Parallelities - Couverture souple

Foster, Alan Dean

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0345424611 ISBN 13 : 9780345424617

Editeur : Fawcett, 1998

Synopsis

Book by Alan Dean Foster

A propos du livre

Extrait

Chapter One

It was one of those special late June days that the Greater Los Angeles
Area Chamber of Commerce tries to bronze and preserve for all eternity--as
well as for the sake of civic advertising. Semitropically hot but not
suffocating, multicolumnar traffic on the freeways actually free of
vehicular stasis by nine o'clock in the morning, no major sigalerts, and
the limpid turquoise sky brandishing a lovely pink tint thanks to a
wispier-than-usual permeation of smog.

Other than in his highly restricted capacity as a civic-minded citizen,
Maxwell Parker could not have cared less about the current condition of
the metastasizing megalopolis's vaunted but frequently arteriosclerotic
freeway system. As one of those fortunate folk who could commute from home
to office on the overstressed but still highly preferable surface streets,
he was immune to such vehicular concerns. All he had to do was drive the
few blocks from his apartment building up to Lincoln Boulevard, cross the
Santa Monica Freeway, turn right on Wilshire, and mosey his leisurely way
up to Bundy Drive, occasionally shaking his head in empathetic but
distanced wonder at the traffic reports that periodically interrupted the
morning news.

He would have preferred keeping the Aurora's stereo set to one of L.A.'s
innumerable small specialty FM music stations, but starting the day by
listening to one of the several all-news channels was one way of getting a
jump on work. After all, the news was his business. Or rather, a certain
fringe element of it was. Max worked, unabashedly, in the journalistic
freak zone. His job was to make the news--not read about it.

Scrupulously avoiding eye contact with the haggard homeless hawkers of
makework newspapers who crowded the median on Lincoln and haunted the
street signals at the freeway overpass, he turned up Wilshire Boulevard.
Maneuvering skillfully around a shambling, shaggy, vaguely anthropoid
figure fervently hoping to force his energies upon the Aurora's already
speckless windshield, Max crossed Bundy and ducked smoothly down into the
Investigator's underground parking lot.

As a prolific, inventive reporter whose current status vacillated between
junior stringer and respected craftsman, his status was sufficiently
ambivalent to qualify him for a comparatively convenient parking space,
but on the lower level. Not only did he not mind having his car consigned
to the concrete abyss, he preferred it. The deeper in the multilevel
labyrinth one parked, the cooler one's car stayed during hot weather, and
the less it was subject to the unwanted attentions of visiting delivery
vehicles.

The modest but modern glass-sided high-rise was home to other enterprises
besides the paper, from the ubiquitous law offices that migrated
constantly in search of more prestigious addresses, to fledgling film
producers unable to afford locations close to the studios, Beverly Hills,
or the better parts of the San Fernando Valley.

The top six floors and most of the parking spaces belonged to the
corporation that owned Max Parker's employer, the International
Investigator. A youthful but energetic competitor of other weekly tabloids
like the Star, and the World, the Investigator had carved out a niche for
itself by emphasizing the newly grotesque as opposed to the traditionally
bizarre. Its computer-generated graphics were lively, its layout fresh,
its prose florid, its weekly quota of insupportable but nonlitigious
accusations slyly incendiary. It was a paper on the way up, its
circulation steadily increasing, and always on the lookout for
enthusiastic, moldable, and generally unprincipled young talent.

Max considered himself lucky. Still only in his late twenties, he had
already succeeded in dumping whatever ethics and integrity he might have
once possessed in return for scads of filthy lucre and a modicum of fame
within the field. Unlike some of his less fortunate coworkers, he had been
blissfully free of scruples for several years, dating his freedom from the
morning he had taken his carefully collected bonuses and used them to move
from the dump he had been shar-ing with a hopeless would-be screenwriter
and a short-order cook into a prime one-bedroom Santa Monica beach
apartment. By the end of the first week he knew in his heart that the
location and setting were worth any number of abstract moral principles.

He smiled to himself as the aged but still serviceable elevator carried
him upward. The owners didn't have to put more than the minimum back into
their hugely profitable old building. Given its location, people would
have lined up to rent the small but cozy apartments if they had come
without electricity, telephone, or running water.

The California summer sun was out and the UCLA coeds would soon be
emerging from hibernation, shedding their heavy winter coats in favor of
freshly molted thong and net swimsuits. Though it was still midweek, he
was already looking forward to the weekend.

"Hey, Max!" Phil Hong was a hyper would-be movie reviewer who lived beyond
his means by cadging loans from the gullible and uninformed, his relatives
as well as his coworkers. Around the office he was known, not always
affectionately, as Phil No-dough. Executing a feint to the left while
accelerating to his right, Max put a move on the eager younger writer
that, if he had been dribbling a basketball in a college game, would
certainly have made the Monday-night-after highlight film on any local
station.

"Sorry Phil--I'm late for the morning bull session. Talk to you later,
man." Leaving a slightly bedazzled Hong gaping foolishly in his wake, Max
lengthened his stride. He paused only long enough to say good morning to
Calliope Charming, manufacturing idle small talk sufficient to gain him a
decent gander at her estimable cleavage before moving on.

The
not-quite-the-top-floor-but-the-people-who-met-there-were-still-considered-of-moderate-importance-to-the-success-of-the-business
conference room boasted a long window with a pleasant, if not sweeping,
view of the Santa Monica Mountains. The stunted chaparral that clung
forlornly to those smog-swept slopes was barely visible through the
increasingly turgid brown atmosphere. As the sun rose higher in the sky,
the atmosphere heated up and the ozone gremlins awoke to their noxious
toil. What had begun as a Chamber of Commerce day was rapidly becoming
little more than a fading morning memory.

The room contained a long conference table; chairs fashioned of shiny,
fine-grain plastic; insistently throbbing air-conditioning; and small
green garbage cans that were already half full. He greeted his colleagues
cheerily, swapping unforced insults and convivial small talk with the ease
of long practice, before sliding into a chair and removing his laptop from
its satchel. Hatcher (oh blissfully apropos moniker for a tabloid
scribe!), who concentrated on sports-related scandals and turpitude, used
pen and paper. So did the excessively slim but unmodelish Penelope
Nearing. Their concession to tradition impressed no one.

The raucous chatter terminated when Kryzewski lumbered in and took the
chair at the head of the table. It was as if a raven had somehow bought a
ticket to a convocation of crickets. Not only at the offices of the
Investigator but within the greater tabloid universe as a whole, Moe
Kryzewski commanded a good deal of respect as well as admiration. In the
elegiac prose of an esteemed contemporary, it wasn't so much that the
senior editor knew shit from Shinola as the fact that during his more than
thirty years in the business he had been consistently able to sell the
former as the latter.

Flipping open the laptop, Max fingered a few keys. It was
middle-of-the-line, six months old, and would be outdated in another
three. At that time he would have to buy a new one. Not because the one he
now owned was insufficient for his needs. In point of fact, a two-year-old
edition of the same machine would have been more than adequate for the
work he did. But it was important to keep up appearances. In the tabloid
business the appearance of the writer didn't matter nearly as much as the
appearance of his laptop.

After insuring that the requisite files had been brought up to where he
could get at them quickly, he looked out into the respectful silence.
Eager, venal expressions transfixed the faces of his colleagues. He was
confident his own was no less.

"Well, what have you lazy pricks and prickesses got for me this morning?
There's a weekend edition to fill and we ain't got shit to put into it.
Longstreet!" Kryzewski barked.

The reporter in question looked up from her palmtop. Her delicate fingers
were small enough to manipulate the tiny keys, and to minimize mistakes
she had filed her nails down short as a longshoreman's. Around the office
she was known as "Longstocking," as in Pippi.

"It's been a slow week, Moe. My boy in Florida tells me some cracker's
hauled a six-legged gator out of the 'glades."

The editor snorted. In the old days he would have been filling the room
with cigar smoke: carbonized essence of Havana. But this was contemporary
Los Angeles. In his day Moe Kryzewski had battled crooked union bosses,
corrupt cops, angry politicians, and homicidal movie stars, but not even
he could stand against the nicotine police.

"Photo op, no story," he commented curtly. "Got anything else?"

Longstreet pursed her lips. "L'Elegace's new summer line for the ladies
features soft transparent plastic tops over Vassarely-styled printed
skirts and culottes."

"Angling for a trip to Paris?" Kryzewski grinned. "Sorry, Charlie. If
readers can see naked French tits in People, why should they want to read
about it in the Investigator?"

Longstreet looked crushed, but not to the point of giving up. "There's a
rumor going around that one of L'Elegace's senior models is supposedly
sleeping with Anais Delours."

Kryzewski perked up. "Isn't she the one who's married to Phillipe Boison,
the director? The guy who makes all those interminably boring flicks about
French adolescents growing up, and all that crap?"

Longstreet nodded. "It's just gossip going around."

"Gossip my prostate! Get on it. When you've got the story done let me know
and I'll tell Travel to cut you a ticket. To 'verify sources.' And you'd
better do some work this time instead of hanging out in Montmartre trying
to pick up the overage graduate students who drift over from the Sorbonne."

Longstreet mustered as much indignation as she could manage. "I do not
pick up college boys." Her mouth subsided into a fey smile. "They pick me
up."

"Whatever. Just pin a source or two to the board. I want it by next week."

The session continued in that vein, the writers laying out their
respective story ideas, the majority of which were immediately shot down
by Kryzewski. Too old, too thin, not involving enough, insufficiently
provocative, hard news, too expensive to research, inadequate glamour, no
buzz--Kryzewski could kill a story with a cocked eye. Though everyone at
the table was open to all possibilities, each writer tended to specialize
in one area, from sports to entertainment, crime to consumer goods,
politics and politicians to miracles and popular music.

Having been dragged kicking and screaming through several science courses
while he was at university, and having been injudicious enough to commit
this fact to print in the form of a line in his resume, Max had been
assigned to the wonderful world of weird science by default. Faced with a
fait accompli and no accomplices to pass it off on, he had chosen to
accept the appointment and run with it--or at least hobble. The result had
been some singularly notable stories whose popularity with the paper's
readers had surprised and delighted everyone from himself on up.

In his skilled hands a report that started out as a straight piece on the
CERN collider in Switzerland would end up informing readers not that a new
subatomic particle had been discovered, but that gremlins had sabotaged
the apparatus to prevent physicists from opening a door to Hell, or that
bosons and mesons were really different species of elves moving at high
speed, which was why humans could not see them unless they chose of their
own accord to slow down--or could be trapped in the accelerator.

From a reporter's standpoint it was reassuring to be able to turn in
stories knowing that nearly one hundred percent of those who read them
understood absolutely nothing about their scientific underpinnings. Max
preached bullshit to the ignorant, who were ever ready to accept the
outrageous as gospel provided it was described in words of more than three
syllables. Wasn't that, after all, what science was all about, and didn't
folks know what was really going on in this country, and wasn't it his,
Max Parker's, job to tell them the real truth? As opposed to the fake
truth, which was usually embodied in unreadable, incomprehensible
government reports?

When the piercing glare of the senior editor finally focused on him, he
was ready. The screen of his laptop glowed with multitudinous absurdities,
any one of which he was ready to promulgate as the absolute truth to a
gullible public. The people wanted to know, and the Investigator was ready
to tell them. So was Maxwell Parker.

"Evan Thibodeux of Avery Island, Louisiana, has caught a mermaid."

Kryzewski rolled his eyes. "Pictures?"

"Not yet." Max smiled confidently. "Binky Chavez, our photo stringer out
of Houston, is going to check it out and get back to me some time tonight
or tomorrow. If the photos are usable I figure it's worth at least half a
page."

Kryzewski nodded approvingly. "We'll make 'em usable. That's what computer
photo touch-up programs are for." He looked momentarily wistful. "Wish
we'd had a couple of those around in the old days. Half a page, you got
it. We haven't had a good mermaid story in years."

Farther down the table, Stu Applewood piped up. "Wonder if anybody's got a
Cajun recipe for blackened mermaid?"

"Oy, that's good!" added Brick the Brit from his chair. "Maybe it's a
black mermaid. Then we could run a recipe for blackened black mermaid."

"The Japanese would do her as sushi," put in Deva Singhwar. "The Japanese
will eat anything."

"Full page, maybe." Kryzewski was clearly warming to the story's potential
for exploitation. "Half for the story, half on how unscrupulous chefs
around the world have been serving mermaid to unsuspecting customers for
years, and passing it off as shark." The editor was almost enthusiastic, a
rare state of being. Beneath the envious stares of his associates, Parker
swelled with a sense of accomplishment. "What else you got for me, Max?"

Parker searched his "new" file. "Truck farmer in South Jersey claims to be
able to grow tomatoes with the face of Jesus on them."
"Great." Dyan Jefferson had just had her tres chic rows done by a
hairstylist recently immigrated from Windhoek, Namibia, who week after
week brought forth for the edificati...

Biographie de l'auteur

Alan Dean Foster was born in New York City in 1946 and raised in Los Angeles, California. After receiving a bachelor's degree in political science and a master of fine arts degree in motion pictures from UCLA in 1968-69, he worked for two years as a public relations copywriter in Studio City, California.

He sold his first short story to August Derleth at Arkham Collector magazine in 1968, and additional sales of short fiction to other magazines followed. His first try at a novel, The Tar-Aiym Krang, was published by Ballantine Books in 1972.  Since then, Foster has published many short stories, novels, and film novelizations, including the New York Times bestselling Splinter of the Mind's Eye and Flinx in Flux.

Foster has toured extensively around the world. Besides traveling, he enjoys classical and rock music, old films, basketball, bodysurfing, and weightlifting. He has taught screenwriting, literature, and film history at UCLA and Los Angeles City College.  He and his wife live in Arizona.
From the Paperback edition.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Fawcett
• Date d'édition: 1998
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0345424611
• ISBN 13: 9780345424617
• Reliure: Poche
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 314
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible