We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  “No, I don’t!”

  “Oh, but all I have to do is this.” Merlo put the toes of his good foot against the end of one post with his cane against the other. “Now lift.”

  I did, and the legs didn’t skid, of course—Merlo was blocking them.

  “That’s called ‘footing,’ ” Merlo explained to me.

  The unit settled with a soft thud. I looked up at it and nodded. “I guess that didn’t strain you too much.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice it, no.”

  I frowned up at the underside of the platform. “What’s that bas-relief melted in there?” It was a pentagram made up of wedges.

  “That’s the IATSE ‘bug,’ ” Merlo explained, “the insignia of the stagehands’ union. I’m a member there, as well as in the Designers’ Guild—though neither of them is all that happy about it.” He grinned.

  “ ‘Stagehands’ comes out to ‘yatse’?”

  “I-A-T-S-E.” Merlo spelled it out patiently. “ ‘The Interplanetary Association of Tridimensional and Stage Employees.’ ”

  “Interplanetary?” I stared. “I thought we were going to be the first ones!”

  “We are, the first stagehands,” Merlo soothed. “But the union includes a lot of public 3DT projectionists and engineers, and they’re already out there on every planet where there are people. We’ll have to check in with each one of them as a courtesy.”

  I hoped they’d be courteous.

  “Well, let’s get the stairs up,” Merlo said.

  I turned around and touched the circle that started the machine cycling out the next piece. The stairs were a bear, but I just backed up as they came out, then let the end drop down onto the floor by itself.

  Merlo nodded approvingly. “I was wondering how long it would take you to think of that.”

  “I’m not always dense.” I lifted the unit and carried it over to the high platform. “Neither is this.”

  “Sure, amazingly light,” Merlo said, eyeing me strangely. “Ain’t modern materials wonderful? Now you’ll need the ladder.”

  “And you need your chair again,” I retorted. I felt a glow of satisfaction as I watched him hobble back to his portable recliner and sit down, grumbling about overattentive nannies. Then I set up the ladder and climbed up with the heat gun, to melt the top step into the unit. “You sure that’ll hold?”

  “Like iron. Now shove the whole thing into place.”

  His voice echoed; I looked up and saw he was sitting at the scene board. Well, that didn’t look too strenuous, and at least he was sitting, so I pushed the unit into place. It completed the stairway down from the highest level— presumably where the ramparts would be when we had the exterior set on, and the bedrooms in the interior.

  “Okay, step back,” Merlo called.

  I stepped. I have a healthy respect for lasers, even when they’re set to be cool light, not heat rays. I kept stepping, too, all the way back behind Merlo—I wanted to see what he was doing at the board.

  He dimmed up the exterior set, and I saw that the top of the illusory granite blocks was an inch below the landing, leaving a strip of gleaming white plastic showing.

  “Sometimes you get the dimensions to match exactly on the first run through the sequence,” Merlo said, “and sometimes you don’t.” He punched a patch on the keyboard and nudged the joystick just a hair. The wall rose. Merlo frowned. “Go check that and make sure I didn’t overshoot, will you, Ramou?”

  “Yes, sir!” I ran back and peeked. “Half an inch high, Merlo. Too far … there! Right on the nose!”

  “Only time I ever want to be accused of being on the level.” Merlo punched another patch.

  “Don’t we have to write a correction for the program?”

  “No, it’s self-correcting. It just reads the new information from the joystick and adjusts itself.”

  I wondered why I’d bothered to learn programming. Merlo sat back. “Not bad, if I do say so myself.”

  I ran back to look at it from his angle. “Damn good!” I breathed. It wasn’t a set, it was the castle, age-darkened granite, streaks of dampness, and all.

  “Now for the outside.” Merlo pressed the “change” patch, and the scene dissolved into the bailey, looking toward the curtain wall. Sure enough, the battlements were up there at the top—and the platform didn’t show at all. Merlo frowned. “I think it’s a little high.”

  So was I. Too high—I was still standing there, thrilling at the sight of something so magnificent that I had helped make, when Merlo stepped up onto the set, hobbled up two steps, and said, “Yeah, it’s two centimeters off. Tap the ‘adjust’ patch, Ramou, and touch the joystick down about..

  About two steps. Merlo, that was. The cane slipped, and he toppled backward with a yelp.

  “Merlo!” I was up beside him before I even thought of running.

  His face was white again. “I’m okay, I’m okay!” He struggled to stand up, but his face went white again, and he gasped.

  ‘There is no further damage to the foot,” the mellow female voice informed us, “but his wrist is badly sprained.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief, and Susanne told Merlo severely, “There, now. You heard it from the robo-doc itself. You’ll have to keep that wrist taped for a week, Merlo— and absolutely no physical work, you understand?”

  “Yes, nursie,” Merlo grumbled, but his eyes weren’t exactly sour as Susanne fastened the clasp on the broad bandage around his wrist. “Thanks, kid,” he said. For a second, I thought he was going to kiss her, and my glands revved up for jealousy—but he only smiled and hobbled out the sick bay door.

  Susanne rounded on me. “Really, Ramou! You were supposed to keep him from doing anything more strenuous than laying his finger on a pressure patch!”

  “I got carried away,” I said humbly, “admiring the set— and he wanted me to have a chance to trim the program, so he went out to eyeball it for me.”

  “Don’t let him be so generous again.” But she had thawed; Susanne understood the kind of people you couldn’t turn your back on for a second. “He’s a very bad patient.”

  “And you’re a very good nurse. Did you have a second career, too?”

  She blushed and looked away. “An actress always has to have some kind of a job to put bread on the table while she’s waiting for one of the auditions to pay off.”

  “I can think of a lot worse,” I said. “Just make sure Barry pays you for both.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t ask that!”

  “Yes you can,” I told her. “Just try a little. Or I’ll do it for you—you’ve just made my job a lot easier.”

  Susanne frowned. “How?”

  “Because Merlo can’t try to do any manual labor now.” I grinned. “Not with his right hand taped up.”

  But he did, of course. He was left-handed.

  6

  While Merlo and Ramou were constructing the sets, rehearsals went on unchecked. Truthfully, I suspected that Ramou wasn’t putting in as much time on the set as he should have—I saw him far too frequently at rehearsals. Admittedly, in the mornings, he was there to supply coffee and doughnuts—though we could all quite easily have operated the food and drink synthesizers by ourselves, of course. I could understand why Ramou and Susanne might not have wanted Ogden operating the beverage dispenser for himself, but surely Susanne could have managed that little task, as she seemed to manage all the rest of Ogden— and to be sure, Ramou could plead that, since he was actually going to have to appear onstage in this production, he had to become fully familiar with it in rehearsal. Merlo accepted about as much of that as you might suspect, and was growing more than a little exasperated with his assistant. I assured him that if he truly objected to Ramou’s absence, Barry could probably be persuaded to manage without him, except for the scenes in which he had to appear, especially those in which he and I were to lead an army of local hirelings to battle. But Merlo only grumbled some nonsense about adolescent hormones and not wishing to deny the lad the i
nnocent pleasures of youth, which more or less confirmed my own conjecture—that it was not the blocking and positioning of actors he wished to witness, but the movements of the actresses. I could hardly blame him—

  Lacey and Susanne were both delights to watch in daily life, but even more pleasurable onstage, especially if the role called for the exercise of feminine charms. Since Barry had them in competition to see which would be allowed to play her witch as young and seductive, the rehearsals allowed them more than adequate scope for the most enticing of their skills.

  Then, too, I was delighted to see that Ramou had come to realize that the alluring developments onstage were entirely artificial, and that the charming and enticing airs the girls so proudly displayed in performance, they counted demeaning in real life.

  Barry made another try at rehearsing Mac … excuse me, the Scottish play. Everything went well at first; the upheavals were limited to disagreements between actor and director. For example, Barry found it necessary to say, “That is excellent, Mamie, but we need a bit less of the seductress and a bit more of the demon.”

  “A femme fatale can’t be fatale without being femme, Barry,” she returned. “My conception of the part is intensely feminine.”

  Barry knew what that meant—that Mamie couldn’t accept being onstage without doing her utmost to make the male members of her audience drool. But all he said was, “I believe you have a line that tells the demons to ‘unsex me here.’ ”

  ‘True,” Mamie riposted, “but she goes on to say, ‘Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall.’ She is obviously referring only to her maternal nature; when it comes to leading a man to his doom, she will use whatever means prove most effective.”

  Barry pursed his lips and became rather thoughtful. “A point, a telling point. Well, if it was good enough for Ellen Terry, it should be good enough for us. Just keep the strumpet within, will you? Very well, proceed.”

  There were similar discussions of characterization, and I could feel the company beginning to develop the first faint stirrings of enthusiasm as they saw how seriously they were each taking the play.

  “Knock, knock!” Barry called, and Marty shambled out into the center of the lounge, the very picture of a man who has been awakened in the middle of the night. “Here’s a knocking indeed!” he grumbled. “If a man were porter at Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key.”

  “Bang, bang,” Barry called.

  “Knock, knock, knock.” Marty looked up in surly resentment, and I was galvanized. I was suddenly reminded that this young man had it within him to play serious parts well, perhaps even with the same inspiration he brought to things laughable.

  Indeed, he was being quite serious. “Faith, here’s an English tailor come hither, for stealing out of a French house! Come in, tailor!” Then he broke off. “Doggone it, Mr. Tallendar, it just ain’t funny!”

  There was so much of the ludicrous in his indignation that we all laughed; we couldn’t help ourselves. Marty looked surprised, then looked around him with a slow grin. Barry smiled, too. “Come now, Mr. Kemp. It has the reputation of being the only moment of comic relief in the whole play.”

  “Yeah, right after they’ve killed a king and gone running off with some bloody daggers! Great comic lead-up, oh, sure! And why doesn’t the porter do something about that knock on the door, instead of prosing about sinners? You sure this playwright shouldn’t have stuck to making gloves?”

  “I assure you that he poached plots far better than he poached game,” Barry returned. “But you must understand, Martyn, that he grew up watching the Miracle Plays—yes, they were still being performed during his youth, and the fact that they only came once a year made them all the more fascinating to a young child. Which of the stations would have most vividly impressed itself on the mind of a ten-year-old boy?”

  “Hell-mouth,” Marty said instantly.

  “Precisely. And this porter, being from an even earlier time, would have grown up seeing those same cycles of plays. When he mentions the porter at Hell-mouth Gate, he isn’t thinking of an abstract religious concept—he’s thinking of—”

  “The character from the play!” Marty exclaimed, with the look that accompanies the flash of insight.

  “Precisely,” Barry said, “and he’s alone in the great hall, so this is his opportunity to mimic the players in their favorite bit of overacting. So he adopts their posture… probably hunchbacked …”

  Marty pulled his head down and hunched his shoulders up, grinning.

  “Deformed,” Barry prompted.

  Marty shrank his arms up against his body like a tyrannosaurus, the hands hooked into claws.

  “Bowlegged.”

  Marty’s knees bent and turned outward.

  “Delighting in his own evilness,” Barry said.

  Marty’s face twisted into a wicked leer, and his eye gleamed with demonic glee.

  “But even more, delighting in seeing human souls corrupted and twisted even more than he, to the point at which they sink to hell and become his toys!”

  Marty gave a low, gloating laugh that chilled me to the bone.

  “Then the porter proceeds to ham it up unmercifully,” Barry said, “as Shakespeare has him recite, not the list of accepted cardinal sins, but his own catalogue of crimes that should send a man to hell—at least, in the eye of an Elizabethan gentleman.”

  Marty crowed with delight and hauled open an imaginary door. “Come in, come in!”

  And he proceeded to go through the most wonderful drunken porter I had ever seen; he could scarcely say a single line without rendering us all helpless with laughter. He grew and blossomed at the sound, until finally he was pantomiming the opening of the real door, and saying to Ban-quo, “Remember the porter!” and holding out a hand cupped for a tip in exactly the fashion of the porters at the less luxurious hotels in New York, a fashion that sent us all into gales of laughter again.

  “Oh, my abdomen!” Barry gasped. “If you can run it that well in performance, Marty, we will all be unable to finish the play! For now, however, let us attempt to continue the rehearsal.”

  Banquo stepped up, but before he could utter a syllable, the lounge rang from wall to wall with the applause of the whole company. Marty looked up in flattered surprise, then took a very elaborate and ceremonious bow. Even Larry was clapping his hands, though slowly and with a bad grace.

  “Awww, thanks, folks,” Marty said, drawing a circle on the carpet with his toe. “It’s just ’cause I finally got it ’splained to me, that’s all.”

  “Don’t be deceived; your English professor probably would not countenance my interpretation,” Barry assured him. “Now, however, you must think of your exit while we resume the play.”

  So, all in all, it was turning into an excellent and very productive rehearsal—until Ramou. and Charlie came in with Marty, presumably in another costume, to murder Banquo.

  “Hark! I hear horses,” Ramou said, with all the expression of a length of two-by-four. Well, it was his first attempt.

  “Give us a light there, ho!” I called, ostensibly offstage.

  ‘Then ’tis he!” Marty said with grim anticipation. ‘The rest that are within the note of expectation, already are in the court!”

  “His horses go about,” Charlie pointed out.

  Marty took Ramou’s lines, out of pity: “Almost a mile— but he does usually. So all men do, from hence to the palace gate make it their walk.” Then he gave his own line, sotto voce, to Ramou: “A light, a light!”

  “A light, a light,” Ramou repeated obligingly. Then, “ ’Tis he!”

  “Stand to it,” Charlie advised.

  “It will be rain tonight,” I said as Banquo, coming between the two chairs that represented the platform sides of the set with Larry a step behind me as Fleance.

  “Then let it come down,” Charlie said.

  “Now, gentlemen!” Barry called. Charlie and Marty sprang out from the chairs to grapple with me, while Ramou
descended upon Larry. I was amazed how deftly Charlie managed—he gave me a knee in the back and an arm around the throat with just enough pressure so that I knew when to bend backward and gargle, “O treachery! Fly, good Fleance, fly! Thou mayest revenge! O slave!”

  In response, I heard the sound of a blow, followed by a heavy thud. The arm around my throat disappeared miraculously, and I straightened up to see Ramou stretched out cold on the floor with Larry staring down at him in horror.

  For a moment, it was a frozen tableau. Then Larry came alive, turning and running for the doorway—but Merlo blocked him and clapped an arm about his shoulders, saying in soothing tones, “Now, hold on, Larry, hold on. It was just an accident, could’ve happened to anyone—he’ll understand that.”

  But Larry still struggled, eyes wide with panic.

  Charlie, meantime, had dropped to one knee beside Ramou, but Susanne was somehow there ahead of him. She clasped Ramou’s wrist; then, satisfied of the pulse, she reached for his head—but Charlie held up a hand to stop her. “Wait a moment, Ms. Souci. Let’s wait till he comes to, and make certain he doesn’t have a major pain there; we don’t want to move his neck until we’re sure.” He looked up at us all, and his gaze singled out Larry. “A glass of water, please.”

  Larry stared, wild-eyed; then he seemed to snap back to his senses, nodded once, quickly and abruptly, and streaked over to the beverage dispenser.

  “That takes too long.” Susanne bent down and kissed Ramou very soundly, her long blond hair hiding his face for a moment. His body stiffened, and his arms came up to go around her. She straightened up with a self-satisfied smile. “Natural reflexes. You’re not too badly off.”

  Behind her, Lacey burned.

  “Not too much, no,” Ramou agreed, his voice slow and rough. He started to lift himself off the floor, then froze. “Ow!” He reached for the back of his neck.

  “Lie down.” Susanne’s hands were on him instantly, lulling.

  “No, no, it’s not that bad.” Ramou started to massage the injury. “Believe me, I’d know.” But his face was still taut with strain.