Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  Beeping stops. Satellite begins to fall away from camera, lurching some as it hits the edges of the atmosphere. As it falls, letters slime down the screen: The End?

  Credits: A movie by Lois B. Traven.

  The lights come up. I begin to breathe again. I’m standing in the middle of the aisle, applauding as hard as I can.

  Everybody else is applauding, too. Everybody.

  Then my head really begins to hurt, and I go outside into the cool night and sit on the studio wall like Humpty-Dumpty.

  Lois is headed for the Big Time. She deserves it.

  * * *

  The notes on my desk are now hand-deep. Pink ones, then orange ones from the executive offices. Then the bright red-striped ones from accounting.

  Fuck’em. I’m almost through.

  I sat down and plugged on. Nothing happened.

  I punched Maintenance.

  “Sorry,” says Bobo. “You gotta get authorization from Snell before you can get back online, says here.”

  “Snell in accounting, or Snell in the big building?”

  “Lemme check.” There’s a lot of yelling around the office on the other end. “Snell in the big building.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

  * * *

  So I have to eat dung in front of Snell, promise him anything, renegotiate my contract right then and there in his office without my business manager or agent. But I have to get this movie finished.

  Then I have to go over to Accounting and sign a lot of stuff. I call Bernie and Chinua and tell them to come down to the studio and clean up the contractual shambles as best they can, and not to expect to hear from me for a week or so.

  Then I call my friend Jukai, who helped install the first GAX-600 and talk to him for an hour and a half and learn a few things.

  Then I go to Radio Shack and run up a bill of $6,124, buy two weeks’ worth of survival food at Apocalypse Andy’s, put everything in my car, and drive over to the office deep under the bowels of the GAX-600.

  * * *

  I have locked everyone else out of the mainframe with words known only to myself and Alain Resnais. Let them wait.

  * * *

  I have put a note on the door:

  Leave me alone. I am finishing the movie. Do not try to stop me. You are locked out of the 600 until I am through. Do not attempt to take me off-line. I have rewired the 600 to wipe out everything, every movie in it but mine if you do. Do not cut my power; I have a generator in here—if you turn me off, the GAX is history. (See attached receipt.) Leave me alone until I have finished; you will get everything back, and a great movie too.

  * * *

  They were knocking. Now they’re pounding on the door. Screw’em. I’m starting the scene where Guy (me) and Marie hitch a ride on the garbage wagon out of the communist pig farm.

  * * *

  The locksmith was quiet but he couldn’t do any good, either. I’ve put on the kind of locks they use on the outsides of prisons.

  They tried to put a note on the screen. BACK OFF, I wrote.

  They began to ease them, pleading notes, one at a time through the razor-thin crack under the fireproof steel door.

  Every few hours I would gather them up. They quit coming for a while.

  Sometime later there was a polite knock.

  A note slid under.

  “May I come in for a few moments?” it asked. It was signed A. Resnais.

  GO AWAY, I wrote back. YOU HAVEN’T MADE A GOOD MOVIE SINCE LA GUERRE EST FINIS.

  I could imagine his turning to the cops and studio heads in his dignified humble way (he must be pushing ninety by now), shrugging his shoulders as if to say, well, I tried my best, and walking away.

  * * *

  “You must end this madness,” says Marie. “We’ve been here a week. The room smells. I smell. You smell, I’m tired of dehydrated apple chips. I want to talk on the beach again, get some sunlight.”

  “What kind of ending would that be?” I (Guy) ask.

  “I’ve seen worse. I’ve been in much worse. Why do you have this obsessive desire to re-create movies made fifty years ago?”

  I (Guy) look out the window of the cheap hotel, past the edge of the taped roller shade. “I (Guy) don’t know.” I (Guy) rub my chin covered with a scratchy week’s stubble. “Maybe those movies, those, those things were like a breath of fresh air. They led to everything we have today.”

  “Well, we could use a breath of fresh air.”

  “No. Really. They came in on a stultified, lumbering dinosaur of an industry, tore at its flanks, nibbled at it with soft rubbery beaks, something, I don’t know what. Stung it into action, showed it there were other ways of doing things—made it question itself. Showed that movies could be free—not straightjackets.”

  “Re-creating them won’t make any new statements,” said Marie (Moreau).

  “I’m trying to breathe new life into them, then. Into what they were. What they meant to . . . to me, to others,” I (Guy) say.

  What I want to do more than anything is to take her from the motel, out on the sunny street to the car. Then I want to drive her up the winding roads to the cliffs overlooking the Mediterranean. Then I want her to lean over, her right arm around my neck, her hair blowing in the wind, and give me a kiss that will last forever, and say, “I love you, and I’m ready.”

  Then I will press down the accelerator, and we will go through the guard rail, hang in the air, and begin to fall faster and faster until the eternal blue sea comes up to meet us in a tender hand-shaped spray, and just before the impact she will smile and pat my arm, never taking her eyes off the windshield.

  “Movies are freer than they ever were,” she says from the bed. “I was there. I know. You’re just going through the motions. The things that brought about those films are remembered only by old people, bureaucrats, film critics,” she says with a sneer.

  “What about you?” I (Guy) ask, turning to her. “You remember. You’re not old. You’re alive, vibrant.”

  My heart is breaking.

  She gives me (Guy) a stare filled with sorrow. “No I’m not. I’m a character in a movie. I’m points of light, fixed on a plane.”

  A tear-gas canister crashes through the window. There is a pounding against the door.

  “The cops!” I (Guy) say, reaching for the .45 automatic.

  “The pimps!” Marie says.

  The room is filling with gas. Bullets fly. I fire at the door, the window shades, as I reach for Marie’s hand. The door bursts open.

  Two quick closeups: her face, terrified; mine, determined, with a snarl and a holy wreath of cordite rising from my pistol.

  * * *

  My head is numb. I see in the dim worklight from my screen the last note they stuck under the door fluttering as the invisible gas is pumped in.

  I type fin.

  I reach for the non-existent button which will wipe everything but This Guy Goes to Town . . . and mentally push it.

  I (Guy) smile up at them as they come through the doors and walls: pimps, Nazis, film critics, studio cops, deep-sea divers, spacemen, clowns, and lawyers.

  * * *

  Through the windows I can see the long geometric rows of the shrubs forming quincunxes, the classical statuary, people moving to and fro in a garden like a painting by Fragonard.

  I must have been away a long time; someone was telling me, as I was making my way toward these first calm thoughts, that This Guy . . . is the biggest hit of the season. I have been told that while I was on my four-week vacation from human cares and woes that I have become that old-time curiosity: the rich man who is crazy as a piss ant.

  Far less rich, of course, than I would have been had I not renegotiated my contract before my last, somewhat spectacular, orgy of movie-and-lovemaking in my locked office.

  I am now calm. I am not looking forward to my recovery, but suppose I will have to get some of my own money out of my manager’s guardianship.

  A nurse comes in, opens the taff
eta curtains at another set of windows, revealing nice morning sunlight through the tiny, very tasteful, bars.

  She turns to me and smiles.

  It is Anouk Aimee.

  Introduction: Heirs of the Perisphere

  IF YOU COULD HAVE TOLD the eighteen-year-old, writing-mad Howard Waldrop that in fifteen years he would 1.) be asked to do an article by The Writer, but then not do it, and 2.) sell to Playboy for lots of (then) money, but that it would not be the pleasant, exciting experience the starry-eyed young writer dreamed of, he would not have believed you.

  This far-future backward look was, as is my usual wont, written because I wanted like hell to be in Mike Bishop’s Light Years and Dark (a swell book that went straight down the tubes when published, but instead I was in there with “Helpless, Helpless”). He said this story “might as well be about a lawnmower, an air-conditioner, and a microwave”—or words to that effect. Mostly he was trying to squeeze me in. I’d futzed around to real near the deadline and he only had 3,000 words of space and money and I was trying to sell him 5,600 words, so instead I sent this off to my then-agent Joe Elder (since retired) and wrote the other story for Mike at 3,200 words, which was more like it.

  Joe sent it to Alice K. Turner, who promptly bought it for Playboy for more money than I’d ever seen, except for a novel.

  Now Alice Turner is one of the finest editors in the business; don’t take my word for it, ask anyone who’s ever worked with her, or see Robert Silverberg’s introductions to the stories in his ’80s and ’90s collections for his true amazement at her editing abilities (Silverberg’s seen and done it all and he doesn’t impress easily). What happened in the next fourteen months was not her fault.

  We worked on this, on and off, through five successive drafts, each one getting better, deeper, more resonant, or something, until we got to the one you see.

  A little background: I was going through truly terrible personal stuff. I was also behind on finishing Them Bones, my first solo novel for the late, very-missed, Terry Carr’s second set of Ace SF Specials (others—L. Shepard, K.S. Robinson, somebody named Gibson—whatever happened to him?—Carter Scholz and Glenn Harcourt, Michael Swanwick) and while I was trying to write it, other stories were driving me bughouse. I had to stop and write them AND work on Them Bones AND the rewrites on this, and deal with the here-and-now-everyday-Halloween-type personal stuff . . .

  Well, it’s not Alice’s fault that I associate this story with a Bad Time; it’s just me. I wish I could have had more pleasant memories of selling to Playboy. This, like a bunch of other stories I haven’t mentioned, was up for a Nebula.

  * * *

  There are just archetypes, and then there are true archetypes in life and in the movies. That they’ll be here long after we’ve gone I have no doubt. And the central element in this story I’d wanted to write about ever since I came across references to it when I was eight or nine or ten years old. It all came together in this story (or the one I started writing, anyway—it’s really here in this final, fifth draft).

  Take a gander at this one.

  Heirs of the Perisphere

  THINGS HAD NOT BEEN GOING WELL at the factory for the last fifteen hundred years or so.

  A rare thunderstorm, soaking rain, and a freak lightning bolt changed all that.

  When the lightning hit, an emergency generator went to work as it had been built to do a millennium and a half before. It cranked up and ran the assembly line just long enough, before freezing up and shedding its brushes and armatures in a fine spray, to finish some work in the custom design section.

  The factory completed, hastily programmed, and wrongly certified as approved the three products which had been on the assembly line fifteen centuries before.

  Then the place went dark again.

  * * *

  “Gawrsh,” said one of them. “It shore is dark in here!”

  “Well, huh-huh, we can always use the infrared they gave us!”

  “Wak Wak Wak!” said the third. “What’s the big idea?”

  * * *

  The custom-order jobs were animato/mechanical simulacra. They were designed to speak and act like the famous creations of a multimillionaire cartoonist who late in life had opened a series of gigantic amusement parks in the latter half of the twentieth century.

  Once these giant theme parks had employed persons in costume to act the parts. Then the corporation which had run things after the cartoonist’s death had seen the wisdom of building robots. The simulacra would be less expensive in the long run, would never be late for work, could be programmed to speak many languages, and would never try to pick up the clean-cut boys and girls who visited the Parks.

  These three had been built to be host robots in the third and largest of the Parks, the one separated by an ocean from the other two.

  And, as their programming was somewhat incomplete, they had no idea of much of this.

  All they had were a bunch of jumbled memories, awareness of the thunderstorm outside, and of the darkness of the factory around them.

  The tallest of the three must have started as a cartoon dog, but had become upright and acquired a set of baggy pants, balloon shoes, a sweatshirt, black vest, and white gloves. There was a miniature carpenter’s hat on his head, and his long ears hung down from it. He had two prominent incisors in his muzzle. He stood almost two meters tall and answered to the name GUF.

  The second, a little shorter, was a white duck with a bright orange bill and feet, and a blue and white sailor’s tunic and cap. He had large eyes with little cuts out of the upper right corners of the pupils. He was naked from the waist down, and was the only one of the three without gloves. He answered to the name DUN.

  The third and smallest, just over a meter, was a rodent. He wore a red bibbed playsuit with two huge gold buttons at the waistline. He was shirtless and had shoes like two pieces of bread dough. His tail was long and thin like a whip. His bare arms, legs, and chest were black, his face a pinkish-tan. His white gloves were especially prominent. His most striking feature was his ears, which rotated on a track, first one way, then another, so that seen from any angle they could look like a featureless black circle.

  His name was MIK. His eyes, like those of GUF, were large and the pupils were big round dots. His nose ended in a perfect sphere of polished onyx.

  * * *

  “Well,” said MIK, brushing dust from his body, “I guess we’d better, huh-huh, get to work.”

  “Uh hyuk,” said GUF. “Won’t be many people at thuh Park in weather like thiyus.”

  “Oh boy! Oh boy!” quacked DUN. “Rain! Wak Wak Wak!” He ran out through a huge crack in the wall which streamed with rain and mist.

  MIK and GUF came behind, GUF ambling with his hands in his pockets, MIK walking determinedly.

  Lightning cracked once more but the storm seemed to be dying.

  “Wak Wak Wak!” said DUN, his tail fluttering, as he swam in a big puddle. “Oh boy. Oh joy!”

  “I wonder if the rain will hurt our works?” asked MIK.

  “Not me!” said GUF. “Uh hyuk! I’m equipped fer all kinds a weather.” He put his hand conspiratorially beside his muzzle. “’Ceptin’ mebbe real cold on thuh order of -40° Celsius, uh hyuk!”

  MIK was ranging in the ultraviolet and infrared, getting the feel of the landscape through the rain. “You’d have thought, huh-huh, they might have sent a truck over or something,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to walk.”

  “I didn’t notice anyone at thuh factory,” said GUF. “Even if it was a day off, you’d think some of thuh workers would give unceasingly of their time, because, after all, thuh means of produckshun must be kept in thuh hands of thuh workers, uh hyuk!”

  GUF’s specialty was to have been talking with visitors from the large totalitarian countries to the west of the country the Park was in. He was especially well versed in dialectical materialism and correct Mao thought.

  As abruptly as it had started, the storm ended. Great ra
gged gouts broke in the clouds, revealing high, fast-moving cirrus, a bright blue sky, the glow of a warming sun.

  “Oh rats rats rats!” said DUN, holding out his hand, palm up. “Just when I was starting to get wet!”

  “Uh, well,” asked GUF, “which way is it tuh work? Thuh people should be comin’ out o’ thuh sooverneer shops real soon now.”

  MIK looked around, consulting his programming. “That way, guys,” he said, unsure of himself. There were no familiar landmarks, and only one that was disturbingly unfamiliar.

  Far off was the stump of a mountain. MIK had a feeling it should be beautiful, blue and snow-capped. Now it was a brown lump, heavily eroded, with no white at the top. It looked like a bite had been taken out of it.

  All around them was rubble, and far away in the other direction was a sluggish ocean.

  * * *

  It was getting dark. The three sat on a pile of concrete.

  “Them and their big ideas,” said DUN.

  “Looks like thuh Park is closed,” said GUF.

  MIK sat with his hands under his chin. “This just isn’t right, guys,” he said. “We were supposed to report to the programming hut to get our first day’s instructions. Now we can’t even find the Park!”

  “I wish it would rain again,” said DUN, “while you two are making up your minds.”

  “Well, uh hyuk,” said GUF. “I seem tuh remember we could get hold of thuh satellite in a ’mergency.”

  “Sure!” said MIK, jumping to his feet and pounding his fist into his glove. “That’s it! Let’s see, what frequency was that . . . ?”

  “Six point five oh four,” said DUN. He looked eastward. “Maybe I’ll go to the ocean.”

  “Better stay here whiles we find somethin’ out,” said GUF.

  “Well, make it snappy!” said DUN.

  MIK tuned in the frequency and broadcast the Park’s call letters.