Terra Incognita

by Connie Willis

  “Not unless you try to walk through them, which ravers sometimes try to do. There used to be barriers, but the studios made them take them out. They got in the way of their promos.”

  She turned and looked at the far wall. “It’s so big!”

  “You should see it during the day. They shut off the back part at night. So the druggates don’t piss on the floor. There’s another room back there”—I pointed at the rear wall—“that’s twice as big as this.”

  “It’s like a rehearsal hall,” Alis said. “Like the dance studio in Swing Time. You could almost dance in here.”

  “ ‘I won’t dance,’ ” I said. “ ‘Don’t ask me.’ ”

  “Wrong movie,” she said, smiling. “That’s from Roberta.”

  She turned back to the mirrored side wall, her skirt flaring out, and her reflection called up the image of Eleanor Powell next to Fred Astaire on the dark, polished floor, her hand—

  I forced it back, staring determinedly at the other wall, where a trailer for the new Star Trek movie was flashing, till it receded, and then turned back to Alis.

  She was looking at the station sign. Pasadena was flashing. A line of green arrows led to the front, and the tourates were following it through the left-hand exit door and off to Disneyland.

  “Where are we going?” Alis said.

  “Sightseeing,” I said. “The homes of the stars. Which should be Forest Lawn, only they aren’t there anymore, They’re back up on the silver screen working for free.”

  I waved my hand at the near wall, where a trailer for the remake of Pretty Woman, starring, natch, Marilyn Monroe, was showing.

  Marilyn made an entrance in a red dress, and the Marilyn stopped practicing her pout and came over to watch. Marilyn flipped an escargot at a waiter, went shopping on Rodeo Drive for a white halter dress, faded out on a lingering kiss with Clark Gable.

  “Appearing soon as Lina Lamont in Singin’ in the Rain,” I said. “So tell me why you hate Gene Kelly.”

  “I don’t hate him exactly,” she said, considering. “American in Paris is awful, and that fantasy thing in Singin’ in the Rain, but when he dances with Donald O’Connor and Frank Sinatra, he’s actually a good dancer. It’s just that he makes it look so hard.”

  “And it isn’t?”

  “No, it is. That’s the point.” She frowned. “When he does jumps or complicated steps, he flails his arms and puffs and pants. It’s like he wants you to know how hard it is. Fred Astaire doesn’t do that. His routines are lots harder than Gene Kelly’s, the steps are terrible, but you don’t see any of that on the screen. When he dances, it doesn’t look like he’s working at all. It looks easy, like he just that minute made it up—”

  The image of Fred and Eleanor pushed forward again, the two of them in white, tapping casually, effortlessly, across the starry floor—

  “And he made it look so easy you thought you’d come to Hollywood and do it, too,” I said.

  “I know it won’t be easy,” she said quietly. “I know there aren’t a lot of liveactions—”

  “Any,” I said. “There aren’t any liveactions being made. Unless you’re in Bogota. Or Beijing. It’s all CGs. ‘No actors need apply.’ ”

  Dancers either, I thought, but didn’t say it. I was still hoping to get a pop out of this, if I could hang on to her till the next flash. If there was a next flash. I was getting a killing headache, which wasn’t supposed to be a side effect.

  “But if it’s all computer graphics,” Alis was saying earnestly, “then they can do whatever they want. Including musicals.”

  “And what makes you think they want to? There hasn’t been a musical since 1996.”

  “They’re copyrighting Fred Astaire,” she said, gesturing at the screen. “They must want him for something.”

  Something is right, I thought. The sequel to The Towering Inferno. Or snuffporn movies.

  “I said I knew it wouldn’t be easy,” she said defensively. “You know what they said about Fred Astaire when he first came to Hollywood? Everybody said he was washed up, that his sister was the one with all the talent, that he was a no-talent vaudeville hoofer who’d never make it in movies. On his screen test, somebody wrote, ‘Thirty, balding, can dance a little.’ They didn’t think he could do it either, and look what happened.”

  There were movies for him to dance in, I didn’t say, but she must have seen it in my face because she said, “He was willing to work really hard, and so am I. Did you know he used to rehearse his routines for weeks before the movie even started shooting? He wore out six pairs of tap shoes rehearsing for Carefree. I’m willing to practice just as hard as he did,” she said. “I know I’m not good enough. I need to take ballet, too. All I’ve had is jazz and tap. And I don’t know very many routines yet. Plus, I’m going to have to find somebody to teach me ballroom.”

  Where? I thought. There hasn’t been a dancing teacher in Hollywood in twenty years. Or a choreographer. Or a musical. CGs might have killed the liveaction, but they hadn’t killed the musical. It had died all by itself back in the sixties.

  “I’ll need a job to pay for the dancing lessons, too,” she was saying. “The girl you were talking to at the party—the one who looks like Marilyn Monroe—she said maybe I could get a job as a face. What do they do?”

  Go to parties, stand around trying to get noticed by somebody who’ll trade a pop for a paste-up, do chooch, I thought, wishing I had some.

  “They smile and talk and look sad while some hackate does a scan of them,” I said.

  “Like a screen test?” Alis said.

  “Like a screen test. Then the hackate digitizes the scan of your face and puts it into a remake of A Star Is Born and you get to be the next Judy Garland. Only why do that when the studio’s already got Judy Garland? And Barbra Streisand. And Janet Gaynor. And they’re all copyrighted, they’re already stars, so why would the studios take a chance on a new face? And why take a chance on a new movie when they can do a sequel or a copy or a remake of something they already own? And while we’re at it, why not star remakes in the remake? Hollywood, the ultimate recycler!”

  I waved my hand at the screen where ILMGM was touting coming attractions. “The Phantom of the Opera,” the voiceover said. “Starring Anthony Hopkins and Meg Ryan.”

  “Look at that,” I said. “Hollywood’s latest effort—a remake of a remake of a silent!”

  The trailer ended, and the loop started again. The digitized lion did its digitized roar, and above it a digitized laser burned in gold: “Anything’s Possible!”

  “Anything’s possible,” I said, “if you have the digitizers and the Crays and the memory and the fibe-op feed to send it out over. And the copyrights.”

  The golden words faded into fog, and Scarlett simpered her way out of it toward us, holding up her hoop skirt daintily.

  “Anything’s possible, but only for the studios. They own everything, they control everything, they—”

  I broke off, thinking, There’s no way she’ll give me a pop after that little outburst. Why didn’t you just tell her straight out her little dream’s impossible?

  But she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the screen, where the copyright cases were being trotted out for inspection. Waiting for Fred Astaire to appear.

  “The first time I ever saw him, I knew what I wanted,” she said, her eyes on the wall. “Only ‘wanted’ isn’t the right word. I mean, not like you want a new dress—”

  “Or some chooch,” I said.

  “It’s not even that kind of wanting. It’s…there’s a scene in Top Hat where Fred Astaire’s dancing in his hotel room and Ginger Rogers has the room below him, and she comes up to complain about the noise, and he tells her that sometimes he just finds himself dancing, and she says—”

  “ ‘I suppose it’s some kind of an affliction,’ 
” I said.

  I’d expected her to smile at that, the way she had at my other movie quotes, but she didn’t.

  “An affliction,” she said seriously. “Only that isn’t it either, exactly. It’s…when he dances, it isn’t just that he makes it look easy. It’s like all the steps and rehearsing and the music are just practice, and what he does is the real thing. It’s like he’s gone beyond the rhythm and the time steps and the turns to this other place….If I could get there, do that…”

  She stopped. Fred Astaire was sauntering toward us out of the mist in his top hat and tails, tipping his top hat jauntily forward with the end of his cane. I looked at Alis.

  She was looking at him with that lost, breathless look she had had in my room, watching Fred and Eleanor, side by side, dressed in white, turning and yet still, silent, beyond motion, beyond—

  “Come on,” I said, and yanked on her hand. “This is our stop,” and followed the green arrows out.

  SCENE: Hollywood première night at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, palm trees, screaming fans, limousines, tuxedos, furs, flashbulbs popping.

  We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash.

  It was a DeMille scene, as usual. Faces and tourates and freelancers and ravers and thousands of extras milling among the vid places and VR caves. And among the screens: drops and freescreens and diamonds and holos, all showing trailers edited à la Psycho by Vincent.

  Trump’s Chinese Theater had two huge dropscreens in front of it, running promos of the latest remake of Ben-Hur. On one of them, Sylvester Stallone in a bronze skirt and digitized sweat was leaning over his chariot, whipping the horses.

  You couldn’t see the other. There was a vid-neon sign in front of it that said Happy Endings, and a holoscreen showing Scarlett O’Hara in the fog, saying, “But, Rhett, I love you.”

  “Frankly, my dear—I love you, too,” Clark Gable said, and crushed her in his arms. “I’ve always loved you!”

  “The cement has stars in it,” I said to Alis, pointing down. It was too crowded to see the sidewalk, let alone the stars. I led her out into the street, which was just as crowded, but at least it was moving, and down toward the vid places.

  Hawkers from the VR caves crushed flyers into our hands, two dollars off reality, and River Phoenix pushed up. “Drag? Flake? A pop?”

  I bought some chooch and popped it right there, hoping it would stave off a flash till we got back to the dorm.

  The crowd thinned out a little, and I led Alis back onto the sidewalk and past a VR cave advertising, “A hundred percent body hookup! A hundred percent realistic!”

  A hundred percent realistic, all right. According to Heada, who knows everything, simsex takes more memory than most of the VR caves can afford, and half of them slap a data helmet on the customer, add some noise to make it look like a VR image, and bring in a freelancer.

  I towed Alis around the VR cave and straight into a herd of tourates standing in front of a booth called A Star Is Born and gawking at a vid-pitch. “Make your dreams come true! Be a movie star! $89.95, including disk. Studio-licensed! Studio-quality digitizing!”

  “I don’t know, which one do you think I should do?” a fat female tourate was saying, flipping through the menu.

  A bored-looking hackate in a white lab coat and James Dean pompadour glanced at the movie she was pointing at, handed her a plastic bundle, and motioned her into a curtained cubicle.

  She stopped halfway in. “I’ll be able to watch this on the fibe-op feed, won’t I?”

  “Sure,” James Dean said, and yanked the curtain across.

  “Do you have any musicals?” I asked, wondering if he’d lie to me like he had to the tourate. She wasn’t going to be on the fibe-op feed. Nothing gets on except studio-authorized changes. Paste-ups and slash-and-burns. She’d get a tape of the scene and orders not to make any copies.

  He looked blank. “Musicals?”

  “You know. Singing? Dancing?” I said, but the tourate was back wearing a too-short white robe and a brown wig with braids looped over her ears.

  “Stand up here,” James Dean said, pointing at a plastic crate. He fastened a data harness around her large middle and went over to an old Digimatte compositor and switched it on.

  “Look at the screen,” he said, and the tourates all moved so they could see it. Storm troopers blasted away, and Luke Skywalker appeared, standing in a doorway over a dropoff, his arm around a blank blue space in the screen.

  I left Alis watching and pushed through the crowd to the menu. Stagecoach, The Godfather, Rebel Without a Cause.

  “Okay, now,” James Dean said, typing onto a keyboard. The female tourate appeared on the screen next to Luke. “Kiss him on the cheek and step off the box. You don’t have to jump. The data harness’ll do everything.”

  “Won’t it show in the movie?”

  “The machine cuts it out.”

  They didn’t have any musicals. Not even Ruby Keeler. I worked my way back to Alis.

  “Okay, roll ’em,” James Dean said. The fat tourate smooched empty air, giggled, and jumped off the box. On the screen, she kissed Luke’s cheek, and they swung out across a high-tech abyss.

  “Come on,” I said to Alis, and steered her across the street to Screen Test City.

  It had a multiscreen filled with stars’ faces, and an old guy with the pinpoint eyes of a redliner. “Be a star! Get your face up on the silver screen! Who do you want to be, popsy?” he said, leering at Alis. “Marilyn Monroe?”

  Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were side by side on the bottom row of the screen. “That one,” I said, and the screen zoomed till they filled it.

  “You’re lucky you came tonight,” the old guy said. “He’s going into litigation. What do you want? Still or scene?”

  “Scene,” I said. “Just her. Not both of us.”

  “Stand in front of the scanner,” he said, pointing, “and let me get a still of your smile.”

  “No, thank you,” Alis said, looking at me.

  “Come on,” I said. “You said you wanted to dance in the movies. Here’s your chance.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” the old guy said. “All I need’s an image to digitize from. The scanner does the rest. You don’t even have to smile.”

  He took hold of her arm, and I expected her to wrench away from him, but she didn’t move.

  “I want to dance in the movies,” she said, looking at me, “not get my face digitized onto Ginger Rogers’s body. I want to dance.”

  “You’ll be dancing,” the old guy said. “Up there on the screen for everybody to see.” He waved his free hand at the milling cast of thousands, none of whom were looking at his screen. “And on opdisk.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said to me, tears welling up in her eyes. “The CG revolution—”

  “Is right there in front of you,” I said, suddenly fed up. “Simsex, paste-ups, snuffshows, make-your-own remakes. Look around, Ruby. You want to dance in the movies? This is as close as you’re going to get!”

  “I thought you understood,” she said bleakly, and whirled before either of us could stop her, and plunged into the crowd.

  “Alis, wait!” I shouted, and started after her, but she was already far ahead. She disappeared into the entrance to the skids.

  “Lose the girl?” a voice said, and I turned and glared. I was opposite the Happy Endings booth. “Get dumped? Change the ending. Make Rhett come back to Scarlett. Make Lassie come home.”

  I crossed the street. It was all simsex parlors on this side, promising a pop with Mel Gibson, Sharon Stone, the Marx Brothers. A hundred percent realistic. I wondered if I should do a sim. I stuck my head in the promo data helmet, but there wasn’t any blurring. The chooch must
be working.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” a female voice said.

  I pulled my head out of the helmet. A freelancer was standing there, blond, in a torn net leotard and a beauty mark. Bus Stop. “Why go for a virtual imitation when you can have the real thing?” she breathed.

  “Which is what?” I said.

  The smile didn’t fade, but she looked instantly on guard. Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon. “What?”

  “This real thing. What is it? Sex? Love? Chooch?”

  She half put up her hands, like she was being arrested. “Are you a narc? ’Cause I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was just making a comment, okay? I just don’t think people should settle for VRs, is all, when they could talk to somebody real.”

  “Like Marilyn Monroe?” I said, and wandered on down the sidewalk past three more freelancers. Marilyn in a white halter dress, Madonna in brass cones, Marilyn in pink satin. The real thing.

  I scored some more chooch and a line of tinseltown from a James Dean too splatted to remember he was supposed to be selling the stuff, and ate it, walking on past the snuffshows, but somewhere I must have gotten turned around because I was back at Happy Endings, watching the holoscreen. Scarlett ran into the fog after Rhett, Butch and Sundance leaped forward into a hail of gunfire, Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman stood in front of an airplane looking at each other.

  “Back again, huh?” the hawker said. “Best thing for a broken heart. Kill the bastards. Get the girl. What’ll it be? Lost Horizon? Terminator 9?”

  Ingrid was telling Bogie she wanted to stay, and Bogie was telling her it was impossible.

  “What happy endings do people come up with for this?” I asked him.

  “Casablanca?” He shrugged. “The Nazis show up and kill the husband, Ingrid and Bogart get married.”

  “And honeymoon in Auschwitz,” I said.

  “I didn’t say the endings were any good.”

  On the screen, Bogie and Ingrid were looking at each other. Tears welled up in her eyes, and the edges of the screen went to soft-focus.