by John Varley
So I told Polly about Isambard Comfort and the Demons of Charon. She listened, fascinated, and I wondered if she was thinking about how she would stage this epic tale of pursuit. Les Miserables, Part Two?
But during the telling I came to an uneasy realization, something I really hadn't considered before but probably should have. While the Charonese race was hot on my trail, those near me could be endangered. My failure to consider that had cost Poly dearly.
Polly reached across the table and patted my hand.
"Poor boy," she said. "You've had a terrible time of it. And you think this Comfort person will follow you to Luna?"
"I think we can count on it," I said, miserably. "And I have to think it would put you and the whole production in danger."
"We'll think on that, of course," she said. "But I don't see how it changes much. We were going to have to disguise your identity anyway. We'll just have to be more careful, that's all."
I thought it would be a lot more than just a matter of extra care, but I kept my mouth shut. She was aware of my situation, I had not tried to minimize it, and I felt that was all I was obligated to do.
"So who do you want to be this time?" she asked.
She meant what did I want to use as a stage name. Anywhere in the inner planets I didn't dare use my own name, or make any mention of my previous credits and career. Which was a damn shame, since Polly could make good use of Sparky's return after all these years. It would put butts in seats, as some producer once said.
"Do you have any idea how seriously they're looking for me?"
"I don't think they're looking for you at all, cher," she said. "But you can be sure that if they run across you—if, for instance, they see your name up in lights on The Rialto—they'll drop by with an arrest warrant."
She smiled as she said it, and I had to smile, too. So, as usual, I'd be playing an actor playing King Lear. Do you wonder why I'm not quite right in the head?
"Kenneth, you know my feelings on this matter. I only wish someone had killed him twenty years earlier. Someone else. God knows there were enough people who wanted to. And if I were serving as the judge, you'd go free. But from what I've read about the evidence they have, it will work out as some degree of manslaughter. Five to twenty years. Have you given any more thought to turning yourself in?"
Polly had suggested that fifty years ago. Even with her pitifully short allotment of years, she felt it was better to serve the time than to stay on the run. Get it over with.
There was a lot of wisdom in that, except for one thing. I couldn't do the time. I think I'd rather die. I smiled again, and shook my head.
"Then have you given any more thought to... the other thing."
She was speaking of the insanity defense. It was quite a narrow defense these days, but having an imaginary playmate, hearing voices... there was a good chance that would work.
I had not told Polly about Elwood. I'd spoken to no one about him, ever. But I had hinted at a few things one drunken night, and I think she had sensed a lot more. Not much gets by Polly, and during the years she had spent when we were closer than brother and sister I'm sure she had seen and heard some things she was too discreet to talk to me about.
Again, there was wisdom in the suggestion, except for one thing. I'd rather go to prison. Call it stupid pride if you wish. I'd never talk about Elwood, certainly never in a court of law, especially not to let him take the blame for my actions.
"No," I said. "That's out of the question."
"Then we're back to the first question. Do you have a name?"
I had several, of course.
My post-Sparky career had consisted of three sorts of jobs. Working from Pluto outward, I simply used my own name. Extraditions from those worlds to the inner planets were spotty at best, and arrests on fugitive warrants practically nonexistent. From the J-Trojans, the belt, Mars, and inward, I usually concocted a one-time-only identity, good for the length of the run, then abandoned. And I moved carefully. But from the S-Trojans to Neptune I had been able to foster half a dozen more substantial identities, even build a certain reputation for some of the names. I had citizenship papers that would withstand a moderately rigorous check. In two of the identities I had even paid some local taxes!
I tried out three of the names on Polly. She carefully considered each, and shook her head. She knew everyone in the inner planets, and quite a few from the outers; if the name hadn't registered with her, then it had zero drawing power on Luna. Though this wasn't to be a star turn—the big name in this production would be Polichinelli—it never hurt to have some name recognition.
"How about Carson Dyle?" I asked. She perked up.
"Now him, I've heard of." She rattled off half a dozen of "Carson's" credits. "That's you?" I lowered my chin modestly. "That's a name I can work with then. I'll send it to publicity tomorrow. That is, if everything's in order with him."
"Give me a day to do a few checks," I said. "Carson may owe a little money here and there. You know how it is."
She smiled, and shook her head. "No, I don't, but if old debts is all that stands in the way we're okay. You'll start drawing salary tomorrow; you can just pay them off. Unless..."
"It's not much," I assured her. "Called away suddenly, no time to clear up a few obligations—" She held up a hand and I blushed. There was no need to sugarcoat anything with Polly. "Well, if that horse hadn't stumbled in the final turn, I had fully intended to pay it all off. Carson has a weakness for the ponies."
She laughed, and so did I, after a while. But it is a sobering thought that I had made a mess not only of my own life, but of most of my alter egos as well.
"So where are you staying?"
"I haven't settled on lodgings as yet," I admitted.
"Then I think it best if you stay right here."
I looked around the tiny cabin, and I trust I concealed my dismay.
"I wouldn't want to impose...."
"Behind that door over there, mon cher, is a narrow stair that leads to an attic bedroom. It's small, but you can stand up in the middle. You'll have your privacy, and the best breakfasts and suppers in Bayou Teche."
I said nothing.
"That used to be my bedroom, Kenneth, until it got to be too much of a chore to climb the stairs every night. Now I sleep on the couch over there, and it suits me fine."
"What about this place, anyway?" I asked. She knew what I meant.
"The Bayou? I've always longed for the Earth. I felt all my life that I was born in the wrong era, the wrong place. On Earth, I'd have been a forest creature, a wanderer. And now that I'm old, I'm a creature of the night. I love the night, and you get a lot of it here."
There didn't seem to be anything to say to that. So I raised one last objection—not very strenuously, because the idea of a cozy attic room was beginning to appeal to me.
"I'm not sure you'd be safe, with me hanging around," I said.
"You let me worry about that. If your Charonese nemesis comes sniffing around, we'll see how he deals with eighteen-foot alligators in the dark."
"Izzy could probably kill alligators with one hand. But maybe the mosquitoes would suck him dry while he was doing it."
* * *
Rehearsals began the next day.
My heart wants to go into great detail about it, but my mind knows there is no point in trying. Any production in the live theater merits a book of its own. There is always exhilaration and disaster, feuding and fistfights and fornication. Half the cast usually hates the other half. At some point the set designer or the lighting director storms out of the theater and has to be wheedled back to work. In the last week, as dress rehearsals loom, there is despair. On opening night there will be at least two nasty crises, the one you half expected, and the one that sprang out of nowhere.
And then the curtain rises... and usually the whole mad enterprise works. Nine times out of ten, anyway. There's no guarantee that anyone out there in the dark likes it, but it has all somehow come together. Yo
u and your fellow troupers have created something.
Then comes the final curtain on the final night, and everyone moves on. For a while you had a play. For a while it was a living, thundering thing, and now it's gone. It exists only in the memories of those who made it happen, and those who came to see it. You can't pop a chip into your player and watch it again, you can't rewind to your favorite scene. If you want to see it again you have to assemble a hundred creative and cantankerous egotists, scream and weep and laugh and sweat and work yourself and everybody else to a state near the edge of hysteria, and hope that once more the magic will happen.
It is a glorious madness.
And, like the man said, you had to be there.
Most accounts of the rehearsal and presentation of a work of drama end up sounding like a riot in a kindergarten. A very special kindergarten, attended only by the most precocious, self-centered, hyperactive, and vicious little five-year-old brats. Brats who are used to having things their own way and expect more of the same, now, or brats who have always felt they should have been catered to all their lives, never were, but intend to make up for lost time now.
It is the nature of the beast. Whether the production is full of talented people or people who simply think they are talented, an ego is the only thing that is an absolute constant in show business. Without one, you never pursue the Muse of performance at all.
Basic law of physics as formulated by Sparky: One ego is the only psychological particle that can exist peacefully. Two egos equal warfare. Three or more egos constitute a nuclear reaction. They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for that.
So, we battled, we shouted, we wept, and we clawed. And sometimes we made the magic happen. By opening night, it was happening pretty regularly.
One problem I had anticipated worked out better than I had any right to expect. Rehearsals had actually started four weeks before my arrival. The part of Lear was handled by my understudy. This is a bad way to start a production, with the star still swinging by the orbit of Jupiter. The rest of the cast assumes you're just too, too busy to share sweat with them. This might have worked for an Olivier, but for poor unknown Carson Dyle, it could be disastrous. The only thing that kept things going before my arrival was Polly's iron will and reputation.
"There is only one rule you need to remember to get along with me," she said on the first day, before my arrival. "I am God. You shall address all your prayers to me, and I will answer them. Worship another God, and I will kill you. It's as simple as that."
If she said I was good, most of the cast were at least willing to wait until I got there... and for about ten minutes after that. Naturally, they all professed happiness to see me, and privately hated my guts. The only thing that kept us going during the week after my arrival was my willingness to work twice as hard as everyone else.
But because I did work twice as hard, I earned their respect. And they all were experienced enough to see I was up to the job.
Once in a generation a director or playwright comes along with a truly distinctive vision. Twice, if you're lucky. Anyone can see it and few can describe it. It can't be imitated, though everyone tries, and in the process the course of art is slightly altered. Sometimes this person is a commercial and popular success: Shakespeare, or Alfred Hitchcock. More often he or she is best known among peers; the larger public just doesn't get it.
Not long after leaving Sparky and His Gang, Kaspara Polichinelli became that director for my generation. Since then, she had made one film or staged one play every five years or so. She made a lot of money in her first decade, then moved into less popular areas. The public knew her work always drew critical raves, that she was mentioned along with the greats... and usually stayed away in droves.
That never bothered her. She wasn't doing it for the money.
In the theater, being a legend in your own time has one big advantage. The top people in the field will always work for you, no questions asked. Major stars will slash or waive their astronomical fees. People who had never showed any evidence of talent will suddenly, under the eye and the tutelage of this director, find depths within themselves they never suspected. "Who knew?" the critics write, and the next thing you know a washed-up matinee idol finds himself with a supporting actor Oscar nomination.
This was that sort of cast. All Polly needed to do was send out the call. The best in the business would break contracts, postpone more lucrative projects, for the privilege of being in a Polichinelli production. Hell, it brought me all the way from Pluto.
* * *
There is really no use in introducing a whole cast of characters at this late stage of my tale, any more than filling in all the details of the rehearsals. Even the spear-carriers were good. (You think that doesn't matter? Frank Capra always gave each extra on his productions a little bit of business, even if it was just something to think about as he walked through the scene, some problem to worry over, some destination beyond the other side of the set. And it shows.)
Everyone was professional. The major players were all superb. The set designer and the lighting director and all other technical people were friends of Polly, people who had worked with her many times in the past, and it all went as smoothly as these things ever go.
And in the center of it was Polly. Polly's vision of Lear.
That had worried me. The Five-Minit Bard had been fun, but it was meant to be ridiculous. Many Shakespearean productions over the centuries have been hilarious without intending to be.
I have no objection to taking a story by Shakespeare and using it as the basis of an entirely new production. The great Kurosawa did it several times, in Japanese. And I don't object, per se, to setting the plays in other places, other times—if something can be gained from the exercise. If something new can be illuminated, or if a fresh perspective can be obtained. But in seven hundred years some pretty ridiculous stuff has been tried. I've seen Coriolanus performed by people dressed up as cats. As You Like It set in a Stone Age cavern. All-nude productions. The last King Lear I saw was staged in a disneyland, and the storm scene got out of hand and blew away the stage and half the bleachers.
And yet, you don't want to re-create the Globe Theatre, either. It's been done, a hundred times.
Polly made it clear from the beginning that this was to be straight Shakespeare, full text, no "updating." But of course it would have her stamp on it. That was good enough for me. I put myself in her hands.
I settled in comfortably at Polly's shack. I even got used to the daily commute in the little pirogue, and in time came to understand a few words Beaudreaux was saying.
I warmed Toby up, took him to the vet for maintenance. He became the production mascot, everybody's best friend, and gained three pounds from all the treats people smuggled to him.
I fell in love with our Cordelia, a lovely young woman named Jennipher Wilcox. Polly once told me I fall in love more often than some people change their socks. And it's true, I guess. But it always feels like love. I have never experienced that kind of love where you want to spend the rest of your life with one person. Frankly, I think it was almost always an illusion. I cite the divorce statistics. And today, with life spans that really amount to something, I think that sort of love is even rarer. Not one couple in a thousand is really capable of spending two, three hundred years together. Very few are capable of lasting as long as five years.
So don't give me any crap about love versus lust, okay? And keep your amateur psych opinions about my childhood rendering me incapable of long-term commitment to yourself as well. For my first thirty years my father demanded all the love I had to give. Since then, it would never have been fair to ask anyone to share more than a few months of my life. A cop, a private detective, or an Isambard Comfort would always show up and I'd have to move along.
I did love Jennipher, in my fashion. And we were great in bed.
And the opening night came.
And by the second act intermission everyone knew we had something special. Our s
pies in the lobby reported an astonishingly good buzz. People were actually hurrying back to their seats before the houselights flashed.
And the third act came and went. And the fourth act. We moved into the fifth act and I knew I'd never been better.
God, I was glorious. I was Lear.
Actually, only one thing happened to put a bit of a damper on the evening, though I swear to you, had you been there it wouldn't have affected your enjoyment of the play at all, Mrs. Lincoln.
Midway through the third act, Isambard Comfort showed up in my dressing room....
* * *
He was seated in the big, comfortable easy chair I had requested for relaxing between scenes when Lear wasn't onstage.
He had Toby in his lap. There was no one else in the room.
"Where's Tom?" I asked. Tom was my dresser. Oh, yes, I had once more come up in the world. This was not the closet aboard the Britannic where he and I had first fought, but a spacious, warmly furnished dressing room. A star's dressing room. It had a crackling holo-fireplace, a wet bar, and my own bathroom complete with a small spa. A big television screen showed the action onstage from a camera in the third row.
"Tom is indisposed," he said, and gestured toward a pile of costumes in one corner. I saw one shoe that looked like part of the pair Tom had been wearing. I couldn't tell if Tom's foot was in it.
"Don't worry; he's not dead. He'll wake up in a few hours with nothing worse than a bad headache."
I had been leaning against the door, which I had closed behind me before I saw him. I was dripping wet, my gray hair in untidy ropes that reached my shoulders.
I had prepared a few automatic surprises for him, but none of them could be used without harming Toby. They had been a forlorn hope, anyway. There were weapons here and there, some concealed, some not looking much like weapons, but I doubted my ability to use any of them against his reptilian reactions and hideous strength.
"I've had a little time," he told me. "I've located a few electronic traps and disabled them." He made a gesture toward the Pantechnicon. "I left the life support running in your tricky luggage. We'll use it to smuggle you out of here. The rest of it, the deadly stuff, won't work. I took the trouble to memorize Mac—sorry, 'The Scottish Play' before I got here, so don't try speaking any lines from it in here. I've read up on other actors' beliefs, if you have any ideas about triggering something verbally."
