"The show?" he croaked.
"They panned it," she said softly.
He closed his eyes again and groaned.
"But it'll make dough."
He blinked at her and gaped.
"Publicity. Terrific. Shall I read you the reviews?"
He nodded, and she reached for the papers. All about the madman who bled all over the stage. He stopped her halfway through the first article. It was enough. The audience had begun to catch on toward the last lines of the play, and the paging of a surgeon had confirmed the suspicion.
"You missed the bedlam backstage," she told him. "It was quite a mess."
"But the show won't close?"
"How can it? With all the morbidity for pulling power. If it closes, it'll be with the Peltier performance to blame."
"And Jade—?"
"Sore. Plenty sore. Can you blame her?"
He shook his head. "I didn't want to hurt anybody. I'm sorry."
She watched him in silence for a moment, then: "You can't flounder around like you've been doing, Thorny without somebody getting hurt, without somebody hating your guts, getting trampled on. You just can't."
It was true. When you hung onto a piece of the past, and just hung onto it quietly, you only hurt yourself. But when you started trying to bludgeon a place for it in the present, you began knocking over the bystanders.
"Theater's dead, Thorny. Can't you believe that now?"
He thought about it a little, and shook his head. It wasn't dead. Only the form was changed, and maybe not permanently at that. He'd thought of it first last night, before the ikon. There were things of the times, and a few things that were timeless. The times came as a result of a particular human culture. The timeless came as a result of any human culture at all. And Cultural Man was a showman. He created display windows of culture for an audience of men, and paraded his aspirations and ideals and purposes thereon, and the displays were necessary to the continuity of the culture, to the purposeful orientation of the species.
Beyond one such window, he erected an altar, and placed a priest before it to chant a liturgical description of the heart—reasoning of his times. And beyond another window, he built a stage and set his talking dolls upon it to live a dramaturgical sequence of wishes and woes of his times.
True, the priests would change, the liturgy would change, and the dolls, the dramas, the displays—but the windows would never—no never—be closed as long as Man outlived his members, for only through such windows could transient men see themselves against the background of a broader sweep, see man encompassed by Man. A perspective not possible without the windows.
Dramaturgy. Old as civilized Man. Outlasting forms and techniques and applications. Outlasting even current popular worship of the Great God Mechanism, who was temporarily enshrined while still being popularly misunderstood. Like the Great God Commerce of an earlier century, and the God Agriculture before him.
Suddenly he laughed aloud. "If they used human actors today, it would be a pretty moldy display. Not even true, considering the times."
By the time another figure lounged in his doorway, he had begun to feel rather expansive and heroic about it all. When a small cough caused him to glance up, he stared for a moment, grinned broadly, then called: "Ho, Richard! Come in. Here… sit down. Help me decide on a career, eh? Heh heh—" He waved the classified section and chuckled. "What kind of little black boxes can an old ham—"
He paused. Rick's expression was chilly, and he made no move to enter. After a moment he said: "I guess there'll always be a sucker to rerun this particular relay race."
"Race?" Thorny gathered a slow frown.
"Yeah. Last century, it was between a Chinese abacus operator and an IBM machine. They really had a race, you know."
"Now see here—"
"And the century before that, it was between a long-hand secretary and a typewriting machine."
"If you came here to—"
"And before that, the hand-weavers against the automatic looms."
"Nice to have seen you, Richard. On your way out, would you ask the nurse to—"
"Break up the looms, smash the machines, picket the offices with typewriters, keep adding machines out of China! So then what? Try to be a better tool than a tool?"
Thorny rolled his head aside and glowered at the wall. "All right. I was wrong. What do you want to do? Gloat? Moralize?"
"No. I'm just curious. It keeps happening—a specialist trying to compete with a higher-level specialist's tools. Why?"
"Higher level?" Thorny sat up with a snarl, groaned, caught at his side and sank back again, panting.
"Easy, old man," Rick said quietly. "Sorry. Higher organizational-level, I meant. Why do you keep on doing it?"
Thorny lay silent for a few moments, then: "Status jealousy. Even hawks try to drive other hawks out of their hunting grounds. Fight off competition."
"But you're no hawk. And a machine isn't competition."
"Cut it out, Rick. What did you come here for?"
Rick glanced at the toe of his shoe, snickered faintly, and came on into the room. "Thought you might need some help finding a job," he said. "When I looked in the door and saw you lying there looking like somebody's King Arthur, I got sore again." He sat restlessly on the edge of a chair and watched the old man with mingled sadness, irritation, and affection.
"You'd help me… find a job?"
"Maybe. A job, not a permanent niche."
"It's too late to find a permanent niche."
"It was too late when you were born, old man! There isn't any such thing—hasn't been, for the last century. Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you up, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody’ll come along and wall you up is it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer is any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?"
"I don't know. It's not fair. A man's career—"
"You've always got one specialty that's safe."
"What's that?"
"The specialty of creating new specialties. Continuously. Your own."
"But that's—" He started to protest, to say that such a concept belonged to the highly trained few, to the technical elite of the era, and that it wasn't specialization, but generalization. But why to the few? The specialty of creating new specialties
"But that's—"
"More or less a definition of Man, isn't it?" Rick finished for him. "Now about the job—"
"Yes, about the job—"
So maybe you don't start from the bottom after all, he decided. You start considerably above the lemur, the chimpanzee, the orangutan, the Maestro—if you ever start at all.
END OF THE DARFSTELLER
The Darfsteller Page 8