Michelle accepted her award and a peck from the former Best Actor. Then she plopped the Oscar down on the podium and, beaming, waited for the applause to die down. It took a while. Then she began to speak.
“Oh God,” Miranda said. “This is really it.”
“Before I do anything else,” Michelle said, “I need to thank one person, my agent, Tom Stein. He's way up there in the balcony. Hi, Tom!” She waved enthusiastically, which got a big laugh. I waved back.
“Shut up and get to it before the orchestra cuts you off,” I muttered under my breath.
“Tom's probably muttering at me to get to it before the orchestra cuts me off,” Michelle said. “He always did look out for me.
“This award means more to me than you could ever know,” Michelle continued. “It's not just my award. It's the award of Rachel Spiegelman, who saw hatred of the demonized âother' destroy her world, and dedicated the rest of her life to making sure that we saw men, all men, as brothers, regardless of their color or their creed.
“It belongs to Avika Spiegelman, who looked beyond my
physical appearance to allow me to take the role of a lifetime. It belongs to those who initially protested my getting this role, because they came and gave me a chance to perform it, and realized that while I did not match Rachel's appearance, I would try to match her heart. Over and over again, I have seen people of all stripes look beyond the appearance, look beyond the otherness, and see what it was that truly connected us all.
“And now I'm wondering if you, all of you, every one of the billion people worldwide who are watching this show, can take one more step.
“You see,” Michelle said, “I am not who you think I am. I am not
what
you think I am. This face is a mask. This body is a pose. Who I am and what I am is something you have never experienced before.”
At this point, people had begun to start whispering. Some of them were worried that Michelle was about to launch into some odd New Age screed about togetherness. Still others began to wonder if Michelle was going to use this worldwide podium to announce she was a lesbian or a Scientologist. But some noticed that the bottom of Michelle's dress had suddenly gone crystal clear. And so, for that matter, had Michelle's legs.
“I'm wondering,” Michelle said. “This award tells me that you believe I have reached into myself and touched some fundamental humanity, some common bond that ties us all together. But could I reach into myself and find this fundamental humanity if I were not human?”
By now it was unmistakable; from toe to armpit, Michelle had gone totally clear.
“What if I told you that that which makes you fundamentally human is something that you share with another people, a people so different from you that they might appear strange or
frightening at first glance. A people who might terrify you from appearance alone. Could you make the jump, and understand that inside, they are not so different at all?”
Michelle was now completely clear. As if she had been replaced by an indescribably delicate and beautiful figurine of hand-blown, iridescent glass. She moved away from the podium and stood in full view of a billion speechless members of the human race.
When she spoke again, her voice rang out, amplified not by electronics but by her own crystalline body.
“Could you accept that another people, so unlike you, and yet not unlike you at all, would offer you their hand in friendship? Because, my friends, we are here.”
We never did find out who won Best Picture that year.
On
the whole, people took it rather well. The only place that rioted was North Korea.
The fact that an alien had managed to sneak past humanity, pose as a superstar, and win the Best Actress Oscar had the desired affect of showing the world that the Yherajk were an essentially benign raceâafter all, if they had been a warlike people, they could have overrun us with their spaceships, or at the very least have fielded a football team and tried to win the Super Bowl instead. Winning the Best Actress Oscar was the most nonthreatening, yet high exposure, way to introduce one species to another.
The other point that came across was the point Michelle made in her speechâdespite the differences, we were in many ways just the same. Michelle wouldn't have been awarded the
Oscar if she had not been able to create such a believable performance as a woman and a human. It was only afterwards, after all, that people realized she wasn't human.
Michelle made it easy for most of humanity by meeting them halfway; although she remained transparent, she also retained Michelle's body shape rather than reverting to the basic Yherajk shapelessness (or smell). She did her job as a true bridge between our peoplesâclearly alien, and yet, human enough for most people to accept her.
The only unpleasant thing about Michelle winning the Oscar came later, when some academy members petitioned to have Michelle disqualified as the Best Actress winner. Their rationale was that not only was she not really a human, there was no way to determine that she was, in fact, female.
The academy voted down the proposal in the interests of interspecies peace. Michelle kept her Oscar.
Roland, who never discovered if he had won Best Director or Best Picture, consoled himself with his Best Editing Oscar, and the fact that Michelle's alien status gave
Hard Memories
the Oscar Bump of the ages. By the end of its run,
Hard Memories
grossed half a billion domestic and another billion and a half foreign. Before video and cable. Roland, whose gross points were now worth $300 million, went on to make the Krzysztof Kordus film without Michelle's money. He paid for it himself out of petty cash.
Roland wasn't the only one raking in the fame and fortune. The day after Michelle unveiled, Jim Van Doren walked into the offices of
The New York Times
and plopped down a story about life on the Yherajk spaceship. It was picked up by every newspaper on the planet; shortly thereafter, Van Doren received an $8 million advance for a book on Human-Yherajk relations,
which, as it happened, he'd already cowritten with Gwedif. It was rushed into print so fast that the glue was still wet when the books hit the stores. It stayed at the top of the bestseller lists for the rest of the year. It's still there now. You wouldn't believe what he gets in speaking fees these days. I don't and I'm his agent.
Beyond Michelle, however, the Yherajk decided it was best if they stayed in their ship for a little longer. They realized the value of having Michelle, for the short run, be the contact between our peoples. The rest of the Yherajk went the go-slow route, answering e-mail from scientists, politicians and common people alike, and communicating with the world through their Web site, letting leak, bit by bit, information about the Yherajk's true nature and appearance. By the time the majority of the Yherajk land on Earth, humanity will have had enough time to absorb the fact of their differences.
Of course, humanity was still impatient. Fortunately, patience is a Yherajk trait.
Soon enough
, they said,
we will come visit your planet, and you will be invited to our spaceship. And then our peoples will truly learn all we can from each other.
Governments and self-appointed ambassadors sent e-mail back towards the
Ionar
, saying
When? When can we visit?
You'll have to check with our agent,
the Yherajk invariably signaled back.
Which leads back to me, sitting in my office, with my headset on, lightly bouncing a blue racquetball off the pane of my office window. Talking to my most important client, who was, and still is, and will probably always be, Michelle.
“I don't see why I have go to Venezuela,” Michelle was saying to me.
“Because you've been to Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay,”
I said. “The Venezuelans are a little touchy about their place in the South American hierarchy of nations. Throw them a bone, Michelle. Don't make them the only South American country on the block without a visit from an Oscar-winning alien. They have enough troubles as it is.”
“When are the rest of the Yherajk going to come down?” Michelle wanted to know. “There's two thousand of us, you know. Wouldn't hurt to have some of
them
pitch in.”
“Jim says the human quarters are just about ready on the
Ionar
,” I said. “When they're ready, we'll start inviting folks up and bringing other Yherajk down. It'll be soon, I promise.”
“You said that a month ago, Tom.”
“You can't rush these things, Michelle. These things take as long as they take.”
“Which reminds me,” Michelle said. “How long until Miranda pops?”
“If she hasn't gone into labor in about a week, our doctor wants to induce,” I said. “Miranda has her own opinions on that one.”
“I don't doubt that,” Michelle said. “Pick out any names yet?”
“We have,” I said. “Michelle if it's a girl, Joshua if it's a boy.”
“Well, shucks,” Michelle said. “I'm touched. I may cry.”
“You don't have tear ducts anymore,” I said.
“I'll make them especially for this purpose,” Michelle said.
Brandon, my new assistant, popped his head through the door. “It's him, on line three,” he said.
I nodded and shooed him out of the room. “Listen, Michelle, I have to go. I have a three o'clock with Carl, but before I do that I have to take this call I've got coming in. Where are you now, anyway?”
“I'm somewhere over the Midwest,” Michelle said. “I'll be in Chicago in about an hour. I can't believe you have me going to a science fiction convention.”
“Hey,” I said. “It won't be so bad. Jim is going to be there. And besides, these people are your core constituency. Give 'em a thrill.”
“Oh, I will,” Michelle said. “Wait till you see what I have planned for the masquerade.” She clicked off.
I looked at my watch. 2:55. Five more minutes. If I took this call, I ran the risk of being late to my meeting with Carl, which would be bad.
Oh, what the hell, I thought. Might as well live dangerously. I flicked the button on line three.
“Hello, Mr. President,” I said.
The ball went
thock
as it hit the window.
Several of my novels have had strange journeys into print, but the journey of
Agent to the Stars
is probably the strangest. It began in 1997 as my “practice novel”âthat is to say, the novel I wrote to see if I
could
write a novel (the answer: seems so). I had no intention of ever selling it or ever really doing anything with it. Nevertheless in 1999 I posted it on my personal Web site, offering it as “shareware,” and encouraging people to send me $1 if they liked it. Over the next five years (until I told people to stop sending me money), I made about $4,000. It was a nice way to stay in pizza, but I didn't expect anything more out of it.
In 2005, Bill Schafer, publisher of Subterranean Press, wandered by the Web site, saw
Agent
there, started reading it, and then sent me an e-mail asking me if he could publish it as a limited edition hardcover. Well, I thought it would be cool to finally see it in print, so I said sure. Subterranean printed 1,500 copies, sold them all, and now people are asking (and getting) several hundred dollars for their copies on eBay. I think this is a little silly, and wish I had extra copies to sell. But again, after that, I didn't expect anything more out of it.
And now here we are in 2008, and the book has come 'round again, this time in a really lovely paperback edition, of
which there are more than 1,500 copies, and I am officially done underestimating this book, because clearly, it doesn't know when to stop. I am delighted by this chain of events, and hope you, the reader, are enjoying this little book which
just won't quit.
The book you have in your hands is substantially the same book I wrote eleven years ago now, but because the novel takes place in contemporary time, this version of the novel has been revised to update a number of cultural references, to bring it in line with the world as it exists in the latter half of the first decade of the third millennium. For example, a character who used to have a television show on the United Paramount Network now has it on Comedy Central, because UPN no longer exists. The age of a couple of characters has also been juggled to have the story make sense today. After this, the book is on its own, because barring it being made into a film or something (because it
just won't quit
), this is the last revision of the book I plan to make. Rumor is I have other books to write. This is what my mortgage tells me, anyway.
There are many people to thank for this book, and I'll begin with the folks at Tor: my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and art director Irene Gallo (to whom the book is co-dedicated) primary among them, as well as Liz Gorinsky and Dot Lin, and of course Tom Doherty himself. Also many thanks to artist Pascal Blanchet for the really wonderful cover, and to Arthur Hlavaty for his work in the copy editor mines. Copyediting is a thankless job, particularly when someone has to copyedit someone as sloppy as me. Er,
I.
Oh, whatever. You know.
Outside of Tor, these people have had a hand in the book, in its earlier incarnations: Bill Schafer, Tim Holt, Mike Krahulik, Jerry Holkins, Robert Khoo, Stephen Bennett, and Regan
Avery. My thanks to each of them for their work and/or encouragement and/or help.
I'd also like to extend a special acknowledgment to my wife, Kristine, who while I was writing
Agent to the Stars
was filled with trepidation, knowing that when I was done writing it, she would have to read it, and if she didn't like it, she would still have to live with me. So I think we were both glad when she finished that last page, turned to me, and said “Thank GOD, it's good.” She's my first and most important reader, and I love her dearly, and I'm glad she's the one I get to be with.
Finally: Thank
you.
No, really. I still get amazed people want to read what I write. I'm really glad you do. Thanks.