The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (best romance novels of all time TXT) 📗

‘And then it was ’73 in Chile and the Coup,’ she muttered.

Lucía sipped her mineral water in silence, her lipstick leaving a red imprint on the plastic straw. She glanced at Amelia, as if sizing her up.

‘Come. Let me show you something,’ the old woman said.

Amelia followed her. She had only been inside the one room in the house where they watched the movies. Lucía took her to her office. There were tall bookcases, a rustic pine desk with painted sunflowers. Several framed posters served as decoration. Lucía stood before one of them.

‘Conqueror Women of Mars,’ she said. ‘The first poster. They had it redone. Cristina Garza said, since she was the better-known actress, she should be on the poster. They made a terrible poster to promote the film, but this was a good concept. It was better.’

The poster showed a woman in white, cartridge belts criss-crossing her back. There was one brief scene in the movie where Lucía was dressed like that. The ground beneath the woman’s feet was red and the sky was also red, a cloud of dust. She was looking over her shoulder. The colors were saturated and the font was all-caps, dramatic. But there was an element of gracefulness in the woman’s pose that elevated this from shlock to sheer beauty.

‘I like it,’ Amelia said.

‘Then look at this one,’ Lucía said, pointing at another poster. ‘To raise money for the Viking project, Nahum commissioned an artist to paint this. It was a lost-world story but with a science fiction twist. It was set in the future, after an atomic war has left most of the world uninhabited and giant lizards roam the desert.’

‘Where did the Vikings come into that?’ Amelia said, puzzled, staring at this other poster, which showed a young Lucía in a fur bikini, clutching the arm of a handsome man who wore an incongruous Viking hat. Behind them, two dinosaurs were engaged in a vicious fight.

‘I don’t know. But you have to remember Raquel Welch had made a lot of money in One Million Years B.C. and this was just a few years after that. I suppose any concept was a good concept if they could get half a dozen pretty girls into furry bathing suits.’

‘So, why couldn’t the director raise the money for it, then?’

‘Same problem as always. Nahum had all these strange ideas he wanted to incorporate into the movie and he kept fighting with Elba. Nahum could have been Alejandro Jodorowsky, but things didn’t quite go that way and besides, there already was one Jewish Latin-American director. In fact, I’m pretty sure Nahum went to Chile because he was so pissed off at Jodorowsky. If Jodorowsky had gone from Chile to Mexico, then Nahum was going from Mexico to Chile.’

‘If he had a cast ready, he must have gotten pretty far,’ Amelia mused, looking at the names on the poster.

‘He had all the main parts figured out. Rodrigo Tinto was going to be the Hero, same as in Mars. He looked great on camera, which is the best I can say of him.’

‘You did not like him?’ Amelia asked, a little surprised. They seemed to have good chemistry in the movie she’d watched. Then again, it was a film with rayguns and space pirates, nothing but make-believe.

‘He had bad breath and a temper.’

‘What about the director? Was he likable?’

‘No,’ Lucía said. Her smile was dismissive but not toward Amelia. She was thinking back to her acting days.

‘Also had a temper?’

‘No. Darling, some people are not meant to be liked,’ Lucía said, with elegant simplicity.

Amelia did not know what that meant. Perhaps, judging by her lack of gigs on Friendrr, Amelia was one of those persons who were not meant to be liked. And judging by the film director’s lack of success, they might share more than that single quality.

Lucía showed Amelia a couple more posters before they said goodbye. In the subway concourse, she saw an ad for a virtual assistant, a dancing, singing, 3D hologram: a teenage avatar in a skimpy French maid’s outfit who would call you ‘Master’ and wake you up in the morning with a song.

Her phone, tucked inside her jacket, rang. The specific ringtone she knew. She had a booking.

She pressed a hand against the cell phone and resisted the impulse to check her messages. Finally, in the stairway to her building, Amelia took out the phone and looked at the screen. It was a booking with Elías, just as she’d suspected. She could press the green button and accept it, or click on the big red ‘no’ button and discard it. But Miguel would ring her up and ask for an explanation. He was zealous about this stuff. Each rejected booking was a lost commission.

Amelia’s index finger hovered over the green button. Accepting was easier than speaking to Miguel. She could spend another two hours locked in Elías’s room. After all, he had given her a good rating. Five out of five stars. She remembered when she used to agonize over each rating she obtained, wondering why people hadn’t liked her enough. Three stars, two. Even when it was four, she wondered. She had wanted to be like the popular ones, the ones who got bookings every day. If she could up her ratings by a quarter of a point… and there was a bonus for customer satisfaction. It did not amount to anything, not ever.

There was a sour note in her. It drove people away. And Jesus Christ, if she could be more cheerful, nicer, friendlier, she would be, but it was no use.

Green. It didn’t matter. Booking confirmed.

*

The view from Elías’s apartment at night rendered the city strange. It turned it into an entirely different city. In the distance, a large billboard flickered red, enticing people to ‘Visit Mars’. You could emigrate now; see more information online.

The words ‘Visit Mars’ alternated with the image of a girl in a white spacesuit, holding a helmet under her arm, looking