The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  They jerked me to my feet again, but did not remove the blindfold. We took a shorter and faster walk.

  Sound effect of someone knocking at a door.

  “Enter.” A voice too brief to recognize, and yet⁠—

  Inside the door, they ripped the adhesive strip from my eyes so fiercely I couldn’t see at first. I refocused on a standard hotel suite as a looming figure said, “Face me.” There was no one in the room but myself, the two who’d brought me, and…this gray Eminence.

  Was the voice so unmistakable? Distinctive, certainly, a bass rumble from the bottom of a well where mossy stones rattled together. But maybe what cued me was hearing his voice while I could see only his outline—the general shape that hadn’t changed in a hundred years, the great height and ungainly mass, all topped with a melonlike head whose close-cropped hair didn’t even try to disguise its uneven shape or jug ears. And the hunch of the shoulders, strangely furtive in such a big man. Before I took in his face, I knew him. V. And once again felt the floor of reality totter and drop beneath me.

  V for Von Bülow. He wore much the same sort of tunic I remembered, expensive dark material cut for someone else, someone with a waist. Alexei “Lex” Von Bülow, my old classmate⁠—

  Very, very old now, near a hundred and thirty standard years, which is near death. The pale moon face seemed overgrown with age, pouched and sagging, the colorless eyebrows untrimmed and shaggy, tufts of white hair in ears and nose, that nose thickened and roseate from a century’s brandies; but back of it all, like sly little rats in an abandoned garden, the same gray eyes. They met mine and froze.

  “Amazing,” he said. “The resemblance. I thought there couldn’t be another Pretender as close. The one on Venezia is younger, of course. Almost too young. Figure five or six years at near-light, minus one or two he wouldn’t age in suspend-sleep. But then he’d need years back in our timestream, to have built up this power base of his. This one could be thirty-five. Someone who’d returned nine or ten years ago. More believable.”

  I was calculating, too. A century ago my classmates at Nexus University had foisted Reform Kanalism and the Column on the galaxy in order to rule it. I shouldn’t be too surprised to discover that some of them had succeeded, and still held power in their old age. And yet it did surprise, keeps surprising, that everything comes down to me, that the whole universe should seem to revolve around me—my history, my childhood friends, lovers, enemies.

  But an actor uses whatever he can, even his own alienation. He can reach into his past, pull out a mental image of a Wayback farmhand—the bowed legs, the lazy hang of one shoulder—and drape his own muscles on that skeleton. Once the body is inhabited, the accent comes back almost unbidden. Play the man, I told myself. Any man but one.

  And what does he say, this I who must not be taken for Larkspur? “Of course it’s believable, Citizen…Director. This other bloke is a Pretender, just as you said. I’m the real Evan Larkspur.”

  “Indeed.” A tigerish purr. Von Bülow folded himself into a chair, the long legs outstretched, polished boots crossed. “Walk.”

  “Beg your pardon?”

  “Walk across the room and back. Larkspur. And speak. Larkspur would know me. Who am I?”

  You can’t think about a walk—the thing is to maintain the character skeleton, and let the feet fall into line. “Well, you’re the Director of the Shadow Tribunal, aren’t you?” I said. “And I want you to know, I’m loyal, see? There’s been a lot of misunderstanding about me. That’s what I was doing tonight, trying to set people straight about this bloody Pretender, making out that I’m a traitor. Why, I was in on the beginning of Reform Kanalism, you should know that.”

  I was facing him again, returning from the far end of the suite. “I?” Von Bülow said. “Who am I? You’re from Wayback, I can hear that. You’ve a gutter version of the accent he had then. A relative. Could be a lineal descendant, if he left a bastard behind. Yes. Frontier colony inbreeding. So much for the resemblance. Unless you know me.”

  “We knew each other?” I said. “V…Of course, Von Bülow…Lucan Von Bülow! My old classmate. I’d have recognized you sooner, but it has been over a hundred years.”

  “But not to Larkspur it hasn’t, fool. And he’d never confuse my name with Lucan Kostain’s. We were never close, but Lucan…Lucan, he would remember.”

  “Alexei Von Bülow! Of course. We studied Rhetoric together, right? Same class as Domina Wintergrin. Ah, what a woman she was, eh, mate? I mean⁠—⁠”

  “Desist. Anyone can read a Larkspur biography—some of them run six volumes, I’m told.”

  I came to a halt, and let my breath go. “Look, I’m rattled, this wasn’t the way I planned to lay it out. But I’m no fool. If I’d had my chance on that stage today, I would have had those Kanalists eating out of my hand.”

  “Possibly. How does that endear you to me? Why should I prefer one seditious Pretender to another?”

  “Look, you’ve got to believe me, Citizen⁠—⁠”

  “Eminence,” corrected one of the cops who’d first held me. “You will address the Director as⁠—⁠”

  “Eminence, sorry, but you’ve got to believe me, politics had nothing to do with this thing. It was just—to be Larkspur, the fame, the women, the money. I’m an actor, I could get a theater going in his name. Like you say, I could skim most of the info from biographies, but there were bound to be questions about Kanalism, see, secret handshakes and whatnot. I’m not a government official or a rich businessman, I don’t have entrée to one of your Reform Kanalist temples, so I had to pick it up in an Old Rite lodge. There was nothing political about it at all, I swear, until I learned about this other Larkspur impersonator. Put a spoke in my wheel, I can tell you. There was only one way to deal with him, and that was head-on. But once I’d hijacked the movement, there’s no way I would have led it in a traitorous direction. Where would that have gotten me, I ask you?”

  “Enough.” He dismissed me with a listless flop of one hand. His moon face turned to the Tribunes who’d brought me in. “So. Eighteen months of false leads. Then a break. Time, place, team. A chance to grab his top lieutenants and decapitate hundreds of the independent cells. And what do you have to show me for it all? This pimp.”

  The taller of the two Tribunes turned out to be the baritone; he had a baby face and prematurely graying hair. “He’s awfully well equipped for a petty criminal, Your Eminence.” He explained about my fractal silk outfit, then pulled a silvery cigar shape from his pocket. “And this skeleton coder is as advanced as one of ours. We’ve confiscated computer picks like this from top Iron Brotherhood mercenaries. His passport and ID are nothing to brag about—pretty much what you can buy from any wristcomp smuggler. But his invitation to tonight’s meeting—Citizen Harrison Mauldin’s—that’s genuine. I checked on it. Citizen Mauldin died in a traffic accident on Gladiolus; we’d had him under surveillance as a subversive and planned to clean out his room, but someone beat us to it. This man, apparently. He’s awfully slick for a small-timer. Eminence, how can we be sure he isn’t really⁠—⁠”

  A knock at the door. The smaller Tribune answered it, exchanged a few words with someone, and returned to Von Bülow’s chair.

  “It’s the genetic report, Your Eminence. They’ve compared the suspect to the Larkspur navy file.”

  So they did have my file. Game, set, and match. But at least I’d played it to the last second. Suddenly my nerves stopped screaming. I was ready to give up.

  The little cop eyed me with contempt. “It was just as you guessed, Eminence. He’s from old Wayback stock, probably a Larkspur cousin. But even allowing for possible virus masking or somatic mutation, he cannot possibly be the real Evan Larkspur.”

  Chapter Four

  Not Evan Larkspur.

  They hung me on a wall for the night, down at the local police station. It was a simple rig—a canvas band around my chest and under my armpits, with a big hook on the back that fit into a bracket on the
wall. After an hour, it felt as if my shoulders were being ripped off; to reduce the pressure on my armpits I had to stretch my legs to their fullest extension, where my toes could just manage ten or fifteen kilos of push against the floor. Stretch until I couldn’t stand it, go limp until I couldn’t stand that. Meanwhile my wrists were manacled so that there were only two ways I could hold my arms, and both were agony.

  Not the real Evan Larkspur.

  It was a random, almost indifferent cruelty on the Shadowmen’s part. If not Larkspur, I was just a petty offender, slated to do a few years’ penal servitude for unlawful assembly and bearing false ID. But hanging me wasn’t much more trouble than locking the door, and no doubt they were happy to leave me tenderizing in case their boss wanted a followup interrogation with his breakfast.

  Not even possibly the real Evan Larkspur.

  I’d thought for a moment the genetic report might be a trick, a way to get me to confess. But if they knew they had Larkspur, they wouldn’t need a confession. And if they had lost his navy file somehow, wouldn’t they try to bluff? The real Larkspur wouldn’t crack to hear they’d failed to recognize him; no one would.

  Except a fake who’d believed himself real.

  There was no sound except my breathing and writhing, no light, nothing except a vague sense of the wall at my back; after a while, the real reason I stretched to the floor was to make sure the floor was there. Flex and squirm, go limp and bend, while incandescent pain flowed along the nerve nets of my limbs with the branching precision of an anatomical chart.

  All those years living in dread of the Tribunal discovering my identity, and there had been no identity to discover. Nothing to fear except Nothing itself—no light above, no floor below⁠…

  And nobody in here but us solipsists⁠…

  A void. And then, after centuries of darkness, a wet rustling sound from the unseen far wall of the cell. A scraping, a dragging. I would think I had imagined it, and then it would come back louder. Can rats tell when you can’t defend yourself, in the dark?

  Rhythmic, wet scraping. Closer, louder, more mass behind it. My eyes, straining in the direction of the sound, caught only the dark-colored shapes that our retinas cast against the darkness.

  It was big, as big as a man, and closer all the time, and now I thought I could see it, as though something phosphorescent, fungi maybe, clung to the feet that scuffled the wetness toward me.

  Definitely the feet of something like a man, and they were glowing in their own right. Feet in sandals, not scuffing, just treading wet, fallen leaves, and the whole form was visible.

  A man made out of purest blue-white light. I had to squint at the brightness, but in a moment it subsided; gray robes flowed from his shoulders. And I knew him now.

  It was Daedalus, the mythical founder of the Kanalist order—artist, inventor, maker of mazes—wearing the chiton and sandals of the ancient Greeks. As always in my visions, he was also Summerisle, the Master of the Nexus University Kanalist lodge, my teacher and my friend. Within the temple, he’d been known as “Daedalus,” and he’d called me⁠—

  “Odysseus?”

  “Master,” I said. “It’s been a long time since you have entered my dreams.”

  “You had become a Master in your own right,” he said testily. He was as I remembered him, gaunt, lantern-jawed, past fifty, with eyes that glittered like the sea. “What does Odysseus say of himself—‘I am become a name’? That’s you, son. You made Evan Larkspur a name greater than any life. It’s a curse, but nothing compared to the curse of letting them take it away from you.”

  “But I’m not Evan Larkspur,” I said. “Just another sailor who had his brains scrambled in a suspend-sleep accident. I’ve always feared it, more and more these last few months, always in the back of my mind.”

  “Nonsense. So the gene pattern doesn’t match. Which is more likely—that a desk ensign made a mistake coding your pattern into Records, or that everything else you remember, decade upon decade, world upon world, is a mistake and a lie? Look me in the eyes and say you never met me.”

  “Forgive me, Master, but you are a hallucination.”

  “Certainly,” he replied, “but you don’t doubt that you really knew Summerisle once. When you think of your birthworld, you don’t encounter a fact, a sentence—‘I was born on Wayback’—you remember the scrub grass under the sun and Billy Winton’s blood on it after the fight and the way Mavis Green wore her hair as she watched. Do you think a madman could invent those million sense impressions?”

  “Who can say what it’s like to be mad?” I said. “And the tests said I was born on Wayback, whoever I am. Besides, suspend-sleep dreams are enhanced to be as vivid as reality. When I dreamed of surfing I could taste the salt; when I broke into a harem I could⁠—⁠”

  “But notice, you still remember those as dreams. In your heart, you know the Larkspur stuff is real.”

  I shook my head. “No, Master, I doubted it from the first moment I woke up in this century. You don’t go into space as an obscure university poet and come back to discover that you’re the most famous man in the human universe, everyone’s idol, everyone’s hope. That is the sort of thing a madman dreams.”

  The ghost regarded me with icy eyes. At last he said, “It won’t do, you know. This Prince of Homburg self-pity won’t hold a modern audience. Can you really see yourself spending the next hundred years in mental institutions? Better to be mad, and enjoy it. For instance…step away from that wall.”

  And I do. I step down from the wall to the stone floor, and cross to him.

  “This isn’t real,” I say.

  “That is correct!” he snaps, my old professor. “This isn’t happening; it never happened; we are just two voices in your head, and what is more, you know it. But now let’s take a walk to a real place. Let me remind you what you give up when you deny the past.”

  And so we walk the flagstone path together, dead leaves scurrying past our ankles, and we talk of archaeology and ancient history, for he is that rare professor who will spend time with a freshman outside class. Above us, Nexus’s largest moon, West Egg, is a full sail against the Milky Way.

  At length we pass Cordoba House, an upperclass dorm favored by the rich and prominent, only a handful of its rooms open to the student-housing lottery. And here is the Masters residence, a semi-detached cottage at one end, its windows alight with candles.

  “There are people you should meet,” Summerisle says. “But not to emulate; I’m hoping they’ll emulate you. Don’t worry, I won’t hang on your elbow. But they should see that you enter with me.”

  And so he leads me in.

  Candles everywhere, bright enough to illuminate the passing trays and glasses, but dim enough to draw you close, to make conversation intimate. The occasion? Master’s Port, a sugary drink for insular drinkers. Professor Summerisle introduces me to the Master, Dean Yang. Yang’s rotund wife shows me the excessive politeness due a poor colonial boy, while her well-preserved husband gazes over her dimpled shoulder at schoolgirls dressed for racier parties later tonight.

  And now I’m on my own, holding a glass of treacly spirits off to one side as if it smelled bad. I know hardly anyone in this rich crowd. Then I see Lucan Kostain, the one they call “the Orphan.” A tall, heavy-shouldered athlete with black curly hair and perpetual dark circles under his eyes. Two weeks ago he went into the village and tried to pick up some townie’s girl in the spaceport bar; three dockhands were trying to spoil those Greek-god looks when I decided to fight on his side. Now he nods a greeting; I’m grateful, then angry at myself for being grateful.

  If I want to write verse plays for a living, I must cultivate these people, but it all seems hopeless. Am I overdressed, in this white tunic—especially considering I have no party invitation for later on? Am I going to be the sort of person who cares whether he’s overdressed? Is there a single thing here I truly want?

  And then I see her. A tall, black-haired girl whose wasp waist only draws
more attention to the flare of her hips, the opulent ripeness of her breasts. Her black gown is cut more modestly in front than most of the party dresses around her, and its fabric is less sheer. But somehow one knows that there is nothing under it but matte white flesh, and when she turns to show the entire pale length of her back, delicately muscled and deliciously indented, one is sure of it.

  The straight raven hair hangs short, shorter than we college boys are wearing it, a rakishly slanted helmet. But that highlights the somehow feminine shape of her skull, the length and slenderness of her white neck. Her eyes are large and long-lashed, a shining brown that shades into hazel. Beneath the prominent but rounded cheekbones, her face tapers to a small chin. Her mouth is also small, though beautifully drawn; the sensual little lips hold a hint of the perverse, with their sharp edges and blood-red gloss.

  And the air around her burns with the halo of money and privilege. She’s the most desirable girl in the room, but so formidable no boy approaches her. I know her name; I’ve seen her in clothes that don’t shriek sex, in my Rhetoric class. She’s always had the rich girl’s bodyguard of friends she prepped with, chatting with the brittle animation of a society I will never share.

  But now she is alone, in a dark corner by the sideboard. Dean Yang walks by, at a discreet distance, and a glance passes between them that drives my fingernails into my palm. Then he is gone, and she sees me staring, and no doubt guesses what I have seen. It would be cowardly to turn away from the challenge in those bright brown eyes, but as I walk toward her I have no idea what to say.

  “Aren’t you Domina Wintergrin?”

  Her eyebrows rise in mock horror. Her mouth is not small at all when it widens into a wicked, V-shaped smile.

  “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” she says, slowly, that I may comprehend. These stupid upper-class customs—but I’d known it, I should have hailed Kostain and asked him to introduce me. Now it will take a witty remark to repair the breach, but while I struggle for one my body is possessed by the wandering spirit of some departed fourteen-year-old, no doubt a terminal acne victim, who compels my lips to stammer out, “Perhaps I should, uh, introduce myself.”