'But I want to. . . .'
'And I don't! Go find someone else.'
'There is no one else. Please.'
'No.' Brendan sat up. 'There's going to
'You're being cruel.'
'I'm being honest. For a change. I can't take care of you forever. I won't.' Lying back down. Brendan stared at the wall. 'Why don't you go try one of the girls? You'll like it. I promise.'
'You know I can't.'
'I know you won't try. Well, now you have to. Go away.'
After a while Demogorgon did leave.
Alone again, Sealock's inner turmoil grew until it reached a point that was almost despair. Nobody to beat up, not in a mood for sex . . . shit. People, if they are fortunate, always have a few ways of dealing with inexplicable personal tumult. The accident with the reactor wasn't really bothering him ... he knew that, and knew further that he was suffering from nothing more than a sort of sourceless anxiety, unfocused, a neurosis-like reaction to his attention having been called to the fundamental directionlessness that seems to infest every human life, no matter how strongly patterned, no matter how purposeful and ordered its days seemed to be.
He rose and, going to a storage cabinet, drew out twelve brain-tap waveguides. Some people take drugs, surrender themselves to the induced monomania of utterly false visions —psychotropic chemistry can erect a structure where none exists. Brendan Sealock had Comnet, and it was a thing he understood well. The past can make the present seem like a logical end point to all that has gone before, even when it is not.
Lying down again, he plugged the jacks into his skull, each making a satisfying click as it snapped into place. Octa-deka Prime OS flooded into his soul, and he drifted down the long, dark tunnels of his life. One of the functions that he himself had designed, a sort of therapy that he'd pioneered as a late adolescent at NYU, was an absolute mental cross indexing. Now he drifted through abrilliantly colored sea of experience, watching all the things he'd done and been, all the scenes that had passed before his eyes. He waited for a meaningful moment to arrive and, after a while, one did. He seized on it, on a time nearly thirty years gone. They sent me away, he thought, and tears gathered in his eyes, unaware. The word for it is catharsis.
Brendan awoke, as he always did these days, feeling lost. There was a little surge of chest-tightening fear that died down swiftly as his dominant intellectual drivers geared into life and smothered the ever present whisperings of intuitional modes in shattered disarray. When he sat up in the soft bed, yawning and throwing back the heavy, down-filled comforter, he was himself again.
'Bren?' That came from the next bed, in a thin, high, rather nasal voice, and he looked over. Kenny Stein was a small, pudgy, flat-faced nine-year-old, with brown eyes and kinky, almost Afrolike hair. He was just another exile here, thrown out of Taho Kibbutz by his people, themselves exiled from the low-tech horrors of Southern California. Sealock didn't like the whining little shit, but then again, he did.
'Fuck off, Stein.' There was a swift wash of anger, demanding a response, on the boy's face, but he said nothing. Brendan in a bad mood was too much for him to trifle with. Out here, at the Phoenix School for Communal Exiles, they lived. There were hundreds of them, children for whom the future had temporarily darkened, sent here from the many corners of one of Earth's largest political entities. They lived here, emotional and psychological 'cripples,' waiting for their problems to be fixed by men who lurked somewhere in the darkness, waiting like defective machines to be assaulted by the mechanics of the mind.
The room they were in was part of a therapeutic program that the school had designed, geared like everything else around here toward producing sensible, cooperative citizens who could eventually be slipped back into the collective-effort society of the Deseret Enclave Complex. Ten terribly antisocial little boys lived in the room, allowed to maul one another's emotions and form the naturalistic pecking orderscommon to such groups, while sociobiological technicians used carefully designed behavior-mod pressures on them. It usually worked.
Seven of the beds were empty, the occupants fled to the comparative safety of a supervised breakfast hall, leaving the dominant clique, perennial late sleepers, to rise alone.
'Why don't you let him be, Sealock?' Tom Leahy stood up from his bed at the other end of the room, tall and angular, with tousled, curly red hair that matched his freckled, perpetually sunburned skin. He was bigger than Brendan and perhaps stronger, but not quite so fast. They'd fought, in the beginning, and Brendan had given him an efficient thrashing, but not before a knob-knuckled fist had broken his nose. Brendan started to repeat his retort, but Leahy was staring at him with his usual bleak, fearless determination. He glared, feeling a twinge of unease, and said, 'Piss on it. Why can't he leave me alone?' Stein stood up and pulled on a pair of white gym shorts. 'Because you don't want me to.' The other two stared at him, Leahy with his seemingly impenetrable incomprehension, and Brendan with a touch of dismay. Kenny was just a little bit too intelligent, with enough insight to baffle Brendan's worst advances, and he was right.
The other boys were an excellent tool against him, for, between them, they were his equal. 'Let's go eat,' he said. Perhaps, somewhere, a social technician chuckled. These little triads were always pretty entertaining, like adolescent love triangles. The focal point snapped his or her fingers, and the lovers danced. . . .
