In his isolation tank in the Salt Lake City Tabernacle of Joseph, naked but for his mirror shades, Nguyen Seth sampled Jazzbeaux's memories. He had access to portions of her mind she herself was losing. He could not tell why he was fascinated with this girl. It had happened before, down through the centuries. He would join in battle or in love so closely with a human that a link was established that worked both ways. Usually, it was a woman or a very young man. Sikander the Greek, Kleopatra, the Maid of Orleans, Aphra Behn, Emily of Haworth, Lizzie B, Rupert Brooke…It took a peculiar collection of qualities to catch his mental eye. It was a weakness, he supposed, but not one he could do anything about. Especially vivid was the period in Jessamyn Bonney's life between her first meeting with the Josephite motorwagons and the burning of Spanish Fork, when she had worn his spectacles. She had left her imprint upon them, and now her mind overlapped with his whenever he wore the sacred lenses. He felt himself sinking into one of the familiar vignettes…
The Daughters of the American Revolution had been racking up a heavy rep in the past few months. They had total-stumped some US Cav in the Painted Desert, and some were saying they had scratched a Maniax Chapter in the Rockies. But after tonight, their time in the sun was Capital-O Over. And the Psychopomps would rule!
Jazzbeaux pushed a wing of hair back out of her eye, and clipped it into a topknot-tail. She took off the snazzy shades she had taken from the preacherman they'd jump-rammed this morning, and passed them back to Andrew Jean. No sense getting your scav smashed before it was fenced. She beckoned the Daughter forward with her razorfingered glove, and gave the traditional high-pitched 'pomp giggle.
The others behind her joined in, and the giggle sounded throughout the ghost town. Moroni it was called. The War Councils of the gangs had chosen it at random. It was some jerkwater zeroville in Utah nobody gave a byte about.
The Daughter didn't seem concerned. She was young, maybe seventeen, and obviously blooded. There were fightmarks on her flat face, and she had a figure that owed more to steroids and implants than nature. Her hair was dyed grey and drawn up in a bun, with two needles crossed through it. She wore a pale blue suit, skirt slit up the thigh for combat, and a white blouse. She had a cameo with a picture of George Washington at her throat, and sensible shoes with concealed switchblades. Her acne hadn't cleared up, and she was trying to look like a dowager.
More than one panzer boy had mistaken the Daughters of the American Revolution for solid citizens, tried the old mug-and-snatch routine, and wound up messily dead. The DAR were very snazz at what they did, which was remembering the founding fathers, upholding the traditional American way of life and torturing and killing people. Personally, Jazzbeaux wasn't into politics. She called a gangcult a gangcult, but the Daughters tried to sell themselves as a Conservative Pressure Group. They had a male adjunct, the Minutemen, but they were wimpo faghaggs. It was the Daughters you had to be conce with.
"Come for it, switch-bitch," Jazzbeaux hissed, "come for my knifey-knives!"
The Daughter walked forward, as calm as you please, and with a samurai movement drew the needles out of her hair. They glinted in the torchlight. They were clearly not ornamental. She grinned. Her teeth had been filed and capped with steel. Expensive dental work.
"Just you and me, babe," Jazzbeaux said, "just you and me."
The rest of the DAR cadre stood back, humming "America the Beautiful." The other Psychopomps were silent. This was a formal combat to settle a territorial dispute. Utah and Nevada were up for grabs since the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez and US Cav joint action put the Western Maniax out of business, and Jazzbeaux thought the 'pomps could gain something from a quick fight rather than a long war.
This was not a funfight. This was Serious Business. Jazzbeaux heard they did much the same thing in Jap corp boardrooms.
The Daughter drew signs in the air with her needles. They were dripping something. Psychoactive venom of some sort, Jazzbeaux had heard. Hell, her system had absorbed just about every ju-ju the GenTech labs could leak illegally onto the market, and she was still kicking. And punching, and scratching, and biting.
"You know, pretty-pretty, I hear they're talkin' about settlin' the Miss America pageant like this next anno. You get to do evenin' dress, and swimwear, and combat fatigues."
The Daughter growled.
"I wouldn't give much for your chances of winning the crown, though. You just plain ain't got the personality."
Behind her patch, the implant buzzed open, and circuitry lit up. She might need her optic burner. It always made for a grand fight finisher.
Jazzbeaux held up her ungloved hand, knuckles out, and shimmered the red metal stars implanted in her knucks. Kidstuff. The sign of The Samovar Seven, her fave Russian musickies when she was a kid. She didn't freak much to the Moscow Beat these days, but she knew Sove Stuff really got to the DAR.
"You commie slit," sneered the Daughter.
"Who preps your dialogue, sister? Neil Simon?"
Jazzbeaux hummed in the back of her throat. "Unbreakable Union of Soviet Republics…" The 'pomps caught the tune, and joined it. The Daughter's eyes narrowed. She had stars on one cheek, and stripes on the other. The President of their chapter wore a Miss Liberty spiked hat, and carried a killing torch.
"Take the witchin' slag down. Jazz-babe," shrilled Andrew Jean, her lieutenant, always the encouraging soul.
The DAR switched to "My Country 'tis of Thee." The 'pomps segued to "Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad," popularized by Vania Vanianova and the Kulture Kossacks.
The Daughter clicked her heels, and made a pass, lunging forwards. Jazzbeaux bent to one side, letting the needle pass over her shoulder, and slammed the Daughter's midriff with her knee. The spiked pad ripped through the Daughter's blouse, and grated on the armoured contour-girdle underneath. The Daughter grabbed Jazzbeaux's neck, and pulled her off her feet.
Jazzbeaux recognized the move. Her Daddy had tried it on her back in the Denver NoGo.
She bunched her fingers into a sharp cone and stabbed above the Daughter's girdle-line, aiming for the throat, but the Daughter was too fast, and chopped her wrist, deflecting the blow.
Just what her Dad used to do. "Jessa-myn, cain't you be sociable?" The low-rent ratskag. Of course, one time his reflexes had been off, and now he was recycled organs.
She danced round the bigger girl, getting a few scratches down the back of her suit, even drawing some blood. The Daughter swung round and Jazzbeaux had to take a fall to avoid the needles.
The 'pomps were chanting and shouting now, while the DAR had fallen silent. That didn't mean anything.
She was down in the dirt, rolling away from the sharp-toed kicks. The DAR had good intelligence contacts, obviously. The girl had struck her three times on the right thigh, just where the once-broken bone was, and had taken care to stay out of the field of her optic burner. Of course, she had also cut Jazzbeaux's forehead below the hairline, making her bleed into her regular eye. Anyone would have done that.
But Jazzbeaux was getting her licks in. The Daughter's left wrist was either broken or sprained, and she couldn't get a proper grip on her needle. There were spots of her own blood on her suit, so some of Jazzbeaux's licks must have missed the armour plate. The hagwitch was getting tired, breathing badly, sweating like a sow.
She used her feet, dancing away and flying back, anchoring herself to the broken lamp-post as she launched four rapid kicks to the Daughter's torso. The girl was shaken. She had dropped both her needles. Jazzbeaux caught her behind the head with a steelheel, and dropped her to the ground. She reared up, but Jazzbeaux was riding her now, knees pressed in tight. She got a full nelson, and sank her claws into the back of her neck, pressing the Daughter's face to the hard-beaten earth of the street.
Finally, the Daughter stopped moving, and Jazzbeaux stood up. Andrew Jean rushed out, and grabbed her wrist, holding her hand up in victory.
"The winnnnerrrr," Andrew Jean shouted, sloppily kissing Jazzbeaux.
She pulled her eyepatch away, and looked at the DAR. They stood impassive as the optic burner angled across them, glinting red but not yet activated.
"Is it decided?" Jazzbeaux asked, wiping the blood out of her eye.
Miss Liberty came forward and stood over her sister. The girl on the ground moaned and tried to get up on her elbows. The veiled Daughter kicked her in the side. The poison blade sank in. The fallen Daughter spasmed briefly, and slumped again, foam leaking from her mouth.
"It is decided," said Miss Liberty.
The DAR picked up the dead girl, and faded away into the darkness.
The Psychopomps pressed around her, kissing, hugging, groping, shouting.
"Jazz-beaux! Jazz-beaux! Jazz-beaux!"
The Psychopomps howled in the desert.
"Come on, let's hit Spanish Fork," Jazzbeaux shouted above the din, "I'm thirsty, and I could use some real party action tonight!"
Nguyen Seth smiled. He remembered that party himself. That was when he had been joined with Jazzbeaux. It was a shame. She was so interesting. Too few human beings were. But there was nothing for it, she would have to be killed. He was too near the Accomplishment of the Purpose to brook any distractions. Jazzbeaux would resist, of course. She was growing since Spanish Fork. She wouldn't be as easy to vanquish as she had been outside the Feelgood Saloon.
He would have Roger Duroc handle it.
Duroc had spent the last three months in France, dealing with the business of the Violent Tendency for Freedom. Operating out of a tiny flat on the Left Bank, the cell had succeeded in spreading some interesting biochemical havoc across half of the United European Community. They were only one of many small groups Nguyen Seth took an interest in, but Duroc knew the Elder saw Paris as an important flashpoint in the coming deluge and so they required more personal attention than similar factions in Johannesburg, Puerto Belgrano, Teheran, Shanghai, Mexico City, Malmo, Berlin, Belfast, Genoa or Birmingham. In the time Duroc had spent with the group, Biron, their leader, had revised the Violent Tendency manifesto countless times, while the scientific wing of the movement, Neumann and Alix, had developed some intriguing ramifications on recombinant DNA which, when injected into a shamburger, would cause the meatoid pulp to meld with the enzymes of any given stomach and expand its mass one hundredfold. Their attack on the Centre LePen hadn't been an unqualified success, but Duroc was pleased with the loss of life. And, of course, time spent in Paris meant that he could buy a new wardrobe, visit his mother and put flowers on his uncle's grave. Also, he had picked up some rare Charles Trenet and Johnny Halliday musichips.
Now, after thirty-seven hours in the air, he was touching down in Salt Lake City. It had proved expedient to fly from Orly to Casablanca, from Casablanca to Lisbon, from Lisbon to Montenegro, from Montenegro to Sacramento, and, by carrier-copter, from Sacramento to Salt Lake, with changes of passport at each stopover. He was used to such things, and he had been able to pass the time by fulfilling an old ambition, to read Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in the original English. He was less concerned with the fate of the customs official in Uruguay whose spine he had had to snap than he was with the course of the ancient empire on its long, slow descent into barbarism. Elder Seth had known Gibbon, and apparently given the Englishman a few insights into the fragility of civilization. Occasionally, a sentence or a phrase would leap out, and Duroc could hear it issuing from the Elder's lips. "History, which is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind," for instance; or, "corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty," and, most chillingly, "all that is human must be retrograde if it does not advance." Setting aside the final volume as the copter's blades slowed, Duroc mused that Gibbon was sending a message to the end of the 20th Century, a message he had never realized was implicit in his text. These were the Last Days, and soon would come the cleansing fire. When civilization was no better than barbarism, the whole experiment of humanity was at an end, and it was time to clean the slate. And afterwards…ah, afterwards, there would be such wonders…
The pilot flipped up the door, and Duroc bent to avoid the still slowly circling blades as he stepped down onto the tarmac.
Elder Beach and Elder Wiggs were waiting for him. They were of the inner circle of the Josephite Temple, and knew more than most of the True Purpose of Deseret.
"Blessed be," said Beach.
Wiggs nodded. Duroc grinned, and shook their hands in turn.
Every time he came back to Salt Lake, things had changed. More buildings were reclaimed from dereliction, more dormitories built for the resettlers flooding in daily, more facilities provided.
As they walked to the terminal, Wiggs ran through the latest developments. The television station was up and broadcasting locally, and the church was buying airtime on one of the national nets. The computer interface was secretly operational, sorting through the Mormons' old listings of everybody who had ever left a record of his or her life on earth. The water pipeline was functioning properly, and three attempts to destroy it—two by the Montana gangcults, one by Jesuits—had been thwarted. The security set-up Duroc had designed was working perfectly.
They were dedicating a new runway at the airport. Duroc took the time to watch as a stout, middle-aged man walked out onto the freshly-hardened tarmac, stripped to the waist and beaming a beatific smile. The heat haze rose from the ground as he flagellated himself with a cat o' nine chains. He had to be assisted as he flayed himself, but he got most of the skin off as easily as a cardigan, and the minister only had to help him with the last few strips. He collapsed in ecstasy, and leaked blood as seven angelic Josephite children joined their voices in "The Path of Joseph."
Beach nodded his approval. "It was well done," he said. "Brother Duroc, things proceed apace. As thou canst see, the flock are dedicated, and willing."
The honoured sacrifice was loaded onto a baggage-carrying cart and pulled away for disposal. His shape was outlined on the runway like a shadow. The choir finished the hymn, and each child in turn drew his letter in the blood. J. O. S. E. P. H.
Old Joseph Shatner, founder of the church, would have been amused.
"Joseph's work will be done," said Beach.
"Yes, indeed."
The three caught the shuttle bus from the terminal, and were driven into the city. Duroc gave a brief account of his doings in Paris, and of his important visit to Berlin. Wiggs smiled, and Beach nodded. His news was digested.
"How are things at the tabernacle?" Duroc asked.
"All is well," said Beach. "Elder Seth is under a great strain, of course. The Dark Ones are demanding, but he has been bearing up remarkably. He is much involved with the rituals these days. Miracles and wonderments."
Duroc knew what that meant. He had lived with miracles and wonderments all his life, ever since his uncle had told him something about the family's history and the eternal presence of Seth in their lives. He had made his first apport as a teenager. He didn't like the demon stuff, was happier with a phosphor grenade than a geas, but he had to know his business. Gateways were opening up here in Salt Lake, and things would be corning through the like of which had not been seen for thousands of years. They were dealing with events of Biblical proportion.
Inside the tabernacle grounds stood an X-shaped cross, and upon that hung a ragged figure that had once been a man.
"Jesuits," Wiggs snorted. "As thou canst see, Rome sends them out by the dozen. If Seth could be bothered to use his influence in Washington, we should have Sollie Ollie protest to Papa Georgi. The priests are becoming a nuisance."
They got off the shuttle, and stood at the base of the crucifix. There was a small gaggle of onlookers, mostly bored.
The crucified spy shifted, gargling from his crushed throat.
"Three days he has been up there," said Beach. "His name is Rafferty. Irish, of course. Three days, and he has not died. Jesus Christ himself did not last so long, I think."
"Jesuits are notoriously stubborn," Duroc mused.
An attendant from the tabernacle came along with a bucket and a sponge on a stick. He first used it to wipe some of the filth from the priest, then lifted the sponge to Rafferty's mouth, forcing it in.
"We can't have him dying of thirst before his flesh has been mortified enough to appease the Dark Ones," said Wiggs.
"Indeed not," agreed Beach.
Rafferty tried to spit, but swallowing was involuntary. He groaned, knowing each drop of water meant an hour or more of life. Duroc was intrigued by the man's predicament. Forbidden suicide by his religion, he could not induce death by, for instance, agitating his pierced hands and feet until loss of blood carried him away. He could only await starvation, suffocation, exposure, simple fatigue or a merciful bolt of lightning.
Wiggs and Beach chortled, making some joke about the Jesuit. Duroc considered reprimanding them. One had to respect an enemy like this. He was dying as well as the man at the airport. That could not be denied. Once, trying to resist his Destiny, Duroc had studied for the priesthood, but the vocation of his family had outweighed the call of Rome.
Duroc looked up at Rafferty, and the priest turned his head, meeting his gaze with pained, still-clear eyes. Duroc saluted the Jesuit, and the dying spy turned his eyes skyward.
"Come," said Beach, "Elder Seth is waiting."
There was sand in front of her, sand behind her, sand to the left and sand to the right. That's the way it had been for longer than she could remember. It was dusk, and the cold was falling. The murdering sun had dipped below the horizon, and this was the time when she could forage for food. Alert, she stalked the jackrabbit, her stiletto poised for a deft jab. There was plenty of game in the desert if you looked. Small animals could live off the whisps of yellow grass that persisted in growing, and large animals could live off the small animals. She was a large animal, a sandrat. She had been a regular person once, but that had been before the voices started up in her head, before the dead woman got out of her rocking chair, before the preacherman reached into her mind and gave it a sharp twist…
The Sandrat had more names than she could remember, and different people to go with each one. She recalled her father's name. Bonney. It was a good name. People who bore it came to her in her rare sleeping periods, and she learned from them.
There was Anne, in thigh-length leather boots, her ruffled shirt open to show a deep cleavage, a blood-greased cutlass in her hand, a rolling deck under her, warpaint on her face. Billy, a smoking Colt in his left hand, a toothy grin on his face, dwarfed by his oversized chaps, a battered hat on his long, ratty hair. And Bruno, sections of his undershirt cut away to emphasize his carefully-nurtured musculature—the result of long hours pumping iron, not expensive bio-implants—a cigar between his teeth, the flexible aluminium whip in his hand. The Bonneys were a dangerous breed.
She found the rabbit, chewing on a stubby cactus, and stabbed it in the neck. It kicked twice, and died. She wiped the stiletto off on its fur and slipped it into the sheath in her boot, then sucked the warm, salty blood from the puncture she had made. The meat she would dry out in the sun tomorrow. Chewed steadily, it should last her for days. As for water, that would come in minute drops from the cactus.
Sandside was only a desert if you were too used to concrete under your boots. She didn't use her gun much any more—ammunition only came her way very occasionally—but she was skilled at knife-hunting. Last night, she had taken one of the wolfdogs that had been following her for weeks. The rest of the pack had turned away. She considered tracking them, but didn't feel the need to make any particular point of it. There was honour among predators.
Strange voices had been talking inside her head forever. Not just the the Bonneys. Andrew Jean was back, beehive still in place, and chattering away like the old days. The days before the sand. And Mrs Katz, a gentle soul who held no grudge for the loss of her skull. And all the voices of Spanish Fork. The drawl of Judge Thomas Longhorne Colpeper, pompously expounding points of law; the gentle Detroit brogue of Trooper Washington Burnside, whose gun she still carried; the primal shriek of Cheeks, who had been maddened by the D.I.V.O.R.C.E. from her body; comments about the weather from Chollie Jenevein, the gasman; chemical tips from pharmacist Ferd Sunderland, who knew the Latin name of every cactus, root and fungus in the sand, plus the effects it would produce if chewed, smoked or swallowed; too many others to distinguish individually.
She had seen the world as it really was, once. Now, she was stripped down to the bare essentials of her person, trying to deal with her knowledge. She was forgetting everything else—the sub-language she spoke, things she knew, chunks of her past, people she had killed—but she had a clear memory of the way the world really looked. That was important.
By night, she walked, hunted, and fed. By day, she put up a shelter against the sun and listened to the cacophony inside her. One day in every seven or eight, she slept. It was a good, clean life. When she first came to the sand, a long time ago, she had had a pocketful of pills and squeezers, but she had lost interest in them. They rattled as she stalked, sometimes alarming her prey, and so she scattered them into the sand, to be ingested by the things that lived below the dunes. Her hair she had hacked short with her knife. She kept clean by washing in sand, and buried her stools well away from her nest of the moment. She was a good animal.
She thought she might be in Nevada, but it was hard to tell. It was just sand and rocks. It could have been Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California, or Deseret. It was all the same, the Big Empty. In her head, Burnside remembered someone calling America the United States of Sand and Rocks.
Sometimes she found things stranded surreally, left by God-knows-who. The original pioneers had been forced to lighten the loads on their wagons by strewing all manner of excess baggage across the western half of the continent. Bookcases, iron safes, furniture from the Old World, a diving bell. And the new resettlers were no different. They left their goods behind as they strove to find their Canaan.
Days ago, the Sandrat had found a huge jukebox, with a selection of hits from Sove musickies. Petya Tcherkassoff's "The Girl in Gorki Park," Tasha's "Love, Sex, Love," Vania Vanianova's "Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad," Andrei Tarkovsky's "Happiness." She had pressed buttons, but nothing happened. She polished the chrome, and wiped sand away from the stained-glass frontage, but it was finally useless, just another piece of garbage from a past that could have happened to someone else for all the trace it had left on her.
She had examined her curved reflection in the chrome mirror. Her cheekbones were prominent, and the ridges of her eyesockets. She saw a skull beneath her skin, but the image meant nothing, although somehow she thought it should. Her hair was growing out again, black and clean. She had been badly hurt some time ago, but her body was dealing with that. She had bruises, but no fleshrot.
The moon shone overhead like a new dime. The sand turned silver-grey, and the Sandrat wandered across it. She had been moving in large ellipses, crossing and recrossing her path in a complicated pattern. The moon called to her, she thought, pulling her this way and that. She went where it directed her, tracing a design on the face of the Earth.
The problem was the other Voice in her head, the one that could silence all the rest, the one that brought its pictures with it, the one that poured memories into her mind until she thought she would burst.
There was a face to go with the voice. A face that wore dark glasses and was shadowed by the wide brim of a flat black hat.
A face that was white, but was often split by a red smile. Red needlepoints glinted behind the shades. When she left the desert, and the Sandrat knew she would eventually come to the end of the sand, the face would be waiting for her.
She knew too much about him to let him live.
His name was Nguyen Seth, and he was older than the United States of America, older than the Black Plague, older than the written word, older than cultivated grain, older than the wheel, older than human language—Nguyen Seth was as old as Death.
Something came to her, a graffito she had seen on the wall of a burned-out Josephite temple in Denver, back when she was with the girlie gangcult. "Within strange aeons, even Death may die…"
She hadn't known what it meant then, but now she knew it had been inscribed there just for her. The moon was pulling at her even before Spanish Fork, leading her to her destiny. Her whole life had been directed towards this one task.
The strange aeons were over, and it was nearly time for the Sandrat to kill Death.
In the distance, predators howled, wolf to coyote, mutant to mongrel. The Sandrat opened her throat, and howled too, joining in their song of the chase.
With the taste of blood still hot on her tongue, she sang in a long, keening cry of the joys of the kill…
Dropping to all fours, she bounded across the sand.
ZeeBeeCee, The Station That's Got It All, feels it imperative to interrupt Screwing For Dollars, with Voluptua Whoopee for this important newsflash. Here, direct from the Capitol Building, is luscious Lola Stechkin…
"Hi, America! It's April the 3rd, 1996, and this is Lola. Here's some news we hope you can handle.
"Ms Redd Harvest of the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez Agency has just announced that the suspect apprehended in Nome, Alaska, last week in connection with the thirty-eight-state murder spree of the serial killer known as "The Tasmanian Devil' has been definitely connected with four hundred and eighteen of the Devil's six hundred and forty-two confirmed kills to date. However, Washington has been rocked by the further revelation that the alleged killer is Dr Ottokar Proctor, the respected economist and adviser to President North, the man often referred to by the electronic media as 'the architect of the Big Bonus.'
"The president's office is keeping a silence on this one, although we are assured that a statement is being prepared. Sources close to President North indicate that he is deeply shaken by the arrest of Dr Proctor, who has been a frequent guest at the White House and is known to be a close friend of the Norths, and was godfather to little Joey North and to Ollie Jr. It has been suggested that the President will instruct the Attorney General to appear for the defence in any trial of Dr Proctor, so important is the doctor's contribution to the administration considered to be. 'He's the only one who really understands the economy,' President North said in a speech three weeks ago, 'and I figure it's safe with him.' Opponents of the Big Bonus have been issuing handbills and vidmail shots featuring T-H-R scene-of-the-crime photographs from the horrific quadruple cheerleader-slaying in Columbus, Ohio, of last December. The handbills bear the slogan, 'He did this to Mary Lou, Betty Jo, Crissie Leigh, Rachael-Rose and the United States of America.'
"Sonny Pigg, lead singer of the Mothers of Violence, who last month released a successful solo album dedicated to 'The Tasmanian Devil,' has issued a press statement in which he claims that 'the Devil is a real gone guy, and we should go with the groove for him when the bloodtide comes round. Doc Proc should be made freakin' Prezz immediamente 'fore we lose this great country o' ours to godless commies, hogfreakin' ragheads, vegetarian homosexuals and sovrock faghaggs.' By a bizarre coincidence, Dr Proctor's last television appearance was on the popular Musichip Jury show, during which he described Pigg's 'Tasmanian Devil' as 'the worst piece of ordure ever.'
"Dr Ottokar Proctor, 42, was bom in Venice, California, and graduated first in his class from Yale at the age of fifteen. He is a world-renowned expert in Side-Demand Financing, post-Jungian psychology, American-made animated cinema, the history of Italian opera and medieval European history. His publications include Giving It All Away: Modern Money Matters, Sylvester P. Pussycat: A Psycho-Sexual Case Study, After Puccini and The European Currency Unit: Paper Money or Solid Brass? He has been a popular guest in numerous network talkshows, and introduced ZeeBeeCee's Emmy-award-winning How to Get Rich in 80 Days last year. Through a series of influential papers and reports, Dr Proctor was in the forefront of modem economic theory. 'America has a lot of assets,' he claimed in his last speech to congress, 'we should cash in on them.' The North administration has reduced personal income tax to virtually nothing, while raising finance through hefty duties on imported items—as you know, a cup of real Nicaraguan coffee now costs $150—and such daring schemes as the leasing-out of America's armed forces to Canada during the Quebeçois uprising.
"Dr Proctor has been kept in seclusion temporarily in the time-locked underground strongroom of the Anchorage branch of the GenTech Nomura Agricultural Loan and Trust Co, and has not as yet been able to confer with his lawyers or issue a public statement. Ms Redd Harvest has made available to this network a volume of evidence that is still being sifted by our experts. However, there would appear to be no chance at this time that the T-H-R conclusion will be proved wrong. As Ms Harvest has said to us over a satellite link, 'Dr Proctor…he was the Devil all right.' We'll bring you more on this upsetting story as it develops. In the meantime, this is Lola, handing you back to the scheduled program."
But before we get back to Voluptua and the gas jockey from Bixby, Mississippi, here's a message from GenTech…
Through the sand, there was a road. One day, Bonney decided it was time to return to the world of cars and concrete and people. She had learned all that the moon and the sand could teach her, and she must search elsewhere. Eventually, she would kill Seth, but in the meantime she had to change herself. She was a walking weapon already, but Seth had only made her into a rough flint axe. She must hone herself into the likeness of her beloved stiletto. She would only have one shot, and she had to be ready to make it count.
She sat by the road and waited, for three days. The sun and the moon passed overhead, the one beating, the other whispering. She heard the motorsickle coming from twenty miles away, and had time to prepare herself. She stood up on her two legs, and purged the animal from her soul. She must be a human person again. Her face was still crooked, but her body was fully healed now, lithe and strong. She set her torso at a provocative angle on her hips, arched her knee a little, and stuck out her thumb.
The cykesound became a speck on the road, and grew bigger as it approached. From the engine noise, she recognized an Electraglide. Out here, that meant the Maniax were back, or perhaps one of the minor biker gangcults, Satan's Stormtroopers, the Apple Valley Hogfreakers. She knew what to expect from the cykeman, but she was counting on his not knowing what to expect from her.
The sickle slowed as it approached, and she imagined the biker licking his lips inside his helmet, anticipating a tasty morsel. He was a Maniak all right, flying colours, with a pair of sawn-off pumpguns crossed on his back, and a long braided pigtail whipping out like an epileptic snake from under his horned skidlid.
She was wrong about the biker. He was smarter than most. When he got within twenty yards of her, something spooked him and he gunned the hog, speeding past her. A shower of pebbles fell short of her shin. He punched the air and yelled something as he weaved from side to side across the road, zig-zagging into the distance.
She realized he was expecting to be dodging gunfire. She had been relying on her blade, her teeth and her hands for too long. She had forgotten the sidearm, which she had kept sand-free but not discharged in months.
The next one, she swore, she would shoot for his ve-hickle and leave alive for the predators.
She had to wait four more days. And this time, there was more than one rider…
Duroc had never seen Nguyen Seth like this. Usually, his face was as unreadable as a mummy's bandage mask. Now, he seemed to be in pain, and the lines on his cheeks were almost cracks. He took off his dark glasses, and Duroc could see points of blood in the Elder's ancient eyes.
They were in the private library, where Seth kept his books. It was a unique collection of the forbidden, the outré and the mystical. Duroc thought the library was something very near to Seth's autobiography. Through the pages of hundreds of books, many famous and some unknown, the undying one could trace his passage down the years. Not since the fire at Alexandria had there been such a concentration of the world's True Knowledge in one building. Here were the secret histories, the stories behind the stories, the truths so terrible they could only be written as fiction, the chronicles of the insane, the lives of the damned.
Somewhere here were the contributions of Duroc's ancestors: a series of articles co-written by Pierre Henri Duroc and Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade, speculating on the limits of the human mind when confronted with endless pain; some transcripts from the meetings of Robespierre's Committee of Public Safety, in which the fates of some of the first families of France were decided on a whim; a suppressed account of certain discoveries in a pre-human city that came to light in 19th-century French Equatorial Africa before the cyclopean stones mysteriously sank into the soft jungle earth; Cauchemar et Fils, Maitres des Mondes Perdues, an unpublished novel by M. Jules Verne that was purchased from the author by a Great-Great-Great-Uncle and consigned to obscurity because it described a steam-driven engine to open up a gateway to a world of dreams that bore a remarkable similarity to a device that the Duroc of the time had indeed developed.
Sitting at his huge desk, surrounded by his books, Seth wore a Chinese robe, embroidered wim dragon gods, and a black skullcap. His hands were those of a week-old corpse.
"The girl," he said, his voice uncommonly thin. "Jessamyn Bonney."
Duroc remembered. Elder Wiggs had told him all about Spanish Fork. "Jazzbeaux? She must be dead, surely. You took her out into the road and…uh…battered her fatally. That must be an end to it."
"No," Seth said, raising a long-nailed finger, "she is not dead. She is in the desert, changing."
He pressed his finger to his forehead. "And she is in here. She wore the spectacles, and now some fragment of her is inside my mind, just as some fragment of me is lodged in hers. Tick-tock, tick-tock."
Duroc was perturbed. Seth rarely talked about the things that set him apart from the rest of mankind.
"And is that serious?"
"Roger, it could jeopardize all we have worked for…everything."
Duroc remembered the files he had accessed from Bruyce-Hoare in Denver. He made a point of checking up on people who got in the way of the Pam of Joseph.
"Jessamyn Bonney. She's just a girl, a juvenile delinquent."
Seth's thin lips assumed a configuration that might have passed for a smile. "She was, Roger, she was. Now, she is turning into something else. Through me, she has been extended. I believe that she may be the focal point through which the Ancient Adversary will try to thwart the designs of the Dark Ones."
Duroc had barely heard of the Ancient Adversary, but he knew this entity was one of the few Great Unseen Powers that stood in opposition to the Dark Ones, the extra-dimensional masters to whom Nguyen Seth had dedicated his long life. The Ancient Adversary had other names: Harry Half-Moon, Puitsikkakaa. The Dawn Reptile.
"I made her, Roger. Each man makes the sword which will kill him, and I made Jessamyn Bonney."
There was something disturbing in all this, beyond the threat to the Great Work. Duroc got the impression that Nguyen Seth was almost proud of the girl he feared. For centuries, no one had come along who could make him afraid. Perhaps the old man found that…stimulating? Exciting? Underneath it all, Seth was still at least partially a man. Duroc could never hope to understand his master fully. That was one of the challenges of his life.
Seth was paging through a book. It was not what Duroc would expect, not the Necronomicon or some volume by Undercliffe or Karswell. It was Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham. Duroc remembered the story. His uncle had taken him to see the Walt Disney film when he was a child. Could Nguyen Seth be identifying with the boy who never grew up?
"I knew J.M. Barrie, you know. I was there in 1912, when he unveiled the statue of Peter Pan that still stands in a London park."
Suddenly, it clicked. "Tick-tock, tick-tock! It's part of the story, isn't it?"
"Yes, Roger. One of the prophecies. I am Captain Hook and she, the crocodile. She has a part of me inside her, and I know she will come for me some day. I can hear her. She too has a clock ticking inside her."
"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock."
Seth's smile soured, and he shut the book.
"Bring me the head of the crocodile, Roger."
"I'll see to it personally."
"No, you are too important to the Great Work to get sidetracked on this thing. Just make sure you secure the services of some capable people. The longer we wait, the stronger she gets."
Duroc left Seth in his library. In among the books, there was a long-case clock. As its pendulum swung, it ticked. Second by second, the world crept towards its End.
It was a convoy. An arvee and ten or twelve outriders. The Sandrat recognized the set-up. She had herself travelled with groups like this. It was a gangcult war party. There was a ninety-five percent probability they would be hostile. Gangcults were in the hostility business, after all.
She dredged up her past, recalling the girl who had been Jazzbeaux, who had been a War Chief. The Sandrat assumed the chapter was finished. The business at Spanish Fork had left them dead or gone. That would nullify all the treaties that protected them. There would be an open season on scattered singletons.
She had none of her 'pomp colours left, but she knew she was still recognizable. The eyepatch was a give-away.
They were bearing down fast. There wasn't time to find a sandhole and hide. She would have to take her chances.
She unflapped her holster, and shifted it round so it hung behind her waist, out of sight.
Maybe they would want a girl for recreational purposes. She could put up with that if it got her to a city, or within reach of a ve-hickle she could scav. It would be no worse than she had lived through before.
The outriders were almost on her. She stuck out her thumb.
It was worse than she could have imagined. The arvee was painted red, white and blue, and had a Statue of Liberty hood ornament. An ice cream truck musichip played "Yankee Doodle." The point rider wore tight white-and-blue striped pants, a red tailcoat, a dyed white beard and a stars-and-stripes stovepipe hat. On his cyketank was a bright legend, AMERICA? DON'T FREAK WITH IT!
It was the Daughters of the American Revolution, with a few Minutemen thrown in. And they remembered only too well who she was.
The pointrider turned and skidded to a stop, signing to the rest of the convoy to follow suit.
"Well, looky-looky-looky," said Uncle Sam, "if it ain't that commie ratskag Jazzbeaux Bonney, late of the Psychopomps, late of the human race. You look like somethin' the goat wouldn't rut with…"
The Sandrat stood stiffly, wondering whether she had a chance.
The arvee doors opened up, and the DAR piled out. Miss Liberty was there. She tucked her unlit torch under her arm, and smiled. She had more teeth than a game-show hostess on ZeeBeeCee, and breasts like udders.
"My deah," she cooed, croaking like Katharine Hepburn, "it's been sempleah ages…"
The Sandrat didn't give them any resistance as they took her weapons away from her.
Miss Liberty raised her veil and kissed the Sandrat on the cheeks. The President of the DAR chapter was old for the gangcult game, twenty-three or -four. It must be the politics.
It was late afternoon. The light would be going soon. A couple of Minutemen were binding together two cloth-padded lengths of wood. They got their cross put together and planted in the sand.
"Such a shame about President North's Big Bonus, wasn't it?" said Miss Liberty. The Sandrat had no idea what she was talking about. "Well, I've always said that Sollie Ollie was just a tad too radical to hold high office in these heah United States."
A teenage matron squirted gasoline on the cross with a flyspray. Uncle Sam brought out a box of marshmallows and some skewers. Three blonde-haired, freckle-faced children in immaculate overalls, with Old Glory on one tit and the swastika on the other, sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."
"I think we're gonna have us a regular patriotic cook-out here, Madame Prezz," said Uncle Sam.
Miss Liberty put her arm around the Sandrat. "My deah," she said. "You wouldn't happen to have a light, would you?"
The Sandrat spat in her face.
Miss Liberty smiled, and wiped the spittle away with a lace-edged hankie she produced from her sleeve.
"Oh well, nevah mind."
She took out her torch and twisted it. A jet of flame shot out and fell upon the cross, which caught light immediately.
"It warms your heart, doesn't it? This used to be a hell of a country, before we started letting red slits like you run loose in the streets frightening the children with their hammers and sickles."
The children joined hands with Uncle Sam and danced around the burning cross.
The Sandrat was shoved roughly towards the cross. She felt the heat wafting across the evening air towards her.
"I guess what we've got here, Jazzbeaux," Miss Liberty said, "is a triumph for Truth, Justice and the American Way…"
In the Outer Darkness, the Ancient Adversary waited while the Dark Ones swarmed towards the light. It had long since ceased to define itself except in terms of its enemies. The game that was being played out in the shadows around the planet Earth was old beyond even its understanding.
For an eternity, it had been alone against the Dark, unsupported even by the fragile hopes of humanity. Now, it was reaching out, spiralling its essence down towards the wormhole in the fabric of the Dark, ready to feed itself into the earthly plane, to become one with the Vessel. It had observed the Vessel from afar, peering through the lens in the moon, tracking the human dot through the sandscape.
Without knowing why, it assumed a ghostshape. Dimensions meant nothing in the Darkness, but it stretched its tail across the shadows, and thrust its snout towards the light. Sharp teeth grew in rows, rough ridges raised across its back. Flat toadlike eyes blinked, watering. There was nothing to see yet, but that would come.
Clawing at the substance of the dark, it wriggled towards the Gateway, squeezing its eternal purpose into the elongated bulb of its lizard brain.
Without knowing why, it talked to itself.
"Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock…"
Down on the Earth, the Vessel was waiting, and so was the Prey…
Miss Liberty marched her towards the cross.
"I just want to ask you one question," the leaderene said.
"Go on," spat the Sandrat.
"Are you now, or have you evah been, a member of the Communist Party?"
Flames licked the darkening sky. The DAR stood around, waiting for the entertainment. The children had stopped singing, and were lighting cross-shaped sparklers. They waved them around, chanting "burn the commie, burn the commie" until Uncle Sam cuffed one of them around the ear.
The Sandrat felt the old skills coming back. Human speech returned, and her brain raced. "Like the man said in the song, 'you have nothing to lose but your chains.'"
She twisted out of Miss Liberty's grip, and sank a foot into the woman's midriff. The leaderene went down with a satisfying thump, her spiked coronet falling off.
The Sandrat darted back in time to avoid the spear of flame from the torch, and flung a handful of sand at Miss Liberty. The Daughter dropped the still-burning torch and a pool of fire spread around her. Her robes went up. That put her out of the fight for the moment.
There were only twenty-five or thirty more of them. Not easy, but she could do it. After all, she had been given a brain to think with while these patriots were being force-fed The Thoughts of Spiro Agnew, The World According to William F. Buckley and Killing Commies for God and Country.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident…" she recited.
Uncle Sam came at her, long arms outstretched. She kicked him in the face with her boot-heel, and he got a grip on her knee.
"…indivisible under God, with Liberty…"
Other hands grabbed her, and she was dragged towards the crucifix.
Miss Liberty was shrieking as she burned. The Daughters wouldn't have enough water with them to waste on her, but the children were shovelling sand at the woman, trying to smother the flames.
The Sandrat bit into the wrist of one of the Minutemen, chewing until she severed the artery. He fell away, blood gushing into her face, trying to stanch the flow with his fingers.
"…and Justice for all!" She spat a bloody froth at Uncle Sam.
She got one foot in the sand, and dragged it. The patriots were having trouble holding her fast. She scratched down a face with her desert-hardened claws, and broke some ribs with an elbow.
"I'm just exercising my right to Freedom of Expression."
It was just her and Uncle Sam now. She slipped behind him, pulling his arms back until his shoulders popped, and pushed him into the dirt. He had a gun in his waistband, a long-barreled Buntline special. She relieved him of it, and made five bullets count, dropping Minutemen and Daughters where they stood.
"Who wants the last one?" she asked.
The remaining gangtypes looked at each other. A tall, well-built girl in a star-spangled bathing suit knelt by Miss Liberty, and picked up the coronet.
"No volunteers, huh?"
The Betsy Ross Bimbo settled the coronet on her Annette Funicello hairdo.
"So you've just elected yourself Boss of the Beach, huh?"
The new leaderene tottered forwards on five-inch spike heels—not the ideal sandwear—rolling her hips. She had a pair of batons with wickedly barbed ends. She twirled them like a majorette, and did a few ninja moves.
"Back off, prom queen!"
Damn, she needed her last bullet. She would have to fight. She slid the gun into her holster, and spread her hands in a sign of peace.
"Can't we settle this constitutionally, with a debate and a referendum?"
The Beach Bunny swung her batons in a deadly arc.
"Just you and me, commie," the Daughter said. "Miss Liberty was my den mother."
"It's always somebody's den mother, or sister, or brother, or pet rattlesnake, huh? Why can't people just be dead and forgotten?"
A baton shot out, piercing the air where the Sandrat's shoulder had just been. The Daughter dodged an elbow thrust, and brought the majorette rod down on the Sandrat's back. It was a good hit, and she had to use all of her concentration not to go down.
The Daughter was a Champion Twirl Tootsie. To get around that, she would have to get in close, and go for some serious cat-fighting. The Sandrat hugged the girl, and pulled her close. The Daughter's face crinkled up in disgust. The Sandrat knew she had an edge. She licked the girl's mouth, tasting strawberry lipstick, and flicked her lightly freckled cheerleader's nose with the pointed end of her tongue.
The Daughter looked as if she were ready to give out with the old Technicolor Yawn. "What's the matter, saph? Worried that you'd like it too much?"
The Daughter wriggled, trying to get a knee up into the Sandrat's stomach. Her rock-hard hair was shaking.
"Maybe you don't kiss on a first fight, huh?"
The Daughter grabbed a handful of hair, and yanked hard. It hurt, but the Sandrat could handle it.
"Hey, no fair! Tammy's cheating!"
The Sandrat lifted the majorette up, and tossed her away. She landed badly, and crawled away.
"Nobody loves a sore loser, Gidget."
The other Daughters were in a semi-circle around the Sandrat. She drew her gun. "Remember the last bullet, everyone? Good, there'll be a pop quiz after recess."
She took aim, and shot the arvee in the gastank. Uncle Sam was loaded with ScumStoppers. The bullet punched tfirough armour plate, the tank exploded, and the arvee rose up into the air in a whirl of flame. The DAR must keep all their ammo in the bus, the Sandrat thought. There was quite a fireworks display. A flying wheel knocked the crucifix over, and chunks of wreckage rained down on a fifty-foot circle. Two or three of the cykes blew up in sympathy. Miss Liberty wasn't the only one on fire now.
Patriots were running all over the place, periwigs ablaze, screaming for help, burrowing into the sand and rolling.
"See, whoever has the biggest gun gets to kick the crap out of everybody else. It's the American Way."
The Sandrat was untouched in the eye of the hurricane. She knew the fire wouldn't hurt her. It was destiny.
She picked up a few more guns from corpses, and didn't feel naked any more. One or two still felt like fighting, and she shot them.
She left the children alone. They would make good sandrat material. Along with the majorette, whom she saw being helped away from the fire by the kids.
"You'll be able to work on your tan tomorrow, surf sweetie," she shouted after the Daughter, "but don't hold your breath waiting for the tide to come in."
She found an unburned six-by-three stars and stripes in the sand. She picked it up and draped it over Miss Liberty's still-smoking remains. She shot a salute at the cooked corpse.
"Like I said, the American Way, sister."
She found a cyke parked out of range of the explosion, and straddled it. It was strange having a sickle between her legs after all these months, but the reactions came back. You never forget. She took a helmet from the handlebars. It was starred and striped, but it would do. She kick-started the machine, and drove away from the fires. Someone took a shot at her, but missed. She searched through the pannier for a musichip to put into the helmet's sound system, but only found Selections from John Phillip Sousa, The Best of Kate Smith, and John Wayne's America. She threw the chips into the sand for the predators, and upped the speed. In the panniers, she did find a supply of Good Ole Home Cooking—Oreos, Hershey Bars, Babe Ruths, Wrigley's Gum, Pork Popsicles. She was back in civilization, at last.
Her hair flew out behind her, and the clean air struck her face. She would have to do something about her face now.
Once she got her bearings, she could head for Dead Rat and get Doc Threadneedle to sort out her skullplates. Maybe she should invest in a few more elaborate bio-amendments. Her credit should be good.
Her wilderness years were over.
She wasn't hallucinating any more, she knew. The voices were under control. She wouldn't be seeing any dead women getting out of their rocking chairs. Things were clear again.
She smiled, and her heart beat away the seconds, tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.