The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  I held to that thought, and soon true sleep was granted me.

  Chapter Eight

  The point of the sword flashed toward my heart. I beat it aside and lunged. Ivan leapt backward and managed to parry my blade, but I kept advancing and drove him off the mat, where he nearly collided with one of the workmen who were tearing down the back wall of the stage.

  A hollow clapping sound came from the first row of orchestra seats. “Not bad,” the Pretender said, our director. “Now that you’re up to speed, we’d better cut back these workouts to a half hour every other day. And once we choreograph the fight, stick to that, no improvising. It’s too easy to injure yourselves.”

  Ivan and I gasped out something about how we could go all day, no problem, and collapsed into folding chairs.

  It was the third week since I’d gotten the lead in the Pretender’s play. We’d been rehearsing steadily but lightly, three or four hours a day after noon. Just line readings. The set wasn’t yet in shape for blocking out the action, and our director’s drinking and wenching schedule killed the mornings. I had my part down cold; as the lead, I was in almost every scene, but I have a poet’s memory. And daily workouts had restored my basic fencing skills, even though I’d lied at the audition and hadn’t really used a sword since winning the intramurals in college. As an actor I was ahead of the game; but as a spy I’d made little progress.

  I wanted desperately to get close to the Pretender, using whatever we might have in common to become his confidant. What would happen after that would depend on who and what he turned out to be. And I couldn’t afford to forget that the Tribunal had a man named Rezakhan watching me—someone I didn’t know, but allegedly working and living nearby—and that sooner or later he would make contact and demand evidence that I was getting somewhere.

  It wasn’t that the Pretender didn’t like or notice me. My allusive alias had caught his attention, and our discussions of my part and the play had occasionally wandered into territory only classical scholars would recognize. He’d seemed as surprised by my knowledge as I was by his, but so far he hadn’t invited me along to dinner, as he had some of the others. I was beginning to fear that he was deliberately protecting his lead player from late nights and drinking—my best chances to get to know him. All I could do in the meantime was try to stay in his good graces by being the best performer possible. To this end, I’d been putting in extra time with my sword before the other players arrived in the mornings.

  Most often I fenced with Ivan, the kid who had been humiliated for showing irreverence to the text at the audition. Characteristically, the Pretender had sought him out, apologized, and cast him in a strong secondary role—as Theodore the Chamois Hunter, secretly Manfred’s long-lost half brother; it was that sort of play. Ivan was also my understudy, which introduced a note of genuine, if cheerful, murderousness to our practice duels. Ivan’s own understudy, Renfrew, had to be able to fence, too, and he occasionally showed up for practice.

  And now the Pretender, uncharacteristically early to arrive this morning, had finally taken an interest. I watched him closely as he came up onto the stage. He was wearing a gondolier jacket, white with gold epaulettes and piping; a Venezian classic, if you had his shoulders, though a joke when some fat tourist tried it. He asked to see Ivan’s rapier.

  Any biography of Evan Larkspur will tell you that the budding young genius was fascinated with swords. Not only was he a college fencing champion, but he kept a number of antique swords on his dormitory wall—and he kept them sharpened, which trophy swords usually aren’t. A childish but charming reflection of his Renaissance man aspirations, blah blah blah.

  Look, I was just a kid, and I’d come from a planet where there was damn little fun or fantasy of any kind. Hence my swordplay. But if you were just impersonating me, how far could you go in picking up all my skills and enthusiasms? It was impressive enough that the Pretender was deeply read in Ur-Linguish literature. And I had to admit it, now that I’d seen the whole: Manfred of Otranto was not a bad play; artificial and lightweight, but more lively than it had any right to be, considering the source material. Surely he couldn’t also fence. But if he wanted to pretend⁠…

  “Care for a bout?” I asked.

  He could have repeated his line about fearing injuries from overtraining.

  Instead, he immediately stripped off his jacket, put on Ivan’s chest protector and mask, and stepped onto one end of the mat. Ivan took a referee’s position, reluctantly—a mere supporting role—and when I stepped up said, “En garde.”

  We took it slowly at first; I was half-spent and the Pretender was clearly rusty. But soon we were driving back and forth with real give and take, and his true form emerged.

  He knew how to fence, all right. He was even good at it, or had been once. At the moment he was hampered by bad wind and the very slight limp I’d noticed once or twice before, but his aptitude was like everything else about him—exactly what you’d expect of Evan Larkspur after several years in deep space and two years back in the mainstream.

  And he enjoyed the sport as much as I did. He cut our match short because he was flushed and out of breath, but he was also laughing.

  “God, that’s great stuff!” he said. “I need to get back into shape. Forget what I said earlier—let’s you and I do this a few days a week, too. We can start to work up some ideas for the Act III fight. Just don’t go all out; it would be disastrous to pull a calf muscle just before the show opens.”

  It was no act; he looked nearly as happy as Ivan, who had cheered up at the first mention of that muscle pull. I twitched my face mask into a serviceable smile, then hastened to cool it with a wet towel; the gyal-wa flesh had trouble getting rid of the heat I generated during heavy exercise.

  Ivan excused himself, saying he wanted a shower before the other actors arrived. The Pretender took the folding chair next to mine. “What brought you here so early, Boss?” I asked—almost everyone called him that, and I wasn’t going to call him Evan.

  “Checking on these contractors,” he said, waving at the rear of the stage, where three generations of men without shirts labored away on an elaborate scaffold. “They keep telling me they’re only a few days away from finishing the structural work.” He shook his head as he watched them—though they looked industrious, stripping away epoxy joins with handheld lasers in order to remove the expensive wood panels intact. The new load-bearing pillars were already in place; I could believe the work was on schedule.

  The Pretender had chosen to stage his play in a manner shrewdly suited to the character of Venezian society, with its love of the beautifully antique. He planned many special effects, but they were all to be achieved without contemporary holographic projectors. Instead, he would use the striking and otherworldly techniques of classical times: trompe l’oeil sets, trick props, special lighting, mirrors, and smoke. For this he needed a deeper stage, and he had gotten permission from the Doge to take down most of the back wall and annex the three stories of corridor behind it.

  Accordingly, the ducal staff offices on the far side of those corridors had lost some of their doors; the holes had already been plastered over. And the center of the new far wall was broken by a vertical line of three elevator doorways, one for each of the three former floors. The set designer had ordered the contractors to expose the whole elevator shaft and face it with glass, making even the doors transparent. With repainting and the right lighting, this would permit all sorts of ascent-to-heaven effects, and the exposed workings of the lift—a restored cable antique from early Venezia—would lend both an air of deliberate artifice and a feel for the historical period. I was pretty sure power-driven elevators came into use a century after Byron’s time, but how many people know that?

  “What will all this cost?” I asked.

  The Pretender shrugged. “The Doge is happy to spend it.”

  “Public money, eh?”

  He turned back to me. “You haven’t been in Venezia long. Here in the city—I t
hink it’s different on the continents—your social status isn’t based on how much money or property you own. Instead you’re known by the style with which you get rid of the stuff. Millionaires compete to become the greatest host or hostess, and the greatest of these is the Doge. Everything but the palace and its staff comes out of the Doge’s personal pocket—the ceremonials, pageants, festivals, even the public works. Very few holders of the Duchy have held more than one term—they go broke. The anthropologists have a word for it⁠—⁠”

  “Potlatch,” I said.

  “That’s right. You are the best-read actor I’ve ever met. Potlatch. It wouldn’t work everywhere, but it suits the Venezian spirit. This is a place where everyone lives like the rich of other worlds. Beautiful rooms; few permanent possessions, but all of them handcrafted by artists; every meal prepared by restaurant chefs; plenty of leisure time for sport or sex or, God help them, religions. But unlike the rich of other worlds, they keep working.”

  “Because they’re also the employees of the hotels, the restaurants, the craft shops.”

  “That’s right. You can find a niche and work it for life, or save your money and buy your own establishment—and sell it again when you’ve run out of money showing how lavish a hotelier you can be. It’s the legendary town where everyone makes a living taking in everyone else’s laundry.”

  I thought it over. “Of course, it’s the offworld visitors who bankroll it. Their money pays for the food and wood and so forth from the other continents.”

  “And it’s not for everybody,” the Pretender added. “That’s what other planets are for. The entrepreneur, the inventor, the social improver—they ought to be free to find worlds where they’re appreciated, too. That’s what it was like under the Federal Alignment, and that’s the way it will be again. This is just the first city and planet to declare itself free of the Column.”

  “And why did you choose it?” I asked. “Why not someplace with—I don’t know—heavy industries to build weapons and defenses with?”

  “Venezia is not without defenses,” he said lightly. “And the cultural pattern is one of them. Most liberal democracies have a weakness. The poor want to vote themselves more money, and the rich want to buy more power. Each class sees the government as an ally it can use against the other; so they keep giving government more money and power, until one day the government has everything, and the world isn’t a liberal democracy anymore. But that can’t happen here—people seek other sources of happiness, and they recognize that a big government would just get in their way. It’s a secure base for liberty, Kanalist-style. That’s why this world was chosen.”

  Not “why I chose this world,” I noted.

  “You’re interested in things like that?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’ve always kept my own liberty by ducking any struggle for it.”

  He laughed. “Very wise. But you are interested, I can tell. In a few weeks the Doge is going to be married to the sea—it’s an annual ceremony. I have to be there. Would you like to come along?”

  “I’d consider it an honor, Boss.”

  “I consider it a bore, but with you along, maybe I can have some intelligent conversation. And we’ll get to see the Mill Stream.”

  “The what?”

  “You’ll see.”

  ◆◆◆

  Progress at last, I thought that evening after rehearsal, watching the black water swirl past the side of the twelve-passenger gondola that took me back to my inn. Bridges and walkways flashed overhead, generally quite narrow; Venezia had a subway system, surprisingly, but no surface vehicles except boats. The city was a small continent to itself, spiderwebbed across the sea to encompass a thousand internal lagoons; no one hurried across it or followed a straight line too long. Just what they said: an immense coral reef, where multitudes of creatures were swirled by the current to their dinners or their deaths without affecting the overall level of life in the colony. I wanted to be an individual again, with his own will. I wanted my name back.

  ◆◆◆

  The next few weeks passed quickly. Once the remodeling was complete, work began on the sets and illusions. The Pretender began to rehearse us in earnest, blocking the stage moves and working up bits of physical business.

  When you saw him in action, it was easier to believe the place he’d come to hold in Venezian society. He was a ball of Saint Elmo’s fire, restless, electric, and illuminating. Master of the witty phrase, the unexpected insight, and the occasional full-dress anecdote that held everyone rapt until the punchline, he charmed or charged whomever he bent his attention on. He knew the two great secrets of charisma: that most people can’t help feeling an initial attraction to anyone with a high regard for himself, and that touches of self-deprecating humor and vulnerability can turn that attraction into admiration and love.

  I found him irritating at first, especially since I had to appear as appreciative as anyone else. Was this picture of a relentless self-advertiser really the way he saw Larkspur? And yet I heard echoes—flashbacks from my first few student productions. Every young talent is a show-off. If I were still in my twenties, the whole world at my feet, and without a ten-year history of running, hiding, and keeping my own counsel…Yes, it was an imaginative and credible portrayal. In fact, I began to wonder why he was so adamant against playing Manfred himself; it was something I might have done, and he was obviously a hell of an actor.

  But the Pretender had bigger fish to fry. He was usually escorted to and from the theater by bodyguards, sinister reminders of his political importance. Their chief was a burly and surly Venezian who held himself like a former military man. His name was Lew Malatesta, and he could occasionally be found arguing quietly with the Pretender before the day’s work began, as if he were some important adviser. But the Pretender’s other political associates seemed to snub Malatesta and the other bodyguards as underlings. Most of these visitors wore the ducal livery, and some were addressed as members of the Doge’s family.

  And one day a rehearsal was interrupted by the bald lecturer who had presided at the underground meeting I’d crashed on Troudeserre. He was in a hurry, straight from a spaceport, still jaundiced from the omniphylaxis treatment and with clothes reeking of decontamination. The Pretender, calling him Curtis, quickly took him aside, and I couldn’t hear what they said, but it looked important. Curtis appeared to defer to the Pretender, but something about the unfriendly, camera-like way he took in Malatesta made me believe that there was someone else, perhaps equally important, to whom he would go back and report this meeting in turn.

  I couldn’t hope to learn much more from my eyes alone. I began to cultivate the cast and crew. Olivia Viviani was a handsome older woman who played Bel-Imperia, Manfred’s stepmother. I got to know her while rehearsing our key scene together, a steamy bit in which Manfred rejects her attempted seduction but implies he’s accepted it before. During her years in local cabaret, Olivia had acquired a number of devoted followers among Venezia’s upper class, “and there is an upper class here, no matter what they say, love,” she told me. “There’s many a rise and fall, but blood will tell, and it’s the best and the worst that keep coming to the top. The rest are boring.” She was never boring, but her local gossip didn’t lead me anywhere.

  Toshiro Ishigara, who played the ancient Abbot who tries to save Manfred from damnation, was an old-looking young man of thirty. He was a wandering player and revolutionary who’d seen fifty planets since his fifteenth birthday. From him I learned how widespread the spirit of revolt had become in the inner worlds of the human sphere, which I had avoided because of the greater Column control there. Ishigara said that working with Larkspur was a dream come true, but confessed that the new play baffled him. “I was in Bolivar six months back, and I could understand that, even the bourgeois ambivalence in the politics. But is it me, or is this one all swords and sorcery and screwing? It seems like he raises this whole peasant uprising thing in the middle just to piss on it and drop it at the en
d. Maybe it’s me; I know the man’s a genius.”

  As for Ivan, he knew his lines, and that was all he knew.

  I didn’t have much opportunity or excuse to mix with the other players cast as servants, spirits, or ghosts. Of the actors with minor parts, only Julia attended every rehearsal. Something—the difference in our ages or my lack of sexual interest in her—had made her feel, since the first day we met, that I could play the kindly uncle she needed. She soon confessed that she had met the Pretender shortly before the audition—they were both guests in the Doge’s palace—and that he had urged her to try out for the part, though her only previous experience was in school plays.

  The Pretender fascinated her, he wanted her, and she couldn’t make up her mind what to do about it. She had led an astonishingly sheltered life, even for an heiress. Her father, Lord West, sounded like a dim figure, elderly and reclusive; her mother was the dominant force, allegedly far more beautiful, intelligent, and forceful than her daughter could hope to become.

  Julia would confide these things when we ate lunch together in the dressing room, while the others had a catered meal onstage, the Pretender supplying entertainment in the form of magic tricks and bawdy stories about the rich fools he’d partied with the night before. I was torn. If Julia actually entered into an affair with the Pretender, I would inevitably learn much more about him. And she would at least emerge from Lady West’s shadow. But the Pretender apparently consumed women in bunches and spat them out afterward; and whatever the hell he was, he was not for real, not the right man for this gravely romantic young girl.

  And so I slowly came to think that my best lead was the stage manager, Arturo. I’d been mistaken to dismiss him as a mere fop. He had the perfect personality for his job, endlessly finicky about small details and overall style of presentation. But he was also bright and witty, and had such a decent regard for the feelings of others that he could always make peace in the spats and flare-ups that threaten any stage production. He even knew how to maintain a friendship after my unambiguous rejection of his sexual advances. “That’s all right, Chris,” he told me. “I was just going to close my eyes and pretend you were the Boss, anyway.”