Bimbos of the Death Sun (4 page)

“Dr. Mega!”

Among the computer displays, air ionizers, and laser models sat Joel Schumann, a junior from last semester’s microprocessing class. Omega groaned inwardly. He should have known that this would happen. One of his students had turned up at the con, and would soon discover the professor’s guilty secret:
Bimbos of the Death Sun
. He might be able to swear Joel to secrecy, though. Omega took the offensive. “Er, what are you doing here, Joel?” the professor asked innocently.

The lanky blond grinned and tapped a computer monitor. “I came to look after these babies. They’re on loan from the campus computer center. I volunteered because I thought it might be fun to come to this thing. See a couple of old sci-fi movies, watch the goings-on, and swap information with other hackers. What about you, Dr. Mega?”

Jay Omega managed a weak smile. “It’s a long story, Joel.”

A
ppin Dungannon stared at the vacant gray screen of his computer terminal, as if he were waiting for the darkness to roll up on one side and reveal glowing letters of wisdom on the other. He tapped out
while waiting for other inspiration to occur, but the exercise did not make him feel any closer to creation.

Beginning a stint of typing was always the most difficult part of writing a book. Once he got going, his brain projected a mental movie of the action onto the computer screen, so that he was not so much inventing as recording what he visualized. He could do maybe fifty pages a day on automatic pilot once he got going, but it was the getting going that was the hardest part. The early chapters of the book were like trying to carve the Gettysburg Address on Mount Rushmore with a toothpick; by
the denouement, which was his current fixation, he had pretty much lost interest in what the story was about anyway, so it was even harder, if that is possible, to get it up for the task. He sighed inwardly, wishing, as always, that he hadn’t already spent his publisher’s advance.

Maybe it would help if he threw something.

Appin Dungannon had written twenty-six books about Tratyn Runewind. Or maybe he had written one book about Tratyn Runewind twenty-six times. He could no longer remember why the series had seemed like a good idea to him, or how he had felt about the first half dozen. It was as if he’d woken up one day to find himself manacled like Marley’s Ghost with garishly covered paperbacks, a line of Runewind action figures (for which he received a percentage that was obscenely low), and a loathsome cartoon series, of which his cut was so meager that he’d fired his agent for the insult.

He was rich enough, according to his accountant—certainly his tax bill seemed to bear that out; and he supposed he was famous enough. He got fan letters in Elvish, and execrable unsolicited manuscripts to “please recommend to your publisher.” He used those under his cat’s dish, and by the phone for scratch paper.

Appin Dungannon was not as happy as perhaps a legend ought to be. His books were best sellers in the genre, but beyond that they went unread. He could expect, at best, a paragraph in
Publishers Weekly
, and he was always bypassed for the major SF awards. Dungannon fiddled a bit with the brightness knob on the monitor. He would have traded ten thousand costumed autograph hounds for one gilt-edged monograph on “Dungannon’s Use of Celtic
Mythology in Contemporary Fantasy.”

At the moment, though, he didn’t feel much like a synthesizer of Celtic mythology: he felt like Milton’s God in
Paradise Lost
, and his Satan had him by the throat. Tratyn Runewind. Tratyn Goddamn Runewind, with the flowing white locks and the clean-chiseled features of a sea hawk. Dungannon scowled. It must have been some kind of sick fantasy, he decided. The 5′ 1″ schmuck with the Mickey Rooney face writing Viking bullshit. He was sure that the vermin discussed its psychological implications endlessly behind his back. There wasn’t much he could do about that, except to cordially despise them, but, by god, he could make them keep out of his sight with their infernal Runewind get-ups. The very sight of some faggoty adolescent in tights and tunic made his hands itch for something to throw.

Dungannon glanced at his watch.

Someone was taking him to dinner soon, he thought. He supposed they’d expect him to talk to them. He reached for the bottle of Chivas Regal, and poured himself half a glassful. That ought to fuel a couple of paragraphs. It just wasn’t
fun
anymore. The first books had been carried by his curiosity about the folklore, and when that ran out, he’d enjoyed putting his editors and his ex-wife in the manuscripts as monsters, but even that became dull after a while. Now he wrote out of inertia, and because they kept waving money at him. And the letters kept coming: scrawls of praise for the series, and pathetic little drawings of “Tratyn Runewind,” but he went on writing, anyway. Because he couldn’t turn down all that money; because he was afraid that stopping would dry up
the gift of words; and because the serious novel in the typing-paper box wouldn’t sell to anybody. He couldn’t give it away. But for Runewind they would pay the earth.

Appin Dungannon took a stiff swallow of Scotch and stabbed a wavering finger at the keyboard. With a giggle of defiance he pressed “Escape.”

No one had come back to claim Jay Omega for any con-related duties, but he was quite happy to be left to his own devices. In this case, the devices were various pieces of computer software which he and Joel Schumann were trying out one by one.

“These disks with burned protection sectors are a pain to copy,” Joel remarked, tapping a few keys.

Jay Omega looked over at the screen to see if anything had happened, but a large, familiar brown suitcase was suddenly positioned between him and the monitor. Near the handles, where the zipper wouldn’t close, copies of
Bimbos of the Death Sun
leered at him from their canvas confinement.

“I thought I’d find you here.
These
were chucked under the registration desk, quite abandoned. So was the smaller suitcase containing your clothes. I had that sent up to your room.”

“Hello, Marion,” said Jay, hoping he didn’t look as foolish as he felt.

“I might have known you couldn’t be trusted in the same building with gadgetry,” she sighed. “But have you done
anything
to promote your book?”

“I asked the booksellers if they had it.”

“And did they?”

“Er—no.”

“And did you offer to provide them with some autographed copies? … I didn’t think so. Well, perhaps
we ought to find somebody who knows what guest authors are supposed to do.” She grinned up at him. “How do you like my costume?”

Jay Omega eyed her warily. This type of question wasn’t his forte. Let him compliment her new hairstyle, and it would turn out that she’d changed shades of lipstick. At present, Marion was wearing her dark hair in some sort of smooth flip style—he was sure that was different—and she was clad in a black jumpsuit. He was about to risk further humiliation by asking if it
were
a costume when the penny finally dropped.
“The Avengers!”
he cried. “You’re Mrs. Peel.”

Marion was pleased. “Not much resemblance to Diana Rigg,” she said, shrugging. “But she was always my idol. I guess while other girls my age wanted to be Mary Tyler Moore, keeping house in New Rochelle for Dick Van Dyke, I wanted to be Emma Peel, going off with some terribly clever man who treated me as an equal, and having adventures.”

Jay Omega pointed to the milling crowd of spacemen and Middle Earthlings. “Will this do?”

She handed him the battered suitcase. “Thank you, Mr. Steed. It will.”

Marion led and Jay followed, which was pretty much the way it had been since that day eighteen months ago, when a shy young man in jeans and sneakers had appeared in the English department with a spiral-bound computer printout, asking to speak to someone about science fiction.

Dr. Marion Farley, who had been in the office checking her mailbox, had given him a disinterested once-over, and said, “Sorry. The class is full. Tell
your advisor to put you down for spring quarter.”

The young man had quietly explained that he really didn’t need the course, since he was already an assistant professor in electrical engineering, but that he would like to talk to someone about his book.

Before Marion had finished apologizing, he had invited her out to lunch, and over a couple of roast beef sandwiches at Bogen’s, he explained to her that he had written a novel, based on a theoretical problem in engineering.

“You see,” he’d said, finishing off the last of her potato chips, “the story involves a sun that emits rays causing slow but steady brain damage. But it affects only the women at the research station.”

Marion, one of the more outspoken members of the Women’s Network, gave him a wary nod. “Go on.”

“The really important thing is that it affects the computers. What I’m actually concerned with is the effects of sunspot activity in relation to polymer acrylic on capacitive interaction among high-frequency micro-components in …”

“The really important thing?” said Marion. “The really important thing is the
machines
, not the women?”

Sensing that he had said something wrong, he halted his narrative. “Well … from an engineering standpoint, I mean. What do you think?”

What did she think?

Marion thought that James Owens Mega was an ugly duckling who had not noticed his transition to swandom. She was sure that he had been a runty undergrad who had spent all his free time rewiring circuits, and who made good grades because he’d
had no social life to distract him. She recognized the type from her own student days, when she’d hung around the wargames club, where it was okay for a woman to be smart and not pretty. Thank god she’d outgrown her pariah phase, she thought, adjusting one amethyst earring. Substituting aerobics classes for lit classes had done her a world of good. She’d gotten out of a miserable marriage to a fellow outcast who was going to remain in grad school forever, and, freed of the guilt of surpassing him, she’d earned her Ph.D. in two years. Now, in a new job at the English department at Tech, Marion had finally reached the stage of accepting herself as both smart
and
pretty.

She looked at her lunch partner, who was unselfconsciously finishing off a butterscotch ice-cream cone. He must have filled out a bit since his scraggly adolescence, and the contact lenses he’d gotten “for better peripheral vision” did wonders for his dark eyes. He’d probably worn safety glasses before, she thought, and he’d have looked like a mosquito in them. Marion looked at his hair, the color of the butterscotch, and at the fine bone structure of his face. He’s adorable, she thought. And he hasn’t been notified.

“Are you still thinking about the plot?” he asked again.

“What? Oh, the plot. Why don’t you leave the novel with me, and I’ll read it and let you know. Actually, the idea of women getting progressively stupid is pretty exciting from a publisher’s standpoint. It feeds the male hostility toward the competitive modern woman.” She looked at him closely. “Did you do that on purpose?”

He blushed. “No. I just threw that in because I
realized that some diseases are sex-linked, and it seemed plausible. My main concern was the computers.”

Marion sighed. “It would be.”

By the time Marion had tinkered with the characterization in his novel, and advised him through rewrites, chapter outlines, and query letters, he had become used to her, in much the same way that a stray cat gets used to belonging to someone. Marion had used a similar method of “taming”: no sudden moves, a calm and friendly manner, and regular offers of food. She hadn’t completely conquered his shyness, though. Marion sometimes felt just before they kissed that he was gearing up for it as one might approach the high-dive—with careful planning and much trepidation. She thought he was making progress, though. And his diffidence was certainly preferable to the first-date lunges of other professors she’d been out with, the post-divorce swingers.

Marion told herself that she was too happy in her newly won independence to be comfortable playing second fiddle to a male engineer earning three times her salary. Anyway, what if one of them got tenure and the other didn’t? Marion had seen too many academic couples break up over tenure problems. If the university denied tenure to a professor, he or she had one year’s grace period, and then it was: find another job. If your specialty was Chinese art or mining engineering that next job might not be anywhere close by. Usually in a relationship, if she got tenure and he didn’t, you could kiss the marriage good-bye: the male partner’s ego usually saw to that. Anyway, when faced with a choice between a lifetime of job security or a marriage
with no guarantees, most people chose the job. She didn’t want that kind of pressure built into her relationship with Jay. And maybe in two years, she would know what she wanted.