the first act, it must be fired before the end of the second.' I promise you that we will use this gun today."

  Foreman stopped himself to make a tangential point. "What we are doing here is demonstrating the first part of the process of dying. Denial. Most of you in this room-including even McCarthy-are refusing to accept that I am serious about this process. We will remain in the denial phase until everybody in the room is satisfied that this is not a trick. I am going to tell Colonel Marisov to shoot Captain McCarthy. This process will continue until Captain McCarthy is dead. The denial of this process is part of what you think you have to do to survive. That's why you do it. Now, where was I?" He strode back to the stand with the manual on it. "Oh, yes-I was talking about our evolutionary history.