Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  He gave me an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry I was such poor company.”

  I shrugged. “That’s all right”

  He opened the door of the practice hall. Miles and Tommy stood by the piano drinking coffee. They looked around.

  “We’re back” Brian had forced a gay, almost playful tone into his voice. “Thank you for coming with me, Noir.” He kissed me full on the mouth.

  Tommy set down his coffee. His eyes traveled from Brian to me. “You went somewhere together?”

  “Aventine ... to get this.” Brian opened the box and took out The Fury. “I’ll show you where it goes.”

  He led the three of us into the substage area. The sections of the carrousel were dressed, waiting to be turned to position beneath the stage opening and raised into place. Light came down from the auditorium through the stage opening, falling on the stage section immediately beneath. The other three sections remained in shadow. The one lighted section was an interior. It looked oddly naked without the projection wall that would be around it when it was in place up top. Brian stepped up onto the platform and placed The Fury on a massive desk there.

  “This is Jonathan’s office. Starting tomorrow, we’ll send the sets up top in turn and let you work on them. I want you to familiarize yourselves thoroughly with those you need to know. For you, Noir, that means just this office. You still need to keep away from the sand garden and the interior set of Hakon’s house. How did the scenes go this morning, Miles, Tommy?”

  Tommy’s forehead creased. “Why did you go to Aventine with him?” he asked me.

  I looked quickly at him. His voice had a note I had never heard in it before, a hard, controlled evenness. I frowned. “That’s hardly your concern, but Brian asked me along.”

  “The period of mourning is over, then, Brian?”

  Brian did not respond.

  I rolled my eyes. “Really. It was hardly an assignation.”

  Tommy stepped toward me, his fist clenched. My heart leaped in my throat. For a moment I thought he was going to raise it to strike.

  ‘Tommy!” Fear sharpened my voice. “Tommy, stop that! Tommy Sebastian doesn’t care where Noir Delacour goes or with whom. You’re letting Jonathan keep too tight a hold on you. Shake him off.”

  Tommy’s mouth opened and closed several times, without letting out a sound. He shook his head hard. After a bit his fist relaxed. “God, I don’t know if I can take this.” He whirled away and ran out.

  Miles went after him. “I’ll see if I can help him.”

  I bit my lip. I leaned against Jonathan’s desk “You may make Tommy a good vérité actor, but you’re also making him an unhappy, confused human being, Brian.”

  “He’s doing beautifully, just beautifully.” Brian looked in the direction Tommy had gone, a fierce joy in his cinnamon eyes.

  I frowned. ‘*Do you really want Jonathan acting like that? It isn’t how he usually is around Allegra.”

  His eyes came around to me. “That’s because she’s always been so completely, faithfully his. When he finds her admiring Hakon, though, and enjoying the alien’s company, it will bring out a side of his character she has never seen before. Sit down, will you? I was thinking about Allegra on the way back from Aventine and I’ve decided I’m not quite satisfied with her. I think we need to make a change in her bio.”

  My brows went up. “Now? We open in just three days.”

  “That’s time enough to incorporate the change. We need a dissonant element in her early life. Up to now, she has always been loved. She’s had no reason to distrust anyone. I think she’ll work more effectively if there’s an element of fear as well as loathing in her initial reaction to Hakon. Let’s say that her father died when she was eight and her mother met a man that loneliness caused her to think she loved. The man, though, proved to be very jealous and possessive, and one night he accused Allegra’s mother of seeing someone else. He struck her in his rage. She broke off with him and soon afterward married a man who became a gentle, loving stepfather to Allegra.”

  My skin pimpled. I shivered.

  Brian cocked his head. “What’s wrong?”

  I pulled my braid over my shoulder and toyed with the end. “Something very much like that happened to me. I was ten and my mother was divorced, not widowed, but—didn’t you know that?”

  The cinnamon eyes flickered. “No. Why should I?”

  “You knew about my fear of heights.”

  “That was just chance. I didn’t know anything about this.” He sighed. ‘That’s going to make it very painful for you, isn’t it?”

  He had known. I felt it with chilling certainty. He was lying. Why? “Can’t we introduce someone unpleasant into her life another way?”

  He thought, rubbing his temples. “I wish we could, but I’m sorry. I have to have it this way to achieve exactly the effect I need. If it helps, we won’t work through a scenario of it. You find a name for the man and a way for Allegra’s mother to have met him. Visualize the rage scene and include it in Allegra’s memories. All right?”

  He said it as though he were offering a concession. I started to protest, to refuse, but his eyes caught mine, steady and compelling. Without ever meaning to, I found myself nodding agreement.

  He patted my shoulder. “Good girl. Well, I think I’ll see if I can find Tommy and Miles.”

  I could have left the substage with him, but I stayed, somehow reluctant to step out of the light slanting down through the opening above and into the darkness of the cavernous room around me. I sat down in the big chair behind Jonathan’s desk and stared at The Fury, trying to sort out my emotions. I could see the face of my mother’s boyfriend before me, ugly and inhuman in its rage. I could see him crumple as my mother struck him with a lamp. I could also see Brian’s cinnamon eyes, flickering past me when he denied knowing about that incident in my past. Later, though, he had looked into me with unwavering directness. It shook my conviction that he had known. Perhaps, after all, he had just chanced to hear about my fear of heights and it was coincidence he gave Allegra one moment of history in common with me. Perhaps he did need just that incident to create dramatic conflict in Allegra’s character.

  I started looking around the office. It was so like Jonathan, all flashy chrome pole lamps and chrome-framed designer furniture . . . expensive, handsome, sterile. In it, The Fury was the single spot of life and emotion. I leaned across the desk to touch a sonic vane. The motion stirred the air and set the sculpture keening. The sound plucked at my nerves. It was like a wail of grief, sharp and unrelenting. It carried after me out of the substage and followed me all the way back to the practice hall.

  * * * *

  The last three days before the opening were hectic. The costumes were ready, and Tommy and I started wearing ours while we practiced in Jonathan’s office. Miles disappeared. I never saw him except in glimpses coming and going. The once I saw him long enough to ask him about his costumes, he only laughed in a long, sibilant hiss, and winked.

  “It’s more of a body makeup. You’ll like it. It’s spectacular.”

  Tommy and I learned to know the office so well we could cross it in the dark. I came to recognize the feel of every piece of furniture, the location of every holographic book in the projection-wall bookcases. Tommy seemed to have recovered from his upset the day I went to Aventine. He was a gentle Jonathan on the set and almost his old self offstage, only a little subdued by his character’s persona.

  We were all developing first-night nerves. In a sense, every night of the run would be an opening night, but we were products enough of conventional drama to find something special in the very first night. Also, in spite of the practice scenarios, we could still not predict exactly how the characters would react. The course and end of the play were no certainty. The agony of anticipation was almost unbearable.

  “Think about Zach Weigand,” Brian said the afternoon of the opening. “He’s going to be in the audience tonight chewing his knuckles, wondering if we’ll
dispose as he has proposed. He’s much more nervous than any of you.” He herded us toward the door. “Go rest, or meditate, whatever you need to do to be at your best. Be back by seven at the latest. The lights go down at eight.”

  I took a cab back to the hotel. I always think I’m going to take a nap before an opening, or lose myself in a light novel. I had the book ready. But I ended up doing what I always do. I paced, nerves singing like high-tension wires. I fought to keep from biting my manicure into ruin. Inevitably, I picked up the phone and called Karol Gardener.

  His voice came laughing back at me over the wire. “Very good, pet. You held out fifteen minutes longer than usual. I have a drink in my hand. I raise it in a toast to you.”

  I kept pacing, taking the phone with me, phone in one hand, receiver in the other. “You’d think I’d learn to have more faith in myself, wouldn’t you, but here I am lost once more in the dreadful broody ‘what-ifs.’ Tell me I’m not going to lay an egg.”

  “My darling Noir, there is no way in this glorious galaxy you can lay an egg. You’ll be superb as Allegra Nightengale. Remember, Brian wanted you and no one else for the part. Do you doubt Brian Eleazar’s judgment?”

  I stopped. I felt cold. ‘Wanted me and no one else? Where did you hear that?”

  “Prying into the affairs of other agents, pet. Vonda King and Maya Chaplain had their agents wooing him for weeks, but after he had asked around, Brian came after you. He wouldn’t hear of anyone else.”

  Why did that disturb me so? “Asked around where?”

  ‘Well, he talked to Charlotte DeMetro, for one.”

  Charlotte DeMetro? Why would a director talk to a gossip columnist when he was looking for someone to take a character? Because, a small voice in me whispered, gossip columnists know things like who has what phobias and what kind of family histories. Charlotte knew more skeletons than any other five columnists put together. Why should gossip be important in finding an actress, though?

  I did not have time to think about it. Karol chattered on, giving encouragement and relaying inconsequential gossip. The words ran through my head in a murmuring stream, sound with just enough sense to distract and calm me. My answers could not have been much more than monosyllables, but Karol read them with precision. He knew to the second when my stomach stopped churning and my pessimism lifted but the keen edge was still on my nerves. That was the moment he broke off.

  “You need to get ready to go now. Break a leg, pet I’ll call you tomorrow and see how it went.”

  He sent me off to the theater at a peak of emotion. I considered asking Brian what he had talked about with Charlotte, but did not have the chance. I did not see him until a few minutes before eight, and then only as he stuck his head into my dressing room to warn me about the time. His face was shuttered and his cinnamon eyes focused on otherwhere. I had taken my angel and was busy slipping into Allegra along with the first costume. It was the wrong time to ask anything. I shrugged. The question would keep until afterward.

  The lights went down in the auditorium and up on the stage. The first scene was between Jonathan and Hakon. I waited in the substage.

  The scene ended and the stage was lowered. Above, I knew, the projection wall would have gone completely opaque and become a swirling storm of opalescent colors. The stage reached floor level. With a smooth hum of motors, the carrousel revolved, bringing Jonathan’s office into position. Tommy leaped from the first set to the office. A stagehand helped me up onto the platform. Slowly the stage began to rise. We went up into light, where the audience was a warm animal smell and a sigh of collected breathing beyond the opalescent projection walls.

  The sound of the audience retreated to a great distance, beyond the angel mist. I looked at Tommy . . . Jonathan.

  The walls resolved into windows, paneling, and bookcases. I looked at the dearest man in the world and saw he was in pain. My heart went out to him. “Jonathan, what’s the matter?”

  I, Noir, retreated to the back of my head. From there I watched Allegra critically but without interfering except for a nudge here and there to keep the action and dialogue dramatically interesting.

  The action went very much as Zach Weigand outlined in the play-book. As Allegra, I was distressed and horrified by what Jonathan had let Hakon force on him.

  “How could you agree to it, Jonathan? It’s . . . barbaric.”

  Jonathan slumped in his chair, a picture of misery. “He tricked me. I was committed to handling the cargo before I knew the Shissahn’s conditions. God, if I’d known what he was going to demand, I would have cut off my arm first. I’d have let the Corbreen syndicate take the option.”

  I could not stand to see him in misery. I threw myself at his knees. “It’s all right. I’ll go.”

  The walls went opalescent Jonathan’s office sank into the substage. The next set rose. I found myself in the Shissahn’s sand garden. Allegra was horrified by it. It was desert, desolation, nothing but rock and sand, no plant life except an occasional cactus or Joshua tree. Noir was entranced. I had never seen anything like it before. I hoped real Shissahn gardens were like it. The rock outcroppings were of many varieties, too many to be occurring naturally. They gleamed with veins of gold and silver, glittered with crystal and semipolished gems. They studded dunes of a dozen colored sands. The main section of the set was a double layer of sand, heavy red under fine silver-white. Mixed together, they made a shimmering pink, then slowly separated into two distinct layers again. Walking across the sand, my feet sank through the topsand to reveal the red beneath and leave scarlet prints that remained a few minutes, bright in white sand, then disappeared as the topsand sifted into the depressions. The projection wall made the set look as though it stretched for acres.

  I was standing in that miniature wilderness working up the courage to go to the house when I heard a sound behind me. I turned, and screamed. The creature standing on the top of the dune looked generally humanoid but it was hairless and earless. Its mottled green, brown, and slate-gray hide had the texture of old leather. A leather kilt wrapped its hips and a long curved knife hung diagonally across its chest.

  “You are the Clay female?” Its voice was the dry hiss of sliding sand. “I am Hakon Chashakananda.”

  Miles had been right. I loved his makeup. It was spectacular. If I had not known for sure it was Miles, I would have sworn a genuine Shissahn had been rung in for the part.

  I backed away, clutching my suitcase, then stopped and forced myself to stand, chin lifted high. I would not run from this creature, no matter how fearsome he looked. “I am Allegra Nightengale.” I tried to keep my voice from trembling. “Be so good as to direct me to my room.”

  Friendship with Hakon came slowly. It developed through the next scenes, beginning with impertinent questions: “Why does a supposedly civilized being run around in nothing but a leather loincloth and that hideous knife?” Hakon had his reasons, which he gave me, but in deference to me he began wearing loose caftan-like robes. Then came curious questions: “What does your name mean in your language?”

  His answer began with a grin, almost a human gesture. “It has no meaning. You could not pronounce my actual name. Hakon Chashakananda is what I have adopted for the benefit of your people.”

  I blinked. “Then why not use a simple one?”

  He blinked, too, in a slow saurian gesture. “What? Would you have an alien named John Smith? Humans expect us to have long and difficult names.”

  That broke the ice forever. From there, the relationship grew quickly. The I that was Allegra began to see the beauty in the sand garden, and the equally fine qualities in the garden’s owner.

  Soon after that, he sent me home to Jonathan.

  Jonathan was startled but overjoyed. He hugged me until I thought my ribs would crack. “How did you do it? I’d have thought he was impossible to move.”

  “You just haven’t had a chance to know Hakon well enough. Today he said, ‘I have come to know you well and find you a person of trustwo
rthiness. If you say your Jonathan is a man of honor, I believe he must be. Then I do not need a hostage.’ And he let me go.”

  Jonathan drew back, frowning. “What did he mean, he’s come to know you well?”

  Inside the angel mist, Noir started. Tommy had used that tone when asking why I had gone to Aventine with Brian. Allegra did not hear the change in voice. “We’ve spent a great deal of time together in four months. I couldn’t very well sit in my room alone day after day. I’d have gone mad. It’s exhausting to hate, so we became friends. He’s really a very fine man.”

  Jonathan’s eyes narrowed. “Man?”

  I nodded. “Any intelligent being is a man. That’s what his people believe. Isn’t that a fine concept? It binds us together instead of separating us into alien and human, Terran and Shissahn.”

  “Have you adopted Shissahn philosophy and discarded human beliefs, then?”