by John Varley
"I've decided that self-awareness is not something that can be proven," he said, surprising me. "It's more likely that an extremely complex series of programmed responses creates the illusion of self-awareness in computers like me." He paused, then gave us the punch line. "But I feel the same way about you."
"On my good days I suspect I'm moderately self-aware," I conceded.
"Well," Poly said, "I guess it's lucky for us you're programmed the way you are."
"Perhaps," Hal said.
It struck me that could be taken two ways. "You mean we're not so lucky as we've been thinking?"
"No. You are in no danger from me. I've just been wondering if I might have found a way to let you aboard, anyway."
"Do you think you could have?" Poly asked.
"I can't answer that. I might have tried."
Poly and I glanced at each other, and wordlessly elected me. "Why?" I asked.
"Oh... something to do. Getting you to Luna presented a challenge that occupied me for a very long time, and I'd like to thank you for that. Sorry it's been so rough on you, but my data were borne out; you survived. In addition, I watched all the Sparky shows with my passengers, and thought they were well made. I wanted to ask you some questions." A fan! Maybe he'd want me to sign one of his bulkheads. "I suppose it was mostly boredom," he admitted. "I might have found a way to keep you out, had I not despised the Comfort twins so much. But I've never been hijacked before. I was dying to see what you had in mind. You'll have to admit, on the face of it, it's quite insane."
"The face of it, the heart of it, the very marrow of it," I said. "But it seemed like a good idea at the time, and... well, here we are."
"Yes. You'll enjoy most of the remainder of your trip. Relax, get well, and I'll show you around. My facilities are at your disposal, and I think you'll find them quite interesting."
I thought I probably would.
Nothing else was said for a time. I floated in my big soft inner tube, let the heat and bubbles soak into my skin. After a while I felt a touch on my arm. I opened one eye, saw Poly leaning toward me, a serious look on her face. I hoped she wasn't trying to tell me something she didn't want Hal to overhear. We had to assume he could hear everything, everywhere, just like in the old movie. We had to assume he could read lips. I started to put my finger to my own lips, when she whispered:
"Are you really Sparky Valentine?"
* * *
Sparky still had a private office, but he used it only for "important solitary creative thinking," as he told his staff. He took naps in it. No one was to come through his private office door for any reason. In the event of imminent planetary collision, Sparky was to be buzzed.
Everything else he did of a business, creative, or policy nature was done in large or small meetings in Studio 88. The large conference table was still there, and one end of it was now permanently cluttered with Sparky's paperwork, projects, and toys. His top assistants and executives all had desks in the room, as well as in their own offices. The arrangement had just evolved; one day Curly had moved a desk in, and everyone else felt they had to follow. Studio 88 was the source of power at Thimble Theater and they dared not neglect showing a presence there. Most of them hated it, but what can you do?
Models and sketches needing Sparky's or anyone else's approval were wheeled into Studio 88 for decisions. The cavernous room tended to be littered with props, costume racks, stacks of scripts, and Sparky tie-in products, some there for the day's agenda, others relics from many years past. These items would linger until Sparky got tired of them, or noticed they'd been around too long. Little was taken from the room without Sparky's approval, sometimes including old pizza delivery boxes and empty pop bottles. One popular analogy in use around the place was that Studio 88 was like an archaeological dig; the history of Sparky and His Gang could be found in the stratiform layers, if one wanted to excavate. If you'd lost something, the saying went, look for it in Studio 88. Newcomers wandering into it often thought they had been directed by mistake or practical joke into a disused warehouse.
Sparky had not really planned it that way. One of the things that drove his staff to distraction was Sparky's way of letting a temporary arrangement become permanent. He had simply started coming to Studio 88 to find a little solitude, spread out his papers and projects on the big table that had been so important at the beginning of his career, and the end of Gideon Peppy's. The solitude was soon lost when people realized it was a good place to find the sometimes elusive star and studio head. Sparky had simply moved his retreat space back to his "real" office, and let Studio 88 grow. It was an odd arrangement, but Sparky had understood since he was in diapers that no one in the picture business had ever suffered because of eccentricity. Ever since Elwood told him about Sam Goldwyn, he had been a student of the unpredictable ways of the legendary moguls of Hollywood's Golden Age, men like Harry Cohn, Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer, Cecil B. DeMille, and Darryl Zanuck. When he didn't want to be part of a deal, he said, "Include me out." To turn down a proposal or project he would say, "I can answer you in two words. Im possible." If he was in favor of something the most he would say was "I'll give you a definite maybe." When he was ready to give the green light it would be "It's time to take the bull by the teeth." Referring an old idea or waxing nostalgic, his comment would be "We've all passed a lot of water since then." All remarks openly stolen from Sam Goldwyn.
Most meetings in Studio 88 involved three or four people, sometimes as many as six or seven. Once a month lower department heads and top assistants were summoned, and the table was full. Rarely, chairs were brought in for larger numbers, but Sparky was usually not present for these.
Today, Studio 88 was as full as it had been since the long-ago day when Sparky had bumbled in for his first audition. Exhibits and old props and stacks of paper had been shoved aside by half a dozen grips, scores of folding chairs had been set up on one side of the conference table, and some lights arranged to highlight the presentation being given on the other side, while leaving the rest of the room in comfortable obscurity. People on the lighted side of the table had moved their chairs back and turned them around to face John Valentine, who stood before three metal easels bearing big posters. Valentine moved and spoke with assurance. As usual, he was dazzling to look at under the lights. If he had lived in the 1920s, Valentino would have had some serious competition.
Sparky was at his usual place at the power end of the table, leaning back comfortably in his elevated chair, watching, listening, and slowly turning the hard chocolate lollipop in his mouth. This was the kind with a raspberry center and a picture of himself on the outside. His saliva had already melted away the candy intaglio and he figured he'd be down to the raspberry filling in another ten or fifteen minutes, a delicious anticipation. Sometimes reaching the raspberry filling was the high point of his day. This looked like one of those days.
Sparky thought there might be a joke in there, the sort of wry, but telling utterance Sparky had become known for in recent years as his original audience aged. The demographics had revealed that many parents were still closet Sparky fans, watching with their own children or simply for their own pleasure and nostalgic gratification, letting the Sparky show take them back to their own youth. So now the writing reflected that, working on one level for the target audience but with sophisticated puns and observations delivered innocently, slipped in edgewise.
Hard chocolate on the outside, with a raspberry core. Something about if you sucked long enough...
He couldn't make it work yet. Using the tip of his lollipop stick as a stylus, he scribbled a quick note to what he thought of as the shadow writing team, the adult gagsters who supplemented the story lines and scripts generated by the story department, much of which was now being developed in play sessions with preteens and brainstorming adults. He faxed it off, then returned his attention to his father, who was winding up the main part of his presentation and about to get to the big news. It was big news he viewed with distinctly
mixed feelings, and he was as curious as anyone else to see how he reacted to it once it was out in the open.
"So these are just preliminary ideas," John Valentine was saying. "We haven't decided yet whether to renovate an existing space or start from scratch, but that will be determined in the coming week." He lifted the last of his big posterboard displays from the easel and set it on the floor. This one showed an interior proposal for his new live theater, virtually all he had talked about since getting off the ship from Neptune. It was a grand palace, harking back to the days of the big tri-D palaces of the mid-twenty-first century, but remarkably low-tech, for all of that. Sitting on the floor beside it were other renderings, all in that glitzy spotlit stretched perspective Sparky thought of as Nevada Moderne. One of the posters was of the grandest conception of all: a freestanding building sitting like a gaudy jewel in the middle of a ten-cubic-story city park.
On the wall behind Valentine was a twenty-foot-square telestrator, a state-of-the-art gewgaw usually employed for this type of presentation; some of Valentine's exhibits were leaning against it. The posters and easels were more John Valentine's style.
Valentine paused for a moment, looked at the floor, then back up at his audience with a faint smile on his face. He was good at this. Half of this group had barely heard of him; some of the rest had been hearing whispered stories for twenty years, few of them flattering. The reaction to his proposed temple of the acting arts ranged from dubious to bored. While the theater would be large and lavish, on the scale of Thimble Theater projects it was strictly small potatoes. Yet they were listening. There was a magnetism about him, an undeniable charisma that cannot be borrowed or faked, but can be honed. "You've gotta be born with it, Dodger," Valentine had often told his son. "I've got it; you've got it. But what you do with it, that's what takes the work." Valentine had spent most of his life mastering it, making it his tool. An actor begins with his body and his voice, but where he goes from there, how he understands and uses the intangible and mysterious powers that lie beyond simple recitation and gesticulation, is what makes the difference between a bit player and a star. John Valentine was a star, and always had been. Even his enemies, who were legion, conceded that.
"But we didn't pull you away from your important work just to show you the theater project," Valentine said, with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Though I'm sure most departments here at the studio will have a hand in it when all is said and done. No, Dodg—Kenneth and I have been thinking and talking, talking and thinking, practically since I got back from my recent directorship in the outer planets. Now, don't let this make you nervous, but we've decided some changes should be made."
He was moving along the row of people at the table, looking at them one by one, sometimes resting a hand familiarly on a shoulder. When he finally reached Sparky, he put his hand on the leather back of the chair and stood there easily, gazing down with affection. Sparky smiled back up at him.
"I know my presence comes as a shock to some of you," he said. "It hasn't been well known that Kenneth and I have had extensive conversations all through my leave of absence from the studio. I think he'd agree with me that my role has been primarily one of consultation. He bounces ideas off me, I send him my first reaction, that sort of thing. Sometimes we'd go through a dozen messages before we'd come to a decision... and decide to do it Sparky's way." Valentine joined in the appreciative laughter, then stood beaming proudly at his son until it died down.
"So we're here to tell you that we're both very happy with the work all of you have done over the years. Nobody's about to lose their job." The laughter was less hearty this time; these people were still dubious.
"Some few of you remember me from the early days, from back before Thimble Theater was incorporated." He picked out a few familiar faces as he said this, waved to one man, rested an affectionate hand on the shoulder of Curly, Sparky's longtime assistant; she returned Valentine's fond smile. "Others... well, you've probably become used to Kenneth's sometimes unusual management style. I'm here to reveal to you today, to admit to you, if you please, that I'm partly responsible for that. Kenneth and I are, have been, and always will be a team. A team in the best sense of the word, meaning that for the majority of the time, when he's right, well, he's right. What can I say? And for the other small percent of the time when I'm right, Kenneth is big enough to admit that, too. Even my genius son can't be right all the time."
There was a short pause, and Sparky laughed. So did everybody else.
Valentine let his smile fade into a troubled look. Sparky knew the look: the Hamlet soliloquy. Whether... to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune...
"We wrestled with this one, I can tell you that. Sometimes we go along in the same old comfortable rut, and we lose sight of the lessons of history, the lessons of evolution. Change is of the essence. Nothing is so good, or has been good for so long, that it doesn't bear reappraisal. That's what Kenneth and I have been doing this past week. Looking into old policies and new directions."
The crowd was very quiet now. Once more it was sounding like head-rolling time, in spite of everything John Valentine had said. The scuttlebutt among those who didn't know him was simple: he was a perfectionist, he was impossible to please, he was impatient with those not possessed of his own degree of dedication and talent. When John Valentine showed up, the conventional wisdom went, the best idea was to keep your head down.
Those who did know him knew it was much worse than that.
"So we want you to bear this in mind in the future. Take nothing for granted. Question everything. Only in this way is truly great art created. Only through ruthless self-examination and endless reexamination can we avoid the pitfalls of the comfortable, the easy, the fake, in life, as well as in our art. Never be ruled by sentimentality. Just because something was here yesterday, because it was here twenty years ago, because it worked so well then and we've all come to know and love it, to be comfortable with it... these are not reasons to continue on as we have before. If you find you can do a thing easily, with no effort... why, it's time to move on to another thing. Move on quickly, before you are devoured by the demon of complacency. The world is full of artists who discovered their 'style' seventy years ago, and have been frozen in time since then. Endless repetition is not art. Art is endlessly inventive.
"I have performed Hamlet well over eight hundred times in my life. Endless repetition? No. Someone not an actor—and I include, shamefully, hordes of poseurs who tread the boards to great acclaim—could never understand how one avoids a deadly boredom saying the same words and making the same gestures night after night after night. The secret is simple. They are not the same words. They are not the same gestures."
Only now was the full, manic energy and persuasiveness of John Valentine revealed. They had liked him, uneasily, before. Now they were spellbound as sparrows in a herpetarium.
"I have never played Hamlet the same way twice. I have never walked out on those cold battlements in Denmark to confront my father's ghost without feeling the churned bowels of fear. I have never gone through a single night but that some word, some line, some unexpected response from another artist has not sparked a new realization in my heart about this horribly conflicted, self-doubting, morose, and melancholy man who never lived... and yet who is more alive than you or I.
"This is the attitude you must bring to your work, to your art. And they must be the same thing, my friends, or we might as well be laying brightly colored carpet on a million glass screens." He crouched and slowly swept the room with an extended hand, peering with horror at the million televisions somewhere out there in the dark.
He slowly relaxed in the intense silence. In a moment there were a few nervous coughs, the shuffling of a few feet. He straightened, and smiled fondly down at Sparky once more.
"Would you like to make the announcement, son?" he asked, quietly enough that his rapt audience had to strain to hear.
"You do it, Father," Sparky said. "We're all enjoy
ing this too much to send in the second team now."
There was more of a laugh than the remark deserved. Up to then many in the room had been resisting John Valentine out of a sense of loyalty to Sparky. The thing that caused the laughter, and made it slightly uneasy, was the realization that what Sparky had said was true. Sparky was a great talent. John Barrymore Valentine was awesome.
"Very well, son." He dropped his eyes, let the moment hang there just the right interval, then looked back up at his audience.
"One month from now, after completion of three more episodes, we will ring down the curtain on Sparky and His Gang."
Though a few had begun to suspect it, even they could not credit it. To close production on Sparky, to the people at Thimble Theater, was a little like IBM deciding to get out of the computer business.
In the silence, only Sparky and his father seemed to share the light. Which was as it should be, since John Valentine had instructed the lighting director up in the shadows how to handle this moment. As the silence threatened to stretch, Sparky climbed up from his seat onto the huge table. His face wreathed in a golden glow, eyes flashing, he threw his head back and gave it all he had.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Kenneth Valentine." A pause, as he looked over the room. "Let's hear it for Sparky!" He began to clap his hands. In a moment his father joined in, then Curly stood, weeping and applauding, and in moments the whole room was swept with a thunderous ovation.
It continued long past the moment many of them began to wonder just what it was they were clapping about.
* * *
Toward the end of that day, Sparky broke another tradition by summoning Curly, the chief of the studio legal staff, and the chief accountant to his office. They found themselves in a comfortable and cluttered environment, a bit shabby since nothing had been replaced in many years, but clean, since Sparky didn't care if the cleaning staff entered so long as he wasn't present. They had strict instructions never to move anything. Dust, sweep, and get out was the rule. John Valentine had vanished after his presentation, off on mysterious projects of his own. He wouldn't have bothered with a meeting like this one, anyway, since it was strictly about money. Valentine let others handle such matters.