The Year's Best SF 12 # 1994

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  The singer thinks about it. “Don’t make no sense,” he says. “Colonel don’t make no money when I’m in the service.”

  “But he gets control,” Leon says. “You can’t look after your affairs if you’re away. You’ll have to put him in charge of everything and trust him. He’ll have to renegotiate your RCA contract, your movie contract. When you get back, he’ll be the one in charge.”

  The singer stares at him and says nothing.

  “He’s just some goddam carnival barker, brother,” Leon says. “All he does now is arrange your bookings—anyone can do that. He isn’t even a real colonel. He just wants to be the boss in the big house and keep you working in his cotton fields for the rest of your life.”

  “Orville Bean,” the singer says. Leon doesn’t understand, but this doesn’t stop him.

  “And you don’t need the damn Army,” Leon says. “All it does is protect bosses like the Colonel and their money. What’s the Army ever done for you?”

  “Ain’t gonna go in no Army,” the singer says.

  “The draft board has to call you up after all this. The newspapers won’t let them do anything else. What’re you gonna tell ‘em?”

  “Have the Colonel work out something.”

  “The Colonel wants you in the Army.”

  The singer closes his eyes and lolls his head back in the big velour chair. He wishes everyone would go away and leave him alone. He strains his mind, trying to find an answer.

  Make the Colonel do what you want.

  The singer starts awake. He’s heard the voice plainly, but he knows Leon hasn’t spoken.

  He realizes it was his brother’s voice, calling to him from the Beyond.

  * * *

  The singer calls the Colonel on the phone and tells him that if he receives his draft notice, the first thing he’ll do is fire Thomas Andrew Parker. The Colonel is staggered.

  He says it’s too late. The singer only repeats his demand and hangs up.

  He manages to avoid seeing the Colonel for another week, and then the Colonel comes anyway. The singer agrees to meet him and wishes that Leon wasn’t in town visiting his mom.

  The Colonel walks into the den, leaning hard on his elephant-head cane, and drops heavily into a chair. He looks pale and sweaty and he keeps massaging his left arm. He explains that he’s talked to every man on the draft board, that public opinion is forcing them to call the singer up. The Colonel has offered them colossal bribes, but it appears they’re all honest citizens.

  “Ain’t changed my mind,” the singer says. “You keep me out of the Army, or you and me are through.”

  “I can’t,” the Colonel protests. His powerful blue eyes are hollow.

  “Then you and me are finished the second that notice gets here.”

  “Listen. There’s a chance. The medical—” the Colonel starts, and then he gasps, his mouth open, and clutches at his left arm. His mouth works and he doesn’t say anything.

  Heart attack. His brother’s voice. Don’t do anything.

  The singer knows the Colonel already had a heart attack a few years ago. He’s old and fat and deserves exactly what he’s going to get.

  The Colonel’s eyes plead with the singer. The singer just watches him. The Colonel begins moving slowly, his hand reaching for the elephant-head cane he’s propped against a table.

  Take the cane, the angel voice says. The singer takes the cane and holds it while the Colonel topples off his chair and starts to crawl toward the door. And then the Colonel falls over and doesn’t move anymore.

  “Ain’t gonna have no more bosses,” the singer says.

  * * *

  “Not gonna fight for no rich people,” the singer says to reporters.

  He doesn’t give a damn about the firestorm that follows. He takes his motorcycle out onto the highways and blasts along at full speed and tries to listen to what his brother is telling him.

  Leon tells him a lot, too. He reads him passages from a book called Capital. He explains about workers and bosses and how bosses make money by exploiting workers. It’s everything the singer ever learned from his family, from his days as a truck driver after high school. Leon explains how he’s a Marxist-Leninist.

  “Isn’t that the same as a Communist?” the singer asks. Leon’s answer is long and involved and has a lot of historical digressions. But the angel voice that whispers inside the singer speaks simple sense:

  Doesn’t matter what people call it, it only matters that it’s true.

  * * *

  There are bonfires out on Highway 51 now, the singer’s records going up in flames. To the American public it looks as if their worst fears are confirmed, that the singer, driving girls into a sexual frenzy with his degenerate Negro music, is an agent of Moscow as well as of Satan. Outside the gate of the house are weeping girls begging him to repent. His brother’s grave in East Tupelo is vandalized, so the singer has both his brother’s body and Satnin’s exhumed and reburied at Graceland.

  Every booking has been canceled. The movie contract is gone. The singer doesn’t care, because for the first time in his life, the nightmares are gone and he can sleep at night. The singer is going to Party meetings and making the members nervous, because crowds of reporters are still following him around and snapping pictures of everyone.

  Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis tell anyone who’ll listen that they’re country singers. Ricky Nelson starts covering Dean Martin tunes. Little Richard goes into the church. Rock and roll is finished.

  “Plenty of bookings in Europe, comrade,” Leon says.

  So the singer plays Europe, but he’s playing clubs, not auditoriums or stadiums. His Daddy and Grandma stay home and take care of his house. The singer’s European audiences are a strange mixture of teenage girls and thin intellectuals who wear glasses and smoke cigarettes. Gene and Junior Smith are still with him, protecting him from fanatics who might want to hurt him, or the strange, intense people who want to discourse on the class origins of his appeal. It seems to the singer that the Left doesn’t understand rock and roll. Leon calmly says that sooner or later, they’ll figure it out.

  All the professional songwriters who kept him supplied with material are long gone. So are Scotty and the others who helped with the arrangements. He picks his own tunes. He has a new band, working-class British kids who worship the ground he walks on. The Party wants him to sing folk songs and songs about the Struggle. He obliges, but he rocks them up, and that doesn’t seem to please them, so he just goes back to singing the blues.

  He records in little studios in Italy and Germany that are even more primitive than the Sun studio in Memphis. He teaches them a trick or two—he knows how to create the Sun sound by putting a second mike behind his head and arranging for a slight delay between the two to produce Sam Phillips’ trademark echo effect.

  The records are carried into America in the holds of freighters. There’s a surprising demand for them. There’s even a story in the papers about a Navy sailor courtmartialed for having some of his 45s in his locker.

  His voice fills out. He’s got three and a half octaves and he uses them brilliantly—his chest voice is powerful and evocative, his high notes clear and resonant. He wishes he had a bigger audience now that he knows so much more about the music.

  Don’t matter who listens so long as you sing it right, his brother says. The singer knows his brother always speaks the truth.

  * * *

  The singer is appalled by his tour of the East. It’s taken him forever to get permission, and he’s succeeded only because some kind of propaganda coup is necessary. Comrade Khrushchev has just built a wall in Berlin to keep out American spies, and he’s demanded solidarity from Socialists everywhere.

  Still, the singer can’t believe the people he’s got opening for him. Jugglers. Trained seals. A couple of clowns. A drill team from the Czech Army, and a couple of folk-singers so old and so drunk they can barely stagger onto the stage every night.

  At least there are
no midgets.

  With the tour is a platoon of big men in baggy pants and bulky jackets, supposedly there to protect the singer from counterrevolutionaries, but all they really do is insulate the singer from anyone in the countries he’s touring.

  Just like Colonel Parker, his brother whispers.

  The audiences are polite, but clearly they like the jugglers best. The singer works like hell to win them over, but his real fans, the young people, seem to be excluded. At one point his rage explodes, and in the middle of a song he turns to Leon and screams, “Look what you’ve got me into!”

  Leon doesn’t respond. He knows there’s nothing he can say.

  When the singer returns to the West, he announces he’s leaving the Party. His remaining audiences get smaller.

  But he’s singing better than ever. He gets together with French and British blues fanatics, men with huge collections of vinyl bought from American sailors, and he listens carefully. He knows how to take a minor tune, a B-side or a neglected work, and reinvent it, jack it up and rock it till it cries with power and glows like neon. And people with names like Dylan and Fariña cross the Atlantic to meet with him, to tell him how much he means to them.

  He doesn’t abandon the Left. He studies Marx and Gandhi and Strachey and Hilferding. He leads his band and followers in discussion groups and self-criticism sessions, American hill people and Yorkshire kids educating themselves in revolution. Leon suggests inviting others to run the meetings, intellectuals, but the singer doesn’t like the idea.

  Years pass. The singer’s audiences grow older. He’s disappointed that the young girls are gone, that he can’t tease them and drive them mad with the way he moves.

  And then rock and roll is back, exploding out of the sweaty-walled European clubs where it’s been living all these years, blasting into the minds and hearts of a newer, younger generation.

  For the first time in years, the singer hears his brother’s voice: Now’s your time.

  * * *

  The singer runs onto the stage, drops onto his knees as he passes the mike, slides across half the stage. He looks at the girls in the audience from under his taunting eyelids.

  “Well…” he intones.

  The eerie sound comes up from the audience again, adolescent girls in the thrall of a need they can’t explain. The singer had forgotten how much he missed them.

  “Well…” he sings again, as if he’s forgotten where he was. The wail goes up again.

  When he finally gets around to singing, he thinks he can hear his brother on harmony.

  Most of his new audience isn’t familiar with the old material, with the old songs and moves—it’s all spanking new to them. And the new material is good, written by Lennon and McCartney and Dylan and Richards and Jagger, all of them offering their best in homage to their idol. They swarm into his recording sessions to sing backup or strum out chords. He isn’t as popular as he once was—there’s still a lot of resistance, and he doesn’t get much airplay and is never invited to appear on television—but his new fans think the American Legion pickets outside his concerts are quaint, and his old fans have never forgotten him.

  He hasn’t forgotten much either. He remembers who shunned him, who helped when the chips were down. The few who dared to support him in public. He works to advance the Struggle. He not only marches with Dr. King, he gives him a bright yellow Cadillac so he doesn’t have to march at all. He directs public scorn at the Vietnam War. FBI men in dark suits and hats follow him around and tap his phones. They can’t do anything to him because he’s never done anything illegal—in the confusion of the headlines and statements and his jump to Europe, his local draft board never actually issued his induction notice.

  Outnumbering the FBI are the fans who camp outside his house, living there just as they did a decade before, people who seem to have a tenuous existence only in the singer’s shadow. It’s as if he’s their god, the only thing that gives them meaning.

  Only one way to become a god, his brother whispers.

  He knows what his brother means.

  When Dr. King comes to Memphis, it’s only natural for the singer to climb on his bike and pay a courtesy call.

  Maybe the magic will work one last time.

  * * *

  What was he doing on the balcony, exactly? Demonstrating his moves, jumping around, playing the clown for his bewildered host? Or was there a whisper in his ear, a soft murmur that told him exactly where the bullet would be found as it hissed through the air?

  Bleeding, both lungs punctured, he shoves the confused Dr. King into the motel room and to safety. He falls, coughing blood, his moist breath whistling through the hole in his side.

  King remembers, forever afterward, the peculiar inward look on the singer’s face as he dies.

  The singer remembers his baptism of the spirit, the way he gave everything away. Now he’s giving everything away again. He hears his brother’s voice.

  Welcome, his brother says, to where we can live forever.

  * * *

  You stand with the long line of mourners as it files up to the big white house. The singer’s will was a surprise: there’s an education foundation, and the house is to be renamed the Memphis Palace of Labor. It will become a library and center for research on labor issues.

  File through a series of rooms on your way to view the coffin. Rooms so strangely decorated that they’re like a window into the singer’s mind. The Joe Hill room, the Gandhi room, the Karl Marx room. A pink bust of Marx sits in a shrine in the corner of his chamber, flanked by smoked-mirror glass and red-velvet curtains. Joe Hill—a life-sized statue of a noble-looking man in a cap and bib overalls—gazes defiantly at the scarlet velour walls of his chamber and at a piano gilded with what appears to be solid gold.

  You have the feeling that the staid trustees of the foundation will redecorate at the first chance they get.

  The singer lies in state under a portrait of the wizened figure of Gandhi, in a room whose walls seem to be upholstered in white plastic. Dr. King is chief mourner and speaks the eulogy. A choir from a local black church mourns softly, then spits fire. The crowd claps and stamps in answer.

  And at last the moment comes when the huge bronze coffin is closed and the singer, Jessie Garon Presley, is carried out to be laid to rest in the garden. On his one side is his Mamma, and on the other his twin, Elvis, with whom he will live forever.

  CALIFORNIA DREAMER

  Mary Rosenblum

  One of the most popular and prolific of the new writers of the ’90s, Mary Rosenblum made her first sale in 1990 to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become a mainstay of that magazine, and one of its most frequent contributors, with almost twenty sales there to her credit; her linked series of “Drylands” stories have proved to be one of the magazine’s most popular series. She has also sold to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Pulphouse, New Legends, and elsewhere. Her first novel, The Drylands, appeared in 1993 to wide critical acclaim, winning the prestigious Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel of the year; it was followed in short order by her second novel, Chimera. A third novel, The Stone Garden, was published late in 1994, and she has finished a fourth novel. Coming up soon is her first short-story collection, Synthesis and Other Stories. A graduate of Clarion West, Mary Rosenblum lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

  In the tough-minded, compassionate, and deceptively quiet story that follows, she examines the seemingly simple idea that what something is worth depends on what you’re willing to pay for it—and the fact that some of those prices can go very high indeed …

  The relief boat came once a week. This morning it had been a sturdy salmon fisher, hired down from Oregon. The crew had unloaded the usual relief supplies; canned milk and shrink-wrapped cheese, cans of peanut butter and stuff like that. It had unloaded mail.

  Mail. Letters. Junk mail, for God’s sake. No power yet, no telephones, but the US Postal Service had come through. Neither rain nor snow nor earthquake
… Ellen struggled to swallow the hurting lump in her throat as she walked slowly homeward. Back on the beach—the new, Wave-scoured beach—people were sorting through envelopes and catalogues and cards. Crying and laughing. Britty Harris had gone into hysterics over a postcard from her vacationing brother. Wish you were here, he had scrawled on the back of a glossy picture of Fisherman’s Wharf.

  Wish you were here. Neither Fisherman’s Wharf nor her brother were there anymore.

  There had been no ghost mail from Rebecca. The lump swelled, threatening to turn into more tears. Ellen ducked her head and walked faster. Her shadow stretched seaward; a tall, thin caricature of herself. Perhaps she was becoming a caricature; turned hollow and surreal by the force of the Quake. Changed.

  Beanpole, Rebecca had called her, and said, Why can’t I be thin like you? at least once a week. Then Ellen would tell her to quit eating so much junk food and Rebecca would call her a Jewish mother and they would both laugh, because Scandinavian-blonde Ellen had grown up Catholic, and Rebecca was Jewish. It had been a ritual between them—a lightly spoken touchstone of love. As she turned up the walkway to the house, the unshed tears settled into Ellen’s stomach, hard as beach pebbles.

  It was a cottage, more than a house. Weathered gray shingles, weathered gray roof. Rebecca’s house, because she’d always wanted to live near the sea, even though she had called it ours. Scraggly geraniums bloomed in a pot on the tiny front porch. The pot—generic red earthenware—was cracked. Ellen had watched it crack, clinging to this very railing as the earth shuddered and the house groaned in a choir of terrifying voices.

  Earthquake, Ellen had thought in surprise. That’s not supposed to happen here.

  They’d heard it was the Big One on Jack’s generator-run radio. But it was only after the relief boats started coming that they got to see the news photos of San Francisco and L.A. Ellen stomped sand from her shoes on the three wooden steps, went inside. A long worktable filled half of the single main room. Boxes of beads, feathers, and assorted junk cluttered the floor, and unfinished collages leaned against the wall. Rebecca’s workspace. Rebecca’s life. The room looked … unfamiliar. The Quake had changed everything, had charged the air with something like electricity. Angles and familiar lines looked sharp and strange and new, as if the unleashed force had transformed flowerpots and people and houses on some subtle, molecular scale.