by Jack Yeovil
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.
II
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."
III
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.
&nb
sp; 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.
IV
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.'
