Star Song and Other Stories

by Timothy Zahn

  He didn't. With a roar that shook the spotlight battens, he climbed up on the empty seat backs in front of him and made a ponderous beeline for the stage.

  The actors froze into statues, staring wide-eyed at this pinfeathered Goliath bearing down on them in slow motion. Making his way across the seats and the covered orchestra pit, he made a huge bound up onto the stage, landing with a thud that must have shaken the whole block. He turned around, filled his lungs, and bellowed.

  You've never seen a theater clear out so fast. The orchestra and mezzanine both—it just emptied out like someone was giving away free beer outside. It was a miracle that no one was killed or seriously injured; even more of a miracle, in my book, that no one filed any lawsuits afterward for bruised shins or torn clothing. I guess the thought of facing a huge unpredictable alien in court made quiet discretion the smart move on everyone's part.

  But at the time, I wasn't convinced any of us would be getting out of the St.

  James alive. With the ambassador's second bellow even the actors lost it, scurrying for the wings like they'd spotted a critic with an Uzi. I was cowering in my seat, trying desperately hard to be invisible, unwilling to move until had a straight shot at an exit that wasn't already jammed with people. The ambassador, still bellowing, had begun pacing back and forth across the now empty stage when Angus grabbed my arm. "Look!" he shouted over the hysterical bedlam.

  "I see him!" I shouted back, momentarily hating Angus for drawing unnecessary attention our direction. "Shut up before he—"

  "No!" Angus snapped, jabbing a finger at the RebuScope monitor he was carrying.

  "He's not just roaring at nothing—he's talking to us!"

  I looked at the RebuScope... and damned if he wasn't right. "Fine," I shouted. "So what does it mean?"

  "I don't know," Angus said. More pictures were starting to scroll along the screen; punching for a hard copy, he tore off the first part of the message and thrust it into my hands. "Here—see what you can figure out."

  I shrank back into my seat, half my attention on the paper, the other half on the ambassador still pacing and roaring. Th-hiss book hiss awl th-hat eye knee-d—

  None of this made any sense. It really didn't. In the five weeks I'd been with the ambassador he'd never so much as raised his voice.

  Howl two howl two drink—

  And anyway, what in the world could be important enough for him to interrupt a

  play for? A play he himself had asked to attend?

  Drink? No, not drink. Straw? Howl two straw? No. Ah—suck. Howl two suck-see-d...

  And then, with a sudden horrible jolt, I had it. I took another look at the rebus—glanced at the new pictures that Angus was getting—

  "I've got it!" I yelled, grabbing Angus's arm and waving my paper in front of him. " 'This book is all that I need/ How to, How to Succeed.' "

  He blinked at me. "What?"

  "It's part of a song," I told him. "The opening song from the classic musical

  'How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.' "

  Angus looked up at the ambassador, his mouth falling slightly open. "You mean—?"

  "You got it," I said. "The ambassador's not talking to us. He's singing." It took till after midnight for Fogerty to get the preliminary damage control finished with the St. James management. An hour after that, he held a council of war in the hotel.

  A very small council of war, consisting of Fogerty, Angus, and me. I'm still not exactly sure why I'd been included, unless that as our resident Broadway expert I was the one Fogerty was planning to pin the fiasco on.

  Not that he wasn't willing to apportion everyone a share of the blame if he could manage it. Fogerty was generous that way. "All right, MacLeod, let's hear it," he said icily as he closed the door behind us. "What the bloody-red hell happened?"

  "The same thing that's happened before, sir," Angus said calmly, letting Fogerty's glare bounce right off him. "The RebuScope made a mistake."

  "Really," Fogerty said, turning the glare up another couple of notches. "The RebuScope. Convenient enough excuse."

  "I don't think 'convenient' is exactly the word I would have chosen," Angus said. "But it is what happened."

  He pressed keys on the RebuScope monitor, pulling up a copy of the ambassador's original Broadway request. "A very simple error, actually, compared with some we've seen. You see this letter C? It should have been a B."

  A frown momentarily softened Fogerty's glare by a couple of horsepower.

  "What?"

  "The message wasn't 'I want to see a Broadway play,' " Angus amplified. "It was

  'I want to be a Broadway play.' "

  For a long minute Fogerty just stood there, staring down at the RebuScope, a look of disbelief on his face. "But that's absurd," he said when he finally found his voice again. " 'I want to be in a—?' No. It's ridiculous."

  "Nevertheless, sir, that's what he wants," Angus said. "The question now is how you're going to get it for him."

  Fogerty tried the glare again, but his heart was clearly no longer in it.

  "Me?"

  "You're the head of this operation," Angus reminded him. "You're the one who talks to the White House, authorizes the expenditures, and accepts the official plaudits. We await your instructions. Sir."

  For another minute Fogerty was silent, gazing at and through Angus. Then, with obvious reluctance, he turned to look at me. "I suppose you have the contacts for this one, too?"

  With anyone else who treated people the way Fogerty did, I'd have been tempted to demand a little groveling before I gave in. But, down deep, I suspected that being polite to underlings was as close as Fogerty ever got to a grovel. "I know a few people," I said. "There may be a way to pull it off."

  "Seems to me there are at least two stage versions of 'Beauty and the Beast'

  out there, aren't there?" Angus suggested. "He'd be a natural."

  "Wouldn't work," I said, shaking my head. "Too many lines. Too much real acting."

  "How about a non-speaking role, then?" Fogerty suggested. "Maybe a walk-on part?"

  I snorted. "Would you travel a three hundred light-years for a walk-on part?"

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. "No, I suppose not," he conceded. "I suppose that also lets out any chance of using him as part of the set decoration."

  "It does," I agreed. "Which leaves only one approach, at least only one I can think of. We're going to have to have a play written especially for him."

  Fogerty waved a hand. "Of course," he said, as if it had been obvious all along.

  "Well. The phone's over there—better get busy."

  "What, you mean now?" I asked, looking at my watch. "It's after one in the morning."

  "New York is the city that never sleeps, isn't it?" he countered, jabbing a finger at the phone. "Besides, we need to get this on track. Go on, start punching."

  There were six New York playwrights with whom I had at least a passing acquaintance. The first five numbers I tried shunted me to answering machines or services. My sixth try, to Mark Skinner, actually went through. "Mr. Skinner, this is Adam Lebowitz," I said. "I don't know if you remember me, but I was assistant set designer when your play Catch the Rainbow was at the Marquis. I'm the one—"

  "Oh, sure," he interrupted. "You're the one who came up with that rotating chandelier/staircase gizmo, weren't you? That was a snazzy trick—tell you the truth, I was damned if I could see how that was going to work when I wrote it into the play. So what's up?"

  "I'm currently attached to the State Department group in charge of escorting the Fuzhtian ambassador around," I said. "We're—"

  "Oh, yeah, sure—Lebowitz. Yeah, I remember seeing you in the background in one of those TV shots. Couldn't place you at the time—that was you in the brown suit and Fedora sort of thing, right? Sure. So what's up?"

  "The ambassador wants to be in a Broadway play," I told him. "We need you to write it for him."

  There was a long silence. "You what?"


  "We need you to write a play for him," I repeated.

  "Ah," he said. "Uh... yeah. Well... can he act?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Oh, and the only translator he brought with him prints everything he says in rebus pictures."

  "Uh-huh. And you're sure he really wants to do this?"

  "We think so. He climbed up on the stage at the St. James tonight and started singing from 'How to Succeed.' "

  Mark digested that. "So you're wanting a musical?"

  "I don't think it really matters," I said. "Fuzhtian singing voices seem to be the same as their speaking ones, except a lot louder. Might help with stage projection, but otherwise it's not going to make much difference."

  "Yeah," Mark said. "And how loud can you make a rebus, anyway? Sure, I'll take a

  crack at it. How soon do you need this?"

  I looked at Fogerty. "He says sure, and how soon."

  "Tell him two days."

  I goggled. "What?"

  "Two days." Fogerty gestured impatiently at the phone. "Go on, tell him."

  I swallowed. "Mr. Fogerty, the head of the delegation, says he needs it in two days."

  I don't remember Mark's response to that exactly. I do know it lasted nearly five minutes, covered the complete emotional range from incredulity to outrage and back again, tore apart in minute detail Fogerty's heritage, breeding, intelligence, integrity, and habits, and never once used a single swear word.

  Playwrights can be truly awesome sometimes.

  Finally, he ran down. "Two days, huh?" he said, sounding winded but much calmer.

  "Okay, fine, he's on. You want to tell him what it's going to cost?"

  He quoted me a number that would have felt right at home in a discussion of the national debt. I relayed it to Fogerty and had the minor satisfaction of seeing him actually pale a little. For a second I thought he was going to abandon the whole idea, but he obviously realized he wouldn't do any better anywhere else.

  So with a pained look on his face he gave a single stiff nod. "He says OK," I told Mark.

  "Fine," Mark said, all brisk business now. "I'll have it ready in forty-eight hours. Incidentally, I trust you realize how utterly insane this whole thing is."

  Privately, I agreed with him. Publicly, though, I was a company man now. "The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity," I told him.

  "I hope you're right," he grunted. "So where do you want the play delivered?" The next two days were an incredible haze of whirlwind chaos. While Fogerty and a skeleton crew escorted the ambassador on a tour of New York, the rest of us worked like maniacs to organize his theatrical debut. There was a theater to hire on a couple of days' notice—no mean feat on Broadway—a complete stage crew to assemble, a casting agent to retain for whatever other parts Mark wrote into this forty-eight-hour wonder, and a hundred other details that needed to get worked out.

  To my quite honest astonishment, they all did. We got the Richard Rodgers theater hired for an off-hours matinee, the backstage personnel fell into line like I'd never seen happen, and Mark got his play delivered within two hours of his promised deadline.

  The play was a masterpiece in its own unique way: an actual, coherent story completely cobbled together from famous scenes and lines from other plays and movies. Fogerty nearly had an apoplectic fit when he saw it, wondering at the top of his lungs why he should be expected to pay a small fortune for what was essentially a literary retread. I calmed him down by pointing out that (A)

  this would allow an obvious entertainment buff like the ambassador to learn his lines with a minimum of rehearsal time, which would get this whole thing over with more quickly and enable us to get out of our overpriced Manhattan hotel and back to the overpriced Washington hotel which the government already had a lease on; and (B) that Mark had even managed to choose scenes and lines that should translate reasonably well on the RebuScope, which would help make the show at least halfway intelligible for the audience. Eventually, Fogerty cooled down.

  We met at nine sharp the next morning for the first rehearsal... and, as I should have expected, ran full-bore into our first roadblock.

  "What's the problem now?" Fogerty demanded, hovering over Angus like a neurotic mother bird.

  "I don't know," Angus replied. "It's the same message that started this whole thing: 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' "

  "So he's in one," Fogerty bit out, throwing a glare up at the brightly lit stage. The ambassador was standing motionless in the center, repeating the same message over and over, while the other actors and crew stood nervously watching him, most of them from what they obviously hoped was a safe distance. News of the St. James incident had clearly gotten around.

  "I know that, sir," Angus said calmly. "Perhaps he doesn't understand the concept of rehearsals."

  Fogerty trotted out the next in line of his exotic curses, sharing this one between the RebuScope and the ambassador himself. "Then you'd better try to explain it to him, hadn't you?" Angus stood up. "I'll try, sir."

  "Wait a minute," I said suddenly, leaning over Angus's shoulder. "That doesn't say 'I want to be in a Broadway play.' It says 'I want to be a Broadway play.'"

  "What?" Fogerty leaned over Angus's other shoulder.

  "There's no 'in' in the message," I explained, pointing. "See? 'Eye w-ant to—'"

  "I see what it says," Fogerty snapped. "So what the hell does it mean?"

  Angus craned his head to look at me. "Are you suggesting...?"

  "I'm afraid so," I said, nodding soberly. "He wants to be a Broadway play.

  The whole Broadway play."

  There was a moment of shocked silence in which the only sound was the ambassador's rumbling. "He must be joking," Fogerty choked out at last. "He can't do a one-man show."

  "Would it be any more incomprehensible to an audience than what we've already got planned?" Angus pointed out heavily. "None of this really makes any sense in the first place."

  Fogerty turned a glare on me. "I am not," he said, chewing out each word,

  "mortgaging the White House to pay for another play."

  "The Fuzhties have a great deal to offer humanity," I reminded him. "If we don't keep him happy—"

  "I am not," he repeated, gazing unblinkingly at me, "paying for another play."

  I looked up at the stage, trying to think. A one-man play.... "Well, then, we'll just have to use this one," I said slowly. "The ambassador's already got the lion's share of the lines. If we just take the other actors off the stage..."

  "Rear-project them, maybe?" Angus offered. "Like—like what?"

  "Like they're all part of a dream," I said. "The whole thing can be done as a monologue: his reminiscences of life on the stage."

  "You're both crazy," Fogerty said. But there was a thoughtful tone in his voice, the tone of someone who has exactly one straw to grasp at and is trying to figure out where to get the best grip on it. "You think you could do the rewrite, Lebowitz?"

  I shrugged. "You'd do better to see if Mark would—but if you'd rather, I could probably handle it," I corrected hastily at the sudden glint in his eye. "But it would take some time."

  "You've got three hours," he said, snapping his fingers and gesturing his secretary over to us. "Lee can handle the typing and other paperwork—you concentrate on being creative."

  It turned out to be easier than I'd expected to convert the play down to a one-man format, and I still sometimes wonder if Mark deliberately designed it with that possibility lurking in the back of his coffee-soaked mind. Still, the whole job took nearly four hours, and Fogerty was about ready to climb the scrims by the time Lee and I emerged from the basement dressing room where we'd been working.

  "Took your sweet time about it," he growled, snatching the sheaf of paper.

  "You want it good or you want it fast?" I quoted the old line.

  "I want it fast," he retorted, rifling through the pages. "Who's going to know from 'good' on this thing anyway? Come on."

  He led the way onto th
e stage, where the ambassador was bellowing at the top of his lungs. Singing, Fuzhtie style. Vaguely, I wondered which musical he was doing this time. "While you two were twiddling your thumbs down there, we got a

  sort of rear projection system put together," Fogerty told us. "That'll take care of the other actors—excuse me; the extras. The bad news is that we've only got a couple of hours now before we have to clear out for today."

  "That should be enough time for a run-through," I said. "And the ambassador seems to be a quick study. Let's try it."

  We did, and he was. But even more than that: if Angus was interpreting the RebuScope messages correctly, he absolutely loved the play. We got all the way through it and were five pages into a second reading when the stage manager arrived to kick us out.

  The ambassador didn't want to leave, of course, and seemed quite prepared to make a major diplomatic incident out of it. Fortunately, Fogerty had anticipated this one and had already arranged to rent one of our hotel's ballrooms so that we could continue the rehearsal over there. The ambassador acceded with what I

  thought was uncharacteristic good grace, and we all trooped back. For a long time after that, through the wee hours of the morning, you could hear his dulcet singing tones from everywhere near the ballroom, as well as from certain portions of two other floors. Rumors that he could also be heard in Brooklyn were apparently unfounded.

  We had one more day of rehearsals, and then it was opening night. Opening afternoon. Whatever.

  I'd been too busy the past few days to get around to wondering exactly what Fogerty was going to do about an audience. I suppose I was assuming he would simply round up the members of the local Federal employees' unions—and any other warm bodies he could find—and plop them down in theater seats, at direct gunpoint if necessary.

  Nothing could have been farther from the truth. New York Mayor Grenoble and half the city council had turned out to see the play, along with several high-ranking members of the governor's office, and even the Vice President and a Secret Service contingent. The rest of the theater was packed with playwrights, actors, and your basic upper-crust New York intelligentsia. Somehow, Fogerty had managed to get this billed as The Event Of The Season, and no one who considered himself a theater aficionado was about to miss it. Under the circumstances, I wasn't surprised to learn Fogerty was also charging them $150 apiece.