The Immortal (4 page)

"The water is in the eighties, for godsakes."

"Don't swear," she said.

"What?"

"I said, don't swear. A girl your age should watch her mouth."

I snorted. "A girl your age should watch her liver."

Silk giggled. If it had been her first drink she would have been annoyed. "You don't like me much, do you, Josie?"

I shrugged. "What's there to like?"

Silk put her feet upon a nearby chair. "I don't know. I'm not a bad person. I'm pretty. I'm talented. I make your father happy."

"You don't bring him happiness. You bring him distraction."

"In this world the two are synonymous."

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I sat beside her. "In
your
world the two are synonymous. My father has talent; you have schemes. You like my father for what he has, what he can do for you. Well, I have to warn you, in Hollywood sleeping with a writer is no way to break into the movies. The writer is way down on the totem pole, below the director, the producer, the studio execs* and the stars. You'll never be a star, Silk. You can't fool an entire audience. You'll never be my father's wife. You may be able to fool him for the time being, but he's smart. He has nothing in common with you:"

Silk blinked at me, dazed, then belched into her drink before moving the glass to her lips. "You sound pretty sure of yourself for a bitchy little snot," she muttered.

I grabbed her drinking arm before her mouth could touch the booze. I held it hard for a moment, wanting to shake the drink onto her clothes. Silk stared at me, momentarily helpless. I saw then how pathetic her life was, living this fantasy that was so deeply entrenched that she actually rehearsed her Oscar acceptance speech each night before she went to bed. I had heard her reciting it through the wall. I let go of her arm, suddenly ashamed of myself.

"I'm sorry," I said. "We're on vacation. I shouldn't be chewing you out at a time like this."

"I heard you almost drowned," Silk said abruptly as it were pertinent to our discussion.

I got to my feet. Helen had betrayed my confidence. "I didn't 'almost' drown. I just faked it so that a handsome boy could come rescue me."

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Silk nodded her approval. "I'll have to try that someday. When I learn to swim."

I found my father on the terrace off his room with his humming laptop on a table in front of him. He sat overlooking the sea. He turned to me as I approached. His door had been unlocked and I entered without knocking. The wind had risen since we arrived and was now churning the gray waves. The western sky was a gray and weary orange. I had missed the sunset by half an hour. What light remained silhouetted the island of Delos, changing it to a shadow realm out at sea. My father gestured to the chair beside him, and I sat down.

"I ran into Silk in the lounge," I said.

"How is she?" he asked.

"Feeling no pain."

He waved his hand. "She's on vacation. Let her enjoy."

"All right." I paused. "You're on vacation, too. Why don't you enjoy? You don't have to write the first day you get here." He appeared troubled at my remark. I reached over and touched his leg. "It will flow again. You'll see."

He watched the waves reflectively. "I wonder. When the stories are there, you don't know where they come from. When they stop, you don't know where they've gone. It's as if a story exists only in the moment—if you don't quickly write it down or show it to someone else, it vanishes." He sighed.

"Sometimes, Josie, I feel as if I've moved out of that moment. Like I'm living in the past, a few seconds
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behind the times, in the shadow of them. Or else in the future, a few months from now, when I think things will be better." He shrugged again. "Whatever, I'm stuck and I don't know what to do."

"Tell me your story from the beginning," I said. "I know you've told me parts of it before, but tell me it all now."

He was reluctant. "There's nothing more shameful than telling people that you're working on a screenplay, and then having it discovered that you've worked out little more than the opening credits."

"I know that."

He smiled affectionately. "I know you know that. That's why you're the one I can talk to. All right, you know the name—
Last Contact.
It's a science-fiction thriller. It takes place five hundred years in the future. Mankind has expanded out across this portion of the galaxy and is living on hundreds of planets circling dozens of stars. They are at war with an alien race. They have been at war for two hundred years. The aliens are humanoid—I know that much—but they don't look like us. The Earth has long been destroyed when we enter the story."

"Excuse me, Dad," I interrupted. "Why are you so sure the Earth has already been destroyed?"

He shrugged. "When the story first started coming to me, I knew the Earth was finished. It was just one of those things I knew in my gut. That fact makes the war with the aliens especially bitter. There is no possibility of compromise. The aliens must be destroyed, or else mankind will be. Unfortunately, humanity is losing

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the war. This is the setting when we meet our main character.

"His name is David Herrick. He's an ace pilot for the System—the name I have given to the collection of human-inhabited planets. Much of the fighting in this war is carried out in small one-man spaceships. I am going on the theory that in the future our offensive weapons will be stronger than our defensive abilities.

To give an example: I don't think we'll be able to 'raise shields' against the weapons that will be developed. I believe a small vehicle will be able to deliver almost as much damage to a planet as a larger one, and there will be little protection against attack. Therefore, I have thousands of one-man fighters up against the aliens rather than a few huge starships. Do you follow?"

"Yes," I said. "It's logical. Go on."

"David Herrick is one of the best pilots the System has. Although young—in his early thirties—he's been on many successful raids against the aliens. He is cunning, resourceful, and brave—all the best qualities you'd want in a hero. But one thing about these pilots—they are all marked men. Inevitably they will—if they continue to be pilots—be killed. The System trains thousands of them, and thousands of them die each year. David has lived longer than most.

"The movie starts with David being called in by his superiors. The System has captured, for the first time, an alien ship. Better than that, they have captured the two aliens who were commanding the vehicle.

Through an intensive process of torture and brain-

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washing, they have broken one of the aliens—the female. The other one died in captivity. From the alien female, they have learned where the alien home planet is located. The world is heavily guarded, of course, but the military intelligence of the System believes that they can use the alien ship, and the alien herself, to sneak into the alien solar system, set a bomb on the home world, and escape. They feel that if they can destroy the alien home world, they will break the backbone of the enemy, and the war will be over.

"The System has chosen David to lead this expedition. It is extremely dangerous. The chance that he will be found out before he can reach the home world of the aliens is high. There is even a possibility he will be captured and tortured. But David doesn't think it's likely. He'd die before he'd allow himself to be taken prisoner. In many ways David is well suited for the mission. You see, Josie, he has recently learned his wife is leaving him for another man.

"David's wife is named Jessica. We meet her in a series of flashbacks as the movie progresses. At first the flashbacks are pleasant. We see David and Jessica going for long walks along wine-colored canals, beneath brilliant starry skies. But then we see how their marriage suffers under the strain of David's career. Each time David leaves on a mission, Jessica has to accept the fact he may not return. Jessica knows it is only a matter of time before he is killed. So her love is intense, but also painful.

"But at the start we don't know all this. We only know that David is eager to go on the mission, that he
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hates the aliens with a passion, and that he doesn't seem to give a damn about anything other than killing them. David's superiors take him to learn how to handle the alien ship. They also introduce him to the female they have captured. Her name is Vani. She is not pleasant to look at. She is hairless, her skull protrudes in a number of colored lobes, and she has hands that are more like talons than fingers. At the same time she has definite female characteristics. Her voice, in particular, is soothing. David hates her the moment he meets her. He anticipates using her against her own people.

"Vani has an implant in her brain that can make her experience pain in varying degrees. That is how David will control her. For example, say they come to a checkpoint while entering the alien solar system.

He will need Vani to say the right things to gain him entrance. She will do exactly what he wishes without him hardly having to turn the dial on the control connected to the pain implant because she has been totally devastated by the torture she has gone through. Even though David despises her, he also sees her as a pathetic creature.

"The two take off toward the alien home world. David has aboard his ship a bomb the size of a basketball, but one that is filled with antimatter— capable of devastating a whole planet. The alien home world is far away. David has to circumvent the entire local region of the galaxy to get to it. The ship is capable of ultra light speed, but still the journey takes many months. Both of them sleep away most of the
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time in hibernaculums. During this time David dreams of his wife, and we see in detail how his relationship fell apart.

"When they awake they are near their goal. But they have to go through numerous checkpoints to get to the alien solar system. Here I have a couple of action sequences. We see Vani aiding David past one particular security check, only to have the aliens get suspicious. In the end David has to destroy them, which adds pressure to his mission. He is not sure if he has already blown his cover. Yet he presses forward.

"During this time, though, he gets to know Vani, and now has trouble hating her. She is pleasant, nicer than most human beings, and he talks freely with her about his troubles with his wife. She listens well. He discovers that the man the System tortured to death, the one who was with her when she was captured, was her husband. He feels bad about that but then decides it is war. He doesn't empathize with her so much that he forgets that Vani's people were the ones who destroyed the Earth. Vani does not deny this fact either.

"But there are things Vani is incapable of discussing. She will go to speak them, and a wave of pain will overcome her. It is obvious that during her torture she was conditioned not to speak of certain matters.

One of these is the one-way nature of the mission David has undertaken. Yes, his is a suicide mission. He begins to figure it out anyway, even without her assistance. It makes sense. The System would want his bomb to go off the moment the ship entered the

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atmosphere of the alien home world. That way, if David and Vani got that far, there would be no possibility of failure.

"David reasons this out. He sees more of the reasons why they chose him. They must have known about his marital difficulties, he thinks. They must have figured he would be smart enough to realize that he wasn't meant to come home, and that it would be easier for a depressed man to accept a hopeless fate.

But David is not overly bitter about being used this way. He understands that the one chance to save the human race rests with him. On the other hand, he isn't happy about being on a suicide mission. He doesn't want to die—not yet. He searches the ship and finds a bomb built into one of the walls. It is the real bomb—the one with the antimatter in it* The bomb they handed him was a fake.

"David is smarter than his superiors suspected. He disarms the bomb and removes it from the wall. He adjusts it so that he, and only he, can detonate it when he wishes. About this time they are closing on the alien home world. In fact, it has become visible up ahead."

My father stopped. I waited for him to continue; I was enjoying the story, although, as I said, I had heard parts of it before. But I soon realized my father had stopped for a good reason.

"That's as far as you've gotten," I said.

He nods. "Yeah. Pathetic, isn't it?"

"Not at all. You have me captivated."

"Thank you. I know you are not just telling me that.

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I like the beginning of the story as well. The problem is, if you captivate the audience, you've got to give them their money's worth before you let them go. I have all the pieces of a great science-fiction epic, yet I don't know what my story's about."

"It's about the war, the struggle for survival, between the aliens and the humans."

He shook his head. "You're smarter than that. For it to work it has to have an underlying theme. I have no theme. I have no clear path of action. I don't know what David will do when he gets to the home world. I don't know what Vani will do. I don't understand the aliens at all. I don't know why they destroyed the Earth, except that it was the single act that started the war, and that is the one act I know I can't change. Really, I don't even know why David's wife left him. I feel her, Josie, I do. She was devoted to him."

I asked delicately. "Is she Mom?"

He shrugged. "She lives on a planet far away, far in the future. I suppose if you believe in reincarnation she could be your mother."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know," he said softly. We sat and stared at the waves. The orange light on the horizon turned gray.

Out at sea, Delos faded to black. The wind continued to gain strength. "Do you have any ideas?" my dad finally asked.