"Krokodil, what's this about?"
He picked up the guitar, gently disentangling it from Shiba's mouth, and slung the shoulder strap around him.
"Down there, they're using black magic and blacker science to gain control of a powerful weapon. They're trying to take over the sky."
The Op looked appalled. He was almost unconsciously tuning the instrument, tightening keys and twanging strings. She could feel the power gathering even in such flawed and negligible notes. 'Ti-Mouche had been right. The girl from the bunker was right. This was magic.
"The sky?" Elvis asked. "That can't be. Why…like the man said…the sky…"
CANTICLE: EPILOG.
The Big Screen was a blazing kaleidoscope of lights.
Sister Addams yelled, and Commander Fonvielle hugged her.
"Total control. Elder," she screamed, "we have total control."
Duroc smiled, and recovered his composure. Despite Simone, despite Krokodil, despite everything…
The Needlepoint System was on line.
"Throw me up a large-scale map of the Cape, and give me manual control. We're going to try a little target practice."
"…belongs…"
It had first been said, so the story went, on February 3, 1959, in a small airport near Mason City, Iowa. Charles Hardin Holly, top-lining a mid-west rock 'n' roll tour, had chartered a four-seater Beechcraft Bonanza to take him to Moorhead, North Dakota for the next engagement. Besides the pilot, the plane was already weighed down with Jiles Perry Richardson, The Big Bopper, and there was one seat left. It would go to either Tommy Allsup of the Crickets or the Chicano kid who sang "La-La-La-La-La-La-La Bamba," Richard Valenzuela. The kid won, but was unnerved, his breath frosting in the cold air as he protested to Buddy his lifelong fear of flying. Sometimes, he dreamed of dying in an air crash. "Don't worry Ritchie," said the twenty-two year-old to the seventeen year-old, confident of their immortality, "the sky belongs…"
"…to the stars!"
Elvis began to play, not as he had played for the Cajuns, to return a hospitality, or for Shiba, to please an admirer. This time, he played for himself alone, although maybe he hoped his Mama Gladys and Jesse Garon could hear, and he played as he had never done before.
Always, Colonel Parker had hammered home, he had been a face and a voice and a set of hips, not a pair of hands and a brain and a heart. Now, he was everything.
He had never been a great guitar player, but now his fingers slammed against the strings as well as Buddy's ever had, and his voice found new heights, new depths…
Without thinking, he started off with a song he had heard many times but had never sung.before. Buddy Holly's "Everyday…" It must be the association with what he had said.
It was getting closer, and it-was coming faster than a rollercoaster…
It was supposed to be a song about a love that had surely come to stay, but Elvis realized as he sang, watching the stricken looks on the faces of the liule group standing around him on that great expanse of blackened and bloody concrete, that it was really a song about darkness, about death, and about what comes after.
Death had certainly come for Buddy, who had often been compared to Elvis, and to so many others. He sang for Buddy, tapping his foot to add the famous handclap to the song, and he sang for Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and that nameless pilot. He sang for Robert Johnson, whose ghost must surely be out there in the swamps, for Charlie Parker, for Johnny Ace, for Frankie Lyman, for Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, dead in a car crash in a foreign land, for Chuck Berry, for Jackie Wilson, for Harvey and the Moonglows, for Alan Freed, for the musical dreams of John Lennon, for Jesse Garon, for Reuben, for all those who had served in battle with him, for the Suitcase People still bleeding on the beach, for the murdered indentees of the Delta, for the mind-robbed Josephites he had killed.
Krokodil was crying, a stream trickling from her one good eye. The ghosts stood solemnly in ranks, solidifying as the song took effect.
Liquid electricity coursed dirough his veins, and he segued into Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail," singing of the blues that fell down like hail.
The girl from underground was sobbing now, falling into Krokodil's arms. With a tenderness the Op had never seen before, his employer stroked the black girl's short hair, and kissed her forehead.
There were more songs to come. "Jambalaya," he sang, expunging the menace from the melody as he evoked fun on the bayou.
Raimundo Rex was dancing, his feet crunching into the concrete, his tail lashing.
The ghosts were coming up through the elevator platform, emerging slowly like conjurer's phantoms. They were all dressed in spacesuits, all hideously mutilated. Elvis had to sing for them.
Something from an old children's show came to him, and he had to sing it. "I Wish I Were a Spaceman."
Then there was a Sinatra song, "Fly Me to the Moon."
And Petya Tcherkassoff's "Soyuz Love."
There were more ghosts than Suitcase People now. The music fought to get free of him, and he felt like a channel to the beyond through which magic was pouring in an irregular, gushing, dangerous flood…
He sang the first songs, the ones he had laid down with Bill Black and Scotty Moore in the Sun Studio in July, 1954. The songs that had taken him from truck driver to star. They were the songs, the ones that still meant the most to him, meant the most to everybody…
"I Love You Because…"
"That's All Right (Mama)…"
"Blue Moon of Kentucky…"
"Blue Moon…"
Love, defiance, prayer, longing.
It was music to reclaim the stars.
“We haven't got time to take heat pattern readings, just tell Keystone to strike down everybody above ground within a five mile radius of this installation…"
Addams' tired fingers paused over the keyboard. She was on the lip of questioning an order from the Prezz.
Fonvielle knew what was needed. Direct, unhestitating action. If the Dream was to be preserved, he would have to get into the cockpit and haul on the stick.
He elbowed the woman aside, and slipped into her chair. It was a keyboard and a screen, not a joystick and a windshield, but he was a fighter jock again.
He fed in the co-ordinates.
The Prezz laid a supporting hand on his shoulder.
The ghosts were ascending through the ceiling. Grissom was the last to go, with a sad wave. Fonvielle was too busy communicating with Needlepoint to pay attention.
"Target co-ordinates locked in, Mr President…"
The Prezz squeezed his shoulder.
"Firing…"
The kid had come into the studio to cut a presentation record for his mother. Marion couldn't imagine anything more square, and yet there was something about his sulky good looks, and the way he shifted about on his feet. He looked a bit like Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire, and dressed like a motorcycle hoodlum.
"What kind of singer are you?" she asked as they were setting up.
"I sing all kinds."
"Who do you sound like?"
"I don't sound like nobody."
"Hillbilly?"
"Yeah, I sing hillbilly."
"Who do you sound like in hillbilly?"
"I don't sound like nobody."
Elvis sang, surrounded by a swirl of ghosts. Across the site, by the gantry, the ghost rocketship was taking shape. The ghosts seemed to be converging on the thing, melding into it, giving it substance.
He couldn't stop himself. As he sang and played, his feet moved, his hips moved. The music shook him.
He was all shook up.
"…NOW!"
Fonvielle stabbed the RUN key, and the instructions were downloaded from Keystone into the entire Needlepoint Ring. There were two satellites who could bring their lases to bear on Florida.
Duroc's fist clenched and his breath caught.
Within seconds…
"You know, Marion," Sam Phillips had said, listening to the ten-inch acetate the kid had made, "that boy has got something. That boy has got the power!"
Krokodil felt the channels opening up as the Op sang. The music was getting into her too, shaking her down to the depths, the depths where the Ancient Adversary lived.