The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (103 page)

“Tell Jane I won’t be in today. Sick. And remind her to—”

“I’m not your errand boy, Barry,” he answered hotly. We stared at each other’s comlink images in mutual dislike. Dino Carrano was the trainer-to-the-stars-of-the-moment-before-this-one, an arrogant narcissist who three times a week tortured Jane into perfect abs and weeping exhaustion. Like Ishmael, he was without the prescience to realize that his brief vogue had passed and that Jane kept him on partly from compassion. He stood now in her deserted exercise room.

“Why are you answering the phone? Where’s Catalina?”

“Her grandmother in Mexico died. Again. And before you ask, Jose is supervising the grounds crew and Jane is in the bathroom, throwing up. Now you know everything. Bye, Barry.”

“Wait! If she’s throwing up because you pushed her too hard again, you Dago bastard – ”

“Save your invective, little man. We haven’t even started the training session yet, and if we don’t train by tomorrow, her ass is going to drop like a duffel bag. For today she just ate something bad.” He cut the link.

My stomach didn’t feel too steady, either. Had it been the Barrington lemonade? I made it to the bathroom just in time. But afterward I felt better, decided to not call my doctor, and went to bed. If Jane was sick, Catalina would cancel her appointments. No, Catalina was in Mexico . . . not my problem.

But all Jane’s problems were mine. Without her, I had my own problems – Leila, Ethan – but no actual life.

Nonetheless, I forced myself to stay in bed, and eventually I fell asleep. When I woke, six hours later, my throat and stomach both felt fine. A quick call discovered that Catalina had returned from Mexico, sounding suspiciously un bereaved. But she was efficient enough when she was actually in the country, and I decided I didn’t need to brief Jane on tomorrow’s schedule. That would buy me one more day. I would take a relaxing evening. A long bath, a glass of wine, another postponement of talking to Leila. The industry news on Hollywood Watch.

The local news came on first. Ishmael’s body had been found in a pond in the Valley.

“. . . and weighted with cement blocks. Cause of death was a single gunshot wound to the head, execution style,” said the news avatar, a CGI who looked completely real except that she had no faulty camera angles whatsoever. I stared at the photo of Ishmael’s handsome face on the screen beside her. “Apparently the murderers were unaware that construction work would start today at the pond site, where luxury condos will be built by – ”

Ishmael’s name was Harold Sylvester Ehrenreich. Failed actor, minor grifter, petty tax evader, who had dropped out of electronic sight eight months ago.

“Anyone having any information concerning—”

I was already on the comlink. “Jane?”

“I just called the cops. They’re on their way over.” She looked tired, drawn, within five years of her actual age. Her voice sounded as raspy as mine had been. “I was just about to call you. Barry, if this endangers the picture— ”

“It won’t,” I said. Thirty years a star, and she still didn’t understand how the behind-the-scenes worked. “It will make the picture. Did you call Everett?”

“He’s on his way.”

“Don’t say a word until both he and I get there. Not a word, Jane, not one. Can you send the flyer for me?”

“Yes. Barry – was he killed because of my interview?”

“There’s no way to know that,” I said, and all at once was profoundly grateful that it was true. I didn’t care if Ishmael was alive, dead, or fucking himself on Mars, but Jane was built differently. People mattered to her, especially the wounded-bird type. It was how she’d ended up married to three of her four husbands and the fourth, the Alpha-Male Producer, had been in reaction to the second, the alcoholic failed actor. Catalina, Jane’s house keeper and social secretary, was another of her wounded birds. So, in his own perverse way, was her trainer.

Maybe that was why Jane had ended up with me as well.

But I could tell that neither me nor Belinda’s cruel words were on Jane’s mind just now. It was all Ishmael, and that was good. Ishmael would get us safely past our personal crisis. Even murder has its silver lining.

As the flyer set down on Jane’s roof, I saw the media already starting to converge. Someone must have tipped them off, perhaps a clerk at the precinct. An unmarked car was parked within Jane’s gates, with two vans outside and another flyer approaching from LA Catalina let me in, her dark eyes wide with excitement. “La policia – ”

“I know. Is Everett Murphy here?”

“Yes, he—”

“Bring in coffee and cake. And make the maids draw all the curtains in the house, immediately. Even the bedrooms. There’ll be robocams.” I wanted pictures and information released on my schedule, not that of flying recorders.

A man and a woman sat with Jane and Everett at one end of her enormous living room, which the decorator had done in swooping black curves with accents of screaming purple. The room looked nothing like Jane, who used it only for parties. She’d actually defied the decorator, who was a Dino-Carrano-bully type but not a wounded bird, and done her private sitting room in English country house. But she hadn’t taken the detectives there. I could guess why: she was protecting her safe haven. Catalina rushed past me like a small Mexican tornado and dramatically pushed the button to opaque the windows. They went deep purple, and lights flickered on in the room. Catalina raced out.

“Barry,” Jane said. She looked even worse than on comlink, red nose and swollen eyes and no make-up. I hoped to hell that neither cop was optic wired. “This is Detective Lopez and Detective Miller from the LAPD. Officers, my manager Barry Tenler.”

They nodded. Both were too well-trained to show curiosity or distaste, but they were there. I always know. In her sitting room Jane kept a low chair for me, but here I had to scramble up onto a high black sofa that satisfied the decorator desire for “an important piece.” I said, “You can question Miss Snow now, but please be advised that she has already spoken with the FBI and HPA, and that both Mr Murphy and I reserve the right to advise her to not answer.”

The cops ignored this meaningless window dressing. But I’d accomplished what I wanted. Dwarfs learn early that straightforward, multisyllabic, take-no-shit talk will sometimes stop average-sizers from treating us like children. Sometimes.

Officer Lopez began a thorough interrogation: How had she arranged the meeting with The Group? When? What contact had she had between the initial one and the meeting? Who had taken her to the meeting? Who else had accompanied her? When they found out that it had been me, Lopez got the look of a man who knows he’s screwed up. “You were there, Mr Tenler?”

“I was.”

“You’ll have to go with Officer Miller into another room,” Lopez said. He stared at me hard. Witnesses were always questioned separately, and even if it hadn’t crossed his mind that someone like me was a witness, he suspected it had crossed mine. Which it had. If law-enforcement agencies weren’t given to so many turf wars, the LAPD would already know I’d been in that grimy basement. Or if Lopez hadn’t fallen victim to his own macho assumptions. You? She took a lame half-pint like you to protect her?

“Everett is my lawyer, too,” I said.

“You go with Officer Miller. Mr Murphy will join you when I’m finished with Miss Snow.” Lopez’s formality barely restrained his anger.

Following Officer Miller to the media room, it occurred to me – pointlessly – that Belinda would have known immediately that I’d been withholding something.

It seemed obvious to me, as it probably was to the cops, that Ishmael had been killed by The Group. Narcissistic, bombastic, unreliable, he must have screwed up royally. Was Ms. Resentful dead, too? The bodyguard with the assault rifle? The boy who’d guided us through the warehouse?

The Group was trying to combine idealism, profit-making, and iron control. That combination never worked. I would say that to Officer Lopez, except that there was little chance he would take it seriously. Not from me.

The media spent a breathless three or four days on the story (“Famous Actress Questioned About Genemod Murder! What Does Jane Know?”). Then a United States senator married a former porn star named Candy Alley and the press moved on, partly because it was clear that Jane didn’t know anything. I’d positioned her as cooperative, concerned, committed to her art, and bewildered by the killing. Opinion polls said the public viewed her favorably. She increased her name recognition 600 per cent among eighteen to twenty-four-year-olds, most of whom watched only holos and had never seen a Jane Snow picture. Publicity is publicity.

She got even more of it by spending so much time with the Barrington twins. Everybody liked this except me. Frieda liked the press attention (at least, such press as wasn’t staking out the senator and his new pork barrel). The twins liked Jane. She liked caring for yet more wounded birds, which was what she considered them. Her thinking on this escaped me; these were two of the most pampered children in the known universe. But Jane was only filling time, anyway, until the script was finished. And to her credit, she turned down the party invitations from the I’m-more-important-than-you A-list crowd that had ignored her for a decade. I’d urged her to turn down social invitations in order to create that important aura of non-attainable exclusivity. Jane turned them down because she no longer considered those people to be friends.

As for me, I worked at home on the hundreds of pre-photography details. Before I could finally reach Leila, she called me.

“Hey, Barry.”

“Hey, Leila.” She didn’t look good. I steeled myself to ask. “How is he?”

“Gone again.” Exhaustion pulled at her face. “I called the LAPD but they won’t do anything.”

“He’ll come home again,” I said. “He always does.”

“Yeah, and one of these days it’ll be in a coffin.”

I said nothing to that, because there was nothing to say.

Leila, however, could always find something. “Well, if he does come home in a coffin, then you’ll be off the hook, won’t you? No more risk of embarrassing you or the gorgeous has-been.”

“Leila—”

“Have a good time with your big shot Hollywood friends. I’ll just wait to hear if this time the son you deformed really is dead.”

She hung up on me.

Leila and I met at a Little People of America convention in Denver. She was one of the teenage dwarfs dancing joyously, midriff bared and short skirt flipping, at the annual ball. I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen: red hair and blue eyes, alive to her fingertips. I was eighteen years older than she, and everyone at the convention knew who I was. High-ranking aide to a candidate for the mayor of San Francisco. Smart, successful, sharply dressed. Local dwarf makes good. More mobile then, I asked her to dance. Six months later we married. Six months after that, while I was running the campaign for a gubernatorial candidate, Leila accidentally got pregnant.

Two dwarfs have a 25 per cent chance of conceiving an average-sized child, a 50 percent chance of a dwarf, and a 25 per cent of a double-dominant, which always dies shortly after birth. Leila and I had never discussed these odds because, like most dwarfs, we planned on the in vitro fertilization that permits cherry-picking embryos. But Leila got careless with her pills. She knew immediately that she was pregnant, and even before the zygote had implanted itself in her uterus wall, testing showed that the fetus had a “normal” FGFR3 gene. I panicked.

“I don’t want to have an average-sized kid,” I told Leila. “I just don’t.”

“And I don’t want to have an abortion,” Leila said. “It’s not that I’m politically opposed to abortion. I’m glad to have the choice, but . . . Barry, I . . . I just can’t. He’s already a baby to me. Our baby. Why would having an Average be so hard?”

“Why?” I’d waved a hand around our house, in which everything – furniture, appliance controls, doorknobs – had been built to our scale. “Just look around! Besides, there’s a moral question here, Leila. You know that with in vitro, fewer and fewer dwarfs are having dwarf children. That just reinforces the idea that there’s something wrong with being a dwarf I don’t want to perpetuate that – I won’t perpetuate that. This is a political issue! I want a dwarf child.”

She believed me. She was twenty to my thirty-nine, and I was a big-shot politico. She loved me. Leila lacked the perspicacity to see how terrified I was of an average-sized son, who would be as tall as I was by the time he was seven. Who would be impossible to control. Who might eventually despise me and his mother both. But Leila really, really didn’t want to abort. I talked her into in utero somatic gene therapy in England.

In those days I believed in science. The som-gene technique was new but producing spectacular results. The British had gotten behind genetic engineering in a big way, and knowledgeable people from all over the world flocked to Cambridge, where private firms tied to the great university where turning on and off genes in fetuses still in the womb. This had to be done during the first week or ten days after conception. The FGFR3 gene stops bones from growing. It was turned on in babies with dwarfism; a corrective genemod retrovirus should be able to turn the gene off in the little mass of cells that was Ethan. The problem was that the Cambridge biotech clinic wouldn’t do it.

“We cure disease, not cause it,” I was told icily.