A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

"Oh, shit!"

  ". . . for almost a year. I finally escaped. But not before I saw what they were capable of." I had to stop for a moment. I had to wipe my eyes before I could continue; I hadn't realized how much it still hurt. "I learned a lot from them, yes. Okay, I admit it. Not everything they said was totally off the deep end. But I know who they are and how dangerous they are. And I broke their brainwashing on my own."

  "You think so? You still look a little glassy-eyed to me. If I'd known . . ."

  "You'd have turned me away, right? That's the famous BettyJohn compassion."

  She hesitated. "No-but I wouldn't have trusted you near the kids either."

  "Oh, come on, B-Jay! You're talking like a goddamned reactionary. The breakthrough exercises work no matter who applies them."

  "Don't be stupid, Jim! Do you think this stuff is new to me? Give me a break! Most of the crap you're repeating is leftovers from the Technology of Consciousness Movement of the last century! Shit, you guys are all alike; you think you just invented enlightenment last week."

  She pointed a finger at me, jabbing me hard in the chest. "Let me tell you something. Personal enlightenment seminars were the big fad when I was in college. They called them Effectiveness Training and Power Sourcing and Jargon Blasting. And everybody was doing Mode. You weren't alive until you'd done Mode. I had a lot of friends who disappeared into that black hole; some came back, some didn't, but while they were under the influence, it was always the beatific smile and the patronizing 'You have to experience it to understand.' I understood what was going on then, and it hasn't changed any now. Every day, you have to have a new transformation, a new breakthrough in possibility, a new level of bullshit and psychobabble!

  "Hell, I didn't even do any of the seminars and I got sucked in for a while. I was one of the ones who was going to prove I could be just as enlightened without doing any seminars; I was too stupid to see that made me just as much a proselytizing evangelist as everybody else. And all of us were redefining our language every day, so we could map out the diverse new landscapes of responsibility. It was rabbit-hole city. Oh, we had conversations about conversation and learned about the possibilities of possibility. We got so good at it, we bludgeoned people to death with our enlightenment. We played caseworker with all of our relationships: parents, teachers, friends-and we couldn't understand why they were so repulsed when all we wanted to do was give them the gift of seeing how impoverished their lives had been. Oh, we were a self-righteous bunch of assholes.

  "We handled each other's cases all day long. We scoped each other. We handled rackets and busted numbers. We metered and bench-marked and state-mastered. We did it all. And you know what? Our lives were fucked up even worse, because now we had a new level of bullshit to explain why they didn't work. I finally got wise, when I realized the cost to my soul.

  "I didn't trust the Modies then. I trust them even less now that they're taking over the government. But most of all, I don't want Modies or neo-Revelationists or anyone else playing with these kids' heads, because these kids already have enough problems."

  She finished with a look of finality, as if there was nothing more to say on the subject. And maybe there wasn't. Her mind was made up and nobody was going to change it. Her expression was tight, as if she was daring me to respond.

  I realized something abruptly. Something I should have known all along. Betty-John was just as crazy as the rest of us, in her own charmless way.

  Of course, I wanted to believe she had it all together. I wanted to believe that someone somewhere knew exactly what they were doing and why. I wanted to know that it was possible, because if it was possible for anyone else, then maybe it was possible for me too. But maybe it wasn't possible here.

  "Well? Don't you have anything else to say?"

  I shook my head. "It wouldn't do any good. Your mind is made up. I did what I thought was right. You don't think it was right. We both want what's best for the children. We each have different ideas. But you're the one who's entrusted with the responsibility. Not me. So it's your word that has to count, not mine." I thought for a moment longer, then added, "I wanted to be of service here. I still do. I'm sorry that you don't appreciate some of what I have to offer."

  She opened her mouth and closed it just as suddenly. She looked surprised. She hadn't expected me to say what I just did. "Well," she said. "Well, I'm glad you realize it."

  I nodded. I realized it. I realized a lot more than she knew. Family was just as much a cult as Jason's Tribe was. A different philosophy, a different leader, a different purpose, a different head game-but a cult nonetheless.

  And either I wanted to be a part of it or I didn't.

  The truth was, I wasn't sure what I wanted any more.

  "I just want to help the kids," I said. And that much was true. She sighed. She ran a hand through her graying hair. She looked very tired. She shook her head in resignation. "Go do something where you can't get into any more trouble. I got your worm fences approved last night. Go put them up." Then she added, "Just stay away from me for a while. And stay away from the kids too. Even your own. I don't know how I'm going to clean up this mess. . . ."

  A lady who jogged in the breeze

  had bosoms that flapped to her knees.

  Said she, "They're quite warm,

  they keep me dry in a storm,

  and when it snows, I use them for skis."

  39

  Worm Fences

  "Good neighbors make good fences."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  It's impossible to build a fence that will keep a worm

  Actually, out.

  A full-grown Chtorran is like a Patton-6 tank with a mouth. A half-grown worm is the mouth without the tank attached. The best you can hope to do is slow the worm down-or at least make it so painfully uncomfortable for the creature to go over, under, or through the barricade that it looks for a way to go around instead.

  The idea is to make the price of lunch higher than the worm is willing to pay.

  That's what Jack Balaban and I were doing.

  Using Duke's name and number again, I requisitioned enough worm fencing to cordon off the narrowest part of the peninsula with multiple rows of razor-ribbon and punji-barriers. Sooner or later, I knew, one of Uncle Ira's accounting programs was going to catch up with me; but in the meantime, I seemed to have an unlimited credit account; that is, Duke did.

  A good fence would be tricky to install, yes, but if we were thorough, we might be able to buy ourselves a reasonable degree of safety. First, we would lay down a strip of razor-ribbon, several long coils of it, firmly anchored every half-meter by a spike in the ground. The razor-ribbon alone wouldn't stop the worms, but it would certainly stop any human beings working with worms. We needed to keep the renegades from getting to the punji-barriers; renegades had been caught hammering down breaks for their extraterrestrial partners.

  Then, the first row of punji-strip would be installed just behind the razor-ribbon. Punji-strip came in huge rolls; you unrolled it where you wanted it and spiked it into the ground. What you got was a wide strip of aluminum spikes, unevenly spaced, pointing in all directions, mostly upward. The spikes were sharp and nasty looking and coated with microencapsulated bad news: poisons, ucrve jellies, and various forms of bacteria that seemed to like the vsides of a Chtorran.

  A human being might be able to pick his way across a punji-barrier, if he were careful, but a worm could never make it. Too many clumsy little feet. The worm would rip out its belly. The average Chtorr didn't have the leverage to step over these spikes; its feet were tiny little stubs that didn't lift its weight as much as helped shuffle it forward. Punji-barriers were nasty.

  The barrier alone wouldn't kill the worm, just injure it badly; hut the stuff on the spikes could give a worm a bad case of the cold rullywobbles. And someday we'd find something that would kill them a little quicker.

  The worms knew about the barriers, of course. Most of them stayed away from them. Only a very youn
g and inexperienced worm would willingly make the attempt to cross one, and then only once; the value of the barriers was more as deterrent than as weapon.

  Behind the first punji-barrier, another row of razor-ribbon. Behind that, another punji-barrier. Behind that, more razorribbon. The theory was that the combination of the two would discourage most worms and renegades.

  The army generally recommended nine lines of razor-ribbon, separated by eight rows of punji-barriers; the army also recommended trenches and mines where possible, plus robots and field sensors. I didn't have a trench digger and I didn't want to risk planting mines. A robot would be useless here, and sensors are useless if there's no one to watch the monitors.

  So far, the statistics showed that the fences worked; even small installations, like this one, were effective enough to justify the expenditure. Some pessimists said that it was only because there were enough other good places to feed that it wasn't yet worth a worm's trouble to plow through the barriers.

  The pessimists were probably right, but I'd vote with the statistics for now.

  Fortunately, just beyond the hiking ridge the peninsula shrank to a very narrow strip of land, only thirty meters wide. Indeed, the peninsula was only a peninsula because of politics. Family had been designed and built as a long crescent island. It was also supposed to have its own independent government; but the county fathers, fearing the loss of millions of lovely tax dollars had passed an ordinance requiring that all utility cables be accessible above ground. This meant that the builders of the island would have to lay down a connecting strip to the mainland, a narrow connecting tongue of rugged, ugly rocks, and in so doing, would also put Family firmly under the jurisdiction of the aforementioned county parentage. Before the Chtorr had come, the joke had been that the people of Family wanted nothing more than to be orphans. Now the Chtorr had given them their wish. Sort of.

  My thought was to put the worm lines down just behind the rocks and hope that no worm would want to cross the rocks and the fence. The rocks were pretty nasty just by themselves. On the other hand, if a worm was determined enough to make it over the rocks, then it probably wasn't going to be stopped by the worm fence either.

  Maybe Betty-John was right. Maybe I was being paranoid. And maybe I still woke up in the middle of the night, shivering and thinking of Jason and Orrie and Jessie.

  No. I had to vote with the statistics.

  I voted with three rows of razor-ribbon and two of punji-that was all we could afford to install-and a heartfelt prayer that it would be enough to deter.

  Now, if only the worms would agree with me. We started early in the morning. Tommy and me, Jack and Dove.

  Jack Balaban was a dour looking man with a Welsh accent so thick he was nearly incomprehensible half the time. He had a slight stoop to his body, as if life had been beating on him for several decades, but he was surprisingly tender toward Dove.

  Dove was a year older and half a head taller than Tommy. He wasn't exactly mute, but preferred to speak in sounds, whistles, and noises instead of words.

  When Dove saw a car, he would point and make the shrill whine of a turbine. If he saw a plane or a chopper, he would make appropriate engine sounds. He could describe floaters, boats, jet skis, motorcycles, and off-road vehicles this way. He was also fond of imitating the electronic chime of the telephone, startling people to their feet, until they realized it was only Dove again. His repertoire also included an astonishing range of explosions, warbles, wheeps, and whistles.

  Apparently, this skill had rubbed off on Jack, because the two of them had developed their own language of sound effects and conversed not so much in words as in noises.

  When I was around, however, both of them shut up. I finally confronted Jack with it.

  He shook his head and denied it. "I don't dislike yeh, Jim. I don't like yeh much, but I don't dislike yeh either. Just don't care much either way, I don't."

  "Is it something I've done?"

  Jack thought about it a moment, stroking his mustache. "Na." He pulled on a pair of thick gloves and picked up a coil of razor-ribbon he had been laying out. He resumed uncoiling it across the grass.

  I picked up the gas-hammer and followed him. "Well then, what is it?"

  "Do yeh have to be liked by everybody yeh know?" he asked.

  "If someone doesn't like me, I'd like to know why," I said. "If I'm doing something wrong, I'd like to know, so I can stop doing it."

  "You're just like all Americans," he said. "You're too worried about who likes you, and not enough concerned with gettin' the job done."

  I thought about that.

  Maybe he was right. But maybe not. I thought I was more concerned with results than with making friends. Certainly, I'd had my share of arguments to prove it.

  "I don't think that's so," I said. "We're out here doing this job right now because I pressured Betty-John. And I don't think she likes me very much anymore because of it."

  "Yeh," he acknowledged. "That's the other side of it. When yeh do finally decide to work for results, yeh don't care who yeh walk over."

  I decided that Jack didn't have a very clear-cut philosophy behind his argument. He was just going to say whatever he needed to say to justify his dislike for me, and if the facts disagreed with his opinions, he wouldn't alter his opinion; he'd alter his justification.

  We worked in silence for a while. It was hard work shooting the anchoring spikes into the ground; even with the gas-hammer. Abruptly, Jack said, "Yeh never properly mourned your mum, did yeh?"

  "What's it to you?" I snapped.

  Jack shook his head. "Nuthin'."

  And then, the nickel dropped. I straightened and looked across at him. His expression was dark and unpleasant.

  "You were sleeping with her, weren't you?" I asked.

  He didn't answer. He was wrestling with the coil of razor-ribbon. But I knew it was the truth by the way he ignored me. There was something Jason had said, something about how to get the truth out of people. "Most people don't tell the truth, not really," Jason had said. "They've been trained not to. If you want to get the truth out of them, you have to startle them or get them angry. Most people only tell the truth when they get angry. So if you want to get the truth out of someone, you have to upset them first. It almost always works; the only drawback is that you'll have a really angry person on your hands for a while."

  Hmm.

  I said to Jack, "Did she give you a bargain rate? She did that for steady customers." I said it with deliberate calm.

  Jack didn't flinch. I had to give him that much.

  He laid down the roll of ribbon, straightened, brushed off his hands, and looked around for the boys. Dove and Tommy were a ways away, carefully unpacking the rest of the spikes.

  Jack turned back to me. "Did yeh have to study to be an asshole or does it come naturally to yeh, Jim?" Colored by the musical lilt of his Welsh accent, the words were as pretty to listen to as they were mean.

  "She was a whore!" I said.

  "Mebbe so," he agreed, startling me. "We've all done some terrible things since this whole bad business began." He pulled off a glove and ran his hand roughly through his wavy hair, as if he was puzzling out the best way to say what he thought. "But there's still a difference between doin' terrible things and bein' a terrible person. Your mum was a fine lady, but she was lonely for your dad, and if she took her comfort where she could find it, who're yeh to sit in holy judgment? Your mum had a lot of love for these children here, and she did a lot of good things for them, and I don't much like listenin' to you spittin' on her good name."

  "You think she was good? I can tell you stories-"

  "Sure, and so can I. For every bad story yeh tell me, I could probably tell yeh six good ones to counter it."

  "You know why she had so much love to give these kids?" I could feel the blood rushing to my face. "Because she sure as hell didn't waste any of it on her own. I'll tell you how much love she had! My sister moved off to Australia, she couldn't stand my
mother's silence. And I was so pissed off at finding a different man in her bed every time I saw her, I finally stopped going to see her. You know she divorced me."

  "You divorced her. She needed you, lad."

  "That's what she said, too. She needed. Didn't you ever notice that everything was always about her and her loss, and what she needed now. She needed us to take care of her now. That's what she said. But who was going to take care of us? She wouldn't. All she did was demand. She screamed at me, every day-it was all my fault that nothing worked anymore, why couldn't I be a better son? She wouldn't leave me alone. She was driving me crazy. Why do you think I went into the army? I could have pleaded exemption, but it was the fastest way I could think of to get away from her."

  "She was grievin', lad-"

  "So was I! And she wasn't there for me, so why should I have been there for her!"

  "It's not the same, lad. You lost your dad, and that's a hard one to handle for anybody. But what she lost is so much greater than what you lost that there's no comparison. She lost her lover, her mate, her friend, her companion, her partner. You lost your dad, but she lost her whole reason for living. Everything she ever did, she did for your Dad. She was so alone without him-yeh never noticed that, did yeh? The poor woman was in such pain."

  "How do you know all this?" I demanded. I was holding one of the spikes like a club.

  "She told me, she did," Jack said. "And no, I never did sleep with her. I could have. Lots of men did. She was a lovely lady-and a lady in every sense of the word-but they'd get up in the morning and they'd leave her. And she'd be alone again. Nah, it wasn't good. But they never sat with her and listened to her, never let her say all that she had to say. She reached out for yeh, Jim. Yeh and your sister. But Maggie was mourning the loss of her children and yeh were so wrapped up in yourself that neither of yeh were hearing. She needed yeh, that's why she plucked and pulled so hard. She was goin' down without a life jacket. And then, when she needed yeh the most, yeh ran away from her. What was she to do? She started grabbing for any man who would hold her, if even for a little while. The same way any drownin' person grabs for any piece of flotsam. Yeh only saw the grabbing. Yeh never saw the person drownin'." He snorted. "Probably, because it would have meant yeh would have had to stop worryin' about your own drownin' for a while."