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.But the distributor had botched the PR targeting when they tried to take it beyond the Shanghai market, and so now Silk Road was in limbo while various heads rolled.Four leading roles was about as many as she could keep in her head at once.The prompter made it possible to play any role without having seen it before, if you didn't mind making an ass of yourself.But Miranda had a reputation now and couldn't get away with shoddy work.To fill in the blanks when things got slow, she also had standing bids, under another name, for easier work: mostly narration jobs, plus anything having to do with children's media.She didn't have any kids of her own, but she still corresponded with the ones she'd taken care of during her governess days.She loved racting with children, and besides it was good exercise for the voice, saying those silly little rhymes just right.“Practice Kate from Shrew,” she said, and the Miranda-shaped constellation was replaced by a dark-haired woman with green, feline eyes, dressed in some costume designer's concept of what a rich woman in the Italian Renaissance would be likely to wear.Miranda had large bunny eyes while Kate had cat eyes, and cat eyes were used differently from bunny eyes, especially when delivering a slashing witticism.Carl Hollywood, the company's founder and dramaturge, who'd been sitting in passively on her Shrews, had suggested that she needed more work in this area.Not many payers enjoyed Shakespeare or even knew who he was, but the ones who did tended to be very high on the income scale and worth catering to.Usually this kind of argument had no effect on Miranda, but she'd been finding that some of these (rich sexist snob asshole) gentlemen were remarkably good ractors.And any professional could tell you that it was a rare pleasure to ract with a payer who knew what he was doing.The Shift comprised the Prime Times for London, the East Coast, and the West Coast.In Greenwich Time, it started around nine P.M., when Londoners were finishing dinner and looking for entertainment, and wound up about seven A.M., when Californians were going to bed.No matter what time zones they actually lived in, all ractors tried to work during those hours.In Shanghai's time zone, The Shift ran from about five A.M.to midafternoon, and Miranda didn't mind doing overtime if some well-heeled Californian wanted to stretch a ractive late into the night.Some of the ractors in her company didn't come in until later in the day, but Miranda still had dreams of living in London and craved attention from that city's sophisticated payers.So she always came to work early.When she finished her warmups and went on.she found a bid already waiting for her.The casting agent, which was a semiautonomous piece of software, had assembled a company of nine payers, enough to ract all the guest roles in First Class to Geneva, which was about intrigue among rich people on a train in Nazi-occupied France, and which was to ractives what The Mousetrap was to passive theatre.It was an ensemble piece: nine guest roles to be assumed by payers, three somewhat larger and more glamorous host roles to be assumed by payees like Miranda.One of the characters was, unbeknownst to the others, an Allied spy.Another was a secret colonel in the SS, another was secretly Jewish, another was a Cheka agent.Sometimes there was a German trying to defect to the Allied side.But you never knew which was which when the ractive started up; the computer switched all the roles around at random.It paid well because of the high payer/payee ratio.Miranda provisionally accepted the bid.One of the other host roles hadn't been filled yet, so while she waited, she bid and won a filler job.The computer morphed her into the face of an adorable young woman whose face and hair looked typical of what was current in London at the moment; she wore the uniform of a British Airways ticket agent.“Good evening, Mr.Oremland,” she gushed, reading the prompter.The computer disped it into an even perkier voice and made subtle corrections in her accent.“Good evening, er, Margaret,” said the jowly Brit staring out of a pane on her mediatron.He was wearing half-glasses, had to squint to make out her nametag.His tie was loose on his chest, a gin and tonic in one hairy fist, and he liked the looks of this Margaret.Which was almost guaranteed, since Margaret had been morphed up by a marketing computer in London that knew more about this gentleman's taste in girlflesh than he would like to think.“Six months without a vacation!? How boring,” Miranda/Margaret said.“You must be doing something terribly important,” she continued, facetious without being mean, the two of them sharing a little joke.“Yes, I suppose even making lots of money does become boring after a while,” the man returned, in much the same tone.Miranda glanced over at the casting sheet for First Class to Geneva.She'd be pissed if this Mr.Oremland got overly talkative and forced her to pass on the bigger role.Though he did seem a reasonably clever sort.“You know, it's a fine time to visit Atlantan West Africa, and the airship Gold Coast is scheduled to depart in two weeks- shall I book a stateroom for you? And a companion perhaps?”Mr.Oremland seemed iffy.“Call me old-fashioned,” he said, “but when you say Africa, I think AIDS and parasites.”“Oh, not in West Africa, sir, not in the new colonies.Would you like a quick tour?”Mr.Oremland gave Miranda/Margaret one long, searching, horny look, sighed, checked his watch, and seemed to remember that she was an imaginary being.“Thank you just the same,” he said, and cut her off.Just in time too; the playbill for Geneva had just filled up.Miranda only had a few seconds to switch contexts and get herself into the character of Ilse before she found herself sitting in a first-class coach of a midtwentieth-century passenger train, staring into the mirror at a blond, blue-eyed, high-cheekboned ice queen.Unfolded on her dressing-table was a letter written in Yiddish.So tonight she was the secret Jew.She tore the letter into tiny pieces and fed them out her window, then did the same with a couple of Stars of David that she rooted out of her jewelry case.This thing was fully ractive, and there was nothing to prevent other characters from breaking into her coach and going through her possessions.Then she finished putting on her makeup and choosing her outfit, and went to the dining car for dinner.Most of the other characters were already in here [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]