The Mountain Cage (17 page)

And now she, her friend Jane, and others like them had to suffer the scorn of writers such as Edwina Maris. Edwina was one of those critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful writers, with a small but vociferous cult following that was waiting for her to “break out.” Along with many such writers, Edwina shared a biting wit, a gift for sarcasm and irony, and scorn for writers who appealed to the lowest common denominator. Once Edwina had directed her barbs at the denizens of bestseller lists. Now, she and her underappreciated colleagues had new targets—the merely adequate wordsmiths who appealed to mass audiences only in other universes.

Darcy knew how Edwina felt. From Edwina’s point of view, her own failure to sell alternate rights was simply further proof of her work’s worth, since those writers signing such contracts were, to Edwina, only hacks unable to achieve success in their own world. Darcy sighed. In Edwina’s shoes, she might have felt exactly the same way.

“Better crank up my hair.” Jane poked at her permed, highlighted, and stylishly cut blonde locks with a gold pick.

“We have to go on after this ad.”

After their appearance, Jane went off to comfort herself with some shopping. Darcy took her limo back to the Royalton, where she had promised to meet her agent for drinks. She and Jane hadn’t exactly lighted a fire under Phil Donahue’s audience. Phil himself had grown increasingly manic in his efforts to work the crowd, and had spent the last five minutes of the program delivering a monologue about his own failure to sell alternate rights to his autobiography.

Leonard was pacing in the hotel lobby. He came toward her as soon as she was through the door. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to Mary Thalberg’s.”

“What for?”

“Don’t ask.” He herded her back outside. “This is disaster. This is absolute, total disaster.”

“Let me guess,” Darcy said. “Money from Elysium House isn’t legal tender any more. The IRS just reversed its ruling, right? That’s why you’re here. You came to tell me I’m broke. I always knew it was too good to be true.”

“No, no. You’re still loaded. But there’s some heavy duty shit coming down the pike anyway.” He pushed her toward the limo.

Leonard was silent all the way to Mary Thalberg’s offices on the East Side. Mary’s partner and assistants had gone home by the time they arrived, but the agent was still in her office. A computer was in one corner; a widescreen TV, complete with speakers and VCR, sat against one wall. Mary’s high heels sank into her pile carpeting as she paced soundlessly and took deep drags on a cigarette.

“I thought you quit smoking,” Leonard said to the other agent.

“I relapsed. I should die of lung cancer anyway now that so many of my clients got screwed.” Mary waved Leonard and Darcy to her sofa. “Leonard’s already seen this, but he wanted you to see it, too.”

“See what?” Darcy asked.

“Didn’t he tell you? My clients already know, the ones that have alternate rights deals. I informed them all immediately. Actually, they’ve been taking the news very well. Anyway, Leonard asked—”

“Just show her,” Leonard said glumly.

“I was on the phone,” Mary said, “talking to an editor in Parallel World 7. Had the TV on to tape
Days of Our Lives,
so I have something to watch when people put me on hold, you know? While I was talking, I lost the picture, and—well, this is what my VCR taped instead.”

Mary pointed a remote at the TV. An image came on, slightly blurred and without sound, but Darcy could make out the tiny form of a young man sitting behind a large mahogany desk, apparently talking to someone on the phone. The room dwarfed him; the place was the size of Madison Square Garden, and the walls were lined with paintings that looked to her untrained eye like Botticellis. An older man was walking toward the desk, bearing a china teapot and cups on a silver tray. Darcy couldn’t be certain, but thought she glimpsed a swimming pool through the glass doors behind the young man.

“That’s the guy I was talking to today,” Mary said. “Lorne Efferman, an editor at Cotter and Crowe—that’s a publisher in Parallel World 7.” She paused. “We were in the middle of our conversation when I saw that on the TV. I immediately guessed it was Lorne, and he reluctantly confirmed it. Seems some signals from other universes are leaking in over the cable.” The image flickered out; Mary turned off the TV. “Let me be more specific. Lorne Efferman is an assistant editor at Cotter and Crowe.”

“An assistant editor,” Leonard mumbled. “Not an executive editor, or a senior editor, or even just a plain editor. An
assistant
editor. Makes you wonder what the goddamn publisher’s office looks like—probably Versailles.”

“My God,” Darcy whispered.

“I was seeing if Lorne might be interested in some novels by one of my clients,” Mary said. “I’d already sold alternate rights to them in Parallel World 8, but I thought I’d feel Lorne out. We’ve been waiting for alternate publishers to come to us, but I figured it was time to be a little more aggressive.”

“And?” Darcy asked.

“Lorne explained—very nicely, not that it helped—that I didn’t have those rights to offer him. ‘Look at your contracts,’ he told me, so I did. I never signed those contracts, I’m positive of that, but my name was on them, and every contract had the same damned clause. I know it wasn’t in any of my alternate rights contracts before—I’d never have approved any of them if it were. But it’s there now, and I have no way to prove that I didn’t let that clause go through!”

Mary put out her cigarette and lit another. “What clause?” Darcy asked.

“The clause that says we haven’t been selling to just one universe when we sign those contracts. We’ve been giving one publisher in that particular universe rights to sell any book we give them to every other universe. And we don’t get one extra fucking cent!”

“Let me put it this way,” Leonard muttered from the other end of the sofa. “Seems the contracts go into uncertainty and then don’t match the worlds they were written in. They drift. You end up with a different contract than the one you started with.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “A lot of you writers would say that’s nothing new.”

“But I get royalties,” Darcy said, “don’t I?”

“That’s just on sales in Parallel World 3,” Leonard replied. “I checked your contracts. You get your share of book club money and foreign sales and everything else, but only from sales in that universe. They get to keep everything else. That’s probably how they can pay such nice advances to everybody.” He glared at the blank TV screen. “That’s how some dipshit little assistant editor can have an office big enough to hold the goddamn Frankfurt Book Fair in.”

“But—” Darcy began.

“I put in a call to that physicist Sterling Blake,” Mary said. “Our agents’ association put him on retainer a while back. He said something about uncertainty creeping into our continuum, about the wave functions of perception shifting or whatever. I think it means we’re in a different universe from the one we were in a few days ago.” She let out her breath. “Blake has some new equations to play with now, so of course he’s just thrilled to death.”

They were all silent for a long time. At last Darcy said, “Does it really matter? Elysium House paid me some serious money. They did beautiful editions, even if I can’t get any author’s copies. I could retire and never have to worry about money again, and you and the other agents are raking in plenty from the deals anyway.”

“That isn’t the point,” Leonard said.

Darcy had known that even as she spoke. The agents would never forgive themselves for letting all those alternate rights slip away, however inadvertently. And she, along with her now-wealthy colleagues, would have to live with the knowledge that, even in other continua, publishers could still rip you off and not pay you what your work was really worth.

Not that this newly acquired wisdom should have come as much of a surprise to any writer.

Mary and Leonard were feeling a little better by the time Darcy left them to go back to her hotel. The two agents had to be philosophical about matters. Anyway, according to the grapevine, it looked as though this alternate rights business was heading toward a downturn of sorts. Mary hadn’t heard of any new alternate rights contracts being signed for nearly a month, and a couple of agents she knew had reported that their calls were no longer going through to a couple of continua. Time to collect as much as they could for their clients just in case things got even more uncertain and they ended up cut off from other parallel worlds altogether. They probably wouldn’t be able to sue for any uncollected payments later on unless attorneys in this universe got even more ingenious than they already were.

Darcy was set. She had to look at it that way. If Donahue’s audience had been more interested in whether she knew Stephen King or in how she was going to spend her money than in her books, she could live with that. Edwina Maris might get better reviews, but raves on the front page of the
New York Times Book Review
hadn’t noticeably fattened Edwina’s bank account. If Elysium House was ripping Darcy off, then at least there would still be all those millions of readers in Gertrude Banner’s world reading
In Terms of Terror and Terror Takes No Time Out.

She had to think of it that way. It was the work that mattered. Her true reward was the writing itself, wasn’t it? No one could deprive her of the vivid moments she spent in worlds of her own creation, or of the sense of accomplishment she felt after finishing a final draft.

But then the image of a publisher somewhere, sitting in the midst of splendor greater than that of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, came to her. The bastards of this world, and every other world, always won in the end; they didn’t care about the writers they exploited. Darcy ground her teeth. She would have to get hold of the Lucky Scribes and ask them for some advice. She could feel a writer’s block coming on.

Afterword to “All Rights”:

“All Rights” may be seen as a companion piece to a story that appears later in this volume, “The Novella Race.” Both are about writing, but “All Rights” is more about the business of writing, which seems appropriate for a tale that features writers. Dedicated and devoted readers, and also younger and more naive writers, can sometimes feel dismay and disillusionment upon discovering that the most popular topics of discussion among gatherings of writers are not aethestics, favorite classics of literature, the artistic demands of the craft, or even the nuts and bolts of putting a story together; but instead money, contracts, and publishers.

I wrote this story during a time when being a writer at all seemed an utterly futile endeavor. A deepening depression, along with life’s more pressing practicalities, were increasingly propelling me toward a decision to give up writing as a profession. In the end, I didn’t, but maybe that’s because while writing “All Rights,” I was still able to find some humor in the fate of the vast majority of American writers, from the best to the worst—namely, to be invisible, ignored, and forgotten, at least in this continuum. All the more reason, I suppose, for writing to be its own reward, since that is likely to be the only enduring reward most of us ever receive.

DANNY GOES TO MARS

“Mars is essentially in the same orbit [as Earth]. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

—J. Danforth Quayle, Vice-President of the United States, as quoted in
Mother Jones,
January 1990

The Vice-President had known that this White House lunch would be different. For one thing, the President’s voice kept shifting from his Mr. Rogers pitch to his John Wayne tone, and that always made Dan nervous. For another, the former Chief of Staff was there as a guest, and that bothered him.

John Sununu might have mouthed off in public about how much Dan had learned on the job, but away from the cameras, his big M.I.T. brain couldn’t be bothered with even saying hello to the Vice-President. Not that it really mattered, since Nunu, as most of the White House staff called him behind his back, had pretty much treated everybody that way, except when he was having a temper tantrum. Almost everyone had been relieved when the former Chief of Staff had been eased out of that position.

Now, here he was in the White House again, sitting around at this intimate lunch as if he still had the President’s full confidence. Maybe the President needed Big John’s help on some scientific deal or other; Dan hoped it was that, and not something political. He squinted slightly, thinking of Robert Stack. That was the ticket, putting on that Robert Stack I’m-a-nice- guy-but-don’t-mess-with-me kind of expression.

“A squeaker,” the President said, “a real squeaker. Almost didn’t pull it out. The Democrats—bad. Attack from the right—even worse. Got something up our sleeve, though—they’ll say, Never saw
that
coming.”

The Vice-President tried to look attentive. Sometimes he couldn’t figure out what the President was talking about. Once he had worried about that, before discovering that many members of the White House staff had the same problem.