And ... I could hear what they were trying to do. All of them. It was a resonance in the air, and each one of us was trying to fit his or her own particular note into that resonance.
I turned around and around, looking for the way out, feeling like I was about to dissolve. Turning
I could feel my own body vibrating in response. I wanted to add my own note. It was in my throat. It came welling up, rumbling like two heterodyning engines. "Mmmmhhhmmmmhhhm mmm.. . .
And I found it. It clicked into the chorus and I disappeared into the sound. The sound was larger than the universe. There was no me any more. Only the sound. The incredible sound. All the voices. All together. And. All of us. Echoes of me. I put my note out and it echoed in all those other throats, all those other bodies.
All the bodies,
all the hands,
all the bodies turning, not
not lost at all, not
and
turning
found
home
here
cry
happ
ing
FORTY-FOUR
THE FAT black lady was naked.
She was sitting on an old toilet, laughing and rocking happily. She saw me and began to laugh even harder. Her eyes were twinkling.
I couldn't help myself I moved closer.
Her breasts were large and voluminous. They shook like jelly with her every movement; when she laughed, they rippled with waves of hilarity. Her nipples were large and black against her chocolate skin.
Her arms were immense, thicker around than my legs. They shook too with great masses of flesh. I found myself grinning. Her thighs were massive. Her hands were balloons. I loved her. Who wouldn't?! !
I could feel her joy. It poured from her like light-I wanted to bathe in the light.
She knew I was standing in front of her, watching her. She knew I was smiling with her, but she didn't do anything except watch me and rock and laugh.
I wanted to ask her who she was-except I already knew. She couldn't hide it.
She saw it in my eyes that I knew-and she laughed even harder. She laughed and laughed at the joke. Her joke. Our joke.
I laughed too. It was a terrific joke. We looked at each other and we laughed like crazy. It was the craziest joke in the universe. There we were, the two of us, knowing what we knew about each other, each knowing how silly the other looked, each knowing how silly we looked to the other, each knowing how silly all of everything was-and we laughed and laughed ... until we fell into each other's arms.
When the fat black lady hugged you, you stayed hugged.
I was happy in her arms. She loved me. She would hold me forever. I was happy here. She laughed and held me and rocked me and cooed at me.
I whispered, "I know who you are. . . ."
And she whispered back, "And I know who you are-"
I glanced around at the others and giggled; I looked back to her and whispered again, "We're not supposed to be talking here, are we?"
She boomed with hearty guffaws then and hugged me to her massive breasts. "S'all right, hon-bun. None o' them can hear us. Not 'less we want 'em too." She stroked my hair.
Her nipple was near my mouth. I kissed it, and she laughed. I looked up at her, sheepishly. She leaned down to me and whispered, "Don't you stop that, hon-bun. You know your mamma likes it." She lifted her breast toward my mouth and--
--for an instant, I was a baby again, safe and warm and rocking in my mother's arms, happily enraptured--
Mamma loved me. Everything was all right by Mamma. Mamma says yes. Come here and let your mamma hug you, honey-bunny--
The tears were rolling down my cheeks again--
I looked up at Mamma and asked her, "Why--?"
Her face was kind, her eyes were deep. She brought her hand up to my cheeks and with her massive thumb, she gently wiped my tears away.
"Mamma," I repeated. "Why--why did you let this happen here?"
Mamma's face was sad. She whispered to me--something, but I couldn't understand the words--
"Say what, Mamma? I didn't understand--"
Her mouth was moving, but I couldn't-- The sounds weren't turning into words--
"Mamma, please--! Why?"
"Baba-baba-baba--" The black lady was babbling. She wasn't making sense.
"Mama-Mama--" I begged-
But she wasn't Mamma any more. She was just a fat black lady, dirty and smelly. Not laughing, not Mamma, not anyone I knew or wanted to know or--
I was crying again. Again and again for everything I'd lost--but especially for losing my mamma again.
Mamma, please don't leave me--Mamma--
FORTY-FIVE
WHEN I was fifteen, I discovered chess.
We had at least thirty different chess-playing programs in the house, including a copy of Grandmaster Plus, the one that finally won the title and held onto it until they changed the rules to exclude artificial intelligence. Most of the programs were public domain, or review copies that had been sent my dad.
One of the programs, Harlie, allowed you to redefine the pieces and the board, so that you could play "fairy" or nonstandard chess. I remember, I'd never wanted to get involved with chess before, because it had seemed so rigid; but with Harlie, I could redefine the game the way I thought it should be played. In my own image.
I spent my fifteenth summer inventing new chess pieces and new playing fields.
One piece was the Time Traveler. It leapt forward in time, any number of moves-but they had to be specified at the beginning. If there was a piece on the square when the Time Traveler materialized, both were destroyed. That was how you destroyed a Time Traveler. You parked a pawn on his arrival point.
Another piece was the Gulliver. Gulliver was a giant. He stood on two squares at once-but they had to be the same color, so there was always another square between them. Because the Gulliver straddled, he could only move one leg at a time. You could only kill him by moving an enemy piece between his legs. Preferably the Time Bomb.
Two other pieces were the Magician and the Troll. The Magician moved like a Bishop, but couldn't capture. It moved into position so that another piece was attacking it. If a piece attacked the Magician, even inadvertently, it died. The Troll was the only piece that was safe from the Magician because it couldn't attack anything. It was just a big inert block that could only move one square at a time. It couldn't attack and it couldn't be attacked. It was useful for getting in the way.
I also invented Ghouls and Vampires and Zombies. Ghouls moved through tunnels under the board. Vampires attacked enemy pieces and turned them into Vampires too. Once you started a Zombie moving, you couldn't stop it. It just went on forever.
In order to play a game with all these new pieces, I had to redesign the chessboard. I invented a gigantic spherical playing field with the opposing armies starting the game at opposite poles. I found I had to put in oceans then-blank areas that no piece could move through to allow for edge strategies. Very quickly, I reached the point that the game could only be played on multiple high-resolution terminals. It was the only way to keep track of what was happening on all sides of the globe at once.
Then I added civilians-pieces whose loyalties were unknown until they either enlisted on one side or the other-or were drafted. Civilians always started out as pawns.
I also randomized the initial setups and board layouts to confuse opening-book strategies. It made the opening hundred moves far more tentative.
By the end of the summer, the game was so big and so complex that the strategy part of the program was taking almost five minutes to compute its options and report back its move. And I was running the program on Dad's desktop Cray-9000 with the 2-gigaherz, multiple-gate, 256-channel optical chip, with pseudo-infinite parallel processing. I was more proud than annoyed. I was the only person I'd ever heard of who'd produced a noticeable delay out of a Cray logic processor. But when I showed it to my dad, he pointed out that most of the delay was due to unnecessary branching. I was letting the program test every possible move, sometimes as many as ten moves ahead to see if there was an advantage, before it made its choice. That was when my dad taught me about orchards-in other words, how do you grow a self-pruning matrix of logic trees? He showed me how to implement the search for live and dead branches.