The Starry Rift Part 39

"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 fas.h.i.+on and culture- video or music." He waves a ravioli on his fork as he repeats 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 Demo- graphic is going to say about it. You want me to wear those heels? Or, These people are singing in Albanian! Or, h.e.l.l, 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 a 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 you 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 pinecone 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 looks at the cultural scene on Earth with mixed amus.e.m.e.nt and scorn.

The Duck Monkey examines all of Kimmie's flashcasts. He mocks her fas.h.i.+ons and shows ridiculous people in history who have 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 cla.s.sical music, to which I'm mostly indifferent, and praises a number of virtuosi. (I look up their reviews to make sure that what I'm saying is 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 Duck 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 fas.h.i.+onable.

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 body 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 things 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 cuff links 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.

No need to bother with a mirror. I just check out the feed from the others' headsets.

I mostly like what I see. The style is kind of severe, but its very plainness invites the use of jewelry. And the look is mature. I remember that Dad wants me to find an older look.

"You look like a schoolboy from Bombay," Anatole says, which deflates me a little.

"Wait a minute," said Lisa. "I know what he needs."

Lisa has acquired the body of a Taiwanese basketball player, tall and rangy, with almond eyes and long black hair. She walks to one of the white metal poolside tables, rummages around the packages for a moment, then returns with a pair of sungla.s.ses. I can feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek as she perches the shades on my nose.

"Ooh, nice," says Deva. I check her video feed. The shades are gold-rimmed wraparounds with deep jade-green lenses, and they've got camera pickups for flashcasting. Wearing them I viddie like a cross between the Bombay schoolboy and a dapper young gangster.

"Now you look like a vicious lawyer," Lisa says. I sneak a look at the online poll and 70 percent of the Demographic approve the look, with a furious 25 percent hating it. And even the 25 percent care.

"I like this look," I say. "We should become the Pack of Vicious Lawyers."

I sense a certain resistance in a few of the pack members, but after all I'm the star-so we all adopt the style, or something similar, and for the next several days the Pack of Vicious Lawyers crosses the Bay Bridge to a series of clubs in San Francisco. (As a loyal citizen of the East Bay, I refuse to call it "the City" like the natives do.) We invade clubs en ma.s.se, listen to bands like Sylvan Slide and the Birth of China, and are invited into the VIP rooms by management eager for the free publicity. I meet and chat with famous people like the artist Saionji-who invites us all to his opening-and the producer Jane Chapman, who asks the name of my agent.

Considering that none of us can even drink legally, this isn't bad at all.

I regain a third of the audience lost during the gorilla fiasco, but then the numbers begin to slide again. People have seen me go to clubs before.

I know the Pack of Vicious Lawyers is only a transitional phase. It's too mature a style for all the Demographic-a fourteen-year-old couldn't pull off the Vicious Lawyer look. And there's nothing in the package but clothing and style-the Vicious Lawyers don't do anything; they just stand around in groups and look intimidating. I hope it will last till I can find the new style that will bring the Demographic screaming back into my camp.

I start to sweat. I want all the love back. I'm knocking myself out looking for the next trend-and of course I'm going to college and being the Duck Monkey as well. Time is running out, and so, for that matter, is my audience.

And then I think I find it. The music is from Turkmenistan, coincidentally where my mother gave a lecture series a few years ago, and is called Mukam. It's descended from a traditional form that goes back for centuries, but everyone in Southwest Asia has been trading licks and musical styles for ages now, so in addition to using the flute and the two-string lute native to the area, the Turkmen imported the double-ended dhol drum from the Punjab along with modern electric instruments and insanely rigorous vocal styles from places like Tuva and Mongolia. The musical forms are incredibly complex, but the dhol drives the music forward and makes it compulsively danceable, at least if you can dance to 5/4 time or the even more complex polyrhythms native to the area.

And the clothing from the region is terrific. Baggy tops and drawers, riding boots of leather or felt, and long fur-trimmed lambskin coats. Some of the coats have lace and trim and frogging that would do credit to a nineteenth-century drum major, and others are ornamented with wild, colorful felt applique.

The only element I don't care for is the huge fur hats the size of beachb.a.l.l.s, which make people look like giant dandelions. I reckon we can do without the headwear.

The Turkmen style had everything. Music, movement, fas.h.i.+on. It had all that was needed for it to become a major trend, everything except exposure.

Exposure I could provide.

I call a meeting of the pack and specify that no cameras are to be worn. I draw the blinds on the clubhouse and play the music and show videos of the clothing.

"That's great," Anatole says. "But how are we supposed to dance to any of this?"

"People have been dancing to this music for hundreds of years," I point out.

Errol just gives me a blank stare. "How?"

I don't have an answer for that one. "Let's look at the videos again," I suggest.

The videos don't help- they're all of professional dancers who are infinitely more skilled than we are. They even look good in those huge fur hats.

Lisa approaches me later, after we break up in confusion. She is still very shy and doesn't like talking in front of the whole pack, but I guess she's comfortable with just me.

It's those trustworthy brown eyes, I decide.

"We could do research on the dancing," she says.

"Yes," I say. "But we don't want to do old stuff."

"It doesn't have to be new," she says. "It just has to be new to your audience."

I look at her for a moment. "You're right."

Lisa goes into the computer archives and digs up information about the sort of dances they were doing in Central Asia clubs about forty years ago. I find old instructional videos. Most of us aren't very good at it, but Lisa turned out to be a natural.

I'm the star and I get to pick my partners, so I dance with Lisa for most of the afternoon and get her to tutor me. I ask her why she's so good at it.

"It's just a matter of counting. For most dances, all you have to do is count to four. For the waltz, you count to three. And for this . . . well, the left side of your brain counts to eight while the right side counts to five."

"Right."

But everybody's smart these days, and after a few more afternoons of practice, I get so I'm good at counting exactly that way.

Autumn comes on, wet and chill. My mother leaves for Mars, where she'll teach for a semester, leaving me with Dad and tons of fresh-cooked gourmet food, which, no longer being a gorilla, I cannot eat nearly fast enough.

We all get good at dancing like Turkmen. Clothing appears at the clubhouse. We listen to hours of music and pick our favorites for our debut, which we decide is going to be at the Cryptic Club down in the Castro-the management is happy to comp us for a night and play our music in exchange for all the free publicity.

I don't let anyone take video of any of our practice sessions. Not only because we don't all look particularly expert, but because I don't want any pictures getting out into the world. n.o.body's going to know about the Turkmen style till I spring it on the world Sat.u.r.day night.

We make appointments to get hair extensions. I've decided that long, wild hair is going to be part of the look.

I'm on top of the world. I'm having enormous fun being the Duck Monkey. Kimmie's audience has stabilized at about a quarter the size of mine and isn't getting any larger. I know that I'm about to popularize a style that will sweep the world and bring the Demographic back.