The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I finished the full hour show by the time Wildlife America and Environment Today asked for a more detailed segment to fit into their national feeds-the half hour segment I’d already made. They also asked for breaking rights so I wasn’t sure where the shows would end up. Jack had become the central topic for ten percent of the major discussion groups. He had become part of the national conversation.

The major feeds are all international but most of the smaller feeds were local. Now, the small foreign feeds were asking about him. It had been a month since I had gotten back from Montana.

National Data called for a single topic show and I had the hour segment waiting for them. This was the big time. The longer segments would be bouncing around for a while. I could stop right now with what I had earned on Jack and not work for the next two years. This didn’t include subsales and residuals that would still be coming in for at least another year after that.

But staleness was already setting in on the original material. By October, I thought my part in Jack’s public career was over.

I took a vacation in Greece. For two months, I lived in a small villa on the Adriatic. I filtered my news, learned to drink Turkish coffee and had an affair with a lovely, tanned, poverty-stricken artist named Gina. She liked the way my rented sailboat cut the water and I liked the way she looked sunning herself on the deck. For a month, she used a room of my villa to paint horrible clashing abstract portraits of nude historical dictators when we weren’t sailing, eating, or having sex. Then, on the first of the year she went back to her husband in Germany. I helped her on the train with her new paintings. Gina kissed me passionately, gave me an abstract Stalin miniature, and left.

After that, I grew restless, so Stalin and I flew back to New York. I hung Stalin on the bathroom wall over the toilet and started going over the news.

Jack was all over the feeds, which surprised me. I knew he had legs but I didn’t think he’d last this long. I started reviewing the news back just before I left.

People liked Jack. More importantly, they liked his wolves. There were three segments of his constituency: those that found him and the wolves cuddly, those that found him a noble savage and those that found him dangerously erotic. There were seven official cameras hovering over him and his wolf pack twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Something like fifty or sixty temporary cams came and went, looking in on him regularly. Several articles and three books that had been written about him while I had been gone. None seemed to me to be as good as my work but perhaps I was biased. Jack dolls had become the Christmas toy of choice and came complete with a set of seven wolves. In a collateral event, interest in a twentieth-century figure, Wolfman Jack, escalated. Pop music started incorporating 1950s rock and roll into the sounds of steam engines and calliopes.

I tuned into one of the cams. It was a howling blizzard in Beck-Lewis right then. The wolves were not in sight. I guessed they were in a den or something. For a moment, I thought I saw Jack’s face in shadow but it disappeared in the snow.

Beck-Lewis also figured prominently in the feeds. Sam had gotten a good portion of the funding he wanted and B-L was getting new men and equipment. I smiled at that. Good for you, Sam, I thought.

***

The winter was cold out there. It sealed Jack and the wolves in and the rest of the world out. By that June, though, Jack was still a cultural item. The snow melted and tour groups started trespassing on Beck-Lewis looking for Jack. He wasn’t hard to find since eleven full-time cams were following the pack around. I watched them. They all looked lean. Jack himself looked haggard. The winter had not been good to them. Apparently, Sam and his people were able to keep most of these tour groups out but not all. Some of the groups were able to get through the mound of paperwork and some didn’t bother.

In July I was still idle but I was looking into a story about a man in South Africa who had attempted to graft into his mind a simulation of the skill and compositional ability of Mozart. He had failed and there had been significant consequences to his family. While I was finding the right people to talk to, I received an article alert from one of the feeds about a trial in Billings. Jack had killed somebody.

Tour groups attract three kinds of people: those that truly want to understand whatever it is the tour is about, those that just want to enjoy themselves in a new venue, and those who are complete idiots. It turned out a tourist, a man named Bernard, had broken away from the main group of Full Moon Tours and tried to steal one of the Raksha’s pups. Raksha had, quite rightly, attacked and torn off a finger. Bernard managed to pick up a rock and knock her down. Then, instead of attacking Raksha the idiot had killed the pup out of spite. Jack ripped his throat out.