Remake (2 page)

I couldn’t tell it wasn’t Mayer till I got close enough to hear the exec’s voice—studio execs are as bad as Marilyns. They all look alike. And have the same line.

“… looking for a face for my new project,” he was saying. The new project was a remake of
Back to the Future
starring, natch, River Phoenix. “It’s a perfect time to rerelease,” he said, leaning down the Marilyn’s halter top. “They say we’re
this
close”—he held his thumb and forefinger together, almost touching—“to getting the real thing.”

“The real thing?” the Marilyn said, in a fair imitation of Marilyn Monroe’s breathy voice. She looked more like her than mine had, though she was a little thick in the waist. But the faces don’t worry about that as much as they used to. A few extra pounds can be didged out. Or in. “You mean time travel?”

“I mean time travel. Only it won’t be in a DeLorean. It’ll be in a time machine that looks like the skids. We’ve already come up with the graphics. The only thing we don’t have is an actress to play opposite River. The director wanted to go with Michelle Pfeiffer or Lana Turner, but I told him I think we should go with an unknown. Somebody with a new face, somebody special. You interested in being in the movies?”

I’d heard this line before. In
Stage Door
. 1937.

I waded back into the party and over to the freescreen, where the baseball-cap-and-beard was holding forth to some freshies. “… programmed for any shots you want. Dolly shots, split-screens, pans. Say you want a close-up of this guy.” He pointed up at the screen with the remote.

“Fred Astaire,” I said. “That guy is Fred Astaire.”

“You punch in ‘close-up’—”

Fred Astaire’s face filled the screen, smiling.

“This is ILMGM’s new edit program,” the baseball cap said to me. “It picks angles, combines shots, makes cuts. All you need is a full-length base shot to work from, like this one.” He hit a button on the remote, and a full-length shot of Fred and Ginger replaced Fred’s face. “Full-length shots are hard to come by. I had to go all the way back to the b-and-w’s to find anything long enough, but we’re working on that.”

He hit another button, and we were treated to a view of Fred’s mouth, and then his hand. “You can do any edit program you want,” Baseball Cap said, watching the screen. Fred’s mouth again, the white carnation in his lapel, his hand. “This one takes the base shot and edits it using the shot sequence of the opening scene from
Citizen Kane
.”

A medium-shot of Ginger, and then of the carnation. I wondered which one was supposed to be Rosebud.

“It’s all preprogrammed,” Baseball Cap said. “You don’t have to do a thing. It does everything.”

“Does it know where Mayer is?” I asked.

“He
was
here,” he said, looking vaguely around, and then back at the screen, where Fred was going through his paces. “It can extrapolate long shots, aerials, two-shots.”

“Have it extrapolate somebody who knows where Mayer is,” I said, and went back over the side and into the water. The party was getting steadily more crowded. The only ones with any room at all to move were Fred and Ginger, swirling up and down the staircase.

The exec I’d seen before was in the middle of the room, pitching to the same Marilyn, or a different one. Maybe he knew where Mayer was. I started toward him, and then spotted Hedda in a pink strapless sheath and diamond bracelets.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

Hedda knows everything, all the news, all the gossip. If anybody knew where Mayer was, it’d be Hedda. I waded my way over to her, past the exec, who was explaining time
travel to the Marilyn. “It’s the same principle as the skids,” he said. “The Casimir effect. The randomized electrons in the walls create a negative-matter region that produces an overlap interval.”

He must have been a hackate before he morphed into an exec.

“The Casimir effect lets you overlap space to get from one skids station to another, and the same thing’s theoretically possible for getting from one parallel timefeed to another. I’ve got an opdisk that explains it all,” he said, running his hand down her haltered neck. “How about if we go up to your room and take a look at it?”

I squeezed past him, hoping I wouldn’t come up covered with leeches, and hauled myself out next to Hedda. “Mayer here?” I asked.

“Nope,” she said, her platinum head bent over an assortment of cubes and capsules in her pink-gloved hand. “He was here for a few minutes, but he left with one of the freshies. And when the party started there was a guy from Disney nosing around. The word is Disney’s scouting a takeover of ILMGM.”

Another reason to get paid now. “Did Mayer say if he was coming back?”

She shook her head, still deep in her study of the pharmacy.

“Any chooch in there?” I said.

“I think these are,” she said, handing me two purple-and-white capsules. “A face gave me this stuff, and he told me which was which, but I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure those are the chooch. I took some. I can let you know in a minute.”

“Great,” I said, wishing I could take them now. Mayer’s leaving with a freshie might mean he was pimping again, which meant another paste-up. “What’s the word on Mayer’s boss? His new girlfriend dump him yet?”

She looked instantly interested. “Not that I know of. Why? Did you hear something?”

“No.” And if Hedda hadn’t either, it hadn’t happened.
So Mayer’d just taken the freshie up to her dorm room for a quick pop or a quicker line or two of flake, and he’d be back in a few minutes, and I might actually get paid.

I grabbed a paper cup from a Marilyn swaying past and downed the capsules.

“So, Hedda,” I said, since talking to her was better than to the baseball cap or the time-travel exec, “what other gossip you putting in your column this week?”

“Column?” she said, looking blank. “You always call me Hedda. Why? Is she a movie star?”

“Gossip columnist,” I said. “Knew everything that was going on in Hollywood. Like you. So what is? Going on?”

“Viamount’s got a new automatic foley program,” she said promptly. “ILMGM’s getting ready to file copyrights on Fred Astaire
and
Sean Connery, who finally died. And the word is Pinewood’s hiring warmbodies for the new
Batman
sequel. And Warner’s—” She stopped in midword and frowned down at her hand.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t think it’s chooch. I’m getting a funny …” She peered at her hand. “Maybe the yellow ones were the chooch.” She fished through her hand. “This feels more like ice.”

“Who gave them to you?” I said. “The Disney guy?”

“No. This guy I know. A face.”

“What does he look like?” I asked. Stupid question. There are only two varieties: James Dean and River Phoenix. “Is he here?”

She shook her head. “He gave them to me because he was leaving. He said he wouldn’t need them anymore, and besides, he’d get arrested in China for having them.”

“China?”

“He said they’ve got a liveaction studio there, and they’re hiring stunt doubles and warmbodies for their propaganda films.”

And I’d thought doing paste-ups for Mayer was the worst job in the world.

“Maybe it’s redline,” she said, poking at the capsules. “I
hope not. Redline always makes me look like shit the next day.”

“Instead of like Marilyn Monroe,” I said, looking around the room for Mayer. He still wasn’t back. The time-travel exec was edging toward the door with a Marilyn. The data-helmet geekates were laughing and snatching at air, obviously at a much better party than this one. Fred and Ginge were demonstrating another editing program. Rapid-fire cuts of Ginger, the ballroom curtains, Ginger’s mouth, the curtains. It must be the shower scene from
Psycho
.

The program ended and Fred reached for Ginger’s outstretched hand, her black-edged skirt flaring with momentum, and spun her into his arms. The edges of the freescreen started going to soft-focus. I looked over at the stairs. They were blurring, too.

“Shit, this isn’t redline,” I said. “It’s klieg.”

“It is?” she said, sniffing at it.

It is, I thought disgustedly, and what was I supposed to do now? Flashing on klieg wasn’t any way to do a meeting with a sleaze like Mayer, and the damned stuff isn’t good for anything else. No rush, no halluces, not even a buzz. Just blurred vision and then a flash of indelible reality. “Shit,” I said again.

“If it is klieg,” Hedda said, stirring it around with her gloved finger, “we can at least have some great sex.”

“I don’t need klieg for that,” I said, but I started looking around the room for somebody to pop. Hedda was right. Flashing during sex made for an unforgettable orgasm. Literally. I scanned the Marilyns. I could do the exec’s casting couch number on one of the freshies, but there was no way to tell how long that would take, and it felt like I only had a few minutes. The Marilyn I’d talked to before was over by the freescreen listening to the studio exec’s time-travel spiel.

I looked over at the door. A girl was standing in the doorway, gazing tentatively around at the party as if she were looking for somebody. She had curly light brown hair, pulled back at the sides. The doorway behind her was dark,
but there had to be light coming from somewhere because her hair shone like it was backlit.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world …” I said.

“Joint?” Hedda said, deep in her pill assortment. “I thought you said it was klieg.” She sniffed it.

The girl had to be a face, she was too pretty not to be, but the hair was wrong, and so was the costume, which wasn’t a halter dress and wasn’t white. It was black, with a green fitted weskit, and she was wearing short green gloves. Deanna Durbin? No, the hair was the wrong color. And it was tied back with a green hair ribbon. Shirley Temple?

“Who’s that?” I muttered.

“Who?” Hedda licked her gloved finger and rubbed it in the powder the pills had left on her glove.

“The face over there,” I said, pointing. She had moved out of the doorway, over against the wall, but her hair was still catching the light, making a halo of her light brown hair.

Hedda sucked the powder off her glove. “Alice,” she said.

Alice who? Alice Faye? No, Alice Faye’d been a platinum blonde, like everybody else in Hollywood. And she wasn’t given to hair ribbons. Charlotte Henry in
Alice in Wonderland?

Whoever the girl had been looking for—the White Rabbit, probably—she’d given up on finding him, and was watching the freescreen. On it, Fred and Ginger were dancing around each other without touching, their eyes locked.

“Alice who?” I said.

Hedda was frowning at her finger. “Huh?”

“Who’s she supposed to be?” I said. “Alice Faye? Alice Adams?
Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore?
”

The girl had moved away from the wall, her eyes still on the screen, and was heading toward the baseball cap. He leaped forward, thrilled to have a new audience, and started into his spiel, but she wasn’t listening to him. She was watching Fred and Ginge, her head tilted up toward the screen, her hair catching the light from the fibe-op feed.

“I don’t think any of this stuff is what he told me,” Hedda said, licking her finger again. “It’s her name.”

“What?”

“Alice,” she said. “A-l-i-s. It’s her name. She’s a freshie. Film hist major. From Illinois.”

Well, that explained the hair ribbon, though not the rest of the getup. It wasn’t Alice Adams. The gloves were 1950s, not thirties, and her face wasn’t angular enough to be trying for Katharine Hepburn. “Who’s she supposed to be?”

“I wonder which one of these is ice,” Hedda said, poking around in her hand again. “It’s supposed to make the flash go away faster. She wants to dance in the movies.”

“I think you’ve had enough pill potluck,” I said, reaching for her hand.

She squeezed it shut, protecting the pills. “No, really. She’s a dancer.”

I looked at her, wondering how many unmarked pills she’d taken before I got here.

“She was born the year Fred Astaire died,” she said, gesturing with her closed fist. “She saw him on the fibe-op feed and decided to come to Hollywood to dance in the movies.”

“What
movies?” I said.

She shrugged, intent on her hand again.

I looked over at the girl. She was still watching the screen, her face intent. “Ruby Keeler,” I said.

“Huh?” Hedda said.

“The plucky little dancer in
42nd Street
who wants to be a star.” Only she was about twenty years too late. But just in time for a little popsy, and if she was wide-eyed enough to believe she could make it in the movies, it ought to be a piece of cake getting her up to my room.

I shouldn’t have to explain time travel to her, like the exec. He was talking earnestly to a Marilyn wearing black fringe and holding a ukelele.
Some Like It Hot
.

“See, you’re turning me down in this timefeed,” he was saying, “but in a parallel timefeed we’re already popping.” He leaned closer. “There are hundreds of thousands of parallel
timefeeds. Who
knows
what we’re doing in some of them?”

“What if I’m turning you down in all of them?” the Marilyn said.

I squeezed past her fringe, thinking she might work out if Ruby didn’t, and started through the crowd toward the screen.

“Don’t!”
Hedda said loudly.

At least half the room turned to look at her.

“Don’t what?” I said, coming back to her. She was looking past me at Alis, and her face had the bleak, slightly dazed look klieg produces.

“You just flashed, didn’t you?” I said. “I told you it was klieg. And that means I’ll be doing the same thing shortly, so if you’ll excuse me—”

She took hold of my arm. “I don’t think you should—” she said, still looking at Alis. “She won’t…” She was looking worriedly at me. Mildred Natwick in
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
, telling John Wayne to be careful.

“Won’t what? Give me a pop? You wanta bet?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head like she was trying to clear it. “You … she knows what she wants.”

“So do I. And thanks to your Russian-roulette approach to pharmaceuticals, it promises to be an unforgettable experience. If I can get Ruby up to my room in the next ten minutes. Now, if there are no further objections …” I said, and started past her.