the World.
When it was all over, there would be few winners and many losers. He would be in the former category. Indeed, after Nguyen Seth, he would be
He knew who would inherit the Earth, and it wasn't the meek.
He knew who would ascend to the throne of Heaven, and it wasn't the pure in heart. The seven-thousand-year snowjob was about to be blown out of the water.
The hymn rose up to the Heavens, but Duroc's thoughts stayed below. The news from Welcome was good. He felt an almost sexual excitement, the thrill of being part of somethng vast that would affect the entire human race and of being one of the few people—perhaps the
Things were coming to a head.
'The Path of Joseph' was nearly over.
'In the Name of Joseph,' the multitude sang,
'In the Name of the Lord,' Duroc joined in…
'…HALLELUJAH!'
III
Federico the Ferrari took care of most of the driving, but Chantal liked to keep the manual override. She had no ambition to become a cyborg, but she loved the feeling of communion with the machine. She had no bio-implants, had always found the idea somewhat distasteful, but there was an undeniable attraction in this temporary fusion. With her helmet on, she was in harmony with the car's system. It was a cyberfeed, but the terminal rested against her shaven hackles rawer than jacking into a skull-socket. Sometimes, she could feel the road under the wheels. She and Federico took turns to select musics from the Ferrari library of non-Russian pop. It answered her choice of Jim Morrison's 'I'm a Believer' with Don Gibson's 'Sea of Heartbreak.'
The country was unfamiliar, but the Cavalry's maps were detailed, and there had been no problems. She had never been to this part of the US before. However, she thought she recognized some of the table mountains and cracked mesas from Western films. This was John Wayne country. The cactus were gone, and the Indians absorbed, but the US Cavalry still rode, and there were still outlaws, varmints, gunslingers and border raiders. More than one Trooper back at Fort Apache, including a Navajo scout, referred to rogue gangcultists as 'injuns.' Federico pulled out Roy Rogers' 'A Cowboy Needs a Horse,' and she snapped back with Emerson, Lake and Palmer's 'Three Wheels on My Wagon.'
She had company on the road. Three bikers were trying to impress her with their fancy machines, keeping level and jeering at her. It wasn't so much a sexual display as it was a flirtation with the car. The windows were sunscreened black, so they wouldn't even know she was a woman. She ran their colours through the onboard files and tagged them as strays from the Satan's Stormtroopers, out of Houston, Texas. With their chopped Harleys, banana seats, beerguts, Viking beards, cossack shirts and pickelhaubes, the whole crew were textbook Motorsickle Crazies. They were just joyriding thugs, not real gangcult specimens. They didn't have a Philosophy, like the Daughters of the American Revolution or The Bible Belt. She didn't feel a pressing need to put them off the road.
They bounced a couple of beercans off Federico without even scratching the paintwork, and did wheelies, thumping the Ferrari's bodywork as they came down. It was time to burn them off. She flicked the overdrive, and let the car do the rest. She pushed 200 miles per, and the cykemen were choking on dust, already out of shouting range.
'So long, boys,' she said, smiling, selecting Pat Boone's 'Speedy Gonzalez' for the in-car sound system.
They were sore losers, evidently. Men usually didn't like to be shown up for half-horse feebs. One of the Stormtroopers must have a little hardware on his motorsickle, because Federico cut into Pat and told her, in Italian, that there was a heat-seeking missile coming after her, personally tailored to the warmth patterns of the car.
She tutted. These Americans displayed an incredible combination of humourlessness, insecurity and lack of imagination.
She took the laptop SDI console from the dashboard, and established provisional contact with the missile's one-track mind. Its directives weren't even encoded. She wiped Federico's smudgy patternprint from its three- minute memory and programmed in a 'Return to Sender' package.
'Ciao,' said the car. Chantal fed in Dean Martin's 'Volare,' and sang along. She didn't even hear the explosion.
Otherwise, the roads were clear.
Until the Tonto Basin, when suddenly her music went down, and a voice came at her through all her speakers.
'SISTER,' it shouted, 'HAVE YOU BEEN
IV
When the Reverend Harry Powell, sole owner of the Word of the Lord Broadcasting System, was informed that the aches and pains his faith healing guest stars had been unable to ease were, in fact, inoperable and extensive cancers of the bone marrow, he found himself faced with a choice. As a Good Christian of long-standing who had raised, over his twenty-seven years as a leading televangelist, over three hundred billion dollars for the Lord, he could kill the pain with morph-plus shots and wait his Just Reward in Heaven. On the other hand, as a sin-loving decadent who had used the greater portion of over three hundred billion dollars to indulge himself in luxurious excesses undreamed of by Caligula, he could expend the remainder of his considerable resources staving off the inevitable.
He took some time to assess the health of his business ventures. WLBS was still the top-rated televangelical crusade, beaming the Word of the Lord into perhaps seven hundred million homes worldwide. Royalties were still coming in for his best-selling testaments
He had diversified into the stock market, foods, theme parks, computer software, motion pictures, armaments manufacture, law enforcement, pharmaceuticals, energy resources, marital aids and souvenirs. He was in the Top Forty of the World's Richest Men, and climbing…
Still, there was nothing that could be done for his body. He had been able to pay for a half-hour of Dr Zarathustra's time at GenTech BioDiv, and the Doc had assured him that no amount of bio-implant and replacement doodads would do anything to help. Muscles, nerves, individual organs, limbs, eyes and skin, you could do something about. And you could replace individual bones—even your skull if you so wished—with durium robo-bits. But you couldn't dispense with your whole skeleton and still survive. It had something to do with blood. Powell didn't understand, but Zarathustra had patiently explained it all to him as if guesting on a kid vid teevee show before returning, substantially wealther, to his important research.
Powell's body was out of the business. But he still had a brain.
Zarathustra had referred Powell to W.D. Donovan, BioDiv's top brain-man, and, eager to be divested of his deadweight walking corpse, he had submitted to the Donovan Treatment. He had joined the other disembodied
