Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  “This is our storage warehouse, John. We make all our movies here.”

  “But I thought you said we were going to correct all the lies of the first movie,” John Rand said to their director. “I thought you said Escape From Teheran was a dumb TV docudrama, only worth remembering because of De Niro’s performance as Colonel Jackson. We’re going to get the true story on film at last, you said.”

  Ivan sighed. “That’s right, John. Admirable memory. But what you must understand is that when making a film, true doesn’t mean an absolute fidelity to the real.”

  “I’ll bet that’s just what the director of the docudrama said.”

  Ivan hissed, which he did often while directing their films, to show that he was letting off steam, and avoiding an explosion. “Don’t be obstructionist, John. We’re not doing anything like that hackwork, and you know it. Lunar gravity alone makes it impossible for us to make a completely realist film. We are working in a world of dream, in a surrealist intensification of what really happened. Besides, we’re doing these movies for our own entertainment up here! Remake bad historical films! Have a good time!”

  “Sure, Ivan. Sure. Except the ones you’ve directed have been getting some great reviews downside. They’re saying you’re the new Eisenstein and these little remakes are the best thing to hit the screen since Kane. So now the pressure is on and it’s not just a game anymore, right?”

  “Wrong!” Ivan karate-chopped the air. “I refuse to believe that. When we stop having fun doing this”—nearly shouting—“I quit!”

  “Sure, Sergei.”

  “Don’t call me that!”

  “Okay, Orson.”

  “JOHN!”

  “But that’s my name. If I call you that we’ll all get confused.”

  Melina Gourtsianis, their female lead, came to Ivan’s rescue. “Come on, John, you’ll give him a heart attack, and besides it’s late. Let’s get on with it.”

  Ivan calmed down, ran his hands through his hair. He loved doing his maddened director routine, and John loved maddening him. As they disagreed about nearly everything, they made a perfect team. “Fine,” Ivan said. “Okay. We’ve got the set ready, and it may not be an exact replica of the compound—” fierce glare at John—“but it’s good enough.

  “Now, let’s go through it one more time. It’s night in Teheran. This whole quarter of the city has been gassed with a paralyzing nerve gas, but there’s no way of telling when the Revolutionary Guards might come barreling in from somewhere else with gas masks or whatever, and you can’t be sure some of them haven’t been protected from the gas in sealed rooms. Any moment they might jump out firing. Your helicopters are hovering just overhead, so it’s tremendously noisy. There’s a blackout in the compound, but searchlights from other parts of the city are beginning to pin the choppers. They’ve been breaking like cheap toys all the way in, so now there are only five left, and you have no assurances that they will continue to work, especially since twice that number have already broken. You’re all wearing gas masks and moving through the rooms of the compound, trying to find and move all fifty-three of the hostages—it’s dark and most of the hostages are knocked out like the guards, but some of the rooms were well-sealed, and naturally these hostages are shouting for help. For a while—and this is the effect I want to emphasize more than any other—for a while, things inside are absolutely chaotic. No one can find Colonel Jackson, no one knows how many of the hostages are recovered and how many are still in the embassy, it’s dark, it’s noisy, there are shots in the distance. I want an effect like the scene at the end of The Lady From Shanghai, when they’re in the carnival’s house of mirrors shooting at each other. Multiplied by ten. Total chaos.”

  “Now hold on just a second here,” John said, exaggerating his Texas accent, which came and went according to his convenience. “I like the chaos bit, and the allusion to Welles, but let’s get back to this issue of the facts. Colonel Jackson was the hero of this whole thing! He was the one that decided to go on with all them helicopters busting out in the desert, and he was the one that found Annette Bellows in the embassy to lead them around, and all in all he was on top of every minute of it. That’s why they gave him all them medals!”

  Ivan glared. “What part are you playing, John?”

  “Why, Colonel Jackson.” John drew himself up. “Natch.”

  “However.” Ivan tapped the side of his head, to indicate thought. “You don’t just want to do a bad imitation of the De Niro performance, do you? You want to do a new interpretation, don’t you? Besides, it seems to me a foolish idea to try an imitation of De Niro.”

  “I like the idea, myself,” John said. “Show him how.”

  Ivan waved him away. “You got all you know about this affair from that stupid TV movie, just like everyone else. I, however, have been reading the accounts of the hostages and the Marines on those helicopters, and the truth is that Colonel Jackson’s best moment was out there in the desert, when he decided to go on with the mission even though only five helicopters were still functioning. That was his peak of glory, his moment of heroism. And you did a perfectly adequate job of conveying that when we filmed the scene. We could see every little gear in there, grinding away.” He tapped his skull.

  “De Niro would have been proud,” Melina said.

  John pursed his lips and nodded. “We need great men like that. Without them history would be dead. It’d be nothing but a bunch of broken-down helicopters out in a desert somewhere.”

  “A trenchant image of history,” Ivan said. “Too bad Shelley got to it first. Meanwhile, the truth is that after making the decision to go on with the raid, Colonel Jackson appeared, in the words of his subordinates, somewhat stunned. When they landed on the embassy roof he led the first unit in, and when they got lost inside, the whole force was effectively without leadership for most of the crucial first half-hour. All the accounts of this period describe it as the utmost chaos, saved only when Sergeant Payton—not Colonel Jackson; the TV movie lied about that—when Payton found Ms. Bellows, and she led them to all the hostage rooms they hadn’t found.”

  “All right, all right.” John frowned. “So I’m supposed to be kind of spaced out in this scene.”

  “Don’t go for too deep an analysis, John, you might strain something. But essentially you have it. Having committed the force to the raid, even though you’re vastly undermanned because of the damned helicopters breaking down, you’re a bit frozen by the risk of it. Got that?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t believe it. Jackson was a hero.”

  “Fine, a hero, lots of medals. Roomfuls of medals. If he pinned them on he’d look like the bride after the dollar dance. He’d collapse under their weight. But now let’s try showing what really happened.”

  “All right.” John drew himself up. “I’m ready.”

  The shooting of the scene was the part they all enjoyed the most; this was the heart of the activity, the reason they kept making movies to occupy their free hours at Luna Three. Ivan and John and Melina and Pierre-Paul, the theoreticians who traded directing chores from project to project, always blocked the scenes very loosely, allowing a lot of room for improvisation. Thus scenes like this one, which were supposed to be chaotic, were played out with a manic gusto. They were good at chaos.

  And so for nearly a half-hour they rushed about the interior of their Teheran embassy compound—the base storage warehouse, with its immense rows of boxes arranged behind white panels of plywood to resemble the compound’s buildings and their interiors. Their shouts were nearly drowned by the clatter of recorded helicopters, while intermittent lights flashed in the darkness. Cut-outs representing the helicopters were pasted to the clear dome overhead, silhouetted against the unearthly brilliance of the stars—these last had become a trademark of Luna Three Productions, as their frequent night scenes always had these unbelievably bright stars overhead, part of the films’ dreamlike effect.

  The actors playing Marines bounded about the compound in
their gas masks, looking like aliens descended to ravage a planet; the actors playing hostages and Revolutionary Guards lay scattered on the floor, except for a few in protected rooms, who fought or cried for help. John and Pierre-Paul and the rest hunted the compound for Melina, playing Annette Bellows. For a while it looked as if John would get to her first, thus repeating the falsehood of the De Niro film. But eventually Pierre-Paul,. playing Sergeant Payton, located her room, and he and his small unit rushed about after the clear-headed Bellows, who, as she wrote later, had spent most of her months in captivity planning what she should do if this moment ever came. They located the remaining comatose hostages and lugged them quickly to the plywood helicopter on the compound roof. The sound of shots punctuated the helicopters’ roar. They leaped through the helicopter’s door, shafts of white light stabbed the air like Islamic swords.

  That was it; the flight away would be filmed in their little helicopter interior. Ivan turned off the helicopter noise, shouted “Cut!” into a megaphone. Then he shut down all the strategically placed mini-cams, which had been recording every minute of it.

  “What bothers me about your movies, Ivan,” John said, “is that you always take away the hero. Always!”

  They were standing in the shallow end of the base pool, cooling off while they watched the day’s rushes on a screen filling one wall of the natatorium. Many of the screens showed much the same result: darkness, flickering light, alien shapes moving in the elongated dancelike way that audiences on Earth found so surreal, so mesmerizing. There was little indication of the pulsing rhythms and wrenching suspense that Ivan’s editing would create from this material. But the actors were happy, seeing arresting images of desperation, of risk, of heroism in the face of a numbingly loud confusion.

  Ivan was not as pleased. “Shit!” he said. “We’re going to have to do it again.”

  “Looks okay to me,” John remarked. “Son of Film Noir Returns From the Grave. But really, Ivan, you’ve got to do something about this prejudice against heroes. I saw Escape From Teheran when I was a kid, and it was an inspiration to me. It was one of the big reasons I got into engineering.”

  Pierre-Paul objected. “John, just how did seeing a commando film get you interested in engineering?”

  “Well,” John replied, frowning, “I thought I’d design a better helicopter, I guess.” He ignored his friends’ laughter. “I was pretty shocked at how unreliable they were. But the way old De Niro continued on to Teheran! The way he extricated all the hostages and got them back safely, even with the choppers dropping like flies. It was great! We need heroes, and history tells the story of the few people who had what it takes to be one. But you’re always downplaying them.”

  “The Great Man Theory of history,” Pierre-Paul said scornfully.

  “Sure!” John admitted. “Great Woman too, of course,” nodding quickly at the frowning Melina. “It’s the great leaders who make the difference. They’re special people, and there aren’t many of them. But if you believe Ivan’s films, there aren’t any at all.”

  With a snort of disgust, Ivan took his attention from the rushes. “Hell, we are going to have to do that scene again. As for my theory of history, John, you both have it and you don’t. As far as I understand you.” He cocked his head and looked at his friend attentively. On the set they both played their parts to the teeth: Ivan the tormented, temperamental director, gnashing his teeth and ordering people about; John the stubborn, temperamental star, questioning everything and insisting on his preeminence. Mostly this was role-playing, part of the game, part of what made their hobby entertaining to them. Off the set the roles largely disappeared, except to make a point, or have some fun. Ivan was the base’s head of computer operations, while John was an engineer involved in the Mars voyage; they were good friends, and their arguments had done much to shape Ivan’s ideas for his revisionist historical films, which were certainly the ones from their little troupe making the biggest splash downside—though John claimed this was because of the suspenseful plots and the weird low-gee imagery, not because of what they were saying about history. “Do I understand you?” Ivan asked curiously.

  “Well,” John said, “take the one you did last time, about the woman who saved John Lennon’s life. Now that was a perfect example of heroic action, as the 1982 docudrama made clear. There she was, standing right next to a man who had pulled out a damn big gun, and quicker than he could pull the trigger she put a foot in his crotch and a fist in his ear. But in your remake, all we concentrated on was how she had just started the karate class that taught her the moves, and how her husband encouraged her to take the class, and how that cabbie stopped for her even though she was going the other direction, and how that other cabbie told her that Lennon had just walked into his apartment lobby, and all that. You made it seem like it was just a coincidence!”

  Ivan took a mouthful of pool water and spurted it at the spangled dome, looking like a fountain statue. “It took a lot of coincidences to get Margaret Arvis into the Dakota lobby at the right time,” he told John. “But some of them weren’t coincidences—they were little acts of generosity or kindness or consideration, that put her where she could do what she did. I didn’t take the heroism away. I just spread it around to all the places it belonged.”

  John grimaced, drew himself up into his star persona. “I suppose this is some damn Commie notion of mass social movements, sweeping history along in a consensus direction.”

  “No, no,” Ivan said. “I always concentrate on individuals. What I’m saying is that all our individual actions add up to history, to the big visible acts of our so-called ‘leaders.’ You know what I mean; you hear people saying all the time that things are better now because John Lennon was such a moral force, traveling everywhere, Nobel Peace Prize, secular pope, the conscience of the world or whatnot.”

  “Well, he was the conscience of the world!”

  “Sure, sure, he wrote great songs. And he got a lot of antagonists to talk. But without Margaret Arvis he would have been killed at age forty. And without Margaret Arvis’s husband, and her karate instructor, and a couple cabbies in New York, and so on, she wouldn’t have been there to save his life. So we all become part of it, see? The people who say it was all because of Lennon, or Carter, or Gorbachev—they’re putting on a few people what we all did.”

  John shook his head, scattering water everywhere. “Very sophisticated, I’m sure! But in fact it was precisely Lennon and Carter and Gorbachev who made huge differences, all by themselves. Carter started the big swing toward human rights. Palestine, the new Latin America, the American Indian nations—none of those would have existed without him.”

  “In fact,” Melina added, glancing mischievously at Pierre-Paul, “if I understand the Margaret Arvis movie correctly, if she hadn’t been going to see Carter thank his New York campaign workers for the 1980 victory, she wouldn’t have been in the neighborhood of the Dakota, and so she wouldn’t have had the chance to save Lennon’s life.”

  John rose up like a whale breaching. “So it’s Carter we have to thank for that, too! As for Gorbachev, well, I don’t have to tell you what all he did. That was a hundred-eighty degree turnaround for you Russkies, and no one can say it would have happened without him.”

  “Well—he was an important leader, I agree.”

  “Sure was! And Carter was just as crucial. Their years were the turning point, when the world started to crawl out from under the shadow of World War Two. And that was their doing. There just aren’t many people who could’ve done it. Most of us don’t have it in us.”

  Ivan shook his head. “Carter wouldn’t have been able to do what he did unless Colonel Ernest Jackson had saved the rescue mission to Teheran, by deciding to go on.”

  “So Jackson is a hero too!”

  “But then Jackson wouldn’t have been a hero if the officer back in the Pentagon hadn’t decided at the last minute to send sixteen helicopters instead of eight.”

  “And,” Melina p
ointed out quickly, “if Annette Bellows hadn’t spent most of a year daydreaming about what she would do in a rescue attempt, so that she knew blindfolded where every other hostage was being kept. They would have left about half the hostages behind without her, and Carter wouldn’t have looked so good.”

  “Plus they needed Sergeant Payton to find Bellows,” Ivan added.

  “Well shit!” John yelled defensively, which was his retort in any tight spot. He changed tack. “I ain’t so sure that Carter’s reelection hinged on those hostages anyway. He was running against a flake, I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was some kind of idiot.”

  “So?” Melina said. “Since when has that made any difference?”

  With a roar John dove at her, making a big splash. She was much faster than he was, however, and she evaded him easily as he chased her around the pool; it looked like a whale chasing a dolphin. He was reduced to splashing at her from a distance, and the debate quickly degenerated into a big splash fight, as it often did.

  “Oh well,” John declared, giving up the attack and floating in the shallow end. “I love watching Melina swim the butterfly. In this gravity it becomes a godlike act. Those muscular arms, that sinuous dolphin motion…”

  Pierre-Paul snorted. “You just like the way the butterfly puts her bottom above water so often.”

  “No way! Women are just more hydrodynamic than men, don’t you think?”

  “Not the way you like them.”

  “Godlike. Gods and goddesses.”

  “You look a bit godlike yourself,” Melina told him. “Bacchus, for instance.”

  “Hey.” John waved her off, jabbed a finger at the screens. “I note that all this mucho sophisticated European theorizing has been sunk. Took a bit of Texas logic, is all.”

  “Only Texas logic could do it,” Pierre-Paul said.

  “Right. You admit my point. In the end it’s the great leaders who have to act, the rare ones, no matter if we ordinary folks help them into power.”