Song of Susannah

(say true)

theyknow Andrew Goodman is dead

(say hallelujah)

theyknow Michael Schwerner—oldest of them and still just a baby at twenty-four—is dead.

(Give up your loudest amen!)

They know that any of them is also eligible to wind up in the mud of Longdale or Philadelphia.At any time. The night after this particular hoot behind the Blue Moon, most of them, Odetta included, will be taken to jail and her time of humiliation will begin. But tonight she’s with her friends, with her lover, and they are one, and Discordia has been banished. Tonight they sing swaying with their arms around each other.

The girls singmaid, the boys singman.

Mia is overwhelmed by their love for one another; she is exalted by the simplicity of what they believe.

At first, too stu

As the busker began the fourth verse, Susa

For breakfast we had bulldog gravy

For supper we had beans and bread

The miners don’t have any di

And a tick of straw they call a bed…

The busker quit after that verse, looking at Susa

“No,” Susa

“Schwerner and Goodman,” he said. “I can’t remember the name of the—”

“James Cheney,” she said quietly. “He had the most beautifulhair. ”

“You talk as though you knew him,” he said, “but you can’t be much over…thirty?”

Susa

“My mother spent the summer of ’64 in Neshoba County,” Susa

“Cool on Mom!” the young man exclaimed, and smiled. Then the smile faded. He fished the fifty out of the guitar case and held it up to her. “Take it back. It was a pleasure just to sing with you, ma’am.”

“I really couldn’t,” Susa

“Please,” the young man persisted. He was smiling again but the smile was troubled and he might have been any of those young men from the Land of Ago, singing in the moonlight between the slumped ass-ends of the Blue Moon’s shacky little units and the double-hammered heatless moonlight gleam of the railroad tracks; he could have been any in his beauty and the careless flower of his youth and how in that moment Mia loved him. Even her chap seemed secondary in that glow. She knew it was in many ways a false glow, imparted by the memories of her hostess, and yet she suspected that in other ways it might be real. She knew one thing for sure: only a creature such as herself, who’d had immortality and given it up, could appreciate the raw courage it took to stand against the forces of Discordia. To risk that fragile beauty by putting beliefs before personal safety.

Make him happy, take it back,she told Susa

Before Susa

Susa

What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?

Let me loose!

Susa

Susa

This looked bad.

As if to confirm her assessment, the Blaine-like Voice of the Dogan began to speak again. “WARNING!” it cried. “SYSTEM OVERLOAD! WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 40 SECONDS!”

Susa

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 30 SECONDS!”

What about the EMOTIONAL TEMP dial?

“Leave it alone,” she muttered to herself.

Okay, CHAP? What about that one?

After a moment’s thought, Susa

Roland’s child,she thought with a strange and painful mixture of emotions.And mine. As for Mia? Girl, you nothing but a ka-mai. I’m sorry for you.

Ka-mai, yes. Not just a fool, but ka’s fool—a fool of destiny.

“WITHOUT POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA, TOTAL SYSTEM SHUTDOWN WILL OCCUR IN 25 SECONDS!”

So waking the baby hadn’t done any good, at least not in terms of preventing a complete system crash. Time for Plan B.

She reached out for the absurd LABOR FORCE control-knob, the one that looked so much like the oven-dial on her mother’s stove. Turning the dial back to 2 had been difficult, and had hurt like a bastard. Turning it the other way was easier, and there was no pain at all. What she felt was aneasing somewhere deep in her head, as if some network of muscles which had been flexed for hours was now letting go with a little cry of relief.

The blaring pulse of the Klaxon ceased.

Susa

“POWER REDUCTION IN SECTION ALPHA HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED,” said the voice, and then it dropped into a John Wayne drawl that Susa

She had to tighten her lips against another scream—not pain this time but outright terror. It was all very well to remind herself Blaine the Mono was dead and this voice was coming from some nasty practical joker in her own subconscious, but that didn’t stop the fear.

“LABOR…HAS COMMENCED,” said the amplified voice, dropping the John Wayne imitation. “LABOR…HAS COMMENCED.” Then, in a horrible (and nasal) Bob Dylan drawl that set her teeth on edge, the voice sang: “HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU…BABE!…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU! HAPPY BIRTHDAY…DEAR MORDRED…HAPPY BIRTHDAY…TO YOU!”

Susa