“Yes, I’d say it definitely strikes a different tone from the first E.T.”
“I’m glad you agree.”
“And you’d want me to play Elliott? I mean maybe?”
“Well, you look enough like Henry Thomas that an audience will be willing to suspend its disbelief. At the same time, you’ve got a look all your own, one I haven’t quite seen before in the movies. Not the boy next door so much as the boy next door to him. Am I interesting you at all?”
“My God,” Dylan said. “I’ve never been so interested in anything in my life.”
“Great. So once we put a wrap on 12 Monkeys, we’ll organize a proper audition. Now let me make sure I’ve got your contact info.”
Dylan wrote down his address and phone number in a little black book, and then they proceeded to eat their s’mores. Dylan wanted to impress Gilliam in conversation but lacked the life experience. Fortunately Gilliam was loquacious, and as long as Dylan kept prodding him with earnest questions about the industry, all he really had to do was listen.
Once again, Dylan told nobody about what had happened. Some part of him was convinced it would all come to naught, that it was far too good to be true. His pessimism was reinforced when summer came to a close without his ever hearing another peep from Gilliam. He and Chad quit their jobs and moved into the “New Res” dorms at Temple. They went to class, read Oedipus and Shakespeare, and auditioned for a play called Balm in Gilead. Chad got a part, Dylan didn’t.
And then one morning, while Dylan was doing his math-for-artists homework at the last minute, he got a call from his mother, who had gotten a call from Terry Gilliam. To Dylan’s surprise, she knew who that was. “Call him right away,” she said.
And Dylan did.
And a week later he was in LA for his audition.
And the rest is a matter of record: despite its modest budget, tight production schedule, and hasty release, E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears was a massive blockbuster, a grand slam for the critic and the casual moviegoer alike. In part the film’s success could be credited to its undeniably slick execution, but it didn’t hurt that first contact had taken place just two weeks before the release (complex hominids with single nostrils on Tarantino, 90,000 light years away); ironically, the film seemed to fulfill the public’s yearning for aliens worthy of the name far better than the headlines were doing, and both Independence Day and Star Trek: First Contact would ride on its coattails later that year.
Whether it was for this reason or a more old-fashioned one, E.T. II also happened to be a grand slam for palpitating young women across the land who were lucky enough to find an adult to accompany them. The fan mail came pouring in, as did the scripts. The first one that Dylan accepted, at his agent’s urging, was James Cameron’s new film, a special effects extravaganza to be called Titanic, with principal photography beginning soon.
• • •
On his way home from the American School, Dylan decided to hover through the Grind. He generally did this a couple of times a month. Owing perhaps to the legal status of prostitution on New Taiwan, the Grind had to be the least seedy red-light district in the Milky Way. The prostitutes, what the natives called azalfuds, were lined up along a narrow, kilometer-long esplanade, females on the north side, flexing their biceps and abs; males on the south, tossing their tawny hair and caressing their breasts. Dylan was slightly troubled by how attracted he felt to the males; they were as feminine as any geisha, but he could not look past the bulges in their bikini bottoms. He knew from the biology textbooks at school that the New Taiwanese penis looked more or less like a human one but with a slightly bifurcated head. For a certain subsection of humanity, of course, these reverse secondary characteristics were a dream come true. Transgender women had always commanded a modest corner of the sex trade on Earth, and here they were normative. By contrast, it was (what American exopats referred to as) “he-males” and “she-girls” who catered to alternative native lifestyles, and, as it happened, heteronormative Terran ones.10 These trans azalfuds, everyone knew, peddled their wares on a block toward the end of the esplanade that had come to resemble an R & R camp for Terran exopats reminiscent of the fleshpots of Saigon circa 1972. Though it had been quietly beckoning for the better part of two decades, Dylan had never once been there. He hovered through for the spectacle and the thought experiments, and that was all. Mike the exobiology teacher would tell him sometimes about his sexual adventures over there: how the she-girls were like the hottest Earthling girls you’d ever seen; how the New Taiwanese vagina was totally compatible with the Earthling penis,11 and “tight as shit;” how they’d do anything you could possibly imagine and dirt cheap to boot. Dylan had gotten really close a couple of times to investigating all of that himself. The thought of sleeping with an alien did strike him as irresistibly exotic for a time. Since first looking up from Earth, human stargazers had projected their hopes and fears onto the heavens, either demonizing extraterrestrials or making angels of them. Caught up in the early excitement of the Great Up-and-Out, Dylan had been as guilty of the latter as anyone—so much so that he’d wondered if he wasn’t making a terrible mistake in sealing himself to Erin just before their departure—but after a couple of years of living and working among the host culture, he’d finally understood, intellectually and viscerally, that life on other planets was just life. Aliens weren’t so alien. Hominids everywhere worked and played, exulted and suffered, loved their families and buried their dead. The universe was largely conscious, it turned out, but that meant what it meant and nothing else besides. We all still had to die.
10_____________
The IEF (International Exodus Federation) was very sensitive to the desires of indigenous populations when settling new worlds. Once they’d established an outpost and their linguist AIs had deciphered the native tongue, which generally took about six weeks (Chomsky’s universal grammar is more universal than even he supposed), they briefed indigenous officials on the particulars of human civilization. As a gesture of goodwill, they practiced full disclosure, and given how notoriously bound up with crime the flesh trade was on Earth, the New Taiwanese could hardly be blamed for not wanting to import any sex workers. In fact, early on, all they had wanted were teachers.
11_____________
The status of intermarriage was still a hot issue in the courts. That said, dozens of Terran-exopat males were now cohabiting with New Taiwanese she-girls, and some had even reared some adorable mongrel offspring. The reverse, i.e. exopat females procreating with New Taiwanese he-males, was comparatively rare, though not unheard of.
Moreover, Dylan was married, and if he believed in anything, it was the sanctity of marriage. He would no sooner sleep with an alien—or anyone else—than he’d have Erin do so. He had watched her make out with another girl at a party once, on a dare. They’d gone at it way too long, and it had made Dylan feel deeply confused, both aroused and jealous at once. After the party, he had asked her not to do that ever again please, and as far as he knew she hadn’t.
Dylan, for his part, had cheated on Erin just once. They hadn’t been married yet, and it probably wouldn’t have happened at all were it not for the immense peer pressure, and the sense of dreamlike impunity that comes with partying inside the moon.12
12_____________
To be sure, the surface of Earth’s moon is every bit as barren as the Apollo astronauts reported it in good faith to be. Conspiracy theorists who hold that the moon landing was a hoax staged at Area 51 are simply misguided. And the moon isn’t hollow either, as other theorists have claimed (not to mention novels by the likes of Edgar Rice Burroughs, C.S. Lewis, and H.G. Wells). What is true, however, is that the moon’s pocked appearance is due to its regularly being impacted by meteoroids, asteroids and the like, and that some of these impact craters are quite capacious, a possibility that wasn’t lost on the generation of New England Brahmins who came of age after the Second
World War, when rocket technology had finally reached the point where it might be able to sling them up there from time to time—to winter perhaps, or summer, or at the very least to throw some all-night, very exclusive shindigs and Earthgaze from a Barcalounger.
When Werner Von Braun, the brains behind Hitler’s V-2 rocket, was “sanitized” by the US government after Nuremberg, he was immediately put to work on the elite party set’s new “yacht.” It wasn’t particularly difficult, and they were making regular jaunts to the Sea of Tranquility by 1950. The Apollo project, allegedly culminating in the moon landings of 1969, turns out to have been a case of an artist plagiarizing his own work, though Von Braun was careful to make Apollo bulkier, louder, altogether more majestic and less efficient. For a little while, this first generation of world-hoppers was content to eat the space food, wear the spacesuits, and bounce around on the cold dead surface, but they soon grew restless and commissioned the terraforming of a resort inside one of Luna’s more spectacular caverns. Von Braun looked to it, and by the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the Illuminati had their own psychedelic, pressurized and climate-controlled love grotto inside the moon. Imagine the most luxurious beach you’ve ever seen, with waves like blue gin lapping gently against a snickerdoodle shore. Now put it inside a cave with a glass ceiling and light it with a grove of tiki torches. Then set out some cocktails, rowboats, and individually wrapped contraceptive devices. If you can imagine all of that, congratulate yourself: you think like Hitler’s rocket man.
It wasn’t long, of course, before these lunar getaways became old-hat, so the Illuminati (old, fat, white guys mostly) began cherry-picking entertainers and inviting them up for the weekend to join in the festivities. Naturally these entertainers were sworn to utmost secrecy on penalty of death, but they were happy to oblige, and “the Grotto” quickly became the best-kept secret in Hollywood. Anybody who was anybody had been there.
Gilliam had invited him up for a cast party. You might think Dylan would have been surprised as the limo mounted a steep canyon to a launch pad near the Hollywood sign, but in fact this latest unveiling of the marvelous life that awaited him seemed perfectly in keeping with the series of unveilings that had taken him in the past couple of years from awkward high-school student to star of the silver screen. A week ago he’d been on the cover of Time—was a cast party inside the moon any stranger or less believable than that?
“Can I tell my fiancée?” Dylan asked.
“Now why would you do a thing like that?” Gilliam said. “Tell her I invited you to my house on Catalina for the weekend. We’ll have you back by Monday unscathed. Unless you like it rough, of course.” He winked.
Dylan smiled as if he understood and then called up Erin and told her about Catalina. He felt terrible lying like this, but he had sworn secrecy on penalty of death. Surely she’d understand.
“I’m happy for you,” she told him.
The rocket ship was smaller on the outside than he might have expected, but bigger on the inside. The seats were nicely padded and there was a full bar and a plasma TV (cutting edge, in those days). It was not unlike the inside of the limo he and Erin had once taken to their senior prom, albeit somewhat roomier.
They watched The Right Stuff, for irony’s sake. Out the porthole, the moon grew larger in the sky—nickel, quarter, fifty-cent piece—until it occupied the entire view and took on a third dimension. He could make out the mountain ranges and individual craters and rocks, and everything was so stark and clean and colorless and dead.
Once they made landfall, the captain, a young guy in a blue jacket with yellow wings, ushered them to the front part of the ship. When they were all accounted for, he pressed a button and a door closed with a pneumatic hiss. Then he pressed another button and the whole module they were in separated from the rest of the ship and became a kind of rover thing. The captain steered them across the rugged terrain toward the mouth of a nearby cave and took them straight through an air lock.
Once inside, they stepped down from the rover and found themselves in a sort of cavern. Light flickered on basalt walls, and the air felt humid, even tropical. They wound along a ridge for a couple of minutes and finally emerged at the head of a trail that led straight down to what appeared to be an honest-to-goodness ocean inside the moon. A couple of surfers carved up the waves. Along the beach, a dozen or so men lounged in beach chairs, drinking cocktails or receiving massages from naked, or nearly naked, women. A number of other men gathered by the cabanas beside the beach, drinking and playing cards, buxom women stroking them and giggling. It was to one of these tables that Terry escorted Dylan, and only when they got close did Dylan realize that he recognized most of these faces from the movies, even if he didn’t necessarily know their names. He did, however, know Hugh Hefner’s name, and Hef was there, wearing a burgundy robe. He had a heap of poker chips before him and a nude centerfold on each arm, both of whom smiled absurdly at Dylan. The one on the right even winked. “Welcome, son,” Hef said. “Which one do you want?”
“Want?”
“This is a man’s world up here, son,” Hef said. “Repression is against the rules. What’s your pleasure?”
Dylan indicated the one that had winked at him, and she immediately came over to him and pressed her hard body against his. “I like you too,” she whispered breathily in his ear.
“Why don’t you give him the tour?” Hef suggested.
“I’d love to,” she said. Then she crouched down and took off Dylan’s shoes, lingering at his crotch for effect, having clearly mastered the art of titillation. He was half crazy already when she stood again, took him by the hand, and led him down to the sea.
“This place is something,” Dylan said.
“Isn’t it, though?”
“So do you, like, live up here?”
“You silly,” she said. “Nobody lives up here.”
“So this is your job then?”
“You could say that,” she said.
“You’re well paid, are you?”
She laughed. “Extremely.”
“I’m Dylan.”
“Hi, Dylan. I’m Fantasia.”
Of course she was.
They were down at the water’s edge now, the warm surf licking at their toes. She giggled and turned to him with this dumb puppy-dog look. Then she took his hand and placed it on one of her bulbous breasts, which was so supernaturally perfect it had to be an implant. It was all so much like a dream, who could blame him for surrendering to the wiles of this vapid, well-compensated goddess and making love to her over and over again on the microbead shores of the Selenian sea?
Over the next couple of days, Dylan slept a good deal in his private bungalow, ate seven of the best meals of his life, and drank cult wines like they were orange juice. On the second day, Hef asked if Dylan wouldn’t rather sow his oats in a different girl today, but Dylan said he was perfectly happy with Fantasia. Judging by her body language the rest of the weekend, she was perfectly happy with him too—or just a very talented actress. Either way would do.
He was back in Santa Monica with Erin by Monday. The end of his career, unbeknownst to anyone, was just a few months off, and he would never be invited to the moon again. One might have expected him to retaliate after his firing by publicly outing the Grotto, but he kept his word. For one thing, though he sometimes wanted to die in the aftermath of his shaming, he never wanted to be killed exactly. Moreover, it was fairly certain that even if he did tell someone, he wouldn’t be believed. And anyway, there was something sacred to him about that memory, and he didn’t wish to profane it.
Even all these years later, Dylan still thought of his weekend’s dalliance with Fantasia on a near-daily basis. It wasn’t that there was anything so transcendent about the sex itself—though there kind of was—but his experience in the moon seemed to his psyche both the literal and symbolic high point of his life: he’d been 238,900 mi
les above the common run of humanity, gained entrance to a secret society, glimpsed the gears and mechanisms at the back of reality. It was difficult not to regard his life since as shrouded in illusion, and he sometimes envied the naiveté of ordinary people. He’d been expelled from Eden, and was condemned to know what he was missing.
He veered off the Grind and went back home.
“Daddy!”
“Da—y!”
Dylan went to the kitchen and gave Erin a kiss on the cheek.
“I made linguine,” she said, holding the steaming bowl to his face. “Real olive oil.”
The sweet, nutty aroma made him feel a touch homesick, though he would never admit that. Still, something was off. “Real garlic?”
She shook her head. “Galric.13 The real stuff would have broken the bank.” Since the ban on teleported crops some years back, Terran crops had become a low-yield, high-price commodity. “It’s always a tough choice. I figure we’ll spring for both on your birthday.”
13_____________
Though beet-colored, cloveless, and in shape rather like a small pear, galric (which had been growing on New Taiwan for perhaps a billion years before the First Expedition began adding it to their spaghetti) tasted as much like garlic as any Terran apple variety tasted like any other. That the two, galric and garlic, were as seemingly cognate linguistically as they were gustatorily couldn’t help but prick one’s sense of wonder, particularly when one considered that New Taiwan, owing to its single landmass and centralized culture going all the way back, had produced but a single language.
King of the Worlds Page 4
