Remake (17 page)

And before you know it, Mayer will be telling everybody the musical’s coming back, and I’ll get assigned the remake of
42nd Street
and find out where Alis is and book the skids and we’ll put on a show. Anything’s possible.

Even time travel.

I accessed Vincent the other day to borrow his edit program, and he told me time travel’s a bust. “We were
this
close,” he said, his thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Theoretically, the Casimir effect should work for time as well as space, but they’ve sent image after image into a negative-matter region, and nothing. No overlap at all. I guess maybe there are some things that just aren’t possible.”

He’s wrong. The night Alis left, she said, “After what you said the other night, I thought maybe I could use a data harness for the lifts,” and I had wondered what it was I’d said, and when I showed her the opdisk, she’d said,
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
Are you sure?”

“It’s not on the disk,” I’d said, “it’s in litigation,” and it had stayed in litigation till the next day. And when I
checked, it had been in litigation the whole time I looked for her.

And for eight months before that, in a National Treasure suit the Film Preservation Society had brought. The night I saw
Brides
, it had been out of litigation exactly two hours. And had gone back in an hour later.

Alis had only been working at A Star Is Born for six months.
Brides
had been in litigation the whole time. Until after I found her. Until after I told her I’d seen her in it. And when I told her, she’d said,
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?
Are you sure?” and I’d thought she was surprised because the jumps and lifts were so hard, surprised because she hadn’t been trying to superimpose her image on the screen.

Brides
hadn’t come out of litigation till the next day.

And a week and a half later Alis came to me. She came straight from the skids, straight from practicing with the harness and the armature that she’d thought might work, “after what you said the other night.” And it had worked. “—I guess,” she’d said. “I mean—”

She’d come straight from practice, wearing Virginia Gibson’s pink gingham dress, Virginia Gibson’s pantaloons, wearing her costume for the barnraising dance she’d just done. The barnraising dance I’d seen her in six weeks before she ever did it. And my theory about her having somehow gone back in time was right after all, even if it was only her image, only pixels on a screen. She hadn’t been trying to discover time travel either. She had only been trying to learn routines, but the screen she’d been rehearsing in front of wasn’t a screen. It was a negative-matter region, full of randomized electrons and potential overlaps. Full of possibilities.

Nothing’s impossible, Vincent, I think, watching Alis do kick-turns in her sequined leotard. Not if you know what you want.

Heada is accessing me. “I was wrong. The Ford Tri-Motor’s at the beginning of the second one.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
. Beginning with frame—”

“I found it,” I say, frowning at the screen where Alis, in her platinum wig, is doing a brush step.

“What’s wrong?” Heada says. “Isn’t it going to work?”

“I’m not sure,” I say. “When’s the Fred Astaire suit going to be settled?”

“A month,” she says promptly. “But it’s going right back in. Sofracima-Rizzoli’s claiming copyright infringement.”

“Who the hell is Sofracima-Rizzoli?”

“The studio that owns the rights to a movie Fred Astaire made in the seventies.
The Purple Taxi
. I figure they’ll settle. Three months. Why?” she says suspiciously.

“The plane in
Flying Down to Rio
. I’ve decided that’s what I want.”

“A biplane? You don’t have to wait for that. There are tons of other movies with biplanes in them.
The Blue Max, Wings, High Road to China
—” She stops, looking unhappy.

“Do they have skids in China?” I say.

“Are you kidding? They’re lucky to have bicycles. And enough to eat. Why?” she says, suddenly interested. “Have you found out where Alis is?”

“No.”

Heada hesitates, trying to decide whether to tell me something. “The assistant set director’s back from China. He says the word is, it’s Cultural Revolution 3. Book burnings, reeducation, they’ve shut at least one studio down and arrested the whole film crew.”

I should be worried, but I’m not, and Heada, who knows everything, pounces immediately.

“Is she back?” she says, “Have you had word from her?”

“No,” I say, because I have finally learned how to lie to Heada, and because it’s true. I don’t know where she is, and I haven’t had word from her. But I’ve gotten a message.

Fred Astaire has been out of litigation twice since Alis left, once between copyright suits for exactly eight seconds, the other time last month when the AFI filed an injunction claiming he was a historic landmark.

That time I was ready. I had the Beguine number on opdisk,
backup, and tape, and was ready to check it before the watch-and-warn had even stopped beeping.

It was the middle of the night, as usual, and at first I thought I was still asleep or having one last flash.

“Enhance upper left,” I said, and watched it again. And again. And the next morning.

It looked the same every time, and the message was loud and clear: Alis is all right, in spite of uprisings and revolutions, and she’s found a place to practice and somebody to teach her Eleanor Powell’s heel-and-toe steps. And she’s going to come back, because China doesn’t have skids, and when she does, she’s going to dance the Beguine with Fred Astaire.

Or maybe she already has. I saw her in the barnraising number in
Brides
six weeks before she did it, and it’s been four since I saw her in
Melody
. Maybe she’s already back. Maybe she’s already done it.

I don’t think so. I’ve promised the current A Star Is Born James Dean a lifetime supply of chooch to tell me if anybody touches the Digimatte, and Fred’s still in litigation. And I don’t know how far back in time the overlap goes. Six weeks before she did it was only when I
saw
her in
Brides
. There’s no telling how long before that her image was there. Under two years, because it wasn’t in
42nd Street
when I watched it the first time, when I was first starting Mayer’s list, and yeah, I know I was splatted and might have missed her. But I didn’t. I would know her face anywhere.

So under two years. And Heada, who knows everything, says Fred will be out of litigation in three months.

In the meantime, I keep busy, doing remakes and trying to make them good, getting Mayer to talk ILMGM into copyrighting Ruby Keeler and Eleanor Powell, working for the Resistance. I have even come up with a happy ending for
Casablanca
.

It is after the war, and Rick has come back to Casablanca after fighting with the Resistance, after who knows what hardships. The Café Américain has burned down, and everybody’s gone, even the parrot, even Sam, and Bogie stands
and looks at the rubble for a long time, and then starts picking through the mess, trying to see what he can salvage.

He finds the piano, but when he tips it upright, half the keys fall out. He fishes an unbroken bottle of scotch out of the rubble and sets it on the piano and starts looking around for a glass. And there she is, standing in what’s left of the doorway.

She looks different, her hair’s pulled back, and she looks thinner, tired. You can see looking at her that Paul Henreid’s dead and she’s gone through a lot, but you’d know that face anywhere.

She stands there in the door, and Bogie, still trying to find a glass, looks up and sees her.

No dialogue. No music. No clinch, in spite of Heada’s benighted ideas. Just the two of them, who never thought they’d see each other again, standing there looking at each other.

When I’m done with my remake, I’ll put my
Casablanca
ending in Happily Ever After’s comp for the tourates.

In the meantime, I have to separate my star-crossed lovers and send them off to suffer assorted hardships and pay for their sins. For which I need a plane.

I put the “Anything Goes” number on disk and backup, in case Kate Capshaw goes into litigation, and then ff to the Ford Tri-Motor and save that, too, in case the biplane doesn’t work.

“
High Road to China
” I say, and then cancel it before it has a chance to come up. “Simultaneous display. Screen one,
Temple of Doom
. Two,
Singin3 in the Rain
. Three,
Good News
…”

I go through the litany, and Alis appears on the screens, one after the other, in tap pants and bustles and green weskits, ponytails and red curls and shingled bobs. Her face looks the same in all of them, intent, alert, concentrating on the steps and the music, unaware that she is conquering encryptions and Brownian checks and time.

“Screen eighteen,” I say,
“Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
,” and she twirls across the floor and leaps into the arms
of Russ Tamblyn. And he has conquered time, too. They all have, Gene and Ruby and Fred, in spite of the death of the musical, in spite of the studio execs and the hackates and the courts, conquering time in a turn, a smile, a lift, capturing for a permanent moment what we want and can’t have.

I have been working on weepers too long. I need to get on with the business at hand, pick a plane, save the sentiment for my lovers’ Big Farewell.

“Cancel, all screens,” I say, “Center screen,
High Road to
—” and then stop and stare at the silver screen, like Ray Milland craving a drink in
The Lost Weekend
.

“Center screen,” I say. “Frame 96-1100, No sound.
Broadway Melody of 1940,”
and sit down on the bed.

They are tapping side by side, dressed in white, lost in the music I cannot hear and the time steps that took them weeks to practice, dancing easily, without effort. Her light brown hair catches the light from somewhere.

Alis swings into a turn, her white skirt swirling out in the same clear arc as Eleanor’s—check and Brownian check—and that must have taken weeks, too.

Next to her, casual, elegant, oblivious to copyrights and takeovers, Fred taps out a counterpoint ripple, and Alis answers it back, and turns to smile over her shoulder.

“Freeze,” I say, and she stops, still turning, her hand outstretched and almost touching mine.

I lean forward, looking at the face I have seen ever since that first night watching her from the door, that face I would know anywhere. We’ll always have Paris.

“Forward three frames and hold,” I say, and she flashes me a delighted, an infinitely promising, smile.

“Forward realtime,” I say, and there is Alis, as she should be, dancing in the movies.

The End

R
OLL
C
REDITS

Connie Willis has received six Nebula Awards and five Hugo Awards for her fiction, and the John W. Campbell Award for her first novel,
Lincoln’s Dreams
. Her first short story collection,
Fire Watch
, was a
New York Times
Notable Book, and her latest novel,
Doomsday Book
, won the Nebula and Hugo Awards. She is also the author of
Impossible Things
, a short story collection, and
Uncharted Territory
. Ms. Willis lives in Greeley, Colorado, with her family.

And be sure not to miss Connie Willis’ next luminous
novella,
BELLWETHER
Coming in March of 1996.
With her usual wit and dexterity, Willis combines
chaos theory and sheep raising,
trends and true love, in this remarkable story. Here’s a
special preview:

    Sandra Foster works at HiTek in Research and Development, looking for the causes of fads and trends. Her topic of choice is hair-bobbing, but the project isn’t going so well. Too many variables, too much confusion. And then, through the auspices of a mis-delivered package, she meets Dr. Bennett O’Reilly, a young chaos theorist who is studying information diffusion in macaques. Or would like to be, if he could ever get his grant. So Sandra comes up with a brilliant idea: why not combine their projects? She has access to some sheep; he could teach them simple tasks, and as for her … Well, how better to study the human herd mentality than in the animal that most resembles it?

Her only problem is likely to be the conservative and overly-cautious Management, but even there she has a hook. Management is angling for the rare, prestigious, and highly mysterious Neibnitz Grant—in which an unknown committee, using incomprehensible criteria, randomly awards their chosen scientists a million dollars free of strings. Now all Sandra needs to do is consult a colleague expert in the ways of manipulating Management….

Gina was addressing bright pink Barbie invitations when I arrived. “I still can’t find a Romantic Bride Barbie anywhere. I’ve called five different toystores.”

I told her my plan.

She shook her head sadly.

“Management’ll never go for it. First, it’s live-animal research, which is controversial. Management hates controversy. Second, it’s something innovative, which means Management will hate it on principle.”

“I thought one of the keystones of GRIM was innovation.”

“Are you kidding? If it’s new, Management doesn’t have a form for it, and Management loves forms almost as much as they hate controversy. Sorry.” She went back to addressing envelopes.

“If you’ll help me, I’ll find Romantic Bride Barbie for you,” I said.

She looked up from the invitation. “It has to be Romantic Bride Barbie. Not Country Bride Barbie or Wedding Fantasy Barbie.”

I nodded. “Is it a deal?”

“I can’t guarantee Management will go for it even if I help you,” she said, shoving the invitations to the side and handing me a notepad and pencil. “All right, tell me what you were going to tell Management.”

“Well, I thought I’d start by explaining what happened to the funding form—”