Route 666

by Jack Yeovil

LYNNE: Is it true that Yuri Andropov personally invited you back to the USSR?

  ANDREI: That’s what I heard. Of course I thought it was a trick. To us, the KGB were pigs. It was rumoured they had death camps for dissidents, deserters and evaders. The Movement was riddled with KGB cointelpro spies who would encourage protestors to acts of defiance then turn them in for harsh punishment. But Andropov knew a dead horse when he saw one and engineered the overthrow of Brezhnev in ’73. His great slogan was “anti-corruption” and there certainly was a change in the Soviet character in the mid-’70s. I returned to Moscow, and, though interviewed extensively, was not arrested or assassinated. At this time, I was a Scientologist. Many fans who came to my first concert in post-Brezhnev Moscow were disappointed that I made the artistic decision not to sing any songs but chose to play an acoustic accompaniment to texts from L. Ron Hubbard. I was sincere in my beliefs, just as I was sincere when I converted to Judaism, Catholicism, Sufism, EST and the Brethren of Joseph. Searching for truth has always been a part of the Russian soul.

  LYNNE: How had things changed in Moscow?

  ANDREI: I wasn’t so young any more. Fashion had passed me by a little. There was a burst of reactionary music. You remember the kulak rock of 1977, all the spitting and slamdancing and such. The Sex Vostoks, Little Vera, that shower. The youth of the day despised the message of peace my generation wished them to receive. They pierced their noses and cheeks with sharpened vodka bottle caps and wore surplus Red Army uniforms with radiation burns and bullet holes. My records were still popular with those of my old fans who hadn’t been killed. It was a relief, actually, not to have to pander to teenagers. I was able to follow artistic impulses, to plough my own furrow.

  LYNNE: Those were the years of your Nostalgia album and tour. Many viewers will remember the spectacular circus which accompanied that remarkable achievement.

  ANDREI: I was looking for a way of expanding my vision into a totality of art, to reach beyond the confines of popular music. I felt my vision demanded the twelve elephants, the banana-shaped dirigible, the cannons, the dead clowns, the hologram mushroom clouds, the mass tractor pull and the dance of the duelling chainsaws. In America, I’m still best known for the songs from Nostalgia. I believe that “Looking Back to the Future Unborn” was recently sampled in a television commercial for a psychiatric health drive.

  LYNNE: Indeed, then it re-entered the charts.

  ANDREI: It’s a good cause, and I’m proud to serve it.

  LYNNE: Among your contemporaries, who do you most admire?

  ANDREI: Vania Vanianova, of course. The Kulture Kossacks were the only indie band of the early ’80s worth standing in line for.

  LYNNE: You were married to her?

  ANDREI: Briefly. Between Sufism and vodka rehab. After the vasectomy but before the cancer ward.

  LYNNE: What do you really think of Petya Jerkussoff?

  ANDREI: I suppose he can’t hurt anyone. We had a sort of detente. All that Glum and Glit business seems antique these days. He was supposed to appear on the Offret album but had one of his nervous breakdowns the day before the recording.

  LYNNE: And Boris Yeltsin?

  ANDREI: He does about as good a job as anybody does. There might not be much left of the Soviet Union but we are fairly prosperous, reasonably democratic and culturally in acceptable shape. He hasn’t had to call out the tanks and shell his opponents, unlike your President North, has he? But I’m disappointed by the Soviets of the ’90s. When I think of the good people who died, the struggles and sacrifices, I’m saddened to see that we have such a trivial, money-obsessed society. Our heroes are not poets and painters but computer programmers and contraceptive entrepreneurs. Moscow is a plague of Nostalgia Boutiques pushing expensive recreations of our fashions from the 70s. I wish I had copyrighted the usage of the word. The blouses are even baggier, the kaftans more tie-dyed, but it’s not the same. These clothes are clean, for a start. We Russians have turned our backs on melancholy and brainwashed ourselves into happiness. Happiness is not good for us. We should lead the world; instead we manufacture more and more useless luxuries. Things must change.

  LYNNE: Andrei, thank you.

  ANDREI: Thank you, Lynne.

  LYNNE: No, thank you…

  ZeeBeeCee is proud to announce the Andrei Tarkovsky Collection, a lifetime of hits in a boxed set of twelve deluxe state-of-the-art musichips with a commemorative set of walkman shades, complete with an Andrei Tarkovsky novelty nose and realistic droopy moustache, thrown in absolutely free. With a full academic commentary by noted authority Charles Shaar Murray, this definitive Andrei is available only to ZeeBeeCee subscribers who call the toll-free number flashing at the bottom of the screen. We guarantee this set will be complete for years to come, since Andrei has signed an exclusive non-recording contract, vowing not to cut any more discs for the rest of the century, so you need not live in fear that your Andrei Tarkovsky Collection will be rendered instantly obsolete by ventures into new styles, religions or media. We’re paying Andrei not to do anything new, so you can enjoy the great work that lies permanently in his past…

  The Book of the Road

  I

  10 June 1995

  “Nine ve-hickles, camped off-road in a box canyon,” Burnside reported. “Place used to be a drive-in movie theatre, the Lansdale Ozoner. Maybe thirty, forty citizens. Repeat, citizens, not gang personnel. No deathware in sight. All in black, like our flat friends two days back. They don’t scan hostile, but they don’t scan too healthy either.”

  Quincannon spoke into the communicator. “We’ll be along directly, trooper. Do not establish contact until we’re with you. The DAR didn’t scan too hostile either, then they slaughtered F Troop with hatpin missiles.”

  “Check, sergeant.”

  Yorke had been driving since they broke camp at sunup. They were well into Utah. Quincannon was keeping watch on the scanners as the cruiser took in the view. The roads here wound through canyons and passes. Road Runner country. It was ideal ambush territory and you had to keep a camera-eye on the horizons for sniping points. There had been no trouble but that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be. Up on the roof, swivel-mounted sensors swept the landscape.

  “So, what are we doing, Quince, rescuing or policing?”

  “Could be either one, Yorke. Either one.”

  The cruiser blip joined the Tyree and Burnside blips on the mapscreen. The troopers were off their mounts, waiting for the heavy brigade. With assumed solids, procedure was to approach as a unit. Only certified gangcults warranted the surprise sneak-up. Quincannon signed for the troopers to saddle up and follow the cruiser. It was the regular formation again.

  “Just slide ’er into the canyon, Yorke. Don’t make too much of a noise but don’t be too stealth-oriented either. We don’t want to provoke any trouble. People in situations are liable to get panicky. Even decent folks have big guns and hair-triggers these days. And, believe me, my favourite song is not ‘I Love a Massacre’.”

  Yorke took the cruiser off the road and the suspension had to do extra work as it bounced over dirt track. The cruiser was so well-sprung, you could put a shot glass of whiskey in the cup-cradle and not lose a drop over the brim.

  There was a bunch of wheelmarks in the dust. They hadn’t bothered to cover their trail. Therefore these were more likely to be victims than violators. The cruiser was gearing up for a fight, just in case. Yorke was still rattled from the patrol’s brush yesterday with Boris freakin’ Karloff and the Spidercopter of Doom. A row of lights on the dash went green one by one, and flashed regularly. The laser cannons were primed, the mortars ready to slide out of their holes, the directional squirters keyed up for tear gas, the maxiscreamers humming.

  If Custer had had just one of these babies, he would have come back from the Little Big Horn a live hero.

  “You hear that?”

  Yorke strained his ears and Quincannon twiddled up the directional mikes, homing in on a noise.

  “Singing?”


  There was a faint, reedy whine. Voices joined, none too professionally, in song.

  “A hymn?”

  “It’s a psalm, Yorke. ‘How Amiable Are Thy Tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts’. You should have paid more attention in Sunday school.”

  “My parents are secular humanists, sir.”

  Quincannon mimed spitting.

  Hymns gave Yorke a bad feeling. “What do you reckon, Quince. The Bible Belt?”

  “Could be.”

  Yorke’s hands were sweaty on the wheel. He had bad memories of the Bible Belt, a motorised gangcult of Old Testament fundamentalists. They wore spade beards, linen robes, open-toed sandals and “Jesus Kills” tattoos. Their kick was doing the Lord’s work, but they were more inclined to Smite the Unrighteous and Put Out the Eye of Thine Enemy than Turn the Other Cheek or Love Thy Neighbour. They had moved into a couple of wide-open townships in Arizona, Welcome Springs and Buggered Goat, and renamed them Sodom and Gomorrah. Then they had razed the places to the ground and righteously slaughtered everyone in sight in the name of the Lord. They could easily have moved this far north.

  Yorke had been captured by the Bible Belt three patrols back, and sentenced to die by the sword for having an ungodly Richard Clayderman chip in his walkman shades. He still owed the Quince for pulling him alive out of Gomorrah, Ariz. And he still owed the Bible Belt for the three plastik and steelspring fingers he was toting on his left hand.

  The cruiser quietly approached the drive-in. There was a camp at one end. A group of people stood together as if at a meeting, scanning up at where the screen used to be. They were the ones singing. Someone with a bigger, blacker hat than the rest stood on the hood of a motorwagon, leading the congregation. The only one who could see the Cav coming, he kept waving his arms, keeping the psalm going.

  Yorke let out a breath. The preacher was not Hezekiah Tribulation, messiah of the Bible Belt.

  “Time to break up the sing-song,” Quincannon said.

  He turned on the outside hailers and spoke into the mike.

  “Attention. This is the United States Road Cavalry. We mean you no harm.”

  He was obliged by law to say that before he shot anyone.

  “We are here to offer assistance.”

  Yorke pulled the cruiser over and saw the blips converge as Tyree and Burnside parked by them. He still had the wheel and was supposed to stay at it in case the hymn-singers proved dangerous. It was the spot he liked. It felt a lot less exposed than getting out and talking to strangers in the Des.

  The lights stopped flashing and glowed steady. The weapons system was waiting for the touch of a switch to cut loose. Yorke wouldn’t even have to aim anything, unless he wanted manual override. The cruiser was ready to put a hole in any moving or stationary blip on its sensors without the photoactive Cav strip down its pantslegs.

  The hymn ended and the singers turned to look at the newcomers. One or two went down on their knees and prayed out loud. They were either thankful for the rescuers or making their peace with God before they got killed trying to kill someone else. The Bible Belt went in for praying in a big way. And torture. Somehow, the two always seemed to go together.

  “See you later, Yorke.”

  “Sure thing, Quince.”

  Quincannon stepped out of the cruiser and walked up to the choir, empty hand outstretched.

  II

  10 June 1995

  There was something strange about the preachie’s shades. Jazzbeaux had worn them on and off for nearly a day. They were clearer than regular dark glasses and had a queer effect. She was used to the more-or-less flat, one-third obscured panorama of monocular vision augmented by an optic replacement. Once or twice, she thought she scanned things in the periphery that couldn’t be there. Indistinct, but unsettling. Sometimes it was like seeing in 3-D again. The disturbing presences hovered in the extreme left field, where she could usually see nothing.

  “Whassamatter, Jazzbie,” Andrew Jean asked, “you a loca ladybug? You’re spookola in spades this ayem…”

  The Psychopomps were grouped outside Moroni. The convention was that everyone parked neatly like solid citizens and walked into the arena like old-style gladiators.

  Jazzbeaux sat on the hood of the Tucker, dangling the shades from her mouth. It occurred to her the glasses might be some new type of “safe” psychoactive. The lenses might convert light rays into optical illusions. It was possible. She’d read such things in magazines.

  “No probs, Ay-Jay,” she said.

  This was important. Some liked a little high before a negotiation. It made them loose, less concerned, more daring. Jazzbeaux preferred going in straight. Back in her warehouse gladiatrix period, she always saved the Kray-Zee pills for after the bout.

  Winning still hurts, she had learned.

  So Long was running through stats on the DAR. In the chapter they were dealing with, there were a few well-known scrappers but no clear contender. That gave the Daughters the advantage; going in, the rep would know exactly who the ’pomps would put into the ring. Jazzbeaux was facing some unknown.

  “If t’were me picking the negotiator,” So Long mused, “I’d go for this fillette, Valli Forge. She’s got more confirmed kills than anyone else in the chapter.”

  “Bio-amendments?”

  So Long made the shaky sign. “None on record. Interesting chemical dependency, but she’s not likely to be in withdrawal crisis when you do the dance.”

  Jazzbeaux liked high-fliers. They didn’t know when they were damaged. The whole point of pain was to tell you when to protect yourself. Anyone with smacksynth or zonk in their system would stumble around on two broken legs until it was over.

  Impulsively, Jazzbeaux slipped on the shades again. Last night, in the dark, she had scanned too many things. In daylight, they should be safe. The view seemed to ripple and voices whispered in her head. She swore she could hear the preacher man fuming.

  “Best of luck, suestra,” Varoomschka said, lying. If Jazzbeaux came out of this badly, Vroomsh would be the obvious candidate for Acting War Chief.

  Jazzbeaux looked briefly at her, and flash-saw a jewelled skeleton wrapped in crinkled plastic. All the ’pomps looked briefly shrivelled and dead. Then there was a shift and things settled—Varoomschka filled out her see-through jump suit properly.

  Sweetcheeks stuck a wet kiss on her face, leaving a lipsticky heart. Jazzbeaux rubbed the girl’s back affectionately, taking in a lungful of the scented air around her.

  After only seconds in the shades, migraine sprouted. A hot nail drove between her eyebrows. Jazzbeaux took off the glasses and thought of throwing them away. She could drive a cyke over them and the distraction would be over. But she just slung them around her neck.

  From inside the Tucker, Sleepy Jane reported the seismograph had picked up ve-hickles on the other side of Moroni.

  “Company’s here,” she said.

  The world looked real again but Jazzbeaux found herself wanting to put the glasses back on. It was like when she was eight and Dead Daddy put her on Hero–9 to keep her under control. She’d had to wean herself off the dope over a period of years and still felt the occasional urge for a H–9 hit. She knew a lot of addicts—there were dotted blue bruises behind Sweetcheeks’ plump knees and Andrew Jean kept a powder compact filled with zonk—and even more people who were just more comfortable facing the world in an altered state.

  It was reversed for her, like a negative picture. As a child, she’d been drugged for annos on end and never had a say. She remembered her first straight hours, when Officer Harvest put her in solitary after a juvie bust; that experience had been like the revelation some get the first time they go out of their skulls. Since then, she’d become more and more hung up on her straight spells, taking fewer and fewer drugs, spending longer and longer with only her unaugmented senses. One day soon, she would be hooked on reality.

  Unless the shades scrambled her brain.

  It was an irrational longing but afte
r minutes it became irresistible. She fought it for as long as she could, but it was such a silly thing. She was Acting War Chief. She wasn’t afraid to wear a pair of glasses.

  “We don’t go into town until nightfall,” Andrew Jean said. “That’s the arrangement.”

  “That’ll make for a long, dull afternoon,” Jazzbeaux replied. “Oh well, que sera, sera…”

  She fiddled with the shades, tapping her teeth with an arm. She knew she should eat but didn’t feel hungry.

  Sweetcheeks was absorbed in a tiny game console; she was hung up on a scenario called “Perfect Date”, but hadn’t yet made it to the senior prom, let alone gone all the way with the class captain. The one time Jazzbeaux played the thing, she wound up being gang-banged by the football team and dismembered by a serial killer.

  Varoomschka unshouldered her boom-box and slotted in ’Tasha’s Ancient Mariner Mambo album. It had never been one of Jazzbeaux’s favourites. ’Tasha had been married, at different times, to Petya Jerkussoff and Andrei Tarkovsky. Moscow Beat said she represented a fusion of Glit and Glum. Jazzbeaux just thought Tasha was a pretentious whiner.

  Maybe she was growing up.

  Finally, she snapped, and—trying not to look desperate—casually slipped her head into the glasses, shaking back her hair at the same time. As the bridge settled against her nose, she kept her eye shut.

  She heard Tasha singing,

  “It is an Ancient Mariner

  Who stoppeth one of three,

  And by your hairy tangle beard and that glitter in your eye,

  keep his filthy rotten hand off of me…”

  Jazzbeaux opened her eye.

  This time, the effect was different. Colours were brighter, but less sharp. There were shadows where there shouldn’t be. It was a little like a Hero–9 or Method–1 buzz, but without any elation. Somehow, with the glasses on, she felt compelled to look back over her shoulder all the time.