remembered someone calling America the United States of Sand and Rocks.
Sometimes she found things stranded surreally, left by God-knows-who. The original pioneers had been forced to lighten the loads on their wagons by strewing all manner of excess baggage across the western half of the continent. Bookcases, iron safes, furniture from the Old World, a diving bell. And the new resettlers were no different. They left their goods behind as they strove to find their Canaan.
Days ago, the Sandrat had found a huge jukebox, with a selection of hits from Sove musickies. Petya Tcherkassoff's 'The Girl in Gorki Park,' Tasha's 'Love, Sex, Love,' Vania Vanianova's 'Long-Haired Lover From Leningrad,' Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Happiness.' She had pressed buttons, but nothing happened. She polished the chrome, and wiped sand away from the stained-glass frontage, but it was finally useless, just another piece of garbage from a past that could have happened to someone else for all the trace it had left on her.
She had examined her curved reflection in the chrome mirror. Her cheekbones were prominent, and the ridges of her eyesockets. She saw a skull beneath her skin, but the image meant nothing, although somehow she thought it should. Her hair was growing out again, black and clean. She had been badly hurt some time ago, but her body was dealing with that. She had bruises, but no fleshrot.
The moon shone overhead like a new dime. The sand turned silver-grey, and the Sandrat wandered across it. She had been moving in large ellipses, crossing and recrossing her path in a complicated pattern. The moon called to her, she thought, pulling her this way and that. She went where it directed her, tracing a design on the face of the Earth.
The problem was the other Voice in her head, the one that could silence all the rest, the one that brought its pictures with it, the one that poured memories into her mind until she thought she would burst.
There was a face to go with the voice. A face that wore dark glasses and was shadowed by the wide brim of a flat black hat.
A face that was white, but was often split by a red smile. Red needlepoints glinted behind the shades. When she left the desert, and the Sandrat knew she would eventually come to the end of the sand, the face would be waiting for her.
She knew too much about him to let him live.
His name was Nguyen Seth, and he was older than the United States of America, older than the Black Plague, older than the written word, older than cultivated grain, older than the wheel, older than human language—Nguyen Seth was as old as Death.
Something came to her, a graffito she had seen on the wall of a burned-out Josephite temple in Denver, back when she was with the girlie gangcult. 'Within strange aeons, even Death may die…'
She hadn't known what it meant then, but now she knew it had been inscribed there just for her. The moon was pulling at her even before Spanish Fork, leading her to her destiny. Her whole life had been directed towards this one task.
The strange aeons were over, and it was nearly time for the Sandrat to kill Death.
In the distance, predators howled, wolf to coyote, mutant to mongrel. The Sandrat opened her throat, and howled too, joining in their song of the chase.
With the taste of blood still hot on her tongue, she sang in a long, keening cry of the joys of the kill…
Dropping to all fours, she bounded across the sand.
IV
'Hi, America! It's April the 3rd, 1996, and this is Lola. Here's some news we hope you can handle.
'Ms Redd Harvest of the Turner-Harvest-Ramirez Agency has just announced that the suspect apprehended in Nome, Alaska, last week in connection with the thirty-eight-state murder spree of the serial killer known as 'The Tasmanian Devil' has been definitely connected with four hundred and eighteen of the Devil's six hundred and forty-two confirmed kills to date. However, Washington has been rocked by the further revelation that the alleged killer is Dr Ottokar Proctor, the respected economist and adviser to President North, the man often referred to by the electronic media as 'the architect of the Big Bonus.'
'The president's office is keeping a silence on this one, although we are assured that a statement is being prepared. Sources close to President North indicate that he is deeply shaken by the arrest of Dr Proctor, who has been a frequent guest at the White House and is known to be a close friend of the Norths, and was godfather to little Joey North and to Ollie Jr. It has been suggested that the President will instruct the Attorney General to appear for the
'Sonny Pigg, lead singer of the Mothers of Violence, who last month released a successful solo album dedicated to 'The Tasmanian Devil,' has issued a press statement in which he claims that 'the Devil is a real gone guy, and we should go with the groove for him when the bloodtide comes round. Doc Proc should be made freakin' Prezz
'Dr Ottokar Proctor, 42, was bom in Venice, California, and graduated first in his class from Yale at the age of fifteen. He is a world-renowned expert in Side-Demand Financing, post-Jungian psychology, American-made animated cinema, the history of Italian opera and medieval European history. His publications include
'Dr Proctor has been kept in seclusion temporarily in the time-locked underground strongroom of the Anchorage branch of the GenTech Nomura Agricultural Loan and Trust Co, and has not as yet been able to confer with his lawyers or issue a public statement. Ms Redd Harvest has made available to this network a volume of evidence that is still being sifted by our experts. However, there would appear to be no chance at this time that the T-H-R conclusion will be proved wrong. As Ms Harvest has said to us over a satellite link, 'Dr Proctor…he was the Devil all right.' We'll bring you more on this upsetting story as it develops. In the meantime, this is Lola, handing you back to the scheduled program.'
V
