Terra Incognita

by Connie Willis

  Slow pan from comp screen to clock, showing 4:58, and back to screen. Shot of sailors dancing. Slow pan to clock, showing 7:22.

  “Feeling better?” Heada said. She was sitting on the bed, holding a glass of water. “I told you ridigaine was rough.”

  “Yeah,” I said, closing my eyes against the glare from the glass.

  “Drink this,” she said, and stuck a straw in my mouth. “How’s the craving? Bad?”

  I didn’t want to drink anything, including water. “No.”

  “You sure?” she said suspiciously.

  “I’m sure,” I said. I opened my eyes again, and when that went okay, I tried to sit up. “What took you so long?”

  “After I found Funny Face, I went and talked to one of the ILMGM execs. You were right about its not being Mayer. He’s sworn off popsy. He’s trying to convince Arthurton he’s straight and narrow.”

  She stuck the straw under my nose again. “I talked to one of the hackates, too. He says there’s no way to get liveaction stuff onto the fibe-op source without studio access. He says there are all kinds of securities and privacies and encryptions. He says there are so many, nobody, not even the best hackates, can get past them.”

  “I know,” I said, leaning my head back against the wall. “It’s impossible.”

  “Do you feel good enough to look at the disk?”

  I didn’t, and there was no point, but Heada put it in and we watched Fred dance circles around Audrey Hepburn and Paris.

  The ridigaine was good for something, anyway. Fred was doing a series of swing turns, his feet tapping easily, carelessly, his arms extended, but there wasn’t a quiver of a flash or even a soft-focus. My head still ached, but the drumming was gone, replaced by a bleak silence that felt like the aftermath of a flash and had its sharp clarity, its certainty.

  I was certain Alis wouldn’t have danced in this movie, with its modern dance and its duets, carefully choreographed by Fred to make Audrey Hepburn look like a better dancer than she was. Certain that when Virginia Gibson appeared, she’d be Virginia Gibson, who looked a lot like Alis.

  And certain that when I called up On the Town and Tea for Two and Singin’ in the Rain, it would still be Alis, no matter how secure the fibe-op loops, no matter how impossible.

  Virginia Gibson came on in a gaggle of Hollywood’s idea of fashion designers. “You don’t see her, do you?” Heada said anxiously.

  “No,” I said, watching Fred.

  “This Virginia Gibson person really does look a lot like Alis,” Heada said. “Do you want to try Seven Brides for Seven Brothers again, just to make sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, standing up briskly. “So, the main thing now that you’re clean is to keep busy so you won’t think about the craving, and anyway, you need to catch up on Mayer’s list before he gets back, and I was thinking maybe I could help you. I’ve been watching a lot of movies, and I could tell you which ones have AS’s in them and where they are. The Color Purple has a roadhouse scene where—”

  “Heada,” I said.

  “And after you finish the list, maybe you and I could get Mayer to assign us a real remake. I mean, now that we’re both clean. You said one time I’d make a great location assistant, and I’ve been watching a lot of movies. We’d make a great team. You could do the CGs—”

  “I need you to do something for me,” I said. “There was an ILMGM exec who used to come to the parties who was always using time travel as a line. I need you to find out his name.”

  “Time travel?” Heada said blankly.

  “He said they were this close to discovering time travel,” I said. “He kept talking about parallel timefeeds.”

  “You said it wasn’t her in Funny Face,” she said slowly.

  “He kept talking about doing a remake of Time After Time.”

  She said, still blankly, “You think Alis went back in time?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and the last word was a shout. “Maybe she found a pair of ruby slippers, maybe she walked up onto the screen like Buster Keaton in Sherlock Jr. I don’t know!”

  Heada was looking at me, her eyes full of tears. “But you’re going to keep looking for her, aren’t you? Even though it’s impossible,” she said bitterly. “Just like John Wayne in The Searchers.”

  “And he found Natalie Wood, didn’t he?” I said. “Didn’t he?” but she was already gone.

  MONTAGE: No sound. HERO, seated at comp, chin on hand, saying, “Next, please,” as routine on screen changes. Hula, Latin number, clambake, Hollywood’s idea of ballet, hobo number, water ballet, doll dance.

  I didn’t have all the alcohol out of my system yet. Half an hour after Heada left, my headache came back with a vengeance. I called up Two Sailors and a Girl (or was it Two Girls and a Sailor?) and slept for two days straight.

  When I got up, I pissed several gallons and then checked to see if Heada had accessed me. She hadn’t. I tried to access her, and then Vincent, and started through the movies again.

  Alis was in I Love Melvin, playing, natch, a chorus girl trying to break into the movies, and in Let’s Dance and Two Weeks with Love. I found her in two Vera-Ellen movies, which I watched twice, convinced that I was somehow missing an important clue, and in Painting the Clouds with Sunshine, taking Virginia Gibson’s place again in a side-by-side tap routine with Gene Nelson and Virginia Mayo.

  I accessed Vincent and asked him about parallel timefeeds. “Is this for Rising Sun?” he asked suspiciously.

  “The Time Machine,” I said. “Paul Newman and Julia Roberts. What is a parallel timefeed?” and got an earful of probability and causality and side-by-side universes.

  “Every event has a dozen, a hundred, a thousand possible outcomes,” he said. “The theory is there’s a universe in which every single outcome actually exists.”

  A universe in which Alis gets to dance in the movies, I thought. A universe in which Fred Astaire’s still alive and the CG revolution never happened.

  I had been looking exclusively through musicals made during the fifties. But if there were parallel timefeeds, and Alis had somehow found a way to get in and out of those other universes, there was no reason she couldn’t be in movies made later. Or earlier.

  I started through the Busby Berkeleys, short as they were on dancing, and found her tapping without music in Gold Diggers of 1935 and in the big finale of 42nd Street, but that was it. I did better (and apparently so had she) in non-Busbys. Hats Off, wearing a hat, natch, and The Show of Shows and Too Much Harmony, “Buckin’ the Wind” in a number made for Marilyn, in garters and a white skirt that blew up around her stockinged legs. She was in Born to Dance, too, but in the chorus, and I couldn’t find her in any other Eleanor Powell movies.

  It took me a week to finish the b-and-w’s, during which time I couldn’t get through to Heada, and she didn’t access me. When my comp finally did beep, I didn’t wait for her to come on. “Did you find out anything?” I said.

  “I found out all right!” Mayer said, twitching. “You haven’t sent in a movie in three weeks! I was planning to give the whole package to my boss at next week’s meeting, and you’re wasting time with Rising Sun, which isn’t even on the list!”

  Which meant Vincent was costarring in the role of Joe Spinell as snitch in The Godfather II.

  “I needed to replace a couple of scenes,” I said. “There were too many visuals to do wipes. One of them’s a dance number. You don’t know anybody who can dance, do you?” I watched him, looking for some sign, some indication that he remembered Alis, knew her, had wanted to pop her badly enough that he’d pasted her face in over a dozen dancers’. Nothing. Not even a pause in the twitches.

  “There was a face at a couple of the parties a while back,” I said. “Pretty, light brown hair, she wanted to dance in the movies.” />
  Nothing. It wasn’t Mayer.

  “Forget dancers,” he said. “Forget The Time Machine. Just take the damned alcohol out! I want the rest of that list done by Monday, or you’ll never work for ILMGM again!”

  “You can count on me, Mr. Potter,” I said, and let him tell me he was shutting down my credit.

  “I want you sober!” he said.

  Which, oddly enough, I was.

  I took “Moonshine Lullaby” out of Annie Get Your Gun and the hookahs out of Kismet to show him I’d been listening, and started through the forties, looking for alcohol and Alis, two birds with one ff. She was in Yankee Doodle Dandy, and in the hoedown number in Babes on Broadway, wearing the pinafore she’d had on the night she’d come to ask me for the disk.

  Heada came in while I was watching Three Little Girls in Blue, which had an assortment of bustles and Vera-Ellen, but no Alis.

  “I found the exec,” she said. “He’s working for Warner now. He says they’re looking at ILMGM as a possible takeover.”

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “He wouldn’t tell me anything. He said the reason they haven’t rereleased Somewhere in Time is because they couldn’t decide whether to cast Vivien Leigh or Marilyn Monroe.”

  “I’ll talk to him. What’s his name?”

  She hesitated. “I talked to the hackates, too. They said last year they were transmitting images through a negative-matter region and got some interference that they thought was a time discrepancy, but they haven’t been able to duplicate the results, and now they think it was a transmission from another source.”

  “How big of a time discrepancy?” I said.

  She looked unhappy. “I asked them if they could duplicate the results, could they send a person back into the past, and they said even if it worked, they were only talking about electrons, not atoms, and there was no way anything living could survive a negative-matter region.”

  Which eliminated parallel timefeeds, and there must be worse to come because Heada was still hovering by the door like Clara Bow in Wings, unwilling to tell me the bad news.

  “Have you found her in any more movies?” she said.

  “Six,” I said. “And if it’s not time travel, she must have walked up onto the screen like Mia Farrow. Because it’s not a paste-up. And it’s not Mayer.”

  “There’s another explanation,” she said unhappily. “You were pretty splatted there for a while. One of the movies I watched was about a guy who was an alcoholic.”

  “The Lost Weekend,” I said. “Ray Milland,” and could already see where this was going.

  “He had blackouts when he drank,” she said. “He did things and couldn’t remember them.” She looked at me. “You knew what she looked like. And you had the accesses.”

  DANA ANDREWS: [Standing over police sergeant’s desk] She didn’t do it, I tell you.

  BRODERICK CRAWFORD: Is that so? Then who did?

  DANA ANDREWS: I don’t know, but I know she couldn’t have. She’s not that kind of girl.

  BRODERICK CRAWFORD: Well, somebody did it. [Eyes narrowing suspiciously] Maybe you did it. Where were you when Carson was killed?

  DANA ANDREWS: I was out taking a walk.

  It was the likeliest explanation. I was an expert at paste-ups. And I’d had her face stuck in my head ever since the moment I flashed. And I had full studio access. Motive and opportunity.

  I had wanted her, and she had wanted to dance in the movies, and in the wonderful world of CGs, anything is possible. But if I had done it, I wouldn’t have given her a two-minute bit in a production number. I’d have deleted Doris Day and her teeth and let Alis dance with Gene Nelson in front of those rehearsal-hall mirrors. If I’d known about the routine, which I hadn’t. I’d never even seen Tea for Two.

  Or I didn’t remember seeing it. Right after the episode on the skids, Mayer had credited my account for half a dozen Westerns, none of which I remembered doing. But if I had done it, I wouldn’t have dressed her in a bustle. I wouldn’t have made her dance with Gene Kelly.

  I’d put a watch-and-warn on Fred Astaire and Funny Face. I changed it to Broadway Melody of 1940 and asked for a status report on the case. It was close to being settled, but a secondary suit was expected to be filed, and the FPS was considering proceedings.

  The Film Preservation Society. Every change was automatically recorded with them, and the studios didn’t have any control over them. Mayer hadn’t been able to get me out of putting in those codes because they were part and parcel of the fibe-op feed. If it was a paste-up, it would have to be listed in their records.

  I called up the FPS’s files and asked for the record for Seven Brides.

  Legalese. I’d forgotten it was in litigation. “Singin’ in the Rain,” I said.

  The champagne wipes I’d done in the party scene were listed, along with one I hadn’t. “Frame 9-106,” it read, and listed the coordinates and the data. Jean Hagen’s cigarette holder. It had been done by the Anti-Smoking League.

  “Tea for Two,” I said, and tried to remember the frame numbers for the Charleston scene, but it didn’t matter. The screen was empty.

  Which left time travel. I went back to doing the musicals, saying, “Next, please!” to conga lines and male choruses and a horrible blackface number I was surprised nobody’d wiped before this. She was in Can-Can and Bells Are Ringing, both made in 1960, after which I didn’t expect to find much. Musicals had gone big-budget around then, which meant buying up Broadway shows and casting box-office properties like Audrey Hepburn and Richard Harris in them who couldn’t sing or dance, and then cutting out all the musical numbers to conceal the fact. And then musicals’d turned socially relevant. As if the coffin had needed any more nails pounded into it.

  There was plenty of alcohol in the musicals of the sixties and seventies, though, even if there wasn’t much dancing. A gin-soaked father in My Fair Lady, a gin-soaked popsy in Oliver!, an entire gin-soaked mining camp in Paint Your Wagon. Also, saloons, beer, whiskey, red-eye, and a falling-down-drunk Lee Marvin (who couldn’t sing or dance, but then neither could Clint Eastwood or Jean Seberg, and who cares? There’s always dubbing). The gin-soaked twenties in Lucille Ball’s (who couldn’t act either, a triple threat) Mame.

  And Alis, dancing in the chorus in Goodbye, Mr. Chips and The Boy Friend. Doing the Tapioca in Thoroughly Modern Millie, high-stepping to “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” in Hello, Dolly! in a sky-blue bustled dress and parasol.

  I went out to Burbank. And maybe time travel was possible. At least two semesters had gone by, but the class was still there. And Michael Caine was still giving the same lecture.

  “Any number of reasons have been advanced for the demise of the musical,” he was intoning, “escalating production costs, widescreen technological complications, unimaginative staging. But the real reason lies deeper.”

  I stood against the door and listened to him give the eulogy while the class took respectful notes on their palmtops.

  “The death of the musical was due not to directorial and casting catastrophes, but to natural causes. The world the musical depicted simply no longer existed.”

  The monitor Alis had used to practice with was still there, and so were the stacked-up chairs, only now there were a lot more of them. Michael Caine and the class were crammed into a space too narrow for a soft-shoe, and the chairs had been there awhile. They were covered with dust.

  “The musical of the fifties depicted a world of innocent hopes and harmless desires.” He muttered something to the comp, and Julie Andrews appeared, sitting on an Alpine hillside with a guitar and assorted children. An odd choice for his argument of “simpler times,” since the movie’d been made in 1965, the year of the Vietnam buildup. Not to mention its being set in 1939, the year of the Nazis.

  “It was a sunnier, less complicated time,” he said,
“a time when happy endings were still believable.”

  The screen skipped to Vanessa Redgrave and Franco Nero, surrounded by soldiers with torches and swords. Camelot. “That idyllic world died, and with it died the Hollywood musical, never to be resurrected.”

  I waited till the class was gone and he’d had his snort of flake and asked him if he knew where Alis was, even though I knew it was no use, he wouldn’t have helped her, and the last thing Alis would have needed was somebody else to tell her the musical was dead.

  He didn’t remember her, even after I’d plied him with chooch, and he refused to give me the student list for her class. I could get it from Heada, but I didn’t want her looking sympathetic and thinking I’d lost my mind. Charles Boyer in Gaslight.

  I went back to my room and took Billy Bigelow’s drinking and half the plot out of Carousel, and went to bed.

  An hour later, the comp woke me out of a sound sleep, making a racket like the reactor in The China Syndrome, and I staggered over and blinked at it for a good five minutes before I realized it was the watch-and-warn, and Brides must be out of litigation, and another minute to think what command to give.

  It wasn’t Brides. It was Fred Astaire, and the court decision was scrolling down the screen: “Intellectual property claim denied, irreproducible art form claim denied, collaborative property claim denied.” Which meant Fred’s estate and RKO-Warner must have lost, and ILMGM, where Fred had spent all those years covering for partners who couldn’t dance, had won.

  “Broadway Melody of 1940,” I said, and watched the Beguine come up just like I remembered it, stars and polished floor and Eleanor in white, side by side with Fred.

  I had never watched it sober. I had thought the silence, the raptness, the quality of still, centered beauty was the effect of the klieg, but it wasn’t. They tapped easily, carelessly, across a dark, polished floor, their hands not quite touching, and were as still, as silent as they were that night I watched Alis watching them. The real thing.