Knife Fight and Other Struggles (27 page)

“Centre stage,” said Jim.

“Centre stage,” repeated Mimi. “Good, Jim. You’re catching on.”

She took two more steps forward, and her hand came to rest on Jim’s bare buttock. The tips of her fingers pressed furrows into the muscle there. “Let’s make a baby,” she hissed through bared teeth.

Jim thought about that for a minute; and thinking about procreating made him think about too many other things he’d never, ever considered. The inevitability of the end of the world. Jerry Wylde’s complicity in that end. His own complicity. Mimi Coover’s sharp fingertips digging drawings into their baby’s skull. Jerry Wylde filming it for season five.

A sudden wave of conscience and self-loathing flooded him, like a tsunami over a Thai whorehouse.

Jim reached around, grabbed Mimi’s wrist, and pulled her hand off his behind. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m out of here.”

Within a week, Jim was indeed out of there—gone without a trace, in fact—and Max Fiddler was alone in Lifeboat 6, firing off the last of his signal flares, calling for someone—anyone in the thinning population of the dying planet—to rescue him from the storm-swollen waves of the rising sea.

The shuttle dropped from the stratosphere and lanced back through the cloudy flesh of Atlantica. The cabin pitched and went dark for a second before the cabin lights came up.

“Where are we going?” said Max.

Mimi clapped. “A question! The eunuch vole wonders after its fate!”

Max shrugged. “The world is ending, and we might as well welcome it. That doesn’t rule out curiosity.”

“Fair enough.” Mimi grinned. “We’re going to the top of a mountain.”

He raised his eyebrows. “That’s interesting,” said Max. “Jerry finally sold his tanker?”

Mimi’s smile broke into a laugh. She mimed a firing handgun with her forefinger. “Gotcha,” she said. “It’s a sea mountain. On the Eastern Scotian Shelf.”

Max blinked.

“Near Nova Scotia?” Mimi blinked back.

“So we are going to the
Minnow
?”

“Where else?” said Mimi. “Oh, you are going to
love
this, Maxie.”

The shuttle banked on its descent, and Max thought he saw lights below them in a tanker-shaped oval, shining through the thinning cloud and thick sheet of rain.

“I cannot wait,” he said, and looked away.

They were greeted on the deck pad by a couple of raincoated production assistants and a video crew. The PAs shouted non-sequiturs into headsets hidden under their hoods as they led Max and Mimi through a Stonehenge of crates and equipment across the broad plateau of the tanker’s mid-deck, under a wide, corrugated-steel awning. Max was still wiping the rainwater from his eyes when the studio lights kicked in and the video crew pulled back for a wide shot.

Mimi elbowed him: “Stand up straight,” she hissed. “You’re live.”

Max didn’t have to be told twice. He’d spent the better part of three decades in the business, and his instinct in this area was even more deeply ingrained than his survival instinct. Max’s spine straightened like a zipper pulling closed, and he felt his lips slide back like covers off a missile silo, to launch a white-toothed grin he thought he’d shelved for good the day they stopped booking him on
The Tonight Show
.

Max bounded across the floor of Jerry Wylde’s soundstage, up the three shallow steps to the set, and landed perfectly on the sofa beside Jerry’s desk, which had been faced with a single word, sea-green lettering on a midnight-black screen:
KRAKEN!
Nuremberg banners reading the same hung behind the set, illuminated from below with white-hot spots.

Somewhere deep within himself, Max Fiddler screamed.

But he was in character now, deep in character, and the scream was a quiet thing. Jim certainly didn’t hear it. He reached across the desk and clasped the thin, hairless hand that belonged to Jerry Wylde. Jerry was wearing a hot pink double-breasted Armani and his pith helmet. Without a thought, Jim told him how sharp he looked tonight. Outside the still-open hatchway, lightning flashed close. But the lights in here were bright enough that Jim could ignore the flash. The neo-primitive cargo cult tribe that made up Jerry Wylde’s studio audience were loud enough Jim didn’t have to ignore the thunder that followed. He couldn’t even hear it. They were chanting something he couldn’t quite make out and twirling their arms around their heads in tightly choreographed mayhem, and they looked quite terrifying with their Frisbee-stretched lips and sponsor-scarified foreheads. Jim waved.

“Ahoy there, Jim!” yelled Jerry as the audience settled down.

“Ahoy yourself, Bwana Jerry,” said Jim. He’d started calling Jerry
Bwana
at the start of the second season but hadn’t used the word since the beginning of the third. The audience let out a nostalgic cheer. Jim crossed one lipo-weakened leg over the other and threw his head back in a near-perfect execution of the talk-show laugh.

On cue, the audience started to chant again. This time Jim understood what they were saying: “Kra-ken! Kra-ken! Kra-ken!”

“Right,” said Jim.

Jerry put his hand over the mike. “Ah, it’s time,” he said into his lapel. “Let’s go to clip, Jeffrey.”

Jeffrey, whoever he was, didn’t take even a heartbeat to shift gears. The studio went dark for barely an instant, and then the CGI projectors fired up and everything became a mottled green. The studio audience went into a panic with the unscripted change, but the projectors faded them to shadowy ghosts, and the dampers made their shouts into distant gurgles. Shit, thought Jim, his survival instinct grumbling. This was too real: every sense but smell told him they were under water.

“The deep blue sea,” said Jerry, standing up and beckoning Jim to do the same. “You ain’t seen nothing like this recently, have you, Jim?”

A heads-up prompter appeared in glowing red letters a few inches from Jim’s eyes. Marks the same colour bled up through the floor. As with the prompter, these glowed like brand tips to Jim but wouldn’t be picked up at all on camera.

“I haven’t seen anything
but
this, Jerry,” read Jim, moving to mark 1 and facing the direction of the arrow. “The whole world’s sinking, in case you haven’t noticed.”

Jerry shrugged expansively. “Why Jim,” he said, “I’m not talking about the water. I’m talking about. . . .” and Jim moved to mark 2, just a step away and facing the opposite direction “. . . this!” finished Jerry, his face obscured behind a silvery tumult of virtual bubbles.

This time Jim screamed along with Max.

He was facing a giant, glowing mass of tentacles—some of them must have been a dozen or more feet long—and staring into what seemed to be an immense eyeball, as big as a soccer ball. And then it was gone, jetting past him, and Jim saw the creature’s full cigar-shaped body, the tentacles at one end, a wide fin as big as a ship rudder at the other. The behemoth had snuck up behind him while he was reading his prompter.
Jee-sus
, thought Max. It must have been sixty feet long, glowing like a motel road sign from end to end; the suckers on its tentacles were each big enough to wrap a baseball.

“Captain Nemo,” whispered Max, momentarily shocked out of character and into recollection. “A kraken
. Twenty Thousand Leagues
. . . .” The welds on Max’s vault of suppressed Disney memories slipped open, and Max peaked inside long enough to remember the movie:
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
. . . James Mason and Kirk Douglas and a submarine and, yes, a great big rubber squid.

Jerry elbowed him in the ribs. “Line,” he hissed.

“What the hell was that?” read Jim, a little too quickly. “Some kind of sea monster?”

Then Mimi stepped out of the murk, eyes focused on her own cue cards. She had changed into a form-fitting yellow wet suit and was carrying a drum-loading spear gun over her shoulder.

“In a way,” she read, once the audience had applauded her entrance. “That’s a giant squid, Jim.”

“Aww, Doctor Mimi,” said Jerry, aping disappointment with his usual brazen subtlety, “I wanted to see a
kraken
.”

The muted audience went back at the chant with renewed vigour.

“Well, Jerry,” read Mimi, “that may be just what you’re looking at—there’s every reason to believe the legendary kraken, which were supposed to have plagued shipping routes for hundreds of years, were actually foraging giant squid, who. . . .”

Jerry’s eyes shifted their focus to some point beyond the horizon.

“. . . mistook early sailing vessels. . . .”

Jerry wandered after the squid, leaving Jim and Mimi alone on-set.

Mimi, ever the trouper, finished her line: “. . . for food.”

“Boy,” read Jim, “I can’t wait until I take on one of these things for real, in a battle broadcast live around the world—” he swallowed, his throat incongruously dry given the illusion of ocean around them, before he read the next set of words “—just three days from now.”

“
One
of them?” Jerry shouted from the murk—probably behind the A camera. “Just
one
? You know what they say, Jim: you can’t have just one!”

The air around Jerry was disrupted by a burst of bubbles and motion. Max stumbled and almost fell as the image of the squid came back for a second pass—something he should have anticipated. But it wasn’t the one giant squid that freaked him out—it was the seven others, as big or bigger, that followed in the first one’s wake.

“Jee-sus!” he yelled. “What the hell’s that?”

He’d missed his cue again—the prompter flashed angry red and white—so he read: “Are my eyes deceiving me? Or are there eight giant squid down there?”

“At least,” read Mimi. “What you saw was an image-enhanced holo we took just yesterday afternoon, from a divebot array just eight hundred feet below this ship. There could be more down there.
Far
more, in my professional opinion.”

The audience
ooh
ed.

“Far more,” said Jerry, rubbing his hands together with a sandpaper sound that gave lie to the illusion of water around them. “Like the sound of that, don’t you, Jim?”

Can’t have just one
, thought Max/Jim crazily before the dark, frothing sea went darker behind his eyes, and he fell to the studio floor in a dead faint.