Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (24 page)

"Oh, well, what the hell, it's just a dream
anyway. I'll sing it for you." She did, singing the whimsical story
Staines had written about meeting a porcupine on a camping trip, a
song with a good chorus. They were a good audience. Nobody left.
Coyote gave a short yip at the end and sat with his tongue hanging
out. That had to do for applause.

The coyote barked again and the camp fire
flared up, sending a blaze of fire and a puff of smoke up the smoke
hole in the center of the tepee, into a sky that peered through the
hole like an oxidized silver eye. Anna Mae stared up into that eye
for a long moment, and when she looked down again, the animals were
gone.

Where coyote had been sitting, a human
shadow sat instead. The shadow's hands were outstretched to the
fire, and they were not made of shadow, for the firelight shone
through them as if they were made of clear plastic. On the wrist of
one hand was a turquoise bracelet. Despite the fire's heat, the
stone retained grains of frost across its surface.

Anna Mae recognized that bracelet, though
she had never seen it before. Recognizing it, she recognized the
shadow as her namesake, the woman whose name she had taken to shame
herself for her own unwitting perfidy. This was the real Anna Mae.
No reason she should be haunting Oklahoma, since she died up in
South Dakota on the Rosebud Reservation from a bullet in the head.
She must be haunting me, Anna Mae thought.

"Sister, forgive me for taking your name,"
the musician told the shadow.

The shadow raised the hand with the
turquoise in a dismissive motion. One song said when Anna Mae was
found, her bracelet was frozen to the ground. The feds had cut off
her hands at the wrist to be sent to D.C. for fingerprints. Only
after a protest from the People had her body, which had been buried
by the feds as that of a drunken Jane Doe, been returned for a
proper burial. They had found the bullet wound in her head then.
The song never said if the hands were returned too.

"What is it that you want?" the musician who
had been Mabel Charley asked, but she suddenly knew. She remembered
the songs, she remembered the stories, but if songs and stories
were dead in this country, who else remembered Anna Mae but the
woman who had taken her name? Forgotten, with only the official
record in existence about her life and death, Anna Mae's spirit had
sought out her namesake.

"I know two songs about you," the former
Mabel Charley told the ghost. "Perhaps you have not heard them.
Larry Long's song tells how you died and how the feds lied about it
and the People reclaimed you. The other song belongs to an activist
named Jim Page. It's to the tune of one of the ballads we brought
back from Britain. It will show you how your myth has grown, how
even the wind knows of you, how the lies of your murderers and
their attempts to degrade you cannot withstand the truth of what
you did and what it meant to people."

The ghost nodded, and the musician closed
her eyes and began to sing, the story forming in her head and
pouring through her, the melody flowing from her to the ghost and
back. She had not sung this song for more than seven years, but she
remembered it well, and with every word and every note the ghost
grew more substantial, the Mic Mac auto-assembly-line worker who
had left her children to work for the Native American cause grew
less a ghost and more a real person, the song taking something of
her namesake to flesh out the ghost. Then the realistic song was
finished, and a real woman sat waiting on the other side of the
fire.

The singer began the more mythic song
written to one of the tunes of "The Cruel Sister," the one that
went, "Oh, the wind and rain" except that the chorus to this one
said, "Blow, Dakota blow, and the cold Dakota winds they blow." The
other song was real, it told the story; this Dakota wind blowing
through the second song blew it up to legendary proportions, made
Anna Mae a universal symbol of brave, committed people fighting for
their rights. The vibrato in the singer's voice increased as she
tried to keep the tears from drowning the song. She closed her eyes
and didn't open them until she finished.

The ghost rose and started toward her as she
finished, but before the figure crossed the camp fire, the singer
fell back into a deep sleep.

She awoke to birds singing, and the notes
sounded a little like the first bar of "All God's Critters," an
impression that faded as she grew more awake. Her eyes went to
where the campfire had been, but there was nothing there but a
clean, bare patch of earth. It had all been a dream, of course, but
an instructive one. She knew how she would reach Tom George now.
She would sing him Anna Mae's song, sing him "The Ballad of Ira
Hayes," sing every other song she could think of which celebrated
their people until he understood. The dream clung to her.

She started to unwind. She should have been
frozen, damp, and cramped, but she was warm and dry, with a
hoarseness that did not feel like a cold coming on and the scent of
wood smoke still haunting her nostrils. Her arms were crossed
against her chest and she uncrossed them to rise and go try to find
Tom George. An unfamiliar weight bound her right arm under the
elastic of her sweatshirt. Curiously, she pulled back the sleeve. A
turquoise bracelet enclosed her wrist. The stone no longer bore a
hint of frost.

CHAPTER 17

The camp fire was down to embers.
Heather-Jon shuddered a little, despite the warmth of the predawn
air, and looked all around the perimeter of the campsite, as if
expecting other eyes to be looking back at her.

"And that was how Anna Mae Gunn realized
that she had had a true vision, in the tradition of her people, and
had been accepted into the warrior clan by the woman warrior she'd
named herself after," Ute said. He stuck something into the fire,
and it belched a sudden bolus of sparks and smoke.

Barbara Harrington-Smith fanned herself,
coughing. "Really, now, Ute, I've heard these musicians had
groupies, but ghost groupies

"Why, ma'am, I'm surprised at you! Here I am
tellin' you about genuine women heroes of two separate and
interrelated causes, and you go usin' pejorative terms like ghost
groupies.' " He sounded as if he were about to faint and added
prissily, "The correct nomenclature, I believe, is 'visible
spiritual remains of a formerly living individual who enjoyed, had
reason to enjoy, and pursued the enjoyment of music of a certain
type by a certain individual or groups of individuals and actively
expressed their enjoyment thereof.' "

"I beg your pardon," Barbara said,
chagrined.

"You got it," Ute said, grinning a big
coyotelike grin.

Heather-Jon asked, "But what about all the
things those other people are trying to do to prevent the music
from spreading? That organization, SWALLOW, the immigration
problems, and that murderer?"

"And I'd like to know how Brose Fairchild
and Gussie Turner and the others fared in a more urban area," said
Mary Armstrong, who was a sociologist and interested in how
environment affected what people did and vice versa.

"Well, the man from SWALLOW was runnin' into
a snag or two," Ute said. "Let's poke up the fire and fix us some
breakfast, and I'll tell you about it before we saddle up."

* * *

The man from SWALLOW had his orders and
rallied to the cause. An outbreak of unauthorized, unlicensed song
was festering in various parts of Oklahoma and spreading virulently
to other parts of the country, and it was up to him to stop it—or
at least to collect.

He'd had a fine time mopping up that south
central area in the past. Some of the people had been under the
impression that a few so-called traditional American folk songs
were theirs to perform or share as they liked. He had quickly
pointed out to them and to the proprietors of the establishments in
which they sang that certain prominent collectors of folk music in
the thirties had not only collected these songs from various
sources, but had arranged and published them, copyrighting them in
the process, so that they too were licensed. Naturally SWALLOW now
held the license and the copyright.

He caught up with one perpetrator in
Oklahoma City. The perp was a sixth-grade teacher who was singing
licensed songs to his students. Hugh Graham barged into the
classroom with his calculator clicking, interrupting the teacher in
the middle of a folk ballad about the Donner Party.

"By the power vested in me by the
Songwriters and Arrangers Legal Licensing Organization Worldwide, I
hereby order you to cease and desist singing that song or to pay
the sum of fifteen hundred dollars plus penalties for violating the
license on said song."

"I beg your pardon, but you don't have the
license on this song," the teacher said. "I learned this song from
my great-grandmother and I'm only just now recalling it."

"Nonsense. That is the arrangement licensed
by SWALLOW."

"Prove it," the teacher said. "Show me a
copy of your version, and I can show you how mine is
different."

Well, the upshot of the whole incident was,
the SWALLOW man left the classroom in a huff and called into the
home office, asking one of the secretaries to punch up the lead
sheet for that particular song and fax it to him.

"I'm sorry, sir," the secretary replied.
"But I don't show any lead sheet for that title. We have the title
but no other data listed."

"That's not possible," Graham said. "You
simply aren't trying hard enough."

"Well, excu-oo-ooze me," the secretary said.
"I'm double-checking the files and it seems we have no data in
terms of actual sheet music for any of the titles that I've
found."

Now, Hugh Graham was greatly puzzled by
that, because he, of course, was simply a zealous employee of
SWALLOW and not one of the masterminds behind the plan to actually
wipe out the music. In fact, nobody in SWALLOW except for one or
two minions actually knew all about the plot—they thought they were
making money with music, not obliterating it. But the fact was,
when the devils finally succeeded in emptying the United States of
the music, it wiped SWALLOW'S own U.S. computers clean too. Which
was kind of funny, because along about then, thanks to one of the
people who'd been at the convention in Tulsa, computers all over
the country were relearning and reloading the songs.

* * *

Morgan Richards and his wife LeeAnn had been
at the convention but they were not musicians. Though LeeAnn sang a
little, there were back-fence courting cats who sang better than
Morgan. But, lordy, did he like to listen! He soaked up that music
like a sponge, and during the night when the Randolphs were telling
their tale to the folks gathered at ConTin-gent, he helped C. J.
Cherryh with her new technical gear and later used what she had
gathered for a little scheme of his own.

Because even though he wasn't a musican, he
was a real virtuoso on another kind of keyboard—he could make
computers jump through hoops and sit up and beg.

When Faron and Ellie had explained that the
main thing they needed to do to fight the devils was to get as many
people as possible singing again, Dally Morales snorted. He'd been
watching C.J. and Morgan program CJ.'s laser disk recorder, and now
he said to Morgan, "Hell, there's more of this kind of stuff around
than there are people anymore. Too bad we can't teach these damn
machines to sing too."

"That wouldn't be too hard, actually,"
Morgan said. He just meant it by way of conversation at first, but
later he got to thinking about it.

"I don't think it would be too hard to
design a folk-music virus," he told Barry later.

"The devils have already done that," Barry
told him. "Killed off a bunch of folks or rendered them voiceless
for good."

Morgan looked patient and Molly punched
Barry on the arm. She was the electronic genius in the family. "He
means a computer virus, silly."

"Sure," Morgan said. "One that would invade
the hard disk memories of the two major kinds of computers. I could
infect a lot of machines by redesigning the communications software
that's used by all the insurance agencies and real estate
companies, TV, radio, and newspaper offices. I'll send it to them
by modem. Several of the kids' games are also played on modem now,
and I could do a version of the most popular one with the virus
built in."

"You can do that? I think you're on to
something," Barry said. "Of course, it's not really the same thing
as having people sing the songs."

"I don't see why it wouldn't be almost as
good," Molly said. "The kids said the important thing was that the
songs be sung, be in the airwaves like, and this would help."

"But wouldn't people discover the virus and
debug the programs?" Faron asked.

"I can arrange it so that they'll play the
songs so fast that they fit between other functions, except in the
case of the children's game, where the songs could be incorporated
as part of the game."

He had been as good as his word and had
spread the virus far and wide at very little expense to
himself.

* * *

So it was kind of funny that thanks to
Morgan Richards's virus, the SWALLOW computer, the only computer in
the U.S. that should have had all the songs listed, didn't seem to
have any of them just at a time when practically every other
computer in the nation was acquiring them. Of course, the secretary
was just checking the main menus. If she'd known how to check for
the computer virus in the communications program, she'd have found
the songs easily enough.

But she didn't know how to check, and so
Hugh Graham promised to use his influence to have her fired for
incompetence when he couldn't get the proof he needed and ended up
looking like a fool in front of that teacher and all those
children.