The Mountain Cage (15 page)

Then she looked more closely at her agent’s statement.

“Alt. Rights
³
,” the statement said cryptically; the same notation was on the check. What the hell were alt. rights? She knew about foreign rights, book club rights, reprint rights of various kinds, but she had never heard of anything called alt. rights. And what was that
³
doing in there, anyway?

Not that she really cared where this unforeseen but welcome wad had come from—Leonard was supposed to worry about that—but it was probably in her interest to find out.

Darcy placed a call to Leonard McDermott Lowell and Associates as soon as she got home; his assistant said that he would call her later. Darcy suspected that her agent was occupied with negotiations involving one of his hot young writers, probably Desirée Thorne, that Danielle Steel clone who had just had her latest piece of banal and basic prose picked up by the Literary Guild as a Main Selection. Leonard would be too busy with Desirée’s business to call her any time soon.

To her surprise, Leonard got back to her in less than five minutes.

“How about that check?” he said jovially. “What about them apples? Hope that cheers you up. Anyway, now I can tell you that Canyon turned down your
Terror Is My Middle Name
proposal two days ago.”

“Uh, Leonard,” Darcy murmured, “where did that check come from? Why didn’t you tell me it was on the way sooner? You could have saved me a lot of worry.”

“I would have told you,” he said, “if I was sure I’d get the money. Frankly, I wasn’t. It’s for alternate rights, you see, and that’s a whole new ball game.”

Alternate rights? What the hell were alternate rights? But then that was one reason she had an agent, so she wouldn’t have to know things like that. A clause covering alternate rights and granting them to her agent was probably in her original book contract somewhere among the twenty-five pages of tiny type. She had stopped reading her contracts, whose prose was either indecipherable or ominous, a while ago. All the clauses and riders seemed to boil down to one assertion: Anything bad that happens to you as a result of signing this contract is your fault and not our responsibility, even if we screw up.

“What are alternate rights?” Darcy asked.

“I’ll give you the short version of the story,” Leonard replied, “but keep it under your hat, at least until it breaks in
Publishers Weekly
and the
Times
, which should be any day now.” He lowered his voice. “See, a couple of months ago, this query came in on my e-mail. Never heard of this editor, or the publisher, but she wanted to publish
The Silent Shriek.
Well, I checked around with some other agents, and they were getting the same kinds of queries. Couldn’t track down any of these publishers and editors, even though they all had New York addresses. So, on a lark, I finally e-mailed back to this mysterious editor and told her to make me an offer. She did, along with a contract that I printed out. One page, that’s how long the contract was.”

“One page?” Darcy said. “Why didn’t she mail it to you?”

“I asked her that myself. She insisted it was valid, that if I e-mailed back my approval, money would be on the way. I figured it had to be a joke, somebody fooling around online. I mean, who’s going to offer forty-four thousand, including my percentage, to do a hardcover of a novel that took a bath as a paperback original? Not that your book wasn’t wonderful, but this deal just didn’t make sense. And who’s going to send the best goddamned contract I’ve ever seen? At least it’s good in terms of the writer’s interests. As far as the publisher goes, they’re practically giving everything away.”

“I still don’t see—” Darcy began.

“Well, I let her know we had a deal,” her agent interrupted. “My reply was pretty sarcastic, just so this joker would know I wasn’t fooled. And then, last week, a week after I said okay, the money came—twenty-two thousand for the first part of the advance.”

“A week?” Darcy could hardly believe her ears. “A publisher sent you a check in a week?” That seemed as unbelievable as the size of the advance.

“They didn’t actually
send
it,” Leonard said. “The money showed up in my account electronically. My bank checked and double-checked, and there’s no question the money was drawn on an account in another New York bank and deposited in mine, so my bank will honor it. They’re just not sure exactly how it got into the other bank. Anyway, by then a few other agents had some idea of what this was all about. Alternate rights—that’s what we’d sold. These editors in some parallel universe had somehow managed to contact this one to buy books published here. Maybe I should say parallel universes, because it looks like there’s more than one. I compared the contract I got with one Scott Fontaney received for a client of his, and then we both talked to Mary Thalberg. It was a popular-science writer client of hers who figured out that we had to be dealing with parallel worlds.”

Leonard sighed and fell silent. Darcy had to believe him; Leonard’s skepticism about most matters was deeply rooted in cynicism and pessimism, essential qualities for any literary agent. He was not a man to fall prey to wild delusions.

“Parallel worlds?” she said at last. “But how?”

“It’s the goddamn electronic highway, or whatever you want to call it. That’s this science writer’s explanation, and a few physicists are backing him up. The computer networks and everything connected to them are so complicated now that messages between different universes are leaking into the system. At least some messages are. Right now, it just seems to be e-mail from editors wanting to buy books, their contracts, and their dough coming through electronic transfers into banks here. Don’t ask me why we haven’t heard from anybody else.”

“My God,” Darcy murmured.

“And that number 3 on your check and statement is a way of keeping things straight. Half the agents in New York got together for a powwow a couple of days ago, and decided that none of us was going to question a good thing. Mary Thalberg and her client worked out a rough system for us to use, based on differences in the language of each contract, names of publishing firms, and what little we’ve learned from editors about their particular parallel worlds so we can keep it straight which contract came from which universe. I mean, we wouldn’t want to sell alternate rights in Continuum 5 to a book that’s already contracted for there.”

“No, you certainly wouldn’t,” Darcy said.

Leonard went on to discuss what an inside source had told him about a meeting several New York banking executives had held with some prominent physicists hastily called in as consultants. The bankers had talked about prohibiting deposits from alternate worlds, but with the economy the way it was, they had a need for new cash flow. A physicist named Sterling Blake had apparently given the bankers the rationalization they needed by assuring them, with appropriate equations, that all alternate universes were only aspects of one reality. When the bankers looked at it that way, a deposit from a publisher in Parallel World 2 was just as sound as one from a European publisher. Actually, deposits from alternate worlds were even easier to handle, since they involved no currency conversions; everyone, so far, was dealing in dollars. The physicist’s explanation might seem drawn as much from theology as from physics, but the banks would take the leap of faith. They could not ignore the situation, and might as well use it; profit was profit, whatever the source. If enough business started coming in from other universes—really
important
business, not just book deals—a lot of deficits could be redeemed.

“Who knows?” Leonard finished. “Get enough alternate moola rolling in, and the government might collect enough in taxes to make a dent in the national debt. Doesn’t look like the IRS is going to make a stink—in fact, I heard that this physicist Blake was called down to Washington last night, right after the meeting with the bankers.”

“Wait a minute.” Darcy frowned. “I can sort of understand how money can go back and forth, but how do these alternate worlds or whatever get copies of our books?”

“You’ve got a modem, right? You’re involved in that online workshop and bitch session or whatever the hell it is, aren’t you? Mary’s client has a theory that the texts must be leaking into these parallel worlds that way.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Darcy said.

“As for your
Terror Is My Middle Name
proposal, we could try Diadem Books. They’re starting a new horror line.”

“I’ll think about it,” Darcy said. “Alternate rights. Well, if I’m getting forty grand, Desiree Thorne ought to be worth a fortune in alternate rights.”

“Probably,” Leonard said cheerfully. “I expect to get an offer for her novels before long.”

As it happened, Darcy’s agent was wrong about that.

“You’ll never believe it,” Jane Rubell said over the phone. “Sixty thousand smackers for
Plumbing the Depths.
And my agent thinks he’ll get an offer for
Flushing Out Death,
too.”

“I can believe it,” Darcy said. Jane Rubell, another freelance writer who lived in an adjoining town, was her closest friend. They often drove into New York together to see editors, pooling their meager resources by sharing a room in a run-down hotel and splitting other expenses. At other times, they got together with their colleague Arlen Williams to complain and exchange horror stories about publishers. Jane had written a series of paperback mysteries featuring a plumber who was also a sleuth, but her books had not done well, either because most plumbers didn’t read or because most mystery readers weren’t enthralled by plumbing. Darcy was a trifle annoyed that Jane had landed a larger advance for hardcover alternate fights to her first mystery than Darcy had for The Silent Shriek, but was still happy for her friend.

“I was talking to Arlen the other day,” Jane went on, “and he told me he got fifty grand for a hardcover of
Warlords of Mimistapol.”

Fifty thousand for a book Arlen called one of his worst? Darcy could believe even that. She had been reading
Publishers Weekly
before Jane called, where a new article about alternate rights had appeared. Generous sums for insignificant books by unknown writers—that seemed to be the pattern. According to this article, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, and John Grisham had not yet received offers for alternate rights to their novels.

Perhaps that was why the trade publications weren’t devoting as much space to alternate rights deals as Darcy had expected. Newspapers and television, after saturating front pages and newscasts with stories about this new development, now mentioned the subject only in passing. As Carl Sagan had so tellingly put it on
Nightline,
these other continua were really only one world with variants, one world in different states. In which case, Ted Koppel had added, it made sense to accept that fact and then go about one’s business. Stranger things had happened; people had seen the Berlin Wall come down, the Soviet Union collapse, the resorts of Yugoslavia become killing grounds, and the leaders of Israel and the PLO shake hands. “Absorb the impossible and move on,” Koppel’s colleague Jeff Greenfield had blurted out then. “It’s what we always do.”

In addition to that, most Americans didn’t much care if a writer was wildly successful in another country in
this
world, let alone in another universe, if he didn’t make a big noise in the U.S. of A. A story about editors buying rights to obscure books wasn’t the kind of news to dominate the media for long, even if the editors buying the books were in other continua. The only publishing stories that really counted to the public at large were tales of mega-advances, surprise bestsellers by former nonentities, book deals involving celebrities, accounts of lurid crimes scheduled to appear in book form before becoming television docudramas, and news of movie rights being sold to Steven Spielberg.

In spite of that, Darcy was convinced that someone like Dean Koontz would eventually nail down an alternate rights deal that would dwarf any past deal in any universe. Then CNN might again devote more than fifteen seconds to the story. In the meantime, she and Jane might as well enjoy their good fortune.

“What’s the number for your rights?” Darcy asked.

“My agent’s statement says ‘Alt. Rights
⁶
’,” Jane replied. “Obviously a publisher in a different continuum is buying rights to my stuff.”

“That seems to be the pattern,” Darcy said.
“PW
claims that about fifty different universes are involved so far, and there’s no overlap—they all seem to be buying different authors. Must be a pain for all our agents to keep things straight.”

“Where lots of money is concerned, they always manage. Hey, I think we should celebrate. How about—”

The phone was clicking in Darcy’s ear. “Hold on a second. Another call’s coming in.” She put Jane on hold and heard her agent shout a greeting.

“Yo, Leonard,” Darcy replied.

“Ready for some more good news?” he said jovially.

“Sure.”

“I heard from Elysium House today.” It took a few moments for Darcy to recognize the name of her publisher in Parallel World 3. “I hope you’re sitting down,” Leonard went on. “They sold paperback rights to
The Silent Shriek.
Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Four hundred thousand dollars?” Darcy squeaked.

“And that isn’t all. They want rights to
In Terms of Terror.
They’re offering us two hundred thousand for that.”