Universe 10 - [Anthology] Read online

  We all nodded. We knew not to. Too much knowledge of each other could interfere with the validity of the reactions. We should not know more than the characters naturally would.

  “And in the same spirit,” Brian went on, “I don’t want you socializing with each other offstage.” He looked at all of us but it seemed to me he stared hardest at Tommy.

  We stared back. Not socialize? That was unheard of.

  Tommy’s eyes rounded in dismay. “Are we supposed to become hermits until the run is over?”

  The cinnamon eyes looked through him. “I’m sure you can find friends among the locals.”

  “But casts traditionally spend time together offstage,” Miles said.

  “Théâtre vérité is not traditional drama.” Brian paced down the line of us, like a drill sergeant before his troops. “It’s my firm belief that when there’s no script to follow and your reactions must all come up out of yourself, personal relationships inevitably affect those of the characters you’re becoming. How can Allegra be repelled by Hakon the first time she meets him if Noir has been Miles’s close companion?”

  I have sometimes experienced personality bleeding during vérité productions, so I realized Brian had a point, but I thought his precaution against it was extreme. We were experienced actors, not amateurs, practiced in living with multiple personalities and keeping them separated. What bleeding there might be would not affect the performance noticeably.

  Tommy said, “During Rainbow Man, Giles Kimner said he thought antagonistic characters should keep their distance offstage to avoid diluting the hostility, but he had no objections to sympathetic characters mixing, and even with the antagonists he never insisted—”

  Brian cut him off coolly. “I’m not Giles Kimner, so I do insist that the only contact between you be here in the theater. Our job is to produce The Sand Garden, not party. Anyone who cannot live with my direction is free to leave the cast. In fact, I’ll insist on it. Is that clear?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Youse is da boss, massa.” He sighed dramatically. “I hope I can find a friendly female soul somewhere in this bleak city to comfort me in my solitude.”

  “Do you two understand?” Brian looked at Miles and me in turn.

  Miles nodded. I frowned—I liked Miles and Tommy and had been looking forward to spending free time with them—but I nodded, too. I could always hope Brian would relax his rules later, and until then I needed the time alone to learn who and what Allegra Nightengale was.

  “That’s all for now. Don’t go into the substage until I give you permission to use the sets. I’ll see you here ready to work tomorrow morning. Noir, I want you at nine o’clock; Tommy, at ten; and Miles, at eleven. We open in one week.”

  Tommy groaned. “The thing I hate about working up a play is getting up in the middle of the night to do it.”

  Brian’s cinnamon eyes flicked over Tommy and passed on. He turned away. As he did, he looked at me one more time. His eyes remained fastened on me even while his body continued turning. He stepped forward beyond the circle of lights and disappeared.

  Tommy brightened. “We’re free. Anyone for a drink?”

  Miles shook his head. “I’m not ready to buck the boss just yet.”

  “Noir?”

  I waved my playbook at him. “Bio, Tommy. Study.”

  “I’m going to drink first.” He stood and headed for the steps. “I saw some delectable creatures in the Beta Cygnus Cafe when I came by on my way here. Perhaps they’re still there. Au revoir.” He blew us a kiss before he left.

  Miles and I sat for a moment longer, just looking at each other. “Well, it was nice to see you again, Miles. I don’t suppose we’ll be doing any practice scenarios, since our characters have never met.”

  Miles stood. “We can at least walk to the door together. That’s still in the theater.” He offered me his arm down the steps.

  I tucked my hand around his elbow. “Isn’t Brian over-worried about personality bleed?”

  I kept my tone noncommittal but Miles must have heard the irritation under the words. He said, “Not bleed. It’s character carry-over that worries him. Don’t you know how Pia Fisher died?”

  “I know she drowned.”

  “It’s how she came to drown.” We reached the lobby. He stopped beside one of the aquarium benches and looked down through the transparent top at the fish swimming in bright flashes through the water and greenery inside. “Pia was the mermaid in Rainbow Man while it was touring in Hawaii. One afternoon she went out and tried to swim around one of the points along the coast. The trouble was, Pia couldn’t swim.”

  I shuddered at the thought of that lovely young actress so caught in the grip of her angel-produced hallucination of being a mermaid that she had walked into the ocean. It explained Brian’s attitude. We were much more likely to fall into carry-over characterization with each other than around unconnected outsiders.

  “Poor Brian. Thank you for telling me.” I waved to the guard as we left the theater. “Where are you staying, Miles?”

  “The Diana Radisson.”

  I smiled. “Really? So am I. Much as I want to follow our director’s orders, I think it would be a waste to call for two cabs, don’t you?”

  We shared the one Miles hailed. Despite Brian, we talked all the way to the hotel, catching up on where we had been and doing what with whom since the last time we worked together. I enjoyed every forbidden moment of companionship.

  At the hotel, though, we went to our separate rooms. I changed into a comfortable robe and ordered hot tea from room service, then curled up in a chair with the playbook. I am a quick study. I read twice through Zach Weigand’s notes on Allegra Nightengale and laid the playbook aside. Then I went to my bag for my angels. I took one.

  I can never remember the full chemical name of the angels. They are a derivative of PCP, though. Government research developed it, the story goes, for use in espionage and the witness protection program. With it, spies could assume an undercover identity so completely they could not be blown even under drug or hypno interrogation, and the previous identities of hiding government witnesses would never be betrayed by old habits or mannerisms. Not only could the government guarantee a new identity; it could provide a personality to match.

  Inevitably, the drug had leaked out onto the streets where trippers, ever on the lookout for a new high, gobbled it in high expectation. They were bitterly disappointed. It did not magically turn them into someone else. The angels are only a tool. A new personality requires study while using the drug. So eventually the trippers forgot about it, and actors started using it.

  There’s a new saying in the theater these days: that ordinary productions take one kind of angel, the one with an open checkbook; vbit4 needs two angels.

  I began to feel the first effects of the angel. My head went light. It seemed I was looking at the room through binoculars, and that I heard sound from a great distance.

  I lay back in my chair and mentally read the bio again. The words appeared printed across the inside of my eyes. While I read, I tried to visualize the people and scenes the words described. I created faces for Allegra’s parents and friends. I built the houses, towns, and schools of her life. I looked at it all as it would be seen through Allegra’s eyes, and included fine details, right down to the contents of her school locker.

  As the images developed, I could feel myself slipping into Allegra. It is a feeling I enjoy, rather like pulling on a body suit. When I was finished she would fit me like another skin. The images would become “memories,” and she become “I, Allegra,” rather than her present “she, Allegra.”

  The phone rang. Even at its distance, I recognized the sound as part of the real world. I groped through the angel mist in my mind to reach for the receiver.

  Tommy Sebastian’s tenor voice sang over the wire with a slight lilt of intoxication. “I’m alone in a golden city with no one to properly appreciate my company. Come relieve my desolation, Noir. ‘How do I love thee?
Let me count the ways.’”

  The sound of my name opened a hole in the angel mist. I became myself. I frowned. “Tommy, you’re incorrigible. You heard what Brian said about seeing each other out of the theater.”

  “We can’t possibly see each other. It’s far too dark in this bar.”

  “How did you know where to call me?”

  He assumed a British accent. “Elementary, my dear Watson. I called your agent and asked him.”

  I had to smile. “I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble when I can’t accept the invitation. I’m working.”

  There was a pause, then, petulantly, “You take old Brian seriously, don’t you?” *

  “I always take my work seriously.”

  “All work and no play—”

  “No work makes a poor play,” I came back. “Why call me? Surely there are some sweet things who will swoon in pleasure at the sight of your profile.”

  “Any number of them, I’m sure, but it’s you I want. ‘If I were king— ah, love, if I were king—/What tributary nations I would bring/To stoop before your sceptre and to swear / Allegiance to your lips and eyes and hair.’”

  I sighed. ‘Tommy, please go away and let me study.”

  “ ‘Had we but world enough, and time / This coyness, lady, were no crime.’ You’ll miss a terrific evening.”

  “So I will. Good-bye,” I said firmly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I hung up.

  I waited a couple of minutes to be sure he was not going to call back, then I let the angel mist wrap around me again and resumed pulling on Allegra’s character.

  * * * *

  Carry-over let me wear her to the theater. She looked back at me from the mirrored walls of the Blue Orion’s practice hall, all pastels and soft focus, dressed in dinging baby blue, hair hanging down her back in a single braid, except for the escaping locks that curled in feathery wisps around her scrubbed face.

  Over the shoulder of the image I saw Brian appear in the doorway. He regarded me critically, then nodded. “I see you’re into her. Take another angel and let’s try some scenes.”

  He opened his playbook and glanced through the notes on Allegra. He chose random incidents from her life prior to the play’s opening and played the roles of other people as we acted out the scenes. That is, he acted out the scenes; as Allegra, I lived them. The practice hall became a schoolroom, my home, an office, and Brian wore the faces of teachers, adolescent loves, and bosses. I, Noir, watched from the back of my head, evaluating my performance. Some of the emotions I felt and words I used amused me. Others made me wince. They were not what I would have said or felt. They seemed right for Allegra, though.

  A little past ten, Brian laid his playbook on the piano and came back to my chair. ‘That’s all for now, Noir.”

  I shook my head to clear out the angel mist and, with a mental somersault to fold Allegra away, resumed being Noir Delacour. “Evaluation, Mr. Director? Criticism? Applause?”

  Brian stared at me with an expression so intense I felt as though I were being dissected.

  I raised brows at him. “You don’t agree with my construction?”

  He blinked. “What? I’m sorry; I was thinking of something else for a moment. No, I’ve no objections. You’ve made her a warm, loving woman who will certainly do anything for Jonathan and find goodness in Hakon.” He smiled. It was a tight gesture, quickly gone.

  He had not intended to stare me apart, then. He had merely been looking in my direction. I wondered what he had been thinking about. Had something Allegra said reminded him painfully of Pia?

  Brian looked past me to the door. “You’re late, Tommy.”

  Tommy sauntered in, yawning, unaffected by the reprimand. “You’re lucky I’m here at all. This isn’t my best hour of the day.”

  The cinnamon eyes swept down him. “It should be Jonathan’s. What’s the matter? Did you leave him in your hotel room?” Brian turned away to get his playbook from the piano.

  Tommy sidled over to me. “You missed one of my best performances, sweetheart,” he said out of the corner of his mouth in a Bogart accent. “I was super, and it was all wasted on a cocktail waitress who kept her eyes closed the whole time because she thought love should be made in the dark.”

  I put my finger to my lips. If he were not careful, Brian would hear.

  He blithely ignored my warning. “I can’t guarantee a repeat, sweetheart, but why don’t we give it a try tonight?”

  Brian’s back was to us at the piano, but he was facing a row of mirrors. His reflected eyes shifted toward us. He must have heard. I held my breath, waiting for his reaction, but he only regarded Tommy’s reflection thoughtfully for a moment, then picked up his playbook and turned back to us.

  “Good session, Noir. Let me see you again about one o’clock. If Tommy does as well as you did, we’ll set up scenarios for the two of you. See the wardrobe mistress while you have time.”

  I left them and went exploring around the rest of the theater. I found my dressing room and the wardrobe mistress. She took my measurements and promised to have some costumes for me to choose among by tomorrow. Mindful of Brian’s warnings, I stayed out of the substage, where the sets were being built on the lowered sections of the stage carrousel. I did go up into the auditorium and watch a gaffer work on an empty raised section programming one set’s walls.

  It looked as if it might be the horizon for an exterior. The holographic projection was circular, cutting the corners of the stage, and the section visible to me had the outline of low hills. On my far right was the possible early blocking of a building. The gaffer, wearing a microphone headset, walked in and out across the projection line, consulting a chart in his hand and talking into the mike to his colleagues at the computer in the lighting and projection control booth high on the back side of the theater. Piece by piece, details were added and the scene built on the projection.

  A theater projection wall has a limited depth—it’s more a bas-relief than three-dimensional holo—and a one-way image. From the inside looking out, it appears opaque, but someone outside always perceives the closest side as transparent. It solves the problem of giving complete visibility to all members of an audience in the round while providing the set boundaries necessary for verisimilitude and the illusion of peering in on private lives. It does cut off actors from the audience, however, which I have always regretted, even though a théâtre vérité cast is supposed to react only to one another and not to observers.

  I walked on around the stage to see the rest of the projection. It was becoming unmistakably an exterior backdrop. The added details identified the building as the outside of a house. The hills remained puzzling, though. There was no grass or any flowers on them, and the few trees showing were stark and twisted. Then I realized it must be the sand garden of the title.

  Someone called my name. I looked around and saw Miles waving to me as he cut across the auditorium toward the stairs to the practice hall. His walk was a sinuous glide. Miles was wearing Hakon Chashakananda to the theater as I had worn Allegra. He was a bit like the projection wall, adding new details to his characterization each time I saw him. I looked forward to seeing the total Hakon onstage, even though Allegra would have to dread it.

  My watch said eleven o’clock. Brian did not want me again until one. What should I do with the intervening two hours? I remembered Tommy mentioning a café down the street. I could pass the time by drinking tea and practicing Allegra on waiters. I could people-watch, always an enjoyable pastime in a city like Gateside.

  I went after my coat.

  * * * *

  At one o’clock I walked back into the practice hall, and into an atmosphere so charged the tension arced almost visibly between the three men in the room. Tommy sat in a folding wooden chair staring at his nails while Miles stood over him and Brian paced in front of them with a face hewn of ice-rimed granite. My coat is supposed to be only temperature-sensitive, but its fibers stood straight on end, then flattened and clung so tight
that taking it off was like skinning myself.

  Brian saw me. His chin dipped in a brusque nod of greeting.

  I peeled the last arm free and dropped the writhing coat on an empty chair. “When does the massacre begin?” I asked. “And do I have to attend?”

  Cinnamon eyes blinked. Brian took a few deep breaths. “No massacre,” he said. “It’s just that we have a small problem with Jonathan, or more to the point, with Mr. Sebastian.”

  He looked around at Tommy. Tommy’s eyes remained fixed on his manicure, but his jaw muscles twitched.

  Brian sighed. “Miles, you can go. Thank you. See you tomorrow.”