The extra, p.3
The Extra, page 3
I got out and stood in the weeds . . . and saw that Japh too, was looking up where Jool was looking. I turned. For a long minute, all three of us stared at it.
It was the holo-board, graffiti-proof advertising, hanging up there where it could be seen for miles from all directions. Simple and to the point, white block lettering on a blue rectangle maybe a hundred feet wide.
EXTRAS
ALIEN HUNGER
Tube Nine Six A.M. Panoply Studios
And the bottom line was tomorrow’s date.
Sometimes words—the simplest words, said at the right time—can change things forever. Just crouch down in the box you were put in? My own words, but I didn’t really hear them till I saw the way Japh and Jool were looking at that ad. Because as I’d spoken them, they had heard them more clearly than I had. . . .
I regretted my words then. This Zoo-girl, given the big brutal box she was born in . . . well, the gamble advertised on that holo-board was something she had to consider a lot more seriously than I ever would. The thought shamed me.
. . . And then it registered how seriously Japh was staring at that holo.
I wasn’t ready for this kind of thinking. “Look,” I said. “I’ve got this gun. It’s got to be worth a full tank.”
She looked at me a minute, as if she’d forgotten the issue between us, and her mind was coming back from somewhere pretty far away. “You got the gun. All you woulda got was the short end of it, if I hadn’t put him down.” But she didn’t give this much heat, said it almost absentmindedly. “I already got a piece,” she added softly—and though it had saved us twice, I saw it now for the first time. She took it from her waist and looked at it like it was something new to her, holding it up and turning it this way and that in the dimness. It was a little handgrip with four inches of shotgun barrel. It didn’t look like metal, more like dull black plastic. Jool twisted the grip, and it came free. Tilted it, and a shotgun shell slid out—the whole shell, even the casing, also plastic-looking.
“You see this?” she asked. It was almost a sweet voice she had when she wasn’t using it to back you off, a velvety voice with a little grit to it, like superfine sandpaper. “And these, kind I use on the street?” She dug a couple other shells from her pocket. Brass casings on these. “I can get five pounds of these for your nineteen clacks. But this kind, with the hard carbon casing? I could trade that pistol for two, maybe three of these. Then I’d have two in the grip, one in the chamber, when I walk through the studio gate. Barrel up my ass, an’ the grip . . .”
A hard-carbon weapon and ammo would be concealable—maybe—from the studio’s detectors, if she went in to hire on as an extra. It stunned me a little, both that she’d reached this decision, and that she was telling us about it. Obviously she was her own woman and took her own risks. Telling us seemed more like telling herself what she’d decided to do. Maybe she needed to make us her witnesses—just to have that little moment of company before jumping off the edge.
She reassembled her little piece, put a “street” shell in the chamber—her moves getting brisker, her face getting harder as she snapped and clicked her kit back together. “OK,” she said. “Short and simple. You did mess me up. I had just one pack, the numb-nut Highlanders, leeching me, and they were bad enough to keep any others off me, and dumb enough for me to duck ’em and string ’em and keep ’em at bay at about half the going rate for protection. I was getting by, had control, and all the rest of that happy horse-shit we make do on down here in monkeyland. So you owe me, end of story. You butted in and you bitched me up.
“On the other hand, what you fucked up was fucked up. I’m writing you off as a wake-up call. You jammed me in a corner and forced me to grow some guts. You ’Rise-asses aren’t the only ones can read. I know there’s a real world out there, and I am gonna step out and find it. So. Take me home, give me all your clacks and that pistol, and I’ll fill your tank. End of story.”
“. . . OK.”
“Deal.”
She looked from one to the other of us, nodding, scowling—till all at once, her scowl broke up, and she burst out laughing.
What a sound that was, what a wild song, that laughter! It was like gold coins flung up in the air, clattering down around us. We had to laugh too, but even while I was laughing I felt . . . envy. Sadness and envy. Because her laughter was wilder than ours, was totally free, that was it. Her laughter was freedom, the way you laugh when you’ve said good-bye in your heart to everything you treasure. Said good-bye, and jumped.
“And I gotta . . . I gotta say, guys . . .”—but Jool still had some more in there that had to be laughed out. At last she wiped her eyes and grinned. “What’s your names? You’re Curtis, what’s yours again?”
“Japh.”
“I gotta say Japh, Curtis . . .”—a few more giggles still in there—“. . . I gotta say, you boys have some fair moves for ’Rise-asses. No time to think, and you do OK. And you’re pretty cute, Curtis. Tell you what. You get back in here, lay your head back in my lap, you can whip some face on me on the way back to my place.”
That set us all off again, but man, even while I was laughing, that sadness and envy was still there, right in the middle of my heart. I was in love with her. Completely in love with her.
“That’s pretty bad odds in there,” I blurted out, nodding up at the holo.
“Well, I’ll tell you what Curtis,” she said. “Thing you learn, living around here, is you never know what’s gonna happen. I mean, rule of thumb, words to live by.” She was almost solemn, looking around at the blocks huddled under their darkening trees. “Because if you don’t keep that in mind,” she seemed to come back to herself, smiled at us both, “what’re you gonna do?”
She told us to keep the ’pod in second. “We’re neighbors here,” she said, “and we keep the noise down for each other.” This, a unified neighborhood, was a side of the Zoo I never knew about. It was a residential neighborhood with all the vegetation run wild, houses totally swallowed in plantings and trees. Not so much run wild, you understand, as trained up into an outer shell for the houses. Streetlights around here were dead, but every block had at least four makeshift poles with antique kerosene lanterns mounted on them encased in bulletproof plexi, and two or three guys with rifles sitting around them on crates or chairs. They made a faint, old-timey kind of light, golden and fluttery, just enough to show you that the tree-sunk lots were sectioned into little compounds of three or four houses each with big chain-link fences crowned by razor wire.
“You like our coops?” Jool asked. “It’s efficient. Each one maintains a generator, shares the power. Fuel, guard duty, plumbing repair—all a team effort. The scum factor can creep in, though. People go out, get dirty, get debts and trashy friends, and bring them home to their coop. Three or four houses to a coop works best, keeps infections small. . . .”
I could see she was growing more remote again. We were now in the middle of everything and everyone she was saying good-bye to. She had us stop midway down a particularly tree-thick block. “Here. Wait at the gate.” We killed the motor. Jool opened a heavy padlock, locked it behind her, and disappeared through the foliage inside. I didn’t talk to Japh. I was already afraid of what I thought he might have decided.
Jool came back out with a fuel can. Took our clacks and the automatic, and started filling our tank. Avoiding our eyes, and avoiding talk too—holding on to her hard decision, preparing herself already. All I had to do was lean forward. I didn’t let myself think about it. I kissed her cheek.
She looked at me with complete surprise. It was already tomorrow morning for her—she was on Tube Nine, heading out to Panoply Studios, steeling herself for it—and suddenly she’s kissed. “Good luck,” I said.
She blinked, and gave me a little smile. Capped our tank, and turned away without a word. Slipped back through the gate. A whisper of leaves swallowed her, and she was gone.
Full dark now, in the river of headlights. This night was wild and sweet! We hit the freeway, and westwards we went, the black night above us tearing our hair back. I was getting a lot of wind on my side where the windscreen wasn’t. “Smell the ocean?” Japh shouted.
“Yeah!” I shouted back.
At the coast we pulled off to the Palisades, and parked on the clifftop. Watched the view a while, not talking. There was a piece of moon up there that put a pale varnish on the sea and made it look cold as ice and wide as the sky. Down under the corpse-piers little campfires winked out from between the pilings, and glinted from the midst of dark knots of people all along the beach, miles and miles of nomads camping on the sand. There was even someone swimming, or drowning, a pale foamy commotion out past the break, someone desperate enough for escape to swim in those toxins. Or maybe just jubilating in the water’s cool grip. People come to the sea to remember the earth, see proof of the size of it. As I looked at it I really believed there was a whole continent at my back . . . and it made me ashamed. I should be straining every nerve to enter that continent, to take my auntie into some freedom, some beauty. . . .
Japh’s silence was getting louder by the minute. I already knew he’d decided what Jool had. I’d never felt so alone in my life.
“Hey. Curtis.”
“I know, man. I know. But I just can’t do it. Your mom and dad have each other. I’m all my auntie’s got.”
“You think I don’t know that, Curtis? Hey. The way I see it, I’m getting up early tomorrow morning, and I’m comin’ back rich enough for all five of us.”
“I don’t even wanna think about you doing it. I don’t wanna talk about it.”
He gripped my shoulder. “ ’Nuff said, my brother. ’Nuff said. Just be ready to be rich by this time tomorrow.”
THE SET
Sunset laid its glory on the set below them—the grandest set Panoply Studios had built to date. The burnished office buildings flashed copper and gold above the wide crazy puzzle of rooftops, streets, and the green clouds of tree-filled parks—all of it gorgeously half-lit in gold, half-etched in jet-black shadow. Their hover-raft hung about ten stories above its highest buildings, and from here every mega-clack spent on this set was visible: a Late Twentieth city in flawless detail, right down to the graffitied phone booths, the dogshit on the sidewalks, the animatronic drunks sleeping in alleys under blankets of newspapers—right down to the zits on the drunks’ cheeks and the headlines on those newspapers.
Kate could not help feeling a thrill of ownership. Well, membership at least. She knew she hadn’t risen above the pack yet, knew that assistant directors were legion. But she had at last arrived in the ranks of those who actually worked on the shoot. More than that, she was gazing on the set from the raft of Val Margolian, King of Panoply, and the greatest living vid director.
There he sat in the pilot’s chair, checking the feeds from the on-set cameras. Tanned, handsome, lean, a vigorous sixty, he looked from time to time at the set itself, as she was doing, seeming to savor it, as she did. His fine, strong jaw in profile had a little flaw, a dent in the bone on its left side, maybe an old fracture. She knew in his youth he’d taught in the Zoo, had stepped out of his Middle-Class safety to help the poor. His first films—his social realism phase—were all set down there in the Flats. She felt the old wound, that crack in the line of his strongly chiseled profile, perfected Val Margolian’s beauty. It was a mark of struggle, and thus a mark of honor.
Her peers saw her friendship with Val as Success itself, but Kate’s pride insisted on more: that her rise in the studios be her own, be earned by her proven talent. Still, it was hard to repress the euphoria of riding in the raft of the man who could put her in a director’s chair with a single word.
“It’s beyond praise, Val,” she said, gesturing at the prospect. “It’s the grandest, most realized work of art I’ve ever seen.” Kate could say this as she felt it, easy and warm. Ass-kissing was not a factor between them.
Val smiled gratefully. Kate’s praise was a gift he knew he could savor, not just another blowjob from young ambition.
“Thank you, dear. It’s . . . true, isn’t it? It is grand. It’s absolutely complete.”
“And made for destruction. I think somehow that’s the finest thing of—”
“Made for immortality!” This interruption came from Rod, who lay in the lounge at the stern. A buffed young man, his dad a big stockholder in Panoply. “Its destruction will live forever in the minds of our viewers.”
Kate bedded Rod, he was good in the sack. He had an enthusiastic nature, but he wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, and his personality needed work. “Forever?” She smiled. She didn’t usually taunt Rod when he was schmoozing. He’d irritated her.
“Hey.” Rod raised a solemn, prophetic finger. “All Val’s work is supreme, but this one is epochal. I hope I’m not being arrogant here, Val, since I pitched the concept. Because what’s an idea? You’re the one who made it reality, Val, and that’s what’s going to live forever, the reality you’ve made of it right here, the greatest live-action vid of the century.”
Kate was amused by a certain tension in Rod’s profile. She could see he was a little afraid that she might speak up here. The “concept”—i.e., the monster in Alien Hunger—had in fact been Kate’s. Rod, one night, sitting in a recliner with a legal pad and an expensive pen, scowling with thought, had asked her: “Kate, what’s the most horrible way you can think of to be killed?” She’d given it a moment’s thought, and told him.
Rod hadn’t copied it down right away. He’d sat there brooding and pondering for another hour, as if his creativity were transforming her banal notion into something more, something with depth and meaning. Then he’d copied it down. Pitched it at Panoply the next morning.
Rod needn’t worry. Kate felt certain that Val, not just indifferent to the death machines in his live-action vids, was actually more repelled by them than anything. She was sure that the APPs in his vids, the Anti-Personnel Properties, were if anything distasteful to a man whose mastery of his art was so complete. Kate herself was well-read and gifted enough to see, on every shoot, his angel’s eye for weaving gigabytes of detail into an irresistible reality.
As if in confirmation of her thought, Val reached out to the controls and wafted their raft twenty stories higher. He punched his com button. “Willy? Let’s see the first wave over Sectors A and B. Deflect the collisions by a nice wide margin, please.”
An answering chuckle. “You don’t wanna see a smashup or two, boss?”
Smiling tiredly, Val said, “No thanks, Willy—let’s save those for immortalizing tomorrow.”
That tipped Rod to the Big Guy’s mood. He stood up and got absorbed in the air show, the robot alien craft arrowing down across the city below them. They were gorgeous in the gold light. And then here came the intercepting wave of our guys—bright knives parrying the lethal onslaught from a distant star. Some breathtaking close passes between craft scheduled for collision during the shoot, while they all traded harmless red bolts of laser light to test the programs that would join them with bolts of live cannon fire tomorrow. With her excellent visual memory, Kate could isolate from the swift melee just which craft would erupt in a spew of deadly, building-smashing debris on the city below. It was harder to calk out casualties from impacts and explosions than the probable kills of the aliens themselves on the sidewalks and in the buildings. . . . Panoply had budgeted for a huge draft of extras—just about everyone who showed up would be taken on. Bread for the masses.
So many of these would die tomorrow—here, of course, was the hard thing about this work. Val had been the pioneer of “live action,” the euphemism his own. But hadn’t the global economy thrust it on him? Would he ever have brought it to birth, if the swarms of extras who answered the first call hadn’t made it plain? That if this genre would feed a need in its audience, it would feed an equally urgent one in its actors?
At the outset, there had been stormy weather from the bleeding hearts within the industry, but Val already had the whip hand at Panoply, and once it was known he was going through with it, all the other majors kept their people in line until Last Gasp hit the screens, and they could see how it grossed. They were poised either to send their politicians in baying like wolves for Panoply’s blood, or to jump on the bandwagon. The Zoo was gung-ho from the first. Already hardened to a dangerous environment, they went for the lottery aspect of the arrangement. The macho glory angle too, like going to war, except that from this kind of war you could come back rich.
Last Gasp grossed off the charts. Val, by grit and gall and a young genius’s drive to make his visions real, had created a whole new entertainment genre. He had grasped the need of the billions, seen that all the tube-suckers were galled by the guilt of synthetic lives. Live action put substance back into vid-sucking, because the people you were watching were having life as real as it got, dancing on the border between life and death. . . .
In the decades since Last Gasp, Val and all his imitatorshad . . . made possible hundreds of thousands of deaths. How that must weigh on a brilliant, humane man like Val, though he would never express these thoughts, not by the slightest flicker of his tanned, handsomely lined face.
Kate gazed out over the vast basin to the south: Zoo without end! Six tenths of the world’s population in perilous poverty. She’d been born to Uptown here—Pasadena, Burbank, Hollywood, and all along the hills west to the sea. There ought to have been a wall like the set wall, but running all along the skirts of the hills to the Pacific. There was a wall of course, not visible from up here. Uptown’s wall was Metro, practically a cop per block throughout this lofty zone. Half their cruisers were Mercedes, so as not to damage Uptowners’ self-esteem.
It did hurt to know you were eating the poor. But throughout history, the elites had taken the world as it was left to them. She at least was part of an industry that created a fiscally viable way to put hundreds of millions into the Zoo economy.
