The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  She erased the message and wrote a new one, addressed to her backup via the decoy node. It would have been nice to upload all her memories, but the Noudah were ruthless, and she wasn’t prepared to stay any longer and risk being used by them. This sketch, this postcard, would have to be enough.

  When the transmission was complete she left a note for Sando in the console’s memory.

  Daya called out to her, “Jown? Do you need anything?”

  She said, “No. I’m going to sleep for a while.”

  MAELSTROM

  KAGE BAKER

  Even on a rough, rude, frontier Mars, people will still have a need for entertainment, and perhaps even for the consolations of Art. And, as proved by the sly and funny story that follows, they may have to turn to the most unlikely of sources to find them . . .

  One of the most prolific new writers to appear in the late nineties, Kage Baker made her first sale in 1997, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and has since become one of that magazine’s most frequent and popular contributors with her sly and compelling stories of the adventures and misadventures of the time-traveling agents of the Company; of late, she’s started two other linked sequences of stories there as well, one of them set in as lush and eccentric a high fantasy milieu as any we’ve seen. Her stories have also appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Sci Fiction, Amazing, and elsewhere. Her first Company novel, In the Garden of Iden, was also published in 1997 and immediately became one of the most acclaimed and widely reviewed first novels of the year. More Company novels quickly followed, including Sky Coyote, Mendoza in Hollywood, The Graveyard Game, The Life of the World to Come, as well as a chapbook novella, The Empress of Mars, and her first fantasy novel, The Anvil of the World. Her many stories have been collected in Black Projects, White Knights and Mother Aegypt and Other Stories. Her most recent books include two new collections, The Children of the Company and Dark Mondays. Coming up are a new novel, Machine’s Children, and another new collection, Gods and Pawns. In addition to her writing, Baker has been an artist, actor, and director at the Living History Center, and has taught Elizabethan English as a second language. She lives in Pismo Beach, California.

  Mr. Morton was a wealthy man. He hated it.

  For one thing, he wasn’t accustomed to having money. During most of his life he had been institutionalized, having been diagnosed as an Eccentric at the age of ten. But when the British Arean Company had needed settlers for Mars, the Winksley Hospital for the Psychologically Suspect had obligingly shipped most of its better-compensated inmates off to assist in the colonization efforts.

  Mr. Morton had liked going to Mars. For a while, he had actually been paid a modest salary by the BAC. Eccentric though he was, he was nevertheless quite brilliant at designing and fabricating precast concrete shelters, a fact that would have surprised anyone who hadn’t seen the endless model villages he’d built on various tabletops in Ward Ten, back on Earth. The knowledge that he was earning his own keep as well as doing his bit to help terraforming along had built up his self-esteem.

  When the economic bubble that had buoyed up the BAC burst, Mr. Morton had been summarily made Redundant. Redundant was nearly as bad as Eccentric. He was unable to afford a ticket back to Earth and might well have become an oxygen-starved mendicant sleeping in the Tubes, had he not found employment as a waiter at the Empress of Mars tavern. Here Mr. Morton had room, board, and oxygen, if not a salary, in surroundings so reminiscent of dear old Winksley Hospital for the Psychologically Suspect that he felt quite at home.

  Then his employer, known as Mother Griffith by her patrons, had had a run of extraordinary luck that had resulted in making her the richest woman on the planet. Farewell to the carefree days of Mr. Morton’s poverty! Mother Griffith set him up in business as a contractor and architect.

  She now owned the entirety of Mons Olympus, and leased out lots to commercial tenants with the dream of building a grand new city on Mars. Areco, the immense corporation owning the rest of the planet, busily devised laws, permit fees, and taxes to hinder her as much as it was able. But by bankrolling Mr. Morton’s firm, Mother Griffith found she was able to evade neatly several miles of red tape and avoid a small fortune in penalties.

  All Mr. Morton was now obliged to do was sit at a drafting terminal and design buildings, and, now and then, suit up and wander Outside to look at a construction site where laborers actually hired and directed by Mother Griffith were busily pouring the peculiarly salmon-pink concrete of Mars.

  For a brief period, Mr. Morton had enjoyed the contemplation of his bank account. He had enjoyed being able to afford his very own Outside gear at last, with the knowledge that he’d never have to improvise an air filter out of an old sock again. His indoor raiment was all of the best, and in the sable hues he preferred. And oh, what downloads of forbidden books the black market in literature had to offer, to a man of his economic status!

  And yet, the more he kept company with Messrs. Poe, Dumas, Verne, King, and Lovecraft, the greater grew his sense of overwhelming melancholy. His position as a newly prosperous bourgeois seemed distasteful to him, a betrayal of all that was artistic and romantic in his soul.

  “Stop moping,” Mother Griffith told him. “Bloody hell, man, the Goddess gifts you with obscene amounts of cash, and you can’t think of more to do with it than buy some fusty old words? You’re making a city with your own two hands, in pixels anyway. There’s power for you! You want artistic, is it? Stick up some artistic buildings. Cornices and gingerbread and whatnot. I don’t care how they look.”

  Mr. Morton retired to his drafting terminal in high dudgeon and plotted out an entire city block in Neogothic Rococo. Factoring in Martian gravity, he realized he could make his elaborate spires and towers even more soaring, even more delicate and dreamlike. A few equations gave him breathtaking results. So for a while he was almost happy, designing a municipal waste treatment plant of ethereal loveliness.

  And, just here above, where its gargoyles might greet both sunset and dawn, would rise . . . the Edgar Allan Poe Center for the Performing Arts!

  Mr. Morton leaned back from his console, dumbfounded. Here was a worthy use for vulgar riches.

  When the last of the concrete forms had been taken away, when all the fabulously expensive black walnut interiors shipped up from Earth had been installed, Mr. Morton’s theater was a sight to behold. Even the shaven-headed members of the Martian Agricultural Collective, notorious for their philistinism, suited up and hiked the slope to stare at it.

  For one thing, dye had been added to the concrete, so the whole thing was an inky purple. Not only gargoyles but statues of the great poets and dramatists, floral roundels, bosses, shields, crests, and every other ornamental folly Mr. Morton had been able to imagine covered most of its gloomy exterior, and a great deal of the interior too. On Earth, it would have crumbled under the weight of gravity and public opinion. Here on Mars, it stood free, a cathedral to pure weirdness.

  Within, it had been fitted up with a genuine old-fashioned proscenium stage. Swags of black velvet concealed the very latest in holoprojectors, but Mr. Morton had hopes of using that vulgar modern entertainment seldom.

  “But that’s what people want to see,” said Mother Griffith in dismay.

  “Only because they’ve never known anything better,” said Mr. Morton. “I shall revive Theater as an art, here in this primitive place!”

  He thought it might be nice to begin with the ancient Greeks, and so he put a word in his black marketeer’s ear about it. A week later that useful gentleman sent him a download containing the surviving works of Aristophanes. Mr. Morton read them eagerly, and was horrified. Had he ever truly understood the meaning of vulgarity before now?

  He was not at a loss for long. Mr. Morton decided that he would write the EAPCPA’s repertory himself; and what better way to open its first season than with adaptations of every single one of Poe’s works?

  “You’re putting on The Descent into the Maelstrom?” shouted Mother Griffit
h. “But it’s just two men in a boat going down a giant plug hole!”

  “It is a meditation on the grandeur and horror of Nature,” said Mr. Morton, a little stiffly.

  “But how on earth will you stage such a thing?”

  “I had envisioned a dramatic reading,” said Mr. Morton.

  “Oh, that’ll have them standing in the aisles,” said Mother Griffith. “Look you, Mr. Morton, not to intrude on your artistic sensibilities or anything, but mightn’t you just think about giving ’em at least one of those son-et-lumière shows so they have something to look at? For if the miners and haulers feel they haven’t had their tickets’ worth of entertainment, they’re liable to tear their seats loose and start swinging with ’em, see, this being a frontier and all.”

  Mr. Morton stormed off in a sulk, but, on sober reflection, decided that to ignore the visual aspect of performance was, perhaps, a little risky. He drafted another script, in which the Maelstrom itself would be presented by dancers, and each unfortunate mariner had a stylized lament before meeting his respective fate.

  “They want a thrilling spectacle?” he said aloud, as he read it over. “Here it is!”

  Fearful as he was to commit the purity of his script to human actors, Mr. Morton liked even less the idea of machine-generated ones. He decided to hold auditions.

  The interior of Mr. Morton’s theater, while richly furnished, was quite a bit smaller than its remarkable exterior (air being a utility on Mars, living places tended to conserve its volume). Mr. Morton preferred to think of the result as an “intimate performance venue.” Seating capacity was thirty persons. Mr. Morton sat in the back row now, watching as Mona Griffith stepped from the wings.

  “Hi, Mr. Morton!” said Mona.

  “Hello, Mona.” Mr. Morton shifted uncomfortably. Mona was the youngest of Mother Griffith’s daughters. She was carrying a SoundBox 3000 unit. She set it on the floor and switched it on. Slinky and suggestive music oozed forth. Mr. Morton’s knuckles turned white.

  “Mona, you’re not going to do a striptease, are you?” he inquired.

  “Well—yes,” said Mona, in the act of unbuckling her collar.

  “Mona, you know how your mother feels about that,” said Mr. Morton. He himself knew quite well; he had known Mona since she was ten. “In any case, I’m holding auditions for a play, not a—a burlesque review!”

  “I’m of age now, aren’t I?” said Mona defiantly. “And anyway, this isn’t just a striptease. It’s very intellectual. I’m reciting as I’m stripping, see?”

  “Tell me you’re not stripping to Hamlet’s soliloquy,” begged Mr. Morton.

  “Pft! As if! I’m doing General Klaar’s Lament from The Wars of the House of Klaar,” said Mona. “And I’ve got these really horrible-looking fake wounds painted in unexpected places, see, so as to create quite a striking effect. So it wouldn’t be at all, um, what’s that word? Prurient?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it would be,” said Mr. Morton. “But—”

  They heard the warning klaxon announcing that the airlock had opened, and then the heavy tread of armored feet approaching the inner door. Boom. The inner door was kicked open, and a man in miners’ armor strode down the aisle toward Mona. He drew a disrupter pistol and shot the SoundBox 3000, which promptly fell silent.

  “Durk! You bastard!” shrieked Mona. The intruder marched up onstage, not even removing his mask. Mona kicked his shin viciously, forgetting that he was wearing Larlite greaves, and hopped backward clutching her foot. “My toe!”

  Her fiancé shoved his mask back and glared at her. “You promised me you wouldn’t do this,” he said.

  “You shot my SoundBox!”

  “But you promised me you wouldn’t do this!”

  “But you shot my SoundBox!”

  “Put your mask on. We’re going home!” said Durk, waving his pistol distractedly.

  “But you shot my SoundBox!”

  “Next,” said Mr. Morton, from underneath his seat.

  The next applicant waited until Durk and Mona had made their noisy exit before emerging from the wings.

  “Er . . . Hello, Alf,” said Mr. Morton.

  Alf was a hauler. Haulers drove Co2 freighters out on the High Road, the boulder-marked route that cut across the Outside wastes to the two poles. The mortality rate for haulers was high. Consequently, most haulers had been recruited from Hospitals, because they tended to care less about that fact.

  Alf was able to face down cyclones, wandering dunes, flying boulders, starvation, and thirst without turning a hair, but he was sweating now as he peered out toward the empty seats.

  “Erm,” he said.

  “Are you here for the audition, Alf ?”

  “Yeah,” said Alf, blinking.

  “And . . . we took our meds this morning, did we?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So . . . what will you be performing today, Alf ?”

  “Erm,” said Alf, and then he drew a breath and said:

  “Scene. Morning room in Alregons Flat in Arf Moon Street. Da room is luxriussly an artriscally fronished. Da sound of a pianer is eard in da adoining room. Lane is ranging arfternoon tea onna table an arfter da music as ceased, Alregon enners curvy mark from music room ovver curvy mark. Alregon. Didja ear wot I wuz playing Lane? Lane I din’t fink it wuz plite to listen sir—”

  Alf, what on earth is that?”

  Alf fell silent and blinked. “S’play.”

  “Which play?”

  “Da Importance of Being Earnest,” said Alf. “By Oscar Wilde.”

  Mr. Morton sat bolt upright. “Where did you find a copy?” Oscar Wilde’s work had been condemned as Politically Trivial so long ago that scarcely any of it survived.

  “Canary Wharf Ospital,” said Alf. Mr. Morton frowned in perplexity. Canary Wharf was a much less genteel institution than Winksley. He fought back feelings of class division and inquired:

  “They had The Importance of Being Earnest in the library?”

  “Nah,” said Alf. “Shoved under floor inna closet. It was like dis old book wiv paper an all? Used to read it when I wuz locked innere. I remember everyfing I read, see?”

  Mr. Morton felt his heart patter against his ribs. “You remember the whole play?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Alf grinned. “Allaway to ‘When I married Lord Bracknell I ad no forchoon of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing dat to stand in my way. Well I spose I must give my consent.’ I wuz locked in a lot.”

  “You must recite the whole play for me one day, Alf,” said Mr. Morton, dazzled by mental images of an Exclusive World Premiere Revival.

  “Sure,” said Alf. “Did I pass da audition?”

  “Why—of course,” said Mr. Morton, thinking to himself that Alf could always sweep the floors. “Well done. I’ll let you know when rehearsals start.”

  “Hey, fanks,” said Alf, and, grinning hugely, he clumped away to the airlock.

  “Next?” said Mr. Morton.

  A woman edged out on stage, wringing her hands. Mr. Morton recognized the silver brooch she wore on her bosom, and sighed. She was one of the sisters from the Ephesian Church’s mission down the mountain at Settlement Base.

  “Hello,” she said. “I . . . ah . . . just wanted to ask you whether you’d ever known the infinite consolation of the Goddess?”

  “Next,” said Mr. Morton.

  In the end, Mr. Morton decided to advertise. He put a notice in Variety (the Tri-Worlds edition): himself, recorded in holo, staring earnestly into the foremost camera and saying:

  “Have you ever considered emigration to Mars? An adventure awaits you in a new company just forming on the Red Planet! The Edgar Allan Poe Center for the Performing Arts is looking for persons with theatrical experience interested in sharing our grand quest to bring the mysteries of our craft to the red and windswept Arean frontier!

  “Yes, you, who have longed to escape from the humdrum routine of Earth, may find your ultimate self-expression here in the
tortured and dramatic landscape of a new world! Send all inquiries to: Amorton@poeyouareavenged.pub.ares.uk today!” The link flashed at the bottom of the holo. Mr. Morton pointed at it and dropped his voice impressively: “Do you dare?”

  Do we dare not to? Meera wondered sadly. She looked over at Crispin, who was sleeping as soundly as though they hadn’t a month to go on their lease and no money to renew, and hadn’t been living on cauliflower for a week, and hadn’t just received notice that the revival of Peter Pan was indefinitely postponed due to the producer’s backing out. She had been cast as Peter, and her salary would have paid both the lease and the last three installments on the Taranis.

  Crispin was an actor too. He had boyish good looks and a wonderful voice, and was brilliant in the right parts; but most of the time he tended to get the wrong parts. His Mr. Toad had been praised to the skies, likewise his Christmas Panto SpongeBob; but his Dr. Who had, in the succinct words of the Times theater critic, “stunk up the stage,” and his Mr. Darcy had simply appalled everyone, himself included. He hadn’t worked in over a year.

  And this morning another catastrophe loomed, one likely to make all their other problems seem small and manageable.

  Meera reached over and grasped Crispin’s foot, and shook it gently.

  “Babe,” she said. “Look at this.”

  “Huh?” Crispin sat up with a snort. She replayed the Variety snippet for him. He stared at Mr. Morton’s shaky doppelgänger, and gradually the lights came on behind his eyes.

  “I wonder,” he said.

  “It might solve a lot of problems,” said Meera.

  “Yeah. Yeah! We could tell the rental agent to go shrack himself, for one thing.” Crispin slid to the edge of the bed and reached for his pants. “I passed the genetic scan in school; did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So we’re eligible to go up there. It might be sort of rough, though.”

  “Could it be much worse than this?” Meera waved her hand in a gesture that took in their sparsely furnished bed-sitter. Crispin glanced around and grinned.