none of the real people in the room appeared to notice when the song ended, Frank Sinatra thanked them for their applause and told them they were beautiful. Ivan caught up with the girl with the food tray and had helped himself to a snack before he realized that she was a different girl and it was a different snack. She was pretty in her own right, however, and the snack was as mysterious and delicious as the first had been. The combo began playing again, somewhat picking up the tempo. As Frank Sinatra sang that he didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew how to get it, Don turned, pointed vaguely, and said to Ivan, “I see somebody over there I have to go schmooze with. I’d introduce you, but he’s a pig.”
“So go schmooze. I can look after myself.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Okay. Ogle some starlets-I’ll be back in a mo.”
As though she had rotated into the space vacated by Don, a long tawny woman appeared before Ivan.
Her waist was as big around as his thigh. Her high breasts exerted a firm, friendly pressure against his lapels. He thought she had the most kissable-looking mouth he had ever seen. She said, “I’m sure I know you.”
Ivan smiled. “I was one of the original Sex Pistols.”
“Really!” She glanced over her shoulder at the hologram, then peered at Ivan again. “Which one?”
Ivan nodded vaguely in the band’s direction. “The dead one.”
She pouted fetchingly. “Who are you, really?”
He decided to see what would happen if he disregarded Don and Michelle’s advice. He said, “I’m a pedologist.”
“Oh,” she said, “you specialize in child actors? No, wait, that’s a foot specialist, right?” She looked doubtfully at his hands, which were big and brown, hard and knobby. “Is your practice in Beverly Hills?”
“Gondwanaland.”
“Ah,” she said, and nodded, and looked thoughtful, and lost interest. Ivan let her rotate back the way she had come and then sidled into and through the next room. The house was a maze of rooms opening onto other rooms, seemingly unto infinity; inside of five minutes, he decided that he was hopelessly lost.
Surrounded by small groups of people talking animatedly among themselves, he turned more or less in place, eavesdropping casually. He quickly gathered that most of the people around him believed in astrology, psychics, cosmetic surgery, and supply-side economics, and that some few among them were alarmed by the trend toward virtual actors. He overheard a tanned, broad-shouldered crewcut man say to a couple of paler and less substantial men, “What chance have I got? I’m losing parts to John Wayne, for chrissake! He’s been dead for decades, and he’s a bigger star than ever.”
“Costs less than ever, too,” said the wispier of the other two men, “and keeps his right-wing guff to himself.”
The broad-shouldered man scowled. “I don’t want what happened to stuntmen to happen to actors!”
“Oh, don’t be alarmist,” the wispy man said. “No one’s going to get rid of actors. Oh, they might use fewer of them, but-besides, stuntmen’re holding their own overseas, and-”
“Crazy goddamn Aussies and Filipinos!”
“-and,”the wispy man said insistently, “the films do have a significant following in this country. For some viewers, it’s not enough to see an actor who looks like he’s risking his life. They want the extra kick that comes from knowing an actor reallyis risking his life.”
The third man had a satisfied air and was shaped like a bowling pin; his white suit and scarlet ascot enhanced the resemblance. “Until that happens,” he told the broad-shouldered man, “better get used to playing second fiddle to John Wayne. Right now, I got development people e-synthing old physical comedians from the nineteen- whenevers. Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Jackie Chan. People still bust a gut laughing at those guys.”
“Never heard of ’em.”
“You will. Because I’m putting ’em together in a film. Lots of smash-up, fall-down. Sure, we use computers to give ’em what they never had before-voices, color-personalities! But when people see Buster Keaton fall off a moving train, they know there’s no fakery.”
“Who the hell cares if some dead guy risks his life?”
The bowling-pin-shaped man jabbed a finger into the air. “Thrills are timeless!”
Glimpsing yet another pretty girl with a food tray, Ivan exited right, through a doorway. He somehow missed the girl, made a couple of turns at random, and was beginning to wonder amusedly if he had happened upon another space-time anomaly when he suddenly and unexpectedly found himself outdoors, on the tiled shore of a swimming pool as big, he decided, as the Tethys Sea-Galveston Bay, at least.
There were small groups of people ranged at intervals around the pool and one person in the water, who swam to the edge, pulled herself up, and was revealed to be a sleekly muscular Amazon. As she toweled her hair, she let her incurious gaze alight fleetingly on Ivan, then move on; she was as indifferent to his existence as though he were another of the potted palms. She rose lithely, draped her towel over one exquisite shoulder, and walked past him into the house.
Ivan sipped his drink, thrust his free hand into his trousers pocket, and ambled toward the far end of the pool and an array of women there. At a table in their midst, like a castaway on an island circled by glistening succulent mermaids, a bald, fat, fortyish man sat talking animatedly to himself. A waiter stood at the ready behind a cart laden with liquor bottles. A large rectangular object, either a man or a refrigerator stuffed into a sports jacket, took up space nearby. Just as this large object startled Ivan by looking in his direction, the fat man suddenly laughed triumphantly, leaped to his feet, and clapped his hands. He pointed at bottles on the cart, and the waiter began to fuss with them. The fat man turned, looked straight at Ivan, evidently the only suitable person within arm’s reach, and pulled him close. “Help me celebrate,” he said, and to the large object, “Larry, get the man a chair.” Larry pulled a chair back from the table, waited for Ivan to sit, then moved off a short distance. The fat man introduced himself as John Rubis and looked as though he expected Ivan to have heard of him. Ivan smiled pleasantly and tried to give the impression that he had.
“I amreal happy!” Rubis pointed at his own ear, and Ivan realized that there was an AnswerMan plugged into it. “The word from the folks at Northemico isgo! ” He indicated the liquor cart. “What can I get you?”
“Brought my own. Congratulations.” Ivan toasted him, and they drank. Rubis smacked his lips appreciatively. Ivan said, “You work for Northemico?”
“Ideal with Northemico. Their entertainment division.”
“I didn’t even realize Northemico had an entertainment division.”
“Hey, they got everything.” He turned toward the waiter and said, “Fix me up another of these.”
“Sorry, I’m just a pedologist from Podunk.” Rubis looked perplexed. “Pedologist,” Ivan said, enunciating as clearly as he could.
“Ah.” Rubis listened to his AnswerMan again. “As in child specialist-or soil scientist? No, that can’t be right. Sorry about that, Doctor. Sometimes my little mister know-it-all gets confused. At least it didn’t think you said you’re a pederast, ha ha. So what is it, set me straight here, what’s your claim to celebrity?”
Ivan mentally shrugged and asked himself, Why the hell not? and to John Rubis he said, “I was one of the first people to travel through time.”
Instead of responding to that, Rubis held up a forefinger, said, “Incoming,” looked away, and hunched over the table, listening intently to his AnswerMan and occasionally muttering inaudibly. Ivan’s attention wandered. Light reflecting from the pool’s surface shimmered on the enclosing white walls. The water was as brilliantly blue-green as that ancient sea-and as he pictured that sea in his mind, he also pictured a woman like a tanned and buffed Aphrodite rising from the waters. And when he told her that he was a foot specialist, she heaved a sigh of exasperation and dived back into the sea.
Rubis turned back to him and said, “Sorry. You aren’t kidding about the time-travel, are you?”
“Well, I was part of the first team of time-travelers-half of it. There were just two of us. Afterward, I made other visits and helped establish a community of scientists in Paleozoic time. The base camp’s the size of a small town now.”
Rubis stared at him for what felt like a long moment. Then a light seemed to come on behind the man’s eyes, and he snapped his fingers and pointed. “Yeah. The hole through time. Back to, what, the Stone Age?”
“Um, actually, back to quite a bit before. Back to the Paleozoic Era, four hundred million and some odd years ago. The Siluro-Devonian boundary.”
