The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories (50 page)

It was my way of saying that I know she's trying to be
me
.

 

I watch as Kimmie walks through shops and looks at clothes and laughs with her friends. She's bouncy and sort of flirting with the cameras.

I feel sick as I remember how she used to flirt with me.
She never loved me
, I think. She just wanted to be around someone who could teach her to be famous.

"Sanson would have liked this," she says, holding up a flirty top. Then she shrugged and put it back on the rack.

Her friends giggle. "That style's so over," she says.

Given up on subtlety, have you?
I think.

Kimmie nods. "I saw Sanson's mother wearing something like this, once, except it was blue."

"Leave my mother out of it," I tell the video.

She touches her friend's arm. "Sanson and his mother are so cute together," she says. "They're really close. He takes her advice on everything."

I snarl and throw a pillow at the holographic image. Lasers burn Kimmie's image across the crumpled pillowcase.

If there's one thing the Demographic isn't going to want to hear, it's that I depend on the advice of a hundred-forty-year-old parent.

Kimmie has declared war. And I don't know how I'm going to fight back—as my dad said, I can't respond directly without giving her more credence than she deserves.

And besides, what am I going to say? That I hate my mother?

I don't need a bucket of hot coals. I need a cannon.

 

Next day we have the semifinals in our gorillaball league. We had chosen a field half a kilometer long, with a three-story municipal office building in the middle, plus a row of stores and two groves of pine trees. The six goals were in hard-to-reach places that would involve a lot of climbing.

The Samurai arrive with angry designs shaved into their fur, arrows and snakes and snarling animals—I wish I'd thought of that, actually. Shaved into each of their backs are the words WE LOVE KIMMIE.

They've got a lot of nerve, considering that they're only playing gorillaball in the first place because they're in
my
Demographic.

Before the game starts the Samurai get in a circle and start chanting "
Sanson is a sellout!"

It goes on for what seems like hours while we stand around and can't think of any way to respond. Eventually Errol starts shouting "
Play or forfeit!"
and the rest of us pick up the chant, but it's far too late. Our fighting spirit has already drained into the dirt, and we look like a gang of lames to our worldwide audience.

The Samurai stomp us. They've practiced a lot, and they have some moves we haven't encountered, and they play rough. The final score is 16-5, a complete rout, and by the end we're dusty and bruised and angry. I'm limping because a couple of the Samurai body-checked me off a building and I didn't catch myself in time. We leave with the
Sanson is a sellout
chant echoing in our ears.

And I'm
still
stuck in the gorilla body till the league finals, which are next week.

I decide it's all Kimmie's fault.

 

There's a lot of silence in the pool area after the game. I shave an area of my calf and slap on an analgesic patch. Hardly anyone is watching anymore, so I ask everyone to turn off their cameras, and we groom each other listlessly.

When I ask Lisa into my office I run all the detectors that are supposed to make certain that no one is eavesdropping. I don't want anyone to know what I'm planning.

"Kimmie's attacking me in her flashcasts," I say. "And I can't respond to what she's doing, because that would give her more credit than she deserves."

"Okay," Lisa says. "I can see that." She sits on one of the three-legged stools and rubs a bruised shoulder. "All you have to do is wait, though, because sooner or later she's going to make a mistake."

"No," I say. "I want to be able to respond—but I don't want anyone to know it's me."

She looks uneasy. "You want me to make a flashcast attacking her?"

"No," I say. "I don't want anyone in the pack to do it, because then it'll look like I'm just telling them what to say."

Lisa is relieved.

"I want to do it myself," I say.

She stares at me. Though our bodies are hulking gorilloids, our faces are a lot more human, so that there's room for brains behind the forehead and so that people can understand us when we talk, but that also means that we have a nearly full range of human expression. I look at Lisa and I know that she's looking at me with calculation.

"I want to create a false identity," I say. "I want to be somebody else when I start talking about Kimmie."

Lisa considers this. "What exactly do you want to do?"

"I want to create an artificial personality, one who makes flashcasts of his own. Maybe he could be based on Mars or somewhere even farther out." I grin at her. "Anatole says you're good at this kind of thing."

"Maybe I am," Lisa says, "but nothing I do is going to be foolproof."

"Lots of people make anonymous flashcasts."

Lisa looks dubious. "I don't think very many of them are as famous as you are."

"I won't do it for very long."

"All right," she says. She still seems doubtful. "If anyone really
wants
to find out, they will."

"Let's do it," I say.

"Let me look into a few things first," she says. "Before I start, I want to make sure I'm not going to make a mistake and wreck things."

I agree. I like the fact that she's being careful.

I start making plans for what I want to say.

 

"You've lost another fifteen percent of your audience," my dad says.

Tonight's meal is Italian. There's stuffed tomatoes, herring artichokes, squid salad, ravioli stuffed with pheasant, braised beef in the Genoese style, and a ricotta pie. And again it's all for the two of us, because my mom's giving a talk in Peru.

"I know," I say.

"You're a trend-spotter," he tells me. "What trends look good?"

"I've been looking around. But with everything else I'm doing—"

"How about the whole neo-barbarian thing?"

"No legs," I say, my mouth full of squid. I swallow. "Besides, after being a gorilla I don't ever want to have to deal with fur coats ever again."

"You need to find some coincidence of fashion and culture—video or music." He waved a ravioli on his fork as he repeated his mantra. "No modern cultural phenomenon ever lasted unless there were great clothes that went with it."

"I know," I say.

"And a new dance style always helps."

"I know."

I know. I know more than he does. I'm the one who's a slave to the Demographic, not him.

 

So I start casting about for trends. I stay up nights listening to music from all points of the solar system, and looking at the flashcasts of obscure designers. For a while I think about getting a second pair of arms, like some of the asteroid miners, but then I realize how much I'm longing to inhabit a basic human body again.

I keep looking. Put
this
style with
this
music with
this
dance. I've done it before. How hard can it be?

It's hard. Especially because I hear in my head what the Demographic is going to say about it.
You want me to wear
those
heels?
Or,
These people are singing in
Albanian! Or,
Hell, I'd rather be a gorilla.

But in the meantime we have to deal with the last gorillaball event, the Samurai versus the Night People, the other Bay Area team that survived the semifinals. I've viddied their games and I don't think they stand a chance.

I appear in person to award the league trophy, which is a huge, fierce gorilla head chomping with its fangs on a ball. Since I don't want to go alone I bring the whole pack.

"Hey, a question," I say to the Samurai captain at the coin toss. "If you like Kimmie so much, how come you haven't gone blond?"

He doesn't have an answer for that, but wins the toss anyway.

I watch with the pack as the Samurai begin one of their patented jackhammer attacks and commence their long afternoon's humiliation of the Night People. The score is 4-1 when I look at Deva and give her the nod.

She quietly leaves, and takes the league trophy with her, out of range of anyone's cameras.

After the Samurai finish, they find that the trophy has been replaced by a piece of paper pinned down by a large pinecone. The rest of us are in our vehicles. (I have new but deliberately downmarket Scion. I'm not legally allowed to drive it, but I can always program it for a destination and let the onboard navigator take over)

"Hey!" the captain says. "Where's the trophy?"

"It's gone for a walk," I say, "but it left behind a clue as to its current location."

What I'd written on the paper was this:

 
There once were gorillas of note
But overly tempted to gloat.
They played ball without peer
Till a brave Mutineer
Carried them off on his boat.
 

How to find the league trophy

• • Scratch your heads in puzzlement until someone watching the flashcast sends you a message informing them that Errol's mother owns a boat called
  Mutineer.
  
• • Troop down to the marina in Alameda, and then stand around like a bunch of apes until you finally notice that the boat is flying flag signals.
  
• • Decode the flags and follow directions across the Bay to Sausalito.
  
• • Spend the next several hours tramping back and forth across the Bay, knowing all the while that millions of people are watching your purgatory in realtime, and that Sanson and his pack are in their clubhouse rolling on the floor with laughter.
  
• • Finally find the trophy in a pine tree on the field where the Samurai had beaten the Stars, and realize that the pine cone was a clue that you were too dense to get.
  
• • Limp off into darkness and obscurity, knowing that millions of people are laughing at you, and will laugh for years to come.
  

 

After we stopped flashcasting, Lisa came over to me and said in a low voice. "You know that thing you asked me to do?"

"Yeah?"

"I've done it."

I take her into my office and she gives me the codes. "All you need to do is decide what your avatar is going to look like," she says.

"Magnetic," I answer.

 

That's how the Duck Monkey begins. A Martian, the Duck Monkey gazes down from the sky and examines the cultural scene on Earth with mixed amusement and scorn.

The Duck Monkey examines all of Kimmie's flashcasts. He mocks her fashions, and shows ridiculous people in history who had worn similar clothing. He points out similarities between her flashes and mine, and suggests that she's nothing but an imitator. He closely examines her ideas and expressions and provides links to the originators of those ideas and expressions. He makes fun of her friends. He points out that it's tacky to use information I gave her in private.

No one could survive such scrutiny with her dignity intact. Not Kimmie, not me, not anyone.

Nor does the Duck Monkey stop with Kimmie. I don't want him to be a one-note critic, or the electronic equivalent of an obsessed stalker. The Duck Monkey also hates the singer Alma Chen and the actor Ahmose. He likes the band Peninsular & Orient, and because I want him to be different from me I have him like al-Amin even though I personally think he's pompous. The Duck Monkey likes classical music, to which I'm mostly indifferent, and praises a number of virtuosi. (I look up their reviews to make sure that what I was saying was plausible to someone who actually knows that scene.)

Other than Kimmie, I never attack anyone who isn't big enough to take the hit. Ahmose has millions of fans—why should he care what the Duck Monkey thinks?

He does, though. He makes a few vicious remarks about the Duck Monkey in an interview and gives my Martian avatar instant credibility. The Monkey's numbers jump.

A pro like Ahmose, you'd think he'd know better.

I really love being the Duck Monkey. I can say anything I want and not have to worry about the Demographic. I can be as sarcastic as I like, and if I love something, I can say so without having to worry about whether my opinion is sufficiently fashionable.

But in the meantime, I also have to be me. And that isn't nearly as much fun.

 

My new human body isn't beautiful. Beauty isn't interesting when anyone can be beautiful. People my age have grown up around physical beauty and we instinctively distrust it. Besides, I've been beautiful in the past, and I don't like the way it makes people look at me.

What I want instead of beauty is
sincerity
. I want to blink my dewy eyes at the camera and have the Demographic believe everything that comes out of my mouth.

At first I plan on straw hair and blue eyes and then I realize everyone's going to think I'm imitating Kimmie. So my next has olive skin and a sensitive mouth and soulful brown eyes, and that's the face I see in the mirror as soon as I climb out of the vat.

I look at myself carefully. Hey,
I'd
believe me.

I give the rest of the pack a few days to choose and settle into their new bodies, and then we have a Style Day. I'm always getting sent stuff—clothes, shoes, hats, accessories—by designers who hope I'll popularize it for them. There's quite a backlog after our two months as gorillas, so we unpack it all by the pool, and model it for each other. We flashcast it all live, and the Demographic send in their comments and instantly rate each item.

There's nothing very exciting. The designers seem to be going through a dull patch.

Wakaba makes a nice cream-colored shirt that fits me, with a standing collar that brushes my ears. It's got French cuffs so I can use a pair of chunky lapis cufflinks that I've had around for months. I find a thin black tie with a gold stripe, by Madagascar, and tie it around the standing collar with a simple four-in-hand knot. Then I find a navy blue silk jacket designed by Desi, with braided lapels and a single vent.