Steel Beach (35 page)

One of his quirks, to my way of thinking, was his recent embracing of the Flack religion. And so what? Mozart wasn’t a guy you’d want to bring home to meet the folks. Listen to the music. Look at the art. Forget about the publicity; no matter how much of it you read, you’ll never
really
get to know the man. Most of us like to think we know something about famous people. It took me years to get over the fallacy of thinking that because I’d heard somebody speak about his or her life and times and fears on a talk show that I knew what they were really like. You
don’t
. And the bad things you think you know are just as fallacious as the good things his publicity agent wants you to know. Behind the monstrous facade of fame each celebrity erects around himself is just a little mouse, not unlike you or me, who has to use the same kind of toilet paper in the morning, and who assumes the identical position.

And with that thought, the lights dimmed, and the show began.

There was a brief musical introduction drawing on themes from the works of Elvis and Tori-san, no hint of a Silvio connection in there. Dancers came out and did a number glorifying the Church. None of the prefatory material lasted too long. The Flacks had learned their lesson from Momby. They would not out-stay their welcome this morning.

It was no more than ten minutes from the raising of the curtain to the appearance of the Grand Flack himself.

This was a man ordinary enough from the neck down, dressed in a flowing robe. But in place of a head he had a cube with television screens on four sides, each showing a view of a head from the appropriate angle. On top of the cube was a bifurcated antenna known as rabbit ears, for obvious reasons.

The face in the front screen was thin, ascetic, with a neatly trimmed goatee and mustache and a prim mouth on which a smile always looked like a painful event. I’d met him before at this or that function. He didn’t appear publicly all that often, and the reason was simply that he, and most of the other Great Flacks, were no better as media personalities than I was. For the church services the F.L.C.C.S. hired professionals, people who knew how to make a sermon stand up and walk around the room. They had no lack of talent for such jobs. The Flacks naturally appealed to hopeful artists who hoped to one day stand beside Elvis. But today was different, and oddly enough, the Grand Flack’s very stiffness and lack of camera poise lent gravity to the proceedings.

“Good morning! Fellow worshipers and guests we welcome you! Today will go down in history! This is the day a mere mortal comes to
glory
! The name will be revealed to you shortly! Join with us now in singing ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ ”

That’s the way Flacks talk, and that’s the way I’d been recording it for many years now. They’d given me enough stories, so if they had crazy ideas about how they wanted to be quoted in print, it was all right with me. Flacks believed that language was too cluttered with punctuation, so they’d eliminated the ., the ,, the ’ and the ? and most especially the ; and the :. Nobody ever understood what those last two were for, anyway. They were never very interested in asking questions, only in providing answers. They figured the exclamation point and the quotation mark were all any reasonable person needed for discourse, along with the
underline
, naturally. And they were big on typefaces. A Flack news release read like a love letter to P.T. Barnum.

I abstained from the sing-along; I didn’t know the words, anyway, and hymnals weren’t provided. The folks in the bleachers made up for my absence. The boogying got pretty intense for a while there. The Grand Flack just stood with his hands folded, smiling happily at his flock. When the number came to an end he moved forward again, and I realized this was it.

“And
now
the moment you’ve all been
waiting
for!” he said. “The name of the person who from this day forward will live with the
stars
!” The lights were dimming as he spoke. There was a moment of silence, during which I heard an actual collective intake of breath…  unless that was from the sound system. Then the Grand Flack spoke again.

“I give you
SILVIO
!!!!!”

A single spotlight came on, and there he stood. I had known it, I had been ninety-nine percent sure anyway, but I still felt a thrill in my heart, not only at having been correct, but because this was so
right
. No, I didn’t believe in all the Flackite crap. But
he
did, and it was right that he should be so honored by the people who believed as he did. I almost had a lump in my throat.

I was on my feet with everyone else. The applause was deafening, and if it was augmented by the speakers hidden in the ceiling, who cared? I liked Silvio enough when I was a man. I hadn’t counted on the gut-throbbing impression he’d make on me as a female. He stood there, tall and handsome, accepting the adulation with only a small, ironic wave of his hand, as if he didn’t really understand why everyone loved him so much but he was willing to accept it so as not to embarrass us. False, all false, I well knew; Silvio had a titanic ego. If there was anyone in Luna who actually over-estimated his genuinely awesome talent, it was Silvio. But who among us can cast a stone unless they have at least as much talent? Not me.

A keyboard was rolled out and left in front of him. This was really exciting. It could mean the opening of a new sound for Silvio. For the last three years he’d been working his magic on the body harp. I leaned forward to hear the first chords, as did everyone in the audience, except one person. As he made his move toward the keys, the right side of his head exploded.

Where were you when…  ? Every twenty years a story comes along like that, and anyone you ask knows exactly what he was doing when the news came in. Where I was when Silvio was assassinated was ten meters away, close enough that I saw it happen before I heard the shot. Time collapsed for me, and I moved without thinking about it. There was nothing of the reporter in me at that moment, and nothing of the heroine. I’m not a risk-taker, but I was up and out of my seat and vaulting onto the stage before he’d landed, loosely, the ruined head bouncing on the floorboards. I leaned over him and picked him up by the shoulders, and it must have been about then that I was hit, because I
saw
my blood splatter on his face and a big hole appear in his cheek and a sort of
churning
motion in the soft red matter exposed behind the big hole in his skull. You must have seen it. It’s probably the most famous bits of holocam footage ever shot. Intercut with the stuff from Cricket’s cam, which is how it’s usually shown, you can see me react to the sound of the second shot, lift my head and look over my shoulder and search for the gunman, which is what saved me from having my own brains blown out when the third shot arrived. The post-mortem team estimated that shot missed my cheek by a few centimeters. I didn’t see it hit, but when I turned back I saw the results. Silvio’s face had already been shattered by the fragmented bullet that had passed through me; the third projectile was more than enough to blow the remaining brain tissue through a new hole in his head. It wasn’t necessary; the first had done the fatal work.

That’s when Cricket took her famous still shot. The spotlight is still on us as I hold Silvio’s torso off the ground. His head lolls back, eyes open but glazed, what you can see of them under the film of blood. I’ve got one bloody hand raised in the air, asking a mute question. I don’t remember raising the hand; I don’t know what the question was, other than the eternal
why
?

The next hour was as confused as such scenes inevitably are. I was jostled to the side by a bunch of bodyguards. Police arrived. Questions were asked. Someone noticed I was bleeding, which was the first time I was aware that I’d been hit. The bullet had punched a clean hole through the upper part of my left arm, nicking the bone. I’d been wondering why the arm wasn’t working. I wasn’t alarmed by it; I was just wondering. I never
did
feel any pain from the wound. By the time I should have, they had it all fixed up as good as new. People have since tried to convince me to wear a scar there as a memento of that day. I’m sure I could use it to impress a lot of cub reporters in the Blind Pig, but the whole idea disgusts me.

Cricket was immediately off following the assassin story. Nobody knew who he or she was, or how he’d gotten away, and there was a fabulous story for whoever tracked the person down and got the first interview. That didn’t interest me, either. I sat there, possibly in shock though the machines said I was not, and Brenda stood beside me though I could see she was itching to get out and cover the story, any part of it.

“Idiot,” I told her, with some affection, when I finally noticed her. “You want Walter to fire you? Did somebody get my holocam feed? I don’t remember.”

“I took it. Walter has it. He’s running it right now.” She had a copy of the
Nipple
in one hand, glancing at the horrific images. My phone was ringing and I didn’t need a Ph.D. in deductive logic to know it was Walter calling, asking what I was doing. I turned it off, which Walter would have made a capital offense if he’d been making the laws.

“Get going. See if you can track down Cricket. Wherever she is, that’s where the news will be. Try not to let her leave too many tracks on your back when she runs over you.”

“Where are you going, Hildy?”

“I’m going home.” And that’s just what I did.

I had to turn the phone off at home, too. I had become part of the biggest story of my lifetime, and every reporter in the universe wanted to ask me a probing question: How did you feel, Hildy, when you put your hand into the still-warm brains of the only man on Luna you respected? This is known as poetic justice.

For my sins, I soon set the phone to answer to the four or five newspeople I felt were the best, plus the grinning homunculus that passed for an anchor at the
Nipple
, and gave them each a five minute, totally false interview, full of exactly the sort of stuff the public expected. At the end of each I pleaded emotional exhaustion and said I’d grant a more complete interview in a few days. This satisfied no one, of course; from time to time my front door actually rattled with the impact of frustrated reporters hurling their bodies against three-inch pressure-tight steel.

In truth, I didn’t know how I felt. I was numb, in a way, but my mind was also working. I was thinking, and the reporter was coming alive after the horrid shock of actually getting
shot
. I mean,
damn
it! Hadn’t that fucking bullet ever heard of the Geneva Conventions? We were noncombatants, we were supposed to suck the blood, not produce it. I was angry at that bullet. I guess some part of me had really thought I was immune.

I fixed myself a good meal and thought it over while I did. Not a sandwich. I thought I might be through with sandwiches. I don’t cook a lot, but when I do I’m pretty good at it, and it helps me think. When I’d handed the last dish to the washer I sat down and called Walter.

“Get your ass in here, Hildy,” he said. “I’ve got you lined up for interviews from ten minutes ago till the Tricentennial.”

“No,” I said.

“I don’t think this is a good connection. I thought you said no.”

“It’s a perfect connection.”

“I could fire you.”

“Don’t get silly. You want my exclusive interview to run in the
Shit
, where they’ll triple the pittance you pay me?” He didn’t answer that for a long time, and I had nothing else to say just yet, so we listened to the long silence. I hadn’t turned on the picture.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, plaintively.

“Just what you asked me to do. Get the story on the Flacks. You said I was the best there was at it, didn’t you?” The quality of the silence changed that time. It was a regretful silence, as in how-could-I-have-said-anything-so-stupid silence. He didn’t say he’d told me that just to charm me out of quitting. Another thing he didn’t say was how dare I threaten him with selling out to a rival, and he left un-voiced the horrible things he’d try to do to my career if I did such a thing. The phone line was simply buzzing with things he didn’t say, and he didn’t say them so loudly I’d have been frightened if I really feared for my job. At last he sighed, and
did
say something.

“When do I get the story?”

“When I find it. What I want is Brenda, right now.”

“Sure. She’s just underfoot here.”

“Tell her to come in the back way. She knows where it is, and I don’t think five other people in Luna know that.”

“Six, counting me.”

“I figured. Don’t tell anyone else, or I’ll never get out of here alive.”

“What else?”

“Nothing. I’ll handle it all from here.” I hung up. I started making calls.

The first one was to the Queen. She didn’t have what I needed, but she knew somebody who knew somebody. She said she’d get back to me. I sat down and made a list of items I would need, made several more calls, and then Brenda was knocking on the back door.

She wanted to know how I was, she wanted my reactions to this and that, not as a reporter, but as a concerned friend. I was touched, a little, but I had work to do.

“Hit me,” I said.

“Pardon?”

“Hit me. Make a fist and smash it into my face. I need you to break my nose. I tried it a couple times before you got here, and I can’t seem to hit hard enough.”

She gave me that look that says she’s trying to remember all the ways out of this place, and how to get to them without alarming me.

“My problem,” I explained, “is I can’t risk going in public with this face on me; I need it rearranged, and in a hurry. So hit me. You know how; you’ve seen cowboys and gangsters do it in the movies.” I stuck my face out and closed my eyes.

“You’ve…  you’ve deadened it, I guess?”

“What kind of nut do I look like? Don’t answer, just hit me.”

She did, a blow that would have sent a housefly to intensive care if one had been sitting on the tip of my nose.