"Of course. Think about it. Here you are, floating in the void. You've just lost all sense of individuality, you're embedded in a community consciousness, and you could be identifying with anyone in the group at any moment in their lives. I don't know what you'd call that, but to me it's a pretty good stand-in for omniscience. Toss that at someone who isn't prepared for it, and you're darn right they're going to mistake it for being God. I thought it was the single greatest experience in my life, and I hope you'll feel the same way."
Katzmarek pushed back into his chair, and wondered if Farragut was right about her being a nutcase after all.
* * *
By the afternoon of the public face-off between congressmen Woburn and Corbham, their deft exploitation of the media had whipped the expected crowd into a matched set of hair-trigger cheering sections. Each of them had held rallies prior to the televised debate, at which they honed their call-and-response control over the human megaphones who would be echoing and amplifying their carefully field-tested arguments in lock-step reflection of the sound-bites that had been fed to the media. Each of them was emotionally invested in the views that they would be arguing, though doing so was newer to Woburn than it was to his Republican opponent. And each of them believed that winning this intentionally freewheeling debate would stand him in good stead to be nominated for president at some point. There was a lot at stake, and the media were making even more of it in order to drive up their audiences and ad revenues.
Katzmarek and Heuff stood near the entrance to the new high-tech sports stadium, watching the excited crowd streaming in.
"I don't think I have to tell you," he said, fingering a new quarter, "how incredibly nervous about this I am."
She smiled easily and glanced at a few of the people walking past. "You'll be okay. Trust me. Either nothing will happen, in which case we can either wait for a new opportunity or try to force one, or a good part of this crowd will melt into an egoless stew, and nobody will be able to claim that Farragut had anything to do with it. Come on, flip it."
He brought his hand up and opened his palm. "Okay. Heads I take Woburn, tails it's Corbham."
It was Woburn.
She wished him well, and disappeared into the crowd, close behind a knot of Corbham supporters who were taunting those they passed with the catchphrases they'd been fed by the right-wing media.
Bernard Katzmarek closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He thought about Randolph Carter, and about the shadowy shapes he had encountered on his fictional journey beyond the gates, the guides who had helped to make sense of what was happening to him. Then he stepped into the image, and, as Gina had directed, faced Carter as one of those guides. It was an unsettling feeling, but she had assured him that practicing it beforehand would give him a place to stand when the world closed in on itself and he slipped into the illimitable darkness of the fractal social void.
Emerging from his reverie, he opened his eyes, and realized that more time had passed than he had realized. The crowd had thinned considerably, and echoing waves of concerted voices were falling over one another in the stadium before which he stood.
Steeling himself, he strode forward, and let his ears lead him to the loudest, most insistent source of the carefully crafted catchphrases that expressed the humanity of spreading a social safety net beneath the populace. He started mouthing the lines before he emerged into the vast bowl of the indoor sports stadium, and eagerly gave voice to them as he found a seat. By the time the announcer greeted the assembled crowd, he was unselfconsciously screaming at the people who were just as determinedly denouncing government support as pandering to the fallen. His heart raced, his voice cracked, and his spirits soared.
In the lull, that followed, those around him hastily greeted one another, offering first names and happy handshakes in exchange for the reinforcing camaraderie of communal solidarity, even if it was of the most fleeting and superficial kind. He joined in, split between wholeheartedly embracing the ideological carnage to come, and the feeling that he might soon be reaching out to those around him from the depths of a chasm few would have the faintest hope of comprehending.
Then he thought about Gina Heuff, and he spent a few moments fruitlessly scanning the crowd for a glimpse of her, before realizing that there was no point to it. If what she described really did happen, then he would not only be one with his own past and future self, but with hers and who knew how many others as well. So he sat back, and gave himself to the excitement of the verbal conflict that was getting underway on the wooden floor below, and reflected on the video screens overhead.
Each congressman in turn was given time to address the crowd, and each of them used it to good advantage. The massed gathering played the part that had been predefined for them by echoing the words they'd been fed, and directing their anger at people they might otherwise be sharing a restaurant or an emergency room with.
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