Tune in Tomorrow, page 7
“Of course he is, you nitwit,” said Fiona. “Did you think he was an elephant?”
“And the camera operators are—dryads exist?” Starr dropped her teacup and her fingers assaulted the Chesterfield sofa again. “And I drank—real pulverized brownie?”
Fiona bit her lip, suppressing laughter. “Jason! She’s right here. Do come in.”
“No!” cried Starr.
But Jason did come in and scanned their faces. “Oh, dear. Fiona, we spoke about this.” His tail whisked up and he toyed with it. “I am heartily sorry—”
Fiona extended an arm and jangled her bracelets. “Au contraire, my dear faun. I accept Starr Weatherby with a whole heart. But you may wish to stand back a few paces. She’s having a—moment.”
Starr jumped to her feet, shaking. “Your horns are—real?”
“As is Mr. Jason’s tail,” said Bookender, who was preparing to remove the tea cart. “All fauns have horns and a tail.”
“Wanna see my legs?” Jason asked.
Starr’s head went from whirling to swimming, and the room blurred. Nearly toppling over the side of the Chesterfield, she jostled past Jason, escaping down the blank, empty hallways. Everything was confused. Nothing made sense. Fiona’s cackling laughter rang in her ears. She ran blindly, not knowing where she was going, hearing the sound of galloping platform boots—or were they hooves?—behind her. Then she was off her feet, flying and kicking as strong arms swept her up.
“Hey,” said Jason. “You just got here. Don’t leave yet.”
“You’re a faun,” she gasped.
“You bet I am.” His tail, tipped with hair like a horse’s mane, flicked around and slipped into her hand, giving it a shake. “Nice to meet you.”
Starr had never been the fainting type.
But she was now.
Chapter 8
Starr Sign
“Well?” Jason slid his glasses on, pulled them off, then slid them on again, peering over Starr’s prone form, now laid across his desk. “Is she breathing?”
“Why must I always check if humans are in a respiratory state?” Emma twitched her nose, prodding Starr’s chest. “That is a terrible feline stereotype.”
Jason snorted and stared into the distance of the moving, glamoured walls of his office, considering going for another extended bolt over the hills—but the naiads in his platform heels had communicated they were queasy after his last two gallops. He had to concentrate. Starr wasn’t dead. That was a good first step.
But she wasn’t with them. Not in a conscious sense.
Emma cocked an ear over the actor’s mouth. Soft, even breath stirred her furry hair. “Mmm,” she murmured. “Coffee… with hazelnut creamer and… lily of the valley?” She waved a handpaw at the faun. “She’s attracted to you; I can smell the pheromones.”
Off came the glasses again. “Be serious—” Jason spoke Emma’s True Name, which created a tickle beneath Starr’s left armpit. He cringed: one did not speak True Names in front of mortals, even ones that were not wakeful. But his concern had made him careless.
“No, she does! And if the stories are correct then you can wake her up by—”
Jason threw up his hands. “Stop believing everything you read. Also, that’s humans kissing humans. Thirdly, I am not a prince. Eighthly, it’s completely the wrong interpretation of what happened in that forest—”
Starr’s eyelids fluttered. She blinked sleepily into dappled sunlight filtering through spreading green leaves.
“And she’s back.” Emma curled her tail around her legs, resting on the edge of the long, uneven wooden slab that was Jason’s desk. She licked at a handpaw, murmuring about hazelnut cream.
“Zeus’ handcuffs, that’s over with,” sighed Jason, peering at Starr’s face. She appeared… softer than before. “I never saw a human actually pass out.”
That was only partly true. Jason had seen humans faint, but at the time he had no idea why they’d collapsed at the mere sight of him. This was before he’d discovered pants. Later, when those same humans came after him with torches, he hadn’t found time to ask.
“Central Park?” Starr asked, woozy. “Have I been dumped in Central Park?”
“Hmph,” said Emma. “As if your level of Central Park ever smelled this good.”
Starr sat up on her elbows and gaped at Jason’s forest glade of an office. A breeze riffled through the leaves, revealing a plum-colored sky. “Whoa,” she breathed. “I didn’t dream it all.”
“Whoops.” Jason reached under his desk and pressed a button. The glamour faded to reveal cracked grey walls lined in bookshelves and filing cabinets, and no windows.
Starr sighed. “The office is magic, too?”
“’Tis,” he said, heart beginning to return to its usual rhythm. “We’ve learned it’s best to keep things… familiar for mortals.”
“What, our little brains would overload if we saw the real deal?”
“If the boot fits,” Emma purred.
“That was so dramatic.” Jason clapped his hands together. “You went ‘aah!’ and then you went zoom—” he made a slicing motion with his arm. “And then you went splat. I thought you were dead.”
“You’re pretty chipper about it.” Jason’s tail was touching the desk and Starr reached out a tentative hand to give it a pet.
“He wasn’t for a spell there,” said Emma. “He was positively distraught. Agitated. Distressed.” She crossed her hind legs behind a Peter Pan-collared, black-and-white striped dress and turned her amber eyes on Starr, offering a handpaw. “Emma Crawford. Head writer. Do not touch the fur.”
Starr pulled her hand back from Jason’s tail, but he gave her a nod to continue her ministrations. She swiveled her gaze between him and Emma and back again, and he suppressed a smile. After years of observing her from afar, having her up close had a heady effect. It was as if he’d breathed life into a dream constructed out of sticks and cloth and a little magical goo.
“I’m confused,” said Starr. “Am I hired or what?”
Emma shook her head. “She’s not caught up one bit, is she?”
“This all happened very quickly, furkins,” he said. “I’ll give her the Guide in a moment.”
Emma pressed a handpaw to her chest. “All right, in brief: werepanther, primarily. Yes, we exist. The stories are all true.”
“I don’t know of any stories—”
Emma barreled on. “Head writer, secondarily. Also, wordcat. Words need chasing. Pinning down. Consuming. I always have more than I need, so I spill them into the scripts. I am the writer’s room.”
“That’s crazy,” said Starr. “That’s not—”
“Human? Indeed not. Being able to write with four paws and my tail simultaneously makes me several times more efficient than humans.”
“But reality shows don’t need… scripts.” Starr frowned, trailing off. “Well, I suppose they need some scripts. Only—how does a reality show work when you’ve got actors who play characters and read scripts and I guess you have a set around here someplace but… you know, that’s not exactly reality. You two aren’t exactly reality, either.”
Jason sat next to Starr on the desk, helping her to a seated position. “You have discovered a bit of a… bump under the rug with us. And well spotted! Things are complicated. As I told you in the toilet room, actual soaps were our model for many years, but they are now out of fashion. So, we have—what is the word, furkins? Pirouetted?”
“Pivoted,” noted Emma.
“Yes!” cried Jason. “Easy as pie crust.”
“No, it’s needlessly complicated,” said Starr. “What is the actual ‘reality’ in your show?”
Jason grinned. “The fact that our audience believes it is actually happening. Or most of our audience. Or some of our audience. The stronger their belief, the better our ratings.”
Starr’s mouth opened a bit. “So you’re lying to every person—every mythic—who watches the show?”
“Mythics are not above lying to themselves,” said Emma.
“Our audience believes in us,” said Jason. “I know this because we are still a functioning show. The more they believe, the more they invest in our show, and the stronger we become. Their belief in us keeps our stories chugging along. Therefore, we are duty-bound to support the notion that what they are seeing is actually happening.”
“It’s fan service,” said Starr.
“It’s a feedback loop,” nodded Jason. “Call it what you will. Think of it like that toy human children play with.” He flattened his arm and tilted it up and down. “The sawsee.”
“A seesaw?”
Jason pointed.
“But that doesn’t address the fact that you two… that dragons, that dryads and whatever else you’ve got here working on your show—I want to say none of you exist.” Starr looked at her hands, then back up at Jason. “I want to say I’m having a vivid hallucination. That I got kidnapped on the street and am actually tied up in a basement about to be subject to horrible torments.”
Emma leaned forward, chin in her paw. “Kidnapped! Stashed in a basement! What delicious ideas.” She made a quick note by pulling a pencil from behind her ear and scribbling in the air. “Tell me more.”
“You most certainly are not kidnapped,” said Jason. “We would never do that. Well, almost never.”
Starr’s neck flushed. “But even if I agree to believe that you are all real—”
Jason clicked his tongue and took her hand. It was so warm; he loved how humans always had such a high body temperature. He curled her fingers around one of his horns, which had risen a couple of inches above his hairline. “Hold on tight.”
He stood, and Starr dangled from his left horn. He let it shrink, and she slid off, stumbling against the desk. “Whether you believe in us or not makes no difference. What matters is what our audience believes. We are here. We have a show to create. We can use someone like you, and you’ve somehow passed muster with Fiona. But there are a few basic conditions—like your acceptance that every so-called ‘mythical creature’ you’ve ever read about exists. Certainly, you know about what you call the ‘Loch Ness Monster.’ Or the ‘Abominable Snowman.’ We practically live among you.”
“But it’s not like anyone ever sees you.” Starr hesitated. “Well, hardly ever sees you.”
“That’s because you keep calling them ‘abominable’ and ‘monster.’ Or suggest their only important characteristic is to have big feet! Those are not encouraging descriptions. They have actual names. Take a trip to Scotland and call for ‘Gertrude’ over by the lake and see what happens. Or hang out in the Himalayas with some bananas and shout for ‘Mi-go.’ You’ll see.” Jason took a deep breath. “In any case, mythics work here, and you will have to get along with them. If you can do that, everything else is easy.”
Emma coughed, as if trying to bring up a hairball. “That’s an exaggeration. Magnification. Overstatement. Things are not easy here. But they are often… amusing.”
Starr stared at her hand. A small bead of blood had welled up on the pad of her thumb where she’d brushed the tip of Jason’s horn. She shivered. “OK.”
“OK?” Jason pressed his fists on his hips. “That’s it? Aren’t you going to marvel before us?”
“Trust me, I marveled so hard a few minutes ago I passed out.” She grinned. “Now I can say I’ve even bled for this job.” She held up the thumb. “I just thought you were all… special effects.”
“I rather like that,” said Emma. “Special and effectual.”
Jason leaned on the desk next to Starr, his tail wrapping around her hips. “I would much rather have a mortal who figured things out for herself than one who came in here like a… brownie. Brownies are all the super fans we need. We’ve had guest actors who couldn’t stop petting everybody—”
“Oops,” said Starr, but Jason waved the concern away.
“As if we were in a zoo,” hissed Emma. “Short-termers all. Gone and forgotten.”
“What happened to them?”
Jason swirled his palm in the air. “A little selective memory erasure. A spell we deploy as necessary.” He cleared his throat. “Now, to business.” With a leap behind his desk, he began rooting around in the drawers.
“So, this is a soap opera—I mean, reality show, and it stars… only humans?”
Jason nodded, digging deeper. His entire arm disappeared into a drawer, which was much deeper than it looked. He knew there was a copy of the Guide in there; the last one had come home after Amelia’s… vanishing. He didn’t want to revisit that dark time, but it was hard not to: it was the one time they’d actually lost track of an actor. No one knew what had happened; she simply stopped coming into work and fell off the radar. Jason had pushed hard to have her tracked down—they couldn’t let humans roam the world with knowledge of what went on behind the Veil, that was both tradition and common sense—but TPTB had been unusually disinterested.
Jason pushed aside rocks and twigs, pencils and unmelted ice cubes and old copies of WaterWorlds folded into origami. And then, at last—the Guide slid into his hands. “Aha!” he cried.
“But why us?” Starr asked. “People are boring. Our reality is particularly dull. We’re the ones who spend billions making movies about you types.”
Emma leaped from the desk to the top of a nearby filing cabinet. “Oh, my sweet, your super heroic comic book tales and fables about magic rings and flying sneetches—”
“Golden snitches, she called them,” Starr corrected gently.
“We have all those things. We are endlessly entertained by weddings! Divorces! Lies! Cheating! Mail fraud! Conspiracy theories! Embezzlement, what a terrific word. Humans die, and we love it—no, not because we’re all bloodthirsty, though some of us …” She shook her head. “The point is, we don’t die. It’s true, we do avoid the whole babies nonsense in this show for reasons best not gotten into now. But Tune in Tomorrow serves as both entertainment and education for our viewers. Hence, reality!”
Jason sat up, shaking the Guide hard enough to wake it up, then handed the book to Starr. It vibrated as it touched her fingers and bonded to her. She scanned the title: Year One: A Compleat Guide to Show Survival, Assimilation Beyond the Veil, and Tea Brewing Techniques.
“There’s not much to know about brewing tea,” Jason pointed out.
Starr gulped. “Survival?”
“Metaphor!” Emma cried.
Jason’s grin felt pasted on. He couldn’t tell her about Amelia. That might be the last straw.
Starr flipped through the pages, and he leaned over her shoulder as chapter titles whizzed by: ‘Not Fairy Gold: Payment by Magic Deposit,’ ‘Health and Safety Procedures for Delicate Human Bodies,’ ‘Distant Future Retirement Options’ and then, toward the end, ‘Home Brew: Overcoming Revulsion to Brownie Tea Preparation.’ Starr closed the Guide, smoothing her hand over the top. “It’s an employee handbook.”
“All yours, new employee,” Jason said. “No one but you will see anything other than a Swedish-Paakantyi translation dictionary. If the Guide remains in your possession for more than one solar day, it will serve as your signed and bound contract, and will regularly update itself during your tenure with the show. But if you choose not to work with us, leave it on your open windowsill tonight. It will wing its way back home and we will not contact you again.”
Starr paled. “No—” she began. “I mean, of course I’m coming back—”
“But you have more questions.”
“I have so many questions. Like, salary? Vacation? Sick days?”
“All in the book. Take some time tonight and start reading.”
Starr closed the Guide and rested her hands on it, beaming. “I accept.”
Knots in Jason’s stomach unfurled. He had so many things to be grateful for today: Fiona hadn’t killed Starr, and she’d not only recovered from a sudden, terrifying faint but seemed to have no inclination to come after him with a torch. Jason tilted his head in admiration. They had hired a tough one.
She’d need to be.
He thrust out his hand and Starr fitted hers into it. They shook. He stared at the small smear of blood on her thumb. That wasn’t insignificant: she trusted him. This job required trust from everyone, but for the first time in many, many years—maybe ever—he wondered about being worthy of that trust. The sensation writhed in him like snakes, or too many noodles. “Any other questions?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Would you please turn the sky back on?”
Jason reached under the desk and the forest glade returned. The plum sky now had a bright orange moon in its center. Starr flattened against the desk again, and after a moment, Jason joined her. Emma made a giant leap directly over them and curled up at their heads.
“You’re going to save this show,” he whispered.
“No pressure,” Starr whispered back.
“Oh.” He nodded. “I think you know precisely how to handle pressure.”
Chapter 9
Starr Light
“And here we are!” Jason rested a warm hand on Starr’s shoulder blade, five days later. “Stage entrance!”
“At long, long, last.” Fiona set icy cold fingertips on Starr’s upper arm.
The two show veterans now flanked her like—prison guards? No, that was wrong. Starr wanted to be here. It had been tough, these past several days of preparation, but at least they were supporting her. Jason, like the angel on one side, Fiona like the… well, Starr didn’t want to think of her that way. Fiona knew what she was doing. Jason wouldn’t have put Starr into his most senior actor’s hands if she didn’t.
Starr clutched her sides, holding the small, stapled packet of pages from the scene they’d be blocking shortly, and swallowed. It was all down to this: a pair of giant double doors, over which a bare red bulb protruded.
A yellow-lettered sign on door one proclaimed:
WORLD ENTRANCE
A red-lettered sign on door two pronounced:
DO NOT ENTER WHEN THE RED LIGHT IS ON UNDER PAIN OF BANISHMENT
