The Mammoth Book of Best Short SF Novels

by Gardner R. Dozois

He thought for a moment of calling Docilia to apologize – perhaps the evening might be salvaged yet. Then he remembered what Mosay had said about personal messages and scrolled them up.

  The first one was personal, all right, and a surprise. It was a talking message, and as soon as the picture cleared he recognized the face of the man who happened to have been his biological father.

  The man hadn’t changed a bit. (Well, why would he, in a mere ninety-some years?) He was as youthful and as handsome as he had been when, on a rare visit, he had somewhat awkwardly taken young Rafiel on his knee. “I saw you were in the Krankhaus again,” the man in the screen said, with the look of someone who was paying a duty call on an ailing friend – not a close one, though. “It reminded me we haven’t heard from each other in a long time. I’m glad everything fait bon, Rafiel – son – and, really, you and I ought to have lunch together some prossimo giorno.”

  That was it. Rafiel froze the picture before it disappeared, to study the dark, well-formed face of the man whose genes he had carried. But the person behind the face eluded him. He sighed, shrugged and turned to the other message . . .

  And that one made him stiffen in his chair, with astonishment too sharp to be joy.

  It wasn’t an imaged message, or even a spoken one; it was a faxed note, in a crabbed, nearly illegible handwriting that he knew very well:

  Dearest Rafiel, I was so glad to hear you got through another siege with the damned doctors. Mazel tov. I’m sending you a little gift to celebrate your recovery – and to remind you of me, because I think of you so very often.

  What the gift was he could not guess, because it hadn’t arrived yet, but the note was signed, most wonderfully signed:

  For always, your Alegretta.

  6

  Naturally, all kinds of connections and antipathies appear among the Oedipus troupe as they come together. Charlus is the sire of Docilia’s unborn child. Andrev, who is to play the Creon, is the son of the composer of the score, Victorium. Ormeld, the Priest, and Andrev haven’t acted together for thirty-five years, because of a nasty little firefight over billing in what happened to be the first production in which either got an acting credit. (They hug each other with effusive but wary joy when they come together in the rehearsal hall.) Sander, the Tiresias, studied acting under Mosay when Mosay had just abandoned his own dramatic career (having just discovered how satisfying the god-behind-the-scenes role of a dramaturge was). Sander is still just a little awed by his former teacher. All these interconnections are quite separate from the ordinary who-had-been-sleeping-with-whom sort of thing. They had to be kept that way. If people dragged up that sort of ancient history they’d never get everything straight. Actually, nobody is dragging anything up – at least, not as far as the surface where it can be seen. On the contrary. Everybody is being overtly amiable to everybody else and conspicuously consecrated to the show, so far. True, they haven’t yet had much chance to be anything else, since it’s only the first day of full-cast rehearsal.

  Although Mosay was still off scouting for locations – somewhere in Turkey, somebody said, though why anybody would want to go to Turkey no one could imagine – he had taken time to talk to them all by grid on the first day. “Line up, everybody,” he ordered, watching them through the monitor over his camera. “What I want you to do is just a quick run-through of the lines. Don’t sing. Don’t dance, don’t even act – we just want to say the words and see each other. Docilia, please leave Charlus alone for a minute and pay attention. Victorium will proctor for me, while I” – a small but conspicuous sigh; Mosay had not forgotten his acting skills – “keep trying to find the right location for our production.”

  Actually it was Rafiel who was paying least attention, because his mind was full of lost Alegretta. Now, perhaps, found again? For you never forgot your first love . . .

  Well, yes, you did, sometimes, but Rafiel never had. Never could have in spite of the sixty or seventy – could it have been eighty? a hundred? – other women he had loved, or at least made love to, in the years since then. Alegretta had been something very special in his life.

  He was twenty years old then, a bright young certain-to-be-a-star song-and-dance man. Audiences didn’t know that yet, because he was still doing the kind of thing you had to start out with, cheap simulations and interactives, where you never got to make your own dramatic statement. The trade was beginning to know him, though, and Rafiel was quite content to be working his way up in the positive knowledge that the big break was sure to come. (And it had come, no more than a year later.)

  But just then he had, of all things, become sick. (No one got sick!) When the racking cough began to spoil his lines, he had to do something. He complained to his doctors about it. Somewhat startled (people didn’t have coughs), the doctors put him in a clinic for observation, because they were as discomfited by it as Rafiel himself. And when all the tests were over, the head resident herself came to his hospital room to break the bad news.

  Even all these decades later, Rafiel remembered exactly what she had looked like that morning. Striking. Sexy, too; he had noticed that right away, in spite of the circumstances. A tall woman, taller in fact than Rafiel himself; with reddish-brown hair, a nose with a bit of a bend in it that kept it from being perfect in any orthodox way, but a smile that made up for it all. He had looked at her, made suspicious by the smile, a little hostile because a little scared. She sat down next to him, no longer smiling. “Rafiel,” she said directly, “I have some bad news for you.”

  “Che c’e? Can’t you fix this damn cold?” he said, irritated.

  She hesitated before she answered. “Oh, yes, we can cure that. We’ll have it all cleared up by morning. But you see, you shouldn’t have a cough at all now. It means . . .” she paused, obviously in some pain. “It means the procedure didn’t work for you,” she said at last, and that was how Alegretta told Rafiel that he was doomed to die in no more than another hundred years, at most.

  When he understood what she was saying, he listened quietly and patiently to all the explanations that went with it. Queerly, he felt sorrier for her than for himself – just then he did, anyway; later on, when it had all sunk in, it was different. But as she was telling him that such failures were very rare, but still they came up now and then, and at least he had survived the attempt, which many unborn babies did not, he interrupted her. “I don’t think you should be a doctor,” he told her, searching her lovely face.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “You take it too hard. You can’t stand giving bad news.”

  She said soberly, “I haven’t had much practice at it, have I?”

  He laughed at her. She looked at him in surprise, but then, he was still in his twenties, and a promise of another hundred years seemed close enough to forever. “Practice on me,” he urged. “When I’m released, let’s have dinner.”

  They did. They had a dozen dinners, those first weeks, and breakfasts too, because that same night he moved into her flat above the hospital wing. They stayed together nearly two weeks; and there had never been another woman like her. “I’ll never tell,” she promised when they parted. “It’s a medical confidence, you know. A secret.” She never had told, either.

  And his career did blossom. In those days, Rafiel didn’t need to be an oddity to be a star, he became a star because he was so damn good.

  It was only later on that he became an oddity as well because, though Alegretta had never told, there were a lot of other checkups, and ultimately somebody else had.

  It had not mattered to Rafiel, then, that Alegretta was nearly a hundred to his twenty. Why should it? Such things made no difference in a world of eternal youth. Alegretta did not look one minute older than himself . . . And it was only later, when she had left him, and he was miserably trying to figure out why, that he realized the meaning of the fact that she never would.

  First run-throughs didn’t matter much. All they were really for was to get the whole cast together, to get s
ome idea of their lines and what the relationship of each character was to the others, who was what to whom. They didn’t act, much less sing; they read their lines at half-voice, eyes on the prompter scroll on the wall more than each other. It didn’t matter that Rafiel’s mind was elsewhere. When others were onstage he took out the fax from Alegretta and read it again. And again. But he wasn’t, he thought, any more inattentive than any of the others. The pretty young Antigone – what was her real name? Bruta? Something like that – was a real amateur, and amateurishly she kept trying to move toward stage front each time she spoke. Which was not often; and didn’t matter, really, because when Mosay came back he would take charge of that sort of thing in his gentle, irresistible way. And Andrev, the Creon, had obviously never even looked at the script, while Sander, who was to play the blind prophet, Tiresias, complained that there wasn’t any point in doing all this without the actual dramaturge being present. Victorium had his hands full.

  But he was dealing with it. When they had finished the quick run-through he dispatched Charlus to start on the choreography of the first scene, where all the Thebans were reciting for the audience their opening misery under the Sphinx. Rafiel was reaching in his pocket for another look at the fax when Victorium came over. “Sind Sie okay, Rafiel?” he asked. “I thought you seemed just a little absent-minded.”

  “Pas du tout,” Rafiel said, stuffing the letter away. Then, admitting it, “Well, just a little, forse. I, ah, had a letter from an old friend.”

  “Yes,” Victorium said, nodding. “Mosay said something about it. Alegretta, was that her name?”

  Rafiel shrugged, not letting his annoyance show. Of course Mosay had known all about Alegretta because Mosay made it a point to know everything there was to know about every one of his artists; but to pry into private mail, and then to discuss it with others, was going too far.

  “Old lovers can still make the heart beat faster, can’t they?” he said.

  “Yes?” Victorium said, not meaning to sound skeptical, but obviously not troubled with any such emotions himself. “Has it been a long time? Will you be seeing her again?”

  “Oh” – startled by the thought, almost afraid of it – “no, I don’t think so. No, probably not – she’s a long way away. She seems to be in one of the orbiters now. You know she used to be a doctor? But now she’s given up medicine, doing some kind of science now.”

  “She sounds like a very interesting person,” Victorium said neutrally – a little absent-minded himself, too, because in the center of the room Charlus had started showing the Thebans the dance parts, and Victorium had not failed to catch the sounds of his own music. Still looking at the Thebans, Victorium said, “Mosay asked me to show you the rough simulation for the opening. Let’s go over to the small screen – oh, hell,” he said interrupting himself, “can you pardonnez-moi a minute? Verdammt, Charlus has got them hopping when the music’s obviously con vivace. I’ll be right back.”

  Rafiel listened to the raised voices, giving them his full willed attention in order to avoid a repetition of the rush of feeling that Victorium’s casual suggestion had provoked. Charlus seemed to be winning the argument, he thought, though the results would not be final until Mosay returned to ratify them. It was a fairly important scene. Antigone, Ismene, Polyneices, and Eteocles – the four children of Oedipus and Jocasta – were doing a sort of pas de quatre in tap, arms linked like the cygnets in Swan Lake, while they sang a recapitulation of how Oedipus came and saved them from the horrid Sphinx. The chorus was being a real chorus, in fact a chorus line, tapping in the background and, one by one, speaking up – a potter, a weaver, a soldier, a household slave – saying yes, but things are going badly now and something must be done. Then Rafiel would make his entrance as Oedipus and the story would roll on . . . but not today.

  Victorium was breathing hard when he rejoined Rafiel. “You can ignore all that,” he said grimly, “because I’m sure Mosay isn’t going to let that dummkopf dance-teacher screw up the grand ensemble. Never mind.” He snapped on the prompter monitor to show what he and Mosay had programmed for the under-the-credits opening. “Let’s get down your part here. This is before the actual story begins, showing you and the Sphinx.”

  Rafiel gave it dutiful attention. Even in preliminary stick-figure simulation, he saw that the monster on the screen was particularly unpleasant-looking, like a winged reptile. “Che the hell cosa is that?”

  “It’s the Sphinx, of course. What else would it be?” Victorium said, stopping the computer simulation so Rafiel could study the creature.

  “It doesn’t look like a sphinx to me. It looks like a crocodile.”

  “Mosay,” Victorium said with satisfaction, “looked it up. Thebes was a city on the Nile, you know. The Nile is famous for crocodiles. They sacrificed people to them.”

  “But this one has wings.”

  “Perchè no? You’re probably thinking of that other Egyptian sphinx. The old one out of the desert? This one’s different. It’s a Theban sphinx, and it looks like whatever Mosay says it looks like.” Victorium gave him the look of someone who would like to chide an actor for wasting time with irrelevant details – if the actor hadn’t happened to be the star of the show. “The important thing is that it was terrorizing the whole city of Thebes, after their ancien roi, Laius, got murdered, until you came along and got rid of it for them. Which, of course, is why the Thebans let you marry Jocasta and be their nouveau roi.” He thought for a moment. “I’ll have to write some new music for the Sphinx to sing the riddle, but,” he said wistfully, “Mosay says we don’t want too much song and dance here because, see, tutta qui is just a kind of prologue. It isn’t in the Sophocles play. We’ll just run it under the credits to mise the scene – oh, merde. What’s that?”

  He was looking at the tel window on the screen, where Rafiel’s name had begun to flash.

  “Somebody’s calling me, I guess,” Rafiel said.

  “You shouldn’t be getting personal calls during rehearsal, should you?” he chided. Then he shrugged. “San ferian. See who it is, will you?”

  But when Rafiel tapped out his acceptance no picture appeared on the screen, just a voice. It wasn’t even the voice of a “who.” It was the serene, impersonal voice of his household server, and it said:

  “A living organism had been delivered to you. It is a gift. I have no program for caring for living creatures. Please instruct me.”

  “Now who in the world,” Rafiel marveled, “would be sending me a pet?”

  It wasn’t anyone in the world – not the planet Earth, anyway; as soon as Rafiel saw the note pinned to the cage, where the snow-white kitten purred contentedly inside, he knew who it was from.

  This is my favorite cat’s best kitten, dear Rafiel. I hope you’ll love it as much as I do.

  Rafiel found himself laughing out loud. How strange of Alegretta. How dear, too! Imagine anyone keeping a pet. It was not the kind of thing immortals were likely to do. Who wanted to get attached to some living thing that was sure to die in only a few years – only a moment, in the long lifetime of people now alive? (Most of them, anyway.) But it was a sweet thought, and a sweet little kitten, he found as he uneasily picked it up out of the cage and set it on his lap. The pretty little thing seemed comfortable there, still purring as it looked up at him out of sleepy blue eyes.

  Most important, it was a gift from Alegretta. He was smiling as, careful not to disturb the little animal, he began searching his data bases for instructions on the care and feeding of kittens.

  7

  Rafiel has decided not to make love to Docilia again. He isn’t sure why. He suspects it has something to do with the fact that the sire of her child is always nearby, which makes him uncomfortable. It isn’t just that they’ve collaborated on creating a fetus that makes him shy off, it is more the fact that they intend to be a family. It is only later that he realizes that that means he can’t bed any of the other members of the troupe, either. Not the Antigone, the little gi
rl named Bruta, though she has asked him to – not even though she happens to have interested him at first, since she has auburn hair and her nose is not perfectly straight. (Perhaps it is because she looks a little bit like Alegretta that he especially doesn’t want to make love to her.) Not any of them, in spite of the fact that, all through his performing life, Rafiel has seldom failed to make love in person to every female he was required to make love to in the performance, on the principle that it added realism to his art. (He wasn’t particularly attracted to most of those women, either, only prepared to make sacrifices for his art.) This time, no. The only sensible reason he can give himself for his decision is that Docilia would surely find out, and it would hurt her feelings to be passed over for the others.

  None of this inordinate chastity was because he didn’t desire sexual intercourse. On the contrary. He didn’t need to program designer dreams of lovemaking. His subconscious did all the programming he needed. Almost every morning he woke from dreams of hot and sweaty quick encounters and dreamily long-drawn-out ones. The root of the problem was that, although he wanted to do it, he didn’t want to do it with anyone he knew. (One possible exception always noted, but always inaccessible.) So he slept alone. When, one morning, some slight noise woke him with the scent of perfumed woman in his nose he supposed it was a lingering dream. Then he opened his eyes. A woman was there, in his room, standing by a chair and just stepping out of the last of her clothing. “Who the hell are you?” he shouted as he sat up.

  The woman was quite naked and entirely composed. She sat on the edge of his bed and said, “I’m Hillaree. You looked so sexy there, I thought I might as well just climb in.”

  “How the hell did you get into my condo?”

  “I’m a dramaturge,” she said simply. “How much would you respect me if I let your doorwarden keep me out?”

  Rafiel turned in the bed to look at her better. She was a curly-headed little thing, with a wide, serious mouth, and he was quite sure he had never seen her before.