John Sandford - Saturn Run

“You’re saying I look better if I’m fuzzy?”

“I’m saying you look better if you can’t see every single pore,” Sandy said.

She nodded: “Did you learn that with Naked Nancy?”

Sandy smiled and said, “Did you know Naked Nancy once had an emergency appendectomy?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“None of her viewers know, either. It’s a very fine scar, like a white hair, but thinner than a hair, a half centimeter long. Anytime you get a full body shot of her, it’s done with a special soft-focus lens. It softens her imperceptibly, so that she looks perfect. Which she almost is. You see everything else, but you won’t see that scar, or any little skin blemishes.”

“Why doesn’t she just go with makeup? On the scar?”

“That would be sort of… anti–Naked Nancy. The word would leak. Her viewers have an aesthetic, you know. They want her naked. That’s why she doesn’t have any hair.”

Fiorella said, “I gotta tell you, that never occurred to me. The aesthetic thing.”

Fiorella was acting as a pool reporter. Her own services got an hour head start, but after that, it was on to three dozen networks—if the networks wanted it. “That’s why I was so worried about you screwing it up,” Fiorella said. “Right now, if you were to make a list of news stars, I’d be a Senior Star—maybe—but nothing like an Ultra. When I get done with this, I want to be an Ultra. I’ve got a shot at it.”

Sandy rubbed his nose. “How bad do you want it?”

“Real bad,” Fiorella said.

The first broadcast was to be twenty-two minutes long, leaving eight minutes for commercials at each end and the middle. With an Earth-side recording, there’d usually be three cameras, but Sandy would have to work it with two, one stationary, one on his StabileArm.

The whole production took six hours on their second day in the station, squeezing out the twenty-two minutes of airtime.

Fiorella had written a script before she left Earth, had edited it the night before, to take into account actual conditions, and then they cut it up into shooting segments.

And they argued about costuming, they looked at colors against her skin and against the colors of the pipes and ducts inside the axis tube, against the blackness of space, against the white/beige colors of the eggs. They settled on her green-black jumpsuit with a gold-chain belt for the “reporting” shots, and a pale army-green blouse with a narrow V neck for her “commentary” shots. She wore a simple gold necklace that showed off her endorsement charms, and gold earrings, with both sets of clothing.

She had to do her own makeup, though they found a crewwoman who could help with her hair. When they were ready, she took an egg out, slaved to Joe Martinez’s egg, while Sandy orbited around her.

And they shot the first five hours.

At the very end, sitting in a conference room looking at the vid on big high-res screens, Fiorella said, “We got most of it: we really did. The editors down there will turn it into gold. But: we need to reshoot the window.”

“What? The window shot is perfect,” Sandy said.

“Perfect Caravaggio—I looked him up,” Fiorella said. “Then I looked up a whole bunch of other pictures from the Renaissance, and you know what? I think we go for Sandro Botticelli. I’d like to make a costume change for the window shot… just for the window shot. We leave the green blouse for the other commentary.”

“What costume change?”

Fiorella said, “I got a blouse from Caroline….” Caroline was the hair helper. Fiorella dipped into a gear bag and produced the blouse and handed it to him.

Sandy shook it out and said, “I don’t think so. It does have a nice casual look, but it’s so sheer that you’d see the brassiere lines under it and…”

Fiorella was shaking her head. “No brassiere.”

“No brassiere? You’re going to Naked Nancy?” Sandy was as shocked as a neo-Victorian. “You’re not Naked Nancy.”

“No, I’m not. But. I’ve looked at all the vid, and it’s very, very cool. I’m very, very cool. I’ve always been that way and I need to heat it up a little. Everything in pop culture is about sensuousness now. That’s worldwide. Sex. Food. Perfume. AR games. MassageSilk. RhythmTech. I don’t want porn, or anything like it, but I need to add some heat. I’m looking for the hot librarian. We don’t have to send it—we can dump it, if it’s too much.”

Sandy looked at her for a moment, then said, “You wanted Ultra Star.”

“I do.”

“Okay. But you’re walking on a scary edge here. Go too far…”

“We won’t.” Fiorella went to change, came back a few minutes later. Sandy checked her out and said, “You’ll need some double-sided tape: you’ll need to stick the edges of the neckline to your skin, or you’re gonna show off a little more than you want. Not that that’d be a tragedy.”

“Maybe not from your perspective, but like you said… I’m walking on an edge. I’ll get some tape.”

When she’d taped the blouse down, she asked, “What do you think?”

Sandy said, “Uh, Fiorella… you know, redheads, in my experience…”

“Which I suspect is extensive…”

“…may tend to have somewhat pale nipples.” He put up his hands to fend off objections, then continued. “If you have in your makeup kit something with a touch of rose to it…”

“Go get in the fuckin’ egg,” she snapped.

They worked for another hour, a windup shot that would last perhaps two minutes on the broadcast vid. Sandy didn’t want to quit, but Fiorella started to lose her voice, even with saltwater sprays. Back inside, they reviewed the footage.

“You are so… venal,” Fiorella said, as she watched herself at the window. The gauzy blouse showed the finest, subtlest flashes of rose, almost as though they were part of the viewer’s imagination. “You are fundamentally an immoral, manipulative snake.”

“So you like it,” Sandy said. “I had to kick up the red channel, and believe me, after I did that, it was hard to keep your red hair under control.”

“We’ll send it down, see what my exec thinks,” she said.

The exec called her the next morning and said, “Unbelievable. Unbelievable. You’re a fuckin’ ice cream cone, Fiorella. They’re gonna eat you up all over the world tomorrow night. Uh, the guy who shot this… is he around?”

Fiorella looked at Sandy: “He’s standing right here. We were going to see if you needed another shot or two.”

“Won’t be necessary. We’re good. Ask Randy…”

“Sandy…”

“Ask Sandy how much they’re paying him to take this trip…”

DAY THREE:

Becca was called into Fang-Castro’s suite on the morning of the third day: “They couldn’t find a better solution,” Fang-Castro told her. “They’re going with your idea, they think they can do something with the reactors that I don’t entirely understand… you’ll have to talk to them.”

“I’ve been thinking about it ever since we talked the first time,” Becca said. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. Boy, do I have a lot of work. I’ve got to get back down. Like right now. Fabrication is gonna be a bitch. Gonna make 3-D carbon-printer heads look like a kid’s crayons. I’ve been having nightmares, thinking about it.”

“But it’s not impossible.”

“No—but right there with the hardest things anybody’s ever built.”

Five plus a cat went up, four came back down.

Clover asked for, and got, permission to stay up, with Mr. Snuffles. “I wasn’t doing anything down there, anyway, that I can’t link into from up here. If somebody can throw out the garbage, lock up my house good, and send me up the rest of my clothes and some culinary supplies…”