by Kim Newman
‘You’ve overreached another deadline, John. I wanted the JFK master back yesterday. We’re committed to a production start. And we have marketing to consider. It’s a q-seller on advance sales, and you haven’t delivered yet.’
‘Sorry.’ Yeovil stretched his mind around the problem. ‘I’ve still got a few more amendments.’
‘You’re a trekkiehead, John. Leave it alone. I told you it was finished last week. I’m satisfied as is. And I’m supposed to be a bastard tyrannical editor. We’re all expletive deleted here. The copiers are primed.’
‘You have my word as a gentleman that a definitive master will be on your desk tomorrow morning.’
‘Tomorrow morning? I get into the office Kubricking early, John.’ Tony looked dubious. ‘Okay, you’ve got it, but no more extensions. No matter how many errors slip through the finetooth. You can have Oswald miss, and re-elect the randy bugger for all I care. The next John Yeovil hits the stands Friday. Does that scan?’
‘Of course. I apologise for the delay. I’m sure you understand…’
‘If that means: Will I forgive you for being an iridium-plated prick, no way. However, my slice of your sales buys you a lot of tolerance. Ciao.’
Tony over-and-outed. He was getting near termination. There were other publishers. Offers tapped up in Yeovil’s slab every morning.
The Kurtz-assist master was still slotted. Yeovil pulled it, primed the duplicator, and cloned a copy. The master tape was too recognisable as such for his purpose. Too many slices and scribbles. Plus he would need it later. His plan did not include writing off the work done on JFK. The dream would be worth a lot of money. Yeovil doled himself out a shiver of self-delight.
He printed on the clone’s spine: JFK by John Yeovil. And under that he scrawled: review copy.
Review copy. Yeovil backgrounded an aural of Richard Horton’s review of his last dream. Just to remind himself what this was about.
‘Yeovil is lucky that his publishers have the clout to buy off his heroine’s heirs, ’cause The Private Life of Margaret Thatcher is quite as unnecessary and unsavoury as his previous efforts. Yeovil is genned up on period externals, and has an insidious knack for concepting his dreams so you zip through without being too annoyed. But once the headset is off, you know you’ve had a zilch experience. A few critics praise the man for his high-minded moral tone, but even they will find the lip-smacking prurience of Margaret Thatcher difficult to get their heads around. Yet again Yeovil bombards the captive mind with an endless round of sensuality – enormous state banquets, thrilling battles, ichor-drenched ‘tasteful’ sexing – and finally condemns all the excesses he has dragged us through with such gloating relish. He is at his worst when his heroine submits to what he has her anachronistically think of as ‘a fate worse than death’ under the well-remembered, much-maligned Idi Amin in order to save a planeload of hostages. One sympathises with the feminist group who have petitioned for Yeovil’s judicial castration under the anti-sexism laws. Finally, the man’s dreams are a far less interesting phenomenon than his publicity machine. If you’re out there taking a rest from adding up the profits, John, pack it in and join the Rural Reclamation Corps. With relief we turn to a new dream from Miss Susan Bishopric, who has made such an…’
Richard Horton was as smug a little shit as ever there was. Listening to his middle-aged parody of the adjectival overkill of a comput-assessor made Yeovil’s fingers twist his watch chain into flesh-pinching knots.
Yeovil could not decide which made him hate Richard Horton more. The Carol business, or his tridvid defamations. Carol Horton had been Yeovil’s mistress for three months. Before he had elected to sever the bond, Carol had taken it upon herself to return to her husband. Moreover she had instituted a civil lawsuit against Yeovil, alleging that he had drawn upon copyrighted facets of her personality for Pristine, the protagonist of his The Sweetheart of Tau Ceti. When he thought about her Yeovil still disliked Carol, but only to prove a point. Deep down it was Horton’s insulting reviews that lifted Yeovil’s loathing into the superhate bracket.
Before leaving the house Yeovil vindictively erased all his Horton tapes.
* * *
Richard Horton was dreaming. He dreamed that he was John F. Kennedy. Or, rather, he dreamed that he was John Yeovil jacking off while dreaming that he was John F. Kennedy. If Kennedy had been like the similie no one would now be around to review the dream. The Ivans would have nuked the world in desperation.
So far it had been the typical John Yeovil craptrap. The man never missed a chance to be cheap and obvious.
In the Oval Office JFK was sexing Marilyn Monroe. Why was it always Marilyn Monroe? Every dream set in the mid-twentieth century found it obligatory to have the hero sex Marilyn Monroe. The girl must have had a crowded schedule. The semiologically inclined comput-assessors called her an icon of liberated sensuality. Richard Horton called her a thundering cliché.
It was the regulation wet-dream stuff, a little harder than Yeovil’s usual hypocritical lyricism. At least there were no butterflies and gentle breezes here. Just heavy-duty sexing. Another depiction of woman as a hunk of meat. Kubrick knows what Carol ever saw in Yeovil.
Horton’s attention strayed around the scene. Perhaps he should feed the dream through the British Museum Library’s researcher. It might catch Yeovil out on an external. It was probably not worth it. Yeovil was the kind of Dreamer who got every wallpaper tone and calendar date right and then hit you with a concept that would make a computer puke.
Yeovil had peppered the sexing with memories. The lanky git was pathetically pleased with himself. Look how much research I did, screamed a mass of largely irrelevant facts. WWII, Holy Joe Kennedy, Hyannis Port.
Who wrote Kennedy’s inaugural address? That was out of character. Horton’s dybbuk flinched from the white-out. There was another mind crowding in, superimposed on the Kennedy similie. It was not Yeovil, he was working overtime on having JFK remember who was topping the bill at the Newport, Rhode Island jazz festival in 1960. There was someone else. A strong mind Horton could not place. It was a contributory Dreamer. Was Yeovil trying to pirate again? Eclipsing a collaborator on the credits was not beneath him.
Horton felt himself getting lost in the dream. The fiction was broken, and he was disconcerted. For an instant he thought he actually was sexing Marilyn Monroe. The woman was screaming in his ear. After all these years, the real thing.
Then it was cartoon time. The JFK similie body stretched impossibly. The return of Plastic Man. There was a playback fault. That was it. Whoever had last dreamed through this copy had left an accidental over-lay. Horton fished around for a name, but was dropped into a maelstrom of explosion imagery.
Was Yeovil experimenting with hard core? At least that would make a change.
Then the dream came together again, and Horton was locked in. Wedged between the minds of Yeovil, Kennedy and the mysterious Mr X.
Marilyn lay face down, exhausted, her hair fanned on the pile carpet. JFK traced her backbone with the presidential seal. Horton was disgusted to feel Catholic guilt flit through JFK’s mind. Yeovil was piling cant upon cliché as per usual.
‘Jack,’ breathed Marilyn, ‘did you know there’s a theory that the whole universe got started with a Big Bang?’
Yeovil’s dialogue was always the pits.
Kennedy parted Marilyn’s hair and kissed the nape of her neck. Horton felt a trekkiehead reply coming. Something hard at the base of the president’s skull. A white hot needle in his head. A brief skin and bone agony (what was that about Oswald?) then nothing.
* * *
Horton was not Horton any more. Horton was not anybody any more. His mind had been wiped. Completely, as an erase blanks a tape. Yeovil watched as the former Horton rolled on his side, retracting his arms and legs, wrapping himself into an egg.
The dreamtape was still running. Yeovil offed the machine, and pulled the clone tape. Elvis Kurtz had been unknowingly generous. He had shared his death
.
Yeovil freed Horton from his headset, and gently popped his contact lenses. They had been making him cry. No point in keeping up enmities from a previous incarnation.
Yeovil wondered how Carol would take to motherhood. She always had shown an inclination to sentiment over gurgling infants. Now she had a chance to be closely acquainted with one. Horton had a lot of growing up to do.
Yeovil dropped the tape into Horton’s Disperse, and used the critic’s in to gain access to his Household. He wiped the whole day. As an extra flourish, he wiped the entire Household memory. A little pointless mystification to obscure his involvement.
Now all he had to do was get back to Luxborough Street, wipe Kurtz off the master tape, give that to Tony, and wait for the returns. Do it, then clear up afterwards.
* * *
Tony had messaged in the Household tridvid.
‘I had a merry hell of a time overriding your Household, you bastard. But we didn’t lend you company programs for nothing. So you were spending the day putting a few final touches to the masterpiece were you? If so, you must be doing it in another dimension because the master is here and you aren’t. Where the Jacqueline Susann are you? Actually, don’t bother to tell me. I don’t give a damn. I now have the JFK master, and that fulfils your contract. You can start looking for a new publisher. By the time you play this back we’ll have a million copies in distribution, with an expected second impression on Monday. Don’t worry though. You won’t have to sue us to get what’s coming to you. Ciao.’
PATRICIA’S PROFESSION
When the call came, Patricia was going FF through the latest snuffs. She was a subscriber to the 120 Days in the City of Sodom part-work, but, since Disney had run out of de Sade and been forced to fall back on their own limited psychopathology, the series had deteriorated. After a few minutes of real-time PLAY, she had twigged that the 104th day was just one of the fifties with a sexual role reversal. Mouldy chiz. Colin broke into the vid-out.
‘Patti,’ he said. ‘Go to PRINT.’
Colin had blanked before she could work out whether he was live or a message simulacrum. The printer retched a laconic strip.
JAY DEARBORN. DEARBORN ESTATE. TWENTY ONE O’CLOCK HIT. 2-NITE.
The mark was on screen. The Firm had a four-second snip from a regular call. Dearborn was a sleek, expensive, youngish man. He had on a collarless, fine-stripe shirt. Silently, he repeated a phrase. Something about cheekbones. Patricia’s lip-reading was off.
She switched to greenscreen and speed-read Dearborn’s write-up. Executive with Skintone, Inc., the second-largest fleshwear house. Married. Euro-citizen. Not cleared for parenthood. No adult criminal record. Alive. Solvent.
Colin came back, real-time. ‘Our client is Philip Wragge. More middle management at Skintone. He likes us. He’s used us before.’
‘Why does he want Dearborn hit?’
‘Getting curious, Patti?’ Colin smiled. ‘That’s not in your usual profile. I think it’s the mark’s birthday.’
Patricia’s birthday was in August. When she was little, her parents had always taken her to their cottage in Portugal for the school holidays. She had escaped until she was twelve. That year, Dad’s job became obsolete, and the cottage had to be marketed. At tea-time on her birthday, the other children had come round to Patricia’s house and killed her.
Colin faded, and the scheduled programme popped up on the slab. Patricia rarely watched real-time. A Luton house-husband guessed that Seattle, Washington was the capital of the US. The Torture Master grinned, and his glamorous assistant thrust his/her bolt-cutters into the hot coals. ‘Wrong,’ sang the man in the dayglo tux, ‘I’m afraid it’s Portland, Oregon. That puts you in a tricky spot, Goodman. You have only three questions and two toes left, so take your time with this next one. Who, at the time of this recording, is the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America…’
Patricia off-switched. It was twenty to nineteen. Chord would be here soon. She put her uniform on. Black spiderweb tights, black lace singlet, black arm-length talon glove, black butterfly tie. She shrugged into the white shoulder holster, and pulled a comfortable heavy white Burberry over her shoulders. She perched a black beret on her Veronica Lake bob. She white-fixed her face, and blacked her lips and eyelids. Neat.
She palmed her desktop, and the safety cabinet unsealed. She took out the roscoe and disassembled it. There had been some question about the foresight, but it seemed okay to her eye. She replaced the lubricant cartridge, and snapped the machine back together. She shoved a new clip of slugs into the grip, and holstered the roscoe.
It could manage up to 170 rounds per second. At that rate, the slugs left the eleven-inch barrel as molten chips. At Sixth Form College, the Firm’s instructor had given a demonstration. She had turned a cow carcass into a piece of abstract expressionism, a study in red and intestine. Patricia didn’t like to use her roscoe as a hosepipe, and usually kept the rate adjusted to a comfortable twenty-five r.p.s.
Outside, the car called to her. Patricia sealed her flat, negotiated the checkpoint in the foyer, and stepped onto the steaming pavement. If she stood still for a few minutes, the yellow ground mist would eat holes in her unprotected shins. Harry Chord, at ease in his reinforced chauffeur’s puttees and Lone Ranger mask, held the Olds’ door open for her. She slid onto the sofa-sized back seat. The Olds purred. Chord took the console.
The sturdy, box-like, black car had only recently been converted. Chord had done the job himself, and was quietly pleased with it. When they stopped at the Gordon’s station to tank up, he pointed out the minute scars on the hood and running boards. Otherwise, it was impossible to tell from the exterior that the cash-wasting petrol engine had been replaced with the latest model booze-burner.
Patricia was tense, impatient. As always before a hit. She had been to the lavatory twice since Colin’s call, but there was still a tingle in her lower abdomen. Some of the other girls pill-popped, but she needed, and wanted, the cold-rush of unfiltered sensations.
Of course, there had been less popping since Rachel. The girl had taken too many zippers, waltzed into her mark’s office singing ‘Paper Moon’, and shot the man through the brain. By the time the termination officers arrived, she had switched to ‘Stardust’. The Firm had lost its 100% efficiency rating.
Patricia had heard Chord, and several of the other back-up personnel, refer to Rachel’s humpty dumpty hit. ‘…all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men…’ The flippancy irritated her. Killing people might seem like a fun job, but you had to take it seriously. If nothing else, Rachel had proved that.
The Dearborn Estate was out in the Green Belt. They were well ahead of schedule, so she had Chord program a route that would avoid the disemployment centre. Shit City, the claimants called it. Nissen huts covered in ghastly, mock-cheerful murals. The dope dole. The Ghetto Blaster gangs. There had recently been a rash of documentaries, but, having spent six years in Shit City, Patricia couldn’t get off on poverty porn.
Evidently, Dearborn’s wife was in on the hit. At the estate entrance, a cobra terminal snaked into the Olds and hovered over Patricia’s lap. HELLO! IDENTIFICATION? She palm-printed the slab, and keyed in the Firm’s trademark. PURPOSE OF VISIT? She had typed MURDER before noticing that the need for a reply had been countered on the print of Gillian Dearborn. HAVE A PLEASANT VISIT.
The crackling electrodes in the gravel drive went briefly dead as the Olds rolled over them. There were other cars, low and streamlined, ranked in front of the house. Over the roof landing floated a small dirigible, shifting gently on its mooring. The house, Victorian but remodelled in early Carolian, was lit by banks of old-mode disco lamps.
Dearborn was having a birthday party, with live music. Patricia recognised the popular song ‘Throw Yourself Off a Bridge’. The ballad was being performed by a small swing combo; an unfamiliar, somehow inapt arrangement. A girl sinatra was trying to croon to the up-tempo.
‘When I get too depressed
,
Crawling along in a ditch,
I get right up,
Walk on down,
And throw myself off a bridge…’
Patricia left Chord with the Olds, and walked unconcerned across the lawn. A few stray guests, in designer rags, noticed her. She hated Depression Chic. The bulk of the party was behind the house between the L of its two wings and the skimming pool. She tried to move easily among the rich.
A man with a plumed mohawk, an epitome of the New Conservatism, reached inside her Burberry. She sliced his forehead with a soporific talon. He fell onto a trestle table, between the swan cutlets and the cocaine blancmange. He would be able to tell the other Young Rotarians he had won second prize in a duel.
‘I could put myself through a mangle,
I could drink the water in Spain,
From a home-made noose I could dangle,
It’s the end to all my pain…’
Dearborn was an easy mark. He was holding a helium balloon with BIRTHDAY BOY on it. He was squiffed, but standing. A plump, dapper man, and an elegant woman with fashionable facial mutilations were propping Dearborn up. Wragge and Gillian? They saw her coming and confirmed their identities by rapidly moving out of her line.
Abandoned, the mark lurched forward into a personal spotlight. No hole-in-the-head innocent bystanders in the way. Terrific.
‘If I feel like cracking up
And locking myself in the fridge,
I get on out
And take a high jump,
To throw myself off a bridge…’
Patricia reached with her bare hand for the roscoe. The Burberry slid from her shoulders. There were a few werewolf whistles. She shimmied across the lawn, getting in close to compensate for the possibly dodgy foresight. She did a few elementary gold-digger steps, and adopted the Eastwood position; legs apart, weight evenly distributed, left hand on right wrist, elbows slightly bent to absorb the kickback.
The bandleader, surprised but adaptable, had his instruments segue into ‘Happy Birthday to You’. The sinatra picked it up immediately, and led the less out-of-it guests in the chorus.