Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

Elvis thinks about smiling in return, but really, what’s the point? “One warning only, Colonel Garnett. Turn yourself around. You got ’til sundown tomorrow.” He shuts down the projection, effectively vanishing. The look on Garnett’s face is surprisingly gratifying.

“You’re back,” Marilyn says, and offers him a stemmed glass. Elvis takes it automatically, though it’s empty, just like hers. She’s wearing a little black number now, every inch the living vision that seduced a nation, and her smile is a thing exquisite.

“How’d you know?” he says.

She shrugs. “I always know.”

“The others don’t.” He gestures with his glass, taking in the whole crowd of them jittering and jiving as Glenn leads the band through Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand , all sweet-sharp brass and mellow clarinets. “You’re the only one.”

Marilyn touches his hand, just for an instant. They’re sitting in a quiet booth off to one side of the dance floor, out of the treacherous currents and swirling tides of the cocktail party. Nobody’s paying them any mind, and for just a moment, he lets his hand press hers in return.

She blushes, and looks away. “I don’t know how I know,” she says. “You’re still… you. But it’s like something is missing. I think sometimes, maybe—I think you have important things you have to do. Not this stuff.”

“This is important,” Elvis says. It’s more important than he can ever hope to explain.

“This?” She looks around the room. “It’s a party. Happens every night.”

“It’s an after-show party. It’s what we do.”

“Work hard, play hard.” She tips up her glass. “Chin-chin.”

He murmurs an apology and gets up to do the rounds. Press the flesh. His mind isn’t really on it, though. Big John Wayne is arm wrestling Lee Marvin at one of the tables, and Frank’s taking bets. There’s a small crowd around them cheering and catcalling, but Elvis is watching the faded, broken, night city outside through the nanolensed eyes of a drone-swarm. Short-lived, semi biological, they crawl and leap and fly amongst the blown sand, the wreckage and detritus, seeking out Garnett and his men.

He sets them to watch, marking certain action parameters, and lets them go. They’ll call if something important happens. Meanwhile, he has other duties.

Jimi and Janis, smashed as usual, howl their way through All Along the Watchtower to tumultuous applause. Bob watches from the sidelines, a rueful grin on his sharp face.

“Sure. I wrote it,” he tells Elvis, “but I never could make it sound like that.”

“It’s okay,” Elvis says, putting a hand on Bob’s shoulder. “It’s what they do. It’s why they’re here.”

“Yeah, man.” Bob can’t take his eyes off the performance as Jimi makes the old Fender do impossible things, wailing through oneiric octaves in an unknown key but it’s right, so right, and Janis stays right there with him, that diamond-gravel voice belting out the words like an anthem to a lost world. “Beautiful,” says Bob with a half-checked sob. “So fuckin’ beautiful .”

And the night rolls on. Fred and Ginger improvise a sparkling routine to something George bangs out on the Steinway grand, leaping and spinning across tabletops in perfect time until Gene steps up with a grin and a tap that sounds like a fusillade, his feet a blur. Ginger spins across to pair with him and they whirl like flames until Fred returns with a hatstand as his partner, mimicking every move Gene makes. On some invisible cue, like magic, Gene twirls Ginger away and Fred spins the hatstand across, and now it’s Gene and the hatstand chasing Fred—and Ginger, as always, making the boys look even better than they are, always in the exact right spot, dancing backwards in heels with a perfect smile and never a hair out of place.

Then it’s Ella and Billie in a searing slow duet while Satchmo leads the band and Miles counterpoints, cool, so very cool. Groucho follows with a routine that pillories Bogey who stands by, laughing helplessly while Harpo honks and mugs and steals his fedora.

Sooner—or maybe later, it’s hard to tell—John and Paul catch up with Elvis and push the big old Gibson flatback into his hands and things get quiet. The lights go down a little, and he catches Marilyn’s eye as he sings Are You Lonesome Tonight? and Love Me Tender , but just as he’s about to give them Heartbreak Hotel to finish for the night the drone swarm signals and he cuts away—

—through a security camera with limited night vision, he watches as Garnett sets up a piece of equipment in the middle of the dusty street corner parking lot where the men have made their camp. It’s nothing like the mismatched guns and worn-out camo, this thing. It’s modern, or maybe postmodern if you factor in the Breakdown and the general halt in research and production around the world.

Garnett unfolds it from a heavy, insulated box lined with dense foam that supports every piece of the construct for transport. It’s a spindly thing, but sturdy enough, rising about man height on a tripod that reflects in the spectrum for titanium, mostly. Lightweight, but rigid. Then the colonel mounts some kind of a black-box unit on top, orienting it with tremendous care.

Elvis runs the silhouette of the device past a range of databases, but nothing matches up precisely enough to make him happy. He moves the drone swarm subtly, getting as many angles as he can. He’ll collate the images and refine them, and share them next time Indira’s got a satellite overhead. Even if she doesn’t recognize it, Indira will want to know.

It’s not until Garnett fans out a tiny, delicate dish of spider-web thin wires that Elvis realizes what he’s looking at. It’s some kind of highly directional transmitter. He checks the satellite database, but no, there’s nothing significant overhead at the moment. A high-altitude drone, maybe? He reorients half a dozen peripheral cameras around the city, but there’s nothing.

He shifts the drone swarm again, measuring the parallax, establishing the angle on Garnett’s transmitter dish. It’s aimed northeast, about thirty-six degrees from horizontal. And there’s still nothing to be seen.

Enough.

As Garnett plugs a portable drive into the unit, Elvis powers up a flatscreen advertisement across the street. The old sound membranes are unreliable with all the dust and blown sand, but the OLED matrix is as bright and clear as ever. Elvis makes a throat-clearing noise, and Garnett looks up. His eyes pop, and he scrabbles for his sidearm, but Elvis shakes his head.

“Ain’t gonna do neither of us no good,” he says.

Slowly, Garnett straightens. “Good trick. You about scared me stupid.”

The straight line is irresistible. “Short trip, I reckon,” Elvis says, and twitches a wry smile onto his image.

Garnett grins. “You might think that. And I guess if I’m right, you might have cause.”

“Right about what?”

Garnett folds his arms across his broad chest and peers at the image, twice lifesize, on the wall across the street. “Could be an animated avatar,” he says. “Could be there’s a man behind, somewhere, using that old face. But I think you’re something more.”

“Do tell,” says Elvis, but he’s got a bad feeling he knows where this is going. The feeling gets stronger as he watches Garnett pull a silvery bag from a pocket and enshroud the transmitter with it. “Faraday cage. You must think me all kinds of sneaky.”

“I surely do,” says Garnett. “That’s why I’m using this here ultra tight-beam, frequency-agile comms unit to talk to a stealthed aerostat way back over yonder. Now, I guess you can figure out the direction. You can probably even guess the range pretty close, knowing what I’ve got for power and seeing the angle of the transmitter dish. But not even you can suborn my communications if you can’t nail the frequency and the signal strength and a few other things I’m not inclined to discuss. So unless you’ve got something interesting to tell me, you might as well sit back and watch me send off a report that says I’m closing in on you, right now.”