"Sometimes, I think Jennie's faking," Fletcher said, "but you'll never get her to admit it. It probably doesn't matter anyway."
"Are any of them faking?" I asked.
She shook her head. "It's not something you can fake for long. Every so often we have civilians sneak in here, thinking they could take advantage of the herd-you know, thinking it would be nothing but a sexual free-for-all. But... something happens to them. They don't leave. You can only fake it for so long. Even the faking is part of the process of... enrollment." And then she added, "On the other hand, they could all be faking--but even if that were true, this would still be a real phenomenon. Whatever it is, we really don't understand it yet."
"I'm beginning to see a pattern," I said. "There's something very fascinating going on here. But just standing around watching isn't enough. It's like a-an anthropological black hole. The closer you get the more likely it is you're going to get sucked in."
"Mm hm," Fletcher nodded. "That's part of the problem. This herd started out as just another group of walking wounded. But now, it's even pulling in the observers too. Almost everyone who gets close. The cowboys aren't allowed to work more than one day a week, and even that might be too much exposure."
She added, "This herd is one of the main reasons why we're keeping the city closed. We don't know what else to do. We've even discussed... euthanasia."
"You're kidding."
She shook her head. "Nope. I'm not. I've argued against it, of course. There's something here we need to understand." She held out a hand to me. "Come on-"
"Huh? Where are we going?"
"We're going for a walk among them. It's safe."
I stared at her. "You've just told me that people are getting sucked into this herd every day, and now you want me to walk through it?"
"I'll be with you."
"That doesn't reassure me."
She held up her wrist and pointed to her watch. "Set your sleep alarm. If you start to fade, the buzzer will wake you up. I promise you, it takes more than an hour's exposure to enchant you."
"Enchant?"
"Uh huh. That's the word. Enchant. You'll see."
I grumbled something about other people's good ideas and cued my own watch. When I looked up, Fletcher was already heading toward the center of the plaza. I hurried to catch up.
"Shh," she said. "Don't run. It upsets them. We had a stampede once. It was awful. Just stand still for a minute and get the feeling of being in the herd. Don't talk. Just look and listen."
We stood there together, side by side, turning slowly and watching the other bodies circling around us. Their faces were content. It was unnerving. I felt uncomfortable. I could feel the sweat trickling down from my armpits.
The sun was hot. It felt good. I loosened the top two buttons of my shirt.
There was a naked girl standing in front of me, studying me. She had red hair and a dirty face. She could have been Peter Pan's little sister. She was smiling, but she looked puzzled too. She stepped toward me cautiously and reached out a hand. She touched my shirt. She fingered the cloth. She sniffed it. She looked up at me and sniffed me. She touched my face, let her fingers trail down past my chin to my neck and my chest. She stopped at my shirt buttons and studied them. It didn't take her long to figure it out. She unbuttoned the next button. She smiled with delight at her own cleverness.
She took one of my hands in hers and studied my fingers. She turned my hand over and over. She sniffed it. She must have liked what she smelled, because she licked my fingers. She took my hand and stroked her breasts with my fingertips. Her bosom was small, her nipples were hard.
She let go of my hand; my fingers stayed where they were. She searched my face again, curiously.
Abruptly, she stepped away from me and dropped to the ground. She got down on her hands and knees and presented her rump to me. She looked back at me and smiled and wriggled her butt.
"Uh-" I looked to Fletcher. I could feel myself flushing with embarrassment.
"Go ahead," Fletcher nodded, "if you've a mind for that sort of thing. It's only the first step toward joining the herd."
"I'll pass for now, thank you," I said.
"Most men do. The first time, anyway."
"What do you mean by that?"
She shrugged. "She's communicating on a very direct level. Much more direct than most of us are used to. That is very difficult to ignore. It is almost impossible to forget."
The girl looked back at me again, puzzled. She got up from the ground and looked at me again. She looked hurt. She wandered away sadly. I felt sorry for her, but a moment later, she was presenting herself to a teenage boy. The boy mounted her from the rear and took her quickly. She gasped and laughed, so did he.
"From an anthropological point of view-" I began. My voice cracked suddenly. My throat was dry. I cleared my throat and tried again. "Excuse me-I was going to say that what we're seeing is somewhat atypical behavior."
"At the very least," said Fletcher, tongue firmly in cheek.
"I mean-if you study ape and monkey colonies. Promiscuity isn't very often seen, is it?"
"Not like this. But maybe this isn't atypical for a human-ape colony. We don't know. We don't have enough data on human herds yet. My own theory-" She stopped herself.
"No, go on," I said.
"Well..." she said slowly. "I was going to say, my own theory is that what we're seeing here is a ... distillation, or a reflection, of our own culture, but returned to the ape level."
"Is that why they're all so horny?"
She nodded. "It could be. Our culture tends to be oversexed. These ... apes ... have learned the lesson well." And then she said, "I also think... that they're still acting out the traumas of culturization-the adaptations that the human animal has had to make for sentience. Even though they seem to have given up sentience, they're still acting the roles, the learned behaviors."
"I'm not sure I understand that."
"All right. Try it this way. Consciousness has goals of its own. Consciousness perverts instinctive behavior to accomplish those goals. On the species level, we're all mad-because we've suppressed our natural tribal behaviors to try to be sentient. Most of us are so busy pretending to be sentient that we're deliberately tuning out our own bodies, our own feelings. We're detached from ourselves. Most so-called civilized human beings act as if they're living by remote control. They operate like machines.
"I think what's happening here is a kind of a ... reaction. The plagues so damaged the world-view of these people that they gave up consciousness. Sentience didn't work any more-so they abandoned it. What we're seeing here is the remaining tribal behavior. The expression of it is no longer covert. It's all out in the open now. These ... people have become beings of pure sensory experience. They're always operating in the present, in the here and now. They have no past or future, no timebinding. They're just here, feeling. When they feel sad, they feel sad-until they're through feeling sad; then they stop and feel something else."
She stopped herself abruptly, and looked at me. "In a way, they're lucky. When we're sad, we carry it around with us forever. Most of us are still dragging around the dead bodies of our past." She looked sad for just the briefest instant, then buried it again under a facade of business-as-usual.
"Come on, this way-"
"Huh?"
She pointed.
Three huge trucks were grumbling slowly into the plaza. The herd began shifting toward them. I thought of cattle heading toward a pasture. The trucks came to a halt., The backs of the trucks opened, and out of each fell a dozen huge bales of... something yellow.
I glanced at Fletcher again.