“And?”
“What if it disappoints me?” Tears stood in Mr. Morton’s eyes.
Cochevelou stroked his beard, regarding Mr. Morton in wonder.
“Well,” he said at last. “You wouldn’t be the first man it’d happened to, would you? And after all, it ain’t about you being happy, is it? It’s about giving all them out front something that’ll take their minds off dying up here.”
“Of course it is,” said Mr. Morton, and sighed. “But oh, the terror of dreams fulfilled! It must go on now, mustn’t it? No way to wave a magic wand and crumble my theater back into the violet dust of unlimited possibilities?”
“No, there ain’t,” said Cochevelou. “The show’s going on, and you’re sitting in the little boat about to go over the edge into the whirlpool. Let’s just hope there’s something nice at the bottom.”
“Ten minute call, Mr. Cochevelou,” said Durk.
“Oh, dear,” said Mr. Morton, and ran for the wings. Then he remembered that he was supposed to give a speech before the curtain rose, and ran back. Cochevelou kept going, to the little dressing room he and Alf shared. Alf was dutifully smearing adhesive on his face, preparatory to attaching his false beard.
“You ought to grow a real one,” said Cochevelou, flipping the end of his own with pride.
“Can’t,” said Alf, looking at him in the mirror. “On account of the meds they gave me in Ospital.”
Cochevelou winced. “Not ever?”
“I don’t mind so much,” said Alf, fitting on the false beard. “This don’t arf tickle.”
“Well.” Cochevelou thumped him on the shoulder. “We’re almost on.”
Meera was standing quite still in the wings, summoning all the despair and anger she could. Exxene was walking in a tight circle, muttering, “Kill, kill, kill.” Mona was fussing with her ribbon-stick, looping it through the air in swirly arcs.
“I don’t like this one,” she whispered. “Can I trade with you?”
Meera simply nodded and handed over hers. She was exhausted; Crispin had had a bad case of performance nerves and hadn’t slept much the night before. He had tried not to wake her, but every time he had climbed into or out of bed, the hiss of the air seal had brought her to sharp consciousness and the certainty that an asteroid was plummeting straight for Griffith Towers.
Uncertain applause out front: Mr. Morton clearing his throat.
“I bid you welcome, friends, to the inaugural season of the Edgar Allen Poe Center for the Performing Arts! When future generations of Martians look back to this evening, upon which the shy Muse of Tragedy first ventured onto our rocky soil, they will undoubtedly . . .”
Crispin emerged from his dressing room, and would have looked haggard even without benefit of makeup. As he passed between the colored lights on his way to the wings, his photoreactive beard and wig flickered, black-white-black. He stepped into place beside Chiring, and nodded.
“What’s the house like?”
Chiring gave him two thumbs-up.
“That’s the ticket,” said Crispin, as cheerfully as he could. He began to bounce on the balls of his feet. “Energy-energy-energy, come on, Crispin, aah eeh eye ohh oooh. Run run run!” He drew up his fists and began to run in place.
“What are you doing?” whispered Chiring.
“Gearing myself up,” said Crispin, running faster and faster. “Never fails to kill those butterflies in the tummy. YeeOW!” He finished, as he always had, by launching himself into midair.
Unfortunately, he had forgotten about Martian gravity. Crispin soared up and straight into the blue can spotlight, which rang like a gong when it connected with his skull. He dropped like a sack of flour, out cold.
“Mr. Delamare!” Chiring stared down at him, aghast.
“What the hell?” Cochevelou leaned down from the curved framework meant to symbolize a fishing boat. “Oh. Drunk, is he?”
“No!” Chiring fell to his knees and slapped ineffectually at Crispin’s face. “Oh, no, Mr. Delamare—oh, look, he’s cut his scalp too—”
“What was that—” Mona ventured out from stage left, saw Chiring, and gave a stifled shriek.
“What is it?” Meera looked up, startled.
“Chiring and your husband are fighting! He’s knocked him down!” cried Mona.
“What?” Meera raced across the stage, closely followed by Exxene who, when she came in range, aimed a roundhouse blow at Chiring. Chiring yelped, ducking, and waved his hands in panic.
“What are you hitting me for? He hit his head on the light!”
“Cris!” Meera knelt beside him. “Oh, baby—somebody call the paramedics!”
“What paramedics?” said Cochevelou, climbing out of the boat frame.
“So what were you fighting about?” Mona asked Chiring.
“What do you mean, ‘what paramedics?’” said Meera, horrified.
“We weren’t fighting!” said Chiring.
“I mean, we haven’t got any,” said Cochevelou. He knelt beside Crispin too and thumbed open an eyelid. “Not to worry, ma’am. He’ll come round. Morton has a cot in his office; let’s stow him in there until he sobers up.”
“But he isn’t drunk!”
“But we’re about to go on!” said Mona.
All this while, the sound of Mr. Morton’s speech had been in the background, but it had begun to falter. They heard hesitant applause and then Mr. Morton leaped through the curtain.
“What the hell is going on back here?” he demanded. He spotted Crispin, unconscious and bleeding on the floor, and his eyes went wide.
“He jumped up and hit his head and knocked himself out and I had nothing to do with it!” screamed Chiring. He stabbed a finger at the blue can spot. “It was that light right there!”
Mr. Morton made a sound suggesting that all the air had been knocked out of him. He fell to his knees.
“Aw, now, it’ll all come right, Morton dear,” said Cochevelou. He pulled out his flask, uncapped it and stuck it in Mr. Morton’s nerveless hand. “Just you drink up. Alf, give us a hand with old Brophy Bear.”
“But we’re about to go on!” said Mona.
“Yeah,” said Exxene. “What’ll we do?”
In tears, Mr. Morton shook his head. He tilted the flask and drank.
“Alf knows the part,” said Mona. “He knows all the parts.”
Everyone, including Alf, gave her a withering look. Quite clearly, they heard someone in the audience saying:
“Well? When are we going to see something?”
“Looks like it’s you, son,” said Cochevelou. He bent over Crispin and peeled off his false beard, but when he pulled the wig off too it was full of blood. “Oh, bugger.”
Meera leaped to her feet and advanced on him menacingly.
“I don’t care how you do it,” she said, “but you’re getting my husband to some kind of medical facility, and you’re doing it right now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Cochevelou, backing away. He thrust the wig and beard at Alf, and turned and ran for his life. Meera knelt again beside Crispin, accepting a handful of tissues Exxene had fetched her to compress his wound.
“Scalp wounds bleed buckets,” she told Meera reassuringly. “It don’t mean nothing.”
“Oi!” shouted someone in the audience. “Are we going to sit here all shrackin’ night?”
“I might have known this would happen,” said Mr. Morton, tragically calm. “They’ll riot next, I know it.”
“No! The show must go on, right?” said Mona. “Come on, Alf! Look, Mr. Morton, see how nice he looks in the other beard? And you can wear his beard, and you can play the youngest brother, because there’s no lines—”
“Raise the damn curtain!” said someone in the audience.
“And—I know! I’ll go out and dance for them,” said Mona.
“In a pig’s eye you will, my girl,” snapped Mother Griffith, shouldering her way backstage with Cochevelou close behind her. She stopped short, gaping at C
rispin. “Goddess on a golf ball! Why haven’t you sent him to the clinic, you idiots?”
The audience had begun to sing “Why Are We Waiting?” Mother Griffith turned and thrust her head through the curtain.
“Shut up, you lot, we’ve got an injured man back here!” she shouted. “Manco! Thak! Come up here and help us.”
The audience, cowed, fell silent at once, as two of Mother Griffith’s staff scrambled over the footlights and so backstage. In short order, Crispin was bandaged, tied into a chair, masked up, and carried away down the tunnel, with Mother Griffith leading the way.
“Wonder why they were fighting?” whispered a miner to a hauler.
“I hear those Hollywood types are temperamental,” the hauler whispered back.
The scurrying and cries behind the curtain faded away. For a moment it hung still, so motionless its folds might have been carved from stone; then it rose, to reveal Edgar Allan Poe standing on an outcropping of rock, before a backdrop of severe sky and a sea like black stone. He was sweating, looked frightened and miserable. He looked out at the audience and said:
“‘You must get over these fancies,’ said my guide.”
The old man, an immense old man like a walking hill, stepped forth from the wings. There was a disturbing glare in his eyes. Were those streaks of blood in his wild white beard? He looked at Poe and said quietly:
“‘For I ave brort you ere dat I might tell you da ole story as it appened, wiv da spot just under yer eye. Look out from dis mountain upon which we stand, look out beyond da belt of vapor beneaf us, into da sea.’”
Poe shrank visibly. He licked his dry lips and said:
“‘I looked dizzily, and beheld a wide expanse of ocean. A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive . . . ’”
Meera, sitting huddled on a chair in the wings, felt Exxene grip her shoulder.
“Come on, that’s us,” she said.
May as well, thought Meera, rising mechanically. Show must go on. She moved out with the others, into the eerie light, into the eerier music. She put into the slink of her walk all the hopelessness she felt. Mother cat, looking for a safe place to have its kittens. But there was no safe place . . .
She and Crispin had been pulled under by the circling tide of history, two emigrants like any others, in the long outward flow of life from the place where it started to its unknown destination. Some washed up on the distant shore and did well for themselves, became ancestors to new generations of races . . . some failed to survive their first winters, and their names were forgotten.
She glanced into the audience on one pass around, and was shocked out of her reverie to see that they were watching raptly, leaning forward in their seats.
Why, look at that; they’re completely into it, she thought. Alf had stepped back from the rock, into the blue circle of light, and his beard and hair had gone to black; well, perhaps the stage effect had pleased them. Here came the rickety little boat effect, pushed by Cochevelou and Mr. Morton. Oh, no, look at the false beard hanging askew, under Mr. Morton’s chin! That was going to get a laugh.
It didn’t, somehow. Alf droned on without inflection, and the audience strained to hear, but his accents weren’t strange or comic, not to them.
“‘The roar of the water was drowned in a shrill shriek, like the sound of waste-pipes of many thousand steam-vessels, letting off their steam all together. We were not in the belt of surf that always surrounds the whirl; and I thought that another moment would plunge us into the abyss—down which we could only see indistinctly. The boat did not seem to sink into the water at all, but to skim like an air bubble upon the surface of the surge.
“‘The rays of the moon seemed to search the very bottom of the profound gulf; I saw mist, where the great walls of the funnel met together at the bottom. What a yell went up to the heavens from out of that mist! Our first slide into the abyss itself, from the belt of foam above, had carried us to a great distance down the slope. Round and round we swept—not with any uniform movement—but in dizzying swings and jerks, that sent us sometimes only a few hundred yards—sometimes nearly the complete circuit of the whirl . . . ’”
And why shouldn’t the audience be transfixed? This was their story; they heard it every day. They had all lived through something like this, here, on this alien soil. Pitiless dunes that buried you, suffocating wastes that froze you, bombs that might roar out of the stars unannounced and strike with an impact that smacked you into flattened and broken strata. Mars in all its casual malevolence, against whom one miscalculation meant sudden death and a freeze-dried corpse pointed out to gawking tourists.
Meera flung up her arms and danced, and the other two whirled after her. They were black goddesses, they were nightmare crones, they were the Fates, they were the brides of Death in this bleak place. We are always at your elbow; never forget. The members of the audience stared openmouthed, started forward when first one and then the other mariner was dragged down, seduced, pulled to his death out of sight.
At last, there was only Alf staring out, with the sweat shining on his moon face, real terror of remembrance in his eyes, and his voice had sunk to a hoarse late-night whisper that nonetheless carried to the back of the house.
“‘A boat picked me up. Those who drew me on board were my old mates, but they knew me no more than they would have known a traveler from the spirit land. My hair, which had been raven-black the day before, was as white as you see it now. I told them my story. They did not believe it. I now tell it to you.’”
There was a profound silence. The lights went down.
Finally, there was an uncertain patter of applause, which abruptly swelled to thunder. The audience had struggled to their feet and were baying their approval. The ladies stared at one another, wondering. Mr. Morton, who had been helping himself to the flask since his exit, looked up foggily.
“Good Lord,” he said. “They liked it!” He rose to his full height and nearly fell over. “Curtain call! Shoo! Shoo! Get out there!” He flapped his hands at them. Meera caught his arm and pulled him out too, and he stood between Alf and Cochevelou, blinking in the glare of the footlights.
Meera took Mona’s and Exxene’s hands, as much for support as tradition. A haze was in the air, for men were stamping now as well as applauding, with the dust flying up from their boots. She couldn’t see a face that wasn’t streaked with tears, white or black runnels cut through the red dust.
Someone was pushing through the crowd. Mother Griffith reached the front row, waving, shouting to be heard above the commotion, but still drowned out by the frenzied whooping.
He’s okay, she mouthed at Meera. Just so she wouldn’t be misinterpreted, she made a circle with forefinger and thumb and winked broadly, grinning. Mona hugged her and Exxene pounded her shoulder, which hurt rather a lot, but Meera scarcely noticed.
Her baby was dancing.
Crispin was sitting up in the clinic bed, wearing an absurd gown with teddy bears on it, sipping from a juice box. His head was bandaged, but the color had returned to his face.
“It was a hit because I wasn’t in it, you know,” he said ruefully. “Luckiest thing that could have happened.”
“Oh, darling, you know you’d have been wonderful,” said Meera, stroking his hair back from the edge of the bandage.
“They said it was all right if we visited,” Mona announced, entering with Exxene. “You left before you got your presents! Are you feeling better, Mr. Delamare? Look what Durk had made for us! Isn’t he an old dear? There’s three!”
She held up a huge sweater. Across its bosom had been machine-embroidered: THE MAELSTROMETTES.
“Isn’t that funny? Except he had them all made triple-X-size for some reason. Mine comes down to my knees,” said Mona.
“Here’s yer roses,” said Exxene, holding out a bouquet. “Know what? I’ve had five proposals of marriage tonight. Odd, ain’t it?”
“And you know what else, Mr. Delamare?” said Mona. “Mr.
Morton wants to do a comedy next, as soon as you’re all recovered! Won’t that be wonderful? It’s this lost play or something about somebody named Ernest. At least, I think that was what he said. He was on his third glass of champagne.”
“A comedy?” Crispin brightened. A bell rang, out in the corridor.
“Crumbs, that’ll be ‘Visiting Hours Are Over,’” said Mona. “Come on, Meera, we’ll walk you home. Good night, Mr. Delamare.”
“I’ll be here first thing tomorrow,” said Meera, leaning down to kiss him. She took a rose from her bouquet and carefully threaded it through the straw of his water carafe.
Walking up the tube with Mona and Exxene, she realized that she didn’t notice the methane smell now at all. And how bright the stars were, up there above the half-finished city on the mountain!
BLESSED BY AN ANGEL
PETER F. HAMILTON
Prolific British writer Peter F. Hamilton has sold to Interzone, In Dreams, New Worlds, Fears, and elsewhere. He sold his first novel, Mindstar Rising, in 1993, and quickly followed it up with two sequels, A Quantum Murder and The Nano Flower. Hamilton’s first three books didn’t attract a great deal of attention, on this side of the Atlantic at least, but that changed dramatically with the publication of his next novel, The Reality Dysfunction, a huge modern space opera (it needed to be divided into two volumes for publication in the United States) that was itself only the start of a projected trilogy of staggering size and scope, the Night’s Dawn trilogy, with the first volume followed by others of equal heft and ambition (and which also raced up genre bestseller lists), The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God. The Night’s Dawn trilogy put Hamilton on the map as one of the major players in the expanding subgenre of the New Space Opera, along with writers such as Dan Simmons, Iain Banks, Paul McAuley, Gregory Benford, Alastair Reynolds, and others; it was successful enough that a regular SF publisher later issued Hamilton’s reference guide to the complex universe of the trilogy, The Confederation Handbook, the kind of thing that’s usually done as a small-press title, if it’s done at all. Hamilton’s other books include the novels Misspent Youth and Fallen Dragon, a collection, A Second Chance at Eden, and a novella chapbook, Watching Trees Grow. His most recent book is a new novel, Pandora’s Star. Coming up is another new novel, Judas Unchained.
The New Space Opera Page 19