"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 SAVED?!!"
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 How to Get Through the Eye of the Needle, Checking Into Motel Heaven, and My Pal, Jesus, not to mention the popular gospel hits he had had ghost-written for him in the '60s by a talented but otherwise unsuccessful young man called Paul Simon, "Little Bitty Orphans in Africa," "Jesus in Blue Jeans" and "I'm Not Ashamed to be a Christian."
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 brains in their tanks, thinking their deep droughts, sinking into their pools of biofluid. Unfortunately, while Donovan could take your brain out and keep it alive, he hadn't yet perfected the technique for putting it back into another body so it worked. That, presumably, was what all the other multi-billionaire prisoners on GenTech's Cerebellum Row—Nelson Rockefeller, Howard Hughes, Charles Foster Kane, Walt Disney, Ken Dodd, Don Michael Corleone—were waiting for. And that was what Powell was expecting, a few years of contemplative thought and resurrection in a young, fresh, ready-to-wear body.
However, his lawyers had not considered the legalities of the Donovan Treatment. Once his brain was slipped from its cranial cradle, the Reverend Harry Powell found himself declared legally dead, and his assets devolved to the Word of the Lord Mission for Christ, parent corporation of the Word of the Lord Broadcasting System, and also of the Word of the Lord Electronic Information Service, the Word of the Lord Chain of Christian Health Food Restaurants, the Word of the Lord Summer Camps, the Word of the Lord Law Enforcement Agency ('Let Christ Be Your Cop!'), the Word of the Lord Publishing Consortium, the Word of the Lord Moral Reassertiveness Centres and the Word of the Lord Graveyard Redevelopment Conglomeration. The board of directors found themselves rather embarassed to have on their hands not only the worldy wealth and temporal holdings of Harry Powell, but his still-functional brain as well.
It might not have gone so badly for the late Reverend if he hadn't made the cardinal error of appointing Genuine Christians to executive offices within his organization. Anyone else might not have been quite so upset to discover that the Word of the Lord Drug Rehabilitation Program was actually a highly successful franchised operation peddling narcotics, hallucinogens, psychoactives, and other forms of ju-ju to teenagers, or that the popular Word of the Lord Crusade for Morals Drop-In Centres Powell had set up in the NoGos surrounding several major PZs were actually omnisexual brothels staffed by runaway youngsters Powell had, in many cases, personally welcomed into the fold.
Once Powell's yakuza-trained accountants had been eased out of the boardroom, only the Genuine Christians—the Honest-to-God Suckers, as he had been wont to call them in life—remained. They had sat around the oval table, looking at the preacher bubbling away in his Self-Contained Environment, and had pondered the ethics of pulling the plug and burying the gray matter along with his literally rotten bones in the gaudily ostentatious cenotaph Powell had designed for himself.
But there was always a use in the church for brains.
V
"…SAVED BY JEEEY-ZUSS! SAVED BY THE LOWWW-UD! SAVED, SAVED, SAVED.''
Chantal braked to avoid slamming into the tanklike vehicle blocking the road. She'd have swerved off into the sand to get round the obstacle, but she didn't want to gum up Federico's wheels without checking the terrain. It didn't matter what kind of hot machine you had, if you tried to drive on soft sand you'd bog down. The desert was full of abandoned vehicles slowly sinking in alkali pits.
"HAVE YOU SINNED? HAVE YOU BEE-YUN SINFUL? HAVE YOU TAKEN CARNAL LUST, BODILY FILTH AND THE DAY-UVV-VILLE INTO YOUR HEART?"
She tried to turn down the volume, but the broadcaster had a lock on Federico's sound system. It was coming from the machine up ahead, that much was certain.
"Do me a search," she said. "Find out what that thing is."
Federico hummed as it went through the files. The voice changed pitch, was joined by a kitschy angelic choir and the kind of string backing the British '60s pop star Ken Dodd favoured on his more unbearable singles, and began to sing.
"Little bitty orphans in Africa
Need a heap of change from you,
Little bitty orphans in Africa
Make ole Jesus feel downright blue