"Do I sing to your satisfaction, sirrah?"
He could see the spit of her sibilants in the spot beam. He shook his head and said: "Not sirrah, no. That's by way of insult. Sir will do nicely. Aye, madam, you sing prettily. Can you dance as well?"
"I can dance the galliard and the high lavolta and eke the heels-in-the-air."
"I thank you for that eke, more expressive than also, however much it may be taken for a mouse stirring." By God, now it was coming. "Can you dance the dance called the Beginning of the World?"
"Nay, sir, I know it not."
"Then, madam, I will teach you." And he, kicking out the Enderby as unworthy and becoming solely, though with a loose lower denture, Shakespeare, advanced upon her, upstage as she already was and near to that day bed. He clipped her in Shakespeare's arms and did buss her rouged lips. His or Shakespeare's heart beat hard and hot. Had having and in quest to have. All was justified; this was, by God, no more than aesthetic duty. He had her on that daybed and lay upon her. For Christ's sake her occluded mouth tried to utter. He mouthed juicily the smooth brown of her wholly exposed shoulders and then, obeying Shakespeare's own Venus, Anne Hathaway really, strayed lower where the. By God, madam, I have thee, I love, I love. He was aware of the sturdy filling of his codpiece, really inside now, Mercutio, Benvolio, the codpieced lot of them. Then he heard a voice saying:
"Madam, Richard the Third is here."
He tried to get his line out but could not. There were certain necessities that obliterated the obligations of art. Nay, more – was it not said that if a man made love on a railway line with an express train fast approaching he must say to himself that the driver had brakes and he not? Enderby was brakeless. But his panting succuba thrust him away and called:
"Tell him William the Conqueror came before -"
Then a whistle shrilled. That was the express coming. Bugger it, it had brakes, had it not? But it sounded like a police whistle. The watch had caught him at it, towsing in public, hale him before the Puritan magistrates for foul fornication. But the man who, to Enderby's surprise and Shakespeare's disgust, had just walked on the stage was in the costume of the twentieth century, that was to say a drab raincoat. He blew, as he had evidently blown before, his whistle, and then he addressed the audience. Enderby could not clearly hear what he said; he disdained the forward tone projection of the actor, though he said something about the actors' union. He pointed at Enderby, or Shakespeare, apparently to indicate that here was a foul fault and a sinful wight, to wit a non union member. Performance discontinued. Union regulation. Enderby, still clipping April Elgar, though looking towards the little expostulator with open mouth, now leapt off her and strode down, aware dimly of intercrucial wetness, to the edge of the apron and tried to push the man off. The man, who wore glasses that were filled with stage light, hit back. Enderby cried to the audience:
"I'm not acting now so this bastard here has no right to shove at me like that. Can you imagine such a monstrosity occurring at a stage performance in Shakespeare's own day? Shakespeare looks down from the heavens in disgust. Union rules, quotha. Devices of protection have become devices for dealing the death of the drama. Only one performance ever failed to reach its conclusion in Shakespeare's time, and that was in the Globe playhouse in 1613 when Henry VIII was being for the first time presented and the thatch caught fire." From nowhere, though it might have been the flies, the word fire was, with a howl, repeated. The house lights came swiftly up. Enderby now saw, very rawly revealed, real seated people ready to unseat themselves, a lot of them, uneasily looking for the source of the cry or the source of the referent of the cry. Fire. "Stay where you are, damn it," Enderby yelled, as people began to panic their way into the aisles. "There's no fire, I just said fire, that's all." Fire came again. There was already the beginning of a dangerous pushing out, that woman there looked as if she expected to be trampled. "Come back," Enderby called, "blast it. Back, you stupid buggers." And, to the gawping orchestra, "Play, damn it." Shakespeare on the Titanic. They began to play, though not all the same thing. The audience, which had seen on films audiences tumbling out from fires, ready to trample, tumbled out none the less, ready to trample. Bloody Americans, no discipline, too prone to panic.
"My last number," April Elgar called to Pip Wesel. She got a lumpish four bars in and began:
"Love, you say love.
What you talking about
Is filthy philandering,
Goosing and gandering -"
Some of the audience turned, some even considered reoccupying their seats. Most left. A man lay in an aisle, not dead. A woman whimpered, looking for probably a child or a handbag or something. Enderby said:
"A pity. It wasn't going too badly."
"Yeah," April Elgar said, "not too badly. Ah, let's go." The stage was filling with stagehands and members of cast. No fucking fire, someone said. Enderby saw the union man in hot colloquy with Jed Tilbury. He pushed the union man in the small of the back with his, or Shakespeare's, nief. The man counted things, probably rules, off on his fingers.
"Some of this?" the fag Oldfellow's dresser suggested, proffering the fluted bottle. Enderby nodded: some of that. April Elgar nodded too. "I only got the one glass," the dresser said. Enderby now saw that he was wearing, had been all the time, the computer wristwatch she had given him for Christmas. He said:
"Never noticed. Nobody noticed. God curse everybody. First man to wear a wristwatch was Blaise Pascal. After Shakespeare's time. Stupid bugger that I am. Uncyclical future. Time a straight line. Domine non sum dignus. Domina too, for that matter. Got to get away. The shame of it all. The bastards owe me money. Where are the bastards?"
"That," she said, pointing. She was pointing at the letter she had herself delivered. "Better open it. Felt to me like more than a letter."
Enderby sliced the envelope open with what had recently been Shakespeare's right index finger. Dollar bills, each of a hundred. Five in all. He frowned, puzzled. He read the note. It was from Dr R. F. Grigson and addressed Enderby as Dear Brother. Distressed to see how service in the Lord's name had brought to a stage of nervous breakdown, not uncommon in the vocation of pastor. Perhaps a brief vocation (crossed out and vacation substituted) might help to restore to health and renewed vigour in the preaching of the Word. The congregation had been glad to help. The widow's mite even. No mighty sum but still. God's blessings and much sympathy and affection. Enderby showed her the letter. She had already seen the money. "Now," she said, "you better go home. I said they were good people."
"I wonder," wondered Enderby, "how much he minded. I wonder if he'll have an air crash waiting for me. Or skyjackers or whatever they're called."
"Everything going to be all right. He liked people to act, right? He was an actor first, right? Here everything going to be all right because of the publicity. One thing won't get in the newspapers, though. A man having to pretend to be William Shakespeare before he can dance the Beginning of the World. You sure are one great big pain in the ass," she said.
"I have this poem to write," Enderby said, having tasted with little relish the sweet fire of Southern Comfort. What he needed was a mug of tea, my kind of, with seven bags. "You gave me something to write about."
"Yeah, that was all it was for. Giving you something to write about. Brother, I been used for a lot of things in my life, but never before to give a guy something to write about."
"Well," Enderby said stoutly, "poetry has to go on. Nobody wants it, but we have to have it. There's something else I have to write first, though. A little story. Leave Well Alone or Leave Will Alone, some such title. About Shakespeare. If he'll allow it."
"You wanna get that stuff off?" the dresser asked. Meaning the beard and the wig and the 5 and 9. Shakespeare looked at Enderby from the mirror and coldly nodded.
12
The Muse
The hands of Swenson ranged over the five manuals of the instrument console and, in cross rhythm, his feet danced on the pedals. He was a ve
ry old man, waxed over with the veneer of rejuvenation chemicals. Very wise, with a century of experience behind him, he yet looked much of an age with Paley, the twenty-five-year-old literary historian by his side. Paley grinned nervously when Swenson said:
"It won't be quite what you think. It can't be absolutely identical. You may get shocks when you least expect them. I remember taking Wheeler that time, you know. Poor devil, he thought it was going to be the fourteenth century he knew from his books. But it was a very different fourteenth century. Thatched cottages and churches and manors and so on, and lovely cathedrals. But there were polycephalic monsters running the feudal system, with tentacles too. Speaking the most exquisite Norman French, he said."
"How long was he there?"
"He was sending signals through within three days. But he had to wait a year, poor devil, before we could get him out. He was in a dungeon, you know. They got suspicious of his Middle English or something. White-haired and gibbering when we got him aboard. His jailors had been a sort of tripodic ectoplasm."
"That wasn't in System B303, though, was it?"
"Obviously not." The old man came out in Swenson's snappishness. "It was a couple of years ago. A couple of years ago System B303, or at least the K2 part of it, was enjoying the doubtful benefits of proto-Elizabethan rule. As it still is."
"Sorry. Stupid of me."
"Some of you young men," Swenson said, going over to the bank of monitor screens, "expect too much of Time. You expect historical Time to be as plastic as the other kinds. Because the microchronic and macrochronic flows can be played with, you consider you ought to be able to do the same thing with -"
"Sorry, sorry, sorry. I just wasn't thinking." With so much else on his mind, was it surprising that he should be temporarily ungeared to the dull realities of clockwork time, solar time?
"That's the trouble with you young – Ah," said Swenson with satisfaction, "that was a beautiful changeover." With the smoothness of the tongue gliding from one phonemic area to another, the temporal path had become a spatial one. The uncountable megamiles between Earth and System B303 had been no more to their ship than, say, a two-way transatlantic flipover. And now, in reach of this other Earth – so dizzyingly far away that it was the same as their own, though at an earlier stage of history – the substance vedmum had slid them, as from one dream to another, into a world where solid objects might exist that were so alien as to be familiar, fulfilling the bow-bent laws of the cosmos. Swenson, who had been brought up on the interchangeability of time and space, could yet never cease to marvel at the miracle of the almost yawning casualness with which the nacheinander turned into the nebeneinander (there was no doubt, the old German words caught it best). So far the monitor screens showed nothing, but tape began to whir out from the crystalline corignon machine in the dead centre of the control turret – coldly accurate information about the solar system they were now entering. Swenson read it off, nodding, a Nordic spruce of a man glimmering with chemical youth. Paley looked at him, leaning against the parferate bulkhead, envying the tallness, the knotty strength. But, he thought, Swenson could never disguise himself as an inhabitant of a less well-nourished era. He, Paley, small and dark as one of those far distant Silurians of the dawn of Britain, could creep into the proto-Elizabethan England they would soon be approaching and never be remarked as an alien.
"Amazing how insignificant the variants are," Swenson said. "How finite the cosmos is, how shamefully incapable of formal renewals -"
"Oh, come," Paley smiled.
"When you consider what the old musicians could do with a mere twelve notes -"
"The human mind," Paley said, "is straight. Thought travels to infinity. The cosmos is curved."
Swenson turned away from the billowing mounds of tape, saw that the five-manual console was flicking lights smoothly and happily, then went over to an instrument panel whose levers called for muscle, for the blacksmith rather than the organist. "Starboard," he said. "15.8. Now we play with gravities." He pulled hard. The monitor screen showed band after band of turquoise light, moving steadily upwards. "This, I think, should be -" He twirled a couple of corrective dials on a shoulder-high panel about the levers. "Now," he said. "Free fall."
"So," Paley said, "we're being pulled by -"
"Exactly." And then: "I trust the situation has been presented to you in its perilous entirety. The dangers, you know, are considerable."
"Scholarship," Paley smiled patiently. "My reputation."
"Reputation," Swenson snorted. Then, looking towards the monitors, he said: "Ah. Something coming through."
Mist, cloudswirl, a solid shape peeping intermittently out of vapour porridge. Paley came over to look. "It's the Earth," he said in wonder.
"It's their Earth."
"The same as ours. America, Africa -"
"The configuration's slightly different, see, down there at the southern tip of -"
" Madagascar 's a good deal smaller. And, see, no Falklands."
"The cloud's come over again." Paley looked and looked. It was unbelievable.
"Think," Swenson said kindly, "how many absolutely incomputable systems there have to be before you can see the pattern of creation starting all over again. This seems wonderful to you because you just can't conceive how many myriads upon myriads of other worlds are not like our own."
"And the stars," Paley said, a thought striking him. "I mean, the stars they can actually see from there, from their London, say – are they the same stars as ours?"
Swenson shrugged at that. "Roughly," he said. "There's a rough kinship. But," he explained, "we don't properly know yet. Yours is only the tenth or eleventh trip, remember. To be exact about it all, you're the first to go to B303 England. What is it, when all's said and done, but the past? Why go to the past when you can go to the future?" His nostrils widened with complacency. "G91," he said. "I"ve done that trip a few times. It's pleasant to know one can look forward to another thirty years of life. I saw it there, quite clearly, a little plaque set up in Rostron Place: To the memory of G. F. Swenson, 1963-2094."
"We have to check up on history," Paley said, mumbling a little. His own quest seemed piddling: all this machinery, organization, expertise in the service of a rather mean inquiry. "I have to know whether William Shakespeare really wrote those plays."
Swenson, as Paley expected, snorted. "A nice sort of thing to want to find out," he said. "He's been dead six hundred and fifty years, is it, and you want to prove that there's nothing to celebrate. Not," he added, "that that sort of thing is much in my line. I've never had much time for poetry. Aaaah." He interposed his own head between Paley's and the screen, peering. The pages of the atlas had been turned; now Europe alone swam towards them. "Now," Swenson said, "I must set the exactest course of all." He worked at dials, frowning but humming happily, then beetled at Paley, saying: "Oughtn't you to be getting ready?"
Paley blushed that, with so huge a swathe of the cosmos spent in near idleness, he should have to rush things as they approached their port. He took off his single boilersuit of a garment and drew from the locker his Elizabethan fancy dress. Shirt, trunks, codpiece, doublet, feathered French hat, slashed shoes – clothes of synthetic cloth that was an exact simulacrum of old-time weaving, the shoes of good leather handmade. And then there was the scrip with its false bottom: hidden therein was a tiny two-way signaller. Not that, if he got into difficulties, it would be of much use: Swenson was (and these were strict orders) to come back for him in a year's time. The signaller was to show where he was and that he was still there, a guest of the past, really a stowaway. Swenson had to move on yet farther into timespace: Professor Shimmins had to be picked up in FH78, Dr Guan Moh Chan in G210, Paley collected on the way back. Paley tested the signaller, then checked the open and honest contents of his scrip: chief among these was a collection of the works of William Shakespeare. The plays had been copied from a facsimile of the First Folio in fairly accurate Elizabethan script; the paper too was an acid-fr
ee imitation of the coarse stuff Elizabethan dramatists had been said to use. For the rest, Paley had powdered prophylactics in little bags and, most important, gold – angels firenew, the odd portague, écus.
"Well," Swenson said with the faintest tinge of excitement, " England, here we come." Paley looked down on familiar river shapes – Tees, Humber, Thames. He gulped, running through his drill swiftly. "Countdown starts now," Swenson said. A syntheglott in the port bulkhead began ticking off cold seconds from 300. "I'd better say goodbye then," Paley gulped, opening the trap in the deck which led to the tiny jetpowered very-much-one-man aircraft. "You should come down in the Thames estuary," Swenson said. "Au revoir, not goodbye. I hope you prove whatever it is you want to prove." 200 – 199 – 198. Paley went down, settled himself in the seat, checked the simple controls. Waiting took, it seemed, an age. He smiled wryly, seeing himself, an Elizabethan, with his hands on the controls of a twenty-third century miniature jet aircraft. 60 – 59 – 58. He checked his Elizabethan vowels. He went over his fictitious provenance: a young man from Norwich with stage ambitions ("I have writ a play and a goodly one"). The syntheglott, booming here in the small cabin, counted to its limit. 4 – 3 – 2 – 1.
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