extras forced to kill each other for clacks. It was too like the gladiatorial carnage of Rome, but an industrial scale carnage that left an aftertaste of disgust. People sucked vid to see extras fighting and dying, but Somme ’s carnage, unleavened by sci-fi demons, made their vile appetite too blatant.
So. He’d ventured into an ugly blind alley with his first. Now, behold his second: Quake. Subterranean demons flooding up from the chasm. For all the “crustal movement” that would shake this set, the story was static, flat: cataclysm, demons, turmoil—so standard, after all.
Here came Val in his raft rising toward him. He thought what Val himself had at his mirror: how handsome the man still was. Almost feral his gray eyes, their utter focus. And Mark realized his value to Margolian: he was Val’s brightest fan, the one who most completely grasped his genius—the more keenly because he craved but could not hope to match it.
Val docked at his gunnel. “Permission to come aboard, Mark?” He smiled.
Mark put in his handclasp all the warmth he could manage. “Mi raft es su raft, Val.” He smiled.
It was but simple truth that his raft was Val’s. His mega-success had brought Panoply’s Board to heel, and he’d dictated new terms to them, redefining his creative control of every vid that bore the studio’s imprimatur. If he chose he could let Mark shoot every frame of Quake, then put his own name on it, just like that.
Val would not dream of doing this, of course. Mark was himself doing everything needful to wither his career on the vine. Once Quake was released, and he’d added a second minor success to his record, he’d be a second-stringer forever after.
Val took a recliner, and Mark poured them some mocha java. They scanned the swarming set below them. Val gracefully praised it, appreciating touches here and there. Two pros together, talking shop. Mark waited for some show of power from his master, some suggestion to change this or that, but then decided that this visit had a subtler aim—that Val was simply here to make Mark feel his polite indifference to a project so beneath his greater vision.
He wondered how Val would take the bit of news he had for him. He began weaving his way toward that unwelcome revelation.
“You know, Val,” he said, with a hand-sweep below them, “I’m overjoyed, of course, to have all this for my palette. But now it seems the whole wide world is your set.”
“Tut, tut, Mark. Just a little piece of the world, no more.”
Mark pretended to fish for some clue to where Val would be filming his new vid, the first Live Action to be shot outside a studio. “I just have to say I’m in awe, Val. Wherever it is you’re shooting, the logistics must be challenging.… I just can’t imagine the craft, the command of detail that it must call for.”
Val, for his part, pretended not to bite. “You’re too kind, Mark, too kind. We are a roadshow I guess, sure enough.”
The pending indictment for Murder of an Incorporated Rural Township up in the scenic Trinity Mountains, a township with a high population of ex-extras, was the unacknowledged elephant sitting in the raft with them. Mark dared to push a little harder. “Involuntary extras … if I’m guessing right? By god, the leverage that will have on audience response! The fierce partisanship it will awaken in them! The viewers will be rapt.”
“Yes. Their sympathy will grip them. They’ll feel the great machinery of government that cups them all in its mighty hand.” He held Mark’s eyes, his smile unfeigned. “Even your own Live War—though it had that beauty of the extras’ consensus, the grandeur of their bonding in two armies, couldn’t present that unity, that self-sacrifice that will emerge from an actual community under assault.”
Mark’s nod warmly conceded his greater scope, and somehow in that moment he saw that Val intuited—knew—that Mark had some kind of bad news for him.
Quick as