The End of Fame

by Bill Adams

  And then we saw each other through an archway leading to the library. And the Pretender drove them toward me, Domina and Captain Marius—no, the Consultant—in the lead. The royal parents stumbled into the back of a couch and propped themselves up against it as their tormentor took Julia over to the fireside, his limp even more noticeable now. Orange light glinted off the blade at the girl’s throat; the sight stiffened my resolve.

  “Hello, Christopher,” the Pretender said. He looked sharp, engaged, almost as if he were enjoying himself. “I thought I’d burned you up. Welcome to Hell, then. You’ll find your place in the Ninth Circle, among the Traitors to Friends and Country. We’ll be neighbors, if I remember my Dante. He put Odysseus in the Eighth Circle”—he paused to shift his grip at Julia’s neck—“for using unfair stratagems of war.”

  “Could we drop the literary bullshit, Boss?” I asked. “This is not a play, or a game, or a dream. These are real people you’re hurting. And I’m not the traitor. I didn’t try to fry you over a misunderstanding.”

  “You tried awfully hard to get my hostages into that shuttle.”

  I saw that Julia had regained expression, that her eyes looked to me with desperate hope. I came toward the fireplace slowly but deliberately, nothing sneaky about it, as I replied. “I was doing what you always wanted me to do—protecting you from running wild. You kept your hostages, and lost your troops anyway. And now I’m just a middleman, the apolitical guy you once asked me to be. I don’t understand this Consultant who stays in the shadows while his Doctor Lao talks to me—I’m not pretending I trust them or that they’re in the right. But what you’re doing is wrong. It’s time to stop and think and talk.”

  “Plausible as ever, Chris,” he said. “This mantelpiece looks solid enough. But just in case the other walls are full of guns, why don’t you stand in their line of fire, right here?”

  “Closer than that.” I stepped well within arm’s length of him, the blazing logs almost too hot next to us. “It’s the old offer, Boss—cut my throat if you want to.” He was watching my hands, so I raised them. The important thing was to get him talking; once he was ensnared in his own world of words, there would be an opportunity to pull⁠—

  My pistol.

  In his hand.

  I’d hardly felt his magician’s touch at my pocket, but words betrayed him after all—he just had to get off a clever line before he shot me, and Julia knew it was her moment to wriggle free. In the instant his eyes flickered to her I hit him once in the face with a conveniently raised hand, bouncing the back of his head off the mantel, and the knife went flying harmlessly as Julia tore loose, running awkwardly with her arms bound. But the pistol discharged, close enough for me to feel the flash burn through my jacket⁠—

  And six steps away Julia pitched over as if punched, and I could hear her mother’s scream as I grabbed the Pretender’s wrist and he simply, limply released the pistol. He knew I would reach down for it—while he kicked it into the fire and yanked at the big rapier from the crossed set mounted above the mantel, sending its twin hurtling over my head to ring on the floor behind me. And I could only stumble away from the first wild swing of his blade, drop, and do a shoulder roll to come up with the other sword.

  And so we faced off, with rapiers, as he laughed and I swore at the scene he had written for us, the performance that could not be avoided now.

  There was no caution in him. He followed a lunge with a ballestra, a running attack, that I cut short with a stop-thrust to the heart that should have killed him—but barely broke his skin, because all my body’s automatic moves were trained to the light touch of sport fencing. And he made the same mistake; he could have continued his attack instead of retreating from my harmless blow.

  For an instant we held back, absorbing the lesson, and then our blades cut their attack patterns through the air, seeking to clash and snarl past each other into flesh and blood.

  He kept sidestepping on defense. I thought it was because he didn’t want to get backed into the fireplace, but he had a second goal—the Consultant, who was trying to walk with his bad knee until the Pretender dashed past him with a sideways flèche attack, his blade flickering in and out of the older man’s midsection. The Consultant collapsed to the floor, whimpering like an animal, and I had to jump over him to keep the offensive.

  Still we circled, a slow precession governing the frantic back and forth of lunge and retreat. I tore a stitch in the Pretender’s forearm with a lucky cutover; his redoublement pinked my thigh—like a red-hot needle for a moment, but if you keep going, the pain falls away. Though I wanted to know, it was long seconds before I could take in—safely, via peripheral vision—where Domina was, cradling Julia’s motionless body and making broken noises.

  The thought of Julia was a gift of fury. My blows crashed down on his, and he gave way again and again. His parries lacked balance; I overextended to take advantage, only to sense myself suckered at the last second, hopelessly out of defensive line when he feinted a disengage and—No, impossible, the Larkspur Pass!—corkscrewed past my counter-parry and into a lunge.

  But at least I didn’t take it in the chest; I could let myself fall sideways behind the nearby couch so that the thrust ripped open the top of my shoulder instead. I rolled behind the couch and leapt up—and ducked, as keen-edged steel slashed through the air where my head had been. And then my guard was up, and the old dance began again, to the ring and clash of the blades, the scrape and slap of our boots.

  But I had never shown him the Larkspur Pass, only Ivan, only the last day. I was in deep trouble, bleeding so freely that the flagstones I passed over would soon be slippery, gasping for air as the all-out effort dragged on. Then something came to me, and I waited long seconds of give and take, attack and retreat, for the moment that had to come—the treading-water moment, of staring and taking deep breaths and fencing with wrists only as we regathered strength—and I lifted my free hand to try it. A shock tactic.

  I tore off my mask and let him see my face—his own.

  And the effect was astonishing. Not a flicker of fallback as I lunged, but a strong parry and riposte, a savage grin and follow-through attack. “All true!” he roared as he came, “All true!” It was as if I’d given him back his strength, and more. The last trace of his limp vanished forever, and he began to beat me ever backward with an aggressive showboat style that I recognized with nightmarish inevitability as my own, at its best.

  I could do nothing but parry and retreat, sidestep and fend, praying that he’d tire again. Where was Summerisle?—but he wouldn’t be able to aim anyway, not the way we were leaping about. I had to think of something, anything I could do myself—step outside the script, the dream, fate. And then I saw it gleaming on the floor.

  His fallen knife.

  Had to get to it—lunge, drive him back, now sidle, come forward with a ballestra to bring it up to my boot—and kick it sideways, as if to get it out of my way, barely avoiding his stop thrust.

  Kick it to Domina, a mere dark shape in the corner of my eye.

  Done! And I survived his strong and assured remise. Now I only had to turn him: stay alive, and draw him into place, with her at his back.

  Exhausted and lightheaded from loss of blood, I used the old teachings, reaching within myself for the strength of the whole-souled and single-minded—the infant who can scream for a full hour when the strongest man can’t do it for a full minute—one thought, one purpose, the particle that cannot be divided or destroyed⁠—

  Going back on the offensive to drive him sideways, leaving an opening for him because it would wheel him around, bashing hand-guards corps-à-corps to stop him where I wanted him…and beyond my focus of vision Domina’s black-and-white shape flickered and approached. Risk after risk after risk, and finally⁠—

  I slipped in my own blood and began to go down.

  My trailing foot shooting behind me, I crashed onto one knee and his blade smashed mine down, trapped the point against a ridge in t
he flagstones, and in an instant his boot had stamped forward⁠—

  And my blade snapped in two beneath it⁠—

  As he drew his arm back cross-body for a slash that would have taken my head off. But past his shoulder I could see Domina, flashback to another time a century past, her arm upraised with the knife gleaming in it, and this time she would have done it, for her daughter and for many betrayals, including one secretly mine, if only in that tiny sliver of time she hadn’t seen—Oh, shit! My face!—my second Larkspur face, to confuse her and stay her hand long enough for the Pretender to catch her shadow or a sound and whip his arm around for her instead, the hilt in his fist bashing into her temple, knocking her headlong.

  But it had been enough, because I’d never stopped moving, never given up the attack, driving up on my forward foot, arm extended, one mind, one purpose, one line of intent from elbow to wrist to snapped-short blade to the hollow of his rib cage, up and in, all the way to the hilt.

  His arms fell upon my shoulders, his sword clattered on the floor behind me; then he staggered backward and fell, the handle of the sword pointing up at the ceiling. His face kept working, the eyes no more than slits, the mouth a rectangle of clenched teeth.

  The rest of the room came back into view, like a reflection in water after the dropped stone disappears.

  Summerisle staggered in from an entryway, a pistol in one dangling hand—late? but the whole engagement hadn’t lasted two minutes—saying to the Consultant, “I’m sorry,” to me, “I’m so sorry,” and finally, as he knelt next to the Pretender, even to him, “I’m sorry it came to this.”

  And that was the final mercy, a last cue from the wings; I could hear the blood bubbling through the Pretender’s first words, but he managed to get out the last:

  “Old man…’tis not so difficult to die.”

  And when Summerisle finally looked up from the corpse, it was at my face; he was waiting for something, but I didn’t know what.

  The round little doctor scuttled in with a first-aid kit fully half her size and tried to approach the Consultant, who lay on his side, jackknifed in a spreading circle of blood. But he turned her away with one imperious gesture of his arm, sending her where he pointed, to the women he loved.

  Domina and Julia lay but a meter apart. Domina was already coming to, and though the doctor hissed with alarm at the sight of Julia’s wound, a moment later she gave us all a reassuring nod.

  I seemed to have picked up the Pretender’s sword and regained my feet. The Consultant was not far away, and I went to him, some random part of me saying, “My face surprised her—you should have told her about me.” Meaning Domina. I don’t know why that seemed important enough to say, or why he bothered to make sense of it and answer. Summerisle just watched my face…waiting.

  “I know,” the Consultant said. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  Then he tried to crawl toward the women, a triumph of will over pain and sense, and suddenly I was full of anger. I barred his way with the sword, shouting, “Talk to me now!” I turned to Summerisle. “Both of you! No more lies, no more half-truths, no more oaths of secrecy. The kid really was Evan Larkspur, he…was…me, and I want to know how that’s possible. Now!”

  And the Consultant nodded his permission.

  “He was a damaged version,” Summerisle said quietly, looking back down at the Pretender’s white face. “He had to travel very far to reach our part of the galaxy once he reemerged. Had to keep going back into suspend-sleep to conserve air and food, and he paid for it with his memories and his sanity.”

  “Version? Version?”

  “You were in the Barbarossa bubble, tangent to space and time when you burst back through. Sunplungers have a target star, can only fit a unique space-time, but you were aimed at the whole galaxy and half of history—there was no one space and time available, but many, and the whole mass of the Barbarossa was behind you, all the tension of the energy debt that must be repaid to this universe. And so it wasn’t one Larkspur who was translated back, it was⁠—⁠”

  “Many?” I asked. “Many Larkspurs? And the real one?”

  “Is all of you, all identical the moment you appear, but from then on different,” Summerisle answered. “The ones who came back seventy and fifty and thirty years ago will be older than you now, the ones who come back next year will be younger, but of course in almost every case the odds are terribly against them—their shuttle can only plunge so many times under its own power—even if they can navigate their way from far across the galaxy.”

  “Many?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Many. Starved or suffocated or doomed to be, far from here, far from now, until we figure out how to restore the integrity of the universe.”

  “How many?”

  He closed the Pretender’s eyes, and then he was staring back into mine, with that same strange expectancy. “For even one of you to have returned to this human era, we calculate—thousands. And in fact⁠—⁠”

  “Two of us returned.” But I knew.

  “No.” I knew who would speak, and what he had to say. A great peace had descended upon me, terrible but wonderful. I hadn’t wanted it this way, but I’d wanted it—one universe and a chance to embrace it—and at last I could see it and believe it, the logic of it, solid as the stones beneath my feet…they would stay solid now. I knew who could have found the hidden White Book and, through it, Summerisle; who could have won and held Domina’s love; who would have felt obliged to find a place for the Pretender; whose household robots would respond to the sound of my voice; who would like to see swords on the wall of his dream castle, and even keep them sharp.

  The Consultant had reached up for his gyal-wa mask at the moment he spoke, but when his hand failed and fell back it didn’t matter. I knew who Summerisle—and the revolution, and the Barbarossa—were waiting for. I knew whose face it was now.

  About the Authors

  A graduate of Harvard University and Mahopac High School, BILL ADAMS is known to readers of mystery fiction as T. M. Adams. He has also been a bonded courier, motel manager, and night dispatcher of everything from grocery trucks to private detectives. He died in 2019.

  An alumnus of University of Miami and Penn State, CECIL BROOKS has, as well as writing, coded for a life insurance company, cooked in a vegetarian restaurant, set type and designed books, been a photographer, done leather-work for exotics, and spent long years as executive of an environmental non-profit. He lives in Pennsylvania.

  Books by Bill Adams and Cecil Brooks

  The Unwound Way

  The End of Fame

  Books by Bill Adams

  Tilt!

  Dead Sirius

  Off the Map

  Quick Tricks