The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  And then I notice that there’s something going on with her eyes. I thought they were blue at first, but now I realize that the borders of her irises are shifting, and they’re shifting through the same spectrum as the threads in her hair.

  I had been paying so much attention to what she was saying that I hadn’t been looking at the image.

  Image, I think. Now I understand what she’s trying to do. I was wrong about her all along.

  I call my parents. My mom is 140 years old, and my dad is 87, so even though they don’t look much older than me, they have a hard time remembering what it was like to be young. But they’re smart— Mom is a professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the College of Mystery, and Dad is vice president of marketing for Hanan—and they’re both good at strategy.

  My dad advises me not to try responding to Kimmie directly. “You’re a lot more famous than she is,” he points out. “If you get involved in a he-said-she-said situation, you’re both legitimizing her arguments and putting her on an equal plane with yourself. It’s what she wants, so don’t play her game.”

  “I never liked Kimmie,” my mom begins.

  Hearing my mom speak of Kimmie in that tone makes me want to jump to Kimmie’s defense. But that would be idiotic so I don’t say anything.

  Mom thinks for a moment. “What you should do is be nice to her,” she said. “Saint Paul said that doing good for your enemy is like pouring hot coals on her head.”

  “A saint said that?”

  My mom smiled. “He was a pretty angry saint.”

  The more I thought about Mom’s idea, the more I liked it.

  I decided to order up a bucket of hot coals.

  I became famous more or less by accident. Forming a flashpack was one of the things my friends and I decided to do when we were thirteen, for no more reason than we were looking for something to do and the technology was just sitting there waiting for us to use it. And, of course, everyone and his brother (and his uncles and aunts) were flashcasting, too. Our first flashcasts were about as amateurish and useless as you would expect. But we got better, and after a while the public, which is to say millions of my peers, began to respond.

  What the public responded to was me, which I didn’t understand and still don’t. I would have thought that if people liked anyone, it would have been Ludmila or Tony—Ludmila was much more glamorous, and Tony had led a much more interesting life. But no—I became the star and they didn’t.

  The others in the pack either accepted the situation or faded away. I think I’m still friends with the ones who left, but I don’t see them very often. Being famous has a way of taking you away from one world and putting you in another.

  In flashcast after flashcast it turned out that I was good at only one thing, which was explaining to other people what it’s like to be me. In our world, where there are very few young people, that turns out to be an important skill.

  Kids are pretty thin on the ground. I have a parent who’s over a hundred and who looks maybe twenty-five, and who is essentially immortal. If something happens to the body she’s in, she’ll be reloaded from one of dozens of backups stored on Earth or in space. She won’t die as long as our civilization survives.

  Neither will anyone else. That doesn’t leave a lot of room on Earth for children.

  In order to have me, my parents had to pay a hefty tax, in order to pay for the resources I’d be consuming as I grew up, and then demonstrate that they had the financial wherewithal to support me until I could earn my own living. Financial resources like that take decades to build. That’s why my parents couldn’t have children when they were younger.

  So by the time they had me, my parents had pretty well forgotten what it was like to be young. My friends’ parents weren’t young either. We were a very few kids trapped in a world of the very old. I regularly hear from kids who are the only person in their town under the age of sixty.

  Sometimes it’s good to know that you aren’t the only kid out there. Sometimes we have to have help to remind us who we are. Sometimes it’s good to have someone to aid you with all the rituals of growing up, the problems of dealing with friends and rivals, the difficulties of courtship, the decisions of what body to wear and what shoes to wear with it. It’s good to have a friend you can count on.

  Well, boys and girls, that friend is me.

  Q: Do we really have to play gorillaball naked?

  A: We tried it in darling little blue velvet suits with knickers, but the lacy cuffs got all spoiled.

  Next day, the pack meets so that we can practice gorillaball. It’s a game that we—mostly me—invented, so now we’re sort of obliged to play it.

  Our team is called the Stars. Because, let’s face it, we are.

  We practice in the hills up above Oakland, natural gorilla country. The air is heavy with the scents of the genetically modified tropical blossoms that stabilize the hillsides. We crash through bushes, smash into each other with big meaty thuds, rollick up and down trees, and scamper over the occasional building that finds itself in the way. The birds are stunned into a terrified silence. It’s a good practice and we end up with our fur covered with dust and debris.

  For a while I forget about Kimmie.

  We’ve got grain cameras floating in the air the whole time and everything is uploaded, available for anyone interested in the gorill-aball experience. Shawn will edit the thing tomorrow and make a more or less coherent story out of it. We keep uploading as all fifteen of us pile onto the roof of a tram and head back to our clubhouse, waving to people on the street and hanging over the edge of the tram roof to make faces at the passengers.

  Our pack headquarters is in the Samaritain, which is a hotel and which gives us the suite free, because the owners of the apartment like the publicity we bring them. We jump off the tram and bound over the pointed iron fence into the pool area, where we splash around until we get the dust out of our fur, and then we lie in the sun and groom each other till we’re dry.

  You don’t want to smell wet gorilla fur if you don’t have to. That’s one reason for the grooming. The other is social. We’re a pack, after all, and packs do things together.

  The grain cameras are still floating around us, maybe a hundred of them, each the size of a grain of rice. No single camera delivers an acceptable image, but once the images are enhanced and jigsawed together by a computer, you have a comprehensive picture. We’re still flashcasting, and for some reason the world is still interested. The splice on my optic nerve tells me that a couple hundred thousand people are watching us as we comb through one another’s hair.

  Mostly I groom Lisa. I don’t know her as well as I know the others, because she’s a year younger and new to the pack. She’s a member because her older cousin Anatole has been part of the group from the beginning, and he made a special request. He’s the brash, self-confident one . . . and Lisa’s not. That’s about all I know about her, aside from the rumor that she’s supposed to be some kind of genius with electronics—even more so than the rest of us, I mean. So I figure it’s time I get to know her better.

  As I comb through the fur on her shoulders, I ask her about what she’s studying.

  “Lots of things,” she says. “But I’m really getting interested in cultural hermeneutics.”

  Which produced a pause in the conversation, as you might imagine. I imagined tens of thousands of simultaneous calls on online dictionaries demanding a definition of hermeneutics.

  “So, what makes that interesting for you?” I say.

  “It tells you who created a thing,” Lisa says, “and why, and what tools were used, and how it relates to other things that were created. And—” She flapped her hands. “You know, I’m not saying this well.”

  “Give an example,” I urge, because I figured my audience was getting lost.

  “Well, look at the headplay Mooncakes. It helps to know that it’s a rewrite of an earlier work called The Prodigal, and that in the original the character of Doctor Yau was a par
ody of a politician of that period named Coswell. And that the character of Hollyhock has to do with a fad of that time called mindslipping, where people deliberately inserted a shunt between the right and left sides of their brain, and programmed it to randomly shift dominance from one to the other.”

  “So,” I say, “that’s why half the time she’s talking like a machine, and the rest of the time her dialogue sounds like some kind of poetry.”

  “Right,” Lisa says. “But people had given up mindslipping by the time Mooncakes was released, so much of the audience wouldn’t understand the character of Hollyhock at all. So instead of Hollyhock being a comment on a contemporary phenomenon, she was just played for laughs in the remake. And though the Doctor Yau character was more or less the same as the original, the references to Coswell are lost.”

  “Maybe I’ll download it and viddie it again with all that in mind.”

  “I wouldn’t bother.” She shrugs. “I didn’t think it was that good the first time.” She looks up at me. “I’d better fix the hair on your head,” she says. “If it dries that way, you’ll look like Vashti the Dwad for the rest of the day.”

  She crouches behind me and begins to comb my hair. “So it’s flashplays you’re interested in?” I ask.

  “Not usually. Hermeneutics can analyze any artifact—a book, a video, a building. Any cultural phenomenon. The idea is that you start with the phenomenon and work backward to try to figure out the people and the culture that produced it.”

  I looked at her. “You could analyze me,” I said.

  “I could,” she said. “But why? You’re one of the most analyzed phenomena in the world. Anything I could say has already been said.”

  “I hope not.”

  She lowered her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. I know. But people say things anyway, even if they’re not new.”

  I shake myself and roll onto my feet and knuckles. I take a breath. What I say now is crucial.

  “So, has anyone seen Kimmie’s flashcast?” I ask.

  Just about everyone raises their hands. Lisa didn’t, I notice.

  “Let’s watch it together,” I say. I look at Lisa and wink at her. “See if she has anything new to say.”

  We roll into the clubhouse. The furniture creaks under our huge gorilla bodies.

  People put on headsets or visors or pull their video capes from out of their pockets, and I tell video walls and the holographic projectors to turn on, and then I look up Kimmie’s flashcast and play it. Suddenly Kimmie is everywhere in the room, her image repeated on practically every surface. It’s overwhelming.

  My breath catches in my throat. I’ve watched the flash enough times so that I think I’ve immunized myself, but apparently I’m wrong. A horrible sense of dread seeps into my veins.

  So we watch the flash. There’s a lot of groaning and laughter as Kimmie offers her revelations. I begin to feel the dread fade. This is a lot better than watching it alone.

  By the end people get raucous, and Kimmie’s final statements are drowned out by denunciations.

  “Hey,” I say. “Let’s not get angry! This is still someone I have feelings about.” I give what I hope is a wise nod. “I know what we should do.”

  We should pour a bucket of coals on Kimmie’s head.

  “We should all send a message to Kimmie telling her that we love her,” I say, “and that we understand her problems.” I picture Kimmie’s message buffer filling with millions of messages from my audience.

  “And while you’re at it,” I say with a wink, “tell her that you really like that thing she did with her eyes.”

  If you’re not gorilla, you’re just vanilla.

  After we’d sent our messages to Kimmie, I ask if anyone has any questions. I’m kind of nervous so I roll to my left, end the roll on my feet, and then roll back to my right.

  Simple gymnastics are one of the great things about being a gorilla. I’m going to miss that when I’m back in a standard human body.

  Cody raises a hand. “Were you really mad at Albert that time?” she asks.

  Everybody sort of laughs.

  “No,” I say. “I was amused. Kimmie was kind of mad at him, though, so maybe she thought I was mad at him, too.”

  Take that.

  I do some somersaults on the Samaritain’s deep pile carpets. “Anything else?” I ask.

  “Okay,” Errol says. “Everyone wants to know if you really took money for wearing the gorilla body.”

  “I’m not going to answer that right away,” I say. I roll to my left, then to my right. It’s important that I get this right.

  “What I want to do is ask another question,” I say. “Now, Errol, you’ve got your visor on, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “And what brand is your visor?”

  He blinked. “Esquiline,” he says.

  “You like it? You think it’s a good visor?”

  He shrugs his huge ape shoulders. “I guess,” he says.

  “What if I offered you money for wearing the visor? Would you take it?”

  Errol looks at me. “But I’m already wearing it,” he says.

  “So, what if I offered to pay you for what you’re already wearing? Would you take the money?”

  He raises his shaggy eyebrows. “All I have to do is wear it?”

  “Right.”

  “I guess I’d take the money, yeah. If that’s all there was to it.”

  “Okay.” I look up into the corner of the room where we’ve got a camera, and with my visor I tell the camera to zoom in on my face so that I can look right at my audience of millions.

  “What would you do?” I ask.

  “You’ve had an eight percent drop in your audience in the last six weeks,” my father says.

  I put down my forkful of chicken in Hunan sauce.

  “It’s a blip,” I tell him. “It’s the part of the Demographic that wasn’t interested in being a gorilla.”

  “The gorilla thing was a mistake,” my father says.

  Wearily, I agree that the gorilla thing was a misstep.

  Wearily, I eat my Hunan chicken.

  “The problem is that there aren’t any great clothes to wear with a gorilla body,” my dad says. “No designer’s dressing for the Silver-back. Baggy shorts and floppy tees, that’s all you had to work with. No wonder you couldn’t make it cool.”

  I wish I could get out of the gorilla body. But I can’t, not till after the last gorillaball game.

  What happened was that DNAble had sent a vice president to show me their new body lines. “The Silverback just isn’t moving like we thought it would,” she said. She looked at me. “It’s got a lot of unexplored potential. It just needs somebody like you to show everyone how much fun it could be.”

  I knew right away why the Silverback hadn’t become popular, reasons totally separate from the issue of how you fashionably clothe a hairy gorilla. If you want to be an ape, you’d pick a gibbon or a siamang or an orangutan, because those are the ones that can zoom hand-over-hand through the trees. Our pack had already been orangutans, and it was great.

  By comparison, gorillas just sort of sit there.

  But I needed to start something new. My audience was starting to get bored with my current round of parties and clubs and clothes.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. Already the first thoughts of gorilla-ball were stirring in my subconscious.

  The flattery worked—Only you can save us, Sanson!

  The VP looked at me again. “I’m authorized to offer you inducements,” she said. “If there’s a big uptick in gorilla body sales, we can arrange for a bonus.”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  But what really happened wasn’t quite what I told the pack by the pool. Real life is more complicated than you can express on video.

  “Want some more fish?” I ask my dad.

  “Thanks.”

  My dad’s body is tall and wiry and at home he dresses in khakis, v
ery immaculate, as if at any moment he might be called upon to sell something and need to look his best. He’s cooked this whole Chinese meal, with sticky rice in lotus leaves and a steamed fish and Hunan chicken and orange peel beef, and since my mom is delivering a lecture series in Milan, there’s only the two of us to eat it. Huge platters of food cover the antique oak table between us.

  Fortunately the gorilla body needs a lot of feeding.

  “We’ve got to figure out a way to grow the Demographic,” my dad says.

  “The Demographic” is what my dad, the marketing whiz, calls my audience. Every product, according to him, has a “demographic” that forms its natural consumers, and his job is to alert that demographic to the existence and alleged superiority of the product.

  By “product,” he means me.

  My dad’s audience has to be alerted by stealth. Nobody has to look at advertisements if they don’t want to. In my Media and Society classes, I learned that broadcast media used to be full of adverts, but they’re not anymore because people can download their entertainment from other sources. You see holograms and posters in stores and public places, but every other form of advertising has to be sneaky. It has to disguise itself as something else.

  My dad is a specialist in that kind of advertising.

  If you’re my age, you grow up suspicious. When you see something new, you wonder if it’s genuine or a camouflaged advertisement for something else.

  That’s why Kimmie’s revelation could be trouble for me. If I turn out to be nothing but an advertisement for DNAble, then the Demographic might never trust me again.

  The numbers are important because they can turn into money. Even though my flashcasts are given away free, I get paid for an occasional fashion shoot, or an interview, or for appearing on broadcast video. Darby’s Train and Let’s Watch Wang may be silly comedies, but they pay their guest stars very well.

  Fortunately I don’t have to do any acting on these programs. I appear as myself. I walk on and all this insane comedy happens around me and in the third act I deliver a few pearls of wisdom that solve the star’s problem.