“Norman Sanders,” he responded. “Thank you, I’d be delighted for the company.”
It was as easy as that. It still amazed her after all this time, but it usually was as easy as that.
“You know,” he said, sitting down opposite her, “this is quite a coincidence. I was actually thinking of getting in touch with you, or at least one of your party, when I heard the story. Might not pay much to these hard-bitten salvage types, but it might well make a great production.”
“Production?”
“Yes, that’s part of my work. I’m a producer. Actually, I’m a writer, but you have to be officially a producer or they rank you lower than the janitor.”
“A producer of what?” She honestly didn’t know what the guy was talking about.
“Comedies, dramas, extravaganzas. Whatever they’ll pay to watch. Go in, pay your money, and become one of the crew of—what was the name of your ship?”
“The Stanley.”
“Ah, yes! Become one of the crew of the Stanley as it explores a bizarre and sinister world of the dead. Feel what it’s like to be pursued by a voracious monster! And, if you survive and get away, this time you’ll be a hero. It’s a natural. I write it and get a real producer to finance it—piece of cake with all the clearances in hand—and then we use some classic virtual actors and a few real ones and we pump in the adrenaline and it’s a natural. Fine tune it, pump it up, and sell it to the bored and stuck masses on a hundred worlds, particularly the young folks, and we got a hit. And based on a true incident, hell, it’s critic proof!”
She tried to follow him. “You write—plays? Books? Cyber experiences?”
“All of the above,” he responded with a smile and a shrug. “It’s a lot more complicated these days in some ways, but the professional storyteller remains the oldest profession of humankind!”
“I thought something else was the oldest profession,” she noted.
He chuckled. “That’s what they all think! But, listen, it wasn’t just animal lust that got the first whore in bed with the first man. No, ma’am. It was because that first man, and first woman probably, and maybe even the first whore, all had fantasies. The fantasies came first, then the act, then more storytelling afterwards as the first man tried to explain it away to the first woman. It doesn’t matter. We storytellers sometimes get shot but we generally don’t starve. One of the earliest tales is of Scheherazade, who was supposed to be executed for something or other but got to telling stories the king found fascinating. She knew when she ran out of stories she’d lose her head, so she kept telling them, a thousand and one, until the old king forgot or dropped dead or whatever. And thousands of years later and on worlds hundreds of light-years from Old Earth, they still remember her name, the storyteller’s name, while nobody knows who that king was.”
“So you lie for a living, so to speak?”
“Well, not really. I entertain, or I’m at the start of the entertainment chain. Without me there’s nothing to watch, nothing to see, hear, or experience. It’s not a lie if you know it’s not the truth, but it entertains you. You mean you never saw any of the big productions? Never walked into a cyberworld story or even had a favorite story or poem you read as a kid?”
She gave a wry smile but decided not to mention her lack of reading skills. “No, not really. I’ve done some cybersex stuff and I’ve heard a lot of stories in my time, but I never was anywhere where you could see the kind of stuff you’re talking about. The most I ever saw on that score was a play once, with one real actor interacting with a bunch of cyber characters on a stage. They all looked and sounded real enough, but it was kind of boring. The language was so weird you could hardly follow it, but it did get bloody now and then.”
He shrugged. “Sorry about that. That’s kind of a lowbrow, low-budget cousin to the kind of things I do. Still, we might be able to put together a package that would make us all a little money. What do you say about that?”
“I can use it. They’re gonna be coming after me real soon for the ship rental. How much are we talking about?”
He gave a low, apologetic cough. “Well, not much up front, but once we get a script and studio deal and then start production there’ll be more. Most of it would be in royalties, percentage of the net, after the thing’s released and the money comes in. That can take a while.”
“How long’s a while?”
“Oh, a year or two. Sometimes more, sometimes less. But it goes on and on.”
“I don’t have a year. I need some money in days, or weeks,” she told him honestly. “The kind of people who’ll be coming to look for me to collect don’t like waiting around.”
“Huh! Too bad! What kind of money you talking about? That you owe, that is?”
“Rental of the Stanley for sixty days, which is sixty thousand, and repair of damages and losses to equipment, maybe another twenty or so.”
He whistled. “Eighty thousand? That’s a bit steep for what you’d get up front on this deal, although you might well make much more than that down the pike. Wonder if they’d accept your percentage in payment?”
“If they would, it would solve everything, but, truth to tell, if they didn’t I’d be a dead woman, and I don’t plan to have to stand there while we find out. No, my best bet is to try for a smaller amount and just screw it. For under ten grand I could become somebody else. Somebody they wouldn’t recognize even with a genetic scanner.”
Norman Sanders leaned back thoughtfully in his chair and said nothing for a while. Then he reached into his inner coat pocket and removed what appeared to be a small jewel case. He opened it, and carefully removed a huge gem from its custom holder inside, then leaned forward and held it out to her.
“Ever see one of these?” he asked her.
It was, apparently, a natural gem almost as large as a hen’s egg, colored in a translucent emerald-green color with a clearly visible center of some different substance that, when viewed from different angles, seemed to form pictures or shapes of some sort. She had never seen anything like it.
Staring into it, she was startled to see that the pictures inside seemed to congeal into images of strange, bizarre landscapes peopled with real, familiar figures from her own past, glimpsed only fleetingly. It was like watching tiny bits of past experiences in her own life against a backdrop of lavalike motion creating the shapes and swallowing them almost as fast as the act of creation had made them.
“I—how does it do that?” she asked, mouth agape, watching the increasingly personalized visions, many of which were becoming quite disturbing.
“Nobody knows. It comes from your own mind, though. I don’t know what you’re seeing, but it wouldn’t be what I see, or what anybody else would see in it. It’s a Magi’s Stone, sometimes called the Magi’s Gift. There are fewer than a thousand known, and they all pretty much look alike and do that sort of thing, although some are colored more like rubies, others sapphires, running through the gamut of gem colors. It’s quite rare. In fact, there are a lot of folks around who’d kill for that thing, even though they couldn’t sell it. They’re all registered, their owners known, and the insurance boys would make the ones after you look like teddy bears when they hunted for it.”
She couldn’t take her eyes off it. “Where—where did it come from?”