of Joseph.'
Beach nodded his approval. 'It was well done,' he said. 'Brother Duroc, things proceed apace. As thou canst see, the flock are dedicated, and willing.'
The honoured sacrifice was loaded onto a baggage-carrying cart and pulled away for disposal. His shape was outlined on the runway like a shadow. The choir finished the hymn, and each child in turn drew his letter in the blood. J. O. S. E. P. H.
Old Joseph Shatner, founder of the church, would have been amused.
'Joseph's work will be done,' said Beach.
'Yes, indeed.'
The three caught the shuttle bus from the terminal, and were driven into the city. Duroc gave a brief account of his doings in Paris, and of his important visit to Berlin. Wiggs smiled, and Beach nodded. His news was digested.
'How are things at the tabernacle?' Duroc asked.
'All is well,' said Beach. 'Elder Seth is under a great strain, of course. The Dark Ones are demanding, but he has been bearing up remarkably. He is much involved with the rituals these days. Miracles and wonderments.'
Duroc knew what that meant. He had lived with miracles and wonderments all his life, ever since his uncle had told him something about the family's history and the eternal presence of Seth in their lives. He had made his first apport as a teenager. He didn't like the demon stuff, was happier with a phosphor grenade than a geas, but he had to know his business. Gateways were opening up here in Salt Lake, and things would be corning through the like of which had not been seen for thousands of years. They were dealing with events of Biblical proportion.
Inside the tabernacle grounds stood an X-shaped cross, and upon that hung a ragged figure that had once been a man.
'Jesuits,' Wiggs snorted. 'As thou canst see, Rome sends them out by the dozen. If Seth could be bothered to use his influence in Washington, we should have Sollie Ollie protest to Papa Georgi. The priests are becoming a nuisance.'
They got off the shuttle, and stood at the base of the crucifix. There was a small gaggle of onlookers, mostly bored.
The crucified spy shifted, gargling from his crushed throat.
'Three days he has been up there,' said Beach. 'His name is Rafferty. Irish, of course. Three days, and he has not died. Jesus Christ himself did not last so long, I think.'
'Jesuits are notoriously stubborn,' Duroc mused.
An attendant from the tabernacle came along with a bucket and a sponge on a stick. He first used it to wipe some of the filth from the priest, then lifted the sponge to Rafferty's mouth, forcing it in.
'We can't have him dying of thirst before his flesh has been mortified enough to appease the Dark Ones,' said Wiggs.
'Indeed not,' agreed Beach.
Rafferty tried to spit, but swallowing was involuntary. He groaned, knowing each drop of water meant an hour or more of life. Duroc was intrigued by the man's predicament. Forbidden suicide by his religion, he could not induce death by, for instance, agitating his pierced hands and feet until loss of blood carried him away. He could only await starvation, suffocation, exposure, simple fatigue or a merciful bolt of lightning.
Wiggs and Beach chortled, making some joke about the Jesuit. Duroc considered reprimanding them. One had to respect an enemy like this. He was dying as well as the man at the airport. That could not be denied. Once, trying to resist his Destiny, Duroc had studied for the priesthood, but the vocation of his family had outweighed the call of Rome.
Duroc looked up at Rafferty, and the priest turned his head, meeting his gaze with pained, still-clear eyes. Duroc saluted the Jesuit, and the dying spy turned his eyes skyward.
'Come,' said Beach, 'Elder Seth is waiting.'
III
There was sand in front of her, sand behind her, sand to the left and sand to the right. That's the way it had been for longer than she could remember. It was dusk, and the cold was falling. The murdering sun had dipped below the horizon, and this was the time when she could forage for food. Alert, she stalked the jackrabbit, her stiletto poised for a deft jab. There was plenty of game in the desert if you looked. Small animals could live off the whisps of yellow grass that persisted in growing, and large animals could live off the small animals. She was a large animal, a sandrat. She had been a regular person once, but that had been before the voices started up in her head, before the dead woman got out of her rocking chair, before the preacherman reached into her mind and gave it a sharp twist…
The Sandrat had more names than she could remember, and different people to go with each one. She recalled her father's name. Bonney. It was a good name. People who bore it came to her in her rare sleeping periods, and she learned from them.
There was Anne, in thigh-length leather boots, her ruffled shirt open to show a deep cleavage, a blood-greased cutlass in her hand, a rolling deck under her, warpaint on her face. Billy, a smoking Colt in his left hand, a toothy grin on his face, dwarfed by his oversized chaps, a battered hat on his long, ratty hair. And Bruno, sections of his undershirt cut away to emphasize his carefully-nurtured musculature—the result of long hours pumping iron, not expensive bio-implants—a cigar between his teeth, the flexible aluminium whip in his hand. The Bonneys were a dangerous breed.
She found the rabbit, chewing on a stubby cactus, and stabbed it in the neck. It kicked twice, and died. She wiped the stiletto off on its fur and slipped it into the sheath in her boot, then sucked the warm, salty blood from the puncture she had made. The meat she would dry out in the sun tomorrow. Chewed steadily, it should last her for days. As for water, that would come in minute drops from the cactus.
Sandside was only a desert if you were too used to concrete under your boots. She didn't use her gun much any more—ammunition only came her way very occasionally—but she was skilled at knife-hunting. Last night, she had taken one of the wolfdogs that had been following her for weeks. The rest of the pack had turned away. She considered tracking them, but didn't feel the need to make any particular point of it. There was honour among predators.
Strange voices had been talking inside her head forever. Not just the the Bonneys. Andrew Jean was back, beehive still in place, and chattering away like the old days. The days before the sand. And Mrs Katz, a gentle soul who held no grudge for the loss of her skull. And all the voices of Spanish Fork. The drawl of Judge Thomas Longhorne Colpeper, pompously expounding points of law; the gentle Detroit brogue of Trooper Washington Burnside, whose gun she still carried; the primal shriek of Cheeks, who had been maddened by the D.I.V.O.R.C.E. from her body; comments about the weather from Chollie Jenevein, the gasman; chemical tips from pharmacist Ferd Sunderland, who knew the Latin name of every cactus, root and fungus in the sand, plus the effects it would produce if chewed, smoked or swallowed; too many others to distinguish individually.
She had seen the world as it really was, once. Now, she was stripped down to the bare essentials of her person, trying to deal with her knowledge. She was forgetting everything else—the sub-language she spoke, things she knew, chunks of her past, people she had killed—but she had a clear memory of the way the world really looked. That was important.
By night, she walked, hunted, and fed. By day, she put up a shelter against the sun and listened to the cacophony inside her. One day in every seven or eight, she slept. It was a good, clean life. When she first came to the sand, a long time ago, she had had a pocketful of pills and squeezers, but she had lost interest in them. They rattled as she stalked, sometimes alarming her prey, and so she scattered them into the sand, to be ingested by the things that lived below the dunes. Her hair she had hacked short with her knife. She kept clean by washing in sand, and buried her stools well away from her nest of the moment. She was a good animal.
She thought she might be in Nevada, but it was hard to tell. It was just sand and rocks. It could have been Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California, or Deseret. It was all the same, the Big Empty. In her head, Burnside
