by Bill Adams
“How long did she do this?”
“She doesn’t talk about it much. But she must have slept through the first forty years of the Column almost entirely. Then she started living several months a year, instead of a few weeks. But it was too late to become one of the great potentates of the Column, like some of her old classmates. And I think many people must have hated her for trying to outlive them, for trying to crash a younger generation. You can see how they’d feel. And she hadn’t even been lucky in her investments. It must have been hard, to have lost your place in time like that.”
Oh, yes, child, it’s hard.
Through the doorway came the sound of a half-dozen people laughing on the stage. The Pretender had been in an odd state since the day of the Maelstrom, or the night of Domina’s arrival: depressed and bitter half the time, then as hyper and exuberant as this afternoon.
“But you’ve seen what she’s like,” Julia said. “Nothing can resist her for long. She made her way back into society, and a decade or two later she married my father. Another Nexus classmate from the Column faction, but he’d stayed in the standard timestream; he’s very old now. I’ve told you about him. He hasn’t trimmed his sails to the new politics, but Mother has. If Evan’s revolution succeeds, she will turn out to be one of its secret backers. Maybe that’s why she still deep-suspends for a few weeks or a month whenever she can. The future’s still ahead.”
“And if the revolution fails?”
“She’ll still be Father’s wife. She always wins. Even her name is Domina—her father the admiral raised her to rule. I suppose I should be grateful she didn’t pass the madness on to me.” She stood up, brushing the crumbs from her slacks, and smiled wistfully. “She does love me, you see. The strange thing is, I believe she loves Father. She flirts with other men; she uses them; but I think in her mind it’s all part of a master plan to protect Father and me.”
◆◆◆
“All right,” the Pretender said before we commenced the scene. “I know this irritates some of you, but let’s review for context first.”
I had always done the same synopsizing when directing my college productions. One more life detail the Pretender had got right, one of incredible thousands.
“Manfred has used a lifetime of acquired occult knowledge to summon some powerful spirits and ask them for Forgetfulness and Oblivion for a sin he cannot name,” the Pretender recounted. “In fact, for humping his sister and killing his father the Emperor. The spirits cannot promise that he will gain forgetfulness even in death. The greatest of them, the Spirit of Manf’s Birth Star, briefly assumes the aspect of Manf’s sister Astarte, and Manf faints. Spirits utter various incantations, blah blah blah, the curse on Manfred.” He leafed through a few pages, not to review the plot, which he must have known by heart, but to glance at his latest verse revisions. Then he muttered:
“…Because a magic voice and verse
Hath given thy baptismal curse:
Though thy slumber may be deep,
Yet thy spirit shall not sleep;
There are shades that will not vanish,
There are thoughts thou canst not banish;
“Thou art wrapt as with a shroud,
Thou art gathered in a cloud;
And for ever shalt thou dwell
In the spirit of this spell.
“From out thy brain I drew the charm;
From out thy past it grew in harm;
In testing every poison known,
I found the strongest was thine own.
“I call upon thee! and compel
Thyself to be thy proper Hell!”
He glowered a moment, and added,
“And when I read each fucking ‘thou,’
I translate which?—and of those, how?”
He’d eliminated the thees and thous—which had no modern Interlinguish equivalent—wherever humans spoke with humans, but went back and forth over whether to retain them, untranslated but easily guessed at, as a special effect where Manfred and the spirits conversed. If the Pretender was just the front man for a team of scholars and playwrights, he did a great job faking his on-the-spot revisions.
He marked something in his copy of the script and went on hurriedly, with sweeping but meaningless gestures:
“Manf awakes, and an Idiot Servant gives him the supernatural news: the late Emperor’s seven-foot-tall suit of black armor has mysteriously moved from the family crypt up to the ground floor of the castle, and stands there like a man. Everyone too afraid to move it back, blah blah, Manfred alone unimpressed, Manf fears nothing, nowhere, nohow. Idiot Servant says Manf’s stepmother, Bel-Imperia, wants a word with him, Manf’s response is to take a walk. Okay.
“Spectacular scene change—morning on the cliffs of the Jungfrau.” He waved once at our new stage manager, Renfrew, indicating his responsibility for this magic. Renfrew was also Ivan’s understudy, and another of my fencing partners, one of those almost autistically withdrawn personalities who are able to come alive only on stage. Although he had the obsessive attention to detail that made a good stage manager, he lacked Arturo’s human touch with the actors. Now that there was no one standing between the cast and the Pretender’s whims, this would not stay a happy company for long.
“Manf gazes upon the face of nature,” the Pretender continued, “and mourns the fallen state of man. He looks down into the abyss, and is so mesmerized by it that he is about to fall in. Not a willful attempt at suicide”—he jabbed his finger at me to emphasize this—“but another reflection of his indifference to life or death, and maybe…” He paused for a long moment, looking at the script but staring at nothing; for an instant the utterly blank look I’d seen in the Maelstrom passed across his face. “Maybe the desire for a big enough death, instead of the petty sickbed defeat most men accept.” He made another marginal note and went on.
“But before he can go over the side, he is rescued by a Chamois Hunter, Theodore, a young man with some slight physical resemblance to our hero.” This raised a laugh from some in the cast, as Ivan spent every waking moment working on this resemblance to me. Just that morning he had complained bitterly of the diet he had to follow to slim down. And maybe part of the joke was the way—everyone thought—I had modeled my own manner of talking and walking and even dressing after the Pretender himself.
“And something came to me over the weekend,” the Pretender continued. “That business of grabbing him by the shoulders never worked. No, you will pull him back from the precipice by the hair. It echoes a speech by one of the spirits, and we might as well use these stupid pony-tails.”
Another laugh from his listeners. Yes, Ivan and I were wearing our hair in one of the styles of Byron’s own century; but, again, I’d copied it from the Pretender. The three of us would have looked like brothers walking down the street together.
“Okay, so we finally come to the present scene, in Theodore’s hut. Manf is incognito, and Theo does not recognize him as Prince Manfred. But he’s clearly a VIP, and Theo would like to enlist him for the Carbonari. These Carbonari revolutionaries want to overthrow the parricide Manfred and put a rival claimant in his place. And what is Manf’s reaction to that going to be?” Pointing at me again. I had never realized how irritating these synopses were; if I ever directed again…
“Lordly amusement,” I said.
The Pretender laughed, one sharp bark. “Just so. Of course, he doesn’t know, and the audience doesn’t know, what Theodore knows—that Theodore is the rival claimant, Manf’s long-lost half brother, and that once these democratic Carbonari put him in place, he means to be another absolute ruler.”
There was a brief interruption while Ishigara questioned whether—“at this particular moment in the history of the human sphere”—this cynicism was the best message for a play to convey. Not for the first time, the Pretender crushed this argument with generalities about art versus propaganda. “Besides,” he said, “isn’t it important that the next revolution not be f
ollowed by petty dictatorships? What do you say, Lew?” The aside caught Malatesta by surprise; he looked up from his front-row seat as if we’d rolled away the rock he lived under. Then he just nodded.
Finally, we got on with the scene, and every Byronic line seemed to carry its Larkspurian double meaning:
THEODORE:
Old? Why, middle age has yet to mark you.
MANFRED:
You’re wrong, for actions are our epochs: mine
Have made my days and nights imperishable,
Endless, and all alike, as sands on the shore,
Innumerable atoms—
and one desert,
Barren and cold, on which the wild waves break,
But nothing rests, save carcasses and wrecks,
Rocks, and the salt-surf weeds of bitterness.
And by the end of the afternoon, the Pretender had slid into one of his black moods, and dismissed the cast without a word of praise. At the last minute, he turned back and invited me to meet him for dinner at the Coq D’Or.
Chapter Twelve
It was a dark, inexpensive place skipped by the tourist guidebooks. The maître d’hôtel knew the Pretender of old, and gave him an isolated corner where he would not be disturbed. The waitress also showed signs of being an old—and intimate—acquaintance, and she also knew better than to intrude on us.
At first the Pretender just talked impersonal stuff: the play, the restaurant, tourists. We discussed our fencing, some moves we might want to incorporate into the stage fight. He asked me not to let him favor his bad leg. “There’s no reason why I should limp.”
But as we finished our Dreeland veal, he got around to the Maelstrom, thanking me for my initiative there.
“I don’t know what it was, Chris. There was something about that…void. That hole in the air. Something to do with the Barbarossa, I guess. I’m the only survivor of my ship, so far as I know. And I don’t remember why that should be, why the others should have been left behind. It’s hard not to feel guilty. And so the other day—it was as if the void had caught up with me.”
“Was the Barbarossa lost, then?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
He nodded. “I believe so. I don’t really remember anything about it. The doctors tell me that I spent too much time in suspend-sleep without wakeups, on top of a brain concussion. It’s destroyed some of my real memories, and left me with others that are false. They come to me in nightmares.” But he shrugged. “It ill becomes me to complain, of course. When all the men in the human sphere laugh at your jokes and all the women want to sleep with you, you can’t whine about what you’ve lost.”
“Not even if it’s a century?” I asked, signaling the waitress for more wine.
“There is that,” he admitted. “And more than that. When Julia arrived with her mother, a few months ago, I looked Lady West in the eyes, and something came back to me, something I must have been suppressing. Our affair isn’t in the history books, you know—she suppressed that, she and her ‘protectors.’ But now that I can have any other woman I want, I remember that she’s the only one worth having. We had a private little talk about it, and the next morning she’d found some errand to take her offplanet until now.”
The wine came and we drank it while I tried to think what to say. What sort of impersonation could require him to undergo personal torments that even I hadn’t suffered?
Sure, Domina had obsessed me for years, never out of my thoughts on the Barbarossa, when I believed decades were passing in her life, inexorably separating us. But after returning more than fifty realtime years later than expected, I had assumed her dead, or so near death it would be pointless and ugly to see her. I had never inquired after her; I’d had more urgent worries. Ten subjective years had passed, and I was a different person. I couldn’t imagine tearing open my life to let her back into it.
Not that she wasn’t at least as desirable as she’d been at twenty. Her face didn’t seem older, just more knowing; it knew it wasn’t a girl’s face anymore, and it knew what time and pain were. It touched me. Her always striking figure had filled out a little; a purist might call her overripe now—but a sensualist wouldn’t. No, if I had returned fresh from the Barbarossa to find her like this, the last good thing left from the previous century, I could have fallen under her spell again, no question.
But why should a Pretender? Unless he really believed he were me—desperately trying to piece together fragments of the life he thought was his own.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
◆◆◆
We floated to a few other taverns, always stopping long enough for one free drink from the delighted owner. As Venezia’s guest of honor, the Pretender had a standing invitation to every dance, wedding, and family celebration in town. Around 2200, we dropped in at some dowager’s salon, a grisly-looking collection of sponging writers, professors dressed as undergraduates, and offworld politicians on the make. Although by this time his gait was unsteady and his breath inflammable, the Pretender pulled himself together and did his duty, ripping off some satirical verses against the Column’s tyranny that might even have been spontaneous.
An offworld journalist with long, ash-blonde hair and hungry eyes asked the Pretender for an exclusive interview, and the two of them disappeared into a bathroom that remained locked for half an hour. Meanwhile I was cornered by a drama critic and a professor of literature, each pumping me for information to confirm a ludicrous “Larkspur theory.” Fools of this stripe want to believe that when they tear down a play into arbitrary parts, it is a feat equal and complementary to its composition—that writing a play is simply a reverse process of sticking all those “strategies” and “voices” and “intertextual ambiguities” together somehow. If they’d cut up a frog with a scalpel they’d think they were its creator’s equals—they could as easily compose a frog, they’d tell you, but actually they consider this pile of rotting meat chunks a satisfying life-form in itself. There was no way to make them see the truth, so I told them lies: the Boss places the caesura in each line by consulting a random-number table, the new sex scene is an allegorical transformation of a Column tax form—that sort of thing. A satisfying art form in itself, I thought.
Finally getting free, the Pretender and I hailed another gondola, and on the way back to his place—the Doge’s palace—he suddenly turned to me and asked if I liked chamber music. Not waiting for a reply, he had the gondolier pull up to the next dock, deep in the old quarter, where four prostitutes in their traditional floor-length black cloaks stood huddled in the cool night air. At our approach, they sang out their prices and flashed open the cloaks.
“You see?” the Pretender said. “A G-string quartet. Let’s not break up the set.”
The gondolier beamed as we brought the four of them aboard; maybe he thought our Boss was going to share. But twenty minutes later, it was just the Pretender and me and the girls—they really weren’t grown women—in his suite.
His rooms were not huge, and he’d diminished them further by lining every wall with shelves for portable books, mainly the Ur-Linguish classics I’d pored through in college—no surprise there. I also saw some swords too sharp for play fencing, some antique black-powder pistols, and a genuine-looking human skull.
He left me and Fragolina, Paparella, and Topolina seated around a card table in the parlor while he took Dolcezza into his bedroom, lay full length, yawning, and murmured with the perfect accent of long custom, “Spogliami.” As his girl began removing his clothes for him, I had one of the others shut his door.
“Are you brothers?” Fragolina asked, and soon they were all asking questions that showed a profound personal interest in rich tourists. It was too much effort to make up all the answers and keep my cover story straight; I got them to talk about themselves instead.
I’ve often heard of places where prostitution is a respectable service industry, but it’s always some other world far away. The average Venezian, though easygoing and fond of l
ovemaking, looked down on what was called lussuria, greed-sex. There were two forms of lussuria: to manipulate a lover for any kind of material gain, or to take extra lovers behind the back of one who has been promised fidelity. Whoring always fell into the first category, and often into the second.
To judge by the stories of the quartet, it was a trade for youngsters from unhappy families, acting out poor opinions of themselves. Outcasts in Venezia—too ignorant of its affairs to even recognize the name Larkspur—they were too lazy to survive on the no-nonsense land continents, and hoarded their hard-earned fees with vague plans of starting over on one of the worlds where only money counts. Not one of the four was over twenty; their wistful, painted faces depressed me, but I told myself they still had time to wise up, that Venezia would be far kinder to them than most places.
Fragolina had her hand on my crotch most of the time, and kept urging me to take her into one of the suite’s guest bedrooms with silly little moans of “Sei molto bello” and “Ti amo.” A man always feels foolish turning this sort of thing down, and I’d been alone a long time. So I gave in, and learned that piano means “slower” and fretta means “faster!” and why her name meant “Little Strawberry.” But it was a fake all the same, and I returned to the parlor feeling less than clean and thinking that one should take it cheerfully or pass it up cheerfully, not fall between. It was the spy business eating at me; it was not knowing who to be.
And the Pretender had just come back from his room, too, wearing an enormous blood-red robe, and in his smirk as he traded Dolcezza for Paparella I seemed to see his approval that I’d acted liked a regular guy, not like his old follower Arturo—and that rankled me on several counts; I wanted to snarl like a dog. But he was gone again before I could throw away the credit I’d earned.
That left me with Fragolina, Dolcezza, and Topolina, all three half-cloaked for warmth, half-naked for business. I found the liquor cabinet and poured a round of red wine. Topolina, a little mouse like her name, produced a Tarot card deck of Venezian design, put the trumps or Major Arcana aside to leave a traditional Italian deck—fourteen cards a suit because of the Cavalier—and reminded me how to play Briscola, an ancient and unimprovable game I’d last seen among smugglers on Far End. But Dolcezza didn’t like Briscola, and said that, anyway, the cliente would want her again soon. The other girls mocked her; knowing how much the Pretender had had to drink, and bearing in mind the journalist earlier, I shared their feeling that Paparella was probably going to be more than enough for him.