The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  I rented a cheap room at the oddly named Hotel Angleterre, dropped a few coins in the slot—after the wall computer explained this concept—and logged onto the city’s network, whose simple name was transformed by the local tongue into something stately and romantic—La Rete di Venezia—somehow reminiscent of ancient Earth newspapers, all those Heralds and Observers of famous cities and their Times. I removed my skeleton coder from the hidden compartment in my bag and recharged its battery. In the two years since I’d stolen the elegant little cybersabotage tool from an Iron Brotherhood mercenary, it had taught me its immense range of capabilities. Plugged into the wall jack intended for wristcomps, it was soon wandering at will through the public and private subnetworks of La Rete di Venezia, and flashing its choicer data finds on the wall screen.

  Where was the man who called himself Evan Larkspur? Messages could be left for him care of the Doge, at the palace.

  Who was the Doge? The Grand Duke of Venezia, the nominal head of state, elected every twenty years by a congress of ex-Doges. But it was harder to identify the state he headed, there was so little to it. A holding company franchised out all the important utilities—even the space defenses—to public corporations. A small police force worked with a number of civil and criminal courts. A staff of ombudsmen, to whom any citizen could petition with a grievance against a utility or court, operated out of the ducal palace; such appeals cost nothing if justified, a great deal if found baseless. A Supreme Court kept an eye out for corruption, and could fine the Doge for malfeasance among his staff. Aside from looking out for his own interest by supervising that staff, and carrying out the pointless ceremonial associated with royalty, the Doge had only one executive power. He could summon a parliament if he thought it was needed.

  But no parliament had met in nearly a century. The Venezians had the strange idea that properly constituted government shouldn’t need hundreds or thousands of new laws every year—that after eight hundred years, it should rarely need new laws at all. Even the Free City Declaration I’d been told about, an announcement signed by the city’s judges and Doge, did not affect Venezian law except to void certain Column regulations that had interfered with it.

  There was more to the power structure than that, of course. There were labor guilds, and business associations, and churches, and the community centers that provided charitable aid. There were private security and intelligence forces. But there was no central government any group could seize control of and use against the others. I liked the motto around the dome of the Supreme Court building:

  The three worst enemies of liberty are a standing army, a sitting legislature, and a lying executive. Oppose them all.

  All this suited my purpose. Where computers have little government power, computer security is often weak. My computer pick couldn’t penetrate the ducal palace itself—there La Rete threw up a bulletproof screen of passwords and counterquestioners—but over the next few days the coder sneaked and wheedled and impersonated its cybernetic way into the data files of power and water companies, courthouses, and any number of businesses. I had no use for the data yet, but it would be at my fingertips should the occasion arise.

  There wasn’t much to do in my room at night. Like many of the older colony worlds, Venezia had a strong prejudice against broadcast entertainment, though not the usual outright ban. You could call up a few classic holodramas from the network library, but nothing contemporary was being produced. One morning I heard the proprietress of a cafe scolding a tourist from one of the “teevee” worlds with the local variation on the arguments I’ve heard on planet after planet: “If you want a show, go to a quality show with live players. If you want a game, play against someone you can look in the eyes. If you want a book, buy a portable, read it out in the world.” And while my own prejudice is against any form of censorship, the inquirers after teevee are always so fat, so dull, and so desperate for their fix—you have to wonder.

  Those nights I couldn’t sleep I’d plug my wristcomp into a data cube I’d stolen a few years before from a woman named Foyle. It had turned out to be her diary; I had mistaken it for something else. There wasn’t much practical purpose listening to it—it didn’t deal with public matters, and I didn’t suppose I’d ever meet her again. But I liked the sound of her voice and the workings of her mind. She was an archaeologist, a secret Old Rite Kanalist, sometimes in trouble with the law, never in sympathy with her surroundings, often lonely…a kindred spirit.

  He’s a handsome man, of course. That’s the first thing one notices. And aware of his good looks, though not offensively so. I particularly like his hands. They are very powerful looking, but the fingers are long and—what’s the word?, not delicate…sensitive. They are clever hands. That might just be the amateur magician in him. But I think they would also be very knowing hands. I like to watch him eat with them. He eats and drinks with great relish, takes his time, doesn’t talk through it. A sensual man.

  That’s me she’s talking about—though I was under another assumed identity at the time. Rather perceptive.

  There’s a pride in him that’s almost arrogance, and a courtesy, almost a courtliness, to make up for it. He’s learned and smart, but more than that, frightfully quick. At first I thought he was just lucky, but it’s really quick-wittedness. The ability to grab that one last chance in the half second it’s offered. Odd, though. There’s something broken and wrong in him, too. The reason I can’t quite bring myself to trust him is that he does not quite trust himself. I don’t know what he suspects himself of, but he must have his reasons.

  Also true, unfortunately. In those days I was afraid that I had deliberately abandoned my mates aboard the Barbarossa, that my partial and scrambled memories of the accident, of a “bubble universe” outside space and time, in which the Barbarossa was trapped, were a defense mechanism to keep me from realizing what I’d done. It was Foyle who had later convinced me that I was wrong. Excavating the site where Kanalism originated, she’d learned enough about the White Book technology to tell me that bubble universes in praeterspace did exist. Of course, by then I’d had to tell her who I really was.

  I know his secret now, but it’s too important to commit to a record like this. It’s almost unbelievable, but nothing else would fit the facts. I guess I’m relieved at the wall it places between us. One “man of destiny” was enough for me. And this one will always have to be on his guard, secretive…closed.

  Maybe so, but at least I told her. It was nice to think, on the edge of sleep, that at least one other person alive knew who the real Larkspur was. And wished him well⁠…

  ◆◆◆

  During the second week, I wandered the canals and walkways to develop a feel for the city. Most of it was hundreds of years old, though new additions were being grown at the edges to accommodate the deliberately slow increase of population. The immature towers were always pumped brim-full to keep the coral alive, and windows were cut and glazed even at the earliest stages, turning each building under construction into an aquarium full of pastel fronds and glittering fish.

  The oldest parts of town displayed limestone arches that were soot-black underneath, rain-leached white on top. Some building fronts were equally weathered, but just as often new owners shaved them down to the bright natural colors of coral, the shine of dressed stone. Big gray mushroom shapes with little shops around their stems turned out to be rain collectors for the fresh water system. Venezian architecture tended to be based on circular cross-sections, the imitation ring-lagoons that the mutant coral was tricked into adding to, but square angles had been sculpted out often enough to prevent monotony. Towers rarely stood alone, but rose from wider squat cylinders or domes, and they took an enchanting variety of forms: Gothic cupolas, Kremlin onions, flutes, even strings-of-pearls that tapered in and out a dozen times on their way up.

  Every canal was lined with docks and their signs, hand-painted down to the name of the artist in the corner. Lazing along in a gondola, you saw how closely the p
eople fit the city, the same combination of diversity and color within the bounds of strong traditions. Then you’d reach a true lagoon, and could rent diving tanks and explore the city’s underside, part human trash dump, part marine-life wonderland. Explore till evening and you wouldn’t recognize the quiet canals of daytime—dancing with torches and electricity, singing with live music and laughter.

  I embraced it all. But from behind a mask.

  Meanwhile, the skeleton coder searched for signs of Rezakhan’s intelligence network. If the Pan-Kanalist revolutionaries turned out to be legitimate, I would take great pleasure in handing the Tribunal’s spies over to them. But Rezakhan was either very good, or far less active than Von Bülow believed. The coder did not find the pattern of secret communications it was looking for, not anywhere in La Rete. It did uncover a conspiracy of about the right size, and we chased down the details for a few days.

  It turned out to be a ring of low-level accountants, shipping-office clerks, and seafood suppliers who contrived, through misreporting and logistical sleight-of-hand, to artificially rig the weekly commodity price of calamari. The price alterations involved were so small, I didn’t see how the plotters could profit from them. But it wasn’t a front for spying.

  I’d gone as far as I could go without showing my face—or at least my mask. The opportunity to audition had come almost as a relief. And now I’d met the Pretender. The play had begun.

  ◆◆◆

  That night, after the audition, Julia West’s face came back to haunt me. Not that I desired her; something put me off any move in that direction. It wasn’t just her air of being closer to twelve than twenty, but something else I couldn’t put my finger on. Ever-changing canal reflections washed across the ceiling of my inn room. The window was partly open, and some argument about sex and philosophy drifted up from a passing boat, passionate student voices as keen as knives. And suddenly I am cut loose⁠…

  And walking among hedges in the dark, a hundred and five years ago—according to the keepers of the calendars; to me, more like seventeen—in the manner of my trauma nightmares but without the dread and distortion. This is not the past but a present, and I am simply there again. On Nexus, where I went to college.

  It is night, and cool, but not with the sudden, edged cold of dry Wayback, where I was born. The breeze is textured with the smell of green living things and a hint of wet clay from the river nearby. Leaves whisper and scheme in dark masses against the sky, and far above them red-eyed orbital defense stations prowl the alleys of the stars past the moon called West Egg.

  I am far from the student dorms; in my room I would not be allowed to smoke this excellent cigar—one of the colonial barbarisms I have yet to give up. This is senior faculty country, two-story bungalows set in a maze of ornamental hedges. It’s three in the morning, and virtually all the lights are out. I am timing verses in my head, trying to figure out why Alexandrines, so tidy and flexible in old Français, tended to buckle or limp in Ur-Linguish.

  Somewhere nearby, a door slams; a shaded window lights up; voices snarl out, angry woman, defensive man, both as suddenly damped down to keep the exact words from their neighbors. I pause for a moment, fascinated. The light goes out, the voices retreat to deeper within the house, and I barely notice the sound of a latch, lower and to one side, as I strain to catch the argument. I can just make out that it’s people I know, Professor Yang and his wife, and this is my Nexus career in a nutshell—the outsider listening in the dark, not quite picking up the words, not quite knowing the people.

  But suddenly, at my elbow, a hiss: “Spy!”

  A streak of orange leaps across the sky and disappears—not a meteor, but my cigar. A scornful chuckle, quickly suppressed, issues from the same invisible speaker. I begin to walk rapidly away.

  “Poet! Come back!…Please!” Desperation raises the voice above a whisper, a hint of sexy contralto. Where is it coming from? There is a pale shape behind this hedge.

  “What do you want?” I whisper.

  “Your jacket.” No further explanation, but I have guessed.

  “Wouldn’t fit you. And I’m leaving now.”

  “No!…Please, Poet—I’m sorry, I forget your name.”

  “That’s all right, Donna, Dolly…is it Winterqueen or Undergrin? Perhaps if I could see you I’d remember.”

  “The jacket first.”

  I step away from the hedge and the shadow of the bungalow into the center of the path. Only then do I unbutton the jacket.

  “Come and get it.”

  A moment passes. Domina Wintergrin disdains to beg or bluster; the hedge rustles and she emerges, naked, pearly moonlight washing from shoulders to breasts to thighs, all perfection, the details and secrets of her still etched in the color of night itself. No shyer than a cat, she does not turn her back as she shrugs the jacket on. It leaves her legs bare and her appeal undiminished.

  She says only, “Let’s get away from here.”

  I glanced back at the Yangs’ window. “How will he account for your dress?” We head up the path toward the student dorms.

  “I don’t care if she strangles him with it. Do you have a longer coat in your rooms?”

  “One room. Not everyone has a suite, you know.”

  “Your poverty moves me deeply. I’m the one without clothes.”

  “No fault of your own, of course.”

  “Don’t be a bastard, Poet.”

  I reach out and catch the collar at the back of her neck. “I’ll be a bastard in his own jacket unless you start calling me by my name. Which you do remember.”

  She raises her chin, but fails to stare me down; I just drink in those dark eyes, those flaring nostrils. Finally, she says, “Don’t be a bastard, Evan.” And almost smiles.

  My hand drops to her back as I guide her onto the footbridge over the gorge. “Watch your step—it’s tricky here. I don’t know why there aren’t any lights.”

  “No one walks these paths so late. Except the wild colonial boy—you’re famous for it, did you know that?”

  “People talk about me? I’m not sure I like that.”

  “Don’t cheapen yourself by shit-kicking,” she says immediately. And it’s the same quietly imperious tone she used in the heart of her circle at Master’s Port; no trace of fear as a virtual stranger leads her into dark woods where no one would hear her scream. “You wouldn’t be a poet if you didn’t want what all artists want: fame, money, and beautiful lovers. Wasn’t that the quote in Rhetoric class?”

  “Freud, yeah. Half-true, like all Freud.”

  “Which half?”

  “As far as the money and lovers are concerned, bring them on. But fame? Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to be paid with applause if I pleased an audience—I could use a little of the friendly approval I never got when I was a kid. But fame is something else. Everyone sucking up to you, trying to get a piece of you, or full of envy for you and plotting behind your back. Or both at the same time. Doesn’t seem like much of a life to me.”

  “No,” she says, and the bitterness in her voice catches me by surprise, “it isn’t much of a life.”

  “And Freud left out the art, the chance of doing something for the ages. I wouldn’t trade that for the bubble reputation of a Lord Byron.”

  “Who?”

  “A poet. The first great Celebrity Artist. The whole world read his poems to find out who he was sleeping with or planning to sue. He invented the Byronic hero—I know you’ve heard that phrase, the critics still use it—the tall, dark outsider who scowls in the corner. He’s got some terrible secret or slight handicap, he’s full of arrogance and self-pity—and he has to beat the women off with a stick.”

  “I still don’t know the name, but I know the type.”

  “Eventually the poor bastard had to bend all his work into promoting the image. So most of what he wrote seems fake and dead now. It’s too bad. When he let the tragic mask slip, he produced some great satiric verse. Of course, even that is dead now, untransl
atable—all style and topicality.”

  “I can’t place it,” she says. “Was this a hundred years ago or something?”

  “More like seventeen hundred, actually.”

  She stops in her tracks, laughing. But she is looking at me differently when she speaks again. “Now I know why Summerisle is bringing you into our lodge.”

  “ ‘Our’? Are you a Kanalist?”

  She shrugs. “My father was; all the best people are, I’m afraid. But you will be one of the special ones who keep it going. Summerisle’s successor. I can tell.”

  “I’m not even sure I’ll join, if it’s one of these snob frats.”

  “Make up your mind. The outsider who scowls in the corner is just a pose, you say. Well, then, stop shit-kicking, come in and accept the rewards of being in. You’re going to anyway, you won’t be able to resist—a boy like you who talks about this Byron as if he passed away last spring. The true Kanalists, like Summerisle, are just like you.” She’s stepping closer; we’re face to face now, and I realize that for some reason a kiss is no longer out of the question. “They have only one foot in this world and this century. Like you, they are⁠—⁠”

  Out of time.

  Sitting bolt upright in my room at the Hotel Angleterre, one hand outstretched in empty air, I clutched at the memory, but there was no more to it. Had I kissed her? I was pretty sure she hadn’t slept with me that first night, yet I couldn’t remember smuggling her back into her own suite, either. I swore and shuddered, and went to the bathroom for a drink of water. It had been so real, realer than this whole vast imitation of ancient Venice floating around me. Incomplete, but mine. No Pretender could possess it.