Sometimes, blasphemously, Duroc wondered what it would be like to be Nguyen Seth. Seth the Eternal, Seth the Unchanged, Seth the Summoner.
The song ended, and Nguyen Seth spoke to his followers. His words didn't matter. Few could ever remember anything specific he might say in his sermons, but the tone of voice, the gestures, the expressions—congregationists standing up to three miles away swore they could make out precise expressions in his eyes—were spellbinding.
Duroc was luckier than his forebears. He knew he was destined to be in at the end of it.
The Josephite Church was founded in 1843 by Joseph Shatner, a drink-sotted pimp and occasional beer buddy of Edgar Allan Poe's. An angel made itself manifest in the backroom of a Boston bar and handed Joseph a testament written in letters of fire, along with a pair of mirror-faced glasses that enabled him to interpret the otherwise impenetrable writings. The testament and the shades remained to this day prize possessions of the church, locked up in a safe in Seth's stronghold. The 1840s were great days for protestant sects in the United States. The Mormons—who had their own angel and their own glasses—the Mennonites, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Danites, the Agapemonists, the Adventists, the Dancing Fools, the Sons of Baphomet, thirty-five breeds of Baptist and numberless Hellfire and Damnation merchants were thriving. The Mormons got to Salt Lake City first, while Joseph Shatner was dodging fraud charges in Massachusetts and building up his first following.
Duroc knew that the shadowy figure referred to in Joseph's memoirs, whom he names "The Ute" (never having been West of New England, he had no idea what a Plains Indian looked like) and who had bankrolled the early days of his sect was none other man Nguyen Seth, who was today taken by most people for either an Egyptian or a Vietnamese. Joseph had attracted followers by allowing all manner of liberties and excesses barred by other denominations, and then withdrew all allowances for everybody except himself. He died a martyr, hanged by the Massachusetts authorities under anti-sorcery laws that had lain unused on the statutes since the Salem witch trials. Led by "The Ute," his followers had made their way West to settle the wilderness. Joseph's brother Hendrik Shatner—rumoured to be the only man of the American garrison to step out of the line drawn by Davy Crockett at the Alamo in 1836 and decorated by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna for services to Mexico during the siege—took command, and his colourful career later included leading the Josephite forces during a brief war with federal troops in the 1850s.
Like the Mormons, the Josephites out West allied with the Indians when it came to resisting the encroachments of other settlers and Hendrik had personally led a joint Josephite-Chiricahua raid against a gentile community called New Canaan in Southern Utah. That had been one of the bloodiest days of the Old West, and Hendrik, war-painted and wearing the black hat that had him named Bonnet-of-Death by his allies, was supposed to have personally lifted thirty scalps. Now, Duroc could appreciate the history better. Now he knew of the need to spill blood constantly, in defiance of the Biblical word, and as a seal on the charms of Invocation. Hendrik Shatner had lived to be 97, and died amid great wealth attended by the several mistresses he maintained until the last. Duroc planned to do better for himself.
Seth finished his speech, and the choir began again. This time, they joined voices in the Josephite anthem, "The Path of Joseph." As a single throat, the multitude joined in.
It was quite possibly the. loudest human sound ever heard in history.
Roger Duroc clamped his hands over his ears, looked down at the salt, and relished the prospect of the End of 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 the big winner. All the suckers in the world, all the suckers in the crowd, were placing their bets on the wrong side, the losing side. To only a few had the correct result of the last battle been revealed.
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 only person—with the knowledge to appreciate just what was, in the vernacular of the Americas, going down.
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.