by Bill Adams
THE END OF FAME
Bill Adams
and
Cecil Brooks
Copyright © 1994, 2020 by Lia Adams and Cecil J. Brooks
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except insofar as is implicitly granted by sale on the Kindle platform, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the authors.
This new edition of THE END OF FAME has given us the opportunity to make a few small editorial revisions, but is otherwise a complete and unabridged version of the work originally published by Del Rey / Ballantine Books in 1994.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Literary Trustees of Walter de la Mare and The Society of Authors as their representative for permission to reprint “Napoleon” by Walter de la Mare.
Cover art by Bill Adams.
To Lia and Jerry
and
to Ed and Al
with love
Foreword
My brother-in-law, Bill Adams (1954-2019), published several stories in mystery magazines in the late 1970s, as T. M. Adams, a nom de plume inspired by his given names William Powell, coincidentally the name of the famous Thin Man star. In the early 1990s, he collaborated with his cousin Cecil Brooks on two novels, The Unwound Way and The End of Fame, about Evan Larkspur, a poet and playwright who finds, after a century in space and cold-sleep, that his works have become both revered and seditious.
Writing about a playwright was a natural choice, as Bill had a deep love of the theater. In 2000, he moved to Ashland largely because the Oregon Shakespeare Festival makes its home there. Bill had a deep knowledge as well: When a group of us attended Coriolanus, we emerged at the first intermission greatly confused—Who was Marcius? What do the rioters have against him? Who or what are the Volscians?—so Bill began to give us a clear précis of the context and the factions. He had barely started when strangers began to flock around; one fellow called to his wife, “Come over here; there’s a guy who knows what’s going on!“
In The End of Fame, we see more of Larkspur the actor and playwright. As in the first book, though, the subtext is the troubling question of what went wrong to produce the repressive dictatorship in which he finds himself and what the famous Evan Larkspur can do to set things right—even if he can manage to claim the mantle of his own legend.
The Larkspur novels have long been out of print. When Bill died unexpectedly last year, I undertook to release them as Kindle Editions. His files contained a few minor revisions, which I have incorporated where possible. As I said in my foreword to The Unwound Way, I think they are great stories, lively and funny, that say interesting things about identity and freedom without ever interrupting the action. I hope you enjoy them.
David Wall
April 25, 2020
PART ONE
THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
Chapter One
The dead emperor wears a mask, but I know better than to lift it and see his face. I can’t quite recall the details of the legend, but I know I mustn’t do that.
“The ring is closing.”
An impersonal voice reverberating from the outer sphere, as if an attendant were telling me it was time to leave.
But there is no exit. The room’s solid gold wall curves around me in a perfect and unbroken circle. I look up. Above two meters the wall ends, not in a normal ceiling, but in a transparent glass bubble, beyond which burn the billion naked stars of deep space, so many that they light the room.
It is a small chamber—but wasn’t it larger a moment ago?—and empty except for the dead emperor and myself. He lies in his bier, a strangely dramatic figure in his moldy and decaying military uniform, though he is no larger a man than myself and I see no sign of the great red beard of legend. Of course, there might be something under the silver mask.
“The ring is closing.
The bubble must burst.”
The room is growing smaller, that’s what it means—even now, the circular band of golden wall contracts with the deep moan and shriek of metal under stress. And, above, the glass of the bubble dome begins to shiver. A little more pressure and it will shatter; hard vacuum will reach in, blow me apart before I can even suffocate, and freeze-dry the fragments as they fly. Only the dead emperor can save me.
That’s the legend, sort of like Arthur’s: the once and future savior king. The anointed hero who fell on the way to the Crusade, but who waits in a cavern of glass while crows circle in the sky to watch the world for him, his red beard weaving round and round the bier until it reaches the seventh coil, when the world will need him again and he will awake…and I know his name:
B A R B A R O S S A
Why does it hurt to say it? Has the air already begun to leak from the shrinking room? There is a crash like thunder, and a crack flashes across the dome, the shape of lightning and just as white against black space, and above the violated-airlock hiss comes that disinterested goddess voice—Domina’s voice:
“The ring is closing.
The bubble must burst.
And the crown must pass.”
The crown, yes! If I were wearing his magic crown, I’d be the immortal, unkillable one. There’s still time, though the curved wall of gold is almost touching me, while crack after crack snakes across the bubble ceiling. Standing to one side of the bier, I bend over the corpse and grip the emperor’s crown with both hands, ignoring the wisps of dead hair that brush at my wrists like spider’s legs—and lift.
But the crown is heavier than I expected. Gold, not spired like most medieval crowns, but rising in crenellated tiers like the layers of a labyrinth, and it’s really a helmet, all of a piece with the mask that covers the face. If mask is the word—a flat sheet of silver that now mirrors my own desperate eyes, my bared teeth as I strain to remove it. And meanwhile the hiss of escaping air has become a roar, above which I can faintly hear:
“The ring is closing,
The bubble must burst.
And the crown must pass
From the last—
to the first.”
As the walls snap tight around the bier to make a big gold coffin, forcing me up and on top of the corpse, to crouch over his clay and bones in an obscene posture as I yank and yank at the crown and the mask, and the bubble bursts above me, a trillion shards of glass suspended like snowflakes for an instant before the explosion of escaping air hurls them at the stars, and now the vacuum of space is coring my lungs like razors of ice as I bend and strain—
—and the mirrored front of the helmet is a centimeter from my face when it suddenly comes free, leaving me eye-socket to eye-socket with his face, the face I feared, the last face I’ll ever see—
And I wake the hell up, of course, my heart ringing in the darkness like fists against the hatches of a sinking ship.
Chapter Two
I lay there a moment, stewed in sweat, trying to catch enough breath to curse with, and telling myself I wasn’t really going to die. I may have been born a hundred and twenty-two years ago, but physiologically I’m just thirty-five. And in excellent shape—below the neck.
They’re called trauma nightmares. Want one as good as mine? They’re expensive: First you have to sign up for a deepspace trip, say, one of those exploratory missions they ran a century ago, the ones that analyzed the stars at near lightspeed so that ships can flit between them faster than light today. Since such a mission will last for years, they’ll want you to spend much of the time in suspend-sleep, your body functions slowed, your brain protected from sensory-deprivation insanity by extremely vivid and ple
asant dreams. And here’s the catch. Someone must sabotage the glass coffin that feeds you your suspend-sleep dreams, must leave it running for weeks on end without the reality checks of regular wake-ups, leave you spinning and spinning those realer-than-real sensuous dreams until it’s too late. Until, when they finally drag you out of the tank, you have lost the ability to tell the difference between reality and dreams.
And then for the rest of your life—if it is your real life—you’ll have rich, recurring nightmares so striking I’ve often thought of numbering them and putting them into verse, like Stephen Vincent Benét. And when you wake up, you’ll never be sure you’ve really woken up. You’ll never feel that solid floor beneath your feet, not ever, ever again.
No floor tonight. But I had to stand up anyway, on plush carpeting—a reminder that I was in the capital city of the planet Troudeserre, a guest of its garish but luxurious Romana Clef Hotel. I turned on the light and went to the bathroom.
My wristcomp showed the time in local minutes. 2310. I’d be a little late, but maybe that would save my life—maybe I’d be captured if I followed the plan. And then again maybe I had already been to the meeting, and would soon wake up for real in a secret cell somewhere, with interrogators warming up the brain probe just outside the door. Fuck it; I erased two days’ growth of beard with ultrasonics, then cleaned my teeth.
I dressed and stepped out into the hotel corridor.
“Watch where you’re going!”
An African lion with yellow eyes and a flowing mane elbowed past me in a red velvet smoking jacket, Cleopatra clinging to his other arm. Not a dream, not a dream. Avoiding the elevator—the hollow-bellied dropping sensation would have been redundant—I walked quickly down the red-carpeted stairs past a musketeer, a pig-woman, a Column marine colonel, and a blonde fairy with transparent wings.
It was the Feast of Pope Joan, a local mardi gras. Conventioneers who visited Troudeserre during the weeklong celebration were encouraged to join in all the masquerades at night. I, too, wore a mask; but I’d come to Troudeserre to take it off.
The hotel lobby gaped before me, vast as a city plaza, and thronged with wild animals, supernatural beings, and historical figures. Most of them were Column civil servants staying at the hotel for the Ministry of Mercantilism convention. In the afternoons they attended seminars on ways to maintain interstellar tariffs despite the Consultant’s latest trade reforms, but at night they partied at the hotel’s main ballroom or at other revels elsewhere in the city. A few commercial groups—tobacco traders, software guildsmen—had reserved smaller banquet rooms of their own; the hall I approached bore the banner WELCOME ACCREDITED DEALERS OF UR-TERRAN ANTIQUES.
None of the party-goers looked at me or at the porter who stood holding the red velvet rope at the entrance. But he couldn’t control a glare of accusation—almost outrage—as he surveyed my costume and my mask.
I was wearing the monkish habit of the Master of a Kanalist lodge chapter, with a gold labrys pin at my throat. My cowled robe was black fractal silk—admittedly eye-catching in that bright lobby, like a hole in the light. As for the mask, it was latex, not too lifelike but recognizably modeled after Schaelus’s bust of Evan Larkspur, the most famous Kanalist of them all.
Altogether, it was just the outfit to wear—in a hotel full of vacationing government officials—to a secret meeting of the forbidden Kanalist underground. But the porter didn’t appreciate the joke.
“At least take off the mask,” he hissed, as a giant panda, a Medusa, and an Iron Brotherhood mercenary swept past us on the way to the ballroom.
I shook my head. I’d had the mask made to order. While it suggested Schaelus’s romanticized Larkspur, it more closely resembled the real thing. Now that I’d placed it over my naked face with no other disguise, I would only remove it after the right build-up, and under the lights of the stage and the eyes of the crowd.
The porter frowned and took a last glance at the invitation I’d handed him. But there was no way he could tell I’d stolen it from a dead man months before. He unhooked the velvet rope and sent me past him with a jerk of the head.
The corridor past the curtains was short; another hotel porter—and secret Kanalist—stood at the far end. He put his hands over his ears as I approached, but I didn’t get the hint. I could hear party sounds from the banquet room beyond him: loud drunken talk, cries for a waiter, the choppy chant of a piano, and a few songsters trying to keep up.
But halfway down the corridor, between two banks of audio speakers artfully camouflaged against the wallpaper, those convivial sounds broke down. Unnatural shrieks, jagged arpeggios, and barks of static drilled into me. I raised my hands to my ears, but as I passed the last of the speakers, the weird electronic cacophony spun itself back into something human: the sound of a lecturer, of listeners coughing and moving in their seats and murmuring to one another. This was the actual sound from the banquet room, I realized—before the wall baffles had computed which vibrations to add and which to cancel out in order to create party noises for the benefit of listeners in the lobby.
Neat. Perhaps this chapter actually knew what it was doing. It had been clever to pick the expo world Troudeserre during convention season. Almost any secret Kanalist could have found some other, legitimate reason to be in the city now, and the traditional masquerade made it easy to slip away from one’s trade or hobby group to this hotel. And why pick the hotel that catered to the Column’s own government employees? Because every room there had been swept for surveillance bugs beforehand by the Shadow Tribunal—the Column’s courtesy to itself. There was plenty of security around, of course, but it was facing in the wrong direction: protecting the bureaucrats, not monitoring their misbehavior.
After all the false leads I’d followed, after all the little groups that had smelled inconsequential, crankish, or government-infiltrated, these signs of intelligence had convinced me to risk everything on this so-called Pan-Kanalist underground. It was that, or crack up under the constant pressure of the trauma nightmares. Two years before, on an optimistic high, I’d thought myself cured, and had made certain grandiose plans; but when those plans had fallen through, the nightmares had returned, worse than ever.
It was time to risk everything on one cast of the dice. Tonight I would show my face—Grandmaster, or nothing.
The inner guard acted sharper than the first one. He shook his head at my get-up, but smiled and said, “Funny.” Then his eye caught the gleam of the gold ring on my finger. “Are you really a Master?”
I nodded, although my chapter of the order had been burned to the ground a hundred years before.
“Please take one of the reserved seats in the front row,” he said. “You’re probably the last to arrive, anyway—the meeting has already started.”
I went past him into the banquet room.
The hall was hung in dark green curtains and tapestries so stylized they might have represented a funeral, an orgy, or a dog-washing. The crowd of two or three hundred impressed me immediately; although they were all in costume, they radiated thoughtfulness and purpose. They looked young enough to be audacious, old enough to be responsible, with a nice mix of bookish heads and athletic bodies. Here and there the broad, farmer’s face of this woman or the sardonic smile of that man drew my eye with the mysterious gravity of natural leadership; and more often I saw what was even more valuable, the eager attentiveness of natural followers. It looked like the briefing for some elite military group, but without the uniforms and muscle-flexing.
Someone had done it for me, someone with fantastic resources at his or her disposal. I was looking at the cream of the underground movement.
And they were looking at me, some taking in the seeming joke of my outfit and mask at a glance and turning away with a laugh, but others whispering to their neighbors with an earnest excitement that puzzled me. I found one of the empty front-row seats; I didn’t want to make a scene—yet.
The speaker didn’t notice me, as he was too busy gaug
ing the effect of his words on the fringes of the audience. He was good—tall, velvet-voiced, with commanding eyes and a bald head so shiny you’d swear he waxed it. But I felt he wasn’t the real leader—rather, a professional recruiter, one more feature of the brilliantly assembled package.
He had been speaking of Kanalism in general terms when I entered. Introductory remarks.
“And now that recent archaeological discoveries have unearthed the original Kanalist initiation maze, we can prove that our order is much older than mainstream historians gave us credit for. Kanalism has been around since the earliest colonies of lost Mother Earth, over a thousand years. Its founders took advantage of a secret trove of alien technology to attain financial and political power behind the scenes of our civilization. To the individual, Kanalism offered wholeness, self-mastery, a leasehold on the universe. To the community, it offered individual liberty as the highest value of government.
“By structuring itself as a secret society, a semireligious fraternity, Kanalism risked the charge of elitism. But for centuries, the Old Rite strategy served us well. Sons and daughters of the great families were imbued with our ideals, encouraged to find the natural leaders and hidden talents among the lower classes—to raise them up, treat them as brothers and sisters, and lead them to Kanalism in their turn. It was such ‘elitists’ who drafted the constitution of the Federal Alignment, the foundation for five hundred years of peace, prosperity, and individual fulfillment spanning the whole human sphere.”
The crowd, I noted, was beginning to shows signs of restlessness. They must have expected some preaching to the choir, but Freeman Slickdome was beginning to push the limit.
“And what were the ideals that motivated them? No one has put them more succinctly than a poet and playwright who lived a hundred years ago. The one great voice who spoke up for the Old Rite when the Reformers destroyed the Federal Alignment and almost succeeded in burying true Kanalism for once and all. Evan Larkspur.”