Rogues

by George R. R. Martin

  Mister Fitz leaned across and pressed one wooden finger against the middle of her forehead, his gauntlets being long since swept away. Tira stopped talking, her eyes rolled back, and Hereward had to turn her head so her mouth and nose weren’t in the water.

  “And we have money for bribes,” continued Mister Fitz. He reached to his arm and pulled off the brassard, the letters fading. “All will be well.”

  “So I suppose,” said Sir Hereward. He took off his own armband, slapped his hand lightly on the moklek’s back, and added, “We have much to thank you for, Rosie.”

  “Indeed, she is a princess amongst mokleks,” said Mister Fitz. “Quite literally, albinism is a mark of the royal line.”

  “Hexareme of Ashagah and mokleks,” said Hereward thoughtfully. “It reminds me of a poem. Let me see …

  Hexareme of Ashagah

  From far-off Panas

  Drumming down the sea-lanes

  In search of easy prey

  Seeking a cargo of ivories, gold and mokleks …

  “Bah!” protested Mister Fitz. “That is doggerel, a murder of the original poem. If you must recite, Hereward, you should do honor to the poet, not commit a crime!”

  “It is a later translation, true, but nonetheless I stand by it!” protested Sir Hereward. “You and your heart of cypress have no feeling for verse!”

  The moklek trumpeted, spraying them with a little seawater. A wave lifted her, and the east wind blew against Hereward’s back, taking them shorewards, knight and puppet bickering all the way.

  Walter Jon Williams

  Walter Jon Williams was born in Minnesota and now lives near Albuquerque, New Mexico. His short fiction has appeared frequently in Asimov’s Science Fiction, as well as in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Subterranean, and in other markets, and has been gathered in the collections Facets and Frankensteins and Other Foreign Devils. His novels include Ambassador of Progress, Knight Moves, Hardwired, The Crown Jewels, Voice of the Whirlwind, House of Shards, Days of Atonement, Aristoi, Metropolitan, Rock of Ages, City on Fire, as well as a huge disaster thriller, The Rift, and a Star Wars novel, Destiny’s Way, and three novels in his acclaimed Modern Space Opera epic, “Dread Empire’s Fall,” Dread Empire’s Fall: The Praxis, Dread Empire’s Fall: The Sundering, and Dread Empire’s Fall: Conventions of War. His most recent books are the novels Implied Spaces, This Is Not a Game, Deep State, and The Fourth Wall, the chapbook novella, The Boolean Gate, and a new collection, The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories. He won a long-overdue Nebula Award in 2001 for his story “Daddy’s World,” and took another Nebula in 2005 with his story “The Green Leopard Plague.”

  In the sly story that follows, a movie star (Sean Makin, the comically self-absorbed narrator of Walter’s novel The Fourth Wall) becomes involved in an intricate real-life plot that proves to be even more outlandish than that of a Hollywood movie, and more dangerous for everyone involved.

  DIAMONDS FROM TEQUILA

  Walter Jon Williams

  “No,” says Ossley. “No. Really. You can make diamonds out of tequila.”

  “Sell enough tequila,” says Yunakov, “and you can buy all the diamonds you want.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” says Ossley.

  We’re sitting in Yunakov’s room at the resort, with the breeze roaring through the windows and doors and sweeping our cannabis smoke out to sea. In one corner of the room a 3D printer hums through its routine, and in another corner is a curved wet bar with two stools and about fifteen half-empty bottles of liquor. Six or eight of us are sitting around a blocky wooden coffee table on which is perched a large clear plastic bong that Ossley had printed out on the first day of principal photography.

  The movie is called Desperation Reef. Yunakov is the prop master, and Ossley is his assistant. The others in the room are members of the crew: a couple gaffers, a wardrobe assistant, a set dresser, and somebody’s cousin named Chip.

  I’m the star of the picture. In fact I’m a very big star, and the producers are spending a couple hundred million dollars to make me a bigger one; but I’m not so big a star that I can’t hang with the crew.

  I want the crew to like me because they can make me look good. And besides, they have the best dank on the set.

  We’re in Mexico, but we’re not smoking Mexican bud. Buying dank in Mexico is hazardous, largely because the dealer would likely turn you in to the cops, who in turn would put you in jail, then confiscate the weed and sell it back to the dealer. Plus of course there would be the embarrassment of having a major Hollywood guy busted in Mexico, with all the outcry and bribes that would involve.

  No, this is 420 grown in California, where it’s pretty much legal, and smuggled to Mexico, where it isn’t, in boxes of film equipment. All of which is fine with me because California has the best of everything, including the best herb.

  In fact I’m less than thrilled to be in a foreign country, where people speak a foreign language and have foreign customs and serve Mexican food that isn’t as good as the Mexican food I can get in L.A. But still, I’m a big international star, so even though I’m in a foreign country, everyone is treating me very well; and that’s better than being treated as a washed-up has-been in California, which is also within my experience.

  We watch as Chip—the person who is somebody’s cousin—sparks the bong’s bowl and inhales a truly heroic amount of smoke, a binger big enough to keep him cross-eyed for hours … After an appreciative pause, Ossley says, “No, really. You have to heat the tequila up to eight hundred degrees centigrade, after which nanoscale diamonds will precipitate onto trays of silicon or steel. There are, like, industrial applications.”

  “You’re just making this shit up,” says Yunakov, but by that point someone’s looked up the answer on their phone and discovered that the story is true, or at least true on the Internet. Which is not always the same thing.

  At which time the 3D printer, which has been humming away in its corner, makes a final mechanical whine, and then dies. Ossley half crawls across the tile floor to the machine and removes an object that looks like a thick-walled laboratory beaker. It isn’t entirely transparent: there seem to be yellowish layers made of slightly different materials.

  “Okay,” he says. “Here’s my latest project.”

  Ossley is a short man, five-four or -five, and thin. His hair hangs in tight corkscrew curls over his ears. Black-rimmed glasses magnify his eyes into vast staring Rorschach blotches, and five o’clock shadow darkens his jawline. He wears tank tops and cargo shorts bulging with tools, cables, and electronics.

  Since he’d established his credibility by building James Bong with his machine, we pay attention to what follows. He goes behind the bar, produces an unlabeled bottle of wine, unscrews the cap, and pours out a glass. The wine is a deep blood red, so dark it’s almost purple.

  “Okay,” he says. “Some friends of mine have a Central Coast winery, and they sent me this stuff to practice on. It’s your basic cabernet. The cab is only a couple weeks old, just old enough that fermentation has stopped. It’s been racked once, so I’ve filtered it to take out any remaining sediment, but otherwise it’s pretty raw.”

  He passes it around and we all take a sample. When it’s my turn I take a whiff, and it doesn’t smell like much of anything. I sip, and as the wine flows over my tongue I can feel my taste buds try to actually crawl away from the stuff like victims crawling from the site of a toxic spill. I swallow it only because spitting on the floor would be rude. I pass it on.

  “Two things would turn this into an acceptable wine,” Ossley says from behind the bar. “Time, and aging in oak barrels. Oak is perfect for wine, and hardly any winemaker uses anything else. Oak allows oxygen to enter the wine, and oxygenation speeds the other processes that go on between oak and wine. Which have to do with hydro-hydrolysable tannins and phenols and terpenes and fur-furfurals.” The cannabis makes him stumble on the technical terms.

  He holds up the
beaker. “I’ve designed this to do in a few minutes what aging in oak does in months. So let’s see if it works.”

  Ossley puts the beaker down on the bar, then pours the wine into it. He glances at us over the bar. “The reaction can be a little, ah, splattery.” He finds a plate and puts it over the top of his beaker.

  “Now we wait twenty minutes or so.”

  We go back to enjoying our evening. The bong makes another round, and I chase my hit with a beer.

  Normally I wouldn’t get this chewed when I know I’ll be working the next day, but in fact I have no dialogue to learn for the next day’s shoot. All my scenes will be underwater, and I won’t have to talk.

  Desperation Reef concerns my character’s attempt to salvage a sunken submarine, an effort made problematic by the fact that the sub is one used by a Mexican drug cartel to smuggle narcotics to the States. The sub went down with 200 million dollars’ worth of cocaine on board, making it a desirable target for my character, a commercial diver with a serious coke habit. Unfortunately the cartel wants its drugs back, and of course the Coast Guard and DEA are also in the action.

  My character Hank isn’t a good guy, particularly. He starts as angry and addicted, but over the course of the film, he finds love and inspiration with Anna, the sister of one of the sailors who went down with the sub. In the climax, when cartel heavies come calling, he trades his coke spoon for a Heckler & Koch submachine gun and takes care of business.

  What happens in the denouement is kind of up in the air. As it stands, the movie has two endings, by two different writers. In the first, the original, Hank raises and sells the cocaine, and he and Anna head off into the sunset many millions of dollars the richer.

  In the second ending, Hank learns the important moral lesson that Drugs are Bad, he turns the coke over to the DEA, and he walks away with nothing.

  The first ending, which everyone likes, makes a lot more sense in terms of Hank’s character. The second ending, which no one at all likes, is an act of cowardice on the part of the producers, who are afraid of being accused of making a movie promoting drug use.

  Last I’ve been told, we’re going to film both endings, and the producers will decide during editing which ending will end up on the final film. Since film producers are notorious cowards, I figure I know which ending will end up on the picture.

  Unless I make a stand or something. I could just refuse to film the second ending, or I could blow every take.

  But then I’m a coward, too, so that probably won’t happen.

  “Right, then,” Ossley says. He’s back behind the bar, peering at his beaker with his huge magnified eyes. “I think the reaction’s over.” He gets a glass and jams it in the ice bucket, then pours the contents of the beaker into the glass. From the way he handles the beaker I can see it’s hot.

  The wine has changed color. It’s a lot brighter shade of red.

  Ossley puts a thermometer into the glass and waits till the wine reaches room temperature. Then he takes the glass from the ice bucket, and he walks from behind the bar and hands the glass to me.

  “Here you go, Sean,” he says. “Taste it and let me know what you think.”

  The outside of the glass is slippery with melted ice. I look at it with a degree of alarm. “Do I really want to drink your chemistry experiment?” I ask.

  “It won’t hurtcha.” Ossley raises the glass to his nose, takes a whiff, and then a hearty swallow. “Give it a try.”

  I take the glass dubiously. I recall that, in the past, people have tried to kill me. People I didn’t even know, and all for reasons I didn’t have a clue about.

  “You realize,” I say, “that if you poison me, the whole production shuts down and you’re out of a job?”

  Ossley gives me a purse-lipped, superior look. “This is actually Version Six point One of the container,” Ossley says. “I’ve drunk from all of them. There’s nothing in there that will harm you. Not in these quantities, anyway.”

  I hold the glass beneath my nose and give a whiff. I’m surprised. Unlike the earlier sample, this sure as hell smells like wine. Ossley grins.

  “See?” he says. “That’s vanillin you’re smelling. And some lactones that give it a kinda oakey scent.”

  Yunakov, the prop master, gives me a wink. “It’s wine, dude,” he says. “I’ve been drinking Ossley’s product all week. It’s fine.”

  I cautiously draw a small amount of the liquid across my tongue. It tastes more or less like red table wine. Not brilliant, but perfectly acceptable.

  “Not bad,” I say. “Much improved.” I pass the glass to the set dresser to my right.

  “See?” Ossley says. “It normally takes months to produce a wine of that quality, and my reactant did it in twenty minutes. Imagine what would happen to the wine industry if every winery could produce grand cru in twenty minutes?”

  The set dresser sips, then smacks her lips critically. “This is hardly grand cru,” she says.

  “It’s early days,” Ossley says. “In another couple years, I’ll be serving up something that you won’t be able to tell from Haut-Brion.”

  She raises an eyebrow. “How do you account for terroir?” she asks.

  Ossley laughs. “Terroir isn’t a mystical thing. Terroir doesn’t happen because your ancestors wore wooden shoes and prayed to St. Valery. It’s just chemistry. Give me a chemical analysis, and I can probably duplicate the result.”

  There follows an earnest discussion on terroir and debourbage and encépagement, and I return to my beer. I like my plonk just fine, but I’m not fanatic enough about wine to care about the fiddly details.

  The bong goes round one more time, and then I decide it’s time to go to bed. Yunakov’s room is on the ground floor of the resort, so I leave by hopping over the balcony rail onto the walk beyond, and then I lope over toward my cabana.

  The sea glitters in starlight. Tropical flowers sway pale in the breeze. The beach is an opalescent shimmer.

  If I close my eyes, I can almost imagine that I’m back in paradise, which is to say Southern California.

  I turn the corner and jump as I hear a shriek. It’s one of the hotel waiters carrying a room-service tray. The bottles and dishes give a leap, and I lunge to get them all settled before something crashes. Eventually the waiter and I get everything sorted out.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Makin,” the waiter says. “I didn’t see you coming.”

  The resort is in Quintana Roo, so the waiter is Mayan and maybe five feet tall, with a broad face and beaky nose and an anxious smile. I look down at him.

  “That’s all right,” I say. “Have a good evening.”

  I’m not entirely unused to hearing people scream when I turn up unexpectedly, which is why I’m an unlikely movie star.

  I was a cute, big-headed kid actor when I was young, and when all America invited me into their living rooms as the star of the sitcom Family Tree. But when I grew, I grew tall, and my head kept growing after my body stopped. It’s a condition called pedomorphosis—my head is freakishly large, and my features have retained the proportions of an infant, with a snub nose, a vast forehead, and unusually large eyes.

  At the moment I look even more sinister than is usual for me since for my morally ambiguous part I’ve shaved my balding head and have grown a goatee. I look like someone you really don’t want to see looming around the corner on a dark night.

  My appearance explains why my career collapsed after I stopped being cute, and why I struggled to find work for more than a decade until I was rescued by an unlikely savior—a game designer named Dagmar Shaw, who employed me as the star of a production called Escape to Earth that was broadcast over the Internet. I played Roheen, who was sort of an alien and sort of an angel. Escape to Earth was an enormous hit, and so was the sequel. I’m in negotiation with Dagmar now for more Roheen projects, but in the meantime I’m trying to expand my celebrity by starring in a feature.

  My freakish face guarantees that I’ll never be the star of a
romantic comedy, and also that I can be accepted fairly readily as a villain—during the years I was scuffling for work, I played heavies more than anything else. So in Desperation Reef, I’m playing a villainous character who finds redemption and turns into a good guy.

  Even if I nail the part, even if I’m absolutely brilliant, it’s still unclear whether people will pay to see my weird head blown up to the size of a theater screen. After all, my only successes have been in smaller formats.

  Thinking about these uncertainties, I walk to my cabana. It’s a white-plastered building with a tall, peaked Mayan roof of palm-leaf thatch, all oozing local color. I open the door, and I see that Loni Rowe has arrived before me. She’s hunched in an armchair drinking some of my orange juice and thumbing text into her handheld, but when she sees me arrive, she puts her phone away and stands.

  “Hi,” she said. “There was a camera drone overhead, so I thought I’d come to your cabana and give them something to write about.”

  She’s a pale redhead who hides from the sun, and when she’s on-screen she has to slather on the makeup to hide all her freckles. She has large brilliant teeth accentuated by a minor overbite, and a lush figure that has won her admirers all over the world. There’s a popular poster of Loni that’s sold millions, and it’s hard to picture the room of any adolescent American male without a view of Loni’s cleavage in it somewhere.

  Loni is an ambitious young actress, and she has a part in the movie as the mistress of a drug lord. She’s also my girlfriend—or actually, my Official Tabloid Girlfriend, good for headlines guaranteed to keep our names in the public eye.

  Even though our affaire is mostly for publicity purposes, we have in fact had sex now and then. The teenagers who go to sleep every night staring at Loni’s poster will be disappointed to learn the experience was pleasant enough, but nothing special. There is no passion in our relationship because both of us are far more passionate about our careers. But Loni and I are friends, even given that we’re using one another, and I imagine we’ll remain friends even after we’ve both gone on to other tabloid romances.