Song of Susannah

TEN

The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susannah-Mia with happy surprise. “I thought I was the only one who knew that one,” he said. “It’s the way the Freedom Riders used to-”

“No,” Susannah said quietly. “Not them. It was the voter-registration people who sang the bulldog-gravy verse. The folks who came down to Oxford in the summer of ’64. When those three boys were killed.”

“Schwerner and Goodman,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of the-”

“James Cheney,” she said quietly. “He had the most beautiful hair.”

“You talk as though you knew him,” he said, “but you can’t be much over… thirty?”

Susannah had an idea she looked a good deal older than thirty, especially tonight, but of course this young man had fifty dollars more in his guitar case now than had been there a single song ago, and it had perhaps affected his eyesight.

“My mother spent the summer of ’64 in Neshoba County,” Susannah said, and with two spontaneously chosen words-my mother-did her captor more damage than she could have imagined. Those words flayed open Mia’s heart.

“Cool on Mom!” the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. “Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma’am.”

“I really couldn’t,” Susannah said, smiling. “Remember the struggle, that’d be enough for me. And remember Jimmy, Andy, and Michael, if it does ya. I know it would do me just fine.”

“Please,” the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon’s shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who’d had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.

Make him happy, take it back, she told Susannah, but would not come forward and make Susannah do so. Let it be her choice.

Before Susannah could reply, the alarm in the Dogan went off, flooding their shared mind with noise and red light.

Susannah turned in that direction, but Mia grabbed her shoulder in a grip like a claw before she could go.

What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?

Let me loose!.

Susannah twisted free. And before Mia could grab her again, she was gone.

ELEVEN

Susannah’s Dogan pulsed and flared with red panic-light. A Klaxon hammered an audio tattoo from the overhead speakers. All but two of the TV screens-one still showing the busker on the corner of Lex and Sixtieth, the other the sleeping baby-had shorted out. The cracked floor was humming under Susannah’s feet and throwing up dust. One of the control panels had gone dark, and another was in flames.

This looked bad.

As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. “WARNING!” it cried. “SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!”

Susannah couldn’t remember any Section Alpha from her previous visits to the Dogan, but wasn’t surprised to now see a sign labeled just that. One of the panels near it suddenly erupted in a gaudy shower of orange sparks, setting the seat of a chair on fire. More ceiling panels fell, trailing snarls of wiring.

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!”

What about the emotional temp dial?

“Leave it alone,” she muttered to herself.

Okay, chap? What about that one?

After a moment’s thought, Susannah flipped the toggle from asleep to awake and those disconcerting blue eyes opened at once, staring into Susannah’s with what looked like fierce curiosity.

Roland’s child, she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions. And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I’m sorry for you.

Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka’s fool-a fool of destiny.

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!”

So waking the baby hadn’t done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.

She reached out for the absurd labor force control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother’s stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was an easing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.

The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.

Susannah turned labor force to 8, paused there, then shrugged. What the hell, it was time to go for broke, get this over with. She turned the dial all the way to 10. The moment it was there, a great glossy pain hardened her stomach and then rolled lower, gripping her pelvis. She had to tighten her lips against a scream.

“POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED,” said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susannah knew all too well. “THANKS A WHOLE HEAP, LI’L COWGIRL.”

She had to tighten her lips against another scream-not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn’t stop the fear.

“LABOR… HAS COMMENCED,” said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. “LABOR… HAS COMMENCED.” Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU… BABE!… HAPPY BIRTHDAY… TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY… DEAR MORDRED… HAPPY BIRTHDAY… TO YOU!”

Susannah visualized a fire extinguisher mounted on the wall behind her, and when she turned it was, of course, right there (she had not imagined the little sign reading ONLY YOU AND SOMBRA CAN HELP PREVENT CONSOLE FIRES, how-ever-that, along with a drawing of Shardik o’ the Beam in a Smokey the Bear hat, was some other joker’s treat). As she hurried across the cracked and uneven floor to get the extinguisher, skirting the fallen ceiling panels, another pain ripped into her, lighting her belly and thighs on fire, making her want to double over and bear down on the outrageous stone in her womb.

Not going to take long, she thought in a voice that was part Susannah and part Detta. No ma’am. This chap comin in on the express train!

But then the pain let up slightly. She snatched the extinguisher off the wall when it did, trained the slim black horn on the flaming control panel, and pressed the trigger. Foam billowed out, coating the flames. There was a baleful hissing sound and a smell like burning hair.

“THE FIRE… IS OUT,” the Voice of the Dogan proclaimed. “THE FIRE… IS OUT.” And then changing, quick as a flash, to a plummy British Lord Haw-Haw accent: “I SAY, JOLLY GOOD SHOW, SEW-ZANNAH, AB-SO-LUTELY BRILLLL-IANT!”

She lurched across the minefield of the Dogan’s floor again, seized the microphone, and pressed the transmit toggle. Above her, on one of the TV screens still operating, she could see that Mia was on the move again, crossing Sixtieth.

Then Susannah saw the green awning with the cartoon pig, and her heart sank. Not Sixtieth, but Sixty-first. The hijacking mommybitch had reached her destination.

“Eddie!” she shouted into the microphone. “Eddie or Roland!” And what the hell, she might as well make it a clean sweep. “Jake! Pere Callahan! We’ve reached the Dixie Pig and we’re going to have this damn baby! Come for us if you can, but be careful!”

She looked up at the screen again. Mia was now on the Dixie Pig side of the street, peering at the green awning. Hesitating. Could she read the words dixie pig? Probably not, but she could surely understand the cartoon. The smiling, smoking pig. And she wouldn’t hesitate long in any case, now that her labor had started.

“Eddie, I have to go. I love you, sugar! Whatever else happens, you remember that! Never forget it! Ilove you! This is…” Her eye fell on the semicircular readout on the panel behind the mike. The needle had fallen out of the red. She thought it would stay in the yellow until the labor was over, then subside into the green.

Unless something went wrong, that was.

She realized she was still gripping the mike. “This is Susannah-Mio, signing off. God be with you, boys. God and ka.”

She put the microphone down and closed her eyes.

TWELVE

Susannah sensed the difference in Mia immediately. Although she’d reached the Dixie Pig and her labor had most emphatically commenced, Mia’s mind was for once elsewhere. It had turned to Odetta Holmes, in fact, and to what Michael Schwerner had called the Mississippi Summer Project. (What the Oxford rednecks had called him was The Jewboy.) The emotional atmosphere to which Susannah returned was fraught, like still air before a violent September storm.

Susannah! Susannah, daughter of Dan!

Yes, Mia.

I agreed to mortality.

So you said.

And certainly Mia had looked mortal in Fedic. Mortal and terribly pregnant.