The party was crammed into the dorm lounge, like always — freshies and faces and hackates and hangers-on. The usual suspects. There was a big fibe-op freescreen in the middle of the room. I glanced up at it, hoping to God it wasn’t the new River Phoenix movie, and was surprised to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, dancing up a flight of stairs. Fred was wearing tails, and Ginger was in a white dress that flared into black at the hem. I couldn’t hear the music over the party din, but it looked like the Continental.
I couldn’t see Mayer. There was a guy in an ILMGM baseball cap and a beard — the hackates’ uniform — standing under the freescreen with a remote, holding forth to a couple of CG majors. I scanned the crowd, looking for suits and/or somebody I knew who’d give me some chooch.
“Hi,” one of the faces said breathily. She had platinum hair, a white halter dress, and a beauty mark, and she was very splatted. Her eyes weren’t focusing at all.
“Hi,” I said, still scanning the crowd. “And who are you supposed to be? Jean Harlow?”
“Who?” she said, and I wanted to believe that that was because of whatever AS she was doing, but it probably wasn’t. Ah, Hollywood, where everybody wants to be in the movies and nobody’s ever bothered to watch one.
“Jeanne Eagles?” I said. “Carole Lombard? Kim Basinger?”
“No,” she said, trying to focus. “Marilyn Monroe. Are you a studio exec?”
“Depends. Do you have any chooch?”
“No,” she said sadly. “All gone.”
“Then I’m not a studio exec,” I said. I could see an exec, though, over by the stairs, talking to another Marilyn. The Marilyn was wearing a white halter dress just like the one I was talking to had on.
I’ve never understood why the faces, who have nothing to sell but an original personality, an original face, all try to look like somebody else. But I guess it makes sense. Why should they be different from everybody else in Hollywood, which has always been in love with sequels and imitations and remakes?
“Are you in the movies?” my Marilyn persisted.
“Nobody’s in the movies,” I said, and started toward the studio exec through the crush.
It was harder work than hauling the African Queen through the reeds. I edged my way between a group of faces talking about a rumor that Columbia Tri-Star was hiring warmbodies, and then a couple of geekates in data helmets at some other party altogether, and over to the stairs.
I couldn’t tell it wasn’t Mayer till I got close enough to hear the exec’s voice — studio execs are as bad as Marilyns. They all look alike. And have the same line.
“…looking for a face for my new project,” he was saying. The new project was a remake of Back to the Future starring, natch, River Phoenix. “It’s a perfect time to rerelease,” he said, leaning down the Marilyn’s halter top. “They say we’re this close” — he held his thumb and forefinger together, almost touching — “to getting the real thing.”
“The real thing?” the Marilyn said, in a fair imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s breathy voice. She looked more like her than mine had, though she was a little thick in the waist. But the faces don’t worry about that as much as they used to. A few extra pounds can be didged out. Or in. “You mean time travel?”
“I mean time travel. Only it won’t be in a DeLorean. It’ll be in a time machine that looks like the skids. We’ve already come up with the graphics. The only thing we don’t have is an actress to play opposite River. The director wanted to go with Michelle Pfeiffer or Lana Turner, but I told him I think we should go with an unknown. Somebody with a new face, somebody special. You interested in being in the movies?”
I’d heard this line before. In Stage Door. 1937.
I waded back into the party and over to the freescreen, where the baseball-cap-and-beard was holding forth to some freshies. “…programmed for any shots you want. Dolly shots, split-screens, pans. Say you want a close-up of this guy.” He pointed up at the screen with the remote.
“Fred Astaire,” I said. “That guy is Fred Astaire.”
“You punch in ‘close-up’—”
Fred Astaire’s face filled the screen, smiling.
“This is ILMGM’s new edit program,” the baseball cap said to me. “It picks angles, combines shots, makes cuts. All you need is a full-length base shot to work from, like this one.” He hit a button on the remote, and a full-length shot of Fred and Ginger replaced Fred’s face. “Full-length shots are hard to come by. I had to go all the way back to the b-and-w’s to find anything long enough, but we’re working on that.”
He hit another button, and we were treated to a view of Fred’s mouth, and then his hand. “You can do any edit program you want,” Baseball Cap said, watching the screen. Fred’s mouth again, the white carnation in his lapel, his hand. “This one takes the base shot and edits it using the shot sequence of the opening scene from Citizen Kane.”
A medium-shot of Ginger, and then of the carnation. I wondered which one was supposed to be Rosebud.
“It’s all preprogrammed,” Baseball Cap said. “You don’t have to do a thing. It does everything.”
“Does it know where Mayer is?” I asked.
“He was here,” he said, looking vaguely around, and then back at the screen, where Fred was going through his paces. “It can extrapolate long shots, aerials, two-shots.”
“Have it extrapolate somebody who knows where Mayer is,” I said, and went back over the side and into the water. The party was getting steadily more crowded. The only ones with any room at all to move were Fred and Ginger, swirling up and down the staircase.
The exec I’d seen before was in the middle of the room, pitching to the same Marilyn, or a different one. Maybe he knew where Mayer was. I started toward him, and then spotted Hedda in a pink strapless sheath and diamond bracelets. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.
Hedda knows everything, all the news, all the gossip. If anybody knew where Mayer was, it’d be Hedda. I waded my way over to her, past the exec, who was explaining time travel to the Marilyn. “It’s the same principle as the skids,” he said. “The Casimir effect. The randomized electrons in the walls create a negative-matter region that produces an overlap interval.”
He must have been a hackate before he morphed into an exec. “The Casimir effect lets you overlap space to get from one skids station to another, and the same thing’s theoretically possible for getting from one parallel timefeed to another. I’ve got an opdisk that explains it all,” he said, running his hand down her haltered neck. “How about if we go up to your room and take a look at it?”
I squeezed past him, hoping I wouldn’t come up covered with leeches, and hauled myself out next to Hedda. “Mayer here?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said, her platinum head bent over an assortment of cubes and capsules in her pink-gloved hand. “He was here for a few minutes, but he left with one of the freshies. And when the party started there was a guy from Disney nosing around. The word is Disney’s scouting a takeover of ILMGM.”
Another reason to get paid now. “Did Mayer say if he was coming back?”
She shook her head, still deep in her study of the pharmacy. “Any chooch in there?” I said.
“I think these are,” she said, handing me two purple-and-white capsules. “A face gave me this stuff, and he told me which was which, but I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure those are the chooch. I took some. I can let you know in a minute.”