Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (20 page)

"There used to be a lot of music in and
around the Ozarks," Julianne said, biting into one of the Oreo
cookies Barry had packed so they wouldn't starve to death, as he
always seemed to be afraid they might do. "Vance Randolph made a
career out of the music and lore from the people there. Now most of
them are retired city people I guess, but I ought to be able to
find an audience. Lucien will know where to find one, even if he
doesn't approve, and maybe George will have a better sense of who
needs us, now that he has a—broader view of things."

"Well, if you do get in touch with George,
you give him our love, you hear?" Gussie said. After all the ghosts
they'd met in the last few years, Juli hearing from her late
husband seemed as normal as any of them trying to contact a living
relative.

The next day the rain let up and they drove
into Joplin, Missouri, without incident. The consulting rooms of
Lucien Santos were just where Julianne remembered them to be. A
light shone from within, sparking rainbows off various-colored
crystals in the window. Gussie wouldn't let Juli go until she
checked and made sure she had everything. Julianne carried her
spoons, money, the tear, and fairy dust in a purse slung around the
narrow waist of her flowing Indian print skirt and a banjo over the
shoulder of an ancient navy blue fisherman's sweater that belonged
to Barry. It covered her T-shirt. To compensate for the cold, she
wore socks under her sandals and a pair of Molly's long johns under
her skirt, and for extra warmth wore around her neck a wool tartan
scarf she'd bought at a gift shop in Scotland. With a last hug and
a wave, she walked up to the door of the shop and knocked. The door
swung open, and a man with a black beard and hair peeked out
briefly as Juli shot them an "okay" sign.

"I'm gonna miss that girl," Gussie said. "I
hope that crackpot doesn't fill her head up again with any of the
foolish notions he gave her before."

"Supernatural stuff, you mean?" Brose
asked.

"Oh, no. I guess we all know that's all
right. I mean all that garbage he tried to tell her about how
people always deserve the luck they get. Why, I know for a fact
that isn't true, and so do you. Torchy told us herself that she is
responsible for luck, and I pity the poor soul she decides to
withhold it from."

"Well, I hope she is on the level when she
says she's given luck to us, because I'm here to tell you, I'm
havin' second thoughts about going back to Kansas City," Brose
said. "Nobody in their right mind would stand on the corner of
Twelfth Street and Vine, with or without a bottle of wine. Good way
to get mugged. But one of the names on that list of Barry's is a
friend I used to play Balkan music with back at the humane society,
so I figure he can help me circulate again."

Strawberry Hill in Kansas City, Kansas,
across the river from Kansas City, Missouri, was full of older
houses with big porches and oaks, elms, and maples crowding tiny
yards. The names on the mailboxes tended to end with "ski" or be
uniformly unpronounceable.

Brose walked up to the door of the house and
knocked. The lady who answered it gasped a little to see a
gentleman of color—and such an odd color, with his bristly red hair
and mottled skin—standing on her porch. But then Brose asked, "What
size shoes did Clementine wear?"

And the woman, who always liked to have the
right answers, added, "Number nine. Boxes without topses, special
made for Clementine. And you are?"

"Brose Fairchild, Mrs. Kaminsky. Is Hank
home?"

"No, but he will be in a minute. Who are
your friends in the car? Do you suppose they'd like some of my
fresh potato soup with homemade sausage? Hank always says I make
enough for an army."

"That's mighty kind," he said, and waved the
others in.

Terry and Dan were the only ones in the
group with no ties in the area, so later that night they
accompanied Gussie to one of the addresses Barry had given her. No
lights were on when Gussie drove up to the big house in Westport,
the oldest portion of Kansas City, Kansas, from back when it was a
point of departure for covered wagons. The night was turning cold,
and an icy wind knifed down the street as she walked up to the door
and knocked. A middle-aged woman Gussie had never seen before
answered the door, and Gussie felt like a damn fool as she asked
the code question from "The Arkansas Traveler." "Say, farmer, can
you tell me where this road goes to?"

The woman blinked twice and rubbed her eyes,
and Gussie thought she was for sure about to call the cops, but
then she said, "It's never gone anywhere since I lived here; it's
always right there when I get up in the morning."

Gussie smiled and stuck out her hand. "Dr.
Callahan, I presume. There's three of us. Have you got room?"

Dr. Callahan opened the door wider, and the
overhead light in the van broke through the night as Terry and Dan
grabbed their instruments and bundled them out into the night.

* * *

"This is all very romantic, Ute," Mary
Armstrong said in a practical tone, "but I don't see how they were
going to manage to go live with a few strangers and teach them
songs. Wouldn't their adversaries track them down that way?
Besides, it seems to me that that would be a very slow way to
spread the music."

"That's a real good point. You're right on
both counts. They figured it the same way you do, but they planned
to keep movin' so that by the time the devils found one safe house,
they'd be on their way to another. As for the hosts, they were
courageous people and that's a fact. Bad things could and did
happen not only to the singers, but to the hosts, but not before
the music had been spread a little farther."

* * *

The Randolphs didn't end up taking their
trip to Arkansas after all.

"You can't go now," Molly told them. "We
need you to do about three thousand things to help us get ready for
ConTin-gent."

"We could do it in a day," Ellie said.

"But ConTingent's only two days away," Barry
said. "This'll be the biggest one since TuCon died. We're expecting
a hundred and fifty hardcore book-and-music people, and we were
able to get our old hotel."

"That funny old pink castle?" Ellie asked.
"That's great, but, Dad, what's the big deal? That's a really small
crowd. There used to be a couple thousand at TuCon. What
happened?"

Barry shrugged and scratched the ears of the
cat, who had deposited herself on top of a pile of paperwork on the
kitchen table. "After you left and the music kept disappearing, the
books began to go. I guess your redheaded friend's pals must have
had minions in the publishing business too. Or maybe it was just
that folk songs and folk stories and myth have always been the
basis for books, and with the songs gone, the stories sort of
followed."

"Uncle Vance Randolph used to say people
never knew whether folk songs were stories made into songs, or the
songs were written first and the stories told to expand on them,"
Faron said. "I wonder what he'd make of that."

"Hmph," Molly said, taking a hard chomp from
a stick of celery she was nibbling while she worked at the computer
across the kitchen table from Barry. "If he wasn't already dead,
those devil things would have killed him by now anyway, so I guess
he wouldn't have said much. But anyway, you see why we need you to
stay here."

"Sure, Mom," Ellie said. "Except that I
think Lazarus wants us to do this. You haven't been with us through
everything, and even though we've tried to tell you, it's a little
hard to make anybody else understand; when I have dreams or funny
feelings of any kind, I pay attention nowadays. When Faron
suggested Callie and Aldin might be able to rebuild Lazarus, I just
knew it was the right thing to do. If we wait too long, I'm afraid
somebody or something might try to steal or destroy these little
pieces I was able to save."

"Why don't you just invite your friends to
come down here too, then?" Barry said. "You can give them the
pieces when they get here."

"I should have thought of that," Faron said.
"They'll love it. They read science fiction and fantasy all the
time—or at least they used to. I'll call them up now."

"Tell them Emma Bull and Will Shetterly are
coming to be our guests of honor from Minnesota," Mollie said.
"Also"—she adjusted her reading glasses and peered into the list on
her screen—"C. J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher, and Misty Lackey from
Oklahoma, of course. And Suzette Haden Elgin is going to interrupt
her linguistics workshops to come down from Arkansas. Robin and
Diane Bailey are picking up Mark Simmons in Emporia on their way
down from Kansas City. And there's several people coming up from
Texas, but nobody whose name would mean anything to them. Anyway,
it ought to be a good crowd. We invited Charles de Lint and Caitlin
Midhir to be joint guests of honor originally, but they said it's
impossible to get across the border now. The customs people have
somehow or other compiled a list of anyone who's ever been a
musician, and when IDs are checked, anybody on the list gets turned
back unless they have the proper papers, which they can only get
down here. Spider and Jeannie Robinson couldn't come last year for
the same reason. But Nina Kiriki Hoffman still remembers where her
banjo is and is coming down all the way from Eugene, Oregon. And
Warren Norwood is bringing his dulcimer and Gigi has a new harp.
Jane Yolen would have shown up too, except that she's come down
with something. We've let these folks know over the years what's
been going on, and they all want to be here, now that you're back,
and hear what you have to say."

"Okay, I guess it would probably be better
if Callie and Aldin could meet them too," Faron said. "But we need
to keep it all very quiet, make sure any room more than one of us
is in at a time has plenty of exits in case of fire or a raid."

"Or lightning or some other disaster." Ellie
shuddered. "I wouldn't want to see a repeat of what happened at
Anna Mae's memorial festival."

* * *

Faron called Mountain Home information for
the number and then got an ambiguous and anonymous message on an
answering machine, but the voice sounded like Aldin's. "For anyone
who's calling because you heard we were dead, we're not, in spite
of everything. Please leave your message at the tone."

Faron felt a little edgy as he left the
message and tried to make it as cryptic as possible for the benefit
of spies while letting them know where and when to come. He didn't
like giving out so much information to an impersonal device, but on
the other hand, an event with one hundred and fifty attendees in a
public hotel was hardly a state secret. At least they had only
Saturday to get through. Saturday nights used to be the busiest
time at TuCon and other science fiction conventions. There were
masquerades and dances, maybe a skit spoofing some popular TV show
or movie, and filk-singing all night long, concerts sometimes by
the writers and fans who were the best musicians. But this whole
event would be squeezed into Saturday.

* * *

"I can't understand why anyone would travel
as far as some of these people were traveling to go to Tulsa,
Oklahoma, for heaven's sakes, to attend such a small affair,"
Barbara Harrington-Smith said, leaning back on her bedroll and
watching the stars twinkle overhead as she, a city-bred
environmentalist, watched the firelight flicker across Ute's
face.

"Well, ma'am, you're a busy person, that's
real plain, and so were these people, but maybe reading and writing
and singing songs has just never been that big a part of your life.
To these folks, it had been their livelihood, and when many of them
had to quit it to make a living doing the kind of things you do
maybe, it was like they had to cut down on their breathing. They
were more than anxious to find an excuse to sit around together in
a restaurant, talking about old times, books and stories they still
remembered, or old shows, or old jokes, or where somebody had found
a cache of books or magazines and how the others could get ahold of
some of them. In the old days book dealers and craftspeople would
bring things to the convention and fill a room with their wares
like a medieval market place. Now maybe each attendee might bring
one treasured possession to share, or a few less treasured ones to
sell off or barter for something else. Videotapes of the old
television shows or movies were highly prized, as was equipment to
play them on, since the newfangled stuff they have now doesn't play
the old tapes and only what's, currently popular is reproduced, as
you ladies probably know."

"And that's as it should be," Barbara said.
"After all, those tapes are synthetic products that require
dangerous and toxic chemical processes to produce—only that which
time has shown to be valuable to society should be preserved by
such expensive means."

"You surely don’t mean the game shows and
talk shows they still have along with all the documentaries and
specials?" Shayla asked, looking up from the tack she was polishing
the way Ute had shown them earlier that day.

"Game shows are intellectually challenging
to an otherwise comatose public and have been known to ask
politically relevant riddles. Talk shows are excellent forums for
social and environmental issues," Barbara said, as if reciting a
lesson.

"Well, ma'am, some of the people at this
function I'm talkin' about could argue that Star Trek in all three
generations did the same thing, only in an entertaining kind of way
that let you know not only that there were important things to
think about, but let you think, now if this or that catastrophe
happened, how would it affect regular people, people like me? So I
want you to imagine—they've held this convention special this year,
later than usual, when other people are havin' Thanksgivin' dinner,
here's this gathering at a hotel, hardly enough people to fill one
little meeting room. A storm's come up outdoors, and the lights
have flickered a couple of times. The wind is rattlin' the glass
doors, and there's a rumor that it might snow. . . .