I, Alien

All right, I can see that. In fact I could maybe give you a few tips before you leave, who you should make sure and talk to. And who not, if you know what I’m saying. Like a certain client-stealing party right here in this building, two floors down, his eyestalks should only drop off. Or another certain individual whom I will not name, over at Galactic Artists and Performers. A real bloodsucker—and I know he says he can’t help it, it’s a dietary requirement of his species, but I still say feh.

But listen. Now I think of it, this is a good thing. This is a chance, I can maybe say some things that need saying. Maybe this is an opportunity to educate people a little about what it means to be an agent. I’m sorry, but believe me, they have no idea.

They think it’s so easy. They look at somebody like me and they’re thinking, what a racket. Just look at this bum, sitting on his tail crest, you should pardon the language, in a fancy office, making such a good thing for himself off other people’s work. Maybe makes a few calls, sends out a few messages, does lunch with some big shots, for this he takes twenty percent of the poor struggling entertainer’s pay?

Sure, right. It should only be so simple.

Leave aside for the moment all you really have to do, which believe me is plenty, you wouldn’t believe the hours I put in sometimes… do you have any idea, my dear youngster, what an agent has to know these days? The sheer amount of information he has to carry around in his head—or heads, as the case may be, hey, I’ve been accused of many things, but nobody can call me a bigot—just to function at all in this business?

All these different worlds, all these different races, they’ve all got their tastes and their customs and they all assume theirs is the only possible way and surely everybody else knows about it so of course they wouldn’t bother to tell you anything—and so you have to learn it all. Have to know it all from memory, there’s no time to be pulling up files and studying background when you’re negotiating with some promoter on the other side of the galaxy who needs an act yesterday if not sooner. Which, by the way, I hate, retro-relative time shunts are more work to set up than you’d believe and when you mention the extra charges, they go h’nogth on you. But I digress.

I was going to say, you have to know all this stuff, easily as much as any cultural scientist, just to operate. Operate shmoperate, to stay out of trouble, which, believe you me, there is plenty of just waiting for you to make one little mistake.

And I mean big trouble. Not just the ordinary stuff, like the fact that on Z’arss any kind of music in three-four time is considered pornography, or that doing impressions on Uuu will get you two hundred to life for personality theft. I’m talking nova-grade catastrophe.

Like this certain former colleague whom I used to see at the agents’ conventions, nice enough young fellow if maybe a bit on the smart-alecky side, who made the mistake of booking a Xee wizard for a big simultanous-live- and-vid appearance on Kabongo. He was really excited about that, because the Xee homeworld was still a recent discovery and this was going to be the first offworld performance by one of their wizards, which nobody really knew anything about except that they were supposed to be extremely hot stuff. So my colleague figured he’d pulled off a real coup in signing this one up, and for a time there, up until show time, he got pretty hard to take.

Hah. And again hah. Ever seen a Xee wizard work? No, of course you haven’t, ever since what happened on Kabongo they’re banned from performing off-world, and you better be glad of it or you might be permanently blind and deaf and paralyzed like all those poor devils on Kabongo. I understand the insurance lawyers are still appealing the judgment, but that’s not much help to Mr. Smart Guy. Who had broken one of the most basic rules: never book an act you haven’t personally seen.

Or take what happened to a very dear friend of mine only last year. One day he gets a call from Keshtak 37, over in the next arm, wanting a whole lineup of acts, price no object. Seemed the Emperor of the Oomaumau had passed away, and they wanted only the best for his funeral festivities, which would go on for weeks because the Oomaumau believe in giving a ruler a first-class sendoff.

So my friend is naturally very pleased to get to handle something that big, and as soon as the contract is signed he starts calling around, seeing who’s available. But then he happens to do a bit of research, to see what kind of acts the Oomaumau might like, and finds out something extremely disturbing. The Oomaumau, it develops, have another unusual mortuary custom: the performers at the royal funeral are given the honor of accompanying the Emperor to the Hereafter, so his spirit shouldn’t get bored.

Yes, that’s right. Well, not strictly speaking; they just bury them alive beneath the royal mausoleum.

My friend is not really to blame for not knowing about this, which is not well known outside learned sociological circles because the last time an Emperor died on Keshtak 37 was well before the memory of any living person on this world. Long-lived race, the Oomaumau, especially the royal family… but ignorance, as they say, is no excuse before the law, and the contract had already been signed.

And the Oomaumau were not about to let my friend out of it. Though he tried hard enough, went so far as to travel personally to Keshtak 37 to plead for a release. He was so desperate he even got an audience with their spiritual leader, the Papa Oomaumau, at the great temple of the goddess L’vira. No go. A contract is a contract and if he reneges, they tell him, he will find himself up to his nictitating membranes in litigation with the Emperor’s attorneys.

Yes, that was what my friend asked. Turns out it’s not at all unusual for dead people to file lawsuits on Keshtak 37. Don’t ask me.

My friend doesn’t know what to do, but then while he’s there, he picks up another bit of information. The only entertainers who don’t get interred with His Imperial Awesomeness are the ones who perform so badly that they are deemed unworthy of the honor. Yes. On Keshtak 37, when you stink at the Palace, you don’t die at the Palace.

So my friend rushes back here and starts calling in all the lousiest acts he can find. Which takes very little searching, because every agent knows plenty of hopeless no-talent losers; they come around begging you to represent them, and they’re so persistent and so pathetic you take their names and information down just to get rid of them and then they call you every few days for the rest of your life wanting to know when you’re going to get them some work.

In almost no time my friend has assembled a collection of the worst stinkeroos in this part of the galaxy. Tone-deaf musicians, stumblebum dancers, comics unfunny enough to induce suicidal depression, he’s got them all. He said he had to open the office windows to air the place out after they all left.

No, he didn’t tell them. He felt bad about that, but it really wouldn’t have done to let them in on what was going on. Entertainers and artists, you see, are very touchy people that way, and the bad ones most of all. The worse they are, the greater they believe they are and the harder they believe it. If he’d told them the truth, they’d have been furious, and chances are they’d have walked out on him.

So off they went to Keshtak 37, and—ah, yes, I’m seeing this look on your face, you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?

That’s right. The thrill of finally getting a professional gig, and a prestigious offworld one at that, got them so worked up they barely needed a ship to get to Keshtak 37; they could have gone into warp by themselves. And by the time they went on at the Imperial Palace, they were so inspired that they performed, all of them, better than they’d ever done in their lives.

Or ever would again, in what little was left of them… my friend was very upset. Not that anybody would miss that particular bunch, but the Oomaumau buried their paychecks with them and he never did collect his cut.

But listen, don’t misunderstand, I’m not disrespecting my colleagues. It’s not like I’ve never made any mistakes myself. How I only wish…

Let me tell you about the comic.

Or rather tell you what happened, I can’t really tell you about him. Can’t do justice to his talent with a simple description, you’d have had to see him in action to fully comprehend just how great he was. And yes, great I said and great I meant. All these people like to think of themselves as “artists,” but in his case it was the simple truth. A genuine comic genius is what he was, and he could just maybe have been the greatest ever, if only—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I found him working open mike night at a cheap club down in the Ginzorninplad district. He’d just gotten into town, worked his way here from his home-world aboard a worn-out old tub of a bulk freighter, and he didn’t have much more than the clothes on his back. I watched his act and then I caught him backstage and signed him up, just like that. And said some very sincere prayers to Hnb’hnb’hnb for granting me the privilege.