by Kim Newman
‘Keep ya eyes on the road, weasel,’ snarled Duryea, and Lawrence turned back. He didn’t have an eye in the back of his head. Not now.
We had faded in on Poverty Row. I had been in town long enough to know the place. It was the worst slum in the City, far from the swish Metro and Paramount districts. Jerry-built tenements cramped together, as convincing as cardboard flats. Every hotel room had an irritating sign flashing outside the window. Every alley had a mangy black cat set to cringe in a flashlight beam. When a door got slammed, the walls shook. There weren’t many people on the streets at any time of the day. Extras cost money. This was the world of peeling paint, tap-dancing cockroaches and the constant shadow of the boom mike. On Poverty Row, life had a low budget and a short running time.
‘Get out of the car,’ said Duryea. I thought of two or three wisecrack answers, but kept them to myself. I even got out of the car.
Back in the rain, I found my shoulder still hurt. Plus my ribs hurt, my calves hurt, my head hurt. I could go on, but you’ve got the general idea.
Duryea and Mazurki joined me on the sidewalk. The car crept away. I noticed a human hand protruding from the trunk.
‘Lawrence has another delivery to make, shamus,’ said Duryea, overdoing it. ‘To the East River.’
‘Anyone I know?’
‘No, but I hope you get a chance to get acquainted real soon.’
We were in front of a cheesy office block, the Monogram. Duryea kicked the aged front door in. The sky shook unconvincingly. The lobby was empty, except for a derelict curled up in a spill of garbage between an overstuffed chair and the reception desk.
‘Lookit the bum!’ Duryea prodded him with the toe of his black-and-white shoe. The old man turned over. His throat was a mess of black blood. Outside, something bayed at the painted moon. Mazurki crossed himself, and muttered darkly in Ukrainian.
This wasn’t part of my plot. Poverty Row was a catch-all place, an open sewer of clichés feeding into the elephants’ graveyard of ideas. Mazurki reached into his pants pocket and produced two silver coins stamped with Walter Huston’s head. He put them on the corpse’s eyes and stood back.
‘That’ll keep him down.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ crowed Duryea, impatient with this time out. ‘But where’s the night man? He’s supposed to keep this stuff out of the foyer.’
Duryea hitched his shoulders, a hand-me-down Cagneyism that looked bad on him, and jammed his palm down on a bell on the desk. A door behind opened, and a stooped figure shuffled on stage. The night man had large, watery eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses, quivering lips and a sparse moustache. It was a familiar face, but I couldn’t have put a name to it without the Scrabble prop on the desk that spelled it out. Byron Foulger.
Duryea reached out and grabbed Foulger’s striped tie.
‘Where wuz ya, worm? Scared of the big bad wolf?’
Foulger whined and dithered, and Duryea dropped him.
‘Mr Daine is gonna be displeased, Byron. Ya better start combing the situations vacant in the Inquirer. I’m sure someone somewhere wants a squealing rat. Now, call up the boss and tell him his guest is here.’
The night man rattled an antique telephone and talked quietly into it. I was close enough to him to hear the nothing at the other end. It wasn’t even connected to the wall socket.
‘He’s expecting you,’ said Foulger, spitefully.
Mazurki jerked me towards the elevator. We did a minor fade instead of riding up.
The penthouse was surprisingly plush. A panoramic window laid the rain-distorted city out like a corpse. The place was decorated in Early Modern Uncomfortable, with coffee tables shaped like swimming pools and chairs like big black marshmallows. Monochrome etchings hung conspicuously, looking more like sketches than finished work. Daine was a collector.
Duryea poured bourbon. Thick liquid gurgled. An unseen gramophone oozed over-orchestration. ‘Charmaine’. Strings sawed at the brass, the melody drowned.
I took the glass offered me, and drank it down. The hell of it – is that in the City you don’t taste anything. You get drunk, but it might as well be sugared water. Then, I didn’t even want to get drunk.
I handed the glass back to Duryea, and felt the whisky grab my brain. Mazurki hit me in the stomach.
‘Chew on that, wise guy!’
I doubled up, and collapsed onto a grey bombazine couch. It felt like fabric stretched over a concrete lump. I’d have vomited, but no one throws up in the City.
The pain got worse. While I was trying to rearrange my insides into their original configuration, someone came in. A smooth, tall, slightly plump man in a quilted smoking jacket. I didn’t need to match him to the description.
It was Truro Daine.
2
Susan Bishopric entered the White Room. A violent black-red shape marred the glaspex sheen of the walls. It was her own reflection. She couldn’t Dream with a distract like that. She twisted her chameleon cameo, and the kimono dragons pinked and passed. Susan scanned the tanned backs of her hands. Ideally she would have had a skinpale too, but now she couldn’t spare the time or expense. Besides, she only had an update scheduled, not a full Dream.
She couched and swung the slab over her lap. She intapped a polite ID and inslotted the Vanessa Vail master. A dreamflower bloomed in the bowl; she plucked it. Hooking a stray tress behind her ear, she pressed the flower to her temple. The subcutaneous terminal pricked in with a slight tickle. She blinked, and melshed with the machine.
Susan did not intend a complete surrender to Vanessa Vail. Just a mnemonic skim to check the externals. Volume up, vision up, sens up. She was inside:
Vanessa Vail: deadly, glamorous, capable, highly-sexed international adventuress.
For a moment, she was overwhelmed, feeling the unfamiliar strength of the similie’s limbs, the ease of her pleasures. Was it only five years since she had Dreamed Vanessa Vail? Had her body really changed that much? Or had she idealised her former self more than she had thought? In realising the fantasy of lithe Vanessa, Susan had built a heroine out of herself. Vanessa Vail had a mind like a stiletto. For a moment Susan was uncomfortable inside it.
Here’s to you, Dr Frankenstein. Just you wait, Henry Higgins. Susan knew what it was like to be outstripped by her creation. Children always turn out to be bastards.
But Vanessa Vail was comfortably doomed by the concept. No need to waste good envy on her. Susan pulled out and dipped into:
Vanessa’s three lovers: Ray Chance, taciturn CIA agent. Nikolai Kropotkin, fiery Soviet commissar. Lord Roger Marshaller, suave English aristocrat.
And sometimes into:
The air, as a detached, invisible presence in the Vanessa Vail sub-universe. Swooping over a firesabre duel in the Finnish wastes. Peeping at troilist romance on a blazing Cuban beach. Observing intrigue in a Jesuit opium den within the walls of Vatican City. Vanessa demolishing a troop of Liechtensteinian police andrews with balletic baritsu kicks.
The D-9000 had concepted Vanessa Vail, tailoring it precisely to audience requirements. But Susan Bishopric had Dreamed it, depthing out the internals, filling in the externals. As a professional, she knew she had to take the commissions that came up on the slab. At the time, she had been pathetically grateful to Tony for chancing on her for such a solid product. She had even got a few good crix on it. And the sales had been good. Not in the John Yeovil slot, but enough to establish her name. Even she was prepared to admit that her solo stuff hadn’t then been up to much. Typical juvie nonsense, most of it. Vanessa Vail was far less embarrassing to her now than, say, The Light of the Bright World Dies, with its fuzzy emotional politics, or Deaf and Blind, which must surely count as the archest Dream of its season.
But that was then. Now she was at a different career stage. Since Vanessa Vail, the nature of the collaboration had changed. With each Dream, Susan had wrestled more control and with The Parking Lottery – due, Yggdrasil willing, to scoop the Rodneys this autumn – she had almost edged the
cranky computer out. Soon she would be popular enough to declare her independence. Then she could concept her own Dreams. And now, she hoped, she was strong enough to think on her own, to create something of lasting merit.
Meanwhile, she resented being yanked back five years to hackery. But needs must…
She quickskimmed to the finish, and sunk into:
Nurse Ted Crozier, attending Vanessa in her terminal tank. Starched linen, hospital smells, the buzzes and bleeps of life support. Nikolai, Ray and Lord Roger, enemies united in grief, crowding around the bed of the dauntless heroine. The dracula from the transplant league outside in the corridor, waiting for the usable organs to be liberated, pacing up and down to frighten the non-terminals in the nearby suites.
The nurse was a clever authorial touch. He provided a necessary break from the Vanessa Vail POV. Thanks to brave little smiles, hair rainbowed on the pillow, choked-back tears and an emotional confrontation with the fey little girl due to receive Vanessa’s surplus heart, it was possible to make dying of cancer look all right. But by no stretch of subjectivism could it be made to feel pretty. There was a market for pain, but the D-9000 did not cater to it. Ted Crozier could naturally have medical externals vital to the concept flit across his mind during the dreamer’s tenure. Also, Susan knew her lady dreamers liked a good handsome nurse.
The subliminal infilling of background external from a minor character’s memory was a typical Susan Bishopric touch, she knew. When she was free of the D-9000 she wanted to experiment with more complex uses of the device: conflicting recollections, false impressions, mental delusions. Dreams were at about the same stage as the flatties in 1912 or ice sculpture ten years ago. The medium was waiting for its Griffith, its Eisenstein, its Chillmeister Freaze…
Susan in:
Ted Crozier watches with heartfelt admiration as the still-beautiful Vanessa Vail lifts herself up to bid her lovers goodbye. His manly tears give the scene a misty, soft-focus effect.
Quickskim:
Nikolai weeping, Ray getting drunk, Lord Roger planning suicide.
‘Darling. Darlings. Before I zed out for the last time, I… There’s one thing I want you all to know. Something important…’
Susan pulled out. The D-9000 had dialogued Vanessa Vail. She had not been qualified to handle that. She rewound.
She tapnoted the obvious external changes. In the next edition Vanessa would wear her hair orientally, a black fringe and pigtails instead of the outmoded red beehive. Fashions in clothing, food and sex updated easily.
The politicals were only a shade more difficult. Since the War Between the States, the CIA was the OSS again, but Ray Chance could still booze and womanise for them. The fall of Premier Romanova meant a few alterations to the Moscow sequence. The D-9000 liked to include real-life characters, and had had Nikolai briefed for his mission to Lapland by Romanova herself. The scene would have to be re-Dreamed for Sobienkin.
Susan thought that, in the light of his treatment of his immediate predecessor, the ascetic new premier would be unamused to learn that his complete change of the Kremlin did not warrant any radical re-Dreaming. In Vanessa Vail the premier was just a face and a voice, plus a few cartoon mannerisms. Romanova’s dialogue would do just as well for Sobienkin. The decor in the office would have to change: Susan would have to make it more like a provincial skimmer waiting room, less like an eighteenth-century bordello. And, of course, the sex was out, unless… No, another brush with the International Libel people was not what she wanted. The Dreamer would stay inside Nikolai anyway. IL excluded Susan from the minds of real people.
A shame: she could think of a few intriguing uses of that trick. One of the pirates had recently offered a bootleg of the King having sex with a goat. The Dreamer had been into the heads of the King and the goat. The pirate had been remaindered, and his tape run wiped clean. A shame, the goat had been an interesting characterisation. She hated to see raw talent go to waste.
The Vanessa Vail headache was cancer. It had been preventable five years ago; now things were worse, it was reversible, even in the formerly terminal phase. Vanessa Vail, condemned to a beautiful death by the unconscious wish of the dreamership, needed a new disease. Or something.
The D-9000 would do the bulk of the research, but selecting the appropriate lingering malady would still be a drearo business. Susan mourned the great romantic disorders: leukaemia, consumption, sickle-cell anaemia, aids, chemical warfare. Cancer had been the last hope of the morbid love story. Now the ogre of generations past was extinct. And whatever substitute she found – mutant measles, perhaps, or foot-and-mouth disease – was bound to be pestered out of existence by the next edition.
She toyed with the idea of making something up. A real-sounding, exotic wasting disease. No one could find a cure for that. Perhaps, during her stopover in the jungles of Ecuador, Vanessa Vail could be dosed with a rare native poison. It was the sort of thing that was always happening to her.
Tony would fight it: ‘There are doctors dreaming out there, Sue-love, and they’ll know. With something as loony as Vanessa Vail it’s bloody vital to get the externals right.’
Susan dropped the dreamflower into its glass of purple. She saved her tapnotes into the slab.
She considered a few internal changes, unnecessary but interesting. Vanessa Vail could do with a complete re-dialogue. Susan cringed at practically every line the D-9000 had stuck her with. But Tony would only allow her to tamper with any obsolete slang; substituting ‘squitch’ for ‘kink’, ‘bove’ for ‘zooper’, stupid stuff like that. Vanessa Vail sold by the million, and was practically sacred in publishing terms.
Rats! Susan spitefully thought of giving Vanessa Vail a sobering dose of realism. ‘Sorry, gang, I can’t fight any cybernetic squid today. I’m menstruating.’ Serve her right, the unreal bitch.
No. She would just polish up the externals and field the whole thing back to Tony. This little Dream wouldn’t hurt. She would save the good stuff for the next Susan Dream, the Great English Dream the crix were expecting from her.
Susan exed the White Room. In contrast to the sourceless glare of the Dreaming chamber, her office was soft-lit turquoise. The shelves were cluttered with extraneous objects: a ceramic bridge, favourite Dreams, her huge and uncatalogued music collection, tridsnaps, and a few flatty tapes. At Eton her House Sponsor had stressed the importance of the cinematic tradition. She was a particular admirer of early Frank Tashlin, mid-period Antonioni and late Richard Attenborough.
Her Rodney nomination plaques and her sole award – Best Nasal Effects for The Sewer Thing – had a mantel to themselves. These things didn’t matter, of course. The Rodneys were always being awarded to utter sick. Last year, John Yeovil’s drearo historical The Private Life of Margaret Thatcher had scooped Best Dream, Yggdrasil rot it! But this year, it was between her and Orin Tredway, and she needed to see Orin frozen out. His Passions Perfected was unspeakably, cloyingly awful, and yet the crix were tipping it as the favourite. Still, she was confident. She had even drafted a beautiful, moving, inspirational acceptance speech.
Her outdoor helmet and flakjak were bundled on a chair. She shifted them and sat at the D-9000 terminal. She backgrounded a music: Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook.
She tapped into the British Museum Library, and pressed the vocator to her throat.
‘Hello, BritLib. What’ve you got on primitive toxicology? I’m particularly interested in South America, but if anything fun turns up anywhere else, throw it at me. I want to be able to make up something superficially convincing.’
The museum coughed and started to sort through itself. It would deposit the findings in Susan’s D-9000 file space. She would tell Tony that whatever she came up with was soundly researched fact. She was good enough to get past him. Even if he did check, he would do it by tapping into the D-9000, whereupon the machine would deluge him with the museum’s native-poison bumph. No way would he go through that.
She planned on selling To
ny her little-known but deadly drug on the dramatics. Vanessa Vail getting the bad news from the unbearable, kindly old Dr Murchison (‘I brought you into the world, Miss Vail, and I think you’ve a right to know…’ ‘Oh, Dr M, is it…?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘How long?’ ‘We don’t know, ’Nessa. Maybe a year. Maybe not that long. You could go’ – snaps fingers – ‘like that!’) could be replaced with some steaming jungle action.
Vanessa Vail slogs through the tropical undergrowth in search of the Great MacGuffin. A fabulous horde of jewels, a crashed spaceship, the lost secret of the original Coca-Cola formula, something like that. She stumbles across an ancient temple, forbidden to unbelievers. A monstrous idol grins at her. Little brown figures lurk in the foliage. Vanessa senses danger. A dart strikes her arm. She brushes it away, and then learns of her impending death from a painted witch doctor. He describes her fate in horrible detail during his ritual curse.
An entirely new concept hook, and a great clip for the trails. Did they have pygmies in Ecuador?
‘Hi, Sue-love.’ Tony cut through the British Museum tap. An iris opened in the lower right corner as he holoed into the tridvid. Susan was reminded of shrunken heads, and wondered if she could work one into her Ecuador sequence.
‘’Lo, Tony. I was busy-busy.’
‘I know. That’s why I’m tapping in swiftkick. You’re off Vanessa.’
Susan assessed her reaction. Relief: escaping a chore. Indignation: would Tony let someone else tamper with her Dream? Fear: was she being disemployed?
‘Sorry, Sue-love. It just came through the slab here. You’ve been conscripted to the Public Service.’
‘Expletive deleted!’ Conscripted to the Public Service? It happened, of course. In theory it could happen to anyone. But what arm of the Gunmint could want a Dreamer?
‘Christ knows why. You’re not the first. The Gunmint skulks whisked Tom Tunney off the West Country a week ago. The same crowd. Whatever it is, sweets, don’t scraggle up or we’ll all be freezing our arses off gutting fish clusters on Rockall.’
