Occupied Earth Read online

  “Back to the Future . . . ?” Iolawn ventured.

  “Well for heaven’s sake, yes! It’s Marty McFly’s house from the first movie of the franchise. Let’s check out another one. Maybe you’ll do better with the next.”

  We rolled off through the night again. Jake’s tales were more interesting to all of us this time, as they were about his own experiences in the world of pitches and treatments, franchises and universes and re-launches. Of being called in to give his “take” on any number of studio properties gathering dust on producers’ shelves. Of the myriad ways in which productions could be almost green-lighted -- and then never happen, or be put into turnaround hell for years. Of actors attaching themselves to projects, and then detaching from them. Of directors who got removed from productions two-thirds of the way through filming. Of who screwed whom and why – and who got the screen credit.

  Jake was again too busy driving and talking to bother to tell us where he was taking us but soon we had rolled on into North Hollywood, as I informed our clients.

  “There on our right is the Mahk-Ra Office of Media Standards . . . “Jake said. And the silence in the car could have been cut with a knife.

  Before long we drove up an avenue called Klump to where it t-boned into Dilling street. We stopped near the corner, before what looked like a split-level ranch. With its stonework façade beside the slab of front door, and the tall windows above both, the place struck me as tip-of-the-tongue familiar.

  “Okay, this one is both easier and harder than the McFly house. And again, no help from you, Starr. Well? Any guesses?”

  “How easier?” asked Iawan. “And how harder?”

  “It looks so familiar,” Iolawn said, “but something about it’s not right.”

  “Exactly. It’s easier because it’s from an iconic show of the late 1960’s through early 70’s, and this exterior shot of it was used a lot. Harder because, since the exterior was shot, it’s been through more changes than the McFly house. That front fence and that gate with a lantern on either side, they weren’t originally there – the owners put all that in to keep out trespassers. The landscaping’s different too. Try to ignore the fence and the lanterns and the landscaping, and just look at the house front. Well?”

  The answer did not come to either Iolawn’s tongue or her father’s.

  “Still don’t know it? You’ve got to be kidding! Okay, okay. One hint, then, from Alice: ‘If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s a perfect kid. And six of ’em, yecch!’”

  “The Brady Bunch, maybe?” Iawan ventured.

  “Dingdingding! We have a winner! You’re getting better at this. One last stop, then – but let’s make it something a bit more challenging.”

  We were off into the Los Angeles night once more. Jake continued to entertain us with dropped projects and dropped names.

  “The longer I listen to you,” the still kronched Iolawn said, “the less your Hollywood sounds like a boulevard of broken dreams than a grand maze of roads taken and not taken.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “The many films and shows produced -- and the far greater number that never saw the light of day or dark of a movie theatre – they constitute a vast multiverse of parallel and alternate universes!”

  “The fog of light upon LA,” said Iawan, “is the aura of might-have-been productions! Can’t you see it?”

  For a moment I cog-shifted. The wall screen of reality slipped between channels, and I did see it. A Los Angeles of innumerable virtual universes glowing evanescently around the projector bulb streetlights of what actually became real. A cityscape much less the old song’s “great big freeway” than a Mobius highway system at whose every crossroad and clover-leaf the hope of luck sprang eternal -- a hope nurtured even in the most dejected wannabe’s still fertile suspicion that, although the system might ultimately get you nowhere, at least it would have the good grace to take forever to get you there.

  I shook my head. The vision disappeared, but I wondered. Was that kronch stuff Iawan put in my drink kicking in, somehow?

  On the concrete roads of an abstract landscape, we didn’t have to travel too far to find Jake’s next challenge. I confirmed to our clients that we were still in North Hollywood. We pulled up to the curb beside a white painted storefront place on Magnolia, called Power Plumbing.

  “Okay, this one’s from an iconic sitcom of the 1970’s. You can play this time too, Starr. I don’t think I’ve shown you this one, before. This place has been through loads of changes. The building looks a lot different, but the awning’s still here. Well? Any idea?”

  None of us had a clue.

  “Nothing? See the alley next door? A pickup truck filled with junk drives up into that alley, after turning in from the street in front of the Magnolia Market, over there. The building across the alley hasn’t changed much either. Any guesses?”

  Still nothing.

  “The theme song of the show is an electric blues/funk piece recorded by Quincy Jones. Last chance? Nothing? Once I play it, you’ll all know. It’s a dead giveaway.”

  “Who’s the human search engine now?” Iawan asked, but Jake was too preoccupied with calling up a video on his handheld to hear the question. Jake didn’t show the image, but we could hear the theme music. Within the first four chords, Iawan, Iolawn, and I all blurted out, “Sanford and Son?”

  “Right you are! This location was used twice in the opening credits of the series, part of the montage.”

  “Jake, why are you so big on 70’s shows?” I asked as we pulled away from the curb. “You weren’t even born when those shows aired!”

  “No, but my parents were,” Jake explained as he passed another vehicle. “They were both born the year The Twilight Zone first aired.”

  “See?” I said, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Now I never would have even thought of chronicling history that way -- or of doing this kind of location-shot windshield tourism, either. I swear, Jake. When you die, other people’s lives will pass before your eyes. And they won’t even be people – they’ll be characters. Your memory’s the product of syndication!”

  “There’s nothing wrong with deep background research. It’s all grist for the mill.”

  “What mill? Doing those ‘take’ things? From everything you’ve told me, my take on those is that you’re being taken. They sound like a way for the studios to get new ideas from ‘outside’ for free. R & D too cheap to pay for. ”

  “You don’t understand the process, Starr.”

  “And I’m glad I don’t. Your ‘process’ would drive me nuts. You’ve been at this how long? Twenty, twenty-five years? Your endless process is like a lightning strike in a wet forest – maybe it starts a little burn, but the fire just keeps skunkin’ around and never really amounts to much.”

  “That’s colorful, Starr, but it misses the mark. The process would drive me nuts – if I didn’t love it. You’ve got to love the process.”

  I made a sound of rueful disgust and turned to look out the window. We drove along in silence. It seemed to me that, for Jake, the fame and celebrity of the location shots endowed otherwise mundane places with a sort of mana, stardust scattered through an anonymous world. The whole point of Jake’s windshield tour was to peel back the surface of the mundane to expose the glamor behind it, as if the Hollywood multiverse was also, somehow, a palimpsest. In a topsy-turvy way, the shots were somehow more real than the locations themselves, evidence of preternatural provenance, of innumerable other possible worlds persisting just beyond the edges of this one.

  A sensation of swarming alternate realities overwhelmed me. My mind was inundated by a tsunami of epiphanies, but when it was done I knew that I had left Earth both to better see the stars and for the stars to better see me. And they had.

  When I turned back to the others, I realized that the car was stopped, parked by the side of the road. And something else about the dreamland we moved through – which moved through us -- occurred to
me, despite myself.

  “I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” asked Iolawn quietly.

  “I saw the Christmas ornament Earth again. Saw my comrades’ aircraft exploding under the Mahk-Ra onslaught. Saw the night-lit Mobius highway of Los Angeles from space, three dimensional and more, endlessly opening like rows of diamonds in a rose of diamond. Saw things that haven’t happened yet on our timeline. The smoking blue ruins of Delphinion Studios. The smoking blue ruins of Earth. I know saying this might get me sent to an RZ camp, but so be it. They all exist. They’re all real.”

  Jake smiled an enormous smile.

  “Now he sees the process! Finally! If he could shift to see the world in overview when he was hanging in space, he could see this – I knew it!”

  Iolawn and Iawan smiled too. Iolawn nodded.

  “From inside a worldline, only that worldline looks real. All the others seem virtual, seem to be might-have-beens. But yes, they’re all real, to those who can see them.”

  “And what you see depends on where you stand, Starr-crossed. Location, location, location.”

  Each held out a hand toward me. In each palm, like shimmering stigmata, a numinous tattoo shifted, from the image of a spear, to the image of a red rose, to the image of a red circle round the letters RIA. “Resistance is All” – the motto of the Committees of the Crimson Rose and Spear. The Red Spear. The clandestine fighters against the Occupation.

  I saw it, and did not wonder if this was all a plot to catch me and send me to an RZ camp. Yet still I had to ask.

  “But you! You’re Mocks!”

  Iawan smiled beatifically.

  “We are the Mahk-Re. The Mahk-Ra conquered and occupied our lands before they ever travelled to another planet beyond the homeworld we lived upon. We know what it’s like to be might-have-beens. And we still are. But not forever!”

  “We can help you,” said Iolawn. “We have already helped you. The ship that picked you up in space after your own was destroyed – it was piloted by a Mahk-Re. You can help us. Join us in our project.”

  “What? The one you plan for Delphinion? But I don’t even know what it is.”

  “Guided oneironautics,” said the smiling Iawan. “Dream shifting. The deepest immersion. We will slide sideways the present consensus reality of the Mahk-Ra empire. Change their hearts and minds. Change the way they see us Mahk-Re. Change the way they see the Occupation of your world. Shift their reality into our consensual hallucination, our dream of the future.

  “And this whole tour tonight? Was that part of it?”

  “In a way,” Jake said. “The Mocks really do love our old media. Especially the TV stuff from the 60’s and 70’s, when their surveillance of us first got just the slightest bit free of government control, and started to gain a popular market back home. The Mahk-Re were instrumental with that.”

  “We saw how your media shaped and changed who you are,” Iolawn said. “How it changed your world. That made us wonder if we could use our version of it to change ours.”

  “I could have shot-toured you to locations of old shows that more obviously changed collective perceptions of our world,” Jake said. “Roots, All in the Family, M.A.S.H., I don’t know. But I didn’t want to make it too obvious. Thought it might scare you off.”

  “Your people scare off easy when it comes to dealing with us Mahk-Re,” Iawan said, glancing away. “Even many in the Red Spear don’t quite trust us, or the soft-power approach we’re advocating. Violence is so much more . . . direct. But some have come around. They realize that, to really collapse the wave-form of all the superposed possibilities, to really change the channel, all that is necessary is that we see to it. That is what all our sage talk of the ‘auras of alternate universe’s and ‘emanations of parallel realities’ must needs amount to. Will you join us, and help us see to it?”

  “But what can an old astronaut turned real estate agent do for you?”

  “The same thing you did for the Mahk-Ra,” Iolawn said, “but with a difference.”

  In the car by the side of the road, the wall screen of reality changed channels again. I looked at our driver and my fellow passengers and saw that it would be through the wounds in their dreams that the light would enter each of them, and that each of them would enter the light. And that the same might become true for me, for like them I had been born of what’s torn.

  “Sign me up,” I said at last, shaking their hands, hoping against a nightmare of smoking blue ruins.

  And nothing changed. And everything changed.

  KIMBERLY GREYMOUNTAIN looked up as the bell on the door of the Taovaya Cultural Center chimed, expecting to see her son Daniel and mentally preparing herself for Round Two of the shouting match they’d begun earlier that morning. Round One had ended with him storming out of the new building, slamming that same door so hard she thought the glass would crack, even though it was designed to be unbreakable.

  But instead of a hotheaded twenty-something with a reservation attitude and big city dreams, two extremely tall, slender men in hats, suits, and sunglasses walked in like they owned the place.

  No, not men. Mahk-Ra.

  The aliens were pale-skinned and big-eyed, so sensitive to the light that they had to wear dark glasses. She assumed that sensitivity extended to their skin, too, since all the ones she’d seen covered almost every inch of their lanky bodies with clothing, but she didn’t really know that much about them. They’d landed in 2020 and taken over, like another race of pale-skinned people had done to hers five hundred years previously, and since the Mahk-Ra had largely left her people alone, not interfering with the system of reservations already set up for them in the Americas, it wasn’t hard to mentally replace one set of invaders with the other. Life went on for the indigenous, who’d endured, and would continue to endure, long after those who wanted their land left for greener galaxies.

  “Gentle . . . beings,” she said as politely as she could, glad Daniel wasn’t here to see her doing the very thing he’d accused her of earlier: being a red apple—red on the outside, white underneath—and kowtowing to men whose skin was lighter than hers. But funding for the cultural center had come from light-skinned people, and she was not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Especially if that horse was healthy enough to carry her to where she wanted to go. “Welcome to the Taovayan Cultural Center. How can I help you?”

  “You are the owner of this establishment?” The words were smooth, but the inflection was off just enough to make the words sound strange and foreign in Kim’s ears, and it took her a moment to grok what the taller of the two aliens was saying.

  “What? No. The tribe owns the cultural center. I simply curate it for them.”

  “But you are in charge?”

  “Well . . . yes, I guess you could say that.”

  “Then this is for you,” the other one said, pulling a folded piece of paper from inside his suit jacket. As he handed it over, Kim tried not to flinch when his clammy flesh came briefly into contact with hers, then mentally chastised herself for the exact sort of bigotry her own people had faced for so many years. Still, principles aside, she couldn’t suppress a small shudder and a sudden longing for antibacterial soap.

  Opening the paper, she saw that it was an offer to purchase the cultural center and the land on which it stood—land that had been part of the Wichita people’s history since the 1700’s—and the number included more zeroes than Kim had seen since Daniel had flunked out of his junior year in high school.

  “You want to . . . buy . . . the cultural center?”

  “No,” the taller of the two said. “We have no interest in the center, or the mission, or the petroglyphs.”

  The “petroglyphs” were probably one of her people’s most sacred artifacts—the whole reason there was a Taovayan tribe again in the first place, as opposed to just another group assimilated under the umbrella of the Wichita. Not true petroglyphs at all, the stone inscriptions were a sort of Native American Rosetta Stone, combining word
s from the long-dead Taovayan language with French and Spanish translations, since they had been allied with one nation and at war with the other back when her ancestors had set chisel to stone. What remained of the artifact had been discovered on ancient Taovayan land, along the banks of Texas’s Red River, and had promptly been dubbed the Red River Stone, though with its size and thickness, it was really more of a paver, or a tile—nothing nearly as grand as the Egyptian treasure it resembled. The most precious of the Taovayan artifacts in the building, it sat in a glass-walled display case of its own, angled on a foundation of creamy silk and carefully illuminated to best reveal the words and symbols carved into the ochre rock.

  Not true petroglyphs, but then the mission wasn’t a true mission, either. It was a sized-down replica of the one at San Saba, which the Taovaya, along with other Wichita and the Comanche, had attacked and destroyed in 1758. Built for the conversion of Apaches, their hated enemies, the Catholic mission had been burned to the ground. Unfortunately, her people hadn’t known at the time that there were no Apache inside, only Spaniards—including two priests, whose deaths had been immortalized in the 1765 painting, The Destruction of Mission San Saba in the Province of Texas and the Martyrdom of the Fathers Alonso de Terreros, Joseph Santiesteban.

  The Spanish had tried to retaliate a year later, at the Battle of the Twin Villages—one on either side of the river, not far from where the Stone had been found two and a half centuries later—only to be soundly defeated. But as other native peoples had learned before and since, there was no stemming the inexorable tide of European conquest, and the Taovaya soon ceased to exist in all but memory, subsumed by the Wichita in the early 1800’s.

  Which made this cultural center all the more vital, and the appearance of these Mahk-Ra all the more terrifying.

  “What, then?” she asked, fear giving her voice a belligerent tone long years of conditioning had taught her could only lead to trouble. But she couldn’t suppress it—she’d fought so hard to bring her people and their language back from extinction. To lose the touchstone of the newly reconstituted Taovayan tribe now, so soon after their seeming victory—their proverbial rise from the ashes—it was too much to be borne.