by John Varley
I sighed, pushed myself off the wall, and walked to my dressing table.
"Then go get that costume on the rack over there," I told him. "The one labeled 'Act Three, scene four.' And hurry. We don't have much time to get me changed and back out there."
He looked at me for only a moment, then stood and put Toby in a hip pocket and zipped it closed. He was dressed in the costume of one of the King's knights, his helmet on the floor beside the chair. I assumed that was how he got backstage. He took the costume off the rack and came up behind me as I stood at the big mirror. I was already unbuttoning my costume. Tom would have done that for me, but I only wanted as much help from Izzy as I absolutely needed.
"You keep surprising me," he said. "I don't like that. Not many people surprise me."
"Get used to it."
"I think I have. But since we have some time together, would you explain how you knew I was going to let you finish the performance?"
"I didn't know," I said, shrugging out of the kingly robes of Lear. "But I thought it was worth a try. The worst you could do was coldcock me and shove me in my suitcase, and you're going to do that sooner or later, anyway."
"You don't think killing you is the worst I might do?" He held up the new robe—outwardly, exactly like the one I had just taken off—and I slipped my arms into it.
"If you wanted to kill me, you could have done it as soon as I got here. When you didn't do it, I knew you had other plans. I don't think I'll like those plans."
"I can guarantee it. Why the costume change, Sparky? It looks like a waste of time to me." I'd seen him feeling the seams, quickly going over it for concealed weapons. There were none. I gestured toward the television screen, the one he had been watching as I entered, and had made me hope he might be content to hold Toby hostage and give me a little more time.
"Watch and you'll learn something," I said. On the screen, Gloucester and Edmund were finishing their scene.
"That's my cue," I said, and hurried out the door.
* * *
"In such a night, to shut me out! Pour on, I will endure. In such a night as this! O Regan, Goneril, your old kind father, whose frank heart gave all—O, that way madness lies; let me shun that. No more of that."
Pure poetry. Not just the lines, but my situation. As Lear, I was going mad. Soon I would be tearing my hair and rending my raiment (the reason for the costume change; this one was strategically weakened so it would tear properly). I was more than good. I was brilliant.
And as Kenneth Valentine—some might say the least successful role in my career—I thought I might go mad as well. Just the thing to put an edge in one's performance.
"Prithee go in thyself; seek thine own ease. This tempest will not give me leave to ponder on things would hurt me more."
The edge of the stage seemed to me an abyss; the wings, dark chances. What was to stop me from leaping the footlights and charging down the aisle, out the lobby, and into the wide world beyond? Or finishing my lines, strolling casually offstage and out the back door.
Well, professionalism, for one thing. Laugh if you must, but I would almost rather die than abandon a performance in the third act. There is that old axiom, the show must go on. Not only do I owe it to my craft to give my best, and give my all, I owe it to the audience. If I lived to tonight's final curtain and somehow could escape from my nemesis... then it's a case of Sorry, Polly. Sorry, cast members. I'm outta here. But nothing short of death was going to keep me from finishing tonight.
Later I realized I'd had no way of knowing if the exits were covered by Izzy's people. If, in fact, half the audience were Charonese agents. But I swear that, at the time, it never entered my head. Somehow I knew that Izzy was handling this alone. I had come to know something about him in our two brief, bloody encounters, come to know something of his culture in my researches aboard Hal. He would handle this alone. Call it pride, call it honor. Call it lunacy. After what had happened in Oberon, he would not be calling in the national guard.
But there was a more important reason I could not flee and that was, of course, Toby. Did Izzy know me well enough to rely on my sense of loyalty to hold me hostage even if my fear and my sense of duty would not? Bet on it.
When I took Toby as my companion so many years before, we had made a deal. As I said before, I was responsible for food, shelter, and safety, and he was in charge of everything else. Oh, I also handled minor matters, such as career decisions, travel itineraries, and our pathetic financial affairs. There had been no need to write any of this down; I considered it a part of the original agreement between man and dog, struck during the Stone Age. This may have been the first deal, the primordial deal, before either written or verbal agreements, and any human who fails to honor it is a pretty poor human in my estimation. Some have found irony in the fact that dogs have accompanied the human race into space, but I fail to see anything odd about it. A dog was the first earthling in orbit, and the first casualty of space travel.
Toby was in charge of love and absolute loyalty, and I could return nothing less to him.
"Is man no more than this?" I shouted. "Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! Come, unbutton here."
And I began tearing my clothes.
* * *
It seemed unusually quiet as I exited the stage. You expect a few slaps on the back, a wink, a thumbs-up. Some encouragement, acknowledgment that things are going well. There was none of that, and for a moment I was worried. Then I saw the faces of the cast and knew the silence meant something else. They were moving out of my way. Some did not even dare to look at me. They were afraid of intruding on me, afraid that anything they might do or say would short-circuit the magic. Theater people are intensely superstitious, always alert for the potential jinx, the careless word or gesture that will shatter someone's concentration.
I think they were a little afraid of me.
* * *
"It's a wonderful performance, Sparky."
"I wish you'd quit calling me that."
"It's how I think of you. How I remember you. I really was a fan, you know."
Incredible as it may seem, I believed him. And I also believed he appreciated Shakespeare, and my performance as Lear. How a man raised in such a perverted society could still cherish the arts of a common humanity I will leave for the reader to research, accept, or disbelieve, as takes your pleasure. But his desire to see the end of the play was my only current hope of salvation, his only window of weakness. I didn't dare question it.
"You know I'm going to kill you, don't you?" I asked.
"I know you're going to try." The prospect didn't seem to disturb him.
I had nothing to do for a while. The King sits out most of Act Four. On the stage, Gloucester was having his eyes gouged out. Cornwall would soon meet his Maker. Time to start laying my plans.
Believe it or not, I was hopeful.
Toby was in Izzy's lap, but refused to be cradled. With someone he likes, Toby is capable of sprawling over your hand and arm, limp as a noodle, completely trusting you not to let him fall. Or he can be a shameless beggar, licking your face, wagging his tail, angling for a handout.
Not now. He sat stiffly, looking from Izzy's face then over to me. He was saying, "Why don't you ditch this jerk?" When Izzy's hand moved in Toby's fur, the little lip curled slightly and the tips of his teeth showed. He was far too well-bred to bite the hand of a guest, but clearly he'd like to. With Toby and Izzy, it was hate at first sight.
I don't think Comfort hated Toby. I don't think he viewed Toby as a feeling thing at all. Anyone can tell a dog lover. A dog lover can't keep his hands off a dog. Put one in his lap and he will stroke, scratch, laugh when his face is licked, sometimes coo and gibber like a fool. Comfort held Toby like he would hold a pillow.
"I was wondering if we could tal
k," I said.
"It would be out of character to plead for your life."
"Not plead. But maybe we could bargain."
He laughed. "Money doesn't tempt me, and you don't have any. What else do you have to offer?"
"I wondered if we could talk about the frog."
He was silent for a while, his eyes narrowing.
"I'd meant to ask you about that," he said. It was as if he was looking for a trap of some kind, and I didn't get it.
"Ask what?"
He shrugged. "What frog?"
"What..." It seemed we weren't communicating. I opened my hand, where the evil little netsuke had been resting. The tiny frog still crouched on the skull, his eyes still unsurprised at all they saw. It felt warm and alive. Ivory is a very sensual surface. I could hardly keep my thumb from caressing it.
I started to toss it toward him and a palm-sized, deadly-looking black pistol materialized in Comfort's free hand. I'm sure it hadn't been there before, and I'm sure it hadn't been up his sleeve, but where it came from and how he got it without apparent movement will have to remain a Charonese secret. He was very fast.
So I carefully set it on the arm of his chair. He looked at it, made the gun vanish (how did he do that?), and gingerly picked it up. He stroked the frog with his thumb, then set it back down.
"Very pretty," he said. Pretty is not the word I would have used, but I'm not Charonese. "What does it have to do with me?"
Here the script calls for the protagonist to sit for a moment in stunned silence as all his assumptions come crashing down. After the long pause I told him how I'd come by the frog.
"Well, she never reported it to us," he said, with a slight smile. "If she had, we would have come for it, taken it from you, and broken both your arms. You'd have been repaired and on your way in a few hours."
"But—"
"We were called in by the governor of Boondock. You do remember visiting Boondock, don't you? Certainly you remember the young lady you met there. I saw her picture, and I certainly wouldn't have forgotten."
"But she was—"
"Nineteen, and engaged to a banker's son. Boondock is an independent city-state within the Outer Federation. It was established by a religious cult about a century ago. They have some unusual customs there, one of which is legally mandated obedience to one's parents until the age of majority, which they say is twenty-five years."
"I didn't—"
"As in so many other places, ignorance is no excuse. I'm sure your producer handed out a booklet before your arrival, concerning local customs; they always do. And like most passengers, you threw it away along with the booklet the shipping line gave you concerning emergency evacuation procedures. But you really should have read it, Sparky. Your brief affair with the girl upset a lot of political plans concerning an upcoming arranged marriage. Family honor demanded reparations.
"We Charonese are the only broad authority beyond Pluto. We're the only ones with enough discipline to maintain strict standards over such a vast region. Each enclave has its own rules and its own enforcers, but when someone flees a jurisdiction, as you did, we are called in. We work only by contract, and the governor's policy with us sets out prescribed remedies for different situations. First, we guaranteed to hunt you down. As I'm sure you have learned from your researches, we always get our man."
"Hunt me down and kill me," I said.
"Hunt you down. The governor was a bit cheap, though, and didn't pay for death in this instance. I'm not sure we would have written such a policy, anyway. We tend to operate more on an eye-for-an-eye basis. Almost Biblical, you might say."
"Biblical."
"Exactly. Since there was no way for us to take your virginity and ruin your marriage prospects, of course, we would have used other methods. The usual penalty would be three days of pain, followed by a year's incarceration."
"So you never intended to kill me."
"I blame myself, really," he said. "I assumed you knew that, back on the Britannic. I assumed too much. I expected resistance—three days of pain is certainly memorable to a non-Charonese, and something you surely would try to avoid—but I wasn't prepared for the tenacity of your assault.
"Of course, things are different now...."
* * *
"You do me wrong to take me out of the grave," I said. "Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears do scald me like molten lead."
Things were indeed different now. If, in some ways, my last scenes of madness were not acting at all, then how to judge the end of the fourth act, when Lear is returned to sanity, temperance, even a sort of tranquillity in the arms of his faithful daughter Cordelia, while within me, poor actor, raged all the tempests of folly?
Considering all that, it might have been my greatest moment on the stage. No one would ever know just how great.
Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, and we play it at cross purposes.
My one and only chance of escape was coming, and I did not feel up to it. I wanted to lie down with Lear, return to my comfortable grave.
But did it matter? What would have been different if I had given Comfort more time to speak, back there in my tiny cabin aboard the Britannic? Or if he hadn't been so unnaturally quick? The tanglenet was supposed to have immobilized him, then I could have listened to what he had to say.
Three days of pain. A year at what I had to assume would be very hard labor and solitary confinement. Would I have surrendered, knowing escape was, in the long run, impossible?
No.
It was as simple as that. I can't do jail time. I'd rather die. I'd rather spend the rest of my life on the run. I once did three days in jail, waiting for arraignment. Every time I went to sleep I found myself back in the airlock, facing the Daewoo Caterpillar. Awake, I spent all my time watching the walls, because every time I turned my back on one it began to move in on me. Very hard work, since you can't watch six walls at once. As soon as I made bail, I jumped, and have never regretted it.
So I would have fought the man from Charon. But I might not have tried so hard to kill him.
It didn't matter now. He'd explained it all to me, before my entrance. I had killed a Charonese. That simply was not allowed. The penalty was death, and a death that would be a long, long time coming.
"Be your tears wet? Yes, faith. I pray, weep not. If you have poison for me I will drink it." I reached up and touched the tears on Cordelia's cheek. Real tears, not glycerine, as in rehearsal. I was so far gone in the part that I couldn't remember her real name.
* * *
I didn't return to my dressing room for the beginning of the fifth act. Cordelia and I waited in the wings, not speaking, not wanting to chance anything wrecking the mood. Soon we were onstage again, captured by our enemies, reconciled. It's my favorite scene in the play. The foolish old King at the end of his folly, granted one moment of happiness before the end. We were led away to what we thought would be our imprisonment, not knowing the plans of the evil Edmund.
I was going to my dressing room when Polly appeared and took my arm. She looked up at me, and I saw concern in her eyes.
"Bear up, old friend," she said.
"How am I doing?" I asked her.
"I think you know how the performance is going. But I'm a little worried about you. Is something wrong?"
"Wrong? What are you talking about?"
"I'm not sure. I sense something. I don't think anyone else would notice. God knows you're giving it your all. Is there anything I should know?"
Anything she should know. The mind reeled. I knew what she was talking about, Polly being the only one who knew who was after me. And I wouldn't get her involved in it.
Anything she should know. Yes, Polly, my dear. After the final curtain I'm going to vanish, one way or another. Either under my own steam, or in the custody of a man from your worst nightmares. There will be only one performance of this Lear, one perfect moment on the stage. You close tomorrow.
Oddly, I knew she wouldn't mind that part. I felt sorry for the rest of the cast, who had a right to expect a long run from such a night as this, but for Polly, the work was done, in the heavenly books. She had created a masterpiece that would last for the ages. As for the cast, well, that's show business.
So I lied. It wasn't my best work, I could tell, and even my best might not have entirely fooled her. But there were distractions. The final duel between Edmund and Edgar was getting under way on stage, and she had made quite a production out of it. "Edgar" and "Edmund" were the two finest stage swordsmen on Luna at the time and they were pulling out all the stops, giving the audience an exhibition of derring-do that would leave them breathless for my entrance. So she didn't question me, and I managed to slip away.
And immediately ran into the head of makeup, in a hissy panic.
"Where is Cordelia!" he said. "We have to get the rope burns on her neck!"
I shrugged helplessly, and as soon as his back was turned I ran to my dressing room.
As soon as I slammed the door behind me I saw Isambard on one knee beside Cordelia, who was lying on the floor.
"My God! What have you done to her? You've killed her."
He stood up. Toby was still cradled in his left hand.
"Contrary to what you might think, I don't kill unless it's necessary. She's unconscious."
"But you said—"
"She came in here and was asking too many questions. She was about to leave to get security, so I had no choice."
I lifted her and put her down on my cot. A bruise was forming on her temple. And damn her, anyway! She had decided to sneak in here at the last moment. There would have been no time for sex, but Jennipher was a cuddler. She wanted to hug and kiss before our last scene, in preparation for a memorable night of celebration.