He realized he was roughing out a Sparky routine. No need for that anymore. He felt a strange mixture of loss and relief at the thought.
He left the treatment room and was met by a lovely young woman in the starched whites of the Nurses' Guild. She smiled, and indicated he should follow her.
This was not his regular medical facility, which was in the exclusive Pill Road district. After the decision to fold Sparky, Sparky had realized he no longer had to live his life in a fishbowl. That is, he needn't cater to his fans, something he'd always felt obliged to do before. It had been fun, before. Now he felt the urge for more privacy, and as nothing more than the studio cohead he didn't need to seek the limelight. It was a new idea for him, and one that held a lot of appeal. So he had booked his hormonal adjustment at this ordinary clinic in a middle-class part of town, far from celebrity haunts. He wore a pair of dark glasses and a King City Loonies baseball hat and a pair of denim pants—something "Sparky" had never worn on the show. He'd done it before and got away with it, and back then he'd still had his odd hair and tonsure to conceal. Now it had been whacked off and was growing in brown, a shade he hadn't seen in years.
"Did everything go smoothly?" the nurse asked.
"Sure, no problem."
Sparky almost missed it, kept walking down the hall with the nurse. If they'd kept on talking he probably never would have noticed. But he had a sharp ear for dialogue, and as the line repeated itself in his head it soon began sounding wrong. It was a line that would have been cut in rehearsals. Go smoothly? What was to not go smoothly? Which meant she didn't know anything about the procedure. Which meant she wasn't a nurse. He took another look at her.
"Don't I know you?" he asked her.
"Yeah," she said, giving it up right away. "I'm Hildy Johnson. Reporter? Cornered you in the spaceport when your father returned?"
"I remember. You wanted an interview."
"You said you'd give me one. And you didn't return my calls."
"That was damn inconsiderate of me." They walked a few steps farther, pondering the situation. "You pissed off?"
"What's the point of being pissed off? For you to give me an interview, you're going to have to like me, and why would you like me if I was pissed off? I tracked you down here to ask you again. I can't seem to make it into your office."
"I don't think—"
"And you'd be pissed off if I did."
He smiled. She was right. But there was something else he didn't like.
"You say 'tracked me down.' What you mean is somebody at the studio told you where I'd be."
"You don't think I could have followed you here?"
Sparky thought about it a moment. "No. I don't think so."
She shrugged. "You're right. But I won't reveal my source."
"That's fair enough, I guess."
They turned a corner and at the end of a corridor there was a glass door with a mass of people milling around on the other side. The door must have been locked—there were two security guards standing on the inside—because no one was coming through it, and they certainly would have had it been possible, because this was the traveling shark pack known as the Celebrity Press.
"Looks like they found me, too," Sparky said.
"If you want to avoid them, I know a back way out of here. It's the way I got in."
"Great. Let's go."
"How about that interview?"
"What's the big deal?" Sparky asked. "I'm not little Sparky anymore, and pretty soon I won't even be little."
"Are you kidding? 'Sparky Grows Up!' It'll be the biggest story of my career."
"So what you really want is a series."
"Well, I would have gotten around to that at the interview."
"Okay, Hildy. You get me out of here, you can follow me around till I'm a grown-up. If that ever happens. You can have an exclusive."
"Over this way," she said, touching him on the shoulder. They turned away from the mob at the end of the hall and entered a stairwell. They started to climb.
"I guess the leak in my office is pretty bad," he said.
"Why do you say that?"
"All those reporters. What happened, somebody in my office put out a press release?"
"Oh, no," Johnson said. "My source speaks only to me. I'm the one who told that bunch. I made the call after I got here so they'd be in a hurry and really frantic. Don't you think they looked frantic?"
Sparky stared at her, then laughed.
"To get on my good side, right?"
"Exactly."
"Must have been a lot of calling."
"Sparky, I try to do as little work as possible. I called D. Mentua Precox and made her promise not to tell a soul."
Sparky was still laughing well after they made their escape.
It's been many years now since I've had to dodge crowds of reporters. You say you hate it, and you do, and yet of course a part of you likes it very much. Who could resist? All those people, with absolutely nothing to do but chase you. It goes to your head, and when it's gone, it leaves you off balance, like you'd been climbing stairs for years and now you're at the top and your foot keeps reaching for one more.
Even in my heyday I never lived in a place like the Halley.
I could have. I could have afforded it. But I was never very good at spending my money. I left that up to my father. There was nothing much I really wanted except to do good work. I'm not saying I shopped at thrift stores. I just never bought the kind of baubles many rich folks buy.
But I could get used to the Halley.
I spent many days doing little more than lolling in the hammock stretched between the wood struts supporting my porch roof, dangling a line in the still water. To call me an angler would have been an insult to fishermen since the beginning of time. A bite on the hook was a minor annoyance; I'd pull in the little perch or bass or catfish, cut off the barb, and set the fish free. Catch and release, a phrase I recall from Old Earth. Then I'd get settled in the hammock again. It got where I was sure I recognized some of the finny critters. They'd look at me accusingly with their wall eyes just before I dumped them in the drink, but I didn't care. I was ruthless. It's your own fault for being so trusting, I'd tell them. Didn't you learn anything when you hit the bait yesterday?
Nothing happened, as I said. But while I idled, things were going on.
Each day was an improvement for Poly. She spent six, seven hours a day practicing. At first she was sure it was annoying me. She offered to move to one of the rim staterooms. I begged her not to. Usually it was scales, arpeggios; finger exercises. Studies for the student. But notes flew into the air and I drank them in, even the simplest, most monotonous run. I seldom saw her when she practiced. The sound came through the open window of her tree house, and each sweet tone soothed me.
At the end of a session, when we would usually share a sumptuous picnic prepared by the ship's gourmet-chef program, she would come alive describing her day's progress. Her skills were returning faster than she had been led to believe, faster than she had dared hope. She was starting to think she might even be ready to play professionally by the time we got to Luna. Most of the time I had no idea what she was talking about. To tell the truth, she had sounded just fine to me on the first day of practice. I have what I consider a good ear. I can carry a tune; Lord knows, I've sung in enough musical theater. But you don't need a perfect voice to sing what have become known as "Broadway" musicals. In fact, you don't even have to have a "good" voice, as long as you can belt it out and not hit sour notes. The genre is famous for its scratchy altos and "singers" who do more speaking than singing. But I know the difference between the sort of music I can make and that made by a real professional musician. I know most ears are not tuned to the fineness needed to distinguish a good performance from a work of genius. Poly has that sort of ear. You have to have it if you expect to move in the circles she aspires to, which, for now, would be concertmaster with a middling philharmonic orchestra. First chair with the King City Symphony, solo work... that would have to await more experience and maturity.