The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  Her smile was gentle, but she said, “Handsome, that’s just a speech some writer wrote for you.”

  “And a damn good one,” I said. “It’s still true. You’re a Kanalist—don’t you understand? What the hell is a scientist doing playing spy, messing with galactic politics—you think it’s your destiny, don’t you?”

  “It’s just that I know something that perhaps no one else knows,” she said defensively. She shifted against me, dancing cheek-to-cheek for a whisper in my ear. “If your Boss is real, there’s someone I must warn him against. But if your Boss isn’t Larkspur, then maybe warning him is the last thing I should do.”

  “And once a Kanalist believes she’s found the role that waits for her, she has to play it,” I whispered back. “It doesn’t matter if she feels like a slave and a fool, waiting in the dark to go on. She must step into what she fears and let the Goddess work through her. Yes?”

  Her only answer was to squeeze the raised hand I was holding.

  “Okay,” I told her, “I’ve never been the best actor in the human sphere, but here’s a part the great actors were too scared to come and take. Here’s a play the whole galaxy is waiting to see; the author is directing it, he’s befriended me, he’s made me the lead. No matter how well I play it, it’s not going to change the world—but if I back down from it, I’m nothing. It would mean I didn’t have a destiny, I was never meant to do anything, I’d just be dirt in the road that people like you walk. Well, I’m sorry, Beautiful, but I’m playing the lead. And call me a shallow egomaniac, but I don’t want somebody blowing my brains out before it happens. If you want my help, help me stay alive.”

  We’d danced through three tunes, and now the music stopped. I stepped back and looked into her grave, rueful face without the slightest notion what was going on in her mind. Nor did I have a thought in my head when I stepped forward again and kissed her. Her arms went around me immediately, and we swayed a moment in the semidarkness. We didn’t say another word about our bargain, but sealed it anyway, an hour later.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A few weeks and a few nights after that, I watched Foyle’s long, lean form withdraw from our gloriously disarrayed bed and cross the room to fetch a bottle of wine. The light of a small fire licked along the tantalizing legs that moved so languidly; I was long past feeling anything urgent about this picture, but was happy to view it. At such moments it occurred to me that I should have told Foyle who I really was at the first opportunity, the first night, when lust and loneliness had snuffed the candle instead.

  Now it seemed impossible to ever tell. I knew exactly what I was to her—the purely recreational kind of lover who showed up every three or four months in her diary. I couldn’t blame her, since that’s what Christopher Sly was, charming but lightweight; she’d made attempts, early on, to delve deeper, and I’d evaded them. If I suddenly turned three-dimensional now, wouldn’t she feel like the purely recreational piece?

  Of course, that was just a rationalization. Her diary revealed that she’d been intrigued with Evan Larkspur two years before, but intelligently wary. And that had been before I’d lied to her about my plans, stolen the Kanalist Grandmaster’s ring from her, and violated the privacy of her journal. Larkspur was not a charming stranger to her, but someone she knew well enough not be get involved with.

  And I didn’t want to give her up—not even the few nights she granted me. For we only got together if we were in the same bar when they closed it, if the Pretender didn’t want to keep me talking till dawn, if she was not engaged in some dark political conversation with hulking, secretive men she would not introduce. Too often I went to bed alone and maskless at my place, reviewing what little I had learned about the Pretender and his circle—or line readings for Manfred of Otranto, since the premiere was now less than a week away.

  Foyle was everything I needed: direct, not devious; courageous, not cunning; self-contained, not self-centered—the antidote to my own personality. Of course, a lioness is difficult to approach, and harder to satisfy. But the lion sleeping next to her afterward is the safest cat in the jungle.

  Tonight, however, after one glass from the new bottle, she put me out on the street.

  “I have to meet with someone at first light,” she said, and I knew I wouldn’t learn any more than that. It was half-past three in the morning, on a world where that meant something; by setting the local second five percent long, Venezia was able to use the classical sixty minutes and twenty-four hours. So it was quite dark when I went down the back stairs of Foyle’s hotel.

  The Winged Lion Arms showed an imposing front to one of Venezia’s broadest paved streets, but I didn’t intend to walk; my place was too far away. After the first few nights with Foyle, I’d found I could tip the night watchman to let me through the kitchen to the delivery dock in the back.

  The door locked behind me, and there was nowhere to walk on either side, but I had never failed to get a ride on the water. In a city devoted to pleasure, for-hire gondolas prowled all night, and a private boat was just as likely to give you a lift if you hailed it courteously and flashed a small bill.

  As usual, there was no one else behind the hotel, or at any other dock in sight. But this morning I was not quite alone. By the blue safety lights that marked the edges of the narrow canal, I could see a man almost directly across the water, leaning against the ironwork rail of a second-story balcony and smoking a churchwarden pipe. A long and ornate walking stick was propped next to him. I nodded in his direction. He responded with one grave dip of his head, and his face caught enough light for me to see that he had no eyebrows. It gave him the startled and inhuman gaze of an owl.

  At the sound of an inboard motor, I looked upstream. A boat approached, its fit young owner in a gondolier uniform so new he hadn’t lost the flat black hat yet. I waved a bill, and he warped in my direction.

  “Red Canal—the Angleterre?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, and threw me a line. He had to be new at his job, because he came in to the garbage side of the dock. The floorboards were slick with drippings. I held my breath against the sickening sweet smell, with its overtones of tomato and banana, and said, “Watch out, it’s slippery,” since he was stepping out for some reason. Usually they just waved you in.

  He nodded with a taut smile, but probably thought I was just talking about water. He slipped immediately, down onto one knee, and instinctively threw out one hand to break his fall.

  A knife clattered against the boards.

  It was a stiletto dagger, good for nothing but murder. His face snapped toward mine. The caught-in-the-act expression left no doubt.

  Still on his knees, he lunged for the knife. I stomped his hand as he grabbed it, a solid bone-crunching contact, but it sent my other leg shooting out from under me, and then I was scrambling on all fours next to him on the garbage slick. I still had a length of boat rope, and tried to whip it in his eyes, one of those brilliant improvisations that never works—missed entirely—and by then he’d scooped up the knife with his other hand and charged me from his knees, wrestler-style.

  He was my size, but younger and stronger, and if he hadn’t been trying so hard to stab me with his second-best hand he could probably have beaten me unconscious and rolled me into the water to drown. But, as it was, we came to our feet locked together, my hands on his knife arm while he hammered my short ribs weakly with the hand I’d smashed, the two of us snarling face to face. “Help!” I shouted to the man across the water. “Call police!”

  Out of the side of my eye, I saw the man with no eyebrows jerk erect and grab his walking stick. But now he held it in both hands—he raised it to his eye like a rifle⁠—

  And I used my leverage on the knifeman’s arm to haul him in front of me as his partner fired.

  The knifeman grunted in my face as if punched twice in the back, and two flat crack! sounds echoed endlessly down the narrow canal’s polished limestone walls. The sense went out of his face; the stiletto fell from his h
and and rang dully against the dock. He was only trying to stay on his feet now, and I did what I could to help him, hands in his armpits, my head ducked behind his, while the man with no eyebrows took his time and waited for a clear shot.

  A boat engine buzzed somewhere upstream. I yelled something, not real words. The walking stick fired again, and a cat-sneeze sound over the shoulder of my human shield was immediately followed by a loud spang! from one of the garbage cans behind me. Then the knifeman’s head lolled backward on a suddenly limp body, his feet slipped from the edge of the dock, and all his weight yanked me after him, over the side and into the water.

  It was cold and foul and too sudden. I came up for air almost immediately, pushing the dead man’s body aside in the water. The man with no eyebrows fired again, but nothing came of it. I ducked under and scooped with my arms to get deeper. I couldn’t open my eyes for long—the water was too dirty—and I had no plan, unless you count not surfacing again.

  One of my arms hit the knifeman’s dangling foot and I grabbed at it for no reason, maybe with some vague thought of continuing the human shield routine—but he pulled right down, the last air escaping from his lungs, and kept sinking past me. Now I had to breathe, and at the last moment thought of swimming under the dock. I kicked and swam a few meters in what I thought was the right direction but surfaced in the middle of the canal instead, with the gunman visibly closer as he readjusted his aim, and the buzz of a boat motor too loud nearby. I took a huge gasp of air and tried to go deep again, but heard the sound of the shot clearly, followed by a disturbance in the water like someone thrusting a spear through it⁠—

  And then the bullet hit me in the head.

  A meter or two of water had taken most of the energy out of it—trick guns lack power anyway—and I felt only a sting as from a peashooter up past my hairline, but the scare and surprise blew all the air out of my lungs, and I had to go back up despite my fear of the gun and that boat’s sharp propellers⁠—

  And it was as bad as I feared. The instant my head broke the surface I heard the gun snap and saw a black hull bearing down on me, no, on top of me, and I tried to go under again, but bobbed right back up, my hands raised defensively⁠—

  And what the hell? My fingers gripped some sort of metal mesh and were nearly ripped off as I was dragged sharply along, most of my body out of the water but not on the surface, in a hot, dry chamber of blackness.

  The boat wasn’t a propeller job, it was a manta hovercraft, and I had hitched a ride under it, within the bubble of air it rode on. My fingers gripped the rigid mesh that protected the lift fan from objects in the water. I was suddenly, absurdly safe. The air stank of rubber and seemed the wrong pressure to breathe comfortably, but it beat drowning, and in minutes if not seconds I should be beyond range of the walking stick.

  The moment I realized that, the manta rolled to one side, and a tremendous crash of water came from that direction; the craft immediately righted itself and continued on at a higher speed. I was pretty sure the boat had just lost its captain, whether he’d been shot deliberately or had merely caught the last bullet meant for me a moment before.

  Intended or not, the murder set the rudder swinging free, and too soon afterward the manta crashed into one side of the canal, wrenching all my fingers to the roots. I twisted my body until I could kick the boat free of the fender it had nosed into, and it sped along for a while before fetching up against the other side. More aquabatics, and then a stretch of straight travel so long that when it finally ended I kicked off and released my grip, letting the manta buzz on its way without me while I still had fingers.

  I surfaced seven or eight long blocks away from the Winged Lion and swam slowly and clumsily, in my stiff jacket and half-boots, to the nearest hotel dock. It was not so well-lit here, and as I laboriously hauled myself out of the water, I could see only one person in the vicinity, a prostitute in the traditional cloak. She watched my crawl onto the dock in a horrified silence, but the moment I started to stand she began to scream and make Green Church gestures against evil. I tried to say something and she bolted for the hotel’s back door; her cloak caught on a docking cleat and she left it behind, disappearing in an eye-catching swirl of pink flesh and black lace.

  Although unnerved, I had to laugh, thinking that for God’s sake, people must fall in the canals all the time—when suddenly it occurred to me to check the face mask she’d been staring at.

  It felt bad; it felt like disaster. Cold and clammy, but worse than that, heavily ridged and misshapen, monstrous. I had no mirror to look in, but suspected the whore had seen a drowned man come out of the water.

  I had to get back to my rooms somehow. But if I meanwhile took the mask off, it might not survive the trip back. I ran my hand through my hair, trying to think, and the hand came back bloody. Oh, yeah, the bullet scrape. It was better than nothing. I collected as much blood as the small wound would yield and covered my crumpled “face” with it, then threw the prostitute’s cloak around myself, hood up, gathering it in front of my mouth with one hand and waving some big bills with the other. The first few taxi gondolas passed me by, but one finally stopped. The gondolier grumbled about my dripping clothes and peered at what he could see of my face, but accepted my muttered story about getting into a fight and being thrown from a boat. In this hard-drinking town, it seemed plausible enough. I didn’t have to use the story on the doorman at my inn; he was asleep on his feet. I made it to my room half an hour after the false gondolier had dropped his stiletto.

  I prodded the pressure points that caused the mask to remove itself from my face, cleaned it gently with warm water, and placed it within its nutrient dish. Helpless. I knew almost nothing about the gyal-wa’s biology. The cold, polluted water had disrupted the organization of the colony, and it would either find its way back or it wouldn’t. Following the scanty directions I’d been given, I prepared a poultice of glycerine, salt-and-sugar water, and a drop of brandy, and laid it on the outer skin.

  Then I spent the hours from four to noon checking the mask’s temperature every half-hour and betweentimes dozing or trying to figure out what I would do if the mask died. I couldn’t come up with a single workable course of action, though much later I would be glad I had devoted so much thought to the problem.

  And at least it distracted me from the idea that people I didn’t know were out to kill me, and would try again. I couldn’t even report the attempt to the police, passing it off as a mugging or the attack of a jealous husband. There were too many signs of organized assassination: a knife man to keep it quiet, a sniper to finish it fast if something went wrong, and a disguised weapon to make the sniper’s getaway easier. If I gave this to the police, I would earn increased scrutiny from them; even if my cover held up, they might set a protective guard on me wherever I went. I couldn’t afford the threat to my freedom of action, not until I was willing to bet all the chips and tell the Pretender everything.

  At nine I called the Pretender and said I was too hungover to fence. He gave me a hard time, but it was just for show; he was never up this early himself without my nagging him.

  On the way back from the intercom, I caught sight of my true face in the mirror, and marveled at how it had changed in its weeks under the mask. Not just paler, but fuller and lineless, moisturized as by a mud pack—a younger, softer-living face.

  As never before, I was the image of the Pretender.

  And the next moment often comes back to me. I stood hunched over the distorted mask of my own face, feeding it another drop of brandy, watching it intently and helplessly. My life in cameo.

  ◆◆◆

  But by twelve the mask was back to normal. And when normal, it was supposed to be happier on my face than in its dish. I put it on, and showed up on time for rehearsal at twelve-thirty.

  Which was more than the Pretender did. He’d called in which scenes we were to rehearse, putting the virtually silent Renfrew in charge.

  “Is the Boss sick or something?” I ask
ed Julia. “How did he look when he left you last night?”

  “He’s fine,” she said, and leaned close to whisper, “Doctor Lao, his therapist, arrived last night. I guess he’s having his session.”

  “What’s that all about, anyway?” I asked.

  She shook her head and shrugged.

  Too bad I’d had so little sleep. I had to go over two of my most complicated and intense scenes from the middle of the play.

  At this point in the plot, Manfred has arranged to have the dozen leaders of the revolutionary Carbonari, innocently revealed to him earlier by Theodore the Chamois Hunter, arrested and brought to the castle. They think they are going to be tortured and killed, but Manfred has ordered them released into the dining hall. Arriving before them, he discovers the giant black suit of armor we have heard of earlier—a sort of concrete ghost of his murdered father the Emperor. The effigy has been moving about the castle in a ghostly fashion, never when someone is looking. Now it stands at the head of the room. Manfred approaches it fearlessly, looks inside the helmet to confirm that it is empty, laughs, and draws a curtain so that no one else will know that it is there.

  Next to arrive is his stepmother, Bel-Imperia—a name looted from The Spanish Tragedy, and why?—played by Olivia Viviani. She has liked being the imperial consort, would like to be one again, and attempts to seduce Manfred in a scene so outrageous we couldn’t rehearse it too often. Today, however, I was a little nervous about working the mask cheek-to-cheek with anyone, and it showed. Olivia apologized to me afterward for having the garlic scampi for lunch.