by Fritz Leiber
And I didn’t have too much time, come to think of it. The sun had already set and moonrise would come but two hours later. To one who lives in space near Luna, keeping track of Earth’s phases is second nature. She is our month-clock.
“Not altogether lonely, I hope, Senor La Cruz — ho-ho, the German put down in Germany, very funny —” Professor Fanninowicz boomed at me heartily, “— for I hope to spend the night at your side, studying your magnificent exoskeleton and perhaps experimenting —”
“Senor La Cruz shall spend his time as he sees fit,” Governor Lamar cut in with authority. “The first demand of hospitality is consideration for —”
He broke off to get to his feet and turn toward the Gringo Door. The other men copied him. I could see without turning, but just the same I got up as rapidly as possible.
Since landing on Terra, I had experienced three great liftings of spirit. The first had been La Cucurach'a. The second, marijuana. The third was the slender, statuesque female we now faced.
Oh’, I didn’t forget La Cucaracha in the least, and I remained as firmly determined as before to be beside her at moonrise. But now, suddenly illumined by the sun’s silvery afterglow from the clouds above, there was a gorgeous counterattraction.
She was nearly as tall as I and of Junoesque proportions, but compared with the male Texans she was slender. She wore Grecian robes of a pale silvery silk which left an ample area of alabaster shoulders and bosom bare and fell in perfect folds to the floor. I had never seen the like, even on stage — one simply cannot achieve that wonderful classic draping without gravity to help.
Her face was at the moment grave and mystic, though subtly seductive. A youthful Athena or Artemis, rather than Aphrodite. In one pale hand she held a scroll with silver knobs.
Her platinum-blonde hair was piled high. Tiny lights winked in it. Under her arching brows, her pale blue eyes were fixed on mine. For a second time on Terra I had lost my heart — something my father tells me a young man can’t do too often, provided it doesn’t interfere with rehearsals and he never misses an entrance or a cue.
“Senor Christopher La Cruz,” Governor Lamar said, “I wish to introduce to you my dear daughter, the Honorable Rachel Vachel Lamar. Sugar, I’ve been waiting for you quite a while.”
“Hush up, Daddy,” the goddess said, wrinkling that delectable nose in a miffy grin. “To honor our guest properly I had to dart into my Diana costume — she’s the Roman moon goddess, Daddy — and then I had to snatch time to dash off a poem of greeting. I’ll read it now, if all you verse-scorning menfolk don’t mind.”
Then without pausing to note whether they did, she struck a pose that I had to admit was most amateurish (but the more delightful for that) and recited in an elocution-school voice that occasionally squeaked and/or went husky and invariably found the worst spots to suck in an over-obvious breath (yet how it all stole the heart!):
Ho, traveler from outer space!
how swell to see your sunk-cheek face,
Your somber form that's flagstaff-trim,
Your flashing eye and sword-slim limb.
She must have got an earlier glimpse of me, I realized, perhaps from an upstairs window, embowered like a Moslem maiden. The poem continued:
We've gazed at your abode for years
Serene over earthly joys and tears.
It sails the sky without a sound
A million miles above the ground.
We never thought we'd get a chance
To hold a moon man in our glance.
But here you've dropped out of the blue
And all of Texas welcomes you!
The other men applauded politely, Elmo fortissimo. As she moved forward toward stage-center — a little too fast and coltish for a goddess, but just right for a girl — I swiftly intercepted her, caught hold of her hand and bowed over it, pressing it briefly to my lips.
Then as I stood “flagstaff-trim” again, holding her hand a moment longer, I said, “Miss Lamar, I never have been so moved since when clutched in the arms of my mother, who was doubling as a member of the mob, I first heard my father give Antony’s oration.”
It was borderline truth, though I had been moved in different ways. My father had terrified me in that black toga.
“Go on, you flatterer, you,” she giggled, giving me a playful shove that sat me back on my titanium heelplates.
Then her eyes got big. “Your pa’s an actor?” They got bigger still. “You’re an actor too — you stayed one?”
I shrugged. “Oh an occasional Hamlet, Peer Gynt, Orestes, Cyrano . . .”
I could have sworn that for an instant she was going to hug me. Instead she looked me up and down, grinned and said, “I bet you overlapped your ma to either side when she clutched you.”
“Yes and she wrinkled her nose too,” I countered. “I wet myself.” Governor Lamar said, “My colleagues and I have a bit of business to finish discussing before dinner. Senor La Cruz, I imagine you and my daughter can entertain each other for the while. You appear to have interests in common.”
Table of Contents
- IV -
RACHEL VACHEL
Tell me some more, Captain Skull. But let me light you another reefer.”
“Thank you, princess. But perhaps you will tell me something for a change. What is moths?”
“Furry' butterflies.”
“What is . . . are butterflies?”
“Butterflies is — Oh, they’re like two tiny swatches of batik or embroidery flappin’ along. And you’ll likely be seeing a few moths in a few minutes for yourself. We even got lunar ones in honor of your homeland. Go on talkin’ theater of space—”
“Very well, princess. Yes, acting in three dimensions in free fall has its special techniques and requires its special conditions. For instance, upstage lies in all directions from stage-center, but so does down-stage. You must learn to favor all sections of the audience by rotation in at least two planes, and that requires motivated or surreptitious contact with the other actors on stage. Also, to make an exit, you must take off from another actor or preferably several, and there should be a counterbalancing entrance — unless you use an air jet or are drawn off by fine-wire, devices we try to avoid. Ideally, 3D nulgrav acting becomes dramatic ballet with dialogue. Think of Don Juan in Hell, the actors afloat, or of Antony’s oration again, with the mob a ragged sphere between the orator and the larger sphere of the audience.”
“Oh, it all sounds so excitin’ — makes our little theater here seem positively earthbound, even though Daddy insists on spending millions on lighting and special effects and sets. Sometimes a heap too much of those; we wanted to do Our Town the right way but Daddy insisted on building us a real town with the smallest House big as the Petit Trianon. We actors were positively lost among those gingerbread skyscrapers. And I had to bust into tears seventeen times before he’d drop his plan to build us a life-size, practical, moving glacier for Skin of Our Teeth.”
“The last time we put on Our Town, princess, we used only six kitchen chairs borrowed from the Circumluna Museum of Terran Domestic Artifacts — all floating, of course, as I mentally float now.”
“Oh, spit I might have known. But do go on, Captain Skull, please.”
Our “interests in common” had indeed drawn the Honorable Rachel Vachel and me closer together, and in less than ten minutes. Our princess-Captain Skull personae derived from her conceit that I was Sir Francis Drake reporting the unknown lands of the Pacific to a youthful Queen Elizabeth. We were seated side-by-side in the gracious dusk on a large couch facing the dark horizon with its mysterious truncated cones across the very faintly shimmering ripples of the vast swimming pool (Rachel had identified that for me and assured me it was water), and we were quite alone. My companion had shooed out all the Mexican houseboys shortly after her father’s departure.
I was still determined to keep my date with La Cucaracha — after all, she seemed the earthier and more easily had of the twain — but
at the moment I was stealing my left arm along the top of the couch behind Rachel Vachel’s ivory shoulders and also an occasional eye-wander down her delicious frontal decolletage.
“Wilder is one of our minor favorites among the old playwrights,” I meanwhile continued. “he rouses and satisfies simply and beautifully our nostalgia for Terra. Other old ones often in our repertory are Ibsen, Bergman (we live-stage his films), Shaw, Wycherly, Moliere, Euripedes, Gorky, Chekhov, Brecht, Shakespeare of course, and —”
“Hush, you’re makin’ me drool green with envy! Our group’s forever tryin’ to stage real serious plays like Macbeth or Pillars of Society or The Gods of the Lightning or Waitin’ tor Lefty or Manhattan Project or Frisco After the Fallout or Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Intolerance (let Daddy use his Hundred millions live-stagin’ that, I say) or Streetcar . . . but — wouldn’t you know it? — Daddy’s forever insistin’ on another revival of Oklahoma, callin’ it Texiana, of course, and usin’ Corpus Christi or Texarkana ’stead of Kansas City, to make it scan, and five times out of six Daddy gets his way. And even then he won’t let me play Ado Annie, the Cain’t-say-no girl — always got to have some little Mex on stilts for that part.”
Edging my arm a little closer, I remarked, “Your father seemed to me a most courteous and mild gentleman.”
“Mild? Huh! You should see him when—”
In turning to make her comment she had suddenly leaned back against my slithering arm. Now with a little scream she bent forward, quickly turning the head to remark, “My, that skeleton of yours is awfully chilly, Captain Skull. Can’t you take it off even for a little while, while you’re on Earth?”
“To my great regret, no,” I informed her. “Without it, I literally could not move an arm or leg or lift my head. While a fall, especially without exoskeletal protection, might easily fracture a limb or my skull. I have just begun to realize that when one is eight and a half feet tall, one has a lot of farther to fall in gravity than —”
“Don’t explain to me about that. I’m eight foot two myself, and I know all about chipped and busted bones. Well, we can’t have you fracturing yourself, that’s for sure, you spacemen are too precious, so . . .” she gave a small sigh of resignation “... I guess I just got to endure the chilliness,” and she flopped herself back against my arm before I could have withdrawn it, had I intended to.
She turned her face toward mine. Amid the mists of her platinum hair, her eyes were dark pools of wonder in which the stars glimmered faintly.
“Anything for Texas — that’s a joke,” she said. “Go on, Captain Skull, tell me some more.”
“But there are many things I would like you to tell me, chiefly about yourself,” I countered, carelessly draping my free hand across my knee so that it Happened lightly to touch one of h’ers. She did not move that leg. “I know you are a poet,” I said. “Are you by any chance also a playwright?”
“Oh, I got a little old script or two in a secret compartment-in my lingerie drawer,” she admitted nonchalantly. “But don’t for worlds whisper a word about them to Daddy. One of them’s called Houston’s Afire, and another Storm over El Paso”
“I also would guess that you are named for a poet,” I continued. “Vachel Lindsay.”
“My, you’re brilliant, Captain Skull, I never dreamed anyone on Earth, let alone in the sky, remembered anything about that little old Chinese Nightingale or General Booth.”
“Rachel Vacfiel,” I said, leaning toward her, “the first poem of any length my father ever taught me was The Congo. That is, after Chesterton’s Lepanto”.
“Recite Lepanto!” she commanded me, but before I could utter “White founts falling . . .,” she countermanded that with, “No, don’t! Daddy and his crew’ll be back any minute, and that poem’s too long, much as I’d be ravished by it. Lemme think.”
Rachel Vachel,” I asked, as my free fingers lightly walked up the silvery silk draping her thigh', “there is an aspect of the landscape puzzles me — the many conical towers.”
“Oh those!” she said impatiently. “Those are just oilwells. Grandpa insisted on keeping the derricks for sentimental reasons, but Grandma thought they were unaesthetic and made him cover them up with those antimacassar lighthouses, I call ’em. Antimacassars were originally doilies to keep hair-oil off chair backs, you know. I’d rather the naked derricks again — be honester.” “And the two very much larger and newer towers?” I continued. It is sometimes effective, I think, to talk of irrelevant matters while moving closer to a female. Besides, I have a curiosity which operates simultaneously on all levels, and when the sexual is awakened, all the others are too. “Only two much larger oilwells?”
“Fact is, I don’t know the answer to that myself,” Rachel Vachel said, anger in her voice.
“When they built them six month’s ago, I asked Daddy, but he put me off with his standard lecture about how women shouldn’t interest themselves in science and technology, but culture and religion only. I tried to ride out to them a couple times, but got turned back.” Suddenly she sat up straight, though clapping a hand over my free one, which had reached her waist. Now her voice was entirely exasperated anger on the verge of tears. “Oh, Captain Skull! You don’t know how Daddy strangulates me, hidin’ a whim of patriarchal Texan iron under all that suffocatin’ courtliness and courtesy. I’m supposed to get bowed to and stood up for and my feminine mystique done reverence, at the price of limitin’ my activities to silly little poems and reproductions of Oklahoma and Babes in Toyland and The Wizard of Oz with a Texas ’stead of a Kansas Dorothy — yes, and of bein’ bossed around like a nine-year-old! Honest, some days I wish I could die!” That outburst over, she instantly flopped back against my left arm, throwing her own right arm over it to keep it from straying, as if it would, and leaning her lovely white-misted head against it so that she could dark-wonder me even more effectively with her glimmering eyes.
“Go on, tell me some more,” she murmured meltingly. “Tell me some more about acting in the Sack.” She sighed softly, at least for a young woman eight foot two, and added wistfully, “I suppose all you actors up there are stars, just like the ones twinklin’ above us now.”
“Far from it, princess,” I told her, my left hand beginning to feather-stroke her bare shoulder and my right Hand resuming its tiptoe journey. “Our situation is far more like that of any Shakesperean or later actors in puritanic Northern Europe and America before the Twentieth-Century deification of entertainers. We are no better than strolling players — worse, because with vacuum outside we have nowhere to stroll when things get hot for us. We are given no special honor by our fellow Sackabonds, and at times we are denounced and threatened by Circumluna’s scientists, engineers and technicians, on whose continuing ticket-buying, nonetheless, we depend for the essentials of life. In that sense we are much like the artists of the Renaissance, dependent on the patronage of their individual princes — our prince being the Circumlunan Establishment. Him we must please, or starve, and the former is as difficult as the latter is easy.”
“ ‘Renaissance’ is just the word I was looking for to describe you!” Rachel interrupted. “You’re like one of those tall, thin, somber-lookin’, small steppin’ Spanish Grandees — the kind that wear great cloaks and hats with black plumes and are deadly duelists. You fence and duel, by any chance?”
“Those were among my first accomplishments,” I contented myself with saying. I was tempted to give her a demonstration which might have surprised her, but it would have interrupted our passage toward togetherness, so I stifled my vanity.
“I might have known, you bein’ an actor,” she said. “Go on about those Longhairs you put on your plays for.”
The scientists, yes. Well, you see, princess, they began over a hundred years ago as — and have continued to be — quite rigid, asthetically puritanic types. They greatly need the catharsis we give them with our dramas — everything from high tragedy to low comedy — but there are always those among them whose viol
ent, temporarily uncatharsized desires, masquerading as high scientific conscience, demand our muzzling and even our expulsion. They accuse us of great sexual laxity, thievery, political and social irresponsibility, corrupting the morals of the young, and dirty personal habits such as not sterilizing our night soil before returning it into the ecologic cycle. In short, all the things actors have been accused of since Egg-oh the Exhibitionistic Cave Man first cavorted in front of the nightly fire.”
“Scuse me, Captain, but your left-arm skeleton bone’s cuttin’ into my neck,” Rachel Vachel interrupted. “There, that’s better. Tell me, do you consider me one of the young? I mean as far as corruptin’ morals is concerned. Don’t answer that one, just keep it up — talkin’ too.”
I continued, “At present the puritanic faction of Circumlunans, composed somewhat more of those of Russian heritage than those of Americo-West European extraction, is in the ascendency. With the lifting of the Interdict, they are demanding that not only we actors, but all Sackabonds not doing vital part-time technologi-cal work for Longhairs be deported to Earth. The great majority of Circumlunans don’t want this at all — we’re almost their sole source of fun and frenzy — but being respectable bourgeois technocrats to a man (and a woman) nearly, they daren’t speak out against the highly vocal hyper-puritanic minority. The only solution for us, of course, is the age-honored one of buying off the Establishment with Circumlunan-acceptable cash — meaning funds available on Terra for buying Moon-short elements and materials the Circumlunans still find it difficult if not impossible to synthesize. It’s to win that cash to defend from deportation all Sackabonds, but in particular the personnel and properties of the La Cruz Theater-in-the-Sphere, that I’ve come down to earth, Rachel Vachel.”
