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“Yes,” ordered Tweed. “Bring Mr. Vo
Actually, Vo
“Thirty seconds, Mr. Tweed.”
“Make yourself useful for a change, Allman.” Tweed twisted around in his chair. “I left my readette of Cat’s Cradle in my dressing room. Fetch it up here for me. You will thumbprint it for me, Kurt?”
“That book is not science fiction,” Kurt Vo
Roger was happy to get away from the set and (especially) from Tweed. He settled himself in a Pneum-A-Pod and was whooshed down to the eighteenth floor of the Understanding tower. This was where the talent for 24/7, the UN’s morning news, talk, and political science show, had their offices. Sharon Swelter and Bobo Lamonica were just down the hall. Tweed had argued his way down onto eighteen even though the directorbots only gave him three or four Book Banter segments a week. But on eighteen he could bump into the stars of 24/7 and pretend he was one of them. The actual headquarters of The Good Word were way up on sixty-four, which was where Roger spend most of his time when he wasn’t ru
The carpetmoss on the floor of Tweed’s office gave off an earthy deep woods scent that Tweed liked to tell people reminded him of Thoreau’s Walden, although Roger was pretty sure that Tweed had never been north of Yonkers. Tweed ’s rosewood desk was slightly bigger than the cubby where Roger worked. The walls were decorated with holos of the host in the reluctant embrace of some of his most famous guests: Judy Blume, Gore Vidal, Joyce Carol Oates, and James Michener. There were two of Tweed with J.D. Salinger, who had become something of a publicity hound since the release of the videogame version of House of Glass.
Tweed ’s desk and credenza were piled high with gaudy readettes, most of them still unread in shrink-wrap. Roger sorted through them, searching for Cat’s Cradle. Every now and then he would find one he was certain Tweed wouldn’t miss, like the latest Ursula Le Guin historical, or the sequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four. As he looked, he tried not to listen to the desktop, on which played the live feed from the studio up on the ninety-fourth floor. Tweed was browbeating a weary Vo
“… fantasy, romance, thrillers-sheer vulgarity, in my opinion, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Don’t you agree, Kurt, that the people who control our publishing houses ought to be ashamed of the way they have dragged American letters into the gutter, have foisted popular hacks like Kelly and Resnick, Kessel and Malzberg off on them while publishing only two Pynchon books in the past decade? Don’t they have the responsibility, nay, the obligation to publish works of fiction that e
Vo
“Obviously, Kurt. I quite agree. But does it bother you that an i
“Doris Lessing.” Vo
“Rog, what are you doing here?”
As Roger spun around, he knocked over a stack of readettes haphazardly piled on top of Tweed ’s brushed titanium IBM File-O-Matic. He managed to snag three in midair, but the rest clattered to the floor. One of those in his grasp was Cat’s Cradle.
“Your clueless boss is live, Bookboy.” Doreen Best gri
Doreen Best flustered Roger in just about every way possible for a woman to fluster a man. It started with her looks. While not exactly beautiful, she was inarguably striking. Doreen was taller than Robert by a head. She had a dancer’s long body; when she was eighteen she’d appeared in the chorus lines of Stephen Sondheim’s The Cherry Orchard and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Treasure Island. Some people might have said that her neck was too long or her nose was too stubby, but Roger was not one of them. He usually tried not to look directly at her, because every glimpse seemed to sear itself into his memory and return to haunt him at odd moments, especially just as he was trying to fall asleep.
Then there was the fact that Doreen had been working for the Understanding Cha
But what flustered Roger most about the glamorous Doreen Best was that she seemed to be taking an interest in him.
Now she crossed the carpet moss to where he stood goggling at her and gently tapped his chin, encouraging him to shut his open mouth.
“Let me try again, Bookboy, this time in English.” She pressed a finger into his chest. “You are here.”
His heart leapt to his throat.
She pointed toward the ceiling. “ Tweed is there.”
He swallowed it again.
She folded her arms over her chest. “Why is that?”
“He’s not clueless,” Roger mumbled, and stabbed at the mute button on Tweed ’s desktop. It made him uncomfortable whenever Doreen mocked his boss, even if he agreed with every brickbat she hurled at Tweed. Tweed may have been an inconsiderate ass-hole, but he was doing the most important work a man could do, bringing civilization to the great unwashed of Florida and Ohio and Montana.
“He just doesn’t always think things through,” said Roger at last.
“Are you stealing his stuff again?” She stopped to pick up one of the readettes and glanced at it. “Oh, you better leave The Cat in the Hat Comes Back if you know what’s good for you.” She tossed it carelessly onto the File-O-Matic and lowered her voice into an unca
“Don’t, Doreen,” he said uncomfortably. “I shouldn’t be listening to this.”
“Then come out with me tonight,” she said. “I have something I want you to see.”
“It’s tomorrow morning, actually.” He checked the clock that hung over the doorway. “Twelve fifty-eight.” He gathered the rest of the fallen readettes. “I need to get back to the studio before they sign off.”