Steel Beach (34 page)

“I love the body, Hildy,” Cricket said as I wedged myself in between them. I preened a bit as a large pink pitcher was set in front of me. These Flacks were trained well; I was about to ask for lime wedges when an arm came around me and left a crystal bowl full of them.

“Do I detect a note of wistfulness?” I said.

“You mean because they’ve retired your jersey from the great game of cocksmanship?” She seemed to consider it. “I guess not.”

I pouted, but it was for show. Frankly, the whole idea of having made love to her seemed to me by now an aberration. Not that I wouldn’t be interested again when I Changed back to male, in thirty or so years, if she happened to be female still.

“Nice job on that lovers-after-death pic out at Nirvana,” I said. I was poking through the assortment of press perks in a basket before me and trying to eat a part of my sandwich with my other hand. I found a gold commemorative medal, inscribed and numbered, that I knew I could get four hundred for at any pawnbroker in the Leystrasse, so long as I got there quick and beat every other reporter in Luna to the punch. A forlorn hope; I saw three of the damn things depart by messenger, and they wouldn’t be the first. By now the medals would be a drug on the market. The rest of the stuff was mostly junk.

“That was you?” Brenda said, leaning over to ogle Cricket.

“Cricket, Brenda. Brenda, meet Cricket, who works for some scurrilous rag or other whose initials are S.S. and who deserves an Oscar for the job she is doing covering her deep despair at having had only one opportunity to experience the glory that was me.”

“Yeah, it was sort of gory,” Cricket said, reaching across me to shake hands. “Nice to meet you.” Brenda stammered something.

“How much did that shot cost you?”

Cricket looked smug. “It was quite reasonable.”

“What do you mean?” Brenda asked. “Why did it cost you?”

We both looked at her, then at each other, then back at Brenda.

“You mean that was staged?” she said, horrified. She looked at the olive in her hand, then put it back into the bowl. “I cried when I saw it,” she said.

“Oh, stop looking like somebody just shot your puppy, damn it,” I said. “Cricket, will you explain the facts of life to her? I would, but I’m clean;
you’re
the unethical monster who violated a basic rule of journalism.”

“I will if you’ll trade places with me. I don’t think I want to watch all that go down.” She was pointing at my sandwich with a prim expression that was belied by what I could see of the remnants of
her
free lunch, which included the skeletons of three tiny birds, picked clean.

So we switched, and I got down to the serious business of eating and drinking, all the while keeping one ear cocked to the jabbering around me, on the off chance somebody had managed to get a scoop on the canonization. No one had, but I heard dozens of rumors:

“Lennon? Oh, c’mon, he was all washed up, that bullet was a good career move.”

“…  wanna know who it’s gonna be? Mickey Mouse, put your money on it.”

“How they going to handle that? He doesn’t even exist.”

“So Elvis does? There’s a cartoon revival—”

“And if they picked a cartoon, it’d be Baba Yaga.”

“Get serious. She’s not in the same
universe
as Mickey Mouse…  ”

“—says it’s Silvio. There’s nobody with one half the rep—”

“But he’s got one problem, from the Flacks’ point of view: he ain’t dead yet. Can’t get a real cult going till you’re dead.”

“C’mon, there’s no law says they have to wait, especially these days. He could go on for five hundred more years. What’ll they do, keep reaching back to the twentieth, twenty-first century and pick guys nobody remembers?”

“Everybody remembers Tori-san.”

“That’s different.”

“—notice there’s three men and only one woman. Granting they might pick somebody still alive, why not Marina?”

“Why not both of ’em? Might even get them back together. What a story. A double canonization. Think of the headlines.”

“How about Michael Jackson?”

“Who?”

It kept on and on, a speculative buzz in the background. I heard half a dozen more names proposed, increasingly unlikely to my way of thinking. The only new one I’d heard, the only one I hadn’t thought of, was Mickey, and I considered him a real possibility. You could have walked down to the Leystrasse that very day and bought a shirt with his picture on the front, and cartoons were enjoying a revival. There was no law saying a cult had to have a real object, what was being worshipped here was an image, not flesh and blood.

Actually, while there were no rules for a Flack canonization, there were guidelines that took on the force of laws. The Flacks did not create celebrities, they had no real axe to grind in this affair. They simply acknowledged pre-existing cult figures, and there were certain qualities a cult figure had to have. Everyone had their own list of these qualities, and weighted them differently. Once more I went through my own list, and considered the three most likely candidates in the light of these requirements.

First, and most obvious, the Gigastar had to have been wildly popular when alive, with a planetary reputation, with fans who literally worshipped him. So forget about anybody before the early twentieth century. That was the time of the birth of mass media. The first cult figures of that magnitude were film stars like Charlie Chaplin. He could be eliminated because he didn’t fulfill the second qualification: a cult following reaching down to the present time. His films were still watched and appreciated, but people didn’t go crazy over him. The only person from that time who might have been canonized—if a F.L.C.C.S. had existed then—was Valentino. He died young, and was enshrined in that global hall of fame that was still in its infancy when he lived. But he was completely forgotten today.

Mozart? Shakespeare? Forget it. Maybe Ludwig Van B. was the hottest thing on the Prussian pop charts in his day, but they’d never heard of him in Ulan Bator…  and where were his sides? He never cut any, that’s where. The only way of preserving his music was to write it down on paper, a lost art. Maybe Will Shakespeare would have won a carload of Tonys and been flown to the coast to adapt his stuff for the silver screen. He was still very popular—
As You Like It
was playing two shows a day at the King City Center—but he and everyone else from before about 1920 had a fatal flaw, celebrity-wise: nobody knew anything about them. There was no film, no recordings. Celebrity worship is only incidentally about the art itself. You need to do something to qualify, it needn’t be good, only evocative…  but the real thing being sold by the Flacks and their antecedents was image. You needed a real body to rend and tear in the padloids, real scandals to tsk-tsk over, and real blood and real tragedy to weep over.

That was widely held to be the third qualification for sainthood: the early and tragic death. I personally thought it could be dispensed with in some circumstances, but I won’t deny its importance. Nobody can
create
a cult. They rise spontaneously, from emotions that are genuine, even if they are managed adroitly.

For my money, the man they should be honoring today was Thomas Edison. Without his two key inventions, sound recording and motion picture film, the whole celebrity business would be bankrupt.

Mickey, John, or Silvio? Each had a drawback. With Mickey, it was that he wasn’t real. So who cares? John…  ? Maybe, but I judged his popularity wasn’t quite in that stellar realm that would appeal to the Flacks. Silvio? The big one, that he was alive. But rules are made to be broken. He certainly had the star power. There was no more popular man in the Solar System. Any reporter in Luna would sell his mother’s soul for one interview.

And then it came to me, and it was so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t seen it before, and why no one else had figured it out.

“It’s Silvio,” I told Cricket. I swear the lady’s ear tried to swivel toward me before her head did. That gal really has the nose for news.

“What did you hear?”

“Nothing. I just figured it out.”

“So what do you want, I should kiss your feet?
Tell
me, Hildy.”

Brenda was leaning over, looking at me like I was the great guru. I smiled at them, thought about making them suffer a little, but that was unworthy. I decided to share my Holmesian deductions with them.

“First interesting fact,” I said, “they didn’t announce this thing until yesterday. Why?”

“That’s easy,” Cricket snorted. “Because Momby’s elevation was the biggest flop-ola since Napoleon promised to whip some British butt at Waterloo.”

“That’s part of the reason,” I conceded. It had been before my time, but the Flacks were still smarting from that one. They’d conducted a three-month Who-Will-It-Be?-type campaign, and by the time the big day arrived The Supreme Potentate Of All Universes would have been a disappointment, much less Momby, who was a poor choice anyway. This was a bunch whose whole
raison d’être
was publicity, as an art and science. Once burned, twice wear-a-fireproof-suit; they were managing this one the right way, as a big surprise with only a day to think about it. Neither press nor public could get bored in one day.

“But they’ve kept this one completely secret. From what I’m told, the fact that Momby was going to be elevated was about as secret from us, from the press, as Silvio’s current hair style. The media simply agreed not to print it until the big day. Now think about the Flacks. Not a closemouthed bunch, except for the inner circle, the Grand Flacks and so forth. Gossip is their life blood. If twenty people knew who the new Gigastar was, one of them would have blabbed it to one of my sources or one of yours, count on it. If ten people knew I’d give you even money I could have found it out. So even less than that know who it’s gonna be. With me so far?”

“Keep talking, O silver-tongued one.”

“I’ve got it down to three possibilities. Mickey, John, Silvio. Am I wildly off-base there?”

She didn’t say yes or no, but her shrug told me her own list was pretty much like mine.

“Each has a problem. You know what they are.”

“Two out of three of them are…  well,
old
,” Brenda put in.

“Lots of reasons for that,” I said. “Look at the Four; all born on Earth. Trouble is, we’re a less violent society than the previous centuries. We don’t get enough tragic deaths. Momby’s the only superstar who’s had the grace to fix himself up with a tragic death in over a hundred years. Most everyone else hangs around until he’s a has-been. Look at Eileen Frank.”

“Look at Lars O’Malley,” Cricket contributed.

From the blank look on Brenda’s face, I could see it was like I’d guessed; she’d never heard of either of them.

“Where are they now?” she asked, unconsciously voicing the four words every celebrity fears the most.

“In the elephants’ graveyard. In a taproom in Bedrock, probably, maybe on adjacent stools. Both of them used to be as big as Silvio.” Brenda looked dubious, like I’d said something was bigger than infinity. She’d learn.

“So what’s your great leap of deduction?” Cricket asked.

I waved my hand grandly around the room.

“All this. All these trillions and trillions of television screens. If it’s Mickey or John, what’s gonna happen, some guy backstage dashes off a quick sketch of them and comes out holding it over his head? No, what happens is every one of these screens starts showing
Steamboat Willie
and
Fantasia
and every other cartoon Mickey was ever in, or…  what the hell films did John Lennon make?”

“You’re the history buff. All I know about him is
Sergeant Pepper
.”

“Well, you get the idea.”

“Maybe I’m dumb,” Cricket said, not as though she believed it.

“You’re not. Think about it.” She did, and I saw the moment when the light dawned.

“You could be right,” she said.

“No ‘could be’ about it. I’ve got half a mind to file on it right now. Walter could get out a newsbreaker before they make the big announcement.”

“So use my phone; I won’t even charge you.”

I said nothing to that. If I’d had even one source telling me it was Silvio I’d have called Walter and let him decide. The history of journalism is filled with stories of people who jumped the headline and had to eat it later.

“I guess I’m dumb,” Brenda said. “I still don’t see it.”

I didn’t comment on her first statement. She wasn’t dumb, just green, and I hadn’t seen it myself until too late. So I explained.

“Somebody has to cue up the tapes to fill all these screens. Dozens of techs, visual artists, and so forth. There’s no way they could orchestrate a thing like that and keep it down to a handful of people in the know. Most of my sources are just those kind of people, and they
always
have their hands out. Kind of money I was throwing around last night, if anybody knew,
I’d
know. So Mickey and John are out,
because
they’re dead. Silvio has the great advantage of being able to show up here in person, so those television screens can show live feeds of what’s happening on the stage.”

Brenda frowned, thinking it over. I let her, and went back to my sandwich, feeling good for more than just having figured it out. I felt good because I genuinely admired Silvio. Mickey Mouse is good, no question, but the real hero there was Walter Elias Disney and his magic-makers. John Lennon I knew nothing about; his music didn’t speak to me. I never saw what the fanatics saw in Elvis, Megan may have been good, but who cared? Momby was of his times, even the Flacks would admit, with a bellyful of liquor, that he had been a mistake for the church. Tori-san deserved to be up there with the real musical geniuses who lived before the Age of Celebrity came along to largely preclude most peoples’ chances of achieving
real
greatness. I mean, how great can you get with people like me going through your garbage looking for a story?

Of all the people alive in the Solar System today, Silvio was the only man I admired. I’m a cynic, have been for years. My childhood heroes have long since fallen by the wayside. I’m in the business of discovering warts on people, and I’ve discovered so many that the very idea of hero worship is quaint, at best. And it’s not as if Silvio doesn’t have his warts. I know them as well as every padloid reader in Luna. It’s his
art
I really admire, the hell with the personality cult. He began as a mere genius, the writer and performer of music that has often moved me to tears. He grew over the years. Three years ago, when it looked as if he was fading, he suddenly blossomed again with the most stunningly original works of his career. There was no telling where he might still go.