Canyon de Chelly stuck its stone finger up at the dusk like a taffy stretched Stonehenge megalith. The free-standing rock tower was a defiant sport. In a million years, wind had created the majestical feature. In a mere minute, the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots would bring the untidy thing down. It was an anomaly and anomalies were intolerable.
Franken Steinberg stood by the bus, recharging as Olympia busied herself with Blastite. Jump-leads connected his neck-bolts with the generator. Kochineel monitored, triple-belled cap nodding over the dials. Juice flowed into the capacitators under Franken's clavicles. He could function for a day on less than five cents' worth of electricity.
Considering Canyon de Chelly, Franken found himself questioning the dictum that nature was random and chaotic. The column was so contrived, so perfect that, like his own mainly mechanical body, it bespoke the existence of a creator.
It might be God's colophon, a declaration of copyright and ownership.
The thought was surplus to the cybermind. He made an effort to burn it from his graymass. When his meatmind consciousness transferred to a more efficient storage vessel, unfruitful byways would be shut off. He longed to achieve true machine state.
He had abraded the GenTech logo from his plaskin face but the symbols persisted inside, a sub-microscopic rash on the robo-bits scattered through his altered body. Retaining memory of his half-life before BioDiv got to work on him, he did not (like more superstitious cyborgs) regard Dr Zarathustra as a God. He had been created equal with meatkind; GenTech BioDiv, for its own reasons, helped him evolve towards perfection.
Towards perfection. That was the path of the 'bots.
He was not personally involved in Olympia's special project, but he observed her preparations with interest and admiration. Olympia was a good machine, if overinclined to special effects. Having run calculations through the chipped portion of her graymass, she had determined the exact charge necessary to fell the pillar. Flitting around the pillar on her points, she chattered instructions to Pinocchiocchio, who hulked along after her like a drone, placing the Blastite as ordered.
Olympia hated inefficiency and freaks of nature. It was not enough that meatfolks become machine, the Earth must be covered over with plastic and durium. Gaia, the sentimental personification of the living planet, must become a cyborg, in symbiosis with its machines. That was how machinekind should greet the millennium.
This current demolition was undertaken aesthetically. The cybermind could create art. It was empirically provable.
Robbie the Robotman and Hymie the Android knelt facing each other over an imaginary chessboard, indicating moves.
Their chess programs were so advanced no game could progress beyond three moves without one or the other conceding that stalemate was inevitable. Andromeda watched, amazonian body entirely covered by black cloth, ironically like a good Moslem girl. She laid her marble-white hand on Robbie's shoulder, trying to follow the game with only her unaugmented meatmind.
Darkness gathered as the sun slipped below the horizon. Franken blinked and his eyes infrareddened. Bored, he accessed the time code. LED numbers gave him a time check, flashing alternates in successive population centres. A master reading told him his eyes had been functional for four years, two months, three weeks, six days, nine hours, ten minutes and forty-eight seconds. He watched seconds tick off towards the expiry of his five-year warranty, whereupon he would be advised to seek an upgrade. It was important that the cybermind remain state of the art.
That meant going back to BioDiv. Eventually the 'bots would have to resubmit to Zarathustra. There were independents – Simon Threadneedle, most obviously – but only GenTech had the R&D capital. Between meat and metal was the barrier of money.
In the bus, Rosie the Maid and Talos the Bronze Giant made crackling love, wires stretched between plugboards, currents passing between them in rhythmic flow. Most 'bots eschewed meat sex. Their pleasure sensors were adapted to capabilities beyond human organs.
Olympia returned, a grin obvious under the black scarves that wrapped her head. Her crystal chest sparkled.
"At dawn, as the sun rises, we shall detonate."
"That is nice, dear."
She did a few steps, balancing perfectly. Kochineel inclined his sad clown's face and watched her, active eyes intent. Penny-sized red highlights were painted on his china cheeks and blue-diamond tears etched under his eyes. He never spoke; his mouth was a cupid's bow around a tiny inlet.
"Then, we should give thought to the Grand Canyon," Olympia continued. "Concrete would be impractical, but fast-expanding synthetics are achieving spectacular results. At the current progress rate, the operation will be feasable within two annos. Our gift to the 21st century shall be to smooth over that nasty crack and restore proper featurelessness to the globe."
"You still have blood on your face, dear. Organic matter from this morning."
Olympia cringed disgust and wiped her forehead with the heel of her hand. Most of her skin was playtex but she had yet to replace her hands or face. Inside, as her superb balance demonstrated, she was all doodads and robo-bits.
Franken was furthest along the road to complete mechanisation. Only his brain and a few unaugmented bones were original to him. When it became possible to download the information that constituted consciousness into silicon, he would willingly abandon physical graymass. He scorned the Donovan Treatment: vulgar brains brooding in bottles had little in common with his improved, augmented, demonstrably superior form.
At the other extreme was Andromeda, whose uncannily mobile prosthetic hand barely qualified her for the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. When funds were amassed, she would have more alterations. Her human body, now in its brief peak of perfection, would customise superbly.
Andromeda walked over, graceful as a panther. She had taken a Pentathlon Gold for the Pan-Islamic Federation at the St Petersburg Olympics in '92, but – a Greek Christian and a persecuted minority within the PIF – had defected. She had been through steroids and longevity programmes, and concluded cyberneticisation was the way to preserve and enhance herself against time.
Olympia watched Andromeda, her body language easy to read. Contempt, jealousy, fear, dislike. Olympia strangely retained much of her meatmind. Eventually, she believed, such irritants would cease to be a part of the cybermind.
Andromeda had sought out the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, crushing her own meathand to demonstrate commitment. Dr Threadneedle, contracted for the job, was enthusiastic about the possibilities of perfecting the woman. Her hand benefited, like Kochineel's body, from developments in ceramics. It was imitation marble. She would ultimately be a goddess of living stone.
When remodelling was complete, Andromeda would be a better machine than Olympia. There was static between the cyberwomen. Now, Olympia could best Andromeda at any contest of skill or strength; but Andromeda's mentality eventually would prevail. Her graymass was closer to the cybermind than Olympia's part-silicon brain. Trained from infancy to treat meat as if it were durium, she was programmed as a Gold Medal winner.
Andromeda looked up at Canyon de Chelly.
"It is very beautiful," she said. "In this light, almost magical."
"Tchah," Olympia spat. "You have too much meat in you, madame. Sentimental juices squirt from your heart, poisoning your mind …"
Olympia's heart had been her first replacement. A necessity; the meat organ was defective at birth. That had taught her not to trust nature, and put faith in the machine.
"Meat is weak," she told Andromeda. "That damfool pilgrim this afternoon. He was pure meat. Look how he burst when squashed. Like a bug."
Olympia was being unkind.
"I would wager your warranty does not cover the treatment you gave that Josephite," Franken told her. "If Pinocchiocchio drove the bus over your chest, your components would fail as surely as the meat of that poor, strange man."
Franken was perturbed by the way the Josephite had accepted his death. As if he were certain of a future.
"My cybermind is of a better quality, Franken. I would not find myself in such a situation. He died for no reason."
Olympia had not acted dispassionately. In killing the man, she had demonstrated something about herself.
"Your brain is still graymass, still mostly meatmind."
"An information storage unit," she said, tapping her skull. "And a reasoning function. Few human brains have reasoning functions. That is why they are obsolete."
"Why did that man defy us?" Andromeda asked. She disapproved of Olympia's treatment of the Josephites. Only interested in the road ahead, she saw no point in the cruelty. Meatfolks were left behind; to Andromeda, that was harsh enough.
Olympia shrugged.
"The rational thing was to pay the toll," Andromeda reasoned. "If they had paid, they would not have died. Why did they not follow that course?"
"Their experience was misleading," Franken explained. "They believed us a common gangcult. The Maniax would have taken tithe and still killed several or all of them."
"We were frustrated in our purpose," Andromeda said, trying to follow the reasoning. "We set out to achieve money by extortion, money we need to pursue our own aims, but gained nothing from the exchange. In a logical sense, we lost."
"We put meat in the ground," Olympia snapped. "Do not underestimate that."
"Frankly, I am still perplexed."
"Catch up, meatdoll."
Andromeda assumed a posture indicating emotional hurt.
Olympia did a triumphant pirouette. Kochineel might be sighing, Franken calculated.
"Metal must always master meat," Olympia said, quoting the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots' slogan.
Andromeda said nothing but her hand flexed. Metal might always master meat, Franken mused, but perhaps marble would outlast metal. Nothing was settled.
He had been at the wheel of the Edsel since midday services. Perhaps six hours, with the joyous voices of the Brethren coming over the CB joined in song. Like all Josephites, W. Bond Wiggs abjured godless radio stations. Those that pretended to be religious were worst of all, polluting airwaves with so-called Christian Heavy Metal, ceaselessly soliciting donations. The Elect had no need of Golden Oldies or Soviet Sounds when they had hymns and a limited band communion.
"Follow the fold, and stra-aaa-ay no more..."
Elder Seth sat beside him, mouth set in a straight line. Another man in mirrorshades might be thought asleep, lulled by the lilting chorus, but Brother Wiggs knew the elder was eternally vigilant. No sin escaped his eye.
After the drive, the flat plastic flask strapped to Wiggs's inner thigh was full and sloshing. Since his voluntary amendment, he ceased to notice the needs of his urino-genital arrangement. Many long-haul drivers without his special consideration adopted such contrivaptions to cut down on pit-stops.
When the Inner Council of the Brethren of Joseph gathered to plan the first convoy of resettlement, none had foreseen that the demands of nearly a hundred bladders would require more stoppages than equipment failure or skirmishes with
[Two Pages are missing here]
The Brethren worked like a Marine platoon, fixing up lean-tos and shelters. Brother Bailie, who had seen combat in Mexico and the Central American Confederation, posted look-outs and inspected facilities. There was already a line by the rest rooms. Sisters held the hands of antsy children. More than a few youngers had had "accidents", a backsliding against Christian Continence sure to earn many a chastisement.
He walked away from the Edsel towards the skeleton screen. It had to be a 100 feet long and 50 high. Sinful harlots would have filled the view, vast close-up lips swallowing an entire audience at a gulp. Twenty yards from the scaffolding, asphalt gave out to dunes. A low wall was overwhelmed by the sand. Wiggs put his foot up on the wall, pleasurably popping his cramped thigh, and hitched his black pantsleg to the knee. The outflow tube was taped down his leg to his ankle, where a plastic spigot faucet tied off the system.
Wiggs turned the faucet and emptied a day's water into the sand. He felt not so much as a twinge from what wasn't there. Before the amendment, he had worried about stories he had heard of amputees with phantom pains in missing limbs. He had no such experiences. He hadn't put on weight, his voice hadn't climbed an octave and the fire hadn't gone out of his faith; he just didn't feel like being a sinner any more. He had found salvation in the Brethren of Joseph.
A nearby wall, covered in pasted-over and torn-away posters for long-gone coming attractions, was a collage of faces, breasts and legs. Wiggs recognised godless harlots of the silver screen and video machine.
Before his amendment, Wiggs had held a special place in his lustful, sinful heart for Traci Lords. There were disembodied segments of Traci on the wall. And Sharon Stone's libidinous eyes, Geena Davis's mile-long limbs, Meryl Streep's welcoming mouth, Voluptua Whoopee's pillow chest. They did not call to him now.
He turned his back on sin and walked back to the ve-hickles, righteous pride rising. Tonight, if called, he would testify. He must abjure his former ways in public.
Carnal excess had been his abiding drive. Through adulterous fornication, he had lost two wives and three children. Directed by the white throb of his urges, his body was consumed by lust. No woman was safe with him. He would lie, wheedle, cheat, cajole and coerce. Nothing was too low if it enticed some godless hagwitch into his bed or automobile and loosed her from her drawers.
He shook his head with sorrow. Sister Maureen smiled at him and, mercifully, he felt no desire to fall upon her.
As a young man, he had been promising. In Macon County, Georgia, where his Daddy was Sheriff, he had been a Deputy in the early '60s. Law enforcement offered opportunities for sin. Solitary female motorists were persuaded to give of their favours to avoid speeding tickets. The wives and daughters of men he locked in the hoosegow would often yield up virtue in the hope of expediting the release of loved ones. Best of all, many was the loose woman who found herself in an overnight cell when W. Bond Wiggs was sole turnkey and custodian. There was a separate section, round the back, for coloured prisoners. Many a night Deputy W. B. Wiggs would saunter there with a jug of cone liquor, and cut out some little ole gal for a taste of dark meat. He had cleaved to sinning as a fly to sticky paper and tasted the bitter gall of self-degradation.
As the Josephites prepared their simple evening meal in a bank of microwaves. Elder Seth stood a little apart and a little elevated, looking down on his flock. The dying sun flashed in his mirrorshades. He was still as a figurehead. The mere sight of the Elder gave Wiggs strength to continue remembering the dark days.
Finally, mere carnality was not enough to excite his depraved tastes, and Wiggs had availed himself of the handcuffs and nightsticks easily accessible in the lock-up. His pursuit of lechery cost him families and his job. His Daddy passed on in 76, the day Spiro Agnew was elected. Sheriff Wiggs had been turning an uppity nigra away from the polling booth with a cattle-prod when an aneurism had burst in his graymass. The new sheriff had immediately kicked Wiggs off the force. In the unholy spirit of vengeance, Wiggs forced attentions on the Sheriff's daughters and found it necessary to leave his native county and state.
Now he fervently hoped Sheriff Pullinger could find it in his heart to forgive him for his undoubted sins. He wondered if it were not too late to make reparation.
By the earth-mover, Brother Kenneth and Sister Barbara held hands and read from The Path of Joseph. There was no carnality between the young Josephites, simply shared, untarnished faith. Brother Wiggs regretted his squandered youth.
For fifteen years, Wiggs had drifted and sinned. He picked up spells of work as a security Op, but most of his hours were consumed by the pursuit of harlots. He travelled from town to town and state to state, sinning all the way. He had been a notable imbiber of the Devil's alcohol, a habitual drinker of Satan's caffeine and a not-infrequent dependant on proscribed chemicals.
W. Bond Wiggs must have stank of his sins. Stank to high heaven.
Trestle tables were erected and food laid out upon them. The Brethren gathered and took their places. Wiggs sat at the Elder's right hand, as was fit. Elder Seth read the blessing and the Brethren ate in prayerful silence. Josephites abjured stimulants and spices, so the fare was plain and unflavoured, sustenance for the body not distraction for the palate. Wiggs happily spooned into his mouth a mush which contained all essentials for the prolongation of life but no harmful additives.
After a meal, Wiggs' taste-buds occasionally yearned for coffee, the most reviled of all stimulants. But the only coffee legally available in the United States was recaff, which hardly counted. All in all, he did not miss any of the things the Brethren were required to put behind them. He certainly did not miss the sins of the flesh. These days, he rarely even thought of them.
Young women, old women, illegally young women, indecently old women. Fat women, thin women, short women, tall women. Dark women, fair women, black women, white women. All of them he had used and cast away until Elder Seth showed him how to escape the coils of his desires.
He had been in Tombstone, Arizona, in a pornobooth at the virtual mall, hips bucking as the milking sleeve simulated the skilled orifice of some faceless harlot. The Revelation was a Fiery Coming. It screeched through the sensory inputs and blanked out the sinful loop. Tearing out of the mall, the weight of Sin crushing him like a falling safe, he found his way to a revival staged in the historic OK Corrall. In a Battle of the Brothers, a succession of evangelists mounted the stand, preaching until the audience gonged them off.
Come one, come all, announced barkers. Anyone could take the lectern.
Staggering into the crowd, self-disgust coursing through his graymass like electricity, Wiggs heard four or five preachers booed off the altar. A hooded pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ, Caucasian, was passed over heads by a multitude of hands and tossed squealing into the street. It was a tough congregation, perpetually on the edge of an ugly mood. A singing nun didn't get into the second "-nique" of "Domi-nique-nique-nique" before she was stripped of her penguin cowl and dumped in the horse-trough. It seemed no-one could satisfy this crowd's thirst for a sermon. They had come to hear the Word and weren't taking any tin dollars.
Then, striding to the podium as Wyatt Earp had strode over the same dirt to face the Clanton Boys, came a tall man with a wide black hat and simple mirrored sunglasses.
From that day to this, Wiggs had never seen the Elder without his shades. He wondered if the man suffered from some disease of the eyes.
Elder Seth had talked all evening and well into the night, holding the rowdy audience rapt. The Word spilled from him like milk from a pitcher, and the crowd lapped it up like babies.
Looking now at the Elder, Wiggs remembered the force of that first experience. Again and again, he thanked the Lord that he had been saved before perdition was unavoidable. Faith had come upon him like a fever.
At the time, he was confused in his feelings, even hostile. He found himself near the front of the crowd, in the company of loose women. The initial fire of his conviction was already petering out, and he was drawn as if by magnetic attraction to painted women. No more than NoGo girls, they wore cutaway plastic minidresses, check shirts tied in tantalising knots above tiny navels and tinselled pseudoleather cowgirl hats. Tags shaped like sheriff stars confirmed their status as registered, disease-free Arizona Harlots.
As Elder Seth preached, the whores inflamed Wiggs's hateful lusts with duplicitous strokes of tongue and hand. He found himself calling out for the gong, a lone voice in the grateful multitude. After that night, two of the lost girls turned away from sin; Rancho Rita was now Sister Rosalie and Chihuahua Chicken was Sister Consuela.
Now, Sister Consuela was beloved of the children. In the Shining City, she would teach the Truth of Joseph and lead the choir. But back then she was an alley-cat who would have rutted with the Tasmanian Devil for a squeezer of smack-synth. In the OK Corrall, she went for Wiggs's sex pistol and almost squeezed off a couple of shots before Elder Seth turned his attention to their corner of the crowd.
Clearly, a certain part of his body ruled the rest of him. It outranked his graymass, his heart and his spirit. Turgid with lascivious blood, it compelled him to cry against the good man who extended the hand of salvation to him.
"Brother," the Elder said, fixing Wiggs with his mirror glare, "in the Good Book it is written, in the Gospel of St Matthew, that Our Redeemer said, 'if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out'…"
Wiggs, realisation coming into his head like a bomb-burst, knew Elder Seth had shown him the Way, the only path to his salvation.
The roadkillers had made better than average time, which meant the Quince ordered a night ride. They roughly followed the old state line, dipping in and out of Arizona. For safety, they kept their speed down to seventy. Tyree felt as if her mount was hobbled.
She listened to Quincannon make cockpit talk with Yorke, fixing on the buzz as a talisman against the fingers of sleep clawing her mind. She was used to 36 and 48-hour stretches on the road but bone-deep weariness descended with the dark. She felt the force, if not the chill, of wind against her padded arms. After hours in the saddle, stiffness set in from her coccyx to her shoulders. She rode with her knees close to the mount, britches warmed by engine heat, and moved her helmeted head back and forth like a darting snake's to fight the ache in her neck.
The patrol was in close formation, outriders at the corners of the cruiser's headlight throw. Darkness rushed around, the odd roadside sign or abandoned building looming as high-intensity beams briefly lit them up like bright white ghosts.
The unknown pilgrim-flatteners had taken an underused route and left clear tracks even after the blood ran out. Tiremarks cut through drifting sand and patches of heat-melted asphalt, hardened in the night's chill, even showed what brand of rubber the quarry was burning. GenTech, natch. The main ve-hickle was an armoured bus. High speed.
Burnside had popped a couple of pills to keep alert and unconsciously hummed "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" into his intercom. The tune settled in around the back of Tyree's brain and stayed there.
"Round her neck, she wore a yellow ribbon.
She wore it for her lover who was far, far away …"
Tyree thought of Trooper Nathan Stack. He was far, far away all right, back at Fort Valens, if not exactly her lover. That time in Nicaragua, when their leave coincided and a rare foreign travel permit came along, there'd been a moment when wedding chapels were open and it would have been easy on an impulse to tie a knot. Back in the States, things scanned very different There were things about Nathan that didn't square with her ideas for the next few years.
"When I asked her why the yellow ribbon.
She said it was for her lover in the US Cavalry…"
She'd set the buzzer in her skidlid to deliver a subaudial jolt every thirty seconds. That kept her awake and alert and there was no risk of developing a dependency. Burnside had popped a few too many pills this tour and she should report him to the Quince. It was in the regulations; but the Cav had regs and rules, and it was a Rule that one trooper not snitch on another, even if she was angling for a promotion.
"Caval-reee, Caval-reee.
She said it was for her lover in the US Cavalry…"
She'd talk to Burnside, suggest he take counselling. His best bet would be Quincannon. The Quince had been through it all and come out the other side. He'd been on these roads forever.
They rode into the night.
Nathan was the recruiting poster image of the Cav. Tree-tall, broad-shouldered, strong-chinned. But he looked down at the ground, not up at the skies. Every time Tyree won a commendation or earned a qualification, he found it necessary to throw a major drunk. In the sand, there was no one better as backup, but in everything else Nathan was never there for her. His priorities were hard to figure.
In their next rotation, to Fort Apache in Arizona, Tyree would be riding with Trooper Stack. She didn't know how she was going to feel about that. The worst thing would be if he came over masculine and protective and got himself crippled or killed trying to cover her ass.
Something birdlike with white hair froze in the light-funnel, red eyes staring. Tyree and Burnside swerved in formation to avoid the beast (a mew-tater of some species) but the cruiser ground it under.
Yorke blathered about racking up another score and the Quince told him it was Des etiquette to eat whatever you killed. Yorke suggested that Ms Redd Harvest of T-H-R must get mighty tired of tucking into a roasted Maniak every suppertime.
The Association of Women in Law Enforcement, of which Tyree was Fort Valens chapel boss, had invited Redd Harvest to address them; she had sent back their invitational fax with a scrawled comment, "I'm not a woman, I'm an Op". Tyree planned to resign. It was important she advance herself on merit, not by soliciting positive discrimination. She knew how she'd feel if anyone she knew got killed because an inferior woman occupied a position of power and made a mistake. Captain Julie Brittles, to whom the Quince reported, was a hard-ass of the old school and had never been in the AWLE.
"Leona," Quincannon said, "the bus's heat patterns are scrambled up ahead."
"Are we losing the trail?"
"It's still clear, but someone crossed the path."
"Could the quarry have made us? Is someone waiting to give us a surprise?"
The Quince considered.
"Nope, this is too recent. The heat signature suggests something big and alive, now off the road a ways to the north."
Tyree scanned and saw nothing but the dark.
"An animal?"
"Could be, but it's heading where there's nothing to drink. Only people are stupo enough for that, or smart enough to pack a canteen."
The sand was thin on the road, a light white brushing in which wheeltracks were black lines. Quincannon's phantom trail crossed. It was behind them in an instant, but the image imprinted in Tyree's visor, fading slowly.
"Man on a horse," she guessed. "Weird."
Waiting for dawn was the quixotic act of a unit too close to the meatmind to realise day and night were mere conveniences for those lacking infrared sight. Olympia's aesthetic decision should be outweighed by wastage of time. Once recharged, Franken conceived no reason why they should remain at Canyon de Chelly waiting for an illusory apt moment.
They should blow the column and move on. There were many more anomalies waiting to be tidied up. To pass the time, Olympia danced with Kochineel, her face set in a razor smile.
The resettlers might have notified the authorities. Canyon de Chelly was a National Monument and thus conspicuous. The Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots could best any number of individual patrols but if the US Cavalry were to mount a campaign like the one that shattered the Western Maniax, the cyborg future would die a-borning. War must eventually be carried against meat, but now the 'bots were too few to make large-scale hostilities pursuable.
Besides, strategy decreed the cybermind take complete control of the processes of perfectibility before meatfolks were rendered entirely obsolete. Dr Zarathustra, so amused by the symbolic face he had given Franken Steinberg, must yield BioDiv to his creation.
After Franken, Kochineel was the most complete machine among them. He wore only black scarves to cover meat forearms and skin shins. The rest of him was perfect automaton. His jester's cowl was metallic pseudoleather. Most of his external body was a ceramic carapace.
Andromeda watched Kochineel with interest. His form was what she could expect of her forthcoming alterations. When Franken had been reshaped, durium was state-of-the-art; now, molecule-locked ceramics were proven superior to any alloy. Kochineel's warranty was good up to and including tactical nukes, though he was not inclined to test it. Suppliers only guaranteed robo-bits; they did not extend insurance cover to the graymass where consciousness lived or any original parts required if you were to remain legally and psychologically yourself.
The dance was deliberate and measured. Through his chest-organ, Talos played the "Barcarole" from Tales of Hoffmann. It was the wrong tale for the dance, but Franken let it pass.
Kochineel lifted Olympia and morphed her through the air. Their moves were perfect, unwavering. No meat could match the precision. Every step and pose was calculated, computer animation in solid matter. If required, the dancers could encore, replaying their routine exactly to the micro-millimetre. Digital dancers would render obsolete stubborn fools who insisted on remaining trapped in steadily rotting carcasses. Kochineel stumbled.
An alarm! display lit up in Franken's vision. Something was seriously awry.
Olympia screamed, more in surprise than fear. Somersaulting, she landed on her points. She backed away in horror from her suddenly-imperfect companion, long legs like scissor-blades.
Pinocchiocchio stepped forward but Kochineel waved him away. His cowl-bells sounded, desperately. Kochineel's scarves were wet. He gingerly unpicked the scarf from his left forearm, unwinding cloth away from skin. Much of the skin, and a layer of meat, came away with the scarf. Kochineel's painted doll face could not register shock but the set of his ceramic shoulders, as if he were trying to distance himself from his own arm, gave away his feelings.
The meat of the arm was melting like wax, revealing the clean piston inside. Kochineel's hand clasped and unclasped, then, without the meatmuscles, seized up. It was as dead as alabaster. The Zarathustra rods that threaded through Kochineel's muscles were exposed. The effect was general. All organic matter in Kochineel's body was rotting away.
A splash of thick blood fell around him and dwindled into dead scum, leaving only the microscopic ticks of the nanomachines that had coursed through the cyborg's system. He fell to his knees, molten meat squelching, and looked up. His imploring eyes shrank and fell into his mask.
In the blackness of Kochineel's empty eye-holes, Franken read a bleak future. He signalled the others to stay away. There was a 76.83 per cent probability the effect was viral. Contact could be fatal. Olympia had already made the calculation and scrubbed herself. Franken shut down his ventilation system and systematically expelled air from inside the spaces of his body. The little of his meat that remained was not exposed.
Talos's organ still played. Offenbach drifted across the desert, accompanied by the rasps of Kochineel's exposed gears grinding uselessly against each other.
A diagonal crack shot across Kochineel's face, running from forehead to eye to mouth to neck. Liquid seeped through the fissure and flooded across his face. The graymass was gone. Kochineel pitched into the sand, inanimate as a store mannequin. Purely mechanical parts still functioned inside him and would do until his solar batteries perished, but there was no controlling intelligence. Insofar as he could die, Kochineel was dead.
"Most interesting," Franken concluded.
"Look," Olympia said, pointing.
Franken wheeled. Andromeda held up her ceramic hand, staring at it, gripping it with her meat hand. The robo-bit worked perfectly but Andromeda deliquesced. The athlete's stricken face ran behind her veil, soaking through. She assumed a position of traditional prayer, whimpering.
It was a waste of human potential.
Andromeda huddled into herself. Fluids gushed through her robes, splashing across sand and rock. She was the size of a dwarf, and shrinking. Her head withdrew like a tortoise's, sheltering in her fragile ribcage. Noisily, Andromeda melted away.
Her white hand, perfect and shining, lay at the edge of a putrescent pool.
"It would appear we are being betrayed by our meat," Franken said.
The sun rose behind Canyon de Chelly and his IR function automatically cut out. Silver dawnlight flooded the area. The remains of Andromeda and Kochineel looked less real.
In the light-patterns the sun made around the stone column, it was impossible not to see the figure of a bearded man, hands outstretched, dressed in a long robe. It would have seemed a conventional representation of Jesus, the Christ, were it not for the curly horns sprouting from his forehead.
Franken made calculations but no explanation was forthcoming. There were precedents for such things but the files were still open, awaiting convincing analysis. At some point, miracles had been reclassified as Unknown Events.
Olympia, distraction blanked out, squatted by the console of her detonator. She had reordered her priorities and focused on the task. She flicked all the switches.
The charges around the base of Canyon de Chelly did not explode, but every scrap of meat in Olympia's body did. She was a red hurricane, swirling away from her mechanical parts. In the cloud of flesh, blood and bone, a shadow-woman of durium and plastic was torn apart. Franken's thought processes were scrambled by phenomena they were forced to regard as supernatural, and several of his chips burned out in a sizzling flash. He fought his headache and tried to think through the crisis.
Other 'bots emitted automatic distress signals as the effect took hold. Pinocchiocchio, Robbie the Robotman, Tetsuo, Hymie the Android, Rosie the Maid, Talos the Bronze, Mecha-Gojira, Tobor the Great, Maelzel. All exhibited symptoms. Franken calculated a 00.00 per cent possibility of saving any of his comrades.
Jesus Goat smiled broadly, his crown of horns bobbing.
Franken, calm under the circumstances, downloaded from graymass into the chips that constituted over half his brain. Memory bytes and personality traits might be lost, but he could survive without the trace elements of his meatmind. The probability was better than 65 per cent.
Pinocchiocchio jerked as if manipulated by a mad puppeteer, spare parts flying away from his spasming bulk. He blundered against one of the cars, leaving a substantial dent, and crashed down, breaking apart on the rocks.
This was the crisis of evolution.
Hymie transmitted a cry for help as organs dribbled through the suppurating wound in his lower abdomen. Franken did not have surplus graymass to consider further how assistance might be delivered. In the past, he had faced 00.00 per cent problems and developed solutions that expanded the parameters of the original programming. But he had not then been distracted by threats to his own survival.
Hymie switched himself off, auto-euthanasing. His doodads were smart parts; when they calculated termination was a certainty, they overruled their owner's graymass and simply ceased to function. Wastage of energy in a hopeless cause was criminally irrational.
Later, when he had survived, Franken Steinberg would calculate what had happened to the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots. There were solutions alternative to belief in forces beyond the natural.
A lesson was learned. The evolution of the Next Generation must not be supervised by the meatmind. If perfection was to come, it must come from the cybermind.
Fifty miles past sun-up city, Varoomschka reported back that she had scoped a party of motorwagons pulled over in the Lansdale Ozoner. Jazzbeaux knew it wasn't worth a detour to the abandoned drive-in. A regiment of raggedyass resettlers could hardly offer serious scav.
The Psychopomp war convoy was spruce-goosed to make an impression, proceeding at speed and in formation. Jazzbeaux was in the front passenger seat of the lead ve-hickle, a salmon-pink Tucker Tomorrow, with Sleepy Jane Porteous at the wheel. She usually drove herself, but had to rest up for the evening's social appointment. Besides, her licence outside the city was provisional and L-plates looked sissy. The Tucker was air-conditioned to a pleasant perfumed breeze. The in-car sound system was tuned to Radio Moscow; Andrei Tarkovsky sang "Twenty-Four Hours to Byelozersk".
Three cars back, Andrew Jean drove a life-size version of Barbie's Dream Motor Home. The gangcult's mobile HQ had frilly curtains On all the windows, sparkly swirls of stars on the bodywork and enough deathware to fight a border war for three months.
The skeleton of the drive-in screen was visible from a long way off. Sleepy Jane, an old-timer at twenty-one, remembered the place from her wild youth.
"Back then," she reminisced, leaning over but keeping her eyes on the road, "'afore the 'Pomps took me on, I was so numb-dumb I'd spread-eagle in the back of a flat-bed, putting out for popcorn kish or a jolt of zonk. I reckon I could juice off fifteen or sixteen grungy guys and still not miss any good parts of the Texas Chain Saw Massacre triple bill. You know the type, girlfriend: cowboy hats, whiskey breaths, room temperature IQs, noodle dicks. Tis a pure wonder I ain't falling apart from the Pork Poisoning. I guess I'm just lucky."
"Real lucky, fillette," Jazzbeaux commented.
Sleepy Jane got her name when one of the grunges, a specimen named Buddy Wayne Meeker, thought it'd be hilarious to cut her eyelids with a razor-blade. His performance was so uninspiring she'd fallen asleep before the end titles rolled. Though interrupted by the Lansdale's Security Op, Buddy Wayne managed to sever a few tiny muscles, giving the ganggirl a permanently dozy look.
Nine months back. Sleepy Jane finally tracked down her amateur plastic surgeon and the 'Pomps had paid him a visit at his place of drinking. Pleased with his shaky night's work, he liked to tell the story to his beer buds, working up a fair old head of laughter as he embroidered details. When Sleepy Jane faced Buddy Wayne down, he recognised her straight off and sprouted a shit-eating grin that was practically a deformity. In the parking lot Jazzbeaux, who'd paid attention to human bio lessons, cut a few of his tiny muscles and made the grin a permanent fixture. Then they'd taken turns and cut a few more of his muscles. None of his beer buds were inclined to intervene, perhaps because Sweetcheeks was dancing semi-nude along the bar, pointing her titties and a pump-action shotgun at a roomful of rednecks. Though good value as a table dancer, 'Cheeks sometimes got carried away and lost a customer.
When Buddy Wayne told the Sleepy Jane story these days, he'd still grin but he wouldn't be laughing. That was one score evened. Jazzbeaux was making a career of settling scores. It was one of the many character traits she could backtrace to the influence of her father. Though Bruno Bonney was dead, she kept running into him.
Varoomschka called in a detailed report.
"They're pilgrims, suestra. Josephites, en route to Salt Lake to reseed the Des."
"Mishkins," Jazzbeaux commented.
Without needing an order, Sleepy Jane slowed down. The Tucker crawled up to the Lansdale turn-off. Jazzbeaux saw Varoomschka standing by her cyke, the butt of her Kalashnikov perched on one hip, keeping an eye on a sober crowd of men in rough black suits. Their womenfolk and kids held back, eyeballing Varoomschka with suspicion and alarm. The 'Pomp wore a see-through jump suit over a red bikini with a yellow hammer-and-sickle motif. Spike heel go-go boots and a white fur hat made her nearly seven feet tall. She had unslung her Kalashnikov and put a hole or two in the dirt by the Josephites' feet.
Jazzbeaux watched her own back because Varoomschka sometimes gave the impression that she wondered if she could get ahead by making an opening for Acting War Chief.
The negotiation with the Daughters of the American Revolution was colossally important. Jazzbeaux shouldn't be conce with petty pickings. With two good-sized states to worry about, she should pass on by without rumbling the Josephites or just give them a light pasting to get their food and fuel. She had other blat to cover, major league blat. There was no need to take the time to beat up on the new pioneers.
But there was a man among them who was unafraid. That was a personal challenge.
"Vroomsh, who's the preachie with the shades?"
Varoomschka pressed a Red Star throat-mike cameo to her larynx and sub-vocalised. The CB translated her swallowed words into a metallic Hawking voice.
"Elder Seth, he says. Leader of the pack."
Sleepy Jane pulled over and the convoy slid smoothly to a halt. As she got out of the Tucker, Jazzbeaux was pleased to see the 'Pomps were still in formation as if for a parade. The chapter would make the late, genuinely lamented Ms Dazzle proud.
Elder Seth stood tall by Varoomschka, smiling just like her old man. On sight, Jazzbeaux knew she would have to take him down.
"Good ayem, preacher-man," she said, looking at her face in his mirrorshades. Even with the eyepatch, she was doubly cute. "My associate, Miss Porteous," she nodded at Sleepy Jane, "is the commandante of this desirable camping area, and we figure you owe her kopeck or two stop-over fee."
The Elder showed empty hands and said, "The Brethren of Joseph are poor. We have little money."
"Nichevo, we'll garner the fee in goods. Vroomsh, So Long, take around the collecting plate."
"Foul hagwitch of slutdom," protested a black-hatted pilgrim with a red face, starting forward.
Elder Seth held his arm out, preventing his follower from flying at Jazzbeaux, probably saving his life.
"Stay calm. Brother Wiggs. The sister will find her reward in Heaven."
"Darlin' dearest," she said, dimpling the underside of the Elder's chin with the sharpened point of her forefingernail extension, "I'd best find my reward in your pockets, else you'll be waiting for me by the time I get to Heaven."
"We have abjured pockets," Elder Seth said, calmly lecturing as if she weren't an eighth of an inch away from puncturing his carotid artery. "Pockets encourage possessions and we have abjured ownership of worldly things."
"You can vocalise that again, preachie."
Varoomschka and So Long Suin went among the resettlers and their ve-hickles, dropping scav into wire baskets as if spreeing down at X-Mart. The haul was pathetic. Josephites abjured rings, necklaces and earrings, so there was no jewellery. Their clothes didn't even have buttons. Only about one in ten had a watch, mainly cheap American Century dial-faces. The Brother who handed over a $5,000 Swiss Chronex was almost relieved, as if he no longer had to worry his fellow pilgrims would find out about his hoard. The mishkin even thanked Varoomschka for teaching him a valuable lesson.
"I could teach you a more valuable one if you'd let me, Studley," Varoomschka said, wriggling inside her cellophanelike wrapping, tongue-touching the tip of the Josephite's nose. From the man's crawling reaction, Jazzbeaux gathered these people abjured more than pockets.
She opened the Elder's jacket and found a wallet hanging on tags. It had a few meagre cashplastics and cards, but she kept it anyway.
"I don't parse you chelovieks," she told him. "Life has few enough pleasures. Why turn away from them?"
"One day, daughter, you will understand."
He had pushed the wrong button.
"I'm not, not, not your daughter, old man," she spat.
She looked at his face. It could be a half-mask under the shades for all the expression he showed.
But there was something in his voice. Soothing and threatening, sad and strange. When he called her "daughter", there was an echo of Bruno Bonney, RIP. The word was a lash.
She had to see his eyes. She had to make him human and taste his fear.
"I'll require these," she told him, reaching up and slipping the mirrorshades from his face.
He didn't even blink, though sun poured into his eyes. There was no fear. She couldn't read anything from the colourless ice-chips looking back at her single eye.
Jazzbeaux found she was the one blinking.
"Jessa-myn," Bruno said in her head, "c'mon over here and sit on Daddy's knee."
She looked at the shades. They were ordinary. She was sure they were cheap.
"Daddy won't hurt."
Bruno always lied about that.
The brother by Elder Seth's side – Wiggs, the Elder had called him – was burning with fear and rage. Jazzbeaux felt the brother's impotent need to hurt her, and it gave her a thrill. It almost made her feel sexy.
She had not been able to enjoy acts of love until her father was dead. She had needed to outgrow guilt and pain.
Elder Seth didn't show anything. Jazzbeaux could swear he didn't feel anything. She had thought her father was like that, but, in the end, she had made him feel too many things.
If the only way of getting a reaction out of someone was to rip out their throat, then Jazzbeaux was willing to go the distance. She tried the same stunt on Officer Rachael Harvest once and wound up with a cracked wrist.
She had to make the Elder's face flicker.
"Andrew Jean," she called out. "They must be hiding something. Bread-fruit trees or coffers of gold. Their whole lives are in the motorwagons."
Andrew Jean considered the question and agreed.
"Find the scav," Jazzbeaux ordered. "By any means necessary."
Andrew Jean saluted, shocking pink fingernails tipped to a beehive hairdo.
Jazzbeaux's lieutenant had a mean streak which sometimes went a mile too far. The paper on Andrew Jean listed a couple of murders Jazzbeaux would have been ashamed of. So she was usually careful about tasks she assigned in that directon.
Now Jazzbeaux was being wilful. What happened next would not strictly be her fault – she had issued no specific orders – and, indeed, Elder Seth would be as responsible as anyone else for the blood that was bound to be spilled.
Andrew Jean cut out a couple of the pioneers and jostled them into a bunch. Three men, youngish, anonymous, good-looking. Andrew Jean always had good taste in men. One was the cheloviek Varoomschka had shaken down for his watch.
"These pilgrims have names, preacher?"
Elder Seth nodded.
"Brother Akins, Brother Finnegan, Brother Dzundza."
"Cosy."
The Josephite's face was stone over a skull.
"Do you feel like divulging the whereabouts of your fabled stash? A fabulous treasure must he hidden in your transports. Think not that you can dupe the Psychopomps."
Without pleading, he told her, "There is no treasure."
She drew her Magnum LadyKill and hefted the pistol, resting the sight against the Elder's throat apple. The gun was a Christmas present from the ganggirls, with a sentiment inscribed on the grip.
"If wishing makes it so, tell yourself there's no ScumStopper in the chamber."
The LadyKill was a single-action weapon; it cocked and fired with one pull. A light touch and Elder Seth's head would vanish. Also, considering recoil, Jazzbeaux would crack her wrist again, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Andrew Jean prowled around the three Josephites, inspecting them, feeling up butts, flicking ears, tugging sleeves. Akins, the youngest, muttered a prayer.
One of the sisters struggled forwards to plead for the Elder's life. She was pushing forty and abjuring make-up was not a good policy decision for her.
"Sister Ciccone," Elder Seth said, silencing her, "take comfort. The Lord will know His own."
The sister sniffled but got back in line. There was something about her squinty eyes that didn't fit with the God Sqaud.
"Any final thoughts?" Jazzbeaux asked.
Elder Seth did not even pop sweatbeads. He looked as if he were sure his throat was bullet-proof.
With three precise stamps, Andrew Jean broke three knees, stepping down on legs as if breaking sticks for kindling. The brothers screamed and fell to the blacktop.
"Vroomsh," Andrew Jean said, "the Klash."
Varoomschka tossed the Kalashnikov over. The gun fell into Andrew Jean's hands and discharged almost by itself.
A stitching of bullet-holes raked across the asphalt and opened bloody cat's eyes in the Josephites' backs. Akins screamed painful prayer. Dzundza of Swiss-watch fame was shocked instantly dead. Finnegan, modelling himself on the Elder, held in his yelps.
Jazzbeaux did not know how she felt. Years ago, Officer Harvest had tried to brainwash a conscience cop into her skull. Sometimes the dumb bitch wouldn't shut up.
Bruno Bonney and Buddy Wayne Meeker, OK; but what about these three pilgrims? They had done her and hers no harm. Jazzbeaux shook her head and swallowed the thought. She would have to squelch Redd Harvest one day, then maybe she'd get some peace. If only people wouldn't stick things in her head that screwed up her thoughts.
Andrew Jean levelled the rifle and pantomimed a massacre, making bang-bang sounds as the barrel raked across the flinching crowd. Sweetcheeks cheerled with a few killercalls and a couple of bump 'n' grind steps. So Long, uncomfortable with this sort of action against civilians, kept her opinions to herself.
It had gone further than Jazzbeaux intended.
Elder Seth watched without even showing interest. It would be easy to shove the LadyKill past his teeth. If she shot a ScumStopper through the roof of his mouth, she'd explode his graymass. Then she'd see a reaction.
Andrew Jean switched the Kalashnikov from automatic, and shot Akins in the foot, the ankle, the calf, the knee, the thigh, the hip…
A woman in the crowd was sobbing. Sister Ciccone.
"Leave them be," Jazzbeaux said, finally. "Trash their chariots."
Andrew Jean, taking a broad interpretation of orders, shot Akins and Finnegan in the heads, finishing their business. A party of 'Pomps filtered – attacked the Josephites' ve-hickles. If she were thinking straight, Jazzbeaux would have ordered the girls to scav usable spare parts.
"Akins, Finnegan, Dzundza," Elder Seth said. "Remember their names, daughter."
"I told you," Jazzbeaux shouted, whipping the barrel of the LadyKill across the man's face. "You're not my daddy."
He spun away from her but did not fall. Wiggs held him up. She should have crushed a cheekbone, but only raised a bruise which sweat red droplets.
He had not needed to remind her. She never forgot the names of her dead.
She holstered her gun unfired, and unhooked the Elder's shades from her chain-link garter.
His eyes fell on her.
"People like you have been looking at me like that all my annos," she said, twirling the sunglasses. "I can hear you thinking, "one-eyed skank", "lowlife panzergirl", "ratskag slutwitch". I've heard a lot of names."
She put on the shades. Strangely, they didn't make things darker. They must cut out glare or something. Maybe if she had two eyes, she could see a difference. No one could blame her for her anti-social attitudes; she was monoscopic, handicapped. Society was piled up against her. Of course, she'd had two good, green eyes back when she'd done for Daddy. But Daddy was another sort of handicap.
The Psychopomps weren't just a gangcult; they were a Support Group for Survivors of Severe Abuse.
The 'Pomps were finished with the convoy now and back in formation. Varoomschka straddled her cyke like a cover girl, an outstretched boot-toe near Akins' head. To move out, Sleepy Jane would have to pizza-plough over the deadfellas. Fine. It would underline the point.
So Long Suin hunched impatient on her cyke. Her lips were pursed and her eyes were slits. She had a determined look that told Jazzbeaux she'd be filing an official complaint with the Den Mother about this. That was another hassle she'd have to deal with.
Elder Seth still looked at her. He wiped blood from his cheek with a kerchief and seemed to wipe the bruise off his face. It was quite a trick; one she'd have loved to learn.
Surely a Josephite wasn't likely to have bio-amendments. Most of these revivalists expended a lot of energy condemning ungodly tinkering with the divinely ordained human form. There were always scandals when televangelists raised money they sneakily used to have the Zarathustra treatment. But Elder Seth struck her as a very different stripe of preachie from the likes of Reverend Bob Jackson or Harry Powell. It must be a trick of the eye.
Jazzbeaux took off the shades but found herself blinking and put them back on.
"Cool as snazz," she said. "I think they set off my outfit."
She rejoined Sleepy Jane in the Tucker, feeling headachy and unsatisfied. Suddenly she wanted to be in a nice, clean gangfight, biting and scratching and stabbing and gouging until the insect buzz in the back of her head was blotted away.
Petya Tcherkassoff sang "Purging My Love" on the radio. It always struck her as deeply chilling.
Through the windscreen, Jazzbeaux saw the Josephites standing like trees in the Petrified Forest. Elder Seth was the tallest tree in the pack. His hat-brim shaded his eyes with darkness.
"This was his lucky day," Jazzbeaux said.
She had let him live. She had taken his dark glasses and let him live. Two mistakes, she thought.
Bad ones, her phantom father whispered.
"Wagons roll," she said.
More damfool deadfolks, Tyree thought, surveying wreckage. Well, arguably folks. And, until bagged and tagged, only arguably dead.
Burnside, always a backdrop buff, was struck silent by Canyon de Chelly. No matter how many times he patrolled Monument Valley or the Painted Desert or the Petrified Forest, the trooper was compelled to waste valuable minutes staring. He should buy a book of postcards and get it over with. He kept on his skidlid, glareproof visor down, as he looked up at the free-standing column. Despite the technology wrapped around his head, he shaded his eyes with his hand.
As Burnside gazed up at the wonders of nature, Tyree rooted down in the dirt for the detritus of man.
"The place scans like an amnesty point for robo-bits," she said into her intercom. The Quince, a few miles back in the cruiser and gaining, grunted at her commentary.
Turning over a durium arm with her boot, she continued her report.
"We've got brand-new prostheses scattered like seashells. I'm no expert, but I think some of the smaller contrivaptions are doodad hearts and kidneys and the like."
She picked up a glass eye. Its pupil dilated and she dropped it like a slug.
"And we have abandoned ve-hickles, some with trace blood in their treads. Plus what looks to me like explosive charges wired around the base of a national monument."
The cruiser was in sight now, growling up an ill-maintained access road. Few tourists ventured this way nowadays. Out in the Des, you were more likely to pick up a permanent disability than a novelty hologram. Besides, once you've seen one acre of sand…
"Looks like a bird of prey," Burnside said, pointing out a circling black bird, "a hawk or something."
"Probably a vulture," Tyree said. "A disappointed vulture. There's no meat around here, just metal."
Burnside tore himself away from the grandeur and started poking around amongst the robo-junk. Some remains were almost complete, like empty suits of armour.
Dried smears of oily substance were all over the show, coating the abandoned doodads but also streaking the sand and rock. It had a faintly nauseating odour. Tyree had no idea what the stuff might be, but didn't care for it.
Quincannon ambled over from the cruiser, Yorke trotting behind like a faithful terrier. They looked like a father-and-son team; the young trooper trying to copy the older, bulkier sergeant's Cav swagger. Yorke was OK for a kid.
"Have you pulled wires on the infernal devices?" the sergeant asked.
"We thought you'd like to take a scan, Quince."
Quincannon raised a disapproving eyebrow at the arrangement of detonators and charges.
"It's just demolition equipment," he said. "You couldn't even call it a bomb."
Tyree agreed, but it was never a good idea to perform surgery on Blastite without a second opinion. "Burnside, disable and collect the fireworks." Burnside saluted and snapped to, scurrying around the base of the column to unfasten the packages.
"We'll put 'em under Captain Brittle's desk for the Fourth of July," Quincannon said.
The Sergeant squinted at a decal on one of the abandoned cykes. It showed Pinocchio making obscene use of his liar's nose. "Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots," Quincannon said. Tyree agreed. Yorke needed the full explanation. "A cyborg fraternity. Renegades from GenTech BioDiv's New Flesh programme. They aren't really even a gangcult. There's a semi-official Hands Off note posted on them. BioDiv wants to observe them in the wild, see how they survive the environment."
"Not too snazz, I guess," Tyree said.
"Good call, Leona. Scans like a back-to-the-old-drawing-board situation to me."
Canyon de Cheliy was an android graveyard. Maybe the 'bots always crawled here to die. In the future, poachers would recover a fabulous fortune in circuit boards and brain-chips from the shifting sands. All they had to do was cripple a toaster and follow the tracks.
"What happened?" Yorke asked. "They all go bughouse and tear out their robo-bits?"
Tyree imagined a religious frenzy falling upon the 'bots. Her Daddy had been a small-time preachie, specialising in Biblical excoriations like "if thine glass eye offend thee…" But theory didn't fit the picture.
"No, they're still here," said the Quince. "Scan those stains. I've seen sludge like that before. When the Virus Vigilantes launched a bioweapon against the Road Runners back in '92, that was the kind of stuff left behind. It's human compost. They tagged the effect the Meltdown Measles."
Yorke did a little dance, scraping black goo off his boot-soles. Tyree couldn't believe that human flesh and bone deconstituted to such an extent, but Quincannon knew best.
"The air tests clean," Burnside put in, a satchel of Blastite and fuse equipment under his arm. "I ran the check first thing. No out-of-the-way bugs."
"This doesn't feel viral to me," Quincannon said. "Scan the way the works are scattered around …"
There were robo-bits strewn in a wide circle, as if they had been wrenched apart and thrown to all points of the compass.
"This feels violent to me. This feels late 20th century."
"Very late," Burnside said.
"Should we call it in to Fort Valens?" Yorke asked.
Quincannon nodded. "Trail runs out here. The way I picture it, the perps ran into natural justice. The 'bots zotzed the pilgrims then something bigger came along and totalled them. Case closed, and we should get back to our route."
There was a distant whup-whup-whup. Tyree saw a sleek shape in the sky, some sort of mutant helicopter. The thing did a circle of the rock column and she tagged it as Private Sector. There was a discreet Japanese GenTech logo.
"Visitors," Burnside commented.
"Best behaviour, boys," Quincannon said, heavily depressing the irony pedal. "We don't want a diplomatic incident."
There was bad blood between the Quince and the Japcorps, Tyree knew. There was a dead girl in the story.
The spidercopter made a neat landing and withdrew its blades. It was a gleaming white and had no obvious windows.
"You expect them to troop out behind a robot and say 'we come in peace'," Yorke said.
"They don't need that," Quincannon said. "They're the new owners."
An aperture appeared and steps unfolded. Two figures stepped down precisely. They did look like aliens. Their Self-Contained Environment suits were sexless and slimline, with filter-mask helmets that resembled samurai armour. They bowed formally and advanced.
"This equipment is the property of GenTech," a computer-generated voice advised the patrol. "Thank you for protecting it. Your welcome assistance is now surplus to requirements."
It was impossible to judge whether the voice came from either of the SCE figures or the spidercopter.
"With all respect," Quincannon said, not bowing, "serious crimes have been committed. We're not rightly sure whether this junk is evidence or the perpetrators."
The figures froze and inclined heads towards each other. A tiny buzz indicated a conversation.
"The air's clean," Burnside said, helpfully. He held up his test print-out.
The SCEs took a moment. One raised an arm and punched buttons on a wrist-band. Tyree guessed the equipment was several generations in advance of the wheezy old contrivaptions Burnside had to lug around. There was a ping which, she assumed, confirmed Burnside's tests. As one, the figures touched buttons at their necks and hoods were sucked into their collars, rolling back like foreskins. Anonymous faces emerged, a Caucasian man and a Japanese woman.
"You will please help Dr McFall-Ngai and Engineer Huff gather the GenTech property," the helicopter said. Tyree didn't quite like its tone.
"It's just junk," Yorke said, kicking a stray leg. The Japanese – Dr Shimako McFall-Ngai, her breastplate read – cringed. In that moment, Tyree found some sort of fellowship with her; it was irrational to think a prosthesis felt pain, suggesting a welcome streak of human idiocy.
"If you will kindly have care," Dr McFall-Ngai said. "Delicate recording instruments are concealed."
"You're looking for the black boxes?" Quincannon asked.
"Indeed," the woman confirmed.
Tyree didn't understand.
"The company has been letting its experiments loose," Quincannon explained. "The 'bots must have imagined they were renegade, but they've been monitored all along."
The GenTech officials methodically went through the detritus, retrieving specific doodads.
"Why didn't they use the off switch when it scanned like they were killing people?"
"There is no off switch," the helicopter said.
"Don't be so sure of that," said Quincannon, raising his voice unnecessarily. "Something sure found a way to pull the plug on the 'bots."
Tyree got the impression the helicopter was sulking. She noticed Dr McFall-Ngai shudder when the Sergeant shouted at it. Whoever generated the voice was a high-level suit. Also, a high-level creep.
Engineer Huff found something and signalled urgently. The Japanese bowed to the Cav and hurried over. "This one still functions," Huff said. The woman knelt like a paramedic and started working on an opened chestplate with chopstick-like implements. She was attending to what looked like a complete android. Its soft green plastic face was a Boris Karloff mask. It even had bolts in its neck.
As Dr McFall-Ngai worked, sparks flew. She muttered in Japanese.
Tyree cautiously approached, careful not to get in the scientist's light. The Frankenstein monster's eyes opened and closed like goldfish mouths. The scientist left the 'bot's chest alone and shifted attention to the head. She found a seam and pressed, opening the flat skull. A glittery crystal ball was exposed, sludged with what the Quince called "human compost". Lights fluctuated inside.
The scientist whistled.
"Ambitious," she said, "but unsuccessful."
"Can it still think?" Huff asked.
She slipped her tool into a hole in the ball. A light in the implement's butt flashed.
"Point debatable. It can calculate but it cannot intuit. Therefore it cannot be classed sentient. It may retain limited motion controls and be programmed for repetitive functions, but this is at best a robot. As a human being, he is dead."
Suddenly, the Frankenstein monster sat bolt upright, hinging at the waist, arms outstretched like a sleepwalker.
The scientists were pushed aside.
The 'bot's chin dropped and it rasped "I live!"
Its heavily lidded eyes were half-alive.
"That's not possible," Dr McFall-Ngai said, not unkindly. "You have no brain, merely storage cells."
An arm lashed out, tossing the woman away. She yelped surprise.
Tyree had her side arm out. So did the rest of the patrol.
"Be warned it is an offence to damage GenTech property," the helicopter shouted.
The Frankenstein monster stood, a giant-sized Aurora Glow-in-the-Dark hobby kit. It wore shredded black coveralls. Its body was metallic. Offence or not, it scanned as if it couldn't be damaged.
"Does this thing have civil rights?" Quincannon asked Dr McFall-Ngai, who was scrambling upright.
She thought a moment, "I would have to say no."
Quincannon spanged a bullet off the Frankenstein monster's face, shredding plastic over its forehead. Undented metal gleamed.
The robot, no longer organic in any sense, looked up at the sky and reached out, grasping for the sunlight. It might have been smiling, it might have been worshipping.
"What's it doing now?" Tyree asked.
Dr McFall-Ngai shrugged but made a suggestion. "Having a religious experience?"
The Frankenstein monster staggered towards the spidercopter. The aperture nervously contracted shut.
"Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?"
The creature was imploring. The spidercopter was silent.
Tyree was baffled, but Dr McFall-Ngai told her, "Milton, Paradise Lost. The epigraph to Frankenstein. All cyborgs revere the book, and the films Pinocchio and The Wizard of Oz. For obvious reasons."
With a Karloffian roar, the Frankenstein monster attacked the spidercopter. Its large, ungainly hands found no purchase on the smooth machine surface.
"It's molecule-locked ceramic," Huff explained. "Three times as resilient as durium alloy."
"That thing's a pot?" Tyree exclaimed.
The Frankenstein monster's fingers scrabbled and broke. An arm extruded from the spidercopter and a needle-beam sliced through the 'bot's neck, shearing away the head.
The thing fell dead.
"That shouldn't have happened," Dr McFall-Ngai said. "With no graymass, it could only follow programs. It could not act independently. It could not quote Milton."
"It did a pretty snazz job, missy," Quincannon said.
"Dr Zarathustra acted prematurely," the Japanese woman said. "The specimen should have been maintained in its state until a thorough examination could be conducted."
Tyree looked again at the featureless spidercopter, impressed. Zarathustra was a household name, a force in GenTech's BioDiv. If anyone born of woman lived forever, it would be his fault.
The Japanese was politely puzzled.
"This has been an Unknown Event," she concluded.
"I've heard that expression before," Tyree said. "I've seen it in reports."
The scientist looked almost afraid.
"There have been many UEs. Things that should not be have been and continue to be."
"Didn't we used to call them miracles?" Quincannon asked.
The scientist nodded vigorously, fringe shaking.
"The world is coming apart. Immutable laws have been broken. Laws of physics."
"Other laws have been broken," Quincannon said. "Laws of America. Against murder, for instance. The 'bots killed a couple of pilgrims just over the Utah border."
The sergeant was looking at Dr McFall-Ngai, but was speaking to Zarathustra inside the spidercopter.
"There's a case that anyone claiming ownership of the robo-remains could be classed an accessory. Like a dog-owner who lets his pitbull savage kids. If BioDiv were monitoring the Knock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots' actions and didn't intervene, there could be hefty charges."
The aperture reappeared, wordlessly summoning the scientists. Huff had collected a string of egg-shaped devices in a clear plastic suitcase. Dr McFall-Ngai bowed rapidly and apologetically, then retreated with her assistant into the spidercopter. The machine snapped shut, extruded blades and rose vertically in parallel with the stone column.
"That woman was worried, Quince," Tyree said.
All around them, left-over robo-bits ticked. A wind seemed to pass through. Valves still functioned, pistons clicked, joints locked and unlocked, cables contracted.
"So she should be, Leona."
Yorke picked up the Frankenstein monster's head, holding it as Hamlet held the skull. Dr Almighty God Zarathustra had left the anomalous thing behind. He wanted only evidence that conformed to expectations and would suppress anything that didn't fit in with the rigidly maintained scientific world image of consensus.
"This'd look fine in the mess hall trophy case," Yorke said.
The mouth opened, dropped, and a voiceless buzzsaw whine came out. Yorke dropped the head fast and kicked it away, shivering.
"Very funny, Yorke," Quincannon said.
Burnside scanned the painfully blue sky until the spidercopter was gone in the haze.
"Remember clouds," the trooper mused. "It's been a long time since you saw a cloud."
Quincannon took a last recce of the site and ordered everyone back to their ve-hickles.
"We should backtrack from the original incident," he said. "Pilgrims don't just come in pairs. There'll be a whole load of folks, probably in trouble."
Trouble, Tyree thought; our job.
Without the spectacles, the Summoner boiled with anger. The surface of his mind was still as glass but great rages tore and shrieked in the depths. He wished to bathe in blood. As the half-human, half-machine abominations were smitten, the Path was blooded. Another move in the ancient rite. The one-eyed girl had disrupted the ritual. The Summoner saw something in her. She was young and foolish, but behind her face was something struggling to be born, something with row upon row of shiny teeth. There was a moment when he could have killed her, but he had let it pass. After so long a wait and so close to the culmination, he needed to leave loopholes. Or else where was the challenge, where the enterprise? He could regain the spectacles. He would wipe away the one-eyed girl. But first he would be tested and proved.
He felt her tugging at the corner of his mind. Jessamyn Bonney was not yet aware she had impinged upon his consciousness. Doubts bothered her like butterflies, but she had not yet troubled herself to think too much of her prize. If she continued to wear the spectacles, she would of course be forced to think more deeply.
At a swallow, he learned the girl's history, probed her flaws, knew where she would bend, where break. Her years were so few, so brief, so banal. When they met again, he would know which points to pressure.
In the Outer Darkness, the Masters stood still and silent, regarding the tiny bauble of the Earth with ferocious interest The Summoner knew the Dark Ones would soon stir. The entities had many names, earthly and otherwise: Nyarlathotep, Cihulhu, Tzeentch, Nurgle, Sathanas, Ba'alberith, Klesh, Tsa-thoggua. Princes of Darkness and Blood and Fear, dimly perceived by every human culture that ever was. No man but the Summoner had any but the faintest idea of their true nature.
Sacrifices must be made. Elsewhere, the Nullifiers were intent For there was a balance to the darkness, a concentrated dot of light that would grow as the Last Days proceeded. The great game of infinite universes would be played out one more time, one last time.
He felt the weight of years lifting from his mind as he developed the strength he would need to survive the few remaining moments of human history. Sometimes he wondered if he could remotely be considered a human being. The shape he wore was transient and deceptive: the labyrinth of memory that was his mind was beyond human imagining. Even geniuses and madmen had been unable to share his visions. His other selves, from the other continua – the masked sorcerer in his castle, the information-bloated leech in his pyramid – overlapped his mind briefly, flaring with their own purpose.
Would the one-eyed girl come to appreciate the gift she had taken? She could no more use the spectacles than an ant could conceive of a whale, but she might discern a certain curvature of the landscape, a certain quality of shadow…
In the near future, his hands would be red with her blood. His mind would be his own again. In the meantime, the ritual continued…
The patrol made good time on the pilgrim trail before making camp, returning to where they had buried the roadkill. The cruiser had a microwave for reheat-rations and an in-built recaffolator, but Quincannon liked to get a real fire going. He said the desert night didn't sound right without crackling. Also, flames kept unwelcome critters away. Every month, some straying patrol logged a sighting of something that shouldn't be alive.
Yorke and Tyree spent half an hour rounding up scrubby weeds and wooden jetsam for the fire while the Quince and Burnside raised the wind-wall and the pup tents. With the sun falling rapidly, the task had some urgency. Under starlight, it was impossible to find anything.
Half buried by the road was a bookcase, complete with paperbacks. There was a set of Margaret Thatcher's "Grantham" romances, which Yorke's mother devoured in the '80s before her father decreed that such slush should be burned in public, and a few pulps by Kenneth Livingstone, who turned out to be a Brit science-fiction writer.
The bookcase and books were all the troopers needed to get a good fire going. Yorke stamped the furniture into fragments and made a pile. Tyree was nervy about putting books into the blaze, which Yorke couldn't understand. They were just dead old words on paper.
While Quincannon boiled up a pot of recaff, hoping that real fire might improve the taste, Tyree hauled herself off to one side with a paperback called Newtworld and started reading. Yorke eyed her. She was like that in off-hours, withdrawn and a tad nose-in-the-air. She was seeing Nathan Stack, another trooper out of Valens, but the affair seemed on the wane. Yorke, who hadn't had himself a woman since his last leave in Tucson, would have liked a chance, but Tyree had a good five years on him, and he knew she didn't take him seriously. She had tiny lines around her mouth and eyes, but was in shape. A man could do a sight worse …
"March over, Leona," the Quince said, "get your reheated taco and grits."
Tyree scrambled nearer the fire and took a plate. With her helmet off, she had honeyish hair that cleared her shoulders by a couple of inches.
"What's the book about?"
"So far as I can scan, it's set in the future when intelligent swamp creatures rule the planet and the Brit government are amphibians. Except the prime minister, who's a jellyfish. The first couple of pages are missing."
Quincannon looked at the faded book-cover. It showed a man-sized lizard with a big gun and a British policeman's helmet.
"I've heard enough strange stories not to be bothered with this stuff…"
Yorke could tell the Quince was in a vocal mood. They'd be lucky to get to sleep before three, by which time the sergeant would have done his best to pack them off to dreamland on the nightmare express. If it was scary, it had happened to someone Quincannon knew.
"Wasn't today strange enough for you?" Tyree asked. "You met the Frankenstein monster. And Dr Zarathustra."
"Hell, Leona, today didn't even go off the Odd scale into Weird."
Yorke bit into his taco. It was standard Cav rations, meat in one end and fruit in the other. You ate your way through to dessert. He washed down protein-intensive chunks with swallows of hot, muddy coffee-derivative. Everyone who remembered what they called "real coffee" bitched and pissed about recaff, but it tasted OK to bis buds.
Quincannon poured himself half a mug, then fished a flask out of his britches' pocket and sloshed in enough Shochaiku Double-Blend to fill the mug to the brim.
"The way I scan it," he said, "we're off duty. And off duty, our gullets and guts are no business of the United States Road Cavalry."
He offered the flask around. Burnside and Tyree waved it away, but Yorke took a hefty gulp. Battery acid sloshed against his sinuses and seeped out his tear-ducts. Fire spread into his stomach.
"Ah, but it has a powerful kick to it," Quincannon said, smiling like a proud father. The more whiskey he had in his blood, the more Irish crept into his accent.
Burnside, having wolfed his rations down, untelescoped his travelling flute and began to blow scales. He liked to get his hour's practice in every day, even on patrol. Scales became a mournful improvisation, low and unobtrusive. Wash Burnside had a melancholy, wondering streak. He didn't talk much about his past.
"Quince, did you follow what that Japanese woman was saying about UEs?" Tyree asked.
Quincannon shrugged.
"Scientists don't like to admit the Lord has them foxed. Recently, they've run up against too many things they can't explain. And explanations that have done good service for centuries have been wiped off the blackboard."
"I don't see how that can be," Yorke put in. "Up's still up, and down's down."
"Mostly," the sergeant agreed.
Above, the desert stars were jewel chips scattered on thick black velvet. The universe was vast and coherent; endlessly changing, yet endlessly the same.
"That UE stuff sounds like blowback roadgrit to me," Yorke admitted.
The Quince was quiet for a moment. Yorke thought his words were echoing out into the big empty.
"Give me your gauntlet, trooper," Quincannon said.
Yorke was reluctant.
"I won't hurt it."
Yorke tugged one of the heavy pseudokid gauntlets from his belt and passed it over. Quincannon exposed the digital read-out and scrolled through the functions – time, compass, blood pressure, geiger counter, atmospheric pressure – until he found the thermometer.
"Now, which of you bright souls can tell your ol' Quince what are the extremes o' the Celsius scale?"
"Zero degrees and a hundred degrees," Tyree said. "The boiling and freezing points of water."
"Take a gold star and go to the head of the class, Leona m'love. For hundreds o' years, we used Fahrenheit which no one could figure. The idea of Celsius is that the scale stretches between the two easiest-to-remember temperatures."
Actually, the gauntlet thermometer could read off in Celsius or Fahrenheit.
"Now, you watch that pot o' cursed God recaff."
Quincannon squeezed his meaty hand into Yorke's gauntlet and picked up the hot pot. The glove was proof against anything short of an oxy-acetylene torch. Flipping open the lid, Quincannon shifted the pot from embers to a still-burning patch. Flames licked up around it, soot streaks clawing the sides.
The Quince dipped a finger into the brown liquid and stirred, making a disgusted face. Burnside played variations on "Whiskey in the Jar", an Andrei Tarkovsky hit from the '70s. Within a minute, the recaff was bubbling and spitting.
"You'll stain my glove," Yorke protested.
Quincannon waved him back with his free hand.
"Worry not, the bounty of the United States is unlimited. Now, you'll agree that this foul brew is boiling?"
"Yes."
"Literally, boiling?"
Steam soaked the gauntlet. Angry bubbles burst on the surface. Liquid slopped over the side and dried to cracked paint.
"Sure."
"Then, me bright boy, take a look at yer man, the thermometer."
It read 92 degrees. Yorke tried to figure out the trick.
"That's not water. That's recaff."
"Good lad, well thought. The boiling point o' water polluted with this rotted poison should be slightly above 100 degrees Celsius."
Yorke's head hurt. Tyree huddled over the fire, flame-shadows on her face, red light in her eyes, peering in fascination at the experiment.
"Last time I tried this little stunt, boiling point was 94 degrees Celsius."
"Well," Yorke said, "92 is still plenty hot enough."
"Did you find this out yourself?" Tyree asked.
The Quince laughed. "No, it was one o' those funny items at the ass-end of Lola Stechkin's Newstrivia bulletin one night a couple o' months back. I just put it to the test."
"Is freezing point affected?"
"Now how would I be knowing that?"
Quincannon pulled his hand out of the pot and gave Yorke back the gauntlet. The index finger was thoroughly browned.
"I'm sorry, me boy. It looks like a cesspit dipstick."
"What does it mean?" Tyree asked, brow furrowed.
Quincannon shrugged again, "Lower fuel bills? The end o' the world?"
Out in the desert, something began whining in answer to Burnside's tune. Yorke found himself shivering.
ZeeBeeCee's Nostalgia Newstrivia:
The 1970s
Tonight, giving his first major tele-interview in ten long annos, we have one of the seminal voices, faces and butts of the '70s. Ask anybody over forty, and they'll be sure to recall that droopy tache, that craggy grin and that battered balalaika. Nobody embodied the ideals and failings of the dream decade more than the style-setting, chart-topping, Soviet singer-songwriter, Andrei Tarkovsky.Born in Moscow on 4 April 1932 – he's a moody Aries, fillettes – Andrei studied at the Institute of Oriental Languages and the All-Union State Jazz and Blues School before taking his first gig in 1954, as a geological prospector in Siberia. Two long, cold annos rooting through frozen ground provided him with the material for his autobiographical first album. There Will Be No Leave Today, in 1959. In the '60s, he was in the mainstream of Soviet pop music, receiving official approval and Union-wide acclaim for the seminal beetroot beat platters Ivan's Childhood and Ikons. It was only as the wave of the Sove Sound hit big in the '70s that Andrei became the irrepressible and outrageous rebel he remains into the '90s.
No matter how gray that moustache, wrinkly those crags or out-of-tune that balalaika, Andrei is still the genius of gloom, internationally hailed by his nickname "the Purge". Each new departure, new religion or new marriage hits headlines. Before Andrei sits in the Moscow Mud Pit with our chirrupy interactive diva, Lynne Cramer, let's listen to his first international colossus, from that atomic year of 1972, "Solaris"…
"Sooo-laris, oh-oh,
Po-laris, oh-oh, oh-oh,
Watch the mushrooming clouds
Blot out the vanishing crowds…"
Lynne: For poprock fans too young to remember the dim and distant pre-wrinkle days of 1972, "Solaris" and "Polaris" were the first nuclear weapons used in battle since 1945, deployed by First Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, who was the Kremlin Top Kat, in answer to the use of scurvy bioweapons by Mao Zedong, head honcho of the Peep's Republic of China. Andrei-Babe, at the time you wrote and recorded the song, you were a Red Army reservist. Did this inspire your strong and, at the time, unusual anti-war stance?
Andrei: Oh yes, Lynne. Moscow in those days was a wild and crazy city and the young were pleasure-seekers trailing in the wake of the idols of the day. Petya Jerkussoff was starting his so-called career and his fans ran riot, spraying his name all over the metro and committing colourful suicide in the streets. There were those of us who thought them mishkins, but the lotus eaters didn't listen to us. There was faction-fighting between the fans of trivial pop and those of us who yearned for a more serious, philosophical approach. They called us the "Glums" and we called them the "Glits". On Soviet Tankmen's Day we would all head to the shores of the Black Sea for an open-air concert and always there would be clashes between Glums and Glits. 1972 was the year it came to a head, with the mass suicide of the Kamchatka Chapter of Jerkussoff s fan club. As the war in Vietnam turned nuke, the cloud of death really did hang over us all. We Glums were proved correct. There was more to worry about than pimples and hollow cheeks.
Tragically, many boys who thronged to my concerts did not live out the year. Over a million died on both sides of the Sino-Soviet border, rendering vast land-tracts uninhabitable for the next century. It was time to be out on the streets, protesting. We chanted slogans like "Ivan, Come Home", "Hell Niet, Don't Go to Viet" and "War is Bloody Bad". I first sang "Solaris" at a rally in Red Square and the next day Comrade Brezhnev, with typical good humour, ordered I be called up and packed off to the killing zone. He specified that my duties involve searching irradiated areas for dog-tags. A few short annos before, I was awarded the Tchaikovsky Medal and the Order of Dizzy Gillespie for Ikons and Brezhnev hummed my tunes when drunk in public. Now I was a dissident, on the dreaded Shit List. I was inspired to write my great hit song, "The Times, They Are A-Stinking".
Lynne: You never went to the war, though?
Andrei: There was a well-established underground railroad for those who resisted militarisation. Like so many other evaders, I was smuggled into Finland. Since I was a public figure, moves were made for my extradition but I kept moving. I visited the West, though I found it gray and poor and not to my taste. It was a great tragedy to me to come to America, land of my musical heroes, to find nobody remembered Chuck Berry or Little Richard or Elvis Presley. All the kids in Detroit and Baltimore were buying Petya Jerkussoff records.
I continued to record and release material. I played concerts for those in exile. When Poland withdrew from the Warsaw Pact, I shared the stage, for the only time in my life, with the dreary Petya. He insisted he top the bill, but I showed him up by delivering a twenty-minute encore of "Solaris" that finished as I set fire to my balalaika and did a cossack dance in the flames. He was too busy crying with shame to best that. My discs were samizdat, circulated underground in the Soviet Union, but I understand kids would pass them from hand to hand and listen in defiance of official rulings. Many were executed by the KGB for crimes no worse than owning a proscribed "Solaris" single. Of course, execution might be thought to be too lenient for those who wasted their roubles on Petya Jerkussoff platters…
Lynne: About this time, you had a great following. Russian kids copied the way you dressed…
Andrei: We all wore those flared blouses and tight, shiny boots. Tie-dyed kaftans were the uniform of protest. And the beards, of course. My beard was bigger than all the others, my moustache droopier and more luxurious. In Helsinki, I found I had lice, picked up in the boxcars I had hidden in during my escape. I shaved the lot off, all my hair, and the kids copied that too. I was amazed. Everyone trooped around as if they had already been shipped off to Siberia. The Labour Camp Look was huge. Jerkussoff, who had to have artificial hair implants to fit in with the previous style, was so livid he developed a multiple personality disorder.
Lynne: Those were hard times?
Andrei: Intolerable. Everybody thought the Chins had long-range missiles which could strike at Moscow, Kiev, Leningrad. The end of the world was coming. That was why the kids were rebellious. They felt their parents had gambled away their future. There was no reason not to sleep around, to smoke kif, to play records loud, to defy authorities, to ride tractors through collective farms at the dead of night.
Boys of fourteen and fifteen were packed off to die in Vietnam for a cause they couldn't understand. There've been a lot of recent Russian books and movies about Vietnam, trying to make out the suffering was good for the soul. You've seen the Rostov films, about the Stakhanovite veteran who never stops fighting. Or The Bear Hunter, Dosvidanya, Vietnam, Born on the First of May. All of them are beetroot mulch.
Back then, we were having to get our real news from the BBC World Service and the Voice of America. When the Chins came in to support the People's Republic of the North against the People's Republic of the South, we did not find out for many months. Those over twenty simply did not believe we were losing. The official Tass line was a succesion of easy victories. But if the victories were so decisive, why was the war dragging on? Brezhnev even tried to keep the nuclear exchanges quiet.
Apart from the areas poisoned by bug bombs and nukes, the USSR lost much territory to scavengers. The Japanese reoccupied Sakhalin in 72 and the Shah spearheaded a drive to seize Transcaucasia. The Pan-Islamic Federation got together just as Turkey was invading Greece and armies of the faithful "liberated" Albania and subcontinent-sized swathes of Soviet Central Asia. The crescent still flies over those lands and, though it is always the Greek Christian terrorists who get publicity, tiny guerilla wars fester after over twenty years, as in Serbia and Ireland. Of course, the resources channelled into Vietnam meant Russia had to duck out of the space race, leaving the stars to the Americans, who turned out to have no use for them. In 1973, Mao claimed he had won the war just because Brezhnev had fallen from power. Of course, China was in the middle of its own break-up into semi-feudalism. I deal with all this in my concept album. The Dragon and the Bear…
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 Cointerpro 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 slam-dancing 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 Of fret 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…