Monday, July 2
11:08 P.M.
Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan Center, Manhattan
165 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
“Better lighting on the runway!” Kerry shouted. “We need to see skin, not washed-out blobs.” He’d already tired of the underwear model and chosen a new body, though he was only halfway through the transformation, and his face had an exotic look somewhere between a Mediterranean surfer and a Polynesian samurai. Decker/Lyle had to admit it looked pretty cool. “Come on, guys,” Kerry continued, “you’ve done fashion shows before, haven’t you? Let’s get it right this time!”
Decker/Lyle rubbed his eyes tiredly, sitting next to Sunny in the semidarkened event center. “The police called me again last night,” he said.
Sunny laughed. “The honorable officers Luckesen and Woolf? Still chasing down their burglary suspect?”
“And their bank robbery suspect,” said Decker/Lyle. “And their manslaughter suspect. He killed a bank teller, you know.”
“Accidentally,” said Sunny, “or so he swore to us when we finally tracked him down. But we did, and he’s in São Tomé now, so relax—you’re the only Lyle left.”
Decker/Lyle shook his head.
“More red,” Kerry shouted, standing in a pool of light and examining his hands. He looked up at a man on a scissor-lift, hanging heavy black lights from an elaborate metal scaffolding. “The skin tones are too pale! We need—” He stopped. “We need one of the Vickies out here, they’re the ones I’m worried about.”
“We can’t change the whole lighting scheme for one girl,” the man on the lift called down. “You’ve got fifty girls in this show.”
“And half of them are Vicky!” Kerry shouted back. He turned and shouted off stage. “Hannah? Where’s Hannah?” He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Dammit, Hannah, you’re the stage manager, why aren’t you on the stage?”
The sound system squealed, and a woman’s voice boomed over the speakers. “I’m in the booth, Mr. White, what do you need?”
“I need Vicky.”
“Which one?”
“Why would I care which one? They’re identical—that’s the point.”
“I think they’re in the dressing room.”
“Well, get them out here! We’re doing a lighting test!”
There was a pause, then the speakers boomed again. “You need more red.”
“I know I need more red!” Kerry stormed off the stage. “Vicky!”
Sunny frowned. “I always hate these shows. We’ve been working on this for months, and we’re still not ready.”
“You don’t have to go onstage,” said Decker/Lyle. “I’m the one giving the science speech.”
Sunny raised an eyebrow. “You mean there’s still science in that speech? I thought Cynthia cut out everything more complex than ‘it makes you pretty.’”
“That’s it in a nutshell,” said Decker/Lyle. “I kept what I could, but you know her.”
“What I wish we’d gotten was ‘Mr. DNA,’” said Sunny. “You know, the little cartoon guy from Jurassic Park? He could explain this whole thing.”
Decker/Lyle laughed drily. “And then a swarm of Vickies would charge off the stage and eat the audience.”
Sunny’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen. “It’s Cynthia. Hang on.” He tapped the screen and held it up to his ear. “What do you need?” Pause. “You’re kidding. Hang on, we’ll find a TV.” He stood up quickly, dropping his phone back into his pocket. “Come on, we’re on TV.”
Decker/Lyle stood and followed him. “We’ve been on TV all summer.”
“Not the ads,” said Sunny, weaving a path through chairs and electrical equipment toward a side door. “This building—this event. There are protesters outside.”
Decker/Lyle followed him through the twisting side halls to the sound booth, where Hannah, the event center’s stage manager, was reviewing a list of sound cues with a room full of technicians. Sunny walked to an angled screen and tapped on it. “Is this connected to the satellite?”
Hannah swung around on her chair and clicked a switch. “Should be, what do you want to see?” The screen flickered to life.
“Local news,” said Sunny.
Hannah clicked a few buttons, flipping rapidly through channel after channel, stopping on a scene of the Manhattan Center. The street outside was filled with protesters, many of them carrying signs. A young, black reporter named Amber Sykes was speaking in the foreground.
“… suspected to be members of the same religious watch group that picketed the Yemaya Foundation headquarters earlier this evening.”
Amber walked to the side, and as the camera followed her a man came into frame: older, maybe early fifties, with a salt-and-pepper blend of close-cropped hair. “This is the Reverend Joseph Wade,” said Amber, “leader of the protesters. Reverend Wade, can you tell us what, exactly, you’re protesting here?”
“I represent a multidenominational Christian society called the Holy Vessel,” said the man, “formed last month when the so-called Guru Kuvam, really just a failed surgeon named Brett Halley, began spreading his dangerous philosophy of ‘secular salvation.’”
“And you’re here at the Manhattan Center…?” Amber prompted.
“What he’s really promoting,” said the reverend, ignoring her and speaking straight to the camera, “is the use of unregulated drugs, and an attitude of outright blasphemy against the sacred nature of our God-given bodies.”
“That’s…” Amber paused, seeming unsure of what to say.
“They’ve linked us,” whispered Sunny. “They’re protesting Kuvam at our event; they know it’s the same lotion.”
“They don’t even know that it’s lotion,” said Decker/Lyle.
“But they know it’s the same substance,” said Sunny. “Kuvam’s been too aggressive with his New Age angle; people have been connecting our hospital stunt to his for weeks, but now this group is connecting us to him, personally, and that’s bad. The red states are gonna hate us.” He leaned forward and pressed the button for the PA. “Kerry, come to the sound booth right now. Drop whatever you’re doing.”
The reporter was still trying to get a straight answer from the reverend. “So you are, in fact, the same group that protested the Yemaya Foundation earlier today?”
“We are,” said the man. “His actions, and the actions of NewYew, cannot be tolerated.”
“So you believe there’s some kind of connection between Guru Kuvam and tomorrow’s announcement from NewYew?”
Lyle is the one who went to Kuvam, thought Decker/Lyle. NewYew suspected it, but Ibis figured it out for certain. What was he trying to accomplish?
The reverend straightened up, looking directly into the camera. “The evidence is all too clear: the Pickett family in Jersey, and the Shaw twins from here in New York, are all part of the same thing. They’re cloning human beings, and it’s an affront to God.”
Sunny’s cell phone buzzed, and he fished it back out of his pocket. He sneered and showed the screen to Decker/Lyle. “Cynthia again.” He held it up to his ear. “Yeah.” Pause. “Yes, of course I heard it. What do you expect me to do? It’s not like I can walk out and tell her to stop.” Pause. “No, he’s still backstage somewhere—oh, here he is.”
Kerry rushed into the room. “What’s so urgent? We have a huge problem with the Vicky costumes, and the whole sequence at 15:30 is going to be ruined if we can’t fix it.”
Hannah and her technicians shuffled through their papers, looking for 15:30.
Decker/Lyle pointed at the screen, drawing Kerry’s attention. “This is worse.”
Kerry looked at the screen; the reverend was still talking. “I’m not saying they killed the little girl,” said the man, “heaven knows I hope they didn’t. But the one they have now isn’t the one they started with: she’s an exact copy of her sister, grown in a lab somewhere. It’s the same with the cancer lady: she’s an exact copy of her daughter. These aren’t people, they’re clones—they’re artificial constructs, designed to look like us and act like us and, ultimately, to replace us. It’s not a salvation, it’s an abomination.”
Kerry watched the screen intently. “Protesters?”
“Obviously,” said Decker/Lyle.
“At least they’ve got it wrong,” said Kerry. “If they’re protesting something we’re not actually doing, what do we care? It’s free advertising, and this time tomorrow they’ll look like idiots.”
“Yes,” said Sunny in the background, still talking on the phone, “Kerry just said the same thing.”
“She’s asking all the wrong questions,” Kerry muttered. “Come on, lady, talk more about the girls! We saved that baby’s life!”
The reverend was still talking. “Of course the clones don’t have souls. This guy Kuvam—I refuse to call him a ‘guru’—is preaching a specifically antireligious message. This is the Tower of Babel all over again: they’ve decided they can get to heaven without God, without doing anything He says, so they’re building an empire of something—of drugs, or some other substance—so they can circumvent the commandments and ignore all the rules and build salvation all on their own.”
“I know he sounds crazy,” said Sunny, hissing into his phone. “It’s still going to hurt us.”
Decker/Lyle looked at Kerry. “I thought you said this kind of coverage was good?”
“The cloning stuff was good,” said Kerry. “This religious stuff is poison: the only good press we had that Kuvam didn’t was the conservative angle. Churches still liked us, because we were saving babies without any crazy talk about New Age cults. Now this guy’s telling the world we’re part of Kuvam’s cult, and that’s bad.”
“Press is press,” Sunny insisted to his phone. “And any press is good press, right? We don’t care what Ma and Pa Kettle think, tonight or tomorrow. All we have to do is play this down and sell to the trendsetters, and a few weeks from now the yokels will fall right into line.”
“This sucks, but it’ll pass,” said Kerry. “We’ve got to get back to the show.”
“Wait,” said Hannah. She looked at her assistants, then back at the three executives. “Okay, I’m just going to come right out and ask it: we all thought the cloning stuff in your show notes was a joke, but now this guy on the news is saying the same thing.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is it real?”
Sunny looked back at her. “Does it matter?”
She shrugged. “For what you guys are paying, I’d manage a show for Captain Baby Killer and His Puppy-Stomping Pirates.”
Sunny smiled. “It’s all real. And if it stays real, and stays good, we’ll double your fee.”
Hannah saluted. “Arrr, Cap’n.”