"Art schmart, Brad. No offense, but when was the last
time you sold anything?"
Weasels, Brad thought. You're all weasels. He fixed what
he hoped was a superior, unconcerned gaze on the wiry boy sitting before
him. The boy fidgeted, looked away. Brad smiled thinly.
"I stay in print," he said.
But now he noticed that the boy hadn't turned away in
shame; he'd turned to his cronies for support. He'd gotten it. All around
the crowded Pro-Party, faces nodded around sly smiles, young authors chuckled
behind raised cans of fashionable Say-No Cola. Only one face, a pale girl
with brown curls tumbling around her bird-like features, looked on with
anything close to sympathy. Brad gave a curt nod. He'd have to work his
way in that direction, check her out.
"Sure, Brad, no offense." The boy paused, letting his
condescending tone rattle around the room, echo back from nodding faces.
"But realistically, you work for nothing. Gratis. No publisher would buy
yourself anymore. It's imperfect."
"It's real," Brad shot back.
This game annoyed him. Every convention, the same stupid
argument. The same stupid attacks from wet-nosed children riding their
fifteen minutes of fame on the Prose-Perfect wave. How could he ever convince
them that computer-written stories were a sham? That stories sweated over
by a real human writer were superior? That no matter how clever your ideas,
to let some machine do the real work...
He let his eyes move slowly over the sea of young faces
surrounding him. Up-and-comers. Major novelists. The room was gleaming
with science fiction's brightest stars... And not one of them over thirty.
There was probably not a person in the room who'd ever even read a man-produced
story. That was all before their time.
He focused again on the wiry pup, let the stare sink
slowly in.
"They teach my work in universities all over the world.
You won't survive into next week."
The pup barked. His laughter came back reinforced by
the crowd.
"Sure, they teach your stuff, Brad." A thin smile played
connect-the-dots between pimple scars on his face. "In the Ancient History
Department."
The room laughed out loud. Brad sipped his Scotch and
pretended not to notice. He lit a cigarette, drew a heavy first drag, then
blew a thick column of smoke directly into his attacker's face.
The boy coughed. Brad smiled. He pulled himself up to
sit tall and cross-legged at the center of the now widening circle of faces.
They were moving away, angry now. They didn't like cigarette smoke; they
weren't real authors at all... He leaned in close to the pup's frowning
face.
"I can't even read the crap you people turn out," he
growled. "It's like reading Mylanta. So smooth and bland it makes me sick."
"And yours reads like you ate gravel for breakfast and
crapped it out on the page."
"What have you read, Junior? Of mine?"
The pup refused to look away. But he did cough again;
that was something.
"Nothing, Old Man. Why should I?"
Brad leaned back again, away from the angry young face.
He sipped his drink. He'd caught a whiff of genuine fear behind the pup's
challenge, a defensiveness that was more than arrogance. The others had
heard it, too. They were frowning now at the boy as though he'd revealed
some secret, broken some dark cultic oath.
Brad let his eyes drift back to the dark-haired girl
by the window. She was watching him, intense, her arms tight across her
chest as if trying to hold herself separate from the mocking crowd, to
let him know she wanted no part of their game; in a room packed with people,
she stood alone.
Brad smiled and nodded a quick Come on. The he turned
and scanned the room for an ashtray. There wasn't one.
Her name was Melissa. She was, of course, a published
author; her first story had come out when she was sixteen. Two years before.
Brad considered checking her driver's license before he took it any further,
but decided it was worth the risk. The girl was different. She sat on the
bed, her thin legs crossed at the knee, smoking the cigarette he'd offered
in jest. He liked her already.
"So, what do you want with an old codger like me?" He
poured two drinks - Scotch, neat - and handed one over. She accepted it,
grimaced at the smell, then sipped it anyway. Good for her. Brad sat beside
her on the bed, ran a slow finger over the narrow strip of thigh peeking
out from under her skirt. "I saw you Prose-Perfect laptop on the counter.
I take it you're in the Writer's Workshop."
"Mr. Peterson..." She touched his roving hand as if to
brush it away, but finished by gripping it tightly, holding on.
"Brad."
She smiled. "Brad," she echoed, the tiniest fraction
of a quaver in her voice. "They really are afraid of you, you know. They
know in their hearts what impostors they are. They have to hide from that.
To survive. You don't let them hide."
He returned her smile. "You're not hiding. I'm glad.
You seem pretty real to me."
"I'm an impostor, too. In my first year of writing..."
"Don't put yourself down," he interrupted, a bit too
gallant, too eager. He checked his tone. "You've been writing two years
with Prose-Perfect, Melissa. Which means you've got - what? Ten?
Twenty stories in print?" A couple of novels, maybe? Not bad..."
The girl looked away. "Thirty-five stories, six novels,"
she said softly. "My first year. I hate them all. They're so... perfect."
She spat the word like warm Mylanta, then faced him, smiling again. "But
I haven't sold much this past year. I've been reading mostly. Your books."
"My books? Really?" A rush of genuine pride swept through
his own practiced defensiveness. It felt good.
"You don't know me, Brad," the girl continued, suddenly
intense. "But I know you. I've studied your work. It's wonderful. It's
no accident that we met. I came to this convention specifically to meet
you."
"Really?" His smile spread into a wide grin. He hadn't
heard that one in a long, long time. He watched the girl taking tiny puffs
from the cigarette, not inhaling. She'd learn.
"I have something to show you," she said.
She slid off the bed, crouched before him, her face almost
in his crotch. Brad finished his drink in one swallow, tilting his head
all the way back. When he looked again, she was sitting on the bed beside
him, a briefcase she'd pulled from underneath resting in her lap. She popped
the locks.
"Hey...," Brad said, the words slurring, going soft.
"Would you look at that?" He ran his hand down her slender arm, till their
fingers intertwined over the cover of a tattered book inside the briefcase.
They pulled it out together, exchanged smiles. "The First Dinosaur..."
A faint whistle. "I don't even own a copy of this. Jesus. What was that,
1986?"
"'84," she said, letting him take the book, move away
with it toward the light. "Twenty-five years and it's still brilliant,
Brad. It has stylistic problems, sure, but the idea is brilliant. The way
you carry it through. It's genuinely moving."
She slid close to him again, joined him in examining
the book under the lamp's yellow glow.
"No one but you could have written this," she said, he
voice suddenly thick with emotion. "There's so much of you in it. Your
hopes, your fears, the way you feel." She touched his hand. "I fell in
love with you reading this, Brad. I'm a writer because of this book."
He offered it back, his cheeks burning. She stopped him,
wrapped her small hands around his, around the book.
"Keep it." She laughed, tiny bells in a spring breeze.
"I've got it memorized. I know it better than you do."
Their eyes met, held. Then she looked quickly away. Her
eyes dropped back to the open briefcase. She hesitated.
"There's more."
It took him a moment to focus on the neat manuscript
she now held out to him. She had to lay it in his lap, sur-render it, before
he could clearly make out the title:
The Last Dinosaur
By Melissa Jackson and Brad Peterson
"I don't remember..." Then it clicked, like glasses falling
into place on his nose. He glanced involuntarily toward the little computer
on the counter, then back to the stack of white papers in his lap. "Oh,
Christ, Melissa. You didn't..."
"Please, Brad. Just read it. For me." She touched his
hand again, twisted her slender fingers through his. A gentle squeeze.
"My agent's already found a publisher, if you'll agree." A soft smile.
"It's you, Brad. It's us. I've studied you, the way you think, the way
you feel, how you see the world, what matters to you. I know you better
than you know yourself. Please. Don't say I'm wrong till you've read it."
He met her eyes again, saw himself reflected back from
her tear-dampened irises. So blue, so young... He looked back to the manuscript.
"Another drink?"
Tears hovered in his own eyes by the third page, traced
slow lines down his cheeks. It was the most beautiful piece of writing
he'd ever read. Already the characters were fully alive, fully human. The
dialog sparkled and flowed. Page after page poured through him like warm,
healing water. The frail truth of his human existence was laid bare by
the poor Last Dinosaur's plight, his struggle to survive against all odds,
his tragic failure. Oh, how he wanted to become a bird, to fly away over
the encroach-ing ice... But that was for the young. The species would survive,
would evolve to meet the challenge, but he, the lone, unchangeable adult,
would not. Evolution doesn't work that way.
Brad wept freely as he read on, entranced by the sparkling
prose, swept away, oblivious to the girl on the floor at his feet, her
knees pulled tight under her chin, watching him. But as he turned the last
page - moments, hours, maybe days later; he couldn't tell - he felt her
eyes caressing him, nudging him to speak, to make some pronouncement. He
held out his glass for yet another refill.
"I've never read anything like it," he said as the girl
snatched up his glass and moved off toward the counter, toward the Prose-Perfect
laptop. He watched her fill his glass, and then one for herself. Her hand
trembled as she passed the Scotch over. She plopped down on the bed beside
him.
"What does that mean, Brad?" She held up a small hand
to shush him, downed her drink in one swallow. The hand fell away. "Okay,"
she said. "Tell me."
"It's beautiful, Melissa." He glanced bitterly again
toward the counter. "Must be one helluva program you're using..."
The girl flinched, looked away. He was immediately sorry,
but he just couldn't reconcile the powerful novel, the emotions it had
stirred in him, with the sight of its mechanical source. Every Prose-Perfect
story he'd ever read had been bland, lifeless, stamped from the same two-dimensional
mold. But this...
It scared him. He hated it.
"Brad?"
"What do you expect me to say?" he almost shouted, his
defenses crashing again into place. "You download me into some machine,
and it out-writes me? How am I supposed to feel about that?"
"Brad..."
He pushed the manuscript aside, pulled her hands together,
held them tight.
"Don't get me wrong. It's good. It's better than good.
That's my problem, see?" He forced a soft laugh, met her eyes. "Not only
does your machine out-write me by a million to one, but it kills me off
in the final chapter..."
"Kills you off? What?"
"I'm obviously the dinosaur, Melissa. He dies in the
end."
"No he doesn't." She reached for the manuscript, set
it back in his lap. "Where do you get that? Show me."
"Okay, hold on..." He pulled the bottom page from the
stack and held it for a long moment under the lamp. Then he offered it
to her, his finger marking the final paragraph. "There. Read that."
She read it over silently, paused, read it again. She
looked up.
"No, Brad, you're wrong. Whether he dies or manages to
evolve is left open, for the reader to decide."
"Melissa, he sinks in a tar-pit."
"He walks off toward the tar-pits. I never say he falls
in. Besides, I established in Chapter Six that certain tar-pits have transformative
powers that..."
"You established that as a superstition, a legend. It's
too weak a hope to hang an ending on. The way it's written here..."
The girl was staring at him, intense. He felt her eyes
nudging him to complete the thought, to ferret out some hidden connection.
He looked to the counter, to the Prose Perfect laptop, then focused again
on the page in his hands, re-read that vague final paragraph. A circuit
in his mind slowly closed: She'd studied his work, come especially to meet
him, put his name on the manuscript...
He smiled. "You wrote this. Yourself."
"Yes."
She took the page from his hand, gathered the rest of
the manuscript, and dropped the whole thing into the briefcase. She snapped
the locks closed.
"I'll rewrite the last chapter before it goes to the
publisher. Or I can take your name off it, if you'd prefer."
She moved to shove the briefcase under the bed, out of
sight. Brad stopped her, pulled her to him.
"Keep them both. Don't change a thing. I love it."
She let the briefcase drop to the floor, in the open,
in sight. She touched his hand, smiled.
"I knew you'd say that."
The sex was not perfect, but it was good. So good that,
in several moments throughout the night, Brad found himself floating, rising
on invisible winds, and watching the little room sink away through a vision
of clouds and feathers and clear blue skies.