V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone

[Robin Landseadel]

>> I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as  
>> they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had  
>> they a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.

	"Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count.
	Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane,
	down in Laguna that time? God, I knew then, I knew. . . ."

	They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going
	to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they
	supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die?
	When that was always their last big chip, when they thought
	they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the
	X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had
	to take it away from us."

	"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."

	"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill
	up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for,
	and though it kills me to say it, it's what rock and roll is becoming  
--
	just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty
	we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced
	all over again that we really are going to die. And they've got us
	again." It was the way people used to talk.

	"I'm not gonna forget," Zoyd vowed, "fuck 'em. While we had it,
	we really had some fun."

	"And they never forgave us." Mucho went to the stereo and put
	on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat
	together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon,
	one they knew and felt their hearts comforted by, though
	outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks,
	the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free
	America of their childhoods even then was turning into.