"EB - Edward L. Ferman - The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction 23rd EditionUC - SS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine)

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My name is Robert Dennis Clary and I was born twenty-three years ago in Oil City, Pennsylvania, which is also where I was raised. I've got a degree in electrical engineering from MIT and some grad credit at Cal Tech in electronics. "Not suitable, Mr. Clary," said the dean. "You lack the proper team spirit. Frankly speaking, you are selfish. And a cheat."
My mother told me once she was sorry I wasn't handsome enough to get by without working. Listen, Ma, I'm all right. There's nothing wrong with working the concert circuit. I'm working damned hard
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now. I was never genius enough that I could have got a really good job with, say, Bell Futures or one of the big space firms. But I've got one marketable talentЧwhat the interviewer called a peculiarly coor-dinative affinity for multiplex circuitry. He looked a tittle stunned after I finished with the stim console. "Christ, kid, you really get into it, don't you?"
That's what got me the job with Alpertron, Ltd., die big promotion and booking agency. I'm on the concert tour and work their stim board, me and my console over there on the side of the stage. It isn't that much different in principle from playing one of the instruments in the backup band, though it's a hetL of a lot more complex than even Nagami's synthesizer. It all sounds simple enough: my console is the critical link between performer and audience. Just one glorified feedback transceiver: pick up the empathic load from Jain, pipe it into the audience, they react and add their own load, and I feed it all back to the star. And then around again as I use the sixty stim tracks, each with separate controls to balance and augment and intensify. It can get pretty hairy, which is why not just anyone can do the job. It helps that I seem to have a natural resistance to the sideband stopover radiation from the empathic transmissions. "Ever think of teaching?" said the school voc counselor. "No," I said. "I want the action."
And that's why I'm on the concert circuit with Jain Snow; as far as I'm concerned, the only real blues singer and stim star.
Jam Snow, my intermittent unrequited love. Her voice is shagreen-rough; you hear it smooth until it tears you to shreds.
She's older than I am, four, maybe five years; but she looks like she's in her middle teens. Jain's tall, with a tumbleweed bush of red hair; her face isn't so much pretty as it is intense. I've never known anyone who didn't want to make love to her. "When you're a star," she said once, half drunk, "you're not hung up about taking the last cookie on the plate."
That includes me, and sometimes she's let me come into her bed. But not often. "You like it?" she said. I answered sleepily, "You're really good." "Not me," she said. "I mean being in a star's bed." I told her she was a bitch and she laughed. Not often enough.
I know I don't dare force the issue; even if I did, there would still be Stella.
Stella VanillaЧFve never learned exactly what her real last name
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isЧis Jain's bodyguard. Other stun stars have whole platoons of karate-trained killers for protection. Jain needs only Stella. "Stella, pick me up a fifth? Yeah, Irish. Scotch if they don't"
She's shorter than I am, tiny and dark with curly chestnut hair. She's also proficient in any martial art I can think of. And if all else fails, in her handbag she carries a .357 Colt Python with a four-inch barrel. When I first saw that bastard, I didn't believe she could even lift it
But she can. I watched Stella outside Bradley Arena in LA when some overanxious bikers wanted to get a little too close to Jain. "Back off, creeps." "So who's teUin' us?" She had to hold the Python with both hands, but the muzzle didn't waver. Stella fired once; the slug tore the guts out of a parked Harley-Wankel. The bikers backed off very quickly.
Stella enfolds Jain in her protection like a raincape. It sometimes amuses Jam; I can see that. Stella, get Alpertron on the phone for me. Stella? Can you score a couple grams? Stella, check out the dudes in the hall. StellaЧ It never stops.
When I first met her, I thought that Stella was the coldest person I'd ever encountered. And in Des Moines I saw her crying alone in a darkened phone boothЧJain had awakened her and told her to take a walk for a couple hours while she screwed some rube she'd picked up in the hotel bar. I tapped on the glass; Stella ignored me.
Stella, do you want her as much as I?
So there we areЧa nice symbolic obtuse triangle. And yetЧ We're all just one happy show-biz family.
IV
This is Alpertron, Ltd.'s, own chartered jet, flying at 37,000 feet above western Kansas. Stella and Jain are sitting across the aisle from me. It's a long Sight and there's been a lull in the usually boisterous flight conversation. Jain flips through a current Neiman-Marcus catalogue; exclusive mail-order listings are her present passion,
I look up as she bursts into raucous laughter. Til be goddamned. Will you look at this?" She points at the open catalogue on her lap.
Hollis, Moog Indigo's color operator, is seated behind her. She leans forward and cranes her neck over Jain's shoulder. "Which?"
"That," she says. "The VTP."
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"What's VTP?" says Stella.
Hollis says, "Video tape playback."
"Hey, everybody!" Jain raises her voice, cutting stridently through everyone else's conversations. "Get this. For a small fee, these folks'll put a video tape gadget in my tombstone. It's got everythingЧ stereo sound and color. All I've got to do is go in before I die and cut the tape."
"Terrific!" Hollis says. "You could leave an album of greatest hits. You know, for posterity. Free concerts on the grass every Sunday."
"That's really sick," Stella says.
"Free, hell." Jain grins. "Anybody who wants to catch the show can put a dollar in the slot."
Stella stares disgustedly out the window.
Hollis says, "Do you want one of those units for your birthday?"
"Nope." Jain shakes her head. 'Tm not going to need one."
"Never?"
"Well. . . not for a long time." But I think her words sound unsure.
Then I only half listen as I look out from the plane across the scattered cloud banks and the Rockies looming to the west of us. Tomorrow night we play Denver. "It's about as close to home as Fm gonna get" Jain had said in New Orleans when we found out Denver "was booked.
"A what?" Jain's voice is puzzled.
"A cenotaph," says Hollis.
"Shut up," Stella says. "Damn it."
We're in the Central Arena, the architectural pride of Denver District. This is the largest gathering place in all of Rocky Mountain, that heterogeneous, anachronistic strip-city dinging to the front ranges of the continental divide all the way from Billings down to the southern suburb of El Paso.
The dome stretches up beyond the range of the house lights. If it were rigid, there could never be a Rocky Mountain Central Arena. But it's made of a flexible plastic-variant and blowers funnel up heated air to keep it buoyant We're on the inner skin of a giant
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