But she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the screen, where the copyright cases were being trotted out for inspection. Waiting for Fred Astaire to appear.
“The first time I ever saw him, I knew what I wanted,” she said, her eyes on the wall. “Only ‘wanted’ isn’t the right word. I mean, not like you want a new dress—”
“Or some chooch,” I said.
“It’s not even that kind of wanting. It’s… there’s a scene in Top Hat where Fred Astaire’s dancing in his hotel room and Ginger Rogers has the room below him, and she comes up to complain about the noise, and he tells her that sometimes he just finds himself dancing, and she says—”
“ ‘I suppose it’s a kind of affliction,’ ” I said.
I’d expected her to smile at that, the way she had at my other movie quotes, but she didn’t.
“An affliction,” she said seriously. “Only that isn’t it either, exactly. It’s… when he dances, it isn’t just that he makes it look easy. It’s like all the steps and rehearsing and the music are just practice, and what he does is the real thing. It’s like he’s gone beyond the rhythm and the time steps and the turns to this other place… If I could get there, do that…”
She stopped. Fred Astaire was sauntering toward us out of the mist in his top hat and tails, tipping his top hat jauntily forward with the end of his cane. I looked at Alis.
She was looking at him with that lost, breathless look she had had in my room, watching Fred and Eleanor, side by side, dressed in white, turning and yet still, silent, beyond motion, beyond—
“Come on,” I said, and yanked on her hand. “This is our stop,” and followed the green arrows out.
SCENE: Hollywood premiere night at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, palm trees, screaming fans, limousines, tuxedos, furs, flashbulbs popping.
We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash. It was a DeMille scene, as usual. Faces and tourates and freelancers and ravers and thousands of extras, milling among the vid places and VR caves. And among the screens: drops and freescreens and diamonds and holos, all showing trailers edited a la Psycho by Vincent.
Trump’s Chinese Theater had two huge dropscreens in front of it, running promos of the latest remake of Ben-Hur. On one of them, Sylvester Stallone in a bronze skirt and digitized sweat was leaning over his chariot, whipping the horses.
You couldn’t see the other. There was a vid-neon sign in front of it that said Happy Endings, and a holoscreen showing Scarlett O’Hara in the fog, saying, “But, Rhett, I love you.”
“Frankly, my dear — I love you, too,” Clark Gable said, and crushed her in his arms. “I’ve always loved you!”
“The cement has stars in it,” I said to Alis, pointing down. It was too crowded to see the sidewalk, let alone the stars. I led her out into the street, which was just as crowded, but at least it was moving, and down toward the vid places.
Hawkers from the VR caves crushed flyers into our hands, two dollars off reality, and River Phoenix pushed up. “Drag? Flake? A pop?”
I bought some chooch and popped it right there, hoping it would stave off a flash till we got back to the dorm.
The crowd thinned out a little, and I led Alis back onto the sidewalk and past a VR cave advertising, “A hundred percent body hookup! A hundred percent realistic!”
A hundred percent realistic, all right. According to Heada, who knows everything, simsex takes more memory than most of the VR caves can afford, and half of them slap a data helmet on the customer, add some noise to make it look like a VR image, and bring in a freelancer.
I towed Alis around the VR cave and straight into a herd of tourates standing in front of a booth called A Star Is Born and gawking at a vid-pitch. “Make your dreams come true! Be a movie star! $89.95, including disk. Studio-licensed! Studio-quality digitizing!”
“I don’t know, which one do you think I should do?” a fat female tourate was saying, flipping through the menu.
A bored-looking hackate in a white lab coat and James Dean pompadour glanced at the movie she was pointing at, handed her a plastic bundle, and motioned her into a curtained cubicle.
She stopped halfway in. “I’ll be able to watch this on the fibe-op feed, won’t I?”
“Sure,” James Dean said, and yanked the curtain across.
“Do you have any musicals?” I asked, wondering if he’d lie to me like he had to the tourate. She wasn’t going to be on the fibe-op feed. Nothing gets on except studio-authorized changes. Paste-ups and slash-and-burns. She’d get a tape of the scene and orders not to make any copies.
He looked blank. “Musicals?”
“You know. Singing? Dancing?” I said, but the tourate was back wearing a too-short white robe and a brown wig with braids looped over her ears.
“Stand up here,” James Dean said, pointing at a plastic crate. He fastened a data harness around her large middle and went over to an old Digimatte compositor and switched it on.
“Look at the screen,” he said, and the tourates all moved so they could see it. Storm troopers blasted away, and Luke Skywalker appeared, standing in a doorway over a dropoff, his arm around a blank blue space in the screen.
I left Alis watching and pushed through the crowd to the menu. Stagecoach, The Godfather, Rebel without a Cause.
“Okay, now,” James Dean said, typing onto a keyboard. The female tourate appeared on the screen next to Luke. “Kiss him on the cheek and step off the box. You don’t have to jump. The data harness’ll do everything.”
“Won’t it show in the movie?”
“The machine cuts it out.”
They didn’t have any musicals. Not even Ruby Keeler. I worked my way back to Alis.
“Okay, roll ’em,” James Dean said. The fat tourate smooched empty air, giggled, and jumped off the box. On the screen, she kissed Luke’s cheek, and they swung out across a high-tech abyss.
“Come on,” I said to Alis and steered her across the street to Screen Test City.
It had a multiscreen filled with stars’ faces, and an old guy with the pinpoint eyes of a redliner. “Be a star! Get your face up on the silver screen! Who do you want to be, popsy?” he said, leering at Alis. “Marilyn Monroe?”
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire were side by side on the bottom row of the screen. “That one,” I said, and the screen zoomed till they filled it.
“You’re lucky you came tonight,” the old guy said. “He’s going into litigation. What do you want? Still or scene?”
“Scene,” I said. “Just her. Not both of us.”
“Stand in front of the scanner,” he said, pointing, “and let me get a still of your smile.”
“No, thank you,” Alis said, looking at me.
“Come on,” I said. “You said you wanted to dance in the movies. Here’s your chance.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” the old guy said. “All I need’s an image to digitize from. The scanner does the rest. You don’t even have to smile.”
He took hold of her arm, and I expected her to wrench away from him, but she didn’t move.
“I want to dance in the movies,” she said, looking at me, “not get my face digitized onto Ginger Rogers’s body. I want to dance.”
“You’ll be dancing,” the old guy said. “Up there on the screen for everybody to see.” He waved his free hand at the milling cast of thousands, none of whom were looking at his screen. “And on opdisk.”
“You don’t understand,” she said to me, tears welling up in her eyes. “The CG revolution—”
“Is right there in front of you,” I said, suddenly fed up. “Simsex, paste-ups, snuffshows, make-your-own remakes. Look around, Ruby. You want to dance in the movies? This is as close as you’re going to get!”
“I thought you understood,” she said bleakly, and whirled before either of us could stop her, and plunged into the crowd.