Buddy Holly Is Alive And Well On Ganymede Part 15

There were no lights in the park now, so Ringo brightened the blue spark in his black dog-eye to ensure that the man would see him. He had changed his mind about his dealings with people. Regardless of whether they were kind or cruel, he would not back away from them anymore. He would not run.

The man straightened his back and c.o.c.ked the rifle. He pointed it at the Doberman and fired.

Ringo's processors flashed, and without even knowing that he would do it, he caught the .30-06 bullet between his incisors.

The man stared for a moment, then c.o.c.ked the rifle again. Ringo sucked the bullet into his mouth, took a deep breath, and spat.

The slug entered the man's right thigh, and he staggered backward, dropping the rifle. Ringo stayed until the man got down on his hands and knees and began crawling toward the black automobile. Then, sure that the man would survive, he loped out to the highway.

The motorcycle's scent was strong and easy to follow. The crew-cab truck's scent was strong too, and Ringo was glad to find that the woman was following Vale as she had said she would. He was looking forward to seeing her again.

As he ran, he belched up a Budweiser and popped it with his teeth. He wished he'd done it earlier; that would havereally freaked the man with the gun.

SKYVUE.

Khrushchev stood beside the county road, his cloudy breath whooshing from his nostrils as if from a cartoon bull. His flesh quivered. He was enraged. The theater's marquee was lit, and there, in gargantuan red plastic letters, were words announcing that the Reverend William Willard of Oklahoma City would hold a rally here, in person, on Monday evening, February 6. Khrushchev had not known about it until this moment. He had been watching Buddy Holly on the five-inch TV in the snack bar when he'd heard the racket, and he had come out here just as the people who had put up the letters were driving away.

Eisenhower emerged from the darkness below the marquee and walked toward Khrushchev.

"Did you let them do this?" Khrushchev bellowed.

"They paid a reasonable fee," Eisenhower said as he came close.

Khrushchev kicked off his right shoe, s.n.a.t.c.hed it from the frozen ground, and began beating Eisenhower on the forehead with the heel.

"Is there a problem in there?" Khrushchev shouted. "h.e.l.lo? Can you hear me? Jesus Christ!"

Eisenhower crossed his arms. "You're going to give me a bruise."

Khrushchev flung his shoe across the road. "There's a mob violence in the cities, world leaders are accusing each other of provocative acts, and now you've rented out SkyVue to the Bill w.i.l.l.yites! They're calling your boy the Antichrist, did you know that? They'd like to lynch him, did you know that? They're using your Buddy Holly stunt to grab power, did you know that? They'remean, did you know that?

They're going to ruin the chances of all their fellow fleshbound, did you know that?"

Eisenhower turned away and began walking down the drive toward the theater lot. "They have a const.i.tutional right to a.s.sembly," he said. "If we're going to make our case for the fleshbound people's worthiness, we have to demonstrate that they deserve the rights they already have."

"b.u.t.these people are fanatics!" Khrushchev cried. "The ordained psychopaths of the Corps of Little David could hurt somebody!"

Eisenhower paused and glanced back, rubbing his forehead. "You should talk," he said, and then continued down the drive.

Khrushchev stood looking after him and felt ashamed.

He had struck a friend in anger.

It was appalling what flesh could do to a person. He would be glad to go home again, to return to the blessed state of noncorporeality that had given the Seekers their freedom.

He stood in the cold for a few more minutes and then began limping toward the snack bar. He had decided not to look for his lost shoe.

Part 3 - the Oklahoma kamikaze

7

OLIVER.

Reading Volume IV of Mother's diary, I see myself and the culture in which I was raised through the eyes of a woman being driven crazy by both of them. Volume IV chronicles the end of my first decade of life, and the end of the sixties. Both of us were stinkers.

My most vivid memory of 1970 is of April, when an oxygen tank in the command module of Apollo 13 ruptured. At school, we had a Moment of Silence every day to pray for Lovell, Haise, and Swigert as they went all the way around the moon with a crippled ship, using the oxygen and power reserves of the lunar module to subst.i.tute for what the command module no longer had. For the only time in my life, I willingly said the same prayers that everyone else did.

And then they were back, haggard and drained, but heroes, and I felt again as though human beings could accomplish anything, that all in the universe was ours.

I was ten years old.

Mother, of course, saw Apollo 13 and its message in a different light.

The ancient Atlanteans, they who fly the ships of light, have done this,she wrote.They crippled the ship to teach us our weakness, and they brought it safely home to teach us that our lives are dependent on chance, on Fate.

The astronauts were closer to death than we have been told. The coupling with the lunar module should not have worked, but the celestial Seekers saw to it that it did. They are warning us of our frailties while exhorting us to become pure of heart so that we may overcome those frailties.

It is yet another omen. They are trying to tell us that we are close to disintegration, to self-destruction.

The command capsule of Apollo 13 returned to Earth on April 17, 1970, and Mother wrote the preceding words the next day. Two and a half weeks later, four people were shot to death on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

They carried no weapons. They were killed by bullets shot from the rifles of National Guardsmen-by definition, their protectors.

Disintegration. Self-destruction.

Some animals, when caught in a trap, will chew off parts of their bodies in order to escape. As the decade came to a close, my nation was caught in such a trap, and it began to devour itself. A few kids at a time.

I was ten years old.

There was no prayer vigils in schools for those who were killed, and none for those killed a few days later at Jackson State. Mother wrote,I am changing my opinions of those who fly the ships of light. Some of them must be malevolent. It must have been one of these who whispered into a Guardsman's ear, "Shoot, or they will kill you!" It is the only explanation. Why else would a youth with a rifle kill another youth who does not have one? Human beings would melt into pools of blood before we would do such things of our own wills.

We could not ma.s.sacre children as it is said was done at My Lai. After all, we are not only humans, but Americans. We are the Good Guys. We would not beat people to death or hang them from trees. We would not kill unless we were made to do so by a force against which we could not stand.

Some blame Nixon. I do not. He is not strong enough to do this to us. He may not even exist.

Somewhere in the Void, a battle is raging. The aliens who love us are fighting those who despise us, and while the battle rages, spies of the malevolent ones whisper in our ears. They know that we can be made to destroy ourselves.

Yet some of us, especially those who make music of power, are not so weak as the rest. They have joined in the battle against the malevolent ones, and in them I place my ultimate hope.

Which was more hope than they could handle. In the fall, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin died of drug overdoses within weeks of each other. Willingly or not, they and their music had become symbols of the counterculture and of the struggle for justice, and they had blown it. Big time.

Shortly after Mother had taken her job at KKAP, she had begun the alb.u.m collection that now forms the core of my own. She began with the Crickets and proceeded through the late fifties and early sixties until she had caught up with the year, and then she had bought whatever music she could afford. By 1970, she owned virtually all of the most important rock 'n' roll alb.u.ms ever pressed.

Then Hendrix and Joplin offed themselves.

They lied,Mother wrote.They promised life, and they gave us death. They listened to the malevolent ones. Jimi played guitar like he came from a planet where a guitar is part of your body, and then he drowned in his own puke. Janis had a voice that could make you feel love and pain and life and s.e.x all at the same instant, and then she filled her body with s.h.i.t and fell on her face.

f.u.c.k them and the bus they rode in on.

She went through her record collection and pulled out everything that had been pressed after 1965, boxed them up, and sealed the boxes with duct tape. She wanted to retreat to the late fifties, when Buddy Holly was still alive and all seemed right with the world.

"We'll take these to the dump," she told me, and I was horrified.Sergeant Pepper was in there.

The boxes sat in the living room while Mother immersed herself in the music of the fifties and in paperbacks about UFOs and ancient civilizations. I listened to acid rock under the covers in my bedroom.

Then, on her thirtieth birthday, Mother wanted to hear "Eleanor Rigby," from the Beatles'Revolver alb.u.m, which was pressed in 1966. The box containing that record came open, and the others soonfollowed. She played them all, even the ones by the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Full Tilt Boogie.

Mother could get righteously angry with the best of them, but even she had a hard time holding a grudge against the dead.

Still, things always get worse before they get better. The year of Mother's thirtieth birthday was a signal for all of the evil on the planet to squirm out into the light. 1971 began with the conviction of Charles Manson and three members of his "family" for the slaughter of seven people. The murders were two years in the past, but it was only with the trial that the sickening details were revealed. Then, as if that weren't horror enough, a court-martial told the world that Lieutenant William L. Calley, Jr., was guilty of the murder oftwenty-two South Vietnamese civilians. Ourallies.

One night soon after the conclusion of the trial, flipping from one radio station to another, I chanced upon a country music station playing a song that praised Calley as a hero. I was confused by this and asked Mother to clarify the situation for me. She refused. If she had her way, she said, I wouldn't hear anything about what was going on out in the world in the first place.

Laos was invaded by South Vietnamese and U.S. forces in February, and thousands were killed. Jim Morrison died of a "heart attack" in France on July 3. North Vietnam was bombed in December.

And, paradoxically, while the world was filled with pain, there were triumphs. Apollo 14 and Apollo 15 went to the moon in January and July, and I felt pride so ma.s.sive I thought my chest would explode.

s.p.a.ce had tried to stop us, but we had come back. We had conquered another planet.

I was eleven years old.

There would be two more lunar landings in 1972, but then we would abandon our new planet, won at such high cost, without so much as a good-bye.

The Vietnam war and the Apollo program had more in common than was clear at the time.

By the end of the year, Mother had begun to talk openly of her beliefs concerning the ancient Atlanteans, their ships of light, the Cosmic Battle, and the malevolent ones. I laughed and told her that she was dreaming.

I thought that I knew better than she did, that my A in science meant that I knew far more of what the Universe was about than she with her fantasies ever could.

Obviously, I knew less than nothing.

That, at least, hasn't changed. Everything else has.

Miraculously, Peggy Sue started when the Bald Avenger attacked at the roadside park, and we escaped. I would like to think that I would have gone back to help Gretchen, but I didn't have to face that decision. As I was slowing down to consider it, the Ford crew cab that the Bald Avenger had been driving barreled past. Its interior light was on, and I saw Gretchen at the wheel. I followed.

Now that Peggy Sue, Gretchen, and I had survived and would continue to survive for a while (theJaguar's rear tires had been shot flat, so the Avenger couldn't come after us), I began to wonder how my neighbors' Doberman had happened to show up in the middle of Oklahoma. Ringo's size and his galvanized chain collar had identified him beyond any doubt.

He had appeared some four hundred miles from where I had last seen him.

As I rode, I listened to the ragged noise emanating from Peggy Sue's semi-amputated left tail pipe. Ringo had bitten through it, and I still had the threaded tooth he had lost doing so. I had seen his eyes, and they had burned with blue sparks.

The conclusion I came to was weird enough that Mother would have been proud of me: Ringo was a doggy robot, or a canine android, or something like that. Therefore, he had stamina beyond that of mortal Dobermans and could follow me indefinitely. Unless the Bald Avenger had killed or deactivated him, I would be seeing the beast again.

That made me unhappy. Ringo scared the p.i.s.s out of me.

As did the Bald Avenger. I hoped that they had managed to waste each other, because I figured that was the only way I'd have a shot at making it to Lubbock unscathed. So far, the regular cops hadn't been a big problem, so as long as I could get the Avenger and the Doberman pinscher cyborg off my tail- I would still be in trouble. Ringo belonged to Cathy and Jeremy What's-Their-Name, which had to mean thatthey were something weird too. (The astute reader will recognize that I should have figured all this out two days earlier when Ringo bit through hot metal. I plead extenuating circ.u.mstances. Buddy Holly had just come back from the grave and had read my name on TV. I was preoccupied.) I was being pursued by things beyond human ken. I began to wonder whether Mother might have been on to something all along.

Such were my thoughts when Gretchen's truck pulled onto the shoulder. I stopped alongside, and she rolled down the window.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n cheap-a.s.s ratmeat," she said.

I flipped up my faceplate. "What'd I do now?"

"This junk Ford is out of gas. I abandoned my backpack to get to it-mybackpack, with my weights and tape player and everything-and now it's stranded me in Oklahoma at two-thirty in the morning with a dorkus on amotorcycle."

I patted the portion of Peggy Sue's seat that extended behind me. "Room for a pa.s.senger," I said.

Gretchen's face contorted. "I'm wearing warm-ups over a tank top and shorts. I'd freeze."

I shrugged and revved the Ariel's engine. It didn't sound good, which diminished the effect I'd been hoping for. "Up to you," I said, "but I'm going on to Lubbock." I put the bike into gear.

Gretchen poked a shotgun barrel out of the window. "You take off without me, and I'll shoot 'Peggy Sue' right in the motor," she said.

I stopped. "How'd you know her name?" She opened the truck door and stepped out. "You talk in your sleep," she said, climbing onto the bike behind me. She put her left arm around my waist and cradled the shotgun in her right.

"You sure you want to keep that?" I asked. The shotgun was aimed at the back of my knee.

"Positive. Just like I'm positive that I was crazy for deciding to go to Lubbock with you. What do I care if Buddy Holly has risen from the grave? What's he gonna do for me if he has? Just take me to the nearest town with a phone, yorkface, and I'll get my friend in Houston to wire money for a bus ticket."

"What about your lack of spiritual fulfillment?"

"Screw it. I'm alive, and I won't be if I stick with you. Our a.s.sociation is ended. Let's go."

I flipped down my faceplate, and we went. I hadn't seen any distance-to-next-town signs since leaving the roadside park, but it couldn't be more than ten miles. Gretchen would survive the ride, and then we would part. It made me a little sad, even though I had a sense that we would each be better off without the other. Gretchen would be warmer, and I wouldn't have a shotgun threatening to shorten my leg.

I should have remembered: Things get worse before they get better. A mist began to fall, and then, six miles from where the Ford had stopped, Peggy Sue lurched and died. I clutched and let her roll.

"What's going on?" Gretchen shrieked. "What the b.l.o.o.d.y d.a.m.n stupid p.i.s.sant h.e.l.l are you doing?"

"I don't know," I yelled. We coasted to a stop on the shoulder.

Gretchen dismounted and began stomping back and forth, shouting curses that were unintelligible because she was shivering. This went on for twenty seconds or so, and then she c.o.c.ked the shotgun and pointed it at Peggy Sue's fuel tank. "Get off!" she bellowed.

I was rigid. "No."

She turned away and aimed the gun across the ditch at an empty field. A spike of blue fire roared out, and then another and another. A plastic sh.e.l.l bounced off my helmet. "G.o.dd.a.m.n G.o.dd.a.m.n G.o.dd.a.m.n G.o.dd.a.m.nG.o.dd.a.m.n!" Gretchen cried, c.o.c.king and firing, c.o.c.king and firing, until the chamber was empty. She threw the gun into the field.