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And last but indisputably first among the Saints, Elvis
Aron Presley, of Tupelo, Mississippi; Nashville; and Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. of A. It was his incredibly
stillascendant star one hundred years after his death that had
inspired the retired ad agency executives who were the founding
fathers of the Flacks to concoct the most blatant and
profitable promotional campaign in the inglorious history of
public relations: The F.L.C.C.S.
You could say what you want about the Flacks-and I'd said
a lot, in private, among friends--but these people knew how to
treat the working press. After the Elvis pavilion the crowd was
divided into two parts. One was a long, unmoving line, composed
of hopeful congregants trying to get a seat in the last row of
the balcony, some of them waving credit cards which the ushers
tried not to sneer at; it took more than just money to buy your
way into this shindig. The rest of the crowd, the ones with
press passes stuck into the brims of their battered gray
fedoras, were steered through a gap in velvet ropes and led to
a spread of food and drink that made UniBio's efforts at the
ULTRATingle rollout look like the garbage cans in the alley
behind a greasy spoon.
A feeding frenzy among veteran reporters is not a pretty
sight. I've been at free feeds where you needed to draw your
hand back quickly or risk having a finger bitten off. This one
was wellmanaged, as you'd expect from the Flacks. Each of us
was met by a waiter or waitress whose sole job seemed to be to
carry our plates and smile, smile, smile. There were people
there who would have fasted for three days in anticipation if
the Flacks had announced the ceremony ahead of time; I heard
some grousing about that. Reporters have to find something to
complain about, otherwise they might commit the unpardonable
sin of thanking their hosts.
I walked, in considerable awe, past an entire juvenile
brontosaur carcass, candied, garnished with glace'd fruit and
with an apple in its mouth. They were rolling something
unrecognizable away--I was told it had been a Tori-san effigy
made entirely from sashimi--and replacing it with a three-meter
likeness of Elvis in his Vegas Period, in marzipan. I plucked a
sequin from the suit of lights and found it to be very tasty. I
never did find out what it was.
I built what might easily qualify as the Sandwich of the
Century. Never mind what was in it; I gathered from Brenda's
queasy expression as she watched my Flackite wallah carrying it
that ordinary mortals--those who did not understand the zen of
cold cuts--might find some of my choices dissonant, to say the
least. I admit not everyone is able to appreciate the exquisite
tang of pickled pigs knuckles rubbing shoulders with rosettes
of whipped cream. Brenda herself needed no plate-carrier. She
was schlumping along with just a small bowl of black olives and
sweet pickles. I hurried, realizing that people were soon going
to understand that she was with me. I don't think she even knew
what one item in ten was, much less if she liked it or not.
The room the Flacks called the Grand Studio had formerly
been the largest sound stage at NLF. They had fixed it up so
the area we saw was shaped like a wedge, narrowing toward the
actual stage in the front of the room. It was quite a large
wedge. The walls on either side leaned in slightly as they
rose, and were composed entirely of thousands upon thousands of
glass-faced television screens, the old kind, rectangular with
rounded corners, a shape that was as important to Flackites as
the cross was to Christians. The Great Tube symbolized eternal
life and, more important, eternal Fame. I could see a certain
logic in that. Each of the screens, ranging in size from thirty
centimeters to as much as ten meters across, was displaying a
different image as Brenda and I entered, from the lives, loves,
films, concerts, funerals, marriages and, for all I knew, bowel
movements and circumcisions of the Gigastars. There were simply
too many images to take in. In addition, holos floated through
the room like enchanted bubbles, each with its smiling image of
Momby, Megan, Tori-san, and Elvis.
The Flacks knew who this show was really for; we were
escorted to an area at the edge of the stage itself. The actual
congregants had to be content with the cheap seats and the
television screens. There were balconies upon balconies
somewhere back there, vanishing into the suspendedspotlight
theme the Flacks favored.
Because we were late most of the seats right up front had
been taken. I was about to suggest we split up when I spotted
Cricket at a ringside table with an empty chair beside her. I
grabbed Brenda with one hand and a spare chair with the other,
and pulled both through the noisy crowd. Brenda was embarrassed
to make everyone scoot over to make room for her chair; I'd
have to speak to her about that. If she couldn't learn to push
and shove and shout, she had no business in the news game.
"I love the body, Hildy," Cricket said as I wedged myself
in between them. I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was
set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about
to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me and left a
crystal bowl full of them.
"Do I detect a note of wistfulness?" I said.
"You mean because they've retired your jersey from the
great game of cocksmanship?" She seemed to consider it. "I
guess not."
I pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of
having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration. Not
that I wouldn't be interested again when I Changed back to
male, in thirty or so years, if she happened to be female
still.
"Nice job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana,"
I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a
basket before me and trying to eat a part of my sandwich with
my other hand. I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed
and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for at any
pawnbroker in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and
beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope;
I saw three of the damn things depart by messenger, and they
wouldn't be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the
market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.
"That was you?" Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.
"Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some
scurrilous rag or other whose initials are S.S. and who
deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing covering her deep
despair at having had only one opportunity to experience the
glory that was me."
"Yeah, it was sort of gory," Cricket said, reaching across
me to shake hands. "Nice to meet you." Brenda stammered
something.
"How much did that shot cost you?"
Cricket looked smug. "It was quite reasonable."
"What do you mean?" Brenda asked. "Why did it cost you?"
We both looked at her, then at each other, then back at
Brenda.
"You mean that was staged?" she said, horrified. She
looked at the olive in her hand, then put it back into the
bowl. "I cried when I saw it," she said.
"Oh, stop looking like somebody just shot your puppy, damn
it," I said. "Cricket, will you explain the facts of life to
her? I would, but I'm clean; you're the unethical monster who
violated a basic rule of journalism."
"I will if you'll trade places with me. I don't think I
want to watch all that go down." She was pointing at my
sandwich with a prim expression that was belied by what I could
see of the remnants of her free lunch, which included the
skeletons of three tiny birds, picked clean.
So we switched, and I got down to the serious business of
eating and drinking, all the while keeping one ear cocked to
the jabbering around me, on the off chance somebody had managed
to get a scoop on the canonization. No one had, but I heard
dozens of rumors:
"Lennon? Oh, c'mon, he was all washed up, that bullet was
a good career move."
". . . wanna know who it's gonna be? Mickey Mouse, put
your money on it."
"How they going to handle that? He doesn't even exist."
"So Elvis does? There's a cartoon revival--"
"And if they picked a cartoon, it'd be Baba Yaga."
"Get serious. She's not in the same universe as Mickey
Mouse . . ."
"--says it's Silvio. There's nobody with one half the
rep--"
"But he's got one problem, from the Flacks' point of view:
he ain't dead yet. Can't get a real cult going till you're
dead."
"C'mon, there's no law says they have to wait, especially
these days. He could go on for five hundred more years. What'll
they do, keep reaching back to the twentieth, twenty-first
century and pick guys nobody remembers?"
"Everybody remembers Tori-san."
"That's different."
"--notice there's three men and only one woman. Granting
they might pick somebody still alive, why not Marina?"
"Why not both of 'em? Might even get them back together.
What a story. A double canonization. Think of the headlines."
"How about Michael Jackson?"
"Who?"
It kept on and on, a speculative buzz in the background. I
heard half a dozen more names proposed, increasingly unlikely
to my way of thinking. The only new one I'd heard, the only one
I hadn't thought of, was Mickey, and I considered him a real
possibility. You could have walked down to the Leystrasse that
very day and bought a shirt with his picture on the front, and
cartoons were enjoying a revival. There was no law saying a
cult had to have a real object, what was being worshipped here
was an image, not flesh and blood.
Actually, while there were no rules for a Flack
canonization, there were guidelines that took on the force of
laws. The Flacks did not create celebrities, they had no real
axe to grind in this affair. They simply acknowledged
pre-existing cult figures, and there were certain qualities a
cult figure had to have. Everyone had their own list of these
qualities, and weighted them differently. Once more I went
through my own list, and considered the three most likely
candidates in the light of these requirements.
First, and most obvious, the Gigastar had to have been
wildly popular when alive, with a planetary reputation, with
fans who literally worshipped him. So forget about anybody
before the early twentieth century. That was the time of the
birth of mass media. The first cult figures of that magnitude
were film stars like Charlie Chaplin. He could be eliminated
because he didn't fulfill the second qualification: a cult
following reaching down to the present time. His films were
still watched and appreciated, but people didn't go crazy over
him. The only person from that time who might have been
canonized--if a F.L.C.C.S. had existed then--was Valentino. He
died young, and was enshrined in that global hall of fame that
was still in its infancy when he lived. But he was completely
forgotten today.
Mozart? Shakespeare? Forget it. Maybe Ludwig Van B. was
the hottest thing on the Prussian pop charts in his day, but
they'd never heard of him in Ulan Bator . . . and where were
his sides? He never cut any, that's where. The only way of
preserving his music was to write it down on paper, a lost art.
Maybe Will Shakespeare would have won a carload of Tonys and
been flown to the coast to adapt his stuff for the silver
screen. He was still very popular--As You Like It was playing
two shows a day at the King City Center -but he and everyone
else from before about 1920 had a fatal flaw, celebrity-wise:
nobody knew anything about them. There was no film, no
recordings. Celebrity worship is only incidentally about the
art itself. You need to do something to qualify, it needn't be
good, only evocative . . . but the real thing being sold by the
Flacks and their antecedents was image. You needed a real body
to rend and tear in the padloids, real scandals to tsk-tsk
over, and real blood and real tragedy to weep over.
That was widely held to be the third qualification for
sainthood: the early and tragic death. I personally thought it
could be dispensed with in some circumstances, but I won't deny
it's importance. Nobody can create a cult. They rise
spontaneously, from emotions that are genuine, even if they are
managed adroitly.
For my money, the man they should be honoring today was
Thomas Edison. Without his two key inventions, sound recording
and motion picture film, the whole celebrity business would be
bankrupt.
Mickey, John, or Silvio? Each had a drawback. With Mickey,
it was that he wasn't real. So who cares? John . . .? Maybe,
but I judged his popularity wasn't quite in that stellar realm
that would appeal to the Flacks. Silvio? The big one, that he
was alive. But rules are made to be broken. He certainly had
the star power. There was no more popular man in the Solar
System. Any reporter in Luna would sell his mother's soul for
one interview.
And then it came to me, and it was so obvious I wondered
why I hadn't seen it before, and why no one else had figured it
out.
"It's Silvio," I told Cricket. I swear the lady's ear
tried to swivel toward me before her head did. That gal really
has the nose for news.
"What did you hear?"
"Nothing. I just figured it out."
"So what do you want, I should kiss your feet? Tell me,
Hildy."
Brenda was leaning over, looking at me like I was the
great guru. I smiled at them, thought about making them suffer
a little, but that was unworthy. I decided to share my
Holmesian deductions with them.
"First interesting fact," I said, "they didn't announce
this thing until yesterday. Why?"
"That's easy," Cricket snorted. "Because Momby's elevation
was the biggest flop-ola since Napoleon promised to whip some
British butt at Waterloo."
"That's part of the reason," I conceded. It had been
before my time, but the Flacks were still smarting from that
one. They'd conducted a threemonth Who-Will-It-Be?-type
campaign, and by the time the big day arrived The Supreme
Potentate Of All Universes would have been a disappointment,
much less Momby, who was a poor choice anyway. This was a bunch
whose whole raison d'etre was publicity, as an art and science.
Once burned, twice wear-a-fireproof-suit; they were managing
this one the right way, as a big surprise with only a day to
think about it. Neither press nor public could get bored in one
day.
"But they've kept this one completely secret. From what
I'm told, the fact that Momby was going to be elevated was
about as secret from us, from the press, as Silvio's current
hair style. The media simply agreed not to print it until the
big day. Now think about the Flacks. Not a closemouthed bunch,
except for the inner circle, the Grand Flacks and so forth.
Gossip is their life blood. If twenty people knew who the new
Gigastar was, one of them would have blabbed it to one of my
sources or one of yours, count on it. If ten people knew I'd
give you even money I could have found it out. So even less
than that know who it's gonna be. With me so far?"
"Keep talking, O silver-tongued one."
"I've got it down to three possibilities. Mickey, John,
Silvio. Am I wildly off-base there?"
She didn't say yes or no, but her shrug told me her own
list was pretty much like mine.
"Each has a problem. You know what they are."
"Two out of three of them are . . . well, old," Brenda put
in.
"Lots of reasons for that," I said. "Look at the Four; all
born on Earth. Trouble is, we're a less violent society than
the previous centuries. We don't get enough tragic deaths.
Momby's the only superstar who's had the grace to fix himself
up with a tragic death in over a hundred years. Most everyone
else hangs around until he's a hasbeen. Look at Eileen Frank."
"Look at Lars O'Malley," Cricket contributed.
From the blank look on Brenda's face, I could see it was
like I'd guessed; she'd never heard of either of them.
"Where are they now?" she asked, unconsciously voicing the
four words every celebrity fears the most.
"In the elephants' graveyard. In a taproom in Bedrock,
probably, maybe on adjacent stools. Both of them used to be as
big as Silvio." Brenda looked dubious, like I'd said something
was bigger than infinity. She'd learn.
"So what's your great leap of deduction?" Cricket asked.
I waved my hand grandly around the room.
"All this. All these trillions and trillions of television
screens. If it's Mickey or John, what's gonna happen, some guy
backstage dashes off a quick sketch of them and comes out
holding it over his head? No, what happens is every one of
these screens starts showing Steamboat Willie and Fantasia and
every other cartoon Mickey was ever in, or . . . what the hell
films did John Lennon make?"
"You're the history buff. All I know about him is Sergeant
Pepper."
"Well, you get the idea."
"Maybe I'm dumb," Cricket said, not as though she believed
it.
"You're not. Think about it." She did, and I saw the
moment when the light dawned.
"You could be right," she said.
"No 'could be' about it. I've got half a mind to file on
it right now. Walter could get out a newsbreaker before they
make the big announcement."
"So use my phone; I won't even charge you."
I said nothing to that. If I'd had even one source telling
me it was Silvio I'd have called Walter and let him decide. The
history of journalism is filled with stories of people who
jumped the headline and had to eat it later.
"I guess I'm dumb," Brenda said. "I still don't see it."
I didn't comment on her first statement. She wasn't dumb,
just green, and I hadn't seen it myself until too late. So I
explained.
"Somebody has to cue up the tapes to fill all these
screens. Dozens of techs, visual artists, and so forth. There's
no way they could orchestrate a thing like that and keep it
down to a handful of people in the know. Most of my sources are
just those kind of people, and they always have their hands
out. Kind of money I was throwing around last night, if anybody
knew, I'd know. So Mickey and John are out, because they're
dead. Silvio has the great advantage of being able to show up
here in person, so those television screens can show live feeds
of what's happening on the stage."
Brenda frowned, thinking it over. I let her, and went back
to my sandwich, feeling good for more than just having figured
it out. I felt good because I genuinely admired Silvio. Mickey
Mouse is good, no question, but the real hero there was Walter
Elias Disney and his magic-makers. John Lennon I knew nothing
about; his music didn't speak to me. I never saw what the
fanatics saw in Elvis, Megan may have been good, but who cared?
Momby was of his times, even the Flacks would admit, with a
bellyful of liquor, that he had been a mistake for the church.
Tori-san deserved to be up there with the real musical geniuses
who lived before the Age of Celebrity came along to largely
preclude most peoples' chances of achieving real greatness. I
mean, how great can you get with people like me going through
your garbage looking for a story?
Of all the people alive in the Solar System today, Silvio
was the only man I admired. I'm a cynic, have been for years.
My childhood heroes have long since fallen by the wayside. I'm
in the business of discovering warts on people, and I've
discovered so many that the very idea of heroworship is quaint,
at best. And it's not as if Silvio doesn't have his warts. I
know them as well as every padloid reader in Luna. It's his art
I really admire, the hell with the personality cult. He began
as a mere genius, the writer and performer of music that has
often moved me to tears. He grew over the years. Three years
ago, when it looked as if he was fading, he suddenly blossomed
again with the most stunningly original works of his career.
There was no telling where he might still go.
One of his quirks, to my way of thinking, was his recent
embracing of the Flack religion. And so what? Mozart wasn't a
guy you'd want to bring home to meet the folks. Listen to the
music. Look at the art. Forget about the publicity; no matter
how much of it you read, you'll never really get to know the
man. Most of us like to think we know something about famous
people. It took me years to get over the fallacy of thinking
that because I'd heard somebody speak about his or her life and
times and fears on a talk show that I knew what they were
really like. You don't. And the bad things you think you know
are just as fallacious as the good things his publicity agent
wants you to know. Behind the monstrous facade of fame each
celebrity erects around himself is just a little mouse, not
unlike you or me, who has to use the same kind of toilet paper
in the morning, and who assumes the identical position.
And with that thought, the lights dimmed, and the show
began.
There was a brief musical introduction drawing on themes
from the works of Elvis and Tori-san, no hint of a Silvio
connection in there. Dancers came out and did a number
glorifying the Church. None of the prefatory material lasted
too long. The Flacks had learned their lesson from Momby. They
would not out-stay their welcome this morning.
It was no more than ten minutes from the raising of the
curtain to the appearance of the Grand Flack himself.
This was a man ordinary enough from the neck down, dressed
in a flowing robe. But in place of a head he had a cube with
television screens on four sides, each showing a view of a head
from the appropriate angle. On top of the cube was a bifurcated
antenna known as rabbit ears, for obvious reasons.
The face in the front screen was thin, ascetic, with a
neatly trimmed goatee and mustache and a prim mouth on which a
smile always looked like a painful event. I'd met him before at
this or that function. He didn't appear publicly all that
often, and the reason was simply that he, and most of the other
Great Flacks, were no better as media personalities than I was.
For the church services the F.L.C.C.S. hired professionals,
people who knew how to make a sermon stand up and walk around
the room. They had no lack of talent for such jobs. The Flacks
naturally appealed to hopeful artists who hoped to one day
stand beside Elvis. But today was different, and oddly enough,
the Grand Flack's very stiffness and lack of camera poise lent
gravity to the proceedings.
"Good morning! Fellow worshipers and guests we welcome
you! Today will go down in history! This is the day a mere
mortal comes to glory! The name will be revealed to you
shortly! Join with us now in singing 'Blue Suede Shoes.'"
That's the way Flacks talk, and that's the way I'd been
recording it for many years now. They'd given me enough
stories, so if they had crazy ideas about how they wanted to be
quoted in print, it was all right with me. Flacks believed that
language was too cluttered with punctuation, so they'd
eliminated the ., the ,, the ' and the ? and most especially
the ; and the :. Nobody ever understood what those last two
were for, anyway. They were never very interested in asking
questions, only in providing answers. They figured the
exclamation point and the quotation mark were all any
reasonable person needed for discourse, along with the
underline, naturally. And they were big on typefaces. A Flack
news release read like a love letter to P.T. Barnum.
I abstained from the sing-along; I didn't know the words,
anyway, and hymnals weren't provided. The folks in the
bleachers made up for my absence. The boogying got pretty
intense for a while there. The Grand Flack just stood with his
hands folded, smiling happily at his flock. When the number
came to an end he moved forward again, and I realized this was
it.
"And now the moment you've all been waiting for!" he said.
"The name of the person who from this day forward will live
with the stars!" The lights were dimming as he spoke. There was
a moment of silence, during which I heard an actual collective
intake of breath . . . unless that was from the sound system.
Then the Grand Flack spoke again.
"I give you SILVIO!!!!!"
A single spotlight came on, and there he stood. I had
known it, I had been ninety-nine percent sure anyway, but I
still felt a thrill in my heart, not only at having been
correct, but because this was so right. No, I didn't believe in
all the Flackite crap. But he did, and it was right that he
should be so honored by the people who believed as he did. I
almost had a lump in my throat.
I was on my feet with everyone else. The applause was
deafening, and if it was augmented by the speakers hidden in
the ceiling, who cared? I liked Silvio enough when I was a man.
I hadn't counted on the gut-throbbing impression he'd make on
me as a female. He stood there, tall and handsome, accepting
the adulation with only a small, ironic wave of his hand, as if
he didn't really understand why everyone loved him so much but
he was willing to accept it so as not to embarrass us. False,
all false, I well knew; Silvio had a titanic ego. If there was
anyone in Luna who actually over-estimated his genuinely
awesome talent, it was Silvio. But who among us can cast a
stone unless they have at least as much talent? Not me.
A keyboard was rolled out and left in front of him. This
was really exciting. It could mean the opening of a new sound
for Silvio. For the last three years he'd been working his
magic on the body harp. I leaned forward to hear the first
chords, as did everyone in the audience, except one person. As
he made his move toward the keys, the right side of his head
exploded.
Where were you when . . .? Every twenty years a story
comes along like that, and anyone you ask knows exactly what he
was doing when the news came in. Where I was when Silvio was
assassinated was ten meters away, close enough that I saw it
happen before I heard the shot. Time collapsed for me, and I
moved without thinking about it. There was nothing of the
reporter in me at that moment, and nothing of the heroine. I'm
not a risk-taker, but I was up and out of my seat and vaulting
onto the stage before he'd landed, loosely, the ruined head
bouncing on the floorboards. I leaned over him and picked him
up by the shoulders, and it must have been about then that I
was hit, because I saw my blood splatter on his face and a big
hole appear in his cheek and a sort of churning motion in the
soft red matter exposed behind the big hole in his skull. You
must have seen it. It's probably the most famous bits of
holocam footage ever shot. Intercut with the stuff from
Cricket's cam, which is how it's usually shown, you can see me
react to the sound of the second shot, lift my head and look
over my shoulder and search for the gunman, which is what saved
me from having my own brains blown out when the third shot
arrived. The post-mortem team estimated that shot missed my
cheek by a few centimeters. I didn't see it hit, but when I
turned back I saw the results. Silvio's face had already been
shattered by the fragmented bullet that had passed through me;
the third projectile was more than enough to blow the remaining
brain tissue through a new hole in his head. It wasn't
necessary; the first had done the fatal work.
That's when Cricket took her famous still shot. The
spotlight is still on us as I hold Silvio's torso off the
ground. His head lolls back, eyes open but glazed, what you can
see of them under the film of blood. I've got one bloody hand
raised in the air, asking a mute question. I don't remember
raising the hand; I don't know what the question was, other
than the eternal why?
#
The next hour was as confused as such scenes inevitably
are. I was jostled to the side by a bunch of bodyguards. Police
arrived. Questions were asked. Someone noticed I was bleeding,
which was the first time I was aware that I'd been hit. The
bullet had punched a clean hole through the upper part of my
left arm, nicking the bone. I'd been wondering why the arm
wasn't working. I wasn't alarmed by it; I was just wondering. I
never did feel any pain from the wound. By the time I should
have, they had it all fixed up as good as new. People have
since tried to convince me to wear a scar there as a memento of
that day. I'm sure I could use it to impress a lot of cub
reporters in the Blind Pig, but the whole idea disgusts me.
Cricket was immediately off following the assassin story.
Nobody knew who he or she was, or how he'd gotten away, and
there was a fabulous story for whoever tracked the person down
and got the first interview. That didn't interest me, either. I
sat there, possibly in shock though the machines said I was
not, and Brenda stood beside me though I could see she was
itching to get out and cover the story, any part of it.
"Idiot," I told her, with some affection, when I finally
noticed her. "You want Walter to fire you? Did somebody get my
holocam feed? I don't remember."
"I took it. Walter has it. He's running it right now." She
had a copy of the Nipple in one hand, glancing at the horrific
images. My phone was ringing and I didn't need a Ph.D. in
deductive logic to know it was Walter calling, asking what I
was doing. I turned it off, which Walter would have made a
capital offense if he'd been making the laws.
"Get going. See if you can track down Cricket. Wherever
she is, that's where the news will be. Try not to let her leave
too many tracks on your back when she runs over you."
"Where are you going, Hildy?"
"I'm going home." And that's just what I did.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I had to turn the phone off at home, too. I had become
part of the biggest story of my lifetime, and every reporter in
the universe wanted to ask me a probing question: How did you
feel, Hildy, when you put your hand into the stillwarm brains
of the only man on Luna you respected? This is known as poetic
justice.
For my sins, I soon set the phone to answer to the four or
five newspeople I felt were the best, plus the grinning
homunculus that passed for an anchor at the Nipple, and gave
them each a five minute, totally false interview, full of
exactly the sort of stuff the public expected. At the end of
each I pleaded emotional exhaustion and said I'd grant a more
complete interview in a few days. This satisfied no one, of
course; from time to time my front door actually rattled with
the impact of frustrated reporters hurling their bodies against
three-inch pressure-tight steel.
In truth, I didn't know how I felt. I was numb, in a way,
but my mind was also working. I was thinking, and the reporter
was coming alive after the horrid shock of actually getting
shot. I mean, damn it! Hadn't that fucking bullet ever heard of
the Geneva Conventions? We were noncombatants, we were supposed
to suck the blood, not produce it. I was angry at that bullet.
I guess some part of me had really thought I was immune.
I fixed myself a good meal and thought it over while I
did. Not a sandwich. I thought I might be through with
sandwiches. I don't cook a lot, but when I do I'm pretty good
at it, and it helps me think. When I'd handed the last dish to
the washer I sat down and called Walter.
"Get your ass in here, Hildy," he said. "I've got you
lined up for interviews from ten minutes ago till the
tricentennial."
"No," I said.
"I don't think this is a good connection. I thought you
said no."
"It's a perfect connection."
"I could fire you."
"Don't get silly. You want my exclusive interview to run
in the Shit, where they'll triple the pittance you pay me?" He
didn't answer that for a long time, and I had nothing else to
say just yet, so we listened to the long silence. I hadn't
turned on the picture.
"What are you going to do?" he asked, plaintively.
"Just what you asked me to do. Get the story on the
Flacks. You said I was the best there was at it, didn't you?"
The quality of the silence changed that time. It was a
regretful silence, as in how-could-I-have-said-anything-
so-stupid silence. He didn't say he'd told me that just to
charm me out of quitting. Another thing he didn't say was how
dare I threaten him with selling out to a rival, and he left
un-voiced the horrible things he'd try to do to my career if I
did such a thing. The phone line was simply buzzing with things
he didn't say, and he didn't say them so loudly I'd have been
frightened if I really feared for my job. At last he sighed,
and did say something.
"When do I get the story?"
"When I find it. What I want is Brenda, right now."
"Sure. She's just underfoot here."
"Tell her to come in the back way. She knows where it is,
and I don't think five other people in Luna know that."
"Six, counting me."
"I figured. Don't tell anyone else, or I'll never get out
of here alive."
"What else?"
"Nothing. I'll handle it all from here." I hung up. I
started making calls.
The first one was to the Queen. She didn't have what I
needed, but she knew somebody who knew somebody. She said she'd
get back to me. I sat down and made a list of items I would
need, made several more calls, and then Brenda was knocking on
the back door.
She wanted to know how I was, she wanted my reactions to
this and that, not as a reporter, but as a concerned friend. I
was touched, a little, but I had work to do.
"Hit me," I said.
"Pardon?"
"Hit me. Make a fist and smash it into my face. I need you
to break my nose. I tried it a couple times before you got
here, and I can't seem to hit hard enough."
She gave me that look that says she's trying to remember
all the ways out of this place, and how to get to them without
alarming me.
"My problem," I explained, "is I can't risk going in
public with this face on me; I need it rearranged, and in a
hurry. So hit me. You know how; you've seen cowboys and
gangsters do it in the movies." I stuck my face out and closed
my eyes.
"You've . . . you've deadened it, I guess?"
"What kind of nut do I look like? Don't answer, just hit
me."
She did, a blow that would have sent a housefly to
intensive care if one had been sitting on the tip of my nose.
She had to try four more times, in the end using an old
spitball bat I found in my closet, before we got that sickening
crunching sound that said we'd done the trick. I shouldn't be
too hard on her. Maybe I was acting erratic, there was probably
an easier way and she deserved more explanations, but I wasn't
in the mood for them. She had a lot worse to come, and I didn't
have time.
It bled a lot, as you'd expect. I held my nose pressed in
with a finger on the tip, and stuck my face in the autodoc.
When it healed, a few minutes later, I had a wide, vaguely
African nose with a major hook on the end and a bend toward the
left.
Part of getting a story is preparation, part is
improvisation, part perspiration and a little bit inspiration.
There are small items I carry around constantly in my purse
that I may use once in five years, but when I need them, I need
them badly. A disguise is something I need every once in a
while, never as badly as I did then, but I'd always been
prepared for disguising myself on the spur of the moment. It's
harder now than it used to be. People are better at seeing
through small changes since they're used to having friends
rework their faces to indulge a passing fad. Bushy eyebrows or
a wig are no longer enough, if you want to be sure. You need to
change the shape of the face.
I got a screwdriver and probed around in my upper jaw,
between the cheek and gum, until I found the proper recessed
socket. I pushed the tip of the blade through the skin and
slotted it in the screw and started turning it. When the blade
slipped Brenda peered into my mouth and helped me. As she
turned the screwdriver, my cheekbone began to move.
It's a cheap and simple device you can buy at any joke
shop and have installed in half an hour. Bobbie had wanted to
take it out. He's offended at anything that might be used to
mar his work. I'd left them in, and now I was glad as I watched
my face being transformed in the mirror. When Brenda was done,
my face was much wider and more gaunt, and my eyelids had a
slight downward slant. With the new nose, Callie herself would
not have know me. If I held my lower jaw so I had an overbite,
I looked even stranger.
"Let me get that left one again," Brenda said. "You're
lopsided."
"Lopsided is good." I tasted blood, but soon had that
healed up. Looking at myself, I decided it was enough, and
turned the nerve receptors in my face back on. There was a
little soreness on the nose, but nothing major.
So I could have gotten some of the same effect by stuffing
tissue paper into my cheeks, I guess. If that's all I had, I'd
have used it, but did you ever try talking with paper in your
mouth? An actor is trained to do it; I'm not. Besides, you're
always aware it's there, it's distracting.
Brenda wanted to know what we were going to do, and I
thought about what I could safely tell her. It wasn't much, so
I sat her down and she looked up at me wide-eyed.
"You got two choices," I told her. "One, you can help me
get ready for this caper, and then you can bow out, and no hard
feelings. Or you can go along to the end. But I'll tell you
going in, you're not going to know much. I think we'll get one
hell of a story out of it, but we could get into a lot of
trouble."
She thought it over.
"How much can you tell me?"
"Only what I think you need to know at the moment. You'll
just have to trust me on the rest."
"Okay."
"You idiot. Never trust anybody who says 'trust me.'
Except just this once, of course."
#
I went to the King City Plaza, one of the better hotels in
the neighborhood of the Platz, and checked in to the
Presidential Suite using Brenda's Nipple letter of credit,
freshly re-rated to A-Double-Plus. I'd told Walter I might need
to buy an interplanetary liner before this job was over, but
the fact was since he was paying for it, I just wanted to go
first class, and I'd never stayed in the Presidential Suite. I
registered us under the names Kathleen Turner and Rosalind
Russell, two of the five people who've played the part of
Hildegard/Hildebrandt Johnson on the silver screen. The fellow
at the front desk must not have been a movie buff; he didn't
bat an eye.
The suite came furnished with a staff, including a boy and
a girl in the spa, which was large enough for the staging of
naval war games. In a better mood I might have asked the boy to
stick around; he was a hunk. But I kicked them all out.
I stood in the middle of the room and said "My name is
Hildy Johnson, and I declare this to be my legal residence."
Liz had advised that, for the benefit of the hidden mikes and
cameras, just in case the tapes were ever brought forward as
evidence in a court of law. A hotel guest has the same rights
as a person in quarters she owns or rents, but it never hurt to
be safe.
I made a few more phone calls, and spent the time waiting
for some of them to be returned by going from room to room and
stripping the sheets and blankets off the many beds. I chose a
room with no windows looking out into the Mall, and went around
draping sheets over all the mirrors in the room. There were a
lot of them. The call I was waiting for came just as I
finished. I listened to the instructions, and left the room.
In a park not far from the hotel I walked around for
almost half an hour, which didn't surprise me. I assumed I was
being checked out. Finally I spotted the man I'd been told to
look for, and sat on the other end of a park bench. We didn't
look at each other, or talk. He got up and walked away, leaving
a sack on the bench between us. I waited a few more minutes,
breathed deeply, and picked up the sack. No hand reached out to
grab my shoulder. Maybe I didn't have the nerves for this sort
of work.
Back in the suite I didn't have long to wait before Brenda
knocked on the door, back from her shopping expedition. She'd
done well. Everything I'd asked for was in the packages she
carried. We got out the costumes of the Electricians Guild and
put them on: blue coveralls with Guild patches and equipment
belts. Names were stitched into the fabric over the left
breast: I was Roz and she was Kathy. Next to the ceremonial
wrenches, screwdrivers, and circuit testers dangling from the
belt I clipped some of the items I'd just obtained in such a
melodramatic fashion. They fit right in. We donned yellow
plastic hardhats and picked up black metal lunchboxes and
looked at each other in the mirror. We burst out laughing.
Brenda seemed to be enjoying the game so far. It was an
adventure.
Brenda looked ridiculous, as usual. You'd think a disguise
on Brenda would work about as well as a wig on a flagpole. The
fact is, she is not that abnormal for her generation. Who knows
where this height thing is going to end? Another of many causes
of the generation gap Callie had talked about was a simple
matter of dimension: people of Brenda's age group tended not to
frequent the older parts of the city where so many of their
elders lived . . . because they kept hitting their heads on
things. We built to a smaller scale in those days.
There were no human guards on the workers' entrance to the
Flack Grand Studio. I didn't really expect to encounter any at
all; according to the information I'd bought they only employed
six of them. People tended to rely on machines for that sort of
thing, and their trust can be misplaced, as I demonstrated to
Brenda with one of the illegal gizmos. I waved it at the door,
waited while red lights turned green, and the door sprung open.
I'd been told that one of the three machines I had would deal
with any security system I'd find in the Studio. I just hoped
my trust wasn't misplaced, in either the shady characters who
sold this sort of stuff or the machines themselves. We do trust
the little buggers, don't we? I had no idea what the stinking
thing was doing, but when it flashed a green light at me I
trotted right in, like Pavlov's dog Spotski.
Up three floors, down two corridors, seventh door on the
left. And who should be standing there looking frustrated but .
. . Cricket.
"If you touch that doorknob," I said, "Elvis will return
and he won't be handing out pink Cadillacs." She jumped just a
little. Damn, that girl was good. She was trying to pass
herself off as some kind of Flack functionary, carrying a
clipboard like an Amazon's shield. The good old clipboard can
be the magic key to many places if you know how to use it, and
Cricket was born to the con. She looked at us haughtily through
dark glasses.
"I beg your pardon," she sniffed. "What are you two doing
. . ." She had been flipping officiously through papers on her
board, as if searching for our names, which we hadn't given,
when she realized it was Brenda way up there under that yellow
hardhat. Nothing had prepared her for that, or for the dawning
realization of who it was playing the Jeff to Brenda's Mutt.
"Goddam," she breathed. "It's you, isn't it? Hildy?"
"In the flesh. I'm ashamed of you, Cricket. Balked by a
mere door? You've apparently forgotten your girl scout motto."
"All I remember is never let him in the back door on the
first date."
"Be prepared, love, be prepared." And I waved one of my
magic wands at the door. Naturally, one of the lights remained
obstinately red. So I chose another one at random and the
machine paid off like a crooked slot machine. We went through
the door, and I suddenly realized what her dark glasses were
for.
We were in an ordinary corridor with three doors leading
off of it. Music was coming from behind one of the doors.
According to the map I'd paid a lot of Walter's money for, that
Aron Presley, of Tupelo, Mississippi; Nashville; and Graceland,
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S. of A. It was his incredibly
stillascendant star one hundred years after his death that had
inspired the retired ad agency executives who were the founding
fathers of the Flacks to concoct the most blatant and
profitable promotional campaign in the inglorious history of
public relations: The F.L.C.C.S.
You could say what you want about the Flacks-and I'd said
a lot, in private, among friends--but these people knew how to
treat the working press. After the Elvis pavilion the crowd was
divided into two parts. One was a long, unmoving line, composed
of hopeful congregants trying to get a seat in the last row of
the balcony, some of them waving credit cards which the ushers
tried not to sneer at; it took more than just money to buy your
way into this shindig. The rest of the crowd, the ones with
press passes stuck into the brims of their battered gray
fedoras, were steered through a gap in velvet ropes and led to
a spread of food and drink that made UniBio's efforts at the
ULTRATingle rollout look like the garbage cans in the alley
behind a greasy spoon.
A feeding frenzy among veteran reporters is not a pretty
sight. I've been at free feeds where you needed to draw your
hand back quickly or risk having a finger bitten off. This one
was wellmanaged, as you'd expect from the Flacks. Each of us
was met by a waiter or waitress whose sole job seemed to be to
carry our plates and smile, smile, smile. There were people
there who would have fasted for three days in anticipation if
the Flacks had announced the ceremony ahead of time; I heard
some grousing about that. Reporters have to find something to
complain about, otherwise they might commit the unpardonable
sin of thanking their hosts.
I walked, in considerable awe, past an entire juvenile
brontosaur carcass, candied, garnished with glace'd fruit and
with an apple in its mouth. They were rolling something
unrecognizable away--I was told it had been a Tori-san effigy
made entirely from sashimi--and replacing it with a three-meter
likeness of Elvis in his Vegas Period, in marzipan. I plucked a
sequin from the suit of lights and found it to be very tasty. I
never did find out what it was.
I built what might easily qualify as the Sandwich of the
Century. Never mind what was in it; I gathered from Brenda's
queasy expression as she watched my Flackite wallah carrying it
that ordinary mortals--those who did not understand the zen of
cold cuts--might find some of my choices dissonant, to say the
least. I admit not everyone is able to appreciate the exquisite
tang of pickled pigs knuckles rubbing shoulders with rosettes
of whipped cream. Brenda herself needed no plate-carrier. She
was schlumping along with just a small bowl of black olives and
sweet pickles. I hurried, realizing that people were soon going
to understand that she was with me. I don't think she even knew
what one item in ten was, much less if she liked it or not.
The room the Flacks called the Grand Studio had formerly
been the largest sound stage at NLF. They had fixed it up so
the area we saw was shaped like a wedge, narrowing toward the
actual stage in the front of the room. It was quite a large
wedge. The walls on either side leaned in slightly as they
rose, and were composed entirely of thousands upon thousands of
glass-faced television screens, the old kind, rectangular with
rounded corners, a shape that was as important to Flackites as
the cross was to Christians. The Great Tube symbolized eternal
life and, more important, eternal Fame. I could see a certain
logic in that. Each of the screens, ranging in size from thirty
centimeters to as much as ten meters across, was displaying a
different image as Brenda and I entered, from the lives, loves,
films, concerts, funerals, marriages and, for all I knew, bowel
movements and circumcisions of the Gigastars. There were simply
too many images to take in. In addition, holos floated through
the room like enchanted bubbles, each with its smiling image of
Momby, Megan, Tori-san, and Elvis.
The Flacks knew who this show was really for; we were
escorted to an area at the edge of the stage itself. The actual
congregants had to be content with the cheap seats and the
television screens. There were balconies upon balconies
somewhere back there, vanishing into the suspendedspotlight
theme the Flacks favored.
Because we were late most of the seats right up front had
been taken. I was about to suggest we split up when I spotted
Cricket at a ringside table with an empty chair beside her. I
grabbed Brenda with one hand and a spare chair with the other,
and pulled both through the noisy crowd. Brenda was embarrassed
to make everyone scoot over to make room for her chair; I'd
have to speak to her about that. If she couldn't learn to push
and shove and shout, she had no business in the news game.
"I love the body, Hildy," Cricket said as I wedged myself
in between them. I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was
set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about
to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me and left a
crystal bowl full of them.
"Do I detect a note of wistfulness?" I said.
"You mean because they've retired your jersey from the
great game of cocksmanship?" She seemed to consider it. "I
guess not."
I pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of
having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration. Not
that I wouldn't be interested again when I Changed back to
male, in thirty or so years, if she happened to be female
still.
"Nice job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana,"
I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a
basket before me and trying to eat a part of my sandwich with
my other hand. I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed
and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for at any
pawnbroker in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and
beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope;
I saw three of the damn things depart by messenger, and they
wouldn't be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the
market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.
"That was you?" Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.
"Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some
scurrilous rag or other whose initials are S.S. and who
deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing covering her deep
despair at having had only one opportunity to experience the
glory that was me."
"Yeah, it was sort of gory," Cricket said, reaching across
me to shake hands. "Nice to meet you." Brenda stammered
something.
"How much did that shot cost you?"
Cricket looked smug. "It was quite reasonable."
"What do you mean?" Brenda asked. "Why did it cost you?"
We both looked at her, then at each other, then back at
Brenda.
"You mean that was staged?" she said, horrified. She
looked at the olive in her hand, then put it back into the
bowl. "I cried when I saw it," she said.
"Oh, stop looking like somebody just shot your puppy, damn
it," I said. "Cricket, will you explain the facts of life to
her? I would, but I'm clean; you're the unethical monster who
violated a basic rule of journalism."
"I will if you'll trade places with me. I don't think I
want to watch all that go down." She was pointing at my
sandwich with a prim expression that was belied by what I could
see of the remnants of her free lunch, which included the
skeletons of three tiny birds, picked clean.
So we switched, and I got down to the serious business of
eating and drinking, all the while keeping one ear cocked to
the jabbering around me, on the off chance somebody had managed
to get a scoop on the canonization. No one had, but I heard
dozens of rumors:
"Lennon? Oh, c'mon, he was all washed up, that bullet was
a good career move."
". . . wanna know who it's gonna be? Mickey Mouse, put
your money on it."
"How they going to handle that? He doesn't even exist."
"So Elvis does? There's a cartoon revival--"
"And if they picked a cartoon, it'd be Baba Yaga."
"Get serious. She's not in the same universe as Mickey
Mouse . . ."
"--says it's Silvio. There's nobody with one half the
rep--"
"But he's got one problem, from the Flacks' point of view:
he ain't dead yet. Can't get a real cult going till you're
dead."
"C'mon, there's no law says they have to wait, especially
these days. He could go on for five hundred more years. What'll
they do, keep reaching back to the twentieth, twenty-first
century and pick guys nobody remembers?"
"Everybody remembers Tori-san."
"That's different."
"--notice there's three men and only one woman. Granting
they might pick somebody still alive, why not Marina?"
"Why not both of 'em? Might even get them back together.
What a story. A double canonization. Think of the headlines."
"How about Michael Jackson?"
"Who?"
It kept on and on, a speculative buzz in the background. I
heard half a dozen more names proposed, increasingly unlikely
to my way of thinking. The only new one I'd heard, the only one
I hadn't thought of, was Mickey, and I considered him a real
possibility. You could have walked down to the Leystrasse that
very day and bought a shirt with his picture on the front, and
cartoons were enjoying a revival. There was no law saying a
cult had to have a real object, what was being worshipped here
was an image, not flesh and blood.
Actually, while there were no rules for a Flack
canonization, there were guidelines that took on the force of
laws. The Flacks did not create celebrities, they had no real
axe to grind in this affair. They simply acknowledged
pre-existing cult figures, and there were certain qualities a
cult figure had to have. Everyone had their own list of these
qualities, and weighted them differently. Once more I went
through my own list, and considered the three most likely
candidates in the light of these requirements.
First, and most obvious, the Gigastar had to have been
wildly popular when alive, with a planetary reputation, with
fans who literally worshipped him. So forget about anybody
before the early twentieth century. That was the time of the
birth of mass media. The first cult figures of that magnitude
were film stars like Charlie Chaplin. He could be eliminated
because he didn't fulfill the second qualification: a cult
following reaching down to the present time. His films were
still watched and appreciated, but people didn't go crazy over
him. The only person from that time who might have been
canonized--if a F.L.C.C.S. had existed then--was Valentino. He
died young, and was enshrined in that global hall of fame that
was still in its infancy when he lived. But he was completely
forgotten today.
Mozart? Shakespeare? Forget it. Maybe Ludwig Van B. was
the hottest thing on the Prussian pop charts in his day, but
they'd never heard of him in Ulan Bator . . . and where were
his sides? He never cut any, that's where. The only way of
preserving his music was to write it down on paper, a lost art.
Maybe Will Shakespeare would have won a carload of Tonys and
been flown to the coast to adapt his stuff for the silver
screen. He was still very popular--As You Like It was playing
two shows a day at the King City Center -but he and everyone
else from before about 1920 had a fatal flaw, celebrity-wise:
nobody knew anything about them. There was no film, no
recordings. Celebrity worship is only incidentally about the
art itself. You need to do something to qualify, it needn't be
good, only evocative . . . but the real thing being sold by the
Flacks and their antecedents was image. You needed a real body
to rend and tear in the padloids, real scandals to tsk-tsk
over, and real blood and real tragedy to weep over.
That was widely held to be the third qualification for
sainthood: the early and tragic death. I personally thought it
could be dispensed with in some circumstances, but I won't deny
it's importance. Nobody can create a cult. They rise
spontaneously, from emotions that are genuine, even if they are
managed adroitly.
For my money, the man they should be honoring today was
Thomas Edison. Without his two key inventions, sound recording
and motion picture film, the whole celebrity business would be
bankrupt.
Mickey, John, or Silvio? Each had a drawback. With Mickey,
it was that he wasn't real. So who cares? John . . .? Maybe,
but I judged his popularity wasn't quite in that stellar realm
that would appeal to the Flacks. Silvio? The big one, that he
was alive. But rules are made to be broken. He certainly had
the star power. There was no more popular man in the Solar
System. Any reporter in Luna would sell his mother's soul for
one interview.
And then it came to me, and it was so obvious I wondered
why I hadn't seen it before, and why no one else had figured it
out.
"It's Silvio," I told Cricket. I swear the lady's ear
tried to swivel toward me before her head did. That gal really
has the nose for news.
"What did you hear?"
"Nothing. I just figured it out."
"So what do you want, I should kiss your feet? Tell me,
Hildy."
Brenda was leaning over, looking at me like I was the
great guru. I smiled at them, thought about making them suffer
a little, but that was unworthy. I decided to share my
Holmesian deductions with them.
"First interesting fact," I said, "they didn't announce
this thing until yesterday. Why?"
"That's easy," Cricket snorted. "Because Momby's elevation
was the biggest flop-ola since Napoleon promised to whip some
British butt at Waterloo."
"That's part of the reason," I conceded. It had been
before my time, but the Flacks were still smarting from that
one. They'd conducted a threemonth Who-Will-It-Be?-type
campaign, and by the time the big day arrived The Supreme
Potentate Of All Universes would have been a disappointment,
much less Momby, who was a poor choice anyway. This was a bunch
whose whole raison d'etre was publicity, as an art and science.
Once burned, twice wear-a-fireproof-suit; they were managing
this one the right way, as a big surprise with only a day to
think about it. Neither press nor public could get bored in one
day.
"But they've kept this one completely secret. From what
I'm told, the fact that Momby was going to be elevated was
about as secret from us, from the press, as Silvio's current
hair style. The media simply agreed not to print it until the
big day. Now think about the Flacks. Not a closemouthed bunch,
except for the inner circle, the Grand Flacks and so forth.
Gossip is their life blood. If twenty people knew who the new
Gigastar was, one of them would have blabbed it to one of my
sources or one of yours, count on it. If ten people knew I'd
give you even money I could have found it out. So even less
than that know who it's gonna be. With me so far?"
"Keep talking, O silver-tongued one."
"I've got it down to three possibilities. Mickey, John,
Silvio. Am I wildly off-base there?"
She didn't say yes or no, but her shrug told me her own
list was pretty much like mine.
"Each has a problem. You know what they are."
"Two out of three of them are . . . well, old," Brenda put
in.
"Lots of reasons for that," I said. "Look at the Four; all
born on Earth. Trouble is, we're a less violent society than
the previous centuries. We don't get enough tragic deaths.
Momby's the only superstar who's had the grace to fix himself
up with a tragic death in over a hundred years. Most everyone
else hangs around until he's a hasbeen. Look at Eileen Frank."
"Look at Lars O'Malley," Cricket contributed.
From the blank look on Brenda's face, I could see it was
like I'd guessed; she'd never heard of either of them.
"Where are they now?" she asked, unconsciously voicing the
four words every celebrity fears the most.
"In the elephants' graveyard. In a taproom in Bedrock,
probably, maybe on adjacent stools. Both of them used to be as
big as Silvio." Brenda looked dubious, like I'd said something
was bigger than infinity. She'd learn.
"So what's your great leap of deduction?" Cricket asked.
I waved my hand grandly around the room.
"All this. All these trillions and trillions of television
screens. If it's Mickey or John, what's gonna happen, some guy
backstage dashes off a quick sketch of them and comes out
holding it over his head? No, what happens is every one of
these screens starts showing Steamboat Willie and Fantasia and
every other cartoon Mickey was ever in, or . . . what the hell
films did John Lennon make?"
"You're the history buff. All I know about him is Sergeant
Pepper."
"Well, you get the idea."
"Maybe I'm dumb," Cricket said, not as though she believed
it.
"You're not. Think about it." She did, and I saw the
moment when the light dawned.
"You could be right," she said.
"No 'could be' about it. I've got half a mind to file on
it right now. Walter could get out a newsbreaker before they
make the big announcement."
"So use my phone; I won't even charge you."
I said nothing to that. If I'd had even one source telling
me it was Silvio I'd have called Walter and let him decide. The
history of journalism is filled with stories of people who
jumped the headline and had to eat it later.
"I guess I'm dumb," Brenda said. "I still don't see it."
I didn't comment on her first statement. She wasn't dumb,
just green, and I hadn't seen it myself until too late. So I
explained.
"Somebody has to cue up the tapes to fill all these
screens. Dozens of techs, visual artists, and so forth. There's
no way they could orchestrate a thing like that and keep it
down to a handful of people in the know. Most of my sources are
just those kind of people, and they always have their hands
out. Kind of money I was throwing around last night, if anybody
knew, I'd know. So Mickey and John are out, because they're
dead. Silvio has the great advantage of being able to show up
here in person, so those television screens can show live feeds
of what's happening on the stage."
Brenda frowned, thinking it over. I let her, and went back
to my sandwich, feeling good for more than just having figured
it out. I felt good because I genuinely admired Silvio. Mickey
Mouse is good, no question, but the real hero there was Walter
Elias Disney and his magic-makers. John Lennon I knew nothing
about; his music didn't speak to me. I never saw what the
fanatics saw in Elvis, Megan may have been good, but who cared?
Momby was of his times, even the Flacks would admit, with a
bellyful of liquor, that he had been a mistake for the church.
Tori-san deserved to be up there with the real musical geniuses
who lived before the Age of Celebrity came along to largely
preclude most peoples' chances of achieving real greatness. I
mean, how great can you get with people like me going through
your garbage looking for a story?
Of all the people alive in the Solar System today, Silvio
was the only man I admired. I'm a cynic, have been for years.
My childhood heroes have long since fallen by the wayside. I'm
in the business of discovering warts on people, and I've
discovered so many that the very idea of heroworship is quaint,
at best. And it's not as if Silvio doesn't have his warts. I
know them as well as every padloid reader in Luna. It's his art
I really admire, the hell with the personality cult. He began
as a mere genius, the writer and performer of music that has
often moved me to tears. He grew over the years. Three years
ago, when it looked as if he was fading, he suddenly blossomed
again with the most stunningly original works of his career.
There was no telling where he might still go.
One of his quirks, to my way of thinking, was his recent
embracing of the Flack religion. And so what? Mozart wasn't a
guy you'd want to bring home to meet the folks. Listen to the
music. Look at the art. Forget about the publicity; no matter
how much of it you read, you'll never really get to know the
man. Most of us like to think we know something about famous
people. It took me years to get over the fallacy of thinking
that because I'd heard somebody speak about his or her life and
times and fears on a talk show that I knew what they were
really like. You don't. And the bad things you think you know
are just as fallacious as the good things his publicity agent
wants you to know. Behind the monstrous facade of fame each
celebrity erects around himself is just a little mouse, not
unlike you or me, who has to use the same kind of toilet paper
in the morning, and who assumes the identical position.
And with that thought, the lights dimmed, and the show
began.
There was a brief musical introduction drawing on themes
from the works of Elvis and Tori-san, no hint of a Silvio
connection in there. Dancers came out and did a number
glorifying the Church. None of the prefatory material lasted
too long. The Flacks had learned their lesson from Momby. They
would not out-stay their welcome this morning.
It was no more than ten minutes from the raising of the
curtain to the appearance of the Grand Flack himself.
This was a man ordinary enough from the neck down, dressed
in a flowing robe. But in place of a head he had a cube with
television screens on four sides, each showing a view of a head
from the appropriate angle. On top of the cube was a bifurcated
antenna known as rabbit ears, for obvious reasons.
The face in the front screen was thin, ascetic, with a
neatly trimmed goatee and mustache and a prim mouth on which a
smile always looked like a painful event. I'd met him before at
this or that function. He didn't appear publicly all that
often, and the reason was simply that he, and most of the other
Great Flacks, were no better as media personalities than I was.
For the church services the F.L.C.C.S. hired professionals,
people who knew how to make a sermon stand up and walk around
the room. They had no lack of talent for such jobs. The Flacks
naturally appealed to hopeful artists who hoped to one day
stand beside Elvis. But today was different, and oddly enough,
the Grand Flack's very stiffness and lack of camera poise lent
gravity to the proceedings.
"Good morning! Fellow worshipers and guests we welcome
you! Today will go down in history! This is the day a mere
mortal comes to glory! The name will be revealed to you
shortly! Join with us now in singing 'Blue Suede Shoes.'"
That's the way Flacks talk, and that's the way I'd been
recording it for many years now. They'd given me enough
stories, so if they had crazy ideas about how they wanted to be
quoted in print, it was all right with me. Flacks believed that
language was too cluttered with punctuation, so they'd
eliminated the ., the ,, the ' and the ? and most especially
the ; and the :. Nobody ever understood what those last two
were for, anyway. They were never very interested in asking
questions, only in providing answers. They figured the
exclamation point and the quotation mark were all any
reasonable person needed for discourse, along with the
underline, naturally. And they were big on typefaces. A Flack
news release read like a love letter to P.T. Barnum.
I abstained from the sing-along; I didn't know the words,
anyway, and hymnals weren't provided. The folks in the
bleachers made up for my absence. The boogying got pretty
intense for a while there. The Grand Flack just stood with his
hands folded, smiling happily at his flock. When the number
came to an end he moved forward again, and I realized this was
it.
"And now the moment you've all been waiting for!" he said.
"The name of the person who from this day forward will live
with the stars!" The lights were dimming as he spoke. There was
a moment of silence, during which I heard an actual collective
intake of breath . . . unless that was from the sound system.
Then the Grand Flack spoke again.
"I give you SILVIO!!!!!"
A single spotlight came on, and there he stood. I had
known it, I had been ninety-nine percent sure anyway, but I
still felt a thrill in my heart, not only at having been
correct, but because this was so right. No, I didn't believe in
all the Flackite crap. But he did, and it was right that he
should be so honored by the people who believed as he did. I
almost had a lump in my throat.
I was on my feet with everyone else. The applause was
deafening, and if it was augmented by the speakers hidden in
the ceiling, who cared? I liked Silvio enough when I was a man.
I hadn't counted on the gut-throbbing impression he'd make on
me as a female. He stood there, tall and handsome, accepting
the adulation with only a small, ironic wave of his hand, as if
he didn't really understand why everyone loved him so much but
he was willing to accept it so as not to embarrass us. False,
all false, I well knew; Silvio had a titanic ego. If there was
anyone in Luna who actually over-estimated his genuinely
awesome talent, it was Silvio. But who among us can cast a
stone unless they have at least as much talent? Not me.
A keyboard was rolled out and left in front of him. This
was really exciting. It could mean the opening of a new sound
for Silvio. For the last three years he'd been working his
magic on the body harp. I leaned forward to hear the first
chords, as did everyone in the audience, except one person. As
he made his move toward the keys, the right side of his head
exploded.
Where were you when . . .? Every twenty years a story
comes along like that, and anyone you ask knows exactly what he
was doing when the news came in. Where I was when Silvio was
assassinated was ten meters away, close enough that I saw it
happen before I heard the shot. Time collapsed for me, and I
moved without thinking about it. There was nothing of the
reporter in me at that moment, and nothing of the heroine. I'm
not a risk-taker, but I was up and out of my seat and vaulting
onto the stage before he'd landed, loosely, the ruined head
bouncing on the floorboards. I leaned over him and picked him
up by the shoulders, and it must have been about then that I
was hit, because I saw my blood splatter on his face and a big
hole appear in his cheek and a sort of churning motion in the
soft red matter exposed behind the big hole in his skull. You
must have seen it. It's probably the most famous bits of
holocam footage ever shot. Intercut with the stuff from
Cricket's cam, which is how it's usually shown, you can see me
react to the sound of the second shot, lift my head and look
over my shoulder and search for the gunman, which is what saved
me from having my own brains blown out when the third shot
arrived. The post-mortem team estimated that shot missed my
cheek by a few centimeters. I didn't see it hit, but when I
turned back I saw the results. Silvio's face had already been
shattered by the fragmented bullet that had passed through me;
the third projectile was more than enough to blow the remaining
brain tissue through a new hole in his head. It wasn't
necessary; the first had done the fatal work.
That's when Cricket took her famous still shot. The
spotlight is still on us as I hold Silvio's torso off the
ground. His head lolls back, eyes open but glazed, what you can
see of them under the film of blood. I've got one bloody hand
raised in the air, asking a mute question. I don't remember
raising the hand; I don't know what the question was, other
than the eternal why?
#
The next hour was as confused as such scenes inevitably
are. I was jostled to the side by a bunch of bodyguards. Police
arrived. Questions were asked. Someone noticed I was bleeding,
which was the first time I was aware that I'd been hit. The
bullet had punched a clean hole through the upper part of my
left arm, nicking the bone. I'd been wondering why the arm
wasn't working. I wasn't alarmed by it; I was just wondering. I
never did feel any pain from the wound. By the time I should
have, they had it all fixed up as good as new. People have
since tried to convince me to wear a scar there as a memento of
that day. I'm sure I could use it to impress a lot of cub
reporters in the Blind Pig, but the whole idea disgusts me.
Cricket was immediately off following the assassin story.
Nobody knew who he or she was, or how he'd gotten away, and
there was a fabulous story for whoever tracked the person down
and got the first interview. That didn't interest me, either. I
sat there, possibly in shock though the machines said I was
not, and Brenda stood beside me though I could see she was
itching to get out and cover the story, any part of it.
"Idiot," I told her, with some affection, when I finally
noticed her. "You want Walter to fire you? Did somebody get my
holocam feed? I don't remember."
"I took it. Walter has it. He's running it right now." She
had a copy of the Nipple in one hand, glancing at the horrific
images. My phone was ringing and I didn't need a Ph.D. in
deductive logic to know it was Walter calling, asking what I
was doing. I turned it off, which Walter would have made a
capital offense if he'd been making the laws.
"Get going. See if you can track down Cricket. Wherever
she is, that's where the news will be. Try not to let her leave
too many tracks on your back when she runs over you."
"Where are you going, Hildy?"
"I'm going home." And that's just what I did.
=*= =*= =*= =*=
I had to turn the phone off at home, too. I had become
part of the biggest story of my lifetime, and every reporter in
the universe wanted to ask me a probing question: How did you
feel, Hildy, when you put your hand into the stillwarm brains
of the only man on Luna you respected? This is known as poetic
justice.
For my sins, I soon set the phone to answer to the four or
five newspeople I felt were the best, plus the grinning
homunculus that passed for an anchor at the Nipple, and gave
them each a five minute, totally false interview, full of
exactly the sort of stuff the public expected. At the end of
each I pleaded emotional exhaustion and said I'd grant a more
complete interview in a few days. This satisfied no one, of
course; from time to time my front door actually rattled with
the impact of frustrated reporters hurling their bodies against
three-inch pressure-tight steel.
In truth, I didn't know how I felt. I was numb, in a way,
but my mind was also working. I was thinking, and the reporter
was coming alive after the horrid shock of actually getting
shot. I mean, damn it! Hadn't that fucking bullet ever heard of
the Geneva Conventions? We were noncombatants, we were supposed
to suck the blood, not produce it. I was angry at that bullet.
I guess some part of me had really thought I was immune.
I fixed myself a good meal and thought it over while I
did. Not a sandwich. I thought I might be through with
sandwiches. I don't cook a lot, but when I do I'm pretty good
at it, and it helps me think. When I'd handed the last dish to
the washer I sat down and called Walter.
"Get your ass in here, Hildy," he said. "I've got you
lined up for interviews from ten minutes ago till the
tricentennial."
"No," I said.
"I don't think this is a good connection. I thought you
said no."
"It's a perfect connection."
"I could fire you."
"Don't get silly. You want my exclusive interview to run
in the Shit, where they'll triple the pittance you pay me?" He
didn't answer that for a long time, and I had nothing else to
say just yet, so we listened to the long silence. I hadn't
turned on the picture.
"What are you going to do?" he asked, plaintively.
"Just what you asked me to do. Get the story on the
Flacks. You said I was the best there was at it, didn't you?"
The quality of the silence changed that time. It was a
regretful silence, as in how-could-I-have-said-anything-
so-stupid silence. He didn't say he'd told me that just to
charm me out of quitting. Another thing he didn't say was how
dare I threaten him with selling out to a rival, and he left
un-voiced the horrible things he'd try to do to my career if I
did such a thing. The phone line was simply buzzing with things
he didn't say, and he didn't say them so loudly I'd have been
frightened if I really feared for my job. At last he sighed,
and did say something.
"When do I get the story?"
"When I find it. What I want is Brenda, right now."
"Sure. She's just underfoot here."
"Tell her to come in the back way. She knows where it is,
and I don't think five other people in Luna know that."
"Six, counting me."
"I figured. Don't tell anyone else, or I'll never get out
of here alive."
"What else?"
"Nothing. I'll handle it all from here." I hung up. I
started making calls.
The first one was to the Queen. She didn't have what I
needed, but she knew somebody who knew somebody. She said she'd
get back to me. I sat down and made a list of items I would
need, made several more calls, and then Brenda was knocking on
the back door.
She wanted to know how I was, she wanted my reactions to
this and that, not as a reporter, but as a concerned friend. I
was touched, a little, but I had work to do.
"Hit me," I said.
"Pardon?"
"Hit me. Make a fist and smash it into my face. I need you
to break my nose. I tried it a couple times before you got
here, and I can't seem to hit hard enough."
She gave me that look that says she's trying to remember
all the ways out of this place, and how to get to them without
alarming me.
"My problem," I explained, "is I can't risk going in
public with this face on me; I need it rearranged, and in a
hurry. So hit me. You know how; you've seen cowboys and
gangsters do it in the movies." I stuck my face out and closed
my eyes.
"You've . . . you've deadened it, I guess?"
"What kind of nut do I look like? Don't answer, just hit
me."
She did, a blow that would have sent a housefly to
intensive care if one had been sitting on the tip of my nose.
She had to try four more times, in the end using an old
spitball bat I found in my closet, before we got that sickening
crunching sound that said we'd done the trick. I shouldn't be
too hard on her. Maybe I was acting erratic, there was probably
an easier way and she deserved more explanations, but I wasn't
in the mood for them. She had a lot worse to come, and I didn't
have time.
It bled a lot, as you'd expect. I held my nose pressed in
with a finger on the tip, and stuck my face in the autodoc.
When it healed, a few minutes later, I had a wide, vaguely
African nose with a major hook on the end and a bend toward the
left.
Part of getting a story is preparation, part is
improvisation, part perspiration and a little bit inspiration.
There are small items I carry around constantly in my purse
that I may use once in five years, but when I need them, I need
them badly. A disguise is something I need every once in a
while, never as badly as I did then, but I'd always been
prepared for disguising myself on the spur of the moment. It's
harder now than it used to be. People are better at seeing
through small changes since they're used to having friends
rework their faces to indulge a passing fad. Bushy eyebrows or
a wig are no longer enough, if you want to be sure. You need to
change the shape of the face.
I got a screwdriver and probed around in my upper jaw,
between the cheek and gum, until I found the proper recessed
socket. I pushed the tip of the blade through the skin and
slotted it in the screw and started turning it. When the blade
slipped Brenda peered into my mouth and helped me. As she
turned the screwdriver, my cheekbone began to move.
It's a cheap and simple device you can buy at any joke
shop and have installed in half an hour. Bobbie had wanted to
take it out. He's offended at anything that might be used to
mar his work. I'd left them in, and now I was glad as I watched
my face being transformed in the mirror. When Brenda was done,
my face was much wider and more gaunt, and my eyelids had a
slight downward slant. With the new nose, Callie herself would
not have know me. If I held my lower jaw so I had an overbite,
I looked even stranger.
"Let me get that left one again," Brenda said. "You're
lopsided."
"Lopsided is good." I tasted blood, but soon had that
healed up. Looking at myself, I decided it was enough, and
turned the nerve receptors in my face back on. There was a
little soreness on the nose, but nothing major.
So I could have gotten some of the same effect by stuffing
tissue paper into my cheeks, I guess. If that's all I had, I'd
have used it, but did you ever try talking with paper in your
mouth? An actor is trained to do it; I'm not. Besides, you're
always aware it's there, it's distracting.
Brenda wanted to know what we were going to do, and I
thought about what I could safely tell her. It wasn't much, so
I sat her down and she looked up at me wide-eyed.
"You got two choices," I told her. "One, you can help me
get ready for this caper, and then you can bow out, and no hard
feelings. Or you can go along to the end. But I'll tell you
going in, you're not going to know much. I think we'll get one
hell of a story out of it, but we could get into a lot of
trouble."
She thought it over.
"How much can you tell me?"
"Only what I think you need to know at the moment. You'll
just have to trust me on the rest."
"Okay."
"You idiot. Never trust anybody who says 'trust me.'
Except just this once, of course."
#
I went to the King City Plaza, one of the better hotels in
the neighborhood of the Platz, and checked in to the
Presidential Suite using Brenda's Nipple letter of credit,
freshly re-rated to A-Double-Plus. I'd told Walter I might need
to buy an interplanetary liner before this job was over, but
the fact was since he was paying for it, I just wanted to go
first class, and I'd never stayed in the Presidential Suite. I
registered us under the names Kathleen Turner and Rosalind
Russell, two of the five people who've played the part of
Hildegard/Hildebrandt Johnson on the silver screen. The fellow
at the front desk must not have been a movie buff; he didn't
bat an eye.
The suite came furnished with a staff, including a boy and
a girl in the spa, which was large enough for the staging of
naval war games. In a better mood I might have asked the boy to
stick around; he was a hunk. But I kicked them all out.
I stood in the middle of the room and said "My name is
Hildy Johnson, and I declare this to be my legal residence."
Liz had advised that, for the benefit of the hidden mikes and
cameras, just in case the tapes were ever brought forward as
evidence in a court of law. A hotel guest has the same rights
as a person in quarters she owns or rents, but it never hurt to
be safe.
I made a few more phone calls, and spent the time waiting
for some of them to be returned by going from room to room and
stripping the sheets and blankets off the many beds. I chose a
room with no windows looking out into the Mall, and went around
draping sheets over all the mirrors in the room. There were a
lot of them. The call I was waiting for came just as I
finished. I listened to the instructions, and left the room.
In a park not far from the hotel I walked around for
almost half an hour, which didn't surprise me. I assumed I was
being checked out. Finally I spotted the man I'd been told to
look for, and sat on the other end of a park bench. We didn't
look at each other, or talk. He got up and walked away, leaving
a sack on the bench between us. I waited a few more minutes,
breathed deeply, and picked up the sack. No hand reached out to
grab my shoulder. Maybe I didn't have the nerves for this sort
of work.
Back in the suite I didn't have long to wait before Brenda
knocked on the door, back from her shopping expedition. She'd
done well. Everything I'd asked for was in the packages she
carried. We got out the costumes of the Electricians Guild and
put them on: blue coveralls with Guild patches and equipment
belts. Names were stitched into the fabric over the left
breast: I was Roz and she was Kathy. Next to the ceremonial
wrenches, screwdrivers, and circuit testers dangling from the
belt I clipped some of the items I'd just obtained in such a
melodramatic fashion. They fit right in. We donned yellow
plastic hardhats and picked up black metal lunchboxes and
looked at each other in the mirror. We burst out laughing.
Brenda seemed to be enjoying the game so far. It was an
adventure.
Brenda looked ridiculous, as usual. You'd think a disguise
on Brenda would work about as well as a wig on a flagpole. The
fact is, she is not that abnormal for her generation. Who knows
where this height thing is going to end? Another of many causes
of the generation gap Callie had talked about was a simple
matter of dimension: people of Brenda's age group tended not to
frequent the older parts of the city where so many of their
elders lived . . . because they kept hitting their heads on
things. We built to a smaller scale in those days.
There were no human guards on the workers' entrance to the
Flack Grand Studio. I didn't really expect to encounter any at
all; according to the information I'd bought they only employed
six of them. People tended to rely on machines for that sort of
thing, and their trust can be misplaced, as I demonstrated to
Brenda with one of the illegal gizmos. I waved it at the door,
waited while red lights turned green, and the door sprung open.
I'd been told that one of the three machines I had would deal
with any security system I'd find in the Studio. I just hoped
my trust wasn't misplaced, in either the shady characters who
sold this sort of stuff or the machines themselves. We do trust
the little buggers, don't we? I had no idea what the stinking
thing was doing, but when it flashed a green light at me I
trotted right in, like Pavlov's dog Spotski.
Up three floors, down two corridors, seventh door on the
left. And who should be standing there looking frustrated but .
. . Cricket.
"If you touch that doorknob," I said, "Elvis will return
and he won't be handing out pink Cadillacs." She jumped just a
little. Damn, that girl was good. She was trying to pass
herself off as some kind of Flack functionary, carrying a
clipboard like an Amazon's shield. The good old clipboard can
be the magic key to many places if you know how to use it, and
Cricket was born to the con. She looked at us haughtily through
dark glasses.
"I beg your pardon," she sniffed. "What are you two doing
. . ." She had been flipping officiously through papers on her
board, as if searching for our names, which we hadn't given,
when she realized it was Brenda way up there under that yellow
hardhat. Nothing had prepared her for that, or for the dawning
realization of who it was playing the Jeff to Brenda's Mutt.
"Goddam," she breathed. "It's you, isn't it? Hildy?"
"In the flesh. I'm ashamed of you, Cricket. Balked by a
mere door? You've apparently forgotten your girl scout motto."
"All I remember is never let him in the back door on the
first date."
"Be prepared, love, be prepared." And I waved one of my
magic wands at the door. Naturally, one of the lights remained
obstinately red. So I chose another one at random and the
machine paid off like a crooked slot machine. We went through
the door, and I suddenly realized what her dark glasses were
for.
We were in an ordinary corridor with three doors leading
off of it. Music was coming from behind one of the doors.
According to the map I'd paid a lot of Walter's money for, that