We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  “Hey, look,” Merlo called, “this is the boss’s job, at least until you’ve seen it done once.” That damn crutch thumped again.

  “Sit down,” I roared. “I’ll get it!”

  And I did—cursing every inch of the way. After all, labor has its rights.

  I stared at the parallel rows of light cables on Merlo’s sketch. “Why?”

  “So they’ll look like the old wing grooves from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” Merlo explained. “We lay the rails out in two-meter segments, parallel to the upstage wall, each one a meter closer to the center line as you go upstage.”

  “If you say so.” I sighed, and began lugging rails. After all, he was the boss—and I was learning real quick not to argue. “But why does Barry want to make it look like two hundred years after Shakespeare?”

  “He’s decided to recreate the Scottish play the way Garrick did it.”

  I frowned. “Who’s Garrick?”

  “A famous actor and manager from 1700s England,” Merlo said, “the most famous of his day. They were still naming theaters after him a century after his death.”

  An actor-manager? Something connected. “And Barry identifies with him, huh?”

  Merlo pursed his lips. “Let’s say he’s aware that he’s following in Garrick’s tradition.”

  I nodded. “So he wants to do the Scottish play the way Garrick did. Makes sense.”

  “In a way,” Merlo admitted, but he was looking at me as if he’d never seen me before. “I still say his good judgment will overtake his sense of history. He’ll probably take one look at this layout and change his mind, but it’s not all that tough for us to move the rails, now is it, Ramou?”

  “No,” I said, “but we’ll have to connect each rail to the light board separately this way, and we don’t have that many cables.”

  Merlo frowned. “You sure? I thought I laid in plenty of everything!”

  “Not one for each rail, no. Oh, we’ve got twenty hundred-foot rolls of cable—but I’ll have to attach connectors at each end, and that’ll only leave us about a dozen spares.”

  “Then we’ll have to splice the pieces if we need to make a really long run later.” Merlo frowned. “Well, we’ll buy more cable on New Venus. Here, let me give you a hand …”

  “No, I’ll bring them to you,” I said quickly.

  * * *

  As we sat there attaching connectors to pieces of cable, I said, “Why did the eighteenth century techies lay out short walls parallel to the back wall?”

  ‘To give them the illusion of depth,” Merlo explained. “Each of those ‘walls’ was a flat, of course, and they called ’em ‘wings.’ The Italians invented them when they discovered perspective, and—”

  “Each wing was a little shorter than the one before it, and a little closer to center!” I looked up, wide-eyed. “Just like a perspective drawing! Yeah, sure, that’d give it one hell of an illusion of depth!”

  Merlo grinned. “We call it the ‘wing and drop’ system now. They could change it really easily, because they laid out their rails two by two, so they could just slide one set of wings out as they slid another set in. Meanwhile, one backdrop was being raised while another one was being lowered—and voila! You had a new set. There were even theaters where you just turned one master windlass, and the whole set changed.”

  “Talk about presets!” I said. “But wouldn’t that kind of limit you? I mean, it’d be great for outdoors, in a city, but how about a forest? Or what if you had to have a scene inside, say, a castle?”

  “That did look a little contrived,” Merlo admitted. “Probably one of the reasons why they switched to counterweighted fly systems and freestanding flats—and the main reason why I don’t think Barry’s gonna like the look of this. The Scottish play just has too many scenes that don’t take place in cities or forests.”

  I stared. “Then why are we going through all this?”

  “Because directors have to be shown.” Merlo sighed. “Pass the soldering gun, Ramou.”

  Barry gazed at the scene with a happy sigh. “It’s absolutely splendid, Merlo.”

  Merlo flushed with pleasure. “Just a quick sketch, really, Barry. I didn’t even debug it.”

  “Still, it’s a marvel.” Barry turned to him. “Take it down.”

  Merlo stared at him, then managed to heave a sigh that ended in a grin. “Didn’t figure you’d like it once you saw it.”

  “Oh, I love the effect! And make sure you keep the system intact—we’ll do School for Scandal next season. But it would be just too limiting for Shakespeare.”

  I thought of all those hours crimping connectors onto cables and ground my teeth.

  “So what are we looking for?” Merlo pressed. “A uniset that will play all of Shakespeare?”

  “Heaven protect me from another reconstruction of the Globe Theatre!” Barry shuddered. “No, start with the interior of a castle’s keep, would you, Merlo? Before they thought of dividing walls. Then we’ll see how we can adapt it to the exteriors.”

  I stared, and bit my tongue just in time.

  Merlo nodded. “I’ll see what I can rummage up.”

  “Thank you, old boy. Sorry about all the wasted effort.” Barry smiled, then turned the same beam on me. “So good of you to humor me, Ramou—but sometimes, the director does need to see his ideas realized, in order to recognize his mistakes.”

  And somehow, I felt as if all the effort had been worth it. What the hey, it had just been busywork, anyway, and I’d had a nice chat with Merlo while we’d been doing it.

  After he had stepped into the lift, I turned to Merlo and let it out. “One big chamber? How to modify it for exteriors? Doesn’t he realize we can change the whole set to a forest in five seconds?”

  “Of course he does,” Merlo said, “but Standard Shakespeare Set Number Four has deeper roots in him than that. Right, too—the action can flow better in a uniset, and you can have simultaneous scenes that don’t distract from the poet’s language. Most importantly of all, you can give the audience scope to use their imaginations, and that involves them more in the play.”

  “So we’re starting from scratch, huh?”

  “Not quite.” Merlo turned away to his drawing board and pressed a key. The board lit up; he typed in a code, and a picture appeared, absolutely realistic, of a huge open hall built of granite blocks. At one side, a stairway curved against those stones, widening out into a landing halfway up, then again at the top. There was a dais in the center with a smaller dais on top of it, and a lower stairway at the other side, its landing disappearing into a doorway. There were a lot of doorways.

  I stared. “When did you come up with this?” “Had the basic idea about ten years ago,” Merlo said. “So as soon as Barry said we were doing the Scottish play, I pulled it out and did some developing.”

  “But why? If he told you he wanted wing-and-drop!”

  “Because I knew he’d change his mind once he saw it.” Merlo grinned. “Go set up the rails in a semicircle, Ramou.”

  “How is Ramou progressing, Barry?”

  “Oh, quite well, Horace—he’s finished with Introduction to Theater, and is well into Theater History I. Really, he’s so avid to learn that he’s a joy to chat with. Merlo says so, too, and Ogden—and I haven’t solicited opinions from Susanne or Lacey, but from what I’ve seen of their conversations, they would say the same.”

  “Team teaching is so effective,” I said, with a smile of amusement. “ ‘The best school is a log, with a motivated student at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other.’ Too bad we can’t always keep that student-teacher ratio. What is next in his curriculum, Barry?”

  “Introduction to Acting,” Barry answered grimly, “and I think we may finally encounter some learning resistance.”

  Y’know, you don’t realize how much work there is in putting on a play, when you’re just sitting out there in front watching. Okay, it occurs to you that someone had to build and paint the set, and someo
ne else had to construct all the costumes—but you never stop to think about all those little things they pass from hand to hand, like drinking mugs and swords and spindles. Somehow you don’t realize that somebody had to make them all, or go out and find them.

  “Somebody” was me.

  Granted, it’s a lot easier than it used to be. Back in the Stone Age, Merlo tells me, the prop master had to go visit all the junk shops to find what he could, then look up pictures of the rest and build it out of papier-mache or a kind of cloth impregnated with plastic—or out of the real materials, if they had the money.

  I had it easy. All I had to do was look up the pictures— which was no problem with the complete historical data base Merlo thoughtfully ordered—then feed the program into the Constructor. It would mulch up the data, let it soak in, mull it over a while, then grind out a chunk of plastic and carve it with laser beams inside—and bingo! It would serve me up a completed goblet. Or bowl. Or shield.

  Of course, I had to write the program that describes the item, first.

  The most common items in the catalogue came with ready-made programs, and all I had to do was make a few adjustments—but the rare stuff, like standing cups and snuffboxes, I had to do from scratch. It took a hell of a long while the first time I tried, but Merlo showed me a few techniques, and where to look up subprograms for ornamentation, and I picked it up fast enough. Fortunately, for the Scottish play, almost everything had a premade program.

  Including the swords.

  I carved out a sample and showed it to Merlo. After all, it looked a lot better than the beat-up old things he’d scrounged up and brought along. But would you believe it, he told me it didn’t look as if it had been used enough?

  “Now, this broadsword,” he said, taking one of the cold rolled iron things out of its packing case, “this looks as if it’s been through the wars.”

  It sure did. The blade was nicked and gouged so bad you would have thought metal-loving gophers had been at it. The flat of the blade had these ridges of metal on them, as if the iron had melted here and there and run like wax, hardening in a bead at the end, and the pommels were so worn they looked like advertisements for saddle soap.

  “The wars it is,” I agreed. “I could modify the program a little, for some wear and tear …”

  Merlo grinned and handed me the sword. “Heft that. Then take a swing at me.” He brought out another one.

  Me take a swing at him? I wondered if Merlo knew what he was asking. Then I remembered that this was supposed to be just pretend, so I swung the sword the way I would have chopped at a beginning student. Merlo grinned wider and swung his blade down overhand—none of this pussyfooting around with parrying, I guess—and slammed his blade against mine with a clang that echoed off the bulkheads far away in that dim and cavernous hold. The pommel jolted against my hands, but I’d been expecting it. “See?” he said. “You can’t get a heft like that with a synthetic sword—and you sure as blazes can’t get that sound!”

  “You sure can’t,” I agreed. I had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach; I was beginning to understand why Macbeth had a high accident rate. Excuse me, “the Scottish play.” The back of my mind started trying to figure out a program for a material that would look, sound, and perform believably.

  “Now that’s a stage sword.” Merlo patted it and put it away, then held out his hand for mine.

  I handed it to him pommel first. “Did the medieval knights really swing their swords to block each other’s blows like that?”

  “Probably, if they didn’t have shields. You can’t stop a sword with this kind of mass by a parry.”

  “Yes I could.” I frowned. “And you left a hole a mile wide with that counterslash. I could have driven through it with a thrust, easy as pie.”

  Merlo frowned and took the swords out again. “Show me.”

  I didn’t like doing it without protective clothing, but after all, they were blunt—square edges, and the tips were really more rounded than pointed. I took the sword, and Merlo said, “Ready?”

  I nodded, holding the sword at guard. He swung, and I half stepped and swung from the elbow, not the shoulder, with English. His sword rang like a chime, jolting aside, and I riposted to touch his chest with the point. “Like that.”

  “Oh, you’re talking about real sword fighting,” Merlo said with disgust.

  I frowned. “What other kind is there?”

  “Stage fencing,” Merlo answered. “See, the object of real fighting is to kill your opponent—but if we tried that in the theater, we’d run out of actors awfully fast.”

  I thought of saying that the Romans hadn’t, then remembered that the gladiators probably weren’t all that good as actors. They also weren’t willing. “That makes sense,” I said judiciously. “So what is the purpose?”

  ‘To put on a good show. So we use big movements, that show up well from the back row in the balcony.”

  I frowned. “Isn’t accuracy a factor?”

  “No, not really.” Merlo grinned. “Just fun.”

  “Fun,” I echoed, and sighed. “I’m beginning to understand why you want the swords to ring.”

  “Yeah—it sounds great.” Then his brow creased at a thought. “But where did you learn to fence, Ramou?”

  “Huh? Oh. From Sensei—I’d learned enough so he thought it was safe to teach me a few weapons.” I said it absentmindedly; I was staring at the swords, trying to figure out how to make them showy but safe.

  “A few?” Merlo’s tone had become guarded. “Like how many?”

  “Oh, just the staff, the spear, the sword, numchuks, shuriken, and sais.”

  “Oh, that’s all, huh?” Merlo was looking a little nervous. “Well, do me a favor, Ramou—just pretend you don’t know anything, and let us teach it to you from the top. Safer that way.”

  “Yeah, it sure will be,” I agreed. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to goof up in front of an audience, and make it look like nothing.” Then I remembered that I was going to have to be in front of an audience, a couple of hundred pairs of eyes all staring at me, watching for the tiniest mistake, and I shuddered. “Audience!” I felt the churning in the pit of my stomach, but this was a different kind. What good is fear if you can’t fight the enemy?

  “He’ll take on half a dozen armed men without batting an eye, but he quakes at the thought of an audience.” Merlo shook his head, mystified. “You’re amazing, Ramou.”

  I was amazed myself. How had I ever let Barry talk me into this?

  The granite and mortar might have been illusions painted by light, but the steps the actors were going to climb had to be real. Merlo punched in the programs on the Constructor, and I took the gleaming white units as they extruded out of its delivery port.

  “Here, I’ll help,” he offered.

  “No!” I hollered. “You go take that game leg of yours and sit on it!”

  “That would break it all over again,” he said with great practicality. “Look, Ramou, it’s immobilized and covered in plastic. I’m not gonna hurt it by carrying a little weight.”

  “That’s not what the robo-doc says—and immobile or not, it’s not exactly as maneuverable as it would be if you were only wearing a shoe on it. You’re much more likely to trip and fall—so how about you just step back and tell me what I’m doing wrong, eh?”

  “Oh, all right, nursie,” he grumbled, and sat down in the folding chair again, his cane near at hand.

  I set up the post-and-lintel unit; the posts were plastiform, tall and straight, but L-shaped if you looked at ’em in cross section, which was what I did as I pulled ’em out of the extruder. Then I stood them up.

  “You don’t have to stand there ready to catch them,” Merlo told me. “They’re self-supporting.”

  “Then they’ll earn my praise.” I turned back to catch the next section as it came out. “Y’know, we could program the machine to make ’em any color we wanted.”

  “That’s what I did. We’re projecting colored
light in front of them, remember? Any color but white will dim it down.”

  “When they’re in back! Of laser beams?”

  “You’d be surprised. Besides, why take chances?”

  I set the unit up next to its mate. “I’ll need the ladder for the next one, right?”

  Merlo shrugged. “You could lay the platform top-down, then stand them upside-down on it.”

  “Probably easier.” I turned to catch the platform as it came out.

  “Here, you’ll need four hands on that.”

  No, I won’t.” He was right, though—I just barely managed to get under the platform and balance it. The weight didn’t bother me—it was foamed, and very light, though it was rigid enough to be very, very strong. But it was awkward. I took it over by the posts, flipped it, and laid it top-down, then turned the posts over and set the lintels on top of the platform. “Why did I turn it upside down? It’s solid—what’s the difference between the top and the bottom?”

  “The top is textured to give the actors traction.”

  “Oh.” I felt dumb. To cover it, I pulled out the heat gun and started melting the lintels into the platform. “You sure these are going to come apart easy? We have to pack them in a truck and take them to a theater, don’t we?”

  “If we’re lucky. More probably a gymnasium or a field house. And yes, they’ll come apart like a dream. You just use the heat gun again, and push on the leg; the seam will melt, and the post-and-lintel units will peel right off.”

  “If you say so.” I stood back, surveying my handiwork, and gave it a dubious nod. Then I racked the heat gun and came back to flip it right side up. I toppled it over easily enough, but when I went to lift the platform, the legs skidded. It was top-heavy, and that top didn’t want to go up.

  “Now you have to let me help.” Merlo grinned as he levered himself onto his foot.