Hamlet touched her cheek with his finger. “I should have loved you well.” He exited abruptly.
The others filed out, not speaking. Ophelia, left alone, stared at the wall. Her eyes were empty; her lower lip drooped. “I was the more deceiv’d,” she said softly, dully. ‘T was the more deceiv’d. I was the more deceiv’d.”
19
Horatio said tiredly, “May I come in?” It was four hours after breakfast.
Hamlet had locked himself in his quarters and canceled rehearsal. Ophelia had stayed motionless the entire morning, and Gertrude refused to speak to or look at Horatio.
When Theater Access said that Paulette had come for him, Horatio had run up and kissed her—and fallen flat on the theater steps. The simula Paulette had laughed at him.
After the door opened, the simula Paulette said easily, “The Theater Access wouldn’t take me, so I stood outside like some unclean Poolsider, waiting. I need a drink” She blew Horatio a kiss and vanished. Horatio sagged on the couch.
* * * * *
Paulette leaped forward and grabbed his hand. “I’ve wanted you so to be here! How long can you stay?”
Horatio felt a little better. “I don’t have to be back until just before the show.” Ophelia still knew her lines, and no acting company ever cancelled a performance while the actors and theater were still standing.
She rushed around, urging footstools into place, coaxing tea-tortoises, setting portajets. “You’ll love this.”
Horatio settled back on a couch. It nestled against him as though the livewool were cold. “What is it?”
“It’s my one extravagance. Daddy arranged it. I’ve finally got it in place here.”
He lounged happily as she stood before a wallscreen, gesturing imperiously to it with broad arm sweeps and deep bows. She must have changed the Access settings to suit herself. He tried to follow her gestures but, as always with Paulette, they meant nothing.
She nodded and leaped to the couch beside him. It bleated. She patted it, and it shut up.
Humphrey Bogart walked in, wearing a wide-lapel suit; he had his hands in his pants pockets. Ingrid Bergman, looking shy but determined, followed.
Behind her came a black T-shirted Marlon Brando; behind him, in a conservative suit, John Gielgud. Last, arm-in-arm and in evening dress, the First Couple of Soviet Film: Marya Zelnick and the great Arkady Potemkin. They stood waiting with more poise than normal humans ever show.
Bogart spoke first. “Say, what is this place? If you want me to rent it, it’s too small.” He stepped over a tortoise-table, said, “Excuse me, buddy,” and sat.
Arkady sniffed and said in his carefully retained accent, “I have played in phone booths, and in phone booths that made people weep in stadiums.”
“Yeah, sure. I’ve caused some tears in my life, too.” Bogart put an arm around Ingrid Bergman. “But I always knew what for. What’s the point? That’s all I wanta know.”
Bergman, peering out from under her curls, said, “Ask them. They made us come.” She frowned at Horatio.
Marya crossed the room, suddenly dominating it. “Someone wants something.” She looked weary. “They always do.”
Paulette clapped her hands. “I want a rehearsal.”
Bogart scowled at her, tugging his earlobe. “Rehearsal of what?”
Paulette stood and put her hands on her hips. Horatio was more sure than ever that her brassy confidence was a complete pretense. She said, “Why don’t you improvise?”
“Because it wastes the audience’s time, young one.” Arkady smiled, looking his most dangerous. He stepped forward and a tea-tortoise actually scuttled out of his way. “Improvisation is hard to build, to climax, to drag the audience along where it is most afraid to go. Why bother?”
“Film work.” Brando grinned. He was young and reckless-looking, straight out of The Wild Ones or A Streetcar Named Desire. His hair was in his eyes, and he’d been drinking. “I bet she wants another old film done different. I seen one, had Abbott and Costello in it, but Costello was Kong and Abbott was Fay Wray. Thought I’d split a gut.” He stepped forward and Paulette, without meaning to, stepped back. Brando tilted his head forward and stared at her almost through his eyebrows.
“Come on, baby. Is that it?”
Paulette made another try. “Hardly, darling. And there’s no film anymore, just simula. Old plots with new people. Hardly worth your time.” Paulette draped herself across the couch, which draped back. “I did say improvise, didn’t I? Here’s an actual actor. Show him your talents.”
Bogart peered at Horatio amiably. Horatio smiled back, feeling the real Bogart as Bogey said, “You’re an actor, huh? Say, kid, where do you play, and what do you do? Do they applaud, and are you any good?”
Horatio sat up. “I’m okay, I guess. I play Horatio in the Globe Hamlet Troupe.”
Ingrid Bergman said formally but warmly, “It’s charming to meet a real actor after all these—”
Bogart cut her off. “Not so fast. Who’d you study with? There’s nowhere to study anymore.”
Horatio thought of the years alone, learning from aging theater people and from dry simula classes. He thought of the one live teacher who had thumped his cane and made the young Horatio shift into role after role: be a stammerer, be a frightened soldier, be an old man.
Aloud Horatio said, “I’m an android.”
“What a surprise.” But Arkady sounded disappointed, and they all slumped. “I thought live theater was back.”
“That would be nice.” Horatio was carefully disinterested.
“Nice?” Marya lit a cigarette, archaic even during her time, and coughed raggedly. “It’s where most of us started. Between us we’ve spent a century—”
“And that was before we became damnable clockwork.” Gielgud sat stiffly on a chair and shushed it warningly when it bleated.
“—working on stage skills. Of course, we can’t use them, but we like to think that someday—” Marya trailed off. Even controlled by the parameters of the room’s sound monitor, her voice seemed to linger after it faded.
Ingrid Bergman walked away from Bogart, looking small but angry. “You can’t know what it meant to us.” When she was impassioned, her accent was more pronounced. “We would work for free. We would work hungry. We would work and be ashamed that we weren’t successful. But we worked anyway.”
Suddenly she smiled, and Horatio felt weak. “But why am I shouting at you? You’re just a—” She faltered. Her English was nearly flawless, but she used her few failings to seem vulnerable.
Gielgud said testily, “You’re another chemical imitation of art. Perhaps making you was an art, but you certainly don’t involve acting.”
“Let’s lay off.” Bogart looked suddenly uncomfortable, and tugged at his wrinkled suit as he stared at Gielgud’s impeccable one. “We’re not human either, Johnny.”
“Of course.” Arkady’s face was carefully neutral. Horatio remembered that face from the film Separate Ends, when Arkady talked to Marya about careers, salary, and compromise with love. “We’re the sum of our work.”
“You know damn well what I’m saying.” Bogart stepped forward, a small, angry man facing a calm giant.
“I know what you oughta mean.” Brando leaned on a chair across the room. The shadow variations were perfect.
Horatio stared intently. The simulas had some shared secret. They looked and mounded completely human, except—Horatio said suddenly, “Five words.” He held up five fingers.
Gielgud repeated, his face unreadable, “Five words?”
Horatio, facing Paulette as well, peered through his fist and cranked: a symbol for movie as old as silent film.
Arkady shifted uncomfortably. “Movie.”
Horatio held up pinched fingers: little word. Finally he gave up and counted on his fingers, doing the second word.
Ingrid Bergman said suddenly, “Count.” She laughed raggedly, the on-edge wife from the thriller Gaslight. “Something Count someth
ing something something.”
“Of Monte Cristo” took ten minutes, and Paulette had to do most of it. At the end Arkady slapped his thigh and said with mock enthusiasm, “I should have guessed.”
“Of course.” Marya stubbed a cigarette out on the back of a hermit crab, its shell covered with simula ashes.
“Jesus, you all should have.” Paulette was excited at beating the best performers of the last century. “I mean, it’s just a simple charade. I mean, Jesus.”
Horatio shook his head. “They never stood a chance.”
Paulette looked flattered. “I’m great, darling, but I’m not that good.”
He gestured to the actors. “They didn’t do charades on film, and they didn’t much do it in their biographies. The simulas can’t do it.”
Even Bogart looked weary. “Okay, kid, you’ve got us. Now be a nice guy and shut us off.”
“You can’t do anything beyond what you’ve already done, can you?”
Brando raised both arms, let them drop. “Ain’t that enough?” He gave his voice a quick and fruity American Shakespearean accent. “‘And the sheeted dead/Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets—’” He grinned. “I did Julius Caesar, once. I bet I could do Hamlet.”
Gielgud muttered, “God, please.”
Horatio whirled on him. “Then make fun of him.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Do Brando doing Shakespeare.” Gielgud looked appalled, and Horatio went on, “You couldn’t. None of you could, except Brando. Marya, act like a six-year-old boy.”
“Do you mind if I wait until I’m without a cigarette?” She had just lit a fresh one.
He waved a hand at Bogart. “Do a comic preacher, or a Chekhov character, or Meronick’s version of St. Francis.”
“You’re cute, you know that? Okay. I can’t.” Bogart puffed on his down-tilted cigarette, not looking at Horatio.
“Of course not.” Horatio turned back to Paulette. “That’s how they’re set up. All their public performances and some biographical quotes are scanned onto a system. What they did sets the limits of what they do now.”
Ingrid Bergman gestured at Brando. “As he said, is that so bad?” She tried to smile. “Please. We do our best—”
“You’re not human anymore.” Horatio was angry that they’d snubbed Paulette. “Humans don’t have limits like you—”
“Or like you, android.” Arkady stood in profile, staring out the window, his jaw jumping. “And humans seldom test their freedom. They remain less than themselves.” He turned away from the window, his Russian accent back full and bitter. “I don’t know, sometimes I almost believe perhaps they can’t choose, either.”
“Some of them do.” Horatio risked a glance at Paulette. “Some of them used to.”
Gielgud was suddenly thoughtful. “I’ve often wondered where those few who would be bitterly unhappy doing anything but acting can go now.”
Horatio remembered that most of these actors had solved crimes on stage and on film. “Do people still want to act?”
“I want to.” Paulette shakily imitated Marya’s famous cigarette pose. “And I’m a people.”
Gielgud smiled at her with no kindness at all. “And a purveyor of stale dialogue, my dear. But what about this sophisticated recording device? Tell me, Horatio: where were you made?”
“Here in New York. The Globe has a lab attached.”
“Really? Most theaters can’t afford well-stocked kitchens. And you associate with human actresses?”
Paulette yawned showily. “Anyone would want to.”
Arkady, casually stroking the fur trim of his evening coat, stepped in front of Gielgud. “Refraining from comment on that last remark—as any gentleman would—” He smiled at Horatio. “It is nice, young man, that you show such kindness to someone who can never join your company—”
Paulette was on her feet. “Take that back, you fake—”
“Pick a play,” Arkady said sharply, “with a part I’ve done, or seen, or been told about, and we’ll see who is a fake. But you—” He turned to Horatio. “Might outdo me.”
The others showed the same hungry fascination the androids had around death or the threat of it. Horatio began to sweat. “I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Marya put a hand on Arkady’s shoulder. “You’ve frightened him. You should ask easier questions, like why he plays charades so beautifully—”
“I’m very versatile.” He walked directly into the crowd of simulas, talking into Marya’s face. “I’m better built than you, more intelligent, more like a real actor.”
Bogart pulled Marya gently aside. “Mister, if you wanta shout at somebody, shout at me.” His fists were balled, though he couldn’t hit Horatio any more than Horatio could hit him. “Since you’re so smart, tell me this: who’s better, you or her?” He jerked his head at Paulette.
Horatio clamped his jaw. If he said he wasn’t as good as Paulette, they’d laugh. Worse, if he said he was better than she, he might never see her again. Worst of all, if she discovered he was human, his investigation was over.
And he was, he told himself, still investigating her.
Paulette said suddenly, “Don’t be unfair to him. Of course I’m better. I’m human.”
To Horatio’s surprise it was Ingrid Bergman who answered, with only a little gentleness. “Don’t be foolish. He has rehearsed and performed; you haven’t. Even if you had greater talent, he has the reality.” She smiled at him again, as though she and Horatio shared a secret joke. “Perhaps more reality than you know.”
“What are you talking about?” Paulette stamped. Her foot passed through Bogart’s left shoe. He pulled his foot up and winced. “I’ve rehearsed with you, in my old place. I’ve performed with you. Why would I do those things, why would you do those things with me, if I wasn’t an actress?”
“You want answers or you just wanna ask?” Brando leaped in front of her, grinning but angry. “‘Cause I got answers, all right, and you’re gonna hate ’em. We work with you ’cause that’s what you make us do, and your daddy made damn sure that you could make us. And you do it ’cause there’s no place else you could perform even if anybody wanted you.”
Horatio cut in, “But she’s good enough that her father paid to make each of you. Simulas aren’t cheap; he must think she has potential—”
Brando suddenly froze in place, as though struck by an idea. They all turned to stare at him.
He laughed at them. “I still got what it takes to hold things still till I say go. Don’t I?” He poked Gielgud, who refused to answer. “Don’t I?”
“Don’t poke me. You can stop them, but only as Stanley Kowalski.”
“There’s nothing ‘only’ about Stanley Kowalski, old man. Tennessee Williams, he wrote old Stan the best any guy’s ever been written. And I’m the best Stan there’s ever been.” A beer bottle popped into his hand from nowhere. He shook it and opened it, sipping the fountain of foam.
He turned back to Horatio. “You think her old man bets she can be an actor? Not on your life. He thinks he can keep her out of trouble, making us into little high-tech baby sitters. And you think he’s hocking the family jewels to do it? You’re crazy, too. He can afford to buy thirty of us—”
Paulette said, “Stop it.”
“Or thirty thousand of us—”
“I said stop it.”
“And not just because he’s rich—”
“Stop it right now.”
“But on account of he’s the head of Simula National, Paul Thibodeaux—”
Paulette shouted, “Brando, freeze.”
He stopped, his mouth open. The others seemed unaffected and unconcerned.
But Marya had noticed Horatio’s expression. “So, you’ve heard of her father? Interesting. You didn’t know too much about how you were built, but you knew who ran the simula company.”
Horatio recovered enough to say, “Osric is a simula fan.” He took a breath, trying not to think about what he�
��d just learned. “He goes to all of them. He loves shows, and he Accesses news about simula production—”
“Really? Always remember, young man, short explanations are the most believable.” Marya blew smoke at Paulette and gestured at Brando. “Are you going to leave him frozen? I’m sorry, dear, but it doesn’t hurt.”
“Nothing hurts now.” But Ingrid Bergman looked as though her words were a lie.
“Brando, unfreeze,” Paulette said sullenly.
Brando looked at her as he sipped his beer, but grinned and said nothing.
“Do you wish us to go away?” Gielgud asked. His voice had a shadow of sympathy behind the stiffness.
“Yes. Go. Leave us alone.” Paulette was, by a miracle of will, not crying yet.
“Very well.” Gielgud held out his hands. The others stepped forward and joined him in a quick bow: curtain call. He added to Horatio, “And good luck, young man. Perhaps I should say ‘young android,’ but I don’t believe I will.”
Marya laughed and Arkady embraced her. They all walked into the left wall and were gone.
Horatio turned to Paulette. He had not known that the gap between them would be so wide even if she knew he was human. She was the daughter of one of the richest men in the world. “You never told me—”
“Why tell you anything?” She ran into the serving area.
Horatio followed. “You could limit them more, keep them from talking back.”
Paulette gestured crazily at the processor. In moments it was three recipes behind. “How could I? If I did, I’d lose Brando in The Wild Ones, Bergman at the end of Gaslight, Bogart in practically everything, and Arkady and Marya in The Colonel is Waiting. They were all rebels, except for Gielgud—and he was an awful, loveless, mean-minded snob.”
A tray slid out of the processor. She took a bite and carried the tray to the window. “Open, God damn you.” It opened, and she tossed the tray. The cries from Poolsider children below indicated that the food hadn’t gone to waste.
“God damn window, God damn shut. My God,” she said bitterly, “They eat like pigs.” She collapsed on a livewood chair and wept brokenly.
Too, Too Solid Flesh Page 17