Route 666

by Jack Yeovil

  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…

  VIII

  9 June 1995

  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 his 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 u
nlimited. 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 Met, 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 col
lective 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 succession 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 guerrilla 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…