IGMS Issue 21 Page 3

She ignored the servant, who didn't have to return with the message because Glone had been watching on a trivid in a near room. He appeared in moments, tailored, manicured and styled, his teeth gleaming, his charisma surrounding him like a vacuum fluctuation. Walter had heard his name but that was all.

  Sylvia looked at him.

  Walter might as well have been vapor. "Ms. Romilar," Glone said, his tone almost confidential, "You are lovelier than ever this evening. I apologize for interrupting. We're getting a lot of noise from law enforcement about these deaths you mentioned in your litany. Many more people have died than you said would die. There are implications there."

  She looked at him as though he were a specimen. "My wine is getting warm."

  "Ms. Romilar, Sylvia, there is no need for us to be enemies. First, I want to apologize for the offensive things I said. That was shameful of me. To atone, I want to invite you to my residence on Corfu -- a little closer to civilization. Ms. Romilar, in truth, I feel I've known you before -- that we knew each other in the past, and were very close."

  "I would have opened my wrists."

  Glone looked away from her. His face and posture shifted. He said to the swarmers. "This snot waitress should remember who owns whom. Sylvia, if you do that kind of speaking thing again, kindly steer away from the subject of death. You say these things -- 'a kid in red clothing will be hit by a car' -- and sure enough, it happens somewhere in Germany, or Argentina, or Omaha. Paranormal powers should do better than that, hmm? You're playing the odds with billions of viewers -- so how can you lose? And it alarms those who exercise authority."

  "Are you offering to exempt me from this cruelty?"

  "No." Glone slouched back, at once fully at ease. "You would not believe," he said, "how much you're making for PulseCorp. It is phenomenal. You're making my family wealthy for generations." Brilliant teeth gleamed inside the grin.

  "You're dental work, disguised as a man." Disgust sharpened her words. "If your children are like you, they should be used for parts."

  Glone hesitated before breaking out the full $40,000 grin, his Hindenberg ego intact.

  At that moment, 5:23 p.m., Dr. Leonardi appeared from the hallway with strict voices behind him telling him to stop, that he was not expected. He pulled away and walked in despite the hands grabbing at him.

  "Sylvia?" he said. He tried to maintain his composure, but looked unsteady

  Glone's head made a swift, grim turn.

  "When you know me better, you'll know I loved you more than my own life. I apologize for being so dull. I'm trying not to be."

  Garith Glone stood up, his charisma curdling into authority. "Get him out of here."

  Dr. Leonardi flapped his hand in front of his face and said, "I'm going, Mr. Glone. Remember me," he said to to Sylvia. Nervously gracious, he made a slight bow. "Your memory of me will be the most precious thing I have." He then returned whence he'd come.

  In the subsequent moment of silence, Sylvia said to Glone, "The snot waitress is visiting with a friend. You were finished?"

  "Of course," Glone said with a smile. "Consider the safety of our viewers."

  On the veranda, Walter and Sylvia sat under a sky of several colors, without much talk, their hands held draped between their chairs. "This could be Walter and Noreen," she mused.

  At 7:45, they heard a crew member hurrying toward them from inside the house. That was unusual. "Ms. Romilar," the young woman said gravely, "Lance Graff is dead."

  Sylvia wasn't shocked, but she was curious. "Why?"

  "Because Dr. Leonardi broke his neck," she explained. "It was on the back stairs, so no one saw the swarmer playback till just now -- if you want to see." She pulled a trivid around for them.

  The figures of Lance Graff and Dr. Leonardi stood at the top of the back stairs, the image frozen.

  She nodded.

  The world would watch as she watched.

  Sylvia's eyes grew wide at Lance's second flight. "It appears," she said, "that he was selected out. We can hope he hasn't bred."

  During the night they slept clinging to each other, and with the audience's expectation of intercourse, she went to 99.91% of viewers. The next morning, millions complained, but all remained hopeful they would see the madonna deflowered.

  After breakfast, Sylvia's trivid chirped and turned itself on. A St. Helena journalist narrated the conclusion of Dr. Leonardi's five-hour walk into town while he was thoroughly observed by a half dozen tag-along swarmers. Walter watched with full attention. Sylvia had coffee.

  The journalist said, as the video substantiated, "On reaching the main street of Jamestown at daybreak, several early-risers who had already observed Sylvia and Walter watching Dr. Leonardi murder Lance Graff, congratulated him for making rid of an annoyance. They try to high-five him, as you may see here, which he took as a threatening gesture. As Dr. Leonardi shuffled through town toward the sea, more people gathered, some of whom were fans of Lance Graff and were indignant."

  The trivid showed a group of a dozen shouting citizens, one of whom threw a flower pot. Others threw dirt and any handy trash.

  "The many people argued," the reporter said, "and, at length, they came to blows. When the commotions subsided, Dr. Leonardi was discovered in such a damaged condition, as we see here, that the exact cause of death will not be understood for several days."

  A car drifted past the reporter, blaring a grab-it song that drowned everything out. She had to pause. She said the incident concluded when a policemen observed a dog licking the remains.

  "You make people crazy," Walter said to Sylvia.

  "And am I the sane one? When I say 'I' or 'me,' the words need footnotes. My sympathy is gone for those people. They do this to me for their entertainment. Call me an accident that waited to happen. Call me a selecting event."

  (Instant surveys indicated few people had any idea what she was talking about. In the Romilar groups, suspensions and excommunications subsequently occurred over interpretation. The usual.)

  On the third day, she said to him, "The next time I see you, if I'm different, I want you to pretend you know me, even if you don't."

  "I will."

  "Tell me you'll never lie to me."

  "I won't."

  Walter Roscoe

  had no more than got airborne than she did another forty minute rip on who was going to get what, and this time the import was noticeably darker. More of it dealt with criminal activities: the undetected, the wrongly detected, the detected but unsolved, and the wrongly solved. Criminals were identified in terms of location, gender, age, clothing or tattoos. Thirty-eight suicides and forty-five hundred plus confessions to crimes of battery or better were attributed to her broadcast; the guilty threw themselves on the mercy of their respective police systems rather than risk fatal torments by the mob. As for the huge number of others who were ratted out by their friends, for money, their guilt would take months to ascertain.

  Sylvia Romilar

  took up knitting for a week. The peculiarity of the choice bumped her rating .7%, then it dropped off a little, and the third week she got a +.1% when speculation increased as to the nature of the item she knitted. It required much yarn of a dozen shades from bright red down to brown. One evening, she spread it full out -- irregularly circular, a distorted tear-drop shape in reds and rusts, heavily textured in places. A large handbag? A throw for those chilly nights?

  "A clot," she said. "A clot," she explained further, "as of blood."

  Sylvia Romilar: +.9 to a week's average of 87.5%. PulseCorp was happy. Madness was a plus.

  Walter Roscoe

  saw three things happening that seemed misguided and troubling, heading into territories that were rarely explored, for good reason.

  First: Channel 614 now became Sylvia's trivid shrine. It had sequencing images of her, candles, droning sounds, and several Sylvia-related mantras that helpfully scrolled across the bottom. Walter could not imagine what cause and effect meant to these people. He would have thought
that they were impaired, except there were so many of them who heeded their midnight voices.

  Second: In the future, accounts of popular music would be unsuitable for children. The grab-it band Pitchforkin' Babies' hit, "Navel Operation," and three notorious songs titled "Untitled," from Unprovoked Attack, all expressed degrees of psychopathic violence, rage and excretory imagery that six months earlier would have been unthinkable.

  Third: While music groups tried to out-deprave each other, Sylvia turned to sit-coms, often conspicuously drifting to sleep in the middle of them. Cleverly, one of the programs, 37 Ocean View, had inserted the lines, "What could we do, Miss Romilar, that would keep you entertained?" The feed showed Sylvia watching the actor pose the question. She said, "Ask your friends in the music business," and walked away.

  Within weeks, Walter saw situation "comedies" turn darker, often including humorous assaults, copulations with the unsuspecting, incest with misidentified parents or siblings, and innumerable varieties of hilarious physical and psychological humiliation. Game shows had become cruel spectacles of mocking and degrading punishments new to history, with a hysterical laugh-track. Sylvia Romilar was seen watching these things all the way through, with moments of interest and enjoyment.

  In actual life, police had begun referring to trivid-inspired crimes in terms of the program and episode. In Largest Life, "Artificial Lover" episode, the murder of the bound and gagged Aston Drew by suffocation with a female part, became known as a "large art lover" and was frequently attempted for several months. Other program-derived names were as obscenely crude as the crimes were grotesque. The word "fadmurder" was added to dictionaries. "He was fadmurdered -- it was a large art lover."

  Walter knew Noreen would never provoke people like this. But Sylvia didn't have any trouble suggesting they degrade themselves -- and they raced to do a good job of it. The ripples went everywhere: Even in Walter's obscure backwater neighborhood, across the street, Noreen's tea shop with white lace curtains was now HARDWARE GUNS, its official name, with bars on the windows. From customers, he heard that more people were getting mugged these days. Gun sales soared. Then more people were getting mugged and shot.

  Even without being physically assaulted, if he walked anywhere, he was likely to hear Wanda & The WhoreMoans yodel-shrieking one of their several versions of "Enema Mama." Their performance was cutting-edge, wildly popular, and ripped any dignity from coprophilia. It was unspeakable.

  Garith Glone

  again watched the refined montage of her hands, the changing light on the planes of her face -- and her lips, the many ways they moved. Twenty-year-old memories melted into the moment . . . he felt more than remembered a thrilling long-ago intimacy, mysterious and electric, where he was alive moment by moment. Sylvia could be the reincarnated woman he had loved, now that he realized how much she resembled her -- but every time he spoke with her, she drew contempt and ridicule out of him. During those moments, he wanted to grab her by the throat and slap her till she bled. But now -- in his darkened office, he was not that person. On the trivid, she was radiant. Garith Glone felt weakness.

  Walter Roscoe

  happened to be watching two days later, when Sylvia sat down to lunch on her St. Helena veranda. She turned down the offer of wine. Then, as off-handedly as a lunchtime chat, she did her Third Speaking, twenty minutes, this time making many predictions and issuing warnings to generally-identified groups and individuals, as to who might suffer and/or die standing up, lying down, sleeping, in cars, in midair, by bullets, strangling, stabbing, poison, falling, or beating with miscellaneous sporting or farm implements. Most pointedly, a surprising number of these persons were identified as employees of PulseCorp, the spawn of Garith Glone.

  Then she had a slow, newspaper-reading lunch, with the wine.

  Before she finished, the news-crawl at the foot of Walter's trivid reported that eight executives of six PulseCorp subsidiaries, in their workplace, had already suffered suspicious fatal injuries, and two others were expected to die. In pops and snaps, the violence started everywhere immediately, but later the same day, in larger cities across Europe and the Americas, mobs swarmed corporate offices of power and finance, interpreting Sylvia's words to coincide with personal grievances; they went after insurance companies with a special vengeance and generally trashed random offices of any business that housed itself in a tall building. Using simple hand tools, they exterminated functionality in selected key areas, knocked employees around and dealt harshly with those in the more luxurious offices, running a few out their windows. "Makin' 'em angels!" became a ubiquitous threat that chilled the hearts of those who worked above a third floor, where they trembled at loud voices.

  There sure wasn't any Noreen Brown showing anymore. If someone came by the shop and wanted to talk to Walter about Noreen or Sylvia, which happened several times a day, he could honestly say, "I don't have any idea who either of those women is."

  One evening, ten minutes till closing, while talking to the dogs and covering the birds, a perky young lady bounced in and beamed across the counter at him.

  "Hi!" she gushed. "I'm just so proud to meet someone who actually knew Sylvia back when she was Noreen --"

  "I don't have any idea --"

  " -- so I just couldn't imagine why --" (She slapped a notebook on the counter, opened it, and pointed to a list of names.) "-- our records don't show that you're a member of any of Sylvia's groups. Why would that be?" She looked up, cheery, nice clothes, big orthoplastic smile.

  "I didn't need to."

  "But you, sir, especially! We have an opening in the SR Pet Owners' Group. It's right up your line, answering desperate calls from those in need of Sylvia's advice."

  "I really wouldn't know what her advice would be, since I don't have any idea --"

  She began writing. Walter didn't stop her.

  "Why is there a Sylvia Romilar pet owners' group?"

  "Well . . .," she said, as though to someone not very bright, "we all want to do things Sylvia would like -- don't you?"

  "Most of the time."

  "So we behave in ways that she would approve of, and that includes raising pets according to her preferences. Any kind of pet. Iguanas, dogs, fish, whatever. People call in with a pet problem and you tell them what Sylvia would do. WWSD. See?"

  "I do." Walter saw that this person was not rational.

  "Besides --" The girl chuckled and whispered, "Sylvia can punch our tickets any time she wants. She killed my evil aunt."

  "Most people think she's predicting things, not causing them."

  "What's the difference?" She waggled a cautioning finger at him as she left.

  They weren't just seeing her face looking out of the trivid -- they were reading her mind of thoughts she'd never had and attributing to her the power of life and death. Walter supposed these people hungered for someone hugely powerful to love them and hate everyone else, no matter how despicable their behavior was.

  Walter wondered what Noreen would say about that. Sylvia would say, "How surprised can you be?"

  Sylvia Romilar

  observed Garith Glone appear on her trivid, shortly after sunset. Charisma pumped out of him like a fluid. She was picking at a tray of hors d'oeuvres.

  "Things do take on a life of their own, don't they," he said gently, suspiciously gently. He had the air of an old friend who was a little sad.

  Sylvia's lips momentarily pursed before a bite of smoked eel. She looked peeved.

  "You've done well for us, Ms. Romilar." The gentleness of his voice worked around a slight shortness of breath. "You've wanted out from the beginning, and we want to do what's right." (Sylvia appeared amused at his lie.) "We will cut the live feed, totally, permanently, we'll only broadcast edited material, and we will continue the payment of one million dollars a day for the rest of your life, whatever your ratings."

  She looked at him with disdain.

  Glone flashed his teeth. "We could do it anyway."

  "If you did, just
imagine, with your reknowned foresight, what my people would do to your people, as we have seen. I imagine a lot of personal contact, don't you? My answer is no." She selected a piece of uncooked beef on a pick. "That was one," she said.

  Gorn had sobered. "One of what?"

  "Your five no's. You've made a start." With her teeth, she pulled the meat off the small tines. One of the swarmers zoomed on the ooze of blood where her teeth cutthrough its fibers.

  Walter Roscoe

  watched this as he leaned on his shop's counter. Raw meat, Walter thought, with teeth and blood -- it seemed to have symbolic import of a threatening nature.

  Several hours later, shortly after St. Helena nightfall, from her Napoleonic bathtub, her peaceful face filled the trivid. Walter wondered how people could not fall in love with her. She gazed dreamily into the eyes of the world and out of nowhere began speaking again, her Fourth Speaking -- another litany of the guilty, the vile, the greedy, the vicious, and this one went on almost eighty minutes as she bathed her perfect skin.

  Walter was in awe.

  ICU! workers were partially named with locations, physical details, details of their pasts and miscellaneous trivia that enabled viewers to hunt them down. How she knew this was a mystery, but no one was surprised.

  At the end of the Speaking, she said to the swarmers, to the world, "I want to go to Paris. I want to meet Walter there."

  He packed a bag.

  The trivid reported that even before Sylvia had arrived at the hideous Luanda-Angola airport, some of her believers weren't above giving a hand to the execution of her "prophecies" and some had been performed with surprising expedience.

  Walter's Santa Miranda taxi to the airport, the first leg of his journey, had a bullet hole in the front door. The driver showed him his gun as he opened the door for Walter. "Gotta license for this." They got in, doors slammed. "But," the driver yammered over the back seat, "I don't gotta license for this one." He waved an eighteen-inch sawed-off. "Kill bastids if they bother us. I'll do it, too."

  The smoky overcast, the wild swerving of the taxi, and the driver's venomous execrations at everything and everyone made Walter queasy. He had troubling life-shouldn't-be-like-this moments.