Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash

by Yahtzee Croshaw

  Heller, who had been leaning against a wall trying to get his breathing under control, turned the color of a slightly used shroud. “Yes . . . sir,” he quavered, taking shaking steps toward the maintenance door we’d entered by.

  “Okay,” said Daniel brightly. “Jacques’s here. Cool. I’m gonna see if the hall is ready for the first signing sesh.” He glanced nervously at the other door, the much grander one that led out to the convention area proper. “Jacques, why don’t you . . . hang out with the other guest and stuff, Jacques? Cool. Jacques.” Then he was gone.

  It didn’t take long to figure out who the other guest was. There was only one other person who wasn’t among the wounded or a member of convention staff slapping multicolored Band-Aids on anyone who was still oozing something. She was a middle-aged woman in a dark sweater, jeans, and sporty ponytail, sitting with arms folded and legs crossed to avoid having to touch the biker lying full length on the couch next to her, who was suffering from having had one of his facial safety pins shoved halfway up his nose.

  “So you’re Jacques McKeown, are you?” asked the woman, as I made to sit on one of the more vacant couches. She had an educated voice that could have cut plexiglass.

  “Maintain cover at all times,” said Warden, unheard to all but me.

  “I know!” I hissed.

  “And don’t acknowledge me!”

  “I—” I cut myself off in time. I smiled tightly at the woman, whose suspicious expression hadn’t changed in the slightest, then gingerly completed the task of sitting down. “I mean, yes. I’m Jacques McKeown.”

  “Geranium Pleasant,” she said.

  The bikers and staff had started tactfully giving the two of us a wide berth, and I found myself alone with the woman in the peaceful eye of the human storm. I looked around. “Where?”

  She frowned. “What? I’m Geranium Pleasant.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I thought you were complaining about the decor, or something.”

  She looked confused for a moment, then shook herself, making the foot on her crossed leg jiggle limply. “Perhaps you’ve heard my name before?” she asked with a just barely detectable ounce of sarcasm.

  I stared at her with bit lip, because now that she mentioned it, I had heard that name before. I couldn’t quite put my finger on where, although for some reason it felt like a name that should have been written down in very severe serifed letters.

  “It . . . rings a bell,” I admitted.

  She gave me a broad, squinty-eyed smile that had all the sincerity of a heart-shaped chocolate box with a turd inside it. “I rather thought it would. I wrote a little book called Flowers Dying in Electric Lights, have you heard of it?”

  “Y-yeah,” I said, to my own surprise. It had been a novel about a ­struggling star pilot in the immediate aftermath of Quantunneling taking off. I’d read it along with a lot of other star pilots at the time it had come out, because we were all feeling starved of sympathy. I hadn’t liked it; nothing much ­happened, not even a moderately interesting laser battle, and the main ­character tended to stare out of the window and think for tens of pages at a time, with about an average of twelve trips to the dictionary per page. None of which felt like anything worth mentioning.

  “It was first published about eight years ago,” said Geranium Pleasant. “Critically acclaimed. Ritsuko Review called it the progenitor of the star pilot fiction genre.”

  “Good . . .”

  “In one short paragraph,” she continued, straightening her back even further. “As part of a twelve-page article about you. Remind me when your first book was published?”

  I hadn’t the first plying idea. “Erm . . .”

  “Seven and a half years ago.” Her stare bore into me like an asteroid-­mining laser. “What a very strange coincidence that it came out so shortly after my book. Flowers was only a modest success, did you hear that?”

  All I knew was that it can’t have made much money among star pilots, because we’d all been lending around the same four or five copies. I’d borrowed mine from Jabril the Mad, and had ended up passing it on to Kid Donny as partial payment for him sweeping my airlock.

  “No,” I summarized.

  “Do you do much research when you set out to write a book, Mr. McKeown?” Her tone had shifted from flat and accusatory to somewhat lilting and interested.

  “Well, I, you know, a bit.” I rocked my buttocks left and right on the seat as embarrassment started prickling me. “I talk to star pilots—”

  “I suspect you do,” interjected Geranium, dropping right back down to flat and accusatory. “I suspect there was one specific book you researched for your first novel. Or maybe you’d like to tell me that it’s complete coincidence how, not three and a half months after I publish a book about a star pilot named Jack, you publish your book about a star pilot named Jacques?”

  It was impossible to be intimidated, as she was quite small and tightening her muscles so hard with tension that she was only making herself smaller. “That does sound like a complete coincidence,” I said in a neutral tone.

  She made several incredulous gasping noises as she started rummaging around in her purse. “Ach! Gach!” She produced a copy of Jacques McKeown’s very first book, Space Hero Jacques McKeown, Hero of Space. Her incredibly weathered copy was so stuffed with Post-it notes that it seemed to have double the correct number of pages. “So this was all a coincidence as well, was it?” She turned to the first Post-it note. “Item one. Jacques McKeown visits a planet called Mulkus 3. At the start of Flowers, Jack Quirinus is living on Manson Street. This not only starts with an M but also has the same number of letters. Item two . . .”

  I pointed awkwardly at the indicated passage. “I think that one definitely is a coincidence.”

  “Are you serious?!” she snapped, thrusting her jaw toward me like a ­vicious ferret. Then she examined her Post-its again. “Well. Maybe that one is. But what about your second book?” She produced a second volume, almost as stuffed with yellow notes as the first one.

  “What was that one again?”

  I had been leaning over to get a look at the cover, but when she saw me doing so, she tilted it out of my view, raising her eyebrows at me. “You don’t know the name of your own second book?”

  “Sure I do,” I said hastily, realizing an instant later that there was a precisely 100 percent chance of her asking the question she then asked.

  “So what’s it called?” She eyeballed the cover I couldn’t see.

  I took a long, slow drink from a nearby water bottle as I went over the possibilities in my head. I was pretty sure they hadn’t started the Jacques McKeown and the —— naming scheme until the third book. The second one had had something really plying uncreative, I remembered, but that didn’t narrow it down. It might have been Jacques McKeown Returns. Or Reloaded or Regurgitates or some other plying Re word.

  The bottle was empty now and my bladder had started to register complaints, so I was going to have to say something. “It’s the . . . the one,” I tried. “The one with the thing. The star pilot thing.” I made the mistake of meeting her gaze. Her face was cold and disapproving, but there was a slight cock to her hips giving away how much she was enjoying watching me squirm.

  “You don’t know,” she said flatly.

  I folded my arms. “I’ve written loads of books. So, you know, I’ve probably forgotten some little details.”

  Her mouth opened and closed a few times in silence, before she slowly leaned back in her chair, shocked. “Well, well,” she chanted, when she finally found her words again. “I’ve figured it out. You’re a fraud.”

  My mind raced. My blaster was still hanging off my belt, and while I was well behind on quick-draw practice, I was confident I could explode her head before she got another word out. A slightly less hysterical inner voice then took over and p
ointed out that a stun shot would probably suffice. Assuming I got the shot off while nobody in the room was looking, I’d then have to explain to them that she had suddenly contracted the kind of airborne narcolepsy that makes plasma burns appear on your skin and clothing . . .

  “I know exactly what kind of writer you are now,” said Geranium Pleasant after I had gaped in silence for a good few seconds. “The kind who hammers books out with so little thought or care that he can’t even remember writing them.”

  “Yes!” I said, nodding. “I mean, how dare you.”

  “So you just hack them out? Like cattle passing through a mincing ­machine? How many drafts do you write?” She thumped her own chest. “My books are my children. I would sooner bring my child to a fast-food restaurant than submit a work before the fifteenth draft.”

  “Well, everyone’s got what works for them,” I mumbled, failing to penetrate her rant.

  “There are young persons out there who obsess over your books.” She threw an arm toward the main doors, from which the sounds of the war zone outside were still thundering. “They’ve taken you into their hearts and you clearly don’t even care. Well.” She stood dramatically. “I’m going to expose you, Jacques McKeown. We’re going to find out exactly how little you know about your own business.”

  She marched away, her ponytail bobbing with suppressed rage as she walked, and took up position beside the door with her back to the room and arms folded.

  After a few moments, I heard Malcolm Sturb coughing in my ear. “So are you sure you don’t need us to—”

  “Yes,” I hissed.

  Chapter 9

  The main thing I had long wondered about Jacques McKeown—besides when, precisely, he was planning to jump out from a side street and pin my doints to the ground with a nail gun—was why he had never come forward and identified himself, even to his own publisher. True, a lot of star pilots had marked him for death, but that was after they figured out he was ripping off our stories. In fact, right after he got really famous, some star pilots were broadly in favor of him.

  I thought it was particularly strange that he had never even tried to claim any fame or riches. But after one hour of living the lifestyle in store for him, I was gaining a much deeper understanding of the thieving divbasket. If I had to deal with a near riot every time I left the house, and the company of people like Geranium Pleasant, I’d probably end up wanting to live under a rock, too.

  A member of the convention staff, with one hand clutching a clipboard and the other holding a piece of raw steak to his eye, arrived at the green room after a few minutes to inform us that the meet-and-greet tables in the lobby were ready for the first session. Geranium Pleasant went ahead, on the reasonable assumption that she didn’t have quite so many psychotic fans to worry about, while I had to wait for a suitable protective detail to assemble.

  Shortly, I was surrounded by a ring of four of Henderson’s trusted black-suited bodyguards, all wearing the tight lips and steely faraway looks of loyal military men about to rise from the trenches and go out into no man’s land. Around them, a platoon of colorful bikers formed a larger circle, whose job was apparently to clear the path for us through the strategic use of massive blunt trauma.

  Once the two circles were fully formed, the staff member with the clipboard subtly crossed himself, then flung the doors wide open. I was moved out into the adjoining hall in the center of my personal wheel of destruction.

  Surrounded by heavyset bodies in black silk, I was spared the sight of the crowd (and, as was presumably the point, they were spared the sight of me); but I was aware of them, in the way one is aware of the crowd of murderous cyberserkers trying to peel the armor off your protective bunker. Even behind two layers of human protection, I could feel the mob on all sides, jostling for room to move. It was like being a cat trapped in the center of an overloaded tumble dryer.

  The floor abruptly changed into a descending staircase, and I would have fallen catastrophically if it weren’t for the tightly packed inner circle giving me no choice but to remain upright. Gradually I became aware that we were descending into the grand lobby of the building; it had been hard to recognize at first with every last square foot of space filled with human traffic. It was like a churning ocean unfolding below me, clad in hundreds of flight jackets and jumpsuits that had none of the frays or coolant stains to suggest they had ever been within a light minute of an actual starship’s engine.

  Looking down at the lobby from the staircase, I could see our destination: a couple of covered tables that had been set up alongside the main reception desk. One was surrounded by signs and cutouts of imagery from Jacques McKeown books, and marked the beginning of the disorderly queue that accounted for most of the people in the room, and the second had a name written on a single piece of folded printer paper. Geranium Pleasant was already sitting behind that one, hands clasped tightly in front of her like a little knobbly grenade.

  The first thirty feet of the queue for Jacques McKeown’s table was kept in line by a rather overoptimistic velvet rope, and once it ran out, the queue snaked wildly around the entire lobby, weaving around every piece of furniture and exhibit like a tapeworm in a particularly unhealthy small intestine. I was hurried past it toward my seat, through an atmosphere of hushed anticipation that thickened more and more as the conventiongoers noticed my presence.

  From the table, with my back to the wall, I had an enviable view of the queue as it stretched away into infinity. It was like being a condemned man whose execution was going to take place in a room with mirrors on all the walls. I clasped my hands in front of me on the wobbly table that was to be my gibbet.

  “Okay, cool,” said Daniel, appearing in front of us. He was still ­physically intact, although I noticed his own bodyguards a few feet away were all nursing black eyes. “This is just gonna be a, like, signing and meeting and greeting thing. Obviously it’s, you know, a big turnout, so maybe we’ll keep it to one signing and one question per visitor . . .”

  A groan went up that did a few circuits of the room like a stadium wave. Several people started disappointedly picking through the vast sacks full of books they had brought.

  “Ready?” said Daniel.

  “I am,” said Geranium Pleasant, straightening her back and briefly stabbing me with a look. I gave Daniel the nod.

  I didn’t know when they’d let people start queuing for this, but the first fifty or so individuals had a haggard look about them, and one person was hurriedly packing away what looked like a small collapsible tent.

  The first two were deceptively easy; they were clearly feeling intimidated by me, the omnipresent security, and the flashing cameras of the journalists, so they hurried up, faces red, and got their books signed so quickly that I didn’t have time to commit their appearances to memory. I invented a signature for Jacques McKeown on the spur of the moment, going for what I hoped was a convincing amount of self-important twirly bits, but they didn’t even look at it before they tottered away.

  The third one was where the difficulties began. He was a robust young man who had set his sights on growing a beard, but the result was to a full, luxurious beard what a dirty frying pan is to a complete breakfast. He handed me a copy of Jacques McKeown and the Slatterns from Saturn to sign.

  “So, I just want to ask, ha ha,” he said, in a distinctly wet voice, “in Jacques McKeown and the Terror of Terrorgorn, it says that your first ship was a Nairo Cruiser, but then in Jacques McKeown and the Bogon Encounter, you have to steal a Nairo Cruiser and it says you aren’t used to how it handles, and my friend says that you were saying you’d only been a crew member on the Nairo Cruiser and hadn’t actually flown it, but he’s an idiot, ha ha, and I think you were just saying that Nairo Cruisers take a really long time to get used to, so was it that?”

  “Yes, I’d like to know that myself,” said Geranium Pleasant, who hadn’t signed anything yet and had littl
e else to do but watch me undergo my trials.

  Time seemed to slow and the bustle faded away as I fixed my gaze on the sweating grin of this fat doint and considered my next move. The temptation was to just say yes, but I had lost track of whatever the hell he had been banging on about halfway through his question, and now the cameras were closing in and I didn’t know if saying yes was going to contradict three other books and refute ninety-seven fan theories.

  I felt a metaphorical finger hovering over the switch in my head, but putting myself in automatic banter mode could have unpredictable results if I didn’t have a strategy worked out. Still, the silence was drawing on and my instincts were usually reliable. I closed my eyes, hit the switch, and Jacques McKeown spoke.

  “Do you honestly care?” I heard myself say the instant my eyes flicked open.

  He seemed thrown by the question. He barked out an unconvincing laugh, a fresh bead of sweat navigating the slalom of his chin tufts. “Uh. No. Ha ha. I was just wondering . . .”

  “You care enough to queue for three days and waste your one question with Jacques McKeown on it,” I said, lazily signing the book with some extra-big curves. “There are people starving to death on old Earth because they voted for the wrong party, and this is what’s most bothering you?”

  “Ha ha, I know that it’s stupid, but . . .”

  “If you really knew it was stupid, you wouldn’t have asked, would you.” I held out the book for him to take, maintaining withering eye contact. “Take your book, kid, and multiply.”

  He stumbled off, mouth set into the kind of philosophical smile one adopts when trying not to cry, and just like that, my strategy was clear. My instincts had come through.

  All I had to do was get through one day, and I could do it by blowing everyone off as obnoxiously as possible. After all, I was the big celebrity guest; if I was tired and didn’t feel like answering their stupid questions, everyone was just going to have to deal. It was exactly the kind of attitude I’d expect from the kind of bracket who’d try to get rich stealing other people’s stories.