“It certainly sounds boring,” Judith agreed. “I think you ought to stick to fiction. That’s more your metier.”
Metier, Malcolm repeated to himself. Jesus, I’ve got an agent who knows more words than I do. “You’re right. Okay, listen to this. This is much better. I’ve been thinking of writing a satirical pseudo-Western. I keep hearing that Westerns are about to make a comeback any day now.”
“I keep hearing that, too,” Judith said. “But I’ve been hearing that for as long as I can remember. I bet you have, too, and I know you can remember a lot further back than I can. Anyway, just what do you mean by a ‘satirical pseudo-Western,’ or do I even want to know?”
She had ordered the pecan pie before finishing the main course, a truly awful fish sandwich, in the almost superstitious belief that this would make her late lunch meeting with Malcolm end sooner. Now she poked at the dry, tasteless, flaky white sandwich filling and thought again about the South. For an instant, a memory of succulent, tasty, lightly breaded fried river catfish came back to her. She could smell it. She closed her eyes and smiled. But then in her mind the dead fish assumed Malcolm’s pouty face. She opened her eyes again and faced reality.
For a moment, Malcolm’s pout disappeared and he displayed some enthusiasm. He leaned forward slightly. “This was my idea. I’d call it The James Boys, and the gimmick would be that it would seem to be a straight historical Western about Frank and Jesse James, but in fact, as the reader — pardon me, the intelligent reader — would eventually come to realize, the two gunslinging brothers are really Henry James, the novelist, and his brother, the psychiatrist, whatever his name was.”
“William. I don’t —”
“Wait, wait,” Malcolm said, rushing on. “See, the plot would be one of the real-life escapades of Frank and Jesse. Robbing a bank, or whatever. But one of the characters, the older brother, would speak in Henry James’s impossible sentences, and the younger brother would ponder everyone’s inner motivations and psychological problems while he was shooting them.” He leaned back, smiling with pleasure at his own idea.
“The more I think about it, the more I like it. Or a variant of it would be to have Frank and Jesse fake Jesse’s murder and escape from the law by moving East and assuming new identities, becoming the other James brothers. Or maybe vice-versa if the dates work out the other way around. Have Henry and William move West and become criminals. Sounds like a blockbuster to me.”
“Sounds impossible to sell, to me. How many editors would even get the joke? It’s a bit obscure.” Judith congratulated herself on her tact. Her first impulse had been to tell Malcolm that his idea sucked with teeth.
Malcolm deflated immediately. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. Not to mention that I’d have to read a bunch of Henry James novels to really get the feel for his prose, which is a pretty awful thought. Ah, well, maybe some day, when I’m famous and can write anything I want to, I’ll give the idea a try.”
I’m desperate to be famous, he thought. It’s loosening my normally ferocious grip on reality.
Judith, he realized, might be the only agent or editor at this convention who even knew who Malcolm Erskine was.
The evening before, on the way up to his hotel room for the night, Malcolm had shared the elevator with a famous editor. Just the two of them, alone in a small elevator for who knew how many minutes! It had struck Malcolm as a gift from the gods, a golden opportunity for the kind of professional schmoozing that he had told himself was the main reason for attending the convention. He had smiled at the man and said hello in as warm and familiar a tone as he could manage.
The editor had smiled uncertainly and peered at Malcom’s convention attendee badge, pinned to his shirt pocket. Malcolm’s name was on the badge, and a red ribbon was attached to it, indicating that he was a professional writer.
“Um, hi,” the editor had said, frowning, concentrating on the name on the badge. “I’m sorry. Do I know you?”
“Not yet, ha, ha! Malcolm Erskine.” He stuck out his hand.
The editor took his hand reluctantly and let it go quickly. “I’m afraid I don’t... I’m sorry, I... What have you written?”
Malcolm told him. It didn’t take very long.
“Ah, yes. I see. Well...”
There was a silence that seemed eternal.
The elevator bell dinged.
“Ah, my floor,” the editor said, not hiding his relief very well. “Well. Have a nice convention.”
The door opened onto a brightly lit hotel hallway filled with happy, laughing people who greeted the editor with cries of welcome uttered in rich, successful voices. Then the door closed, and Malcolm continued alone up to his floor, which was quiet and dusty and ill lit, where were located the rooms the convention had reserved for failed authors who really shouldn’t have bothered attending.
He’s just clutching at straws, Judith realized. Poor man. He really is depressed and worried about his career. With good reason, she admitted to herself. To what degree Malcolm’s situation was her fault for not selling his work, and to what degree it was Malcolm’s for not sending her work she could sell, she could not have said. She was sure that agents and their clients would always have different answers to that question.
“I’m not sure you should spend too much time thinking about Westerns.”
“Maybe so,” Malcolm said. “I suppose science fiction really is my metier.”
This is going to go on forever, Judith thought. I’ll never get to enjoy my pecan pie. I’ll never even get back to my room. How do I stop it?
She looked at her watch. “Why, it’s three o’clock already!” she said brightly. “So that means it’s already four o’clock in New York! This whole time zone thing seems strange to me. I always have trouble keeping track of it. Here we are, eating,” she sighed, “pecan pie, and in New York it’s already almost dinner time. It’s really quite late.”
“Time zones are shit,” Malcolm said.
“What?”
“They make no sense at all. The whole world should just be on Greenwich time. So instead of setting my alarm for 6 a.m. to get up for work, I’d set it for 1 p.m. So what? I’d still be tired and filled with resentment and anger when it went off. Anyway, it’d be less confusing for everyone, in the long run.” Maybe that way agents wouldn’t call their clients at 5 a.m., thinking they must be up already because it was 8 a.m. in New York, as Judith had once done to him.
“But wait a minute!” he said suddenly. “Why stop there? The world’s moving toward decimal measurements in everything, so why should time be sacred? Why don’t we divide the day into ten parts? Divide that into ten parts and so on. So that way, a milliday would be, um...” He drifted off into calculation.
Judith played with her pecan pie. She could of course eat it and ignore Malcolm as he rattled on, but she knew she wouldn’t really enjoy it until he finally shut up. And, preferably, left.
“Just under a minute and a half,” he said. “So that would be convenient. People could get used to thinking in those terms.”
“I couldn’t.”
“No, they couldn’t. You’re right. They wouldn’t accept it. People are idiots.” He didn’t notice Judith’s sudden stiffening or her glare. That editors and agents are also people with feelings was a fact that too often eluded Malcolm. “The only way to make such a radical change stick would be to kill everyone off and start fresh. No parents to bias the new kids. Brew the next generation in vats.”
Oh, no, Judith thought, he’s about to come up with another hackneyed, derivative, unsellable idea for a science-fiction novel.
“I could do a non-fiction book suggesting all of this,” Malcolm said thoughtfully, surprising her slightly. “Maybe make a bit of stir. Or maybe I’d just be dismissed as a kook. Probably not even publishable, right?”
Judith shook her head, feeling a vast sense of relief.
“Maybe I should do it as a novel, instead. A whole new world of new people. All speaking the same languag
e, all using rational measurements. The only holiday all over the world would be the first day of the new year, which would be called Vat Day.”
“And everyone would look the same and act the same?”
“Oh, no. There’d still be lots of genetic diversity.” Malcolm laughed. “But they’d all read the same books. Mine!” He could imagine himself being happy in such a world. A rational world. A peaceful world. A prosperous world. A world in which he was the top bestselling author. Or maybe the only bestselling author. It wouldn’t be a very rational world otherwise.
Everyone would be physically perfect. Especially the women. Who would also be perfectly infatuated with Malcolm Erskine.
Too simple, Malcolm realized. You have to have tension and an antagonist. So maybe the bestselling writer turns out to be the world’s only defense against a seemingly sexy woman who somehow emerged from the vat mentally warped. Marlinga is her name. Maybe the temperature control went bad while Marlinga was still being formed. Or someone accidentally poured too much or too little of some important chemical into the mix. So she’s outwardly a hot number, with a firm little body that looks terrific in panties, and she can do pretty remarkable things with her mouth, as the author hero finds out before he discovers that she’s a criminal genius intent on destroying the world and especially him.
There’d have to be an even hotter babe involved, a girl who had emerged from the vats without a single flaw. All the temperature controls and chemical mixtures were absolutely optimum. She’d be a dusky goddess with shoulder-length black hair. She’d be rescued from Marlinga by the hero writer at the very end and would fling her arms around his neck and kiss him passionately. End of book, but not end of story.
Gazing off into space, smiling slightly, Malcolm sighed.
“Well, actually,” Judith said, “I was thinking that maybe you should give science fiction a rest. Maybe you need to get some distance from it for a while. Crime, mystery, suspense — that’s more what I had in mind. All very big right now.”
Malcolm sneered. “So are New Age and self-help. Maybe I should invent some new kind of woo-woo.”
Foolishly, Judith asked, “For example?” Maybe he had a germ of an idea for something useful. Infected by his desperation, she found herself wanting to help him even while she was desperate to get away from him.
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t...” Then he chuckled. “Here’s one. It just came to me. You know how idiotic astrology is?”
“Um,” Judith said. One of her clients was selling a couple of hundred thousand paperback copies a year of an astrological cookbook, Stars in Your Kitchen.
“Right. Even if the theories weren’t just pulled out of thin air and based on the sun’s positions in the Zodiac thousands of years ago, how would the effect work? Not gravity. Someone calculated that the gravitational effect of the doctor standing next to a mother giving birth is far greater than the pull of the planets on the baby at the same time. I mean, it just makes no sense at all. But how about magma?”
How about those Yankees, Judith wanted to say. “What about magma?”
“Well, it’s close by. Right under our feet. Almost. Sort of. It probably does have a gravitational effect on us. It flows in huge currents. Maybe it even releases gases that we aren’t aware of. So in other words, where you’re born and when may affect your personality because of the magma flows underneath you at the time.”
“It’s novel,” Judith said uncertainly.
The gimmick began to appeal to Malcolm more as he thought about it. “Magmamancy,” he said. “Magmoscopy. No, that sounds medical. Anyway, I’d have to come up with a good name for this new pseudo-science. I could tie it to primitive religions. Maybe that’s why they used to throw virgins into volcanoes! They wanted to connect the tribe to the magma! They understood all of this intuitively.”
“I bet that never happened except in a movie,” Judith said.
Malcolm scarcely heard her. He had been transported into a fantasy in which he rescued a beautiful black-haired, dusky-skinned maiden from a terrible death in some Polynesian volcano. She turned to him, her almond-shaped eyes wide with gratitude and desire, and flung her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist and kissed him passionately.
That sexual fantasy gave way to an even more potent one: the cover of a bestselling book with Malcolm’s name on it. Across the top it said MAGMAMANCY. Beneath that was a painting of a volcano in full eruption.
Malcom frowned. He had seen that cover before, in real life. Hadn’t it been used for L. Ron Hubbard’s book about his invented religion?
Then he saw the look on Judith Tillen’s face, and both the book cover and the luscious mouth of the almond-eyed maiden faded away.
“Crap,” Malcolm said. “Maybe I should start a new religion, like Hubbard. Now even his awful science-fiction series is a smash, because all those Scientologists rush out and buy each new installment. And he’s dead! He’s writing bestsellers from the grave! Do I have to die to make it? I can’t become young again, but I can still die. Then you could hire some young guy to write more novels under my name and pretend they’ve just been discovered among my papers. Maybe then you could even sell my real novels, once they’re reeking of the tomb and decaying flesh and wriggling piles of maggots.”
Judith pushed her uneaten slice of pecan pie away and signaled for the check.
* * * * *
Malcolm found himself utterly caught up in his new literary project.
At work, he lied bald facedly about what he was really doing, and he worked on his new book instead of producing programs. He realized that eventually there would be a day of reckoning. He was counting on literary success coming first.
When someone approached close enough to see the monitor of the computer on his desk, close enough to see that the screen was covered with English text rather than lines of source code, he would say something about documentation. “Suppose a truck runs over me some day,” Malcolm would say, repeating one of the oldest clichés in the programming business. “You guys would be left with having to figure out how all my programs work. I thought it was about time I started churning out detailed documentation, just in case of that truck.”
Once, Jim Leiter, worried by how much time Malcolm was spending on this self-assigned documentation project, asked just how long all this text would turn out to be.
Into Malcolm’s mind suddenly sprang a clear, solid, full-color picture of his book filling a window display in a Barnes & Noble outlet. It was a thick book. People of both sexes, various ages, and a range of income levels and professions were rushing into the store to buy it. It was as close to a religious experience as he ever wanted to come.
He closed his eyes to see his vision more clearly, watching one of the dream people pick up the book and read the back and front inside covers. He guessed the expensive hardcover to be around four hundred pages long. Meaning six hundred double-spaced manuscript pages. “Six hundred pages,” he said.
Leiter stared at him in horror. “Six — !”
“Double spaced,” Malcolm said quickly. “And with wide margins. Twenty-five lines per page, ten words per line. Say two hundred and fifty words per page, for the sake of argument.”
Leiter looked dazed. “Huh? Why?”
“Because that’s the way I do documentation,” Malcolm explained.
“It’ll take you forever! What are you doing to my schedule? I’ve got to hand in the next quarter’s estimates to Jab. I’m screwed!”
Malcolm suspected that Leiter had never been screwed and never would be. “Give him anything,” he told his boss, thinking this would soothe him. “He probably can’t read, anyway.”
Alarm filled Leiter’s round face. He looked quickly to either side and then shook his head warningly at Malcolm. In a low voice, he said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Of course he can.”
“The guy’s not even human,” Malcolm said, although he did lower his voice.
Jab, as Leiter insisted on calling him, o
beying the Western Bell dictum that everyone was to be addressed by first name or nickname, furthering the pretense of equality, democracy, and doors that were always open, was Leiter’s boss. Malcolm had glimpsed him on a few of Jab’s rare visits to what was supposed to be his office, and Malcolm really wasn’t sure he was human.
“Look at him,” Malcolm said. He kept his voice low, for until he achieved the success and wealth he was increasingly sure Business Secrets from the Stars would bring him, he needed a paycheck, and jobs were hard to come by in an America presided over by the Great Defibrillator. “He’s like two feet tall and covered with hair. And he doesn’t speak. He makes strange noises.”
“You’ve spoken to him?” Leiter looked even more alarmed.
“No. But I heard that weird babbling outside my cubicle one day, so I stepped out into the corridor and I saw him walking away. He looked like a little monkey wearing a suit.”
Leiter glared at. “Well, you’re wrong, okay? I’ve talked to him. He has kind of a strange accent, but he’s brilliant. He’s just what this company needs. And you...” He pointed at Malcolm. His finger shook with agitation, possibly anger, possibly just his usual nervousness. “Just do your damned job, okay?” He spun around and stalked out of Malcolm’s cubicle and away.
Malcolm closed his eyes again.
The dream reader was still there, waiting in line to pay for the book and avidly reading it while waiting. Fuzzy and indistinct before, the dream reader now solidified into a stunningly, exotically beautiful young woman with shoulder-length black hair and olive skin. She looked at Malcolm’s photograph on the inside back cover (the author: pensive, frightfully intelligent, yet dashing and with an intriguing glint in his otherwise quiet eyes) and she said to the woman waiting in line behind her, “Wow! Isn’t he wonderful? I’d give anything to meet him and throw myself on him and wrap my arms and legs around him and kiss him nearly to suffocation and become his sex slave.” She sighed. “But of course it will never happen. Especially if he doesn’t get this book finished.”
Business Secrets from the Stars Page 3
