Year Zero (33 page)

“Nasty—what
is
that?” Judy asked, stomping on it with a Louboutin heel. The stereopticon processed this development, decided that the orb had been killed, and rendered it
clinging lifelessly to the leather-clad spike that had impaled it, its orange blood and viscera dripping into a revolting little pool on the carpet.

With Judy distracted, Manda clutched at her neck to make the stereopticon ooze into its more familiar form, then jabbed at its controls while kicking the door shut. An instant later, my office turned into a completely enveloping star field. I swayed briefly as an infinite, glittering abyss seemed to replace the floor beneath us—but Judy didn’t flinch. “Your constellations are all screwed up,” she groused, like a jaded teen irked by a sloppy special effect. “Cassiopeia’s way too far from Perseus.” Then a brilliant rendering of Earth appeared overhead, and she fell silent.

Our message was short and to the point—and delivered by none other than Richard Nixon (courtesy of the impersonating mode that Manda discovered in the stereopticon).
¹
Nixon declared that greedy intellectual property laws were imperiling our planet. As he spoke, wads of money
²
flew in like asteroids, gradually blotting out the entire scene, until
we were surrounded by nothing but drifting piles of space cash. Then the money started to burn. And as the scene dissolved into an image of the Earth ablaze, Nixon said that
only you
can save our race from destruction, whereupon the flames vanished and a heart-shaped rainbow encompassed our world. Nixon then urged Judy to believe everything that I was about to tell her about the alien threat to our planet, regardless of how fantastic it sounded.

Judy remained silent for several seconds afterward, then turned to me. “Aliens, huh? Well, I’m convinced, because that was incredible. How’d you do it?”

I glanced at Manda. She held up the stereopticon. “Self-organizing light,” she said. “Extraterrestrial technology.”

“Oh, I could have done the graphics in PowerPoint,” Judy quipped. “It was Nixon’s voice that amazed me.” She leaned toward Manda. “Richard Nixon is
dead
,” she said slowly, as if explaining meiosis to a Playboy bunny. She then turned back to me, and unleashed a barrage of smart, probing questions.

Judy always says that when she realizes she’s wrong about something, she embraces the new reality, and immediately casts her old, invalid beliefs aside. And true to form, she adjusted to the alien situation with impressive speed. She inhaled the facts as fast as I could utter them. We covered almost everything within twenty minutes—and then
I
was the one who turned to
her
and said, “So now what?”

“Now what? Nick, please. We do what we’ve been doing for our entire careers.” She glared at Manda. “Yes, really—all eighteen minutes of it.” She turned back to me. “We have a client. It’s called humanity. We have an adversary. It’s some goddamn union. We even have a hot little paralegal
who I’m sure you’re trying to bang. Most important, we have a legal system of some sort, and we have a high court.”

I’d been so focused on getting Judy to help out with Fido and The Munk that it took me a moment to realize what she was getting at. “Are you saying that we should … go and plead our case to the Guardian Council?”

“As opposed to leaving it to some lip-syncing martian slut whose bumbling got us into this mess in the first place? Of
course
I’m saying that we should plead our case to the Guardian Council. More precisely, I’m saying that
I
should plead it to the Guardian Council.
You
can be my supporting counsel. And Mindy here can be our Vanna White, and hit the buttons on her little projector when I tell her to.” She glared at Manda and raised her left heel. “And you can start by getting this noxious thing off my shoe.” The punctured orb was still rendering there, and had started to shrivel and dry in disgusting ways. Manda’s fingers flew across the stereopticon’s surface and it disappeared. “Okay,” Judy said, “any questions?”

“Just one,” Manda said in a hostile tone. She paused, waited for the silence to get really awkward, then said, “Nobody told you that Carly’s a slut. So how did you know that?”

Christ, Manda knows about the kitchen-counter scene!
I thought wildly.

Before I could launch into some stammering explanation, Judy grinned. “She’s funny,” she said to me, pointing at Manda.

“I am,” Manda smiled—and I realized that she was just putting Judy in her place a bit, and making it clear that she wasn’t some kind of bimbo.

“But Carly really is a slut,” I said, idiotically trying to
play along. “You should hear what she did with these Vulcans last week.”

The temperature in the room instantly dropped about thirty degrees. “Nick,” Judy said. “Just like blacks can use the N-word with impunity, and queers can use the F-word, and orientals can use the A-word, Mitzi and I are within the bounds of decorum when we joke about other women being sluts. But as a man in a phallocentric society, you cross a bright, red line when you do that—particularly in a professional setting. Is that clear?”

My hands turned to ice as my adrenaline surged and my reptilian brain flipped a coin between fight and flight. I was about to take off for the elevators at a dead run when Manda looked at Judy and said, “You’re funny, too.”

“I am,” Judy said, and they both fell apart laughing. As I calmed down, it struck me that these two were going to work beautifully together, and that they’d probably love Carly, too. However effective I’d been with the jailer and the Guardian, I should probably just hang back at this point, take their drink orders from time to time, and otherwise let the three of them save the world.

“Anyway,” Judy finally said to me. “It sounds like there’s no way to get in touch with the Guardians until astroslut turns up again. So when do you expect her?”

“I’m not sure. A bit over a half hour ago she and Frampton went to see the Pluhhhs.”

“pluhhhs,” Judy corrected me irritably. Damn, she learns fast.

“Right—pluhhhs. They’re going to try to put her on the Guardians’ planet. She might get blocked out, but wherever she ends up, both of those planets have this special Wrinkle geometry that makes them accessible to most of the universe
around the clock. So she could turn up on Earth at pretty much any time.”

“How’ll she find us?”

“She has our schedule, and the addresses of our meetings today,” I said. “As well as my phone number, email address, and whatnot.”

“Great. And we’re definitely going to those meetings. I’m sure I can get something out of them that will buy us some time with Paulie and the Guild—and we don’t know how long it’s gonna take us to get in front of the Guardians. Now, is there anything else I should know before we shove off?”

I nodded. “It’s kind of a long shot, but Manda and I have set up a C-Corp that already owns the copyright to an alien song here on Earth. I was thinking we might try to register the corporation’s ownership to the Refined League as a whole.”

“Why would we do something as demented and useless as that?”

“Well, I was thinking that if we copyright the aliens’ music for them here on Earth, then our fines should apply to any pirated copies that are made of their songs down here.”

Judy nodded slowly. “I don’t see why not. But what does that get us?”

“Maybe we could put together a huge server farm to make zillions of illegal copies of their songs. Then the fines that we owe them on their music could offset the fines that they owe us on our music.”

“Gee, great thinking there, Nick. One little problem. It sounds like each and every human is personally owed a massive fortune, since half of the alien debt to the music companies
will flow to national governments in taxes, and from there it will be the property of all the citizens. So we’d have to talk each and every person on this planet into personally making zillions of copies of that crap alien music, so as to voluntarily eradicate their own personal intergalactic fortune. Somehow, I don’t see that happening.”

“Then … we should have all the governments make the copies?”

Judy gave Manda an aggrieved look. “Your man writes a great brief, but he sucks at math. He always drops or adds a zero—sometimes two.” She turned to me. “And in this case, maybe nine. Because from what you’ve told me, the entire human race can’t possibly have enough disc space to offset even a sliver of the debt in the way you’re suggesting.”

“Oh, right. There’s that.”

Judy looked at her watch. “Okay, let’s move it. We’ll be about nine minutes late for Fido, which is perfect. Then between me telling him what to think, and Mimi here hitting the buttons on her Hot Topic necklace, we’ll get him on board. My car’s waiting downstairs.”

Judy trolls Manhattan in a nonstretch limo with the driver’s compartment sealed off behind an opaque barrier. This let us flip through our selection of visual effects in private as we rode to the meeting (and a midtown traffic jam gave us ample time for this, despite the fact that it wasn’t even a mile away). When we showed Judy the full rendering of Özzÿ’s orb with the thunder and lightning effects and that booming, supernatural voice, she seized on it. “That’s the one for Fido. Only we won’t say it’s an alien. We’ll say it’s the spirit of Brigham Young, or Joseph Smith or something.” She turned to Manda. “Fido’s a psycho Mormon,
and he’ll totally buy it. The stereopticon turns anything you say into that crazy voice, right?”

“It does if I’m holding it right,” Manda said.

“Good. Just turn your back to Fido when the orb pops out of the floor. He won’t pay any attention to you once Brigham shows up.”

“But I don’t know a thing about Mormons—what do I say?”

Judy shrugged. “You’ve got a phone—ask Wikipedia. We’re five blocks away, that’s plenty of time. Just come up with something that’s close enough. It’s not like he’s gonna start a theological debate with Brigham Young.” She thought for a moment. Then, “No, screw Brigham. Make it Ronald Reagan’s ghost!” She turned to me. “This wingnut’ll do anything Reagan says, guaranteed.”

Just then, I had an alarming thought. “Wait a second. Carly and Frampton’s episode is airing in just a few minutes—which means that Paulie’s about to learn the truth.”

“Right, we know this,” Judy said impatiently.

“I was just thinking that his immediate reaction might be to go ballistic on Özzÿ, since he was supposed to go through my apartment and figure out if I was a Guardian in the first place.”

“Sure. Poor Özzÿ. But why do we care?”

“Because if he grills him hard enough, Paulie might end up learning that we have Özzÿ’s stereopticon.”

“And that matters because?”

“Well, for one thing, he could start using it to spy on us.”

Judy considered this for a split second. “Let him. He’ll see us negotiating with Fido. Which is exactly what he should want us to do. If we’re lucky, he might even put everything on hold, and sit down to cheer us on.”

“Good point,” I said. “But—well, the other possibility is that they’ll throw a kill switch, and disable the stereopticon before we can use it to win over Fido or The Munk.”

“If that happens I’ll just improvise, and get what I want from those two anyway. Trust me. This is what I do.”

I immediately relaxed. I’d never known Judy’s confidence to be misplaced. And ultimately, she was a more powerful secret weapon than any alien gizmo. Still, something was bugging me as we arrived at the Four Seasons. Something connected to … Judy herself? But with all of the adrenaline and sleep deprivation, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

Fido was staying on the hotel’s fifty-first floor. His fabulous suite had its own small library, where an assistant stuck us while his earlier meeting wrapped up.

“Is it hot in here?” Manda asked, shifting uncomfortably moments after we were seated.

“I’m actually kind of cold,” I said.

Manda shifted some more, only her shifting was more like writhing, then her hands flew up to her throat, and she yanked like mad, and hurled her necklace to the floor. “
Oh my God
. It’s like it was on fire.” With that, the disguised stereopticon started glowing—white hot, then blue hot—then it burst into flames, and vanished.

We all stared at the scorched little patch of carpet that it left behind. “Kill switch,” we said in unison.

An instant later the library door opened and the assistant stuck her head in. “The senator will see you now.”

As we all rose, I figured out what had been nagging at me, and immediately started frisking myself for the ZZ Top key chain that the Guardian had given me. I found it in my right front pocket, and jammed it into Judy’s hand, saying
“You
need
to take this.” Now that Paulie was on to me, it was only a matter of time before he started picking off my allies. If he’d surveyed the stereopticon’s immediate surroundings before hitting the kill switch, he might have marked Judy as a potential enemy. And I couldn’t take the risk of him snatching her.

“Nick, get serious,” Manda said when she figured out what I was doing. “You can’t be without a Foiler—we need you on Earth.”

“So long as Judy has one of them, I’m happy,” I said.

“Judy Sherman, greetings,” Fido boomed from the suite. Judy pocketed my Foiler with a confused look and walked in. As we followed her, Manda shoved her own Foiler into my outer jacket pocket.

Fido’s suite was much bigger than it needed to be for a bunch of small meetings with lobbyists and donors. But it was just the right size to project the power of his office, and the wealth of his campaign (which had financed this fancy trip). The folks from his prior meeting lingered to say hi to us, and they were a familiar bunch—executives from one of the major global music labels.

The guy that I knew best was Del McCann, who’d joined the label’s public policy group a bit more than a year before. Prior to that, he’d been a Judiciary Committee staffer for ages. Back then, he was the music industry’s go- to guy on the committee—always tweaking bills in ways that favored us, pushing for hearings that promoted our viewpoint, or sounding the alarm when something was brewing that we’d want to fight. Committee staffers are extravagantly powerful, in that they have de facto final say on the text of most of the country’s laws. But they’re also anonymous, overworked, and underpaid. This makes them incredibly
vulnerable to manipulation by way of cosseting, flattery, and the prospects of future payback during the staffer’s post-government career. And nobody is better at working this system than Judy.