Diamond Star (23 page)

"I'd have to find it." Jud waved at the room, which was cluttered with morph equipment and Madagascar cartons from their dinner last night. "I can't remember where I put it."

Del eyed the mess. "Maybe we should clean up." He had never realized before how much people tidied up after him. Even at the base, robo-sweeps cleaned his room. "At least we should get some of those robotic maid-mice."

Jud scowled at him. "Maybe if you weren't always fooling around in some virt, you'd remember to pick up your stuff."

"I'm not always in a virt." Del enjoyed building the fantasy worlds, but he didn't spend more than an hour a day. Well, maybe two. "Besides, half this stuff is morph equipment. Who could that belong to, I wonder?"

Jud laughed. "Okay, I give."

The console chimed again.

"One of us should answer it," Jud decided.

Del spoke to the air. "Claude, who's comming us?"

His EI from the base, which the military had allowed him to keep, answered. "It's Harvey Orner. Your publicist."

"Oh." Harv was his publicist. "Okay. Put him on." Looking around at the disaster area he and Jud called their living room, Del added, "But just audio. No visual."

Harvey's voice floated in the air. "Del, baby! Howz it go?"

Del winced. "Hello, Harv."

"We're all set," Harvey enthused. "You're going to do that interview on the Atlantic City-Time Hour."

"That's the fourth time you've told me that," Del said. "Why would it come through this time when it hasn't all the others?"

"They had a cancellation," Harv said. "The toe contortionist who was going to close the show dropped a brick on his foot."

"Well, gosh," Del said. "They go for the second-best act compared to that? I'm so flattered."

"Del, sweetheart, listen to me. Today, you're the closing act on Atlantic. Tomorrow you'll be the star."

Right. At the rate Del was going, he would need a second job to make his half of the rent. He had no intention of dipping into his Ruby accounts to support himself. He had thought Prime-Nova was paying him a lot, but he had yet to see any money except for his advance. Mac kept using the word "unrecouped," which as near as Del could tell meant he had to pay back Prime-Nova for every expense under the sun, including his vid, virt, touring, promotion, and for all he knew, the price of baking soda in Iceland. Even being the last ditch fill-in for a human toe-pretzel act would earn him some pay on a major show like the Atlantic.

"Sure, I'll do it," Del said. "When do they want me?"

"Uh, that's the thing." Harv cleared his throat. "You have forty-five minutes to get to their D.C. studio."

"What!" Del jumped up to his feet. "I can't do that."

"I'm sending a fly-taxi," Harv said. "Be ready in five minutes. Wear something sexy. And Del baby, don't forget to pay the pilot. I don't want to get stuck with another of your bills."

"Fine, yeah." Del was striding into his bedroom. Claude transferred Harv to the console in there.

As Del threw around clothes on the bed, Harv added, "My niece was wondering if you'd sign her holo-vid cube."

"Sure." Del held up a pair of torn jeans, then tossed them aside and took his leather pants. As he pulled them on, the cloth smoothed out its creases.

Claude suddenly said, "Your pants just sent me a message."

Del blinked. "They what?"

"Your pants contacted me. They say it is difficult to maintain their best appearance when you leave them crumpled up. They suggest you hang them up after you wear them."

"Great," Del muttered. "My clothes are talking to me." He pulled on a wine-colored pullover that Anne had picked out to match his hair. It glimmered with a gold overlay she claimed "accented his eyelashes." Del had no idea what that meant, but it evoked positive moods from people, so he wore it.

"Del, are you there?" Harv said.

"Yeah, I'm here." He sat on the bed and pulled on his boots. "You said something about your niece."

"She wants you to sign her holo-cube."

"Sign it?"

"Your autograph. You know."

"Oh." The "signing" thing again. People wanted him to write his name for them, and he didn't know why. As a keepsake? The signature of a Ruby prince was no small matter. Besides, he didn't know how to write his name in English. He could barely even do it in Iotic. But he couldn't admit that. So he said, "Sure."

Then he jumped up and headed out to his interview.

Ricki wasn't pleased.

Zachary Marksman sat in his big leather chair and surveyed the holos above the big desk in his Prime-Nova office. Ricki stood next to him, her arms crossed, frowning as she watched. The display told her nothing she didn't already know, but seeing the statistics floating in the air as blazing red graphs brought the point home with inescapable force.

"This vid is the third plummet for Mort's Metronomes," Zachary said. "The hum in the m-universe is that they're boring."

Ricki shrugged. " 'Boring' just means no one thinks they're new anymore."

Zachary brought up a holo of the group. Four skinny young men with buzzed-off hair yelled and danced while Mort screeched his song. "They don't hit with the audience." He shook his head. "Let them off the option for their next cube. Paying them the termination fee will cost us less than another plummet."

Ricki stiffened, but she didn't argue. In her younger days, she would have fought for any band she signed. She was the one who had talked Zachary into taking a chance on the Metronomes. The group had struck her as innovative without being controversial. Mort's voice was hopeless, but he had good presence in the studio. It hadn't translated well into the vid, though, and his virt sales stank. She had learned to choose her battles more wisely, saving the fight for the ones she had a chance of salvaging.

Zachary pulled in a new set of graphs, this time with no trace of red, just pure, shining blue. "Mind Mix," was all he said. They needed no other introduction. " 'Frazy Baby' debuted at number two on the Stellar Hits charts last week. It'll go number one this week."

No surprise, there. "That last tour of theirs shouted rocket all the way," Ricki said.

Zachary scowled at her. "Yeah, if Tackman doesn't fuck it up with his neuro-amps. He either cleans up or he's out."

"I've spoken to his manager."
Argued
was a better word, but Ricki could deal with him. "But Zach, Mind Mix is at the top. This would be bad timing to dilute their act." As stomach-turning as Tackman and Tristan could be in their smug satisfaction, they brought in millions for Prime-Nova. So she put up with their conceited asses.

"Just keep an eye on him," Zachary said.

"I will."

"What about this one?" He brought up a display that was part red and part blue. "This Del Arden fellow. He's got weird stats."

Ricki's shoulders tensed up under her tunic. She tried to separate her personal life from work, but it was growing more and more difficult with Del. He had been avoiding her since that party. It wasn't like before, when he smoldered with anger every time she came near. In the four weeks since, they had seen each other a few times, but they spent most of their time in bed. Not that she objected. He had turned into a gentle lover, as if he felt guilty about their night at the party. It was sweet, but she missed his growling, defiant alter ego.

Enough,
Ricki told herself. This was time for business. She knew what the graphs showed. His vid had entered the charts much lower than they hoped, but it had since moved up more than was normal for acts with such a weak debut.

"People don't know what to make of him," Ricki said. "He's different. But he's good enough that they listen anyway. And he's selling well in cities he played with the Mind Mix tour."

Zachary brought up a holo of Del in concert. "It's the oddest thing. His show was too plain, even after he jazzed it up. But it's impossible to stop watching him."

"It's
because
he's unpolished," Ricki decided. Del was doing that thing where he crouched down while the drums played. Then Jud exploded into chords and Del jumped high in the air. He came down singing, practically shouting into the mike. "Who knows what the boogle he's doing? He looks so good doing it, you don't care."

"Boogle?" Zachary asked, laughing. "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

Ricki glowered at him. "My point, Your Royal Tech-Mechness, is that you
know
it's unrehearsed. Unprepared. You can't stop watching to see what he'll do next. He could fall on his sexy butt up there and he'd look like dynamite."

"His material is strange. And he hasn't taken the word 'crystal' out of that damn diamond song."

She regarded him with exasperation. "A diamond
is
a crystal."

Zachary frowned at her. "You know what I mean."

She waited, but he didn't insist Del change the word. Which was a relief. Ricki didn't want to get into another argument with her temperamental lover about artistic purity. Who would have thought she would end up in bed with an undercity renegade? The worst of it was, he was starting to make sense.

"He does sing well," Zachary allowed.

"The Ell-bees love him," Ricki said.

Zachary considered the graphs. "Those holos of him that Elba Malls licensed have decent sales. We should capitalize on that. Get him onto more of their pre-teen channels in the mesh mall."

"It's a good idea. But look at this." She indicated a blue spike in one curve. "That's an
academic
demographic. College professors are buying his stuff."

"Not a lot of them."

"Yeah, but enough to register."

Zachary scrolled through more graphs. "Heh. Look at that. The boomallitics like him. And you're right, good hum from the intellectual set. Strange mix with the teeny-bops. His sales are so-so, but his cube isn't plummeting." He glanced at her. "You want to produce his second one?"

That was a relief. Or maybe not. If Zachary had shunted Del off onto a junior producer, it would have been far kinder to Ricki's blood pressure. But she didn't want some amateur messing with Del.

"Sure," she said. "We'll see where we can take it."

Michael Laux, the host of the Atlantic City-Time Hour, had an upswept mane of black hair and blue eyes so vivid, Del could see the color from across the stage. Except the stage wasn't a stage. The crew called it a "surge studio." It looked a lot like the room where he recorded his vid, with glowing blue walls and equipment everywhere. When Del watched the City-Time Hour on the mesh, it always had an audience. It looked nothing like this.

"So, Del, come in, come over," Laux said heartily, extending his hand.

Del shook his hand and smiled, feeling like an idiot. They were standing in a blue room acting as if they were in front of hundreds of people.

"It's great to be here," Del said, because Harv had coached him to talk that way. He wondered if he sounded as fake to everyone else as he did to himself.

Laux beamed at him. "You've made quite a splash out there."

Splash?
As in water? Del eased down his shields and picked up enough to realize Laux meant it as a compliment. He liked what he caught from Laux; the fellow enjoyed his job and wanted to encourage new talent.
Talent,
as in, he wasn't just looking for commercial appeal. How refreshing.

"I do my best," Del said, hoping that was safe, because he had no idea what they were talking about.

Laux lifted his hand, inviting Del to sit on the skeleton of a chair. It bore no resemblance to the furniture on the show, but he and Luax sat facing each other in the same arrangement as those chairs. Probably the techs projected some sort of holo onto the skeleton.

After they were settled, Laux said, "From what I understand, your best is a knockout."

Knockout? Still confused, Del smiled and said, "Well, gee, thanks." For some reason, Harv loved it when he said "gee." It inspired the publicist to make comments about Del eating corn, which made no sense to Del, but seemed to please Harv immensely.

"So Del, we've only a few minutes left," Laux said with a smile. His teeth were so white, they could have lit up the studio. Del could see why Laux was such a popular host, though, and it had nothing to do with his perfect teeth or handsome face. The fellow's good nature was genuine.

"You've stirred some controversy with that exercise in your concert," Laux said. "How would you like to do it here, with verification you aren't using enhancement?"

"It would be my pleasure," Del said, because Harv had told him to. Then he growled what he really wanted to say. "I've
never
used a Roberts Enhancer, and I'll challenge anyone who claims I did."

"Great!" Laux seemed much happier with Del's scowl than his polite words. Turning to the nonexistent audience, he said, "Del will sing tonight with no aids. You can download our guarantee of that from the Tru-Tech Verifier site, with its Platinum-certified seal." To Del, he said, "It's all yours!"

Del slid off his chair and stepped to a mark on the floor a tech had shown him earlier. Fortunately, he had practiced today, and his voice felt warm despite his having no warning about the show. When a tech gave him the cue, Del started the exercise, doing "bay-ay-ay-by," up and up, until he had covered six octaves and a bit more. Then he stopped and let out a breath, relieved it had come out all right.

Laux strode over and clapped him on the shoulder. "Now that's a set of pipes!" He turned his megawatt smile on the non-audience. "Was that impressive or not? Tell us what you think at the City-Time Virt Grotto. Come on by, hang with your friends, and let's talk. Remember, Citizens, this is City-Time, Top Time, and--" Laux pointed straight at the holo-cam. "
Your
time."

Lights flared, and Del had no doubt that when he saw the "live" show later, it would have an applauding audience. He didn't mind; he just appreciated the chance to prove Pizwick wrong.

As the studio lighting softened, Laux lowered his hand and spoke in a quieter voice. "That really was impressive. I've heard it's even your own voice, with no medical augmentation."

"Pretty much," Del said. "Earlier generations of my family were selected for genes that improved our vocal range." He almost said
my ancestors
instead of earlier generations, but he stopped himself in time. It would give away his Skolian heritage, because only Skolians who descended by the Ruby Empire could have distant ancestors who knew genetic engineering.