Business Secrets from the Stars

by David Dvorkin

  Mr. Umbral — he hated being called Mr. U. — had connections.

  He left the family compound immediately and flew to Los Angeles, where he met with some Disney people. They showed him their newest innovation, and it pleased him greatly. It reminded him of the old days, even though the artisans of those times had possessed skills modern man had yet to rediscover. Still, it was a start. He made his needs clear to the group of modern craftsmen. They expressed some doubts, but they were flattered by his confidence and the importance of his commission, and so they agreed.

  Next, Mr. Umbral flew to London and met with a different group of craftsmen. These worked for Madame Tussaud’s. They, too, were flattered by Umbral’s compliments and at being asked to participate in something so novel and important.

  Finally, Umbral headed for home. Along the way, he stopped in New York, where he spoke to officials in the city’s child welfare agency and arrived at arrangements satisfactory to both him and them.

  While Umbral paid attention to family values, Daddy paid attention to other aspects of Jibber’s image. Cute was good, and his boy had the cute part down pat, but Daddy was sure that that wasn’t enough. Jibber would need an appropriate image, something that would push the right emotional buttons in the electorate.

  Religion usually worked.

  Daddy set about training Jibber to simper and raise his eyes to Heaven whenever he heard the word “God.” Unfortunately, Jibber couldn’t distinguish between words with a similar sound. So while he learned to simper and look at the ceiling when he heard the word “God,” he also simpered and looked up when he heard “dog” or “log” or “bod.” That last one actually made some sense to Daddy, but he feared the public might not agree.

  Scratch religion, then.

  How about jingoism?

  The public had always been quick to confuse excessive nationalism with patriotism and xenophobia with love of country. Any politician worth his salt knew that fact and exploited it constantly. The trick was not to go overboard. Even the American public could be pushed too far. You couldn’t do something too obvious, such as wear a U.S. flag tie like some kind of used-car salesman. And while Daddy had a mental image of little Jibber wearing a Roman toga with stars and stripes all over it, like some kind of American emperor, he knew that would never fly. You had to wrap yourself in the flag symbolically, not literally.

  Scratch jingoism.

  No, he would have to be more subtle. More indirect. Strike the right balance, and you could be as absurd as you wanted to be, and Americans wouldn’t even realize that their buttons were being pushed.

  After casting about and looking at some popular magazines, Daddy settled on an old, reliable bit of fakery: the cowboy trail.

  Daddy had a little cowboy hat and a little cowboy suit and a little cowboy hat and a little pair of cowboy boots custom made for his hairy little boy. Fortunately, Jibber took to them immediately. He only had to be shown once how to wear everything, and after that, he was rarely to be found wearing anything else, except for those days that he reverted to type and wore nothing at all.

  The little cap-firing six guns were an even greater success. It reached the point that Grammy had to forbid Jibber to fire them in the house. The sound was giving her a headache.

  The only failure was the horse.

  Daddy took all three brothers to a stable whose owner could be trusted to keep his mouth shut and introduced them to the cowboy’s best friend.

  Jebber and Jabber disappeared immediately. Fortunately, they had scampered back to the car and hidden under it, and Daddy found them there later.

  Jibber wasn’t quite so swift. He stared at the horse, trying to figure out what this creature was. It wasn’t a lion or baboon or leopard or anything else he knew he was scared of, so for the moment, he remained calm.

  Then Daddy scooped him up and set him atop the saddle.

  The horse shifted impatiently under him.

  Jibber froze in terror.

  Then he unfroze.

  Rather, his bowels and his bladder unfroze. They unfroze so explosively that his little cowboy pants burst open in the front and the rear. The back of the cowboy’s best friend was covered by the monkey’s worst products.

  The horse shook himself in violent disgust and turned his head around, fixing Jibber with an evil glare out of one eye.

  Jibber leaped off the horse and zipped away after his brothers.

  Daddy backed away quickly from the horse, who had now turned his evil glare on him. He turned and followed his three little cowboys’ dusty trail out to the parking lot. Tomorrow he would tell the stable owner to have the horse taken away and shot. That’d teach him.

  Oh, well, Daddy thought. The kid can still pretend to be a cowboy. Reality doesn’t matter in this game.

  Six months after his trip, Umbral introduced Daddy and Jibber and Grammy to the new Mrs. Jibber Longlegs and Jibber’s and her two adorable children. Daddy was charmed, Grammy pretended to be charmed, and Jibber was bewildered.

  “Allow me to introduce,” Mr. Umbral said, “Tess.”

  On cue, a pretty young woman walked in from an adjoining room.

  “More precisely,” he added, “Tess Longlegs. Mrs. Jibber Longlegs. I have already created a good pedigree and personal history for her.” He held up a looseleaf binder that looked quite full. “If you approve. We can change it, of course.”

  “Satisfactory,” Daddy said. “Sure it is. Always is. You did a fine job with the three boys.”

  Grammy frowned doubtfully. She stepped up to the young woman and examined her carefully. “Tess, you say?”

  “Yes,” the young woman said. “Ma’am.” She paused, then added, “Honored. To. Be. Your. Daughter. In. Law.” Another pause. “Ma’am.”

  “Why does she talk that way?” Grammy asked.

  Daddy had understood right away. “Suitable,” he said. “Suitable. But Umbral, why not... Well, you know.”

  Umbral nodded. “Why not human?” He gestured with his chin toward Jibber.

  Daddy squinted at his oldest boy, who wasn’t really a boy at all, of course. For a moment, the illusion he had managed to convince even himself of fell away and he saw the little simian as he really was. “Ah. Yes. All right.”

  Grammy continued to examine her new daughter-in-law. “Oh, Hell,” she said finally. She had accepted the three little simian brothers as her sons, so she supposed she could learn to accept this Tess person. At least she was human.

  “Mr. U.,” Daddy said suddenly, as usual not seeing the faint hint of a grimace that crossed Umbral’s face at the sound of the hated nickname, “a wife is good. Politician needs kids, though. Cute ones. Told you that before.”

  Umbral smiled slightly. “Oh, yes,” he said. Often, it was hard to tell that Mr. Umbral was smiling. His ancient internal machinery was slowly breaking down. In general, it didn’t interfere with his efficient performance of his duties as chief Longlegs family retainer. The only visible side effect was that problem with his mouth, the left corner of which was slowly edging upward. Behind his back, some of the junior family retainers had taken to referring to him as “Mr. Sneer.” They thought he had no way of knowing about this. They were wrong. Mr. Umbral had long ago perfected the art of biding his time.

  Still wearing his faint smile, he vanished into the room from which Tess had emerged. A moment later, he returned, leading two small girls by the hand.

  The kidlings were about five or six years old. They were dressed in frilly dresses and shiny patent leather shoes, their hair was shoulder length and curly, and they glared at everyone.

  “New York’s finest,” Mr. Umbral announced. “I’ve named them Bip and Bop. Those are working names only. I’m sure you’ll come up with something better.”

  “Hmm,” Daddy said. “Like it. Fits with the J-J-J pattern for the boys. Bip and Bop. Yep. Those’re their names.”

  Daddy and Grammy approached cautiously, trying to ooh and aah. These were wild kids, though. They curled bac
k their lips and snarled, and the elder Longlegs were a bit scared of them. “Okay,” Daddy said. “Enough with the grandparent crap. Take ’em away. Keep ’em in the nursery. Jibber, come here. Make nice with your new wife.”

  “He. Is. A. Cute. Little. Monkey.”

  When Tess said that, Grammy warmed to her a bit. Daddy warmed to her a lot. This was the kind of political wife a potential President needed! He watched with approval as Tess grabbed Jibber’s hand in an unbreakable grip and dragged him away.

  Jibber twisted his head around and looked at Daddy as though begging for rescue.

  Daddy smiled and nodded encouragingly. “Time the boy grew up,” he said to Grammy.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” Grammy said. “Suddenly, I feel like breaking out the handcuffs.”

  Mr. Umbral felt a tiny stirring of doubt. He straightened his back. “I am determined that everything will go correctly this time,” he told the family sternly. “I’m not going to repeat the mistakes I made with the Hapsburgs.”

  “The who?” Daddy said.

  “Do they live over in Bar Harbor?” Grammy asked uncertainly.

  Umbral grimaced and rubbed his chest. He wondered if he needed some work in there already. He also wondered if he had chosen the wrong family yet again.

  He decided not to bother explaining about the Hapsburgs. He would press on, grimly doing his duty, no matter what. Head held high, he left the room.

  Grammy pulled Daddy up the staircase to the master suite.

  While Grammy and Daddy set about making sub-dom whoopee, Tess led Jibber into the bedroom she had been told was theirs. She locked the door behind them.

  Jibber shrank back against the door.

  Tess yanked her clothes off and stood naked before her lord and master. As wax-covered robots went, she was not unattractive.

  She waited expectantly.

  Jibber hugged the safety of the door.

  Memory stirred in Tess’s brain circuits. She heard Mr. Umbral’s voice explaining, “We have had to make some assumptions about the mating habits of the unknown species to which the three J boys belong, based on the ways of other, presumably related, African animals. We have colored your appropriate parts in what we hope is a suitable manner. You should turn your back to him, bend over, and, er, present yourself. Nature will then take its somewhat unnatural course.”

  Tess followed those instructions. She turned and bent, pointing her rear end toward Jibber.

  Jibber was filled with images of the females of his rare species. For a moment, he closed his eyes and imagined he was back among the scrubby trees of the veld. Safe in the branches, the cheerful females used to turn, bend over, and present their swollen red genitals to him. Jibber and his three brothers would shriek with glee and launch themselves upon the willing hairy little babes, commencing a night and a day and a night and a day and a night of delight.

  Sniffling slightly, smiling nostalgically, he opened his eyes.

  What he saw was rather larger than he remembered. And considerably less hairy. And the smell was odd. And it wasn’t red. It was blue. At the center of the blue was a large white star. At the center of the star was an arrow pointing to the target.

  Jibber burst into tears.

  Tess waggled her star-imprinted loins at him.

  Jibber straightened his back. He didn’t understand much of what had happened to him since he’d been snatched away from his happy albeit lion-infested homeland and brought to this often horrifying place, but he felt a lot of warmth toward Daddy and Grammy Longlegs for their kindness to him and his brothers, and he enjoyed the act he had been taught to perform involving cowboy boots and six guns, and moreover he understood that Daddy wanted him to pretend to regard this terrifying creature as a female of his own species, and finally he was awfully, awfully good at pretending, and so he steeled himself and tried to do what had to be done.

  He pulled off his cowboy boots.

  He untied the leather laces that held his chaps in place and let the chaps fall to the floor.

  He flung away his little Stetson.

  He unbuckled the heavy belt that held his holstered, pearl-handled cap guns and let it slide down his legs.

  He unzipped his sturdy jeans.

  He unbuttoned his cowboy shirt and peeled it off.

  He pulled down his pants and stepped out of them.

  Naked, he advanced upon his mate.

  Tess wiggled again.

  Jibber paused, steeled himself, and moved forward again.

  He felt himself stiffening and looked down and was surprised to see just how erected he was. Poor unlettered little simian, he was unacquainted with the ancient tradition of humans mating with beasts. For that matter, he had no idea that he was about to write a new chapter in those pornographic annals by becoming a beast who mated with a wax-covered animatronic machine.

  Disney and Tussaud’s had done their work well. The appearance and odor of the starry end of Tess were real enough that Jibber finally gave a cry of delight and triumph and leaped upon her, thrusting himself deep inside her.

  Relatively speaking. He was rather small compared to her. He found himself straddling her like, well, like a cowboy straddling a horse. His feet were a foot off the floor. His penis, while enclosed entirely inside her, wasn’t actually all that far in. Nonetheless, he did his determined best, holding onto her haunches with both hands and thrusting away valiantly.

  Unlike the hairy little enthusiasts of his native land, Tess remained immobile.

  Jibber’s enthusiasm began to fade, and his movements became slower. Closing his eyes and thinking of Africa, he forced himself into rapid motion again and concluded triumphantly. He gibbered in high-pitched delight as his masculine juices shot out of him into the fairly good imitation of a human woman.

  Exhausted, Jibber slid out and off. He landed on the floor in a crouch, dazed, confused, exhausted.

  Tess straightened and turned around. She looked down at her husband. Jibber looked up at her. Her mouth expanded into a smile simulation. “Thank. You. Jibber,” she said. Her metallic teeth glinted. She leaned down toward him, probably intending to simulate a kiss but looking as though she meant to eat him.

  Jibber shrieked in terror and sprang away. He scampered up the expensive drapes beside the huge window, zippety zip, lickety split, as fast as any little simian ever did. He balanced for a moment on the heavy-duty curtain rod, testing his footing, then sprang a full fifteen feet to the fan rotating lazily in the middle of the ceiling.

  Hanging onto one blade by his fingertips, going around slowly in a circle, Jibber stared down in horror at the creature he had just mated with. He gibbered even more meaninglessly than usual. His bowels loosened, and chimpy feces showered down on Tess and the expensive carpet beneath her.

  The door opened and Mr. Umbral walked in. He looked the scene over, wrinkling his nose in disgust. At times like these, he really missed the Inquisition.

  * * * * *

  CHAPTER THREE

  Oh, Starspawn of my star-begotten loins! How like unto a god art thou! How divine thy needs and wishes and desires, and how debased thine enemies and those who stand in thy way and keep thee from what thou deservest! Heed me, O distant descendant: you deserve it, they owe it to you, so grab it, and let no one stop you!

  — Lukas of Aldebaran, stardwelling Merskeenian, as transcribed by Malcolm Erskine, after what might perhaps have been a few too many beers

  The successful writers Malcolm had met had about them a lordliness, a self-assurance, an overly evident awareness of being at the top of the heap, that always drove him up the wall. It would have been bad enough if he had considered any of them his moral and intellectual superiors. Perhaps then he could have excused their superior manner. Most of them, though, were in his eyes measly scum.

  Sometimes he wondered if they really had that air about them or if he was imagining it, creating it whole cloth out of his envy. But most of the time he didn’t care whether they had that air or not. He just w
anted to get there himself, to reach the point where Malcolm Erskine could look down his nose at anybody he chose to, and anyone observing him would say, “That’s Malcolm Erskine. He’s such a rich, famous, powerful writer that he’s earned the right to look down his nose at anyone he wants to.”

  Malcolm already had his candidates for lofty nasal observation picked out.

  Joe Hoffman, for example: fellow Piketonian, fellow science-fiction author, fellow alumnus of Indiana University, at one time even fellow computer programmer for Western Bell. That was all they had in common, though. Hoffman was up to about a dozen books vs. Malcolm’s three. Hoffman had been the guest of honor at a couple of major science-fiction conventions, whereas Malcolm had yet to be invited even to pay his own way to a single one. Hoffman seemed to getting somewhere, edging toward real literary success, while Malcolm was still mired in the mid-list, perhaps forever. Hoffman had a sexy wife and a happy marriage, whereas Malcolm had memories of Marlene, the girl of his nightmares. Hoffman was self-confident and possessed considerable presence in public, but Malcolm was inundated by self-doubts and self-criticisms and could never hide that from others. In short, in Malcolm’s view, Hoffman had been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Malcolm with his foot in his.

  Which part of all of that was the worst? Malcolm couldn’t decide. Perhaps it was the guest of honor thing.

  How he dreamed of being one some day! He imagined himself walking among the adoring fans, bestowing a gracious smile or two. Not too many. Keep them in their place.