Swiggs chuckled. "Babe, you got a pilot's license?"
She popped another bubble, then took the gum out of her mouth, dropped it on the carpet, and stepped on it. In her heels, that was a precision feat. "Aerobatic," she said.
"No way," Gecko said.
She didn't bother to reply.
"I don't believe it," Gecko said. "Was it hard to get?" Gecko had once decided he would try for an aerobatic rating. The grapevine said that he'd puked all over the cockpit the first time the instructor had taken him out.
She looked at him for a moment, and cocked her head. For a moment I thought her expression might change. "Nah," she said. "It was boring." She looked at Swiggs. "You want me to give the yozzies blow jobs?"
"No, sweetie," Swiggs said. "Not these guys."
"OK." She picked up her clothes and walked out.
After she'd left, I said, "What is this, Swiggs? We can't use her. She's a junkie."
"No, no," Swiggs said.
"Don't try to bullshit me, Swiggs," I said. "I know needle tracks when I see them."
"Hey," he said. "Cut her a little slack. She's good. We're not going to find anybody better, believe me. Everybody in Hollywood has experimented a little; it's no big deal. Don't you know? In Hollywood, people don't say 'Hi, how are you' when they meet, they say, 'How high are you?' "
He snorted at his own joke. "And, besides, just wait until you hear the plot. You'll die."
"Yeah? You've been promising. When will I see it?"
"I'll get it to you tomorrow."
· · · · ·
"It's a draft," Swiggs said. He seemed anxious that I like it. "Just a draft. Something here that doesn't work, we can fix it."
I retired into a lounger beside the kidney-shaped swimming pool to read. I was worried—we hadn't wanted a script at all—but as I turned pages, and started to visualize the scenes, I relaxed. This might be ok.
To my surprise, the script was good. I could see the writer had stolen wholesale from half a dozen old science fiction stories, but the pieces fit together seamlessly. He had me on the edge of my seat.
The heroine was a rich adventuress whose daddy had contributed to the project. The hero was the handsome, dedicated engineer. From the beginning they didn't like each other, but they had to work together to make the mission a success, and, of course, at the last minute the crew ends up to be just the two of them. It had romance, it had adventure, and you could feel the tension building as things started to go wrong—would they make it? And then, they make it to the moon (the script says "shots of scenery and our protagonists bouncing around")—but there isn't enough oxygen left. Micrometeoroid punctures had put tiny pinholes in their tank, too much of their oxygen had leaked out. They blast off from the moon, but there isn't enough oxygen left for them to make it home alive.
Shit, I thought. It's a cliche, but it grabs you. I could see it on the screen. The audience would believe it. Every one of them would be holding their breath.
We'd have micrometeoroid shields over the tanks, of course. A few layers of multi-layer insulation would do it. But the audience wouldn't know that.
The hero makes a great speech about self sacrifice. He says he's going to float off into space so he can save enough oxygen so that she will survive. She tells him no, she loves him too much. They both are wearing their space suits, and as they are talking he is operating the air pump to depressurize the cabin. He's got my attention. She opens the hatch, pops the latches on her helmet, and as her helmet flies away and the air explodes out, with her last breath she says, I love you, and she pushes off from her couch and the camera follows her as she drifts off into space—
What?
Holy shit, I thought. How is he going to get them out of this one? Does he think that she can hold her breath? I flipped to the last page—
The end was, she's dead.
· · · · ·
"It's, interesting," I said.
"What did I tell you?" Swiggs said. "Interesting? It's fucking killer. Am I right, or am I right? Say yes."
"This plot. It's—the cold equations."
"Hey, that's a good phrase. Yeah. What do you think—it's got tragedy, romance, adventure—everything."
"OK. So, how do you think we're going to shoot this? We don't have a budget for special effects—how do you want to do the scene where she opens her helmet?"
Swiggs shrugged. "What's the need for special effects? She opens her helmet."
"But, she can't do that."
"Why not?"
"There's no air in space. She'll die."
"Well, that's the point, isn't it?" He looked at me. "Didn't you tell me that the whole point is that this isn't just make-believe, it's real? She dies. Let me tell you, that will pack the theaters."
Oh, no. This was worse that I thought. It was a snuff movie. "When the police find out that you killed somebody deliberately, they'll shut down the film, and we'll all be in jail."
"Shit, dude, don't be dumb. We don't release the script—that's top secret. Any leaks, we deny everything, and it just adds to the buzz. To the public, it's an accident."
"I'd better talk to Miss Vixen."
Swiggs shrugged. "She's cool with it."
So I talked to the actress. Did she understand what, exactly, the script said?
"Yeah, I die. Big deal." She shrugged. "Live fast, die young."
"You don't mean that."
"Fucking yes. Everybody dies, yozzie, you know that? It's happening. I'd just as soon check out early as late, and why not do it on screen? It's the ultimate kick."
"Don't you want to live?" I said. "There's plenty of experiences. You could have children—"
"Had a kid when I was fifteen," she said. "Died."
"There's more to life—"
"Shit, yozzie, what the hell do I want to live for? I've seen it all, I've done it all, and not one moment was worth the bother of doing again. Life is no BFD, if you ask me. Sex while sky diving? Yeah, done that. Motorcycling at a hundred miles an hour down Topanga Canyon, dead-drunk and blasted off my ass on acid? Yeah, yeah, done that. I've snorted strychnine for kicks, gang-banged the Hell's Angels, surfed Dead-Man's Rocks in a hurricane, done that, done that, done that. I've got more friends dead than you ever had living. Death? Fuck, bring it on. Dying is just another kind of high."
"I've got the backing," Swiggs said. "One billion little green ice-cubes, payable on demand. We are go for lift-off, kids, and let me remind you that I have controlling interest in this venture, not you. I can buy talent, kids. I can buy rocket scientists. I have the plan, I've got the money, and we're making this movie, with or without you. So, are you in, or not?"
"Hey, Astro-boy, why the shocked expression?" she said. "It's not like I'm not going to die anyway. Take a look at me. I'm sagging." She popped her breasts out of her blouse and shook them at me. "How long do you think I've got left in the industry, two years, maybe three? I'm washed up and faded out. Go out with a bang? Hell, I'd do fucking anything to go out that way." For just a moment her face had an expression; she was wistful. Then her face was blank again. "At least they will remember my name."
"It's out of the question," I said. "No. I veto it."
Swiggs shook his head and smiled. "Take another look at the contract. You can't veto anything. I'm running this project now."
· · · · ·
"The problem," said the Gecko, "is that she'll do it. She's crazy enough to really die, just to get a little screen time."
It was the three of us meeting, alone.
"The real problem is that we've signed over the project," Mr. Rich said. "That includes non-disclosure agreements. If we say word one about this to anybody, Swiggs denies everything, sues us for breach of contract and gets everything we have, and we go to jail, as well. We're out of the control loop here. Even if we drop out, he still goes forward with it."
"You'd do it too," I said.
"What?" said the Gecko.
"Admit it," I said. "You'd be w
illing to die, if it means that you could get to the moon first."
The Gecko thought for a moment. "Yeah," he said. "But that's different."
· · · · ·
So, I ask you, what should we have done? What would you do?
Yeah, I'll tell you how it all came out. There's not much to tell. The Gecko called up American Express, told them his card had been stolen, it had been gone for a week and he just noticed it was missing. The credit card company found the ten-thousand dollar charge to Rocketdyne, they stopped payment, and the next day Rocketdyne melted the F-1 engines down for scrap. I think that hurt the Gecko more than anything, seeing those beautiful engines melt into scrap metal. But without the F-1 engines, Project Moon was over.
End of story.
Nah, Swiggs couldn't make the movie by himself. He tried suing us, but there was nothing to sue for; we were flat-out bankrupt. He went on making movies, some of them where the actors even wear clothes. Nope, none you've ever heard of, I don't think.
The Gecko took his government pension, and started a new career in the computer industry. Did pretty well for himself, I guess, enough to buy himself a new yacht and a new car and a new wife every couple of years. I sort of lost track of him after a while. Guess he's retired for good, by now. I hope he found happiness.
Mr. Rich died. Cancer got him; it gets everybody in the end, but it got him early. I still exchange Christmas cards with his wife.
And me, well you see me. I got old.
What happened to the actress? She died of hepatitis. Sometimes I picture her. She straightened out, got married, settled down. She thinks back on her crazy youth and laughs.
We sold our dreams, but we couldn't sell our conscience. And as a result, the project failed. Twenty years later, no moonbase, and the stars look farther away every time we look up.
So, I ask you—should we have sold out?
So now you say you want to go to the moon. You think Hollywood can finance it; you've got it all worked out, you think you've got every detail arranged. Artemis Project, is it? Nice name.
I just have one question for you, kid. A question you'd better start asking yourself now, since you'll have to answer it some day.
Just how far are you willing to go?
JEFFREY FORD
Jeffrey Ford (born November 8, 1955 in West Islip, New York) is an American writer in the fantastic genre tradition, although his works have spanned genres including fantasy, science fiction and mystery. His work is characterized by a sweeping imaginative power, humor, literary allusion, and a fascination with tales told within tales.
Jeffrey Ford is the author of a trilogy of novels from Eos Harper Collins: The Physiognomy, Memoranda, and The Beyond.His most recent novel, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque(Morrow/Harper Collins), was published in June 2002 as was his first story collection, The Fantasy Writer's Assistant & Other Stories (Golden Gryphon Press). The summer of 2005 will see the publication of Ford's sixth novel, The Girl in the Glass,from Harper Collins (August 2005), and a stand-alone novella, The Cosmology of the Wider World, from PS Publishers (June 2005). His second collection of short stories, The Empire of Ice Cream, will appear in March of 2006 from Golden Gryphon Press. His short fiction has appeared in the magazinesFantasy & Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Event Horizon, Black Gate, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, MSS, The Northwest Review, and Puerto Del Sol and in the anthologies Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Vols. 13, 15,and 16, Years Best Fantasy of 2002, The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest, Leviathan #3, Album Zutique, Witpunk, The Silver Gryphon, The Dark, Trampoline, Thackery T. Lambshead's Guide to Exotic & Discredited Diseases, andPolyphony #3. His stories have been nominated multiple times for The World Fantasy Award, The Hugo Award, The Nebula Award, and once each for The Theodore Sturgeon Award and The International Horror Guild Award. He is the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards and one Nebula. Ford lives in South Jersey with his wife and two sons. He teaches Writing and Literature at Brookdale Community College in Monmouth County, New Jersey.
The Empire of Ice Cream, by Jeffrey Ford
2003 Nebula Award-winning Story; 2004 World Fantasy Award-nominated Story; 2004 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award-nominated Story; 2004 Hugo Award-nominated Story
Are you familiar with the scent of extinguished birthday candles? For me, their aroma is superceded by a sound like the drawing of a bow across the bass string of a violin. This note carries all of the melancholic joy I have been told the scent engenders—the loss of another year, the promise of accrued wisdom. Likewise, the notes of an acoustic guitar appear before my eyes as a golden rain, falling from a height just above my head only to vanish at the level of my solar plexus. There is a certain imported Swiss cheese I am fond of that is all triangles, whereas the feel of silk against my fingers rests on my tongue with the flavor and consistency of lemon meringue. These perceptions are not merely thoughts, but concrete physical experiences. Depending upon how you see it, I, like approximately nine out of every million individuals, am either cursed or blessed with a condition known as synesthesia.
It has only recently come to light that the process of synesthesia takes place in the hippocampus, part of the ancient limbic system where remembered perceptions—triggered in diverse geographical regions of the brain as the result of an external stimulus—come together. It is believed that everyone, at a point somewhere below consciousness, experiences this coinciding of sensory association, yet in most it is filtered out, and only a single sense is given predominance in one's waking world. For we lucky few, the filter is broken or perfected, and what is usually subconscious becomes conscious. Perhaps, at some distant point in history, our early ancestors were completely synesthetic, and touched, heard, smelled, tasted, and saw all at once—each specific incident mixing sensoric memory along with the perceived sense without affording precedence to the findings of one of the five portals through which "reality" invades us. The scientific explanations, as far as I can follow them, seem to make sense now, but when I was young and told my parents about the whisper of vinyl, the stench of purple, the spinning blue gyres of the church bell, they feared I was defective and that my mind was brimming with hallucinations like an abandoned house choked with ghosts.
As an only child, I wasn't afforded the luxury of being anomalous. My parents were well on in years—my mother nearly forty, my father already forty-five—when I arrived after a long parade of failed pregnancies. The fact that, at age five, I heard what I described as an angel crying whenever I touched velvet would never be allowed to stand, but was seen as an illness to be cured by whatever methods were available. Money was no object in the pursuit of perfect normalcy. And so my younger years were a torment of hours spent in the waiting rooms of psychologists, psychiatrists and therapists. I can't find words to describe the depths of medical quackery I was subjected to by a veritable army of so-called professionals who diagnosed me with everything from schizophrenia to bipolar depression to low IQ caused by muddled potty training. Being a child, I was completely honest with them about what I experienced, and this, my first mistake, resulted in blood tests, brain scans, special diets and the forced consumption of a demon's pharmacopoeia of mind-deadening drugs that diminished my will but not the vanilla scent of slanting golden sunlight on late autumn afternoons.
My only-child status, along with the added complication of my "condition," as they called it, led my parents to perceive me as fragile. For this reason, I was kept fairly isolated from other children. Part of it, I'm sure, had to do with the way my abnormal perceptions and utterances would reflect upon my mother and father, for they were the type of people who could not bear to be thought of as having been responsible for the production of defective goods. I was tutored at home by my mother instead of being allowed to attend school. She was actually a fine teacher, having a Ph.D. in History and a firm grasp of classical literature. My father, an actuary, taught me Math, and in this subject I proved to be an unquestionable failure until I reached college age. Although x=y migh
t have been a suitable metaphor for the phenomenon of synesthesia, it made no sense on paper. The number 8, by the way, reeks of withered flowers.
What I was good at was music. Every Thursday at 3:00 in the afternoon, Mrs. Brithnic would arrive at the house to give me a piano lesson. She was a kind old lady with thinning white hair and the most beautiful fingers—long and smooth as if they belonged to a graceful young giantess. Although something less than a virtuoso at the keys, she was a veritable genius at teaching me to allow myself to enjoy the sounds I produced. Enjoy them I did, and when I wasn't being dragged hither and yon in the pursuit of losing my affliction, home base for me was the piano bench. In my imposed isolation from the world, music became a window of escape I crawled through as often as possible.
When I'd play, I could see the notes before me like a fireworks display of colors and shapes. By my twelfth year, I was writing my own compositions, and my notation on the pages accompanying the notes of a piece referred to the visual displays that coincided with them. In actuality, when I played, I was really painting—in mid-air, before my eyes—great abstract works in the tradition of Kandinsky. Many times, I planned a composition on a blank piece of paper using the crayon set of 64 colors I'd had since early childhood. The only difficulty in this was with colors like magenta and cobalt blue, which I perceive primarily as tastes, and so would have to write them down in pencil as licorice and tapioca on my colorfully scribbled drawing where they would appear in the music.
My punishment for having excelled at the piano was to lose my only real friend, Mrs. Brithnic. I remember distinctly the day my mother let her go. She calmly nodded, smiling, understanding that I had already surpassed her abilities. Still, though I knew this was the case, I cried when she hugged me good-bye. When her face was next to mine, she whispered into my ear, "Seeing is believing," and in that moment, I knew that she had completely understood my plight. Her lilac perfume, the sound of one nearly inaudible B-flat played by an oboe, still hung about me as I watched her walk down the path and out of my life for good.
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