The New Space Opera

by Gardner Dozois

  Kemp and Burbank were the two real leaders of the troupe, along with Kemp’s wife (and Burbank’s lover) Condella, whom everyone secretly, and never affectionately, referred to as “the Cunt.” I never learned how the nickname got started—some say it was her French accent as Catherine talking to her maid in Henry V—but other and less kind guesses would probably have been equally accurate.

  Kemp had always been a clown in the most honorable sense of the word: a young arbeiter comic actor and improviser when he was chosen for the Earth’s Men by Burbank’s father, the former leader of the troupe, more than fifty years earlier. One of Kemp’s specialties was Falstaff although he’d lost weight as he aged, so he now had to wear a special suit fitted out with padding whenever he played Sir John. He was a brilliant Falstaff, but he was even more brilliant—frighteningly so—as Lear. If Kemp had had his way, we would have performed The Tragedy of King Lear for every second performance.

  Burbank had the weight for Falstaff but not the comic timing, and since he was in his early fifties SEY, was not quite old enough—nor impressive enough in personality—to make an adequate Lear. Yet he was now too old to play Hamlet, the role his father had owned and in which this younger Burbank had also excelled. There was something about the Prince’s dithering and indecisiveness and self-pity that perfectly fit Burbank. Still, it was a frustrating time for Burbank and he marked it by getting hammier and hammier in the roles Kemp allowed him and by screwing Kemp’s much younger wife every chance he got.

  Alleyn was our young Hamlet now and a wonderful one at that, especially when set against Burbank’s Claudius and Kemp’s Polonius. For villains we had Heminges. Kemp once said to me after a few drinks that our real Heminges out-Iagoes Iago on and off the stage. He also said that he wished that Heminges had Richard III’s hump and personality just so things would be more peaceful aboard the Muse.

  Coeke was our Othello and was perfect in the role for more reasons than his skin color. Recca, especially adept at playing Kate the Shrew, was Heminges’s wife and Coeke’s mistress—when she felt like it—and her easy infidelity had done little in recent years to improve Heminges’s personality.

  Heminges was also our only revolutionary.

  I should explain that.

  There were a few men or women out of the billions scattered among the Archon and other alien stars who believed that humans should revolt, throw off the yoke of the Archons and reestablish the “human era.” As if that were possible. They were all cranks and malcontents like Heminges.

  I was about fifteen and we were in transit in the Pleroma when I first heard Heminges mutter his suicidal sedition.

  “How could we possibly ‘rise up’ against the Archons?” I asked. “Humans have no weapons.”

  Heminges had given me his Iago smile. “We’re in the most powerful weapon left to our species, young Master Wilbr.”

  “The Muse?” I said stupidly. “How could the Muse be a weapon?”

  Heminges had shaken his handsome head in something like disgust. “The touring ships are the last artifacts left from the human age of greatness,” he hissed at me. “Think of it, Wilbr . . . three fusion reactors, a fusion engine that used to move our ancestors around the Earth’s solar system in days and which the Archon cabiri bots . . . and Tooley . . . keep tuned for us. Why, the flame tail from this ship is three miles long during early atmosphere entry.”

  The words had made me cold all through. “Use the Muse as a weapon?” I said. “That’s . . .” I had no words for it. “The Archons would catch us and put us in a pain synthesizer for the rest of our lives.” I assumed this last statement would put an end to the discussion.

  Kemp had told me about the Archons’ pain synthesizers the first months I’d been with the troupe. The lowest of the four tiers of alien races rarely deigned to deal with us, but when dole or arbeiter disappointed them or disobeyed them in any way, the Archons dropped the hapless people into a pain synthesizer and kept them alive for extra decades. The settings on the synthesizers were reputed to include such pleasures as “crushed testicle” or “hot poker up the anus” or “blade through eyeball” . . . and the pain never ended. Drugs in the synthesizer soup kept the prisoner awake and suffering for long decades. And, Kemp had whispered to me, the first thing the Archons do to someone going into the pain synthesizer is to remove their tongue and vocal cords so they cannot scream.

  Heminges laughed. “To punish us, the Archon would have to be alive. And so would we. Three fusion reactors make for a very nice bomb, young Master Wilbr.”

  That thought had kept me awake for weeks, but when I asked Tooley, who was apprenticing with Yerick who was then the ship’s engineer, if such a thing were possible, he told me that it wasn’t—really—that the reactors could melt and that would be messy, but that they couldn’t be turned into what he called “a fusion bomb.” Not really. Besides, Tooley said in his friendly lisp, the Archons had long since retrofitted Muse with so many of their own posttech safeguards and monitors that no amount of mere human tinkering could cause the reactors to go critical.

  “What would we do if we . . . did . . . somehow attack the Archons?” I asked Heminges when I was fifteen. “Where would we go? Humans can’t transit the Pleroma . . . only Abraxas can do that, praise be unto His name, and He shares those sacred secrets only with the Demiurgos, Poimen, and Archons. We’d be stranded forever in whatever star system we’d started the revolt in.”

  Heminges had only snorted at that and turned his attention back to his ale.

  Still . . . all these years later . . . just the thought of losing the Muse made me shiver. She was home to me. She was the only home I’d known in the past eleven SEY and I fully expected to call her home for another fifty SEY until it was time for me to be carted back to Earth on a funeral barge.

  We were performing Much Ado About Nothing and because I was playing Balthasar, Don Pedro’s attendant, I didn’t have to go with the supernumeraries as they went out to drum up business with the Circus Parade.

  There were twenty cabiri for every human from our troupe, but the parade is hard to ignore. Those not preparing for major roles in Much Ado and our huge metal spiders made their way to the dole city on the higher ridges before the cabiri activated their holograms and my friends already in costume began blowing their horns and shouting and singing into their loudhailers.

  Only a few doles joined the procession then—they rarely turn out for the Circus Parade—but by the time the line of brightly costumed actors and the procession of free-roaming elephants with red streamers, tigers, dromedaries carrying monkeys wearing fezzes, wolves in purple robes, and even some leaping dolphins got halfway through the arbeiter city, there were several hundred people following them back to the Muse.

  More trumpets and announcements began blaring from the ship herself. The lower hull is always part of the stage and backdrop, of course, and this night the Muse extruded her lower balconies and catwalks and rows of spots and other lights beneath the tent just minutes before the crowd arrived. Holograms and smart paint became the fields and forests and hilltop manse of Leonato while we players in the wings hurried with our last costume and makeup preparations.

  We started on time to a final flourish of silencing trumpets. Peering out from behind the arras like Polonius, I could see that there were about six hundred paying customers in their seats. (The chinks were only good in pubs and the few provision outlets, of course, but they were good on all the worlds we visited. Chinks are chinks.)

  In the old days, Much Ado would have been Kemp’s and Condella’s tour de force, but a middle-aged Benedick and Beatrice simply didn’t work, so after watching Burbank and Recca being merely adequate—and both very bitchy—in the roles for years, on this tour Alleyn and Aglaé were playing the leads.

  They were amazing. Alleyn brought to Benedick all the bravado and uncertainty of the sexually experienced young nobleman who remained terrified of love and marriage. But it was Aglaé who dominated the performances—just a
s the real Beatrice dominated Leonato’s compound above Messina with her incomparable and almost frightening wit leavened by a certain hint of a disappointed lover’s melancholy. Someone once said that of all of Shakespeare’s characters, it was Beatrice and Benedick that one would most want to be seated next to at a dinner party, and I confess that it was a pleasure being onstage with these two consummate young actors in those roles.

  Kemp had to satisfy himself with a scene-stealing turn as Dogberry, Burbank blustered as Leonato, and Heminges had to throttle down his ultimate Iago evil to fit into the lesser villain of Don John, a character that Kemp once suggested to me was indeed Shakespeare’s early, rough sketch for Iago. Anne played the hapless Hero and Condella was reduced to overacting as Margaret, Hero’s waiting gentlewoman attendant. (Condella always created precisely the character here in Much Ado that she used for the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, even though I’m certain that the Bard hadn’t meant for the two to have any similarities.) And I got to woo her onstage even though I’m twenty SEY younger than she is.

  The audience, mostly arbeiters in their brown rawool and a few score doles in their cotton gray, laughed hard and applauded and cheered frequently.

  Alleyn and Aglaé were wonderful in their act 1 banter and we’d just gotten into act 2 with Benedick asking me to sing a “divine air”—I don’t believe I mentioned that they had me play Balthasar primarily because I was the best singer in the troupe now that Davin had died and left us—and I’d just begun the song when everything changed forever.

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,

  Men were deceivers ever,

  One foot in sea, and one on shore,

  To one thing constant never.

  Then sigh not so, but let them go,

  And be you blithe and bonny,

  Converting all your sounds of woe

  Into Hey, nonny nonny.

  In the middle of my song, into the tent floated a forty-foot-long heavy iron-gray gravity sledge carrying at least eight carapace-hooded, chitinous, four-armed, ten-foot-tall Archons, each sitting deep in its own iron-gray metal throne. Hanging from the sledge by their synaptic fiberneural filaments, which ran down to their hairless, distended skulls like slim, translucent copper hair, were four naked dragomen. Their oversized, lidless eyes focused on the stage and their cartilage-free ears rotating the better to pick up—and relay to their Archon masters—my singing.

  Arbeiters and doles created a racket scrambling out of their seats to get out from under the massive, flat-bottomed gravity sledge. Archons landed their vehicles when and where they pleased and more than a few humans from 25–25–261B certainly had been crushed before this night.

  But the sledge did not land. It rose to a point just below the tent roof about forty feet from the stage and hovered there. The doles and arbeiters who’d fled found places to sit in the aisles out from under the sledge’s shadow and the dangling bare feet of the dragomen and returned their attention to the stage, their faces pale but attentive.

  I’m a professional. I did not miss a beat or drop a note. But I know my voice quavered as I sang the next stanza.

  Sing no more ditties, sing no more,

  Of dumps so dull and heavy.

  The fraud of men was ever so,

  Since summer first was leavy.

  Then sigh not so, but let them go,

  And be you blithe and bonny,

  Converting all your sounds of woe

  Into Hey, nonny nonny.

  Gough, playing Don Pedro, did not miss a beat. “‘By my troth, a good song,’” he cried, his eyes never shifting to the sledge and Archons.

  “‘And an ill singer, my lord,’” was my response. For once I was telling the truth. My voice had cracked or quavered half a dozen times in those eight simple lines of singing.

  “‘Ha, no, no, faith,’” bellowed Gough/Don Pedro, “‘thou sing’st well enough for a shift.’”

  My hands were shaking and I did sneak a glance at the motionless sledge and the slowly twisting dragomen hanging naked and slick-skinned and hairless and sexless beneath that sledge, the filaments from the four of their skulls running up to red sensory node bundles on the complicated chest carapaces of the eight Archons.

  Did the peasant arbeiters and equally peasant doles out there—any of them—have any idea that Gough’s use of the ancient word “shift” in his line meant something like “to make do”? Almost certainly not. Almost all of the beauty and subtlety of Shakespeare’s language was lost on them. (It had taken me years after the troupe adopted me to begin appreciating it.)

  Then what in the hell were the Archons perceiving as they heard these archaic words through the dangling dragomen’s ears, saw our colorful costumes and overbright makeup through the dragomen’s eyes?

  Alleyn caught my eye, forcing my attention back to the play, responded broadly to Don Pedro, and turned to the audience—ignoring the gravity sledge—and gave his chuckling Benedick’s reply.

  “‘An he had been a dog that should have howled thus, they would have hanged him. And I pray God his bad voice bode no mischief. I had as lief have heard the night-raven, come what plague could have come after it.’”

  The night-raven, I knew and the arbeiters and doles almost certainly did not know—who in the name of the Gnostic God of All Opposites had any idea what the dragomen and Archons knew?—was the bird of ill omen.

  There is always a party after a performance. There was that night.

  Some worlds are so dolefully awful that we have to hold the party on the Muse, inviting the pretty girls and pretty boys aboard (there are no human dignitaries, mayors, burgomasters, commissars, or officials of importance in human life now, only the gray doles, and they don’t know how to party). On the more palatable worlds, and 25–25–261B qualified as such, we tried to move the party to a local pub or barn or similar public space. This rock had a pub in the oldest section of arbeiter town. (Those are the only two public institutions that have survived the end of all human politics and culture after our species’ hopeless enslavement—pubs and churches. We’d never partied in a church. At least not yet.)

  The drinking with the few adventurous arbeiters and storytelling and drinking and gambling and more storytelling and more drinking went on until the sulfur winds began to howl against the titanium shutters, and then the young ones among us began pairing off with the most attractive locals we could cull from the herd.

  Aglaé rarely stayed at these parties for long and never went off with locals, but Philp, Pig (our apprentice Pyk), red-haired Kyder, Coeke, Alleyn, Anne, Pope, Lana, the short Hywo, Gough, Tooley, and some of the rest of us each found someone eager to make the beast with two backs with a rare stranger to their world, and two by two, arbeiter and actor, like randy animals filing toward Noah’s Ark, we began slipping away from the ebbing party and heading for arbeiters’ hovels and barracks and outbuildings and barns.

  In my case it was a barn.

  We did it three times in the loft that night as the acid rains blew against the stone walls. (It would have been more times, but at age twenty, I’m not as young and resilient as I once was.) The barn held five animals (besides us)—a llama, a cow, a goat, and two chickens. None seemed bothered by our exertions or Larli’s loud cries.

  Larli was the arbeiter girl who’d invited me home to her barrack’s barn. She was fairly typical for a postperformance fling girl: very young but old enough for me not to feel too guilty, curly hair, pretty eyes, broad shoulders, more muscles than I’d ever have, and hands so callused and strong that several times when I cried out, it was in pain not ecstasy.

  She liked to talk and ask questions—also fairly typical for a postplay fling date—and I tried to stay awake and keep up my end of the conversation (since I was too tired to keep anything else up) as the wind and sulfur rain tore at the slate tiles above us.

  “You must see a lot of wonderful places,” she said, lying back on the blanket on the straw. “Lots of wonderful worlds.”

 
“Uh-huh,” I said. I was deciding how to explain that I was going to return to the Muse to sleep. I always came home to the Muse to sleep after the postperformance. This night was already later than most.

  “Have you ever gone to Earth?” she asked. Her voice almost broke on the soft syllable of the last word. They always do.

  “I was born on Earth.”

  I could tell by her silent stare that she didn’t believe me.

  “A lot of players come from Earth,” I said. “I was nine when they chose me.”

  “There’s no one . . . alive . . . on Earth,” she whispered. I could hear the acid rain outside diminish and the hot winds begin to blow. It would not be long before the terminator crossed this plateau. And it was the Sabbath.

  I patted her pale but powerfully muscled leg. “There are thousands of living arbeiters on Earth . . . um . . . Larli.”

  “I thought only the dead lived there.” She shook her blond curls, flustered. “You know what I mean.”

  I nodded in the dim glow of one shielded lantern hanging on a post below this loft. “There are a few thousand living humans on Earth,” I said quietly. “My family among them. I was born there. The cabiri tend the tombs and do the heavy work, but there is always some labor for the doles and arbeiters.”

  “What is it like, Wilbr? Earth, I mean? It must be very beautiful.”

  “It rains a lot,” I said. This was an understatement. Earth had not seen a blue sky in more than a thousand years.

  “But the oceans . . . the perfecti tell tales of the great blue seas. Oceans of water. They must be gorgeous.”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking only of how I was going to disengage myself so I could get back to my bunk on the Muse. The oceans of Earth had been drained by the Demiurgos long ago. Everything there now was rock and tombs: metal sarcophagi, tens and hundreds of billions of them, stacked on rocky plains, coastal shelves, deep shadowed mountain ranges that had once been ocean depths. Earth had no ecology, no wild things, no domesticated plants or animals—not even the ubiquitous goats and cows and llamas and chickens and other pathetic livestock scattered among sad arbeiter communities like this around the Tell—and no real towns. The few thousand arbeiters and doles were scattered among the tombs.