by Allen Steele
Because I can’t count on you to do what you haven’t done already. And if you’re thinking about it now, please, let me get revenge first.
Amen.
5
Elvis Has Risen From The Crave
(Saturday: 11:05 A.M.)
As the pressurized passenger tunnels locked against the Lone Star Clipper’s airlock hatches, Sheriff Bigthorn watched North Dock’s control center overlooking the enormous SSTO bay. He held onto the coffee squeezebulb he had cadged from the dock-worker lounge and watched as spacesuited hangar techs swarmed over the shuttle’s sleek white hull, attaching power and fuel lines, checking the fuselage for signs of atmospheric erosion or micro-meteorite pits, opening service ports to tinker with the space-liner’s complex innards.
Four TexSpace and Skycorp dock supervisors were at their stations in the control center, hunched over their consoles and screens, monitoring the post-arrival processing of the shuttle. It was a routine procedure, carried out a couple of times a week, and someone had slipped an old twentieth century rock tape into the jury-rigged cassette deck on top of the console, which was plastered with a sticker reading “Welcome to Clarke County—Now Go Home.” The old Kingsmen number “Louie, Louie,” rasped from the deck, providing a funky aural backdrop for the technochatter muttered into headset mikes by the dock supes.
“Ah, yeah, we roger that, Rhonda, pressure oh-point-oh-five on the starboard main tank. Can you get a snake in there to drain that stuff, please, Phil?”
“Gornick’s boys are on the port LOX tank now. They’ll get it as soon as they’re finished there.… How’s that, Pauline? Oh, right, yeah, I gotta positive reading on that, it’s pegging the meter.…”
“Jesus, what’s with that Number Two hatch? I’ve gotta positive feed on your external electrical.… Oh, waitamminit, the goddamn safety hasn’t been set, lemme … okay, there we go, try it … okay, so it was my fault, gimme a fucking break.…”
“Foreward OMS safed, yup … aft OMS safed, gotcha …”
“Tell your IBM to blow it out its serial port, bud, my board says the central-six trunk bus is copacetic and I say it’s copacetic.… Look, don’t gimme no shit, it’s wrong.…”
“Okay, we’ve got a good seal on the starboard hatch, go ahead and pop it open.…”
The dock crew, Bigthorn decided, were a strange bunch of guys. The sort of people found doing the hard-core, nuts-and-bolts work of the frontier: pragmatic, persnickety, downright rude stiffs who seldom used deodorant and had lousy table manners, but who nonetheless got the job done.
He scalded his mouth with another sip from his squeezebulb—they couldn’t make decent coffee, either—and tried to concentrate his attention on the disembarking passengers, seen thirty feet away through the Plexiglas walls of the ramps as they were herded and helped off the shuttle by the flight attendants. Coyote had told him something evil was aboard this ship. Coyote had scorched his brain with a horrible vision. Coyote was a trickster, but at the heart of his lies was always a little truth, and Bigthorn had learned to trust his encounters with the ancient demigod.
The sheriff tried to reach out with his instincts to figure out which of these passengers posed a potential danger to the colony. They were the same instincts—the sixth sense every good cop acquires—which allowed him to zero in on shoplifters in O’Neill Square’s tourist shops or on an unlicensed dope dealer on the Strip. Yet last night’s peyote session had left him fatigued, his head feeling as if it had been stuffed with cotton.
I need sleep, Bigthorn thought. He sucked on his squeezebulb, watching the tourist parade. I should put Wade in charge of the office. Clock out, go home, get a shower and a few hours of sleep. Hell, I’m wearing yesterday’s clothes, haven’t brushed my teeth or shaved or …
He noticed a pair of cargo loaders clamping a ramp against a large hatch on the port underside of the shuttle. If that hatch led only to a cargo hold, they would not be bothering to attach a pressurized sleeve to it before jacking it open. He tapped one of the supervisors on the shoulder. “Hey, Skip, where’s that hatch lead to?” he asked, pointing towards the bay.
Skip, the most obnoxious of the control supes, barely acknowledged his question. “Third Class,” he muttered. “The zombie tanks.” He immediately returned his attention to his job. “Hey, lookit, Maurice, we don’t got all day here, so just get a snake on that tank and drain it before I get pissed, okay …?”
Bigthorn watched as the first stainless-steel sarcophagus emerged on a conveyor belt from the hold. Of course. Half of the passengers were in suspended animation. Perhaps the person he was seeking was in a zombie tank. Bigthorn was looking around, the cupola for a vacant data terminal, when the phone on his belt chirped. He unclipped it and held it to his ear. “Station Twelve,” he murmured.
Hey, John. Wade Hoffman, his deputy sheriff, was nauseatingly cheerful this morning. Where are you at, big guy?
“Down at North Dock. What’s the story?”
I got a call from Robyn Abbey at the livestock area. She says a couple of the goats managed to get loose. They pawed off their restraint collars and now they’re eating their way through the soybean fields in the Southeast quad. She wants you to …
“I know,” he said disgustedly. “Damn, Wade, what do I look like, an animal-control officer? Can’t Robyn get some of the Ark people to get her goats? She’s getting mine with petty bullshit like this.”
Hey, you’re funny today.…
“Have you heard me laughing?”
She says she tried, but the goats don’t like the idea much. One of them butted Dale Cussler in the stomach and he had to be taken to the clinic. She wants you because you’re so good with animals.
“Right. Okay, I’ll come down and shoot the critter.” Bigthorn sighed and kneaded his eyelids with his fingertips. “No, don’t tell her I said that, she’ll just get pissed off. Tell her I’ll be right over. Listen, I want you to get in touch with the TexSpace office and get them to send us the passenger list for TexSpace Three twelve, the flight that just came in. I want it in our system by the time I get back from the Southeast quad. Got it?”
That’s affirmative. I’ll … oh shit, I almost forgot!
“What?”
I just remembered. We just received a priority message from FBI headquarters in Washington regarding one of the passengers on that flight, but it’s not a bench warrant. They want you to contact them ASAP. Wade paused, then added guiltily, I was about to call you when Robyn called and started honking about her goats.
Well, now. This was an interesting coincidence. “Did the feds say who the passenger was or what this is about?” he asked.
Nope. You’re just supposed to call a number and talk to someone named Sherman Brooks in the Organized Crime Division. Apparently it involves some sort of ongoing investigation.
“Okay, I’m coming straight back to the office, then.”
What about the goats?
“Is D’Angelo on duty? Send him over to deal with the goats. Tell him I don’t care if he’s from Brooklyn and has never seen one before.”
There was a short pause. Danny says that not only is he from Brooklyn and has never seen a goat before, but he wouldn’t know what to do if he met one.
“Tell that rookie son of a … never mind, just put him on.”
In a few seconds Daniel D’Angelo, another Sheriff’s Department officer, came on. Danny here, chief.
“Listen, Danny, there’s an old Navajo trick for dealing with goats. Just stand in front of it, point your finger between its eyes, and say in a stern voice, ‘Goat, lie down.’ I guarantee it’ll work. Now get going, that’s an order.”
There was another pause, then Hoffman’s voice came back on the line. He got it, Chief. He’s going right now to see if it’ll work for him.
“Great. I’ll remember to try it sometime myself if it does. I’m on my way back to the office. And get me that passenger list from TexSpace.”
You got it. Anything else?
&nbs
p; “Yeah, make me some coffee.” Then he added, in his best Perry White imitation, “And stop calling me Chief. Station Twelve out.”
He clicked off, hung the phone back on his belt, and stuffed the remainder of his squeezebulb down a recycle chute before grabbing a handrail and pulling himself hand-over-hand out of the control center. “Later, boys,” he threw over his shoulder as he exited. “Have fun.” None of the controllers responded.
The TexSpace Third-Class resuscitation area was a “lounge” only insofar as it was decorated and furnished in the NeoVictorian manner, with plush leather chairs, gold-filigree wallpaper, and ornamental spittoons arranged between the brass-frame beds on which the passengers lay until they awakened. In fact, the lounge was more like an outpatient wing, located on the medical deck which took up most of Torus N-9. Once the Third-Class passengers were removed from the zombie tanks and administered the counteractive drugs that brought them out of biostasis, they were wheeled into the lounge and laid out on the beds, where they could gradually regain consciousness in a less technophiliac environment.
Biostasis for space travel had been achieved not by cryogenics—dozens of people from the twentieth century were still paying for that mistake—but through psychoactive drugs, clinical derivatives of dioden hystrix, the fungus that Haitian houngan had used for centuries to fake the deaths of men and women, then later revive them and enslave them as zombis, the so-called living dead of modern myth. The derived “zombie dope” had the desired effect of slowing down the physical metabolism and mental processes to a state resembling natural hibernation, making short-term human biostasis possible. First used by NASA and Japan’s NASDA for deep-space missions to Mars and the outer planets, the “zombie tanks” were perfected and eventually approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for commercial use by TexSpace and other space lines. As much as fourth-generation space shuttles, zombie-tech had opened the way for low-cost space tourism.
The undesirable side effect of biostasis (besides the rare incidence of a passenger lapsing into a permanent coma) was the godawful hangover one experienced upon awakening. It was a cerebral numbness which left a person in a highly suggestible, near-hypnotic state for as long as an hour after gaining consciousness. This was the effect for which the houngan had prized their crude creation, and pharmacologists had never quite ironed the side effect out of the biostasis spinoff. For this reason, Third-Class passengers were kept in an undisturbed, comfortable area until they were ready not to accept a casual insult like “drop dead” as a literal command.
Most of the time, the strategy worked.
Zombie tanks provided, as an incidental development, a low-profile means of getting into space for those who didn’t wish to be noticed. This was how Henry Ostrow, known in some circles as the Golem, found himself awakening in the Third-Class lounge, feeling as if he had spent the night with Johnnie Walker, José Cuervo, and Jack Daniels.
Henry Ostrow lay for a long while on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, performing little mental exercises—like running through multiplication tables and silently reciting Poe’s The Raven—which he had long ago learned to keep himself alert during moments of woolgathering while, say, waiting for a target to emerge from a long lunch at a restaurant. At the age of fifty-one, Ostrow retained the cold discipline of a professional badass, although under his present alias as Cecil Jacobson he was a St. Louis real estate agent on vacation.
Finally, Ostrow sat up slowly and swung his legs over the side of the bed. At the peak of physical condition, he had recovered from the zombie dope a little more quickly than the other Third-Class passengers, most of whom were still unconscious in their beds around him, their eyelids fluttering in time with the canned music—“Promises, Promises,” now seguing into “Classical Gas”—wafting from hidden speakers in the rococo ceiling. Henry Ostrow was a man who could lift a teacup with an outstretched pinky, and the next second drop the teacup and grab for a semiauto submachine gun, but at this moment he was not quite prepared to meet Elvis Presley.
Elvis was dressed in a skintight black leather outfit with silver studs running down the legs and more zippers than considered practical running along the wrists and pockets of his jacket, which was open to his naval, exposing several gold chains and a crucifix. Elvis groaned as he sat up clumsily in his own bed next to Ostrow’s, ran a hand encrusted with huge gold rings through his pompadour, and gazed at the Golem with unfocused dark eyes that suggested he had been eating uppers and downers all night.
“Whudda fug?” mumbled the King of Rock and Roll.
Ostrow stared back at him, then yawned. Elvis Presley was in the next bed. Okay. He could accept that. “The Third-Class lounge, I think.”
“Huh?” replied Elvis. “We’re here?”
“I think so.”
“Well fuggit,” said Elvis, and collapsed back into bed.
Ostrow studied his fellow passenger closely. He noticed that although he closely resembled Elvis Presley—that is, Elvis circa 1969, about the time he had stopped making movies and made his Las Vegas comeback—he didn’t quite sound like Elvis Presley. Ostrow was an expert at identifying people in only a few moments, and the man on the bed didn’t precisely match the film images he had seen of the American folk hero.
This was besides the fact, of course, that Elvis Presley had been dead since 1977.
Already a couple of physicians in white uniforms, noticing that two of their passengers were awake, had hurried over to unstick the biosensors from their foreheads and chests and to quickly check their pupils with penlights. They put pills and little paper cups of orange juice in their hands, dropped orientation brochures on their beds, then bustled away to attend to other groaning, cross-eyed passengers elsewhere in the overdecorated ward. Ostrow downed his pill with a slug of O.J. and rubbed the back of his neck. “So how does it feel to be alive again after seventy years?” he asked politely.
“Lousy.” Elvis looked at his pill, grimaced and shoved it underneath a sheet, then slurped his orange juice and massaged his temples. “God, do I need a drink. Where’s the bar?”
He sat up again, swung his legs over the bed frame, and attempted to stand up. His body wasn’t ready yet to listen to his brain. His knees collapsed and he fell backwards onto the bed. “Whoa, there, Ollie,” he muttered to himself. “Elvis needs gravity.”
“You’re not really Elvis, are you?” Ostrow asked.
He did not know it, but he had asked a question to which Elvis could not respond by lying or evasion. At this stage of recovery from biostasis, a person was almost totally incapable of lying. The synapses of the brain were inhibited to the degree that the mind could not work creatively enough to fabricate, or even recall, an untruthful statement. So, although Elvis was conscious, he could not think clearly enough to speak an untruth.
Looking as if he were about to gag, Elvis could only respond honestly to Henry Ostrow. “Naw, My name’s Oliver Parker.”
“Hmm.” Ostrow contemplated that information, then motioned to Elvis’s face. “Cosmetic surgery?”
Elvis nodded his head, almost painfully. If he had taken the counter-effect pill he had been given he wouldn’t have been in such trouble. “How come?” Ostrow asked.
“I’m the leader of the First Church of Twentieth Century Saints, Elvis Has Risen, so I’m given the title of Elvis. So it’s Elvis Parker, or the Living Elvis.” Elvis Parker rubbed his jaw-line where his mutton-chop sideburns ended. “Cost me a bundle, but it was worth it.… Shit, am I really saying this?”
Ostrow nodded. The Golem was very familiar with drugs and he realized that the zombie dope’s aftereffects were acting like scopolamine in Parker’s nervous system. All he had to do was to keep asking questions. He dimly remembered an article in People. “You’re the guy who claims he’s the living reincarnation of Elvis Presley, aren’t you?”
“Yup. That’s me.” This time, Parker couldn’t keep himself from grinning. “The Living Elvis, live and in person.”
“Right.
Elvis was the chosen voice of God in the last century, and he died for the sins of those who believe in his divine persona. That’s the gist of it, isn’t it?”
“You got it, hoss,” Parker replied, still grinning.
“Hmm.” Ostrow slowly shook his head. “Hard to believe that somebody would buy into swill like that. So what are you doing here, Living Elvis?”
“Ah, just a little revival.” Parker hitched his thumb toward the rest of the passengers in the Third-Class lounge. “I’ve brought about seventy of my followers up here for a week in LaGrange. Monday night there’s going to be a performance at Bird Stadium. It’ll be telecast live on Earth on about two dozen channels. You ought to show up.”
“I’ll make a point of missing it.” Ostrow slowly extended his legs, planted his feet on the floor, and stood up. “It’s been nice talking to you, Elvis, but I have to run. Give my best to all your fans, will you?”
“Okey-doke.” Elvis winced again, then asked casually, “So what are you up here for?”
It almost worked. The same side effect of the zombie drug nearly made Ostrow babble out the truth. His muscles went taut; he clenched his jaw as tight as he could and squeezed his eyes shut. The Golem is silent, he told himself. The Golem never speaks.
“Business,” he hissed.
He put one foot in front of the other and carefully, deliberately, walked away from the bed. Parker was saying something else, but Ostrow deigned not to speak. After a few more steps, he was out of earshot, pushing through the door of the Third-Class lounge.
Henry Ostrow paused in the corridor outside the lounge to collect his breath. He had left his orientation brochure on the bed, but there was a wall map nearby. He studied it for a minute, figuring out where to get the nearest tram that would take him to the main sphere. His baggage had already been taken to his room at the LaGrange Hotel. Satisfied, he headed for the Green Line North station.
As he turned, he bumped into someone walking the opposite way. It was unlike Ostrow to collide with someone in an otherwise empty corridor, but he owed his clumsiness to the zombie dope. “’Cuse me,” he mumbled to the person with whom he had collided, and walked the other way.