by Michael Shea
Seventy meters deep, the opposing walls of ruptured “earth” were still being detailed by techs here and there, and one of these work-zones was not far ahead. The pilots had ramped the boat to eighty klicks. At this speed through the center of the Crack, its uneven walls—narrowing and widening—loomed scarily in-and-out at the passengers.
In the fissure ahead, full-spectrum floods lit scaffolding webbed to one wall, where the little blue arc-torches of creters sculpted the hardened crete, and tinters followed them with their airless tint-rifles. The scaffolds swarmed with at least two-score toiling techs.
Though her lights were still off, as she swooshed past the scaffolding the boat’s gloss reflected the wash of the workers’ lamps, and the raft gleamed with the deep-sea flash of a big predator swooping very near: the wall thrust in here and clearance from the facing wall was less than nine meters.
Sandy saw in a neat frame of scaffolding a creter’s awed face blue-lit on one side by the torch he held, turning just in time to see them sweep near him, big as a house, and three solemn-faced women tilted on their sides watching him as they flashed past.
Fast snaking through more darkness then, the pilots ramping up to a hundred fifty klicks—more darkness, and more dark—and then light and scaffolding again loomed toward them. Coming just past a sharp turn, this onslaught was more sudden than the first, and here there were crete rafts hovering just off the scaffold and cluttering the sector boat’s airspace.
Lance and Trek flipped a nose dive and sliced down into deep Crack—and almost made it clear, except for a brief kiss of impact against the boat’s upper fin tip, explained an instant later by a glimpse of a raft bottom spinning like a pinwheel away up above them.
Deep they stayed, ramped to a full two hundred klicks, crooking their way through at blur-speed, and then climbing steadily, to erupt up into the moonless night.
They cleared the set wall by less than a meter. The pilots laid the boat back belly-down on the air, and ramped up into the open sky at near four hundred clicks.
“Whoa!” shouted Mazy. “Bitchin ride, boys!”
“Not too bad,” piped Ming, pleased in spite of herself. “Little training from us, you guys might become pilots!”
“Ooo, such a little hardcase you are!” grinned Lance. “Just remember what Caesar said: alea jacta est!”
“And what’s that mean, horn-head?”
“It means the die is cast,” said Sandy Devlin. “And so it is.”
At Sunrise—just, in fact, as the sun came up—they nested the boat in a swale in the hills, far enough from the town so the studio spies and electronic eyes most likely would miss it, socketing it in a notch in the slope. Soon they had other hands helping, tarping it over, heaping scythed grass till it looked like a compost pile.
VII
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
On his rowing machine, Val Margolian rivered sweat, reviewing as he oared his recent triumphs and trials.
Pull! Alien Hunger: plutonium.
Pull! Alien Hunger, Director’s Cut, that child of mayhem and mischance: ultra-plutonium.
Pull! He was among the richest men in California.
But. The Cut was such a triumph because it nearly took his life and killed his reputation in one stroke. Through his own folly, the malice of his pilots, and the treachery of Mark Millar, Val had been dragged into the jaws of his own set.
Like some hapless wage slave of the Industrial Era snatched into the mangler that he served, Val had been transformed into a scrambling extra in his own vid, madly fleeing—on camera!—a monster he had himself designed.
His escape from its fangs had killed Raj Valdez, a brave and charismatic action star. Stunned by the mangling that his own opus had given him, Val had retreated to the south of France. His manslaughter moment had been edited out, of course, but he couldn’t edit his humiliating performance from his memory.
Until it dawned on him. He’d always been an actor in his every vid, the invisible star that all the others played to. The audience always knew he was there. And if he’d left that moment in the Cut, they would have loved it. The cold killer genius Margolian, caught with his tail in a crack, tossing the male lead to a spider to save his ass.
What tasty schadenfreude his viewers would have sucked from seeing him almost eaten by his art. And as it was, he’d left much in. Had shown his crash (but not its cause), had shown his danger and his near pursuit. A spicy fragment that displayed a great director’s willingness to chuckle at himself. And, had captured yet again the whole vid-sucking world’s devout attention.
From feeling diminished, Val came to feel enlarged.
His rowing slowed … slowed … and ceased. He smiled. Now Val Margolian bestrode an even loftier eminence than he had occupied before.
As he showered and dressed, the mirror displayed a man who looked stronger and more handsome than ever. Lean and silver-haired—striking even with that flaw on his face, the crease down his cracked cheekbone, that an idealistic young teacher had suffered in the Zoo long ago.
* * *
Mark Millar sat his raft above the set of Quake. Quake: The Set, he thought. He bleakly scanned his chasm, the little faux city taking shape … and thought he might as well just mail this one in.
Battle of the Somme had done well at the box office, even very well. That was the problem. In the boardroom they’d say, “Somme did very well.” A death-knell for his career.
He’d needed a hit to move up next in line as Val’s successor. But with so much talent around, directors who did “very well” their first time out were all but doomed to the second-string for life. He’d needed a flick that broke the mold. And a mold-breaker he’d thought Live War would be: extras in armies killing each other—each the other’s APPs.
He saw now it was the absence of monsters that had hurt Somme. There’d proved to be something repugnant about it: extras forced to kill each other for clacks. It was too like the gladiatorial carnage of Rome, but an industrial scale carnage that left an aftertaste of disgust. People sucked vid to see extras fighting and dying, but Somme’s carnage, unleavened by sci-fi demons, made their vile appetite too blatant.
So. He’d ventured into an ugly blind alley with his first. Now, behold his second: Quake. Subterranean demons flooding up from the chasm. For all the “crustal movement” that would shake this set, the story was static, flat: cataclysm, demons, turmoil—so standard, after all.
Here came Val in his raft rising toward him. He thought what Val himself had at his mirror: how handsome the man still was. Almost feral his gray eyes, their utter focus. And Mark realized his value to Margolian: he was Val’s brightest fan, the one who most completely grasped his genius—the more keenly because he craved but could not hope to match it.
Val docked at his gunnel. “Permission to come aboard, Mark?” He smiled.
Mark put in his handclasp all the warmth he could manage. “Mi raft es su raft, Val.” He smiled.
It was but simple truth that his raft was Val’s. His mega-success had brought Panoply’s Board to heel, and he’d dictated new terms to them, redefining his creative control of every vid that bore the studio’s imprimatur. If he chose he could let Mark shoot every frame of Quake, then put his own name on it, just like that.
Val would not dream of doing this, of course. Mark was himself doing everything needful to wither his career on the vine. Once Quake was released, and he’d added a second minor success to his record, he’d be a second-stringer forever after.
Val took a recliner, and Mark poured them some mocha java. They scanned the swarming set below them. Val gracefully praised it, appreciating touches here and there. Two pros together, talking shop. Mark waited for some show of power from his master, some suggestion to change this or that, but then decided that this visit had a subtler aim—that Val was simply here to make Mark feel his polite indifference to a project so beneath his greater vision.
He wondered how Val would take the bit of news he had for him. He began w
eaving his way toward that unwelcome revelation.
“You know, Val,” he said, with a hand-sweep below them, “I’m overjoyed, of course, to have all this for my palette. But now it seems the whole wide world is your set.”
“Tut, tut, Mark. Just a little piece of the world, no more.”
Mark pretended to fish for some clue to where Val would be filming his new vid, the first Live Action to be shot outside a studio. “I just have to say I’m in awe, Val. Wherever it is you’re shooting, the logistics must be challenging.… I just can’t imagine the craft, the command of detail that it must call for.”
Val, for his part, pretended not to bite. “You’re too kind, Mark, too kind. We are a roadshow I guess, sure enough.”
The pending indictment for Murder of an Incorporated Rural Township up in the scenic Trinity Mountains, a township with a high population of ex-extras, was the unacknowledged elephant sitting in the raft with them. Mark dared to push a little harder. “Involuntary extras … if I’m guessing right? By god, the leverage that will have on audience response! The fierce partisanship it will awaken in them! The viewers will be rapt.”
“Yes. Their sympathy will grip them. They’ll feel the great machinery of government that cups them all in its mighty hand.” He held Mark’s eyes, his smile unfeigned. “Even your own Live War—though it had that beauty of the extras’ consensus, the grandeur of their bonding in two armies, couldn’t present that unity, that self-sacrifice that will emerge from an actual community under assault.”
Mark’s nod warmly conceded his greater scope, and somehow in that moment he saw that Val intuited—knew—that Mark had some kind of bad news for him.
Quick as thought, Mark’s eyes acknowledged the hunch. “Val,” he said somberly, “we’ve got a sector boat missing from the hangar. A sector boat, and all four of its rafts.”
Val gazed at him calmly. “I see. Any defectors?”
“The boat’s two pilots, and two payraft pilots, didn’t show up for flight-drills today. Here are their names.”
Val read, nodding thoughtfully, and looked out over Mark’s set—but was actually seeing, Mark knew, complications arising on his own “set” up there in the mountains, and already crunching changes this might mean to his shoot. Mark suddenly remembered how much he loved this man, his invincible artistry. The great Margolian, the Fire-Bringer, the Prometheus of Live Action.
Five anti-gravs stolen, one of them with firepower … It had clinched Mark’s conviction that Sunrise was Val’s target, because only Sandy Devlin—a Sunriser now—could have pulled off such a theft. Devlin. Val’s personal demon, his nemesis on the shoot of Hunger. She would make good use of her little squadron.
Now Val faced assault on his fleet of cam-rafts. What would he do? Shoot that as well, of course. Record all their counterassaults on his cams. Wasn’t that what Val was conceiving right now? Shooting the trapped town’s assault on his fleet? A kind of meta-vid!
Not much of a fight that would be, their five boats so hugely outnumbered. No. More likely, the Sunrisers would use them against whatever APPs Val struck them with.
But an exciting notion had begun to tingle through Mark’s body.…
Val said, “Excuse me a moment,” and thumbed his com. “Hello, Harv? I want you to extract from your employee base all the relatives and close friends of the following personnel: pay-boat pilots Mazy Dubois and Ming Slater, and sector-boat pilots Lance and Trek Desmond. Any and all such relatives and friends on our payroll are to be given one year’s severance and escorted off the set today. No … make it three years’ severance.” And he returned to his thoughtful gazing over the set.
They both sat silent. Mark was stunned. Val had erred. Just when Mark had thought his mentor above this challenge to his opus, incorporating it, the great Margolian had faltered, and let his anger mar his judgment. Val had sensed it himself—his second-thought revision of the severance terms betrayed the fact.
For by this angry sanction Val had, in one stroke, created an unknown number of new enemies to Panoply. Whatever these people’s collusion with the defectors might have been, they’d surely henceforth join his enemies.
Mark’s exciting little notion began to grow. He began to think about how he might put a few more rafts into the defectors’ hands.
Because more than this—oh what a thrill was starting to steal along the tendrils of his nerves!—more than increasing the Sunrisers’ armament, he began to think about launching a groundbreaking shoot of his own.
When Val left, he would com a friend of his, Razz Abdul, a second-string director like himself, over at Argosy Studios.
VIII
DEEP SHIT
Three days after “the Shootout at the Rasmussen Corral”—it was Japh started to call it that, to keep our spirits up—Sunrise’s appeal of the murder charge against it was denied by the state. What need for a meeting? All of us staying for the fight were already busy fortifying our homesteads. Smalls commed everyone the details of the ruling.
We were all individually guilty of homicide, but not just common everyday run-of-the-mill garden-variety homicide. Noooo. This was special circumstances stuff, the slaughter of “Law Enforcement Officers in the Performance of their Duty.”
However, though now we were all officially felons, this didn’t mean that some of us couldn’t keep possession of our land here. Oh no! The state wasn’t going to be inhuman about this. It recognized good plot as well as the studio did, and was going to give us “choices” to keep things interesting. After all, not everyone here had pulled the trigger on those tragically misunderstood arresting officers. In fact, we had two options that would let some of us keep living.
Option A: seventy percent of us could voluntarily enter into terms of life imprisonment. Option B: thirty-five percent of us could surrender ourselves for capital punishment.
But this didn’t exhaust the state’s generosity. There was actually a Third Alternative: no one suffered either penalty, if every one of us vacated Sunrise’s acreage, immediately and forever, and all its fifty thousand acres reverted to state ownership.
The state gave us four days to choose A, B, or C. If we didn’t … well, I loved this part so much, I just have to quote it directly: “Failing acceptance by Sunrise, Inc. of one of the three sentencing options, a correctional force, contracted by the State of California, will inflict capital punishment on the residents of Sunrise Inc., until the requisite percentage thereof have been dispatched.”
People howled, they raged and wept, but in the end, most of them got busy. For the next two days the streets swarmed with preparations. Panel trucks and pickups were pulling out in a steady stream for weapon and provision runs down in the valley, some of them bound as far as Bakersfield and L.A. A lot of these vehicles were also carrying the very young or the very old or the very afraid away to safe havens.
Now, with two days down and two to go, Jool was still up at Momma and Auntie’s building barricades for their windows and doors, and Gillian was helping her. We were all going to be joining the main fight in town, and were battening down all our homesteads, but no one knew what we were facing. I was with Chops and Japh and we were headed to the Majestic for a gathering of the “effectives”—meaning everyone of fighting age and/or inclination.
As we passed Cap’s Hardware we saw our gold-toothed friend out front taping a big hand-lettered sheet to his display window: TAKE WHAT YOU NEED.
“Hold up!” he called, and came down to join us, grinning. “Just like old times, ’ey, Homes?”
“Watchoo mean Homes?” Japh said. “You Zoo-meat, we ’Risers!”
“We all Sunrisers now, fool,” he laughed.
Cap housed down here in his shop—the man loved being a storekeeper, and loved the town. Here he was living the dream that all Zoo-folk cherished as they scammed and struggled down in their mean streets. It was a full-on, serious hardware store, with a deeper selection of goods than the former owner’s, all agreed.
But Cap’s pe
rsonality was also in evidence. He’d installed a modified dentist’s chair in one nook where he did tats for his clientele or they could do them on each other. In his display window he’d stationed three female manikins—of the busty hoochie-koochie type—all booted and belted and hard-hatted and jump-suited and hung with so many implements and other butch gear it was a wonder they stayed vertical. There were women in town who didn’t know whether to be amused or irked at some sly feminist satire.
“So how are the numbers shaking out?” I asked him.
“Word out from Smalls is it looks like eighty percent stayin’ right here for the fight.”
Man, that moved us all. It seemed we might field four or five hundred soldiers to protect those less able to fight, but who just wouldn’t leave their homes. “Hallelujah,” I said.
“Hey,” said Cap, “the Studio wouldn’t have settled for less meat than that in its grinder.”
“So we know it’s a studio?”
“Come see Smalls’ show, an’ you tell me.”
The Majestic was full again, and Sandy and Smalls were on the stage when we arrived. Up on the big tattered screen a link from the holo wall was projected—same wall of features in every ’Rise in the state, the morning edition. Smalls had it frozen on its opening frame, some pretty-faced Suit. With all our denim and trail boots and back-holstered shotguns, we looked like ghosts from a bygone era—mountain men watching a vid of the Future.
“First,” the sheriff told us, “this is some talkin head from one of the networks, one that’s owned—no surprise—by Panoply, which a lot of you’ve had some dealins with. The man has some beautiful teeth, you gotta give him that.”
Sandy spoke up. “People. Before we run it, I just want to get you to notice the scripting here. He exaggerates the number of extras up here, people from the Zoo that beat the odds, faced death, and won their freedom. He’s pitching a big sympathy factor. Meanwhile he questions the state, calls the cops at fault—the whole town is innocent. We’re the Good Guys, not just some random population like in all other vids. This whole clip is aimed at building box office.”
