W. Bond Wiggs must have stank of his sins. Stank to high heaven.
Trestle tables were erected and food laid out upon them. The Brethren gathered and took their places. Wiggs sat at the Elder's right hand, as was fit. Elder Seth read the blessing and the Brethren ate in prayerful silence. Josephites abjured stimulants and spices, so the fare was plain and unflavoured, sustenance for the body not distraction for the palate. Wiggs happily spooned into his mouth a mush which contained all essentials for the prolongation of life but no harmful additives.
After a meal, Wiggs' taste-buds occasionally yearned for coffee, the most reviled of all stimulants. But the only coffee legally available in the United States was recaff, which hardly counted. All in all, he did not miss any of the things the Brethren were required to put behind them. He certainly did not miss the sins of the flesh. These days, he rarely even thought of them.
Young women, old women, illegally young women, indecently old women. Fat women, thin women, short women, tall women. Dark women, fair women, black women, white women. All of them he had used and cast away until Elder Seth showed him how to escape the coils of his desires.
He had been in Tombstone, Arizona, in a pornobooth at the virtual mall, hips bucking as the milking sleeve simulated the skilled orifice of some faceless harlot. The Revelation was a Fiery Coming. It screeched through the sensory inputs and blanked out the sinful loop. Tearing out of the mall, the weight of Sin crushing him like a falling safe, he found his way to a revival staged in the historic OK Corrall. In a Battle of the Brothers, a succession of evangelists mounted the stand, preaching until the audience gonged them off.
Come one, come all, announced barkers. Anyone could take the lectern.
Staggering into the crowd, self-disgust coursing through his graymass like electricity, Wiggs heard four or five preachers booed off the altar. A hooded pastor of the Church of Jesus Christ, Caucasian, was passed over heads by a multitude of hands and tossed squealing into the street. It was a tough congregation, perpetually on the edge of an ugly mood. A singing nun didn't get into the second "-nique" of "Domi-nique-nique-nique" before she was stripped of her penguin cowl and dumped in the horse-trough. It seemed no-one could satisfy this crowd's thirst for a sermon. They had come to hear the Word and weren't taking any tin dollars.
Then, striding to the podium as Wyatt Earp had strode over the same dirt to face the Clanton Boys, came a tall man with a wide black hat and simple mirrored sunglasses.
From that day to this, Wiggs had never seen the Elder without his shades. He wondered if the man suffered from some disease of the eyes.
Elder Seth had talked all evening and well into the night, holding the rowdy audience rapt. The Word spilled from him like milk from a pitcher, and the crowd lapped it up like babies.
Looking now at the Elder, Wiggs remembered the force of that first experience. Again and again, he thanked the Lord that he had been saved before perdition was unavoidable. Faith had come upon him like a fever.
At the time, he was confused in his feelings, even hostile. He found himself near the front of the crowd, in the company of loose women. The initial fire of his conviction was already petering out, and he was drawn as if by magnetic attraction to painted women. No more than NoGo girls, they wore cutaway plastic minidresses, check shirts tied in tantalising knots above tiny navels and tinselled pseudoleather cowgirl hats. Tags shaped like sheriff stars confirmed their status as registered, disease-free Arizona Harlots.
As Elder Seth preached, the whores inflamed Wiggs's hateful lusts with duplicitous strokes of tongue and hand. He found himself calling out for the gong, a lone voice in the grateful multitude. After that night, two of the lost girls turned away from sin; Rancho Rita was now Sister Rosalie and Chihuahua Chicken was Sister Consuela.
Now, Sister Consuela was beloved of the children. In the Shining City, she would teach the Truth of Joseph and lead the choir. But back then she was an alley-cat who would have rutted with the Tasmanian Devil for a squeezer of smack-synth. In the OK Corrall, she went for Wiggs's sex pistol and almost squeezed off a couple of shots before Elder Seth turned his attention to their corner of the crowd.
Clearly, a certain part of his body ruled the rest of him. It outranked his graymass, his heart and his spirit. Turgid with lascivious blood, it compelled him to cry against the good man who extended the hand of salvation to him.
"Brother," the Elder said, fixing Wiggs with his mirror glare, "in the Good Book it is written, in the Gospel of St Matthew, that Our Redeemer said, 'if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out'…"
Wiggs, realisation coming into his head like a bomb-burst, knew Elder Seth had shown him the Way, the only path to his salvation.
III
The roadkillers had made better than average time, which meant the Quince ordered a night ride. They roughly followed the old state line, dipping in and out of Arizona. For safety, they kept their speed down to seventy. Tyree felt as if her mount was hobbled.
She listened to Quincannon make cockpit talk with Yorke, fixing on the buzz as a talisman against the fingers of sleep clawing her mind. She was used to 36 and 48-hour stretches on the road but bone-deep weariness descended with the dark. She felt the force, if not the chill, of wind against her padded arms. After hours in the saddle, stiffness set in from her coccyx to her shoulders. She rode with her knees close to the mount, britches warmed by engine heat, and moved her helmeted head back and forth like a darting snake's to fight the ache in her neck.
The patrol was in close formation, outriders at the corners of the cruiser's headlight throw. Darkness rushed around, the odd roadside sign or abandoned building looming as high-intensity beams briefly lit them up like bright white ghosts.
The unknown pilgrim-flatteners had taken an underused route and left clear tracks even after the blood ran out. Tiremarks cut through drifting sand and patches of heat-melted asphalt, hardened in the night's chill, even showed what brand of rubber the quarry was burning. GenTech, natch. The main ve-hickle was an armoured bus. High speed.
Burnside had popped a couple of pills to keep alert and unconsciously hummed "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" into his intercom. The tune settled in around the back of Tyree's brain and stayed there.
"Round her neck, she wore a yellow ribbon.
She wore it for her lover who was far, far away …"
Tyree thought of Trooper Nathan Stack. He was far, far away all right, back at Fort Valens, if not exactly her lover. That time in Nicaragua, when their leave coincided and a rare foreign travel permit came along, there'd been a moment when wedding chapels were open and it would have been easy on an impulse to tie a knot. Back in the States, things scanned very different There were things about Nathan that didn't square with her ideas for the next few years.
"When I asked her why the yellow ribbon.
She said it was for her lover in the US Cavalry…"
She'd set the buzzer in her skidlid to deliver a subaudial jolt every thirty seconds. That kept her awake and alert and there was no risk of developing a dependency. Burnside had popped a few too many pills this tour and she should report him to the Quince. It was in the regulations; but the Cav had regs and rules, and it was a Rule that one trooper not snitch on another, even if she was angling for a promotion.
"Caval-reee, Caval-reee.
She said it was for her lover in the US Cavalry…"