A Rage for Revenge watc-3

by David Gerrold

  "We grab you by the tail, we lift you up out of the water you're swimming in, then we put you back in the water. You know why? You can't keep a fish out of water. It dies. The Training doesn't mean you won't be swimming in water. It just lets you see the water you're swimming in. That's called an operating conditionor a mode. The Training is the opportunity to discover your modes. Right now, you're unconscious to most of your operating states. So they run you. If you were conscious of them, you could transcend them. And you could be more responsible for the results you produce in the world.

  "The Training is about your relationship with your own life. It's about being able to get out of the water long enough to see the water you're in. You can't see it while you're in it. This is about your natural ability to make great leaps. Most people are stuck underwater, Jim. This is the opportunity to learn how to fly."

  "That doesn't tell me a lot."

  "I know. The answer is unsatisfactory. If you knew what it was, you wouldn't need to do it to find out. I could explain it to you all day, but you still wouldn't know what it is." He grinned. "Would you rather spread whipped cream all over Lizard's body or would you rather have someone explain to you how to spread whipped cream all over Lizard's body?"

  "I see the point," I said. "There's a difference between explanation and experience. We had that one in high school."

  "Uh-huh. "

  "I, uh, don't think I'm ready for it," I said.

  "Of course, you're not. Nobody ever is. Do you want to do it anyway?"

  I thought about it. I didn't know what I was saying yes to.

  I felt as if there were another gun in my mouth. Live or die?

  But . . . I loved Lizard. I would do anything for her. I looked at Lizard. She smiled at me, reassuringly.

  I said, "Yes."

  "No, that's not good enough." Foreman looked at Lizard. "Not yet, my dear. He's not ready."

  She nodded. "I see it too."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "You're willing to do it for Lizard. But I don't know yet if you're willing to do it for yourself."

  For a moment, there was a cool breeze across the top of Diamond Head. It smelled of the sea. I shivered. I said, "You're right. I don't really want to do it."

  Foreman nodded. "So, don't. There's no pressure on you."

  "Yes, there is-"

  He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.

  I looked at Lizard. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. But, I'm not completely human any more. There's things that you don't know. Neither of you. I don't feel that I should be trusted."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm deranged. Crazy. Damaged. I don't know where it started. Maybe with the renegades, maybe at Family. Did you know that I pulled the trigger on them?"

  Foreman nodded. So did Lizard. He said, "It must have been a tremendously difficult thing to do."

  "It was . . . exhilarating. I liked it. And . . ." I started to choke, ". . . I'm horrified at myself."

  "Uh-huh."

  "I liked them. They were good people. They were. They poured their love over everything and everybody. It was real. They'd even worked out how to live with the Chtorrans. They had an answer. I'm terrified that Delandro might have been right-that they were the future. Their way may be the only way that people can survive on the same planet with the Chtorrans.

  "But, see, it's also the wrong answer. It's not acceptable. I'm so confused. I've been confused since the beginning. And it only gets more confusing. The only thing I've been able to hang on to is my rage."

  I looked at Lizard. "I love you, but it isn't fair for me to let you love me; you deserve better than me. There are times when I think I know how crazy I really am. And I think I can handle myself. But I can't. I can't handle it any more. It's like that old Solomon Short quote: 'This neurotic pursuit of sanity is driving us all crazy.' "

  Foreman started laughing. So did Lizard.

  "Huh? What did I say?" I looked from one to the other.

  "No, it's all right." Foreman held up a hand. "There's something you don't know. Who do you think Solomon Short is?"

  "I never thought about it. Just some cynical old bastard who posts a quote on the network every day."

  Lizard giggled. Foreman said, "Cynical, eh? Well, I won't argue with that one; but as far as I know, my parents were married."

  "Huh-?" And then it hit me. "You're Solomon Short?"

  Foreman grinned. "You don't know the half of it, Jim."

  "Well, gosh," I said, because I couldn't think of anything else to say. "Everybody quotes you."

  "That's the idea," said Foreman. "I never said I wasn't vain. But we were talking about you, not me. We were talking about The Mode Training."

  I looked away from them both. I looked out over the sharp green hills of Hawaii. The colors were so bright here they were almost unreal. I looked back to Foreman. The breeze ruffled through his white hair, making it stand up like a crown. The top of his skull was pink and shiny. Once again, it was a question of trust.

  It was always a question of trust.

  Finally, I said, "I know what the Training is. I looked it up. It's about self-actualization. It's about being the best that you can be. It's about being truly human. It's the next step. But I can't even manage being me. How can I manage anything more?"

  Foreman considered the question. "I don't know either."

  "Well . . . what kind of an answer is that?"

  "An unsatisfactory one. Do you know that all the answers are unsatisfactory? They always will be. If you're looking for satisfaction, you're looking in the wrong place. The answers are the answers. Period. Whether you like them or not is irrelevant. Satisfaction lives somewhere else."

  "So . . . okay, then I can't do it," I said.

  "That's right," he agreed. "You're arguing for your limitations. That guarantees your failure." He added, "Too bad."

  I stood up. "Maybe we'd better go back then."

  "Okay."

  "Dammit! Aren't you going to try to convince me?"

  "No." His expression was impassive. "Why should I? You're responsible for yourself. You already know that. If you want to keep on thinking you're a failure, that's your choice too."

  "That's what Jason said," I snapped.

  Foreman nodded. "Maybe Jason was right."

  "No, he wasn't! He was wrong! I know it! I don't know how I know it, but I know it."

  "So prove it," Foreman said calmly.

  I froze. "You're manipulating me," I said softly. He shook his head.

  I glowered at him. I wanted to punch his fatuous grinning face. Lizard's too. I felt trapped in a corner.

  Foreman was impassive. "Relax, Jim. This is just a picnic. And a talk. We don't have an agreement for anything more. Lizard asked me if you could do the Training; but since you don't want to, you can't. Besides, you've already done it."

  "Huh?"

  "Delandro was one of my students ten years ago. One of the best. I'm certain that he discovered things about the Chtorrans that are true. I'm certain that everything he told you was the truth as he had experienced it. I'm certain that his Tribe was definitely a context of lovingness, despite whatever judgments any of us might care to add. I may not like the facts, but I'm certain that there is a truth behind what you say, else you-and I and Lizard-would not be so disturbed by it."

  "He tried to brainwash me."

  "And he must have succeeded. You're still crazy. Sit down." I sat.

  He moved closer, so he could reach over and put his hand on mine. "You need to abandon some old concepts, Jim. They're keeping you stuck. Delandro used the technology of The Mode Training to create a specific mode, a context of operation. It worked for his Tribe. They survived. It worked until it stopped working. Somewhere, there was a fatal error. You were merely the expression of that error. Think of it as an experiment that failed. The program crashed. It wasn't viable. But it was one more attempt on the planet to create an operating mode for human beings that guarantees survival in a Chtorr
an future.

  "You've already had the first part of the Training, the experience of transferring from one mode to another. But that's only the smallest part of it. The real training is the creation of operating modes. Call it programming the human machinery."

  "I want to do the Training to be deprogrammed," I said.

  "There is no deprogramming. All there is, is shifting from the operation of one program to another. A computer that isn't running a program is a dead-and useless-machine.

  "I'm going to give you the good news now. If you know this fact, then you can create programs of joy and satisfaction."

  "I don't like it."

  "I didn't ask you to like it. Just know it." He sighed. "Let me give you one more piece of bad news that may put some of this in perspective. Do you know what the natural state of humanity really is?"

  I shook my head.

  "The cult. That's the impolite term for it, but it's accurate. People need tribal identities. Veteran. Hacker. American. Fan. Employee. Parent. Grandparent. Writer. Executive. The problem with America is that it's a country that invented itself. So there aren't a lot of tribal identities. People keep borrowing identities from other sources. Religious ones are great, especially some of the Eastern disciplines. Martial arts. Creative Anachrony. Transformational Communities. Political movements. Genre fanatics. Sexual communities. We use the word cult to identify the ones that are alien to us, and we ignore the real truth that people need to belong to tribes in order to provide a context for their identities. Without your family, tribe, nation, or context, you don't know who you are. That's why you have to belong to something.

  "Break away from one something and become part of another and you're reprogramming your operating context and the identity that operates inside that context. We call that being seduced by a cult, because it threatens us. It suggests that there's something wrong or weak or inappropriate about our identities. It suggests that we're not right. So we call it a cult and make it as wrong as we can so that the people close to us won't want to do it, won't desert us, won't insult or damage our contexts. We do it to preserve our identities, right or wrong. But this is the bad news, Jim. It's always wrong. Because you are not your context."

  I chewed that thought over. Foreman was right. I didn't like it. "So, all you're doing is replacing one cult with another?" I asked.

  He nodded wryly. "You can look at it that way. It wouldn't be inaccurate. But The Mode Training is an attempt to go beyond the limitations of living inside a cult to the possibilities that are available when you can create any context or cult you need."

  "So, it's all brainwashing?"

  "Jim, forget that word. All education is reprogramming. All transformation is reprogramming. First we find out what you know; then we identify what's inaccurate or inappropriate. Then we devalue your investment in it so that we can replace it with the correct information. A lot of times, it also means devaluing the context around the information and replacing that with a more appropriate one. This is what you do whether you're learning trigonometry or French or Catholicism. Yes, it's reprogramming. The same way you reprogram a computer. You're a machine, Jim. It's all bad news. So, what are you going to do about it?"

  I looked him straight in the eye. "I don't know," I said. I said it with finality.

  "Fair enough," said Foreman. "When you get bored with not knowing and start getting curious about what's on the other side-and I know you will-then come see me. The next Training starts in ten days. I'll hold a chair for you."

  He stood up and stretched and ran a hand through his hair. He pointed along the rim of the crater. "See that little building over there? That's a comfort station. I'm going to take a walk."

  He left Lizard and me alone.

  I looked at her. "I don't like being told that what I feel for you is just a program. It makes me feel like I'm not in control."

  Her eyes were deep. She asked, "So, who wrote the program?"

  "I don't know."

  "Yes, you do."

  I looked at my love for Lizard. Oh. "I-I guess, I did."

  "You guess?"

  "I did."

  "Uh-huh. And so did I. So what?" She said, "We've been looking at the worms as biological machines and trying to figure them out. What would we discover if we turned the same mirror on ourselves? What kind of machines are we?"

  "I'm a jerk," I said. "I'm a jerk machine."

  "And I'm a nasty bitch machine," she said. "So what?"

  "I don't want to be a machine," I said.

  "I got it. That's what kind of a machine you are. The kind who doesn't want to be."

  "Uh . . ." And then I started to giggle. "I got it. I'm the kind of machine who goes around telling myself I'm not a machine. Like a little tape recorder playing my little tape, 'I'm not a machine, I'm not a machine."'

  She laughed too. And leaned over and kissed me. "You're ready to take the next step, sweetheart. You've already taken it."

  "I have?"

  "Yes, you have. You're willing to deal with bad news."

  I sighed. I looked into her eyes. "All I want is to find the way-not just the way to survive, but the way to win as well. I want to know. Is this it?"

  She understood what I was saying. "You'll let us know, afterward," she said.

  There was a young man named Levine

  who said to his lady, inclined,

  "Thanks for the spasm,

  it felt like orgasm;

  as a matter of fact, 'twas divine."

  70

  Mode: The Last Day

  "Reality is what bumps into you when you stand still with your eyes open."

  - SOLOMON SHORT

  When we entered the room, it was empty. I mean, empty.

  There was no stage, no dais, no platform. There was no podium, no music stand with a manual on it, no director's chair. There were no overhead screens. Everything had been dismantled and removed.

  There were no assistants at the doors. There were no assistants in the back of the room. There was no table for them; there were no chairs.

  There were no chairs for the trainees either; they were stacked neatly in a large closet in the back wall. The door to the closet was half-ajar when we entered. Periodically, someone would walk over, open the door, look in, look back at the rest of us in the room, look puzzled, and then do nothing; he or she would return to the growing throng standing and milling near the door.

  The room was abandoned. It was as if The Mode Training and all the people responsible for it had simply vanished during the night.

  We stood around, waiting in puzzled groups, looking at each other and wondering. We talked in low voices. Was someone going to come in and take charge soon? Had they all overslept, or had they forgotten that there was one more day to the training?

  Or maybe something serious had happened? Had the training been cancelled abruptly? Was there an emergency? If so, why hadn't they told us? We didn't know.

  What the hell was going on here?

  There was something else bothering me. For a moment, I couldn't figure out what it was. I looked to Marisov, but she shook her head; she couldn't figure it out either. I turned around slowly, trying to see what I had already seen, but hadn't consciously registered.

  There was something wrong about the room. That was part of it.

  Everything looked the same, but it wasn't. I had a feeling: if I could figure out what was wrong, it would explain everything else as well.

  It wasn't just that the room hadn't been set up or that Foreman and all the assistants weren't here. Something else was missing; something that I was used to wasn't the same

  And then I got it. The floor hadn't been swept. It wasn't dirty, but neither was it clean-and that bothered me. It made a difference. There wasn't much dirt, and only a few scraps of paper, but it seemed dirty by comparison to the way we usually found the room.

  Always before, the room had been spotless. Ready. Even the bullet holes in the walls were always repaired after the first brea
k. Today, the room was not ready. That's why it looked abandoned. We had grown accustomed to that feeling of readiness. But this wasn't a big clean space waiting to be filled anymore; instead, it was just a big empty space. The difference was profound.

  Foreman had talked about integrity almost every day. "You're either a guest on the planet or a host.

  "Guests expect to be taken care of. Guests make messes without wondering who's going to clean them up. Guests don't pay their own way. We invite guests into our homes because we enjoy their company, not because we enjoy cleaning up after them. If the cost of cleaning up after a guest becomes prohibitive, the guest becomes an enemy. Remember that.

  "Hosts are the people who take care of other people. Hosts are owners. Hosts clean up messes wherever they find them. Hosts keep their homes clean so that guests will feel welcome and taken care of.

  "The question is," Foreman had said, over and over, "Are you a guest or a host on the planet Earth? Are you leaving a trail of trash in your wake? Dropped cigarettes, candy wrappings, crumpled paper, orange peels, soft-drink containers, and all the other garbage of your life? Do your relationships look like Dachau? Are you leaving a trail of dead bodies behind you? It's all the same.

  "You're expecting someone else to clean it up. Or maybe you don't care if it ever gets cleaned up.

  "A host cleans up trash wherever he finds it-it doesn't matter who left it there. He's a host, it's his responsibility. He enters a room and cleans it up because he can't stand seeing the dirt on the floor. He takes care of his relationships because he can't stand seeing people damaged, incomplete, and in pain. A host cares about the place he lives in.

  "I live on Earth. Where do you live?" Right.

  Foreman wasn't subtle. But then he'd never promised to be. He'd only promised results. I was laughing as I went to the closet where the chairs were stored.

  As I expected, there were brooms and dustpans stashed in a corner.

  I didn't ask-there wasn't anyone to ask anyway-I just took the broom and began sweeping the floor.

  Several people turned to stare at me; a couple applauded; but after a moment, there were four of us sweeping the floor.