Rewired_ The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology - James Patrick Kelly [165]
The man didn’t have time to answer though, because like all of them he was digging through his pack, wrapping an elaborate crenellated set of earmuffs around his head.
The music struck up, and Soma began.
“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee…”
It was powerfully odd that the Kentuckians didn’t join in the singing, and that none of them were moving into the roundel lines that a group this size would normally be forming during the anthem.
Still, it might have been stranger if they had joined in.
“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee…”
There was a thicket of trumpet flowers tucked amongst a stand of willow trees across the dry creek, so the brass was louder than Soma was used to. Maybe they were farther from the city than he thought. Aficionados of different musical sections tended to find places like this and frequent them during anthem.
“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee…”
Soma was happily shuffling through a solo dance, keeping one eye on a fat raccoon that was bobbing its head in time with the music as it turned over stones in the stream bed, when he saw that the young Crow who wanted to see a bear had started keeping time as well, raising and lowering a clawed boot. The Owl was the first of the outlanders who spied the tapping foot.
“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee…”
Soma didn’t feel the real connection with the citizenry that anthem usually provided on a daily basis, didn’t feel his confidence and vigor improve, but he blamed that on the drugs the Kentuckians had given him. He wondered if those were the same drugs they were using on the Crow who now feebly twitched beneath the weight of the Owl, who had wrestled him to the ground. Others pinned down the dancing Crow’s arms and legs and Japheth brought out a needle and injected the poor soul with a vast syringe full of some milky brown substance that had the consistency of honey. Soma remembered that he knew the dancing Crow’s name. Japheth Sapp had called the boy Lowell.
“Tonight we’ll remake Tennessee, every night we remake Tennessee…”
The pink light faded. The raccoon waddled into the woods. The trumpet flowers fell quiet and Soma completed the execution of a pirouette.
The redheaded man stood before Japheth wearing a stricken and haunted look. He kept glancing to one side, where the Owl stood over the Crow who had danced. “Japheth, I just lost track,” he said. “It’s so hard here, to keep track of things.”
Japheth’s face flashed from anger through disappointment to something approaching forgiveness. “It is. It’s hard to keep track. Everybody fucks up sometime. And I think we got the dampeners in him in time.”
Then the Owl said, “Second shift now, Japheth. Have to wait for the second round of garbage drops to catch our bundle bug.”
Japheth grimaced, but nodded. “We can’t move anyway, not until we know what’s going to happen with Lowell,” he said, glancing at the unconscious boy. “Get the whiskey and the food back into the cache. Set up the netting. We’re staying here for the night.”
Japheth stalked over to Soma, fists clenched white.
“Things are getting clearer and clearer to you, Soma Painter, even if you think things are getting harder and harder to understand. Our motivations will open up things inside you.”
He took Soma’s chin in his left hand and tilted Soma’s face up. He waved his hand to indicate Lowell.
“There’s one of mine. There’s one of my motivations for all of this.”
Slowly, but with loud lactic cracks, Japheth spread his fingers wide.
“I fight her, Soma, in the hope that she’ll not clench up another mind. I fight her so that minds already bound might come unbound.”
In the morning, the dancing Crow boy was dead.
Jenny woke near dark, damp and cold, curled up in the gravel of the parking lot. Her horse nickered. She was dimly aware that the horse had been neighing