by Allen Steele
“How do you like it, Elvis?” This from one of the entourage: Carol Boyd, thirty-five, plump and fawning, one of the Church’s true believers. She was at his right elbow behind Frank Coonts, the shorter of his bodyguards.
“I like it fine, baby,” Elvis Parker drawled. “This is a happening place. We can swing here.” He glanced back over his shoulder, turned on his smile, watched her blush. Words from the King, just to her. Considering that she had recently kicked $7,800 in tithes into the Church’s coffers, he could afford to give her lots of smiles.
“What do you want to do, Elvis?” whined Fred Callenbach, waddling on splayed feet behind him. Fred was even more enormous and more puppyish than Carol, with sideburns grown long like Parker’s, thick-lensed eyeglasses, wearing a T-shirt that rose over his tremendous gut: “The King Has Returned!” Weird as weird can be.
Actually, Ollie Parker wanted a double Scotch on the rocks so bad his throat crawled, but he couldn’t do that. He was doing the Good Elvis shtick tonight. The Good Elvis didn’t drink or do drugs. He had to be tempted by Satan before he would drink. Parker thought he could do with some serious temptation tonight. He wanted to double back to Chateau L’Amour, put down a few stiff ones, and see if he could hire two or three beauties to service him at once.
That was the style of the Dark Elvis, though, so he couldn’t. He had to show that the Good Elvis could wander past vice dens without walking in. Maybe tomorrow he would change the itinerary so that Dark Elvis would slide back into depravity.…
Ollie stepped back and flung his arm around Fred’s shoulders. “Elvis wants to go play some pool, Brother Fred,” he said, grinning at the sycophant. “Let’s go play some pool … maybe pick up some fried chicken later.”
Fred looked as if he were going to faint with pleasure. The Living Elvis wanted to play pool with him! And eat fried chicken! “Praise Elvis!” he stammered.
“Praise Elvis, buddy,” Parker replied. What was it that P.T. Barnum once said about suckers?
“The Living Elvis walks among us!” shouted Carol. Here it comes again.…
“All praise the Living Elvis!” From the throats of the true believers, in unison. Only Frank and Paul, the bodyguards, stayed silent, remaining in their roles as the Living Elvis’s tough guys.
“The King has returned!” shouted Carol, shooting up her hands.
“No more lonely nights!” responded the believers. “Hallelujah!”
The canticle could have gone on for fifty more lines, but Parker decided to rein it in. Let ’em save it for Monday night. He raised his arms in benediction. “Elvis hears and sees,” he said, repeating the last line of the canticle, “and Elvis blesses you.” He made sure that his hands encompassed not only the entourage but the pedestrians around them.
Even though the scam had been deliberate and cunning in its genesis, Oliver Parker was still surprised at how successful it was thus far. But when he stopped and thought about it, he realized that he had simply rediscovered what successful con artists had known for generations: desperate people will believe in anything, if it satisfies a need.
Out of the total population, 99 percent wouldn’t fall for this pseudo-religious malarkey, and most people with strong religious beliefs would call it utter blasphemy. But he didn’t care about the majority opinion, or need it. It was that one percent who wanted to believe in a reincarnated Elvis Presley as a divine prophet which was making him a rich sumbitch.
That tiny fraction were the ones like Fred and Carol. The lifelong outcasts, the ones who had never been asked to dance, the people who desperately yearned to belong to something that gave them an identity and respected them despite their physical demerits and social ineptitude. Fred couldn’t tie his shoelaces without making a blunder and Carol was probably still a virgin, and the others in the entourage had similar problems, scars, and warts of both the body and spirit. They were fucked up, doomed and lonely as hell. In the Church of Elvis, they were still fucked up and doomed, but at least they were no longer lonely.
Best of all, many of these walking wounded were filthy rich, usually beneficiaries of large trust funds or inheritances. If Elvis needed money, Elvis got money. All he had to do was give them love and attention … and let them believe that they were helping a higher cause.
If I keep playing my cards right, Parker mused, I’ll own more cars than that cracker ever put in his garage.
“Great Elvis.” A voice at his shoulder interrupted his thoughts. Only one of his church members ever called him that.
“Easy there, hoss,” he replied. “Elvis ain’t greater than anyone else. He’s just like you.”
Parker was feeling magnanimous today, but it seemed to startle Gustav Schmidt. The young German computer engineer sometimes worried Parker. The scam had worked almost too well on him. The skinny kid with the intense eyes seriously believed not only that Parker was the living reincarnation of the King, but that Deacon Elvis was a messiah to be ranked alongside Mohammed, Buddha, and Jesus. Even for Parker’s purposes, this was carrying true devotion just a bit too far.
When Schmidt had first hooked up with the Church of Twentieth Century Saints, during one of Parker’s first overseas revivals in Berlin two years ago, the kid had come prepared. He had carried a Holy Bible with passages marked by strips of paper, lines from Matthew, Luke, and John which—in Schmidt’s warped mind—supported Parker’s insinuations that Elvis had come back as Oliver Parker. Germany had laughed him out of the country; Schmidt was the only convert Parker had made on that trip. His unshakable beliefs were eerily reminiscent of Aunt Ridley’s religious fanaticism, and although Parker had done nothing to dispel Schmidt’s convictions, this particular believer made Parker a little nervous.
Schmidt still wasn’t saying anything, although he continued to hover behind Parker. “What’s up, old buddy?” Parker asked.
“I wanted to make certain you were reminded of the schedule, Great—I mean, Elvis,” Gustav said. He then added hastily, “Of course, you are omniscient and all-knowing, so far be it for me to remind one as perfect as yourself …”
“Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock, at Bird Stadium,” Parker said. “Rehearsal for Monday night’s revival and special effects taping.”
Schmidt was useful, despite his zealotry. He was acting as the production supervisor for the TV transmission of the revival, using his electronics expertise for the good of the Church. Yet now he fidgeted, visibly uncomfortable. “Right?” Parker asked impatiently.
“Nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” Schmidt corrected him, as if expecting a lightning bolt to suddenly roast him on the spot.
Damn.
“Thank you for reminding me, Brother Gustav,” Parker murmured. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes, Living Elvis. I’ve received progress reports from our missionaries. Brothers Gene and Julio and Sister Donna have been canvassing the permanent inhabitants, in Big Sky and in the South Torus living areas. They report that they’ve received great interest in the revival from the residents.”
“Well done, Gustav. Good job.” Actually, Parker doubted that he would win any converts among the colonists. From what he had seen of them, the natives were much too pragmatic to fall for the scam. Yet the idea was to fill the stadium seats with as many warm bodies as possible, even if they were only idly curious. A packed arena would look good on TV.
Schmidt still looked uneasy. It was time to give him a stroke. “You’re my fondest disciple, Brother Gustav, a true friend to Elvis.” He dropped his voice low, so that Sister Carol and Brother Fred wouldn’t think they were being snubbed. “I think …”
Someone was walking towards them, a face in the crowd which stopped him cold. The man whom he had met yesterday in the Third-Class lounge, when he had revived from biostasis. When Parker had still been recovering from the zombie dope, this man had pulled more admissions from him than the Living Elvis wanted to admit in public … and especially not in front of his followers. Parker stiffened and hoped that a confrontati
on wasn’t coming. Besides that, there was something about the big man that made Parker nervous.
The stranger, though, walked past without seeming to notice Parker. In an instant, he was gone. Parker relaxed again. There was food for thought: even prophets can be intimidated.
“Great Elvis? Is there something wrong?” Schmidt again.
“Nothing,” Parker said quickly. “Elvis … just had an idea for a new song.” He shook off the willies. “C’mon. Let’s go find some fried chicken and mashed potatoes.”
The entourage cheered as they steered towards a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise just down the concourse, and Parker kept the grin plastered on his face even though he felt his stomach roiling. Fried chicken and mashed potatoes again…
12
Midnight Rendezvous
(Sunday: 12:05 A.M.)
The code he had been provided for the door lock was correct; he entered 761335 on the keypad, the red light blinked twice, and he was in. Simon McCoy should not have been surprised, but he was. He was still getting used to the extent of Globe-watch’s resources.
He let the door close behind him, sealing him in darkness. The lights were out in the suite, but he didn’t ask for them to be turned on. The penlight he took from his pocket cast a small white circle around the front room. It was furnished like any office: a reception desk, chairs and a couch, a blank wall-screen, potted plants.
McCoy played the light over an ordinary door behind the desk (leading to private offices, the data center, and the cryogenics and biomed labs, if he recalled his briefing correctly), then a heavy vault door prominent in the wall by the couch. A window in the wall next to the vault door looked into the room beyond. He could see the thin, shifting glow of digital readouts through the window, but that was all.
He went to the vault door. Another keypad was mounted on the door; above it was the black plate of a retinal scanner. He took a deep breath, then punched in that month’s security number: 148934, also provided by Globewatch.
Vault code confirmed, a disembodied female voice said. Please face the plate for retina scan.
“Override sequence C-for-Charlie ten-ten,” McCoy said. “Identity California State Board of Health. Code …”
He stopped, his mouth open. Oh, hell! He couldn’t remember the number!
McCoy tried to pull the six-digit string from his memory, but his mind had gone blank. He thrust his hands into his coat pockets, then his trouser pockets, hunting for the scrap of paper on which it was written.
Override code requested, please, the voice said, with just the correct twinge of impatience. He heard the electronic locks on the front door click behind him. The walls hummed slightly. The computer waited a couple of moments, then said, Lockout sequence initiating. Countdown: ten … nine … eight …
There it was, wadded in a back pocket behind his wallet. He fished it out, dropped it on the floor, scooped it up, uncrumpled it and quickly punched in the third line of numbers: 539662.
Six … five … four … the computer continued unheedingly.
Bloody literal-minded computer. “Override sequence C-for-Charlie ten-ten, identity California State Board of Health,” he gasped out and hastily re-entered the final sequence. “There! Satisfied, damn it?”
The countdown stopped. A long pause. Then the walls stopped humming. Identity and override sequence confirmed, the computer said politely. Or did he detect a trace of disappointment that it hadn’t been able to gas him unconscious? Vault access granted. Welcome to the Immortality Partnership.
Chrome-steel tumblers the diameter of a baby’s arm pulled back with a hollow cha-chunnk and the vault door popped backwards a fraction of an inch with a faint hiss of escaping air. The vault was one of the most impregnable places in Clarke County. In theory at least, it could survive the worst possible disaster, the destruction of the medical torus by a Class-Four blowout. The vault was practically a habitat in itself, containing its own life-support system within twelve-inch-thick steel walls, protected by the automatic security system. Not even the fabled gold vault at Fort Knox had been so impenetrable.
Inside the Immortality Partnership vault, though, were not bars of gold bullion, but dead people.
McCoy slowly walked into the narrow chamber. It was cold and dark; he shivered and pulled up the lapels of his jacket. His penlight cast a circle over the metal floor, the consoles with their readouts … and finally the seven steel caskets, arranged in a row on the left side of the long, vaultlike gunmetal-gray tombs. The cold air was still. The atmosphere was that of a high-tech graveyard, haunted by electronic ghosts.
“Lights, please,” he said.
Light panels in the ceiling glowed to life. The effect was hardly less disturbing. All shadows were swept away, rendering the vault gray-on-white, antiseptic and vaguely unsettling. He blinked, glanced at the caskets—which now looked like gray lozenges—and decided that he liked the darkness better. “Lights off, please,” he said.
The room fell into darkness again. McCoy sighed. Perhaps it was better to confront the dead in the dark.
He walked in front of the row of sarcophagi and stared at them. Each cryonic cylinder was nine feet tall and about two and a half feet in diameter; the first three had single nameplates mounted on them. Their cool surfaces only hinted at the extreme cold within: 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. The dead, suspended in 150 gallons of liquid nitrogen, could not be seen; there were no portals in the cylinders. Even if there had been, all that he could have seen were human forms mummified within nylon-polyester cocoons, like mountain climbers zipped into sleeping bags.
McCoy walked to the fourth cylinder; this one had six plates mounted on its front. Sometimes he knew, a whole corpse had not been frozen—only the head. The assumption was that brain transplants would be possible in the anticipated future. And it was less expensive to preserve only a decapitated head. Glancing over the dates on the nameplates, McCoy observed that most had died in the late twentieth century. Cryonic preservation had been trendy back then.…
It was the middle of the twenty-first century now; medical science had not yet discovered how to revive the dead or how to successfully transplant a human brain. You’re all just going to have to wait a little while longer, he thought.
McCoy walked to the fifth casket, another six-pack of heads, and threw his light on the plates. There. The third one: L. Cray 7/4/85.
He gazed at the nameplate for a while, remembering what the Fourth of July used to be like.…
Suddenly the vault door clicked loudly; he swung his light around and saw that the door had shut and locked. By itself? Yet he had disabled the security system, using override commands entered long ago into the computer’s subroutine. He had been assured that this was a never-used back door. So someone must know he was in the cryonics area.
“Good evening,” he said aloud, watching the window next to the door. No point in trying to hide from the police if they appeared. He turned around, playing his light across the walls and consoles. He glanced at a computer screen behind him. looked away, then did a double take.
IT’S MORNING, ACTUALLY, replied a line of luminescent type on the screen.
McCoy walked closer. Static lines shifted lazily on the screen. “I suppose it is morning at that,” he replied nervously. “It’s after midnight, after all.”
A new line appeared on the screen. YES IT IS. A LITTLE LATE FOR VISITING, ISN’T IT? IF I DIDN’T KNOW BETTER, I WOULD HAVE SIGNALED THE SHERIFF’S OFFICE AND PUMPED GAS INTO THE ROOM.
“Ah, but you didn’t …” McCoy hesitated. “So why didn’t you? And who are you, anyway?”
YOU CAN CALL ME BLIND BOY GRUNT, the screen replied. AS FOR THE FIRST QUESTION: WHEN I DETECTED YOUR PRESENCE IN THIS ROOM, I RAN YOUR IMAGE THROUGH MY FILES. WHAT I FOUND INTERESTED ME, SO I DECIDED TO TAKE MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS, SO TO SPEAK.
The lines disappeared and were replaced by another statement. YOU’RE AN ENIGMA. ACCORDING TO MY INFORMATION, YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST AT ALL.
NOT EXACTLY. I SEE YOU, THEREFORE YOU EXIST. WHETHER YOU THINK YOU EXIST HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. BUT ACTUALLY THE LINE YOU SHOULD USE IS, “HOW CAN YOU BE IN TWO PLACES AT ONCE WHEN YOU’RE NOT ANYWHERE AT ALL?”
McCoy smiled. “Firesign Theater. I like a ghost with taste. I assume I’m talking to a ghost, of course.”
THAT’S AN AMUSING ACCUSATION. WHAT MAKES YOU BELIEVE I’M A GHOST?
“Deus ex machina,” McCoy replied. “A ghost in the machine.”
A LATIN LOVER. I’M IMPRESSED. BUT YOU’RE MUCH MORE OF A GHOST THAN I, MR. MCCOY. PERHAPS THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS FUTURE, BUT I COULD BE JUMPING TO CONCLUSIONS. TELL ME, LEONARD …
“Simon,” McCoy interrupted. “If you’re going to call me anything, please call me Simon McCoy.”
HOW ABOUT LEONARD MCCOY?
McCoy laughed. “Cute, but I’m too young to have been a Trekkie,” he replied. “‘Simon’ will be satisfactory.”
TOO BAD. I THOUGHT IT WAS A GOOD PUN. ANYWAY, WHAT BRINGS YOU DOWN HERE, BESIDES MORBID CURIOSITY?
McCoy shrugged and looked over his shoulder at the caskets. “Only morbid curiosity. Sort of a desire to see how the other half lives.”
I LIKE A MAN WITH A SENSE OF HUMOR, YET SOMEHOW I DOUBT THAT THIS IS ALL A COINCIDENCE.
McCoy cocked his head. “Coincidence? Where do you see a coincidence?”
DON’T PLAY STUPID WITH ME, PLEASE. THERE ARE TOO MANY THINGS OCCURRING IN CLARKE COUNTY RIGHT NOW, JUST UNDER THE SURFACE, FOR YOUR PRESENCE TO BE COINCIDENTAL. YOU’RE HERE FOR A REASON.
“It sounds like you get around a lot,” McCoy said.
I’M IN THE WALLS, UNDER THE BEDS, IN THE CLOSETS. IF YOU MAKE A PHONE CALL, I’M LISTENING IN. IF YOU WALK INTO A SECURITY AREA USING A FORGOTTEN PASSWORD, AS YOU JUST DID, I’M WATCHING THROUGH THE MONITOR CAMERAS. YOU FORGOT ABOUT THOSE, DIDN’T YOU? DON’T WORRY, I’LL SCRUB THE TAPES OF YOUR VISIT HERE, SO NO ONE WILL BE THE WISER.