Agent to the Stars by John Scalzi (top novels of all time TXT) đ
- Author: John Scalzi
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âSomething, not someone,â Joshua said.
âThatâs a distinction thatâs going to make a lot of difference to the 90% of humanity that doesnât know the difference between astrology and astronomy,â I said. âThis is a power that bothers me immensely, and I understand exactly what youâre saying. How the Hell am I going to find a way to make the rest of the world get it?â
âIf it bothers you, I just wonât do it,â Joshua said.
âYouâre missing the point, Joshua,â I said. âIt doesnât matter if you choose not do it. Itâs the fact that you can do it. Itâs alien and itâs scary. Itâs something that weâre going to have to work with. And thatâs my point. You know more about us than we know about you. If you know you can do something that humans canât, you really have to let me know. Donât wait for me to ask about it. And donât just bring it up in conversation. We canât have any surprises. I canât.â
âYou were lying just a second ago,â Joshua said. âYou are upset.â
I started to refute that, but I stopped myself and gave Joshua a little grim grin. âIâm sorry, Joshua,â I said. âYouâre right. I am upset. Iâve been thinking about this thing for over a week now. But I have no idea what to do. And it really bothers me.â
âA weekâs not that much time,â Joshua said.
âNo, itâs not. But by this point I should have at least some idea of a plan,â I said. âEven a bad idea would be better than nothing. But Iâm drawing blanks. I think Iâm having performance anxiety.â
âIf it will make you feel better, Iâll still respect you in the morning,â Joshua said.
I grinned more widely. âThatâs the problem, you know,â I said. âWhen I was a kid, I remember seeing this 1950s science fiction movie on channel nine. Three guys went to the moon and discovered it was populated by women. One of the Gabor sisters was the ruler. Here was humanityâs first contact with life on another planet, and they all looked like fabulous dames. And of course the guys from Earth were having no problems with it at all. It would be much simpler if you looked like that.â
âI donât know if Iâd want to look like a Gabor sister,â Joshua said. âAlthough it could have interesting ramifications. âPeople of the Earth! Surrender now, or we will slap your policemen!ââ
âMaybe not a Gabor sister,â I said. âBut not a blob, either. If you looked like Ralph,â I motioned to the sleeping dog, âThen weâd be set. Everyone loves dogs.â
âWe know about this problem,â Joshua said. âThatâs one of the reasons we came to you.â
âI know. Thatâs what Iâm saying. By now I should have some idea of how to get away from this or work around it. But Iâm having a hard time. I know I probably shouldnât tell that to you, but there it is. Youâve got me stumped at the moment.â
âYouâll figure it out,â Joshua said. âMaybe while youâre doing that, Iâll take some lessons on dog behavior. As a backup. There are worse things than being a dog. Right, Ralph?â
Ralph cracked an eye open at the sound of his name.
From beside the cooler, my cellular phone rang. I sighed and picked it up. âMiranda, Iâm busy with a client right now,â I said. Miranda was the only person that had the number to this particular cellular phone (I had three), so I didnât worry about who it would be on the other side.
âTom,â Miranda sounded upset. âYou remember Jim Van Doren?â
âYeah,â I said. During the last week Van Doren had been calling every couple of hours trying to get an interview with me. I eventually told Miranda to tell him whatever it was, I was not available for comment. âWhat about him?â
âWhere are you?â Miranda said. âAre you in LA?â
âIâm in Glendora,â I said. âItâs about 45 minutes out.â
âThis weekâs edition of The Biz just came out,â Miranda said. âYou need to get back into LA and pick it up. Youâre on the cover. And youâre not going to be happy with the story.â
âWhy?â I asked. âWhatâs it about?â
âHereâs what it says on the cover,â Miranda said. ââTom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood. So why is he acting so damned weird?ââ
Tom Stein is the hottest young agent in Hollywood. So why is he acting so damned weird?
By James Van Doren
At first glance, Tom Stein doesnât seem like your typical Hollywood millionaire. Maybe itâs because heâs lugging a five gallon bottle into his car. The bottle is filled, he says, with sulfurous waters from an out-of-the-way desert spa the agents at Lupo Associates go to whenever theyâre feeling a little stressed-out. The fact that Stein is hauling this into his car tells you two things: first, heâs stressed out. Second, he doesnât have time to feel stressed out right now.
And who can blame him? Last week, Stein pulled the biggest coup of his young agentorial career, when he managed to pull a $12.5 million paycheck out of the hat for client Michelle Beck, for her return to the Murdered Earth series. There have been larger paychecks for an actress, but not many, and certainly not so soon: Michelleâs most recent paycheck for a supporting role in the just-wrapped Scorpionâs Tail, was a mere $650,000 â a twentieth of her next. Or, to put it another way, Steinâs 10% is worth almost twice as much as his clientâs previous highest salary.
Steinâs success is another example of hard-nosed Hollywood capitalism â but the question becomes: at what price? For shortly after Steinâs magic trick with Michelle Beck, friends and colleagues started noticing the normally affable Stein has become more closed and secretive. And his clients are discovering the oddest behavior of all: without warning, Stein has dropped them onto a subordinate agent, whose inexperience and (some allege) incompetence could send their careers into cinematic limbo. What have they done to deserve this, they ask? And what secret is gnawing away at Tom Stein? Is his red-hot career over just as it begun?
The story itself would have been funny, if it had been written about anyone else. Van Doren, in the absence of reality, spun out a fascinating tale of stress and paranoia that speculated that I was suffering from everything from conflicted sexuality to drug use to a âlate-blooming Oedipal conflict,â with my agent father â my making my first million apparently being a way to âclaim my fatherâs crownâ in my chosen field, according to the psychologist Van Doren managed to dig up.
The Biz being the pariah magazine it is, the quotes about me from colleagues and friends were unusually skimpy â the attributed quotes coming largely from high school acquaintances and college dorm-floor residents who generally described me as âfriendlyâ and âdriven,â â nothing to get worked up about, since they were true, and blandly non-specific; these folks could have been describing a ski rescue dog with the same words, with equal results.
The unattributed quoters, of which there two, were not that hard to figure out. The first, the âLupo Associates Insiderâ, was obviously Ben Fleck. Ben, no doubt relishing a chance to take a whack at me, described me as a âshark with Brylcremeâ who was âinsanely secretive, to the point of forbidding his assistants to even talk with other agents.â The latter I found amusing, the former, inscrutable â I donât put anything in my hair, much less Brylcreme. I suspected Ben didnât actually know what Brylcreme was. I had Miranda send him a tube with my compliments.
The second was a âstrongarmed clientâ who described Amanda as a âshrieking virginâ and myself as a âfucking overlord of ego,â and then went from there. It was pretty clear that Van Doren got more than he expected from Tea Reader, since by the end of it, even he noted that it seemed this particular client âwas on her own personal vendetta against the universe, and Tom Stein happens to be the closest moving object.â
Be that as it may, Van Doren took Teaâs grudge against Amanda and ran with it, taking a bat to the poor girl. Van Doren dug up the Mexican soap star, who complained, through an interpreter, that Amanda had found her no work in the big Hollywood productions. The actor who revived her at the marathon described how they met, which made Amanda appear both sickly, for passing out in the first place, and then flaky, for representing the first passing jogger who happened to administer mouth-to-mouth.
Ben Fleck then reappeared in his Lupo Associates insider guise to make dismissive comments about the practice of bringing up agents from the mailroom (Ben got his job through nepotism: his step-father was a senior agent before keeling over, corned beef in hand, at Canterâs Deli), and mentioned, darkly, that I had come up from the mailroom myself. Obviously we mailroom types were looking out for each other, like frat brothers or Templars.
Amanda read the story and burst into my office, flinging The Biz onto my desk and then collapsing into the chair, moody. âI want to die,â she said.
âAmanda, no one reads The Biz,â I said. âAnd those that do generally know enough to realize that itâs full of shit.â
âMy mom reads The Biz,â Amanda said.
âWell, all right, almost everyone knows itâs full of shit,â I said. âDonât worry about it. Next week theyâll find some more naked pictures of celebrities and theyâll forget all about it. Donât be so upset.â
âIâm not upset, Iâm pissed off,â Amanda said, whispering the words pissed off like she was worried about being punished. I wondered again how she ever managed to become an agent. âI know who talked to The Biz. I know who that unnamed source is. Itâs that bitch Tea.â She stumbled over bitch, and then she gave me a bitter smile. âYou know, I just got her a part in that new Chevy Chase film, too. A good part. Guess it doesnât matter.â
âIâm sorry, Amanda,â I said. âI shouldnât have unleashed Tea on you unawares. I should have let you know sheâs a high riding bitch. Itâs my fault.â
âNo, itâs all right,â Amanda said. âItâs okay. Because I know something Tea doesnât know.â
âWhatâs that?â
âThat she got a part in a Chevy Chase movie.â
âAmanda,â I said, genuinely surprised. âYou star. And here I was beginning to worry about you.â
Amanda smiled like a five year old who had gotten her first taste of being naughty and realized it was something she would enjoy doing. A lot.
Amanda ended up getting the best of it; the worst of her problems were over with Tea right then. My problems with my clients had just begun. For the next week, I was in Agent Hell.
*****
âMind the light,â Barbara Creek said.
The light she was referring to was a huge klieg light, which lay on the set of her sonâs sitcom, Workinâ Out! The light casing was heavily dented and the lens was shattered and strewn like jagged jewels across the floor, nestled up to the weights and exercise equipment that made up the health club locale set .
âIâm guessing that lightâs not supposed to be on the set,â I said.
âOf course itâs not,â Barbara said, and then raised her voice so everyone on the set could hear her. âItâs on the set because some damned fool UNION light hanger doesnât know how to do HIS DAMN JOB! And he wouldnât HAVE a JOB unless HIS DAMN JOB was protected by his DAMN UNION!â Barbaraâs voice, a commanding boom in
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