'Fichtig Mosay. He and I don't do the same kind of thing. This one will be intimate, and personal. Pas music, pas dancing, pas songs. It will be a whole new departure for your career.'
'But a song-and-dance man is what I am!'
She sniffed at him. 'You're a short-timer, Rafiel. You're going to get old. Listen to me. This is where you need to go. I've watched you. I'm willing to bet my reputation-'
'Your reputation!'
She ignored the interruption, '-that you're just as good an actor as you are a dancer and singer... and, just to make you understand what's involved here, you can have five points on the gross receipts, which you know you'll jamais get from Mosay.'
'Five per cent of not very much is still very little,' Rafiel said at once, grinning at her to show that he meant no hard feelings.
She nodded as though she had expected that. She opened her bag and fingered the keypad for her screen. 'May I?' she said perfunctorily, not waiting for an answer. A scroll of legal papers began to roll up the screen. 'This is the deal for the first broadcast,' she said. 'That's twenty million dollars from right here on Earth, plus another twenty million for the first-run remotes. Syndication: that's a contract with a guarantee of another forty million over a ten-year period. And all that's a minimum, Rafiel; I'd bet anything that it'll double that. And there are the contracts for the sub rights - the merchandising, the music. Add it all up, and you'll see that the guarantee comes pretty close to a hundred million dollars. What's five per cent of that, Rafiel?'
The question was rhetorical. She wasn't waiting for an answer. She was already scrolling to the next display, not giving Rafiel a chance to order her out of his condo. 'La!' she said. 'Voici!'
What they were looking at on the screen was a habitat. It was not an impressive object to the casual view. As in all pictures from space, there was no good indication of size, and the thing might have been a beverage can, floating in orbit.
'There's where our story is,' she said. 'What you see there is habitat Hakluyt. It starts with a population of twenty thousand people, with room to expand to five times that. It's a whole small town, Rafiel. The kind of town they used to have in the old days before the arcologies, you know? A place with everybody knowing everybody else, interacting, loving, hating, dreaming - and totally cut off from everyone else. It's a microcosm of humanity, right there on Hakluyt, and we're going to tell its story.'
Although Rafiel was looking at the woman's pictures, he didn't think them very interesting. As far as Rafiel could tell, Hakluyt was a perfectly ordinary habitat, a stubby cylinder with the ribs for the pion tracks circling its outer shell. What he could tell wasn't actually very much. He hadn't spent much time on habitats, only one two-week visit, once, with - with...? No, he had long since forgotten the name of the companion of that trip, and indeed everything about the trip itself except that habitats were not particularly luxurious places to spend one's time.
'How much spin does this thing have?' he asked, out of technical curiosity. 'I'm not used to dancing in light-G.'
'When it's en route pas spin at all. The gravity effect will be along the line of thrust. But you're forgetting, Rafiel,' she chided him. 'There won't be any dancing anyway. That's why this is such a breakthrough for you. This is a dramatic story, and you'll act it!'
'Hum,' said Rafiel, not pleased with this woman's continuing reminders that, in his special case, becoming older meant that it would become harder and harder for him to keep in dancer's kind of shape. 'Why do you say they're cut off from the rest of the world? Habitats are a lot easier to get to than, per esempio. Mars. There's always a stream of ships going back and forth.'
'Not to this habitat,' Hillaree told him confidently. 'You're missing the point, and that's the whole drama of our story. You see that cluster of motors on the base? Hakluyt isn't just going to stay in orbit. Hakluyt will be going all the way to the star Tau Ceti. They'll be cut off, all right. They aren't coming back to the Earth, ever.'
As soon as the woman was out of his condo, unbedded but also unrejected, or at least not finally rejected in the way that most mattered to her, Rafiel was calling his agent to complain. Fruitlessly. It was a lot too early in the morning for Jeftha to be answering her tel. He tried again when he got to the rehearsal hall, with the same 'No Incoming' icon appearing on the screen. 'Bitch,' he said to the screen, though without any real resentment - Jeftha was as good a talent agent as he had ever had - and joined the rest of the cast.
They had started without him. Charlus was drilling the chorus all over again and Victorium, with Docilia standing by, was impatiently waiting for Rafiel himself. 'Now,' he said, 'if you're quite ready to go to work? Here's where we come to a tricky kind of place in Oedipus. You've ordered Creon banished, in spite of the fact that he's your brother-in-law. You think he lied to you about the prophecy from Apollo's priests, and you've just found out that your wife, Jocasta, is also your mother-'
'Victorium dear,' Docilia began, 'that's something I wanted to talk about. I don't have enough lines there, do I? Since it's per certo as big a shock to me too?'
'You'd have to talk to Mosay about that when he gets back, Docilia dear,' Victorium said. 'Can't we stick to the point? Besides the incest thing, Rafiel, you're the one who murdered her husband, who is also your real father-'
'I've read the script,' Rafiel told him.
'Of course you have, Rafiel dear,' Victorium said, sounding much less than confident of it. 'Then we follow you into Jocasta's room, and you see that she hung herself, out of shame.'
'Can't I do that on-screen, Vie?' Docilia asked. 'I mean, committing suicide's a really dramatic moment.'
'I don't think so, dear, but that's another thing you'd have to talk to Mosay about. Anyway, it's not the point right now, is it? I'm talking about what Rafiel does when he sees you've committed suicide.'
'I take the pins out of her hair and blind myself with them,' said Rafiel, nodding.
'Right. You jab the gold hairpins into your eyes. That's what I'm thinking about. What's the best way for us to handle that?'
'How do you mean?' Rafiel asked, blinking at him.
'Well, we want it to look real, don't we?'
'Sure,' Rafiel said, surprised, not understanding the point. That sort of thing was up to the computer synthesizers, which would produce any kind of effect anybody wanted.
Victorium was thoughtfully silent. Docilia cleared her throat. 'On second thought,' she said, 'maybe it's better if I hang myself offstage after all.'
Victorium stirred and gave her a serious look. Then he surrendered. 'We'll talk about all this stuff later,' he said. 'Let me get Charlus off everybody's back and we'll try putting the scene after that together.'
Rafiel was surprised to see Docilia give him a serious wink, but whatever she had on her mind had to wait. Victorium was calling them all together.
'All right,' he said, 'let's run it through. All the bad stuff is out in the open now. Rafiel knows what he's done, and all four of you kids are onstage now in the forgiveness scene. Ket, you're the Polyneices, take it from the top.'
Obediently the quartet formed and the boy began to sing:
POLYNEICES: We forgive you. If you doubt it,
ask that zany Antigone, or Eteocles, or sweet Ismene.
ETEOCLES: You can't be all that bad.
ISMENE: After all, vous etes our dad.