"Maybe somebody else…?" Yorick suggested, grinning hugely.
The young woman threw up her hands. "Producers! What do they expect production secretaries to do, if they keep bypassing 'em and ordering things on their own? Strogan-off!" and she was off, careening through the crowd.
"Stroganoff?" Yorick looked at the table. "Little odd, for breakfast."
"I think it's somebody's name." Brother Joey pointed at someone. "See the plump fellow she's talking to? The one in the gray flannel coverall?"
Yorick nodded. "Probably giving him what-for, about sending for a monk when the script didn't call for it."
"You're enjoying this," Chornoi accused.
"Why not?" Yorick couldn't stifle a chuckle. "I just love other people's mistakes!"
"Do you get the feeling we've wandered into a 3DT set?" Rod asked Brother Joey.
"Oh, of course," the monk confirmed. "Where else would so many weird people seem so normal?"
"What is a '3DT set'?" Gwen asked.
"An absurdity based on a fantasy derived from a reality that never existed," Rod answered. "The abbreviation stands for 'Three-Dimensional Television'—pictures that look and move like real people, but are absolutely artificial. The folk you see there, use 3DT for telling stories. Well, no," he said, correcting himself instantly, "not telling, really— showing. They show a story, as though you were right there, watching it happen."
"Yes, but this story is much more interesting." Brother Joey beamed, watching the actors mill about. "I've been watching these people for three or four days now. They're fascinating, they take so much time to do something that seems so simple!"
"Well, if they're making it look simple, they must be doing it really well." Rod had enough experience trying to run an army, to be sure that managing even a hundred people had to be a minor nightmare.
"My lord," said Gwen, "who are those men with those devices strapped on their shoulders?"
"Camera operators, darling. Those little plastic bulges are 3DT cameras. When they're recording, the men will wear special goggles that sense every movement of their eye muscles, and transmit them to the cameras. Then the camfiras will automatically 'look' wherever the men do."
Chornoi frowned. "I thought they made all these 3DT epics on Luna."
Brother Joey looked up in surprise. "Oh, no! Not since the PEST regime took over Terra and cut off the unprofitable planets. The ones that still had trade operating, adapted— quickly, too! And while they were at it, they developed ways of making their own entertainment. You really didn't know about this?"
"I've been out of circulation for a while," Chornoi said, flustered.
"Cloistered, you might say," Rod put in.
Chornoi glared daggers at him, but Brother Joey nodded with full understanding. "Oh, a retreat? Well, let me explain it to you, then. You see, some of these people were nice enough to explain it all to me. Not the young lady in the kerchief and computer tablet, of course—she's always busy, and she never remembers me from one day to the next. But the 'extras' do—the ones who just dress up like peasants and lurk in the background, bystanding."
"They get paid for that?"
Brother Joey nodded. "So they always have a great deal of time on their hands, and they're glad to talk."
"But how can the company afford it?" Rod looked around, frowning. "This looks like a pretty expensive operation."
"Oh, yes, it certainly is! So when PEST cut them off, they had to work out ways of cutting costs. The main one seems to be specialization: Each 3DT company works in just one genre, and settles down on whichever pleasure-planet has its kind of settings."
"So this company is making a Gothic epic—a horror story," Rod observed. "But didn't PEST want to keep the resort planets?"
"No. Pleasure costs money, so it isn't profitable."
"For the customers, at least." Rod gave him a dry smile. "Never mind how much money it makes for the sellers."
"PEST doesn't. They're rather puritanical."
"Most dictatorships are, during their early years."
"All PEST could see was the amount of money Terran citizens were spending on those 'foreign' planets, so they cut off trade with the resorts. They reasoned that if the dissolute couldn't go to the pleasure-planets, the money would stay at home."
Rod's smile gained real warmth. "I take it that only drove up the price of transportation?"
"Correct. Which did rather hold down the number of people who could come here from Terra."
"Let me guess—most of the ones who do are in the PEST bureaucracy."
"Why, how did you know? You're right, of course—the really wealthy will keep their privileges, no matter who sits on the throne. But it has been hard on the people who live here; they're experiencing some rather lean times."
"But not starving," Rod noted.
Brother Joey shook his head. "No. They're managing, on the handful of Terran patrons, and the few who come in from each of the frontier planets."
"Which makes them a nexus," Rod said softly, "one of the few surviving links between the outlying planets and the shrunken Terran Sphere."
"Yes." Brother Joey looked directly into his eyes. "Some trade survives. Only a trickle, perhaps, but it's there. In both directions."
Yorick grinned. "No wonder our freighter was bound for Otranto."
"The resorts become trade centers." Rod nodded slowly, as understanding dawned. He'd always thought the resort planets of his own time had become Sin Cities to service the merchants. He'd never realized it could have begun the other way.
"And that," Yorick went on, "is why we're here."
"Oh." Brother Joey looked up in surprise. "Did you want to go to Terra?"
Rod opened his mouth, but a short, lean man with white hair and a face with a few wrinkles bawled, "Mirane!"
"Over here, Whitey!" the girl with the computer-pad called back. She dived into the crowd and plowed toward him.
As she came up to him, he said, "About time to roll, isn't it?"
"Eight o'clock," Mirane confirmed. "And all present or accounted for."
'"Accounted for'?" Whitey's eyebrows lifted. "How many are we missing?"
"Only a couple of extras." Mirane touched a few keys on her pad. "A middle-aged peasant and a matron in a babushka."
"Nobody we can't shoot without." Whitey scowled up at the sky. "But we can't start until the clouds cooperate. What is it with that weatherman? He promised us a low overcast, with threatening thunderheads, and all we've got is a high haze!"
"We paid enough for it." Stroganoff, the plump man, joined them, scowling. "Check and find out what happened to it, will you, Mirane?"
The young woman punched buttons on her computer-pad, then pulled a handset from a pouch at her belt and talked into it, frowning at the sky.
The plump man paced. "Hang it, we've got three stars, five supporting actors, and a hundred extras tied up here! We can't afford to waste time on a weatherman who can't deliver!"
"So sue him." Whitey lounged back against a shopfront, hands in his jacket pockets. "You worry too much, Dave."
"Somebody's got to." Dave pinned him with a glare. "It's okay for you to talk, you're just the director!"
"Also the backer," Whitey reminded him. "It's my money we're wasting. Come off it, Dave, relax."
Dave heaved a sigh. "You make it sound good, Whitey. But blast it, we've got a schedule to keep! If we get behind a little every day, pretty soon we'll need an extra day's shooting—and that'll cost you a couple of therms! Besides, we lose Gawain after the twenty-seventh."