John Varley
Demon
PROPHECY
In the year 2024 the most important single thing which the cinema will have helped to accomplish will be that of eliminating from the face of the civilized world all armed conflict. With the use of the universal language of motion pictures the true meaning of the brotherhood of man will have been established throughout the Earth... All men are created equal.
-D. W. Griffith, 1924 (Director of "The Birth of a Nation," adapted from the novel The Klansmen)
Music will always be the voice of the silent drama. There will never be speaking pictures.
-D. W. Griffith, 1924
All right, D. W., take three ...
SHORT SUBJECTS
Stupidity got us into this mess-why can't it get us out?
-Will Rogers
COMING ATTRACTIONS
The location scout was the first into the valley.
Like most of Gaea's genetically tailored beings, the scout did not have a sex. It had no mouth and no organs of digestion. What it did have was a pair of cinemascope eyes and a magnificent spatial sense.
The scout clattered over the valley on spindly rotors, hovered, and turned slowly. It saw a rushing river beneath twenty-meter cliffs. Above the cliffs was a plateau of sufficient size, and ringing the plateau were trees more than sufficient for the needs of the approaching Crew. It felt warm contentment, like a kitten who has found a bowl of milk. This was the place.
It flew over the trees, spraying them with an attractant pheromone. That done, it made several passes over the plateau, dropping spores. It settled at the edge of the plateau, already beginning to feel tired. Its rotor withered and fell away. Walking on long, feathery legs, it circled the location, stopping every hundred paces to poke a seed into the ground with a long sharp organ growing from its belly.
With the last of its strength it made its way into the woods and died.
In twenty revs the plateau was covered with bushes a meter high. Spaced around the location were klieg trees, already twenty meters high and getting bigger at the rate of two meters per rev.
Forty-five revs after the death of the scout the advance party of carpenters, teamsters, and vintners arrived. Carpenters were hairless animals the size of grizzly bears, all alike except for their teeth, which were wildly specialized. Some had beaver incisors, capable of gnawing down a tree with a few dozen bites. Others had a single projecting tooth two meters long, notched on one edge, which could saw beams and planks from raw timber. There were carpenters with trapezoidal teeth. These could bite the end of a plank in tenons, ready for dovetailing. Others had drill-bit teeth. Twisting their heads vigorously, they could ream out a mortise.
In Gaea, a team of forty carpenters was called a union.
All the carpenters had quite human hands, except that each finger ended in a nail shaped for a different utility. The palms of the hands were as different as human fingerprints. Some were hard and horny, some were deeply grooved or pebbled, while others were smooth as a jeweler's rubbing cloth. With these hands the carpenters could plane and sand wood to a wondrous luster. The distance from the end of the thumb to the end of the little finger of each carpenter was exactly the same: fifty centimeters.
In a few revs, the platforms, soundstages, archives building, and scores of chapels had begun to take shape.
The vintners were one-purpose creatures. All they did was move onto the location and devour clusters of small white grapes. The plants that bore the fruit were not grapevines, but the fruit were, for all practical purposes, grapes. The vintners ate them all, then fell into a torpor from which they would never emerge. But in thirty revs they could be tapped for an excellent white chablis.
The teamsters were something else again. In a place where a union of carpenters was well within the norm, the teamsters stood out as weird.
Teamsters looked something like hippos, but were five times the size of elephants. They were land whales mincing along on six legs just thick enough to support them in Gaea's low gravity. Three of them arrived at the valley and started eating the plants that had grown from the scout's spores.
There were many kinds of plants. Each variety went to a different stomach. The teamsters had eleven separate sets of digestive organs.
When the field was cleared, the teamsters moved to the side and fell over, somnolent as the vintners. Their legs withered until the animals were little more than bulging bladders lined with row upon row of nipples in a bewildering variety of shapes and colors. But the teamsters retained their mouths for a little longer. They would eat the union of carpenters when construction was done.
Gaea's operations were always tidy.
Things started to really pop when the production crew began trickling in.
There were hordes of skittering little bolexes, brainlessly pointing themselves in all directions and whirring fruitlessly, too stupid to know they needed re-loading. They spotted the teamsters and began fighting for a teat like piglets after a weary sow. Their excited cries sounded like meet meet! meet!
Close behind them were the arriflexes, accompanied by producers, and behind them were the lordly panaflexes, each with its attendant executiveproducer. The production species hung back with nothing to do while their photofaunal symbiotes gorged on silver nitrate, pyroxylin, and other chemicals, each going to its proper holding bladder. All the producers looked much the same, except for their size. The execs were the largest and the only ones with a voice. From time to time, for reasons having nothing to do with communication, one of them would grunt unch, unch.
As the bolies, arries, and panas chowed down, others of the Crew filtered into the site, dodging carpenters, who were putting the finishing touches on their work with Swiss Army fingernails. There was a gaggle of twenty-meter booms, stalking through the chaos like solemn storks. Groups of grips and bestboys quickly broke up, guiding others to their work sites. Painters sucked stains and dyes from the teamsters, then spread them over the bare wood with their long perforated tails. Elephants arrived, pulling rumbling carts full of costumes, props, carpets, make-up, and portable dressing rooms. These were real Earth elephants, bred from imported stock. In Gaea's gravity, elephants did not lumber; they pranced, supple and frisky as cats.
Pandemonium was taking shape.
Humanoids, androids, homunculi, and a few genuine human beings made their penultimate entrances, signaling it would not be long before the appearance of the Director Herself.
Some of these human-based and human-derived hybrids were workers, others mere extras. Some were the shambling undead, from which even the brainless constructs seemed to recoil. A very few were stars. Luther swept in with fire in his demented eyes and took his apostles straight to their spare chapel. Brigham and his boys rode in on horses to find the Temple not yet ready for them. There were recriminations, and conniption fits. Mary Baker was there, and so was Elron. It was rumored that Billy Sunday was in the neighborhood, and perhaps even Kali. It was going to be quite a festival.
As each bolex, arriflex, and panaflex finished eating, the appropriate producer attached itself and the two moved off as one. Like the producers, the photofauns were enough alike that one could serve as model for all, except in size. The most important thing about a panaflex was the size of its single, glassy eye, and the width of its horizontal anus, which was precisely seventy millimeters.
A panaflex had only one urge: getting the shot. It would do anything to get the shot-take a ride on a copter, dangle from a boom, go over a waterfall in a barrel. Its unblinking eye ogled everything, and when it was ready, it shot film. Somewhere in its innards guncotton and camphor and other unlikely substances came together under considerable pressure to form a continuous strip of celluloid. That strip was coated with photoreactive chemicals to produce a full-color negative. The strip moved behind the panaflex's eye and was exposed in discrete frames by a muscle-and-bone pull-down and shutter mechanism Edison would have recognized.