“Why this interest in Shockies?” Brutus asked.
“You know why. My parents are Shockies.”
“Oh, yeah,” Brutus said. “I forgot.” But he hadn’t forgotten at all. He was just looking for something more to sneer about. “They went starkers when the maseni touched down, a couple of wide-eyed blubbers.”
Jessie watched the approaching Pure Earthers. “That’s right.”
The first maseni interstellar ships had landed a decade ago, in the second week of October, 1990. Within a year, the population of Earth—regardless of nationality, race, ethnic group, or education—had been roughly divided into three types of reactions. First, there were those who were profoundly shocked by these developments, but who were able to cope and reorder the nature of their lives and the limits of their perceptions of the universe. These were about forty-five percent of the population. Another forty-five percent were simply unable to adjust. These were the Shockies. They were jolted by the realization that mankind was not the most intelligent species in existence, a fact scientists had predicted for years but which the Shockies had always rejected as “hokum” or “bunkum” or “crap,” or “heresy” or “craziness”. They were further jolted to discover—thanks to the maseni—that the supernatural world actually existed, that the denizens of nightmare were real. And they were crushed to discover that God—Yahweh, Christ, Buddha, Satan, Mohammed, what have you—was not quite the being they had always thought. Not only were their patriotic and racial convictions smashed, but so was their spiritual belief… Shockies behaved in one of three ways: uncontrolled rage that led to murder, bombing, rape and rampages of undirected violence; as they had always acted before, refusing to acknowledge that the maseni existed or that their world had changed at all, no matter how much that changed world impinged on their fantasy; or they simply became catatonic, staring off into another world, unable to speak, unable to feed themselves or control their own bodily functions. Cultural shock, severe, horrible. Space-program scientists had long theorized the extent of such a sickness if an alien race should ever be found, but none of them had realized how far-reaching the illness would be.
“Are you going to bleed for them forever?” Brutus asked. “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘survival of the fittest’? Did the Cro-Magnon man weep for the Neanderthal?”
“These were my parents,” Blake said. “My mother and father. If they could have just accepted change, a little bit—”
“Then they’d have been Pure Earthers,” Brutus said. “Would you have been any happier with that?”
“I guess not.”
The Pure Earthers, at first, had no name and operated under no central organization; that development had required five years in the making. But they were all alike, and they could function coherently as a group; the Pure Earth League was an inevitable product of the maseni landing. Those citizens who had not gone starkers but who were also unable to cope, about ten percent of the world population, agitated for an end of human-maseni relations and a return to the simpler life. They were, of course, doomed to extinction. Their own children, more accustomed to seeing maseni and supernaturals in the streets, were falling away from the older folks; succeeding generations would give fewer and fewer bodies to the Cause.
“Come on!” the hell hound urged, trotting up to the Four Worlds’ main revolving door. “They’re almost back again.”
Jessie looked at the rag-tag mob of Pure Earthers, saw the old lady in the sunflower dress at a position in the front of the march, sighed and followed Brutus into the Four Worlds.
* * *
A Shambler, one of the maseni supernaturals, was the current hostess at the Four Worlds Cafe. She greeted Jessie and Brutus when they entered the ornate foyer. Shambling up to them, her amorphous face pulsing through countless lumpy variations, she said, “Welcome to the Four Worlds. May I check your coat, sir?”
“I’ll keep it, thank you,” Jessie said, not bothering to shrug out of the tailored leather jacket. “You’re new, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am,” the Shambler said. “My name’s Mabel, sir.”
“Mabel?” Brutus asked.
“Well, not really Mabel,” the Shambler admitted. “But my real maseni supernatural name is eighty-six characters long, and it really isn’t suitable for human-maseni conversation.”