Strum Again? Book Three of the Songkiller Saga (21 page)

CHAPTER 14

Ute stretched out by the fire and leaned on
his elbow, his fingers twiddling with a small bundle of smoking
sage, his eyes fixed on the camp-fire flames as if he were
remembering something that happened to him. Except, Mary Armstrong
thought, his memories seemed to be those of other people, as if he
had been a psychic fly on the wall, buzzing from thought to
thought.

Saturday evening rolled around at ConTingent
with no fanfare, drum rolls, or very many musical instruments of
the regular kind in evidence. With so many songs forgotten during
the last seven years, people had tended to find themselves with
instruments and no repertoires, which was discouraging. There'd be
the old guitar or fiddle sulking at you from some corner, looking
neglected, and even if you remembered how to play, you didn't know
what to play. The instruments soon got packed away.

People who made up their own songs or
for some other reason were still able to play discovered that when
they tried to fly or take buses or trains with musical instruments,
their instruments were lost, destroyed, or badly damaged in
transit. Of course, the musicians who lost their instruments this
way were angry, but they only
knew
that they had encountered an unusually malicious baggage
handler. Most of them didn't even suspect that the offending
handlers were, actually, carefully placed minions of Torchy's
Company who had been replacing the regular kind of handlers
gradually over the years with other minions. The Accounting Devil
had seen to it too that the inevitable damage to the instruments
made them uninsurable, so that the musician lost out all the way
around.

In short, any musicians still brave enough,
inventive enough, and unimportant enough (otherwise, they would
have been destroyed along with their instruments) to still be
traveling by public transportation of any kind had learned a long
time ago that traveling with an instrument was no longer worth the
trouble. Still, those in the science fiction-fantasy community who
had once been musical—or still were in a discreet fashion that no
longer extended to bringing their instruments out in public—were
curious to see what Faron and Ellie would have to say—or sing.
Faron brought a guitar because it was the best accompaniment for
some songs, but he also brought his favorite instrument, his old
mandolin, even though the neck had badly warped during the time
he'd been gone.

In the northern half of the hotel's
ballroom, which was divided by a plastic folding wall, people
sprawled against the walls or sat on one uncomfortable straight
chair with their feet propped up on another. Some of them sat
hunched over chairs with ring-binder notebooks spread open on the
seats. These notebooks, once crammed with songs, were for the most
part sadly blank, but pens were poised expectantly. Other chairs
contained tape recorders. Suzette Haden Elgin sat crocheting a
castle, and Caroline Cherryh had her brand-new portable compact
disk laser recorder set to pick up every word Faron said.

Faron had changed. Everybody said so.
When he left, he had been a skinny, gawky kid who didn't open his
mouth often, but when he did, it was to say something unusually
witty or unusually enlightening. Otherwise, you wouldn't have
looked at him twice. Now it was as though all of the witty,
enlightening stuff that he had kept stored inside him was seeping
out through his pores, making him look more filled out, kind
of—taller, stronger, more authoritative,
shinier
somehow. He didn't even have to clear
his throat and bob his Adam's apple up and down for people to pay
attention. Suzette thought he must have been practicing the
linguist tricks for gaining charisma she knew about from her work
as a doctor of linguistics, but even she couldn't detect exactly
what he was doing, and they had always been close friends. Ellie
was different too—still young looking and plumply pretty, but in a
way that somehow made it look as if soon all the actresses were
going to start wanting the Ellie Randolph look—naive and yet with a
sophistication that spanned time, vulnerable in her babyish
roundness but strong and sturdy too, girlish and yet somehow
womanly. Of course, what nobody knew was that while Ellie and Faron
had changed inside—as anybody worth their salt will over seven
years of growing and learning and living through new experiences—it
wasn't the inner growth that was making them so attractive at all.
Sad to say, most people, even very smart people like science
fiction writers, just aren't perceptive enough to find inner growth
necessarily all that rivetingly gorgeous.

No, what was making everybody hang on to
their words was the fairy dust. It not only protected those who
used it from the devils, but it also gave those who wore it a
little of the old-time glamorie that the fairies had once used to
confound mortals. Of course, since Torchy hadn't mentioned that
particular property when she was making the deal, neither Faron nor
Ellie were aware of it. They just thought everybody sure seemed
glad to see them.

Faron and Ellie sat in chairs near the front
of the room, and the talk ebbed and flowed around them—it did, that
is, until Faron simply picked up his mandolin and began to sing the
ballad about the Gypsy rover. Now, even back when he had been one
of the Midwest's star filkers, he had never had a particularly
beautiful voice, and Ellie's harmonies had always been tentative,
though they were always right on pitch. But now! The nasal quality
in his voice sounded like the bagpipes, and Ellie's sweet tones had
the ring of the sheep bells coming through the dells.

Listening to the song, however, Mark
Simmons wasn't thinking about Gypsies in the English countryside so
much as he was about the first time he had heard any version of
that song—long ago, on a sweet spring day with winter blowing away
on a breeze scented with early crab-apple blossoms in his mom's
backyard, and he thought about Cindy Smithers and her lavender
cashmere sweater set and how she always looked a little lonely
going with the captain of the football team and right then and
there he had decided to take up the guitar. He didn't learn
D
,
F
, and
G
fast enough to win Cindy away from organized sports, but he
had learned the whistling Gypsy song, and that night he relearned
it, along with about a hundred others.

Ellie and Barry watched closely to make sure
everybody sang along on the choruses. Actually, as soon as Faron
started singing some of the songs, the verses came back too.
Caroline Cherryh's new techno-toy not only recorded the voices on
tape, but printed out the words and musical notation as soon as it
was sung, and she promised everybody copies.

One song flowed into another and night into
day, and by morning everyone was hoarse, exhausted, and very high.
The harmonies had been ragged at first, but as the night wore on,
even the most annoying voices found their own range and strengths
and the people drank in the songs as if they were hot strong coffee
zinging with caffeine.

By morning each person felt as if the other
people in the room were dearer than family, closer than any
friends—even though filk-singers had always been a fairly
competitive lot in the past, as full of ego trips and hurt feelings
and delusions of grandeur as any performers, amateur or
professional.

At noon Barry brought in a cart full of
pizzas, and people lit into them eagerly. After scarfing down a
couple of pieces, Faron gave Ellie a high sign, and she brought out
the old beaded purse she'd stuck the banjo's popped-off parts
into.

They told the rest of the people about the
banjo in as few words as possible, because by now they were so
hoarse they had to talk in whispers. Dally Morales listened
carefully and said, "Might be I could do somethin' with it. I'm
pretty good with my hands, and I've seen that old banjo. I made a
ukulele out of an armadilla shell once. Don't know as there's
enough left of that skin for another banjo head, but I reckon I
could come up with somethin'."

"We had some friends who were supposed to be
here who might be able to fix it," Faron said, glancing at his
watch. "Looks like they didn't make it."

"I hate to let it go very far away," Ellie
told Dally, her fingers clutching at her purse.

"Well, that's up to you, ma'am," the cowboy
shrugged. "To change the subject, you playin' that song about the
'Trooper Cut Down in His Prime' brings to mind again an old cowboy
song."

And he played "The Streets of Laredo," after
which someone else played a spoof. Pretty soon everybody was either
inventing spoofs of the songs they'd just learned, or they were off
in corners of the hotel scribbling away at new songs.

Toward evening a couple of wet, tired
people—the woman small and plump with long blond braids, looking as
if she'd just stepped out of a German folk painting long enough to
change into dripping jeans and T-shirt, the man tall with an
aristocratic goatee and long dark hair that would have looked good
under a cavalier's plumed hat—slumped wearily into the ballroom.
Faron and Ellie hurried over to them. "Callie, Aldin, boy am I glad
to see you," Faron said.

"We were beginning to think you'd decided
not to come after all," Ellie said.

"No," Callie said, wringing out her sopping
braids with both hands. "But you wouldn't believe all the car
trouble we had. We started out at seven a.m. yesterday morning. At
the border we lost a fan belt. Fortunately, we always carry an
extra. Then we had a flat, and when we went to change it, our spare
was flat too."

"Then there was that asshole who ran us off
the road," Aldin reminded her. "That was after I hitched to the
nearest town with the bad tire for the first time."

"The first time?" Ellie asked.

"All five tires went flat on the way."

"And when we finally got them all changed
and started rolling, the headlights went out in the middle of the
worst thunderstorm you ever saw," Callie added. "But we're here. So
show us what you want done and let's talk."

Ellie pulled the banjo remains from her
beaded bag. Callie and Aldin examined them, Callie uncurling the
strings to marvel at their fine and hairlike texture.

When she replaced them in the bag, they
slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor, rolling every which
way.

Ellie swooped down to scoop them up. "I hate
to let these out of my sight. Somehow I feel like Lazarus could
be—I don't know—resurrected, I guess, if you just put these pieces
back together."

Faron stooped down to help her, his sneaker
brushing one string to the side and against the wall, where it hid
in a crack. "With all the bad luck you folks had coming down here,"
he said to Callie and Aldin, "it seems to me as if they may be onto
you."

"They who?" Callie asked, and then Faron and
Ellie had to go through the whole story again of how the devils
came to wipe out the songs and how their little group had traveled
across the Atlantic to retrieve those same songs. The songs
themselves were proof enough for Callie and Aldin, who sang along
as eagerly as a desert rat drinks water. Meanwhile, other
convention-goers packed up their notebooks and returned to their
hotel rooms to pick up their suitcases, knapsacks, and garment bags
and take them to their cars before checking out of the hotel.

Ellie handed Callie a handful of pieces and
the beaded bag, too upset at relinquishing Lazarus's remains to
look at them very closely. Callie, for her part, was so tired she
was trembling with fatigue and the excess adrenaline that had kept
her moving for the last thirty-six hours or so. She didn't think to
count the strings either. And just then Faron came up with the idea
that maybe he and Ellie should share one devil's tear and should
give one, and some of the fairy dust, to Callie and Aldin to
protect them and the banjo parts. They got off on that subject, and
then Aldin asked if he could get some help starting the car, which
had died just as they got to the parking lot, and the upshot was,
nobody ever did check the beaded bag to make sure all the strings
were there.

Dally Morales packed his car, checked out of
his room, and returned to the ballroom to say good-bye and renew
his offer to help in any way he could. By that time, Faron, Ellie,
Callie, and Aldin had already adjourned to the parking lot.

The ballroom looked sadly abandoned and
empty in a way that made Dally hang his head a little in sadness.
As he hung his head, he caught a glimpse of something shining in
the corner and absently bent to pick it up and stuff it in his
pocket. He was like that, always finding bits and pieces of stuff
he'd try to make something out of later on. It didn't occur to him
at the time to give the string a closer look. Like everybody else,
he thought Ellie had given all the banjo fragments to the luthier
couple.

But later on, as he drove home, he felt the
string poking through the pocket on his plaid shirt, which he'd
always kept buttoned ever since he gave up smoking and started
chewing instead. He pulled it out and only then did he notice that
what he'd taken for just any old discarded guitar string was in
fact a golden-colored banjo string made of something that was
springy, though not made of gut or wire, but looked almost like an
especially strong strand of human hair.

CHAPTER 15

Willie bought his ticket for Wichita Falls
and boarded the bus, knapsack on his back and guitar case in hand.
He felt like he was just a little too goddamn old to be takin' up
hippy ways at his age and wished Gussie had decided to spend some
of her money on another vehicle. He started to hump his guitar onto
his shoulder and up into the overhead rack when the driver boarded
and saw him.