The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  But something Von Bülow had said back on Troudeserre pricked at me. He’d wondered if Evan Larkspur had left a clone fetus behind, a fetus someone had kept on ice until twenty-odd years ago. I could be pretty sure I’d never been cloned. But suppose Domina had been pregnant when I left?

  She could have had the child before going into deep-suspend, or she could have had the fertilized egg removed and saved for reimplantation at any convenient time. A refrigerator would do the job, and deep-suspend could no doubt do it more safely. One scenario: have a child to cement her marriage to a rich old man, and let him think it was his.

  Any hack playwright could see myriad possibilities here. The Pretender could be my son, grandson, or even great-great grandson—that would qualify as distant-relative genes. Or Julia could be my long-delayed daughter. Genuine incest was possible either way—and hadn’t Lord Byron committed incest with his half sister? But I didn’t buy it.

  The Pretender believed he was the real Evan Larkspur—he wanted his “right place” in Domina’s life. And she believed he was her old lover, too; that’s why it would be almost incest, figurative incest, for him to sleep with her daughter. And the whole notion that Domina would ever have had my child or preserved my seed, given the way things were between us when I left, was laughable.

  I dismissed the whole speculation.

  And as soon as I abandoned that Gothic plot, another one suddenly took center stage and compelled belief.

  Considering the wringer the Pretender was putting her through, why didn’t Domina just leave and take Julia with her? Why had she come in the first place? It was as though she were on a mission of some kind. She did undertake political missions. She had a partner and protector so powerful he could get her pulled from the history books. The Consultant, some people said.

  The Consultant would certainly be that powerful. An ex-naval officer as well as galactic dictator, he could even get naval gene records switched right under the noses of the Shadow Tribunal. In fact, it was hard to imagine anyone else who could.

  Summerisle the Consultant, always saying “we”; Summerisle and Domina? But all the clues were there.

  The Consultant had risen to power through blackmail—the sort of blackmail the Vice Book would have made possible. And if he’d had to kill a lot of top Column people along the way, maybe that wouldn’t come so hard to a man who’d led the resistance to the Column until it was utterly crushed. It would be even easier if someone close to him possessed all the ruthlessness he lacked.

  Sure, Summerisle had always been the sort of mystic and philosopher who didn’t need sex and avoided its entanglements. But I of all people knew better than to underestimate Domina’s attraction. Her husband was a powerful old Columnard; maybe he’d been one of Summerisle’s early targets until Domina had interposed her own body. Summerisle could never have found a better agent in the highest levels of Column society; and she would have been able to use him in turn, to build a place in Summerisle’s post-Column order for her husband and child.

  I still couldn’t believe it, but hadn’t he virtually admitted it? When the time comes to judge us and what we’ve done, he’d said. Yes. He knew I’d have tough questions to ask the man who’d been ruling the galaxy for nearly forty years and hadn’t managed more than a handful of reforms. And the apologetic way he’d asked me to steer clear of Domina—that should have given it away immediately, if it hadn’t been so hard to visualize them together.

  But to hell with it. I was not in a position to judge my Master. Or even Domina, who didn’t strike me as the heartless kid of old; far from it. The Shy Lock revolution still sounded good; Von Bülow would always be a bad guy. I had my orders, and would carry them out. For now.

  ◆◆◆

  I went looking for Foyle at the Coq D’Or and the Valhalla and the Wayfarer—and in this last dive found the Pretender instead. He’d been cornered by some tourist woman too stupid or persistent to ignore his bodyguard’s hints that he wanted to be left alone. She was going on and on about the bust of Larkspur displayed on the shelf behind the counter: yet another copy of the famous work by Schaelus, heroic but slightly effeminate, that the Pretender usually referred to as “Prometheus Un-balled.” The tourist was telling him how brilliantly Schaelus had captured his spiritual essence. He gave me a facial SOS; I slid an ale from the counter and ambled over, slapping him on the back as I sat down.

  “How goes it?”

  He gestured limply at his tormentress. “Citizen Delacroix, this is Freeman Sly.”

  “Charmed,” I said, starting up my sourest Wayback twang. I clutched her offered hand and slobbered a kiss on it. “You’re through with her, then?” I asked him. “Or d’ya want to go threesies? Not too expensive, to judge by the frock. How much a go, darlin’?—and don’t price yourself out of the market, the Boss and me go through six a’ you girls a night.”

  Citizen Delacroix drew herself up, white-lipped, tried to say something, then sped away.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, the Pretender howled. “Oh, God,” he said, “I thought you were supposed to be my conscience, Chris.”

  “Yeah, but you were behaving like a gentleman—so I rewarded you.”

  He laughed again. “Just so you remember which of us is the Byronic figure here.”

  “Always that name. What is the bad baronet to you, anyway? What’s it all about?”

  “Fame, Chris,” he said. “That’s what Byron understood; everywhere I’ve been, he was there first. Forget his serious stuff, that’s mainly humbug, but read Don Juan:

  What is the end of fame? ’tis but to fill

  A certain portion of uncertain paper.

  Some liken it to climbing up a hill,

  Whose summit, like all hills, is lost in vapor;

  For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kill,

  And bards burn what they call their ‘midnight taper,’

  To have, when the original is dust,

  A name, a wretched picture, and worse bust.”

  He went melancholy after that, picked up a barmaid, and left. I found Foyle at the Dutchman. The way her face lit up, like a young girl’s, dug a thorn into me.

  We’d been together barely three weeks, but it had been three weeks of lonely tension when apart and cheerful, greedy lovemaking when together. For all her independence and toughness, she was too straight not to yield to honest emotions. I felt something, too, but the sentiments of a poet are always suspect…Still, that night in bed, I decided I owed her more of the truth. For a moment I even considered removing the mask, but the scene that would follow was too easy to imagine. I’d deceived her too long.

  But I told her about spying on the therapy session. I said that what I’d heard convinced me the Boss wasn’t the real Evan Larkspur, but a genuine weapon against the Column all the same. And if the secret she wanted to tell him would undermine his sense of identity, she should keep it to herself.

  Funny, I’d meant to keep it true, if incomplete. But once I’d started to manipulate, I couldn’t stop. I told her that the therapist’s questions about Malatesta showed that the revolution’s higher-ups distrusted the chief bodyguard, just as I did. Had she learned anything about Lew that could be used to dump him over the side?

  She said that she’d cultivated a few lowest-echelon bodyguards, including amiable Arn, “even though they know they’ll never get to sleep with me. They’d never admit it, but a woman they can actually talk to is the greatest need in their lives.” She told them she was studying men of action—they didn’t know the difference between archaeology and anthropology, or care. But it was slow going. “They complain about their officers, like all dogfaces, but it’s just force of habit; they’ve got it soft here.” It was true that Malatesta liked to hold little meetings the Pretender knew nothing about, not just with his favorite cronies among the bodyguards, but with other hardcases never seen around the palace. That didn’t make him a traitor, though. The lower ranks assumed it was the usual mercenary moonli
ghting—arms smuggling, maybe—and Foyle couldn’t disprove that. I told her I wanted dirt on Malatesta, and she said she’d get it. Arn had hinted about some “special training” they’d been getting in rotation; maybe the details would illuminate Malatesta’s mysterious sideline.

  I realized that if Foyle didn’t have to tell the Pretender about the other Evan Larkspur she’d met, then her self-imposed mission to Venezia was logically ended. She was not independently wealthy, though she owned a small freighter that could haul cargo between archaeological expeditions; its current orbital fees were probably mounting. Why should she stay in this dangerous game, if not for my sake?

  But I didn’t even tell her about the attack on me that morning. She would have asked why I hadn’t informed the Pretender or the police. The truth is all or nothing. Lying within the scent of her, the purring sound of her sleep, I knew she deserved better. And said nothing.

  ◆◆◆

  When I got back to my room that morning to change my clothes, Julia called and invited me to breakfast. We met at a little place with a view of the water—old Venezian joke—and had hot crescent rolls, apricot juice, and the local elaboration of coffee, which was prepared in an enormous chromed surgical device and served in thimbles.

  Julia made small talk about the play at first. But it was clear that she was upset about something, and she didn’t need much coaxing to reveal it. “It’s Evan,” she said. “Last night, I sneaked past Mother’s suite to see him in his rooms—No, don’t say anything yet. He had passed out. One of his antique pistols was in his hand, and there was the beginning of a suicide note on the table. I woke him up and talked to him. He said it was a joke that had come to him while he was drunk. That could even be true. We talked for an hour, Christopher, and I don’t have the slightest idea what it was about. He wants to sleep with me—he doesn’t think I should because it would make no difference—there’s no place for him in the world—my mother hates him—and on and on. I would have done anything to give him some peace. But the way he was, still half-drunk—he wouldn’t even have remembered it in the morning.”

  I’d been holding my breath, and let it out with relief. “Kid, playing with your love would be just another thing for him to feel guilty and miserable about later. You wouldn’t give him a drink—don’t give him yourself, either.”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” she whispered fiercely, “everyone fucks. It means absolutely nothing to them. He does those whores, and you do that red-haired horse—you think I don’t know?—and my mother does the Consultant, everyone says so. I’m the only one who has this great heavy treasure she has to carry forever because she can only spend it once. Well, let me break it to you—I’ve done it. Years ago, on Belle-Isle, with the cook’s nephew. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, feeling a million years old. “And you thought that when I said ‘love’ instead of ‘sex’ it was a silly euphemism. But it’s the love that’s dangerous, kid. That’s the little knife that cuts your heart out. Ask your mother if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, you have no idea,” she said. “She flutters around me, talking him down, but you can see she’s saying everything except the truth. She’s jealous of me. She had her chance with him when she was my age, but he was poor and had no prospects. That’s what it’s all about.”

  All Domina had to do was tell Julia the truth about those days, or the Pretender’s intentions toward her now. But that might drive a wedge between them forever. I felt a wave of unreserved pity for my poor Dark Lady, tortured by the Pretender’s sad young face, marooned in a century that was never meant to be, and now held hostage to a mother love she couldn’t have imagined when she was young and free.

  “You’re very hard on your mother,” I said. Like a father. Having failed to show how grown up she was, Julia found a distraction in a brown young boy who’d tied his skiff to the coffee shop’s dock and was selling lottery tickets to the patrons. She hailed him and had him explain the rules and the payoff schedule for the Shrimp Lottery. He did so rapidly, in the nasal accent of the old quarter. “But if the government doesn’t run the lottery, how do I know it’s not fixed?” she asked quite seriously, holding a coin before his hungry eyes that was worth about one percent of the meal we’d just eaten; the rich are truly a race apart.

  “Just look, Signorina,” he said, dashing to the bulletin board on the wall. It had been showing police news off La Rete—something about two men found dead of bullet wounds in the Jade Canal, police seeking to question a hideously scarred man who had taken a gondola to the Angleterre but didn’t reside there, anyone who knows anything to call them, etc. The kid told the board to display the financial screen, then pointed at the commodity price of shrimp. “See, that is the winning number—the five o’clock closing price, everything past the decimal. And no one can fix the price of shrimp, Signorina.”

  Julia was satisfied. I was slow on the uptake. The boy had worked the whole room and was about to leave when the right memory finally surfaced: the strange and seemingly pointless conspiracy of fishing industry clerks that my skeleton coder had uncovered when I first arrived on Venezia. “Excuse me,” I said. “Is there a Calamari Lottery, too?”

  “Yes, Signore, that is the big one. I have tickets for Venerdi—the day after tomorrow.”

  Of course—the big one is the one to fix.

  ◆◆◆

  After his emotionally shattering interviews with Domina and Julia, and perhaps a suicide attempt, the Pretender turned up for rehearsal full of obnoxious zest and cheer. He didn’t allow me to corner him for a conversation about Julia, though.

  I thought he might start his drinking early, and looked for him at the Dutchman in the afternoon. He wasn’t there, but on my way out I was buttonholed by the new manager, Van Damm.

  “About your bar bill, Freeman Sly,” he said—none of this old-quarter Signore stuff when you’re in arrears.

  “I believe that’s on Freeman Larkspur’s tab,” I said. Since winning a part in the play I’d been receiving a small weekly stipend from the Doge, but I still needed the Pretender’s credit to get by. When Van Damm asked me to discuss it with him in his office, I didn’t have much choice.

  Still less so when the door locked behind me and he activated an antisurveillance screen from a blinking panel on the wall. Van Damm ran a hand through his blond hair and aimed his gunmetal eyes at me. “All right, Sly, or Mauldin, or whatever your name is. I’m Rezakhan of the Tribunal. I need a full report from you immediately. Then we can proceed to your next assignment.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I’d known it was coming. And I should have been doubly alert, with faceless men gunning for me. But it was still hard to compose myself—for I do mean “compose.” Quickly, now: my character was a con man and spy from Wayback; he had little or nothing to fear from his Tribunal contact on Venezia; in fact, he might be looking forward to payment for all his spying. I relaxed into a seat opposite Van Damm’s oak desk and even accepted a cigar when he offered it.

  “You’ve done well,” he said. But then, Summerisle had said the same, and what good had that done me? “You couldn’t have positioned your label better. I would have contacted you a few weeks ago, once I finally got control of this place. But I think we’re nearing the end phase of this op, and I wanted to downscale my net’s double potential before activating my own label.”

  “Come again, mate?” I said.

  “Oh, I forgot you weren’t a professional.” He showed a self-satisfied smile. “I wanted to cut my organization to the bone before taking action under this identity. Lessens the possibility of our harboring a Kanalist spy.” He said “Kanalist” the way you’d say “pederast.”

  “If I’m doing so bleeding well,” I said, “what’s all this about transferring me to another assignment?”

  “I didn’t say ‘transfer.’ But let’s face it, the end phase always upscales risk potential. It’s time we had a depth debriefing before⁠—⁠”

>   “Before I get killed?”

  “How many millions will get killed if anarchy spreads past this system?” he rapped. I must have let my surprise at his vehemence show; he shrugged and leaned across his desk to light the cigar I’d just cut. “V. warned me you have your own motives. But I’m not going to judge you. Look at it this way: I need all the information I can get if I’m to keep you alive.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What do you want to know?”

  In the next hour I let him extract a chronological account of my time on Venezia. There were only a few things I had to keep from him. Much of the rest he probably knew anyway, and corroborating it would make me look good without hurting the Pan-Kanalist cause: the composition of the Pretender’s circle, his relationship with the Doge, Malatesta and the Hard Men, Arturo’s politics and assassination, and the Pretender’s character in general. Van Damm’s tight young face told me that none of this was good enough.

  I rewrote my part, from observer to operative. Told him of the attempt on my life, how I’d handled it without informing anyone, how I’d recruited Foyle to investigate the Hard Men for me, how I’d spied on the Pretender’s therapy session. This was the right stuff; he stopped me several times to make sure his recording equipment was getting everything.

  Of course, the right stuff was much less true. I fed him a fake Foyle, a wild-eyed revolution groupie sure to appeal to this reactionary youngster’s view of the world—hints of bisexuality and nymphomania went down particularly well—and an even falser Doctor Lao, who looked like late middle age at a distance, but proved at short range to be a young man wearing a centenarian disguise. I decided to let Van Damm know that the Pretender’s therapy was a refresher course on Larkspur’s life. I couldn’t see the harm, now that Summerisle had both a false and a real Larkspur at his command.