I, Alien

ACTS by William Sanders

WELL, WELL. I tell you, this is really something. This is just amazing.

Yes, I’ve known your parents a long, long time. All five of them, ever since we were not much more than hatchlings. In fact we used to get mistaken for brood sibs, we spent so much time together. It’s true we’ve been a little out of touch lately, but oh, the memories. The stories I could tell you.

And now here’s their youngest, coming around wanting to interview me for a big entertainment magazine yet. Who would believe it?

Of course, another thing that is to me incredible is that anybody would want to hear about me and my business. The glamorous life of a performers’ agent? It is to exfoliate already.

And Hnb’hnb’hnb knows it’s not like I’m some big success. I swear if I was a yingslaagl people would stop gn’rking… but okay, I see, you’re not just interviewing me, right? This is something, you’re asking different people in the business? Like a survey?

All right, I can see that. In fact I could maybe give you a few tips before you leave, who you should make sure and talk to. And who not, if you know what I’m saying. Like a certain client-stealing party right here in this building, two floors down, his eyestalks should only drop off. Or another certain individual whom I will not name, over at Galactic Artists and Performers. A real bloodsucker—and I know he says he can’t help it, it’s a dietary requirement of his species, but I still say feh.

But listen. Now I think of it, this is a good thing. This is a chance, I can maybe say some things that need saying. Maybe this is an opportunity to educate people a little about what it means to be an agent. I’m sorry, but believe me, they have no idea.

They think it’s so easy. They look at somebody like me and they’re thinking, what a racket. Just look at this bum, sitting on his tail crest, you should pardon the language, in a fancy office, making such a good thing for himself off other people’s work. Maybe makes a few calls, sends out a few messages, does lunch with some big shots, for this he takes twenty percent of the poor struggling entertainer’s pay?

Sure, right. It should only be so simple.

Leave aside for the moment all you really have to do, which believe me is plenty, you wouldn’t believe the hours I put in sometimes… do you have any idea, my dear youngster, what an agent has to know these days? The sheer amount of information he has to carry around in his head—or heads, as the case may be, hey, I’ve been accused of many things, but nobody can call me a bigot—just to function at all in this business?

All these different worlds, all these different races, they’ve all got their tastes and their customs and they all assume theirs is the only possible way and surely everybody else knows about it so of course they wouldn’t bother to tell you anything—and so you have to learn it all. Have to know it all from memory, there’s no time to be pulling up files and studying background when you’re negotiating with some promoter on the other side of the galaxy who needs an act yesterday if not sooner. Which, by the way, I hate, retro-relative time shunts are more work to set up than you’d believe and when you mention the extra charges, they go h’nogth on you. But I digress.

I was going to say, you have to know all this stuff, easily as much as any cultural scientist, just to operate. Operate shmoperate, to stay out of trouble, which, believe you me, there is plenty of just waiting for you to make one little mistake.

And I mean big trouble. Not just the ordinary stuff, like the fact that on Z’arss any kind of music in three-four time is considered pornography, or that doing impressions on Uuu will get you two hundred to life for personality theft. I’m talking nova-grade catastrophe.

Like this certain former colleague whom I used to see at the agents’ conventions, nice enough young fellow if maybe a bit on the smart-alecky side, who made the mistake of booking a Xee wizard for a big simultanous-live-and-vid appearance on Kabongo. He was really excited about that, because the Xee homeworld was still a recent discovery and this was going to be the first offworld performance by one of their wizards, which nobody really knew anything about except that they were supposed to be extremely hot stuff. So my colleague figured he’d pulled off a real coup in signing this one up, and for a time there, up until show time, he got pretty hard to take.

Hah. And again hah. Ever seen a Xee wizard work? No, of course you haven’t, ever since what happened on Kabongo they’re banned from performing off-world, and you better be glad of it or you might be permanently blind and deaf and paralyzed like all those poor devils on Kabongo. I understand the insurance lawyers are still appealing the judgment, but that’s not much help to Mr. Smart Guy. Who had broken one of the most basic rules: never book an act you haven’t personally seen.

Or take what happened to a very dear friend of mine only last year. One day he gets a call from Keshtak 37, over in the next arm, wanting a whole lineup of acts, price no object. Seemed the Emperor of the Oomaumau had passed away, and they wanted only the best for his funeral festivities, which would go on for weeks because the Oomaumau believe in giving a ruler a first-class sendoff.

So my friend is naturally very pleased to get to handle something that big, and as soon as the contract is signed he starts calling around, seeing who’s available. But then he happens to do a bit of research, to see what kind of acts the Oomaumau might like, and finds out something extremely disturbing. The Oomaumau, it develops, have another unusual mortuary custom: the performers at the royal funeral are given the honor of accompanying the Emperor to the Hereafter, so his spirit shouldn’t get bored.

Yes, that’s right. Well, not strictly speaking; they just bury them alive beneath the royal mausoleum.

My friend is not really to blame for not knowing about this, which is not well known outside learned sociological circles because the last time an Emperor died on Keshtak 37 was well before the memory of any living person on this world. Long-lived race, the Oomaumau, especially the royal family… but ignorance, as they say, is no excuse before the law, and the contract had already been signed.

And the Oomaumau were not about to let my friend out of it. Though he tried hard enough, went so far as to travel personally to Keshtak 37 to plead for a release. He was so desperate he even got an audience with their spiritual leader, the Papa Oomaumau, at the great temple of the goddess L’vira. No go. A contract is a contract and if he reneges, they tell him, he will find himself up to his nictitating membranes in litigation with the Emperor’s attorneys.

Yes, that was what my friend asked. Turns out it’s not at all unusual for dead people to file lawsuits on Keshtak 37. Don’t ask me.

My friend doesn’t know what to do, but then while he’s there, he picks up another bit of information. The only entertainers who don’t get interred with His Imperial Awesomeness are the ones who perform so badly that they are deemed unworthy of the honor. Yes. On Keshtak 37, when you stink at the Palace, you don’t die at the Palace.

So my friend rushes back here and starts calling in all the lousiest acts he can find. Which takes very little searching, because every agent knows plenty of hopeless no-talent losers; they come around begging you to represent them, and they’re so persistent and so pathetic you take their names and information down just to get rid of them and then they call you every few days for the rest of your life wanting to know when you’re going to get them some work.

In almost no time my friend has assembled a collection of the worst stinkeroos in this part of the galaxy. Tone-deaf musicians, stumblebum dancers, comics unfunny enough to induce suicidal depression, he’s got them all. He said he had to open the office windows to air the place out after they all left.

No, he didn’t tell them. He felt bad about that, but it really wouldn’t have done to let them in on what was going on. Entertainers and artists, you see, are very touchy people that way, and the bad ones most of all. The worse they are, the greater they believe they are and the harder they believe it. If he’d told them the truth, they’d have been furious, and chances are they’d have walked out on him.

So off they went to Keshtak 37, and—ah, yes, I’m seeing this look on your face, you’re way ahead of me, aren’t you?

That’s right. The thrill of finally getting a professional gig, and a prestigious offworld one at that, got them so worked up they barely needed a ship to get to Keshtak 37; they could have gone into warp by themselves. And by the time they went on at the Imperial Palace, they were so inspired that they performed, all of them, better than they’d ever done in their lives.

Or ever would again, in what little was left of them… my friend was very upset. Not that anybody would miss that particular bunch, but the Oomaumau buried their paychecks with them and he never did collect his cut.

But listen, don’t misunderstand, I’m not disrespecting my colleagues. It’s not like I’ve never made any mistakes myself. How I only wish…

Let me tell you about the comic.

Or rather tell you what happened, I can’t really tell you about him. Can’t do justice to his talent with a simple description, you’d have had to see him in action to fully comprehend just how great he was. And yes, great I said and great I meant. All these people like to think of themselves as “artists,” but in his case it was the simple truth. A genuine comic genius is what he was, and he could just maybe have been the greatest ever, if only—but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I found him working open mike night at a cheap club down in the Ginzorninplad district. He’d just gotten into town, worked his way here from his home-world aboard a worn-out old tub of a bulk freighter, and he didn’t have much more than the clothes on his back. I watched his act and then I caught him backstage and signed him up, just like that. And said some very sincere prayers to Hnb’hnb’hnb for granting me the privilege.

I got him a few local gigs and he did just fine, even got some good ink from the critics. But you know this town; an outsider has a tough time getting accepted. Especially an outsider from, and I don’t mean this in any derogatory way, a different-looking race. I hate to say that, but it’s true.

So when this opening turned up for a long offworld tour, I advised him to go for it. Oh, it wasn’t much of a booking—the world was a pretty backward sort of place, off in a distant arm of the galaxy where hardly anybody ever went even to visit, and the pay was worse than lousy.

But I didn’t really have anything else for him at the moment; things were slow, all the best clubs were booked up solid. And I figured this was a chance for him to get some experience, develop his material, and practice his technique out in the sticks without having to worry about bombing because even if he did have a bad night nobody who mattered would ever hear about it. Meanwhile I could work on lining up something better for him.

Well, what can I say? It seemed like a good idea at the time, I should hit myself repeatedly with the nearest blunt object.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that he went into the sandbox or anything like that. On the contrary, they loved his act—or at least they loved him; right away, almost as soon as he arrived, they started making a big fuss over him. In no time at all he was playing to packed houses.

You understand, he was sending back regular reports, keeping me up on what was going on, and every time I heard from him, he sounded more amazed. People followed him around on the street, came up to him wanting to meet him and trying to touch him, and before long he even had his own fan club. In fact there were about a dozen of them who took to traveling around with him, seeing to his needs, just like he’s a big superstar.

But what was really strange was the way the audiences reacted to his act. Nobody ever laughed. He’d do his funniest routines, stuff that would make a Rhrr laugh, and they’d just sit there staring at him with these very serious faces and nod and look at each other and nod some more, like he’d just said something wise and profound.

He tried everything. He even tried dumping his own material, since they didn’t seem to get it, and doing corny old gags about farmers and animal herders and fishermen, thinking maybe they just weren’t ready for sophisticated modern humor. Didn’t make a bit of difference. They still came to see him, more and more all the time, but they still didn’t laugh.

And this was starting to make him crazy, as you can imagine. He got so desperate he started doing magic tricks. Now I mean that’s pretty bad, when a talented performer has to reach that low. What next, I thought, he’s going to take up juggling? But these hicks absolutely ate it up. They liked the tricks even better than the comic routines; the crowds started getting really huge.

Finally the time came for his debut at the big city— well, the biggest in that part of that particular world, it wouldn’t have made a slum neighborhood here— and off he went, hoping the city audiences would be a little more hip.

He made something of an entrance, too; his twelve roadies did a really great job of getting the word out, making sure there was a big crowd to welcome him when he arrived in town. By the time he did his first show, the turnout was so big they had to hold it outdoors on a mountainside, where he gave possibly his greatest performance ever. Still no yucks, but he thought he saw a few of them smiling a little toward the end.

So things were looking up; and so my boy didn’t think anything of it, a few nights later, when a bunch of people showed up, right after dinner, and wanted him to come with them. Some kind of fan thing, he thought, and he said sure, and went along without argument, though some of his entourage tried to talk him out of it.

And when they got where they were going, he still didn’t tumble to what was happening. Not even when they started bringing up the lumber and nails. In fact he gave them a hand. He figured they were getting ready to build a stage for him. There were some cops standing around but he assumed they were just security.

By the time he found out different, it was too late.

If I told you what they did to him, you would not sleep tonight and you would have dreams for years, just as I did when I heard about it. So I think I better not go into the details. Enough to say it was a terrible, terrible thing and I’ve never heard of anything quite like it, even on the most barbaric worlds.

The shock and the pain were so great that it was three planetary rotations before he could pull himself together enough to activate his recovery circuits and get out of there. He came back here and told me what had happened—I had naturally been worried sick— and then, despite all my pleas and reassurances, he got on the next available ship back to his homeworld, and as far as I know he never got on stage again. I understand he went into the family construction business. Such a waste, and I can’t help feeling responsible.

But there was one thing I want to tell you about, because it illustrates just what kind of a person he was. Right after he got his body systems working again, he was just about to send the emergency beam-up signal when he thought of something he wanted to do. And as bad as he wanted out of that place—and who can blame him?—and as stiff and sore as he was, he stayed around long enough to put in a final appearance to his original fan club, and do a little farewell routine just for them. Now is that class or what?

You can see why it broke my heart—no, both of them—to see him go.

Well. So much for my little reminiscences. I’m sure you’ve got a whole list of questions.

So ask.