think for a moment of the damage you were doing poor Sean or the injustice inflicted on poor Arnie? I'll wager you didn't. No mercy for such types as you. Six years deverbalizing. Next case."
The third defendant made only the following statement: "You suck."
Root sources were hard to locate on this. First appearance of the native second person singular pronoun was almost impossible to ascertain. Thousands laid claim to it, and each gave way, with always the elder claimant winning out.
Whoever got credit for this one stood to be a very wealthy man - or woman, as it turned out to be, though she was hardly recognizable as one. Indeed, her body hair was a little thick and her size rather diminutive. She couldn't converse well and understood little of the concept of royalties; yet they finally did get it across to her that something she made and therefore owned had been taken by another person and what's more, it was that person right there.
She went for him with a club. The court restrained her, but the judge and the prosecutor exchanged winks.
"Standard royalty," said the judge.
“Suck” was a little easier to locate, being a more modern verb. The author, an old Saxon farmer, had a hard time accepting authorship for it, as it had come out of an inadvertent slip of the tongue which he hardly remembered. Nonetheless it had stuck, and he was credited with spawning it.
The royalty was "minimum."
"Three years deverbalizing."
Deverbalizing was an interesting process. It involved being alone with one's mind, hearing everything it had to say and letting the original speakers denounce every part of it as borrowed, stolen, lifted , or sliced out of their original formulation. The ghosts then demanded royalties for each usage and the royalties were, of course, too steep to pay; hence, no one who engaged in deverbalization could afford to speak or even think anymore.
Eventually one began to realize that he never had an original thought in his life, that it was all just a rehash of what came before, and even that was a rehash. Now that earliest rehash was what was most interesting, though. The funny line between actual words and the categories of distinction the words represented: verbs - instances of actions; nouns - objects of distinction; adjectives - modifiers of nouns; adverbs - modifiers of verbs. Who could lay claim for types of distinctions: for the very word types themselves? Who would be the one to draw royalties for all uses of nouns, who for verbs? Just when did man separate from living in the present moment to become a narrator? When did he split in two?
Usually the process ended before an author was found, for by the time the prisoner got down to these archtypal word categories, he had stopped thinking, and hence no one was summoned up to lay claim to the type of category he was thinking in.
One prisoner persisted, though. Unsurprisingly, it was Sturgis, the fellow who had drawn the twelve year sentence.
One can't really describe what he was thinking of when he got to that state, though, for `words' were no longer available to him; just vague impressions of what distinctions one could make about what one was sensing: but even that was taken from him. An author was summoned and denied him permission to use them.
So he sat there in a (rather pleasant) void of thought `til his twelve years were up.
Of course that did not prevent him from reinventing the wheel, if he wished to.
He didn't.
Up From Processing
It was boring in Heaven.
For the fourth consecutive month there was absolutely nothing to do.
It was already done, and they would have laughed at his efforts to suggest anything else – it seemed to present an absurdity to them he couldn’t quite get the feel of, so he just kept his peace and didn’t make the suggestion. In fact he now could watch with full predictability the reactions of the intelligences to newcomers when newcomers asked (as they inevitably did), “Okay, I’m here. What is there for me to do?”
They laughed. Always. Every time.
He was almost laughing along now, just out of the sheer contagious vibrancy of it, but he could not yet see the joke – it seemed cruel to him, and they never explained; they just laughed and vanished, leaving the newcomer wondering what he’d said and whether he’d just blown it for another lifetime.
It never failed. He could predict it now: a newcomer would come up from Processing, ask the question, get the same laughter – always fresh – and puzzle his head (in a manner of speaking) until eventually he, too, started laughing.
That usually took six months. He’d seen many of them go over to the other side while he was here. It was always marked by the sudden ability to laugh with the others; when they could do that, he knew they’d been assimilated. He supposed it would even happen to him eventually, and had begun just waiting until he got the joke rather than wondering about it.
Until then he was not a resident, but a floater. He supposed he could go back to where he was before, but he didn’t really feel like it. He’d have to do a lot of complaining to get that to happen, and other than being bored, he had nothing to complain about.
Oh, he could always oppose being bored and thereby drag himself down, but he’d be back up in half an hour and he knew it.
So there he was.
Bored.
Such was his state when a new floater arrived. It was in the air immediately. All the intelligences massed together in close proximity to the new specimen like atmosphere around a planet. She – somehow he knew it was a she – the overtones were conspicuous - was wide-eyed in a wonderland (in a manner of speaking) and felt like she’d really accomplished something just by getting there.
He yawned and gave her two days.
They gathered together around her, waiting in perfect contentment, embracing her as she grew used to it, `til finally it happened. Oh, before the first day was out she’d perceived their presence like a cloud about her, and made the usual mistake of thinking it meant she was important; yet as time (again, figuratively speaking) went on and they only hovered about her without interacting with her as such, she began to question the significance of their presence – for they were neither advising nor requesting anything of her.
Just hovering `round.
So she began to ignore them and cast about for something to do.
He could see it happening, and he felt a mild amusement – to his surprise – at its arrival. She was doing exactly as he had done.
She got to the punchline late, late, late, late on the second day.
She had cast about, finding no objects, no other people (as such) and no plot to the events and occurrences (such as there weren’t), but rather just the big, empty, white, well-lit space – and finally demanded in a squawk of frustration: “Well, what am I supposed to DO?”
The cloud laughed in incredible delight and dispersed in a vibrant shimmer. She noticed it in shock and realized at once the presences had been there all along, waiting for her to walk into something they all found hilariously funny.
And now they were gone, and she was left wondering what was it she’d done to amuse them so.
As he hung there observing, a light snicker ran through him. He controlled it, but it came through again, in a mild aftershock. It was not her they were laughing at, he realized, but themselves. It was not laughter at the expense of, but laughter at the recognition of something.
He knew it was him he was watching – and not him in his himness or herness, but in something more fundamental than that – something that waits
and expects
and is disappointed when it doesn’t get.
When he knew what part of him that was, he could join the revel, too.
One abiding strangeness he’d noticed about this place was you couldn’t buddy up. He couldn’t go console her, or explain to her any of what he’d seen.
He could not even impress himself upon her as a presence.
Only let her be.
She doesn’t even notice me, he thought, and the thought, w
ell confirmed, was grounds for interest this time, not depression. He could observe what was left of her without fear of intruding. She would not notice him.
The breath of freedom.
He knew what she was going through: questioning - questioning what had she done, who were these people, why was she blocked from proceeding – what was so funny? That, most of all would become the burning question.
What was so funny?
He could hardly wait for the next floater.
Somehow he thought he would never get tired of the joke – and he hadn’t even gotten it yet.
Yet he had started to, like a dawning, like a wedge, like a crack that was leading to a very bright light.
And he didn’t want it to hurry.
Like a sunrise, it could come up slowly, invading him bit by bit, freeing his consciousness.
And like that same dawning, he knew the other intelligences were still getting the joke, too – it growing more profound each time they saw it played.
The humor was that it happened every time.
Every time.
They always asked, “What am I supposed to do?”
He surrendered himself to the inevitability of it. The scene would play itself over and over again. Meanwhile, what else was there to do but hang around until he fully saw himself?
And he gasped (figuratively speaking, of course) at what he’d just thought – for it was the answer to the question.
That’s what there was to do: hang around and see himself. Each new floater showed it to him more