A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

  I said, "I'm a pervert."

  She sat up across from me. She wrapped the blanket around herself to keep warm. "So, you're a pervert and I'm a bitch. We deserve each other. The good as well as the bad."

  I stared into her face. She was dead serious. I'm a pervert. She's a bitch.

  So what?

  I still loved her. And she still loved me.

  I started laughing. So did she. I held out my arms, she fell into them. "Do you know why I love you so much?"

  "Why?"

  "Because I do, I just do. You make me laugh. I never would have believed that about Colonel Lizard Tirelli, that you would have such a sense of humor. You make me feel good. And you make me feel safe. And most of all, because you accept me the way I am."

  After I finished kissing her and she finished kissing me, she said, "Listen, sweetheart, I don't have any choice in the matter. I love you because you're committed."

  "Even though I'm guilty as hell?"

  "Especially because you're guilty as hell."

  "Lizzy," I said. "There's something else I have to tell you."

  "What?"

  "I lied."

  "About what?"

  "I lied to the president of the United States today-I mean, yesterday. About the people in the camps. She asked me if they were still human. And I said no. I said it was my experience that they'd sold out their humanity. That isn't true. That was a lie. I know how human they are. I only said that because . . . because I wanted her to drop the bombs. I wanted revenge."

  "I know," she said.

  "What?"

  "I know," she repeated.

  "The thing is, I lied! And that was the issue on which the president was going to make her decision, wasn't it? About the people in the camps. And I told her they weren't people any more, I helped her justify the dropping of the bombs."

  Lizard looked grim. She said, "I know. Now, I have a confession for you. We knew you would do that. That's why we put you in front of the president. Dr. Zymph, Dr. Foreman, and a couple of other people approved it. I was there. I work with the Advisory Board, sweetheart. We wanted those bombs dropped. Listen to me: I'm just as big a jerk. I dropped them! Do you think the decision was made solely on the basis of your testimony? No, there were a lot of other reasons why those bombs had to be dropped. You were there . . ." She started laughing suddenly. "Oh, no-the irony of it-you were there to mitigate the guilt of the decision!"

  "Huh?"

  "So we wouldn't have to wallow in it-like you do!"

  And suddenly I saw it too. And we both burst out laughing!

  l rolled her under me and said, "I have never had this much fun in bed in my life! It feels positively indecent!"

  "Good! It's something else to be guilty about!" She wrapped her legs around me. "Do something perverted."

  "Okay. Where do you keep the Boy Scouts?"

  "In the fridge. Second shelf."

  "Mm. Are we going to get any sleep today?"

  "You'll sleep in October-"

  A whore with a face like a hound

  complained that her sales were down,

  till a lover named Michael

  bought her a cycle,

  and she peddled it all over town.

  69

  Hawaii

  "Genius is a perpetual notion machine."

  -SOLOMON SHORT

  "But it's such a touristy thing to do-" I protested.

  "Foreman invited us," Lizard insisted. "It's a privilege."

  I shrugged. "All right," and followed.

  We rented bicycles from a stand opposite the beach and pedaled down the busy avenue toward Diamond Head. It loomed like a big ocean wall.

  I was amazed at Foreman's energy. I had trouble keeping up with him. I began to be grateful for stop lights. "Over there," he pointed, "that's the Honolulu Zoo. You should go some time. They still have three rhinocerouses. Probably the last three in the world. It'll be something to tell your grandchildren about, won't it! There might not be any more."

  The light turned green and he pushed off again. I looked at Lizard, "I thought you said he wanted to talk to me."

  "He does." She pushed off after him.

  I muttered something unprintable and followed them both. Why bicycles? Why couldn't we have driven? I still hadn't gotten used to the weather here in Hawaii. It was either too hot or too wet, or both at the same time. The locals were saying all the rain was unseasonable. I didn't care. It felt like more excuses.

  We rode past some houses, then up a hill and halfway around the crater, up another hill, through a tunnel and out into the wide open center.

  I came to a stop just outside the tunnel. And stared. "I've never seen anything like this before."

  And then I knew I had. A long long time ago. The memory came floating back. I'd forgotten

  When I was nine years old, my mother had taken me to visit a friend of hers, a Chinese lady. The lady had shown me a bowl. She had made me sit down, then she placed it in my lap and put her hands around mine so we both held it at the same time and she told me to look into the bowl. Inside the bowl was a world, little houses of ivory, little trees of jade, little streams of ebony, little people made of gold.

  "It's a window into paradise," she said. "It took over a hundred years to make. Four generations of a single family worked on this bowl. It's very valuable, but that's not why I keep it. I keep it because it's also very very beautiful. It's my own private little world."

  I looked into that bowl and I felt awe. I couldn't pull my eyes away. I wanted to climb down into that bowl and explore every little copse and gazebo. I wanted to meet the tiny golden ladies under their delicate golden parasols. I wanted to see the ebony animals and birds in the tiny green garden. I wanted to live in that beautiful little world.

  That was the feeling I had now, looking down at the center of Diamond Head crater.

  It was a private world, a bowl both huge and tiny at the same moment. There was no sense of scale here, no sense of time. We were looking down across a lush green landscape, but not a tame one like the inside of that Chinese grandmother's jade bowl. No, this was a wilderness. It curved away from us into the distance, but the opposite wall of the crater was still too close. The bowl felt small, but the more you looked into it, the bigger it became. You could fall into this world. You could be lost in it and never be heard from again. You would not want to come back. You could hide a secret world here.

  In fact, God already had.

  The meadow was spread like a green blanket from here to forever. There were some small buildings on one edge of it. There were deep forests all around it, sprawling and lush and bright with blossoms. There were magic things living beyond those trees, I knew. And they came out on moonlit nights and danced on this broad green field, hidden away from the eyes of human beings.

  The walls of the crater were a ring of sharp hills; they surrounded us like a hug, tall and sheltering.

  The sky was brilliant.

  I was frozen in the act of looking. I couldn't tear my eyes away.

  I could feel the enchantment here, taste it, smell it. The air smelled of flowers, but there weren't any flowers near us.

  "I've never seen anything like this-" I repeated.

  Foreman said, "That's why I brought you here. Ready? Come along."

  We pedaled down to the center of the crater. There was the inevitable comfort station there. "Do you have to go?" Foreman asked.

  "No. Why?"

  "Better go now. It'll be a while before you get another chance." I looked at Lizard. She shrugged back. We did as he said. When I came out, he was locking the bicycles into a rack, I said, "I thought that locks were a thing of the past. Wasn't it you who said there's enough for everybody now?"

  He nodded. "But not all of it is in Hawaii. And part of the job of being enlightened is to not tempt others to be less than they are."

  I said, "We could have driven."

  He shook his head. "No, we couldn't. Ah, here's Lizard. Follow me."


  He led us off on a trail into the brush. I couldn't stop marveling at the lushness of the growth here. My only previous experience with craters had been the meteor crater at Winslow, Arizona, and that had been mostly barren on the inside. I hadn't known what I had expected to find here inside Diamond Head, certainly not this little piece of paradise.

  The trail suddenly turned sideways and upward. It jogged back auud forth across a rocky, tree-covered wall. Everything was dark and shady here. I realized we were hiking up to the top of the crater. I hadn't known that was possible. I followed Lizard and Foreman without much comment. I didn't wonder why they had Inwaght me here, I already knew. This was all supposed to be part of my therapy.

  Occasionally we passed people heading downward. They grinned and waved knowingly. They knew what was ahead. They'd been there. We hadn't. At least, I hadn't.

  I felt that way with Lizard and Foreman. They always knew what was ahead for me. I never seemed to.

  We broke from the brush high on a cliff wall. We could see over thc top of the crater now. The suburbs of Honolulu were scattered high on the green slopes of Oahu. The houses glimmered bright in the crystal air.

  The trail wound around, zigged and zagged, and stopped before a hole.

  "Well, come on," said Foreman. "First, the tunnel. Then the stairs." He plunged in.

  "Where does he get his energy?" I asked Lizard.

  "He creates it." She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the darkness. There was a handrail for part of the way.

  For a moment, I was absolutely blind.

  Lizard stopped me in the tunnel. She came into my arms and found my mouth with hers. The kiss was quick and passionate. "What was that for?" I gasped.

  "So you don't forget."

  "Forget what'?"

  "How much I love you."

  "How much do you love me?"

  "You'll find out."

  Foreman was waiting for us when we came out of the tunnel. "Look," he pointed.

  We were at the bottom of a concrete staircase. There were at least a thousand steps to the top. At least, it looked like that many. "Want to catch your breath before we go?"

  "Uh . . . "

  "How's your heart?"

  "I'm young."

  "You won't be when we reach the top. Let's go." He started cheerfully up.

  He was right. I was a thousand years older at the top.

  "This used to be a naval lookout station," he said. "It's over a hundred years old. They used to watch for Japanese planes from here. Now, it's mostly a weather station. And a place for tourists to picnic."

  He led us up through four levels of concrete bunker, up a set of stairs, and out onto a catwalk

  "Urk-" I said.

  "You are now two hundred and thirty-three meters above sea level," said Foreman. "Don't look if it bothers you."

  The catwalk led around a bulge of rock on the outermost edge of the highest point of the crater, to a set of stairs and a handrail. At the very top was a tiny concrete gazebo. It looked too high, too precarious, and much too easy to fall off of.

  "I, uh . . . think, I'll go back inside . . . and look from there."

  "Okay," said Foreman. He started up the last flight of stairs. Lizard followed him.

  Neither looked back at me. Goddammit.

  I hadn't even known I was this afraid of heights.

  I closed my eyes and climbed the stairs, not opening them until I reached the top.

  They were waiting for me there.

  They had spread out a blanket. Lizard was laying out a small buffet. Foreman was opening a bottle of champagne. The cork popped and shot straight out toward Waikiki. It arced high, then tumbled down into the greenery, two hundred and forty meters below.

  "Nice shot," I commented.

  Foreman handed me a glass. "Thank you." He poured for himself and Lizard. "Have you ever been here before?"

  "Uh, no."

  "That's why we brought you. When I was your age, there weren't as many stairs or handrails. That last bit of stairs, for example-that used to be a rocky slope. A bit more challenging then."

  I looked back and shuddered.

  "Spend a moment taking in the view," he said.

  "I feel like I can see almost all of Oahu from here."

  "Well, this side of it anyway. Look," he pointed. "There goes the state bird of Hawaii."

  I looked. "All I see is a lumbering old 747."

  "That's it. We've got everything that flies going back and forth between here and the mainland. They're on the ground only long enough to take on fuel and supplies. We've got planes landing every thirty seconds. We're connecting to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LAX, and San Diego. We're moving as much of the vital organs of the United States as possible out of the cancerous part of the body. We're duplicating the memory tanks in New York, Denver, and Washington, D.C. as well.

  "If you look out there," he pointed, "you can see where we've started three new artificial islands. By next year, we'll have a chain of them ten miles long. As long as the current flows, we have electricity. As long as we have electricity, we can grow all the sea domes and islands we can use. We're also putting in a floating runway exclusively for shuttle operations, but that'll be at Maui."

  "How are the locals taking it?" I asked.

  "Some of them hate it. Some of them love it." He shrugged. "Nobody likes living in a refugee camp, and there's a very good chance that's what this state will become. We're trying to get more people to move on to Australia and New Zealand, but most Americans don't want to go that far. Would you?"

  "I wouldn't want to abandon the United States to the Chtorrans, no. Here, we're still fighting back."

  "Uh-huh." Foreman smeared some chopped liver on a cracker and popped it into his mouth. "What about you?"

  "What do you mean, what about me?"

  "What do you want to do?"

  "Haven't we had this conversation once before?"

  "Uh-huh, and we'll probably have it again. The answer may have changed. What do you want to do, Jim?"

  "You know where my commitment is. I hate the worms. I want to kill them."

  "So? What?"

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "I didn't say 'So what?' I said, 'So? What?' Two different sentences. So? What next?"

  "I don't understand."

  "Wanting to kill Chtorrans isn't all, Jim. There's something else there. If all you really wanted was to kill Chtorrans, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You'd just be a killing machine. We'd point you at Chtorrans and you'd kill them. But the truth is, you don't want to kill any more, do you? You've got some very real questions about what's going on, don't you? And you want to find the answers more than you want to keep on killing. Right?"

  What he was saying was true. "Right," I agreed.

  Foreman refilled my champagne glass. He refilled Lizard's as well. She was listening to both of us, saying nothing.

  Foreman said to me, "Who are you?"

  "I'm James Edward McCarthy."

  "No, you're not. That's a name you use to identify that body."

  "Well, I'm this body then."

  "No, you're not. That's just a body that you use."

  "Well, then, I'm the person who uses this body."

  "So? Who's that? Who are you?"

  "I'm a human being!"

  "So? What's a human being?"

  I stopped. "I don't know what you want me to say."

  "I want to know who you are, Jim."

  "Well, none of my answers has been good enough for you."

  "None of your answers is who you really are. You keep saying things that show that you think you're your name, or your body, or your species. Are you really?"

  I thought about it. I didn't know what he was driving at. I said, "I don't know."

  He said, "That's right. You don't. You don't know who you really are. And you don't even know that you don't know."

  "I know now," I said. "This conversation is . . . sort of silly. I
mean, I don't know what we're talking about at all. It's like a head game."

  "Yes, it is a head game, Jim. That's why God gave you a head. You can't play football without a ball, you can't play head games without a head. That's all it's good for. Now, let me ask you the next question. Now that you know that you don't know who you really are, what are you going to do about it?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do."

  "No, I don't."

  "Saying you don't know is what keeps you unconscious. It keeps you stuck. It lets you avoid being responsible."

  "All right. I guess I'm supposed to say that the next step is that I should find out who I really am. Except, I don't know how to do that."

  "I didn't ask you if you knew how. That wasn't the question. Have you ever noticed that most people never answer the question that's asked them. They give you the reason why they won't answer it instead."

  "What is all this about?"

  "Lizard asked me to put you into the next Mode Training. I need to know if you really want to do it. Do you?"

  I said, "I don't know."

  Foreman smiled. "Thanks for being so honest. The purpose of the training is to reveal your operating modes, so that you can be aware of them and transcend them."

  "Could you translate that into English?"

  "It's really very simple, Jim." He scratched his ear. "Let me give it to you this way. Do you know how to surprise a fish?"

  "Huh? No, how do you surprise a fish?"

  "You reach very carefully into the tank, grab it by the tail and lift it up out of the water, just high enough for it to get a very clear view of the top of the water. You'll have to watch very quickly, but if you do, you'll see that fish get a very surprised expression on its face."

  "Uh-huh." How far into his cheek was his tongue?

  "Now-whatever you do, do not put that fish back into the same tank with other fish who have not also had the same experience."

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because that poor fish is now crazy by their standards. He'll be swimming around poking all the other fish, saying, 'Hey! This is water! We're swimming in water!' They're going to look at him sideways and swim off into the corner to say, 'Poor old fellow, he used to be so sensible, till he started talking about this water stuff.' That's how the Training works.