by Jack Yeovil
Remembering Hawk's tutoring, she centered herself, trying to make her mind the calm eye of the raging hurricane.
Elder Seth appeared in the centre of the Jibbenainosay, eyes blank. He was waiting for her to kill him, she knew.
She remembered her other selves. Jessamyn Bonney. Jazzbeaux. Jesse Frankenstein's Daughter. They came to her, and melded with her current person.
Krokodil.
She was Krokodil.
She started up the motor, and did a three-point turn in the lagoon. Cape Canaveral was almost directly due East.
The Cadillac knifed through the swampwater, leaving nothing behind but a wake.
IV
Raimundo's jaws closed over the Donny, snapping him off half-way down his torso. The dinosaur worried at the Josephite until the mouthful came loose, and Donny's lower body fell, twitching, to the floor.
"Heyyy, homes," said Raimundo between swallows, "chewy-chewy, maaaann!"
"Watch out," Elvis said. "He's not out of it yet."
Donny's body got up. One arm was still attached by a strand and a joint, and the fist convulsed, discharging the gun. A bullet whined against the blades of the ceiling fan.
Raimundo nudged the headless Josephite, knocking him down, and put a three-taloned foot on the wriggling thing. The dinosaur put all his weight on one leg, and Donny squished apart.
Josephites appeared behind Raimundo. Elvis head-shot two, and they went down. They weren't all Waltons, thank the Lord.
Raimundo stumped off into the thick of battle, stray bullets flattening against his hide.
Elvis and Shiba dashed out of the wrecked office. Shiba chewed the ankles of a Marie Walton, wrenching her leg off. Elvis fired his remaining shots at the armoured transport, and paused to reload. The battle seemed to be turning in their favour.
Raimundo loomed over the transport. Its tower was swivelling, trying to bring a chaingun to bear. The dinosaur ripped the thing free and, its magazine flapping, pointed it down into the interior of the transport. He got a talon into the manual trigger-guard, and fired it. Empty cartridges clattered against the armourplate, and the interior of the transport rang with resounding ricochets and cries of pain.
The Suitcase People were coming out ahead. The Josephites hadn't sent a large enough force on this strike.
Shiba had been stabbed in the tail by a Marie, but was chewing on a writhing arm. He was ripping the creature apart. The head was babbling adspeak, endorsing the latest oven cleanser, while the fingers of her remaining hand crawled towards Shiba's left eye. Elvis grabbed the wrist, and bent it back. Shiba, through a mouthful, said thanks.
A Josephite with his hands up shouted, "I surrender, I surrender," his hat falling from his head. He was a young kid; one of the clear-eyed idealists who wanted a miracle, Elvis suppposed. A Donny Walton twisted the boy's head around on his shoulders, and was torn apart by gunfire. He staggered forwards, his face still a smiling blank, and collapsed like a marionette.
Krokodil had said the Waltons were clones, but Elvis wasn't sure. All the sex- and labourclones Elvis had met revealed a total lack of personality. While the Waltons were walking stereotypes, there was a tenaciousness and cunning about them that suggested a nasty intelligence. He was reminded of soldier ants, those insects who move in a huge, hungry mass, seemingly governed by one guiding group mind.
A half-Marie advanced rapidly on its hands, and was hosed down with fire by an indentee humping a flamethrower. The thing screeched and burned, the lacquered hair crumpling in an instant. Elvis shot into the fireball until it wasn't moving any more.
Raimundo was howling with victory, his huge throat open wide enough to swallow a sheep whole. An iguana-faced soldier gave him a high-five slap, and they bumped asses in a little dance. The dinosaur's steps made the ground shake.
"Yo, homes," Raimundo shouted, "we don' real gooooood!"
Shiba was bipedal again. The smoke cleared. There were dead Josephites all over the compound, and not a few indentees and Suitcase People.
A tear leaked from Shiba's 'gator eye.
"A waste," he said. "Regrettable. The next time, we shall not be so unprepared. I shall see to it."
A lizardman in fatigues walked across, limping slightly, a bloodied pad pressed to a neck wound. He saluted. Elvis recognized Captain Tip Marcus, the security chief he had met earlier.
"I accept full responsibility, Mr Shiba. I should have posted more people in the swamp. You may have my bars…"
Shiba shook his snout. "No. You did what you could with your resources. I am the one who should have foreseen all this."
They could have continued their polite argument, each trying to grab the lion's share of the blame, but there was a distraction.
A Donny crawled out of the transport, broken by Raimundo's random fire, but still in one piece. He hissed, hands turned to claws, and fell off the ve-hickle. Raimundo stomped on him, and he stopped moving. The mess stamped into the dirt spilled recognizable organs, but there wasn't much blood. Krokodil had been right. The combat fatigues were torn enough to disclose a featureless tailor's dummy of a body, without nipples or genitalia.
"Frankie, skin me op, maaan!" the dinosaur shouted.
The iguana soldier pulled a reefer the size of a man's arm out of a haversack and gave it to Raimundo.
"Yow, incredibly gen'rous, homes!"
Raimundo stuck the spliff into his maw, and leaned towards a patch of burning wall that had been spattered by a phosphor grenade. The dinosaur sucked in marijuana smoke, and his eyeballs rolled.
"This ees great shit, maaaan!"
The dinosaur's chest inflated, stretching his ragged T-shirt to its seams. Then, Raimundo shot ten-foot spurts of smoke from his nostrils.
The whole compound was going to wind up stinking of whoopee weed at this rate.
"Ramirez," snapped Marcus. "Remember…discipline!"
Raimundo waved a claw, and took another prehistoric toke. "Yo, homes. Discipline an' shit, maaan! We don' stomped os some righteous Black Hat bad-ass! Call os the kiiings of the jongle!"
A petite, veiled woman with green arms came up. It was Marielle, Shiba's assistant-cum-secretary. She had a provisional damage and casualty report.
"This is unfortunate," Shiba said, looking at the figures. "We shall have to work hard."
The woman scuttled away, head down.
"We should hit them, maaan! Hit them hard so they don' never forget. The Suitcase People rule the swamp. This is our territory, and don't no one gonna freak with us!"
Raimundo wiped his enormous head with his hands, as if slicking back the hair he didn't have any more. Marcus was nodding.
"He's right, Mr Shiba. We should go on the offensive. I've got some intelligence reports from the Cape. They're up to something. This assault force was below strength because they need all their personnel. We should strike now, while they're preoccupied."
Shiba hung his snout thoughtfully.
"How many people can we put in the field?"
Marcus was eager. "Enough. If we make a strike, we can call in all the non-aligneds out in the swamp. The Josephites haven't been discriminating between factions."
Elvis understood that some of the Suitcase People were living ferally in the swamp. They were the ones who could barely remember their human lives. The bastard who had stolen the Cadillac was probably one of those, although no one he had questioned could think of a mutant matching his description.
"Rolling stock?"
"Visser left us a couple of half-track amphibians. And we've got a stockpile of Good Ole Boy guns 'n' ammo. If Raimundo hasn't shot up the armoured car the Josephites came in too badly, we could requisition and re-equip it."
"Mr Presley," Shiba said to him, "your opinion?"
Elvis thought it through. "Well, it's not my place to make suggestions, but I have to go to the Cape. If you came along, I'd feel a whole lot safer. Whatever the Josephites are up to, I want it stopped. I'll carry a gun and take orders if I have to. I don't reall
y know what kind of a set-up they have at Canaveral, but my guess is that they won't be easy to take out. Those Donny and Marie things are as tough to get shot of as cockroaches."
Shiba was pondering.
"Very well," he said. "Captain Marcus, you have twenty-four hours. Ready a strike unit. We'll hit them tomorrow."
Raimundo expressed his approval with a tail-lashing frenzy.
V
Since Needlepoint came on line, Fonvielle had been seeing the tall, spear-shape take form out on the main pad. It was a rocket made of immobile smoke. He stood out on the firing grounds, remembering the long-ago times when golf-carts loaded down with generals and politicians and journalists scurried across the empty expanse for every launch. There had been stands like at Yankee Stadium for the spectators. Being wood, they had rotted into the water and now existed only as streaks of colour in the mud. The streaks were ghosts of a sort too, the Commander supposed. He put his hands into his flightsuit pockets and scratched his thighs.
The bent and rusted gantry didn't prop the rocketshape up, but he could see phantom lines running between them. He recognized the craft. It was the next-to-last of the Titan 7 series, the one that had exploded,under Circe IV, killing Mikko Griffith, Lester Mihailoff and Mildred Kuhn. That had been in 1976. Debris had rained all over the peninsula after the firework display, and there had been now-nameless ground casualties. Fonvielle wondered if those smitten-from-the-sky technicians and swamp-rats qualified for the elite ghost cadre, the sacrifices of outer space.
Fonvielle searched his arm for the patch, and found it. The three names were written around the circumference of the circle. A siren pouted against a starscape, posed like Marilyn Monroe in her nude calendar, the Roman numerals modestly concealing her body.
The Indians claimed that even inanimate objects had souls. They were called manitous. Once an object, be it a table, a 1968 Studebaker or a piece of sculpture, was destroyed, its manitou lingered on for the use of the discarnate spirits of men. The Happy Hunting Ground was stocked with spirit game, spirit trees, spirit lodges. Since the white men came to America, Fonvielle assumed that the Indian afterlife was also littered with manitou co-cola cans, drive-in motels and TV sets. There was no reason why a spacecraft should not have a ghost.
None of the Black Hats could see the Titan 7. They walked through it, disappearing into the smoke and emerging the other side. Fonvielle couldn't bring himself to try the experiment. He was afraid that the smoke would be as substantial as the real rocket for him. As far as he could tell, the smoke rocket was becoming denser, more solid. The only other person on the Cape who could see the ghosts was the First Lady. She must have a touch of the Dream…
"Commander?" Addams pulled him out of his reverie.
"Yes?"
"We're dry-firing the system in twenty-five minutes."
"I'll be with you."
The success of the Needlepoint Ring was a vindication, at last, of the programme. With this proven, the Prezz would surely authorize more funds. The Cape would live again. The next rocket wouldn't be a ghost. Mars called, and Deep Space. Camp Glenn should be re-manned. Now America owned the skies, it was time to put on a little show.
The Black Hats were staking out an animal in the sun, and sawing at its throat. It was one of the Suitcase People, a black-hided warthog thing with yellow tusks. Blood trickled across the tarmac, following the almost-erased markings. No spirit shape was coalescing in the air above the sacrifice. It didn't count.
Fonvielle walked towards the bunker. Grissom was waiting for him by the elevator platform, his helmet off. His stocky face was still wet, his hair plastered back with seawater. He looked ill, and his suit sloshed as he moved.
"Gus?" Fonvielle said. None of the ghosts had ever talked.
Grissom nodded his head in recognition. His face was greenish, and slightly swollen.
In 1962, Virgil Grissom had gone EVA in a blaze of glory, and been automatically photographed against the rising sun, waving a confident thumbs-up at the stars. There had been much speculation around the project as to whether Grissom or Glenn would be selected to captain the moon mission. Fred Flintstone and the Clean Marine, they had been called in the press. An artificial rivalry had been generated carefully by the publicity Suits NASA was saddled with, and soon the fake contest became a real one. Fonvielle wondered whether that had been what killed Gus. The board of inquiry said it was a faulty hatch, but the Commander sometimes imagined that Grissom had been pulling some grand gesture stunt, climbing out onto the surface of the capsule to be found sitting on top of it bobbing in the blue Pacific, and had it backfire. That was the Fred Flintstone style. He knew that after the disaster, the Clean Marine had shown his first traces of humanity, getting as drunk as a skunk. Grissom's re-entry had been perfect, but a hatch had opened as soon as he splashed down, and the capsule had sunk like an anvil. By dying after re-entry, he just missed being the first American to perish in space, losing that miserable honour to poor old orbiting Richard Rusoff. Fonvielle remembered the recriminatory inquisition canning every non-essential staff member who could conceivably have touched the hatch mechanism, from the designer down to the janitor. It hadn't been fair, but the purge had gone some way towards assuaging NASA's collective guilt. But, within three months, Rusoff was off his trajectory, and America had another martyr. And Cape Canaveral had another ghost.
"Gus, can you hear me?"
The drowned astronaut shook his head, and opened his mouth. Black brine leaked down the front of his silver suit. His eyes watered.
"What is it, Gus? What do you want?"
Grissom held up his hand, thumbs-down.
"Commander?"
It was Addams. Grissom was transparent, and fading fast. Addams was treating him like an idiot.
"Are you ready?"
Grissom was gone.
"Yes," Fonvielle told Addams. 'Take us down."
Addams worked the mechanism, and the platform sank towards the bunker.
The oblong of the sky receded above them.
The Prezz was waiting for them in the bunker, with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Board of General Motors, Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Walt Disney and Frank Sinatra. It was the full tum-out. They all saluted.
"Ah, Fonvielle," said the Prezz, "good to see you. I've reported to the Elder. He is well pleased with our progress."
Fonvielle expected he would get the Congressional Medal of Honour for this.
The First Lady exchanged looks with him. There was something about that one. She was hardly more than a girl. And she was wise to the Cape.
She could see Griffith, Mihailoff and Kuhn clustered in the corner, smouldering.
"Now Keystone is responding," Fonvielle told the Prezz, "it's vital we establish that the inter-satellite communications lasers are angled correctly. We took a certain amount of deviation into our original calculations, but no one has looked at the system for fifteen years."
The Prezz understood. He was up on Needlepoint. He didn't need the lecture really.
"Okay, let's reach for the skies."
VI
Hiroshi Shiba looked at the Op for the thousandth time, and had to force himself to believe that this really was Elvis Presley. He remembered the old films and television programmes he had watched in his dormitory in Kyoto. He remembered the time Inoshira Kube had made Shiba, Sonny Shamada and Tetsuya Ito abase themselves in front of the entire trainee corps after they had been caught greasing each other's hair into "Elvisu Pu-res-lieh" quaffs. Later, while taking the American culture courses all GenTech East execs had to qualify in before they were sent overseas, he had been able to put Elvis in context, tracing the influences on his work. The blues, country and western, Carl Perkins, Dean Martin, Chuck Berry, Al Jolson.
Still, for Shiba, the Elvis of the '50s represented the apex of America as a cultural force. When he vanished into the army, the cutting edge of rock 'n' roll was lost to the USSR and the United States began its long descent into its current position as
the warring ground for gangcults, multinats, lunatic factions and desperate psychopaths. So much vitality applied to so little effect. It was frightening.
He wished he could reach out and touch Elvis. The man contained within him all that was great and potentially great about the country. Ideally, he would have liked to recruit the Op as a member of the Blood Banner Society—he felt sure Elvis would appreciate the purity of its ideals, its motives—but that honour was open only to pure-born Japanese.
They were working on Visser's half-track amphibians, converting them to assault vehicles. Elvis was with Captain Marcus, checking under the hood. Raimundo Rex hefted the half-track up by its prow, lifting it at a forty-five degree angle so Elvis and the Captain could take a look at the hull. The saurian was a one-mutant combination tank, trash disposal system, fork-lift truck and Spanish lesson. After Elvis, he was the hero of the compound.
Marielle brought Shiba some papers to sign. He tried. His signature was getting problematic now that his fingers were almost fused. He would soon have to revert to the oriental practice and start favouring his personal seal. Marielle sped away. Since the change began to affect her, she had been veiled with thick mosquito netting. She had never been an extraordinarily attractive girl, but evidently her vanity was affronted by the creeping greenness, the thick scaly plates and the yellowing eyes. That was a shame. The Suitcase People would have to learn to appreciate their own form of beauty.
There had been burials in the swamp earlier, and Shiba had said a few words over Reuben and the others. Reuben had been much loved by the indentees, and his heroic death had bound them to the Suitcase People. Even those who had not picked up Dr Blaikley's modifying enzymes volunteered to go along. Privately, Shiba had decided that once GenTech shut this facility down, he would see to it that the indentees were released from their obligations to the corp. They had earned their freedom. While Reuben had been laid on a bier and ceremonially burned, with Colonel Presley singing "All My Trials" as the embers sank, Spermwhale Visser had been wrapped in oilcloth and dumped in the deepest lagoon with the other Good Ole Boys. Now, they even had a layer of Josephites on top of them. The swamp was getting thick with the dead.