Steel Beach (11 page)

I remembered leaving Callie’s ranch. I recalled wandering for a while, taking endless downscalators until there were no more; I had reached the bottom level. That struck me as entirely too metaphorical, so I took an infinite number of upscalators and found my way to the Blind Pig. I don’t recall what I was thinking all those hours, but in retrospect, it couldn’t have been pretty.

You might say the next thing I recall is waking up, or coming to, but that wouldn’t be strictly accurate. It wouldn’t convey the nature of the experience. It felt more like I reconstructed myself from far-flung bits—no, that implies some effort on my part. The bits reconstructed themselves, and I became self-aware in quantum stages. There was no dividing line, but eventually I knew I was in a back room of The Pig. This was considerable progress, and here my own will took over and I looked around to learn more about my surroundings. I was facing downward, so that’s where I first turned my attention. What I saw there was a woman’s face.

“We’ll never solve the problem of the head shot until an entirely new technology comes along,” she said. I had no idea what this meant. Her hair was spread out on a pillow. There were outspread hands on each side of her face. There was something odd about her eyes, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I suppose I was in a literal frame of mind, because having thought that, I touched one of her eyeballs with the tip of my finger. It didn’t seem to bother her much. She blinked, and I took my finger away.

There
was an important discovery: when I touched her eye, one of the hands had moved. Putting these data together, I concluded that the hands bracketing her face were my hands. I wiggled a finger, testing this hypothesis. One of the fingers down there wiggled. Not the one I had intended, but how much exactitude could I expect? I smiled, proud of myself.

“You can encase the brain in metal,” she said. “Put a blood bag on the anti-camera side of the head, fire a bullet from the camera’s pee-oh-vee. And
ka-chow
! The bullet goes whanging off the metal cover,
ka-blooey
, the blood bag explodes, and if you’re lucky it
looks
like the bullet went
through
the head and spread tomato sauce all over the wall in back of the guy.”

I felt large.

Had I taken large pills? I couldn’t remember, but I must have. Normally I don’t, as they aren’t really much of a thrill, unless you get your kicks by imagining yourself to be the size of an interplanetary liner. But you can mix them with other drugs and get interesting effects. I must have done that.

“You can make it look even more real by putting teeny tiny charges in back of the eyeballs. When the bullet hits, the charges go off, and the eyeballs are blown out
toward
the camera, see? Along with a nice blood haze, which is a plus in masking whatever violations of realism are going on behind it.”

Something was rubbing against my ears. I turned my head about as quickly as they rotate the big scope out in Copernicus, and saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier pigeon that my own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded. The first was probably hers, too.

“But that damn steel case. Crimony! I can’t tell you what a—you should pardon the expression—headache that thing can be. Especially when nine out of ten directors will
insist
the head shot has to be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead full of Max Factor #3 to
guarantee
a juicy wound, you anodize the braincase in black so—you
hope
—it’ll look like a hole in the head when the skin’s ripped away, and what happens? The damn bullet rips through everything, and there it is in the dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at the bottom of the hole. The director chews you out, and it’s Retake City.”

Was I aboard a ship? That might account for the rocking motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the bar had been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily, it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I decided I still needed more data. Feeling adventurous, I looked down between myself and the woman’s body.

For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then I couldn’t see them any more. Then I could again. Where were her legs? I couldn’t see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were tickling my ears, her legs must be those things against my chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.

“I don’t want to do this,” I told her.

She kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never missed a syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably mine. I held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and
presto
! The pants did fit. I stumbled through a curtain and into the main room of The Pig.

It was maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant sensation, though at one point I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather stool.

“Bartender,” I said, “I’ll have another of the same.”

The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for a famous clandestine news source. He probably had another name, but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat on the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.

“Hold the heavy stuff this time, okay?” she said. I saw that it was Cricket. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I shrugged, then nodded to Deep Throat’s enquiring look. His customers’ state of sobriety is not his concern. If you can sit at the bar—and pay—he’ll serve you.

“How you doing, Hildy?” Cricket asked.

“Never better,” I said, and watched my drink being prepared. Cricket shut up for the time being. I knew there were more questions to come. What are friends for?

The drink arrived, in one of the Pig’s hologlasses. It’s probably the only bar in Luna that still uses them. They date back to the midtwenty-first century, and they’re rather charming. A chip in the thick glass bottom projects a holo picture just above the surface of the drink. I’ve seen them with rolling dolphins, windsurfers, a tiny water polo team complete with the sound of a cheering crowd, and Captain Ahab harpooning the Great White Whale. But the most popular glass at The Pig is the nuclear explosion at Bikini Atoll, in keeping with the way Deep Throat mixes the drinks. I watched it for a while. It starts with a very bright light, evolves into an exquisitely detailed orange and black mushroom cloud that expands until it is six inches high, then blows away. Then it blows up again. The cycle takes about a minute.

I was watching the tiny battleships in the lagoon when I realized I’d seen the show about a dozen times already, and that my chin was resting on the bar. To enhance the view, I suppose. I sat up straight, a little embarrassed. I glanced at Cricket, but she was making a great show of producing little moist rings with the bottom of her glass. I wiped my brow, and swiveled on my stool to look at the rest of the room.

“The usual motley crew,” Cricket said.

“The motliest,” I agreed. “In fact, the word ‘motley’ might have been coined simply to describe this scene.”

“Maybe we should retire the word. Give it a place of honor in the etymological hall of fame, like Olympic champions’ jerseys.”

“Put it right next to motherhood, love, happiness…  words like that.”

“On that note, I’ll buy you another drink.”

I hadn’t finished the first, but who was counting?

There have always been unwritten rules in journalism, even at the level on which I practice it. Often it is only the fear of a libel suit that stays us from printing a particularly scurrilous story. On Luna the laws are pretty strict on that subject. If you defame someone, you’d better have sources willing to testify before the CC. But more often you hold back on printing something everyone knows for a subtler reason. There is a symbiotic relationship between us and the people we cover. Some would say parasitic, but they don’t understand how hungry for publicity a politician or celebrity can be. If we stick to the rules concerning “off the record” statements, things told us on “deep background,” and so forth, everybody benefits. I get sources who know I won’t betray them, and the subject of my stories gets the public exposure he craves.

Don’t look for the Blind Pig Bar And Grill in your phone memory. Don’t expect to find it by wandering the halls of your neighborhood mall. If you should somehow discover its location, don’t expect to be let in unless you know a regular who can vouch for you. All I’ll say about it is that it’s within walking distance of three major movie production studios, and is reached through a door with a totally misleading sign on it.

The Blind Pig is the place where journalists and movie people can mix without watching their mouths. Like its political counterpart over by City Hall, the Huey P. Long Memorial Gerrymandering Society, you can let your hair down without fear of reading your words in the padloids the next morning—at least, not for attribution. It’s the place where gossip, slander, rumor, and character assassination are given free rein, where the biggest stars can mix with the lowliest stagehands and the slimiest reporters and not have to watch their tongues. I once saw a grip punch a ten-million-per-picture celebrity in the nose, right there in the Pig. The two fought it out until they were exhausted, went back to the set, and behaved as if nothing had happened. That same punch, thrown in the studio, would have landed the grip on the pavement in microseconds. But if the star had exercised his clout for something that happened in the Pig, and Deep Throat heard about it, the star would not have been welcome again. There’s not many places people like that can go and socialize without being bothered. Deep Throat seldom has to banish anyone.

A reporter once broke confidence with a producer, printed a story told to him in the Pig. He never returned, and he’s not a reporter anymore. It’s hard to cover the entertainment beat without access to the Pig.

Places like the Pig have existed since Edison invented Hollywood. The ambiance is dependent on what is shooting that day. Just then there were three popular genres, two rising and one on its way out, and all three were represented around the room. There were warriors from Samurai Japan, taking a break from
The Shogun Attacks
, currently lensing at Sentry/Sensational Studios. A contingent of people in old-fashioned spacesuits were employed at North Lunar Filmwerks, where I’d heard
Return Of The Alphans
was behind schedule and over budget and facing an uncertain reception, as the box office for Asteroid Miner/Space Creature films had turned soft in recent months. And a bunch in bandannas, cowboy hats and dirty jeans had to be extras from
The Gunslinger V
. Westerns were in the middle of their fourth period of filmic popularity, two of them coming in my own lifetime.
TG,V
, as it was known to the trade, had been doing location work not far from my cabin in West Texas.

In addition, there were the usual scattering of costumes from other eras, and quite a number of surgically altered gnomes, fairies, trolls, and so forth, working in low-budget fantasy and children’s shorts. There was a group of five centaurs from a long-running sci-fi series that should have been axed a dozen Roman numerals ago.

“Why don’t you just move the brain?” I heard Cricket say. “Put it somewhere else, like the stomach?”

“Oh, brother. Sure, why not? It’s been done, of course, but it’s not worth the trouble. Nerve tissue is the hardest to manipulate, and the brain? Forget it. There’s twelve pairs of cranial nerves you’ve got to extend through the neck and down to the abdomen, for one thing. Then you have to re-train the gagman—a couple of days, usually—so the time lag doesn’t show. And you don’t think that matters? Audiences these days, they’ve seen it all, they’re sophisticated. They want
realism
. We can make a fake brain easy enough and stuff it into the gagman’s skull in place of the one we re-located, but audiences will spot the fact that the real brain’s not where it’s supposed to be.”

I turned on my stool and saw my new friend was sitting on the other side of Cricket, still holding forth about her head shots.

“Why not just use manikins?” Cricket asked, showing she hadn’t spent much time on the entertainment beat. “Wouldn’t they be cheaper than real actors?”

“Sure. A hell of a lot cheaper. Maybe you’ve never heard of the Job Security Act, or unions.”

“Oh.”

“Damn right. Until a stunt performer dies, we can’t replace him with a machine. It’s the law. And they die, all right—even with your brain in a steel case, it’s a risky profession—but we don’t lose more than two or three a year. And there’s
thousands
of them. Plus, they get better at surviving the longer they work, so there’s a law of diminishing returns. I can’t win.” She swiveled, leaned her elbows on the bar, looked out at the tables and sneered.

“Look at them. You can always spot gagmen. Look for the ones with the vacant faces, like they’re wondering where they are. They pick up a piece of shrapnel in the head; we cut away a little brain tissue and replace it with virgin cortex, and they forget a little. Start getting a little vague about things. Go home and can’t remember the names of the kids. Back to work the next day, giving me more headaches. Some of ’em have very little left of their original brains, and they’d have to look at their personnel file to tell you where they went to school.

“And centaurs? I could build you a robot centaur in two days, you couldn’t tell it from the real thing. But don’t tell the Exotics Guild. No, I get to sign ’em to a five-year contract, surgically convert ’em at great cost to the FX budget, then put ’em through
three months
of kinesthetic rehab until they can walk without falling on their faces. And what do I get? A stumblebum who can’t remember his lines or where the camera is, who can’t walk through a scene
muttering
, for chrissake, without five rehearsals. And at the end of five years, I get to pay to convert ’em
back
.” She reached around and got her drink, which was tall and had little tadpole-like creatures swimming in it. She took a long pull on it, licked her lips. “I tell you, it’s a wonder we get any pictures made at all.”