Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  Again Lord turned away to eye the view. In the small private parking area just below the terrace, Hallward’s utilitarian van waited. “Graphics to the Stars” was painted on both side doors. Across from the van was a regal blue Maserati, and close beside that an infinitely more modest Volks. The owners of any vehicles parked here at this hour of the morning, Lord surmised, had more than likely slept here.

  To the west a great blur of high fog was still visible above the miles-distant Pacific, but the rest of the morning sky was as clear as a tourist’s idea of what sky ought to be like in Southern California. Disjointed segments of a freeway, acrawl with traffic, were visible between other hilltop houses in the middle distance.

  “Now, really announce us, you bastard,” Hallward grunted with soft rage, at the same moment presumably compelling obedience with a deft prod from the plastic stick in his fingers. Good programmers, Lord had observed, seldom got angry at their systems; Hallward was definitely an exception.

  This time an answer was forthcoming within seconds. “Be with you very shortly, gentlemen,” boomed a male voice, sounding genuinely human, over the terminal’s speaker. “Just settling up with the pedicurist.” That last word was followed by a sound that might have been the start of a laugh—it cut off too abruptly for Lord to be sure. The impression he got from the voice was that it belonged to a man who wanted everyone to be impressed by his confidence.

  Not unusual, but not encouraging either. The agent decided he might as well have the cigar, and stop worrying about what impression he himself was going to make. He took out a stogy and lit up. No use offering a smoke to Hallward, who was addicted to nothing but his programming.

  Leaning on the marble balustrade, puffing smoke out into the sunshine over the parking area, Lord presently saw a shapely female form, dressed in a pink smock, emerge from some lower level of the house and go striding on high heels toward the Volks. He couldn’t see her face, only the brown curls of the back of her head. Quite likely the pedicurist, he supposed. In a matter of seconds the Volks had vanished down the curving drive toward the public highway.

  Still the client did not appear, or invite them into his house. Lord, chewing his Havana, strolled back across the terrace toward the muddle of packing crates. In the morning sunlight their tough plastic was as white as the stucco of the wall behind them.

  Against that wall leaned the uncrated painting. The face of its youthful subject contemplated the California morning as if he were glad to have escaped the box. The subject was a very young and very handsome man, golden-haired and dressed in very old-time clothing. Maybe, Lord guessed, that style was from a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred. Who knew? He could only hope that his client—if Dorian Gray did become his client—would be as good-looking as the painting. No doubt Hallward was a genius, and could create a beautiful personal graphic based on anyone who was ahead of Quasimodo in the looks department; but still, the higher the point you started from the more you could do.

  The wooden frame of the painting was dark with age, and it looked as heavy as some old-time piece of furniture. It must have taken a couple of moving men to get the thing up here from the parking area; Lord wasn’t at all sure it would have fit into the little elevator adjoining.

  There was movement behind him. Hallward was looking up from his work. Lord turned fully around, smiling, to get his first look at his potential client.

  Dorian Gray, wearing a thick gray robe, had just come bouncing out of his house onto his terrace. It was as if he were calculating his movements to be jaunty and energetic, but despite his best efforts they came out awkward, overacted. The good looks were there, though; what looked like a promising basis for a program. Blond hair curled crisply around Gray’s shapely skull, as if it were still damp from an after-pedicurist shower. Just as Hallward had described him, Gray was tall, lean, and muscular, with a square jaw and a face definitely in the casting category of tough-guy hero. The subject of the portrait might have been his faggot brother.

  Hallward was practically mute, as usual, indifferent to all social happenings, and Gray, all the while nursing a superior smile as if he admired his own suavity, stumbled around trying to introduce himself to Lord.

  Well, maybe together they could be made to amount to something. Right now Lord could only hope. The agent took charge of the faltering conversation, and with his prompting to take up the slack everyone seemed to hit it off pretty well. He began to explain to Gray how, if they were going to be in this together, he intended to organize their approach to the people at the studio.

  Hallward interrupted them to announce that the light was just great right now, and he wanted to get more sunlight input into the graphics banks on which the personal program would be based. Lord shut up immediately, getting out of the programmer’s way; after all, it was the graphics that were going to make or break the deal with the studio when the time came.

  Basil had his little videocam out, getting input of Dorian in sunlight. The little camera was a real professional model, with more adjustments and controls on it than the hometronics terminal had. With it the programmer swept the terrace from side to side, capturing Dorian from every angle. More material for the personal program to draw on when it was finally finished and went to work; you could never, Lord gathered, have too much data in the banks. Personal programs were something new, only starting to have a real impact on the business, and he wanted to know as much about them as anyone could who was not actually a programmer.

  When die personal program that Hallward would design for Gray eventually went into operation, it would work the mass of graphic material on Gray into shape, the best shape for any given scene, selecting some details and suppressing others, adding bits of behavior, putting grace into the gestures of the image and good tones into its voice, even making vocabulary choices that could improve its wit when the necessity to ad lib came up.

  Not that Hallward ever showed any particular grace or wit in his own behavior. The programmer, the agent thought, was like a writer. He was a writer, in his own way, and something of a director too, developing characters for his clients, writing their parts and doing half their performances for them in the great play they had to put on for the studio people, the money people, before any of the actors ever got the chance to perform for a mass audience. And all that most of the mass audience would ever see of the performer was the performing graphic. The quality of the best graphics was so high that you would swear you were watching real people act, sing, dance, make love, or die on stage or screen. You would swear that . . . except that real people just were never really quite that good, that beautiful to watch.

  Hallward grunted orders. “Now turn around, Dorian. No, just halfway. I want some more of the back of your head in this light.”

  Dorian, when he faced away from the videocam, was now looking directly at the old portrait that stood propped against the wall. Flicking a glance sideways at Lord, he remarked: “Wonder if the old bastard had a good life? Looks like it was a rich one, anyway.”

  “Old?” That was probably the last word that would have come to Lord’s mind when he considered the portrait. His thoughts had immediately turned on how great it would be to be that young again. Of course you couldn’t expect this kid to look at it that way. He was about the same age as the subject of the portrait had been when it was made, maybe twenty-one.

  Gray waved a hand in a clumsy gesture. “Well, he’d be about two hundred if he was still around, right? Or at least a hundred fifty. He’s some kind of relative of mine, way back in the family somewhere. That’s how come I got all this stuff. From the last heir’s estate when she died.”

  Lord moved a step toward the painting and took a closer look. The artist had signed it, in the lower left comer, but he couldn’t read the squirrelly red letters. For all Lord could tell, the name might even have been “Hallward.”

  Now Dorian was being ordered to turn around again, then walk back and forth across the terrace. This was a long, uninterrupted scan,
in which the camera caught plenty of input from Dorian. And from the background too; the sunlit terrace, the dimmer house interior of tile and oak beyond the open doorway, the packing crates. And the portrait, leaning almost straight upright in the California sun.

  “I might suggest, Dorian,” said Lord, “that you’d want to move it inside. This much sun can’t be good for it.”

  “It’ll be in the shade in a minute anyway. As the sun comes around.”

  And with that everyone forgot about the painting.

  “We can take a look now at what we’ve got,” Hallward told them, wrapping up his videocam. “Is that stage in there turned on?”

  The three men all pitched in to move the heavy videostage from its site deep in the house out to a place near the doorway to the terrace. There Hallward’s special cable, stretching from the hometronics terminal and his portable computer, could reach it. He assured the other two men that his computer had enough onboard memory to provide a fairly good presentation; and anything that looked good here ought to look really great when it was run on studio equipment.

  The stage was set up just inside the house, in shadow; the polychrome lasers that generated its three-dimensional graphics were bright enough to stand up to anything but direct sun.

  And then Dorian, wearing only a purple bikini brief, his robe cast aside, his muscles even bigger than Lord had expected, was standing on the stage, had somehow jumped up onto the low dais before Lord had seen him approach it.

  And still, at the same time, Dorian Gray was standing just where he had been, still wearing his gray robe and slumping, a little behind Lord and to his right . . .

  The robed man who stood near Lord in the sunlight was squinting slightly, and you could see the start of a small pink blemish on one of his rugged cheeks. At the moment the look on his face was expressive of stupidity more than anything else.

  Lord turned his head. The image on the stage was without blemish, and taut with energy. It stood proudly erect, with one fist planted on a hip, the free arm hanging gracefully at ease. With a gaze of keen intelligence its eyes met those of Henry Lord, then moved on to each of the other men. It looked last upon its model, and its gaze rested upon him longest.

  The voice of the graphic image said: “Good morning, gentlemen. Or, I suppose I should say, fellow workers.” Lord supposed that the program, using input from the house cameras, could do fairly well in determining what humans were present, and where they were standing. Then a good program ought to be able to come up with a reasonably appropriate response. The tones of its speech were resonant and finely modulated; the voice of it sounded very much like Dorian’s own, and yet it differed. There too things had been improved.

  “Good morning,” Dorian answered himself, automatically. The words came out sounding rough and awkward, almost angry, as if he were swearing in surprise.

  Hallward was surprised too, muttering real swearwords, but joyfully. Lord realized that the programmer was actually delighted, and really astonished, by how good his own creation looked.

  “That last input must have helped a lot,” Hallward was murmuring to himself. “I don’t know why. Son of a bitch, just look at this thing, would you?”

  “I hope,” said the holographic reproduction on the stage, “that we are all going to enjoy a long and mutually profitable relationship.” Once again it looked each of the three men in the eye, one after another. And it didn’t just say the words. It acted them, projected their syllables, made them the utterance of some great man on the brink of some tremendous enterprise. This thing was going to knock their eyes out at the studio, if Henry Lord knew anything at all about his business. This was going to catch them right by the balls and lift them out of their goddamn chairs. He had long since dropped his cigar and ground it out with his shoe.

  Again Basil Hallward’s hands were moving, easily and decisively, over his computer keyboard. Dorian-on-stage was suddenly fully clothed, garbed in the latest style of black formalwear, trousers turning into tights a little above the knee, white lace blooming at his wrists and throat. His onstage figure turned easily, one hand gracefully in his pocket, the other making a small, effective gesture. The image asked: “Is it time for us to join the ladies, gentlemen? Can’t lick ’em”—here the stage face stuck out its tongue and contorted in a lewd grimace, returning next instant to smooth innocence—“if you don’t join ’em.”

  “Tremendous,” said Henry Lord, meaning it heartily for once, wishing he had a better word to use.

  And now, suddenly, the image had an imaged bottle of champagne in hand. With a powerful, dexterous movement of its wrists it made the imaged cork pop out; with a dance step it slid its black dress shoes out of the way of the gushing foam.

  Henry Lord had by now recovered from his happy surprise and started talking. It wasn’t hard to be upbeat and encouraging about this. The only trouble was, he felt he ought to be talking to the graphic on the stage rather than to the man it represented.

  Every once in a while he tried to get Hallward more involved in the conversation. But Hallward kept on staring at his little computer screen, and when Lord pressed him he insisted he wasn’t sure that things were quite ready to be taken to the studio.

  “Not quite ready? What is that supposed to mean? Baby, I’ve never seen a graphic that was readier than this one!” Not that Lord—or anyone—had seen a vast number of personal graphics in any stage of readiness. It was a new concept, just beginning to be well established.

  Hallward still grumbled. He said there were things he hadn’t figured out yet, about the way this particular program was working now.

  “Anything that’s likely to screw up a presentation?”

  Hallward grumbled something.

  “Well?”

  “How the hell do I know? I guess not.”

  Five days later, in the sunlit afternoon, the three men were again together on the terrace. The presentation at the studio had gone off as well as Lord had dared to hope—but, of course, it hadn’t gone in precisely any of the ways he had imagined beforehand. One thing he had long ago learned to be sure of was that such meetings never did.

  Today a fourth person, a young woman, was with them on the terrace. Her name was Sibyl Vane, and she was under the patronage—perhaps for the obvious reason, perhaps not—of Alan James. James was the major power at the studio, or at least the most major power that programmers and young actors and their agents were ever going to see.

  The way things looked now, Alan James was going to give Dorian Gray a contract. It looked as if he was going to give Basil Hallward a contract too, and Henry Lord was going to be collecting ten percent from both of them. But the contracts would be signed only—only—if Sibyl Vane—rather, the personal program that Hallward was now going to design for Sibyl Vane—appeared in the first commercial production with the graphic program of Dorian Gray. It was going to be feature length, for theater release, and the working title was Prince Charming.

  As far as Henry Lord could tell so far, the requirement to use Sibyl Vane oughtn’t to slow them down particularly. Dorian would have to share billing with someone. Whether Sibyl Vane was any good or not, Alan James had seen something in her, and a genius like Hallward ought to be able to connect with that something and get it to come out in a polychrome three-D graphic. Whether Prince Charming would be a hit or a flop when it hit the public screens and stages, was impossible to determine this early, anyway. Lord wouldn’t have wanted to say that out loud to anyone in so many words, but it was so.

  Already Hallward’s preliminaries with Sibyl were over, and her first session in front of his videocam was well under way. Dorian, thirty seconds after he got his first look at her, had volunteered his house and terrace as a location. And there were certain advantages to working here rather than at the studio.

  Lord thought that Sibyl, whose dark hair and fair skin made her look almost Taylor-like, ought to provide a fine visual foil for Dorian. And so far she had been willing to give the session all she ha
d. It was beginning to look as if that might not be very much, beyond the naturally great starting points of her face and body.

  She was growing increasingly nervous as the session went on. Henry Lord, having become her agent too, found himself having to calm her down.

  “Take it easy, kid. This is only a test.”

  “Only a test!” Sibyl almost screamed the words, even though her breathless, ill-modulated voice foiled to give them much real volume. She, unlike Dorian, was from a poor family. She understood as well as did Henry Lord that she could easily be throwing potatoes into hot grease for McDonald’s next month if this thing didn’t pan out, and if Alan James turned sour on her as a result.

  “Take it easy. Yeah, only a test. I mean, if your first try doesn’t look right, Basil can fix it up until it does.” Basil, hearing that, gave him a look. Lord ignored it. This was a time for encouragement, not stark truth. “He’s great at this, a goddamn genius. You’ve seen what he’s done for Dorian. Take another look at that.”

  Something changed in Sibyl’s face, as if a healing, restorative thought had come to her. “I want to do it right,” she whispered to Henry Lord, “for Dorian too.”

  Holy shit, he thought. Both of them, really gone on each other, just like that. A complication we didn’t need.

  Hallward was frowning, and he kept on frowning, through the rest of that session and the next. Sibyl’s graphic took shape. There was nothing grossly wrong with it, but Lord thought from the start that it would never attain anything like the magical quality of Dorian’s. He was right.

  Dorian said nothing about the difference. The truth was that he hadn’t really looked at Sibyl’s graphics yet, being busy admiring his own whenever he had the opportunity. But he took Lord aside, with the air of a man who had something he was just bursting to talk about, and told him how much he loved Sibyl, and how great and talented she was.