“But they know it’s the same substance,” said Sunny. “Kuvam’s been too aggressive with his New Age angle; people have been connecting our hospital stunt to his for weeks, but now this group is connecting us to him, personally, and that’s bad. The red states are gonna hate us.” He leaned forward and pressed the button for the PA. “Kerry, come to the sound booth right now. Drop whatever you’re doing.”
The reporter was still trying to get a straight answer from the reverend. “So you are, in fact, the same group that protested the Yemaya Foundation earlier today?”
“We are,” said the man. “His actions, and the actions of NewYew, cannot be tolerated.”
“So you believe there’s some kind of connection between Guru Kuvam and tomorrow’s announcement from NewYew?”
Lyle is the one who went to Kuvam, thought Decker/Lyle. NewYew suspected it, but Ibis figured it out for certain. What was he trying to accomplish?
The reverend straightened up, looking directly into the camera. “The evidence is all too clear: the Pickett family in Jersey, and the Shaw twins from here in New York, are all part of the same thing. They’re cloning human beings, and it’s an affront to God.”
Sunny’s cell phone buzzed, and he fished it back out of his pocket. He sneered and showed the screen to Decker/Lyle. “Cynthia again.” He held it up to his ear. “Yeah.” Pause. “Yes, of course I heard it. What do you expect me to do? It’s not like I can walk out and tell her to stop.” Pause. “No, he’s still backstage somewhere—oh, here he is.”
Kerry rushed into the room. “What’s so urgent? We have a huge problem with the Vicky costumes, and the whole sequence at 15:30 is going to be ruined if we can’t fix it.”
Hannah and her technicians shuffled through their papers, looking for 15:30.
Decker/Lyle pointed at the screen, drawing Kerry’s attention. “This is worse.”
Kerry looked at the screen; the reverend was still talking. “I’m not saying they killed the little girl,” said the man, “heaven knows I hope they didn’t. But the one they have now isn’t the one they started with: she’s an exact copy of her sister, grown in a lab somewhere. It’s the same with the cancer lady: she’s an exact copy of her daughter. These aren’t people, they’re clones—they’re artificial constructs, designed to look like us and act like us and, ultimately, to replace us. It’s not a salvation, it’s an abomination.”
Kerry watched the screen intently. “Protesters?”
“Obviously,” said Decker/Lyle.
“At least they’ve got it wrong,” said Kerry. “If they’re protesting something we’re not actually doing, what do we care? It’s free advertising, and this time tomorrow they’ll look like idiots.”
“Yes,” said Sunny in the background, still talking on the phone, “Kerry just said the same thing.”
“She’s asking all the wrong questions,” Kerry muttered. “Come on, lady, talk more about the girls! We saved that baby’s life!”
The reverend was still talking. “Of course the clones don’t have souls. This guy Kuvam—I refuse to call him a ‘guru’—is preaching a specifically antireligious message. This is the Tower of Babel all over again: they’ve decided they can get to heaven without God, without doing anything He says, so they’re building an empire of something—of drugs, or some other substance—so they can circumvent the commandments and ignore all the rules and build salvation all on their own.”
“I know he sounds crazy,” said Sunny, hissing into his phone. “It’s still going to hurt us.”
Decker/Lyle looked at Kerry. “I thought you said this kind of coverage was good?”
“The cloning stuff was good,” said Kerry. “This religious stuff is poison: the only good press we had that Kuvam didn’t was the conservative angle. Churches still liked us, because we were saving babies without any crazy talk about New Age cults. Now this guy’s telling the world we’re part of Kuvam’s cult, and that’s bad.”
“Press is press,” Sunny insisted to his phone. “And any press is good press, right? We don’t care what Ma and Pa Kettle think, tonight or tomorrow. All we have to do is play this down and sell to the trendsetters, and a few weeks from now the yokels will fall right into line.”
“This sucks, but it’ll pass,” said Kerry. “We’ve got to get back to the show.”
“Wait,” said Hannah. She looked at her assistants, then back at the three executives. “Okay, I’m just going to come right out and ask it: we all thought the cloning stuff in your show notes was a joke, but now this guy on the news is saying the same thing.” She narrowed her eyes. “Is it real?”
Sunny looked back at her. “Does it matter?”
She shrugged. “For what you guys are paying, I’d manage a show for Captain Baby Killer and His Puppy-Stomping Pirates.”
Sunny smiled. “It’s all real. And if it stays real, and stays good, we’ll double your fee.”
Hannah saluted. “Arrr, Cap’n.”
26
Tuesday, July 3
11:00 A.M.
Hammerstein Ballroom, Manhattan Center, Manhattan
164 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
The lights went down, and the crowd fell silent. Backlit screens around the edges of the theater began to glow, and a low bass rumble shook the floor; Decker/Lyle could feel it in his shoes and up his legs, humming at the base of his spine.
“Everyone wants to be something.”
The voice poured out from the speakers, rich and deep and dripping with effortless authority. They’d paid good money for that voice—not just in hiring him, but searching for months in advance to find the perfect combination of warmth, trustworthiness, and hipness. They needed this event to say “Our product is revolutionary and edgy and exactly what you’ve always wanted,” and this guy’s voice said it right from the first syllable.
The screen on the stage exploded with light, shapes, and colors whirling over and around and through each other in a frenzied dance, resolving at precisely the right moment into a close-up shot of a model’s face—one of the Vickies, eyes sultry, hair swept dramatically across her cheek. The screens on the walls pulsed with life, and abruptly all the lights cut out and the room fell dark again.
“Good job,” said Hannah’s voice, tinny and distant in Decker/Lyle’s headset. “Prep the shatter, cue voice-over in three, two, one, go!”
“Everyone wants to be young.”
“Screen two!” shouted Hannah, and once again the stage erupted in light and sound as the shapes reappeared, whirling around each other in a subtle double helix before resolving again into a quick succession of images: a man on the beach, shirt unbuttoned and chest shaved; a girl in tight jeans with one leg propped up on a motorcycle; another close-up of Vicky, eyes eager, lips parted.