The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  “What about my face?”

  “Don’t worry,” Von Bülow said, pouring an extra glass of chablis. “We can mask it. And we won’t alter it. After all, if we can’t assassinate Larkspur, there are all sorts of uses we might find for his double⁠…⁠” He handed me the glass of wine. “On Venezia.”

  PART TWO

  VENICE PRESERVED

  Chapter Six

  “Players! Players! May I have your attention, please? The auditions will commence in thirty minutes.”

  The speaker looked overdressed for a stage manager—perhaps for anything—with cloth-of-gold showing through the vents in his Lincoln-green tunic. And while there was no such thing as an aristocracy on Venezia, his airy accent at least suggested wealth. But I was not backstage at an ordinary playhouse. This was the private theater of the Doge himself, one floor of the Municipal Palace. Before Evan Larkspur—or, as I thought of him, the Pretender—had arrived on Venezia, the theater had been something of a toy, open to the public only for concerts and masques on official city holidays. Venezians loved live entertainment, but mainly in the form of cabaret—little acts that could be staged at any of the city’s thousands of restaurants, inns, or nightclubs.

  But if Evan Larkspur wanted to honor this planet and its capital city with his first new play in a hundred years, the Doge was only too happy to have it staged here—indeed, to remodel the whole structure to the Pretender’s requirements.

  I looked out a window and down upon the canal two stories below, where native Venezians in their theatrical everyday clothes steered handcrafted, battery-powered gondolas between shiny walls the color of turquoise, salmon, or mustard. Was there another city in the human sphere to have been grown instead of built, every tower really a reef, a ring formation of mutant coral artificially teased up into open air? What a silly, happy dream of a place. If only I could simply be here, under my own name—or at least, an unstolen one—and not hiding behind a mask.

  For one thing, the mask itched. For another, I couldn’t help remembering that it was alive, a sort of leech, and that if I didn’t take it off within forty-eight hours, it would begin to grow inseparable from my face. I scratched one side of my nose. Already, the wax-coating feeling had faded, and the mask’s nerve cells had begun to communicate with mine; it wasn’t quite like scratching my own face, but eerily close.

  “Ten minutes!”

  All around me, actors and actresses of two dozen worlds paced about nervously, their lips moving, going over their audition pieces yet one more time. Perhaps I should have been doing the same, but my worries stayed stubbornly at a different level.

  There’d been no choice about the mask. I could not wear my Larkspur face to Venezia, not when the Pretender’s was so well known there. Theatrical makeup wouldn’t do—too easily detected at short distances, or in natural light. So the Tribunes had fitted me with a gyal-wa, a highly organized colony of specialized living cells.

  It was very thin. It changed my appearance just enough, by raising and slightly sharpening the line of my nose, faintly underbagging my eyes, and creating a delicate ridge up each side of the forehead to suggest hollower temples. It accentuated the details—saturnine, expressive—that might help a stage actor, but blurred those that were merely distinctive to Evan Larkspur.

  The mask lived in a small dish of nutrient agar except when I placed it on my face. It went on over my cheekbones and up to the hairline, with precise holes from my eyebrows to my lower lids. When first applied, it did not match the skin tone, and faint lines showed where it met my flesh, but within a few minutes it put out a perimeter layer one cell thick. Specialist cells found their positions relative to the actual face’s pores and sweat glands, and it began to consume my sweat and sebaceous secretions, mix dead epidermal cells into a face-hugging paste, and respond to subcutaneous neuroelectrical impulses in a realistic-looking manner. It became part of me. And something of my identity, my sense of self, leaked out into it and became false.

  “Excuse me, may I speak with you a moment?” a girl of seventeen or eighteen with lustrous chestnut hair said. Her coltish awkwardness was charming, if surprising, in one so pretty and expensively dressed. But the way she’d approached me, as if looking for something in my face, raised some defenses.

  “Do we know each other?” I asked.

  She lowered her dark eyes apologetically. “It’s just—everyone else seems to be going over their lines, and I didn’t want to interrupt them. But I’m—perhaps you’re like me; I prefer to clear my mind for a moment before I go onstage. Talk about the weather, whatever. We haven’t been introduced, but⁠—⁠”

  “Sly,” I said. “Freeman Christopher Sly—at your service.”

  “I am Julia,” she said.

  “Julia⁠…⁠?” I prompted.

  She blinked with surprise and a touch of social embarrassment; in her circles, I realized, everyone must know everyone else. “West,” she said. “We use our House name.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Julia.” So she did not use her family’s original name, but the name that had come with her parents’ title—Lord and Lady West, I supposed. It is difficult for me to keep the Column’s snob titles straight; they didn’t exist under the Federal Alignment, when I was a boy. “Are you here to audition with us, then?”

  She smoothed her long rose-colored skirt and blushed—she was that young. “I’m overdressed, aren’t I? As soon as I came in, I could see it. You’re supposed to show off how much personality you can project in plain clothes, aren’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Remember—an actress doesn’t mind standing out in a crowd. Drawing attention is her business.”

  “That’s true, isn’t it?” Her shy smile lit up our corner of the crowded green room. If she could act at all, she would be the perfect ingénue. She had the beauty of Everyman’s teenage daughter at a commencement or a wedding day; it’s not the kind that lasts, but that’s part of its appeal. “But tell me—I’m not disturbing your concentration, am I? This is your business, and I mustn’t spoil it.” No matter how polite, they are driven to determine one’s social rank as soon as possible.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m a pro. Pros like…you and me, we don’t go in for this last-second cramming.” She awarded me another of her enchanting smiles. “Are you a native of Venezia, Julia?”

  “Oh, no. I’m on holiday. Well, protracted holiday. I mean, if I can get a part in the play, I will stay.” If her parents approve, I thought—she’d all but said it. “And you?”

  “An itinerant trouper, I’m afraid. Just arrived a few weeks ago. Didn’t have trouble finding a room, of course.” She smiled again. Even the natives of this continent-city lived in rented rooms; virtually every private house was also an inn or a restaurant. It was a great city in which to meet people, hear gossip, and make connections—otherwise, I might not have made the audition’s short list. “I must say, now that I’ve seen the place, I’m tempted to immigrate.”

  “Oh, I know what you mean. It’s like a festival every day, isn’t it? The freedom, the color, the…aliveness of it all.”

  “The only way to live,” I said. “Of course, if revolution really does break out, I suppose it’ll all come crashing down around their ears.”

  “You mean this Free City Declaration?” she asked. “I don’t know what to think about that—I’m not sure the Venezians know what they mean by it. Some say that Column laws and regulations have never been enforced very rigorously here anyway, and that it’s silly to draw attention to the fact. Others⁠—⁠” She lowered her voice and moved pleasingly closer. “Others say that there is a faction around Larkspur—they call them the Hard Men—who want to overthrow the Column, one world at a time.”

  “And what about the great man himself—what does he want?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it? I don’t believe anyone really knows. And your average Venezian isn’t likely to commit to anything unless Larkspur uses his powers of
persuasion.”

  “He has that much influence?”

  “I saw an editorial the other day that called the revolution a Larkspur play; everyone expects him to produce it, and everyone wants him to direct it.”

  “The auditions will commence now,” the stage manager said—right on cue.

  For a time I watched in the wings with the others, trying to get a glimpse of the Pretender as he prompted the would-be actors on stage. But they had the lights up, and nothing could be seen of the orchestra seats but the black void that every actor knows and fears and makes his sacrifices to.

  As for the actors themselves, they didn’t concern me long. Given the hundreds of billions of people in the human sphere, I would have been surprised to see any of the fringe-world players I’d worked with in this century; so that was one nasty complication I wouldn’t have to face. Nor was the competition so fierce I couldn’t hope to snag some minor role. There were a number of locals, trying vainly to subjugate their nasal Venezian dialect of Interlingua to the Ur-Linguish echoes in the play’s text. A few offworld professionals showed talent, but only a few. I had feared that the prospect of being in the theatrical event of the epoch would draw pros from every part of the human sphere, but the political cloud hanging over Venezia had apparently scared most of them off. And for some reason the Pretender had moved his schedule up, which helped: with a premiere only ten weeks away, he could not spend much time seeking a cast. And finally, I was not a bad actor, and had the advantage of knowing how to perform verse, which—apart from Larkspur revivals—had been out of fashion for generations.

  Naturally, the Pretender couldn’t try to pass off a new play under my name unless it were in verse, too. It was called Manfred of Otranto, the damnedest literary pastiche I’d ever seen—a bizarre combination of Byron’s second-rate verse drama Manfred with Walpole’s tenth-rate novel The Castle of Otranto. I hadn’t read either of them in many years, but was pretty sure the stories had little in common and nothing to recommend them dramatically except a few supernatural scenes. I’d chosen one of the latter for my audition piece. It meant trying out for the lead, but might also earn me consideration for some lesser part.

  As I went over the lines a last time in my head, I couldn’t help but wonder what the Pretender thought he was up to. True, Evan Larkspur was famous for rendering ancient Ur-Linguish classics into modern Interlingua. One could even imagine that he—or I, damn it—might be so amused at all the canting critics who called him a “Byronic figure” that he would choose to adapt one of Byron’s plays, eking out its skimpy plot with elements from another work of the same period. And there was no denying that he’d caught something of my style, even if it verged on parody in places; there were some good lyrics here and there, and the many passages of straight Byron translation were first-rate. No question, the Pretender, or whoever he had hired to concoct this thing for him, had real talent. But why hamper himself with this Gothic goulash of a vehicle? Unless I could have transformed it into something personal, I would never have touched this material.

  Well, but maybe that was the point. If he’d done another Shakespeare adaptation, it would be too easy for the huge Larkspur audience, and the Larkspur scholars, to make invidious comparisons with my previous work. This way, he could pretend that Larkspur was “stretching himself,” “exploring new ground,” and so forth. I could already imagine the reviews of the hack critics—hell, he might even get away with it.

  And why not follow that thought to its logical conclusion? If Shakespeare could write Troilus and Cressida, the real Larkspur could have written Manfred of Otranto. What made him the Pretender and me Evan Larkspur were only the shadows in my brain, memories that could as easily be false as true.

  I had to meet him, to get close to him. To know.

  And then I got my chance. More than that, a break. It happened that the auditioner before me was also trying for the lead, and had picked a similar passage to perform.

  His name was Ivan. He was young, and had the usual chip on his shoulder: every narcissist knows he’s a star and resents having to prove it. Ivan seemed to have decided that the author couldn’t be serious about this material, so he gave it a tongue-in-cheek delivery, with plenty of overdone classical flourishes. Some of the actors next to me flashed each other anxious looks—had they misunderstood the point of the thing after all?

  Ivan brought his piece to a campy conclusion and waited for a reaction. And waited. Longer than anyone before him had had to wait. And finally, a bored, vaguely familiar voice floated up from the invisible third row.

  “Do you know how to take tickets?”

  The backstabbing bunch around me hooted. I thought that if this was the Pretender—and that great man was supposed to be directing the play himself—he didn’t have my voice quite right; it was a half tone too high in pitch. Meanwhile, Ivan stormed off, a genius unappreciated by everyone except me; he’d given me the perfect setup. I rolled my shoulders a few times, shrugging into the part—Manfred, a younger and sexier Doctor Faustus, about to summon spirits—and walked pensively onstage. The speech I’d chosen was almost a straight translation from Byron:

  “The lamp must be replenished, but even then

  It will not burn so long as I must watch.

  Knowledge is Sorrow. They who know the most

  Must mourn the deepest over the fatal truth:

  The tree of Knowledge is not that of Life.

  Philosophy and Science, and the springs

  Of wonder, and the wisdom of the world,

  I have essayed. I’ve been a benefactor,

  And battle’s victor too. It is all one.

  The revelation of a single hour

  Has left me desolate of fear—or love⁠—

  For anything still left upon the earth.”

  I raised my voice and attempted to summon spirits of darkness, first calling upon them by a book of spells, then a magic ring, and finally crying:

  “By the strong curse which is upon my soul,

  The thought which is within me and around me,

  I do compel you to my will—appear!”

  And now I faced that silence from the darkness, and wondered if I’d played it too straight…When suddenly, with a grunt of effort, someone leapt up from the orchestra pit and stood tottering in the footlights, a limping silhouette who replied, in lieu of applause:

  “I am the rider of the wind,

  The stirrer of the storm;

  The hurricane I left behind

  Is yet with lightning warm;

  To speed to thee, o’er shore and sea

  I swept upon the blast;

  The fleet I met sailed well, and yet,

  Will sink ere night has passed.”

  He stepped closer, and extended his hand. “Larkspur,” he said. “Evan Larkspur, Freeman, as you say in this century, and the best honorific I know. What’s your name?”

  “Christopher Sly.” I tried not to stare at him. He didn’t quite look like my face in the mirror, but a mirror reverses things; the resemblance was still enough to frighten me. Height and build were the same. He looked younger than I by exactly as much as he should be: a Larkspur who’d only returned to the time stream two years ago instead of ten. A little soft around the belt, a little pale and puffy in the face, as if from too much drinking lately…but that hint of a limp was the only unLarkspurian thing I could cling to. Even the long hair, gathered in the back, had been the fashion when I was a boy.

  “Christopher Sly?” he asked. Could it be? The name I’d chosen was a Shakespeare allusion so obscure that even a classicist might not catch it; but the real Evan Larkspur read Shakespeare in the original. He waited for me to say something, then shrugged my alias off with a line—“Well…As You Like It”—that only he and I appreciated. He asked about my acting credits, and I supplied some. All fake, either uncheckable or leading to someone in the pay of the Tribunal, but sounding as solid as any I’d heard that afternoon.

  “I know why you think h
e’s so good, Boss,” the foppish stage manager said, emerging from the wings. “He’s doing you.”

  “What?” the Pretender said, and several voices cried out ad lib agreement: “He’s got your voice down!” “It’s an impression.” “It’s an hommage!”

  The Pretender was dubious. “His voice is a half tone higher than mine, surely…Of course, when I hear my own voice in a recording, it always sounds higher, too. Anyway, not bad if he is a bit like me. Byron’s Manfred was an autobiographical sketch; let people think the same of mine.”

  “I still think you should play it yourself,” the stage manager said. “With only ten weeks to prepare⁠—⁠”

  The Pretender shook his head angrily, as if this were an old argument, and asked me, “Can you fence?”

  “Foil and saber,” I said. “I’ve played your Cyrano.”

  He laughed, and others were eager to laugh with him, but he followed up quickly: “Rapiers—we’ll use both styles. Are you in practice?”

  “Not very. But that’s what rehearsal is for.”

  “Truthful and cocky. That’s good. We’ve others to see, but…don’t leave, Chris. Stay and watch.”

  The other actors made a space for me, half envious, half obsequious. They were sure I had the role. But the Pretender had my role, and no matter how I turned it over in my mind, I couldn’t see how he could possibly be so good at it. I hardly noticed anything that happened for the next few hours, except Julia West’s audition. She lacked experience and craft, but it didn’t matter; she walked away with the ingénue role.

  I remember thinking, she’s almost too pretty for a tragedy.

  Chapter Seven

  I’d arrived in Venezia two weeks before, carrying no more in wardrobe or bank credit than one would expect from a wandering player. The Tribunal expected me to earn my own way, but at least they supplied the trick luggage that enabled me to smuggle in the mask’s maintenance supplies, the fractal-silk night-prowling outfit, and my skeleton coder. At Customs I learned that monetary tokens were used on Venezia—paper bills and metal coins. Quaint and inefficient, maybe, but also the mark of a free society: you could spend your money as you pleased without generating a computer record. Remembering that the Tribune’s man Rezakhan would be trying to keep tabs on me, I turned all my credit into cash.