The Great Jones Coop Ten Gigasoul Party Read online

  It is impossible to overstress the discomforts and dangers to which a sensitive soul in these debased times is subject. So far from being an harmonious Golden Age, like that of ancient Greece or Rome, when Mankind lived in unison with Nature, respectful of and not injurious to Her, demanding not overmuch of Her bounty, this modern era is a Time of Lead, in which Nature is continually affronted, one might almost say raped, if one cared for stronger language. I myself have suffered continuously from the impediments, the very “improvements” of modern life, to which clings a nearly visible miasma of ill will. Every newfangled device I have ever attempted to incorporate into my life—through the mistaken desire to seem au courant—has rebelled and turned on me, drowning me in a sea of misfortune. My life has literally been almost forfeit on a number of occasions too bizarre to recount. Even the simple implements of an earlier age seem to possess a positive hatred of my touch.

  I do not consider myself to be an overly ham-handed fellow, and was long at a loss to explain why I, seemingly alone of my contemporaries, had to suffer these indignities. At last, after much laborious cogitation, I have formulated a theory as to my misfortunes.

  I have always, since my days in knee-pants, been a sensitive soul who found the abode of Nature a cheerful, comforting place. Amidst Nature, I always felt I could discern her proud and sovereign peacefulness. If we posit that the spirit I intuited has some external reality—as the best classical minds assure us—and further, that those portions of Nature which are ripped from Her bosom and hammered and pounded by Man into submission, soon learn to hate humans as the agents of their separation, why should they not seek to strike back? Unfortunately for Nature, however, Mankind is armored in his ignorance and contemporary cynicism. Just as a witch doctor can harm only those who credit him with power, so can Nature take revenge only on those who—paradoxically—believe in her rightness and primacy. It is as if a goddess spurned by armored unbelievers were to take out her anger on her faithful priests.

  Perhaps she even hates us, her visionary followers, a bit more than others, since only we perceive the full magnitude of her degradation…

  Harry laid the book down on the scarred, initial-carved table. The one-room library suddenly seemed to shrink down around him like a coffin, and he was forced to flee.

  Weeks later, through research at the state historical society, he learned further details of Alden Winship’s life. His death had come in the belts of a threshing machine, as he stood talking with a neighbor. An eyewitness had recounted in the weekly paper of the time how the humming, slapping belts “seemed to reach right out for his coattails.”

  * * * *

  Alaska was far from Harry’s village. But it was safer, he hoped. As a frontier and periphery of civilization, it could not be beat. Harry’s cabin was a log affair distant from all others. He lived a simple life, trapping small animals such as rabbit and otter with snares (he dared not carry a gun) and trading their furs for his meager needs. A garden in summer supplemented his diet. He used candles for light and wood for heat. He was very careful with the axe. Most of the time, he tried not to think, or to miss people, and was content.

  One winter’s day, after a fresh snowfall, he was tramping along the path of his snares. He wore boots but not snowshoes, since the winter had barely begun. Under the dense pines, he welcomed the sun on his face.

  One certain step was his last. The jaws of the hidden bear-trap snapped shut on his right leg above the ankle, biting through flesh to bone, and he went down.

  Before losing consciousness for the first time, he wondered who had intruded on his territory. But he could not bring himself to blame the unknown human, for he was not really the agent at all.

  * * * *

  Harry’s strength was almost at an end. He felt peaceful for perhaps the first time in his life, knowing he would never have to worry about the implacable hostility of Nature again. He studied the glittery snow on the branches above him, considered the red patch beneath his leg. He was reminded of the winters of his youth, when he had found such solace amid the silence.

  Suddenly, a gigantic figure materialized before him, hovering in the frosty air. Its head was a massive block of anthracite coal, with pool’s of gas-blue fire for eyes and mouth. Tears of petroleum dripped from its sockets. Its torso was rusty iron, its arms and legs huge tree trunks with the bark still on them. Here was Nature, then, he thought, Winship’s vengeful goddess, if only as Harry’s faltering mind conceived of it, come to witness his demise.

  The deity seemed to communicate directly with his mind. Its message did not come in words, But Harry Strang grasped its import.

  It reminded him that Man, rebellious and independent as he was, constituted part of the web of life. Soon Harry’s molecules would meld with the earth. It would reclaim him as its own, and he would share its mode of being. There would no longer be enmity between them.

  And someday, the atoms that had been Harry Strang, incorporated into leather or wood or some more exotic substance, would wreak their own revenge.

  INTRO: FLASHERS

  I seem to recall being under the influence of Tom Disch’s great novel Camp Concentration when I wrote this. Also not a little of early J. G. Ballard. I also recall editor Ellen Datlow’s comment about the title of the story, when she rejected it for Omni. Something along these lines: “All I can think of is dirty old men naked under their raincoats.”

  FLASHERS

  “The upheaval of our world and the upheaval in consciousness are one and the same.”

  —Carl Jung, Modern Man In Search Of A Soul

  “If our brains were organized differently, we would experience a different reality. We would have different psychological needs. A slight change in our brains could almost be guaranteed to alter our psychology and our sociology. We would be convinced by new kinds of arguments (or perhaps we wouldn’t require convincing at all).”

  —Richard Restak, The Brain

  The beads of rain upon the bus window—fragile, wind-shifted, writhing chains—reminded Tinker of the molecular structure of neuropeptides: vasopressin, oxytocin, all those busy intermediaries that flooded the brain upon ingestion of a dose of CEEP. Staring intently at them, Tinker gradually lost cognizance of his surroundings. He was falling into a post-CEEP flashback. The soot-grimed window with its dancing beads became a horizontal glassy plain upon which he looked down like a powerless god. The snaky chains appeared to beckon with mute meaning, offering a new knowledge beyond anything Tinker’s mind could currently hold. Their ceaseless movements seemed to comprise the alphabet of a metalanguage that hovered frustratingly at the borders of comprehension. Tinker, floating above their mocking saraband, strained to unravel their meaning. His mind ached to pierce the unaccustomed veil that hung between him and diamond-bright insight. For what seemed an eternity, he exerted his perceptions and intellect in tandem, striving desperately to recreate the familiar synchrogenesis flash that had once been his whole reason for existing.

  But it was no use.

  His brain was empty of cheep.

  Through greed, he was a flasher no more, nor ever would be again.

  The normal world had his brain in a straitjacket for good.

  Reality reasserted itself. The glassy plain became merely a rain-flecked window again, outside which dingy buildings rolled by, beneath a lowering grey urban sky. The uncushioned plastic bus seat was hard beneath his buttocks. The stale air inside the bus was redolent of nervous sweat and wet wool. Faltering heaters occasionally gusted weakly against the penetrating November chill.

  Tinker glanced nervously around the bus, checking if his near-catatonic reverie had alarmed his fellow passengers. (God, how he hated riding the bus! But his withdrawal from cheep had left him unfit to drive. Imagine falling into such a fugue at fifty miles an hour...)

  Apparently the other riders had taken no notice of his aberration. Many of them seemed similarly preoccupied, sitting with grim faces, slow to respond to most stimuli. But Tinker knew that their condition was vastly different from his. No keen racing of mental gears lurked behind their abstracted faces. Rather, those blank looks betokened that they were already embarked on the long preciptious slide to a new kind of schizophrenia.

  Aparadigmatic psychosis had sunk its talons into their psyches. These people were representative of the mass mental disturbances currently spreading across the globe.

  Tinker felt contemptuous of them. They aroused in him a vast disdain for their inability to master the changing conditions of this new world they all so suddenly found themselves in.

  But as Tinker thought more closely about the matter, contempt began to be replaced by fear and guilt.

  Without cheep, would he not soon succumb to the same set of symptoms, the classic Fours A’s: autism, ambivalence, loose associations and altered affect? And were not he and the other flashers instrumental in fashioning the world where this mental virus could spread? Surely claiming that he and his fellows had been simply following governmental orders was an excuse which, in this third decade of the twenty-first century, had long been outworn.

  The answers to these questions were suddenly so obvious to Tinker that he knew he had been deliberately deluding himself until now, refusing to face up to the reality of his new position.

  Yes, one day, when the mental disciplines left over from his years as a flasher failed through lack of reinforcement, he too would fall victim to aparadigmatic psychosis.

  And yes, he and the others at the NIS were totally responsible for the current screwed-up mess the world was in.

  But—damn it!—they had only been following orders.
r />   The bus rumbled to a halt at the stop down the block from the Department of Employment Security. Tinker stood, and moved off down the aisle. While halted, the old bus began to fill with exhaust fumes through hidden cracks. The diesel odor struck Tinker like a mailed fist between the eyes, and suddenly brought with it the feeling of danger and entrapment that made his palms sweat. Another leftover from cheep. His amygdala—control node for the olfactory sense, among other, more crucial talents—had been left susceptible to hyperexcitation. Smell was now Tinker’s dominant sense, and he could be easily exalted or depressed by a vagrant odor, thanks to the amygdala’s interconnections with his hippocampus and limbic system.

  Sometimes nowadays he felt like a dog or cat, slave to his snout. It was hard to remember that once to the contrary he had always felt more than human.

  Tinker was the only one getting off here. From past weeks, he recognized several of his other passengers as fellow dolebodies, who should have been coming with him. But they sat motionless instead, lost in their private worlds that were so much more reassuring than the common one. Perhaps they would ride the bus through its route several more times before they summoned up enough will and awareness to get off.

  Knowing he could do nothing for them, and uneasily aware of what they foretold for him, Tinker descended the bus’s steps.

  A crowd was waiting to board. All dolebodies who had just left DES, they exhibited little excitement at having garnered another week’s stipend. Rather, they stood apathetically, not eager to face the ride home to the deadly boredom of unemployment and total obsolescence. For the most part, they were just realizing that they faced a life of total inutility, since even retraining was not a possibility. New waves of flasher-derived technology flooded out of the NIS daily, altering the whole employment equation in ways no program could possibly anticipate.

  Tinker shouldered through the crowd, anxious to report to DES and be away from those who reminded him so painfully of his own stature. Although what he would do after keeping his appointment, he had no idea.

  At the end of the bus queue, Tinker saw a man with one arm. He was undergoing a slo-gro.

  Tinker stopped dead.

  The slo-gro was one of his flashes.

  The stump on the man’s left side was exposed to the chilly November drizzle. Strapped around the arm-stub was a small metal pack. The end of the stump was pink with new cellular growth, stimulated by the complex electromagnetic fields generated by the pack. Soon, following the body’s own blueprints, the growth would become a totally functional regenerated arm.

  The circuitry for the pack flashed through Tinker’s mind again in its entirety. He didn’t understand it this time anymore than he had the first time. Of course, neither biology nor electronics was his field. However, experts in those areas had no more idea of why the device worked than Tinker did. Which was, at the root, the source of aparadigmatic psychosis.

  But work it did, and this man was proof.

  Tinker, managing to salvage a little pride from this sight, resumed his walk toward the DES building at a slightly brisker pace.

  Inside the cavernous building, he took his place in the long line at his station.

  At first, Tinker recalled, there had been talk of doing away with DES as a government agency. That had been years ago, when worldwide unemployment stood at only two percent, thanks to the stimulus the first flasher inputs had given to the economy. What a vibrant, exciting time that had been! It had seemed as if a real golden age were descending, borne on the wings of a miracle drug.

  But that had slipped away all too soon. As the products of the National Institute of Synchrogenesis (finally split off from the NIMH) became more and more radically unexplainable and destabilizing, unemployment had begun to swell, until now it stood at fifteen percent, with no signs of slowing.

  DES now absorbed more funds than the military.

  Tinker’s line moved forward only slowly, and he had plenty of time to ponder such matters. His thoughts were not comforting.

  At last he reached the head of the queue. A new caseworker awaited him, and Tinker sighed with exasperation, knowing that he would probably have to explain his situation to the new man, who looked improbably officious, considering the human wreckage around him. What stupid nonsense, to abide by these rules while the world was disintegrating! Why couldn’t they just pass legislation granting a minimal income to everyone? So what that some would call it socialism? But no, they had to use the same cumbersome machinery that had made sense only under much different conditions, pretending that all these poor souls here were just temporarily unemployed, and would soon find nonexistent jobs, all the while extending the benefit period time after time.

  “Your card,” the man said to Tinker. He showed traces of MS palsy that even artificial myelin couldn’t eradicate.

  Tinker presented his ID, and the man brought up Tinker’s case on his terminal. The caseworker’s bland face lost its sternness and assumed a look of utter bafflement and awe.

  “You were employed by the NIS?” he asked with amazement.

  “Yes,” Tinker admitted.

  “As a synchrogenesist?”

  “Yes,” Tinker said, knowing what would happen with his admission.

  All around him, in his line and others, applicants and clerks fall silent and turned to stare. They looked at him as if he were simultaneously devil and angel, scum and superman. Edgy and contemptuous again, denying in his mind that these people meant anything to him, Tinker raked them with his own gaze. Eyes dropped, as if to meet his would be to surrender their most private thoughts. Tinker savored this small triumph among his degradation.

  The caseworker recovered himself and continued. “You were fired. Why?”

  They loved to force him to utter the word, although Tinker knew it was right there shining on their screens.

  “Malfeasance,” he said. Then: “But I’ve been through the waiting period. I’m entitled to collect.”

  To beg, thought Tinker. Goddamn you, Thorngate!

  “All right,” said the clerk, satisfied with this obesiance. He tapped a key and the printer by his elbow stuttered out a check, which he handed to Tinker. “Continue to look for work in the following week,” he concluded.

  Tinker nodded, as if the ritualistic statement had any meaning. Then, gratefully, he left.

  The bus ride back home was as tedious as the trip out. Once in the rundown building that had become his new home when he left the Institute, Tinker ascended the gloomy stairs (smelling of boiled cabbage and hopelessness) to his drab one-room apartment. Inside it was cold. Of course—the radiators weren’t running. The refining of heating oil had practically stopped, since the introduction of heat-blox.

  Tinker moved to the small black cube—about the size of a hatbox—that sat on the floor near one wall. It had a small thumb-shaped depression in one corner, and was integrally pre-set somehow at the factory to 72 degrees. Tinker thumbed the on-spot.

  Almost instantly the room began to warm. Soon it was comfortable.

  Tinker laid a hand on the heat-blox, still amazed after all these months of use. The device was cool to the touch. It was a monolithic construct, he knew, with no interior structure and no fuel required. No one knew how it worked. There was one or more in nearly every home and office. It was Witkin’s flash.

  Tinker lay down on his lumpy, unmade cot. He put his hands behind his head, and stared at the peeling ceiling. He realized that he felt totally unconnected from his own life and the rest of the world. It was a new and disturbing feeling, the total opposite of the flasher experience. It unnerved him, and he began to quiver as he lay there.