sending more men and women into the red throat of the abattoir.
Then the war had ended and silence had fallen . . . for a while. But at some point, the speakers had begun broadcasting again. How long ago? A hundred years? Fifty? Did it matter? Susannah thought not. What mattered was that when the speakers were reactivated, the only thing they broadcast was a single tape-loop . . . the loop with the drum-track on it. And the descendents of the city’s original residents had taken it for . . . what? The Voice of the Turtle? The Will of the Beam?
Susannah found herself remembering the time she had asked her father, a quiet but deeply cynical man, if he believed there was a God in heaven who guided the course of human events. Well, he had said, I think it’s sort of half’n half, Odetta. I’m sure there’s a God, but I don’t think He has much if anything to do with us these days; I believe that after we killed His son, He finally got it through His head that there wasn’t nothing to be done with the sons of Adam or the daughters of Eve, and He washed His hands of us. Wise fella.
She had responded to this (which she had fully expected; she was eleven at the time, and knew the turn of her father’s mind quite well) by showing him a squib on the Community Churches page of the local newspaper. It said that Rev. Murdock of the Grace Methodist Church would that Sunday elucidate on the topic “God Speaks to Each of Us Every Day”—with a text from First Corinthians. Her father had laughed over that so hard that tears had squirted from the corners of his eyes. Well, I guess each of us hears someone talking, he had said at last, and you can bet your bottom dollar on one thing, sweetie: each of us— including this here Reverend Murdock—hears that voice say just exactly what he wants to hear. It’s so convenient that way.
What these people had apparently wanted to hear in the recorded drum-track was an invitation to commit ritual murder. And now, when the drums began to throb through these hundreds or thousands of speakers—a hammering back-beat which was only the percussion to a Z.Z. Top song called “Velcro Fly,” if Eddie was right—it became their signal to unlimber the hangropes and run a few folks up the nearest speaker-posts.
How many? she wondered as Eddie rolled her along in her wheelchair, its nicked and dented hard rubber tires crackling over broken glass and whispering through drifts of discarded paper. How many have been killed over the years because some electronic circuit under the city got the hiccups? Did it start because they recognized the essential alienness of the music, which came somehow—like us, and the airplane, and some of the cars along these streets—from another world?
She didn’t know, but she knew she had come around to her father’s cynical point of view on the subject of God and the chats He might or might not have with the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve. These people had been looking for a reason to slaughter each other, that was all, and the drums had been as good a reason as any.
She found herself thinking of the hive they had found—the misshapen hive of white bees whose honey would have poisoned them if they had been foolish enough to eat of it. Here, on this side of the Send, was another dying hive; more mutated white bees whose sting would be no less deadly for their confusion, loss, and perplexity.
And how many more will have to die before the tape finally breaks?
As if her thoughts had caused it to happen, the speakers suddenly began to transmit the relentless, syncopated heartbeat of the drums. Eddie yelled in surprise. Susannah screamed and clapped both hands to her ears—but before she did, she could faintly hear the rest of the music: the track or tracks which had been muted decades ago when someone (probably quite by accident) had bumped the balance control, knocking it all the way to one side and burying both the guitars and the vocal.
Eddie continued to push her along The Street of the Turtle and the Path of the Beam, trying to look in all directions at once and trying not to smell the odor of putrefaction. Thank God for the wind, he thought.