Dark Benediction

by Walter Michael Miller

  Somewhere downstairs, a door slammed behind D’Uccia.

  “Into death!” hissed Adolfo-Thornier, throwing back his head to laugh Adolfo’s laugh. It rattled the walls. When its reverberations had died away, he felt a little better. He picked up his buckets and brooms and walked on down the corridor to the door of D’Uccia’s office.

  Unless “Judas-Judas” hung on through the weekend, he wouldn’t get to see it, since he could not afford a ticket to the evening performance, and there was no use asking D’Uccia for favors. While he waxed the hall, he burned. He waxed as far as D’Uccia’s doorway, then stood staring into the office for several vacant minutes.

  “I’m fed up,” he said at last.

  The office remained silent. The window-box lilies bowed to the breeze.

  “You little creep!” he growled. “I’m through!”

  The office was speechless. Thornier straightened and tapped his chest.

  “I, Ryan Thornier, am walking out, you hear? The show is finished!”

  When the office failed to respond, he turned on his heel and stalked downstairs. Minutes later, he came back with a small can of gold paint and a pair of artists’ brushes from the storeroom. Again he paused in the doorway.

  “Anything else I can do, Mr. D’Uccia?” he purred. Traffic murmured in the street; the breeze rustled the lilies; the building creaked.

  “Oh? You want me to wax in the wall-cracks, too? How could I have forgotten!”

  He clucked his tongue and went over to the window. Such lovely lilies. He opened the paint can, set it on the window ledge, and then very carefully he glided each of the prize lilies, petals, leaves, and stalks, until the flowers glistened like the work of Midas’ hands in the sun-light. When he finished, he stepped back to smile at them in admiration for a moment, then went to finish waxing the hall.

  He waxed it with particular care in front of D’Uccia’s office. He waxed under the throw rug that covered the worn spot on the floor where D’Uccia had made a sharp left turn into his sanctum every morning for fifteen years, and then he turned the rug over and dusted dry wax powder into the pile. He replaced it carefully and pushed at it a few times with his foot to make certain the lubrication was adequate. The rug slid about as if it rode on a bed of bird-shot.

  Thornier smiled and went downstairs. The world was suddenly different somehow. Even the air smelled different. He paused on the landing to glance at himself in the decorative mirror.

  Ah! the old trouper again. No more of the stooped and haggard menial. None of the wistfulness and weariness of self-perpetuated slavery. Even with the gray at the temples and the lines in the face, here was something of the old Thornier—or one of the many old Thorniers of earlier days. Which one? Which one’ll it be? Adolfo? Or Hamlet? Justin, or J. J. Jones, from “The Electrocutioner”? Any of them, all of them; for he was Ryan Thornier, star, in the old days.

  “Where’ve you been, baby?” he asked his image with a tight smile of approval, winked, and went on home for the evening. Tomorrow, he promised himself, a new life would begin.

  “But you’ve been making that promise for years, Thorny,” said the man in the control booth, his voice edged with impatience. “What do you mean, ‘you quit?’ Did you tell D’Uccia you quit?”

  Thornier smiled loftily while he dabbed with his broom at a bit of dust in the corner. “Not exactly, Richard,” be said. “But the padrone will find it out soon enough.”

  The technician grunted disgust. “I don’t understand you, Thorny. Sure, if you really quit, that’s swell—if you don’t just turn around and get another job like this one.”

  “Never!” the old actor proclaimed resonantly, and glanced up at the clock. Five till ten. Nearly time for D’Uccia to arrive for work. He smiled to himself.

  “If you really quit, what are you doing here today?” Rick Thomas demanded, glancing up briefly from the Maestro. His arms were thrust deep into the electronic entrails of the machine, and he wore a pencil-sized screwdriver tucked behind one ear. “Why don’t you go home, if you quit?”

  “Oh, don’t worry, Richard. This time it’s for real.”

  “Pssss!” An amused hiss from the technician. “Yeah, it was for real when you quit at the Bijou, too. Only then a week later you came to work here. So what now, Mercutio?”

  “To the casting office, old friend. A bit part somewhere, perhaps.” Thornier smiled on him benignly. “Don’t concern yourself about me.”

  “Thorny, can’t you get it through your head that theater’s dead? There isn’t any theater! No movies, no television either—except for dead men and the Maestro here.” He slapped the metal housing of the machine.

  “I meant,” Thorny explained patiently, “‘employment office,’ and ‘small job,’ you… you machine-age flint-smith. Figures of speech, solely.”

  “Yah.”

  “I thought you wanted me to resign my position, Richard.”

  “Yes! If you’ll do something worthwhile with yourself. Ryan Thornier, star of ‘Walkaway,’ playing martyr with a scrub-bucket! Aaaak! You give me the gripes. And you’ll do it again. You can’t stay away from the stage, even if all you can do about it is mop up the oil drippings.”

  “You couldn’t possibly understand,” Thornier said stiffly.

  Rick straightened to look at him, took his arms out of the Maestro and leaned on top of the cabinet. “I dunno, Thorny,” he said in a softer voice. “Maybe I do. You’re an actor, and you’re always playing roles. Living them, even. You can’t help it, I guess. But you could do a saner job of picking the parts you’re going to play.”

  “The world has cast me in the role I play,” Thornier announced with a funereal face.

  Rick Thomas clapped a hand over his forehead and drew it slowly down across his face in exasperation. “I give up!” he groaned. “Look at you! Matinee idol, pushing a broom. Eight years ago, it made sense—your kind of sense, anyhow. Dramatic gesture. Leading actor defies autodrama offer, takes janitor’s job. Loyal to tradition, and the guild—and all that. It made small headlines, maybe even helped the legit stage limp along a little longer. But the audiences stopped bleeding for you after a while, and then it stopped making even your kind of sense!”

  Thornier stood wheezing slightly and glaring at him. “What would you do,” he hissed, “if they started making a little black box that could be attached to the wall up there”—he waved to a bare spot above the Maestro’s bulky housing—“that could repair, maintain, operate, and adjust—do all the things you do to that… that contraption. Suppose nobody needed electronicians any more.”

  Rick Thomas thought about it a few moments, then grinned. “Well, I guess I’d get a job making the little black boxes, then.”

  “You’re not funny, Richard!”

  “I didn’t intend to be.”

  “You’re… you’re not an artist.” Flushed with fury, Thornier swept viciously at the floor of the booth.

  A door slammed somewhere downstairs, far below the above-stage booth. Thorny set his broom aside and moved to the window to watch. The clop, clop, clop of bustling footsteps came up the central aisle.

  “Hizzoner, da Imperio,” muttered the technician, glancing up at the clock. “Either that clock’s two minutes fast, or else this was his morning to take a bath.”

  Thornier smiled sourly toward the main aisle, his eyes traveling after the waddling figure of the theater manager. When D’Uccia disappeared beneath the rear balcony, he resumed his sweeping.

  “I don’t see why you don’t get a sales job, Thorny,” Rick ventured, returning to his work. “A good salesman is just an actor, minus the temperament. There’s lots of demand for good actors, come to think of it. Politicians, top executives, even generals—some of them seem to make out on nothing but dramatic talent. History affirms it.”

  “Bah! I’m no schauspieler.” He paused to watch Rick adjusting the Maestro, and slowly shook his head. “Ease your conscience, Richard,” he said finally.

  Startled
the technician dropped his screwdriver, looked up quizzically. “My conscience? What the devil is uneasy about my conscience?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend. That’s why you’re always so concerned about me. I know you can’t help it that your… your trade has perverted a great art.”

  Rick gaped at him in disbelief for a moment. “You think I—” He choked. He colored angrily. He stared at the old ham and began to curse softly under his breath.

  Thornier suddenly lifted a finger to his mouth and went shhhhh! His eyes roamed toward the back of the theater.

  “That was only D’Uccia on the stairs,” Rick began. “What—?”

  “Shhhh!”

  They listened. The janitor wore a rancid smile. Seconds later it came-first a faint yelp, then Bbbrroommmpb!

  It rattled the booth windows. Rick started up frowning.

  “What the—?”

  “Shhhh!”

  The jolting jar was followed by a faint mutter of profanity.

  “That’s D’Uccia. What happened?”

  The faint mutter suddenly became a roaring stream of curses from somewhere behind the balconies.

  “Hey!” said Rick. “He must have hurt himself.”

  “Naah. He just found my resignation, that’s all. See? I told you I’d quit.”

  The profane bellowing grew louder to the accompaniment of an elephantine thumping on carpeted stairs.

  “He’s not that sorry to see you go,” Rick grunted, looking baffled.

  D’Uccia burst into view at the head of the aisle. He stopped with his feet spread wide, clutching at the base of his spine with one hand and waving a golden lily aloft in the other.

  “Lily gilder!” he screamed. “Pansy painter! You fancypantsy bona! Come out, you fonny fenny boy!”

  Thornier thrust his head calmly through the control-booth window, stared at the furious manager with arched brows. “You calling me, Mr. D’Uccia?”

  D’Uccia sucked in two or three gasping breaths before he found his bellow again.

  “Thornya!”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Itsa finish, you hear?”

  “What’s finished, boss?”

  “Itsa finish. I’ma go see the servo man. Pma go get me a swip-op machine. You gotta two wiks notice.”

  “Tell him you don’t want any notice,” Rick grunted softly from nearby. “Walk out on him.”

  “All right, Mr. D’Uccia,” Thornier called evenly. D’Uccia stood there sputtering, threatening to charge, waving the lily helplessly. Finally he threw it down in the aisle with a curse and whirled to limp painfully out. “Whew!” Rick breathed. “What did you do?” Thornier told him sourly. The technician shook his head.

  “He won’t fire you. He’ll change his mind. It’s too hard to hire anybody to do dirty-work these days.”

  “You heard him. He can buy an autojan installation. ‘Swip-op’ machine.”

  “Baloney! Dooch is too stingy to put out that much dough. Besides, he can’t get the satisfaction of screaming at a machine.”

  Thornier glanced up wryly. “Why can’t he?”

  “Well—” Rick paused. “Ulp!… You’re right. He can. He came up here and bawled out the Maestro once. Kicked it, yelled at it, shook it—like a guy trying to get his quarter back out of a telephone. Went away looking pleased with himself, too.”

  “Why not?” Thorny muttered gloomily. “People are machines to D’Uccia. And he’s fair about it. He’s willing to treat them all alike.”

  “But you’re not going to stick around two weeks, are you?”

  “Why not? It’ll give me time to put out some feelers for a job.”

  Rick grunted doubtfully and turned his attention back to the machine. He removed the upper front panel and set it aside. He opened a metal canister on the floor and lifted out a foot-wide foot-thick roll of plastic tape. He mounted it on a spindle inside the Maestro, and began feeding the end of the tape through several sets of rollers and guides. The tape appeared wormeaten-covered with thousands of tiny punch-marks and wavy grooves. The janitor paused to watch the process with cold hostility.

  “Is that the script-tape for the ‘Anarch?’” he asked stiffly.

  The technician nodded. “Brand new tape, too. Got to be careful how I feed her in. It’s still got fuzz on it from the recording cuts.” He stopped the feed mechanism briefly, plucked at a punchmark with his awl, blew on it, then started the feed motor again.

  “What happens if the tape gets nicked or scratched?” Thorny grunted curiously. “Actor collapse on stage?”

  Rick shook his head. “Naa, it happens all the time. A scratch or a nick’ll make a player muff a line or maybe stumble, then the Maestro catches the goof, and compensates. Maestro gets feedback from the stage, continuously directs the show. It can do a lot of compensating, too.”

  “I thought the whole show came from the tape”

  The technician smiled. “It does, in a way. But it’s more than a recorded mechanical puppet show, Thorny. The Maestro watches the stage… no, more than that… the Maestro is the stage, an electronic analogue of it.” He patted the metal housing. “All the actors’ personality patterns are packed in here. It’s more than a remote controller, the way most people think of it. It’s a creative directing machine. It’s even got pickups out in the audience to gauge reactions to—”

  He stopped suddenly, staring at the old actor’s face. He swallowed nervously. “Thorny don’t look that way. I’m sorry. Here, have a cigarette.”

  Thorny accepted it with trembling fingers. He stared down into the gleaming maze of circuitry with narrowed eyes, watched the script-belt climb slowly over the rollers and down into the bowels of the Maestro.

  “Art!” he hissed. “Theater! What’d they give you your degree in, Richard? Dramaturgical engineering?”

  He shuddered and stalked out of the booth. Rick listened to the angry rattle of his heels on the iron stairs that led down to stage level. He shook his head sadly, shrugged, went back to inspecting the tape for rough cuts.

  Thorny came back after a few minutes with a bucket and a mop. He looked reluctantly repentant. “Sorry, lad,” he grunted. “I know you’re just trying to make a living, and—”

  “Skip it,” Rick grunted curtly.

  “It’s just… well… this particular show. It gets me.”

  “This—? ‘The Anarch,’ you mean? What about it, Thorny? You play in it once?”

  “Uh-uh. It hasn’t been on the stage since the Nineties, except—well, it was almost revived ten years ago. We rehearsed for weeks. Show folded before opening night. No dough.”

  “You had a good part in it?”

  “I was to play Andreyev,” Thornier told him with a faint smile.

  Rick whistled between his teeth. “The lead. That’s too bad.” He hoisted his feet to let Thorny mop under them. “Big disappointment, I guess.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just… well… ‘The Anarch’ rehearsals were the last time Mela and I were on stage together. That’s all.”

  “Mela?” The technician paused, frowning. “Mela Stone?”

  Thornier nodded.

  Rick snatched up a copy of the uncoded script, waved it at him. “But she’s in this version, Thorny! Know that! She’s playing Marka.”

  Thornier’s laugh was brief and brittle.

  Rick reddened slightly. “Well, I mean her mannequin’s playing it.”

  Thorny eyed the Maestro distastefully. “Your mechanical Svengali’s playing its airfoam zombies in all roles, you mean.”

  “Oh, cut it out, Thorny. Be sore at the world if you want to, but don’t blame me for what audiences want. And I didn’t invent autodrama anyhow.”

  “I don’t blame anybody. I merely detest that… that—” He punched at the base of the Maestro with his wet plop.

  “You and D’Uccia,” Rick grunted disgustedly. “Except—D’Uccia loves it when it’s working O.K. It’s just a machine, Thorny. Why hate it?”

  “Don’t need a reaso
n to hate it,” he said snarly-petulant. “I hate air-cabs, too. It’s a matter of taste, that’s all.”

  “All right, but the public likes autodrama—whether it’s by TV, stereo, or on stage. And they get what they want.”

  “Why?”

  Rick snickered. “Well, it’s their dough. Autodrama’s portable, predictable, duplicatable. And flexible. You can run ‘Macbeth’ tonight, the ‘Anarch’ tomorrow night, and ‘King of the Moon’ the next night—in the same house. No actor-temperament problems. No union problems. Rent the packaged props, dolls, and tapes from Smithfield. Packaged theater. Systematized, mass-produced. In Coon Creek, Georgia, yet.”

  “Bah!”

  Rick finished feeding in the script tape, closed the panel, and opened an adjacent one. He ripped the lid from a cardboard carton and dumped a heap of smaller tape-spools on the table.

  “Are those the souls they sold to Smithfield?” Thornier asked, smiling at them rather weirdly.

  The technician’s stool scraped back and he exploded: “You know what they are!”

  Thornier nodded, leaned closer to stare at them as if fascinated. He plucked one of them out of the pile, sighed down at it.

  “If you say ‘Alas, poor Yorick,’ I’ll heave you out of here!” Rick grated.

  Thornier put it back with a sigh and wiped his hand on his coveralls. Packaged personalities. Actor’s egos, analogized on tape. Real actors, once, whose dolls were now cast in the roles. The tapes contained complex psychophysiological data derived from months of psychic and somatic testing, after the original actors had signed their Smithfield contracts. Data for the Maestro’s personality matrices. Abstractions from the human psyche, incarnate in glass, copper, chromium. The souls they rented to Smithfield on a royalty basis, along with their flesh and blood likenesses in the dolls.

  Rick loaded a casting spool onto its spindle, started it feeding through the pickups.

  “What happens if we leave out a vital ingredient? Such as Mela Stone’s tape, for instance,” Thornier wanted to know.

  “The doll’d run through its lines like a zombie, that’s all,” Rick explained. “No zip. No interpretation. Flat, deadpan, like a robot.”