ALL RIGHTS, by Pamela Sargent

Darcy Langton dreaded her daily journey to the post office. She knew only too well what her mailbox would yield—bills she could not pay, along with more rejections.

Lately, no one wanted to buy her stories; she wondered why editors kept encouraging her to submit them. Maybe they just wanted to keep her on tap in case the hot new writers they were buying now either priced themselves out of the market or self-destructed. Maybe they just wanted to pretend they were good guys after all, sensitive caretakers of writing talent instead of stripminers and exploiters of it. Maybe it was part of a vast conspiracy, in which editors regularly got together and cackled about all the suckers to whom they were giving false encouragement. Maybe—

Going to the post office often provoked such musings. Darcy’s agent would have told her that it was simply a matter of too many stories chasing too few markets. Agents were supposed to think that way, and Leonard McDermott Lowell was more hardheaded than most, which was one of the reasons she had asked him to represent her work ten years ago. Still, he hadn’t been doing much for her lately. Maybe he was too busy hyping his hot new clients to publishers to tend to her paltry business affairs.

Her post office box was empty, except for a suspiciously thin envelope from Leonard McDermott Lowell & Associates. Darcy clenched her teeth, suspecting it was a letter telling her that Canyon Books had rejected her proposal for a new novel. She locked her box, crossed the room, and leaned against a table as she prepared to read of her doom. Disaster it would be, after six months of waiting to hear from an editor who had encouraged the submission only to lapse into a lengthy silence. Darcy would have to go back to her old job at Burns and Royal to make ends meet, assuming the bookstore still had an opening. Leonard might at least have called to tell her about the rejection, and to commiserate with her, instead of heartlessly notifying her in a letter.

She tore open the envelope. A statement from her agent fell out, along with a check. She stared at the check for a long time, not daring to believe it. Twenty thousand dollars for a new edition of her first novel, The Silent Shriek, and this was apparently only the first part of the advance. Leonard’s statement revealed that more would be forthcoming on publication, six months from now.

Ecstasy and an overpowering feeling of relief flooded through her. She had been reprieved from the torment of having to go back to working in a bookstore where her own books were conspicuously absent from the shelves and always had to be special-ordered by the one or two customers who wanted to buy them during their brief duration in print.

Then she looked more closely at her agent’s statement.

“Alt. Rights3,” the statement said cryptically; the same notation was on the check. What the hell were alt. rights? She knew about foreign rights, book club rights, reprint rights of various kinds, but she had never heard of anything called alt. rights. And what was that 3 doing in there, anyway?

Not that she really cared where this unforeseen but welcome wad had come from—Leonard was supposed to worry about that—but it was probably in her interest to find out.

* * * *

Darcy placed a call to Leonard McDermott Lowell and Associates as soon as she got home; his assistant said that he would call her later. Darcy suspected that her agent was occupied with negotiations involving one of his hot young writers, probably Desirée Thorne, that Danielle Steel clone who had just had her latest piece of banal and basic prose picked up by the Literary Guild as a Main Selection. Leonard would be too busy with Desirée’s business to call her any time soon.

To her surprise, Leonard got back to her in less than five minutes.

“How about that check?” he said jovially. “What about them apples? Hope that cheers you up. Anyway, now I can tell you that Canyon turned down your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal two days ago.”

“Uh, Leonard,” Darcy murmured, “where did that check come from? Why didn’t you tell me it was on the way sooner? You could have saved me a lot of worry.”

“I would have told you,” he said, “if I was sure I’d get the money. Frankly, I wasn’t. It’s for alternate rights, you see, and that’s a whole new ball game.”

Alternate rights? What the hell were alternate rights? But then that was one reason she had an agent, so she wouldn’t have to know things like that. A clause covering alternate rights and granting them to her agent was probably in her original book contract somewhere among the twenty-five pages of tiny type. She had stopped reading her contracts, whose prose was either indecipherable or ominous, a while ago. All the clauses and riders seemed to boil down to one assertion: Anything bad that happens to you as a result of signing this contract is your fault and not our responsibility, even if we screw up.

“What are alternate rights?” Darcy asked.

“I’ll give you the short version of the story,” Leonard replied, “but keep it under your hat, at least until it breaks in Publishers Weekly and the Times, which should be any day now.” He lowered his voice. “See, a couple of months ago, this query came in on my E-mail. Never heard of this editor, or the publisher, but she wanted to publish The Silent Shriek. Well, I checked around with some other agents, and they were getting the same kinds of queries. Couldn’t track down any of these publishers and editors, even though they all had New York addresses. So, on a lark, I finally E-mailed back to this mysterious editor and told her to make me an offer. She did, along with a contract that I printed out. One page, that’s how long the contract was.”

“One page?” Darcy said. “Why didn’t she mail it to you?”

“I asked her that myself. She insisted it was valid, that if I E-mailed back my approval, money would be on the way. I figured it had to be a joke, somebody fooling around on line. I mean, who’s going to offer forty-four thousand, including my percentage, to do a hardcover of a novel that took a bath as a paperback original? Not that your book wasn’t wonderful, but this deal just didn’t make sense. And who’s going to send the best goddamned contract I’ve ever seen? At least it’s good in terms of the writer’s interests. As far as the publisher goes, they’re practically giving everything away.”

“I still don’t see—” Darcy began.

“Well, I let her know we had a deal,” her agent interrupted. “My reply was pretty sarcastic, just so this joker would know I wasn’t fooled. And then, last week, a week after I said okay, the money came—twenty-two thousand for the first part of the advance.”

“A week?” Darcy could hardly believe her ears. “A publisher sent you a check in a week?” That seemed as unbelievable as the size of the advance.

“They didn’t actually send it,” Leonard said. “The money showed up in my account electronically. My bank checked and double-checked, and there’s no question the money was drawn on an account in another New York bank and deposited in mine, so my bank will honor it. They’re just not sure exactly how it got into the other bank. Anyway, by then a few other agents had some idea of what this was all about. Alternate rights—that’s what we’d sold. These editors in some parallel universe had somehow managed to contact this one to buy books published here. Maybe I should say parallel universes, because it looks like there’s more than one. I compared the contract I got with one Scott Fontaney received for a client of his, and then we both talked to Mary Thalberg. It was a popular-science writer client of hers who figured out that we had to be dealing with parallel worlds.”

Leonard sighed and fell silent. Darcy had to believe him; Leonard’s skepticism about most matters was deeply rooted in cynicism and pessimism, essential qualities for any literary agent. He was not a man to fall prey to wild delusions.

“Parallel worlds?” she said at last. “But how?”

“It’s the goddamn electronic highway, or whatever you want to call it. That’s this science writer’s explanation, and a few physicists are backing him up. The computer networks and everything connected to them are so complicated now that messages between different universes are leaking into the system. At least some messages are. Right now, it just seems to be E-mail from editors wanting to buy books, their contracts, and their dough coming through electronic transfers into banks here. Don’t ask me why we haven’t heard from anybody else.”

“My God,” Darcy murmured.

“And that number 3 on your check and statement is a way of keeping things straight. Half the agents in New York got together for a pow-wow a couple of days ago, and decided that none of us was going to question a good thing. Mary Thalberg and her client worked out a rough system for us to use, based on differences in the language of each contract, names of publishing firms, and what little we’ve learned from editors about their particular parallel worlds so we can keep it straight which contract came from which universe. I mean, we wouldn’t want to sell alternate rights in Continuum 5 to a book that’s already contracted for there.”

“No, you certainly wouldn’t,” Darcy said.

Leonard went on to discuss what an inside source had told him about a meeting several New York banking executives had held with some prominent physicists hastily called in as consultants. The bankers had talked about prohibiting deposits from alternate worlds, but with the economy the way it was, they had a need for new cash flow. A physicist named Sterling Blake had apparently given the bankers the rationalization they needed by assuring them, with appropriate equations, that all alternate universes were only aspects of one reality. When the bankers looked at it that way, a deposit from a publisher in Parallel World 2 was just as sound as one from a European publisher. Actually, deposits from alternate worlds were even easier to handle, since they involved no currency conversions; everyone, so far, was dealing in dollars. The physicist’s explanation might seem drawn as much from theology as from physics, but the banks would take the leap of faith. They could not ignore the situation, and might as well use it; profit was profit, whatever the source. If enough business started coming in from other universes—really important business, not just book deals—a lot of deficits could be redeemed.

“Who knows?” Leonard finished. “Get enough alternate moola rolling in, and the government might collect enough in taxes to make a dent in the national debt. Doesn’t look like the IRS is going to make a stink—in fact, I heard that this physicist Blake was called down to Washington last night, right after the meeting with the bankers.”

“Wait a minute.” Darcy frowned. “I can sort of understand how money can go back and forth, but how do these alternate worlds or whatever get copies of our books?”

“You’ve got a modem, right? You’re involved in that online workshop and bitch session or whatever the hell it is, aren’t you? Mary’s client has a theory that the texts must be leaking into these parallel worlds that way.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Darcy said.

“As for your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, we could try Diadem Books. They’re starting a new horror line.”

“I’ll think about it,” Darcy said. “Alternate rights. Well, if I’m getting forty grand, Desirée Thorne ought to be worth a fortune in alternate rights.”

“Probably,” Leonard said cheerfully. “I expect to get an offer for her novels before long.”

As it happened, Darcy’s agent was wrong about that.

* * * *

“You’ll never believe it,” Jane Rubell said over the phone. “Sixty thousand smackers for Plumbing the Depths. And my agent thinks he’ll get an offer for Flushing Out Death, too.”

“I can believe it,” Darcy said. Jane Rubell, another freelance writer who lived in an adjoining town, was her closest friend. They often drove into New York together to see editors, pooling their meager resources by sharing a room in a rundown hotel and splitting other expenses. At other times, they got together with their colleague Arlen Williams to complain and exchange horror stories about publishers. Jane had written a series of paperback mysteries featuring a plumber who was also a sleuth, but her books had not done well, either because most plumbers didn’t read or because most mystery readers weren’t enthralled by plumbing. Darcy was a trifle annoyed that Jane had landed a larger advance for hardcover alternate rights to her first mystery than Darcy had for The Silent Shriek, but was still happy for her friend.

“I was talking to Arlen the other day,” Jane went on, “and he told me he got fifty grand for a hardcover of Warlords of Mimistapol.”

Fifty thousand for a book Arlen called one of his worst? Darcy could believe even that. She had been reading Publishers Weekly before Jane called, where a new article about alternate rights had appeared. Generous sums for insignificant books by unknown writers—that seemed to be the pattern. According to this article, Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, and John Grisham had not yet received offers for alternate rights to their novels.

Perhaps that was why the trade publications weren’t devoting as much space to alternate rights deals as Darcy had expected. Newspapers and television, after saturating front pages and newscasts with stories about this new development, now mentioned the subject only in passing. As Carl Sagan had so tellingly put it on Nightline, these other continua were really only one world with variants, one world in different states. In which case, Ted Koppel had added, it made sense to accept that fact and then go about one’s business. Stranger things had happened; people had seen the Berlin Wall come down, the Soviet Union collapse, the resorts of Yugoslavia become killing grounds, and the leaders of Israel and the PLO shake hands. “Absorb the impossible and move on,” Koppel’s colleague Jeff Greenfield had blurted out then. “It’s what we always do.”

In addition to that, most Americans didn’t much care if a writer was wildly successful in another country in this world, let alone in another universe, if he didn’t make a big noise in the U.S. of A. A story about editors buying rights to obscure books wasn’t the kind of news to dominate the media for long, even if the editors buying the books were in other continua. The only publishing stories that really counted to the public at large were tales of mega-advances, surprise bestsellers by former nonentities, book deals involving celebrities, accounts of lurid crimes scheduled to appear in book form before becoming television docudramas, and news of movie rights being sold to Steven Spielberg.

In spite of that, Darcy was convinced that someone like Dean Koontz would eventually nail down an alternate rights deal that would dwarf any past deal in any universe. Then CNN might again devote more than fifteen seconds to the story. In the meantime, she and Jane might as well enjoy their good fortune.

“What’s the number for your rights?” Darcy asked.

“My agent’s statement says ‘Alt. Rights6’,” Jane replied. “Obviously a publisher in a different continuum is buying rights to my stuff.”

“That seems to be the pattern,” Darcy said. “PW claims that about fifty different universes are involved so far, and there’s no overlap—they all seem to be buying different authors. Must be a pain for all our agents to keep things straight.”

“Where lots of money is concerned, they always manage. Hey, I think we should celebrate. How about—”

The phone was clicking in Darcy’s ear. “Hold on a second. Another call’s coming in.” She put Jane on hold and heard her agent shout a greeting.

“Yo, Leonard,” Darcy replied.

“Ready for some more good news?” he said jovially.

“Sure.”

“I heard from Elysium House today.” It took a few moments for Darcy to recognize the name of her publisher in Parallel World 3. “I hope you’re sitting down,” Leonard went on. “They sold paperback rights to The Silent Shriek. Four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Four hundred thousand dollars?” Darcy squeaked.

“And that isn’t all. They want rights to In Terms of Terror. They’re offering us two hundred thousand for that.”

Darcy sucked in her breath.

“But I think I can get them up to three hundred.”

* * * *

“I promised myself I’d take a long cruise,” Jane said, “if I ever made major money. Now I’m worth over a million, and I’m afraid to go out the door. I mean, a meteor might fall on me or something. That’s about on the same order of probability as my becoming a millionaire.”

“I know what you mean,” Arlen Williams muttered. “I’ve got all this money coming in, and all I’ve done so far is tell my son he can go to Harvard and take his junior year abroad besides. Thing is, I never expected to have much dough, so I don’t know what to do with it all.”

“You’re afraid the money’ll dry up,” Darcy said. “We’re all just too damned used to being poor.”

“That’s part of it,” Arlen said as he dipped a small silver spoon into the caviar. “Kind of ridiculous, actually. All I need is some good financial advice, to set things up so I can be secure for a while. Trouble is, I don’t know anything about handling finances. I don’t even know who to get advice from.”

Darcy had the same problem. Her past fiscal affairs had been operated on one basic principle: Make sure you can always borrow enough to pay off what you’ve already borrowed, and sooner or later things will either sort themselves out or you’ll be dead before you have to settle. She had no debts now, having paid all her creditors, and no idea of how to handle her assets.

Jane sipped some more champagne, then leaned forward. “I heard,” she said softly, “that Desirée Thorne still hasn’t sold any alternate rights. Has your agent said anything to you about that?”

“Leonard doesn’t discuss clients with other clients,” Darcy said, but she wondered about that herself. Leonard had to be disappointed. Still, even Stephen King had not managed to sell any alternate rights. A theory about the reason for that was forming in her mind. Maybe Stephen King wasn’t getting any offers for alternate rights because, in every possible universe, there already was a Stephen King, a literary juggernaut so overwhelming that no continuum could possibly be without one of him. There were probably also countless versions of Michael Crichton, Jean M. Auel, Anne Rice, Tom Clancy, and other mainstays of the bestseller list in other parallel worlds; their editors there would have no need to buy the work of their counterparts in this universe. It was only insignificant writers such as Darcy that they would buy, writers so unimportant that they probably existed in only one continuum.

These speculations were making her feel depressed, and there was no excuse for depression now. She was falling into old habits acquired when she was poor and struggling. Leonard would tell her, as he had after selling Melanesian rights to her novel Terror Takes No Time Out, that even such a limited edition might increase her readership. He would tell her to be glad that she was such a big deal in at least one continuum.

And she was a big deal in Parallel Universe 3. Elysium Books was now selling foreign rights in that world to The Silent Shriek and In Terms of Terror, and their version of the Book-of-the-Month Club had bought both novels. Surely that proved that she had underestimated herself and her work, and had too readily assumed that her writing was unexceptional because publishers treated it so indifferently. She had accepted and even internalized their valuation of her work. The treatment her books were getting in another continuum only proved that her publishers in this world were wrong.

The same was true of her friends and their writing. It wasn’t Jane’s fault that the ingenuity and wit of her mysteries were wasted on an audience unable to appreciate the details of the plumbing trade. Arlen might have committed Warlords of Mimistapol to paper, but he had also won a Golden Tome Award for his ornate and sensual Prince of Ithlakkan trilogy.

After all, hadn’t she always told herself that it was the writing itself that counted, and not what others thought of it? Her good fortune proved that she had been right to persevere.

* * * *

It was almost midnight when Darcy pulled up in front of her house; it had taken her a while to sober up after overindulging at Jane’s. She locked her Mercedes, wondering if she should arrange for a chauffeur and limo the next time she visited her friend; that way, it wouldn’t matter how much she drank.

Of course, it wouldn’t be wise to let such vices get the better of her, now that she had so much to live for. Perhaps she should contact the Lucky Scribes, an informal network several newly affluent writers had formed to exchange ideas on how to handle the sudden wealth parallel worlds were showering upon them. The Lucky Scribes, from what she had heard, spent most of their time complaining about writer’s block, which was apparently proliferating among them now that they could afford more leisure and self-indulgence, but some of them might be able to advise her on other matters.

Darcy climbed the stairs to her second-floor apartment and unlocked her door. Her lease would be up soon. She would have to decide whether to move into a luxury apartment downtown or buy a house in the country. Even if she wanted to stay here, her landlord was likely to raise her rent as much as possible to take advantage of her recent prosperity, while the jokes her neighbors made about hitting her up for loans were beginning to sound both more insistent and more resentful.

The light on her phone’s answering machine was blinking. Darcy hit the message button and sat down to listen.

“Darcy, this is Leonard,” the machine said. “It’s about four o’clock. I just got off the phone with Gertrude Banner, your Elysium House editor. Yeah, you heard that right. She called me up, I actually heard her voice. Looks like communications from other universes are leaking into the phone lines now. Anyway, she wants to talk to you. Call me tomorrow, soon as you can.”

* * * *

“She wants to talk to me?” Darcy said to her agent the next morning. “About what?”

“About your next book. I managed to drop a few hints about your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal, and she thinks it sounds great, but she wants to talk to you. She’s really insistent—called back just a few minutes ago to ask if I’d heard from you yet.”

Leonard had talked to her Elysium House editor twice! Amazing, Darcy thought. If telephone conversations were possible now, what next? Faxes from other worlds? Maybe a book tour, if someone could figure out how to move bodies, and not just information, from one continuum to another. Anything might be possible. She might actually decide to settle down in Parallel World 3 permanently; writers, after all, had often been expatriates.

“I guess I should talk to her,” Darcy murmured. “How did she sound?”

“Like she grew up in Brooklyn and didn’t quite manage to get rid of her accent. Anyway, I was sure you’d appreciate a chance to schmooze, so I told her you’d be looking forward to her call. She said she’d call sometime this afternoon, probably around three.”

“My God.”

“And she was making a few noises about doing a short story collection of yours.”

A short story collection! Would wonders never cease? At this rate, Gertrude Banner would soon be expressing interest in her memoirs. Darcy had begun an autobiography some months back, abandoning the project after realizing that people uninterested in her fiction probably wouldn’t be any more interested in her life.

“Anyway, let me know how it goes,” Leonard continued. “Frankly, I think the sky’s the limit at this point.”

* * * *

Toward three, Darcy was growing increasingly more agitated. She had spoken to plenty of editors in her life, but they had usually been people who regarded her novels largely as a relatively inexpensive way to fill slots on their lists. The only times they called were to ask her when her next novel would be finished. “You have to keep up your shelf presence! Don’t leave me with empty rack space to fill!” She had always sensed such unspoken thoughts behind any offhand praise the editors might offer for her books. She had never spoken to anyone who wanted to invest big bucks in her work, or who treated her as much more than a temp who would eventually be replaced, or as a migrant worker who could be run off the farm.

Maybe, she thought as she fluttered around the phone, Gertrude Banner wouldn’t call today. Darcy had known more than a few editors who seemed to assume that two months was an appropriate waiting period before returning one of her calls.

But the phone rang promptly at three. Editors in alternate worlds apparently called when they said they would.

“Hello?” Darcy said, realizing too late that her nervousness made her sound like Rocky the Squirrel.

“Darcy Langton?” a woman’s voice with a touch of Brooklyn said. That had to be Gertrude Banner, and she did sound a little like the female New Yorker Mike Myers played in drag in his “Coffee Talk” routine on Saturday Night Live.

“Speaking,” Darcy said, dropping her voice into the Mary Tyler Moore range.

“I’m delighted to hear you at last,” the woman said enthusiastically. “This is Gertrude Banner, your editor at Elysium House. I just finished reading your wonderful Terror Takes No Time Out—I simply can’t remember when I’ve had such a good time. What a terrific read—I couldn’t put it down.” Darcy did not have the heart to interrupt as Gertrude went on about how suspenseful and brilliantly written her novel was. “I want to buy it, of course,” Gertrude finished.

“Uh, you’ll have to talk to my agent about the contract.”

“Well, of course. But the main reason I called is that I hear you’re working on a new book. I think Leonard mentioned the title—”

“Terror Is My Middle Name,” Darcy said.

“That’s the one.”

“Leonard can E-mail the proposal to you,” Darcy said. “That’s probably the easiest…”

“Oh, Darcy. I don’t need to see a proposal from you. Just tell me you’ll do Terror Is My Middle Name for me, and I’ll start discussing the advance and contract with your agent right away.”

Darcy could not bring herself to speak. “Um,” she said at last.

“I’m so pleased. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to working with you on that. This is really going to be exciting. I know you’ll need more for this one than we gave you for In Terms of Terror, but I just know Leonard and I can come to an agreement that will make us all happy.”

“Um,” Darcy said again.

“Wonderful! I’m just so excited!” Gertrude went on to mention another pending book club deal and the prospect of interviews now that The Silent Shriek looked like a sure bet for the bestseller lists. It was a pity Darcy couldn’t be there in person, but at least now she could be interviewed over the phone. Too bad also that there was no way to send author’s copies from one continuum to another. But Gertrude could download some material from a CD-ROM that would give Darcy an idea of how the book would look, and she could rest assured that one of the best designers in the business had done her dust jacket.

“And I insisted on full cloth for the book,” Gertrude went on, “a nice red shade, with Gothic gold lettering on the spine—and acid-free paper, of course. But we’ll also be doing a special collectors’ edition of one thousand copies in leather.”

“Um,” Darcy said. There wasn’t much more to say. All in all, even though the conversation was basically one-sided, it was by far the best discussion with an editor she had ever experienced.

* * * *

“I ran into Edwina Maris this morning,” Jane murmured to Darcy as she sat down. They were sitting in Phil Donahue’s green room, waiting to go on his show. Three other writers were already out in the studio fielding questions from the audience about their alternate rights deals, but Darcy had been told she and Jane would be going on after the break.

“What about Edwina?” Darcy asked.

“Oh, she was being really bitchy. I think her new book just got remaindered.”

“But it only came out five months ago.”

“Well, you know how it is,” Jane said. “Anyway, that’s not the point. She just saw a really shitty review of The Wrench Tightens in Kirkus, and made a point of telling me all about it. She looked absolutely delighted.”

“What do you care?” Darcy said. “You only got about a million dollars so far for The Wrench Tightens in Alternate World 6.”

“Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t care, but I do. I’m stuck in this universe, Darcy, and here I’m just a midlist paperback mystery writer. Maybe I’m even flattering myself by saying I’m midlist. I mean, I have to live here. I’m only on the bestseller lists in a world I can’t even get to.”

Jane sounded totally bummed. Darcy hated to admit it even to herself, but she was feeling the same way lately. She had thought it might be her usual depression after finishing a book, but there was more to her low spirits than that. She had completed Terror Is My Middle Name a week ago, in record time, buoyed by Gertrude Banner’s encouragement and praise and Elysium House’s million-dollar advance. Terror Is My Middle Name was her best novel so far, but Leonard had not yet found a publisher for the book here. The Silent Shriek was still number 1 on Alternate World 3’s bestseller lists, but it remained out of print in this world. Darcy might have finally made it to Phil Donahue’s show, but only as part of a program about this alternate rights business. To most people, she and her colleagues were probably even less interesting than a random selection of lottery winners; a glance at the green room’s monitor told her that Phil’s audience was already getting bored. David Letterman had booked a few alternate rights millionaires as guests on his show, but only to poke fun at them. Oprah Winfrey hadn’t invited any such writers at all.

And now she, her friend Jane, and others like them had to suffer the scorn of writers such as Edwina Maris. Edwina was one of those critically acclaimed but commercially unsuccessful writers, with a small but vociferous cult following that was waiting for her to “break out.” Along with many such writers, Edwina shared a biting wit, a gift for sarcasm and irony, and scorn for writers who appealed to the lowest common denominator. Once Edwina had directed her barbs at the denizens of bestseller lists. Now, she and her underappreciated colleagues had new targets—the merely adequate wordsmiths who appealed to mass audiences only in other universes.

Darcy knew how Edwina felt. From Edwina’s point of view, her own failure to sell alternate rights was simply further proof of her work’s worth, since those writers signing such contracts were, to Edwina, only hacks unable to achieve success in their own world. Darcy sighed. In Edwina’s shoes, she might have felt exactly the same way.

“Better crank up my hair.” Jane poked at her permed, highlighted, and stylishly cut blonde locks with a gold pick. “We have to go on after this ad.”

* * * *

After their appearance, Jane went off to comfort herself with some shopping. Darcy took her limo back to the Royalton, where she had promised to meet her agent for drinks. She and Jane hadn’t exactly lighted a fire under Phil Donahue’s audience. Phil himself had grown increasingly manic in his efforts to work the crowd, and had spent the last five minutes of the program delivering a monologue about his own failure to sell alternate rights to his autobiography.

Leonard was pacing in the hotel lobby. He came toward her as soon as she was through the door. “Come on,” he said, “we’re going to Mary Thalberg’s.”

“What for?”

“Don’t ask.” He herded her back outside. “This is disaster. This is absolute, total disaster.”

“Let me guess,” Darcy said. “Money from Elysium House isn’t legal tender any more. The IRS just reversed its ruling, right? That’s why you’re here. You came to tell me I’m broke. I always knew it was too good to be true.”

“No, no. You’re still loaded. But there’s some heavy duty shit coming down the pike anyway.” He pushed her toward the limo.

* * * *

Leonard was silent all the way to Mary Thalberg’s offices on the East Side. Mary’s partner and assistants had gone home by the time they arrived, but the agent was still in her office. A computer was in one corner; a widescreen TV, complete with speakers and VCR, sat against one wall. Mary’s high heels sank into her pile carpeting as she paced soundlessly and took deep drags on a cigarette.

“I thought you quit smoking,” Leonard said to the other agent.

“I relapsed. I should die of lung cancer anyway now that so many of my clients got screwed.” Mary waved Leonard and Darcy to her sofa. “Leonard’s already seen this, but he wanted you to see it, too.”

“See what?” Darcy asked.

“Didn’t he tell you? My clients already know, the ones that have alternate rights deals. I informed them all immediately. Actually, they’ve been taking the news very well. Anyway, Leonard asked—”

“Just show her,” Leonard said glumly.

“I was on the phone,” Mary said, “talking to an editor in Parallel World 7. Had the TV on to tape Days of Our Lives, so I have something to watch when people put me on hold, you know? While I was talking, I lost the picture, and—well, this is what my VCR taped instead.”

Mary pointed a remote at the TV. An image came on, slightly blurred and without sound, but Darcy could make out the tiny form of a young man sitting behind a large mahogany desk, apparently talking to someone on the phone. The room dwarfed him; the place was the size of Madison Square Garden, and the walls were lined with paintings that looked to her untrained eye like Botticellis. An older man was walking toward the desk, bearing a china teapot and cups on a silver tray. Darcy couldn’t be certain, but thought she glimpsed a swimming pool through the glass doors behind the young man.

“That’s the guy I was talking to today,” Mary said. “Lorne Efferman, an editor at Cotter and Crowe—that’s a publisher in Parallel World 7.” She paused. “We were in the middle of our conversation when I saw that on the TV. I immediately guessed it was Lorne, and he reluctantly confirmed it. Seems some signals from other universes are leaking in over the cable.” The image flickered out; Mary turned off the TV. “Let me be more specific. Lorne Efferman is an assistant editor at Cotter and Crowe.”

“An assistant editor,” Leonard mumbled. “Not an executive editor, or a senior editor, or even just a plain editor. An assistant editor. Makes you wonder what the goddamn publisher’s office looks like—probably Versailles.”

“My God,” Darcy whispered.

“I was seeing if Lorne might be interested in some novels by one of my clients,” Mary said. “I’d already sold alternate rights to them in Parallel World 8, but I thought I’d feel Lorne out. We’ve been waiting for alternate publishers to come to us, but I figured it was time to be a little more aggressive.”

“And?” Darcy asked.

“Lorne explained—very nicely, not that it helped—that I didn’t have those rights to offer him. ‘Look at your contracts,’ he told me, so I did. I never signed those contracts, I’m positive of that, but my name was on them, and every contract had the same damned clause. I know it wasn’t in any of my alternate rights contracts before—I’d never have approved any of them if it were. But it’s there now, and I have no way to prove that I didn’t let that clause go through!”

Mary put out her cigarette and lit another. “What clause?” Darcy asked.

“The clause that says we haven’t been selling to just one universe when we sign those contracts. We’ve been giving one publisher in that particular universe rights to sell any book we give them to every other universe. And we don’t get one extra fucking cent!”

“Let me put it this way,” Leonard muttered from the other end of the sofa. “Seems the contracts go into uncertainty and then don’t match the worlds they were written in. They drift. You end up with a different contract than the one you started with.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “A lot of you writers would say that’s nothing new.”

“But I get royalties,” Darcy said, “don’t I?”

“That’s just on sales in Parallel World 3,” Leonard replied. “I checked your contracts. You get your share of book club money and foreign sales and everything else, but only from sales in that universe. They get to keep everything else. That’s probably how they can pay such nice advances to everybody.” He glared at the blank TV screen. “That’s how some dipshit little assistant editor can have an office big enough to hold the goddamn Frankfurt Book Fair in.”

“But—” Darcy began.

“I put in a call to that physicist Sterling Blake,” Mary said. “Our agents’ association put him on retainer a while back. He said something about uncertainty creeping into our continuum, about the wave functions of perception shifting or whatever. I think it means we’re in a different universe from the one we were in a few days ago.” She let out her breath. “Blake has some new equations to play with now, so of course he’s just thrilled to death.”

They were all silent for a long time. At last Darcy said, “Does it really matter? Elysium House paid me some serious money. They did beautiful editions, even if I can’t get any author’s copies. I could retire and never have to worry about money again, and you and the other agents are raking in plenty from the deals anyway.”

“That isn’t the point,” Leonard said.

Darcy had known that even as she spoke. The agents would never forgive themselves for letting all those alternate rights slip away, however inadvertently. And she, along with her now-wealthy colleagues, would have to live with the knowledge that, even in other continua, publishers could still rip you off and not pay you what your work was really worth.

Not that this newly acquired wisdom should have come as much of a surprise to any writer.

* * * *

Mary and Leonard were feeling a little better by the time Darcy left them to go back to her hotel. The two agents had to be philosophical about matters. Anyway, according to the grapevine, it looked as though this alternate rights business was heading toward a downturn of sorts. Mary hadn’t heard of any new alternate rights contracts being signed for nearly a month, and a couple of agents she knew had reported that their calls were no longer going through to a couple of continua. Time to collect as much as they could for their clients just in case things got even more uncertain and they ended up cut off from other parallel worlds altogether. They probably wouldn’t be able to sue for any uncollected payments later on unless attorneys in this universe got even more ingenious than they already were.

Darcy was set. She had to look at it that way. If Donahue’s audience had been more interested in whether she knew Stephen King or in how she was going to spend her money than in her books, she could live with that. Edwina Maris might get better reviews, but raves on the front page of the New York Times Book Review hadn’t noticeably fattened Edwina’s bank account. If Elysium House was ripping Darcy off, then at least there would still be all those millions of readers in Gertrude Banner’s world reading In Terms of Terror and Terror Takes No Time Out.

She had to think of it that way. It was the work that mattered. Her true reward was the writing itself, wasn’t it? No one could deprive her of the vivid moments she spent in worlds of her own creation, or of the sense of accomplishment she felt after finishing a final draft.

But then the image of a publisher somewhere, sitting in the midst of splendor greater than that of the Hearst estate at San Simeon, came to her. The bastards of this world, and every other world, always won in the end; they didn’t care about the writers they exploited. Darcy ground her teeth. She would have to get hold of the Lucky Scribes and ask them for some advice. She could feel a writer’s block coming on.