by John Varley
"How odd." I gulped. Poly's eyes were wide.
"Yes, I thought so. It makes no difference, of course. I am not authorized to receive instructions from the ground concerning such matters. Even if the caller had the password."
"Did he have the password?"
"I don't know. You instructed me to cut him off before he could use it."
"I see."
"Yes. The password is only used to prepare facilities ahead of time, of course. Meals, extra staterooms, matters of that nature."
This was something Poly and I had discussed for quite a long time. I felt it was a necessary risk, letting Izzy out of jail; it was, in fact, the only reason I had visited her in the first place. Without her cooperation, I could not have him released. But in my reading I had learned that many ships of this class were quite intelligent. The scenario I feared was a simple one: I ask for entry, and the ship wants to know how it is I'm knocking on the door when I'm still in jail. The ship could very easily be monitoring newscasts. If it hears Izzy is out, me showing up with the right thumbprint and the right DNA code was easier to accept.
Was it the right decision? I didn't know, yet. But what at first had seemed a narrow escape had turned out to be nothing of consequence. The ship would have ignored Izzy's attempt to block me anyway, even if I hadn't cut him off in time.
"I suggest you make yourselves comfortable in the acceleration couches," the ship said. "Boost will be in thirty seconds."
Poly and I both climbed into our couches and stretched out. I could see the seconds counting down on a ceiling clock as the passive restraint system bound us securely.
"How much acceleration will it be?" I asked.
"Five gees," the machine replied.
I tried to sit up, but the web wouldn't allow it.
"Five gees?" I shouted. "It'll kill us!"
"According to my data, the human body has a ninety-five percent chance of surviving five gees for an hour or more."
"An hour?"
"We will be boosting for an hour and a half, approximately."
"An hour and a half!"
"To get you to Luna by the date specified."
I wondered if there was still time to abort. I wondered if I wanted to abort. While I was still thinking it over and the last seconds were ticking away, the computer voice destroyed what little wits I might have had left to make the decision.
"It will be quite uncomfortable," it said. "Before we leave, I wonder if you'd tell me something?"
"What's that?"
"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"
The acceleration sat on me like a playful elephant, and I felt myself spiraling down, down, down, wild-eyed, sweaty-faced, seeing myself in the third person again, twisting through mad colors and flashing lights like Scotty Ferguson in the grip of his phobia in Vertigo, and I knew I was heading into another flashback.
* * *
ACT 4
The ravenous creature had no face. It shuffled down the broad spaceport concourse slow as a glacier but not nearly so quiet. Roughly circular in shape, it had scores of backs and hundreds of legs; approach it from any direction and that was all you saw. Backs of heads, backs of legs, the heels of shoes. It was a hungry ant colony with but one purpose: to feed upon the rays of charisma radiating from the jostling center. To feed, in a sense, upon itself.
In the center of the mass was a small boy, wearing a smile on his face and a jacket of gold brocade on his shoulders. His hair was copper-colored and stuck out stiffly to the sides. He was bathed in shafts of yellow and red and blue light, then momentarily frozen by strobes. Tiny skyrockets shot into the air from somewhere close to him, became dime-sized starbursts as they neared the ceiling.
The era when a paparazzi feeding frenzy like this would include bulky cameras and blinding lights and microphones on the end of poles was long over. These reporters had cameras embedded in their eyes, microphones in their ears. In each face one eye, usually the left, glowed softly with a red laser light. Some carried periscopes to get their points of view above the action.
Quite a while ago somebody had noticed that it just wasn't the same, the reporters crowding around without the lights, without the handicaps of technical gear to shoulder, notebooks to juggle and drop, microphones to thrust back and forth from mouth to mouth, and camera bags to swing around like incense thuribles. Especially the lights. It all looked rather drab without the lights.
So lights were brought in. At first they were carried by men and women. They still were, if the crowd of reporters wasn't large enough; anything to preserve the illusion that something important was going on here. But there was never any lack of reporters when Sparky was in town, so these lights and mini-pyros were rented from a firm specializing in hub-bub, called Hub-Bub Inc. The lights came from robotic helicopters the size of hummingbirds which circled slowly with no more noise than a bee and kept their beams always focused on the face of the Star. Other lights came from moving pylons, five feet tall, that shot up mini-rockets filled with flash powder and confetti and ticker tape, in addition to beams that swung back and forth like searchlights at a world premiere. Hub-Bub would also rent you a limo to cruise up to a theater or restaurant or tennis court along the public passageways, and outriders on electrocycles, all of them spouting glitz at a terrific rate.
Trailing at a discreet distance behind the beast were two automated sweepers, as required by city ordinance, feeding on brightly colored squares and strings of paper.
This was the ancient and honorable saturnalia that could spring up without warning at any time and any place, like fungus, if an important person happened to be in the neighborhood. It was the movable feast of the great bitch goddess Celebrity, the shufflin' charivari dedicated to the Public's Right to Know. It was a one-ring elephantine circus. Hoo, boy!
Sparky had spent a great deal of his life dealing with such circuses, but he saw them from the beast's belly. From here, the beast was all eyes and flashing teeth and moving lips. Ninety mouths and no butts, the beast had. He'd never seen it from the outside, where it was all ass.
Drop somebody down into the belly and he'd probably be frightened. There were so many teeth. Sparky knew that all it took to keep the beast fed was to keep smiling and keep moving. The bodyguards cleared a path, and he moved into it. Everyone was shouting questions and he couldn't hear any of them. He never could. But he nodded and smiled, and shuffled. It was enough. The beast was happy.
The bodyguards led the way to an unobtrusive door to the left of the main concourse. A storage locker, possibly, or a mop closet. There was no sign of any kind on the door. It opened to the man's thumbprint, and the three of them entered. Sparky turned at the last moment, paused, waving and smiling. Then the door closed behind him.
He put the smile away until it was needed again, let his shoulders and spine relax. He did a few neck rolls.
"Can I get you anything, boss?" one of the bodyguards asked.
"No, thanks, Rocko, I'll be fine." He walked across the thick-pile blue carpet toward a buffet table. There were heaps of fruit and veggies, attractively displayed, trays of cookies, a few steaming covered trays. Sparky filled a small bowl with radishes and pickles and other noshing food, carried them to a plush leather chair, and settled into it.
The room was provided by the airport for people like Sparky who could not wait out on the concourse. For an annual fee, Sparky could avail himself of this room and other places like it throughout Luna. Though it was nicely furnished and the food was always good, its chief attraction was the peace and quiet it offered. To that end, the one television screen was always on, but could be listened to only through headphones. There was a small library, a table with built-in chessboard, and another with poker chips and cards. Haircuts, massages, and manicures were available, on call.
The one really extravagant feature of the room was the fireplace. A real fire burning real wood crackled on the hearth. The first time here, Sparky had burned his hand, thinking it was a holo p
rojection. He remembered wondering what it cost to clean the pollutants and combustion products out of the air. About twenty special permits were required on Luna to install and maintain such an outrageous thing. Since that first time he hadn't thought about it at all. Sparky was by now thoroughly accustomed to luxury.
Beyond the tall windows the massive hulks of deep-space ships were trundled back and forth from cargo bay to fueling station to launchpads just over the horizon. From time to time one of them lit its torch and leaped into the sky atop a light so bright the windows polarized automatically to protect human eyesight.
Sparky never looked at any of this. He sat with his back to the window and unrolled his Scrawlpad. When he pushed a button columns of figures raced across the screen. When he stopped, he made a note with his stylus in his small, precise hand. He occupied himself this way for ten minutes.
"Would you like some coffee, Sparky?"
He looked up. An attractive woman in a blue spaceport-worker uniform was holding a steaming cup on a tray. Sparky took it, smiled at her, and looked back to his work. After a minute he noticed she was still there.
"Can I do something for you?" The employees were not supposed to ask for autographs, but sometimes they did. Sparky was usually easy about it.
"Actually, you could." The woman produced a card and handed it to him. "My name is Hildy Johnson, and I'm a reporter for the News Nipple."
"A very new reporter, evidently," Sparky said, annoyed. "Didn't your editor ever tell you—" Johnson was holding up her hand.
"Very new," she agreed. "Just in town from the dinosaur farm with a new job as cub reporter."
"You worked on a dinosaur farm?" Sparky had been thinking of dinosaurs for the new story arc scheduled to start in six months. "What was that like?"
"I got tired of shoveling brontosaur turds. Sparky, my editor did tell me that places like this are off-limits. Truce zones, he called them. And I'm not here to interview you."
"You're not?"
"Well, not right now. I just thought it wouldn't hurt to approach you and ask for an interview at a later date. I wanted to show you I could get in here, if I tried. I've been told you admire initiative."
Sparky was beginning to be more amused than annoyed.
"I admire chutzpah," he said. "It's how I got started in this business myself. But what if you made me angry? Then I might never give you an interview."
"You seldom do, anyway. I thought it was worth a shot. If you turn me down, I haven't lost anything, and I go looking for my big story somewhere else." She smiled, and shrugged her shoulders.
"Call my secretary tomorrow morning," he said. "He'll set something up. Now get out of here, you sneaky person." He watched her hurry away toward a door he assumed led to the kitchen.
"Rocko," he said, and across the room the big man stood up quickly and hurried to Sparky's side.
"Did you see that girl who was just here?"
"Yeah?"
"She was a reporter."
Rocko looked surprised, twisted to look at the door Johnson had used for her exit, as if his eyes could bore right through it.
"Find out how she got in here, and tell airport security. Have them plug the hole."
"You got it, Spark-man," Rocko said, and started away.
"And Rocko?"
He turned, eyebrows raised.
"If this happens again, you're fired."
"Naturally."
Sparky smiled, and went back to his Scrawlpad. In one sense, the mistake wasn't Rocko's fault. Airport security should have kept Hildy Johnson at bay. But in a larger sense, it was his fault. Rocko was in charge of all studio security, and especially the person of Sparky Valentine, the studio's most valuable asset. It was up to him to see anyplace Sparky visited was safe, and if it wasn't, either advise Sparky not to go there or make it safe with his own people.
Still, Sparky knew no security was perfect, and Rocko knew Sparky was unlikely to fire him unless incidents like this became commonplace. Rocko was very good at what he did. There had been three stalkers at various times in Sparky's career deemed dangerous enough to warrant more than a restraining order. Two of them were serving long jail terms, and the third had not been seen or heard from in over three years. Sparky never asked.
He put the production-cost numbers back in their file and called up the story department. The analysis of the next seven proposed episodes was supposed to be delivered today, and he wanted to see what his staff of geniuses thought of the proposals. He was just in time; the Scrawlpad was downloading the moment he called up the file. He began to read.
Sparky had originally been designed as an endless (one hoped) series of one-offs. Each episode was to stand on its own as a story, watchable by anyone who had never visited the Sparky universe before. There was continuity, in that each character had a history created through his adventures in previous episodes, and to a lesser degree, a back story. These tidbits were all written down by the series historian, and maintained in a small document known as a bible. All television series had bibles. They enabled new writers to come into the fold and read up on each character, know where he or she had been in life, know his limits and strengths and personality. For the first several years that was just about all that was in the bible. Episodes did not connect with each other. There was no "continued next Saturday!" This seemed to satisfy everybody. For the first few years.
When ratings begin to slip, new approaches are called for. The prevailing wisdom was that Sparky's target audience was too young to participate in complicated multiepisode plots. Too confusing, the pollsters said.
Sparky paid for another survey. This one found that estimates of the target audience were skewed by the fact that large numbers of viewers were staying loyal to Sparky even when they passed out of the targeted demographic: four-to-ten-year-olds. The show scored well all the way up to thirteen, when hormonal pressures led most Sparksters toward more sexual shows. And even then, kids who had grown up with Sparky still showed an interest in product tie-ins and in collecting memorabilia and old episodes. Sparky had filed that away for future consideration: surely there was a way to profit from this almost instant nostalgia when the teens grew into adults and had more money to spend. To that end, not much was ever thrown away from a Sparky production. It was all labeled, filed, and stored. "Taking a page from Walt Disney's book," Sparky called it. "If you can make money on it once, why not make money on it five or six times?"
"Retain the ephemera" became the watchword at Thimble Theater.
Then Sparky commissioned another study, and it was here that his feel for the audience transcended the dry pronouncements of focus groups and play-therapy sessions, measurements of eye movements and pupil contractions and palm sweat and heart rate, all so scientific and so lacking in the most important ingredient, to Sparky: magic.
He did the new study himself. He disguised himself and went out among the children. He hung around them and he listened to them, and he watched their eyes. He wasn't looking for pupil dilation, either. He was searching for that gleam of wonder as a child stammered out his recollections of a story that moved him. He found it, many times, and he found out something else. These kids remembered shows from two years ago.
So the show was revamped, gradually, to become a longer, continuing saga. Armageddon Angry was built up as the arch villain. Each episode might be seen as a skirmish, and each season as a war. There was a term in the industry for this kind of plotting, known as the "story arc." A problem would be posed in one episode, dealt with to a greater or lesser degree in three or four more episodes, and brought to a climax in the sixth installment. Meantime another arc had begun around episode three.
Keeping it all straight was a formidable task. The series bible grew from a dozen stapled sheets to a massive volume tended by a staff of three. There was another department whose mission in life was to steal. Steal from dead people, it's true, but steal nonetheless. Sparky had long ago given up coming up with plots and, except for the occasion
al inspiration, characters. Anything in the public domain was fair game. Old comic books were a fertile source. Almost anyone who had had his or her own comic book in the twentieth or twenty-first century had made a guest appearance on Sparky by now. Sparky had visited locations from Gotham City to Surf City. Old movie and television serials had been plundered for plotlines and cliffhangers. Sparky had entered alternate universes, places where classic private eyes, singing cowboys, half-breed aliens with pointy ears, and giant radioactive ants actually existed.
The show also had to keep up with trends. One fairly recent innovation in the marketplace was the introduction of gene-reconstructed dinosaurs raised as meat animals. Sparky had done shows with dinosaurs in them, but had never gone to a dinosaur ranch. What were the possibilities in such a setting? He had posed the question to his staff, and their first thoughts on the subject were in a new report he had not had time to read yet. Hildy Johnson's intrusion had jogged his memory on the subject, so he refiled the story-arc analysis and brought up the brainstorming-session minutes, a series of memos ranging from the humdrum to the impractical, with the solid ideas usually buried somewhere in the middle. Sparky encouraged his writers to put everything down, no matter how wild. No one was ever upbraided for having a dumb idea. Sometimes the real nuggets were mined from the extremes, not the comfortable middle.
'Saur-punchers. 'Saurboys 'n 'Saurgirls. Sparky liked it. Brontoboys. Yuck. He lined it out. There were lists of words used by actual cowboys, suggestions how they might be adapted. Dogies. Chuckwagon. Brandin' and calf-ropin' and hog-tyin'. Bobbing off their tails. Did they really do that? Cayuses and fillies and remudas and geldings and poontangs and chaps and spurs that jingle-jangle-jingle. He'd heard somebody was using a T. Rex to round up his herd. True? Make a note, find out. And what the heck was a dogie? Some kind of cow dog?
Sparky was enjoying himself. This was the kind of work he liked. It was like studying for a role, something he still did, faithfully, as his father had taught him, even though he hadn't played any role but Sparky for a long time. His memory was practically photographic, and jammed with odd facts that had been learned for one role or another. At the same time there were vast gaps, and for the same reason. If he were called on to play, for instance, Christopher Columbus, he would soak up everything he could learn about fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, but quite likely remain ignorant of the fourteenth century. And why not? What was the point of learning all those things unless you planned to use them? Life was too short.