Rolling Thunder (35 page)

“Hey! I’m right here. You can talk to me. What happened?”

“You passed out. This gentleman carried you inside and called for me.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

That was pretty fast response time. Turns out Pellucidar has a complete emergency room and doctors on call twenty-four/seven. Another fringe benefit of the rich and famous.

“But I feel fine.” It was true. I felt rested, and stronger than I had even this morning. In fact, I felt like I’d had a full night’s sleep.

What I wasn’t ready to tell anyone yet was that I’d gone to that strange place I’d begun to think of as the inside of the bubble.

EACH TIME I
returned there, I had a stronger sense of location.

How often had I returned? It was hard to say. During my recovery I slept a lot, as surgery patients do. I estimated I had it about twice a week, something like that. This was the first time I’d had it during my waking hours, and it seemed to have knocked me out. I was told that I’d been unconscious for just about ten minutes, that I hadn’t seemed in any distress, that I’d been breathing deeply and had a faint smile on my face.

Whatever had happened, it clearly was not an epileptic seizure. People who have those are disoriented when they come out, and I felt fresh as a daisy. I was ready to rassle alligators. I was hungry.

The doctor had me hold out my arms and touch my nose with my fingertips, and I nailed it. He had me walk a straight line, heel to toe. There were a dozen little tests like that, and I aced them all. At last he shrugged.

“There are many kinds of seizures,” he said. “I’m going to have to put it down to a plain old-fashioned fainting spell, caused by blood leaving your head when you tried to stand up. Even though your blood pressure is fine. And I’d recommend you get those other tests done, let us take a look at your brain.”

I knew something he didn’t know, which was that I’d gone to that place that isn’t a place. I wanted to keep that for myself.

AFTER THE EXCITEMENT
settled down I sent Millie to the kitchen to fix snacks and drinks for everybody. We talked of old times for a while. Music with Cassandra and Quinn, the bus trip with Tina and Slomo. It felt good to have them there. Tina and Slomo and I were a small group of expatriates living in a foreign country, our old country being the previous decade.

Quinn and Cassandra were links to my musical past. They’d moved on, making money off the tracks we’d burned before “Jazzie’s Song,” and moving in and out of groups exploring and expanding Pod music. If anyone was going to help me get hip to it, it was these two.

Turned out they weren’t there just to rehash old times, though. Tina soon got to the point, and she was direct about it.

“I’d like to talk to you about your career,” she said.

“Career?” I hadn’t spent much time thinking about that.

“If you want to keep on singing, you have some choices to make.”

I guess it was obvious I wasn’t going to be playing piano bars and coffeehouses if I was going to perform in public.

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“Simple. You need management, and I’m applying for the job.”

She didn’t try to sell me on it; she sat back in her chair and let me think it over. What became clear to me pretty soon was that I wasn’t even prepared to set foot outside Pellucidar. I wouldn’t know how to go about it. All those people outside my hotel room, the endless stories I’d seen in all the news media, that monstrous queue of messages waiting for me to delete or answer …

“Will you screen my messages and answer my fan mail?”

“Of course. That’s part of the job.”

“Then you’re hired.”

THERE WAS A
lot more to it than that, of course, but that’s how it began, with a handshake. She would hire a top public-relations person, and a staff to sort through the messages. She would book my first post-Europa concerts.

“That will be tricky, since you’re still in the Navy,” she said. “But I’ve talked to some people in the Madmen, strictly informally, and they all feel that the Navy won’t interfere with a reasonable number of private gigs because it’s good for the Navy. There’s talk of a big tour, a morale builder, mostly to Earth. If that’s what they want, that’s what you’ll do, of course. But you’d own all the rights to recordings of those tours. The Navy is barred by law from profiting on artistic creations or performances by personnel.”

“A tour of Earth?” I said. “Do I have to?”

“Legally, yes. Practically, you’re too big for them to really push around, and if you put your foot down they’d probably never ask. But it would be a mistake. For one thing, nobody can count on getting out of the armed forces these days. They can extend your enlistment indefinitely. For another thing … hell, they
need
it, Podkayne. Morale is very low in the Earth-based forces. It would be the patriotic thing to do, and frankly, if they ask you to go and you don’t do it, I’d have to resign.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I’ll go where they send me,” I said. “I’ll go where I’m needed. I just don’t have to like it.”

“Nobody does. But we do what we have to.”

There were lots more details to iron out, but most of them I could answer quickly: You handle that. That’s what I’m paying you for. The matter of pay was easy, too. She named a salary that seemed reasonable to me, and she’d have the option of taking that or a percentage of what we made, as an incentive.

Then she and Slomo took off, and Quinn and Cassandra got together in the room I’d set aside for my instruments and other equipment. We played around with some ideas, and Quinn made up a list and called some contractors to have the room converted into a real studio. They said they could have it all done in twenty-four hours.

By the time they left I was beginning to feel more engaged with this brave new world than I had since I woke up. I had a direction, even if it was still rather nebulous. I had people who wanted to help me, and I was going to have an actual career, not merely empty celebrity that felt, somehow, posthumous.

I was excited, and went to bed feeling good about myself.

THE NEXT MORNING
I was in the kitchen, scanning the day’s news over coffee and warm croissants from the Pellucidar bakery—delivered fresh from the oven!—when I sprayed, gasped, and almost choked on a mouthful. There it was, a headline in
Scandals,
Thunder City’s most scurrilous drudgeloid:

POD DRIVING DRUNK?

PASSENGER INJURED IN PELLUCIDAR CRASH!

Horror-stricken, I ticked on the
VIDEO
button and saw myself look over my shoulder and crunch into the corner of the guardhouse. Cassandra was thrown forward and hit her face on the dashboard and started streaming blood. Then I saw it from another angle. And then another, in slow motion.

I didn’t bother reading the story. I called Tina at once.

“Hi, Podkayne,” her small image answered in a corner of my vision. I dragged the window front and center, took a deep breath, and screamed.

“Help!”

“Don’t worry, we’ve been on it for an hour already.”

“But I wasn’t drinking!”

“And it’s too late for breath or blood tests. But
don’t worry,
hon. I handled
much
worse than this when I worked for Cosmo. You wouldn’t believe the scrapes I had to get him out of. This is
nothing.
You gonna be okay?”

“I guess. But how can they
lie
like that? I think we ought to sue them.”

“Part of the job description. And suing is a bad idea, over something this minor.”

“Minor.”

“That’s right, minor. Believe me, in a few hours everyone on Mars will be back on your side. In fact, nobody ever even left your side, even if the story had been true. You have a vast store of sympathy out there, Pod.”

“I don’t want sympathy. I want the truth.”

“Which is what we’re getting out there, as I speak. The problem, my dear, is what I pointed out yesterday. You haven’t made a public statement, you haven’t made an appearance. The media are getting
desperate,
Poddy. We have to get you out there. Just a few interviews. And most of all, a concert. People want to see you. If they don’t see you pretty soon, not even the walls of Pellucidar can protect you. As you’ve just seen. Gotta go now, dear. Keep watching.”

I did, though I was dreading it. My croissants went cold, and so did the coffee.

But pretty soon there was Quinn, being interviewed by a more reputable news source. He came over very well. He was laughing, not as hard as he had in the car the previous day, but it was clear that it was all a joke to him.

“She wasn’t drunk,” he said. “She was completely sober. She just doesn’t drive very well.” To prove it, there was security cam footage of my garage door opening, and the crunch as I backed up, then pulled out, trailing the toolbox. More cams showed me hitting the mailbox, and tools falling out. I heard a stifled giggle, turned, and saw Millie. She’d piggybacked on my news window, so we were both watching an imaginary screen hovering over the kitchen table.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “But it’s funny.”

“I told you not to call me ma’am,” I said, sourly. “Is it really all that funny?”

“Forgive me, but look at it again, and imagine it’s not you.”

I did, and she was right. Okay, lighten up, Podkayne. You looked like a fool. Deal with it. And while you’re at it, get someone to fix up that damn car and
sell
it. It’s not so far to walk to the gate.

WE DIDN’T SUE,
but we got a retraction and a written apology.
Scandals
knew it had crossed a line. That issue sold very well, but the negative response was so intense it frightened the editors, and a huge number of advertisers canceled, as well as 10 percent of their subscribers. I almost put them out of business, which made me feel very good.

So where did the original video come from? Obviously it was an inside job, and the management of Pellucidar did their best to find out. The men at the gate swore they didn’t do it, and I believed them. But there were unseen people in the security department, people who monitored all the cameras. It must have been one of them who did the capture and succumbed to a bribe from
Scandals.
But they never found him.

THE NEXT DAY
I traveled into town to visit Podkayne, Inc.

That’s not what they called it. We’d settled on the name Kahlua Management, with Tina as manager and only one client. Then there was the Official Podkayne Fan Club, which took care of the grunt work like sorting and answering mail and sending out “autographed” pictures.

We occupied two floors of a big office building downtown. It was a bustle of activity when I arrived. There were twenty people in cubicles just handling the mail. I went from booth to booth shaking hands, many of which were cold and sweaty. Nervous, I realized, sort of like I’d been when Baako arrived at my door. What an odd feeling. I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.

There was a public-relations department, an art department busy making posters for teenagers to put on their walls. There was a media-relations department, scheduling interviews. I lost track of it all. I found I now had thirty-seven people working for me.

I wasn’t just a celebrity now. I was a commodity.

17

THUS BEGAN THE
Podkayne Road Show. First order of business: A total makeover, from hair to shoes.

This wasn’t as dreadful or extreme as it sounds. I don’t know many girls who don’t enjoy being fussed over at a salon, getting a pedicure, trying on new clothes. But the funny thing was, after it was all done, I didn’t look all
that
different.

“We’re not out to change you,” Tina said. “The goal is to enhance what you’ve already got. We’ll stay with clean, cute, girl next door. But we have to do something about that
hair.
And the clothes …”

After two days of intensive work, the hair was trimmed a bit, treated with something that made it look an even lighter, glossier shade of gold than it already was, with a few subtle streaks and a bit of a wave. I liked it.

My closet no longer looked so deserted. Practically all my old stuff was gone. Now I had dozens of outfits from the best designers on Luna and Mars. Suddenly, I had fifty pairs of shoes.

I learned more about makeup in those forty-eight hours than I’d picked up in my previous nineteen years. I could even do some of it myself, for day-to-day purposes. For appearances in public, there were three people working on my face and hair.

When the makeover was done I liked the result. When Mike saw me the first time, for once he didn’t have an affectionate insult ready; he just stared. Marlee looked me up and down with narrowed eyes, and slowly nodded, then smiled.

“Excellent. Brings out all your strong points, hides the weak ones.”

I wanted to ask her what the weak ones were, but didn’t, because as far as I could see she didn’t have any weak points at all.

Even Mom and Dad approved, which was a big relief, as they had been dubious, afraid Tina was going to tart me up in some ridiculous avant-garde rags. Grandma Kelly had much the same reaction as Marlee: a cold appraisal, then a satisfied nod.