The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  “And we’re expecting a baby in six months!” said Crispin. Meera put her hands to her face in dismay. To her astonishment, people applauded. She looked around at them all. They were happy for her.

  “No, nobody thinks anything about it, up here,” said Mother Griffith, as she led them along the corridor. “At least, nobody thinks any harm of it. They do say people aren’t having them now on Earth. I can’t say I’m surprised, with those fines! I had mine in the Celtic Federation, see, when you didn’t need a permit. Different now; shame, but there it is. I wouldn’t go back to Earth if you paid me, indeed.”

  “What do people do for—well, for clothes, and furniture?” inquired Crispin.

  “And nappies?” inquired Meera.

  “Catalogs,” said Mother Griffith. “Or the PX at Settlement Base. For now. Not to worry! Within the twenty-four-month, the boys will have my Market Center finished. It’ll be vast! At last, affordable consumer goods up here at reasonable prices, what a thought, eh? It’ll be even more civilized when your next one comes along.”

  “Next one?” said Meera, in a faint voice. Crispin shrugged.

  “And here we are!” said Mother Griffith proudly, and pulled a lever. With a hiss, the great door before them unsealed and folded back on itself. A rush of air met them, cool and sweet, very like Earth. They stepped through and found themselves on a catwalk, looking out across a gulf of air at a corresponding catwalk on the opposite side. Behind them, the portal hissed shut again. “Griffith Towers!”

  “Brilliant!” said Crispin, going at once to the railing and peering over. Meera followed him and looked down, then quickly backed away. Ten stories below was an open atrium with a fountain, and little green things dotted here and there. Immediately above them was a modest dome, letting in the light of day.

  “That’s a rose garden down there,” said Mother Griffith, in satisfaction. “Trees, too, would you believe it? No expense spared. Can’t wait to see what the American sequoia will do in our gravity. I know it doesn’t look like much now, dears, but give it a few seasons.”

  “Oh, no, it’s very nice,” said Crispin, and Meera conquered her fear of heights enough to take a second look. She had to admit that the place showed promise; while most of it was cast concrete, in pink and terra-cotta hues, the floors were cut and polished stone of an oxblood color. There was a great deal of ornamental wrought iron on all the balconies, and hanging baskets that were clearly meant to contain plants one day. Green flowering creepers, perhaps, in all that wrought iron, level after level descending . . .

  The image of the Maelstrom came into her mind, the whirling vortex. Meera pulled back and gasped out, “Griffith Towers, you said. Will there be floors added going upward?”

  “Lady bless you, no, dear! Far too dangerous, even when we get the Great Dome finished. Couldn’t very well call it Griffith Hole-in-the-Ground, though, could we? It’ll be nicer when the workmen’s gear isn’t lying all about,” conceded Mother Griffith. “You’ll have some noise to put up with for a few more months, but it’ll all be finished by the time the baby comes. Your place is done, though. Come and see.”

  She led them along the catwalk to a door, beside which was the first window they had seen on Mars, something like a large porthole. Mother Griffith rapped on it with her knuckles.

  “Expect you never thought you’d see one of these again, eh? Triple-glazed Ferroperspex. Anything happens to the dome, you’ll still be safe inside. As long as you don’t open the bloody door, of course,” she added cheerfully, and palmed the via panel. The door opened for them. “Got to program in your handprints before we leave, do remind me.”

  They stepped through, and the lights came on to reveal a snug, low-ceilinged room. It had plenty of built-in shelves, though the phrase was more correctly “cast-ins”; everything was made of the ubiquitous pink cement, polished to a gloss, from the entertainment console to the continuous bench that ran around the walls. There wasn’t a stick of wood in evidence anywhere. The few pieces of freestanding furniture were made of wrought iron. An attempt had been made to add warmth, in the big Oriental rug on the floor and in the bright cushions on the bench.

  “Front parlor,” announced Mother Griffith. “Kitchen and bath through there—yes, a real private bath, with running hot water and all! Everything state-of-the-art, see? And bedrooms off here—this one we made adjoining, thought you’d want that for the nursery. Come and see.”

  Each room had a sealed airlock rather than a door. They stepped through into the bedroom and stared; for the bed was sunk into a recess in the floor, under a transparent dome of its own.

  “More state of the art,” said Mother Griffith. “Anything happens, your own little dome keeps you safe with your own oxygen supply.”

  “‘Anything happens’? What’s likely to happen?” asked Crispin.

  “Oh, nothing very much, nowadays,” said Mother Griffith, with a wave of her hand. “Once the Great Dome’s finished, I don’t expect there’ll be many emergencies. If we get another Strawberry, it can’t flatten the place—that’s the clever part of building underground, see? Though it might dash a boulder or two against the atrium dome, so it’s best to take precautions. And it’s five years now since we had an asteroid strike, and that was way out in Syrtis Major, so—”

  “Asteroid strike?”

  “Scarcely ever happens,” said Mother Griffith quickly. “We never waste time worrying about ’em, and you needn’t either. And aren’t they building a whole series of orbiting gun platforms up there, and bases on Phobos and Deimos to boot, all manned with clever lads who’ll pot the nasty things off with lasers to some other trajectory, if they don’t blow them up entirely? They are indeed.

  “No, the only real inconvenience is the dust. There’s a lot of dust.”

  “But,” said Meera. “Just supposing for a moment that an asteroid did hit—say it plummeted right through the atrium dome!”

  “We’d lose the rose garden,” said Mother Griffith. “And I suppose anyone who’d been silly enough to be down there without a mask on, but that’s Evolution in Action, as we’re fond of saying up here. You’d be snug in here with your door sealed, I expect.”

  “But we’d be trapped!” said Crispin.

  “Not a bit of it! There’s a hatch in the kitchen, opens out on the maintenance crawlway. Leads straight back to the Empress of Mars, so you’d just stroll up and have a pint while the Emergency Team dealt with things. What, were you expecting aliens with steel teeth lurking round the water pipes? Not a bit of it; only alien you’ll see is the fellow in the Tars Tarkas costume on Barsoom Day, bringing presents for the kiddies,” said Mother Griffith firmly. “Come now, have a look at the nursery.”

  Meera waited offstage with Exxene and Mona, the three of them in matching black leotards. They were growing slightly bored, waiting as they had been for fifteen minutes. Across from them, they could see Alf and Cochevelou, waiting for their cues, sitting quietly in a pair of folding chairs.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t have done it live,” Mona complained. “I take really good care of my singing voice, you know? I could do it night after night. I’d be loud enough too.”

  “He couldn’t have put in his special effects then, could he?” said Exxene. “We’ll be louder. Scarier. Inhuman, like.”

  Meera shifted uncomfortably. Her leotard was a little tight. She wondered how much the baby showed. It was hard to think of herself as a scary, inhuman force of nature with a baby.

  “I heard the first edit,” she said. “It’s wonderful. He’s mixed in all kinds of sound effects, bits of music—all distorted so you can’t quite recognize them, you know—and then our voices come in on the Philip Glass piece and we sound quite unearthly.”

  “I guess it’s okay, then,” said Mona. Exxene stamped her feet in impatience and did a back bend.

  “When’s this Poe going to get his arse in gear?” she muttered. Mr. Morton entered from stage right, waving his hands.

  “Sorry!
Sorry, all! Mr. Skousen is ready. Places, if you please.”

  Meera focused and thought of herself as a deadly goddess, a creature of the storm, a wall of water black as jet, devouring . . . or an asteroid approaching through the black cold infinity of space . . . Here came Mr. Skousen in makeup as Edgar Allen Poe, and she was appalled at the thought of how much white pancake foundation they must have had to use. He had poise, though, and the big sad dark eyes for the role; he walked sedately to his mark, turned his little Hitler mustache to the audience, and said:

  “‘You must get over these fancies,’ said my guide.”

  “Your cue, Mr. Delamare,” said Mr. Morton. Crispin, in full makeup, came bounding out, rubbing his hands.

  “‘For I have brought you here that I might tell you the whole story as it happened, with the spot just under your eye!’” he cackled, leaping so high he almost collided with the holo rig.

  Meera winced. Mr. Morton pulled his white hands up to his mouth, as though he were about to stifle a scream of dismay; but he made no sound. Mr. Skousen, visibly startled, turned to stare.

  “‘Look out, from this mountain upon which we stand, look out beyond the belt of vapor beneath us, into the seaaaa!’” Crispin declaimed. Mona stifled a giggle. Mr. Skousen cleared his throat, not quite suggesting disapproval.

  “‘I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean,’” he said. “‘A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horribly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking for ever.’” He spoke in clear, somber, and entirely appropriate tones.

  Mr. Morton forgot to cue the music, but the stage manager—Mona’s betrothed, who had cleverly traded shifts with another miner so he could keep an eye on her—remembered anyway, and switched on the sound.

  A menacing drone filled the air, disturbing currents of Bach’s Fugue in G, eddies of electronically modified voices.

  “Oh, wow, is that us?” said Mona.

  “We sound good,” said Exxene in surprise.

  “Ladies, that’s our cue,” Meera reminded them, and they processed out from the wings, looking baleful as the three witches in the Scottish play, seductive as the mermaids in Peter Pan, deadly as the Guardswomen in Sheeratu. They prowled together in a tight circle upstage, and Exxene in particular got an unsettling light in her eye.

  “I’m going to kill somebody,” she said sotto voce.

  “That’s the spirit,” said Meera, resolving to keep well out of arm’s reach of her.

  They walked on, round and round, in a silence that deepened.

  “Line?” said Crispin at last.

  “‘Do you hear anyfing, do you see any change in da water,’” said Alf helpfully.

  “‘Do you hear anything?’” said Crispin, lurching up to Mr. Skousen and jerking at his sleeve. “‘Do you see any change in the water?’”

  “Crumbs!” said Mona, sincerely shocked. “He’s awful!”

  “Oh, dear, Mr. Delamare,” said Mr. Morton, “Mr. Delamare—I am afraid—this is not quite what I had in mind.”

  “Sorry?” Crispin straightened up. “Oh. Too broad, isn’t it? I can tone it down a little.”

  “Yes, please,” said Mr. Morton. “Go on. Your line, Chiring.”

  Mr. Skousen drew a breath and said:

  “‘As the old man spoke, I became aware of a vast and gradually increasing sound.’”

  Mr. Morton waved distractedly, and Durk raised the volume on the music. Mulet’s Thou Art the Rock was briefly recognizable. Mr. Skousen raised his voice:

  “‘The vast bed of the waters, seamed and scarred into a thousand conflicting channels, burst suddenly into frenzied convulsion—heaving, boiling, hissing—prodigious streaks of foam gyrating in gigantic and innumerable vortices, and all whirling and plunging eastward. These streaks of foam, spreading out to a great distance, took unto themselves the . . . er . . . ’”

  “‘Jyartry motion of da subsided votrices,’” said Alf.

  “Thank you. ‘Took unto themselves the gyratory motion of the subsided vortices, and seemed to form another, more vast.

  “‘I looked down a smooth, shining, and jet-black wall of water, speeding dizzily around and around with a swaying and sweltering motion, sending forth to the winds an appalling voice. The mountain trembled to its very base.’”

  Mr. Skousen looked at Crispin, and cried: “‘This, this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelstrom!’”

  Crispin leaned in and, with his very, very worst SpongeBob titter, said, “‘I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of the Maelstrom! Ha-ha-ha!’”

  “Oh, dear God,” said Mr. Morton.

  “I didn’t think I was that bad,” said Crispin miserably. They were sitting together in their little state-of-the-art kitchen, over a couple of mugs of Martian-style tea. Yellow lakes of melted butter swam on its surface, but it was surprisingly soothing.

  “You weren’t really,” said Meera. “It’s only that . . . it’s not a comedy, darling.”

  “It could be,” said Crispin. “It could be played funny. Why doesn’t anybody see the humor in the thing? Nobody could see the humor in The Dancing Daleks either. Why are people so serious? Life isn’t serious.”

  “No, but Art is,” said Meera. “Apparently.”

  “The big guy, Alf, he’s amazing. We talked, you know, about all his adventures on the road up here, really awful stuff he’s lived to talk about, and you should hear him! ‘So dere I was wiv, like, dis sand doon over me, and I finks to myself: How da hell am I gointer find out wevver Arsenal won da match? So I reckoned I’d better get a shovel or somefink, but dere weren’t no shovel, so I tore da seat off da lavvy and dug out wiv it.’ It’s all in a day’s work to him! He was laughing about it!”

  “That was nice; you got his voice exactly,” said Meera.

  “These people live on the edge of destruction, all the time, and they manage by treating it all as a joke,” said Crispin. He folded his arms the way Mother Griffith did and cocked his head at Meera. “‘Oh, my goodness no indeed, you don’t want to let a little thing like an asteroid hitting the bloody planet bother you! Just come up to the Empress for a pint, my dears!’ So why can’t Morton see how really innovative it would be to play this thing for laughs?”

  “I don’t know,” said Meera. “But, you know, it’s his vision. And it’s his theater. And these people have been awfully good to us.”

  “So I don’t suppose I could walk out of the show,” said Crispin. He gave her a furtive look that meant: Could I?

  “No,” said Meera firmly. “This isn’t like walking out on Anna Karenina, where it didn’t matter because Mummy loaned us the money to get the car fixed. Or walking out on From the Files of the Time Rangers, when it didn’t matter because your aunt left you that bequest. It isn’t just a matter of scraping by until one of us gets a commercial. You’re right; you can’t leave. We can’t leave. Remember why we’re here.”

  “I know,” said Crispin, and sighed. He looked at her sadly. “Life has caught up with us, and it’s going to suck us in. I have to grow up now, don’t I?”

  “Grow up?” Meera laughed, though she felt tears stinging her eyes. “Crispin, you’re having adventures on bloody Mars! You’re living in a Star Wars flat beneath the surface of another planet! Our baby’s going to think Father Christmas has four arms and tusks! Do you think growing up is going to be boring?”

  He giggled, looking shamefaced.

  “No, no, see, it’s all wrong. If I’m having adventures on Mars, I ought to be in my space suit, with my rocket ship in the background, and my clean-cut jaw sticking out to here—” He thrust his chin out grotesquely. Meera couldn’t help laughing. He jumped up on the table and struck an attitude.
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  “And I’d have a ray gun in either fist—and I’d be firing away and dropping alien hordes in their tracks, brrrzzzt! Aiee! Die, space scum! ‘Retreat, my minionth! It ith Thtar Commander Delamare! Curthe you, Earthman!’ And I’d have this gorgeous babe, naked except for some strategically placed pieces of space jewelry, clinging to my leg as I stood there. Played by the beautiful and exotic Meera Suraiya.” He smiled down at her.

  “Would she be pregnant?”

  “Of course she would,” said Crispin, jumping down and kissing her. “Got to repopulate the planet somehow.”

  “It’s standing room only!” said Mr. Morton, biting his fingernails. “Look! Look! Look at them out there!”

  Cochevelou peered through the gap in the curtain. He spotted Mother Griffith in the front row, arms folded, with most of the tavern staff seated to either side of her. Behind them, in ranks all the way to the back wall, were haulers and miners. Some were washed and combed and wearing their best indoor clothing; some had clearly come straight from their rigs, or from their mine shifts, for they wore psuits or miner’s armor and had tracked in red dust on the purple carpet.

  “Heh,” said Cochevelou, leaning back. He took a small flask from an inner pocket, and had a sip before passing it to Morton, who drank and coughed. “Now, see, if you’d charged ’em for tickets like I’d told you, you’d have made a chunk of change tonight.”

  “No! These poor fellows would never have access to the finer things in life on Earth; I won’t deprive them of the chance, here on Mars,” said Mr. Morton. “The Arts shall be free! If only . . . ”

  “If only?” Cochevelou tucked away the flask and peered at him. It was dark backstage, and Mr. Morton’s licorice-stick silhouette was barely visible; his pale face seemed to float above it, like the mask of tragedy.

  “If only it wasn’t for the human element,” he said mournfully.

  “Ah. The holotalent?” Cochevelou shrugged. “Well, and what if the boy’s terrible? It ain’t like this lot will know any better.”

  “There is that,” Mr. Morton admitted. “But . . . I have built my theater. I am about to accomplish a thing of which I have dreamed my life long. I am a dramaturge, Maurice. My players are assembled, my Shrine to the Arts is filled . . . and . . .”