Con Living

by E. M. Foner

  “Your friends were idiots,” Bianca told her. “All books are a cheat of sorts. Succeeding as an author depends on craft, not life experience. I used to love reading the biographies of famous people before I started writing novels. After I learned how a plot is put together, I realized that all of those supposedly true stories were just too dramatic to be real.”

  “What if they have footnotes and references?” Marilla asked.

  “Years ago, a biographer writing about a famous writer who I won’t name asked me for my memories. I gave him a bunch of quotes for the funny and insightful things that Rob—I suppose it doesn’t matter—Robert Anglish said in my presence. Later that day I realized that none of the quotes I gave her were actually Robert’s. I was subconsciously borrowing them from other authors I knew, including myself. Maybe I did it to show off to the biographer or because I wanted to be a footnote in history. I don’t understand it myself.”

  “But that doesn’t mean that books are all a cheat,” Julie said. “Sure, biographers cherry-pick what they include to make their subjects interesting and sell more copies, but true romance—”

  “The emotions are all true, nobody would read my books otherwise, but that’s not what I’m talking about,” Bianca said. “The big cheat in fiction is that authors cram all of the highlights of a life or a relationship into sixty or a hundred thousand words that a real romance fan can swallow in a lazy afternoon. And I’m not picking on my own genre because it’s the same for all novels. The minute-to-minute progress of a normal life isn’t interesting for art.”

  “What about immersive documentaries?” Marilla asked.

  “Puh-lease,” Bianca said. “They usually take a life or a whole culture and squeeze it down into a few hours. In my experience, people who expect their lives to be an unending series of highlights end up addicted to drugs before they ever have a chance to accomplish anything.”

  “My father reads thrillers and I always thought they were pretty unrealistic,” the Horten girl said. “They start with some pirate or crime lord kidnapping the daughter of a retired intelligence agent or fleet officer, and then they all go chasing around the galaxy and a lot of stuff gets blown up. I had a lecturer at the Open University who said that the key to writing bestsellers was to keep raising the stakes to get readers emotionally committed to the outcome and flipping the pages.”

  “I’ve grown out of reading books that keep me on the edge of my seat,” the romance author said. “If I want an upset stomach, I can just order fast food.”

  “You told me last week that the key to writing a good romance is to keep placing obstacles between the two main characters,” Julie reminded Bianca. “Would anybody want to read a book about a couple who meet on an arranged date in the last chapter, get married that night, and live happily ever after?”

  “No, but I think I’ve explained myself poorly,” Bianca said. “It’s the sheer concentration of events that’s unrealistic. The idea that every bit of dialogue or action has to move the plot forward is copied from scriptwriters who don’t want to leave the audience time to think too deeply about what they’re seeing. Characters that only exist to serve the plot are the very definition of one-dimensional. It’s not about how well you describe them or how full you stuff their back story with traumas—if you want your characters to come alive, you have to let them live their own lives.”

  “Thank you,” Marilla said. “I thought that I was going about it all wrong when I tried, but now I’m going to start writing again.”

  “It’s funny, but you sounded just like Jorb when he’s teaching martial arts,” Julie told the author. “He always stresses that the most important part of fighting is what comes in between all the strikes and blocks.”

  “You know Jorb?” Marilla asked. “He went to the Open University with me and my friends. Is he still chasing that pretty choral teacher?”

  “Rinka, I take lessons from her. And he’s caught her, kind of, but I guess they have a lot of dating rules.”

  “Not as many as the Frunge,” the Horten girl said, and that seemed to remind her of something. “How about world-building?” she asked Bianca. “How do you balance between going on and on describing the settings and only providing as much information as the plot demands? I’ve read detective novels where it seemed like every object the author took the time to describe turned up later as a clue or a murder weapon.”

  “One-dimensional objects can be easier to spot than one-dimensional characters because they don’t have any lines to distract you from their purpose,” Bianca said. “On the other hand, the only writer I ever heard of who described every part of life with equal weight was a crackpot autobiographer who recorded his waking hours for decades. Do you think anybody wanted to read it? He thought he would leave an invaluable record for future historians, but I can’t imagine they’ll have any interest in somebody who sat around all day writing about how he felt about writing.”

  “We’re here,” Marilla declared suddenly. “That didn’t feel like fifteen minutes at all.”

  “I visited Union Station the last two times Flower stopped here,” Julie said. “Are we at the main travel concourse?”

  “The rental agency is in Mac’s Bones, that’s where you should tell the lift tube to bring you when you’re ready to leave. I’ll point you in the right direction, and you can either ask for Abs House or Blythe. The station librarian will know who you’re talking about and have the lift tube bring you to the right deck.”

  Apparently, the station librarian also alerted Blythe they were on their way, because the publisher was waiting in front of the lift tube when Bianca and Julie exited.

  “Thank you for coming, Bianca, and you must be Julie,” Blythe greeted them. “I sort of have the advantage of you, Julie, because my husband is the director of EarthCent Intelligence and your name came up quite a bit around a year back.”

  “Thank you for all the help,” Julie said. “The captain told me that you sort of financed EarthCent Intelligence and Flower’s mission.”

  “EarthCent Intelligence, yes, though it’s almost profitable at this point, but Flower is heavily subsidized by the Stryx,” Blythe said. She made small talk about their trip in the rental and led them down a corridor and past a guard into a small conference room. “There, we’re in a secure meeting room, which means only half of the alien intelligence agencies on the station have the technology required to eavesdrop. Can I get either of you something to drink? Did you think about my proposition, Bianca?”

  “The advance offer was quite generous, but the devil is in the details,” the author said. She seemed a bit flustered by the fact that Blythe was alone. “I don’t want to sound paranoid, but do you have a team of lawyers somewhere ready to pounce?”

  “I don’t blame you for thinking about publishers that way,” Blythe said. “Translating books by human authors for alien readers is a new business for Abs House, so I thought I’d start by asking a few of the authors we’re approaching what you’d like to see in your contracts. I’m not offering you carte blanche,” she added hastily. “The economics on our side are largely constrained by what alien publishers are willing to pay since we’re using a partnership model to get distribution, but we have plenty of room to discuss subsidiary rights and the like. Your English rights obviously stay with you.”

  “Action figures? Immersive rights? Anime adaptations?”

  “Some of the alien publishers we partner with require audiobook rights in their languages, but that’s about it,” Blythe said. “They initially asked for more, but I pointed out that they don’t give up any of the other rights when we translate their books into English, and that sort of shamed them into cooperating for the time being.”

  The conference room door slid open, and a tall man walked in explaining the shortcomings of the room’s security over his shoulder to a younger man, who turned out to be Bill.

  “Sorry,” the tall man said. “I didn’t know you were using the secure room.”

 
“My husband, Clive,” Blythe introduced him to her guests. “This is Bianca and Julie. The witness-protection-program Julie.”

  “What are you doing here?” Julie asked Bill, who had followed Clive into the room.

  “Can I tell her?” he asked Clive.

  “Go ahead. I don’t imagine she’s a security risk,” the director of EarthCent Intelligence said with a smile.

  “I’m here to be debriefed,” Bill said. “The captain didn’t mention that when I agreed to work for the Sharf, I would be expected to report to EarthCent Intelligence. I guess I’m kind of a double agent now.”

  Fourteen

  “They seem to have put us next to each other,” Bianca said. She stared balefully at her name card at the head table on the raised platform at the front of the banquet hall. “Just because I agreed to work with you doesn’t mean you’re forgiven.”

  “What did I ever do to you?” Geoffrey demanded.

  “You hurt Sixth is what you did to me, and you ruined her bestselling series. You were her model for the soldier-poet in Mercenary Hearts and she couldn’t write it anymore after you walked out.”

  “But I didn’t even do a full hitch in the mercenaries, and I certainly would have remembered if I had ever saved an empire or even just a princess. What was the hero’s name again?”

  “Abraham,” Bianca said. “He was strong, yet vulnerable, handsome without being pretty. After being orphaned and raised by pirates, he had enough conflicts to make him interesting, but he was loyal to a fault and he never would have walked out on Ophelia. After you left, Sixth ended the series with Abraham forced to abandon ship in one of those lifeboat stasis pods. The lifeboat’s transponder was defective, and since she never wrote another romance, he’s still out there floating around interstellar space in suspended animation. It’s lucky she had already recruited me or the D’Arc line would have died out.”

  “Abraham wasn’t a man, he was an ideal that I couldn’t live up to,” Geoffrey protested. “I used to get up every morning and do a hundred sit-ups just to try to recover the shadow lines between my abdominal muscles. You think that was fun for a man in his fifties?”

  “And you didn’t know that Sixth starved herself to fit into those stylized Vergallian fashions you always admired? It’s a lot harder for a woman to keep her figure than a man.”

  A bot dressed in the ship’s livery floated up in front of them and inquired, “Chicken or beef?”

  “No fish?” Bianca asked.

  “I got so many requests for vegetarian meals that it’s all dressed up tofu tonight,” the bot replied in Flower’s voice. “I can shape it like a fish if you want.”

  “Beef is fine,” she said.

  “You don’t have to dress it up for me,” Geoffrey said. “I take my tofu straight.”

  “You’re doing it again,” Bianca complained as the bot floated off. “That’s so like something Abraham would have said. Sixth really loved you.”

  Geoffrey flinched, and for a moment, he looked almost as old as he had on his first night on board Flower. “Maybe I got scared,” he finally admitted, struggling to meet Bianca’s eyes. “You need to keep your edge in the writing game and Sixth was making me soft. She was too good for me, and then when the royalties for Mercenary Hearts started flowing in—”

  “You asked her for money?” Bianca looked shocked.

  “No! The opposite. I had overextended myself trying to produce a game based on my War College series, the dumbest thing I ever did, and she offered me money. Offered ME money! I used to be the top author in the Space Marines genre and she was bringing in more money than I was.” Geoffrey stopped suddenly and put his hand to his forehead. “Gods, was I really that stupid?”

  “Apparently you were. Did you actually leave because you couldn’t stand being with a woman who was more successful than you were?”

  He took a sip from his water glass, and Bianca couldn’t help but notice a tremor in his hand. “You know, I had a lot of time to think about all the mistakes I made in my life while I was locked up. It was more like reliving those years in an unending dream sequence, thanks to all of the drugs they were putting in my food. But even then I couldn’t be honest with myself about the biggest mistake I ever made. It was just my stupid pride. That’s what ended my first marriage too, when it turned out my stint in the mercenaries had left me sterile.”

  “Why didn’t you just talk to Sixth? Why did she have to wake up to a note on the dresser?”

  “Would Abraham have told what’s-her-name that playing the consort role to her princess was making him feel small?”

  “Ophelia, and don’t try to worm out of it.” Bianca glared at the old author, but either he was a better actor than she remembered, or he was already beating himself up more than she could. “Let’s just drop it for now,” she said with a sigh. “You have to do the intro after dinner and I don’t want you weeping on the microphone.”

  “First rule of being a military science fiction author,” he said, dabbing at the corner of his eye with his suit sleeve. “Never let them see you cry.”

  Another bot floated past the table ladling fruit salad in the bowls that were part of every place setting and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. Soon after the main course arrived, followed by apple pie with a choice of frozen yogurt or vanilla ice cream for dessert. Then the lights over the floor of the banquet room dimmed slightly, and a spot illuminated the lectern placed to the right of the head table.

  Geoffrey moved slowly to the lectern, adjusted the old-fashioned microphone he had requested, and blew into it, causing the audio engineers in the audience to flinch. “Testing. Of course, it works. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking of NewCon,” somebody called out. “I saw you give the keynote there thirty years ago, and when you touched the microphone, the fire alarm went off.”

  “Ah, yes. And a noisy fan in my room’s ventilation system kept me from sleeping, but that’s what you get at those old New York hotels. I hope you all enjoyed your vegetarian meals,” Geoffrey continued, “and for those of you who are wondering, there is a cash bar, but it won’t be open until after this evening’s entertainment.”

  “Where have you been the last ten years?” somebody else called out.

  “Let’s just say I was on a retreat, but now I have the big guns on my side and I’ll be advancing again.”

  “Are you moderating any sessions?” somebody closer to the stage asked. “I want to see you roast some newbie butt.”

  “I don’t do that sort of thing anymore,” the old author said. “I learned quite a few things about myself in, er, on retreat, and I’m trying to put the old Geoffrey Harstang behind me. I’ll no longer be pointing out to new authors that the seasons in the southern hemisphere on Earth run opposite those in the northern hemisphere, or that diving a ship into a black hole is not a reasonable method of escaping pursuit.”

  Geoffrey waited a moment for the brief round of laughter and snorting to die out before taking a hand-written index card out of his pocket.

  “MultiCon is proud to present Grynlan and the Grenouthian, just back from their second galactic tour. We were lucky—”

  “You can sit now,” interrupted the fast-moving alien who looked like an enormous bunny. The new arrival used a gentle belly bump to move the old author away from the lectern. “I’m the Grenouthian, and he,” the bunny pointed dramatically at a Verlock shuffling slowly across the stage, “is Grynlan. Normally, the last place the two of us would want to spend our time off is talking to a bunch of Humans, but—”

  “Money,” the Verlock bellowed.

  “—the money was so good we couldn’t refuse. In the interest of getting this over with as quickly as possible, I’m going to skip the bit about how we’re glad to be here, which we aren’t, and jump right to the jokes. A mathematician walks into a bar and gets into an argument with a physicist about the shape of the multiverse membrane. The bartender says—what now?” the Grenouthian broke off w
hen his partner finally drew near and poked the bunny in the shoulder.

  “Humans,” Grynlan said in a slow stage whisper. “They don’t get math humor.”

  “Then what are we going to do for an hour? I suppose I could dust off the old ‘How many Humans does it take to…’ jokes that I tell to the other species. If these people get offended, that’s their problem.”

  “‘How many Humans’ requires math,” the bulky Verlock pointed out to his partner.

  “Then it’s going to have to be improv. Can I get some volunteers up here? How about everybody sitting at table number three? You’re all funny-looking, so at least we have that going for us.”

  “Do we have to come up on the stage?” a woman at table three asked.

  “Unless you have a personal holographic projector. No? I didn’t think so. Hop to it,” the bunny demanded, stamping his foot to speed them up. “What do you think, Grynlan? Have you ever seen a less-likely looking bunch of panel participants in your life?”

  “Poor material,” the Verlock concurred as the guests took the stage and stood facing the audience. “Moderator?”

  “Right. I’m going to have you people form a panel discussion for our little improv because I doubt you know how to do anything else. We’re going to need a moderator so how about you?” the Grenouthian asked, pointing at the woman who hadn’t wanted to get on stage.

  “I’ve moderated over a hundred sessions at—”

  “A simple ‘yes’ would have been sufficient,” he interrupted. “Now what is the panel going to be about?” he asked, massaging his furry chin between his thumb and forefinger.

  “Artificial Intelligence,” the Verlock suggested.