Quozl (31 page)

What held his attention were the Quozl movements, their attire, their attitudes, and the rhythms of their speech. It shifted unpredictably from accurate observation to pure invention. There was no avoiding the obvious: while much of the show was fiction, it was constructed on a foundation of knowledge.

That did not include the way the Quozl interacted with each other or their young human companions. There was enough actual physical contact, touching and holding and hugging, to precipitate a war among real Quozl. The concept of individual Sama space apparently did not translate well to children's tv.

Mercifully it ended, with children and Quozl happy and content and singing at the tops of their lungs. As they danced and sang over the closing credits, Chad watched the names and titles go whizzing by at incredible speed. Many of them were oriental. But despite their unfamiliarity and the velocity at which they flashed across the screen, one name stood out clearly in tandem with a title.

Mindy Mariann Collins

Story Editor

He sat there for a long time, until a clutch of jut-jawed, half-naked heroes and heroines wielding lasers and other assorted weapons had disposed of half a dozen similarly clad evildoers, the latter distinguishable from the good guys and gals only by the hue of their armor and the fact that their eyes were devoid of pupils. A real human being appeared on the screen and began to talk about tide-pools. The shock was sufficient to jolt Chad back to real time. He picked up the remote and switched off the box.

His sister. The entire improbable business had nothing to do with the long-departed High-red-Chanter and his mate. It was his sister. This was how she dealt with the trust of Runs-red-Talking and the colony. This was how she kept the great secret—by splashing it all over the airwaves every Saturday morning, indoctrinating the youth of America in the ways of the Quozl. Everything Runs-red-Talking had told her, everything she'd been able to glean from her brother's previous four years of contact, all the long conversations she'd held with members of different surface study teams, was all there on the screen rendered in cheerful pastels for anyone to see and absorb.

No wonder she'd done so much sketching.

He knew she'd been making a living writing for television, but she always named a company, never a show, and he'd never bothered to inquire deeply, being too wrapped up in his own studies. He regretted his lack of familial curiosity even as he wondered how long this had been going on. Probably the show was produced right here in L.A., though there was the matter of all those oriental names. Perhaps actual production took place in Japan, or Taiwan. It was time to find out.

His first thought was to call the local network affiliate which showed the program, until he remembered that it was Saturday. Business offices would be closed. He'd have to wait until Monday morning. There was an optional one
P.M.
seminar but that could wait. Everything could wait.

For lack of anything better to do he dressed himself, wondering how his sister was capable of such complete betrayal. Revealing the secret to a friend or two he could understand, but to put the entire colony on television? Beyond belief!

Too late to do anything about it now. The genie was out of the bottle. She'd delivered up the Quozl for more than thirty pieces of silver, much more.

Was it all the result of artistic frustration? He could remember Mindy yelling aloud when unable to compose the right sentence, or when she couldn't think of the proper word, or when a page didn't read back right. Could recall her endless efforts to finish a novel. All those years of struggling to make it as a writer, of humiliating visits to their parents to ask for still another loan whereupon her mother would sigh and come up with another few dollars, another pitiable check, insisting quietly and unconvincingly that this would be absolutely, positively, the last time they could help her out. The rejections coming in the mail, one close upon the posting of the next.

She'd sold a couple of short stories to magazines that paid in copies and criticism, two or three magazine articles for three-figure paybacks, and one lamentable concept for a slasher film that never got beyond the talking stage. Yet she struggled on. To her mother she showed perseverance, to her father unremitting stubbornness.

Then the big breakthrough which he heard about only casually. A writing job with some big production company. No movies, just television, but nice, steady, well-paying work. If Judas were alive today, Chad thought grimly, would he have a piece of the ancillary rights to the story of the crucifixion?

Story editor. He wasn't sure what it meant but it sounded impressive. A credit all to her own, that lasted a few nanoseconds longer than most of the others.

Come to think of it, she had said something during a holiday dinner about writing specifically for children's television. Since she hadn't elaborated he hadn't inquired. To him children's television meant
Sesame Street
and
Reading Rainbow
on PBS, not Saturday morning cartoons.

He slammed the door as he exited his apartment, wondering how he was going to restrain himself for the duration of the weekend. He considered confronting her immediately. She had a fancy house somewhere out in the west Valley. But it would be better to beard her in her lair, at the studio where she worked, where she couldn't flee as easily. Find out where she performs her perfidy, he told himself. Confront her there. He exited the building fuming. Despite the fact that he was not an especially impressive physical specimen, the pedestrians who saw his face made it a point to give him plenty of room on the sidewalk.

There was nothing else he could do, not even anyone to share his fury with. Not that it mattered anymore. Why try to conceal the Quozl's existence when everything there was to know about them was right there for anyone to see every Saturday morning at eight o'clock? The greatest secret on Earth sandwiched in between screaming ads for syrupy cereals and plastic avengers.

It was easy to find out where she worked. All he had to do was call his mother and ask. Controlling his tone while he put the question was much harder.

So it was that on Monday morning next he found himself pacing the false tile floor of the reception area in a new, slickly decorated building in Encino, when what he should have been doing was dissecting microorganisms at UCLA. As if that wasn't bad enough, they made him wait.

For years he'd had to listen to his parents brag to their friends of their daughter's success in the fiercely competitive world of television. And what about their son, the brainy one? Oh, him. He was working on his advanced degree. Still. If only they knew, Chad thought, that his sister's achievements lay in her ability to plagiarize and adapt, not in originality and invention. That her clever tales were stolen from alien storytellers and her character designs sketched from life.

The office whose confines he paced like a caged bobcat was decorated with framed animation cells taken from the company's many programs and features. Most were utterly unfamiliar to him, depicting superheroes, funny animals, and distorted children. A few, however, were taken from the
Quozltime
show and these drew his attention. The unnatural shapes, the amplified speech and cute names and other changes did not surprise him. This company was not in the business of making documentary films.

The magazines arrayed on the coffee tables were alien to him:
Variety, The Reporter, American Cinema, Animato
. As he paced the room people came and went, sometimes dropping off packages at the receptionist's window, other times making pickups, occasionally vanishing into unknown regions through a single back door. None of them wore a suit or tie.

After a while the receptionist glanced out at him and said, “You can go back now, Mr. Collins. Straight down the main corridor to the end, turn right, last door overlooking the courtyard.”

He hesitated at the doorway. “What number is her office?”

She smiled at him. “There's no number. Her name's on the door.”

Her name is on the door, he thought. Why not? Wasn't she the story editor? She did more editing than anyone imagined, he reflected as he strode past tiny rooms overflowing with piles of books, drawings, posters, sketches, and magazine cutouts, past people hunched over angled boards beneath intense little lights. Strange machines hummed and whirred and bulbs strobed unexpectedly.

Few of the doors were closed. Among them was the one with his sister's named emblazoned across it. Automatically he raised a hand to knock, then said the hell with it and walked in.

It was unexpectedly spacious, an enclosed palace compared to the cubbies he'd just passed. There was a couch, a few chairs in skeletal Danish Modern, an equally spindly desk. Framed cells hung on the walls. Not all were from the
Quozltime
show. The big glass window provided a view of a sunken courtyard lush with palm trees, philodendron, and hibiscus, a rectangular tropics circumscribed by a sea of concrete. The carpet beneath his feet was shaggy contoured white, in imitation of a dozen flayed polar bears.

The two garbage pails were empty because everything was piled on the desk. Some of the items he recognized from childhood: a favorite doll, a tired sneaker. The desk was in the shape of a large “U.” A typewriter rested on the right, a computer keyboard and terminal to the left. His sister sat in the middle, surrounded and protected by her electronic flanks. She looked up with a startled smile when he entered.

“What a surprise! You should've called so I'd known you were coming, Chad.”

“So you could've met me somewhere else?”

“Actually I'm surprised it's taken you this long.”

“I've been sort of busy,” he replied laconically. “You don't get a Ph.D. in biology by faking your lab results, and unlike certain other professions, you can't borrow the basics from other people.”

“This isn't how I wanted this to start off, but since it already has, why don't you at least sit down and make yourself comfortable?”

“I may never be comfortable again, thank you. I'd rather just stand. If I sit down I might get my strength back, and if I get my strength back I'm liable to punch something.”

“It's a wide desk. I don't think you've got that much reach. I'm not worried, Chad. You can talk about it all you want, but you're not the violent type.”

“I'm glad you're not worried. Would you be worried if I went straight to your boss and told him what you were doing?”

She smiled. “And what
am
I doing? What would you tell my boss?”

Hard to hide pure bluff. It gleamed like polished coal, with its own unmistakable inner light. He couldn't tell her boss a damn thing, of course.

“How could you do it?” was all he could finally say, staring evenly over the desk. “The Quozl,” he lowered his voice, “they trusted you. Runs-red-Talking and Blue-watches-Time and all the rest. They trusted you with everything: their history, their stories, their very existence. And you betrayed all that. For money.”

She wasn't smiling anymore. “Did I?” She picked up a pencil and began chewing on the eraser, a childhood habit she'd been unable to break. Between the typewriter and the terminal he wondered what use she had for a pencil.

“Am I supposed to argue with you?” He looked away from her. “You've given away the Quozl. You've told the whole world of their existence. All those sketches you made, all those notes you took, it was with this in mind all along, wasn't it? You were never really interested in the Quozl for their own sake, you were only intrigued by their commercial possibilities. Have they been profitable for you?”

“Not much use in denying it,” she told him evenly.

“How long? How long have you been writing about them for others?”

“Ever since that first summer. The idea of using them and their stories as the basis for a kidvid struck me the instant I saw them, but I wasn't sure what approach to take or how to write a pilot and bible. I had all winter to think about it.

“By the end of the second summer I had enough material for a proposal. I took it to my agent. She thought we might get a movie out of it. It didn't kick around very long before Barbara Hammer, who's in charge of production here, had it on her desk. She called me in and asked for three scripts. That took another winter. The show sold immediately. We're into our second season and gearing up for the third.
Quozltime's
been number one in its time slot ever since it went on the air.” There was wonderment in her voice.

“Nobody expected it to do what it's done. The spin-offs, the ancillary rights have been unreal. We've got companies,
big
corporations, bidding against each other for a slice of the action.”

“I saw some of the stuffed toys.”

“Oh, good. Nice, aren't they? Have you seen any of the McDonald's glasses yet?”

McDonald's glasses! He turned back to her, more numb now than angry. “It really doesn't mean anything to you, does it? Your betrayal, what you've done? It means nothing to you at all. You talk of money, not trust. As far as what's going to happen to the Quozl, you could care less.”

“On the contrary,” she said with unexpected passion, “I care very much. But you tell me what's going to happen to them. You're the bright kid, the one who always brought home the good grades, the one Mom and Dad always patted on the head. You tell me.”

“They're going to be overrun. They're going to be put under heavy guard and watched all the time and poked and prodded and examined. The government will quarantine them until it can make up its collective mind what to do with them. Then the xenophobes will start squawking about an invasion, and the rednecks will start loading their hunting rifles and making reservations for flights to Idaho, and the televangelists will scream about godless aliens, and …”