Remake

“An affliction,” she said seriously. “Only that isn’t it either, exactly. It’s… when he dances, it isn’t just that he makes it look easy. It’s like all the steps and rehearsing and the music are just practice, and what he does is the real thing. It’s like he’s gone beyond the rhythm and the time steps and the turns to this other place… If I could get there, do that…”

She stopped. Fred Astaire was sauntering toward us out of the mist in his top hat and tails, tipping his top hat jauntily forward with the end of his cane. I looked at Alis.

She was looking at him with that lost, breathless look she had had in my room, watching Fred and Eleanor, side by side, dressed in white, turning and yet still, silent, beyond motion, beyond—

“Come on,” I said, and yanked on her hand. “This is our stop,” and followed the green arrows out.

SCENE: Hollywood premiere night at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Searchlights crisscrossing the night sky, palm trees, screaming fans, limousines, tuxedos, furs, flashbulbs popping.

We came out on Hollywood Boulevard, on the corner of Chaos and Sensory Overload, the worst possible place to flash. It was a DeMille scene, as usual. Faces and tourates and freelancers and ravers and thousands of extras, milling among the vid places and VR caves. And among the screens: drops and freescreens and diamonds and holos, all showing trailers edited a la Psycho by Vincent.

Trump’s Chinese Theater had two huge dropscreens in front of it, running promos of the latest remake of Ben-Hur. On one of them, Sylvester Stallone in a bronze skirt and digitized sweat was leaning over his chariot, whipping the horses.

You couldn’t see the other. There was a vid-neon sign in front of it that said Happy Endings, and a holoscreen showing Scarlett O’Hara in the fog, saying, “But, Rhett, I love you.”

“Frankly, my dear — I love you, too,” Clark Gable said, and crushed her in his arms. “I’ve always loved you!”

“The cement has stars in it,” I said to Alis, pointing down. It was too crowded to see the sidewalk, let alone the stars. I led her out into the street, which was just as crowded, but at least it was moving, and down toward the vid places.

Hawkers from the VR caves crushed flyers into our hands, two dollars off reality, and River Phoenix pushed up. “Drag? Flake? A pop?”

I bought some chooch and popped it right there, hoping it would stave off a flash till we got back to the dorm.

The crowd thinned out a little, and I led Alis back onto the sidewalk and past a VR cave advertising, “A hundred percent body hookup! A hundred percent realistic!”

A hundred percent realistic, all right. According to Heada, who knows everything, simsex takes more memory than most of the VR caves can afford, and half of them slap a data helmet on the customer, add some noise to make it look like a VR image, and bring in a freelancer.

I towed Alis around the VR cave and straight into a herd of tourates standing in front of a booth called A Star Is Born and gawking at a vid-pitch. “Make your dreams come true! Be a movie star! $89.95, including disk. Studio-licensed! Studio-quality digitizing!”

“I don’t know, which one do you think I should do?” a fat female tourate was saying, flipping through the menu.

A bored-looking hackate in a white lab coat and James Dean pompadour glanced at the movie she was pointing at, handed her a plastic bundle, and motioned her into a curtained cubicle.

She stopped halfway in. “I’ll be able to watch this on the fibe-op feed, won’t I?”

“Sure,” James Dean said, and yanked the curtain across.

“Do you have any musicals?” I asked, wondering if he’d lie to me like he had to the tourate. She wasn’t going to be on the fibe-op feed. Nothing gets on except studio-authorized changes. Paste-ups and slash-and-burns. She’d get a tape of the scene and orders not to make any copies.

He looked blank. “Musicals?”

“You know. Singing? Dancing?” I said, but the tourate was back wearing a too-short white robe and a brown wig with braids looped over her ears.

“Stand up here,” James Dean said, pointing at a plastic crate. He fastened a data harness around her large middle and went over to an old Digimatte compositor and switched it on.

“Look at the screen,” he said, and the tourates all moved so they could see it. Storm troopers blasted away, and Luke Skywalker appeared, standing in a doorway over a dropoff, his arm around a blank blue space in the screen.

I left Alis watching and pushed through the crowd to the menu. Stagecoach, The Godfather, Rebel without a Cause.

“Okay, now,” James Dean said, typing onto a keyboard. The female tourate appeared on the screen next to Luke. “Kiss him on the cheek and step off the box. You don’t have to jump. The data harness’ll do everything.”

“Won’t it show in the movie?”

“The machine cuts it out.”