“So, Hedda,” I said, since talking to her was better than to the baseball cap or the time-travel exec, “what other gossip you putting in your column this week?”
“Column?” she said, looking blank. “You always call me Hedda. Why? Is she a movie star?”
“Gossip columnist,” I said. “Knew everything that was going on in Hollywood. Like you. So what is? Going on?”
“Viamount’s got a new automatic foley program,” she said promptly. “ILMGM’s getting ready to file copyrights on Fred Astaire and Sean Connery, who finally died. And the word is Pinewood’s hiring warm-bodies for the new Batman sequel. And Warner’s—” She stopped in midword and frowned down at her hand.
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t think it’s chooch. I’m getting a funny…” She peered at her hand. “Maybe the yellow ones were the chooch.” She fished through her hand. “This feels more like ice.”
“Who gave them to you?” I said. “The Disney guy?”
“No. This guy I know. A face.”
“What does he look like?” I asked. Stupid question. There are only two varieties: James Dean and River Phoenix. “Is he here?”
She shook her head. “He gave them to me because he was leaving. He said he wouldn’t need them anymore, and besides, he’d get arrested in China for having them.”
“China?”
“He said they’ve got a liveaction studio there, and they’re hiring stunt doubles and warmbodies for their propaganda films.”
And I thought doing paste-ups for Mayer was the worst job in the world.
“Maybe it’s redline,” she said, poking at the capsules. “I hope not. Redline always makes me look like shit the next day.”
“Instead of like Marilyn Monroe,” I said, looking around the room for Mayer. He still wasn’t back. The time-travel exec was edging toward the door with a Marilyn. The data-helmet geekates were laughing and snatching at air, obviously at a much better party than this one. Fred and Ginge were demonstrating another editing program. Rapid-fire cuts of Ginger, the ballroom curtains, Ginger’s mouth, the curtains. It must be the shower scene from Psycho.
The program ended and Fred reached for Ginger’s outstretched hand, her black-edged skirt flaring with momentum, and spun her into his arms. The edges of the freescreen started going to soft-focus. I looked over at the stairs. They were blurring, too.
“Shit, this isn’t redline,” I said. “It’s klieg.”
“It is?” she said, sniffing at it.
It is, I thought disgustedly, and what was I supposed to do now? Flashing on klieg wasn’t any way to do a meeting with a sleaze like Mayer, and the damned stuff isn’t good for anything else. No rush, no halluces, not even a buzz. Just blurred vision and then a flash of indelible reality. “Shit,” I said again.
“If it is klieg,” Hedda said, stirring it around with her gloved finger, “we can at least have some great sex.”
“I don’t need klieg for that,” I said, but I started looking around the room for somebody to pop. Hedda was right. Flashing during sex made for an unforgettable orgasm. Literally. I scanned the Marilyns. I could do the exec’s casting couch number on one of the freshies, but there was no way to tell how long that would take, and it felt like I only had a few minutes. The Marilyn I’d talked to before was over by the freescreen listening to the studio exec’s time-travel spiel.
I looked over at the door. A girl was standing in the doorway, gazing tentatively around at the party as if she were looking for somebody. She had curly light brown hair, pulled back at the sides. The doorway behind her was dark, but there had to be light coming from somewhere because her hair shone like it was backlit.
“Of all the gin joints in all the world…” I said.
“Joint?” Hedda said, deep in her pill assortment. “I thought you said it was klieg.” She sniffed it.
The girl had to be a face, she was too pretty not to be, but the hair was wrong, and so was the costume, which wasn’t a halter dress and wasn’t white. It was black, with a green fitted weskit, and she was wearing short green gloves. Deanna Durbin? No, the hair was the wrong color. And it was tied back with a green hair ribbon. Shirley Temple?
“Who’s that?” I muttered.
“Who?” Hedda licked her gloved finger and rubbed it in the powder the pills had left on her glove.
“The face over there,” I said, pointing. She had moved out of the doorway, over against the wall, but her hair was still catching the light, making a halo of her light brown hair.
Hedda sucked the powder off her glove. “Alice,” she said. Alice who? Alice Faye? No, Alice Faye’d been a platinum blonde, like everybody else in Hollywood. And she wasn’t given to hair ribbons. Charlotte Henry in Alice in Wonderland?
Whoever the girl had been looking for — the White Rabbit, probably — she’d given up on finding him, and was watching the freescreen. On it, Fred and Ginger were dancing around each other without touching, their eyes locked.
“Alice who?” I said.
Hedda was frowning at her finger. “Huh?”
“Who’s she supposed to be?” I said. “Alice Faye? Alice Adams? Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?”
The girl had moved away from the wall, her eyes still on the screen, and was heading toward the baseball cap. He leaped forward, thrilled to have a new audience, and started into his spiel, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was watching Fred and Ginge, her head tilted up toward the screen, her hair catching the light from the fibe-op feed.
“I don’t think any of this stuff is what he told me,” Hedda said, licking her finger again. “It’s her name.”
“What?”
“Alice,” she said. “A-l-i-s. It’s her name. She’s a freshie. Film hist major. From Illinois.”
Well, that explained the hair ribbon, though not the rest of the getup. It wasn’t Alice Adams. The gloves were 1950s, not thirties, and her face wasn’t angular enough to be trying for Katharine Hepburn. “Who’s she supposed to be?”
“I wonder which one of these is ice,” Hedda said, poking around in her hand again. “It’s supposed to make the flash go away faster. She wants to dance in the movies.”
“I think you’ve had enough pill potluck,” I said, reaching for her hand.
She squeezed it shut, protecting the pills. “No, really. She’s a dancer.”
I looked at her, wondering how many unmarked pills she’d taken before I got here.
“She was born the year Fred Astaire died,” she said, gesturing with her closed fist. “She saw him on the fibe-op feed and decided to come to Hollywood to dance in the movies.”
“What movies?” I said.
She shrugged, intent on her hand again.
I looked over at the girl. She was still watching the screen, her face intent. “Ruby Keeler,” I said.
“Huh?” Hedda said.
“The plucky little dancer in 42nd Street who wants to be a star.” Only she was about twenty years too late. But just in time for a little popsy, and if she was wide-eyed enough to believe she could make it in the movies, it ought to be a piece of cake getting her up to my room.
I shouldn’t have to explain time travel to her, like the exec. He was talking earnestly to a Marilyn wearing black fringe and holding a ukulele. Some Like It Hot.
“See, you’re turning me down in this timefeed,” he was saying, “but in a parallel timefeed we’re already popping.” He leaned closer. “There are hundreds of thousands of parallel timefeeds. Who knows what we’re doing in some of them?”
“What if I’m turning you down in all of them?” the Marilyn said.
I squeezed past her fringe, thinking she might work out if Ruby didn’t, and started through the crowd toward the screen.
“Don’t!” Hedda said loudly.
At least half the room turned to look at her.
“Don’t what?” I said, coming back to her. She was looking past me at Alis, and her face had the bleak, slightly dazed look klieg produces.
“You just flashed, didn’t you?” I said. “I told you it was klieg. And that means I’ll be doing the same thing shortly, so if you’ll excuse me—”