Route 666 df-1

by Jack Yeovil

  "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?

&n
bsp; 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…

  THE BOOK OF THE ROAD

  I

  10 June 1995

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

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

  "Check, sergeant."

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