After a long and thoughtful inspection of the metal-band sculptures, the Yoda soap carvings, and the pen-and-ink sketches of dragons, Jay Omega followed his guide into the more commercial sphere of … he had heard the term “fandom,” but could one say “condom?” He snickered. One had better not.
“Hucksters’ room,” announced Diefenbaker with a wave at the chaos before them. “This is where you feed your habit—or wear it,” he added, as a monk-robed individual brushed past them.
The guest author solemnly contemplated the colorful chaos of weapons displays, movie posters, comic books, and a thousand lurid paperbacks scattered across a dozen metal tables, each surrounded by an assortment of elves and aliens.
“I thought you said there were electronics exhibits,” he said at last.
“Different room. We’ll get there. I thought you might like to see if any of the dealers have your book. It would be kind of you to autograph their copies.”
“I never know what to write,” sighed Jay Omega.
“Oh, just a signature would do,” Dief assured him. “But it would be very kind of you to put their names and the date in as well. Of course, I’ve never written a book, but if I did, I think I might write ‘Thank you for reading me.’ If anyone ever asked me to autograph it, that is.”
Jay Omega thought it over. “‘Thank you for reading me.’ Yes … that would be good.” He remembered Marion’s stern lectures about publicity. He certainly hadn’t received any promotion help from Alien Books. Even the mall in his parents’ town hadn’t been told about him. Marion said that Alien Books ought to be in charge of national defense, because they were so good at keeping secrets.
He edged his way past a Dorsai and said to the first book dealer, “Do you have any books by Omega?”
“Matheson,” said the dealer promptly, pulling out a hardback.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Richard Matheson wrote it. The Omega Man. A TV movie starring Charlton Heston. They changed the ending, though. The original title was I Am Legend. This is a first edition.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Hmmn. Kane Omega, Cosmic Sex, Lyle Stuart, 1973.”
“No. That’s not it, either.”
“I see you have my Runewind series,” said a solemn voice behind him. “Shall I autograph these for you?”
Jay Omega turned around with outstretched hand. “Appin Dun …” His voice trailed away.
The young man behind him, a few inches taller than Omega himself, wore a white satin tunic and a wool homespun cloak. His bone-white hair fell to his shoulders, and his green eyes burned with intensity. He stood spread-eagled in white tights and scuffed leather buskins, one hand resting on his broadsword, and smiled benignly at the mortals in his path. With graceful dignity he accepted Omega’s outstretched hand, which was still dangling in the air as he gaped.
“No,” he smiled gently. “I am not He Who Writes the Saga, but He Who Lives It. I am Tratyn Runewind, Lord of the Eildon Hills, Wielder of the Red Gold Sword of Cu Chulainn, son of Aiofe and the Runewolf—”
“Dog meat if Dungannon sees you,” Diefenbaker remarked. “You know how he feels about people impersonating his character, Cliff.”
The Presence lifted his chin and endeavored to look noble. “The Scribe’s envy is an affair for his soul, not mine,” he intoned.
“He threw a water carafe at you at World Con,” the bookseller pointed out.
“He once chased a Runewind down three flights of steps with a battle-axe!” said the Dorsai.
“Of course, he did!” snapped the Rune Warrior. “That was an imposter!”
“If he hears that you’ve been offering to autograph his books, you’ll probably die from the aftershock of his rage.”
“Well, I may change after the costume competition,” the warrior conceded.
Diefenbaker was about to continue the discussion, but at that moment Miles Perry appeared, waving two packs of Reese’s Pieces and three Yorkie bars. “I got them!” he announced breathlessly. “The Scotch guy said this would work.”
Diefenbaker frowned. “I think some of the colors are different.”
“Which ones?”
“I’d have to think about it.”
“Come on, then. You get to sort them out. He wants them in twenty minutes.”
Diefenbaker cast a helpless look at Jay Omega, as he was being dragged away. “I’ll be back! Perhaps someone else could show you the gadget room …”
Left unattended, Jay Omega decided to spare himself the further humiliation of inquiring after his book. Instead he would find the gadget room on his own. A poster-sized map taped to a pillar in the hucksters’ room provided reasonably clear directions. A large red arrow in the lower right-hand corner was labeled “You Are Here.” In the lower left-hand corner, a facetious physicist had penciled in, “You maybe here. Werner Heisenberg.” Omega smiled. After so much uninterrupted bewilderment, it felt good to get the joke. He took this as a hopeful sign that things would make more sense among the computers.
“Dr. Mega!”
Among the computer displays, air ionizers, and laser models sat Joel Schumann, a junior from last semester’s microprocessing class. Omega groaned inwardly. He should have known that this would happen. One of his students had turned up at the con, and would soon discover the professor’s guilty secret: Bimbos of the Death Sun. He might be able to swear Joel to secrecy, though. Omega took the offensive. “Er, what are you doing here, Joel?” the professor asked innocently.
The lanky blond grinned and tapped a computer monitor. “I came to look after these babies. They’re on loan from the campus computer center. I volunteered because I thought it might be fun to come to this thing. See a couple of old sci-fi movies, watch the goings-on, and swap information with other hackers. What about you, Dr. Mega?”
Jay Omega managed a weak smile. “It’s a long story, Joel.”
FOUR
Appin Dungannon stared at the vacant gray screen of his computer terminal, as if he were waiting for the darkness to roll up on one side and reveal glowing letters of wisdom on the other. He tapped out while waiting for other inspiration to occur, but the exercise did not make him feel any closer to creation.
Beginning a stint of typing was always the most difficult part of writing a book. Once he got going, his brain projected a mental movie of the action onto the computer screen, so that he was not so much inventing as recording what he visualized. He could do maybe fifty pages a day on automatic pilot once he got going, but it was the getting going that was the hardest part. The early chapters of the book were like trying to carve the Gettysburg Address on Mount Rushmore with a toothpick; by the denouement, which was his current fixation, he had pretty much lost interest in what the story was about anyway, so it was even harder, if that is possible, to get it up for the task. He sighed inwardly, wishing, as always, that he hadn’t already spent his publisher’s advance.
Maybe it would help if he threw something.
Appin Dungannon had written twenty-six books about Tratyn Runewind. Or maybe he had written one book about Tratyn Runewind twenty-six times. He could no longer remember why the series had seemed like a good idea to him, or how he had felt about the first half dozen. It was as if he’d woken up one day to find himself manacled like Marley’s Ghost with garishly covered paperbacks, a line of Runewind action figures (for which he received a percentage that was obscenely low), and a loathsome cartoon series, of which his cut was so meager that he’d fired his agent for the insult.
He was rich enough, according to his accountant—certainly his tax bill seemed to bear that out; and he supposed he was famous enough. He got fan letters in Elvish, and execrable unsolicited manuscripts to “please recommend to your publisher.” He used those under his cat’s dish, and by the phone for scratch paper.
Appin Dungannon was not as happy as perhaps a legend ought to be. His books were best sellers in the genre, but beyond that they went unread. He could expect, at best, a
paragraph in Publishers Weekly, and he was always bypassed for the major SF awards. Dungannon fiddled a bit with the brightness knob on the monitor. He would have traded ten thousand costumed autograph hounds for one gilt-edged monograph on “Dungannon’s Use of Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Fantasy.”
At the moment, though, he didn’t feel much like a synthesizer of Celtic mythology: he felt like Milton’s God in Paradise Lost, and his Satan had him by the throat. Tratyn Runewind. Tratyn Goddamn Runewind, with the flowing white locks and the clean-chiseled features of a sea hawk. Dungannon scowled. It must have been some kind of sick fantasy, he decided. The 5′ 1″ schmuck with the Mickey Rooney face writing Viking bullshit. He was sure that the vermin discussed its psychological implications endlessly behind his back. There wasn’t much he could do about that, except to cordially despise them, but, by god, he could make them keep out of his sight with their infernal Runewind get-ups. The very sight of some faggoty adolescent in tights and tunic made his hands itch for something to throw.
Dungannon glanced at his watch.
Someone was taking him to dinner soon, he thought. He supposed they’d expect him to talk to them. He reached for the bottle of Chivas Regal, and poured himself half a glassful. That ought to fuel a couple of paragraphs. It just wasn’t fun anymore. The first books had been carried by his curiosity about the folklore, and when that ran out, he’d enjoyed putting his editors and his ex-wife in the manuscripts as monsters, but even that became dull after a while. Now he wrote out of inertia, and because they kept waving money at him. And the letters kept coming: scrawls of praise for the series, and pathetic little drawings of “Tratyn Runewind,” but he went on writing, anyway. Because he couldn’t turn down all that money; because he was afraid that stopping would dry up the gift of words; and because the serious novel in the typing-paper box wouldn’t sell to anybody. He couldn’t give it away. But for Runewind they would pay the earth.
Appin Dungannon took a stiff swallow of Scotch and stabbed a wavering finger at the keyboard. With a giggle of defiance he pressed “Escape.”
No one had come back to claim Jay Omega for any con-related duties, but he was quite happy to be left to his own devices. In this case, the devices were various pieces of computer software which he and Joel Schumann were trying out one by one.
“These disks with burned protection sectors are a pain to copy,” Joel remarked, tapping a few keys.
Jay Omega looked over at the screen to see if anything had happened, but a large, familiar brown suitcase was suddenly positioned between him and the monitor. Near the handles, where the zipper wouldn’t close, copies of Bimbos of the Death Sun leered at him from their canvas confinement.
“I thought I’d find you here. These were chucked under the registration desk, quite abandoned. So was the smaller suitcase containing your clothes. I had that sent up to your room.”
“Hello, Marion,” said Jay, hoping he didn’t look as foolish as he felt.
“I might have known you couldn’t be trusted in the same building with gadgetry,” she sighed. “But have you done anything to promote your book?”
“I asked the booksellers if they had it.”
“And did they?”
“Er—no.”
“And did you offer to provide them with some autographed copies? … I didn’t think so. Well, perhaps we ought to find somebody who knows what guest authors are supposed to do.” She grinned up at him. “How do you like my costume?”
Jay Omega eyed her warily. This type of question wasn’t his forte. Let him compliment her new hairstyle, and it would turn out that she’d changed shades of lipstick. At present, Marion was wearing her dark hair in some sort of smooth flip style—he was sure that was different—and she was clad in a black jumpsuit. He was about to risk further humiliation by asking if it were a costume when the penny finally dropped. “The Avengers!” he cried. “You’re Mrs. Peel.”
Marion was pleased. “Not much resemblance to Diana Rigg,” she said, shrugging. “But she was always my idol. I guess while other girls my age wanted to be Mary Tyler Moore, keeping house in New Rochelle for Dick Van Dyke, I wanted to be Emma Peel, going off with some terribly clever man who treated me as an equal, and having adventures.”
Jay Omega pointed to the milling crowd of spacemen and Middle Earthlings. “Will this do?”
She handed him the battered suitcase. “Thank you, Mr. Steed. It will.”
Marion led and Jay followed, which was pretty much the way it had been since that day eighteen months ago, when a shy young man in jeans and sneakers had appeared in the English department with a spiral-bound computer printout, asking to speak to someone about science fiction.
Dr. Marion Farley, who had been in the office checking her mailbox, had given him a disinterested once-over, and said, “Sorry. The class is full. Tell your advisor to put you down for spring quarter.”
The young man had quietly explained that he really didn’t need the course, since he was already an assistant professor in electrical engineering, but that he would like to talk to someone about his book.
Before Marion had finished apologizing, he had invited her out to lunch, and over a couple of roast beef sandwiches at Bogen’s, he explained to her that he had written a novel, based on a theoretical problem in engineering.
“You see,” he’d said, finishing off the last of her potato chips, “the story involves a sun that emits rays causing slow but steady brain damage. But it affects only the women at the research station.”
Marion, one of the more outspoken members of the Women’s Network, gave him a wary nod. “Go on.”
“The really important thing is that it affects the computers. What I’m actually concerned with is the effects of sunspot activity in relation to polymer acrylic on capacitive interaction among high-frequency micro-components in …”
“The really important thing?” said Marion. “The really important thing is the machines, not the women?”
Sensing that he had said something wrong, he halted his narrative. “Well … from an engineering standpoint, I mean. What do you think?”
What did she think?
Marion thought that James Owens Mega was an ugly duckling who had not noticed his transition to swandom. She was sure that he had been a runty undergrad who had spent all his free time rewiring circuits, and who made good grades because he’d had no social life to distract him. She recognized the type from her own student days, when she’d hung around the wargames club, where it was okay for a woman to be smart and not pretty. Thank god she’d outgrown her pariah phase, she thought, adjusting one amethyst earring. Substituting aerobics classes for lit classes had done her a world of good. She’d gotten out of a miserable marriage to a fellow outcast who was going to remain in grad school forever, and, freed of the guilt of surpassing him, she’d earned her Ph.D. in two years. Now, in a new job at the English department at Tech, Marion had finally reached the stage of accepting herself as both smart and pretty.
She looked at her lunch partner, who was unselfconsciously finishing off a butterscotch ice-cream cone. He must have filled out a bit since his scraggly adolescence, and the contact lenses he’d gotten “for better peripheral vision” did wonders for his dark eyes. He’d probably worn safety glasses before, she thought, and he’d have looked like a mosquito in them. Marion looked at his hair, the color of the butterscotch, and at the fine bone structure of his face. He’s adorable, she thought. And he hasn’t been notified.
“Are you still thinking about the plot?” he asked again.
“What? Oh, the plot. Why don’t you leave the novel with me, and I’ll read it and let you know. Actually, the idea of women getting progressively stupid is pretty exciting from a publisher’s standpoint. It feeds the male hostility toward the competitive modern woman.” She looked at him closely. “Did you do that on purpose?”
He blushed. “No. I just threw that in because I realized that some diseases are sex-linked, and it seemed plausible. My main conc
ern was the computers.”
Marion sighed. “It would be.”
By the time Marion had tinkered with the characterization in his novel, and advised him through rewrites, chapter outlines, and query letters, he had become used to her, in much the same way that a stray cat gets used to belonging to someone. Marion had used a similar method of “taming”: no sudden moves, a calm and friendly manner, and regular offers of food. She hadn’t completely conquered his shyness, though. Marion sometimes felt just before they kissed that he was gearing up for it as one might approach the high-dive—with careful planning and much trepidation. She thought he was making progress, though. And his diffidence was certainly preferable to the first-date lunges of other professors she’d been out with, the post-divorce swingers.
Marion told herself that she was too happy in her newly won independence to be comfortable playing second fiddle to a male engineer earning three times her salary. Anyway, what if one of them got tenure and the other didn’t? Marion had seen too many academic couples break up over tenure problems. If the university denied tenure to a professor, he or she had one year’s grace period, and then it was: find another job. If your specialty was Chinese art or mining engineering that next job might not be anywhere close by. Usually in a relationship, if she got tenure and he didn’t, you could kiss the marriage good-bye: the male partner’s ego usually saw to that. Anyway, when faced with a choice between a lifetime of job security or a marriage with no guarantees, most people chose the job. She didn’t want that kind of pressure built into her relationship with Jay. And maybe in two years, she would know what she wanted.
Bimbos of the Death Sun Page 3