"Thank you." The man was remarkably calm.
He put the gun on the small table behind him. Then he produced a gold American Eagle coin from his pocket. He held it up for everybody to see, turning it this way and that, so the camera could show both its head and its tail. He asked Marisov to examine the coin; he asked me to examine the coin.
"Call it," he said. "Heads," I said.
He caught the coin in his hand and-slapped it down on the back of his wrist.
"Heads. You win, McCarthy."
I grinned weakly. I didn't like the sound of that.
"Here. You can keep the coin. Obviously, it's your lucky coin."
It felt heavy in my fingers. I started to pocket it.
"Wait-" said Foreman. He handed me a second Eagle. "You're going to need two. Hang onto them."
Two coins? I didn't get it, but I slid them both into the pocket of my jumpsuit.
"All right," said the Honorable Reverend Dr. Daniel Jeffrey Foreman. He stepped to the edge of the platfonn and addressed the entire room. "We have established the following: We have the legal authority of the president of the United States. We have selected our two volunteers by an entirely random procedure, first by cards under your chairs, and second by the toss of a coin. We have produced a gun and loaded it and demonstrated to the satisfaction of everyone in the room that this is a lethal weapon. We have recorded all of this in nondestructible memory, two copies. Neither copy is on the premises and neither copy can be altered. Both copies are available for review by appropriately authorized personnel, including the president of the United States of America."
Foreman stopped.
He looked at me. He looked at Marisov. He looked at the room. "Are there any questions?"
He waited.
From the back of the room, someone called, "Yes! What is the goddamn Survival Process anyway?"
Foreman looked at his watch. He looked at the assistants in the back of the room and grinned. "Right on schedule. Did I call it or did I call it? Who wins the pool?"
The Course Manager answered. "You do. Again."
Foreman looked satisfied with himself. He turned his attention back to the roomful of trainees.
"All right," he said. His voice was oddly calm. "The process is this. I am going to tell Colonel Marisov of the United Nations Marine Corps to shoot Captain McCarthy of the United States Special Forces Warrant Agency. This process will continue until Captain McCarthy is dead."
"Excuse me?" I said. "It sounded like you said . . . "
"I will repeat it." Again, he spoke in that very odd tone. I listened as hard as I could. I was certain I was missing something. "I am going to tell Colonel Marisov to shoot Captain McCarthy. If Colonel Marisov refuses, I will begin selecting people at random until we find someone who is willing to shoot Captain McCarthy. The Survival Process will continue until Captain McCarthy is dead."
I hadn't missed a thing.
There was an incredible drumming in my ears. I heard myself saying, "That's what I thought you said- "
And then I passed out.
23
Food of the Gods
"A baby is the human race's way of insisting that the universe give it another chance."
-SOLOMON SHORT
All of us were a little dazed after that.
For days afterward, we moved around the camp glassy-eyed and stunned. Sometimes we forgot to dress or eat. We didn't see Jason for three days.
So much happened in that circle.
All of the circles before had merely been practice., Like an orchestra. tuning itself, we had been rehearsing this part of the Revelation and that part of the Revelation, not knowing how all the parts would fit together until the moment when the whole was revealed.
I remember flashes and visions. I remember thoughts. But I remember most clearly a single experience; I remember realizing, "Oh, yes-this time, we're wearing naked ape bodies, and doing ape things."
I realized why Jason had allowed us to spend so much time experiencing ourselves as physical animals. Not because we were physical animals, but because we weren't. We were gods playing at being physical animals. That was the game, and he wanted us to play it one hundred percent. "If you cannot completely experience something," he said, "you will get stuck in it. We must complete our experience of our physical bodies so we can move beyond them." It didn't make sense to me at all, but I became an ape with Jason until I realized I had been an ape all along, pretending not to be.
And then I wasn't an ape any more. Then I was a god like Jason. And I was revealed.
I remember realizing that what we were doing here was something unprecedented on the planet. We were the first human beings to live as Chtorrans. We were taking the Chtorran experience and bringing it home. It was an incredible shock and I fell to my knees, crying with joy and terror.
Jason too went farther than he had ever been before.
He was shaken by the experience. He tried to share it with us, but it came out as babbles. He held up a hand and said, "We don't have the concepts yet." And then he buried his face in his hands and cried, "I don't have the concepts yet!" He began to sob. "I saw it, I saw it. I broke beyond my limits and saw. But the experience is so far beyond concept that to try to conceptualize it is to channel it and narrow it. It would be like calling a symphony a sound. . . ." He wept into his hands, and the rest of us wept with him.
We didn't see Jason for three days after the Revelation. He was recuperating, Marcie said. He had taken such energies into his body that he had injured himself and needed to rebuild his strength.
The camp was not the same afterward. Everything looked different to me. I had never seen the world this way before. Everybody looked different to me. I could see things inside them that I had never known were there. I could see things inside myself.
By the glow on others' faces, I knew that they too were transformed by the Revelation.
I was told I would be assigned new chores. But for now, to make myself useful to Marcie, Jessie, and George-who I still thought of as Frankenstein's monster.
I was still walking around confused. I finally went to-of all people-Frankenstein, and after I told him how much I loved him, I told him how confused I was.
He told me that was normal. "It's part of the process. Cherish it. The greater your confusion, the farther you're moving from the level of ordinariness."
He spread his big hands wide to encompass the whole world. "Confusion is the doorway to the extraordinary level. You can only get there by being willing to not know anything. Confusion is the recognition that what you think you know is not what you really know. The more confused you are, the farther you're moving. Jason says that we're always on the threshold of the extraordinary, but as soon as we assimilate it then we've fallen back into the ordinary. So we have to keep pushing ourselves into the extraordinary, over and over."
He had picked up a large carton. He handed it to me to hold, while he gathered up puppies from the floor and put them in the box. They were four weeks old and so fluffy they looked like little mops. They squeaked and yipped and tried to climb out of the box.
"So, this will wear off eventually?" I asked.
"Yes and no," he said. "You are transformed by the experience. You will always be transformed by it. Can you not have experienced something you've already experienced? Can you make it not have happened? Of course not." He put the last puppy in the box and took it from me. I followed him across the camp.
"Assimilation is normal," he said. "It's the mind figuring out and explaining and conceptualizing the experience. It's a necessary step. Because once you've assimilated an experience, you've completed it. Then you're ready to go on to the next. You're ready to push yourself into not-knowingness again. You're ready for the next breakthrough. Being at the extraordinary level is impossible. You can get there, but you can't stay there. All you can do is get there and get there and get there. Breakthrough after breakthrough after breakthrough."